N ew Labour has always preserved from the hard Left the
Leninist idea that the party (or, in Blair/ Brown theory, ‘the project’) is the only reality to be respected. All the other institutions of society — above all, Parliament — are ‘superstructure’, so much flim-flam to be insulted, ignored and, if the chance presents itself, kicked into ‘the dustbin of history’. Everything about the arrest of Damian Green shows the effects of this process. Thus the police, corrupted by years of political pressure, chose the brief moment when the House of Commons was prorogued to raid the offices of a Member of Parliament. Unless they are intensely stupid (a proposition not to be discounted), they cannot have imagined that their behaviour could ever have led to a successful prosecution, but they went ahead anyway, influenced perhaps by the fact that the official urging them on was Sir David Normington, who happens to be chairing the body trying to select the next Metropolitan Police Commissioner. Three of the senior policemen involved in the case want the job. Thus, too, the Speaker, Michael Martin, weakly anxious not to be on the wrong side of government, passed the buck for letting the police in to the Serjeant at Arms, herself a politically correct appointment designed to weaken the independence of parliamentary officers. The Commons ‘Commission’, the body invented to safeguard Parliament’s rights, was not consulted. And then the Leader of the House, Harriet Harman, seems to have tried, in a secret meeting, to tell the Speaker how to handle the issue in Parliament. Not so long ago, there was something called ‘the usual channels’, which was in essence, one person, the government chief whip’s private secretary, Murdo Maclean. When all parties respected Parliament, they could settle most disputes amicably through the good offices of Mr Maclean, without unnecessary partisanship. But Mr Maclean was pushed out in the early Blair period, and now there are no usual channels. Indeed, there would appear to be almost no channels at all. The Leninist view of life involves, among other things, a breakdown of that bourgeois concept, trust. It is terrifying.
The Home Office, the department in charge of this particular mess, now seems to have developed a concept of law in which the gesture, not the actual effect, is what matters. Others have pointed out that Jacqui Smith’s plan to make men liable for prosecution for hiring prostitutes who have been trafficked, even if they do not know that they have been, is not workable or just. Another example arises with the work of the UK Borders Agency. This has the reasonable aim of trying to control immigration better, but, once again, there has been a lack of interest by its creators in how it would actually work. Under the new rules, all schools taking foreign pupils will be made liable. So if a pupil at a boarding school decides to stay in England for the summer holidays, the school will be responsible for his/her whereabouts all that time. If the pupil and even, possibly, his/her entire family claims asylum in this country, the school, as the ‘sponsor’, will have to pay all the costs associated with the asylum process. And if it turns out that the school is unwittingly harbouring a current foreign pupil who is not complying with the rules, it can be fined £10,000. The legislation promised to clamp down on the bogus language schools which got ‘students’ into this country on false pretences. But since the new rules apply only to courses of six months or more, the bogus schools will be able to continue as before by offering five-month terms. By the way, there was no consultation with any of the boarding schools involved when these rules were drafted.
Our family has recently learnt a bit about how banks are recovering their losses. Just before starting at university this autumn, our son was persuaded by his bank, NatWest, which is part of the distressed, now government-owned Royal Bank of Scotland, to start an Advantage Gold account. The ‘advantage’ was that he got free travel insurance. After travelling abroad, he had £9 left in his account. NatWest then imposed a ‘subscription charge’ of £12.50. This made him overdrawn, involuntarily, by £3.50. There followed a ‘maintenance charge’ of £28, and a sudden rush of new subscription charges, plus interest at an astonishing rate. Our son protested, but was told he could not sort it out at any local RBS branch, or by email or phone (his bank is at home), so a slow correspondence ensued. Two months have passed and NatWest have now added up a bill of £212.50 for an overdraft which they have created, without any help from their customer.
The BBC’s insistence that there is no such thing as a terrorist, only a ‘militant’, came under particularly severe strain in Mumbai last week. Was there any conceivable sense in which the men, killing tourists, a rabbi and his wife, waiters and train passengers were not terrorists? Why do militants deserve this libel? One might be militantly in favour of good grammar, or nationalisation, or be a trade union militant or the Church Militant. Why should one be made to share the term with fanatical Islamist murderers?
Still, in the matter of television licences, the BBC is acting firmly against the Church Militant. The Revd Christopher Smith, a vicar in Beckenham, sends me a letter he has just received from TV Licensing, addressed to the ‘Managing Director’, St Michael’s Church. It states (correctly) that the church does not have a television licence, and concludes (falsely) that it is acting ‘against the law’ since ‘businesses’ too must have licences.
Since Andrew Sachs, a 78-year-old grandfather, was the victim of the horrific verbal assault from Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand, I have promised to give the money from the television licence fee which I intend to withhold, unless Ross is sacked, to Help the Aged. A great many old people have written to me to say that they would like to refuse to pay their licence fees too, but they cannot because, if they are over 75, they get it free anyway. No doubt most of them are happy with this arrangement, but it does mean that the old are, in a curious way, disfranchised. It is much harder to exert any power over something you do not pay for.
It seems quite a good idea to make criminals on community service wear fluorescent jackets saying ‘community payback’ — the same principle as the stocks, but more humane. Virtually everyone in public employment nowadays seems to be made to wear fluorescent jackets. Shouldn’t there be ones saying ‘government minister’, or would that make the wearer liable to attack?
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