In defence of Members of Parliament

Surprisingly I find myself moved to come to the defence of MPs. Yes, this is in response to our Prime Minister (for how long is in doubt) and her dis-graceful comments concerning her fellow Parliamentarians. I was out when she made her now infamous broadcast appeal to the nation for 10 Downing Street on Wednesday, but I did catch one of her comments in Prime Minister’s Questions at midday. Annoyed by Jeremy Corbyn, she describe the House of Commons contemplating its navel about Brexit and indulging itself in not coming to a conclusion over it. Unusually swiftly Mr Corbyn questioned the respect of Parliament shown by describing its deliberations as self-indulgence. I think Mrs May was attempting to demonstrate anger at the rejection of the deal painstakingly pulled together by UK and EU civil servants over many months, as she repeated the twin charges of navel gazing and self-indulgence as if from a script.

There was palpable anger among MPs at the idea that their honest wrestling with the Hobson’s choice with which they had been presented for the past few months was nothing more than an indulgent waste of time. However it seems that it was not a mere poorly phrased answer in the crucible of PMQs, because she compounded her contempt for her colleagues only a few hours later in her prime ministerial broadcast from Downing Street (which I gather was staged like the Kremlin). “You are tired of the infighting, you’re tired of the political games and the arcane procedural rows, tired of MPs talking about nothing else but Brexit…

“So far, parliament has done everything possible to avoid making a choice.

“Motion after motion and amendment after amendment has been tabled without parliament ever deciding what it wants.

“All MPs have been willing to say is what they do not want. I passionately hope MPs will find a way to back the deal I’ve negotiated with the EU, a deal that delivers on the result of the referendum and is the very best deal negotiable.” She implied an opposition between the people, who want “her” Brexit deal, and MPs, who don’t. “I am on your side.”

No wonder MPs were alienated. It seemed to be designed to undermine the public’s relationship with their representatives. It’s little wonder either that some MPs felt – and were – physically threatened. The Prime Minister appeared to shift responsibility for her own inept negotiating skill on to the shoulders of genuinely conscientious MPs. Her disdain for her colleagues in Parliament reminded me of Brutus’ description of Julius Caesar:

“to speak truth of Caesar,
I have not known when his affections sway'd
More than his reason. But 'tis a common proof,
That lowliness is young ambition's ladder,
Whereto the climber-upward turns his face;
But when he once attains the upmost round.
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend.” i.e. the upwardly mobile tend to treat the lower ranks through which they rose with contempt.

I recall March wasn’t a good month for Julius Caesar.

As for me, I wish the honourable Members of Parliament every success in their search for a way through to a solution advantageous to the United Kingdom as well as to the European Union.

Are referendums democratic - or not? Let's get real.

I have kept my counsel with remarkable restraint for the past couple of years, but I’m sorry. I can do so no longer. Which is by way of a rant warning, but really… I have had enough of the continually repeated mantra, “Another referendum would be anti-democratic.”

Picture: LSE.ac.uk

For one thing you can’t have it both ways. For another it’s clearly fallacious. For a third I gather that if the government threatens that, if the House of Commons fails to approve Mrs May’s compromise Brexit deal, it will be presented for a vote again when, presumably, the markets’ negative reaction will have spooked MPs into changing their mind. For a fourth far from another referendum being a rerun of the June 2016 one, this would be the difference between voting on substantial proposals and voting on a promise of unicorns – and don’t dare tell me that the “ordinary voter” is too dim to understand what’s being proposed.

The pressure for a referendum came in the first place from the arch-Eurosceptics who had long peddled their myths about the EU. Now they have turned into a “research group” of sloganising Brexiteers who have been revealed as wearing the emperor’s clothes, or pin-striped suits. But they can’t have it both ways. They can’t claim that another referendum would not be democratic – if the first one was. Once you let the referendum cat out of the bag, as the logical Swiss know, there’s no way you can capture it again. It’s entirely democratic to say to the people, “Almost three years ago you voted by a small majority that we should leave the EU. Since then our keenest Brexiteers have been negotiating and this is the best package that your government have managed come up with. Is this what you want? The alternatives are to leave with no deal (which would mean the following…) or to stay in the EU and influence its decisions from within."

By the way, I have little patience with the Brexiteers’ bogus claim that the fact that both the Tories and Labour at the last election included implementing Brexit in their manifestoes indicates that 82.5% of people were in favour of that policy. What rubbish! I certainly voted for one of those parties. That does not indicate that I was voting for their every policy, but for the whole package that I judged would be best for the country and the team I trusted more. I suspect that is true of every voter in every election. That means that one is not entitled to extrapolate that each person who votes for a party also is endorsing each of its policies. It’s a fallacy. I voted to remain in Europe, but hoped that the parties would in the end see sense.

It's also a fallacy to call one plebiscite (referendum) an exercise of democracy and another a denial of democracy. You can argue that holding any referendum is a denial of representative, or parliamentary, democracy, based on the premise that the people vote for representatives they trust to debate and make informed decisions on their behalf. The 2016 referendum bears this out. The decision to hold a referendum was an abdication of parliamentary responsibility in the face of a fierce populist onslaught on the principle of parliamentary democracy.

There were rumours put out last week that, if Mrs May’s deal was not voted through on 11^th December, then the MPs' Christmas break might be put off for another vote, I assume in the hope that there will enough hoo-hah from industry and the financial markets that they will change their minds. Their Christmas might even be cancelled! Hang on! If a second referendum is antidemocratic as is argued, how can a repeat vote in Parliament be democratic? You can’t have it both ways.

Another referendum on the other hand wouldn’t be a repeat vote. The issue is now quite different from June 2016. Then the question was simple: In or Out? But the evidence was all hypothetical. For example: Out, and the economy would suffer. Out, and the NHS would benefit by £35 million a week. Out, and we'll "regain control". Now we have a potential agreement for withdrawal and have concrete evidence for what would be entailed in the UK’s departure from the EU. And many MPs see that it is the worst of all worlds. I suspect more MPs are unhappy with the agreement now than ever were sceptical about the EU. What a pity they weren’t more effective in advocating its benefits all along.

As Brexiteers were wont to tell us and I agree with them, ordinary folk are quite capable of understanding facts and issues. The trouble before June 2016 is that they weren’t given them – because they weren’t known. We now know a whole lot more, for example about net migration, housing, schooling and the health service. We know exactly what the terms of the withdrawal agreement are. If the electorate was trusted once, why not trust them again? Perhaps the additional number of 18- to 20-year olds might affect the vote, which probably the Brexiteers fear. But in my opinion the outcome of any referendum is by no means a foregone conclusion. I fear Michael Gove might be right, "“I actually think if there were a second referendum people would probably vote to Leave in even larger numbers than they did before." However his claim that the very act of calling a second referendum would damage faith in democracy and rip apart the social fabric of this country would very much depend on him and his ilk. If damaging democracy becomes their strapline then a large minority of the population will swallow the bait, ignoring the fact that parliamentary democracy has already been damaged and relegated to being of less importance than plebiscite democracy. Were they to resist the Dominic Cummings' policy of social media slogans and discuss the real issues, it would be possible to reach the most desirable outcome of settling one way or another the present stalemate which is poisoning the UK’s body politic. 

I don't envy Theresa May and the Procrustean bed she chose to lie on. She has shown amazing courage in the past year as ministers have deserted her. I hope she will show yet more courage in trusting the people one more time. She might be surprised at the outcome. Will she, the government and MPs be prepared to take the risk of asking the country anew?

The Right Honourable Leader of Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition

What exactly do MPs, of all parties, reckon the role of the Leader of the Opposition to be? Do they really want a supine yes-man who fails to submit government actions to critical scrutiny? Or do they want a leader who is not afraid to ask those in power the awkward questions which remain unanswered?

Whatever the truth of the Salisbury affair, we as the public certainly have been given no more proof that the attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal was authorised by the Kremlin than circumstantial evidence, such as that Skripal was a Russian spy and a British double agent, that the fourth generation nerve agent used, generically known as Novichok, was developed in Russia and has a Russian nickname meaning "newcomer", and we think the Russian president is a nasty piece of work. It might be summed up in Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson’s profound observation that if something "swims like a duck and quacks like a duck" it's probably a duck. “Proof” seems to add up to “you have to take our word for it,” said loudly and repeatedly. Theresa May, the Prime Minister, was more circumspect in her Commons’ statement saying merely that it was “highly likely” that the Russian state was responsible. According to our former ambassador in Uzbekhistan, Craig Murray - who is far better informed than me - it is highly unlikely that this "proof" is true. Read https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/03/the-novichok-story-is-indeed-another-iraqi-wmd-scam/. It is eye-opening.

Jeremy Corbyn was unflinchingly direct in his condemnation of the poisoning of the Skripals, both of the use of chemical weapons in war and on the streets. He also condemned the Putin government and its supporters for “its human rights abuses both at home and abroad”. But, much to the dislike of the government benches, he also asked some pointed technical questions, including whether they had referred the incident to the International Office for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons. A former member of that office and weapons inspector interviewed on Tuesday’s Today Programme confirmed that following a whistleblower’s revelations any “advanced” state could manufacture a chemical agent of this type. So it was also a reasonable question to ask what particularly pointed its manufacture to Russia.

Whatever the details of the Salisbury affair turn out to be, if we’re ever allowed to know them (and official secrets are a well-used governmental fig leaf), far from playing tawdry political games that proved he wouldn’t defend us (Daily Mail), Jeremy Corbyn proved himself a serious opposition leader, unafraid to do his job – subjecting the government to critical scrutiny and awkward interrogation. This was evidenced in the hostile personal attack with which the Prime Minister answered him. It is a shame that he is not receiving the support he deserves from some members of his own Parliamentary Party.

Another thing that seems to have riled the Conservatives is Mr Corbyn’s pointing out on Monday how much the Tory party has received in donations from rich Russian oligarchs now domiciled in the UK with British nationality – over £3million since 2010, and just since Mrs May took office more than £820,000. Of course they want to hold on to it. One wonders why these fabulously wealthy exiles choose to buy favour with the British ruling party.

An irony of the affair in the House of Commons is that in Russia and its predecessor, the Soviet Union, those we most admired were the dissidents, the brave people who dare to challenge accepted orthodoxy. And yet here the powers that be, political, media and plutocracy do all they can to shut his dissenting voice up. It’s perhaps no coincidence that his speech contained this comment about dissidents: “I join with many others in this house in paying tribute to the many campaigners in Russia for human rights and justice and democracy in that country.” One of those no doubt was Alexei Navalny, the hero of John Sweeney’s Panorama programme last night of which Vladimir Putin was the villain. 

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the case, we should welcome the fact that we have in Parliament an opposition leader who holds our government to account - however uncomfortable that may be.

Tweeting truth

I want to gripe again. My question is this. When do you ever hear what a politician really thinks?

 

Cartoon from Cartoon Stock

Maybe Donald Trump’s tweets are genuinely his thoughts. But if they are, then where do his more reasonable speeches come from? Are they really what he thinks and wants? Or are they what his speech-writers reckon will go down well with his audience at the time? Certainly his minders minded when in the early days he strayed off-script. And it’s probable that they now also try to vet his tweets, with limited success it must be said.

Meanwhile on our side of the pond it’s fairly obvious that our prime ministers don’t have the time to write the host of speeches they choose to deliver every week. One imagines that their party minders, the ones who pre-brief on coming speeches, suggest a promising topic as well as a crowd or party pleasing line; the PM chooses it and the speech writers produce it for her to deliver. And so we have the curious phenomenon of shifting policy arguments stated with all the conviction of a university debating chamber.

How I long for a politician whom one knows where they stand! And I don’t think I am alone. I suspect the perceived straightforwardness of Jeremy Corbyn accounted for the unexpected success of Labour at the last general election, and the beautifully articulate rigidity of the honourable member for the 18^th century, Jacob Rees-Mogg, explains similarly his unaccountable and regrettable popularity among certain circles. Even the wily Father of the House, Ken Clarke, remains consistent  at the expense of his colleagues falling asleep.

There is, it seems, a struggle between politicians of convenience and politicians on conviction. Sadly often those with political aspirations start off with conviction but the pressures of expediency and the pursuit of power soon squeeze them into the mould of convenience.

It would be nice to believe that a good interviewer might elicit the truth from a politician. But of course the party machines have that awful possibility covered as well. Their representatives are intensively trained in interview technique, which we recognise all too well. It seems to boil down to, “Don’t answer the question asked. Have a sound bite and repeat it at every opportunity. Above all, stay on message.” In my view, the adversarial nature of the interviewing game has done nothing for honest politics. Belligerent interviewers such as John Humphrys simply produce defensive politicians.

 

E B Herbert, The Fox Hunt

Let me add one thing. I’m not blaming politicians more than anyone else. The rest of us have a mob mentality, like a pack of hounds led by journalists on their high horses, seeking out any weaknesses and hunting down our prey to their political extinction. We relish the chase. Perhaps if we respected our politicians more, who are entrusted with a huge responsibility on our behalf, we might receive the respect of their honesty in return.

So, meanwhile, are Donald Trump’s tweets the nearest we will get to knowing the honest views of a politician? If this is as good as it gets, how sad.

A tale of two paradoxes

Two news stories have struck me this week. 

One is the extraordinary ineptness of the contractor employed to carry out tests for PIPs (Personal Independence Payments) for disabled people in the North East, who has hired rooms in a luxury spa owned by multi-millionaire, Duncan Bannatyne, for the purpose. I can imagine few things worse than being pushed in my wheelchair through a place thronging with healthy and wealthy spa-goers padding around in fluffy slippers and snow-white bath robes on their way to a massage, a manicure, and a meal of coleslaw and prosciutto, or working off their excess weight on cross-trainers, or showing off their finely toned bodies between the swimming pool and the sauna. It is hard to imagine a more inappropriate venue for what is already a humiliating enough experience - an assessment designed to save the government £1.3bn by 2020, by cutting the number of people who receive DLA (Disability Living Allowance, being replaced by PIPs) and in particular the mobility element which gave disabled people freedom to get out and about. 

It is true that supporting the disabled costs us all a lot of money. It's also true that the introduction of PIPs has already caused a lot of personal harm and hardship. "PIP assessments have so far led to Motability cars being taken away from 50,000 disabled people.  
When the new assessments were announced to replace the Disability Living Allowance (DLA) in 2016, it was estimated that entitlements would be cut by up to £150 a week for more than half a million people." See Huffington Post article.  See Huffington Post article. The irony is that the sum result of a lot of misery for a section of the population will in the end barely dent our social services bill a jot, if at all.

I do realise that a while ago I made a resolution not to whinge so much. But really! Sometimes it all gets too much. So here's my second one. It's about Theresa May's much touted Florence speech. I'm not entirely clear why her minders chose to stage it there. I gather it might have been because of the trading/banking history of the city, or it might have been some sort of convoluted symbolism to do with the Renaissance. Here she was, in the tradition of Michelangelo and the Medicis, launching a second Renaissance in Europe, Mrs May's Renaissance. From the news reports that seems to have been the gist of her message. Brexit is not an end; it's a beginning. It's not a divorce; it's a new glorious "partnership". There were precious few details of what the partnership would look like, just like nothing we had seen before and we need some more time to think about it. What must puzzle objective observers is, then what Brexit was all about. In the referendum campaign we were constantly told that it was about breaking off with the EU, having done with it, breaking free from its shackles. Which sounded very much like a divorce, a very acrimonious one at that. It sounded like "a plague on all your 27 houses".

"Brexit," Mrs May intoned, like a mantra, "is Brexit." Now it appears, "Brexit is Brentrance." Whether Europe will allow us to have our cake and eat it remains to be seen.

Keeping religion out of politics

It's commonly claimed that religion should be kept strictly private. There's a long tradition of that view stretching in this country at least back to Thomas à Becket whom Henry II famously called "a low-born cleric" or a "turbulent priest", because he would not put the King's interests above divine ordinance, leading to his assassination in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. In more recent times it was echoed by the Thatcher government when Robert Runcie prayed both for British and Argentine casualties after the Falklands' conflict and then put his name to the 1985 Faith in the City report (a government "source" rubbishing it before publication as Marxist propaganda). It was particularly puzzling and galling that former Scot's Guard and Military Cross winner, favoured Tory choice for the archbishopric, should be so turbulent as to suggest that the individualistic policies of the government might have contributed to poverty in the cities of Britain. And of course Rowan Williams got up the nose of successive governments, including Mr Blair's, with his rigorous questioning. And now David Cameron must be having similar thoughts to Margaret Thatcher concerning Old Etonian, Justin Welby. Of all people, the former oil executive, "within a month", questioning how benefit cuts would affect the poorest children - what is it about the post of Archbishop that suddenly turns sound men into bleeding-heart liberals? Certainly arch-conservative columnist, Melanie Phillips, who sometimes talks good sense, is at a loss to explain it and can only vent her spleen on such meddlesome men.

Strangely enough I heard her on The Moral Maze last week maintaining, I think, that belief in God was needed to underpin ethical behaviour; I recall her mentioning "conscience". It might occur to her that the way we treat the vulnerable, such as children, in our society is, or should be, a matter of conscience. I guess it certainly is for Justin Welby and his 44 merry colleagues. It seems to me that they are doing no more than their Christian conscience demands, as paralleled in the early equivalent of a welfare state. "They only asked us to remember the poor - the very thing I was eager to do." In this case, the Children's Society, because it is that admirable charity which has, I suspect, enlisted the bishops' and other church leaders' support, is asking for the welfare uprating bill to be amended in the House of Lords next week in order to protect children in particular from the ravages of inflation, which the financially robust are able to ride. The letter written by the bishops and published by the Sunday Telegraph seems to me a justifiable request to a still well-off government to remember the poor. And it seems to me that faith without a public conscience is dead. So I am glad that the new Archbishop has already indicated his intention to follow Jesus in being "on the side of the poor" and powerless.

Having said that let me add a postscript concerning the plight of politicians. It is all too easy and all too frequently done to indulge in government-bashing. After all the High Court of Parliament is adversarial, and it is right that governments be held to account. However on Saturday I was talking to someone who has had the closest contact with the highest ranks of government, and he said that ministers have an impossible job; their days are filled with meetings and briefings from civil servants and advisers. They really have no time for quiet reflection about the big issues. Once in power they hardly have time to think. The implication of what he said, I take it, was, "Have some sympathy for these people. They're trying their hardest with impossible jobs."

On Saturday, the Home Secretary, Theresa May, who's not a politician I readily warm to, gave a speech looking to the next General Election. It was mischievously cast by the media as a leadership salvo. For me, more interesting because I suspect more genuine, was what she said at the outset: "It’s often said that politics is about public service, and of course it is. But to me, it’s about much more than that. Politics is a passion. A passion to make a difference. To change lives for the better. To stand up for people who work hard and want to get on in life. To help people to help themselves and their families. To help those in genuine need." I do appreciate that there's a bit of coding about strivers and skivers in those last phrases. Nevertheless the phrase "a passion to make a difference" does, I reckon, reflect the initial and fundamental motivation of the majority of those who enter the risky front line of politics, with its minefield of corrupting power. I guess that's why St Paul urged, "Pray every way you know how,... especially for those in power to govern well".