We’re Not Having It, Either

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If anyone’s looking for tips on how to move ahead investigating our MPs and their expenses, this old post of mine from 2008 has some good ideas:

I now want the Action Squad to co-ordinate a new drive against the hard core of ‘hard nut’ cases.

That car of theirs? is the tax up to date? Is it insured? Let’s find out.

And have they a TV licence for their plasma screen? As the advert says, ‘it’s all on the database.’

As for their council tax, it shouldn’t be difficult to see if that’s been paid

And what about benefit fraud? Can we run a check?

How could any MP object to such investigation? Those aren’t my words, those are Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s in a speech by to the 2008 ‘Anti-Social Behaviour: We’re not Having It‘ conference.

Of course she was admitting to using the power of the state to harass individuals because they behave in ways the government disapproves of or finds politically inconvenient, not because they’re committing any crime.

But we’re told that if you have nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear, so I’m sure Honourable Members, especially Labour Members , won’t mind such close scrutiny at all.

Golden Shred

Given their historic ability to maximise opportunities for optimum personal benefit, it seems unlikely that Tony Blair would have failed to take the full quota of parliamentary allowances whilst in the Commons and at Downing St. Cherie wouldn’t let him.

No doubt when they claimed expenses it was entirely within the rules. Both Blairs are lawyers, and who better to abide by rules than a pair of lawyers?

Tony himself says he’s a “pretty straight kinda guy”, so I’m sure he’d be quite happy, in the spirit of transparency suddenly abroad, to publish past claims as an example to current MPs on how to make expense claims with integrity.

From 2001 perhaps, to pick a year at random; I’m sure his 2001 claim is a model of its kind.

But oh, what a shame. There appears to have been a nasty shredder accident. How terribly unfortunate that we should be denied the benefit of Mr Blair’s expertise.

A Need To Focus

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What was it Jacqui Smith said about ID cards recently?

“Like every other citizen, they [pilots] ask themselves what will happen to the data they are coerced into providing; whether it will it be safe, whose hands might it fall into, and what might they do with the data?”

Well,quite.

If you, like me, have been indulging in the bitter pleasure of having our belief that most elected politicians are deceitful, greedy, entitled egotists confirmed yet again, have you not idly wondered what fresh hells the government’s been quietly getting away with under cover of media furore? Me too.

MPs may be focused on covering up their corruption and incompetence, scrambling desperately to hold on to their lucrative seats, while bleating about data protection and invasion of privacy, but the implementation of the many repressive and unnecessary laws they’ve steamrollered through rolls inexorably on for the rest of the population.

First off, if you thought ID cards were a goner, think again. Spyblog reports that the planned advent of biometric ID cards is going ahead full steam . While we were boggling over 88p bathplugs, massage chairs and moatcleaning fees, four pieces of secondary legislation were laid before Parliament under the Identity Cards Act 2006:

They are The Identity Cards Act 2006 (Information and Code of Practice on Penalties) Order 2009, which allows government to require referees to vouch for your existence, and keep their details on the database too; and

The Identity Cards Act 2006 (Fees) Regulations 2009, which lays down a £30 charge just to apply for an ID card; and

The Identity Cards Act 2006 (Provision of Information without Consent) Regulations 2009 which allows for the sharing of your information by the government, without your consent, with the tax authorities and with credit reference agencies.
Secondly, Justice Secretary Jack Straw has told Parliament that although he’s backed down on trying to make inquests secret whenever it suited the government, he’s still going do it, but by using other legislation.

“Where it is not possible to proceed with an inquest under the current arrangements, the government will consider establishing an inquiry under the Inquiries Act 2005”.

And who’d decide it was not possible to proceed? Jack Straw. Of course.

In legal news, the Attorney General and the police are collaborating on new legislation that will give ‘law enforcement’ – now there’s a nicely nebulous name – power to, amongst other things, remotely scan your hard-drive.

Oh yes, and terrorism legislation was used to spy on eight people suspected of committing benefit fraud.

But most worrying for any British parent is the announcement that the illegal government database containing your child’ fingerprints and other physical and personal details is about to go live:

Frontline professionals will start using the controversial children’s database ContactPoint from next week, the government has announced. Up to 800 frontline practitioners, including social workers, health professionals and head teachers, in early adopter areas will be trained to use the £224m system from Monday 18 May.

New Labour may have set all this repressive legislation in motion, but now the machine of enforcement grinds on regardless of expenses scandals or public opinion. And like disgraced Labour MP Shahid Malik claims to have done, the government will enforce the rules, however unjust and or illegal they may be, “One million percent by the book”.

MPs may be corrupt, but then we knew that already. This receipts hoohah is mere confirmation. Parliaments may rise or fall, but Government goes on – and I’m more worried about what the State is actually doing right now, and how to oppose it effectively, than I am about the petty bourgeois aspirations of Labour members or the mole problems of Tory grandees.

Though I do wonder just how far that purple-jowled prick of a Speaker Michael Martin can inflate himself in pique before he has an apoplexy.

Can We Get The Pitchforks Out Yet?

I used to regularly come across disgraced rookie MP Shahid Malik at AntiNazi League national meetings. I was gobsmacked when he was elected MP in 2005 – he was a bumptious, egotistical, gladhanding arse even then.

Well, he’s an even bigger bumptious, egotistical, gladhanding arse now. But greedier.

Sky News presenter: Can I ask why a £800 massage chair is so important to you?

Shahid Malik: You see, I’d have more respect for you if you were honest about the figures. You know full well it is £730.

Malik’s rise from obscurity to Labour’s National Exec to the Commission For Racial Equality to neophyte Labour MP to the Dept for International Development to Justice Minister, in the short space of four years, has been astonishing; this even though questions were asked by his local paper about exactly how it was he was elected, for which he unsuccessfully sued the paper for libel. It was expensive too. I wonder who paid his costs?

He’s denying wrongdoing now as well. Will he sue the Telegraph? And will his suit have the same, lame result as before?