A community against bovine TB

Peter Black, in and out of the Assembly, has been campaigning long and hard against the official badger biocide in England. The Welsh Government's more enlightened policy on bovine TB has survived the departure of most of the Liberal Democrats and the arrival of the more huntin' and shootin' inclined members of UKIP and the BREXIT organisation, though there has been pressure on funds in recent years.  Now there is news of a local initiative in Gower which aims to take the battle against TB in both badgers and cattle a stage further.

Gower has been a hot spot for bovine TB. Farmers, local vets and other members of the community have taken up the badger vaccination programme in a big way. Measures to control cattle movement are being considered. It seems to me that Gower, with natural boundaries on most sides, is an ideal area to prove what many of us feel is the way forward in tackling the disease.

Work towards controlling the disease has been given a boost by an inaugural conference at Aberystwyth University, as reported in last week's Country Focus. Leading figures from farming, veterinary science, government and academia came together to look at the latest developments in diagnosing bovine TB - the limitations in the current test, how it might better be used and what innovations are coming down the line. The university's bovine TB Centre of Excellence is generating evidence to help inform TB control.

Glamorgan - once again, a promising start and a sad finish

I confess that after the first few results when we contested the top spot with Lancashire in the second division of the county championship that this was going to be the year when the county reclaimed its proper place in cricket's hierarchy. We should have taken a crushing defeat by the red rose county at Colwyn Bay in our stride. After all, Lancashire has been virtually all-conquering this season. However, there seems to have been an undue effect on the players' self-confidence, not helped by dismal failures in the one-day competitions. Undoubtedly, though, the biggest blow was having to cede Marnus Labuschagne to the Australian tourists. Securing the services of Kraigg Brathwaite was a great coup, but came too late the shore up the soggy middle of the championship season. If we had won one of those matches, this week's weather would have seen to it that we finished higher up the beach than our challengers. (A word of sympathy for Somerset who seemed to be on track to win their first country championship, only to be thwarted at the last.)

 A bright note is the probable return of Labuschagne for the 2020 season. We still need a Waqar Younis capable of clearing out obstinate tail-enders to have a perfect division-winning team, but otherwise things look promising. Now can we please have more than just the one week in Wales' second city?

Johnson and emotion

"Psychopaths and sociopaths share a number of characteristics, including a lack of remorse or empathy for others, a lack of guilt or ability to take responsibility for their actions, a disregard for laws or social conventions, and an inclination to violence. A core feature of both is a deceitful and manipulative nature."  - from Psychopaths versus sociopaths: what is the difference? in The Conversation.

It is very tempting to diagnose prime minister Johnson as a sociopath on the basis of that article, especially as he has made his political way in the world on the basis of charm and a sense of entitlement. His response ("humbug") to Paurla Sherriff's emotional tirade linking the neo-Nazi murder of her friend Jo Cox with the sort of language which was flying around during the last referendum campaign would seem to indicate that. However, it could also be an innate revulsion at any display of emotion, a "stiff upper lip" attitude  ingrained by years of private education. One recalls his attack on Liverpudlians' "wallowing in their victim status" as a result of Hillsborough.

There has to be a Prorogation Act

In the first Urgent Question session to the resumed House of Commons today, the Attorney-General several times unequivocally endorsed the right of the Supreme Court to extend the Common Law. In doing so, he stated that they had created a new principle in relation to prorogations. The trouble is that uncertainty has been created as to when the courts are able to intervene in a prorogation. The thought that occurred to me was: who is to decide what is an exceptional length of time, and does that not depend on circumstances?

The successful legal actions in Edinburgh and in London were a timely example of a process described in this year's Reith Lectures, that of encroachment of lawyers on a field previously and properly occupied by elected representatives. That ground could be recovered by enshrining in statute law not only the generally-held understandings but also their limits. In the present case, Parliament should have the final say on prorogations as it does in calling recesses.

Outsourcing

Now that prorogation never happened, I hope that our MPs raise their heads from the unedifying Brexit disputes for long enough to rescue the Bills referred to in my previous posting.

Parliamentary life goes on. The Institute for Government has published a paper on outsourcing. This seems a good time to take stock as the first flushes of outsourcing under Labour and Conservatives have passed. As the introduction to the paper says:

outsourcing waste collection, cleaning, catering and maintenance services has delivered significant savings and benefits to citizens. Particularly in these areas, bringing services entirely back into government hands could lead to worse and more expensive services for the public. 

The report also shows that consecutive governments have overstated the benefits of outsourcing. Senior politicians regularly claim outsourcing can still deliver 20–30% savings but there is no evidence to support this. It highlights a series of high-profile contract failures – including security at the Olympics, welfare assessments, offender tagging and probation. These contracts have wasted millions of pounds, delivered poor services and undermined public trust. The outsourcing of probation failed on every measure, harming ex-offenders trying to rebuild their lives.

Consecutive governments have outsourced services with no market of good suppliers or in pursuit of unrealistic cost savings – and without a reasonable expectation that companies could deliver efficiencies or improve the quality of services.

The report recommends that the current government must strengthen its commercial skills and capabilities, makes ministers and officials more accountable to the public and improve the evidence base that informs outsourcing decisions.

You want to stand by a dodgy decision? Really?

The BBC in its vox pops continues to find respondents who voted Remain "but now just want to get out", many who voted Leave and who opine that making a clean break with the EU is the only democratic course. Admittedly, they send their young reporters out to areas of West Midlands which recorded the highest percentage of Leave votes, but my personal experience and that of my friends is that the Leave vote is softening. We would like to see the BBC surveying one of those constituencies which voted Leave in 2016 but whose citizens were among the most keen to sign the "Revoke Article 50" petition.

Let us clear this anti-democratic issue for a start. The 2016 was mandatory only because one of the worst prime ministers in UK history said it was. The legislation and the official House of Commons advice stated the traditional legal position, that referendums in this country are only advisory. This country has operated as a representative democracy for nearly one thousand years, on and off. For Johnson and the ERG to claim that a referendum, bedevilled by fake news and voters taking a pop at the government just because it is the government, is more democratic than the deliberations of MPs is too reminiscent of Hitler and Goebbels. By the way, those MPs who voted in favour of the Iraq invasion were quite ready to admit that they were wrong, and that they had been swayed by false evidence. If MPs are big enough to do this, then why not ordinary members of the public, given a further referendum.

The referendum campaign resembled one of those murder trials in certain areas of the States, where the DA fabricates evidence to convict a poor black, who is represented by an advocate who is drunk or incompetent or both. On finding out that their verdict was flawed, do the jurors feel that their decision should stand, even though it was wrong, and the convict should be executed? Fortunately, the States' judicial systems do allow for appeals.

And if intransigent Leavers insist that there should be just one referendum and we must abide by it, I would point out that we had one 1975 which, free of fake news, returned a two-thirds vote in favour of Remaining.

Ratting

The official web-site of the International Churchill Society is pretty certain that one of WSC's more notorious epigrams ("Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat") is at base genuine, even though no direct attribution can be found. It was said to have been coined when the great man returned to the Conservatives after a golden period in the Liberal party when he and Lloyd George, aided by a young civil servant named William Beveridge, laid the foundations of the welfare society. That return was largely seen as opportunism at the time, the Conservatives' fortunes having been restored and the Labour Party's enjoying their first great surge in support at the expense of the Liberals. Indeed, this may have been a genuine spur to Churchill's estrangement from the party and, possibly, personally from Lloyd George. Churchill had a visceral loathing of socialism and could not tolerate the Liberals' co-habitation with Labour.

One cannot see much re-ratting to the Johnson Conservative Party on the part of the new recruits to the Liberal Democrats. There are no remaining traditional Conservatives around whom a revived party could coalesce. The once-proud successor to the party of Disraeli and Macleod has become, as Vince pointed out in his speech in Bournemouth yesterday, the English National Party.

So the reason for our new members' escape (or expulsion) from the "ENP" is clear, but the attraction of the Liberal Democrats is less so. Dr Wollaston was, from early on in her parliamentary career, obviously in the wrong party. Her initial loyal support of the government line on Brexit withered with her chairing of the Health Select Committee and her realisation, as the evidence rolled in, that a break with the rest of the EU would exacerbate the personnel shortages and the supply of some essential medicines. In other respects, her humanity was at odds with the growing power of the ERG. But the last two transfers-in seemed more problematic.

I am one of those nerds who rush off to UK-Elect (to check constituency voting figures) and to theyworkforyou.com (for voting records) when a member of parliament changes status. What I read about Dr Phillip Lee disturbed me. On economic matters, he could kindly be described as a Gladstonian liberal. On civil rights, he stuck too firmly to his party's line. There might be the excuse of cabinet collective responsibility from 2016 on when he was a junior Justice minister, but not before that. He avoided votes on equal marriage and on enforcing Northern Ireland compliance with rights legislation which applies to the rest of the UK. Facebook friends also pointed out his proposed illiberal amendment to the 2014 Immigration Bill which would mandate testing of refugees for HIV. (Note that this was not in itself homophobic; although HIV is in the first world a problem mainly for the gay community, globally - and especially in Africa - it is predominantly a heterosexual disease.)

Sam Gyimah is certainly not homophobic. His voting on personal sexual relations is a model of liberalism, and he was punished by his constituency party in part because of it. On the other hand, he also followed the party line on other touchstone issues, including the repeal of the Human Rights Act.

The party's chief whip in the Commons, Alistair Carmichael, addressed these issues and others as part of the parliamentary report-back section of UK conference last Saturday evening. Alistair's readiness to answer questions, not only on the topic but also on the specific acquisitions, is what one has come to expect of a party dedicated to openness and honesty. There was plenty of razzmatazz when Shaun Woodward and Quentin Davies jumped ship, but I do not recall their conference querying Labour's acceptance of long-standing Conservatives. As to the Conservatives themselves, the last MP to move to them from another party was Reg Prentice, forty-two years ago. Prentice had been deselected by his Labour constituency party for his attempts to combat communist entryism. However, one was reminded yesterday of Sajjad Karim, who moved from the Liberal Democrats to the Conservatives when he found that he would not have the key first place on the Euro list for the English North-West in 2008. He clearly did not manage to make the Conservatives any more liberal as he recounted yesterday as part of the campaign against Islamophobia in the party.

Alistair emphasised that recruitment was a long drawn-out process of frequent conversations. Many more leads are followed than actually come to fruition. Lee had been quizzed about the Immigration Bill amendment. Incidentally, Dr Wollaston also signed this amendment, though she later withdrew her signature. His explanation was that it was only a probing amendment with no expectation that it would ever reach the statute book. Alistair also pointed out a liberal slant to Dr Lee's work at the Home Office in progressing measures to rehabilitate offenders. Finally, things have to be cleared with the local parties.

I had initial doubts, but having heard the chief whip's explanation my worst fears have been allayed. There are clearly still deviations from the Lib Dem norm, but that is only to be expected as the parliamentary party grows and they do not go to the heart of what we stand for. Certainly, I am far happier about these latest developments than I was about Emma Nicholson's "ratting", which seems to have been occasioned solely by the then Conservative Party's institutional misogyny. This has improved and I note that Baroness Nicholson quietly slipped back to her traditional home three years ago.

The natural political progression is from radical to conservative. Could our new recruits genuinely feel more liberal as they have matured politically? Well, there is at least one outstanding example of a politician seeing the light. When he first entered politics, John Bercow was a devotee of the Monday Club, that swivel-eyed collection of hangers, floggers and let's-beat-the-woggers. Now, he is virtually indistinguishable from a social democrat. As those who felt they were misfits in other parties adjust to their new Liberal Democrat family, I trust that our family values will be steadily absorbed.

Not dead yet

Apologies to anybody who still reads my stuff (and I include the Labour councillors who I am sure still check up on me) for the gap in posting since Sunday. What happened was that a cold that I thought I had got over was replaced on Monday by a ferocious member of the breed which practically incapacitated me. All the usual symptoms were telescoped into 24 hours and it just so happened that the asthma inhalers were near the end of their life so that I had difficulty managing the congestion when I did start to recover. I did manage a few Facebook postings, but those required less mental effort than a piece for the blog. However, normal service will shortly be resumed.

The Liberal Democrat federal conference in Bournemouth, as relayed in full by the BBC (hurrah!) offered some relief. It has also provoked a backlash by Johnson, Corbyn and Foster who clearly see burying their differences over the Barnier withdrawal proposals as more palatable than entering a general election in which all their parties will lose seats. Expect some coded messages from Labour's conference that Boris Johnson has made concessions to Jeremy Corbyn over the withdrawal terms, and complementary indications from Manchester - always assuming that the prorogation remains lawful and that Speaker Bercow does not recall parliament first.

Sterling has already risen a few points against most other currencies on the basis of rumours that a deal has come closer. An orderly withdrawal may be almost as bad as a clean break for the British in the long term, but it would provide certainty and markets do not like uncertainty.

The big winner could be Boris Johnson. He will be seen to have succeeded where others have failed. If Parliament approves the deal, the immediate pain of withdrawal will be deferred by a transition period which could last as long as three years. He will no doubt bring back into the fold Conservatives who went Independent of their own accord or were expelled. It may not restore technically his majority, but it will suffice for all practical purposes. It will take off the pressure for an immediate general election.

That parliamentary approval is his biggest hurdle. It is unlikely that the Commons would throw out the deal on principle (much as most Remainers would like MPs to do so) but it is virtually certain that they would insist on a confirmatory referendum.