Liar, Liar!

Parliamentary privilege allows Members of Parliament to say things in the House of Commons that outside it would make them liable for prosecution for slander, contempt of court, or breaching the Official Secrets Act. On the other hand, rules around unparliamentary language forbid MPs from using certain words or phrases about other MPs. Words like blackguard, coward, git, guttersnipe, hooligan, rat, swine, stoolpigeon, and traitor. And of course, liar.

 

Members of Parliament are generally described by one another as "the Honourable Member for . . .” and the assumption is, as the Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle has said, that “No honourable member would actually mislead or lie to the House,” and should an MP unwittingly utter a falsehood, or accidentally mislead the House, then they are obliged to correct the matter at the earliest opportunity. Not that they always do. [1]

 

Accusing a fellow MP of lying will result in the MP making the accusation being required to withdraw from the Chamber if they do not retract their remark, as happened to Labour MP Dawn Butler last week. Citing a YouTube video produced by the lawyer and filmmaker Peter Stefanovic in which he dissected and debunked a number of claims made in Parliament by Boris Johnson, Butler said that Boris Johnson “has lied to this House and the country, over and over again."

  

As Dawn Butler found, in this country we take accusations of lying very seriously. In much the same way as we take accusations of racism and anti-Semitism very seriously. Unfortunately, we take the accusations more seriously than the offence a lot of the time. As former Speaker John Bercow and Dawn Butler herself said in a joint statement published in The Times, “Someone lying to tens of millions of citizens knows he or she is protected by an ancient rule. They face no sanction. By contrast, an MP with the guts to tell the truth is judged to be in disgrace. It is absurd.”

 

Dawn Butler speaking in the Commons on Friday. Picture: House of Commons/PA

MPs can be accused of lying of course. Virtually every week at Prime Minister’s Questions, Sir Keir Starmer says, of some answer or statement that Boris Johnson has given, ‘That simply isn’t true.” A lie, then. As he has said, “the Prime Minister is the master of untruths and half-truths.” Starmer says that he supports the deputy speaker who ejected Dawn Butler, but also supports Butler for what she said. He likely only said that because his silence on the matter had drawn criticism, but that sort of fence sitting harms him more than Johnson and the Tory government.

 

I saw a comment on Twitter that if MPs were allowed to call each other liars, then that word would be constantly bandied about in the Chamber, and the point being made clearly was that it would be uttered even when no lie had been told. Which raises two points.

 

First, if Honourable Members were actually honourable and didn’t lie, then the accusation would carry no weight (it wouldn’t stop it being used, but it would be more detrimental to the accuser than the accused), but secondly – and just as importantly – is it right that MPs shout across the Chamber?

 

While some speeches in the House of Commons are listened to respectfully, anyone who has watched PMQs will know that the House is often like a bear pit, with voices raised on both sides. MPs should not shout ‘liar’ at their opponents; they ought not shout anything at all. They should however, be able to use a speech to call out lies on the part of another member, particularly if that member knowingly and demonstrably did lie.

 

The arcane rules and customs of Parliament are like Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, where things are done a certain way because of accidents of history, because of tradition, not because they are logical or make sense. If Parliament were a private business, engaged in banking for example, it would probably use abacuses instead of calculators, and handwritten ledgers instead of computer mainframes because that is how it has always been done. Getting Parliament to move with the times is on a par with getting a cat to learn algebra.

 

Christopher Lee as Mr Flay, responsible for upholding the rules and maintaining 
tradition in the castle of Gormenghast. From the BBC production.

But move with the times it should. The whole system of politics in the UK is overdue for reform: Our First Past the Post (FPTP) voting system for a start. In the last seventy years FPTP means that in all but three elections the majority of votes have been cast for parties other than the one that formed a government. 

 

Politics is binary, but the world is nuanced. The majority support a political party the way they support a football team, with blind, unthinking loyalty. But whichever party you support you are likely to be lumbered with just as many policies that you don’t like as ones that you do. In fact, it may be that there are policies that another party has that you support more than the ones proposed by the party you vote for. Which is the reason why we should stop voting for people and parties and start voting for policies.

 

Come election time, the parties should set forth their intended policies. The public votes for the policies they want and the policies are carried out by private industry. We will still need MPs, but not the 600 odd we have now; a couple of hundred should suffice to act as administrators and make sure that the private companies entrusted with carrying out the policies we voted for do so properly. An unintended consequence is that this could lead to a privatised health service, but at least it would happen through conscious choice and not implemented by stealth.

 

In private industry objectives are the norm, and performance against objectives is how pay rises and bonuses are set. In a privatised parliament, our MPs could be assessed and rewarded by how effectively they manage to get the policies implemented.

 

This method of governance would ensure that the right people are doing the right jobs. Iain Duncan Smith last year lambasted the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), for recommending that working from home measures stay in place. He said that SAGE had no right to tell employers what to do because “most of them have never run a business.” Duncan Smith has never run a business, nor have many MPs, so how appropriate is it that a completely unqualified person is put in charge of the Department of Health, or Education, or the Ministry Defence?

 

Michael Gove once said that Britain is fed up with experts, but it is normally accepted that some degree of expertise and knowledge of a business is useful when running it. Being in charge of a multi-million pound department with thousands of employees and the literal power of life and death over the population of the whole country apparently requires no experience or knowledge, just the good fortune to have won a popularity contest and be looked on kindly by the Prime Minister.

 

It’s time to privatise government and get the experts in.

 

 

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[1] Since 1979 there have been 93 occasions on which MPs have apologised for misleading the House. The most recent was in 2019. Source: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn03169/

It’s Not Coming Home - Again

My interest in football – especially international and Premier League football – has waned a bit in recent years, and I’ve rarely watched live football on TV, especially since covid, what with the lack of atmosphere at games played behind closed doors. I approached Euro 2020 with some scepticism; I wasn’t expecting to watch many games, and I wasn’t overly optimistic about how enjoyable it would be.

 

As it turned out, I watched more games that I expected, and enjoyed them much more than I had anticipated. It helped of course, that England surpassed my expectations (a Semi-Final place was the best I was hoping for, and even that was a stretch), but in any case, the quality of the games – especially in the knock-out stages – was mostly excellent. Two games on the same day – Croatia v Spain, and France v Switzerland – were spectacularly entertaining, and then the next day England beat Germany, and any victory over Germany is one to be savoured.

 

Spain's Mikel Oyarzabal celebrates scoring their fifth goal in their thrilling game against Croatia. Picture:  REUTERS/Stuart Franklin

The football benefited from the return of the fans, although a multi-country, multi-city format during a pandemic introduced some unnecessary risk. It seems that at Wembley especially, the supposed covid restrictions that required fans to show their vaccination status or a negative test result were not rigidly enforced, and the chaotic and violent scenes at the stadium and other parts of London on the day of the Final were as predictable as they were saddening.

 

In the end, England’s quest for a first tournament win since 1966 fell short in the penalty shoot-out against Italy. It won’t be long before ‘thirty years of hurt’ becomes sixty at this rate. Perhaps Messrs Broudie, Skinner, and Baddiel will update the tune in time for the 2026 World Cup, unless England manage to go one better than this year before then.

 

Comparisons between England’s final this year and 1966 are inevitable, and as much as anything, they display the changes that the country, indeed the whole world, has gone through in the last fifty-five years.

 

Take the crowd at Wembley. In 1966 most of the men were in suits and ties; rosettes abound, and the flags being waved were largely Union Flags. Now it’s replica shirts and the Cross of St George.

1966 at Wembley

And everyone looked older. Take a picture from 1966 and compare it with one from this year, and most of the fans will be roughly the same ages, but those from 1966 look older, and they certainly seem to be have been more mature in their behaviour. In 1966 no one was sticking a lighted flare up their backside as one England ‘fan’ did before the game this year. Sadly, the events at Wembley and in Central London on final day make a possible England bid for the 2030 World Cup looked doomed to failure.

Wembley 2021

It isn’t just the fans. This is a picture of Sir Alf Ramsey – plain Mr Ramsey then – at the time of the 1966 final. He was 46 years old.

 

Then there is Gareth Southgate. He’s fifty in this picture. But then, everyone looks younger and dresses younger these days. 

When I was a teenager my grandparents seemed incredibly old, but in reality they weren’t much older than I am now, yet as my mother said, once her mother hit fifty, she became old, and acted old. My parents never owned a pair of jeans between them, or trainers; my dad didn’t even own any polo shirts or t-shirts come to that. His casual wear still involved putting on collar and tie, even if he wore them with a windbreaker rather than a sports jacket.

 

Much has been made of the youth of the England team that lost to the Italians, particularly the ages of those who missed the crucial penalties. Yes, Bukayo Saka, Jordan Sancho, and Marcus Rashford are 19, 21, and 23 respectively, but in 1966 England had Alan Ball (21), and Martin Peters (22). Hat-trick scorer Geoff Hurst was just 24, as was Nobby Stiles; even Bobby Moore was just 25. The average age of the 1966 team was 26.5, compared with 25.27 for Gareth Southgate’s men.

 

The refereeing, and the use of VAR impressed me at Euro 2020. In fact, the first game I watched made me wonder if VAR was even being used. It was unobtrusive and seemed to be genuinely there to help referees, unlike the version used in the Premier League which seems to just stoke controversy and generate perverse decisions.

 

That isn’t to say there wasn’t any controversy at Euro 2020. If anything, it has made me doubt whether I know what is and isn’t a foul any more, especially after some commentators called into question the correctness of the referee awarding a penalty when French goalkeeper Hugo Lloris as near as damn-it decapitated Portugal’s Danilo, but were certain that the minimal contact on Raheem Sterling in England’s Semi-Final against Denmark was a nailed-on penalty.

Some commentators had some doubt about this being a penalty...

...but no doubt about this one.

I have read and re-read football’s Law 12, which deals with Fouls and Misconduct, and have reached the conclusion that it is not a law at all (football is very precious about the fact that it has laws, not rules), but rather a set of very loose guidelines that are within the gift of the referee to interpret as they see fit. I guess that anyone who has, like me, watched football for more than half a century, thinks they know a foul when they see one, but sometimes it can be very hard to explain why when there are a series of very similar challenges, some are fouls and some are not; it’s all highly subjective.

There were two things that rather got on my nerves during Euro 2020. Firstly, the trend for treading on an opponent’s foot, which – if you will pardon the pun – really needs stamping out. The other thing – and why this is so prevalent baffles me – is the foul throw.

 

At the top of the game, players spend hours honing their skills at free-kicks, penalties and other set pieces. They practice pinging passes with unerring accuracy over long distances, but when it comes to taking throw ins it often looks like some of them are doing so for the first time. I lost track of the number of foul throws that were taken, yet not one that I saw was flagged by an assistant referee.

 

The foul throw is somewhat like a victimless crime; it’s rarely more advantageous for the player taking it and his team than a proper throw, and in that respect one might say it’s not worth worrying about. Except of course, football will maintain that it has laws, and unlike rules, with which one might allow a degree of discretion, laws have a more rigid structure. If the ‘law’ on foul throws is not going to be enforced then it should be changed.

  

Now that the dust has settled after Euro 2020, it seems that once again, football has failed to come home; instead, it went to Rome. Maybe next year in Qatar, eh?

 

 

 

 

 

 

One Rule For You

It is easy to paint all members of any given group with the same brush if a small, unrepresentative element among them behave badly. It was too easy (and lazy) back in the 1970s, to condemn all football fans for the hooliganism that a minority indulged in at football matches, and the anti-social behaviour of some fans on trains and in town centres on Saturday afternoons.

 

Badly behaved British holidaymakers in Spanish resorts, and so-called ‘lager louts’ in town centres up and down Britain are equally unrepresentative of the majority of Britons who holiday abroad, or enjoy an evening out in this country. By the same token, we should not consider all of Britain’s cyclists together as an arrogant, ignorant and anti-social, Highway Code ignoring, lumpen mass – but sometimes it is difficult not to.

 

I suppose that it is a combination of confirmation bias and the frequency illusion that gives the impression that all cyclists are ‘Lycra-clad louts,’ as they are sometimes dubbed – not that all cyclists wear Lycra -  and in fact, where I have a problem with cyclists, it is less with the Lycra-clad among them, who at least seem to confine themselves to the road, even if they do sometimes ignore the rules.

 

My biggest bug-bear with cyclists are those who ride their bikes where it is expressly prohibited, and if challenged, are not only unapologetic, but downright affronted, displaying the increasingly common trait of exceptionalism.

A week or so ago, Val and I were in Eastbourne for the Finals of the Viking International Tennis, and as we always do when we visit Eastbourne – and most other seaside towns we go to – we love to walk along the promenade. Eastbourne has a particularly fine promenade, and along the two-and-half miles from Holywell in the west to Fisherman’s Green in the east, cycling is prohibited. West of Fisherman’s Green, pedestrians and cyclists each have their own dedicated lane along the prom to the end, by the water treatment works.

 

The prom at Eastbourne, marked in red.

There are of course, signs on lampposts and painted on the footway indicating that cycling is prohibited. These are flagrantly ignored and in one walk we took, we were passed by nearly a dozen bike riders.

 

Recently, notices have appeared on a couple of lampposts reiterating the ban on cycling, however these are hidden away quite discreetly and virtually invisible to the cyclists that whizz by them. It doesn’t help that as well as being hard to see, the signs contain an invalid URL for the local council (it should read byelaws, not bylaws), and the website for reporting anti-social behaviour to the police is so convoluted and user-unfriendly that many people must be deterred from trying to report the matter.

That notice, complete with mis-spelling of 'bye-laws.'

Getting more and more annoyed as we were passed by more and more cyclists, we decided to ask some of them why they were cycling in an area where it is prohibited. Most totally ignored us, and one or two just laughed. One said he wasn’t cycling because he was riding an electric bike, and one asked why we were bothered, as it was 7am and there were few people about. He got very upset when we took a photo of him.

Cyclists on the prom.

There have also been a good number of people riding e-scooters up and down the prom, and while the prohibition on cycling does not specifically mention e-scooters, riding them anywhere other than on private property is illegal, and police recently confiscated over 500 e-scooters (which are subject to all the same legal requirements such as MOT, tax, and licensing as cars and other vehicles) in London. What makes it particularly galling is that on the north side of Grand Parade (which runs parallel to the prom), cyclists are allowed to ride on the pavement; they presumably prefer the view of the sea that one gets from the prom.

 

You may think that given the name of my blog, which comes from the concept that rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men, that I would be more forgiving, especially since you could argue that a cyclist riding on an almost deserted prom at 7am is doing little harm. Except that my attitude towards being guided by rules is that the person doing so should be circumventing, or even ignoring them for the benefit of others not themselves. They should be using discretion in applying the rules to avoid unintended consequences that disadvantage others; it does not mean blithely ignoring rules that are an  inconvenience, or which they simply do not like.

 

In 2020, the Eastbourne Herald reported that a Freedom of Information request showed that no fines or warnings had been issued to cyclists in the previous two years. In that article, a spokesman for Eastbourne Council was quoted as saying, " Our Neighbourhood First officers do their best to engage with anyone not abiding by the no-cycling signs and explain why it is a pedestrianised area." You will excuse my scepticism on that score.

 

No doubt the police and the council would cite a lack of resources for the lack of enforcement of the bye-law, and I appreciate that the promenade cannot be patrolled 24/7, however, some sort of presence, some sort of enforcement, along with publicising those prosecuted or fined might make a difference, because the current policy - relying on the goodwill of the public- is clearly not working.

 

I do wonder if the apparent absence of any enforcement is due to the fact that back in 2016, the local council wanted to amend the bye-law and allow cycling on the prom, but the Government – in the form of the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) – rejected the plan.

 

Exceptionalism and people’s belief that the rules don’t apply to them has never been more apparent than in the last fifteen months, during which time the whole world has been subject to restrictions of one form or another. And during that time there have been many examples of people deciding that the rules did not apply to them.

Dominic Cummings’s eyesight testing drive to Barnard Castle got justified because he was, to quote the Prime Minister, merely doing what any good father would have done, leaving thousands of men crestfallen that by not breaking the rules, they were not good fathers.

 

More egregiously (which last April I would not have thought possible), we had Matt Hancock canoodling with his aide, Gina Coladangelo, in flagrant breach of the social distancing rules that he was largely responsible for. Hancock’s hypocrisy in this matter is breath-taking: You may remember that last year he was all for the police getting involved when Prof Neil Ferguson resigned (with more alacrity than Hancock did) after breaking social distancing rules.

Thousands of people who stuck to the rules and were unable to visit their loved ones in care homes, or relatives ill and dying in hospital will have asked themselves, why did we bother?

Given the sacrifices that so many people have made because they have stuck to the rules, seeing others regularly ignoring them, those same people may be forgiven for taking a more selective approach to which rules they stick to in the future.