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BBC NEWS | Politics | Suspension looming for MP Conway Last night on Radio 4’s PM programme we were treated to the spectacle of Ann Morrison, Chair of the local Conservative Party, refusing to answer most questions but saying that Tory MP for Old Bexley and Sidcup Derek Conway was doing the ‘right thing’ by announcing that he was standing down at the next election.

What?

Let us understand exactly what Mr Conway is accused of having done. At a time when the Tories have been merrily demanding the fall of Labour ministers for inaccurately reporting donations for their deputy-leadership campaign - although there is no suggestion that any of these ministers used the money for personal gain, or spent money in a dishonest way - Derek Conway is accused of handing over £13,161 of public money to a son who entirely failed to do anything to justify this. Of course, the police have not as yet investigated this, and the accusation is therefore not legally proven. On the other hand, Derek Conway and the Conservative Party are not denying it.

If an employee of, say, the NHS, or a local councillor, or a policeman were found to have given £13,161 to anyone improperly, they would find themselves immediately suspended and shortly afterwards dismissed. If they had handed over £13,161 to a member of their own family, they would have found themselves in jail shortly after that.

We must understand that the accusation against Derek Conway is completely different from the accusation against Peter Hain. Hain’s alleged ‘crime’ is that money given for the political activities of the Labour party is said to have been used for political activities of the Labour party which are not quite the same as the political activities of the Labour party for which it was given. This is reprehensible, because anyone in public life should be entirely transparent in regard to their finances and donations. But it is a technical violation, and as much an artefact of our tortuous regulations as anything else.

My Conway’s “administrative shortcomings and … misjudgements” (his words) are that he took taxpayer’s money and used it to increase the fortunes of his own family without giving the taxpayer any benefit whatsoever.

This is a clear abuse of his position, one based on the trust of the electorate, and is sleaze on the level of Cash for Questions under the last Tory administration.

What sanction has David Cameron imposed? Initially nothing, then, after twenty-four hours in which it became clear that the Conservative party (ie, his own personal reputation) was being tarnished, he withdrew the whip, in other words, saying “this man is no longer a Conservative”. But, Mr Cameron, this man was a Conservative when he was doing the deed. It is now that he is contrite and repentant that he is no longer a Conservative. And yet, David Cameron refused to rule out Mr Conway regaining the whip at a later stage.

Mr Conway has said that he will not stand at the next election. This would be like a shop-assistant caught with their fingers in the till saying “I’m sorry I was caught, and I’ll look at getting another job in a couple of years.” But his majority was in any case only 3,345 - far too slim a majority to defend when questions of sleaze are on the table. Aged 55 now, he will probably by 57 then, so if he stood for that seat again and lost it (as he certainly would), it would probably not be until the age of 62 that he would be able to stand for another seat at a General Election: a little old to be restarting his parliamentary career.

In other words, Derek Conway has promised to do nothing more than bow to the inevitable. He has not “done the right thing” - which in this case would be to resign his seat straight away and trigger a bye-election - and David Cameron has not “done the right thing” by withdrawing the whip. Cameron should have let him keep the whip and instructed him to resign immediately, and then faced the electorate in a bye-election straight away. Of course, the last thing that Cameron wants is a bye-election in Old Bexley and Sidcup, now or ever. All he has done is try to limit the damage to himself, at the very time that he is trying to embarrass Gordon Brown in regard to the far more minor misdoings of Labour politicians.

It is time to clean up politics. Brown does not show much inclination to do so. Cameron postured about it, but has now shown that he has absolutely no interest in moral politics, and is merely engaged in looking for advantage where he can get it.

It is time for the electorate to look elsewhere.

BBC NEWS | Politics | UK should outlaw paying for sex

After endless amounts of backwards and forwards discussion, Harriet Harman is considering “banning” prostitution. Her reasons are something I applaud - to reduce the sex market, thereby decreasing the profits of sex-trafficking, and moving towards eliminating the modern slave-trade.

Actually, though, ‘banning’ is something that patently does not work as far as what is generally referred to as ‘vice’ is concerned. The American experiment with Prohibition of Alcohol is invariably cited as the case in point. On the other hand, the solution recommended by the English Collective of Prostitutes - to legalise building-based prostitution, as has been done in New Zealand - has also been proven not to work. In Amsterdam and across Belgium, building-based prostitution has been shown as the best of all worlds for people-traffickers. Their victims are out of sight, easy to control.

This sounds like the counsel of despair. If banning doesn’t work, and if legalisation doesn’t work, we are almost at the point of saying that we are living in the best of all possible worlds - and what a terrible world that is.

Some solutions, have yet to be tried. It has been hinted at in radio interviews, but the best solution is to target the clients. Any kind of restrictions on sex-workers invariably results in more pressure by pimps and traffickers on illegal immigrants. The threat of law is used against the victims. What’s more, those involved in semi-consensual sex, which is most prostitutes, can only pay the fines that are currently dished out to them in magistrates’ courts by engaging in more prostitution. Targeting the clients, on the other hand, goes (as the Inland Revenue say) ‘where the money is’. There are at least three kinds of prostitutes: trafficked women, semi-consensual prostitutes, and (most often heard on the radio) prostitutes who choose to do what they do. There is only one kind of client: men who want sex, and are prepared to pay for it. The experience of research in Belgium is that men are unwilling to distinguish between the three kinds. Target the clients, and the market reduces.

However, this approach can only be pursued if routes are created out of prostitution for those who want to exit the trade. This is not only for trafficked women. There are plenty of semi-consensual prostitutes, working to pay for drug-habits, or because their economic situation is one for which they cannot find another solution. We don’t (as yet) have sufficiently integrated paths out of drug-use. Any way out needs to be carefully constructed at a local level to provide drug rehabilitation, dental treatment (almost always essential for drug users), training for employment, social housing, and more. This can only happen if we commit to it as a society: far too often initiatives of this kind are held back because ‘ordinary’ people (or their local political representatives) say that they don’t want public money to go on helping people out of their own bad choices to this extent. It’s the same argument that says that teenage girls get pregnant in order to get housing benefit. True, or not? Hard to say. But irrelevant. In a civilised society, we need to invest in people’s lives to bring them back into mainstream society, no matter how they fell out of it. If we are not willing to pay the price, then we must accept that we will never approach an answer to human trafficking.

Which makes all of us guilty.

BBC NEWS | Education | Law challenge to Gore school film
A father from Kent is challenging in the courts a DfES decision to send copies of Al Gore’s Oscar winning film on Climate Change to every secondary school in England. ‘An inconvenient truth’ is, by its nature, a political film, but DfES points to a clear scientific consensus on global warming (more…)

BBC NEWS | Politics | Opposition urge Clarke to resign

Charles Clarke damned himself this afternoon when he declared that public safety is the government’s highest priority. And in doing so he damned the whole Blair programme. Menzies Campbell and David Davies were right in framing the charge that Mr Clarke had failed to protect the public. To have failed to take account of the position of 1,023 prisoners who should have been deported was gross negligence on the part of the Home Office.

In itself, that was an indictment of one department and one man. Clarke’s response, that public safety was the government’s highest responsibility was exactly suited to his contention that he should stay in office and sort the mess out. But in defending his own position, Clarke revealed the crucial failing which makes New Labour no longer fit to govern.

Public safety is indeed a very great responsibility, and should be very high in the government’s agenda. But it should not be at the top. Very simply, accountability to the public should and must be the highest priority of a democratically elected government. Anything else at the top will ultimately lead to tyranny.

If we make public safety our highest priority, then we will indeed invest in more prisons, in ID cards, in withdrawing the right to trial by jury, in retrying people who have been declared innocent by the courts for a second time on the same allegation. We will arbitrary withdraw the rights of those who seem to pose a threat to the state, and we ultimately engage in a programme of detaining people because they are likely to one day commit crimes. Public Safety has been the watchword of totalitarians from Julius Caesar to Adolf Hitler and from Josef Stalin to Robert Mugabe.

Unless government makes accountability to the public its highest calling, it is simply unfit to govern. And Charles Clarke’s position - supported, at least for the moment, by Tony Blair - makes it absolutely clear that something other than accountability is at the top of his agenda. If Blair, Clarke — and, indeed, Prescott and Hewitt in this Teflon-testing week — really believed in accountability, then Clarke would now be on the back benches, Prescott would have at the very least have switched job, and Hewitt would be considering her position. Not because they are bad people, nor indeed because they are unfit to be secretaries of state, but because the only way in which a minister can demonstrate true accountability is by resigning before their position becomes untenable.

We can applaud the many good things that Tony Blair’s government has done for the country. History will remember them well in many ways. But, unless they can rediscover the simple truth that they are accountable to us, rather than merely to each other, they will demonstrate more clearly with every passing day that they are no longer fit to rule in Great Britain.

Today’s Federal Party Conference finished on a high note. Menzies Campbell’s leadership withstood its first test on Saturday, as delegates overwhelmingly voted through the parliamentary party’s policy on Post Offices. This was the motion that had been sent back by the autumn conference — but yesterday tables were turned and it was the (now rather few) rebels who were defeated. Today the party proved that it has the will to take the fight to its political enemies.

Everywhere there was a sense that change is in the air. This wasn’t just the thrilling Harrogate weather. Elsewhere Labour was going through another regretful crisis. While in Wales David Cameron was pleading with his party not to be frightened by the pace of his changes.

We should not gloat over the discomfiture of Tessa Jowell. Her situation is a tragedy largely not of her making. Nor should we be gleeful over the down-turn on Tory confidence in Cameron. Britain needs rejuvenation in its parties, and if the Tories are too slow-witted to see that, then that is their loss and ours.

In fact, the time for continuously comparing ourselves with our opponents and our poll-ratings has reached its end. Scandal may sell newspapers, but it does not make for good government.

Outside of the tiny world of British party politics, the world is changing. The environment is deteriorating far faster than most people are willing to believe. The West’s recent adventures in war and publishing have dramatically destabilised our relationship with the entire Muslim world. The economic development of China and India is a seismic shift in international trade. And, all the while, the worldwide growth in human trafficking for the sex-industry sees more than five million people sold into slavery each year — a blight on our consciences about which are doing almost nothing.

We no longer have time for bickering.

And Liberal-Democrats, at least, are ready to engage in constructive politics.

See BBC NEWS | Education | Results fiasco test chief quits and BBC NEWS | Politics | CSA chief resigns amid criticism

Today Jonathan Ford resigned as head of the National Assessment Agency, following a fiasco of English testing for 14 year olds, while Doug Smith, head of the Child Support Agency, resigned amid a prolonged and powerful attack by MPs on the “chronic, systemic failures” of management across the agency.

If these were merely the isolated failures of isolated agencies, then today would have been a simple coincidence. But they are not. They are part of a long series of systematic failures in public sector agencies. Over the last few years we have seen fiascos on passports, on CRB checks for school teachers, on exam results, and on the introduction of computer systems in many parts of the public sector. And, of course, we saw the fiasco of the Millennium Dome and the abortive UK athletics stadium.

It would be convenient to pin the blame on New Labour, but at least half of the failing agencies and systems were established by the Old Tories.

Rather, it points to a malaise in British politics which dates at least back to the Thatcher years.

The malaise is one of farming out the risks of untested policies to paid officials or unelected boards, making ministers accountable only for their intentions, and not for their results.

It was not always so. We may rather laughingly look back at the plethora of government departments, admirably satirised on Radio 4 in ‘The Men from the Ministry’ and later on television in ‘Yes, Minister’. But the old system of departments - for all its faults - made ministers directly accountable for the implementation of government policy. This - in itself - was probably enough to make ministers think twice before establishing systems which could not possibly work.

The Child Support Agency was just one such system. It was doomed to failure from the start, structurally unsuitable for the task it was required to complete, under-resourced and sent off to sink or swim by a government (John Major’s) that knew there was little chance that it would still be around to pick up the pieces.

So, quango heads have rolled. Doubtless others will follow. The public has already forgotten which minister it was created the mess. In this way, although they may have failed in their tasks, the quangos have satisfied their purpose - to take the heat off government long enough to survive just one more election.