Law & Order

Labour has created more than 3000 new criminal offences so it is not surprising that our prison population is the highest ever at over 80000. The re-offending rate amongst the young (18 -25yrs old) is in excess of 75% so we are spending some £35000 per year per prisoner of taxpayer money for abject failure. As usual David Cameron faces both ways on the one hand waxing eloquent in his conference speech about Amir Khan's initiative to keep youngsters out of crime and on the other saying he (Cameron) would build more prisons.

Meanwhile the Kids Company charity, which also wants to keep kids away from crime, has about 11000 children turning to it each year and the Metropolitan Police are so impressed with it that it wants it to do more. However it needs £5million before March 2008 or it goes under. It thus needs to keep 1.3% of the kids that turn to it out of prison to be cost effective. This, and the hundreds of other groups doing similar work, is where we need to put the money. Then we won't need more prisons.

Moreover we will not be needing to let out, to ease overcrowding, people who really are a threat to our well being and safety.

Debts & Fat Cats Again

We read that the outgoing CEO of Northern Rock may be in line for a salary pay out of c.£800000 & a pension pot of two million £. The last UK Bank run before Northern Rock was the City of Glasgow Bank in 1878. Its' directors went to Gaol for between 8 & 18 months. A more deserving reward for Northern Rock methinks. It would be an outrage if any Northern Rock Director received a penny for loss of office. They were handsomely paid (grossly overpaid!) for a flawed business model that eventually caught them out.

The Liberal Democrat Vince Cable warned of this some three years ago. Naturally no one took any notice. The Government has so far put billions of taxpayer money into propping up Northern Rock. Meanwhile, a year on, the poor people who saved with Farepak still wait for some of their money back. The lesson to learn is that if you are going to be a disaster be a big one.

Targets

What does 90 patients in Kent dying of Clostridium Difficile have in common with the Surrey Constabulary coming top of the performance league and with a £130million budget increase to the National Drug Treatment Agency resulting in a mere 70 extra patients 'going clean? Answer - idiotic targets. Pressure to cut waiting times & costs caused Maidstone & Tunbridge Wells Trust to fail to properly see to cleanliness; Surrey chief constable discovered that his officers were boosting numbers by focusing on soft targets & ignoring tough cases; the Treatment Agency was spending money getting treatment numbers up rather than actually getting results. It would be a surprise if these were the only cases where addiction to 'targets' was not having a perverse result.

'Not everything that counts can be counted & not everything than can be counted counts' Albert Einstein.

Liberal Democrats accept that targets have their place but not when they are misconceived and used as the principal, sometimes only, measure of achievement.

Footnote: one of the policy motions passed at the LibDem Conference in September was to scrap all centrally imposed Targets on Local Government.

Funding the Army

Underfunding of the UK military is the hot topic. Of course if we were not fighting George Bush's wars the problem might well not arise but that dodges the issue a bit. We might want our ground troops to fight OUR wars and they need, and deserve, the best equipment AND the very best aftercare. Not having their hospitals closed and pathetic compensation & relatives being thrown out of their dreadful military houses when the soldier gets killed.

The way to pay for this ,at least in part, is to NOT spend £80bn on weapons like Trident replacements which will only be of any use if we were to go to war with the United States.

Debts & Fat Cats

Morgan Stanley is the latest bank to discover a huge loss [$3.7bn; £ 1.8bn] as a result of the subprime mortgage debacle. Meanwhile petrol in the UK breaks through £1 per litre and the country is beginning to discover the perils of debt. The world's stock markets are yo yoing about all over the place. Vince Cable of the Liberal Democrats was the only mainstream politician to warn about this some three years ago. Naturally nobody paid attention.

The banks are sitting on piles of 'financial instruments' [so much scrap paper!] that they thought was actually worth something and now they don't know if they are or not. These 'instruments' were dreamed up by people who were paid obscene amounts of money for their so called 'ability' and who paid minimal taxes whilst considering it OK to try and avoid paying their office cleaners the minimum wage. If we imposed proper levels of taxation on these people and they carried out their threat to go abroad then I for one would be pleased.

However they wouldn't go. No less a person than Michael Heseltine pointed out that there are massive benefits to the very rich from living in Britain and paying fair taxes that they could well afford would not make them leave.

Civil Liberties - de Menezes

The few words that really matter about the killing of Mr de Menezes are that SEVEN dum dum bullets were pumped into him by a specially trained firearms officer of the Metropolitan Police.

Such an officer knows very well that ONE such bullet in the head is enough to kill. To use SEVEN is the action of a person who is out of control. Explanations, communications errors, reports, prosecutions & all the rest of the torrent of words about this case merely serve to obscure this simple fact and provide a reason for not dealing properly with the officer concerned. Sir Ian Blair should resign because of his failure to recognise the simplicity of this situation. Loyalty to ones staff is admirable but sometimes, as here, is misplaced.

Iran

Imagine you are an Iranian. In 1980 you are attacked by Iraq under Saddam Hussein. The United States decides to support Iraq. The extract below is from an academic report on the matter:

In March 1981 U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he saw the possibility of improved ties with Baghdad and approvingly noted that Iraq was concerned by "the behavior of Soviet imperialism in the Middle Eastern area." The U.S. then approved the sale to Iraq of five Boeing jetliners, and sent a deputy assistant secretary of state to Baghdad for talks. The U.S. removed Iraq from its notoriously selective list of nations supporting international terrorism (despite the fact that terrorist Abu Nidal was based in the country) and Washington extended a $400 million credit guarantee for U.S. exports to Iraq. In November 1984, the U.S. and Iraq restored diplomatic relations, which had been ruptured in 1967.

Twenty years later the United States invades Iraq and issues threats against you. You know that the US has nuclear weapons (actually some 6000 strategic warheads) but worse Israel, although it denies it, has between 75 & 200 nuclear warheads (source Arms Control Association). Would you not want a nuclear weapon? Do you have any grounds for trusting anything the US Government says?

Of course I don't want Iran, or anyone else to have nuclear weapons but threats are not the way to stop it.

For any sort of peace in the Middle East the West has to be prepared to be more even handed, which means being much more critical, of the Government of Israel. Please note I said 'Government of Israel' not 'Jews'. The briefest trawl of the internet throws up many Jewish groups who are horrified by what Israel does.

One of the excuses for invading Iraq was that Saddam Hussein was in breach of UN resolutions. But Israel is in breach of many more UN resolutions, and for much longer, than Saddam ever was. There are no sanctions on Israel. Many more Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli army than Israelis by 'terrorists'. Israel conducts an air strike on Syria - silence. The Palestinians are urged to conduct democratic elections - so they do & elect Hamas. Sanctions are imposed. You can have democracy says the West as long as you elect whom we want. And so on for pages.

For goodness sake is it any wonder that the Arab, and Persian, and by association the whole Muslim world is against us.

Whatever we do there will always be fanatics of one sort or the other prepared to commit acts of terror. But we surely don't have to follow policies which push ordinary people who just want to get on with their lives into the 'terrorist camp'.

Foreign Affairs

Britain must distance itself from George W. Bush. Of course the United States is a country with which we must have the best possible relationship but we should take the posture of 'critical friend' and a man like George W.,and those who back him, have been a disaster for the United States and the world.

I don't believe we can discharge the critical friend all the while we delude ourselves with a so called 'special relationship' derived from the imperatives of the early days of World War II. The reality is that the USA did not enter either WW I or WW II until their own self interest came under threat and I have absolutely no problem with that. Whatever special relationship emerged from those events was dealt a massive blow when the USA cut off their financial lifeline to us in 1946. We have only just finished paying back the money we owed the USA as a consequence of their support for Britain in WW II. It was dealt a second massive blow when the USA (rightly) refused to support us in the Suez adventure. It was dealt a third massive blow when Harold Wilson (rightly) refused to get involved in Vietnam.

We would be better able to work with the US if we buried the 'special relationship'

Civil Liberties

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown says he wants to remove the bit of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (SOCPA) that prevents demonstrations within a kilometre of Parliament Square. Perhaps he is not such a denyer of basic rights that our ancestors fought and died for after all. WRONG. The Government dredged up an Act from 1839 to try and prevent the peace march on 8th October 2007. This Act is even more draconian in preventing peaceful protest than the bit of SOCPA that he proposes to withdraw. Happily, at the very last minute, they backed off and the march went ahead.

Don't think Brown & Co won't try again. If you put together all the bits of personal intrusion introduced in the last decade and planned for the future it is hardly an exaggeration to say that so called 'free' Britain has a capacity for monitoring its' citizens similar to that of any totalitarian state you care to think of.

Civil Liberties

Did you know that your local Council, along with some 700 other public bodies in the UK can now access your mobile and land line telephone records which all service providers are now obliged to keep? Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat spokesman on home affairs said that this further extension to spy on our private lives was done "with no meaningful public or parliamentary debate". The Government claims full consultation had taken place. The key word is ' meaningful'. The measure, slipped through in the summer by the personal decree of the Home Secretary, was not debated with anyone who might oppose it.

Retirement Pensions

On 27th October 2007 the Financial Times showed that retired people whose pensions fall between about £8000 and £32000 per annum will be worse off under Alistair Darlings proposals on Tax & National Insurance. No prizes for guessing where most peoples pensions probably fall. By contrast if your pension is above about £ 80000 p.a. you will be £ 800 better off. Boy that's a true Labour Government for you.

Democracy?

Did you know that between 1881 and 1975 the 'Guillotine' was used 80 times to curtail debate in the British Parliament. Between 1997 and 2003 it was used 216 times. Contempt for democracy or what?