Remember Steve Moxon? He was the whistleblower Michael Howard was so keen Tony Blair should meet. After Blair refused, it transpired that Moxon had approached us first, meeting Richard Allan, his constituency MP, and Mark Oaten.
Moxon, they discovered, holds some very odd opinions. As Allan says on his excellent website (www.richardallan.org.uk): “He was very frank with us that he does not agree with Lib Dem policy on immigration and Europe … We in turn have respected those disagreements and have not sought to pretend that we can accommodate his views.”
And that was that. Until this Monday when Vince Cable – fresh from his heroics on budget day – asked a question about Moxon. He described him as someone who had “openly advocated the use of nuclear weapons against Muslim radicals” and in effect asked why he was working as a civil servant.
If you read Allan’s website you will see this is a misrepresentation of Moxon’s views. But it is more worrying to see a Liberal Democrats adopting the old left tactic of demanding that people whose opinons we dislike should be sacked.
For Vince is not alone. This week Anthony Lester suggested that David Blunkett should get rid of one of his special advisers, Matt Cavanagh. While a philosophy lecturer, Cavanagh published a book raising questions about the moral basis of equal opportunities policies.
This trend worries me. I have seen no suggestion that Moxon’s views have affected his work, and the more philosophers government employs the better. There is so much yea-saying in Whitehall that it badly needs a leavening of scepticism.
Besides, Cavanagh has much in common with this column. A reviewer described him as a contrarian: “one who makes great play with contradictions in the conventional wisdom, does not put forward a coherent alternative, but nonetheless makes authoritative-sounding pronouncements on public policy.” That’s House Points!
And the trend is bad politics too. The left was helpless in the face of Mrs Thatcher partly because they had never met anyone like her. They lived in a world where everyone was a Labour member and dissident voices were never heard.
We Liberal Democrats should not make the same mistake. As John Stuart Mill said: “beliefs not grounded on conviction are apt to give way before the slightest semblance of an argument”.
Every day backbench MPs ask questions of vital interest to their constituents. And every day ministers do their best to avoid answering them.
Fortunately, oral questions account for only an eighth of the 50,000 put down in the Commons each year. Most are asked and answered in writing, never eliciting replies that begin: “We will take no lessons from the party opposite….”
If anything, the problem is the reverse. Written answers deluge MPs with a tidal wave of information. Here are some random facts from the last few days of Hansard.
So far this year the Inland Revenue has placed three advertisements in Hello! A limited number of burials on private land over a period of time may not constitute a change of planning use. Last year the UK gave £1,933,221 in aid to Armenia.
The Ministry of Defence buys locally grown salad vegetables for use at Mount Pleasant Airfield on the Falklands. In 2000, 10.8 per cent of the children in local authority care were convicted of an offence or subject to a final warning or reprimand. Five ducks other than ruddy ducks have been killed since the ruddy duck control scheme began in April 1999: two female tufted ducks, one male tufted duck, one male teal and one juvenile long-tailed duck.
Viewed in this light, the Palace of Westminster resembles a grotesque Victorian mill full of seething boilers, flailing machinery and ragged children dodging the wheels. The raw material of our national life is brought up the Thames on barges, then hammered, stamped and rolled until neatly packaged facts emerge at the far end.
The good news is that there are still things the government does not know. The same issues of Hansard tell us there is no central register of facilities provided at public leisure centres in Northern Ireland and that the decision whether or not to provide sunbeds is a matter for each council. And there is no national strategy to counter dog theft.
The bad news is that you could easily imagine MPs taking up just these campaigns. If Mrs McSnood of Donaghadee gets sunburnt or Pongo goes missing, there will be angry voices calling for government action and demanding the facts.
So shovel on the coal and let the fact mill roll.
House Points instinctively sides with anyone attacked by Gerald Kaufman. If he has a go at Vlad the Impaler we find ourselves thinking that, while Vlad was a bit of a rough diamond, he did do wonders for the Transylvanian timber industry.
So it was a shock on Monday when Kaufman took up one of our pet causes – the persecution of people who do not own televisions. (Just try living without a set. The TV Licensing Authority refuses to believe it and bombards you with threats, forms and inspectors.)
Alistair Carmichael asked the first question, referring to constituents who feel “bullied and harassed”. That’s right: constituents in Orkney and the Shetlands.
We have heard of TV detector vans, but there must be an armada of detector boats too. (“Only a fool would put to sea on a night like this.” “But we’ve heard rumours of a single mother with no licence on Papa Westray.”
As Kaufman (stroking his white cat) pointed out, the BBC acts as though it has the right to snoop on every household in the country and uses the thuggish slogan ‘Get one or get done’.
The licence fee comes from a world where people watched The Billy Cotton Bandshow or lumped it. If it survives in one with more channels than you can count, it will not be because the BBC gets better and better at putting the frighteners on. It will be because the corporation makes programmes no other broadcaster can.
Fewer licence evaders end up in prison than is sometimes implied. Even so, there is something wrong with a society in which they are behind bars while Patrick Kielty walks free.
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Tessa Jowell said all this was nothing to do with her. She was not the only minister to deny responsibility on Monday.
Beverley Hughes blamed the shambles in the Immigration Service on junior staff at its Sheffield office and in her own. It was nothing to do with her because she did not read an e-mail telling her all about it.
Hughes first came to notice when she denounced Chris Morris’s Brass Eye on media obsession with paedophilia and then admitted she hadn’t watched it. You may detect some irony in this.
Jim Sheridan introduced his Gangmaster (Licensing) Bill a month before the Morecambe Bay tragedy. But inevitably it was in everyone’s mind during the second reading debate last Friday.
Sheridan said passing the bill would be “a fitting memorial” to those who died. Certainly it would be more use than the piles of flowers and teddy bears with labels round their necks saying “Why?” that most victims get these days.
Yet the debate went far deeper than individual tragedy and revealed something important about the way the British economy works.
Sheridan himself talked of workers paid just £3 to cut 1,000 daffodils and of others forced to live in partitioned containers with no water supply. Rent and transport were deducted from the their wages before they were paid. One worker was paid £83 and had £80 rent deducted.
Other members added their own horror stories. Thirty workers sleeping in a three-bedroomed house at the same time, to be replaced by another shift of 30 when they go out to work. Involvement by Chinese triads and the Russian mafia (though if by any chance they are reading this I am sure they are very nice people really).
Mark Simmonds said that gangmasters – and many of them operate perfectly legitimate businesses – have always supplied casual agricultural labour in Lincolnshire. He claimed to have seen figures showing that foreign nationals have gone from forming 3 per cent of the workforce on farms and in packhouses in the county to 97 per cent over the past three years. This sounds too a rapid a change to be fully credible, but there is no doubt about the trend.
It was Simmonds and our own Andrew George who went furthest to explaining what is going on. Agricultural labour used to be seasonal: now supermarkets demand fresh produce 24 hours a day and 364 days a year. Add to this the constant downward pressure on prices and it is no surprise that corners are cut.
Meanwhile, social security regulations make casual work unattractive to many legitimate workers because it is so hard to get back on benefit afterwards.
David Boyle, a former editor of this newspaper, recently said to me that food is emerging as a vital political issue. On Friday I saw what he meant.