Liberal Burblings

Archive for November, 2008

The initial report on the Damian Green arrest on the Telegraph website (see clip below from Google news) stated he had “been arrested under the Official Secrets Act”. I based my post yesterday on that report.
I have since noticed that the Telegraph have changed their report to take out the reference to the Official Secrets Act. Indeed, Andrew Rawnsley today says:

Mr Green was not detained under the Official Secrets Act. The authorities resorted to a catch-all law about ‘procuring misconduct in public office’, a piece of blunderbuss legislation which dates back to the 18th century.

(This is like being arrested for allowing a duck to fart in public on a Sunday under a 14th century piece of legislation.)

In that case, I am going to turn on a sixpence, do a 180 degree U turn, and say that I take back everything I said in my post yesterday and whole-heartedly condemn the ludicrous and outrageous arrest of Damian Green.

I am going to leave my post from yesterday intact, with a note of correction, as a monument to my stupidity in believing the Telegraph in the first place.

UPDATE 30th November: This is a load of cobblers due to being based on an incorrect, subsequently corrected, report on the Telegraph website. See an explanation and correction here.

Oh, so it’s not OK for the police to investigate a potential breach of the Official Secrets Act allegedly involving Damian Green, but it was OK for the Tories to lock up Sarah Tisdall, try to lock up Clive Ponting and pursue Spycatcher author Peter Wright across the world in his dotage, was it?

Fascinating.

And I don’t remember David Cameron raising any objection to Ruth Turner being arrested at dawn over the Cash for Honours investigation.

I applaud the dropping of party political norms evidenced by Nick Clegg’s Telegraph article today. I agree with his general thrust.

But the police have the task of upholding the law, in this case one which had its public interest defence removed in 1989 under a Tory government.

The fact that no Labour politician was apparently told about this before it happened is surely a sensible way of firewalling them from the action, as they should be, is it not?

If the law is wrong, it should be changed. In the case of the Official Secrets Act, a public interest defence should be allowed. But we cannot complain if the police are legally seeking to uphold the law. That’s their job. People are not forced to work in the Home Office. They know they will have to sign the Official Secrets Act if they do.

Without knowing the full details of the police investigation it is almost impossible to make an objective comment. If it turns out that Inspector Knacker has over-stepped the mark on this occasion, I’ll be among the first to call for appropriate disciplinary action.

Hat-tip: Alex Wilcock.

It’s tempting to think of people working at the end of the phone as doing a simple task. The traditional lady sitting in front a telephone exchange is perhaps indelible in our minds. But it is worth thinking of the awesome job done by some people at the end of a phone.

That is, public sector workers who will greet with alarm his announcement that “We have got to end the apartheid” in pensions, by ending their final salary scheme:

We are getting into a situation now where pretty much everyone in the private sector has gone to defined contributions and the final salary schemes are closed. In the public sector you have still got a lot of people on final salary schemes including members of parliament.
MPs are going to have to lead by example. We have got to close the MP’s final salary scheme because we have got to be able to turn around to the rest of the public sector and say that over time it does makes sense to move towards defined contribution.
There is an issue of fairness between the private sector and the public sector but there is also an issue of economic efficiency. We do not want to make it so hard for people to move from the public sector to the private sector or from the private sector to the public sector.
My vision over time is to move increasingly towards defined contribution rather than final salary schemes.
This is something (sic) where the government has been remarkably feeble partly because they are in hock to the public sector unions.

Hat-tip to the FT.com Westminster blog, which comments on this here and here.

On Tuesday night on the BBC Six O’Clock news I was expecting the usual manic Robert Peston reactive commentary about Woolworths and MFI going into administration.

Albeit that I was in the bath and could only hear him, he seemed remarkably calm and reserved, choosing his words very carefully.

Although I couldn’t see to check, it sounded as though the rolling eyes and usual OTT behaviour were refreshingly absent.

I can only feel great sadness that MFI and Woolworths have gone into administration. That is mixed with enormous sympathy for the staff facing great uncertainty.

I suppose that deep inside me there is a hard-hearted devil who takes the attitude that Woolworths has been on its last legs for years (its founding American counterpart business lost its name and transmogrified into a sports goods chain over ten years ago). A business that started in this country as the “3d and 6d” shop was being undercut at the lower end by the Pound shop and the 99p shop (its nemesis was its own genesis); and at the other end by supermarkets.

But, frankly, on this occasion my over-riding emotion is sympathy for the managers and staff, and prayers that some decent enterprise can be salvaged from what is a huge business and a major landmark in the British high street.

So says “Gender Analyzer“. I regard this high praise for my writing style.

There is one slight snag, however.

If you vote to say whether or not they have got the gender right, you see that only 53% say yes – they got it right, against 47% saying they got it wrong. That means that whatever software they are using is only 6% better than tossing a coin.