Crash Bang Wallace
Libertarian political blog from Mark Wallace; political opinion, breaking news and exclusivesEXCLUSIVE: TFL 2012 staff trained on where Wembley and Stratford are
Posted on March 01, 2012Giving evidence to the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee on 24th January, Jeremy Hunt said that:
There is a huge amount of work going on, right down to training Tube drivers to make sure that we make Tube passengers feel particularly welcome in this special period for London
I was intrigued at what kind of training was being given to Transport for London staff – possibly “striking is a pain in the backside” would be a good start? So I made a Freedom of Information request to find out the details of the course.
Almost a week later than the legal deadline, and accompanied by a threatening note claiming that I’m not allowed to publish the information they’ve sent me (which I’m ignoring for obvious reasons centred around the words “freedom” and “information”), they’ve responded.
Given that the 9,600 people they are training all work on the London Underground, I was slightly surprised to say the least that part of the course is a Powerpoint presentation (screenshot below) teaching staff where in London the Olympic venues actually are.
Shouldn’t the staff for London’s transport system already know where, err, Stratford and Wembley are located?
Replace the House of Lords with a House of Losers
Posted on February 27, 2012Less than a year after their walloping in the AV referendum, the Lib Dems are pushing for constitutional change again. Their obsession with their hobby horse regardless of its electoral irrelevance has led them to resemble a bluebottle banging its head against a window, desperate to move ahead despite the battering it gets from its repeated failure.
This time it is House of Lords reform that forms their windowpane of choice . Supposedly, Clegg is demanding that it is prioritised in the Coalition’s legislative programme.
They will face all sorts of problems – the question of whether there should be a referendum on constitutional changes (A: Yes), the question of whether we should be discussing this while the economy is struggling (A: No) and most importantly the question of what a new House of Lords should look like (A: Who knows?)
This last question is the most important – even the Lib Dems, who have thought about little else for the last 50 years, haven’t agreed on an answer. Should it be 100% elected, or partially elected and partially selected experts? Should it be done by STV, a list system, AV or another PR electoral technique? How long should the terms be, and how great should the powers of the chamber be? For that matter, should it be called the Lords, or the Senate or something else?
Personally, I do think Britain should have an elected Upper Chamber. It is perverse to have an unelected, unaccountable chamber disrupting and sabotaging the work of a legislature elected by the people.
I emphatically do not think we should be prioritising Lords reform now, however. People want the economy boosted, and growth restored – if we had a proper system for initiating popular referenda, I strongly doubt we would see Lords reform jumping to the top of the list.
However, if the Lib Dems insist on changing it now, what should the new Lords look like?
For a start, I’d prefer to keep calling it the Lords, because I’m a bit sentimental like that. “Senates” and so on all sound a bit trendy, which is one thing Westminster definitely isn’t.
So how should we select it? The system would need to satisfy several requirements:
- it would need to be in keeping with the verdict from last year’s AV referendum that the people have no truck for obscure forms of PR (no matter how much the Lib Dems may love them)
- it would need to be affordable and efficient
- it would be important that it did not have a claim to greater legitimacy than the Commons
- it would be pointless if it simply produced a second house identical in makeup to the Commons
- if possible, it would be good if it did something to answer the concerns people have about votes being wasted in the First Past the Post system, while maintaining a constituency link where possible
I have a proposal that would fit each of these criteria. We fill the House of Lords with all those who come second in elections to the House of Commons – a “House of Losers”, if you will.
Let’s test it against the above criteria. We continue to use the First Past the Post system, which the people clearly don’t want to get rid of. We wouldn’t need to spend anything extra on holding another wave of elections. There would be no challenge to the legitimacy of the Commons, given that those on the green benches would have beaten the red benches at a general election. The new Lords would be a counterbalance to the Commons in their political makeup, providing for energetic scrutiny. Finally, millions of votes currently viewed by many as “wasted” on candidates who come second would in fact count for something – dramatically upping the proportion of voters who get a representative they voted for.
The important thing would be to get the powers of this new House of Losers right. Too little, and it would become redundant as a scrutineering chamber, too great and it would deliver gridlock. But that goes for any reform of the Lords – at least under this system we wouldn’t waste a fortune and we would improve the proportionality of our Parliamentary democracy.
Newsnight’s unasked immigration question
Posted on February 21, 2012Last night Newsnight ran a package on the findings of the Vine Report, the damning outcome of an investigation into flaws in the security of British borders.
One expert interviewee featured condemning the current Government for allowing the problems to continue after the 2010 election was Matt Cavanagh, introduced as a former “Government immigration adviser”.
Now, Matt Cavanagh’s critique may well be right – the Coalition evidently didn’t ask the right questions that would have uncovered these failings in May 2010. But shouldn’t some criticism – perhaps the bulk of it – go to those who oversaw these security breaches opening up in the first place?
Vine reports that the holes in our borders first began in 2007/8. To prevent such a thing happening again, we surely need to know how the problem first emerged.
But who could Newsnight have interviewed about such a thing?
Perhaps we should look at Matt Cavanagh’s full tagline on Newsnight – which was, err, “Government immigration adviser, 2003-10“.
It was fair enough to interview Cavanagh and ask him about the Coalition’s role in allowing the scandal to continue. But why wasn’t he asked about how the problems allegedly started on his watch?
Maude or Grayling to replace Ken Clarke…say Ken’s own civil servants
Posted on February 20, 2012Understandably, there’s a lot of speculation over the future of certain Cabinet Ministers at the moment. The strongest argument against predictions of Andrew Lansley’s impending departure is the claim that David Cameron wants to avoid a reshuffle in the foreseeable future.
However, it seems that it’s not only those on the outside of Government who think one might be coming.
Two of this blog’s readers were out for a curry last week and found themselves next to a very loud table who, it soon became clear, were staffers from the Private Offices of Ken Clarke and his fellow Justice Minister, Crispin Blunt.
The civil servants in question were nattering away about the internal politics of the Coalition, so my correspondents decided to talk loudly about politics, SpAds and other Westminstery topics in order to give them a subtle message that people could hear them.
They carried on regardless, and it’s interesting to learn that the prime topic of conversation from Ken Clarke’s aides was who is going to replace him as Secretary of State for Justice.
I’m told by my man with the tikka masala that the civil servants’ top tips for the MoJ job were Francis Maude and Chris Grayling. Ones to watch…particularly if you’re Ken Clarke.
The Labour Councillor who “Likes” IRA Bombings
Posted on February 16, 2012Councillor Florence Anderson, Sunderland City Councillor, has form for unpleasant behaviour online. Most memorably, whilst Deputy Leader of Sunderland she got in hot water after saying on Facebook that she wants Margaret Thatcher to “BURN IN HELL” (a statement that she stood by on the bizarre logic that “I’m not the deputy leader of the council on Facebook”).
That was pretty distasteful, and typified the way in which some on the Left take their disagreement with people’s ideas to a truly unpleasant level. There are plenty of Facebook Groups planning to party when Thatcher dies, dance on her grave and so on.
But it seems Cllr Anderson has gone a bit further than merely distasteful behaviour, into the downright worrying.
One of the more extreme anti-Thatcher Facebook Groups is called “Margaret Thatcher doesn’t have to be dead before we give her a funeral“. Florence Anderson is a member. Some of its more memorable posts include calling for violence against Baroness Thatcher.
Just being a member is bad enough, but Florence decided to take it one step further. When the admin of the page posted this:
We are appealing to the IRA to find it in their hearts to bomb the next tory conference
Florence Anderson didn’t think “that’s appalling”. She didn’t think “it’s inappropriate for a councillor to be a member of this group”. She didn’t even think “I could get in trouble for being associated with this”.
Oh no, Councillor Florence Anderson, confronted with a post calling for terrorist murder of her political opponents, didn’t do any of those things.
She clicked “Like“.
It’s perhaps worth pointing out at this stage that she chairs the committee charged with ensuring public authorities in Sunderland are fulfilling their duties to fight crime.
What do her constituents think of this? Or the Labour Party, who would come down like a tonne of bricks on any Tory who did anything even approaching this behaviour?
I don’t think Cllr Anderson’s excuse that she’s a different person on Facebook quite cuts it.
Richard Dawkins, the Pope of preachy atheism
Posted on February 14, 2012With today’s almighty row about secularism, atheism and religion, it seems like an opportune time to repost this article I wrote on why Richard Dawkins does atheism a gross dis-service by acting like a religious zealot.
Dawkins was on the Today Programme this morning, debating with Occupy-luvvy and former Chancellor of St Paul’s. With two of my least favourite public figures fighting against each other, it was a bit like the Iran/Iraq War, in that you rather wish they could both lose, but in the end it was wonderful to hear Fraser expose the absurdity of Dawkins’ illogical approach to attacking religious people. Listen here.
The curse of the Miliband Mix-up, episode 329
Posted on February 13, 2012This blog has long followed the Great Mili Mix-up, the tendency of even the most accomplished commentators to mix up David and Ed Miliband, almost as if the universe itself is trying to set right the error made when the wrong brother was elected Labour leader. So far it’s struck the BBC website, the Today Programme, the Telegraph, the Mirror and even Google Image Search.
The latest in this longstanding tradition is City AM, who illustrate the findings of today’s Voice of the City poll with the wrong Miliband:
The poll finding illustrated with David’s photo reads “69% Disapprove of Ed Miliband’s performance during the NHS reform debate”.
It’s hardly City AM’s fault that the Opposition Leader is apparently one of Britain’s most forgettable men – or were the picture desk just trying to imply a solution to the problem?
Aidan Burley attack teacher fights in gutter, gets dirty
Posted on February 10, 2012The problem with fighting in the gutter is that everyone tends to get covered in muck.
So it is with the latest set-to around Aidan Burley, the MP who became notorious for attending a stag do where someone wore a Nazi costume.
This week, a schoolkid on a trip to Auschwitz tweeted:
aiden burley seen texting and dozing whilst listening to an concentration camp survivor
#torynazi?
Burley denied dozing or being disrespectful, a position that was given quite a bit of credibility by a statement from Dr James Smith, the Director of the Holocaust Centre, who sat next to him at the talk in question.
Something seemed a little fishy, particularly given that teenagers on school trips aren’t normally that big on recognising backbench Tory MPs, so perhaps it wasn’t a huge surprise that the teacher leading the group of school children turned out to be a Labour councillor, Suzannah Reeves. According to PoliticsHome it was she who recognised Burley and “confronted” him.
The problem for Councillor Reeves (other than the appalling grammar of her pupils) is that she’s not exactly in a position to preach about controversies involving alleged anti-semitism.
As well as being a teacher and a Labour councillor, she’s also the Chair of Governors at Parrs Wood High School. Only last week, she and the school’s Headmaster were called to a meeting with Jewish community leaders angry that the school was hosting an event run by a Hamas-linked charity, Human Appeal International, listed by the US State Department as being linked to terrorism.
The school has since had to cancel the event, which was particularly embarassing given previous controversies over a pupil’s skewed perspectives on the Middle East.
Now, I’m sure Cllr Reeves isn’t anti-semitic in any way, the school trip she was running shows that she must have an understanding of the importance of Holocaust education, and there’s no suggestion she personally played any part in organising the HAI event.
But should she really be attacking Aidan Burley when the school she is meant to Govern has drawn the attention Department of Education’s extremism experts due to agreeing to host an event for a charity which is linked to funding Hamas, an anti-semitic terrorist movement dedicated to destroying Israel?
My point is simply this – perhaps the gutter isn’t the best place to fight, if you want to stay clean.