Britannia Radio

Simon Heffer is a perplexing and chameleon-like writer.  He has undoubtedly toned down the worst of his OTT rants recently as the full horror of the disintegration of our country becomes apparent.  But admidst brilliant insights he also writes  sometimes before he thinks!

Today is no exception in his Satuday multi-topic page.  I give below his lead story which is barely noticed by the ‘meejah’ generally but is of supreme importance!  Unforunately his next item betrays a degree of economic illiteracy as well as inaccuracy.  In this he writes of the question of commercial debt.  He seems unable to distinguish the different roles that equity and debt play in corporate life.  The one is long term and stratergic and the other is short-term and tactical.  (In the case of small businesses debt is their life blood though it generally called by its other name - ‘bank lending’).  I’m glad the Tory shadow chancellor has got this clear after a flurry olf speculation this week. He said “'We are not considering the abolition of tax relief on debt interest. This is not our policy and it has never been our policy,' 

Now to the important constitutional point - - -

Christina

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3.7.09

Want more sleaze? Have full-time MPs

Proposals to clean up Parliament show how sinister Gordon Brown's Government has become, writes Simon Heffer.

Measures are before Parliament to try to clean up the behaviour of MPs. Well, that is how they are presented. They are, in fact, a vindictive and manipulative exercise by the clowns who run the Labour Party, aimed mainly at making the lives of Tory MPs more difficult, and at creating an exclusive class of professional politicians. There could be no finer evidence that the people who govern us have learned precisely nothing from the recent debacle. Our public life needs more professional politicians like we need cholera.

Dave, regrettably, appears to endorse quite a lot of this, and to the anger of many of his backbenchers. They argue that a man with private means such as he has should not be seeking to apply a restraint of trade on those less trust-funded than himself. They are right. But this is not just about lifestyle: it is also about the indubitable truth that MPs who have serious outside interests are going to discharge their constitutional functions as representatives of the people far more impressively than those who never leave the Commons. And it is also about reversing the entirely unhealthy trend of the last 30 or so years of turning the job of an MP from being a representative of the people into that of a district councillor or a social worker.

Some of the strictures that have been proposed have absolutely nothing to do with clamping down on sleaze. The idiotic idea that what MPs say in the Chamber of the Commons could be used in court would, had it not been thrown out by a humiliating (for Mr Brown) Labour rebellion this week, have meant the end of parliamentary privilege. With that would have gone the ability of MPs to speak freely and represent us as we should be.

That it even got so far as being debated, against the advice of senior Commons officials and the counsel of senior parliamentarians, shows just how derelict, incompetent and sinister the Government, in its death throes, now is. It also provides the clinching argument that the Prime Minister has lost his marbles utterly – though Jack Straw, the so-called "Justice Minister", at least had the courtesy to admit to the Commons when seeking to take through this repellent piece of legislation that the matter was not even on Gordon Brown's radar.

But here is another example of the idiocy. If you write a book – and I know, because I have written several – the process can take dozens of hours a week. It doesn't matter that many authors sit up half the night to do it, and that the process invades their weekends and holidays: if the author is an MP, he is going to have to specify how much time he spends writing, and what he earns from it. The latter will usually be a pittance; the former could be thousands of hours a year.

One such writer, Denis MacShane, the Labour MP for Rotherham, pointed out this lunacy in an excellent speech in the House this week. He feels he can't write any more books because his constituents will persecute him. He further points out that such minor politicians in living memory as Winston Churchill and Enoch Powell – not to mention Roy Jenkins, Tony Benn, Ted Heath, and so on – would under these rules either have had to stay out of public life, or abandoned literary careers.

All hasty legislation is, as a rule, unworkable, or has horrible unintended consequences. I am not sure whether this kneejerk attempt to legislate isn't intended to wipe out the likes of Churchill, Powell and Benn. Mr MacShane argues that it will end the right of MPs to think and write as independent actors in public life. He is absolutely right. And will it encourage better people to go into parliament? Of course it won't: quite the reverse. I think the public knows that there is no link between time spent working as an MP and the effectiveness with which one does the job. When will the idiots who run the country? The House of Lords must know its duty: throw this Bill out.