I love it when a plan comes together
It’s beautiful, it really is. Elegant in it’s simplicity, fiendishly brilliant.
First we have the Democratic Process Bypass Bill (“Jim Murphy offers long and detailed assurances about how the Act will and won’t be used. When asked to put these assurances into the Bill, he refuses.”) allowing government ministers to do that they darn well pleasey – introduce new laws, change existing ones and other such trifling matters – without recourse to Parliamentary oversight.
Then, we have Geoff “what’s wrong with managerialism?” Hoon proposing the curtailment of parliamentary scrutiny, the coup de grace, if you will:
The Guardian: Hoon plans curb on MPs’ questions
The right of MPs to table questions is to be curbed for the first time in the history of parliament, according to a confidential document being circulated to ministers by Geoff Hoon, the leader of the house.
He proposes in the consultation document that MPs be limited to 10 questions a day after a huge rise in queries, particularly since the last general election. Part of the blame is being put on MPs’ researchers drawing up a lot of questions.
You have to admire its perfection. If this plan was a car it’d be a jet-black needle-thin roadster that did 500 miles to the gallon and had room in the back for three kids and a grand piano.
Damn those MPs and their insatiable quest to get to the bottom of what the Government is up to. And if only they’d do something meaningful with the largely worthless, and yet jealously guarded, information they’re able to glean from ministers.
But couldn’t the Government just hire some more special advisers or build a bigger instant rebuttal machine? They haven’t been overly concerned about the cost of government before now. How long does it take to write prevaricating and misdirecting answers anyway? Does Adam Ingram get a sore wrist writing:
We make every effort to minimise any impact of the coalition’s military action on the Iraqi population. We have no means of ascertaining the numbers of Iraqi military personnel or civilians killed during the conflict.
He, along with other ministers, should stick a list of such stock answers up on his office wall as a cheap and easy labour saving device.
The thing is, when Geoff Hoon frets that Ministers are being deluged by questions what he means is they are being asked too many questions like, “how many civilians did we cluster bomb today?” and not enough like, “minister, why are you so great?”. I doubt he’d be complaining very much if every question could be answered with a friendly, “everything’s smashing, thanks for asking”.
It’s like his recent kite-flying exercise suggesting that the Salisbury Convention (the agreement by which the House of Lords do not vote against legislation that featured in the government’s election manifesto) should become legally binding. If the Lords, and as an advocate of Lords reform I’m writing this with gritted teeth, weren’t doing such a bang up job preventing our New Labour overlords from establishing a junta, I imagine Geoff wouldn’t even have heard of the Salisbury Convention.
Democracy, I suppose, is all well and lovely until it’s not working for you. In fact, that would make a good line in a speech given by the New Labour minister of your choice: “Democracy – if it’s not with us it’s against us”. “DEMOCRACY: TRAITOR” the Sun headline will screech. Efficiency is our friend now. It’s the roughage that will ease the passage of so much New Labour legislation.
The real worry is that Labour MPs are permitting these excesses four years out from a General Election. God knows what they’ll be prepared to vote for on the eve of election, with sub-zero polling figures, when Blair/Brown says “back me on this measure [pensioners to be turned into Soylent Green, restrictions on the consumption of Victory Gin or whatever] or lose your seats”.
To steal a phrase: I know why the sun never sets on New Labour: God wouldn’t trust them in the dark. Geoff’s doing his best ARP warden impression.
Posted on March 9th, 2006 at 1:52pm under Affronts to democracy, L.A.R.R.B., New Labour, UK politics
Ingram’s little contribution you quoted is truly priceless. So they take ‘all measures possible’ to minimise causalties, but have failed to put in place any means of telling whether any of these measures are working? They might believe in managerialism, but these people are truly shitty managers.
How about governments only being able to introduce 10 bills per parliament. That would have the dual effect of giving more time for proper scrutiny and easing poor old Geoff’s workload a bit.
“what’s wrong with managerialism?”
Well probably not a lot, that is if you have managers who can manage. NuLabour are like a load of middle managers who can just about *talk the talk* but definitely can’t *walk the walk*. If they were in business their financial incompetence, strategic ignorance and general dimwittery would see them heading to the wall at a rapid rate of knots. Most of them are only in politics because they couldn’t hack it in the *real* world.
I used to work for a major UK multi-national whose senior management were joined at the hip with MacKinseys. It was the first in its industry, globally, to make £1bn profits which was seen as a measure of its success. However, within a small number of years after a series of, almost annual, strategic lurches prompted by their in-house consultants it went from bad to worse and was eventually taken over by a smaller rival to put it out of its misery. The parallel with NuLabour and its slide from its lofty ideals of 1997, albeit that these were merely to make an unelectable rabble electable, are staggeringly similar.
I despair now of reading the newspapers or watching the news for the arrival of a another hair-brained, unthought out, crackpot, populist, knee-jerk, money-wasting scheme from the idiots who are our government. It is as though they have a never-ending book of blank cheques which they just cannot resist the temptation to use. I fear that unless some real sense of proportion and a greater respect for true democratic principles is brought back into how the country is governed (and I ain’t holding my breath) then this patient is terminally ill.
Of course Geoff Goon doesn’t think that he has anything to do with politicians’ current unpopularity. Shocking and awful.
Remember this?
Ssshhh! sshhh! Though now shrapnel makes you shriek,
and deformities in future may brand you as a freak,
you’ll see, one day, disablement’s a blessing and a boon,
sent in baby seeking bomblets by benefactor Hoon.
By Tony Harrison
(In response to Hoon saying on Today programme last week that Iraqi mothers would thank him for using cluster bombs.) March 2003, Guardian
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Campaign Against the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill
It is soooo hard not to be a conspiracy theorist with this kind of crap going on. Honestly, where is the line between concerned citizen and tinfoil hat wearing loon, because I fear I’m about to cross it.
I’m not sure New Labour bother me so much as the people who will go along with New Labour rather than speak out. For instance, am I missing something, or are the Education Bill rebels actually goig to cave in this week so as to avoid making Mr Blair call in the Conservatives to vote with him? That’s how it looks to me.
Pip,
No.*Management* is a Good Thing (if done well), and I’d rather have the use of my tax buck managed than left to chance. Managerialism, however, is the delusion that possession of an MBA is a sufficient qualification for deciding what my tax buck ought to be spent on. This is a Bad Thing, and is associated with Bad Kings (or Prime Ministers) – Chris