And another thing…

WE NEED fewer MPs, the received wisdom states. David Cameron has suggested that the Commons needs to be reduced by the suspiciously round number of ten per cent. Sir John Baker, former head of the Senior Salaries Review Board, was last week hoping that his call for the number of MPs to be cut by about a third would mitigate his crime of calling for a big payrise for those remaining.

Now today the unpleasant Minette Marin at the Sunday Times is sneering her way through yet another article demanding that the number of MPs is reduced.

To sum up the arguments currently in vogue: everyone hates MPs, so there should be fewer of them. And that’s it.

There may well be arguments in favour of reducing the size of the Commons, but if “we don’t like the ones already there” is the best you can do, then we should just get used to the existing number.

What about actually looking at an MP’s job before deciding we don’t need the current number? How many Statutory Instrument (secondary legislation) committees are held each day the Commons is sitting? How many standing committees, grand committees, select committees?

In constituencies, are electors complaining that MPs hold too many surgeries, or too few? Do they complain about seeing too much of their representatives or too little?

By all means examine the way the Commons operates and decide how many MPs are needed to make it function effectively. But to claim there should be fewer of us because we’re unpopular makes about as much sense as claiming that an appropriate response to the expenses scandal is to introduce proportional representation.

“We have to many politicians!” is the cry. “Look at the American House of Reprsentatives – 435 members representing a population of 250 million.”

Well, yes, but have you seen the staffing numbers for each Congressman? Have you seen how much it costs to run state-level legislatures and state senators’ offices?

If the aim of a reduction is to reduce the cost of politics, think again: fewer MPs means fewer – and bigger – constituencies. Bigger constituencies mean bigger workloads and increased staffing and administrative budgets for MPs.

A FEW years ago I made a speech in a church in my constituency; the general theme was the importance of the role of older people in society, but I took the opportunity to talk more widely about the benefits culture and to bemoan (not for the first time, and certainly not the last) the levels of incapacity benefit claimants in Glasgow.

My comments were well received and afterwards I was circulating during the tea and scones before heading off to my next appointment. A woman who reminded me of my father’s saying – “I wouldn’t go home to her with a broken pay packet” – approached me and said that her husband was claiming incapacity benefit and that she found my comments offensive.

“Well, you have every right to feel offended,” I replied.

What else could I say? I wasn’t going to apologise for saying what I felt was the truth. I had already, in my original comments, made all the obligatory qualifications one has to when talking about this subject. Politics – real, important politics – should be challenging and occasionally that means they will be offensive to certain individuals and groups of people. Cosy, comfortable, inoffensive politics are of no interest to anyone other than LibDems.

And as I’ve written here before, being offended is hardly the worst experience you can suffer.

So I was delighted to read this very sensible offering today from Shazia Mirza, who says what I’m trying to say here but better and, well, less offensively.

LIBERAL Conspiracy reports optimistically that Students for Sensible Drugs Policy UK (aka “students”) will hold a demonstration tomorrow in support of the martyred Professor Nutt.

Dress: casual

Location: wherever you want it to be, innit? Prescribing an exact location would be, like, so authoritarian, yeah?

Time: straight after SpongeBob Squarepants but before Harry Hill’s TV Burp.

Jamie Reed MP: "Hair gel's for losers."

MILLENNIA ago, during the summer recess, I roped in some parliamentary colleagues to write some guest posts with the aim of giving me less work to do highlighting the writing talents of other parliamentarians.

One of those I invited to submit was my partner-in-podcasting, Jamie Reed, the MP for Copeland. Quick as a flash, he immediately, four months later, submitted this post. Remember: the views expressed here do not necessarily etc, etc…

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Driving a stake through the rotten heart of the 1980s revival

Just prior to Harris and I watching Drag Me to Hell at the Leicester Square Odeon (no leg room and outrageous prices) we were ushered into a malodorous holding area whereupon we discussed Sam Raimi and the merits of the 1980s horror film.

Like Harris, the very mention of the film The Exorcist sends me running for a bible and some catarrh loosening medicine (the many merits of Exorcist 3 – a prequel of sorts – can be discussed later) but was the renaissance of the horror genre the only decent thing to escape the rotten, pus-filled boil of a decade which was the 1980s?

Under copyright law, Stewart Maconie or the late Tony Wilson should actually pop up and offer some random comment on the period throughout this written retrospective, but apologies in advance if they don’t.

If suitably petitioned, I will post how the 80’s horror revival was actually a cultural response of sorts to the prevailing political nightmare of the time, but for now, just take this assertion as fact. Best not to argue (not yet anyway).

The reason for such opprobrium is, of course, the nascent 80s revival and the horrific spectre of a new Spandau Ballet album. Now, I’ve nothing against Spandau Ballet. On the contrary, whist on holiday in Ibiza some years ago, I sat next to the one who used to be in Eastenders. He was with his wife who is/was one half of Pepsi and Shirley. You may recall that they were the backing singers for Wham at one point. They seemed like a great couple with fantastic kids. Nothing wrong there (and speaking of Eastenders, are they now officially recycling old scripts from the 1980s?). More to the point, a much slimmer Tony Hadley can be found masquerading as Rob Flello MP, Monday-Thursday in the House of Commons.

But that paragraph almost sums it up. How much better would it have been to be able to write: ‘…whilst sat in a London café next to David Bowie and Ronnie Wood who was at that time in a band called The Faces. You may recall that their lead singer was Rod Stewart and Ronnie eventually went off to join the Rolling Stones…”

But for the sixties, take the fifties, the seventies, even the twenties (”…whilst sat in a clinic for depression with F. Scott Fitzgerald…”). All were preferable to the decade that style, taste, decency and humanity forgot.

And yes, I’ll always choose ‘beer and sandwiches at No.10’ over ‘no such thing as society’. Molotov cocktails on the streets of Britain; Brixton, Toxteth, the Miners, Hillsborough, and almost four million unemployed. And, yes, militant, the Cold War, red braces, stock brokers, wet-gelled hair and, very briefly, the Krankies’ own TV show…

But (you say) the video recorder, MTV, the microwave, Michael Jackson at his peak, the advent of Indiana Jones, Live Aid, Gremlins, the A-Team, the Rocky films and more…

And that’s just it. Most of what was enjoyable and memorable from the 80s didn’t come from Britain. Most of that which was wretched about the 80s was home grown.

For most people, Ronald Reagan isn’t synonymous with Mr.T, VHS, Van Halen and the seminal body of work Clint Eastwood made with that orang-utan. However, Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran, Howard’s Way, the ZX80 and so much more depressing, dreadful, awful rot is synonymous with that woman from Grantham.

But what about the fall of the Berlin Wall? Surely (you cry) credit where it is due?

Absolutely; that’s precisely my point. Those responsible for bringing about the end of the Cold War gathered together recently to remember it. Helmut Kohl, George Bush Sr. and Mikhail Gorbachev appeared together in public to remember the event. All of those people alive who really mattered were there (with the exception of David Hasselhoff).

So there you have it. Call a Priest, pass me the stake and the holy water and fetch me your New Romantics.

“The power of Christ compels you…”

Editor’s note: responses including the phrases “pity the fool” or “fandabbydozy” will be deleted.

I WAS NOT present in Westminster yesterday when the Kelly report was published. Fortunately. There aren’t many “big” parliamentary occasions that I’d be happy to miss but this was one of them.

And when I saw TV coverage of the Commons being told by Speaker Bercow that Sir Ian Kennedy, who is to chair the new Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, is to receive an annual salary of at least £100,000, I fretted that my colleagues’ jeering response might not strike the right note with the watching electorate.

Which just goes to show how misleading TV coverage of the chamber can be. This afternoon I spoke with a colleague who had been present. He was utterly bemused and frustrated by media reports of the response, described by at least one journalist as “a derisive groan”. It was nothing of the sort, said my friend. Rather, the Speaker’s announcement was met with genuine hilarity and amusement, as if months of pent-up anger, fear and stress found voice in an odd kid of catharsis.

There was no jeering, no contempt, just a straightforward acknowledgement of the entertaining irony of Sir Ian being paid significantly more than an MP’s basic salary. But MPs’ reaction just had to be derisive in order to fit in with the media’s current narrative. A genuinely good-natured and humorous countenance doesn’t make good copy.

But I’m glad I wasn’t there to share in the joke.

DESPITE a very polite invitation, I am unable to meet with Old Holborn and Tory Bear today in the Westminster Arms where, they say, I was to have been presented with a copy of Orwell’s Animal Farm.

The gesture was planned after I posted an article suggesting that Orwell’s classic tale of agricultural shenanigans and glue factories was a charming children’s fable, just ripe for Disneyfication.

But today, being a celebration of a major victory against terrorism, is full of tradition. And one of the best loved, and more recent, traditions is Old Holborn (”I’m not mad – I’m furious!”) dressing up as that bloke out of V  For Vendetta and trying to march into the House of Commons, only to be asked by a police officer to remove his mask and go through the x-ray machine like everyone else, and then writing a blog post about how we’ve become a police state under Labour.

Which all just goes to show how lucky we are to live in a  country where people still have the right to demonstrate against not having the right to demonstrate about not having the right to protest.

Anyway, I’ve already got a copy.

I ALMOST feel sorry for the nationalist candidate in Glasgow North East. Almost, but not quite.

His latest faux pas fits into the media’s developing narrative of a hapless chap who’s not quite sure about where he was born or why he can’t buy his Benson & Hedges from the cheese counter…

"Hurry up, Alex - I've just been told Santa's grotto's near here..."

A FEW days ago I compared members of the South West Norfolk Conservative Association to “a village idiots’ convention” because of their treatment of their new parliamentary candidate, Liz Truss. I later repeated this description on The Westminster Hour on Sunday evening.

I wish to issue an apology. Village idiots up and down the country do an important and difficult job and they do not deserve to be compared to members of South West Norfolk Conservative Association.

I hope that’s cleared that up.

WE’VE ALL been having fun with Dave’s scrapping and melting down of his “cast iron” guarantee to have a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

And at 4.00 pm, the cast-iron laddie will take to the rostrum to explain a new policy which he hopes will be an effective sticking plaster over the newly exposed European wounds in his party. He’s been lucky in at least one respect: whatever he says will be lost in the acres of coverage of Kelly’s report into MPs’ expenses; so, for the time being at least, Dave’s difficulties won’t be too high up the media agenda.

Apparently he’ll announce a “manifesto mandate” to be obstructive and rude to foreigners, or something, which will go down well enough with his rank and file.

But all this dancing around the issue is getting silly. Dan “I’m not as mad as I look, honestly” Hannan MEP was on Newsnight last night insisting that a future Cameron government should hold a referendum on Europe. Which aspect of Europe? asked Paxo, reasonably enough. Doesn’t really matter, provided there’s a referendum, replied the party’s Great White Hope.

You know what he meant. I know what he meant. Paxo knew what he meant. There’s a more than 50 per cent chance that Hannan knew what he meant: the overwhelming majority of rank and file Conservative Party members want a referendum on withdrawal from the EU.

All this shilly-shallying over Lisbon, over the proposed repatriation of specific powers, none of this really matters to most Tories. The big issue for them is not a refinement of the UK’s relationship with Europe; it is Britain’s membership itself of the EU, and they will not rest until they get it.

Cameron would unite his party if today he were to announce exactly that (although there would then be the bear trap of which way any government led by him would campaign during the campaign).

Of course, not all Tories go along with the foamers; Ken Clarke, distrusted by most of his party, has reportedly pulled out of his appearance on today’s The Daily Politics. A straw in the wind, perhaps?

ANYONE who saw David Kerr’s car crash of an interview on Newsnicht last night will be left wondering why he’s ashamed of having been born in Govan.

Pressed on the vexed question of his birthplace, the SNP’s Glasgow North East candidate refused point blank to say where he was born, instead falling back on the weasel words of “there wasn’t a maternity hospital in Dennistoun at the time”. Why didn’t he just say “Govan”?

Pressed further on why he he previously claimed, during the Falkirk by-election, to have been born in Cumberbauld, he said that a big boy done it and ran away (or words to that effect) and that the mistake had been quickly rectified.

Was it? Does that mean that during that particular campaign, a replacement leaflet was produced by Kerr’s campaign stating that he was, in fact, born in Govan? Or Dennistoun? Will he now produce that leaflet?

A nation holds its breath.