Recall

I was too optimistic yesterday in welcoming the promise in the Queen's Speech  of  "right to recall". Details filtering out reveal that the Bill will be much watered-down from what Liberal Democrats and radical Conservatives hoped for before the 2010 election. (I only hope that the "pubco" Bill doesn't also turn out to be as flat as last year's swipes.)

The Independent, surely swimming against the tide of public opinion, is against giving constituencies the right to recall members of parliament who have turned out to be corrupt. Therefore, it is a measure of the feebleness of the Bill that yesterday's leader column praised it (with faint damns). The writer says: "A strong recall power, of the kind favoured by Goldsmith [Zac Goldsmith, Conservative MP for Richmond Park], would mean that, no sooner had the result of a close election been declared, the political opponents of the successful candidate could start to look for excuses to collect signatures for a petition to demand a by-election. Imagine how such a power might be used by a minority in any constituency". Goldsmith's response is that a reasonable threshold (he is in favour of 20% of the electorate) would deter frivolous recall petitions. This is supported by wikipedia's summary.

It is important to give people this extra power in a democratic state. Steve Shaw of Unlock Democracy wrote in 2011:

The Power Inquiry of 2006 showed evidence that over three-quarters of people felt they had little or no power between elections, and that 56 per cent of people consider that they have no say in what the government does.

Parliament is meant to hold the government to account. Yet currently the reverse happens: party leaders and whips control how MPs vote and the Parliamentary legislative timetable.

Citizens have no way to hold their MPs to account. General elections are almost never about voting for your MP, but rather about voting for the next government and based on the current government’s record.

Introducing recall: the power for voters to remove their MP, would be very effective at reversing this in a way unlike any other proposed reform. It would mean MPs are truly held to account and thus make MPs more responsive to their voters and less so to the government, political party leaders and whips.

Zac Goldsmith, feeling betrayed by the Conservative leadership and traduced by Nick Clegg, posts here.

The Westminster sausage-machine

We should be grateful that Labour speakers in the early exchanges on the Queen's Speech debate did not resort to the "zombie government" rhetoric which has featured so strongly during the recess. The most notable culprit is the shadow Leader of the House, who seems convinced that the Commons is doing its work only if it is churning out legislation throughout its working hours (and preferably creating new imprisonable offences while it is at it). Of course, the full - probably too full - programme of Bills has stemmed the criticism. Some of these are overdue and worthwhile, like the recall and pubco legislation.

But this interchange on Wednesday:

Thomas Docherty (Dunfermline and West Fife) (Lab): On a point of order, Mr Speaker. This morning, the Downing street press office made available to the British and, indeed, international press a 100-plus page document that sets out in great detail every item in the Queen’s Speech, but Downing street is not making it available to Members of Parliament and it is not in the Vote Office. Is there anything you could do, Mr Speaker, to bring to the urgent attention of Downing street office holders the need to share the information with Parliament?

Mr Speaker: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his point of order. If Ministers have prepared material which they feel would be helpful in understanding the full import of the Queen’s Speech, I have no doubt they would wish to share it with hon. and right hon. Members as soon as possible.

illustrated that party managers and spin-doctors still treat the debating chamber with contempt. Speaker Bercow stands up for ordinary members so far as he is able, and has been subject to sniping from the Conservative side in part for it. However, it does require some sacrifices of media publicity by the leaders of the coalition to the benefit of the House as a whole. This will be difficult for David Cameron and Danny Alexander whose previous careers were in public relations. Restraint from the front bench of the Labour Party would be welcome, too.

Parliament is more than a machine for producing legislation - though Private Members' Bills have also been shamefully deprived of time in recent years. The great parliamentary speeches and interchanges of this generation which come to mind have been occasioned by self-standing motions or ministerial statements - the latter showing a welcome increase during this parliament. My one exception is the speech by Stephen Dorrell in favour of Lord's Reform, ironically in support of a Bill which the coalition was unwilling to assign proper parliamentary time for scrutiny. (It will no doubt be said during next year's election campaign that this or that party voted against the Lords Reform Bill. The truth is that each major party in the Commons voted in favour of the Bill; it was only the dispute between the two front benches over time allocation which prevented its proceeding.)

Peter Oborne in the Telegraph wrote that this government may rank with the greatest. It was certainly a game-changer, showing that continental-style coalitions can, even in the UK's antiquated system, be efficient and stable. Otherwise, I would say its legacy will be mixed. Steve Webb's pension improvements will stand for a long time. The shift back from casino capitalism to an industrial base for the economy will support us through the next hard times. There are many improvements which have received virtually no public recognition, like the Green Investment Bank, which will actually have some power thanks to Liberal Democrats. But then welcome support for pensioners and low-paid workers were counter-balanced by mean attacks on benefits (though these would have been even meaner without the Liberal Democrats in government) and may easily be reversed by future governments. Nothing has been done about the scandal of brass-plate companies through which UK money is able to flow abroad without the taxman being able to put his hands on it. The answer to the scandal of fixed-odds betting terminals is not to tax them (which merely makes them more attractive to the Treasury) but to repeal Labour's Gambling Act 2005.

For me, the great changes introduced in 2010 relate to the working of parliament. Cabinets may no longer appoint chairs of select committees which scrutinise among other things government decisions. Time is set aside for debates on matters decided by ordinary members, through the medium of the Back Bench Business Committee presided over assiduously by Natascha Engel. There are still improvements to be made and evidence (as above) that the executive is grabbing back power.

The signs are that there will be another hung parliament in 2015 or, if one party has a majority, it will be a slim one. This could be an arena in which the back-bench gladiators are able to reassert themselves and strike a blow against the executive and the party machines and for the people who put them there.

[Later: for a more informed comment, read Lord Tyler here.]

Greening the film industry

Hollywood has been notoriously spendthrift and wasteful. The reuse of sets and costumes from Cleopatra by Carry on Cleo was a notable example of a British company recycling what would otherwise have been simply burnt or dumped. It is therefore satisfying to learn from The Film Programme that this has now been regularised. There is also a http://www.ukgreenfilmfestival.org/Green Film Festival running until 8th June.

Stefan Zweig: ethnicity is not enough

Three statements from a recent "Open Book" edition surprised me: first, that nobody in the UK has heard of Stefan Zweig; second, that his work was "accessible"; and third, that he did not, in his writings, tackle Nazism head-on.

In fact, Zweig's name has come up more frequently in Richard Strauss's 150th anniversary year, as the composer famously refused  under pressure from the Nazi authorities  to remove his Jewish librettist's name from the programme for "Die Schweigsame Frau". But it is as a supreme exponent of the novella - the long short story - that Zweig's reputation rests. I cannot believe that any Briton who is interested in the arts at all has not come across the story of the art collector now blind who can describe his etchings from memory to a visitor; "The Royal Game" (Schachnovelle), [Genfer See] or even Max Ophuls' film "Letter from an Unknown Woman" (from Brief einer Unbekannten) This is before Wes Anderson's hat-tip.

As to the easy-to-read prose, I suggest that this is down to the English translation. My recollection of tackling "Buchmendel" for A-levels in the 1950s is that Zweig makes maximum use of gender in the German language to build long but unambiguous sentences from multiple subordinate clauses. There is a particular extended metaphor comparing the retrieval of old memories to fishing in deep, dark oceans which I had hoped to find on the web - the text of the metaphor, that is, not the oceans. (You can see how it is easier in the German language to link to the female Metapher rather than to the plural oceans.) I didn't find that one, but I did find this description of memory destruction (memory is clearly an abiding interest of Zweig) in Ken Frieden's critique of Buchmendel:
in dem phantastischen Kunstbau seines Gedächtnisses mußte irgendein
Pfeiler eingestürzt und das ganze Gefüge in Unordnung geraten sein:
denn so zart is ja unser Gehirn, dies aus subtilster Substanz gestaltete
Schaltwerk, dies feinmechanische Präzisionsinstrument unseres Wissens
zusammengestimmt, daß ein gestautes Aderchen, ein erschütterter
Nerv, eine ermüdete Zelle, daß ein solches verschobenes Molekül schon
zureicht, um die herrlich umfassendste, die sphärische Harmonie eines
Geistes zum Verstummen zu bringen.

(in the fantastic artistic frame of his memory some pillar must have collapsed
and left the entire structure in disorder; for our mind is so delicately
tuned - this circuitry of subtlest materials, this fine, mechanical,
precision instrument of our knowing - that an obstructed vein, a convulsed
nerve. a worn-out cell, or a misplaced molecule suffices, in order
to silence even the masterful, most comprehensive, harmony of the spirit.)

I am grateful to the Professor Frieden's commentary for the literal translation, which would be beyond me these days, but you don't need to read German to take the point: the example is just part of one sentence.

The third criticism has more substance. "Buchmendel" is suffused with Jewishness - boys at Oldershaw Grammar were grateful to our part-Jewish German master for explaining a bit of Yiddish which had escaped the clearly Anglo-Saxon editor of our set text - but Zweig's dream was of a world at peace, beyond religious and racist affiliations. Part of his dream was of a united Europe, the first signs of which he would have seen if he had not given up on life just as the war was turning against the Nazis.

There is more here.

Boris Lashes Mexico With Intense Rainfall and Threatens to Trigger Deadly Landslides

This Boris is a tropical storm: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/imageo/2014/06/03/tropical-storm-boris-lashes-mexico-intense-rainfall/

Potty law

http://www.southwales-eveningpost.co.uk/Aberavon-councillor-Mark-Jones-charged-cannabis/story-21164603-detail/story.html refers. Presumably as a precaution, in addition to his suspension from the Welsh Labour Party, Mark Jones has been removed from all Neath Port Talbot committees except for Planning.

The court will judge on the facts of the case, but whether he is innocent or guilty, Councillor Jones has fallen foul of a law which is in my opinion and of others with more medical knowledge than myself is outdated.

Liberal Democrat way forward

John Pugh MP writes:

Nick Clegg has said that we must and indeed should get the credit for the economic recovery and the economic competence it implies. I agree but even if successful, it’s still not enough.

Voters by and large don’t vote in gratitude. Ask the 1,700 or so Lib Dem councillors who have lost since 2011! If the nation didn’t vote for Winston Churchill for winning the war, they won’t vote for Nick Clegg just because they think he saved the economy. Those who voted UKIP last week didn’t do so because UKIP had done something for them.

My belief is that we need to fill out the anodyne “Strong Economy and Fairer Society” and start talking more about long-term, growing social inequality and declining social cohesion. Social inequality of course implies inequality in power as well as in wealth. I share the current concern over this with such obvious lefties as the Governor of the Bank of England, the Pope and my good friend Norman Lamb - all of whom have spoken out recently about it. The coalition story in addressing social inequality is much better than people currently credit.

Whether or no Nick Clegg remains as party leader - and the signs are that the party on the whole feels that now is not the time for a potentially divisive leadership contest - Liberal Democrat ministers must surely bend their minds to the "fairness" aspect of the slogan quoted by John Pugh.

It's taken until now ...

... and in the most "westernised" nation in Africa, but the continent now has its first openly gay MP. He is naturally a member of South Africa's liberal party, the Democratic Alliance. Liberal International reports:

Speaking after he was sworn in to office, Zakhele Mbhele MP, said that he hopes his election will inspire others from the LGBT community to seek public office. Mr Mbhele said: “One of the most damaging things about homophobia is its destructive effect on a young LGBT person’s self-esteem. That was certainly one of the issues I grappled with when I was coming to terms with my sexuality in my teen years. Having more openly gay achievers in society can counter that damage by giving young LGBT people role models to inspire them to build their self-confidence and work ambitiously to achieve their dreams.”