UK News

Constitution in crisis as tyrannical journalists devour cowed politicians

A sordid tale of excess and brutality, of a world dominated by journalists with their ears to the keyhole, of tyrannical newspapers wielding remarkable power and of a political class not only cowed, but consumed, by that power.

Sound familiar? With two of Britain’s most senior policemen out of a job, the prime minister under pressure for his serenading of News Corp and one of the world’s most powerful press barons, in the form of Rupert Murdoch, summoned to testify to parliament, it would be one way of describing the current state of affairs.

In fact, it is how Irish writer and wit Oscar Wilde saw the state of Britain 120 years ago.

“In old days men had the rack. Now they have the press. That is an improvement certainly. But still it is very bad, and wrong, and demoralising,” Wilde wrote in 1891, several years before a court case in which intimate details of his own private life became the centre of a media storm.

Wilde believed that in America “the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs for ever and ever” but that its power there had been diminished in the eyes of the public having “carried its authority to the grossest and most brutal extreme”.

In England, having not been pushed to ”such excesses of brutality”, the press remained a really remarkable force: ”The tyranny that it proposes to exercise over people’s private lives seems to me to be quite extraordinary,” he wrote in his 1891 essay “The Soul of Man under Socialism”.

Then, as many are doing now, he debated whether newspapers had the power to mould peoples’ minds or whether they merely held up a mirror to the public mood.

Reality intrudes on new British political order

Britain’s new political order was on display in the House of Commons on Tuesday when Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg squeezed  happily between Prime Minister David Cameron and Foreign Secretary William Hague  on the government front bench.

The house was packed and in an excited, start-of-term mood. Everything was going swimmingly, with former Conservative minister Peter Lilley cracking jokes as he gaves what is typically a light-hearted response to the Queen’s Speech.

Lilley played around with the apt description of the Lib Dems, settling for allies as he mused that partners might imply an inappropriate degree of intimacy.

Lilley told the house it was his wedding anniversary and was greeted by cheers. But when he turned to themore serious  issue of coalitions, he made  it clear that he regarded the current arrangement very much as a marriage of convenience.

He said he would not support changes to the voting system that makes hung parliaments the norm and would campaign vociferously against a switch to the Alternative Vote system when a referendum is held. For the Lib Dems such a change is the bare minimum.

The tensions between Conservatives and their new Lib Dem friends are bubbling below the bonhomie.

from The Great Debate UK:

The Disunited Kingdom

- Paul Henderson Scott has written numerous books on Scottish history, literature and affairs, including ‘A 20th Century Life’ and its sequel, ‘The New Scotland’. He has been Rector of Dundee University, President of the Saltire Society and of Scottish PEN and a Vice-President of the Scottish National Party. The opinions expressed are his own -

The recent election has revealed more clearly than before the profound divide between Scottish and English opinion. The Conservatives have 297 seats in England but only one in Scotland (plus eight in Wales). As Joyce McMillan said in The Scotsman, “Our pattern of voting increasingly marks us out as a nation apart”.

Both of the two major Scottish papers had headlines like: “The Disunited Kingdom”. Much of the English press, or at least their Scottish editions, drew the same conclusion. "The Daily Mail" said that Britain is now "a nation of two tribes”. Magnus Linklater in "The Times" said that, “England and Scotland may share a boundary, but this weekend there is little common ground between them”.

If the Conservatives form the next British Government they have no moral right to legislate for Scotland where they have only one parliamentary seat.

One might well ask how could there be such a wide divergence between two countries which have been in a Union under the same government for 300 years? Before the Union of 1707 Scotland and England had profoundly different histories. For centuries they had very little contact except across a battlefield.

Scotland was very much part of the rest of Europe, allied to France and in close contact with many other countries in trade and cultural exchange. It evolved a distinctive and rich cultural and intellectual tradition. Even after 1707 Scotland retained control over its own education system, the law, the church and local government which had much more influence on national character and opinion than the distant Parliament in London.

In the 19th century the British Empire reconciled many Scots to the Union because of its consequences for the Scottish economy and the opportunities which it gave for administrative employment in its territories. Most of the steam ships and the locomotives for the whole empire were built in Scotland.

from Matt Falloon:

Brown soldiers on

If a car slams into a bus stop just yards away as you launch a last-ditch election offensive, you might be forgiven for thinking that the gods are not on your side.

But even after the nightmare week British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has had, such portents of doom have little visible effect on the self-proclaimed underdog in this, one of Britain's most closely fought parliamentary elections for 25 years.

Brown and his cabinet colleagues, unveiling campaign posters in a windswept car park on Friday when the sound of screeching brakes made everyone jump, ploughed on with their attack on the centre-right Conservatives, warning that a vote for the opposition would put British economy and families at risk.

"You have got to have this inner reservoir of resilience to fight back when anything happens to you," the Labour leader told students later in an athletics hall at Loughborough university. "That's what I've got to do in the next few days anyway."

Even a man who has survived two coup attempts from within his own party since taking over from Tony Blair in 2007 could not have expected such bad luck in the days before the May 6 election.

Behind in opinion polls for much of his three-year tenure at the top, this was meant to be the week Brown fought back.

The third, and final, televised leaders' debate was on the economy -- a godsend for a man who helped spearhead the response to the global financial crisis and served as finance minister for a decade before taking over from Tony Blair in 2007.

Opinion poll raises spectre of hung British parliament

The latest opinion poll in Britain showing the opposition Conservatives six points ahead of the ruling Labour party has raised the possibility of a hung parliament with no one party having an overall majority and a return to the kind of political uncertainty not seen since the 1970s.

Kenneth Clarke, the Conservatives’ business spokesman, said earlier this month that a hung parliament at this point in the economic cycle would be a disaster, an assertion his boss David Cameron was quick to try to play down after the latest survey.

The fact is that a landslide Conservative victory, which at one point had appeared inevitable with polls showing Cameron’s party 20 points ahead, now looks far less likely after Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s best opinion poll showing in almost a year.

The Ipsos MORI survey in the Observer newspaper showed Labour on 31 percent, the Conservatives on 37 percent and the Liberal Democrats on 17 percent. The last British election to deliver a hung parliament was called in February 1974 by Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath. His decision to call a snap poll in the face of labour unrest and economic turmoil disastrously backfired. A second election in October 1974 allowed Labour’s Harold Wilson to turn a minority government into a small working majority.

The fresh glimmer of hope for Labour came against a backdrop of confidence in economic recovery, a Labour by-election victory and signs the Conservatives were struggling to win over floating voters. Labour, in power since 1997, has suffered from the longest recession on record, a scandal over lawmakers’ expenses and military losses in Afghanistan. A general election must be held by June 3. 

“I do think that in the middle of an acute national crisis a hung parliament would be one of the biggest disasters we could suffer … that would be a bigger danger than a Labour victory,” said Clarke, one of the heavyweights of the Conservative party and a former finance minister.

“Fear of City Turmoil if Election Delivers Hung Parliament,” was the Daily Telegraph headline prompted by Clarke’s comments over an article that referred to the “potentially devastating effect such a result could have on the financial markets at a time when the economy is on a life-support machine.”

Was the Queen’s speech pointless?

LibDem leader Nick Clegg had called for the speech to be cancelled because he says there is little chance of much legislation getting through before the coming general election. ”The speech will be dressed up as the way to ‘build Britain’s future’ when it will be little more than a rehearsal of the next Labour Party manifesto, an attempt to road-test policy gimmicks to see whether they might save this Government’s skin,” he said.”It is a waste of everyone’s time, and should be cancelled in favour of an emergency programme of political reform,” he added in the Independent. “That is the only job this rump of a Parliament is fit for.”The Conservatives piled in too, with their leader in the upper House, Lord Strathclyde saying that if the measures outlined were so important they would have been in the government’s legislative programme last year rather than being left to the last moment of the fifth term.Downing Street however called the speech a ”very focused programme” of legislation, while Labour’s deputy leader Harriet Harman said it contained important plans to foster economic growth and make the banks more accountable.What do you think?

Is it time to give Guy Fawkes a break?

It’s bonfire night, and once again poor old Guido gets it.

Up and down the country he will be burned in effigy for the dastardly crime of trying to blow up the Houses of Parliament over 400 years ago.

But wait — after all the moats, duck houses and house-flipping of the past 12 months, should it not now be conceded that he might have had a point, even if his methods were a little extreme?

With Westminster held in little more than contempt by many people who have been appalled at the greed and sharp practice of some of our MPs, surely Guy Fawkes should — maybe for just one year — be regarded as more of a hero than a villain. A sort of sabbatical from the day job.

That of course would leave a vacancy on top of all the woodpiles stacked waiting and ready for tonight.

Who should we put there instead?

MPs’ expenses: rubbing it in?

Fury, resentment and a general feeling of being hard done-by is reported to be the prevailing mood amongst MPs as they reconvene after the Summer break to find brown envelopes of an unwelcome sort waiting for them.

These are the already infamous “Legg letters,” the latest symbol along with duck houses, moats and mole-catchers of the expenses scandal which did so much damage to all parties earlier this year.

Written as a result of the inquiry headed by former civil servant Sir Thomas Legg, they assess the expenses claimed by each MP between 2004 and 2008 and, where anomalies have been found, they either demand repayment or clarification.

Gordon Brown is to pay back 12,415 pounds, Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg 910 pounds and SNP leader Alex Salmond 700 pounds. David Cameron has been asked to provide more details about his mortgage repayments.

But three things have particularly annoyed backbenchers.

The first is that Legg has imposed  retrospective limits on various categories of expenses that the MPs themselves obviously cannot have known about at the time. He has said the maximum allowable for cleaning for example is 2,000 pounds and that for gardening 1,000 pounds, according to newspaper reports.

The second is the perception at Westminster that those MPs who made the really big claims, the ones on mortgage payments, are getting away with it. Saying “sorry” seems to be enough, as in the case of former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith.

Clouds of change: Buzzwords from conference season

Opposition leader David Cameron has delivered his speech to the Conservative party conference in Manchester.******Cameron told delegates there would be “painful” cuts in public spending, promised to send more troops to Afghanistan and stressed the importance of confronting “Labour’s debt crisis.” He also pledged to modernise the pension system, “break the cycle of welfare dependency” and cut back on bureaucracy to make life easier for entrepreneurs.******Cameron’s speech brings conference season to an end. Leaders of the three main parties — Cameron, Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Nick Clegg for the Liberal Democrats — have all laid out their plans for Britain ahead of a general election due by June 2010.******The ‘word clouds’ below have been generated using the complete texts from each of the leaders’ keynote conference speeches, in the order they were given. At first glance there are some striking similarities and fascinating overlaps — but we will leave it to you to draw your own conclusions.******How did you think each of the leaders performed? Who did you find the most convincing? Is David Cameron ready to lead the country?******Keywords from Nick Clegg’s speech:************ ****** ****** ****** ****** ****** ****** ******Keywords from Gordon Brown’s speech:************ ****** ****** ****** ****** ****** ****** ****** ******Keywords from David Cameron’s speech:******

Tories and Trotskyites

Chalk and organic cheese would be an understatement.

There is a surprising public perception that there wouldn’t be much difference between a Conservative or Labour government, but there couldn’t be fewer similarities between the supporters of both movements and the two party conferences.

It would be hard to imagine union activists sipping on cocktails from the Knightsbridge luxury store Harvey Nichols stand at the Labour party conference in Brighton, but in Manchester thirsty Conservatives can enjoy an HN gin ricky.

They can also buy soft, pastel cashmere jumpers from Marks & Spencer or get a suit fitted in the market place. Cufflinks and chalices await those who visit the elite Carlton Club stall, along with limited edition portraits of icon Margaret Thatcher.

At Labour, union stands tend to dominate — reflecting their influence over the movement and the party’s reliance on their funding. The closest you can get to a Harvey Nichols cocktail by the main hall is a pint of tepid bitter from the hatch.

Beans on jacket potatoes, stewed tea and bacon buns with butter and brown sauce on sale in Brighton; fairtrade white chocolate muffins, herbal tea and organic, homemade sandwiches in Manchester.

And it doesn’t stop there. Outside the Labour party conference, radical socialists march past crying “Revolution!”, pro-Palestinian supporters picket. In Manchester, the anti-European UK Independence Party rally against the European Union and a few protest against hunting.