This week has seen 2 dominant politicians depart and 1 make the same sort of dangerous mistakes. The first was Silvio Berlusconi. Much like Boris he presented himself as a disruptor, there to shake up the system for the people’s benefit. This was a big fat lie. Berlusconi was a product of the sleazy clientilismo embedded in Italian politics since WW2. It was how he made his money; its collapse as a result of ferocious magistrates threatened his gains. He…
It is quite something for a government to challenge via judicial review the use of legal powers exercised by an inquiry it set up, run by a judge it appointed, with terms of reference it drafted. Why? Two broad reasons: (1) The need not to impede good governance (do stop laughing) by disclosing Ministerial/civil service communications which the government thinks irrelevant. (2) Concerns about personal communications and the private life of governmental witnesses. This latter point features quite strongly in…
There were two Braverman statements on Monday in the Commons. Only one of them really matters and it is not the one which has so exercised the commentariat. It is the Home Office’s formal response to the final report of IICSA and its 20 recommendations for an effective and comprehensive system for the protection of children from what the inquiry chair described as a “national epidemic” of abuse. The Inquiry was set up in March 2015 by Mrs May following…
Now that the legal stand-off between Ms Cherry and The Stand has been resolved with the latter accepting that it had unlawfully discriminated and reinstating the event, it is worth considering what this issue tells us about attitudes to free speech and Equality Act rights. First – and very importantly – it goes without saying that if a venue discriminates against someone with views wholly opposed to Ms Cherry’s (a transgender writer, say) on the basis that some staff disapproved…
It is again time to review what the “intellectually challenged from the neck up” party (© Joanna Cherry) – or the SNP as it is usually known – is up to. Having finally found an auditor (though, rather embarrassingly for a pro-independence party, there was not one auditor anywhere in Scotland willing or able to take on the job) the Holyrood government has decided to reform the Scottish criminal justice system. In one of his previous roles as Justice Minister,…
Remember the De Lorean fiasco? To provide jobs in Northern Ireland, the then Tory government paid the bouffant-haired car designer to set up his factory there. It collapsed a few years later amidst missing money and fraud. Arthur Andersen, the auditors, who admitted missing obvious fraud signs, were banned from government work and sued. It was only when Blair won that the ban on AA was lifted and a risible settlement agreed. (Doubtless entirely coincidentally, AA had provided free advice…
Is Simon Case the new Cressida Dick? The Civil Service has not been declared institutionally misogynist, racist or homophobic. Nor institutionally corrupt. But it has not been well led in recent years. Had Jeremy Heywood lived, he would have had serious questions to answer about the Greensill affair, though it is fair to note that he may have had good answers. Still, that whole episode does not reflect well on anyone involved: not the civil service nor the politicians nor…
Scotland is fast becoming to British politics what Ireland was in the 19th century: a country with endless, seemingly unresolvable, political grievances and issues defying easy answers. It has voted against independence but since 2007 has voted into power a party whose raison d’être this is. The current travails (today’s development a whistleblower about SNP finances claiming threats by the police, whose chief retired earlier than expected shortly before Sturgeon announced her resignation) are what almost inevitably happen when a…