Matt Wardman

Matt Wardman (Wardman Wire): Parliament closes this week until after the Party Conferences, and reopens in October.

It is the best season of the year for a certain sort of blogger or journalist. It is the time when Government Departments publish Written Ministerial Statements by the shedload, in order to “clear the desk”. Certain unsympathetic people will note that it is also the optimum time
to publish unpopular proposals which will affect public image, since it is the time where there is the maximum delay - until October - before scrutiny in Parliament will be possible.

For specialist bloggers, campaigners, and perhaps for occasional Comment is Free writers, it is an opportunity for detailed research without the day to day grind of political knockabout as a distraction.  Read the rest of this post...

Damian O'Loan

Damian O'Loan (Paris): Allegations of British collusion with torture by Pakistani security services led to calls for an Intelligence and Security Committee investigation on Tuesday. A week earlier the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee published a report into historical enquiries. These events are linked.

Lat year, the British government accepted the findings of a report confirming police collusion with a loyalist paramilitary group involved in murders and other grave offences.The NIAC report may be a step towards allowing further historical inquiries to be suppressed. Why would we not want to learn from our history? Read the rest of this post...

John Jackson (London, Unlock Democracy): Many political commentators are enjoying great sport by sniffing out and pursuing members of the presently besieged government who smell like attractive quarry. With increasing frequency the victims deserve this attention because of incaution, stupidity or breaking cover at the wrong time. It is rare for a minister to attract praise for doing something rather brave. One such should be Michael Wills at the Ministry of Justice responsible for the discussion paper "A national framework for greater citizen engagement" (pdf).

I have just reread Wills' paper "A New Agenda-Labour and Democracy" written when he was a backbencher and published by the Institute for Public Policy Research in June 2006. In the introduction he says "This essay argues for a programme of reform, that may have to be driven not by the political class who are seen as responsible for undermining faith in our constitutional arrangements but by the people themselves who are served by such arrangements. It suggests that the time may be coming for an elected, one-off, fixed term constitutional convention to heal the fracture in our politics".

It is easy to contrast that imaginative idea, set out in clear and refreshingly honest words, with the caution, correctness and need not to be too costly pervading the ideas outlined in the discussion paper and either damn Wills as a cowardly backslider with faint praise or dismiss him as someone of no consequence with caustic snidery. It would be wrong and unfair to do either. Read the rest of this post...

James Graham

James Graham (Unlock Democracy): The latest Lords reform white paper is both a step forward and a step back.  It is positive in that for first time ever an official government document is unambiguously in favour of second chamber which is either mostly or fully elected.  It also nails the lie about an elected second chamber being a threat to Commons primacy:

The Government welcomes a confident and assertive second chamber. It sees this as further enhancing our democracy and something that is entirely consistent with the primacy of the House of Commons. That primacy rests in the fact that the Government of the day is formed from the party or parties that can command a majority in the House of Commons. It also rests in the Parliament Acts and in the financial privilege of the House of Commons. The Prime Minister and most senior ministers are also drawn from the House of Commons. A more assertive second chamber, operating within its current powers, would not threaten primacy.
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Patricia Daniel

In her second report from Women's Worlds 2008, Patricia Daniel explores women and the global economy: New Zealander Marilyn Waring argues feminists must develop a new economic paradigm, and Sonía Parella Rubio examines a global care crisis.

Another wonderful speaker, New Zealander Marilyn Waring renowned academic, formerly the youngest member of the NZ parliament, anti-nuclear campaigner and currently gender advisor to the Solomon Islands, updated for us her seminal work from 1988: Counting for nothing - what men value and what women are worth.

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Stuart Weir

Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): There is a surreal ironist in the Home Office.

BBC News is trumpeting an investigation into rogue illegal immigrants who are apparently able to re-produce practically any official document anyone might need, from passports, driving licences down to gas and electricity bills. But what is the Home Office doing about this plague of illegality?

"That what ID cards are for" Did I hear right?

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Arthur Aughey

Arthur Aughey: (University of Ulster): When I finished the manuscript of my book Nationalism, Devolution and the United Kingdom State (Pluto 2001) I did so with what I thought was not only a literary flourish but also a political warning. 

The literary flourish was intended to engage with Tom Nairn’s polemic against ‘UKania’ in After Britain (Granta 2000) where he had employed the Kakanian metaphor of Robert Musil’s novel The Man without Qualities. Nairn argued that just as the fond hope of Austro-Marxists that they could save the integrity of the Habsburg Empire from nationalist challenge came to nothing so too Labour's constitutional activism merely replayed the old Austrian saying - 'es muss etwas geschehen' (something must be done). However, the fatalistic end was implied in that action - 'es ist passiert' (it just happened). And what will just happen, is already happening, is the dissolution of the United Kingdom. It was like the old Austrian lament of 1916 we find in Strong (History of European Ideas 1984, p. 305): 
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Guy Aitchison

Guy Aitchison (Bristol, OK): Is there a democratic case to be made against an elected second chamber? Anthony Barnett has made the case on OK for the Athenian practice of sortition as an alternative and democratic form of citizen engagement that could help renew the second chamber. David Marquand was not convinced.

Now Lord Norton has put the "democratic" case for appointment. In a series of posts in response to the Government's recent White Paper on the Lords, first on Lords of the Blog and now on Conservative Home, the Tory peer has been making the case for an appointed chamber on the basis of "core accountability". The British constitution, claims Norton, has the benefit that there is one body - the Government, chosen through elections to the House of Commons - that is responsible for public policy. If the electorate disapproves of these policies it can vote it out at the next election. To elect other bodies "that can then claim the mandate of the popular vote undermines that core accountability." Come election time the various elected bodies will each be holding the others responsible for policy failures and a confused electorate will not know who to blame. Democracy is undermined. Read the rest of this post...

SpyBlog

SpyBlog (London): We would have liked to have been able to comment on the latest Intelligence and Security Committee's Annual report, which appears to have been leaked, at least in part to The Guardian newspaper, but it does not yet appear to be online on the Cabinet Office website.

The Guardian is running a story on the cancellation of phase 2 of the delayed SCOPE intelligence sharing computer system: Multimillion pound security project shelved by ministers

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Tom Griffin

Tom Griffin (London, The Green Ribbon): The row over MPs expenses continued today when David Cameron used Prime Ministers Questions to revisit Gordon Brown's failure to vote for reform two weeks ago.

MPs will return to the issue this evening, albeit largely symbolically, thanks to a Conservative motion and a Labour amendment which both call for the abolition of the now-infamous 'John Lewis list'.
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Damian O'Loan

Damian O'Loan (Paris): Bastille Day in France was the first to be celebrated under President Sarkozy. M Sarkozy celebrated his first as President of the EU, and the day was a rare success as the Mediterranean Union was inaugurated. A busy day in a busy time, but what does all this mean across the Channel?

It is no secret that Sarkozy was bitterly disappointed by the Irish No, that his plans for the presidency were thereby irrevocably altered. Opinion in France itself is deeply divided on Lisbon; the opposition Socialist Party were unable to hold a line in the parliamentary vote on ratification. There are contradictory reports on whether the treaty would pass or not if there were a French referendum.
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Tom Griffin

"Sometimes the best-intentioned plans bring the most insidious threats, where freedoms are not appreciated until it is too late to turn the clock back," Information Commissioner Richard Thomas warned in his annual report released today.

The targeted, and duly authorised, interception of the communications of suspects can be invaluable in the fight against terrorism and other serious crime. But would that provide justification for the scheme which - it has been suggested - is under consideration to create a government-run database to hold details of the telephone and internet communications of the entire population? Do we really want the police, security services and other organs of the state to have access to more and more aspects of our private lives? Any such scheme would require the fullest public debate to establish whether, whatever the benefits, it amounted to excessive surveillance as a step too far for the British way of life.
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Tom Griffin

In today's Guardian, George Monbiot takes up the case of former diplomat Craig Murray, who is facing the threat of a libel action by private military contractor Tim Spicer.

Monbiot argues that Spicer's lawyers are threatening an injunction "against a book they haven't read and that won't be published until September," although Murray himself suggests elsewhere that they may have been tipped off by the Foreign Office.

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Patricia Daniel

In the first of two reports from Women's Worlds 2008, held in Madrid 3^rd-9^th July, Patricia Daniel is taken from Cambodia to Egypt, through moving presentations from Somaly Mam and Nawal el-Saadawi.

Held every three years since 1981, the international interdisciplinary forum Women's Worlds continues to flourish: located each time in a different capital, it has travelled across the five continents and more than 40,000 people from over one hundred countries have taken part. It provides the opportunity to explore all areas of academic study - and of life itself - from a feminist perspective. In Madrid there were discussions on fourteen different themes, with 130 invited speakers and hundreds of other contributions in exchange workshops every afternoon. This tenth event took as its overall theme "New frontiers: changes and challenges" and its slogan, open to a number of interpretations: "Equality is no utopia."

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Tom Griffin

Tom Griffin (London, The Green Ribbon): Jack Straw has today published the Government's white paper on reform of the House of Lords.

The proposals call for a chamber which is 80-100 per cent elected, with members serving a single non-renewable 12-15 year term and a third of the chamber retiring at each election

One key point that emerged from Anthony Barnett's discussion with David Marquand below is that the choice of electoral system is likely to be crucial, not just to the future of the second chamber, but to the case for reform of the Commons.The White Paper leaves that issue very much open:
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Tom Griffin

Tom Griffin (London, The Green Ribbon): Most Welsh Assembly members want the same law-making powers as the Scottish Parliament, a new poll has found. The survey for the Western Mail comes ahead of today's inaugural meeting of the All Wales Convention, which will examine the case for further devolution.

A survey of AMs found 90% were convinced the Assembly was ready for an increase in powers, with 82% calling for the same law-making capabilities enjoyed by politicians in Scotland.

This was the opinion of all Plaid Cymru and Liberal Democrat AMs, three-quarters of those in the Labour group and 67% of Conservatives.

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As the Government announces plans for a reformed House of Lords, David Marquand and Anthony Barnett discuss whether a new chamber should be chosen by lottery.

David Marquand (Oxford): At first sight, the idea of ‘sortition’ for the reformed House of Lords (or Senators or whatever) is attractive. But when you reflect on it it becomes distinctly unattractive.Here’s why:

First (a minor – but still significant – tactical objection), It clearly won’t happen; and it’s a mistake for constitutional reformers to give the impression that whatever the Government proposes they will be against.

Second (and much more serious): The main point of having an elected Second Chamber is to give it democratic legitimacy, so as to make it a stronger check on abuses of power by the elective dictator who controls the Lower House. Whatever may have been true in ancient Athens – not really a democracy, remember, since slaves, women and foreigners couldn’t participate – in today’s world democratic election is the only source of democratic legitimacy. An upper house chosen, in effect, by chance would be less legitimate than the Commons, not more. It would be a permanent focus group, as far removed from true democracy as the Government’s proposed Citizen’s Summit.
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Tom Griffin

Tom Griffin (London, The Green Ribbon): The Barnett formula for financing the UK's devolved governments is unfair and should be replaced, according to a report issued by IPPR North on Thursday.

Scotland and Wales have already begun considering alternatives. Northern Ireland should be looking to do the same, according to one of the report's authors, Iain Maclean in the Sunday Times today:

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