Sadly I am taking a blogging break while I grab some much needed sun, sea and sand (possibly simultaneously) until Sunday 8th November.  In the meantime, I leave you with a set of predictions for the 10 things that will probably NOT happen while I’m away:

1. The collective IQ of postal workers suddenly breaks into double figures, and they subsequently come to the realisation that every day that they spend on strike makes it less likely that they will actually have a job to return to.

2. Gordon Brown will go to work one morning and tell everyone that he’s just remembered how much Tony Blair hates him and how much effort Tony Blair put into holding back his political career for over a decade, and has thus decided to withdraw his support for Blair’s candidacy as EU President.

3. Nadine Dorries declares that actually she wasn’t that offended by Smeargate after all, and hands over the damages that Damien McBride paid her to a pro-abortion campaigning group.

4. Under a cloud of confusion, Sir Christopher Kelly brings an abrupt halt to his investigation into MPs expenses.  It emerges several days later that he and his family have recently moved into their very own second home with the added promise of duck ponds and unlimited access to porn, all courtesy of Parliament.

5. Nick Griffin sends out a press release stating that he will never appear again on Question Time because he is worried that he might say something that could “hurt other people’s feelings”.  He also announces that he has a black friend.

6. Watford Council decide to overturn their own decision to ban parents from their children’s playgrounds after they realised that the ban won’t do anything to stop paedophiles and will “cause unnecessary inconvenience to so many law-abiding parents”.

7. An increasing number of earthquakes are reported around the world, arousing suspicion that Gordon Brown’s claim that the world is going to end in 50-odd days after the Copenhagen conference on climate change is in fact true and the apolocalypse is now inevitable.

8. The Territorial Army storm Downing Street and take Gordon Brown’s family hostage as a reminder that they are still perfectly capable of doing a good job provided that the Government doesn’t screw them over.

9. President Obama tells the media that he “can no longer be arsed” with healthcare reforms.

10. Our G7 partners fire their entire public sector workforce – thereby sending unemployment through the roof, crippling GDP and triggering nationwide riots - because they felt so guilty that the UK is the only G7 nation not to have emerged from recession and wanted to give us a chance to catch up.

I will, of course, be seeing how accurate these predictions prove to be when I return.

Take care

A.Tory

2. Raedwald reckons public sector fat cats are quivering in their boots right now.

3. Lord Elvis suspects that Labour and the Lib Dems are two cheeks on the same arse.

4. The Adam Smith Institute claims that trade unions want to ban jobs.

5. Obsidian declares that Mandelson is on course for an epic own goal.

- Aaron McLear, Governor Schwarzenegger’s press secretary, trying to play down an email Schwarzenegger sent to one of San Francisco’s Democratic Assemblymen.  At first sight, the message that Schwarzenegger sent to Tom Ammiano, explaining why he’d vetoed a boring bill about financing the city’s port, seems straightforward enough.  However, a vertical reading of the first left-hand letter in each of the seven lines of the main body of the email suggests that the Governor was passing on an altogether less statesmanlike message.  The mathematical probability of the phrase seen below appearing by chance is about 8,031,810,176 to one. (full story HERE)

H/T Mr Eugenides for the image

Having presumably given up on any short-term leadership ambitions, you are now rejoining the fold by announcing that local councils are to get the power to seize the assets of minor offenders.  Home Office claims that seizing “ill-gotten gains” are a key part of the fight against all kinds of crime is misleading and deliberately designed to silence doubters of what is without question another brutal assault on our civil liberties.

Under this new move, ‘Accredited Financial Investigators’ – which include customs officers, Department of Work and Pensions investigators, trading standards and other local authority workers - are to be given the power to seize assets worth more than £1,000 ahead of a court ruling on their origin and to execute search warrants. At the moment, these powers are executed on the investigators’ behalf by police officers.  A spokeswoman said the powers would not be used against people in arrears on their council tax or parking fines, as has been reported. She said: “We are determined to ensure criminals do not profit by breaking the law. Seizing ill-gotten gains is a key part of the fight against criminals — whether it is from small-time offences or organised crime. Accredited Financial Investigators have played an integral role in the recovery of criminal assets since the Proceeds of Crime Act was introduced in 2003, they are fully trained and their powers carefully controlled in law. By giving them some new powers we are extending the fight against crime and freeing up valuable police time.”  Oh, how noble of you.  Thankfully, the backlash against your plans was immediate and poignant. 

Paul McKeever, of the Police Federation, said: “The Proceeds of Crime Act is a very powerful tool in the hands of the police and police-related agencies and it shouldn’t be treated lightly.”  He added that there was a “behind-the-scenes creep of powers occurring” and the public “would want such very intrusive powers to be kept in the hands of warranted officers and other law enforcement bodies which are vetted to a very high standard rather than given to local councils”.  Too bloody right.  Law enforcement is the concern of the police and a select few other individuals, not some pen-pusher from the local council.  ‘Power creep’ is a wonderful way of describing this sop to local authorities, who should have no right to enter people’s homes.  To think that some insignificant little council worker could execute a police search warrant is truly chilling.  Far be it for me to agree with Caroline Spelman on a regular basis, today I will make an exception.  She rightly pointed out that ”surveillance laws designed to tackle terror and serious crime have been routinely abused and over-used by town hall officials” to snoop on local residents and prosecute them for minor offences that have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.  Furthermore, when the Proceeds of Crime Act was introduced it was meant to be used to deprive major organised criminals of their lavish lifestyles, so I hardly think it is appropriate to extend such far-reaching powers to unaccountable jobsworths in the local council.

2. Mr Eugenides watches the Scottish government try to revamp a turd.

3. They Are Joking prays that President Klaus stands firm.

4. John Ward explains why the Financial Times is really struggling.

5. Obselete discovers the real reason behind the Blair presidency.

- Nick Clegg, responding to the letter he received from the Speaker John Bercow in which Bercow turned down his request to widen the scope of the audit of MPs expenses amid concerns that some of worst abusers of Commons allowances – including those who ‘flipped’ their second homes and avoided capital gains tax – are escaping punishment.   Bercow, who was elected as Michael Martin’s replacement after claiming he was the right candidate to clean up Parliament, has admitted to personally using a legal loophole to avoid paying capital gains tax. Now he has ruled against broadening the Legg inquiry, claiming such an investigation would take too long.  The decision was approved by the Members Estimates Committee, a group of senior MPs including Harriet Harman and her shadow George Young. (full story HERE)

After Sir Thomas Legg made a complete hash of approaching the issue of MP expenses a couple of weeks ago, I was hoping for something a bit more solid, respectable and effective from yourself.  Details of your report on reforming MP expenses have emerged after you discussed them in Parliament for the first time yesterday, and it is quite clear that you have got it all wrong on the issues of MPs second homes and MPs employing family members.

Let’s deal with second homes first, as this has proved to be the most controversial allowance.  You are proposing to ban MPs from claiming the cost of mortgage interest payments on second homes and will recommend that MPs rent second homes in future.  What an unbelievably stupid idea.  Do you have any idea how much it costs to rent a home in London?  Didn’t you think that it might be a good idea to check this first before coming out with such a daft proposal?  Even a cursory glance at a property site will show that it is extremely hard to find a property for less than £1,500-£2,000 a month, yet you have not given any indication of whether MPs will be limited by any sort of renting budget.  The last thing we need is a free-for-all when it comes to MPs renting homes at our expense and the potential for abuse would be enormous unless this is carefully controlled.  Furthermore, if MPs have to rent houses they could easily rack up bills of £25,000+ a year, which could and should have been used by Parliament to buy furnished properties (preferably flats) in London and allocated to MPs after each election, thereby removing the need for any expenses as MPs would each have a permanent base and the John Lewis list could be torn up once and for all.

Next comes the recommendation that MPs will not be able to employ family members.  There is obviously an argument to say that in a fair and open selection process, it is unlikely that MPs’ wives or indeed husbands would be top of the pile for every job in a Parliamentary office.  However, unions representing Commons staff say they are already considering legal action as such a move may amount to constructive dismissal and be discriminatory.  I can see no possible defence against such claims, because firing someone simply on the basis that they are related to their employer is illegal and rightly so.  Alternatively, you could ban any new family members from being employed after your report is published, but even then you risk legal action on the basis of discrimination.  Obviously the Derek Conway incident was disgraceful as he just handed thousands of pounds to his son for supposedly temporary work, but this kind of nonsense could be stopped by having Parliament employ staff and deal with contracts rather than MPs, who still exercise complete control over who works for them.  If researchers, secretaries and even interns were all allocated from an anonymous pool for each party’s MPs, there would be no need to ban family members nor would there be any need for staff allowances.

Your proposals are both ill-conceived and likely to complicate matters even further.  If Parliament bought permanent accommodation for MPs in London and allocated staff to MPs on an anonymous basis, every MP would have somewhere to live in the capital, every MP would have the staff they require to do their job, the need for second homes and staff expenses would be thrown out the window and Parliament could start to rebuild some of the moral authority that it has pissed away in recent months and years.  Your reforms will apparently be phased in over five years to appease MPs concerned that their existing arrangements might be endangered, but this merely distracts from the fact that your reforms will do little, if anything, to help Parliament get back on its feet.

Yours in frustration,

A.Tory

2. Diary of a Geek wants eco campaigners to become as socially-unacceptable as wife-beaters.

3. Ambush Predator tells Margaret Hodge, the culture minister, to start living in the real world.

4. Tory Politico thinks Peter Mandelson might be briefing against Brown.

5. The Daily Maybe suspects that Norfolk Tories are a bunch of backwards a***holes.

- Lord Stern, a government adviser on global warming, who believes that people should give up eating meat to halt climate change.  The author of the 2006 Stern Review on the cost of tackling global warming predicts that eating meat could in the future become as socially unacceptable as drink driving.

To be honest I had never heard your name before I read the Guardian yesterday.  According to their investigation, you are in overall command of Association of Chief Police Officers’ (ACPO) “domestic extremism” remit.  This rather shadowy organisation raises a huge number of questions about what the role of the police is and whether it is acceptable to try and prevent crime in a very ‘Minority Report’ fashion.

£9 million a year is allegedly spent gathering the personal details of thousands of “domestic extremists” who attend political meetings and protests, and storing their data on a network of nationwide intelligence databases.  Detailed information about campaigners is stored on a number of overlapping IT systems, even if they have not committed a crime.  Senior officers say ‘domestic extremism’, a term coined by police that has no legal basis, can include activists suspected of minor public order offences such as peaceful direct action and civil disobedience.  Three national police units responsible for combating domestic extremism are run by the “terrorism and allied matters” committee of the ACPO, and their role includes deploying surveillance teams at protests, rallies and public meetings, creating detailed files on individual protesters who are searchable by name, tracking vehicles associated with protestors and monitoring their movements at protests, recording footage and photographs of campaigners and using ’spotter cards’ to identify target individuals who police believe are at risk of becoming involved in domestic extremism.

This infrastructure was set up with the backing of the Home Office to combat animal rights activists who were committing serious crimes. Senior officers concede the criminal activity associated with these groups has receded, but the units dealing with domestic extremism have expanded their remit to incorporate campaign groups across the political spectrum.  The three police units divide their work into four categories of domestic extremism: animal rights campaigns; far-right groups such as the English Defence League; “extreme leftwing” protest groups, including anti-war campaigners; and “environmental extremism” such as Climate Camp and Plane Stupid campaigns.  You claim that people who find themselves on the databases “should not worry at all”, but refused to disclose how many names were on the national database (although you estimated that you have files on thousands of people).  As well as photographs, you said surveillance officers noted down ‘harmless information’ about people’s attendance at demonstrations and this information was fed into the national database.

There is a part of me that thinks it’s blatantly obvious that the police should engage in activities that might help prevent crime before it happens.  There are several groups in society who are already ’monitored’ to some extent (in theory, at least) , such as ex-offenders, people with severe mental health problems and those who might threaten national security.  The question is does the same logic extend to ‘domestic extremism’, which includes individuals as dangerous as Plane Stupid?  As I understand it, some of the people on the database have committed minor offences in the past and the police insist they are just monitoring the minority who could damage property or commit aggravated trespass. You went on to argue that there are safeguards to protect the human rights of individuals on the database and, although it was possible that protesters with no criminal record were on the databases, police would have to give a justified reason. ”Just because you have no criminal record does not mean that you are not of interest to the police,” you said. “Everyone who has got a criminal record did not have one once.”  And the penny drops.  Using surveillance to make sure that you do not miss crimes being committed and can identify offenders at the earliest possible moment is one thing – using it to create a database of innocent people in case they commit a crime at some point in future, even if there is no evidence they pose a risk, is surely a step too far.

Yours sincerely,

A.Tory