Bag carrying
Admins = accidents waiting to happen
We at Westmonster don't want to add to the media frenzy around party funding, added to over the weekend by revelations about Alan Johnson. All we will say on the matter is that this is a result of the law of unintended consequences, and the best thing for all concerned would be to deregulate the system rather than regulate it further. If the machinery of government is grinding to a halt over the matter of monies amounting to less than the price of a second-hand Ford Fiesta, whose interests are these rules serving, other than those of the Fourth Estate?
No, the question we'd like to ask is about the quality or otherwise of politicians' backroom staff. The HMRC fiasco demonstrated how moronic civil servants seem to have become, but the torrent of funding cases linked to "administrative errors", going all the way up to the Gen Sec of the Labour Party, beg the question: who are these muppets? And why are they finding it so hard to get this stuff sorted out? Why should an obviously talented politician like Alan Johnson be removed as an effective legislator for an unknown amount of time while he sorts out a mess presumably created by an incompetent underling?
We've read the Alistair Campbell diaries, and we think they show not how omnipotent and brilliant the man was, but how he rose to the top simply by being not crap. These days, it seems being not crap is enough to get you right to the top of government (otherwise, how do you explain James Purnell?). As government becomes more complicated, it needs more and better backroom staff. It would be an irony indeed if three decades of mismanagement of the education system had led to a generation of imbeciles who can't make government happen. Bring on McDonald's A-levels, we say.
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3 Comments
I think the problem is that these laws were passed explicitly to knobble the Tories, therefore they simply "don't apply" to NuLab. So why should they obey, or even know, them ?
Alan Douglas
Mr Johnson obviously agrees with you that the sum involved is derisory and not worthy of his attention otherwise he would have ensured that it was properly recorded. I do not know what is the relevance of Ford Fiesta values but I do appreciate that 38 weeks basic state pension is in many quarters a trifling matter.
I believe, however, that the muppets in the backroom do what the plonker in the front office tells them to do.
Mmm, I think you are making the mistake of assuming that the headline figure is all there is.
Hain's corruption is hardly small beer. The headline figure alone is over £100k. However, that money wasn't going into his bank account. The purpose of his corruption was to get himself promoted and a pay rise. If you add up the financial value of that including a super pension, you get a corruption worth several million pounds. It makes the maximum £5k punishment for breaking Labour's party funding laws look rather inadaquate.
Until this sort of thing is stamped out by the politicians themselves, the relatively innocent (Johnson, Osborne and even Mandelsson) will continue to be treated in the same way as the blantantly criminal (Aitkin, Levy and Hain).
As Johnson belongs to the same party as most of the accused at the moment, he has a special duty to speak out, rather than treating this as a simply tribal affair in which only Tories can be criminals. Until he does so, he deserves everything he gets.
As for the 'machinery of government grinding to a halt', have you noticed any significant change in government output since these scandals surfaced? No. When Brown talks about 'getting on with government' you can be assured he really means getting on with plotting his PR strategy for the next local/general/regional elections.