I post this as an example of the disintegration of our whole government and Gordon Brown in particular.
Gill Hornby in Tuesday’s Telegraph sums it up in writing about how well Obama is succeeding: - -
“cast your mind back to the origins of this mess that is our present government: we didn't actually vote for Gordon Brown as Prime Minister, either. And as he carries doggedly on with his campaign for the "Worst PM of All Time Award" – looks like he's got that one in the bag – it's reasonable to exercise the power of choice that was denied us when Brown took over. So let's just be led by the leader of another country instead. Westminster is collapsing before our very eyes”
We get initiatives by the day , even three different ways of dealing with old age! Almost none of them will happen before an election anyway. The bill referred to below was intended to be draconian in its effects from next week. Now it seems it might make next week but be toothless and all because Brown was in a panic and had to rush!
Christina
GUARDIAN 15.7.09
Gordon Brown backs down over powers of new MPs' expenses watchdog
Patrick Wintour
Gordon Brown has had to abandon plans to make MPs subject to discipline by an external statutory regulator in a desperate attempt to ensure that the bill cleaning up parliament in the wake of the expenses scandal reaches the statute book next week.
He has also had to drop plans to make the House of Lords subject to the external regulator. The former lord chief justice Lord Woolf had strongly attacked the proposals in the Lords.
Jack Straw, the justice secretary, responding to Woolf, said: "There has been a concern that, by setting up a statutory body to oversee MPs' expenses, parliament will be subject to judicial review and infringement by the courts.
"We have tabled amendments to make it clear that the independent parliamentary standards authority cannot discipline MPs in any case where there is a matter of dispute between the MP and the authority, and that the issue must then be referred to the Commons committee on privileges."
Decisions of the privileges committee, made up entirely of MPs, cannot be subject to judicial review, so greatly reducing the extent to which ancient parliamentary privileges will be eroded by this bill.
The prime minister had to make the concessions in the face of a revolt in the Lords where peers regard the plans as constitutionally revolutionary, rushed and designed to assuage a media witchhunt.
Under the new plans, the independent parliamentary commissioner would examine any case of expenses mispayment and could ask an MP to repay any wrongly claimed expenses, but he would no longer have the power to direct an MP to repay. He would instead have to refer the issue to the privileges committee.
Straw also disclosed that a bill gradually removing the remaining 92 hereditary peers from the Lords will be introduced next week. He said he had no plans to push through a bill trying to introduce a largely or wholly elected second chamber by the time of the general election
I’ve already posted on “The disintegration of Gordon Brown” but looking back when was he ever integrated ?
Christina
TELEGRAPH
15.7.09
Afghanistan, and a lesson from history that goes unheeded
Great leaders can see the bigger picture in times of conflict, says Irwin Stelzer
Reading Andrew Roberts's Masters and Commanders is a depressing experience. Not because of any flaws in this beautifully researched and wonderfully told tale of the Masters (Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill) and Commanders (General George Marshall and Field Marshall Sir Alan Brooke, both chiefs of staff) who forged the strategy that won the Second World War. You leave this book unread this summer at peril to your understanding not only of the war, but of the relevance of that history to the policy decisions confronting whatever government British voters decide to trust with their fate at the next general election.
The baseball player Yogi Berra once famously said: "I came to a fork in the road and I took it." Britain's policymakers do not have the luxury of such choice-avoidance: nuclear-armed Pakistan is threatened by Afghanistan-based Taliban jihadists, Russia is on a roll, Islamic fanatics are threatening to continue terror attacks on our countries, British and American citizens are being trained in Afghanistan for suicide missions, Iran's mullahs are close to acquiring nuclear weapons, and North Korea is becoming the nuclear-arms supplier of choice for groups that wish to do us harm. In short, the threats Britain and America face might not be as visible as those presented by Hitler, but are in the long-run as dangerous to the survival of the West, especially because many are posed by non-state actors who do not have a "return address" should we seek to respond to any attack.
President Obama is sufficiently impressed with the danger posed by the Taliban to face down many in his own party and order a troop surge – though that Bushite word never passes the Obama lips – in Afghanistan. If this anti-Iraq war disciple of "soft power" feels the need to put 20,000 more American troops in harm's way, there surely must be good reason for concern.
Roberts's book, combined with a reading of your daily newspaper, make clear the difference in the policy considerations being given weight by the Prime Minister, and those deemed important by Roberts's Masters and Commanders.
Gordon Brown, who ranks the Defence Secretary 21st out of 23 Cabinet members (below the Olympics and Welsh secretaries), has kept the MoD on short rations and turned down Obama's request for more troops because he wants to husband his dwindling financial resources to continue expanding the welfare state. Also, the Government has left the military short of the Chinook helicopters that would lessen reliance on dangerous overland supply routes. Health and education services are to be protected from any "Tory cuts", but a defence review is to be held in lieu of the increase in spending that is clearly needed to match resources with the Prime Minister's stated intention of seeing to it that Pakistan does not fall into the hands of the Taliban.
Worse still, whereas Churchill and Brooke tried to consider the larger picture of how to shape strategy and allocate scarce resources so as to maximise Britain's ability to participate in American policy planning as an important, if not equal partner, Brown prefers to ignore such considerations. If Britain is to separate itself from America over Afghanistan, it should be because the Government believes such a policy will increase its ability to be a major player on the world stage, and to defend the realm – not because it wants to improve its electoral prospects by sheltering public-sector workers from the recession.
Any reader of Roberts's history will come away impressed with several things: the ability of America and Britain to agree on important strategies, often after bitter differences were resolved; the frequency with which the British view trumped the American, especially during the early stages of the war; most of all, the largeness of vision, the ability to see the relation of one decision to the next displayed by the military's political masters.
Not that the politicians were insensitive to the effects of military decisions on their electoral prospects, as Brown quite properly must be. Roosevelt often asked that the dates of planned offensives be pushed up to precede rather than follow key elections, and Churchill's preference for an American commander of the invasion of France might have been due to a desire to avoid blame should the invasion fail. But neither would stint on military resources for political reasons.
On the home fronts, Churchill would not have permitted British citizens to call for attacks on the nation, as some Islamic preachers do. And Roosevelt, who ordered the internment of blameless Japanese-Americans, would not have countenanced visits to Afghanistan for terror-training by Somalis who are US citizens, as the Department for Homeland Security fears is the case.
There is a real question of the willingness of the Prime Minister to think large, to consider the immediate consequences of his decisions, both on the ability to wage what he correctly says is a necessary war, and on Britain's role in the world. As General Guthrie, former chief of the defence staff, says: "It is time for Gordon Brown to put his money where his mouth is."
Churchill broke the country in order to save it. Brown is breaking the country in order to save public-sector spending.
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