Liberal Burblings

Archive for May, 2010

Of course, David Laws shouldn’t resign and/or shouldn’t be sacked. This is a most depressing furore and I wager that the Comissioner will not raise any eyebrows over this technicality of interpretation of “treat each other as spouses”. (Their relationship was not known to family or friends, they had separate bank accounts and social lives). Compare Laws’ episode with the thumping great flipping of Labour ministers such as Hoon. There was no question of  Hoon being asked to resign so why the hell should Laws resign over a finely nuanced semantics issue, from which he made no personal gain?

If anyone wants to know the real motive behind all this, just have a look at the front page of the Telegraph today – i.e the hard copy version. A “secret lover” headline with photos of Laws and his friend. It’s disgusting.

I had hoped that the election had drawn a line under Telegraph expense stories. I’m happy to wait for the verdict of the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner on David Laws. The matter seems to boil down to interpretation of the rules, the definition of partner and regarding onesleves as living like spouses or not. David Laws’ explanation that he and his friend had a relationship unknown to friends and family, and that they have had separate bank accounts and social lives, seems entirely plausible.

But I feel as though we are finding out more than we ought to know. I feel great sympathy for David Laws and his friend, having had this thrust upon them. David Laws is obviously a very serious and intensely private person. I can quite understand why he and his friend wanted to keep their private life private.

Quite frankly, I am sick of these expenses stories. They come out and then ten thousand people (yes – including me!) state a view based on the blinking Telegraph report. Then everyone moves on to other stories and the verdict of the Parliamentary Commissioner comes out, one way or the other.

I am mightily fed up with the whole thing, particularly if it has now got to the stage of effectively and very publicly ”outing” two decent people.

For deeper thoughts on this matter, see Sara Bedford. I agree with everything she says.

I’m quite moisty eyed this morning. It’s wonderful to see Floella Benjamin being made a peer. I saw her once at a conference discussion on adult education and she was very impressive in both her commitment to and knowledge of the subject. And of course, I seem to remember watching her with my (then) two year old as she (Floella) did an impression of a steam train on the telly.

Also, it is enormously great to see Meral Ece being made a peer. Her blog has provided a very fair commentary on many matters, especially those in relation to equality.  

And if I might go local for my third bit of mosity eyes, many, many congratulations to Lee Dillon on being made the youngest ever mayor of Thatcham. I have known Lee since he was a 17 year old volunteer LYDS-type deliverer. He has a easy-going and affable character. He’ll make a superb mayor of Thatcham.

Well they are beautiful, aren’t they? Unfortunately they only last a few days; hence the urge to photograph them.

It was Ross Noble’s joke on “Have I got news for you” last night. Vince Cable is now a flex. You have to see it to appreciate it. It seems that it is David Laws who has got the driving seat position in the cabinet, for a LibDem. While Vince Cable, as the set-up to Noble’s quip went, was given the Business department and then had $900 million slashed from his budget. “He’s now a flex” etc etc

In a similar vein, Alastair Campbell, who apparently carries round with him a framed portrait of David Laws (he is obviously smitten – well Laws is a handsome lad, after all), quipped on Question Time that Vince Cable looks a bit lost in the coalition government. He said:

He looks like a Burnley supporter made to stand at the Blackpool end

I am sure Vince will prove all the naysayers wrong and prove to be an excellent Business Secretary. It’s quite right that he is clearing the decks by stepping down as LibDem deputy leader.

Apart from workload considerations, there is also another reason why it is a good idea for Vince to step down as deputy leader. It will be good for the party to have a deputy leader who is not in the cabinet (or indeed in the government) and who is therefore better able to represent views from outside the, doubtless rather seductive, atmosphere of government. I think this will become more and more important as we progress and hit choppy waters. Having both the leader and deputy leader in the cabinet would have been too much. The party would have risked becoming unnecessarily divided. Activists would have felt that the whole leadership had “gone native” with the Tories.

Which brings me back to Question Time and the august figure of Piers Morgan. Back from abroad, he just could not believe that the Tories and LibDems had got together and said it wouldn’t last more than a few months.

In one sense I can understand where he is coming from. Indeed, Vince Cable himself is not a natural co-habitee of the Conservatives. He cut his political teeth in Glasgow, where Conservatives are something of a rarity. He was a Labour councillor. So one can understand that he is not a natural in Conservative salons.

Whereas, I suspect Nick Clegg is a natural for cross-party relations with the Conservatives. He was born and brought up in Chalfont St Giles, for goodness sake. He’s 100% a liberal. But in Chalfont St Giles you tend to get used to dealing with Tories. Glasgow – not.

But I think what Piers Morgan (and Alastair Campbell, who chipped in, in a similar vein) is missing are the historic strands of common thought between the LibDems (formerly Liberal Party) and the Conservatives. OK there are wings of the Tory party that are so right wing that you’d never see any common ground between them and the LibDems. But when you look at the likes of Kenneth Clarke and, historically, Ted Heath, they tend to be philosophically in the same ball park as us liberals.

Indeed, the best historic example of someone who was easy temperamentally, philosophically and politically in the Liberal and Conservative parties, and indeed in coalitions between the two and Labour, was, of course, Winston Churchill.

Many people look at him as a Tory and regard his career as a Liberal politician as short-lived and a “marriage of convenience”, often basing their thoughts on his oft-repeated quotes about ‘ratting and re-ratting’ and ‘any hack to get out of the stables’ etc etc. 

But if you look at his ministerial career (below) he spent most of it serving as a Liberal Party member. He spent 10 years as a minister in purely Liberal governments. 10 years as a minister in purely Conservative governments. 6 years serving under Lloyd George in a coalition government while he was a member of the Liberal Party. 5 years as Prime Minister in his own coalition government during the second world war (while a member of the Conservative party). So 16 years beats 10 years or 16 years beats 15 years. Whichever way you look at it, Churchill was temperamentally ambi-dextrous between Liberal and Conservative (witness his foundation of the Labour Exchanges and National insurance which show his liberal credentials – but he also went off the rails and did some very illiberal things like sending the Black and Tans in to Ireland and suggesting that striking miners should be machine-gunned during the General Strike, while expressing his admiration for Mussolini etc etc).

I would suggest that what we are seeing in terms of, to an extent, a natural coalescing of policies between Tory and LibDem is not completely out of left field. There is a tradition of some of the philosophies of the two parties being compatible. …As there is also a lot of natural affinity between the LibDems and Labour. The most obvious distinguishing philosophy, which has been brought sharply into focus recently, is the Liberal Democrat belief in decentralising power. This has found an echo in the Conservative belief in “small government” (shown in the relatively easy merging of policies on things like stopping ID cards and lowering tax thresholds) and an anti-echo (if there is such a thing) in Labour’s belief in centralising power and authoritarianism, which, I wager, was one of the main stumbling blocks in trying to form a Lab-Lib coalition. 

Well, strictly speaking, I spiked my own peony after Iain Dale kindly provided me with alternative material. It’s been one of those weeks when I’ve had trouble finding stuff to blog about (but, I stress, blogging has not been ‘light’). At one point I seriously considered putting up a photo of my peonies. They are quite beautiful again this year. However, I did what I often do when pushed to find something to rant about. I went to Iain Dale’s Diary. It’s nothing if not exciting. It normally reminds me why I am a liberal in short order.

This week has been sensational on IDD. First, he went all moist about the pomp and tights of the Opening of Parliament. Then he railed against the protest camp in Parliament Square. Then he rather misguidedly turned vigilante and investigated the professional arrangements of one of the camp organisers. But today Iain has surpassed all this with a short post:

A tale of two ladies

Doesn’t it strike you as a little unfair that the lady who Baroness Scotland employed illegally has just been sent to prison for eight months, while Lady Scotland escaped with a £5,000 fine, and kept her job (which the electorate has just relieved her of)? A slight imbalance in the scales of justice, I think.

Crikey. OK, if you read it and supporting comments carefully, all Iain is saying is that maybe the Baroness should have received a stiffer fine for failing to keep a copy of some documents which turned out to be forged. In fact, reading some learned friends on this subject, the size of the fine depends on the quality of the forgery presented to the employer:

The fine is calculated on a sliding scale and can be up to £10,000 per illegal worker depending on how little checking the employer has done, whether it was the first time an illegal worker was found working for the employer and other factors. In the case of forged or counterfeit documents presented by the employee, the UK Border Agency applies the term “reasonably apparent”. So if it considers that a forgery should have been reasonably apparent to the employer or the employer should have noticed that the employee does not bear a reasonable likeness to the document produced, the employer can be given a Civil Penalty. If a forged document is of good quality and not reasonably apparent to the employer, it is unlikely that any action will be taken against the employer…We can also see the quandary in which Baroness Scotland found herself in relation to her Tongan housekeeper. It is reported that she said that she failed to keep copies of the relevant documents. This is why she was given a Civil Penalty of £5,000, which is the level of penalty for a first offence.

So, it would appear that the fine for Scotland was in the right ball park, compared to the usual fines meted out, according to Messrs/Mesdammes Wright Hassall, Solicitors. And let’s remember, according to the BBC:

The jury of eight men and four women took less than 90 minutes to find Tapui guilty.

They agreed she knew she had overstayed her student visa, and tricked the chief law officer into hiring her as her housekeeper for £6 an hour.

and let’s also remember:

Tapui also confirmed she was paid £95,000 for her story by the Mail on Sunday, with a £19,000 commission payment going to PR expert Max Clifford.

It seems to me that justice has been done in both instances here. In fact, I feel a little vicarious schadenfreude on behalf of the Baroness. In many respects, she has been vindicated, after going through months of public humiliation and opprobrium. A commenter called Richard on IDD put it very well:

Baroness Scotland was, in fact, fined for merely not having kept copies of the documents that her housekeeper was relying on. The Border Agency itself accepted that she had not known that the housekeeper was an overstayed and also that she had carried out checks on her. To my mind, a £5,000 fine for failing to take photocopies is hardly nugatory.

By contrast, the housekeeper received 4 months for being on possession of a false visa and 4 months for committing fraud against her employer. She also received a concurrent 1 month sentence for overstaying.

Iain – I have to say that I don’t thnk (sic) the two cases are remotely comparable, you are comparing apples and oranges and so your assertion is off-target on this occasion. Sorry.

In fact, when you actually read what Iain has written carefully it is relatively unremarkable. But he does have a wonderful knack of making us liberals see red….or should that be orange?