Another reason to scrap the Human Rights Act
A judge has used Human Rights rules to strike down a ban on illegal immigrants using sham marriages to stay in the UK. The ban was introduced by Home Secretary, David Blunkett, back in 2004 to tackle the fact that thousands of people a year were using sham marriages to stay in the UK.
Law Lord Baroness Hale is reported as striking down the ban, saying it was not a "proportionate response to the legitimate aims of a firm and fair immigration policy."
Can you remember voting for her? Me neither.
Having judges overturn decisions made by elected governments is bad for many reasons. Most obviously, it is anti-democratic. Yet it also makes it very difficult for us to develop new public policy solutions to changing circumstances. In a democracy, innovation happens because when one government gets something wrong, you can at least throw them out and give the other lot the chance to try something new. (Which could help explain why democracies tend to be more successful than non-democracies).
Yet with unelected judges stifling new innovations to tackle the problem of illegal immigration, it is hardly surprising that we still have a 1950s-type immigration system in a world of mass communication and cheap air travel.
Judges may well be experts on jurisprudence
, but are they intrisically better at making public policy decisions than anyone else? Do they have some higher morality or insights than the rest of us? And if, Heaven Forbid, a judge ever get things wrong, can we ever turf them out of office?
If Baroness Hale et al have their way, we could arrive at a situation where if you are concerned about large-scale illegal immigration, there will not be anyone you can vote in to office to deal with it. If any future government wants to clamp down on sham marriages as a means of tackling illegal immigration, it is also going to need to show how it will get it all past the judges.
One of the things I least like about my job as an MP is the Joint Committee on Human Rights. As a member of it, I see firsthand how serious the problem of judicial activism has now become.
Posted on 31 July 2008 by Douglas Carswell
Free trade - just do it
Talks to liberalise world trade have stalled
. The so-called Doha negotiations failed, with China, India and America unable to reach agreement.
This is a bad thing. It will keep people in poverty. Everyone - from Clacton to China to Culcutta - loses out.
Perhaps rather than waiting for the supranational WTO to do a deal, or giving professional diplomats more airmiles to sort it out, we should think of declaring unilateral free trade?
If there ceased to be any import tariffs on anything in the UK, we might all be better off - and the rest of the world would have to follow suit.
We did it once before, and it made us the world's number one economy.
Posted on 30 July 2008 by Douglas Carswell
3,000 stolen passports remind us why we can't trust ID cards
We are told a national Identity Card scheme will make us safer from terrorism, reduce crime and stop illegal immigration. Really?
Which of the July 2005 suicide bombers would have been stopped by having to carry an ID card saying who they were?
The one category of person who will not have to carry ID cards will be recently arrived foreigners. So how, therefore, will ID cards possibly help us halt illegal immigration?
Today we hear that some 3,000 blank passports have been stolen. Imagine if it had been ID cards that had been stolen.
Not only do ID cards not make us safer, it is conceivable that in the wrong hands they could actually help bad people intent on doing evil.
Posted on 29 July 2008 by Douglas Carswell
What's news?
As Jerry Seinfeld once observed, "isn't it amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper".
Late July / August is supposedly a quiet time in news terms. Is that because few events worth reporting actually happen? Or is it more likely because those who decide what constitutes news - the PRs, TV producers and news editors - are sunning themselves in the south of France?
Before the internet came along, I used to watch the TV news and read the paper - and just assume that "the news" was what was happening in the world. Now, I realise that "the news" is what certain people say is happening in the world. Two very different things.
Reading my paper this morning, there are a whole load of stories that seem more like PR, than actual news; A bird charity highlights a supposed surge in attacks on birds ; a group of government-funded officials demand a greater role for government-funded officials ; an NGO says that there will be a disaster, unless we give them lots of cash.
Don't get me wrong. I love birds and think NGOs are a good thing. But behind each of these supposed news stories, is there not perhaps a vested interest (however noble) at work?
What is so interesting about the internet is that the pool of people who decide what is "the news" is widening. The news agenda is no longer set exclusively by a handful of media types and Today programme editors - even if they still think they do. In the age of Google, it will become increasingly apparent whenever vested interests present PR to us as news.
Some politicians get this. They appreciate that the political raw commodity to have risen fastest in value is authenticity. Most politicians don't, and perhaps won't.
Posted on 28 July 2008 by Douglas Carswell
Brown is a (monumental) disaster
Glasgow East. Wow. Labour lose their third safest seat in Britain.
There isn't now a corner of the country that doesn't see Brown for what he is; Zero vision. No new ideas. And he's thrown away our money.
I imagine that nasty little band of MPs who once competed to be called "Brownites" as they conspired to oust Blair, feel a little less cocksure today. I wonder if Cherie and Tony allow themselves the occasinal wry smile?
Surely we can all do better than to be led by people like this?
We need people in charge with a vision and a purpose. A sunshine view of where we could all be.....
Posted on 25 July 2008 by Douglas Carswell
Brown is a disaster
This time last year, Gordon Brown was a new Prime Minister riding high in the polls.
Having spent twenty years plotting for the top job, what has he actually achieved with it?
10p income tax doubled. Fuel and vehicle excise duty up. Credit crunch. Mortgage meltdown. Billions of our tax contributions simply frittered away.
No public service reform. No clue about how to make Britain better. Zero vision.
The aggressive little clique of boorish hangers-on that surround Brown in Westminster can't protect him from reality; Brown is a disaster.
Posted on 24 July 2008 by Douglas Carswell
McCain visits the internet
I read this and thought it was funny.
(Hat tip Conservativehome.com)
It reminded me of when Homer Simpson asked "The internet? Is that thing still around?"
Posted on 24 July 2008 by Douglas Carswell
Is it time to scrap government-run SATS tests?
Education Minister, Ed Balls, still refuses to apologise for the SATS test cock-up - or even admit that the system is flawed.
Yet beyond Westminster, many now recognise that there is something profoundly wrong with State-run SATS testing. Teachers don't like being drawn into "teaching to the test". Parents find that State tests tell them remarkably little about the progress their child has made.
Then, when it all goes horribly wrong, the Minister blames the quango, who in turn passes the buck.
So why have State-run testing at all?
As a member of the Education Select comittee, I produced a recent minority report arguing against government-run testing in the first place - precisely because I said it would lead to the sort of mess we now have.
Does a Minister oversee the system to assess would-be vets or architects? No. Is an executive agency of government used to set music grades? Of course not. Can leftist quango chiefs tinker with the content of the International Baccalaureate? Never.
And guess what? It all works just fine. Such tests tell us what level of ability students have attained. There is no traditional summer angst about grade inflation. You never get the catastrophic SATS cock-ups we got this year.
So why not leave exams and testings to the schools themselves, and to universities, employers and professional bodies? It'd give us rigorous testing that meant something - and without the incompetence.
It took a while, but a couple of decades back people started to see that our economy didn't need to be run by people like Ed Balls or quango chief, Ken Boston. Its time to extend the same logic to testing.
Posted on 23 July 2008 by Douglas Carswell
Climate change and the Crucible
Arthur Miller's The Crucible had a big impact on me as a child. Set during the Salem Witch Trials of the 1690s, the play is an allegory for how those with communist sympathies were drummed out of public life in 1950s America.
The play tells how collective madness can make people utterly unreasonable.
Looking back sixty, or even three hundred years, we can marvel at how fear of witchcraft or communism could make people behave so irrationally. Yet, are we always quite so rational today?
Perhaps in decades to come, people will ask how it was that fear of man-made climate change drove us to do daft and beastly things.
Religion-like, faith in climate change puts man at the centre of creation. It demands sacrifices (from poorer people through their fuel bills) in order to save the world. It encourages us to flaunt our carbon credentials as a sign of our virtue and in hope of redemption.
And like Abigail Williams and her friends in the play, we join in shouting down of those who dissent. Like the Witch Finder General, yesterday OFCOM even decreed that Channel 4's documentary "The Great Global Warming Swindle" was wrong in challenging assumptions about global warming.
To me, the hero of Miller's play is old Giles Corey. Fearless, his final words to his tormentors were "More weight". We need a Giles Corey now.
Posted on 22 July 2008 by Douglas Carswell
A very part-time Defence Minister
During defence questions today, I asked our part-time, clown of a Defence Minister, Des Browne, about helicopters - or rather the lack of them for our armed forces.
Given the shortage of helicopters in Afghanistan, I asked, did the Minister think it was wise to have awarded the £1 Billion contract to Future Lynx, when they cost twice the price of the alternatives, wouldn't be ready for years, and when there had not been a full competitive tender process?
In other words, is the Minister happy that British troops are paying a blood price because our defence budget is being spent in the interests of a few defence contractors, rather than our armed forces.
It was like trying to get sense out of Homer Simpson.
Posted on 21 July 2008 by Douglas Carswell
Caption competition
Please email any answers:
Posted on 21 July 2008 by Douglas Carswell
David Cameron: Britain's first Eurosceptic Prime Minister?
Daniel Hannan's blog considers if David Cameron might be our first properly eurosceptic Prime Minister.
The thought of it actually happening warms the cockles of my sceptic heart ....
Posted on 20 July 2008 by Douglas Carswell
What lessons to draw from Lisbon?
The government has now formally ratified the EU Constitution Lisbon Treaty
. It did so despite having promised us a referendum, and despite the Irish "no" vote. Shame on them. With luck it will begin to undermine the
legitimacy of the EU project itself.
Yet what does this episode tell us about the way foreign policy is made?
It seems undeniable that the driving force behind our Europe policy is the Foreign Office.
What difference has it made who has occupied Number 10 – Brown, Blair, Major et al? What does it matter which MP happens to be called Europe Minister? There is a continuity in Europe policy that can only be explained by Foreign Office mandarins calling the shots.
Rather like the QCA in education, or NICE in health, it is the permanent quangocracy of the FCO that really run things. Preening politicians only pretend they do (If you doubt me, see Ed Balls over the latest SATS fiasco).
How can changing Foreign Office ministers on its own change much, when the only choices Sir Humphrey Appleby permits them to make are on the wine list?
Conservatives wanting to change our relationship with Europe need to start thinking in terms of transformation at the Foreign Office - not just changing Ministers. Without the later, the former is not possible. And as long as foreign policy is made by unaccountable Foreign Office officials, it will never serve the national interest.
That is the lesson to draw from Lisbon.
Posted on 18 July 2008 by Douglas Carswell
SATS test chaos continues ...
Ed Balls, the minister, and Ken Boston, the quango chief, have together managed to cock-up SATS results for tens of thousands of school kids. Cross-examining them both this week, it was clear they were out to blame the company involved - as the Times coverage of the story makes clear.
I have asked Ken Boston to submit a copy of his contract - especially the bits about his performance related pay. It would be shocking if after all this we hear that he gets some sort of a bonus.
Shocking, but not surprising ....
Posted on 17 July 2008 by Douglas Carswell
Smithers and the sats test chaos
I've just been cross-examining little Ed Balls, the Education Minister. He is to Gordon Brown what Smithers is to Mr Burns in the Simpsons.
I asked him why chaos with sats test results means thousands of children still don't have their results. Worse, many doubt that the marks, when they finally arrive, will be reliable.
Would he take responsibility or apologise?
As you'd expect from a Smithers, he squirmed, trying to blame the quango - the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. Then he tried to kick the cock-up into touch with an inquiry that won't report until the autumn. His boss, Mr Brown, will be pleased.
When I cross-examined the head of the quango himself, Ken Boston, on Monday, he gave answers that subsequently turned out not to be entirely accurate. He, too, then tried shifting responsibility.
So, the Minister blames the quango. The quango passes the buck. Remote elites make decisions, while local parents take the rap. No one accountable. No one sacked. This is how our education system is now run.
Listing to little Smithers trying to squirm his way out of it, I wondered why we allow people like that to decide what is right for our children. They never get it right.
Why not get government out of education, and allow teachers and parents to decide? Letting people decide what's best for them, rather than having a Smithers decide for us, seems to work for most things in life.
Posted on 16 July 2008 by Douglas Carswell MP
Knife crime and our criminal justice system
The relatives of a young man fatally stabbed came to see me this morning about knife crime. Their sadness is mixed with frustration.
They clearly feel that the criminal justice system - especially the public prosecutors and courts - are no longer on their side. At the same time, they want to know what "the politicians" are going to actually do about it - other than make the right noises.
They had a number of sensible proposals that they want to see enacted. Their list of ideas is aimed at ensuring that our criminal justice system pursues criminals through the streets and the courts, determines guilt and then administers just punishment.
However, as they went through their list, I wondered why it is that our criminal justice system is not already doing those things that we expect of it in the first place?
Here are a few clues: Our police chiefs answer to remote Home Office officials, not local people; our public prosecutors are unaccountable to everyone, even when they drop almost one in ten cases due to their own incompetence; our judges and probation officers answer to no one.
No organisation - even in the criminal justice system - is ever going to be as effective without proper scrutiny as it is with. I suspect that without proper accountability our courts and probation services, in particular, have been taken over by people with daft leftwing ideas about criminology and society.
Until we change this, we will never have a criminal justice system that is fully on our side. To do that, we don't just need a new Home Secretary, but direct democratic accountability. Its time to elect local police chiefs and public prosecutors, and democratically scrutinise judicial appointments.
Until then, little will really change.
Posted on 14 July 2008 by Douglas Carswell
Local delusions of grandeur
My local council has set up a regeneration company with a wonderfully ironic name, Intend. Its purpose is to "focus on delivering major projects and activities which will transform the Tendring District and the lives of the next generation of residents and visitors to the area."
Apparently, Intend will succeed where John Maynard Keynes et al failed, and local unemployment will be cut and average wages raised. Hummm ... maybe.
Having decided to spend the lion's share of Intend's £1.3 Million budget on six new jobs in the town hall, they'll certainly succeed in cutting unemployment and raising average wages for the luck half dozen. As for the other 100,000 plus local residents, it's less clear. Perhaps they have some sort of retro-1970s system of economic planning in mind? It worked wonders last time round.
Not satisfied with sorting out the local economy, Intend also seeks to raise education standards and make us all healthier. Evidently, they believe they can deliver where successive education ministers and secretaries of state for health have not.
While stongly in favour of local councils taking the intiative, Tendring council might want to get basic services sorted out first, before they settle for such macro ambitions. As a supporter of localism, I can't help think that this grandiose ambition is the
precise oppostite.
Far from empowering local people, Intend now means that large spending decisions can be made without having to get locally elected councillors to approve it all. Who does this reduction in local accountability suit most? The unelected council officers who are behind it, of course. It all smacks of corporatism, not local democracy. Cloaked in all the current cliches and regeneration jargon, this nonsense will fool no one.
This sorry little episode is a classic example of what happens within a local authority when unelected officers call the shots. Weak and ineffective leadership from a rag tag coalition on the council has left council officers able to run things for their convenience, not local residents.
When I spoke at the Local Government Association conference in Bournemouth the other day, I showed how a future Conservative government might give local councils more power and responsibility. On future such occasions, I shall use Intend as a text book illustration of how not to do it.
Posted on 13 July 2008 by Douglas Carswell
At Prime Minister's Question Time
I type this as I sit here in the House of Commons chamber during Prime Minister's Question Time.
Gordon Brown is in Japan saving the planet, so its left to Harriet Harman to try saving the government.
It's not just me she fails to inspire. The benches behind her aren't with her.
Oh dear! Harriet tries some pre-rehersed line about Bishops, and spoons it.
Labour MPs think they should replace Brown as leader because things can't get much worse for them. With Harman at the helm, yes, they can!
Posted on 9 July 2008 by Douglas Carswell
G8 summits are preening and pointless
The Western world's political elite jet off to Toyoko to ... um ... well, you know... do the stuff people like that do at global summits; Talk. Issue communiques. Save the planet. Pat each other on the back. Smugly pose for photos while smiling next to more smug people.
Amidst the sea of self-importance, what will these people actually do?
The current fetish is to try to cut carbon emissions. In half by 2050, to be precise.
With oil nudging $150 a barrel, I suspect that our carbon emissions will fall, but perhaps not in quite the way our politicians imagined.
On current trends, it won't be renewable energy that replaces fossil fuels in UK homes. It'll be the cold.
That's, alas, is the price we pay for summits that allow politicians to appear active, while actually changing very little.
Posted on 8 July 2008 by Douglas Carswell
Only ourselves to blame
Some MPs belly-ache about the "unfair" media coverage surrounding their pay and expenses. Most MPs are personally honest, but are we totally blameless?
When I called for Speaker Martin to set a date for his departure, I did so solely because I doubted he would be able to force Westminster to clean-up its act - and make MPs more directly accountable.
Indeed.
Since then, his Favourites Estimates Committee has proposed replacing one system that lacked transparency, with another system that … um ... lacked transparency. As one colleage put it, "they simply wanted to swap troughs".
Some say we need to change the system. Yes. But I can also think of something else we need to change. Until we do, we have only ourselves to blame.
Posted on 7 July 2008 by Douglas Carswell MP
Sunday in Clacton
Church today in Clacton was a Salvation Army service marking 60 years of the NHS. A wonderful lady, who had spent her life as a local nurse, gave a touching talk about the changes she had seen.
Listening, I wondered what changes in medecine the next few decades will bring? We can't, perhaps, imagine some of the advances that lie ahead - assuming public policy-makers don't make a mess of it....
Posted on 6 July 2008 by Douglas Carswell
There is something wrong with our judges
Lord Phillips, the Lord Chief Justice, believes that aspects of Sharia law should be adopted in Britain. Having recently read Milestones, a manifesto for political islamism by the radical Sayed Qutb, I could not disagree more strongly. Not merely wrong-headed, Lord Philips - like Rowan Williams before him - can only have encouraged those inspired by Qutb's teachings.
Setting aside the debate about sharia, what does this all say about our judges?
Many people will feel uneasy with the news that the most senior judge in the country advocates legal separatism. Yet surely this is not the first time that the behaviour of our judiciary should give us cause for concern?
Until a generation or so ago, judges in Britain tended merely to interpret the law. Acts of Parliament and the Common Law were the main sources of the law. Today, activist judges no longer merely interpret the law – they adjudicate on the basis of numerous charters and conventions that give them enormous scope for activism.
Judicial activism has not come about because of any conscious decision taken by Parliament, but at the behest of an expansive and ambitious judiciary. Judges adjudicated on the basis of the European Convention of Human Rights before it was formally incorporated into UK law - giving lie to the idea that judges are only doing what Parliament asked of them. The notion of judicial review, which did not exist until recently, is entirely the invention of our learned friends.
Should we be concerned by judicial activism? Given the failure of the legislature to hold the executive in check, is there not a case for welcoming it?
The failure of Parliament to hold Ministers and government to account has, it is true, given some faux legitimacy to judical activism. Yet the problem with relying on unelected judges to do the job of elected Parliamentarians is pretty obvious; it is not democratic.
A lack of democratic accountability explains why it is that judicial activism only ever seems to happen one way. Judges, like Lord Philips, only seem to call for legal relativism – you don’t hear them demanding the opposite. Judges only seem to instruct the executive not to remove people from Britain – I’ve yet to hear a case of a judge demand that the Home Office deport an illegal immigrant in accordance with our laws on entry. A judge rules in favour of Abu Qatada? No surprise there, then.
Perhaps it is time to rethink how we make judicial appointments.
Today, a quango – the Judicial Appointments Commission – decides who our judges are. Yet if such appointees are going to take an active interest in questions of public policy, surely there is a need to start democratising the way such appointments are made? How about public confirmation hearings? If a particular human rights lawyer is up for a judicial appointment, and they have a particular "beef", might it not be an idea to air that before handing them the job?
Some will balk at the idea of "politicising" the judiciary. But it is the judges themselves – like Lord Philips today – who have crossed over into politics. Whether we have sharia law in the UK is a profoundly political question. If Philips is going to not merely take a view on such matters, but adjudicate in a way that facilitates such a change, he must be made democratically accountable.
What activist judges regard as their precious independence, the rest of us are beginning view as a basic lack of accountability.
Posted on 4 July 2008 by Douglas Carswell
A Keith Vaz Parliament
Some newspapers today suggest that Keith Vaz MP might have been persuaded to drop his opposition to the government's 42 detention plan, in return for the promise of some sort of "reward".
Setting aside what that might say about Keith Vaz MP, what does it tell us about our Parliament?
Here we have the chairman of a key committee of the elected legislature not only falling in with the executives wishes, but allegedly lobbying on its behalf in return for "rewards".
Who says Parliament is supine and spineless?
We can all be proud of our Parliamentary democracy.
Posted on 3 July 2008 by Douglas Carswell
iLocalism
The Local Government Association invited me to speak at their conference in Bournemouth yesterday. I outlined some of the new thinking taking place on the centre-right; devolving powers from Whitehall to the town hall, directly elected police chiefs, localised planning decisions, legally enshrined parent and patient choice, and much else.
Not surprisingly, given the audience, heads nodded. Yet at the end someone came up and asked "But won't decentralising power and doing away with central frameworks just mean chaos?"
"Chaos gave us the ipod" I replied. "If we'd left it to central government planning we'd still be waiting for the walkman".
Look at all those public policy disasters in the past thirty years - high rise tower blocks, child-centered learning, forced inclusion for special needs kids, probation services built on behaviourism.
Each came about, and like a bad smell still lingers, precisely because policy-making is top-down. Localise power, and any council that tried to force people to live in monstrous highrises, ditched disciplined classrooms and synthetic phonics and went soft on lawbreakers, would soon go the way of the walkman.
Posted on 2 July 2008 by Douglas Carswell
When Big Business meets Big Government ....
Lazy
BBC-types sometimes talk about whether a particular politician or political party is "pro-business". What this means is not always clear.
Being "pro-business" is not necessarily the same as favouring free market enterprise. Indeed, some big businesses are distinctly hostile to open competition.
I wonder if the biggest obstacles to free market competition today come not from bolshie trade unionists, or socialists firebrands, but from the corporate boardroom.
Corporatism - the alliance of big business with big government - is "pro-business" in the sense that it suits certain businessmen. However, it is very often the antithesis of free market.
Here are some examples of what happens when big business and big government team up:
-
Household utility bills go up to fund some of the de facto subsidies that have paid for the massive increase in wind turbines.
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EU regulation is introduced in a way that creates barriers to entry in certain markets – thereby suiting the interests of some established players.
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Defence contracts see squillions of public money transferred onto the balance sheets of certain suppliers – yet somehow our armed forces don't get the kit they need.
The Conservatives must be staunchly pro-business – yet in the best sense of the term. We must favour enterprise and open markets. We must not favour grubby, lobby-for-favours, corporatism.
Posted on 1 July 2008 by Douglas Carswell