IPSA sees sense? Maybe
No fan of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA), I do, however, believe that Parliament needs an external regulator.
That external regulator is called the voter.
In order to ensure that the voter can do their job properly, there needs to be transparency so that folk can see what it is that MPs actually do. This is especially important when it comes to MPs using public money.
The Sunlight Centre for Open Politics first proposed a new system of MPs expenses based on this sort of transparency (to which I wrote the forward). It seems that IPSA might actually be inching their way towards such a system.
In a letter from their head honcho this afternoon, IPSA seem to suggest that MPs travel cards will in effect become cards that can be used to pay certain legitimate costs incurred directly – with total disclosure to guard against mis-use. Some suppliers could even be paid direct by IPSA, in some instances.
As the Sunlight Centre grasped, it is not big bureaucracy, with micro regulation of every possible eventuality that best guarantees good behaviour. Rather it is openness.
Think how much money and angst could have been spared if those who set up IPSA had read the Sunlight Centre report to start with?
Posted on 3 September 2010 by Douglas Carswell
The nature of BBC bias
Mark Thompson, head honcho at the BBC, has admitted that the BBC has had a left wing bias. Progress.
While refreshing to hear Mr T say what the rest of us have known for years, to fix the problem, it is important to grasp the nature of the BBC’s inbuilt prejudices.
The BBC does not tilt to the left in a partisan sense. It’s coverage of political parties tends to be pretty fair and balanced. Rather, it is the BBC's outlook - the unconscious presumptions of their producers and reporters - that often makes them seem so leftist.
When examining a public policy problem, BBC reporters almost always appear to presume that state action is the solution. Too many folk drinking too much booze? New laws to decree minimum pricing for everyone, rather than existing laws to enforce individual responsibility. And how many items on the Today programme boil down to a vested interest of some kind demanding state intervention or favour?
I’ve often heard BBC news reporters ask government officials questions based on certain assumptions about the nature of equality. I cannot ever recall hearing a BBC reporter challenge government intervention on the basis that it might be morally wrong to violate someone else’s property rights.
Have you heard a BBC journalist challenge officials on the basis that it might be morally wrong to restrict an individual’s freedom to earn a living? No, but I bet you’ve heard lots about government action to protect jobs. Fair and balanced reporting would point out how the later very often has consequences for the former.
When a private company makes a whopping profit by providing willing customers with a product they want, far from greedy, the company is likely to have done something extraordinarily good. Yet how often does BBC coverage reflect the virtues of the free market?
Free markets provide sixty million Britons with food each day – without which we would starve. So why does the subtext of almost every BBC news item about public services imply that we need the state to ration public services the way it once rationed food?
Perhaps the BBC’s bias is innate. Being a big, bureaucratic corporation funded through public money, the BBC’s instincts will always favour big quangos, corporatism and lots of public spending.
Posted on 2 September 2010 by Douglas Carswell
Is that it?
So. Three great election wins. More than a decade holding the levers of power. Now the memoirs published.
And what was it Tony Blair was all about?
New Labour seems to me shorthand for governing without principle. A feather for each wind that blows ....
Tilt this way, on one issue. Lean that way on another. Impressions crafted, rather than action taken, in response to events.
But beneath his words, carefully calibrated for each audience to draw from them the meaning they sought, what was Blair for?
What great reforms for the better were embarked upon? What great trends were reversed, or false orthodoxies challenged? Which over arching philosophy and principles guided the ship of state?
No. Mainly just a fall out with the neighbours. How apt.
Posted on 1 September 2010 by Douglas Carswell
Britain and France to share aircraft carriers
Seem like protectionist defence procurement isn’t quite giving us sovereign capability the way we were promised, eh?
Had we ordered much of the new carriers to be built overseas, we could have had them at a fraction of the £5 billion cost. But the asinine logic of the Defence Industrial Strategy means that we instead had to have them built in the UK.
Why? It gives us sovereign capability, we keep being told.
Balls. Instead we end up with British-built carriers that may not have airplanes to put on them - and which we have to share with France.
So much for the Defence Industrial Strategy giving us sovereign capability. "May we take le carrier to le Falkland islands, s'il vous plait, Monsieur? We give you fish quotas or concede new EU directive against the City in return, oui?"
The Defence Industrial Strategy is ruining our defence capability. It might suits politicians and their pork barrel politics. Big defence contractors might love the mega buck contracts it puts their way.
But the way the Ministry of Defence spends our defence budget means that what economic strength Britain retains is not efficiently converted into military muscle. Too many vested corporate interest are getting in the way.
Posted on 31 August 2010 by Douglas Carswell
Mark Thompson on Sky
Sky should invest more in homegrown TV programmes, preaches BBC chief, Mark Thompson.
I'm sure they would if we gave them over £2 billion of public money through the license fee each year.
"It's time Sky pulled their weight" he declares. Sky would love to pull more weight, if only they - and the rest of British broadcasting - could escape the gravitational pull of the BBC black hole that dominates the UK broadcast universe.
While Sky's revenues come by persuading willing customers to purchase the product Sky has to offer, the BBC is funded through coercion. If you don't pay the license fee, the state will use force against you to make you give the BBC your cash.
Mr Thompson should remember that before lecturing Sky on how to broadcast.
We are constantly told by Mark Thompson and co that the BBC license fee represents value for money. If true, then why not make purchasing the BBC product a matter for each individual viewer? We'd soon see if the rest of the viewing public agreed.
Without a license fee, money that would otherwise have been channeled to the BBC might even go to Sky, enabling them to commission more programmes the way Mark Thompson wants.
Posted on 28 August 2010 by Douglas Carswell
The one good thing about IPSA
For years, MPs have been creating quangos to take difficult decisions and let them off the hook.
So much so, that entire swathes of public policy are made by unaccountable officials, rather than anyone you voted for. But what happens when those officials at the CSA or FSA or Environment Agency or Monetary Policy Committee turn out to be flawed?
Not happy with the number of quangos we have already, only a few years ago, I remember a politician advocating the creation of an independent regulator to oversee carbon trading - "like the Monetary Policy Committee manages interest rates". (Not sure the MPC is seen as quite such a model of success after the credit bubble burst .... But I digress)
The little understood, but significant consequence of having an Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) is that it has killed MPs appetite for creating quangos dead.
With MPs themselves now having to live under an incompetent, unaccountable bureaucracy, politicians know how many of our small businesses, families, and farmers feel when confronted by remote officials.
If IPSA is the last quango politicians create as a consequence, it'll have been worth it.
Posted on 27 August 2010 by Douglas Carswell
How to cut immigration?
Quit handing out so many visas would be a good start.
It's five years since Parliamentary questions first revealed the extent to which student visas were facilitating large scale immigration into Britain.
But because immigration officials and the Home Office are not properly accountable to those we elect, little seems to have been done - as opposed to said - to change things.
Posted on 26 August 2010 by Douglas Carswell
Lessons from the IFS
The Institute for Fiscal Studies - are they the experts who saw the credit crunch coming all along?
Were they the ones issuing those clear, concise monthly warnings about where Gordon Brown's fiscal recklessness was taking us? Or did I just imagine it?
They were certainly once wheeled into the Commons, when we were in Opposition, to explain why Tories couldn't possibly advocate serious tax cuts. Very effectively they did their job, too.
Somehow I don't reckon we'll be inviting them in to give us fiscal lectures again soon. Which is progress, in a way.
Posted on 25 August 2010 by Douglas Carswell
Why do we have a Law Commission? That is Parliament's job
According to some reports the Law Commission is concerned at how zillions of new crimes have come into being at the behest of quangocrats and regulators.
Who better than a quango, like the Law Commission, to now tell us how to repeal them, eh?
Sounds like the Law Commission is trying to sail with the prevailing wind. I can't ever recall them supporting calls for a Great Repeal Bill when Labour was riding high in the polls. I don't remember any Law Commission angst at the way quangos and their guidelines were determining the rules by which millions of private citizens had to live.
Perhaps the Law Commission now fear they'll go the way of the Audit Commission?
If the Law Commission really dislikes the way unelected bodies initiate regulations and law, they could always recommend the repeal of the 1965 Act that set them up. We could get really radical, and have those we elect to Parliament initiate legal reforms, like in other democracies.
Or, if we want to get really bold, how about a new right of popular initiative, so that the people themselves, not legal technocrats, recommend changes in the law?
Posted on 25 August 2010 by Douglas Carswell
Begging from America - the price of protectionist defence acquisition
According to the Telegraph, the Royal Navy may have to borrow US fighter jets. So much for protectionist defence procurement giving us sovereignty of supply.
Instead, the Defence Industrial Strategy squanders what resources we do have on overpriced kit we could buy cheaper elsewhere .... leaving us to beg for kit to fill the gaps.
Spending the defence budget in the interests of crony capitalism is not patriotic. It's stupid.
What chance that the Defence Industrial Strategy is scrapped in all but name later this year? If we want to remain a military power, it's got to go.
Posted on 25 August 2010 by Douglas Carswell