Breaking: Commons Speaker Michael Martin to announce retirement at 2.30 this afternoon.
It is not clear whether he will resign immediately from his post or pledge to stand down at the next General Election.
There is not yet any official confirmation of the move.
His decision comes after he was condemned as a ‘dead Speaker walking’ last night after an unprecedented parliamentary mutiny against his rule.
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.
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.
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?
All this week it’s been rumoured in UK political blogdom that the known troughers and married Cabinet Ministers Education Secretary Ed “So what” Balls and Treasury Secretary Yvette Cooper were so worried about public reaction to that greed being exposed that they’d obtained an injunction to stop the publication of their expenses; the implication being that despite the dishonesty that had already been exposed to public disgust, there was an even worse crime Labour’s golden couple were trying to hide. Which of course leads one to ask the inevitable question, “What! Worse than this?”
So have they or haven’t they got an injunction? The press have been remarkably quiet on Balls and Cooper this week, considering their past history, so reports that they’d obtained an injunction haven’t seemed at all unlikely, though impossible to confirm.
Now it’s rumoured they have applied but they haven’t succeeded:
Balls Fails to Prevent Expenses Revelations
News reaches me that Brown protégé Ed Balls has been fighting a rear-guard action to prevent publication of the expenses he and his wife Yvette Cooper have been claiming over the last few years. Rumours have abounded for a while that the Daily Telegraph had a devastating story on the couple but I have been informed that Balls sought a High Court injunction to prevent the Telegraph publishing what it knows.
This morning the High Court rejected Balls’ pleas to cover up his expenses record and I am told that therefore there will be a very damaging story published shortly. Balls has been suggested by some to be Gordon Brown’s preferred successor and if he is damaged goods it will further reflect badly on the Prime Minister’s judgement.
‘News reaches’ him from where? How does a Reading conservative have an inside track on Labour? Has the Councillor a mole in Downing St, or is his source in the High Court, or one of the chambers acting for the couple? If not where are these rumours coming from? Of course it could just be a deep Labour plot, an attempt to nobble Brown’s anointed successor Balls ahead of any leadership battle – hence the propagation of the story in Tory-leaning blogs. You can say virtually anything in a comment thread.
I don’t expect source-revealing. I’m not just nosy (well, I am, OK I admit it), merely trying to pin down whether the injunction story’s true or not. Obviously if the source is a court official, Councillor Willis can’t name names – contempt and all that -but ‘news reaches me’ is just a little fuzzy.
So I reluctantly have to conclude – because I do loathe Cooper and Balls, who personify everything vile about New Labour in one easy to hate package – that at the moment the whole injunction story’s still just a rumour.
Damn. It could have done for them politically for once and all. One can only live in hope.