Will Cameron get tough with...Cameron?

What exactly is the difference between an expenses claim for duck island and one for removing wisteria?

The demise of "Gorbals MIck".

Quick thought on Speakergate: Michael Martin is obviously not the sharpest tool in the box, but then Speaker doesn't strike me as a very demanding job (it would be a waste of Vince Cable's evident talents) and Martin is not by any means the first rather dim jobsworth to become Speaker. But all that to one side, there is a deeply unpleasant Bullingdon-type Bullying in the baiting of "Gorbals Mick" (the class war is alive and well). It would be a pretty shabby outcome if Martin is singled out for sacrifice while Douglas Hogg (who named Pat Finucane under privilege less than a month before his murder), Hazel Blears, Ed Miliband and Yvette Cooper, and Jacqui Smith, et al, effect a Houdini-like escape.

MP's expenses

The bottom line seems to be that MP's consider themselves poorly paid. Of course, they are not badly paid at all - around 64 grand is a pretty sum by most peoples standards (the median is around 23-grand) and some of those in the headlines are also on ministerial salaries - but MP's "comparative reference group" (lawyers, head teachers, company executives, dentists, accountants) earn more, and so MP's, and Ministers, feel hard done by. This is itself a reflection of life inside the Westminster goldfish bowl, with MP's envying the bigger fish, with little idea what it is like in the big bad world outside. One might call this "the Mandelson syndrome". Yet MP's - or successive governments - have been unwilling to vote for wage increases because of the likely adverse public reaction. So instead a basically corrupt expenses system (and an extremely generous pensions system) was put in place, allowing MP's to make all sorts of ludicrous claims, with nothing resembling scrutiny from the Fees Office. It seems to have been made clear to MP's by the whips that this was a supplement to their income, and they should claim as much as they could get away with (and the Fees Office took the same view). This was all intended to be kept secret; but assidous research by some journalists using the Freedom of Information Act means that disclosures will officially been made by the end of July. The Telegraph bought the info ahead of time - for, it seems, a 6-figure sum - and carefully staged its disclosure (Labour first) to damage the Labour Party more so than the Conservatives. The whole farrago is at once hilarious and slightly worrying: it seems that the main beneficiaries (if voters turn away from the Establishment parties) will be UKIP and maybe even the BNP (Although the expenses scandal is not the only factor here; for years Labour - obsessed with winning over "Middle England" - has simply taken what was hitherto its "natural constituency" for granted). Yet the anger of the voters is clearly understandable - some MP's (such as Hazel Blears, Douglas Hogg, Andrew MacKay and Julie Kirkbride, and Jacqui Smith) have behaved disgracefully. The vulgarity of Hazel Blears flourishing her cheque in front of the TV cameras was particularly nauseating (her constituents must be reflecting on how fortunate she is to be able to write out such a cheque at a moments notice). In any case, if she thinks she has done nothing wrong why is she paying the money back? David Cameron seems to have responded rather better than Gordon Brown, at least (as one might expect) from a PR point of view. But then the party in government is bound to suffer more from this (although the blame does not lie with Brown to any greater extent than his predecessors). The Telegraph also kindly gave the Tories more time to mull over their response; and in any case Cameron's response is all spin - he himself claimed the second-home allowance in full (not to mention £700 for gardening, which he is repaying!!) and he is not exactly short of a bob-or-two. Also, the sums of money involved while pretty big by the standards of most ordinary people are trifling in terms of government spending, certainly insignificant by comparison with the zillions that have been spent on bailing out the bankers; and it has to be said that the level of corruption exposed would not figure on the Richter scale in, say, Italy. What's more there are more serious kinds of corruption in British public life: not least the notorious "revolving door" syndrome; and the shovelling of shed-loads of money towards consultants and PFI contractors. A small note: Brown, personally, does not come out of this especially badly. £53 a week for a cleaner is more than some of Hazel Blear's constituents have to spend on food for a week (and Brown could certainly afford to pay it out of his own pocket) but it is not exhorbitant - and according to his sister-in-law Brown paid full National Insurance contributions for the cleaner which, if true, shows him in a better light than many such employers of this kind of casual labour. Brown does not strike me - for all his manifold faults - as someone who is in politics for personal enrichment (although he is in thrall to the bankers) or as someone who gives much thought to such things (now Blair, by comparison...!!). Of course, Brown tolerated the system; but then it goes back several decades. Finally, there is no doubting the seriousness of all this, but I am rather afraid that after the European elections we may reflect that, as cheap and vulgar as claiming for trouser-presses, moat-cleaning, mock tudor beams and so on are, there are far worse things...

Christopher Galley MP?

This is an odd thing for me - an old leftist - to say but I think Government ministers must be able to have discussions with civil servants or other ministers without fearing that these will appear in the Daily Mirror or The News of the Screws the following day. Without this expectation of confidentiality there will be much more decision-making by an inner cabal, with no paper trail, and no input from anyone but a core of trusted cronies. Of course, a civil servant ought to be able to offer a "public interest defence" for leaking information; but there is a great deal of difference between "what is in the public interest" and "what the public might be interested in" (a distinction the DPP's statement elides). And there is a big difference between leaking in the public interest, and leaking merely in the interests of the opposition party, and in the expectation that this might help one in a future political career. For example, on September 1 The Daily Mail ran with a leaked letter from Jacqui Smith to Gordon Brown which predicted that the credit crunch would lead to a rise in crime. Now: (i) this is to state the bleeding obvious; (ii) it is ludicrous to pretend that the leaking of such information is a threat to national security, (iii) the civil servant who leaked this cannot plausibly offer a"public interest" defence; this is just the sort of thing ministers ought to be able to discuss in confidence (It's not as if we are talking about the government concealing from the public key facts about the sinking of the Belgrano. Christoper Galley is no Clive Ponting). As I read the DPP's statement, there is a "high threshold" before a criminal prosecution can be justified and in this case "there is insufficient evidence for a realistic prospect of conviction". This falls far short of a general commendation for either Christopher Galley or Damien Green. True, the DPP does dismiss the idea that the leaks were a threat to national security; but he does say they damaged the "proper functioning" of the Home Office (why did the government not take this line?). Contrary to what almost everyone else is saying, I do not think Galley or Green come out of this well. Galley in particular is not someone I would trust as far as I could spit. I don't know what assurances Damien may have given you, Chis, old son, and maybe in your dreams you can already see "Christoper Galley M.P."; but I wouldn't bank on it...

Manslaughter?

The Guardian front page says that the policeman who struck Ian Tomlinson may be charged with manslaughter. Mmm. Is there a hope in hell he will be convicted of manslaughter? The blow he struck was unprovoked, and pretty nasty, but in all fairness I don't see how he could reasonably have anticipated that it would lead to Tomlinson's death. It would be different if he had forcibly struck Tomlinson on the head with his truncheon (as apparently happened at Bishopsgate). Is he going to be charged with the most serious offence with which he could be charged on the expectation that there will be a much lesser chance of a guilty verdict? That's how it looks to me. He deserves to lose his job; and he ought to be charged with a lesser offence. But manslaughter? He will be suspended on full pay while the trial takes place; he will be acquitted; he will return to duty a canteen hero; and after a while it will all be forgotten. I think that's what the police call a "result" It smells a bit fishy to me.

The arrogance of authority

It isn't so much the amount of violence involved; there was worse, much worse, at Bisopsgate - the police attacked when there was no media around for a reason. But there is a whole world of meaning in that slap by the back of the hand. It tells us a great deal about the attitude of the police, and for that matter of this government, towards protest. There is an arrogance, a contempt for the right to protest, an incomprehension of dissidence, the worship of power. The violence - the slap then the truncheon - is not used in self-defence, and is not used against someone who is "tooled-up", it isn't even used "man-to-man"; it is used by a large hulking copper against a woman who cannot possibly defend herself. He hits her because he can. Would that particular policeman even understand the proposition that one of his duties - not his only duty, to be sure - ought to be to ensure that the protestors are able to protest, to guard their right to protest. I doubt it.

Last came Anarchy: he rode

On a white horse, splashed with blood;

He was pale even to the lips,

Like Death in the Apocalypse.

And he wore a kingly crown;

And in his grasp a sceptre shone;

On his brow this mark I saw -

'I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!'

The first commandment of spin

Monday's Guardian cartoon was spot on. It had Alistair Campbell handing out the ten commandments of spin, a cowed Brown and McBride before him, a shadowy Blair behind him. And the first commandment? "Don't get fucking caught". I doubt if anyone in politics is quite as shocked by the McBride/Draper affair as they affect to be; there is a certain amount of thespian artfice to the parade of outraged Tories we have seen over the last few days. Politics is a hard old game and no party is quite innocent of dirty tricks. Guido - a Tory outrider - and Dale (a Tory candidate) are not exactly strangers to gossip. Guido's blog - and even more so the comments of his band of faithful public school interlocutors - are so scurrilous and so vulgar as to beggar belief, and the sight of Guido heading for the moral high ground is a little incredulous. You can't be a "louche libertarian" (as he styles himself) and the Vicar of Dibley at the same time. You can bet your life that if it were rumoured that a Labour politician had taken cocaine in the past Guido would be after him like a bloodhound. I have no doubt McPoison is a nasty piece of work and Dolly Draper a social-climbing catastrophe-prone dimwit (whom no sane person would touch with a bargepole); but it isn't as if the Tories don't have a few nasties and dimwits of their own. Remember Bernard Ingham? Aitken's "shiny sword of truth"? Brown envelopes? Jeffrey Archer? And as for Andy Coulson (formerly of that guardian of the moral high ground, The News of the Screws) his past form does not suggest he is a choir boy.
Running the McBride/Draper operation out of Downing Street and inviting Draper to Chequers (I mean, why?) was, apart from anything else, inept. Leaving an electronic paper-trail is a bit daft (what happened to quiet off-the-record chats over a few beers?). But there are other questions. Just how did Guido get hold of the e-mails? It seems clear the Tories have a mole or two inside the government machine (and - aided by friends in the media - they have just neatly dispatched the copper who tried to look into this, his replacement being - apparently -"one of us"). The Tories are certainly determined to milk this for what's its worth; but, as I say, I doubt if the average voter is quite so shocked as the parade of outraged Tories touring the TV and radio studios purport to be. We know a performance when we see one.

Brown pays homage to Washington

So Brown has been to Washington to pay pledge fealty to the new Emperor. Addressing Congress was - so it is being reported - a highlight of his career, something of which he is immensely proud. From where I sit it was a display of rather embarrasing grovelling by a local satrap eager to please. The theme? "America the wonderful". The so-called "special relationship" was laid bare. Special it may be to Brown, but I doubt if, for Obama or Congress, it is especially special. They looked at Brown and saw someone who came to pay them homage, and took it as their due.

Thatcher - a sympathetic portrait?

I seem to be out of kilter with everyone else in respect to the TV drama Margaret, about Thatcher in her bunker. The prevailing view - in nearly all the reviews I have seen - is that it was at least a somewhat sympathetic portrayal of Thatcher, showing her "human" side. I didn't see that at all (but maybe that's just me). The arrogance and conceit was there, the petty humiliation of colleagues (asking Howe to fetch her shawl), and even the vanity (the smirk of pleasure as Charles Powell comments on her ear-rings or remarks that she looks "radiant" - a very unsympathetic but probably accurate portrait of Powell as a scheming, sycophantic courtier). Yes, there was the "private side" but I didn't find it sympathetic - it was mostly maudlin self-pity. She was certainly depicted as having a limitless capacity to feel sorry for herself but there was little evidence here of any ability to empathise with others (and of course the real Thatcher didn't have any). Yes, she put a blanket over Crawfie in one scene; but then Crawfie appears to have been a family retainer, someone useful. To anyone not useful to her, or to whom she was not related, Thatcher - on the evidence here - gave no thought at all. It was all about Margaret. She didn't even have the grace to leave the stage with dignity after the gig was over; she had to be dragged from office kicking-and-screaming. Lindsay Duncan's performance was excellent, but one thing was missing. It is impossible to truly appreciate the awfulness of Thatcher without that voice. It turned my blood cold; it was both repellent and nauseating. Time moves on. It is thirty years since Thatcher was elected; nearly twenty since she left office. One has to be in one's fifties to have lived through those awful years. You had to be there. You had to hear her in her pomp. Ever now I cannot hold back a shiver of distaste.

Should there hae been a ballot?

Arthur Scargill and the other Miners leaders have often been criticised for not holding a national ballot on whether to strike in 1984. I am fairly agnostic about this. Perhaps it was a mistake - it certainly handed the Tories a propaganda gift. But I doubt if - had a ballot been held (and even if the Miners voted to strike) - it would have made a difference to the eventual outcome. The whole might of the state was against the Miners and add to that the pusillanimity of most of the rest of the trade union leaderships and of Kinnock et al and it seems to me the Miners had a very uphill task. Scargill argues - in Saturday's Guardian - that if the pit deputies union Nacods had come out the strike could have been won (he obviously suspects that some behind-the-scenes skulldugery explains why they choose not to, and he may well be right) and he thinks that if picketing had been increased at Orgreave after June 18 the coking plant could have been closed. Maybe. But vis-a-vis the ballot Scargill has a point. The difficulty was that Miners in some areas - believing (falsely) that their jobs were safe - could vote against a strike, effectively voting Miners in other areas out of a job. Scargill quotes Peter Heathfield speaking at the time: "...a ballot should not be used and exercised as a veto to prevent people in other areas defending their jobs". As I say, I am not convinced the decision taken not to hold a national ballot was correct; but this is certainly a fair point. Very often the "recieved version" of past events is allowed to stand with insufficient scrutiny.

Lock-em-up and take the cash

Saturday's Guardian has a truly horrendous story about judges in Pennsylvania recieving kickbacks from the private-run prisons for passing custodial sentences on children. Each inmate represents a bundle of cash paid from the taxpayer to the private-run prisons; the more there are the more money there is; so it makes sense to buy judges (two were bought for $2.6 million). The case has been called "kids-for-cash" . Judges have passed custodial sentences on a child for throwing sandal at her mother, on another for stealing a jar of nutmeg worth $4, and on another for slapping a friend at school. One judge in the first two years of his term passed custodisal sentences in 4.5% of cases; by 2004 (by which time he was on the payroll) it had risen to 26%. Of course, here in blighty New Labour as been pushing private prisons with great enthusiasm. Whether the same sort of thing happens here we shall probably never know; but it is perfecly obvious that a privatised prison sector has a deep vested interest in ever-higher levels of incarceration.

Fill circle

There is an obituary in Saturday's Guardian of Hamas leader Said Siam, killed recently by the Israelis. He doesn't, on the evidence here, seem a terribly nice man (he "led a unit that killed Palestinians suspected of informing for Israel", and "human rights agencies highlighted his ministry's use of torture"). But here it is, the story of Palestine, which tells us a great deal about the roots of this conflict, and probably a great deal about said Siam: "...he was born in a Shati refugee camp, Gaza, to a family who hailed from Al-Jura, a now destroyed village west of the Israeli city of Ashkelon...".

John Pilger in The New Statesman (12/1/09) reminds us of the "...infamous Plan D of 1947-8" which "resulted in the murderous depopulation of 369 Palestinian towns and villages" - much like Al-Jura. He also reminds us of the "massacre of Palstinian civilians in such towns as Deir Yassin, al-Dawayima, Eilaboun,..." and so on. Ben Gurian when asked "What shall we do with the Arabs?" made (according to Israeli historian Benny Morris quoted here by Pilger) "..a dismissive, energetic gesture with his hand and said 'Expel Them'..."

And on it goes.

It takes all kinds

Geoffrey Robertson in his Guardian obituary of John Mortimor says that: "In Henley, he encountered with interest the bookshop-owning lesbians who had taken opium with Cocteau, and a prim, elderly lady who had, in her youth, urinated regularly upon pioneering sexologist Havelock Ellis...". I think possibly Politaholic has led a very sheltered life.

In praise of...Israeli refusniks

Politaholic has a lot of time, a lot of respect, for people whose moral boundaries are not wholly circumscribed by their own ethnicity, and who can look beyond their own ethnic identity to, well, a common humanity, a universal sense of right and wrong. I mean the white South Africans who stood against apartheid, the white (and perhaps impossibly brave) young people who participated at great risk in the voter registration drives in the Deep South in the 1960's. So it is heartening to read in Saturday's guardian about Israeli "refusniks". These are people whose views on the Middle East are, I suspect, not coincident with my own; but they are brave, and their ability to see beyond "my own ethnic group right or wrong" deserves respect. One of these, No'em Levna (who was imprisoned for 14 days) is quoted as saying: "Killing innocent civilians cannot be justified...Nothing justifies this kind of killing"; and he also refers to the "incontinent theft" of Palestinian lands.
Meanwhile The Independent reports (18/1/09) that: "British Jews have been attacked for expressing support for Palestinians suffering under Israeli military strikes in Gaza. Police confirmed yesterday that they have provided protection to a number of people believed to be victims of UK-based Zionist extremists angered by expressions of solidarity with Palestinians..."

I blame the parents

The News of the Screws has a story about Harry Windsor calling a colleague a "Paki" and referring to "fucking rag-heads". Harry - son of Phillip, grandson of the "Queen Mother" - a racist? No shit Sherlock. I am as shocked as This chap.

Licensed to Kill

The death-toll in Gaza is now - what - 800 and rising? - as Israeli's genocidal onslaught (which is also their their peculiar form of electoral campaigning) continues. The victims include 13 members of the same family after their house came under tank fire. They include those killed in the two schools which were targetted by the Israelis after they had been given their GPS co-ordinates by UN officials who identified the schools as refugee centres. (UN officials were in control of the schools and deny the presence of Hamas fighters). Why did the Israelis target the schools? Because they are deliberately targetting civilians. Consider this: how many Israeli soldiers have been killed in the last few weeks (excluding "friendly fire" incidents) and how many Palestinian children (the figures are less than ten compared to several hundred). The children of the colonised are at far greater risk than the "soldiers" of the occupying colonial power. Israeli is, as Avi Shlaim argued in G2 (7/1/09) a "rogue state" which "habitually violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction, and practices terrorism - the use of violence against civilians for political purposes". And, as we can see in the picture above showing Israeli settlers apparently jubilantly watching Gaza bombed and children killed, they think murder is a form of entertainment. But then Israeli is always held, by the western powers, to a different and lesser standard of morality than anyone else on the planet. Robert Fisk quotes Fintan O'Toole in The Irish Times: "At what point does the Nazi genocide of Europe's Jews cease to excuse the state of Israel from the demands of international law and of common humanity?"