Appropriate ingredients

I would not normally comment on Royal events (and I am sorry to see that the The Independent has relaxed its stance), but this news item centres on beer. Windsor Knot, an ale brewed especially for the current round of royal nuptials, uses only English Invicta hops. Surely, it would be appropriate to use an American variety, as so many British ales do already? The combination of British barley and American hops would be good for celebrating an Anglo-American union. I see Cascade and Crystal on craft beer labels everywhere.

But perhaps something more out of the ordinary is required. How about the El Dorado which Prince Harry has struck? Or, for a lager-style, Liberty which I see is descended from German stock?

Would we have done as well without Brexit?

It seems that the party's determined support for the EU has come to its rescue, erasing memories of a broken promise by former LD ministers. Time was, Liberals would have taken a generation to recover from a reverse on the scale of 2015. Now we look like making gains in local authority elections in large parts of England on a scale we have not seen since before the coalition.

Anyway, good luck to all my friends and colleagues who are aiming to gain or retain council seats in England in the campaigns which are now on the final lap, hitting the tape next Thursday, May 3rd.

House of Lords: what Conservatives said then

Some selected views of the unelected house during the Lords Reform discussions of 2011:

Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con): I must confess that I think the House of Lords has done a pretty good job over the past 100 years, and I am glad that the Deputy Prime Minister [Nick Clegg] acknowledges that it does, indeed, do a good job.

Conor Burns (Bournemouth West) (Con): May I begin by saying to the Deputy Prime Minister, who concluded his remarks by saying that no one is in favour of the status quo, that I am in favour of the status quo, as I know many Conservative Members are?

Oliver Heald (North East Hertfordshire) (Con): A respectable case can be made that the House of Lords works well. In recent years, we have had the issues of 90 days’ detention, attacks on jury trials and the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006, which would have given Ministers the chance to overturn laws just by signing an order. On those occasions, the Lords came to the rescue of the country and did the right thing. It is an excellent revising Chamber and it does not try to rival what we do here. 

Andrew Griffiths (Con): The House of Lords is there to improve the legislation that we send to it. It is a revising Chamber. It is there to scrutinise the work that we do.

Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con): The whole point is that in the upper House there are not only experts but people who can make changes to Bills that would be whipped out of existence if they were introduced in the lower House.

Mr Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con): I contend that what we have in the House of Lords is not so very bad. It reflects our history and traditions and I would have thought that, as Conservatives, that is what we are about. We are about preserving what is best in our history and I very much hope that as this debate proceeds to its final conclusion, there will be a blocking mechanism from the old left and the old right to throw this proposal into the dustbin of history, where I believe it belongs.

Mr David Ruffley (Bury St Edmunds) (Con): We fumble with the rich and delicate texture of our constitution at our peril, and we should beware the law of unintended consequences.

Jesse Norman (Hereford and South Herefordshire) (Con):  The House of Lords is an imperfect institution, as even its own Members concede. Its powers, composition and legitimacy have all come in for severe criticism over the years from different parts of the spectrum, but I am at a loss as to why anyone should want a Lords that was more party political, less expert and more expensive than it currently is. There is widespread public distrust in elected politicians, but this measure serves only to aggravate that distrust when we should be doing everything that we can to restore it.

- and now, after their Lordships have revised the EU Withdrawal Bill:

"BERNARD JENKIN Anti-Brexit Lords are pitting Parliament against the people" (The Sun, 21st April 2018)

(Conor Burns is a ministerial bag-carrier and Andrew Griffiths is now small business minister. Both presumably have to be diplomatic. Oliver Heald voted against the government in favour of giving parliament a final say on the terms of any deal with the EU27, so may be in sympathy with their lordships.)

Edward Leigh: Unelected peers voting against the people to keep us as half-in-half-out colony of the EU. Nein danke!

(David Ruffley had to resign the House in disgrace. I cannot yet find a reaction from Jesse Norman to the process in the Lords.)

Peers are "playing with fire" by trying to thwart Brexit and could end up "burning down" the House of Lords, Jacob Rees-Mogg has warned. (To be fair to Mr Rees-Mogg, in 2011 he felt that the HoL was already too powerful and his opposition to the Lords Reform Bill was because the Bill would make the Peers more powerful.)

More contributions are welcome - FHL

Hardly the Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation

The revelations about the security services vetting BBC employees are chilling. (Thanks to Mr Dillow and Ms Rigg for putting me on to them.) They must cast a long shadow. Although anti-communist* (and fellow-traveller) vetting was abandoned almost thirty years ago, many of the young men (usually) recruited in the 1970s. '80s and even '90s, will have moved on to senior and middle management. As Chris Dillow writes:

The men who were selected as “sound” in the 70s and 80s hired the senior people who work there today. And they are likely to have had a bias towards people like themselves - “sound” people. Path dependence thus generates a bias against subversives even if overt vetting has ended.

Is it any surprise that the BBC gives inordinate coverage to reactionary organisations like UKIP or, before them, the Referendum Party?

* The security services were not so worried about those with fascist tendencies, it seems. That is presumably how Guy Burgess became a BBC producer, working the same trick as with MI6, cloaking his communist sympathies behind membership of a pro-fascist club.

Millicent (Garrett) Fawcett statue unveiled

As I write this, a statue of one of the stalwarts of the women's suffrage movement is being unveiled in Parliament Square, Westminster. Clearly, the statuary there reflects politics and civil power, but it would be good to have in another public place in London a statue of the oldest Garrett sister, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson who, so far as I can see, is commemorated in the capital only by a blue plaque and the name of a school.

A short break

I have a few posts on the stocks, but they need to be worked on and further researched. So posting will be light this week.

Repatriation

You do not need to stray far from the pages of the Guardian, or switch from BBC-News which has just caught up with that journal's crusade, to learn of many members of the Windrush generation and  their children who have already been sent back to the West Indies or have been under threat. These people have contributed an adult's life time of work, paying UK taxes, in some cases past the normal retiring age. Even after retirement, they must have contributed to cohesion of family and the wider community.

Perhaps Mrs May should look instead at those whose financial manipulations have not been helpful to this country or have overseen unlawful actions or both. In the latter category I would place Jes Staley, born in Boston, Massachusetts, whose investment expertise may have done much for Barclays, but whose pursuit of a whistle-blower was unethical as well as illegal.

His predecessor, Bob Diamond (born Concord, Massachusetts), implicated in the Libor rate-fixing scandal, can still come and go as he pleases. Indeed, he is now boss of an Africa-orientated investment vehicle listed in London.

This is before one gets to Russian plutocrats.

Immigration

(Baroness) Sally Hamwee posted on Liberal Democrat Voice outlining her vision of a Liberal Democrat policy for immigration.