Basically, her premise is that many Islamic people find it difficult to hold on firmly to their religion in a country which she sees as having no morals, and therefore they turn to extremism, and that therefore to combat extremism it is necessary to rein in some of the worst excesses of society. She references Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (the ‘underpants bomber’):

At university he apparently cut himself off, tried to hold on to Islamic Puritanism in a country of no shame, no restraint. Millions of Britons of all backgrounds are alarmed by the dissipation and debauchery that now defines Britain.Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Don’t get me wrong — she is not in any way supportive of violent extremists and is critical of a lot that is wrong:

Sexual abuse, rape and forced homosexuality remain the dirty secrets of British Muslim communities, kept under wraps as it were, while they flap around proclamations of purity. I cannot stand these false virtues and self-reverential pieties nor am I pleading on behalf of screwed-up men who would murder us naming Allah.Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

However, whilst I understand what she is saying– that a society seen as permissive may make it difficult for people used to a much stricter regime — I cannot agree with the conclusion she arrives at. I find it very difficult to separate her arguments from these other two…

• A society with a lot of sexual permissiveness is ‘pushing some Muslims to the edge of reason’ (her words). Therefore we must change our society to avoid having problems with extremists
• A woman who goes out wearing a short skirt knows the effect that this will have on men. Therefore she cannot complain if someone rapes her as she was ‘asking for it’
• Some British people don’t like Muslims, and don’t want them in their communities. Therefore Muslims should not be allowed to go in those communities

Basically, all of these arguments are along these lines.

• A doesn’t like B. Therefore B is at fault and must change

It’s utter nonsense. I don’t particularly approve of people binge-drinking and sleeping around and being sexually permissive but — and here’s the important point — it’s none of my damn business.

It’s none of my damn business if someone wants to binge drink. It’s none of my damn business if someone wants to wear revealing clothes. It’s none of my damn business if someone wants to sleep with someone else.

If they do these things in such a way that another person is brought to harm, then society has a right to stop them, and indeed you will find that we have laws in place. But if you’re not hurting anyone else: if what you are doing is mutual, and consenting, then what right have other people to stick their noses in because they don’t like it?

But to be honest, it was the holier-than-thou, ivory tower, let’s sneer at the estate folk attitude which really annoyed me. See if you can guess which was the key word or words that told me there was a problem with Yasmin’s argument.

A list was sent home to the parents of girls at a middle-class school in London last week sternly reminding non-uniformed sixth-formers that there were still rules of decorum to follow. A list followed of garments henceforth disallowed: no tops that show the midriff or cleavage, no tight mini-skirts, no underwear showing, no clothes with holes in them, etc, etc.Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Yes, that’s right. Middle-class. This word is entirely surplus to requirements if you’re trying to make the point that this is happening at a London school. It’s only required if you’re trying to say “and it’s not just the vermin from the estates, you know”. I mean, I knew people were saying that the Independent was going downhill, but I hadn’t expected it to turn into the Daily Mail quite that quickly.

I have a perfectly simple rule for racial, ethnic, and religious harmony. Whenever someone tries to convince you that there is something wrong with a particular group, remind yourself of it. It’s easy to remember, it can be applied to members of almost any grouping, and if everyone followed it, the world would be a much nicer place.

Live and let live.

And if that one’s too difficult for you, may I instead refer you to the fall-back rule I mentioned earlier: what other people are doing — so long as they aren’t hurting anyone else — is none of your damn business.

And that, not sexual inhibition (or exhibition), or religion (or lack of it) ought to be the one thing enshrined in society.

I’ll just make it explicitly clear at the outset: you don’t have to be Muslim to want to protest; you don’t have to be Muslim to be the sort of jerk who inflicts violence on others who you disagree with. It’s just that the main focus of the news has been of the Islamic side of things, so that’s where I’m going to look at mostly. Please take this paragraph as read throughout the rest of this post, as I have no intention of qualifying every statement with the additional statements like “…and there’s plenty of non-Muslims who disagree with the war”, or “…but you get nutters in every walk of life” or “…it’s only a tiny minority, most are perfectly happy to live and let live”.

Cartoon Violence

Remember that chap who produced the Danish cartoon which depicted the prophet Muhammad as a terrorist? That was a jolly impolite thing, I think most of us were in agreement about. But the reaction to it by some Muslims was not something which should be tolerated even less.

And recently there was the guy who tried to kill the cartoonist, when he was at home with his five year old grand-daughter. This is wrong on so many levels, as it suggests that you are not prepared to countenance any point of view which is different to your own, and the appropriate way to silence that dissent is through murder. I thought we’d all moved on from that, but it seems some haven’t.

But it’s the lack of self-awareness which makes it really stupid. Look at the steps:

1. Person is offended by cartoon describing major figure in their religion as murderous terrorist
2. Person decides most appropriate way to rebut this is by becoming a murderous terrorist, just to show how wrong the cartoonist was

What a fucking idiot. How exactly does that defend Islam against the charge of being murderous?

My God Is Bigger Than Your God

The beliefs of another person ought to be something that we are, generally, tolerant of. Whether someone believes in a God, in multiple Gods, or actively disbelieves in any of ‘em, ought to be something which is their business, not yours. But that is not to say that religions should be exempt from criticism. Particularly religions which react badly when you do criticise them.

I’ve been critical of the Catholic Church, in their attitude towards the use of condoms, which has led to more HIV infections and people dying. I’m critical of religions — and there’s more than one — which are intolerant of homosexuality. And I have a right to voice my opinions, and my beliefs, whether or not they are directly associated with a named religion or not.

When people are critical of the beliefs of others and speak about those beliefs in a critical way, implying someone must be stupid for believing that sort of thing (and/or assuming that because some adherents to a religion think X, that all adherents do), that annoys me. I find that a bit rude and unpleasant to be honest. I tend to feel that irrespective of whether or not that person is right, they are a fairly intolerant human being. attitude intolerant and offensive.

But when someone says that you are not allowed to be critical of beliefs or to speak about them in a critical way, at the risk of being attacked or prosecuted, then that annoys me for precisely the same reason. It’s intolerant and offensive. Plus it makes it seem as though people are worried that the religion won’t stand up to proper scrutiny and frankly, if there is a God, I rather suspect He is big enough to cope with a bit of disbelief. After all, he’ll get his chance to point out the error of their ways in his own manner…

And that’s why, I think this new Irish blasphemy law is a bit shit. If I were to say something in Ireland which you felt outraged or offended your religion, I could be fined €25,000 fine unless I could justify it. Not surprisingly, many people are critical of this (rightly in my opinion) as damaging to freedom of expression.

The Blasphemy Ireland website (set up, I presume, specifically to challenge this), sums it up perfectly:

In a civilised society, people have a right to to express and to hear ideas about religion even if other people find those ideas to be outrageous.Blasphemy.ie

And, to point of the stupidity of the whole thing — every religion will have, somewhere, something contained within it that adherents to another may find objectionable — they have a list of quotations from a variety of figures, but three of the main venerated types are represented — Jesus Christ, Muhammad and Richard Dawkins.

Wootton Bassett

And then there’s Anjem Choudary. He suggested that his group — which I’m not going to name because I think they’ve gone about this primarily for the publicity, and I’m not going to contribute to that — should march through Wootton Bassett, where British servicemen killed in action are returned, in protest against the Muslims being killed by British forces in Afghanistan (and/or Iraq? — not sure on this one).

If he’d wanted a peaceful march through the streets of anywhere else, no one would have given a toss. But he picked Wootton Bassett primarily because it would spark in the national consciousness, and infuriate people who felt that dead servicemen who weren’t responsible for the war in the first place and surely who had already sacrificed quite enough thank you very much should be used as pawns for his political ends.

And yet the media helped serve his political ends by this suddenly becoming a national media item; with everyone debating whether or not his potential march (which, so far as I know, he never actually asked permission for in the first place) should be banned — and he’s suddenly seen as the face of Islam in the UK. Do the papers speak to the vast majority of British Muslims to find out their views? Certainly not at first. Not until after they’ve painted Anjem Choudary as the face of Islam in the UK.

The vast majority of atheists, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, Pagans and God/Deity Of Choice knows what else are quite capable of doing this. So why do we spend so much of our time pandering to the intolerant?

So how do I feel about this. Should it be banned? Should it be allowed to go ahead? Well, there’s a You Tube video which expresses my thoughts probably better than I can here…

Dan Bull, thank you.

So, at a time of year when politics seems to be even more back-biting and bitter than usual, and political bloggers are desperate to put the knife into someone on “the dark side” (although of course which is the dark side rather depends upon your own standpoint), I thought that we needed something a little more jovial to lighten the mood.

Let’s remember politics isn’t just about MP’s expenses, bitching backbenchers, and bile-spewing bloggers. It’s also about facial hair. So I’ve combed Parliament’s list of MPs in order to investigate which MPs are ‘tached up — at least according totheir parliamentary photo (the theory being is that if they can’t be bothered to keep their parliamentary photo up to date, I can’t be bothered to chase down recent photos either).

During this process I have learned a number of things. Firstly, when it comes to electing a government in the election this year, if you want facial hair to be a priority for the next government, you must vote Labour; over 12% of all Labour MPs were ‘tached up, compared to less than 1% of Conservatives. As you might expect, the Liberal Democrats sit somewhere between these two, with just under 7% having sporting a moustache.

…finally, having looked through photos of all of the male MPs (I’ve made the assumption that none of the females have a moustache, or at least one they are proud of) I’ve discovered that there is no requirement for someone to be even remotely physically attractive in order to become a member of parliament. Vaguely humanoid seems about the limit.

I went through some early rounds to determine exactly who would go through to the ‘final’. This was based on grouping those MPs with clearly visible ‘taches (bumfluff that the MP appears to be hiding is automatically disqualified) into 8 alphabetical groups, and picking the ‘tache which, in my opinion, is of the best quality for some reason of that particular group. My working is available here (word doc, 25 kb).

But for the finalists for ThePickards Parliamentary Tache Of The Year 2009, read on…

Tache	Owner	Vital Statistics
	Dave Anderson	2005-5335
	Colin Challen	2001-12343
	Wayne David	2001-15359
	Elfyn Llwyd	1992-6614
	Doug Naysmith	1997-8962
	John Thurso	2001-8168

Place your vote for your Parliamentary Tache of the Year 2009 by leaving a comment to the desired effect. Please note that as I’ve specifically said the competition is to lighten the mood and as an antidote to the backbiting and sniping, any comments which are unpleasant will be removed and associated votes will not be counted. The competition will close on Friday 15th January, please ensure your votes are in by then…

And now 2009 has come to a close, there’s a few things that I’d like to bring back to the public attention and ask, in a sort of a semi-polite but jabbing finger kind of a way, what the fuck is going on?

So here’s my shit-list for 2009…

• How come Trafigura and Carter-Ruck haven’t been more publicly hauled over the coals for attempting to silence debate about what is being discussed in parliament? If they’ve done nothing wrong, let them provide their side of the story.
• Does anyone know what — if any — disciplinary or criminal action has been taken against any of those police officers in the G20 who — to my untrained eyes at least — certainly appeared to have done something which I would have taken to be assault?
• Does anyone know what — if any — disciplinary action has been taken against those police officers who misled the media about the conditions under which Ian Tomlinson was first encountered, was treated, and so on?
• Does anyone know what — if any — action has been taken to prevent similar police tactics — that’s the kettling as well as the lying — being used in the future?
• Can anyone explain to me why no-one seems to be able to draw a line between MPs claiming perfectly reasonable expenses (“look at this cheeky fucker — wants to have a chair in his house, does he?”) and the slightly more outrageous ones (duck islands, moat cleaning, home-flipping). Can anyone explain to me why no MPs are yet facing criminal prosecution when Joe or Jane Muggins on a council estate who had lied for their benefits would already have seen the inside of a courtroom?
• Can anyone explain to me why the taxpayers should have bailed out the banks? I don’t recall the banks propping up the public sector when times were better for them. I don’t recall the banks telling taxpayers not to worry about their mortgages — they’d bail them out if needs be. So why should the taxpayer look after them? (Yes, I know we need a banking system: but I don’t see why it needs to be in private ownership)
• The fact that Tony Blair no longer seems to even care that the flimsy excuse for a war only his mate Dubya wanted hasn’t held up to even the faintest of scrutiny — and he’s still living the high life despite all the people that have died as a direct result of his actions. Scum.

These stories have been allowed to die. It has been in the interests of various parties to allow these stories to die. Do not forget. We will have a general election in 2010, and it’s in the interests of the great british public (whether washed or unwashed) to show that we’re sick of being pissed about and we’re not going to stand and have this shit.

And we’ve proved with the Christmas number one that when the British Public take a stand against something, we can actually achieve something. So let’s take a stand as a nation and do the same thing with our political system. Let’s vote in Rage Against The Machine for Government! (unless anyone has any better ideas…?)

But, on a lighter note, my award for the biggest cock-up of the year goes here. Although I would give my second place vote to that slightly surreal clown they had on question time, who was pretending to be a real politician but didn’t really fool anyone.

I’m not going to go into the scientific evidence for man-made global warming here. I’ve read arguments from both sides, and for me the crucial factor is that the vast majority of scientists, while they might disagree about the amount of man-made global warming, all seem to think that it is something critical which needs to be addressed.

But even if you don’t believe it’s man made — or only believe a tiny proportion of it is man made — then what you’re doing amounts to a bet. I’ll stake paying a few quid less tax against the potential loss of large areas of the planet becoming uninhabitable for humans.

Personally, in this sort of circumstance I don’t care what the odds are, I don’t like the stake we’ve just put up.

So I’d like to say something to all the governments of the world for failing to reach any sort of meaningful deal over carbon dioxide emissions — they’ve failed to cut them enough, and they’ve failed to make any sort of binding agreement.

Fuck you. Fuck you very much indeed.

On the plus point though, I live on a hill 128m above sea level. Or, as we’re risking it being called in the future, ‘an island’.

This is the former British Lion Gareth Thomas, who is something of a high-profile player (ninth highest ever test try scorer) even if at 35, he is presumably coming towards the end of his professional career.

I don’t think anything more positive (or negative) about Gareth for this. Basically, if he was playing for my team, I’d support him. If he was playing against my team, I’d want him to play badly. His sexuality has — as he himself says — got buggerall to do with the sport…

“I just happen to be gay,” he added. “It’s irrelevant.”Gareth Thomas, quoted on BBC News

I don’t want to praise Gareth for coming out, simply because the idea that he has to be brave in order to come out rather demonstrates that we still expect ingrained homophobia in professional sport. But perhaps we are wrong to expect this, as can be demonstrated from the reaction he encountered from some team-mates:

“But they came in, patted me on the back and said: ‘We don’t care. Why didn’t you tell us before?’ Two of my best mates in rugby didn’t even blink an eyelid.” Gareth Thomas, quoted on BBC News

Perhaps we are finally growing up after all. I’d like to think any other homosexual player in professional football would receive the same response from their team mates and — with luck — from the terraces, although I think you might need a few idiots ejected from grounds first.

And if that wasn’t a big enough sporting revelation for one day, it also transpires that Newcastle’s manager, Chris Hughton, was formerly a columnist for the newspaper of the British Workers Revolutionary Party. No, that isn’t a joke.

In his youth at Spurs, he used to write a weekly football column for The News Line, the paper of the British Workers Revolutionary Party, although he says that this was because a mate of his asked him to, and he wasn’t really bothered about politics, just liked the idea of having his own column. Yeah, and the fact that he seems to have introduced a kind of a workers’ collective at Newcastle for making decisions is entirely coincidental, is it Chris …

I knew there was something I liked about him…

On his Muck&Brass blog, resident Niall Connolly has called members “jackasses” and claimed a council leaflet was “like a Nazi call to arms”.

Former vice chairman Anthony Canvin, 61, said: “There’s some sick, stupid people out there.”

BBC News

My first thought was wow. Not wow as in “hurrah”, but wow as in “cripes, I’m a bit surprised at that”. At this stage, I’d not actually read anything of Niall’s Muck and Brass blog. I’d heard about it on the BBC. (Mainstream Media 1, Blogger 0)

Reaction

But I was a bit surprised at this response by Jim Hawkins, who has in the past been critical of blogging, suggesting that it does not have as much value as proper journalism…

@ThePickards Regardless, it’s a shame. One whining anonymous critic takes down most of a council but doesn’t have guts to stand for electionJimInTheMorning

…this instinctive “blogger must be wrong” response struck me as sadly typical of mainstream media (except in regard to Iain Dale who turns up bloody everywhere), and — and I hope Jim will forgive me for highlighting his mistake hiere — shows that even mainstream journalists aren’t always 100% accurate in checking their sources, since both the BBC article (which Jim retweeted) and the blog itself named the author as Niall Connolly.

Jim’s counter — that we can’t be sure he actually is Niall, since the BBC haven’t managed to contact him today — seems a weak argument since he appears to have been blogging since 2006 without anyone questioning his identity before. Besides which, before assuming someone’s identity is fraudulent, it might seem reasonable to check them out: and since the person claiming to be N. Connolly has in his possession a photo of a franked envelope sent to N. Connolly (publicly available on his blog for anyone to spot), it would seem a little perverse to be suggesting he isn’t…

Is It Right To Criticise?

The other question is of course whether or not it is “a shame for democracy”. There’s a perfectly simple answer to this. Or rather there are maybe two. And these are “No, it isn’t”, and “It depends”.

The fundamental question to the “no it isn’t” camp is whether we, as individuals, as bloggers, as private citizens, in the media or not, anonymous or not, have a right to criticise our elected representatives. My vote would be a clear and unequivocal yes: with of course the caveat that if you’ve been telling stuff which turns out not to be true, you have to pay the penalty (as Damien McBride and The Sun have found out recently).

That’s my personal belief: we all have a right to be critical of our elected representatives. And, in theory, we should be allowed also to sing their praises should such a situation ever arise.

If you’re not convinced on this, then maybe you’ll fall into the second camp: “it depends”. This camp would suggest that hang on, if the guy’s criticisms are reasonable, then maybe he is right to be critical: if he’s being unreasonable, then no.

Surely everyone would agree with these two being the only reasonable camps: after all, the only other possibility is that your elected representative can do whatever the hell they like and you’d be the one in the wrong if you were to say anything about it.

Challenge The Media

So what has Niall actually had to say? Have any of the journalists (and let’s just watch today’s papers to see) actually read his blog before drawing their conclusions? Well, this is where it might just get interesting…

There are, at the time of writing, only eighty-five posts on the blog, so while it might take a little effort, it’s certainly possible to at least skim the posts and pick out the relevant ones. (And read some half dozen of the council minutes too)

So I have done. As I say, if the story is picked up by other sources tomorrow, let’s see which “proper” journalists have done the same (and without “coincidentally” picking up on exactly the same points as me)…

What’s The Story?

In 2006, there’s no real vitriol only a few references to the council, one of which simply states that the age profile of the town is somewhat elderly, and the makeup of the town council reinforces this profile. There are a few references to the Somerton Town Plan of 1977 — isn’t it right that someone is taking an interest like this? — and then he ponders whether the council are doing enough to engage with the community.

I don’t know if anyone at the meeting was under forty but it certainly didn’t look like it. So where is the wider community? Clearly they don’t get involved and its useful to ask why not? Maybe the very nature of ‘local politics’, certainly as they are pursued in Somerton, just turns people off.

I can’t think of any situation where — assuming the comment to be true — a Council wouldn’t seek to determine why this should be the case and try and engage with younger people. If he’s wrong, or the council were engaging with the youth in other ways, then surely it’s simple enough to say so.

Of course, the bigger question seems to be whether or not things are going through proper channels:

It was proposed to the meeting that Tony Canvin, the well known builder and local and district councillor, would use his ‘buying power’ to negotiate the best deals. It was proposed that there would be no tendering evidently because tendering is a tedious process which doesn’t offer any benefit.

This strikes me as seeming a bit unusual. I would have thought that tendering for deals would be a requirement, and that anyone who was a local builder should have to declare their interest at this point, and then have no further part in the process.

Reasonableness

And then you’ve got the questions of whether the criticisms are reasonable:

Somerton’s dominance in the Precept League is again underscored when you consider the average Precept charged by the 121 Town Councils in South Somerset. The average Precept charged per property across those Councils is a paltry £24.85p and Somerton exceeds that by close to 400%.

Now assuming these figures are accurate — and I’d presume these figures are, by nature, publicly available, so anyone can check — then surely it’s not unreasonable to ask why you’re paying four times more per head for your town council than those residents of other councils. Is this not a reasonable question? And here I’ll introduce some of my research:

Somerton’s plans for 2007-08 showed that it was expected that there would be a shortfall of £40,000, which would have to be met from reserves. Of course, when it came to the 2008-09 prediction, there were revised figures for 2007-08 which showed that the council didn’t make a loss of forty thousand at all. It would appear that they actually spent — with an income of around £275,000 (including £220,000 precept) more than one million pounds more than their income.

Not only is this a rather spectacular amount — particularly as the next highest amount which needed to be paid from any of the other town council balances was less than seven thousand, it’s also around 25 times greater than the council expected.

I think it’s perfectly appropriate for anyone to question why this should be the case… Blogger 1, Mainstream Media 1

Accuracy and Correction

Then there’s the question of whether a blogger is allowed to say things he knows to be factually inaccurate. Would a blogger who wasn’t honest and decent allow something inaccurate to stand, would they quietly drop the allegation (as I’m sure has been done before) without actually publishing a clear retraction, or would they publish a clear correction? Let’s look at Niall:

On the 14th October an anonymous comment was posted to Muck&Brass suggesting a connection between Wild Meadow Farm and Hawthorns SW. Muck&Brass has been assured that there is no financial connection between these two companies. Muck&Brass: Correction

Note, this isn’t retracting an allegation he has made, this is correcting an allegation an anonymous source made during the comments. If only the media published their corrections, retractions and apologies on their front pages…

Not only that, but you also have this:

Recently this blog has received a number of comments which have not been published because they contain information which cannot be verified. I would ask those contributors to contact me directly in order that I might learn more about the issues that they raise.Muck & Brass: Request for Information

Blogger 2, Mainstream Media 1.

The Lone Nut Theory

Next, I’ll look at the implication that the blogger is a lone nut: as with the JFK Walnut commission investigation. What about other sources? Do other people agree with these sort of views? Well, yes…

Terry Bastyan, speaking on behalf of residents living in the Badgers Cross Lane, said: “We feel let down by the council because you are supposed to be representing us. “The only reason all these people are here is because two of us found out and let everyone know. “We fully support recycling, but question the need to move from the current site.”

The current site is owned by Somerset County Council and managed by Viridor. The proposed new site is a disused quarry owned by Mr Canvin.

This Is Somerset

Does this seem to then be a lone voice? Well, no… (look at the local election results also — which also demonstrates that if he didn’t stand for election, he was actively involved in the process).

Blogger 3, Mainstream Media 1

Is There A Case To Answer?

But of more import seems to be the activities of one Councillor Tony Canvin, who has been the one at whom most of Muck&Brass’s vitriol appears to be aimed at. Is he being unfair and just picking on the poor man? Or does he have a point? Well, let’s take a look…

A proposal to relocate Somerton Household Waste Recycling Centre from Bancombe Road Trading Estate to Badgers Cross Lane has been submitted by Tony Canvin.This Is Somerset [2]

Okay, then, if we were to work on the assumption that what is in these articles is accurate (it has been produced by “proper” journalists, after all), doesn’t anyone else think that it is inappropriate for a councillor to submit a proposal for the council to move one of their centres to some land he himself owns? I’m not saying it’s against the rules — I don’t know the rules — but as with MPs expenses, it’s one of those things where my opinion is that if it isn’t against the rules, it ought to be.

M&B has received a number of emails regarding a ‘new’ planning application which seeks permission for an amenity site out at Badger’s Cross. This development will effect everyone in Somerton and has been rumoured for over a year yet it has not been discussed by Somerton Town Council and it is fair to ask, ‘Why not?’.

This application comes from none other than ‘Mr Somerton’ himself, Tony Canvin (aka Cllr Canvin) …

Muck & Brass: It’s That Damn Badger Again

Niall also makes a sound point that leaving a meeting for five minutes here and there does not necessarily mean that there is no conflict of interest:

Obviously the applicant’s consultants were quick to point out that, in a situation such as this, where the applicant faces possible accusations of ‘conflict of interest’, the applicant would leave a Council Meeting whilst their application was being discussed. But the community is beginning to appreciate that the issue is not the relatively short period of time when the application is being considered that is under scrutiny. Under scrutiny is the far longer period of time, possible a year or 18 months before the application is made, when the applicant can use their extensive access to the process to prepare their position. In the face of this advantage, the community is starting to feel abused.Muck & Brass: Shaved Heads and Earrings

Now, I don’t know whether there is anything actually wrong in all of this, but to me it poses an interesting question — the council may well have resigned en masse because of criticism from a blogger, but the question should be posed (and of course answered by the council, and former members, where appropriate) as to whether that criticism was justified. If so, then perhaps they have been forced to resign through their own actions, rather than because of blaming one blogger.

And of course this is before we look at other claims: councillors shredded a letter of questions sent out to them and sent the shredded bits back; suggestions of intimidation and vandalism and so on…

Blogger 4, Mainstream Media 1

Money Where Mouth Is?

And it appears Mr. Connolly has been prepared also to put his money where his mouth is…

Whether the wider community agrees or disagrees with the views expressed in this blog, the information provided to the External Auditor is all based upon fact, backed with documentary evidence. In the light of that evidence, I believe that the community of Somerton has been very badly let down by its Town Council and its Town Clerk.Muck & Brass: Thank You

Of course, I’m not claiming to know what the facts of the case actually are. That’s why I’d like to see Somerton Town Council — and former councillors — put their side of the story. My personal opinion is that it would be appropriate for some outside and independent agency to investigate these claims and stories and report publicly whether or not any wrongdoing has taken place, and either clear the name of the councillors, or take whatever other action may be appropriate.

However, I would suggest that those people who immediately assumed that the council was in the right have obviously not looked into the allegations which I think suggest there is a case to answer. For those of you who judged someone before knowing the facts (which, admittedly, I still don’t know — that’s why I suggested an external, independent, public investigation) — shame on you.

Blogger 5, Mainstream Media 1

Summary

To sum up though, I hope Jim will forgive me, but his thoughts — democracy is the loser, anonymous, whining blogger — and so on, seem very much to be a case of “kneejerk reaction first, establish facts later”. Which is strange, because that lack of attention to the facts, and the lack of investigative reporting (such as that carried out by Niall), is always something that the mainstream media seem to criticise bloggers for.

Perhaps this is simply proof that bloggers can be better, after all; perhaps there is still a place for the independent crusader and local resident to actually make an impact on local politics. Perhaps local government ought to be accountable to its residents. Perhaps people shouldn’t jump to conclusions just because they are biased against bloggers.

…or perhaps all of the allegations and suggestions are false. I don’t know, and because I don’t know, I didn’t jump to conclusions based on prior bias, and that is rather the point.

Anyone who was holding that sort of attitude was certainly not representing the views of the electorate — irrespective of what political party they belonged to.

The new thing is slightly different. Thomas Legg (note: he’s not that doctor off of Eastenders) has been through the last four or five years of claims and has decided that the amounts which MPs were allowed to claim for cleaning and gardening expenses were too high, and — as I understand it — is asking for anything above this limit to be paid back.

This has upset a lot of MPs, including Frank Fields who claim it is the equivalent of driving at 30mph down a road for years, and then suddenly the speed limit is changed to 25mph retrospectively and you suddenly receive five years worth of speeding fines. I can see his point. To look at it more specifically in terms of expenses, say you’d put in a claim in year 1 for cleaning expenses of £5000. And that this was fine. So, assuming the cleaning company had done a decent job, you’d employ them again next year. And again, this is deemed fine. But five years later, you’re suddenly told the limit was £3000, and you’ve got to pay back five years’ worth of difference, when if you’d known in the first place this was too much, you’d have shopped around for something cheaper.

But for journalists and some MPs to suggest that “they don’t know who is currently more incensed about expenses” is to show a complete lack of empathy with the public. It’s the public who are rightfully bloody angry about a lot of the claimed expenses, and they have little sympathy for MPs who have been claiming more than was deemed reasonable by Thomas Legg. Yes, it might have been deemed reasonable back then, but MPs still ought to have considered it part of their duty to ask when spending public funds whether it was really necessary and if so, could they have got it cheaper?

MPs might be angry too, but they — as a whole — have been allowed to get away with so much for so long that all of them now have to take the unpleasant tasting medicine. It might not be fair on some of them, but if they were behaving like a bunch of naughty schoolchildren in the first place, then they should not act surprised that the whole class has been punished.

I accept that this may not be fair on some — as Frank Fields points out, people like him who have not had a duck island built, but have paid slightly too much for cleaning or gardening services have their reputations tarnished by being asked to pay stuff back — but that’s the way it goes. The whole class has been brought into disrepute by the actions of some; the whole class have to stay behind. Although personally, I think it would have been funnier if every MP had been required to write out 1000 times “I will not take the piss with my expenses claims”…

MPs as a group need to take their medicine. And whilst I can understand some grumbling about it, they need to accept that even if they themselves were relatively clean, they are still tarnished by association with the previous rules. I don’t recall massive campaigns from the backbenches (on either side) to cut allowances and expenses prior to the Telegraph getting its hands on the details.

And I would urge MPs to keep their grumbling to a minimum. Certainly, if any start talking about the public being jealous of them, then it’s a perfectly simple task to publicise how little they think of the electorate in the run up to the next election. You’d find plenty of ordinary people, not part of the political machine of either party* who would be capable of doing a decent job (but that’s my grumble with politics: that the public are disillusioned with the whole party machinery and would rather see ‘ordinary’ people doing it, rather than those who have been involved in party politics for a long time).

*yes, there are other ones, but there’s only two that can give you a PM. Besides, saying this always annoys the Lib Dems, so it’s worth doing just for that reason.

(And just to be clear, I have nothing against MPs who need a second home being able to claim for a [smallish] telly, or for a phone allowance, or travel — I agree with the principle that politics should not be the preserve of the rich. It is however important that they don’t take the piss, which is what they were doing).

So just stand in line and take your medicine. Or quit.

Well, there’s just one problem. There seems to be an assumption that the Taxpayers Alliance represents all taxpayers, judging by the fact that they are quoted by the BBC and other media sources pretty much whenever anyone spends any money. Only their mission statement makes it clear that they will not always represent my views:

The TaxPayers’ Alliance is Britain’s independent grassroots campaign for lower taxes. After years of being ignored by politicians of all parties, the TPA is committed to forcing politicians to listen to ordinary taxpayers.TaxPayers’ Alliance

I’m all up for politicians to be forced to listen to taxpayers. I’m 100% behind that. No problem there. But I’m not always going to be in support of lower taxes, if it comes at a social cost. I’m in favour of reducing waste, and inefficiency, I’m in favour of the public sector being expected to be open about what it is spending its money on, but I’m not in favour of draconian knee-jerk reactions to try and save twenty quid at the expense of decent working conditions, or helping people.

Take a look at the Portsmouth Council / Facebook thing. A freedom of information request revealed that Portsmouth Council staff, in total, were spending an average of 413 hours per month on Facebook. Portsmouth Council were unable to determine whether this time was during workers’ breaks, when they were allowed to do personal surfing, or when they were supposed to be working, when obviously they shouldn’t.

Yet while the TaxPayers’ Alliance admitted this equated to only six minutes per staff member per month, they seemed to fail to notice that there was no evidence that this was being done in clocked-in office hours:

Even if everybody does just spend a small amount of time on the site it is still being paid for by the taxpayer. It is a huge amount of work time, and therefore money being wasted.’Mark Wallace from the Taxpayers’ Alliance, quoted in Portsmouth Today

And so, Portsmouth Council banned their workers accessing Facebook, despite the fact that — assuming 22 working days in a month — workers were averaging around only 15 seconds per day on Facebook, and there wasn’t any evidence that this was being done in work time. This sort of kneejerk reaction is typical of what happens when the TaxPayers’ Alliance goes wading in, despite the fact that when you look at the statistics, that sort of reaction is entirely unreasonable.

The council probably loses more money in terms of people wiping their arse more times than is strictly necessary (as hey, that wastes toilet paper as well).

There’s also another reason why I don’t feel the TaxPayers’ Alliance represents me. They aren’t all taxpayers…

The Taxpayers’ Alliance, a campaign group that calls for tax and spending cuts and claims to represent the interests of taxpayers, has admitted one of its directors does not pay British tax. The Guardian has learned that Alexander Heath, a director of the increasingly influential free market, rightwing lobby group, lives in a farmhouse in the Loire and has not paid British tax for years.The Guardian

So I therefore feel it is necessary to set up a different group, offering a different voice to the TaxPayers’ Alliance, to represent those tax payers who the TaxPayers’ Alliance does not represent (particularly because their name implies they represent all taxpayers when they plainly do not). I therefore propose setting up the TaxPayers’ Rebel Alliance, so named for three reasons.

Firstly, because it’s a link to Star Wars and I think it has a certain nerdy cool to it. Secondly, it represents that we may take a different view to the standard TaxPayers’ Alliance. And thirdly, it frames the TaxPayers’ Alliance as representing the Evil Empire with Darth Vader and stuff, which, while not strictly accurate, is at least amusing.

The TaxPayers’ Rebel Alliance therefore has three key points:

• We believe that the public sector should remember that they should be responsible and open about how they spend their money, remembering that it comes from the ordinary taxpayer
• We believe that sometimes it is beneficial to the country when the public sector spends money, and they should not automatically be criticised for doing so — only where it waste can be demonstrated.
• We believe that every time the national media give a voice to the TaxPayers’ Alliance, they should give our contrary opinion an equal voice

And, in a nutshell, that’s it. Who’s with me?

It was just that now that we’re towards the end of party conference season, and the major parties have worked themselves up into a frothing lather about why they really are the best, after all, I thought I’d have a look at some of the highlights of each party’s conference and pick out one thing that I support, and one thing that I don’t. That way it’s fair.

My political nature is left-of-centre: colour-wise, I’d say I’m a reddish-green, so obviously my views will be … er … coloured … by my own political perceptions and beliefs, but I’ll still try to be as fair as I can.

Labour

Ah, the labour party conference. The first escape poor Gordon has had from Gordon-baiting and tormenting for the last six months or so. The global recession wasn’t his fault, but then again, if you going to declare that you’re bringing an end to “boom and bust”, you deserve to come in for some stick when it turns out that we’ve gone bust after all.

And that’s before we look at the savage attacks on civil liberties, the policing of protests, wars of allegedly dubious legality, the party seeming to kowtow to big business and so on. I can’t help think that this wasn’t what I’d wanted to sign up to in 1997. It might not strictly have emerged from the conference, but this is the millstone of negativity that hangs around Labour’s neck at the moment: disillusionment.

On the counter side to that, we have Labour’s social policies: the abolition of charging patients for hospital car-parking; the abolition of means-testing for home care for the elderly. This is a party which considers that sometimes a financial price is one better worth paying than a social one, and that represents the sort of society I want to live in.

Liberal Democrats

The biggest problem the Liberal Democrats face is that they are “the other ones”. You know, you’ve got Labour, Conservative and… the ones with Charles Kennedy. No, wait, Menzies Campbell. No, it’s er… Compo. Sorry, Clegg. They are not going to form a government. The best they can hope for is the influence that an alliance with them might offer in an otherwise hung parliament, which gives them a certain ability to say whatever they like because it doesn’t really matter. But of course everyone knows this.

One thing that for me the Liberal Democrats did well was to call for criminal sanctions on MPs who break the rules on expenses. Although while a good move, it missed the point somewhat: the country was very angry at those MPs who had broken the rules but they were also bloody furious at what MPs were allowed to get away with within the rules.

And for me the Liberal Democrats did something particularly wrong. First they allowed Dawkins a platform to spout his intolerant anti-religious views (I have no problem with people being atheists, or religious, I just don’t think it’s right that either should have a platform to say the others are bad people) and claim that faith schools are like child abuse. My son goes to a faith school. It’s a good school, with a good ethos, and well-behaved children. My job is to ensure that he gets brought up with the correct tools to make up his own mind, not having religious figures or Mr. Dawkins deciding on his behalf what he should believe.

But they did have a brilliant comedy moment:

I want to be prime ministerNick Clegg

…yes, and I want world peace, an end to hunger, a million quid in cash and x-ray vision. We’ll see who achieves their ambition first.

Conservatives

I did say I was going to be fair, didn’t I, which is why I dropped my original subtitle for this post. Let’s start with what seems bleeding obvious. Barring some calamity for the Conservatives, or Gordon Brown finding a cure for cancer, it seems that the next government will be a Conservative one. This worries me: I feel the Conservative party will support businesses and the financial industry at the expense of the working man (or woman), the single parent, and society.

It also concerns me because I feel that some of those who are the problem with the labour administration will escape relatively unscathed (in some cases shifting to the House of Lords, or the EU) while good, honourable, hard-working back bench MPs are the ones who have to pay the price. That’s not fair, but it’s the same regardless of which administration is in charge.

Anyway, what have the tories suggested that I like? Well, a rise in the state pension age. By the time I’m 70 — assuming I get there — I’ll likely have to work until I’m three hundred and forty in order to qualify for a state pension, since everyone is living longer, so why not bite the bullet and up the state pension age now. Or at least, as soon as possible. It’s going to have to be done, so let’s just get on with it…

But in comparison, there’s the public sector pay freeze which I really don’t like. What I don’t understand is how bankers drop the country in the economic shit, the public bails them out with public money, and then the public sector have to have a pay freeze. Before we even consider a slowdown in public sector pay rises (which haven’t exactly been great in the last few years anyway), we should be looking at a long-term pay freeze for bankers, and an outright ban on bonuses.

After all, it wasn’t the public sector that got us into this mess, so why should they be the ones who have to suffer? And that basically sums up my worry for a conservative administration: that the ordinary man or woman will be left to pick up the bill for the mistakes businesses make in bad times, and businesses will be allowed to get away with exploiting and gouging them the rest of the time.

Where Will My Vote Be Going?

My vote will be going, as it has done for the last few elections, not on a party ticket, but to the individual candidate whom I think will best represent me (this being three different parties in the last general, local, and european elections). This is based on a few factors: what I can tell or can find out about their beliefs, any voting record, their election literature, what (if anything) I know of them personally (tip: have an online presence) and (if they’ve been elected at something before) whether I think they’ve done a good job or not.

In other words, assuming there are no major surprises, I’ll be voting for Dave Anderson: not because of the party he represents, but because of what he stands for. Of course, if you can convince me that my vote would be better placed elsewhere…