Stuart Weir

Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): I can't say that I watched or listened to every TV or radio news report yesterday, but the pattern of those reports I did catch was clear enough. Not one reported in terms that the trial and conviction of Salim Ahmed Hamdan for being Osama bin Laden's former driver was a clear violation of international human rights laws, or even used the term, "human rights abuse". It was established, without comment, that Hamdan had been in custody for seven years and that, had he been found not guilty, or given a sentence light enough for release once the seven years were taken into account, he would anyway remain incarcerated.

Instead that old polarity was established - between on the one hand the need for security against terrorism, and on the other, due process and US law, as apologists for the Guantanamo regime explained that this military farrago was "straight down the middle". This was just one of a host of assertions that went unexamined and unchallenged. Meanwhile George Bush's concerns about "human rights abuses" in China were rightly broadcast, though without any suggestion that his position was contaminated by the enormity of the US record on unlawful detention and torture.

Stuart Weir

Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): Local government in England is neither local, government nor representative.  Local authorities are ruled from above by central government departments and major quangos.  At last, with the granting of royal assent for the the creation of the Homes and Communities Agency - a merger of the former Housing Corporation and English Partnerships - the shape of effective regional and local governance is now clear. It sets the seal on a troika of power that is accountable, though imperfectly, only upwards: this new super-quango, regional development agencies and the government's regional offices will now rule between them.  Yes, there is provision for deals with the larger local authorities - some of them with populations of over a million - but the real power rests with the regional quango state. Read the rest of this post...

Stuart Weir

Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): Just so that I don't spoil the movie, please skip this post if you mean to go and see Dark Knight, the latest Batman film.

I went of course to enjoy the movie and to watch Heath Ledger as the Joker (and yes, it is an awesome portrayal). But Dark Knight can also be viewed as an allegory for America's war on terror and the response to 9/11, and must have been consciously made with the parallels between this tale of a struggle to save Gotham from a crazed terrorist and Bush's conduct in mind. There are also parallels with the response of Blair and Brown to terrorism in Britain.

The Joker's main objective is to destroy the observance of the values of the rule of law and criminal justice, and ultimately those of civilised society, through targeting key figures for murder, creating mayhem and blowing up much of the city. He is very imaginative and elusive and Batman, the police authorities and both a dedicated cop and a decent DA can't keep up with him. Batman is a ruthless presence who of course takes the law into his own hands and tears it apart. While he sticks to a code of not deliberately taking life, the collateral damage effected by his frantic pursuit of the Joker and assorted criminals is pretty devastating. Read the rest of this post...

Stuart Weir

Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): Just imagine being ready to drive off to work when an unmarked white van pulls up, armed police pour out and while one policeman smashes a side window of your car, the others drag you and push you to the ground a hand-gun pressed against the back of your head - five days after armed police have shot dead the innocent Jean Charles de Menezes! (The Guardian has CCTV footage of the arrest here)

This was the terrifying ordeal that the entirely innocent Omar Ahmet had to go through having been identified as a possible terrorist suspect by a worker at the hotel where he had stayed the night. The worker had telephoned the Merseyside police after seeing a photo of the suspect in a newspaper and told them that he was "85 per cent" certain that Ahmet was the man. Ahmet is a fair-skinned man of Cypriot heritage; the wanted terrorist was a black Eritrean. He had lodged car rental documents and his credit card with his home address in Maidenhead with the hotel. Read the rest of this post...

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?

 Read the rest of this post...

Stuart Weir

Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): Gordon Brown is on shakier ground than he thinks on 42 days pre-charge detention for people suspected of terrorist offences. On the eve of the Haltemprice and Howden by-election, a new ICM poll conducted for the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust shows most people (60%) think terrorist suspects should be held without charge for no more than the current limit - 4 weeks, or 28 days.
 Read the rest of this post...

Stuart Weir

Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): There is no such thing as the single monolithic “British Muslim community” that our politicians and media discuss.  Britain’s one and a half million or so Muslims belong to a remarkably diverse set of communities; in all, it is estimated, there are over 50 ethnicities speaking almost 100 languages between them.

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Stuart Weir

Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): Seven years ago I sat on a radical commission into the future of the NHS with Will Hutton in the chair and alongside Allyson Pollock, Conor Gearty and others. We were very fearful for the prospects for what we saw as Britain’s “greatest and most prized institution”.

We believed that the market-driven mechanisms that the government was introducing, and the restless demand for change after change, was destroying both the universalist ethic of the service and the morale of the people who worked in it. We found that the service was virtually unaccountable at all levels, from its national direction down to complaints and redress at patient level. Our main recommendation was that the government should consult widely over writing an NHS constitution that protected its founding principle – that people should have “access to free medical treatment at the time of need". Read the rest of this post...

Stuart Weir

Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): James Graham and I are in the same boat so far as electoral reform is concerned. The boat unfortunately is crewed by MPs and members in the two largest parties who are viscerally committed to first-past-the-post elections to the House of Commons because it gives either one of them near exclusive political power in Westminster and Whitehall for periods of time in return for periods of exclusion. Also for a shifting majority of them in safe or safe-ish seats it more or less guarantees the MPs lifetime security. My old history master used to bang on about "rotten boroughs". We have progressed since 1832. We now have a "rotten Parliament", in more ways than one, and frankly I see scarcely any chance that this will change unless, as Sunder Katwala suggests, the whole edifice sinks under the weight of its contradictions. Read the rest of this post...

Stuart Weir

Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): If we are realistic, the chances of electoral reform for elections to Westminster are now at least a generation away – unless first-past-the-post (FPTP) elections topple in confusion under the weight of the system’s distortions and contradictions. What can be done to try and rescue the opportunity for change, short of Gordon Brown seizing the moment for overall constitutional change by holding a Citizens Convention that embraces electoral reform as part of his near lost Governance agenda?

Well, I am a convert to the idea that the ice-breaker has to be the Alternative Vote (AV), even though it is even more disproportional than FPTP. The Combining All Our Strength alliance for civil society organisations, in which OurKingdom is a key player, this week held a high-level seminar on the prospects for change, involving electoral experts and Labour and Lib Dem MPs. My sense was that there was a consensus, reluctant on the part of some, around the argument that AV represented the best way forward, almost certainly because it was clear that it was the only likely starter.

Sunder Katwala of the Fabian Society opened a discussion that was held under Chatham House rules (for Sunder's argument for AV see his post in OK) . He argued that reformers had to unite around a first choice rather than continually debating systems; that AV would be no worse than FPTP; that it retained the constituency link that voters liked; and that it was an “honest” system in that it reduced the need for people to vote tactically. He suggested that at least Labour should be encouraged to put a change to AV for elections to the House of Commons in their next manifesto, along with the single transferable vote (STV) for elections to a reformed House of Lords and a written constitution. Hopes that a hung Parliament might lead to electoral reform were misplaced. “It will soon be the anniversary of the People’s Budget and then the Parliament Act. Make these anniversaries the occasion for another Great Reform Act”. Read the rest of this post...

Stuart Weir

Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): Just how old fashioned the principles of representative democracy have become for government ministers is beautifully encapsulated in a brief report on the politics of the third runway at Heathrow by Nicholas Watt in the Guardian (Tuesday 17 June). Watt says that David Cameron was signalling that a Conservative government is likely to block the third runway at Heathrow in a subtly evasive environmental speech and castigated Gordon Brown for his pig-headed pursuit of this project.

The response of government ministers shocked me. For them his apparent opposition "shows he has yet to move from being an opposition politician to a prime minister -in-waiting. They say as prime minister he would face the pressures they face: from the City to improve Heathrow and from the airlines to ensure that Heathrow acts as a European hub." I suppose that we should appreciate such openness about whom they feel accountable to, and I know it anyway.  Read the rest of this post...

Stuart Weir

Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit):The Irish "no" vote has not only exposed the degree to which the leaders of the European Union are prepared to consider going ahead with the Lisbon Treaty in defiance of their own rules and, let it be said, most likely popular opinion across the 27 member states. It has also revealed the hypocrisies of the non-debate in this country.

On the one hand, we have the opponents of European integration who continuously beat the drum about the "faceless bureaucrats" in Brussels who rule our lives, who are stealing our national identity, who . . . - well, you can fill this space with any complaints you like from immigration to high fuel prices to nasty smells creeping across the Channel. The fact is that it is the governments and political class in each of the states who rule the Union, and its democratic de-legitimatisation is their failure. Read the rest of this post...

Stuart Weir

Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): I don't know what impact David Davis will have on the erosion of civil liberties after the pusillanimous performance of Labour MPs (many of whom I want to respect) in the 42 day vote. But he has already exposed the political class - and yes, that does mean the media too - as a cynically self-important bunch. The outrage of his colleagues is extraordinary. These are people who have elevated the norms of party politics to a principled position above the protection of the human rights of British subjects and residents here. How dare Davies put his personal principles before the convenience of his party? How self-indulgent the man is! The gloating media coverage has been nauseous. The Guardian and no doubt other newspapers carried the inevitable anonymous quote, this one from a senior Tory trashing Davis. When will the British press cease this unprofessional and unprincipled practice? Nick Robinson on the BBC said, with that odd leering death-mask face of his, that colleagues were describing Davis as "courageous", by which they meant, "bonkers". Yes, they are between them even debasing our language. Good for Shirley Williams on Question Time, who used the word in its proper sense. And on this occasion, quite accurately too. Read the rest of this post...

Stuart Weir

Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): All right, Gordon Brown and his government are weak and dishonest in their protestations over rebalancing power between the executive and Parliamemt. Their whole agenda is shot through with evasions; their Parliamentary Resolution on war powers is an inglorious hypocrisy. I don't know what angers me most, the dishonesty or the idea that we are too dumb to notice. But we should still take the opportunity to press for real instead of apparent change.

Adam Tomkins, a law professor at the University of Glasgow, has given meticulous evidence setting out precisely (and elegantly) why Gordon Brown's proposal has no clothes. His most valuable contribution is however to have also spelled out with clarity a modest list of what needs to be done to clothe the war powers resolution properly. He points out that wherever there is a clash between constitutional accountability to Parliament and the government's interest in flexibility and control, Brown's proposals come down uncompromisingly in favour of the latter.

The point is that Tomkins's analysis gives those of US who care an agenda around which we can unite in encouraging parliamentarians to reject the Resolution as it now stands, beginning with the Joint Committee, and for lobbying both Houses should the draft Bill enter Parliament unchanged in the next session of Parliament. Read the rest of this post...

Stuart Weir

Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): You can hardly have failed to notice that the children’s commissioners for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have combined forces in a joint report to the United Nations to condemn the treatment of children in the United Kingdom. But you may not have taken on board their central message, and you very likely missed an equally significant report last week on the effects of poverty on education and social mobility in the UK.

The point of this unprecedented initiative is to insist that children have human rights, separate from the family, and that their rights are being systematically abused. The commissioners have presented a dossier of human rights abuses of British children in violation of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) that, in the words of the Guardian report (Monday, 9 June) have “denied hope and opportunity to many of Britain’s 14 million children and adolescents”.

The report is to the UN committee set up to review compliance with the Convention; in its last review of the UK, in 2002, the Committee found “serious violations” of the Convention. An additional report from the Children’s Rights Alliance for England, a coalition of more than 100 civil society organisations, says that the government has passed 30 laws that breach the Convention since then.

The biggest complaints centre on the punitive juvenile justice system and public attitudes that demonise adolescents. But there is a deeper-lying cause for complaint and concern. At a Sutton Trust conference on social mobility in New York last week Ed Miliband, the Cabinet Office minister, and UK educationists, heard the results of a massive study of children born in the UK and US in 2000 and 2001. The study found that the damaging effect of being in a low-income home was more pronounced in the UK than in the US and that “there is a stronger income differential in the UK than in the US,” meaning that (as a US academic told the conference) “there are more behavioural problems among low-income children in the UK”, and that the transition from home to school was harder, especially for boys. (The gap between the UK and the US would be even wider were it not for Britain’s childcare provision.) Read the rest of this post...

Stuart Weir

Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): In his speech to the Constitution Unit's Devolution Conference last week, "The Purpose of the Union", Professor Robert Hazell argued that Britishness should not be defended in terms of values, but in terms of "interests and institutions". It is interesting to look at Robert Hazell's list of institutions that symbolise Britishness. I rather wonder who for. Here is the list:

• Westminster Parliament

• The Monarchy 

• Supreme Court, judiciary, common law

• BBC, British Council

• Civil service, armed forces, National Health Service
  And in civil society 

• The Church of England, of Scotland and in Wales, and other churches and faith
  groups 

• Voluntary organisations, from national welfare bodies like Age Concern and the
  NSPCC, to specialist bodies like Amnesty or Oxfam.

I served on the Commission on the NHS in 2000 with Will Hutton, Allyson Pollock, Conor Gearty and others and we actually asked people in a poll to choose "the most valuable instutions for this country", admittedly from our own list of seven. The NHS, which comes at the tail end of Robert's list, was overwhelmingly the most popular choice, with nearly two thirds (63 per cent) of those polled: Parliament followed on with 12 per cent, then the police (11 per cent), the BBC (4 per cent), the Royal Family (3 per cent) and the Benefits Agency (2 per cent). The police received the most second preferences (44 per cent), followed by the NHS (17 per cent) and Parliament (14 per cent). In the same poll we found strong support for economic and social rights alongside civil and political rights. I mention this because the government and commentators tend to ignore the social aspect of people's sense of "Britishness", belonging and democracy.

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Stuart Weir

Stuart Weir (London, OK): The opaque and well-defended Ministry of Defence is under hostile and "friendly" fire - and let us hope that its officials will be overrun. For two years at least the MOD has been obstinately fending off a parliamentary and civil society offensive against the use of cluster bombs by UK forces. In Parliament there were two Private Members' Bills and an adjournment debate in 2006-07, the Foreign Affairs Committee took evidence from Human Rights Watch in January 2007 and has since kept up the pressure on government. There have also been numerous questions in both Houses seeking change.

You may remember that Hilary Benn, then International Development Secretary, broke ranks in 2006 with a leaked internal memo arguing that the UK and US should cease using these deadly weapons which kill and maim far more innocent civilians - most of them children - than they do enemy combatants. The MOD and Foreign Office immediately disowned Benn's memo. In 2006, Handicap International published estimates of the death toll, suggesting that they had killed 11,00 people in the past 30 years, 98 per cent of them civilians. In all the death toll may be as high as 100,000. Under parliamentary pressure, the government finally agreed to sign the international Oslo Declaration to cease using cluster munitions.

But with a caveat. The forces would stop using "dumb" cluster munitions - i.e., the ones that just lie there waiting to explode - but would continue, as Defence Secretary Des Browne explained, to use "smart" bombs with "inbuilt self-destructing or self-deactivating mechanisms" - i.e., ones that self-destruct so that they do not lie around waiting to kill or maim. The MOD even reclassified one of its weapons systems, the CVR-7, used on Apache helicopters, to escape the partial ban. Read the rest of this post...

Stuart Weir

Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): There was the official welcome from the chair, "Hazel Blears is here", following an informal clue to her arrival as a man in black slid two blocks behind the speaker's plinth from which she was to speak. So in she bounced to deliver a brisk and rousing speech to local council delegates from across the country at the Local Government Information Unit's "Power to the People" conference in London. I think the delegates were roused, and I myself was not immune to her spirited commitment to empowering people; and also, to the general spirit of optimism that seems to have overtaken many in local government about the government's commitment to "new $localism".

Blears promised a white paper on empowerment in a few weeks which was, she said, still open for ideas. It is all part of the Queen's Speech agenda introducing bills to increase accountability in the NHS, police, local government, schools, housing and regeneration policy. And while she is at it, she is also promising empowerment for local authorities who desperately need it. Quite whether she or her master will go as far as speakers and delegates at the conference were demanding is another matter. Among their proposals, for example, were a merger of primary care trusts and local authorities, handing the proceeds of the business rate back to local councils (this would apparently double their money at a stroke) and finally resolving the whole of local government funding and the future of council tax. It was I think Chris Leslie, the former minister who is now director of the New Local Government Network, who said that council tax could be revalued so long as government would chuck £4 billion at people in the form of transitional relief - money that could be raised by a one-off tax on the super rich. Now there's an idea that would secure Gordon Brown's fortunes (with me at least). Read the rest of this post...