Voters desert Labour and Tories, says ICM poll | Special Reports | Guardian Unlimited Politics
The most recent ICM poll shows that the Cameron factor is failing, and the Brown factor is unlikely to do Labour any favours, according to the Guardian today. By contrast, support for Lib-Dems has risen ahead of next week’s council elections, and smaller parties are also set to benefit. (more…)
BBC NEWS | Scotland | Christianity is on party’s agenda
The (so-called) ‘Scottish Christian Party’ is contesting the Scottish elections with a mixture of old-fashioned Calvinism and modern right-of-centre politics. Great Britain — and especially Scotland — has a long and honourable tradition of Christians in public life, but, unlike much of mainland Europe, there is no tradition of ostensibly Christian political parties. It is true that some Christians — in common with many voters of all faiths and none — have lost confidence in mainstream political parties. But has the time come for specifically Christian parties to call on the support committed believers, or should Christians seek to involve themselves in mainstream parties? And what about this particular ‘Christian’ party?
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BBC NEWS | Politics | MPs info exemption plan scuppered
Liberal Democrats Simon Hughes and Norman Baker — with cross-party support — successfully ‘talked-out’ a bill by a former Tory chief whip which would have exempted MPs from the Freedom of Information laws which parliament itself introduced to make bodies such as the NHS, the civil service, the courts and the police more transparent.
The irony was that ‘talking-out’ was a special tactic of Tory David Maclean, which he had used to powerful effect on many occasions to delay legitimate business in the House of Commons.
Were Hughes and Baker right to use this tactic? Procedurally, absolutely. This is one of the arcane ways of the House of Commons. Morally? Also absolutely. For a body such as parliament to make rules that apply to everyone, and then to exempt itself because the rules are inconvenient is appalling. For politicians — who already enjoy less trust than almost any other profession — to make things easier for them to conceal their activities is bordering on the delusional.
Hughes and Baker — with Winnick and Shepherd — have done us a great service.
But it highlights something important. First, the time for filibustering really should be at its end. The reason they needed to filibuster was that this bill had slipped through on the nod on its first reading, had spent just an hour in the committee stage, and was facing a House of Commons packed with — wait for it — just about ten MPs, since the others were already back on the way to their constituencies.
Legislation that would have damaged democracy almost slipped through because there are no proper procedures for managing this kind of business.
Parliament needs reforming. It’s popular to talk about the need for reform in the House of Lords (and quite right too), but the ways of the House of Commons also need shaking up. Hughes and Baker saved us from a minor catastrophe by playing the game tightly according to its rules. But the rules ought to have been such that there was no need for this kind of thing.
The next generation of politicians must act early in their parliamentary careers to bring British democracy into the 21st century.
We fail in this at our peril.
Institute of Public Policy Research | Raise the legal drinking age to tackle Britain’s binge-drinking youth?
Britain is pulling in different directions. This week the Institute for Public Policy Research will outline proposals to raise the drinking age to 21. At the same time, the government is pushing through a programme of casinos and super-casinos, dismissing claims that this will increase problem gambling.
So which do we need? More laws restricting unhealthy or unhelpful behaviour, or more government sponsorship of ‘vices’.
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BBC NEWS | Scotland | North East/N Isles | Honours probe MP sorry for ‘romp’
SNP’s Angus McNeil, the Western Isles MP who demanded and vigorously promoted the Cash for Honours probe, has apologised for a ‘romp’ involving two teenage girls, half his age, just a few weeks before his wife gave birth, and two months after he was elected to parliament.
As a media story this has all the makings of a classic, offering equal amounts of prurience, bad judgment, and political hypocrisy. But it begs deeper and more serious questions about the nature of integrity in (post)modern British politics.
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BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Warming ‘already changing world’
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, due to be published today, will make the case that of 29,000 pieces of data on observed changes in physical and biological aspects of the natural world, 85% are consistent with a warming world.
I met some Americans recently who put forward the view that global warming was still an unproven phenomenum. They were not trying to advance a political agenda — it was just that this is what they understood to be the balance of scientific opinion.
Ten years ago, it was probably legitimate to say that the jury was still out on climate change — although the likelihood was far greater than that of an asteroid hitting the earth, which was something that NASA was actively investigating at the time. Five years ago you had to be fairly stubborn if you wanted to maintain the view that it wasn’t happening. As of today, it is, in many respects, the most likely thing in the world.
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BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | Iranians release British sailors
During the Iraq war, amid all the tragi-comedy of Comical Ali and the daily briefings which got further and further from any sense of reality, most of us overlooked something which should have been the key to our Middle Eastern future. It was something very simple: every day Saddam Hussein could take his pick of any one of his ministers able to give a briefing in English. Neither Britain nor the USA was able to put up a single minister or military leader who could brief Al Jazeera or any part of the Arab press in Arabic.
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