{via spiritof76}

A little story I was told in class today.

One of my classmates apparently had a phone call last night from a relative of hers.

Oh good, we have the classic set up for an urban myth straight away - a classmate apparently had a phone call from a [generic] relative - trans. everything that follows is at least third or fourth hand and entirely unattributable to any known source.

Better still, this is really fresh one - one that hasn’t even reached Snopes yet.

This relative of hers is a guy who has something of a weakness for accepting stupid dares when he’s drunk.

It’s get even better as we’re now heading straight for the ‘people do the funniest things when pissed’ variation.

The other day it seems he got drunk with another male friend. After a few too many they were dared to head over to a registry office and demand one of these new same-sex civil partnerships. (These guys are both heterosexual, by the way.)

And yes, we have set-up for the punchline. Male-bonding - strictly hetero, naturally - but with just the merest frisson of homoerotic tension in a good natured, Beavis and Butthead dumb kind of way

And well, the upshot of it all is, he and his friend are now married, and have a certificate to say that they’re partners, and can’t get divorced for at least a year.

Oh well, I suppose they could always push for an annulment on grounds of non-consumation, unless he gets drunk again and gets dared to consumate it.

And the punchline - they got hitched on the spot and now have to wait a year for a divorce unless they take the annulment on non-consumation get out clause … unless - nudge, nudge, wink, wink - they get pissed again in the meantime.

As ever there is just one little detail that the originator of this charming little tale has neglected.

What is the waiting period for civil partnership?

There will be a 15-day waiting period once each person has given notice of intention to register, before the civil partnership can be registered. There will be procedures in place to reduce the 15-day waiting period in exceptional circumstances where there are compelling reasons to do so.

It will also be possible for a civil partnership to be registered at the residence of someone who is housebound, detained or seriously ill and not expected to recover.

There will also be procedures to allow couples to form a civil partnership quickly in the cases of former spouses, one of whom has changed gender under the provisions of the Gender Recognition Act 2004.

There are, therefore, only two possible situations in which the story could be true. Either the few drinks which motivated the apocryphal gentlemen in question to seek a civil partnership, spanned a minimum of 16 days or one of the two, strictly heterosexual males was not only not originally a male at all; having undergone female to male gender reassignment - which entails an operation known colloquially as a ’strappadictomy’ - but was also the other male’s ex-wife.

The only remaining question arising from this story is that of how long it will take to turn up in the Daily Sport as an ‘exclusive’.

Lords defeat for anti-terror plan

The Terror Bill was put together after the July bombings
Controversial plans for new anti-terrorism laws have suffered a defeat in the House of Lords.

Peers voted by 270 to 144 to ditch plans in the Terrorism Bill for a new offence of “glorifying” terror.

Ex-law lord Lord Lloyd of Berwick said the offence was too vague, unworkable and could jeopardise freedom of speech.

Update:

The Lords have also blindsided the provisions covering the distribution of ‘terrorist’ publications, which will now require prosecutors to show recklessness or intent to make a charge stick.

ACTION: Introduce a ‘community call for action’

In the police reform White Paper, Building Communities, Beating Crime, we committed to introducing a power that will give local communities a formal way to request and ensure that action is taken by the police,
local authorities and others in response to persistent anti-social behaviour or community safety problems. Or if that action is not taken – they will know why not publicly.

We will place a duty on district level ward councillors to consider issues, and respond within a prescribed timescale. The majority
of problems should be resolved at this stage.

However, for particularly difficult problems the councillor will have a new power to refer them to the scrutiny committee of the local authority. The committee would have a duty to consider any referred issue and respond within a prescribed timescale. We will also
place a duty on responsible authorities, co-operating bodies and registered social landlords to respond to the committee’s report again within a prescribed timescale.

At every stage local agencies will have to make public the action they will take or the reason they will not take action.

Respect Action Plan, pp28

New law to permit small brothels

The law could be changed to allow two prostitutes and a receptionist or maid to work together legally in brothels, the government has confirmed.

Currently only lone prostitutes can offer sex from flats or other premises without breaking the law.

Launching the new prostitution strategy for England and Wales, minister Fiona Mactaggart said that working in groups would be safer for women.

So can anyone explain to me quite what’s going to happen when a ‘Community Call to Action’ is made which calls on the Police and Local Authority to shut down an entirely legal brothel or evict a sole prostitute working from a flat within the community that make the call for action.

In terms of prostitution, aren’t these two proposals inherently ccontradictory, unless local communities are somehow prepared to tolerate prostitutes working their local area - which from experience seem a highly unlikely prospect?

I got up this morning in what was, for me, a remarkably good mood.

Why? I couldn’t have told you to begin with. I just had the indefinable sense of anticipation about the day ahead, as if subconsciously I knew there was something about today that was worth looking forward to.

It didn’t take long to find it. A quick trawl of the blogs via their RSS feeds led me to Tim Worstall’s blog, a regular port of call for any discerning Brit blogger, a visit that quickly yielded the reminder that, yes, today is Tuesday and that makes it Polly Pot day.

Oh joy, says he, pausing briefly only to sharpen the satiric claws, I wonder what the Grauniads purveyor of vapid inanities par excellence has in store for us today. Tim sums it up very nicely:

Ministers can’t cope with everything so experts should do it instead.

Today finds girding her loins - not the best mental image to conjure this early in the morning - and taking up her sword of incandescent banality to leap to the defence of New Labour’s own fragrant supermum and Opus Dei-st, Ruth Kelly.

The sight of a minister devoured in a feeding frenzy should make any decent person feel sick…

…pines Polly, with barely a flicker of recognition that its the sharks in the office next door who’re doing most of the feeding to begin with - looks like this is going to be one of those ‘physician, heal thyself’ pieces on the iniquities of journalistic [lack of] ethics; and sure enough we have to wait only a further scene-setting paragraph before she hits her full naval-gazing stride:

A free press may be essential to democracy, but how grotesquely it exploits that necessity. Self-righteously we pontificate on politicians, free to damn ministers at whim, shameless about our own far worse venality and hypocrisy. Politicians try to get things done while we shoot them down from comfortable quarters. They come and go - but we stay on and on, never at risk of de-election from jobs no one elected us to. Instead we award one another prizes. We confront no dilemmas where there is no right answer; we always know the answer to everything.

Ah, but I am but a humble supplicant at the altar of democracy, eh Polly? Ever so ‘umble, I am.

Polly’s point, when she eventually gets to it, has some small measure of merit. The credo of Ministerial Responsibility, under which politicians swing for the errors and obfuscations of their underlings, is fundamentally unfair - it punishes the over-worked Parliamentary sock puppet for parroting the dissembling obfuscations of malign Sir Humphreys while leaving the semi-obsequious in place and looking forward to a nice fat pension and ultimate elevation to the Grand Order of St Laurel and St Hardy come the day of their retirement from years of loyal public dis-service.

I wonder. Is there a collective noun for civil servants? If not, how would everyone feel about ‘an obfuscation of civil servants’ has the right kind of ring to it, don’t you think?

To some extent Polly has a point. The overweening growth and complexity of government bureaucracy has created an uneven and, dare I say it, undemocratic power relationship at the centre of Whitehall. Modern government has become so complex that no Minister can ever feel anything but exposed and, well, naked without their surrounding cabal of policy advisors and senior civil servants to spoonfeed them the answers to even fairly routine questions, while anything that is genuinely complicated leaves our elected representatives all at sea. As a simple rule of thumb, the bigger the cock-up, the more civil servants will be found routinely accompanying a minister on their travels in order to prevent them giving anything that remotely resembles a candid answer to any question.

Ministerial responsibility does place politicians in an impossible bind. Once the official line has been fed into the Ministerial loop by civil servants and quoted by Ministers to their Parliamentary colleagues, there can be no deviation from the officially sanctioned truth - even if that ‘truth’ turns out to be a lie. Accountability is a one-way street in this relationship, a Faustian deal in which civil servants are spared the slings and arrows of public accountability, safe in the knowledge that should the shit ever really hit the fan they can push the Minister put front and centre and let them take the fall. Those of us who are inclined, rightly, to a cynical and suspicious nature in dealing with bureaucracy have long suspected that Civil Servants understand the dynamics of this relationship just that little bit well and milk it for every possible advantage it yields; that if the Civil Service has a motto is is likely to be:

Oh Minister. If only things were so simple…

Spoken, of course, with all the unctious insincerity of Sir Humphrey Appleby at his best

This being Polly, of course, she may stumble across a valid point from time to time, but usually at the expense of missing several others.

So it is that Polly’s immediate solution to the iniquities of Ministerial Responsibility lies in devolving ever more power to professionals:

Ministers should not make such decisions. In this example, before people are put on List 99 and banned from working with children, an education minister has to decide borderline cases; but he/she has no more clue than you or I. It needs a professional panel to examine each one.

None of which addressed the central problem, which is the wholsesale lack of accountability in the whole process. Ministerial responsibility may sometime deliver the wrong scalp when things go pear-shaped but at least it does deliver a scalp - devolving such decisions to a professional panel merely pushes decisions further into the dark heart of the civil service and into even deeper obscurity.

As with many of Polly Pot’s articles, reading it is rather akin to walking through a minefield - every safe step that takes you forward propels you inexorably towards the next mine that’ll take your leg off.

So we go from the eminently reasonable - if heretical in New Labour terms -

What all this reveals is the need now for a firm rule across all departments that ministers no longer do individual cases. They should do policy - that’s their job - and oversee others, such as ombudsmen, special panels and judges, to adjudicate cases fairly.

- straight into -

Yet every department is snowed under with individual cases that should not be handled by amateur politicians. Lazy MPs showing off to constituents by writing direct to ministers should be re-directed sternly to the proper channels - and only write to a minister when every other system fails. It should be regarded as improper for ministers to intervene in particular cases: as improper as the European courts found a home secretary’s handing out of jail sentences.

MPs should be ‘re-directed sternly to the proper channels - and only write to a minister when every other system fails’? What about public servants should be accountable to Parliament and to elected representatives of the people?

Is that not rather more in keeping with democracy. Polly?

As ever, Polly misses the most important structural points which underpin this issue.

Governments don’t end up in this position by accident or oversight but because they pursue policies which serve to bolster the proliferation of bureaucracy - and on that score this present government has an entirely unenviable track record.

The New Labour project may have succeeded in the key task facing a party in opposition, that of making itself electable, but in office it has failed in one of the key tasks facing any, nominally, left-wing/centre-left government, that of delivering effective public services without becoming over-reliant on centralised bureacracy as a means of trying to artificially engineer efficiencies.

Such a track is ultimately self-defeating - bureaucracy doesn’t create efficiency of save money, it merely transfers both into its own compendious coffers in order to justify the creation of even more bureaucrats and even more bureacracy. It is a parasite, the living embodiment of Agent Smith’s revelatory virus. It spreads and it consumes until, at some point, it will eventually come to eat its host.

I’m sure there are those on the right who would happily leap on that last statement as evidence to support their contention that markets and market reforms are the answer - I don’t believe they are. Markets may deliver greater financial efficiency but lack any real sensitivity towards the social role and values of public services, many of which are fundamentally unsuited to market-led approaches. The problems here are pretty simple; those with the greatest need and who place the greatest demands on public services are invariably those with the least ability to pay and the most important and essential public services don’t lend themselves readily to profitability in the marketplace, which is why you don’t see BUPA and others queuing up to bid for A&E services.

The key challenge for the left is to devise a means of driving public services which relies neither on bureaucracy or the presumed pre-eminence of market forces. Quite what that might be, is a matter I need to think through in more detail, but my instincts tell me that whatever it is it will entail a broader notion of measuring efficiency than mere productivity and that democratic accountability, at a very local level, will play a major role in driving service delivery.

Beyond that the present government and its ministers can consider themselves directly responsible for any public whippings they receive as a result of the manifest failings of Civil Servants, for which they have no one to blame but themselves.

As a managerialist government they can hardly consider themselves blameless when managerial failures arise - its no good blaming, as Polly does, the bureaucratic culture of the Civil Service when you belong to a government that bought into that culture wholesale and, with very few exceptions, went ‘native’ from day one.

If the degree of power and responsibility vested in Ministers is now too much for them to keep their eye on the ball on matters so obviously contentious as the issue of whether those on the sex offenders register should be permitted to teach children in state schools then government has become too centralised to function effectively and it is time to devolve power and responsibility back to Parliament and, crucially, back to Local Government and to local democratic institutions.

The failings in managerial government are even manifest in its approach to legislation.

Conceptual elegance and clarity of expression and intent were once the hallmark of Parliament. Today they are a rarity. Acts of Parliament are poorly drafted and unclear as a matter of routine, vague in expression and intent and often little more than a rough framework under which Ministers reserve to themselves the right to define and redefine the law at will using secondary legislation and ever more complex regulations. At 967 pages, made up of five parts, six schedules and 40 statutory instruments, the UK’s current housing benefit regulations are double the length of the EU Constitutional Treaty - and we call them bureaucratic?

Law-making has become a shambolic process in this country. Laws are routinely drafted in vague and highly subjective terms, stripped of almost all detail and clarity, the right to determine which is then reserved to the relevant Minister and his functionaries. Then we get the statutory instruments and regulations which, far from clarifying matters, usually heap further confusion and uncertainty on matters before leaving to the courts to sort the whole sorry mess out.

That would be bad enough in itself, but it doesn’t stop there. In the realm of managerialists, the judiciary is only free to interpret the law in the the precise manner the government intends it to be interpreted and not otherwise - which would be eminently reasonable if the government had specified its intent properly in the first place instead of dissembling at the legislative stage. So, of course, when that’s not quite how things turn out, when judges faced with unclear and badly drafted legiislation fall back on the time-honoured on proven traditions of natural justice, common law and simple common sense, then what do we get?

The obligatory review and promises that the law will be ‘tightened’ and ‘clarified’ - more legislation, more regulations and more bureacracy, all of which would be unnecessary if only laws were drafted properly in the first place and not rammed though on guillotined debates and committee proceedings which prevent them being fully and properly scrutinised at the time of their passage through Parliament.

Is there anything less efficient than constantly having to go back and redo jobs that weren’t done properly in the first place? And on that basis, is there a public institution that could be considered less efficient and more in need of fundamental reform than Parliament.

To give Polly her due, she does demonstrate a glimmer of recognition that such things are actually important when she notes at the end of her article that:

Kelly’s real test is not sex offenders; it is whether she produces an education bill unambiguously designed to do best for those with least - the most effective way to raise national standards.

Which I suppose is something, however this points to the real problem with the credo Ministerial Responsibility - it may permit, in limited circumstances, Ministers to be held immediately - and yes, unfairly - to account for the incompetence of their subordinates but what it doesn’t do is enable them to be held to account for the incompetence as legislators and policy makers. It should be remembered that one of key demands of the Chartist movement, and one that was nver realised, was annual parliaments which would force MPs and government to revalidate their mandate to govern and to represent every year rather than every 4-5 years at present - an idea that may have been, and still be, short on practicality bit big on accountability.

What are we to do with the House of Lords?

That’s a question that will come up sooner or later as another run at a package of reforms is in preparation at the moment and due to be put to Parliament at some time in the near future.

One the one hand, in a liberal democracy it cannot be right that there are some people who are given a direct influence over legislation for no better reason than the fact that distant ancestor was, to put it politely, happy to accommodate the fancies of long-dead monarch either personally, or vicariously by turning a blind-eye to their spouse’s regular visits to the palace. Equally it cannot be right that there are some whose influence derives from simple political patronage, that making sizable donations to a particular party or, in the case of a number of former MPs, merely standing aside to permit an up and coming favourite of the party leader to take a safe seat in the Commons, should give them the right to a seat at the legislative table – and then, of course, there are the Bishops whose position derives fundamentally from their willingness to comply with Henry VIII’s demand for a divorce from his first wife where the Pope wouldn’t.

On the other, one has to concede that the Lords have acted as the sole constitutional bulwark against many the more draconian and illiberal proposals that have been spawned by this present government pretty much any time its turns it’s attention to matters of law and order – with a natural opposition majority in place, the Lords may well predisposed to challenge any legislative proposal put forward by a Labour government and, in this, its role has not always been so benign or enlightened as recent events may suggest – let’s not forget that the Lords did vote against equality for the gay community on the age of consent, requiring use of the Parliament Act to push that particular piece of legislation through. Nevertheless the Lords has at least tried to mount a rearguard action against some of Blair’s more overt Manichean tendencies, for which it deserves some measure of credit.

Decisions, decisions…

I am, at heart, a democrat and for that reason, much as I am grateful for the timely interventions of the House of Lords on issues such as ID cards, I cannot in all conscience support the continuation of a second chamber based on patronage, heredity and privilege. The question for me is not whether we replace the Lords but how can we best replace it and what form should a new second chamber take.

Of the seven or eight options put to the Commons last time around, only four were put to a vote, these being the options of a fully appointed second chamber, a fully elected second chamber and two hybrid systems in which elected members made up the majority (either 80:20 or 60:40) with the balance of members appointed by a nominally independent appointments commission – of these the 80:20 split came, I think, closest to being accepted.

I’ve given this a lot of thought of late and looking at the three basic options – fully appointed, fully elected or hybrid – tries to come to some sort of conclusion as to which may provide the best possible solution, one that is democratic in spirit, avoids patronage and yet which retains some of the better elements of the existing framework of the Lords – yes, there is something about the current make-up of the Lords that is worth retaining, which I’ll come to in a moment.

The option of a fully appointed second chamber is one I cannot support.

I really don’t care whether such a system has a nominally independent appointment commission attached to it or not, it still remains an open vehicle for political patronage – like it or not, the majority of nominees that such a commission would be asked to consider would be put forward by political parties and those parties, particularly the party in government at any given time, would exert an influence over appointments even operating at arms length. The problem with appointment commissions is always the matter of who appoints member to that commission, which invariably means the government of the day.

A full elected chamber has obvious attractions – it has, at least, the merit of being directly elected by the people and would also serve to invalidate further use of the Parliament Act as the Commons could no longer cite its democratic mandate as justification for overriding the will of the second chamber.

But a fully elected second chamber is not without its downside. Even if some form of proportional representation were put in place for its elections, such a chamber would be dominated entirely by professional politicians and, in particular, by the three main political parties and, to be honest, the one feature of the current House of Lord that I would quite like to retain is the presence of independent members – the crossbenchers – who often contribute a welcome air of rationality and scepticism to the proceeding of the Lords. I supposed that some sort of dual list electoral system could be contrived in which the electorate cast two votes, on for a political party, the other for an individual from the independents list, but ensuring a suitable number of independent members requires more than simply a modified system of elections, one also has to consider the costs of mounting an effective campaign and developing a suitable public profile, which will tend to favour independent candidates with either wealthy backers or substantial independent means or ones with a measure of ‘celebrity’ value – things which would serve to devalue the role of independent members if left unchecked and leave these elections open to a disproportionate degree of influence from special interest groups.

What, then of a hybrid system – could such a system work?

All things considered, it could if constructed correctly. A starting point would be the get the right split between elected and appointed members – having thought it through, something of the order of an 80-20 or 75-25 split would seem about right.

Crucially, within such a hybrid system, political parties above a certain size in terms of membership/income would be restricted to fielding candidates in elections to the second chamber, these elections being carried out using a system of PR – which one would work best is a matter on which I’m agnostic and open to persuasion, but is should be one that broadly reflects the will of voters, in terms of percentage vote gained, while allowing for a measure of regionalisation so as not to unduly penalise the likes of Plaid Cymru, the SNP and the various parties in Northern Ireland.

The remaining members would be appointed by an independent commission – for all their obvious flaws there really is no way of getting away from them entirely – but under very strict eligibility criteria which preclude the appointment of any member who has been a member of a designated political party, or a donor to such a party (which would include corporate donors where the individual held a position on the board or a senior executive , which placed them in a position to influence any such donation) within the preceding 5-7 years. The matter of designated political parties is quite important here as the aim is to keep those parties who could reasonably contest elected positions out the independent bloc which not preventing people who may have stood for a genuine fringe party from putting their name forward.

Members appointed in this way would also be precluded from taking a party whip once appointed, becoming ineligible for a seat in the chamber should they become a member of a designated political party.

Unless someone can come up with a fair means of electing a fixed proportion of independent members to the second chamber, such a system while not ideal, would at least offer a reasonable compromise, provided that the criteria upon which independent members are appointed can be seen to open, fair and transparent. For example, while I would not support the idea of fixed quotas for any group so as to establish tokenistic minority representation amongst independents, I would expect such appointments to be made subject to the same equality laws and regulations that operate in employment.

This leaves only the thorny problem of terms of office – should it be fixed or open ended. In terms of elected members I would favour some sort of limit on the number of consecutive terms that any one member could serve – two or three five years terms would seem reasonable.

Admittedly, such a question gets a little more complex in relation to appointees as one may be effectively asking them to reapply for their ‘job’, however a system of staged mandatory retirements may prove workable – one which half the appointees must retire from office every five years such that no individual member may serve for more than ten years as an independent member of second chamber – the sole exception being the first tranche of retiring members, i.e. those who stand down after the first five year term of the new chamber, who would be eligible to reapply immediately for a second full ten-year term so as to bed in the retirement system.

To some extent, I’m kicking ideas around here in the hope of sparking a debate - the key point to take from all this is that in some way, shape or form, I feel it important that a second chamber include a reasonable contingent on independent members who are not tied or beholden to any particular political party and, when considering legislation, not subject to the control of party whips.

A new second chamber in this, or a broadly similar form, would be a start in modernising our present system of government, but only a start.

As recent years and recent governments have clearly demonstrated, a rag-bag constitution, much of which is unwritten and based on convention, offers insufficient safeguards against the Manichean ambitions of political leader with a commanding majority in the House of Commons and the will to use that majority to toss out any conventions which they see as inconvenient and centralise ever more power and authority on their own office and those of their close cabinet colleagues.

A new second chamber is but a starting point for reform – reform that of necessity should include a written constitution and a constitutional bill of rights backed up an independent Supreme Court with the power and authority to strike down unconstitutional legislation, a clearly defined separation of powers between the executive and the judiciary based on the principle that politicians should not exercise judicial or quasi-judicial powers and greater non-partisan oversight of government – a role ideally suited the kind of new second chamber outlined above.

A range of other measures will also be required to redress the imbalance in power between executive, legislature and judiciary that has been manufactured by successive government over the last 25 years - Yes, the Tories had their Manichean moments too, none more so than in putting in place amendments to the Official Secrets Act which define the interests of the government and the state as being synonymous while removing the right to a public interest defence from Civil Service whistleblowers. To give but one example, significant changes need to be made to the Inquiries Act to restore the principle that public inquiries report to and are undertaken under the aegis of Parliament, not of individual Ministers.

Lords reform is no bad thing in itself, but lets not be fooled here into thinking that it may offer a solution to the ongoing decline in parliamentary democracy which now so badly damaged the trust of citizens in the democratic process that more people refused to vote at the last election than bothered to vote for an individual political party. It is a start and nothing more – what is needed is root and branch reform which places the citizen at the heart of democracy not a small and increasingly out of touch and unrepresentative elite at the heart of government.