A terribly polite bombshell

The Iraq war inquiry began last week in a strange atmosphere of high civility, verbal trickery and obfuscation yet already its revelations are damning

What have we learnt so far, then, locked inside a small room in the blandly hideous Queen Elizabeth II conference centre in London, where the chairman of the Iraq inquiry, Sir John Chilcot, has, with exquisite politeness and even deference, been interviewing the highborn civil service mandarins who assisted the government in its decision to invade Iraq?

They wander inside each morning at about 10 o’clock and sit themselves down facing the panel. In his short opening address, Chilcot expresses a wish that they will be open and candid, and sign a transcript at the end to this effect.

They are not always open and candid, though; some of them, so far, have been closed and downright obfuscatory on certain matters, employing all those linguistic tricks and sleights of semantics that made Yes Minister such a pleasure to watch. But we have still learnt plenty, along the way, since the inquiry opened on Tuesday.

First, the government knew all along that there was no evidence whatsoever to suggest Saddam Hussein had any links with Al-Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden or international Islamic terrorism in general, contrary to what was said in America — particularly by Dick Cheney, the vice-president — at the time.

Second, as a perceived threat to the West, Iraq came a long way behind Libya, Iran and North Korea, according to intelligence reports. The government knew in 2002 from these reports that Saddam’s nuclear programme had been destroyed a decade previously and that Iraq had been “effectively disarmed” by sanctions and the threat of military pressure.

Third, while the US and Britain insisted that Iraq posed a “clear and present” threat to its neighbours, none of those neighbours was audibly desirous of an invasion of the country, and most were audibly opposed.

Fourth, the government included details in its infamous “dodgy dossier” of September 2002 that implied Iraq might be pursuing a nuclear programme when it had not the slightest evidence for this, simply an absence of evidence to the contrary. Which is not quite the same thing, is it?

Fifth, the foreword to the dodgy dossier, written by the prime minister at the time, Tony Blair, was an exercise in hyperbole and scaremongering from which the mandarins arraigned in the QE2 centre could not distance themselves more quickly if they tried. In particular, Blair’s assertion that Saddam had “beyond doubt” continued to manufacture chemical and biological weapons was a statement that was “impossible to make”, according to not only Chilcot but two of his interviewees. In other words — to use an appropriate iconic phrase — the document had been sexed up.

Sixth, an intelligence report in March 2003, shortly before the invasion, suggested Saddam had no chemical weapons whatsoever; they were all long since disassembled and useless. This report was taken by the government to imply confirmation that Iraq actually had chemical weapons, even if they were unusable, and the invasion proceeded.

Seventh, Britain was set on course for an illegal war against Iraq when the prime minister signed up to the notion of “regime change” after an agreeable private meeting with George W Bush in the middle of 2002, despite insisting all along to the public and the House of Commons that war could be averted. It is clear from the evidence so far that Britain was signed up to war at an early stage and (unlike America) merely wished for the military action to be sanctioned by the United Nations.

Eighth, Saddam’s perceived threat to the West was predicated entirely upon his behaviour towards neighbouring countries a decade or so earlier, and ignored the extent to which he was constrained by both sanctions and a no-fly zone.

Now, I think that’s not a bad haul of newish information from less than a week of gentle and almost genteel crossexamination. It may merely confirm what we already knew or suspected, but it is nice to have it on the record.

There’s other stuff too, of course, to pique the interest; the inquiry panel also wished to know if Jack Straw was too thick to understand the intelligence reports he was receiving, and two former mandarins — Sir William Ehrman and Tim Dowse — believed he did understand them, and later signed their names at the bottom of a transcript of their testimonies to this effect.

In a way, it is remarkable that so much has quietly emerged, given the tenor and tone of the inquiry and the sorts of people being interviewed and, indeed, doing the interviewing. This whole procedure is a little like a very upper-class version of the Channel 4 series Come Dine with Me, with charming, learned and polite knighted people asking the gentlest of questions of charming, learned and polite knighted people, before breaking for lunch.

Ehrman, for example, is our current ambassador to China and back in 2002 was the director of international security at the Foreign Office. He makes Sir Humphrey from Yes Minister appear a model of candour and directness.

Here he is talking about the “threat” from Saddam: “There was also the fact that he was supporting terrorist groups, Palestinian terror groups, and although we never found any evidence linking him closely to Al-Qaeda and we did not believe he was behind, in any way, the 9/11 bombings, he had given support to Palestinian terrorist groups . . .”

Translation: “Yes, it’s a thin straw I’m clutching at here.”

And: “We never assessed it [Iraq] as an imminent threat and that was never stated. What we said was that there was a clear and present threat. But we never said there is an imminent threat.”

Translation: it is untranslatable. How can something be any more “imminent” than “present”?

Then there’s Dowse, who was formerly the head of counter-proliferation at the Foreign Office, talking about the dodgy dossier: “It is good that when one puts one’s assessment in the public domain, it is always preferable for them to be based on accurate information.”

Translation: “I suppose, looking back, it would have been better if that dossier we released to the world had contained even the slenderest element of truth.”

And: “We had not concluded that the aluminium tubes were definitely not for a nuclear purpose.”

Translation: “We knew Iraq’s nuclear programme had been utterly destroyed years ago, and we knew there was not the slightest evidence that the aluminium tubes we found lying around in the desert had any nuclear-related purpose. But hell, who cares, the public don’t know that, so we put it in the dossier anyway.”

Sir Jeremy Greenstock, our former man at the United Nations, suggested that he had threatened to resign if Britain succumbed to American pressure to attack Iraq without a UN resolution. But did anyone back home understand him?

He recalled: “I decided to say that if it happened to become UK policy to go along with abandoning the UN route and go to the use of force without a further resolution, that I would have personal difficulties about that. Maybe I thought that I should be clear about that. Maybe I thought that that was a stiffener for London on what I thought should happen. But I thought it was a clarifying thing to say that there were limits in what I as a permanent representative could do in New York in terms of what was going on.”

Maybe he should stop saying maybe.

The mandarins’ interrogators are themselves mandarins par excellence. Sitting alongside Chilcot are a former ambassador to Russia called Sir Roderic Lyne, the eminent historians Sir Martin Gilbert and Sir Lawrence Freedman, and a lady called Baroness Prashar, who does not say very much but just sits there looking sage and concerned and sometimes bored.

It will give you a flavour of the whole thing if I tell you that the sharpest questions from the panel last week, those with the vague and distant whiff of controversy, came from Freedman — who was a policy adviser to Blair, which makes you wonder if he is an entirely disinterested party.

Chilcot, who also served on the previous Butler inquiry into Iraq, has already decreed that this inquiry will not be a court of law and that its job is not to apportion blame, nor does blame seem to be implied in any of the questions. Chilcot even prefaced one question to Ehrman with the observation that it was a “parenthetical question” that he really didn’t need to answer if he was not of the mind to do so. This is an unusual tactic for someone whose job it is to elicit straight answers, I reckon.

On Thursday morning, Sir Christopher Meyer, the former ambassador to Washington, grew so bored of the delicacy of the questioning that he began, instead, to ask questions of himself, having first cleared with Chilcot that it was constitutionally right and proper of him to do such a thing. Meyer’s questions to himself were more penetrating than any of the questions asked by the panel, which sat there nodding appreciatively.

Meyer — a classy, colourful and candid act among the monochrome and weaselly mandarins — identified the early date at which Blair first started to talk about regime change for Iraq. This apparently followed a convivial supper discussion with Bush, to which Meyer was not privy.It is difficult to believe that from this moment henceforth, Britain was not committed to an invasion of Iraq, no matter how often Straw told the parliamentary Labour party — and, of course, the general public — that war could be averted. The only question that remained was whether or not the United Nations would sanction an invasion; and in the end, even that did not matter to Britain. You wonder how much any of this matters any more. By the second day of evidence at the QE2 centre, the members of the public wishing to observe the inquiry had dwindled to precisely six, and the media room was looking a bit thinner too.

Even back in 2005, when it became patently clear that the government had misled parliament and the public over Iraq, and soldiers and civilians were dying by the hour in Basra, only the chattering class and a few of the broadsheet newspapers cared terribly much, to judge from both the opinion polls and Labour’s general election triumph.

Now, it would seem, even the chattering classes have grown a little bored of it all, given that there are MPs’ expenses to rail about, and the banks, and of course Afghanistan. But you would hope the distance of time might loosen tongues a little and that the full extent of the government’s chicanery, long assumed but unproven, might be quietly revealed over the next couple of months, half by accident, through these polite interlocutors.

Distorted truths

The Iraq inquiry seems to be an exercise in exquisite emollience and obfuscation, while the manifest contradictions in the various testimonies are never touched upon.

For example, both Sir William Ehrman and Tim Dowse addressed the question of Saddam Hussein’s missing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) such as stockpiles of chemical warheads.

WMD, if you exclude nuclear weapons, has long been a most misleading term. Chemical and biological weapons, terrifying and vile though they are, tend to kill far fewer people than the expensive conventional weapons deployed by the rich western states.

It is simply a term used to punish countries we do not like and in Iraq’s case it was broadened to encompass your humdrum, everyday ballistic missiles — a redefinition that renders the term effectively meaningless but was crucial in linking Saddam to WMD, as Ehrman and Dowse made clear.

They argued that a country such as Iraq, with a well developed petrochemical industry, was easily able to create chemical weapons in a very short space of time and had little need to stockpile them.

So Saddam had no chemical stockpiles. But he did have plenty of ballistic missiles which would be needed to deliver the chemical devices (that he didn’t have).

Iraq had ballistic missiles and the means to create chemical weapons. Ergo, Iraq had WMD: fabulous reasoning.

Ehrman and Dowse admitted that Iraq was not in the first league of states to be terribly worried about, because it was not developing a mature nuclear programme, nor did it have close links with international Islamic terrorism.

However, they later argued that Iraq was “unique” because Saddam was a nutter and had previously behaved aggressively towards neighbouring states.

The fact that his aggression had occurred more than 10 years beforehand, when he had invaded Kuwait, and had subsequently been easily contained through sanctions, no-fly zones and suchlike, was not dwelt upon for too long.

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Full article and photo: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article6936078.ece

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Another Vast Jewish Conspiracy

British media and society are gripped by lies about a “secret” Israel lobby controlling foreign policy.

Here is a small selection of events that have taken place in Britain since the end of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza earlier this year.

The government has imposed a partial arms embargo on Israel and failed to vote against the Goldstone report in the U.N . The charities War on Want and Amnesty International U.K. have both promoted a book by the anti-Israeli firebrand Ben White, tellingly called “Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide.” The Trades Union Congress at its annual conference has called for boycotts of Israeli products as well as a total arms embargo.

In the media, the Guardian newspaper has stepped up its already obsessive campaign against the Jewish state to the extent that the paper’s flagship Comment is Free Web site frequently features two anti-Israeli polemics on one and the same day. The BBC continues to use its enormous influence over British public opinion to whitewash anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial in the Middle East. Its Web site, for example, features a profile of Hamas that makes no mention of the group’s virulent hatred of Jews or its adherence to a “Protocols of Zion”-style belief in world-wide Jewish conspiracies.

Readers may be surprised to learn, therefore, that the British media and political establishment is apparently cowering under the sway of a secretive cabal of Zionist lobbyists who have all but extinguished critical opinions of Israel from the public domain.

Such charges have been aired to mass critical acclaim this week in a landmark  documentary, “Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby,” on Channel 4—the same outlet that offered Iran’s Holocaust-denying president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an uninterrupted, seven-minute propaganda slot on Christmas Day last year.

The makers of the documentary—top Daily Mail columnist Peter Oborne and TV journalist James Jones—have also written about their program in the Guardian. Both furiously deny that they are peddling conspiracy theories. But the mindset we are dealing with was neatly exposed by the authors’ own explanation on how their suspicions were aroused that something sinister is at work in the corridors of British power.

It all transpired, they told readers ominously, during an address earlier this year by Conservative Party leader David Cameron at a dinner hosted by the Conservative Friends of Israel.

“The dominant event of the previous 12 months had been the Israeli invasion of Gaza,” they wrote. “We were shocked Cameron made no reference in his speech to the massive destruction it caused, or the 1,370 deaths that resulted, or for that matter the invasion itself. Indeed, our likely future prime minister went out of his way to praise Israel because it ‘strives to protect innocent life.’ This remark was not intended satirically.”

Since it is inconceivable, the authors obviously believe, that anyone could honestly credit Israel with anything other than the most damnable motives it must therefore follow that those who do in fact praise the Jewish state must be being paid or bullied into doing so.

If you think this all sounds familiar, you’d be right. Messrs. Oborne and Jones produced an extensive pamphlet accompanying the documentary, which openly claimed inspiration from none other than John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”—another conspiracy theory alleging malign Zionist influence in the United States.

But if Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt at least felt the need to dress up their polemic in pseudo-academic wrapping paper, the sheer amateurishness of the British documentary they inspired is breathtaking. There was the endless superimposition of the Israeli Star of David on to the British flag, which, along with some absurdly melancholic background music, was presumably designed to prepare viewers for an astonishing series of revelations. But of course such revelations actually never materialized.

It turns out from the documentary itself that the allegedly secretive Jewish donors have been quite open in declaring their interests in accordance with the law. One of them, Poju Zabludowicz, the billionaire funder of the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) is good friends with Madonna—not exactly the kind of company you’d choose if you were trying to hide behind a veil of obscurity.

Much is also made of the influence of Friends of Israel groupings in the British Parliament. Such allegations are, of course, rendered ridiculous with a moment’s reflection on the countervailing influence of vast amounts of Arab oil money, not to mention the fact that membership in such groups for many parliamentarians is either purely formal or outright meaningless. Michael Ancram, for example, a former Northern Ireland minister and a member of Conservative Friends of Israel for more than 30 years, is famous for calling for talks with Hamas.

Given the paucity of the arguments, it would be tempting to dismiss the whole thing as unimportant. Would that we could. The documentary has already provoked a torrent of abuse against British Jews, not least on Channel 4′s widely read Web site, whose moderators have seen fit to approve dozens of postings about the Zionist lobby’s “seditious behavior,” its “disgusting attack on British democracy,” “the hand of global Zionism at work,” and several along the lines of the following, which said flatly: “We want our country back. The agents of a foreign power embedded at all levels of our government and politics need flushing out.”

If this sort of language takes hold, a bad situation in Britain may be about to get a whole lot worse.

Jewish leadership organizations have long feared accusations of divided loyalty between Britain and Israel and, ironically given the charges now being made against them, are frequently criticized in their own communities for failing to be sufficiently robust in Israel’s defense. The risk is that some may now be panicked into silence.

Non-Jews who call for a more reasoned discussion of Israel—already a small and diminishing group in Britain—will likely face additional slanders against their integrity: Since there is supposedly no reasonable case to be made in favor of the Jewish state, we must have sold out to the “Lobby.”

Such calumnies cannot be allowed to stand. Now more than ever, the forces of reason and decency must continue the fight to be heard.

Mr. Shepherd is director of International Affairs at the Henry Jackson Society. His new book, “A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem With Israel,” has just been published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704204304574543671980025770.html

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The secret Mali deal to release two Canadians

Canadian diplomats Robert Fowler, right, UN special envoy to Niger, and his assistant Louis Guay are pictured as they meet with Mali President Amadou Toumani (out of camera range) after they were released along with two European tourists by al-Qaeda-linked captors after months as hostages, in Bamako on April 23, 2009.

Four terrorists, including a bomb-maker, were released from prison in the African nation of Mali in exchange for the freedom this year of Canadian diplomats Robert Fowler and Louis Guay, high-ranking government sources in Mali have confirmed.

The released prisoners were members of al-Qaeda’s increasingly powerful branch in the Sahara region of northern and western Africa. Two of them had been arrested in the northern Mali desert town of Gao last year after an accidental explosion while they were manufacturing a bomb, the sources say.

The prisoner release, which the Canadian government maintains it played no part in, was confirmed by government sources in Mali and by a local intermediary who was intimately involved in negotiations to free the Canadian hostages from the Sahara terrorist group, known as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). The group, formed in 2006 after a merger between al-Qaeda and an Algerian-based terrorist group, seeks to expel Westerners and set up an Islamic theocracy in Africa.

Several sources said three of the released prisoners were Mauritanian members of AQIM, which has members from across West Africa and North Africa. One of the prisoners, known as Sidi, was a “chemist,” a bomb-maker, who was involved in last year’s explosion. A second prisoner, known as Tayoub, was a logistics expert who was caught after the same explosion.

A fourth prisoner, Mohamed, was in the process of being released, but was killed in a car accident during the transfer.

In addition to the prisoner release, Malian sources support earlier reports that several million dollars in cash was given to the kidnappers, although the exact origins of the money remain unclear.

Mr. Fowler and Mr. Guay, kidnapped in Niger last December, were taken across the border to Mali and held in captivity for 130 days in a remote corner of the Sahara desert. They were the focus of a massive Canadian effort to free them.

Mr. Fowler had been one of the most powerful bureaucrats in Ottawa, where he served as deputy defence minister and as a senior prime ministerial adviser. He was also Canada’s longest-serving United Nations ambassador. In July, 2008, he took an unannounced assignment as a special UN envoy to mediate between the Niger government and a rebel movement. Mr. Guay, his aide in the Niger mission, is a former Canadian ambassador to Gabon.

Speaking in detail for the first time about the circumstances that led to the diplomats’ release, Mali officials said they felt under heavy pressure to find ways to resolve the hostage situation, to the point they were worried that Canada might withdraw aid if the hostages were not freed.

Canada’s aid to Mali has increased sharply in recent years, from about $20-million in 2002 to more than $100-million last year. Mali is now one of the five biggest recipients of Canadian aid, and it is one of the few African countries to remain on Ottawa’s trimmed-down priority list for foreign aid this year.

Mohamed Ag Mahmoud, director of the Northern Mali Development Agency in the Mali government, said the four prisoners were released because Canada is a “big partner” of the country and needed to be kept happy. The prisoners who were involved in bomb-making were “very dangerous” but “not very well-known,” he said in an interview.

“Maybe releasing … prisoners won’t make such a big difference,” he said. “Sometimes, with an enemy, a prisoner exchange takes place.”

Shortly after the two Canadians were freed on April 21, Algerian news reports suggested that terrorist prisoners were released in exchange for the hostages. A statement by al-Qaeda claimed that four of its fighters were freed from prison as part of the hostage deal. But until now, the prisoner swap has never been confirmed by government officials.

The deal paved the way for the release of Mr. Fowler and Mr. Guay, as well as two European tourists who had been kidnapped by the same terrorist group in January. A third tourist was later released, while the fourth tourist – a British man – was killed by the kidnappers in May.

Sources say that the British government complained to Canada about its willingness to let Mali negotiate with the kidnappers, arguing that Ottawa had “betrayed international convention.”

The informal complaint, which was made below prime ministerial level, came after Mr. Fowler’s release and before the death of the British hostage, Edwin Dyer. It was a terse criticism. “The job of releasing Mr. Dyer was made more difficult,” said a source. “There was considerable anger.”

The hostage takers had demanded the British government release Abu Qatada, a Jordanian being held in jail in Britain. London refused, and Mr. Dyer was killed.

While Prime Minister Stephen Harper has denied that his government made any concessions, he would not discuss whether other governments might have offered considerations to the kidnappers on behalf of Canada.

“The government of Canada does not pay ransom or money, the government of Canada does not release prisoners,” he told a news conference in April after the release of the two Canadian hostages. “What efforts or initiatives may have been undertaken by other governments are questions you’ll have to put to those governments.”

Soumeylou Boubèye Maiga, a former Malian defence minister and former head of its secret services, said two of the prisoners who were exchanged for the Canadians included a bomb-maker and an expert in logistics and military tactics for AQIM. They were handed over to AQIM in the far north of the country, near the Algerian border, while a third prisoner was released near the border of Mauritania, he said.

Mr. Maiga confirmed that cash was given to the kidnappers. “The problem is that the ransom gives financial resources to al-Qaeda, allowing them to acquire more equipment and more capacity to engage in terrorism,” he said.

A hostage negotiator, a key figure in the final deal, said the three released prisoners were Mauritanian members of AQIM, which has members from across West Africa and North Africa.

The negotiator said he was recruited by Mali President Amadou Toumani Toure. “The president was almost crying. He really wanted to find a solution. He liberated the prisoners to please Canada.”

Another northern Mali leader, a member of parliament, said he is certain that the government released al-Qaeda prisoners in exchange for the Canadian hostages. He said the prisoner release triggered a bitter reaction from Mali’s northern neighbour, Algeria, which has been fighting the same terrorist group for years.

“The Algerians were angry,” he said. “The Algerians have openly said to me that they were upset about this.”

And Mr. Fowler himself has acknowledged that concessions were given to his captors in exchange for his release.

“I mean, they got something. I don’t know from whom or how,” Mr. Fowler told CBC television in an interview last month.

TIMELINE

July 2008: Robert Fowler is appointed special UN envoy to Niger, with a mandate to explore ways to bring peace to the country. It is a hush-hush mission; not even the UN Security Council is informed.

Fall: He holds several meetings with government leaders and civil-society groups in Niamey, Niger’s capital, and meets some of the country’s rebel leaders in Europe.

Dec. 14: Mr. Fowler and his aide, Louis Guay, along with their driver, are taken at gunpoint while driving on a main road about 40 kilometres northwest of Naimey.

Feb. 4, 2009: UN spokesman Farhan Haq says the United Nations is working on the belief that its missing Canadian diplomats are still alive, but it has had no contact from anyone claiming to have abducted them.

Feb. 7: Malian sources claim to have seen a video showing Mr. Fowler and Mr. Guay alive. “It is Robert Fowler who appears first before the camera,” the source says. “Behind him there are armed men. Mr. Fowler asks for a response to the demands of his kidnappers, but doesn’t provide any more details.” The description is reminiscent of al-Qaeda tapes.

Feb. 18: Al-Qaeda’s North African branch claims it is holding two missing Canadian diplomats hostage. The statement’s authenticity can not be independently verified, but it is confirmed by the SITE intelligence group, a U.S.-based organization that monitors militant messages. AQMI, an Algeria-based militant group that joined Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network in 2006, conducts dozens of bombings or ambushes each month.

April 22: It is announced that the two diplomats have been freed by Islamic militants claiming ties to al-Qaeda. Prime Minister Stephen Harper says Ottawa paid no ransom and exchanged no prisoners for their release.

Sept. 7: Mr. Fowler says in an interview with the CBC that he believes someone in the government of Niger or possibly with the UN betrayed him to al-Qaeda.

Geoffrey York, Globe and Mail

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Full article and photo: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/the-secret-mali-deal-to-releasebr-two-canadians/article1319983/

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The British Disease

Gordon Brown is widely believed to have taken lessons in how to smile.

Whenever I am in Amsterdam, I stay in a small, elegant and well-run hotel. The excellent and obliging staff are all Dutch.

Whenever I am in London, I stay at a small, elegant and well-run hotel. The excellent and obliging staff are all foreign—which is just as well, for if they were English the hotel would not be well-run for long. When the English try to run a good hotel, they combine pomposity with slovenliness.

Perhaps this would not be so serious a matter if the British economy were not a so-called service economy. It has been such ever since Margaret Thatcher solved our chronic industrial relations problem by the simple expedient of getting rid of industry. This certainly worked, and perhaps was inevitable in the circumstances, but it was necessary to find some other way of making our way in the world. This we have not done.

Incompetence and incapacity are everywhere. Despite ever-rising local taxes, town and city councils are either unable or unwilling to clear the streets of litter, with the result that Britain is by far the dirtiest country in Europe.

Although we spend four times as much on education per head as in 1950, the illiteracy rate has not gone down. I used to try to plumb the depths (or shallows) of youthful British ignorance by asking my patients a few simple questions. Fifty percent responded to the question “What is arithmetic?” by answering “What is arithmetic?” It is not that they were good at doing something that they could not name: When I asked one young man, not mentally deficient, to multiply three by four, he replied “We didn’t get that far.”

This is the result of 11 years of state-funded compulsory education, or rather attendance at school, at a cost of between $100,000 and $200,000. The government’s response has been to raise the school-leaving age to 18, thus making total ignorance even more expensive.

This is at the bottom rung of society, but incompetence starts at the very top. It is doubtful whether any major country has had a more incompetent leader than Gordon Brown for many years. The product of a pleasure-hating Scottish Presbyterian tradition, he behaves as if taxation were a moral good in itself, regardless of the uses to which it is put; he is widely believed to have taken lessons in how to smile, though he has not been an apt pupil, for he now makes disconcertingly odd grimaces at inappropriate moments. He is the only leader known to me who combines dourness with frivolity.

Early in his disastrous career in government he sold the country’s gold reserves at a derisory price, against all advice, driving the price lower by the manner in which he arranged the sale. A convenience-store owner couldn’t, and almost certainly wouldn’t, have done worse.

After 12 years of ceaseless Brownian motion, British public finances have gone from being comparatively healthy to being catastrophically bad. In order to expand vastly the public sector in which he is a true believer, Mr. Brown has raised taxes by stealth, undertaken government obligations that appear nowhere in the accounts and that will weigh on future generations, and eased credit to encourage asset inflation and give people the illusion of prosperity. For the duration of his time in government, Britain has been like a consumptive patient, with an excess of bogus well-being shortly before expiry. If the world is an opera stage, Britain has been playing Violetta or Mimi in the last act.

What, then, of the opposition? Surely it has managed to hit a few of the easy targets with which the government has so thoughtfully supplied it?

No words of mine can adequately convey the contempt in which the Conservatives are now, rightly, held by almost everyone. I do not recall meeting anyone who thinks that David Cameron, their leader, is anything other than a careerist in the mold of Tony Blair. The most that anyone allows himself to hope is that, beneath the thin veneer of opportunism, there beats a heart of oak.

But the auguries are not good: Not only was Mr. Cameron’s only pre-political job in public relations, hardly a school for intellectual and moral probity, but he has subscribed to every fashionable policy nostrum from environmentalism to large, indeed profligate, government expenditure. Not truth, but the latest poll, has guided him—at a time when only truth will serve. However, he will be truly representative as prime minister. Like his country, he is quite without substance.

Theodore Dalrymple is the pen name of Anthony Daniels, a British physician.

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203917304574414924180862140.html

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Time to show your hand, or fold

Suspects must hear the case against them or go free, judges say

YOU may not leave your home between 5pm and 9am; you may not receive visitors without permission; you must wear an electronic tag at all times. Those are among the requirements that have been imposed on 40 people over the past four years through “control orders”, restrictive conditions that the home secretary may place, with the agreement of a judge, on anyone he believes to be a terrorist. Seventeen people, including British citizens, are restricted in this way at the moment.

Three such cases were the subject of a ruling by the House of Lords on June 10th that will change the operation of control orders—and perhaps much else besides. At issue was the way in which evidence given at control-order hearings can be kept secret from the defendant and his counsel in order, it is said, to protect flows of information important for national security or the health of the source. A security-vetted “special advocate” is appointed on the defendant’s behalf to hear evidence and cross-examine witnesses in private. The advocate may not communicate with his client thereafter, which prevents him from asking if the defendant has an alibi for a certain date, for instance, or can explain a particular phone call.

Someone who has done nothing wrong is left wondering what he is accused of, and struggling to provide a defence (the guilty have some idea of what they must explain away). Even the judge’s detailed ruling is kept secret; a vaguer version is released for public consumption.

Their lordships ruled that this system would not do. “A trial procedure can never be considered fair if a party to it is kept in ignorance of the case against him,” wrote Lord Phillips, the senior law lord on the case. Secret evidence may continue to be used, the lords ruled, but defendants must get a good enough gist of the case against them to be able to rebut it. In practice, the Home Office might drop some cases rather than contest them in public and thereby risk revealing sources or spying methods. Eric Metcalfe, the director of Justice, a lobby group, reckons that about half of the control orders now in place might be lifted as a result of the ruling.

There will be further consequences, for the use of secret evidence has spread widely in the past decade. A report by Justice released at the same time as the lords’ ruling outlines how secret evidence has spread from immigration hearings (in 1997), to the detention of terrorists (from 2001), to parole-board hearings (in 2002) and, since 2006, to the freezing of suspected terrorists’ assets.

Few Western countries are as relaxed about secrecy in court. Australia’s approach is similar to Britain’s, and “investigating magistrates” in civil-law countries such as France may provide summaries of spies’ intelligence that omit some details. But in the use of secret evidence and special advocates, “Britain is the pioneer,” says Ben Ward of Human Rights Watch, an international lobbying group.

The curiosity is how Britain has ended up with this approach. “In some ways, the UK is in this position because it tried to take the enlightened step of giving the courts some control of this secret material,” Mr Metcalfe says. The use of secret evidence in court dates back to the creation of a special tribunal in 1997 to handle appeals by people who were being deported for national-security reasons. Until then, such folk had been booted out without much of a hearing, as they were in most countries. But a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights in 1997 that this rough justice violated their right to a fair trial prompted the government to set up a quasi-judicial commission for such cases, in which some evidence was kept secret and special advocates were used.

This compromise was not ideal, but it was fairer than most other countries’ approaches. (A decade on, Denmark is considering adopting the British model for its deportation appeals.) Alas, it created a template that was later applied to kinds of cases that would never normally have hinged on secret evidence. Now, perhaps, the trend will be reversed.

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Full article: http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13832619&source=hptextfeature

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See also: 

Disclosure required for fair terror-suspect trial

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/reports/article6472457.ece

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Once Again, British Ruling Class Stirs a Revolt

Every so often, Britons in large numbers seem to rally around a common theme, a newly coined orthodoxy that brooks no dissent and rudely demands change. And, as events over the years — indeed the centuries — have shown, their leaders ignore such junctions in the nation’s history at their peril.

It happened, perhaps mawkishly, when Princess Diana died in 1997 and the royal family — perceived as stuffy and unresponsive, remote and unfeeling — seemed to disdain its subjects’ communal grief. Only when Queen Elizabeth II addressed the nation, descending from her palace to street level to bow — however discreetly — at Diana’s funeral cortege, was the monarchy redeemed.

It happened again in 2003 when over a million people took to the streets of London to tell the then-prime minister, Tony Blair, that they did not want their soldiers to fight in the American-led invasion of Iraq. But Mr. Blair did send his troops to war and became embroiled in the acrimonious debates over Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction that undermined his every justification for doing so.

It is often argued that the beginnings of his ouster in 2007 were rooted in those passionate days in 2003 when he lost the people’s trust at one of those moments when the British stiff upper lip turns into a mastiff’s snarl.

And it is happening again, in 2009. With shared fury, Britons have rounded on those who represent them at the Mother of Parliaments, scenting something rotten in this cradle of democracy as their legislators are caught out in tawdry manipulation of their expense accounts.

The instances of straight cheating and more ambiguous rule-bending are now legend. The public purse, it seems, financed the cost of cleaning a moat, of purchasing a home for pet ducks, of paying off non-existent mortgages, of buying manure, crackers and dog food. Legislators have been caught using public funds to sponsor relatives’ accommodation, renovate homes, hire unauthorized spin doctors and evade taxes.

By the standards of chief executives’ or investment bankers’ bonuses, the amounts were generally modest. Members of Parliament earn £64,766 a year, or about $104,000, and are permitted expenses including office costs and an extra £24,000 for running a second home — either to be near their constituents or to be near their colleagues on the green benches of Westminster. And, true enough, not all legislators have been found morally deficient.

But day after day for over three weeks, The Daily Telegraph has mined a trove of legislators’ expense accounts, stoking its readers’ revulsion at an aloof ruling class depicted as milking the public purse. (In 1997, it was the tabloid press that heaped pressure on the royals to change their ways.)

Usually, The Daily Telegraph is seen as speaking to, and for, the Conservative right of British politics, but the stain of its campaign has spread beyond its traditional targets.

Legislators from both main parties have been forced to quit, some in the face of angry public encounters with constituents whose sense of betrayal is personal. Still more will not be permitted to run for office again. The Parliament speaker, Labor’s Michael Martin, announced tersely and testily that he would resign in June. As if to escape a British equivalent of the French revolutionary tumbrel, politicians of all stripes are vying with one another to promise a new beginning.

“It’s been a terrible few weeks for politics,” David Cameron, the leader of the opposition Conservatives, said with rare understatement. People have come to believe “that the state is their enemy, not their ally.”

Some of those passions and perceptions have been magnified by the prospect of elections across the Continent next week to the European Parliament — a ballot most Britons generally greet with indifference.

“Fewer people voted to decide who should represent them in the glass house in Brussels than did to choose who should stay in the Big Brother house on television,” said Timothy Garton Ash, a historian and columnist.

But the European ballot has been used in the past by some Britons as a vehicle of protest. For the British establishment, the fear now is that, out of disaffection and spite, the voters will give an undeserved and embarrassing electoral boost to the anti-immigrant British National Party, punishing the mainstream by rewarding the extremes.

Such are the worries that the Church of England, often remote from politics, became embroiled in a somewhat undignified exchange with Nick Griffin, the National Party’s leader.

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, used a joint statement to tilt against political parties exploiting Britain’s malaise to conjure “fear and division within communities, especially between people of different faiths or racial background.” In response, Mr. Griffin told the clerics it was time they “grew up.”

In Britain, the European ballot is no more than a bellwether. The fight for the real prize is at the British national elections within 12 months. Before the scandal over expenses erupted, the Conservatives seemed confident front-runners. Now the question is whether Prime Minister Gordon Brown will risk an earlier vote — and whether the political system will endure as it has in the past.

Some close watchers of politics have their suspicions that the British elite will survive the shocks of 2009 — emerging as a phoenix in newer plumage, but the same creature at heart.

Britons may well hear promises of renewal from their leaders, Mr. Garton Ash wrote in The Guardian. But then, the promise of change will give way to “the long slow disappointment as the new masters behave like the old, exploiting all the powers and privileges of an over-mighty executive in an over-centralized state.”

Others have reached far into history to seek a parallel, settling on the bloody example of the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381. At that time, rebellious serfs marched on London to challenge the feudal authority of an elite around the young King Richard II. Buildings burned. Heads rolled. And the rulers broke promises made to defuse the revolt.

“What irks voters, taxpayers and shareholders is what angered medieval peasants — that the ruling class regards us with contempt,” the columnist Carl Mortished wrote in The Times of London. “Meanwhile we must fight their wars, fill their castles with food and pay the taxes they impose.”

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/30/world/europe/30iht-letter.html?ref=world

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See also:

Beneath a British Scandal, Deeper Furies

http://abluteau.wordpress.com/2009/05/24/beneath-a-british-scandal-deeper-furies/

What a Member of Parliament Deserves

http://abluteau.wordpress.com/2009/05/26/what-a-member-of-parliament-deserves/

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In Britain, Scandal Flows From Modest Request

The House of Commons speaker, Michael Martin, standing in robe, speaking Tuesday about new proposed rules over expenses.

It began modestly enough back in 2005, when an American freelance writer and journalism teacher living in London, Heather Brooke, entered a request under Britain’s newly promulgated freedom of information act for details of the expense claims of British members of Parliament.

Ms. Brooke’s initiative to expose the politicians’ greed, now led by one of the country’s principal newspapers, The Daily Telegraph, has led to the biggest scandal to hit the House of Commons in decades. On Tuesday, the affair claimed its biggest victim yet when the speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin, became the first man to be ousted from that job in more than 300 years.

At one level, the scandal is a rich tale of politicians exploiting a lax system of expenses to claim a mind-boggling array of benefits. The claims have centered on so-called second-home allowances, which have allowed some members of Parliament to use nearly $40,000 a year in taxpayers’ money to renovate and even sell properties for profit, while others have claimed monthly payments for mortgages that had already been paid off. Still others claimed “necessities” like the clearing of a country house moat, an electrical massage chair and even a Kit Kat bar.

At another level, it is a story of a newspaper, The Telegraph, which broke with a reputation as a stuffy publication favored by retired army colonels and blue-rinsed widows to seize what has turned out to be one of Britain’s greatest scoops. As it has done so, it has stolen a march on its rivals in an overcrowded market where vanishing profits have intensified an already brutal rivalry.

The Telegraph’s editors, with daily banner headlines pummeling members of Parliament like a boxer raining blows on a helpless opponent, have declined to comment on reports that they paid about $140,000 for computerized disks containing more than a million individual expense claims by members of Parliament over the past over the past four years. An unidentified whistleblower is said to have approached at least one of The Telegraph’s rival publications, The Times of London, with an initial demand for $380,000.

The timing of the scandal has played its part in fostering a public outcry with few precedents in parliamentary history. With Britain mired in its deepest recession since the 1930s, and tens of thousands losing jobs every month, it is hard to imagine a less auspicious moment, for the parliamentarians, to have their expenses exposed to public scrutiny.

In response, they have made groveling apologies, waved reimbursement checks before television cameras and pledged to restore “respect for Parliament.”

For the time being, the scandal has overwhelmed every other story in Britain’s media. The country’s main television news channels offer live coverage of every twist and turn, while members of Parliament with dubious expense claims elbow their way past television crews and newspaper reporters mounting vigils outside their homes. Almost every hour brings new attempts to save careers with hand-on-heart apologies, tortuous explanations and promises of unrelenting modesty in future claims on the public purse.

The two main political protagonists in the affair, Prime Minister Gordon Brown, leader of the Labor Party, and David Cameron, leader of the opposition Conservatives, have escalated their responses to the scandal day by day. Both have pledged that no member of Parliament shown to have made improper expense claims will be allowed to run as a candidate in a general election that must be held before June 2010. With at least 80 Parliament members already named by The Telegraph in its serialized chronicle of abuses, that could result in dozens of sitting members being denied the chance to run for re-election.

Some have already decided to jump before they are pushed. Just as Mr. Martin was announcing his decision to quit Tuesday, the man who seems likely to become the unhappy icon of the scandal, Douglas Hogg, announced he would quit Parliament, and politics, at the end of its current term. Mr. Hogg, 64, a former Conservative cabinet minister and an aristocratic grandee, was the man who included a $3,400 claim for the clearing of his country house moat on a list of his expenses.

When The Telegraph first made the moat claim public, Mr. Hogg provided one of the more farcical moments of the scandal, leading a BBC television crew on a fast-paced march from his London home to the House of Commons. Wearing a flat cap of a kind favored at country steeplechases, and trying breathlessly to explain the bureaucratic intricacies of the expenses system, he avoided, for several minutes, responding directly to the BBC reporter’s insistent questions about the moat. A few days later, under pressure from Mr. Cameron, he announced that he would repay the money claimed for the moat.

Ms. Brooke, who entered the original request for the details of the expenses, has been a largely unheralded figure as the scandal has unfolded. She worked as an investigative reporter in Washington State and South Carolina before moving about 10 years ago to Britain, her parents’ birthplace. Her request led to a protracted battle by the Labor majority in Parliament to get a statutory exemption for their expense claims from the freedom of information act, a bid abandoned only in January.

The blustering efforts of Mr. Martin, the 63-year-old speaker, to block the publication of the expenses, and his announcement last week that he had asked Scotland Yard to open a criminal investigation into the leak to The Telegraph, appeared to have contributed to the decision by Mr. Brown to pressure him into resigning. That made him the first speaker forced out since 1695. Scotland Yard chose the moment of Mr. Martin’s resignation to announce that it would not be investigating the leak.

The expenses were to have been made public anyway by the House of Commons in July, after detailed redacting by officials that would have disguised some of the members’ more controversial practices. One of these would have been the so-called flipping from one house or apartment to another in second-home claims, which enabled some members to buy and improve properties at the expense of the taxpayers and then sell them for handsome profits.

For readers of The Telegraph, many of them staunch Conservatives, the revelations have carried an irony of their own. The day-by-day exposures have raised questions about the integrity of many Conservatives, as well as members of Labor and the Liberal Democrats, the third major party in the Commons, making for what some commentators have called an “equal opportunity” scandal.

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/world/europe/20britain.html?scp=4&sq=Speaker%20Commons&st=cse

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What a Member of Parliament Deserves

Drip, drip, drip: The neverending stream of revelations has been compared by one British member of Parliament to “torture” — waterboarding? — and rightly so. One day, it emerges that a senior MP has charged British taxpayers £2,000 (about $3,200 as of yesterday) for the cleaning of the moat on his 13th-century estate. A few days later, another MP is revealed to have charged 1,645 pounds for a floating duck house. Almost every day for the past two weeks, in fact, the British press has published accounts of the ginger crinkle cookies, stainless steel dog bowls, swimming pool heaters, spousal iPhones and the trouser press (119 pounds) that British legislators charged to the British government.

Which isn’t bad compared with the MP who submitted a claim for interest payments on a mortgage he had already repaid, or those who kept swapping properties in order to avoid taxes. Outrage is genuine. The Daily Telegraph — the newspaper that obtained the expense receipts (and isn’t saying how; most assume the paper bought them) is calling for early elections. So is just about everybody else, except, naturally, the ruling Labor Party.

There is a degree of unfairness about this scandal. With the exception of a handful of real cheaters and tax-dodgers, most politicians were operating within a legal system. According to parliamentary rules, they were allowed to claim for the expenses of maintaining a second home, either in London or in their districts. But only a degree: After all, the reimbursement system was set up and run by the politicians themselves, under the aegis of soon-to-be-retired, yet apparently unrepentant Michael Martin, the first speaker of the House of Commons to be forced out of office since 1695.

Besides, while some MPs charged for the leaky pipes under their tennis courts, others kept their expenses to a bare minimum. And in that fact lies an interesting psychological question: Why did members of the world’s oldest legislative body feel they were entitled to ask the taxpayers to pay for their scatter cushions and their swimming pool maintenance? Though some retained a sense of propriety, most did not. Why not? The explanation seems to me to lie in the declining prestige of the House of Commons and the rise of the outsize-bonus culture in the London financial district down the road.

Both have their origins in the 1980s, when a combination of Thatcherite reforms, the adoption of English as the universal business language, and geography — Britain is in a time zone about halfway between New York and Tokyo — made London the financial capital of Europe. Throughout the decade, everyone in Parliament watched their friends from college get not just rich but very, very rich, while their own salaries remained stagnant. As a result, British MPs came down with a bad case of what columnist David Brooks has called “Status- Income Disequilibrium,” a disease whose sufferers hold badly paying but prestigious jobs, positions that require them to “lunch on an expense account at The Palm, but dine at home on macaroni” — (or, in British terms, “go home every night to beans on toast”).

The problem worsened as the importance of Parliament declined. With the rise of 24-hour television, the importance of substantive debate declined, too. MPs were not only relatively poor but also relatively insignificant. They earned less, and they mattered less, not merely less than bankers but less than journalists and less than their political predecessors. This parliamentary crisis of confidence seemed to climax in the “cash-for-questions” scandal in 1994, when a few conservative MPs were shown to have taken money — in cash, in brown paper bags — from businessmen who wanted them to make official inquiries on their behalf.

Back then, a solution seemed imminent: Crusading against parliamentary “sleaze,” Tony Blair’s Labor Party cruised to victory in 1997, ending 18 years of Conservative rule. This time after 12 years of Labor rule, there are no white knights. All three major British political parties — Conservative, Labor, Liberal Democrat — have been damaged by the expenses scandal, which is unfolding just as Britain enters a deep recession (itself partly the result of the outsize bonus culture). As a result, the next elections may well bring to into office a gaggle of political independents or representatives of the xenophobic British National Party.

Or they may simply reveal new depths of voter apathy. If the declining prestige of Parliament is a part of the source of this scandal, a far more dramatic decline in the prestige of Parliament will be the result. That feeling, so palpable in London — and in New York, and in Washington — that “I’m clever, I work hard, so I deserve to be richer, even at someone else’s expense” helped bring down Lehman Brothers, helped create the Madoff pyramid and has now damaged the ancient House of Commons. Which venerable institution is going to fall next?

Anne Applebaum, Washington Post

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/25/AR2009052502118.html

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Beneath a British Scandal, Deeper Furies

POWER CLOTHES Michael Martin was Commons speaker during the State Opening of Parliament. He resigned over Britain’s expense scandal.

To speak of a “political revolution” in Britain would seem chimerical were it not for the number of times the possibility has been raised these days, in precisely those terms, by politicians and the London-based commentariat. Suddenly, the talk is of a political system grown petrified, and in urgent need of a root-and-branch overhaul that restores the accountability of politicians — and of the government — to the people.

The alarm has been stirred by an upsurge in public anger over venality that seems to have run like a virus through the House of Commons, as exposed in revelations in The Daily Telegraph about expense claims entered by many of the 646 members of Parliament. But the expense abuses are only the tip of a malaise that has seen Parliament grow ever more remote from the voters, and governments grow ever more oblivious of Parliament.

There have been no angry mobs storming the House of Commons, nor much of anything in the way of organized protest. But the mood of anger is palpable in every pub and on every bus and train. It concerns far more than the latest scandal, touching grievances that have been building gradually for at least 30 years — perhaps for nearly a century — about the growth of a self-serving political class, arrogant habits of rule and an inward-looking cadre of senior civil servants, for all of which the most appropriate adjective seems to be “high-handed.”

Now the popular resentment has reached proportions that are drawing comparisons to the situation 180 years ago, when the Great Reform Act of 1832 was speeded through Parliament by riots in several cities. That act laid the basis for modern democracy in Britain by widening the males-only franchise and shifting power to the country’s cities from the “rotten boroughs” controlled by rural grandees.

Some of the Parliament members caught up in the current turmoil, and as many who have not been, argued in its early stages that the expenses scandal was no more than a storm in a teacup — involving at most £30 million to £50 million in dodgy claims over the past five years. A mere bagatelle, as these proponents would have it, at a time of government-financed bank bailouts that have cost British taxpayers tens of billions.

The problem, these voices suggested, lay less in the claims’ extravagance than the laxity of rules under which they were made; the solution, no less surely, would require nothing more than a tightening of the rules already laid down by Parliament itself, and a stricter audit. But the air of imperturbability didn’t last long in the face of a lengthening list of M.P.’s — nearly 200 to date — whose integrity has been brought into question by the excoriating details published in The Telegraph.

Under a “second homes allowance” enabling every member to claim the costs of commuting to London, M.P.’s entered claims to stretch the credulity of an Evelyn Waugh novel. For the Tories, the worst embarrassments lay in charges for the clearing of a moat, a shipment of horse manure for a garden, the maintenance of sprawling woodlands, the installation of a miniature “duck house” in a country house pond. The more mundane needs of Laborites and Liberal Democrats were met by claims for nonexistent mortgages, dry-rot repairs at the house of a Labor M.P.’s partner, and a Liberal Democrat’s trouser press. Before he resigned over the scandal, the speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin, claimed thousands of pounds for a chauffeur-driven car that drove him about his Glasgow constituency, one of Britain’s poorest.

Along with the greed, the revelations brought forth some displays of breathtaking arrogance. Anthony Steen, a 69-year-old Conservative, told a BBC reporter that $135,000 in claims for the upkeep of his country home were nobody’s business. “Do you know what it’s about? Jealousy,” he said. “I’ve got a very, very large house. Some people say it looks like Balmoral. It’s a merchant’s house of the 19th century. It’s not particularly attractive. It just does me nicely.”

On its own, the scandal would scarcely have been enough to set off calls for a political upheaval. Britain, after all, is home to the “mother of parliaments” and a democratic tradition that traces its origins back at least 800 years. In the United States, as in Britain itself, it has been commonplace to think of this country as a haven of political stability. Until the euphoria that greeted the rise of President Obama, American politics were often dismissed here as a circus, compared with the “dignity” inherent in Britain’s political traditions.

But critics had also noted that the reforms that began in earnest in 1832 began to be rolled back as early as World War I, with governments claiming ever-widening statutory powers, and imposing their will roughshod through their control of pliant parliamentary majorities. The result, the critics say, has been an entrenchment of “parliamentary dictatorship,” with the only moment of meaningful accountability for governments coming at general elections that are held, in normal circumstances, every four or five years.

American presidents, who struggle with hostile majorities in Congress or assertive Supreme Courts, have envied the relatively untrammeled power wielded by, say, Winston Churchill during World War II, or Margaret Thatcher when she initiated free-market reforms that rejuvenated Britain’s economy. With an informal constitution based on centuries-old precedents and traditions, British governments are spared the balance-of-power constraints of the American Constitution, though they can be subject to restraint by the courts or, occasionally, to backbench rebellions that may block or delay government bills.

But the breakdown of public trust evident in the reaction to the expenses scandal has been speeded in the past three decades by an erosion of other traditions that have allowed prime ministers to assume quasi-presidential powers. Especially since Tony Blair led Labor to power in 1997, cabinet government has given way to informal cabals of favored ministers and trusted aides, in what British tabloids have called “sofa government.” The independence of civil servants has been undermined, especially at 10 Downing Street, by political favoritism and the proliferation of American-style “special advisers” on the public payroll, who act as the prime minister’s acolytes.

From academics who specialize in government, and from public interest groups, pressure for change has been growing; that pressure feeds on public disaffection with the way unpopular policies have been pushed through with only a minimum of parliamentary scrutiny, and sometimes with debate cut short by the government. The watershed, historically, may prove to have been Britain’s decision to join the United States in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, at a time when antiwar protests were drawing hundreds of thousands into London’s streets.

Even as he has rejected calls to sack ministers caught up in the expenses scandal, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has enlisted himself in the reformers’ ranks, telling a news conference that he wants an end to the functioning of Parliament as “a gentlemen’s club” that makes its own rules on members’ benefits, as well as wider changes that would make Parliament and the government “more accountable to the people.” Similar commitments have been made by David Cameron, the Conservative leader, who could be prime minister himself after the election that must be held sometime in the next 12 months.

The reformers’ wish list reads like a primer from American experience. It includes fewer members of Parliament — Britain, with a population of 60 million, has 200 more members in its lower house than there are in the United States House of Representatives, which represents more than 300 million people. The list also includes parliamentary committees with real powers of oversight and investigation, in place of tame, government-controlled bodies; primary elections to select parliamentary candidates, superseding the closed, party-run selection system that operates now; and a return to the old traditions of cabinet government, ministerial accountability and civil service independence.

But first, the expenses system has to be cleaned up, and that could prove to be the sharpest shock of all. With Mr. Brown and Mr. Cameron vowing to “de-select” — bar from the next election — Labor and Conservative candidates who have made improper claims, the careers of dozens of M.P.’s are at hazard, including many on the Labor and Conservative front benches. “A few M.P.’s have made terrible mistakes, and they will pay a very heavy price,” Mr. Brown told his news conference. By all appearances, British voters will accept nothing less.

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/weekinreview/24burns.html?hpw

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Hamburg Reaches Deal with Google on Street View

After numerous citizen complaints, Hamburg says it has reached a tentative deal with Google limiting the scope of its Street View service, which offers ground-level photos of city streets around the world. The service is highly controversial in Germany, despite not yet having launched here.

Internet search giant Google has reached a tentative deal with the government official in the city of Hamburg responsible for data privacy issues surrounding the company’s controversial Street View project. The official, Johannes Caspar, said Google had responded to an ultimatum on the firm placed by the city-state to address 12 potential violations of German data privacy laws.

Google Street View is controversial due to its linking of ground-level images of streets (complete with buildings and monuments) to its comprehensive Google Maps. In Germany and other European countries — where privacy and data protection laws are far stricter than in the United States — the project has proven highly controversial.Google Street View is already available for other parts of Europe, allowing a user to take a virtual tour of the streets of Paris or London’s Piccadilly Circus, for example. It’s simple to operate: Users just drag a symbol of a small yellow man over the desired street. A street-view image then opens, allowing a 360-degree view of homes, front yards, cars, people and whatever other objects were captured when the camera-equipped cars dispatched by Google travelled through the area.

And some of the images tell more than Google anticipated. Several months ago, the service drew controversy in Britain when a woman divorced her husband after finding evidence on Street View that he had cheated on her. An image on the service showed his car parked in front of the home of his mistress.

In Germany, Hamburg isn’t the only city to have expressed its grief against Google over Street View. In Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany, the state’s top data protection official, Thilo Weichert, has described the way Google collects data for the project as “horrible.” Last October, a homeowner in Molfsee, a suburb of the German port city of Kiel, saw one of black Opel Astra cars the company is using to take street images in German cities and complained to local officials, sparking community outrage over the search engine’s ambitious and, they felt, prying endeavor. The state parliament even took up the issue. Communal resistance to the ambitious projects also spread to other German cities like Hamburg. As a result of the protest, Google initially suspended its work in northern Germany. But now it is continuing to busily take snapshots of street scenes in cities like Frankfurt, Hamburg, Bremen and Kiel.Pixillate or Perish

In Hamburg, the city had issued an ultimatum on Monday that it must adhere to data protection demands or face an injunction against its project, which it would like to complete globally. In a letter to both Google Germany and Google in the United States, the state official in charge of data protection ordered the company to submit a written guarantee that it would adhere to the rules by Wednesday. Hamburg officials said a deal would not be finalized until Google’s US headquarters provided a written pledge to adhere to the rules.

Hamburg is demanding that the faces of people captured in the images are pixilated to the point they cannot be recognized before they are used or archived. It wants the same for license plates and other potentially identifiable private data. And it wants the company to delete any images of homes if asked to by owners — both online and in any data it saves.On Wednesday, Caspar praised Google for meeting the deadline, and said that planned talks in the coming week would focus on written assurances that Google would delete any raw data that has not been pixilated and has already been transferred to the US.

Hamburg data-protection officials said numerous residents and communities had issued complaints in recent weeks about Google Street View, with at least two upset citizens calling by phone each day.

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Full article: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,626075,00.html

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Google Threatened With Sanctions Over Photo Mapping Service in Germany

A German data protection official on Tuesday threatened Google, the world’s largest search company, with “unspecified sanctions” if the company did not change its Street View panoramic photo mapping service to conform to the country’s strict privacy laws.

Johannes Caspar, the data protection regulator for the German city-state of Hamburg, where Google has its German headquarters, said officials would be forced to pursue unspecified sanctions if he did not receive written guarantees from Google agreeing to changes before 10 a.m. local time Wednesday.

Mr. Caspar said during an interview that Google and the German data protection officials were at odds on 12 points involving the operation of Street View. German privacy law forbids dissemination of photos of people or their property without their consent.

The most significant disputes involving Street View, Mr. Caspar said, concern Google’s unauthorized filming of houses and private property and the company’s handling of the photographic data it records but which is later removed from Street View following complaints by property owners.

“I have asked for written guarantees on 12 points,” Mr. Caspar said, “and if Google doesn’t deliver the guarantees by the deadline, we will be forced to investigate the possibility of sanctions.” He declined to specify what the other 10 points were or what sanctions were contemplated.

Dietmar Müller, a spokesman for the German Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information in Bonn, said the Hamburg agency could levy fines against Google of up to €100,000, or $136,000, which Google could appeal in court. Private citizens could also sue Google in German court over unauthorized filming, he added.

“But generally, the penalties for this type of activity are limited in Germany,” Mr. Müller said.

The data protection administrators of 16 German states, led by Hamburg and the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, have objected to Google’s plans for its Street View service. In Kiel, a city on the Baltic Sea, residents last year put stickers on their front doors warning Google not to film their property for the service.

Google has been compiling a photographic inventory since 2008 of major streets in Germany for Street View, which is available in 11 countries, including France, Italy, Spain, Britain and the Netherlands in Europe.

But about 300 people in Germany have complained to local officials about the filming, Mr. Caspar said, and Google has not set a date for introducing the service in Germany, the largest European economy.

In an attempt to resolve the dispute, representatives for Google and the state data protection officials met in April. Stefan Keuchel, a Google spokesman in Hamburg, said Google had made real progress at the meeting toward a resolution to the impasse.

“We are committed to reaching an agreement which respects local laws,” Mr. Keuchel said.

Google, Mr. Keuchel said, agreed at the meeting, in Schwerin, to give Germans the right to opt out of Street View filming in advance by visiting a Web site. Also, property owners can contact Google after Street View goes online and have their property or images removed or made unintelligible by pixelation.

It is standard practice, Mr. Keuchel said, for Google to make vehicle license plates indecipherable and obscure the faces of individuals filmed unwittingly by Google’s 360-degree panoramic camera.

But Mr. Keuchel declined to say whether Google would accede to all the German objections, which a confidentiality agreement prevented him from detailing.

“We will definitely be submitting our answers to all of the questions raised by the state officials by tomorrow’s deadline,” Mr. Keuchel said.

Mr. Caspar said that his agency so far had received only a verbal promise from Google and that it was seeking written guarantees from authorized representatives at Google’s headquarters in California.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/technology/companies/20google.html?hpw

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See also:

Greece put brakes on Street View

The Hellenic Data Protection Authority wants more information.

Greece’s data protection agency has banned Google from expanding its Street View service in the country, pending “additional information” from the firm.

Street View gives users a 360-degree view of a road via Google Maps.

Authorities want to know how long the images would be kept on Google’s database and what measures it will take to make people aware of privacy rights.

A similar street mapping service, run by local ISP Kapou, was also suspended for the same reason.

In a statement, Google said that it had not seen the full details of the The Hellenic Data Protection Authority’s request, but had taken steps to protect people’s privacy.

“Google takes privacy very seriously, and that’s why we have put in place a number of features, including the blurring of faces and licence plates, to ensure that Street View will respect local norms when it launches in Greece,” the statement read.

“We have already spoken with the Hellenic Data Protection Authority to ensure that they understand the importance we place on protecting user privacy.

“Although that dialogue is ongoing, we believe that launching in Greece will offer enormous benefits to both Greek users and the people elsewhere who are interested in taking a virtual tour of some of its many tourist attractions.”

First launched in the US two years ago, Street View has now covers nine countries, including the United Kingdom and Google wants to expand the service to cover all of Europe.

Users zoom in to a given location in Google Maps, and then drag the “Pegman” icon above the zoom bar on to a given street.

A picture view of that street appears, which users can control to get a 360-degree view of the area or to progress on street level, throughout the city.

Google says the service shows only imagery already visible from public thoroughfares.

Under fire

However, it has come in for criticism from some quarters, being accused of an invasion of privacy.

While many of these charges have been dismissed, either through the courts or by regional information commissioners, in some cases people have taken a more direct approach.

In April, residents near Milton Keynes blocked the driver of a Google Street View car when he started taking photographs of their homes saying the service was “facilitating crime”.

Google’s street mapping cars are, for now, being kept in neutral.

The Pentagon has also banned Google from filming near or inside its military bases, saying it posed a “potential threat” to security.

The director of the UK-based privacy watchdog Privacy International, Simon Davies, said the Greeks’ decision would set a precedent for other nations.

“This is fantastic news. The Greek regulators understand the risks of future technology creep. They have watched what has happened in the US and UK very carefully and will be familiar with the arguments on both sides.

“This highlights the difference between regulators – some will allow the public space to be exploited, others acknowledge that people’s privacy needs to be protected.

“Now we wait for the domino effect, as the Greek decision sets an example that others may follow – we will see what happens next in Central Europe.”

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See also:

All clear for Google Street View

http://abluteau.wordpress.com/2009/04/24/all-clear-for-google-street-view/

Broughton residents challenge Google camera

http://abluteau.wordpress.com/2009/04/03/residents-challenge-google-camera/

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See also:

Street View under fire in Japan

Residents say the Street View images let users see more than they should.

Google’s Street View service suffered a second blow this week after numerous complaints in Japan forced the firm to start reshooting all the photos.

Cameras attached to the Street View car were “too high” for Japanese buildings, allowing them to see over walls into private areas.

Google said it would lower the cameras on its cars by 40cm (16in).

On 12 May, Greece’s data protection agency ordered Google to stop filming because of privacy concerns.

In a statement, Google said it would make “locally appropriate modifications to ensure a better user experience”.

“We have lowered the height of the camera due to the unique characteristics of many Japanese roads; they tend to be narrow, without pavements and driveways, and houses are built close to the street,” the statement said.

“We think the new camera height allows us to get a high-quality image of the street while respecting the privacy of homeowners.”

The Street View service covers 12 cities in Japan, including Tokyo and Osaka.

Timeline

First launched in the US two years ago, Street View now covers nine countries including the United Kingdom, and Google wants to expand the service to cover all of Europe.

Users zoom in to a location in Google Maps, and then drag the “Pegman” icon above the zoom bar on to a given street.

A picture of that street appears, which users can control to get a 360-degree view of the area or to progress on street level, throughout the city.

Google says the service shows only imagery already visible from public thoroughfares.

However, it has come in for criticism from some quarters, being accused of an invasion of privacy.

Earlier this week, Greece’s data protection agency banned Google from expanding its Street View service in the country, pending “additional information” from the firm.

Authorities want to know how long the images will be kept on Google’s database and what measures it will take to make people aware of privacy rights.

In the UK, residents near Milton Keynes blocked the driver of a Google Street View car in April when he started taking photographs of their homes saying the service was “facilitating crime”.

The Pentagon has also banned Google from filming near or inside its military bases, saying it posed a “potential threat” to security.

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Full article and photo: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8049490.stm

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German Towns Saying ‘Nein’ to Google ‘Street View’

Google’s corporate slogan might be “don’t be evil,” but some communities in northwestern Germany see something nefarious in the company’s photographing all their streets and houses. If they get their way, they will remain black holes in Google’s ambitious mapping of the universe.

Google’s mission “to organize the world’s information” has just met a formidable foe in the form of the town of Molfsee near Kiel in the northwestern German state of Schleswig-Holstein.

The picturesque, but not picture-friendly town hopes to block the Internet giant from filming its streets and the houses of its fewer than 5,000 inhabitants for its “Street View” program — a service that provides 360-degree, street level images via the Google Maps search engine.

“We are not going to let this happen,” Reinhold Harwart, the leader of the CDU on the town council, told the Lübecker Nachrichten daily Sunday. “You can see everything in those photos! That is opening house and home to criminals!”

Harwart’s worries are shared at the state and federal levels. “We find the project extremely alarming,” Marit Hansen, the state’s deputy officer in charge of privacy protection, told the same paper. “It gathers personal data and puts it on the Internet. That will not do.” Peter Schaar, Germany’s Federal Commissioner for Data Protection, told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that he had major misgivings about Google’s plans.

The Street View program, which uses a combination of photographs taken from cameras mounted on the roofs of cars and global positioning technology, has elicited similar responses around the world since it was first introduced in San Francisco in May 2007. Since then it has spread to dozens of other cities across the globe. The worries range from those of people worrying that the program could be used to help would-be kidnappers, people patronizing adult entertainment establishments or even people trying to hide the fact that they smoke from a spouse.

As far as Google is concerned, the complaints are much ado about nothing. “You can’t really see anything more than a person walking down the street would,” Kay Oberbeck, Google’s spokesman for North and Central Europe told the Berlin daily Die Tageszeitung. “But, whereas that person can look over the hedge, our cameras can’t.” He added that the program automatically blurs out the faces of people and license plate numbers caught in the images.

Filming residential streets, which Google has been doing in this country for a few months, is not illegal in Germany. But to stop Google from filming its community, Molfsee plans to require the company to get a permit, citing laws related to traffic and commercial activities in public spaces. “We will require that they get a special-use permit for the streets,” Harwart told Die Tageszeitung. “People can’t just put tables or benches out on the street to sell ice cream. In such cases, people need permits.”

“And when they ask for a permit,” Harwart added, “we will say no.”

But Google doesn’t seem bothered by the threat. “We don’t need permits,” Oberbeck says, arguing that the streets are public property. “Street View is not a tool designed for criminals.”

In the meantime, according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Molfsee, Lübeck and a number of communities in Schleswig-Holstein are looking into taking legal actions to protect themselves from Google’s prying eyes.

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Full article: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,581177,00.html

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Speaker of British House of Commons Says He Will Quit in Scandal Over Expenses

Britain’s speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin, during a procession at the Houses of Parliament in December of last year.

After days of mounting pressure over Britain’s parliamentary expenses scandal, Michael Martin, the speaker of the House of Commons, announced Tuesday that he would step down — the first holder of the prestigious position to be ousted in more than 300 years.

“In order that unity can be maintained, I have decided that I will relinquish the office of speaker on Sunday, June 21,” he said. A successor would be appointed the next day. He gave no further details of his decision and went on to conduct normal parliamentary business.

He was the highest-ranking public figure to fall victim to the expenses affair. Political commentators depicted his announcement as a sign that Prime Minister Gordon Brown had caved to pressure, further damaging his political fortunes. The British leader is battling disastrous poll ratings in advance of elections that must be held within a year.

For some, Mr. Martin was a scapegoat for the squirming embarrassment of legislators of all major political parties caught in a cascade of disclosures in The Daily Telegraph newspaper about their spending under an official program that allows members of parliament to defray the costs of maintaining homes in London and in their home districts.

But for others he was held responsible for blocking disclosures of financial abuse and for stonewalling reforms from his leather chair dominating the benches of the House of Commons.

In over a week of front-page disclosures, The Telegraph has cited official records of four years of expense claims to report that members of Parliament have charged — and been routinely reimbursed — for items like hedge-trimming, moat-clearing and tennis court repairs.

According to the newspaper’s account, legislators have put manure, massage chairs and pornographic videos on their expense accounts. They have charged for flat-screen televisions and bathrobes, and for workers to change their light bulbs and show them how to operate their washing machines. They have used their expense accounts to pay off their mortgages and to renovate houses that they then sold at huge profits. Some billed for mortgage repayments on home loans that had already been paid off.

The disclosures incensed many Britons, caught in a deep recession and angry at what they have seen as examples of their elected representatives exploiting their privileged positions to secure unwarranted financial support.

Facing a possible no-confidence vote, Mr. Martin announced his decision Tuesday to a house he has presided over as speaker since 2000.

At the time he took over the job, he had been a Labor legislator for 21 years, elected in the Scottish city of Glasgow. As speaker, he succeeded Betty Boothroyd, another Labor legislator who had served as the first female speaker in seven centuries. Like her, he declined to wear the wig traditionally worn by speakers and also eschewed the practice of some of his predecessors of wearing black, ceremonial tights.

The last time a speaker was ousted was in 1695 when Sir John Trevor was forced out of office after the House of commons found he accepted a bribe to push through legislation. The post of Speaker dates to the 14th century, straddling a delicate role between parliament and the monarchy. Before the mid-16th century, several office-holders were beheaded for perceived transgressions.

The impact of the expenses scandal was felt more widely on Tuesday when Mr. Brown said that legislators found to have broken the rules on spending would not be allowed to stand for re-election as members of the ruling Labor Party. Mr. Brown promised “major changes” in the expense regulations and said legislators claims going back four years would be scrutinized.

“If they are found to have broken the rules, then action will be taken,” he said. “People have got to recognize that, because of the anger of the public, because of the mistakes that have been made, because of the errors that have happened, changes are quite fundamental and will be made very soon.”

One Conservative legislator, Douglas Hogg, who had billed parliament for the cleaning of a moat at his country house, said on Tuesday that he would not seek re-election in the next national ballot.

Mr. Martin planned a meeting later with Prime Minister Brown.

Sir Stuart Bell, an ally of Mr. Martin and a Labor legislator, said the speaker would propose reforms to give independent regulators control over parliament’s finances and to strip the speaker’s post of executive authority.

Another Labor legislator, Austin Mitchell, said Mr. Martin’s decision set a perilous precedent. “There has been a hue and cry whipped up by The Daily Telegraph and the House of Commons has given in to it. We have thrown them a bone and God knows who is going to be next.”

Mr. Martin’s departure followed extraordinary scenes on Monday in the usually smooth-running House of Commons, when Mr. Martin tried to maintain order even as legislators from all the main parties demanded that he go.

He kept his composure, but power and authority all but drained out of him as the session went on. He was heckled whenever he spoke, so that he would repeat “Order! Order!” in the middle of his own remarks.

“The reputation and standing of this house, in the views of those that send us here, is at the lowest point I can ever remember,” Richard Shepherd, a Conservative member of Parliament, declared, addressing his remarks to Mr. Martin, who was sitting in the speaker’s chair overhead. “Many out there will not believe that we are serious about the changes that are necessary as long as you are in the chair.”

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/world/europe/20britain.html?hp

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School for Scandal

British intrigues typically involve sex or spies. Now, the Parliament expense scandal threatens to be as corrosive as anything seen in Britain for decades.

The Mother of Parliaments has always been, in truth, a lady of somewhat questionable virtue. Though the British like to think of their House of Commons as the very model of parliamentary democracy, its members, the elected tribunes of the people, have frequently fallen short of those high British ideals of decorum, dignity and probity.

For the British, by turns prurient and puritan, sex is the usual temptation. In the last half a century, the course of British politics has been diverted by tales of a Cabinet minister who fathered a daughter out of wedlock, a leader of a party accused of murdering a homosexual lover, a minister, who, press reports said at the time, liked to dress up in the uniform of his favorite soccer team while she pleasured him, and countless other lurid stories of libidinous excess.

Renaissance rebel Guy Fawkes, before King James I in an 1869-70 painting.

The transgressions were, for the most part venial rather than venal in nature. Occasionally the tittering glee and clucking disapproval that accompanied these episodes was replaced with expressions of grave concern for the national interest, as in 1963 when the defense minister John Profumo admitted to having an affair with a prostitute who happened to be sleeping at the time with a Russian spy. But generally the British parliamentary scandal has been as much entertainment as indictment.

As they surveyed the antics of their own flawed politicians, in fact, the one thing the British could proudly note, in marked contrast to other nations, was that money was rarely a motivating factor. They might be running around the corridors of Westminster in an almost constant state of arousal, but British politicians were not, so anyone thought, really on the make.

In the last week, however, all that has changed. Britain has been convulsed by a series of escalating revelations about the expenses claimed by members of Parliament.

A week or so ago, the Telegraph newspaper got its hands on some of the juiciest secrets in Britain — the dubious expenses claimed over the last few years by British politicians. The scale of the cupidity is astonishing. The evidence suggests that members of all parties — Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, even, most impressively, representatives of Sinn Fein, the Irish republican party whose members for years actually refused to take their seats because they didn’t recognize Westminster’s writ — have been bilking the system for all they’re worth.

The scandal threatens to be as corrosive as anything seen in Britain in decades — this is not just about a party abusing power; it threatens to undermine the public’s remaining faith in the probity, not just of politicians, but of Parliament itself.

It all started in a classically pragmatic way. During Britain’s brutal recession of the 1980s, Parliament honed a clever device to increase members’ pay without voting for unpopular salary hikes: It quietly expanded the list of living expenses that could be claimed for reimbursement by taxpayers.

The result was a secret handshake in the halls of Westminster that put thousands of extra pounds in the pockets of British politicians each year — without the public knowing the details. The government “was saying, ‘You can’t increase your wages,’ so they created a myriad of other ways for MPs to supplement their income,” said Labour MP Jim Fitzpatrick. “People were told, ‘You don’t have to buy a TV anymore or a cooker or a sofa. You can claim it.’ ”

Politicians have sought and received reimbursement for claims ranging from a bag of manure and light bulbs to home cinema systems.

The perquisites claimed offer a colorful reminder of the resilience of the class system in Britain: from the Tory MP who claimed for the upkeep of the moat at his country house, to the Labour man who charged for a couple of toilet seats.

Some have been caught “flipping” their designation of a second home, for which they receive an allowance, from one residence to another, each time collecting money for redecoration.

A newspaper poster Friday advertises the latest on the expenses scandal.

Communities Minister Hazel Blears submitted expenses for £5,000 ($7,588) of furniture for second homes over a three-month period and has now paid back £13,332 she claimed for a housing tax. Elliot Morley, a former environment minister, has been expelled from the Labour Party over allegations that he claimed expenses of more than £16,000 for interest payments on a mortgage he had paid off more than 18 months earlier. Andrew MacKay, a Conservative member of Parliament, resigned as political adviser to party leader David Cameron after it came out that he claimed a full “second-home allowance” on his London address — while his wife, fellow Conservative MP Julie Kirkbride, claimed the full allowance for another home

On Friday, Labour MP and minister Shahid Malik — one of the party’s fast-rising stars — became the scandal’s most high-profile casualty when he stepped down as justice minister pending an inquiry into claims that he failed to declare a subsidized rent. Mr. Malik bitterly contested the allegations on television late Thursday, but had stepped aside by midday Friday. “I’m pleased to have this opportunity to clear my name,” he said.

The revelations have triggered “the most serious scandal to affect British politicians in the last 100 years,” says constitutional historian Anthony Seldon. On Friday, Britain’s Metropolitan Police said that it and the Crown Prosecution Service will look at whether they should begin criminal investigations into the misuse of parliamentary expenses.

The outraged public is writing angry letters and firing off snide remarks at their local MPs. Yet it’s also consuming the scandal like a cultural phenomenon, as witnessed by an expenses quiz in the Guardian newspaper that asked questions like “I spent £199 on a pouffe, £30 on a black glittery loo seat and £9.50 on oven mitts. Who am I?”

The Daily Telegraph’s stories are only possible because of a landmark change that is casting light on the innards of Britain’s centuries-old, but secretive, parliamentary democracy. In 2000, Parliament passed a Freedom of Information law mandating, for the first time, public access to documents relating to thousands of government bodies across the U.K.

That law became the basis of a five-year battle in which a freelance journalist and campaigner, Heather Brooke, navigated through a labyrinth of freedom-of-information filings and the courts to win public access to the ugly truth of parliamentary expense records. The records Ms. Brooke fought are set for formal release, in a somewhat redacted form, as early as late June.

Preparation of those records may have led to the leak to a newspaper. Parliamentary officials hired a contractor to convert thousands of paper receipts into computer files so they could be put on the Internet, according to parliamentary records. Because the job was so big, temporary staff were hired to help, increasing the number of people with access to the information, according to a person familiar with the situation.

The scandal comes as the public is already cranky about the recession. The British public spent the winter hectoring the lavish pay reaped by investment bankers it blames for the global financial crisis; now the spring is being spent slagging politicians for billing taxpayers for their personal lifestyle.

Politicians have been feeling the heat, suffering personal attacks and hate emails. Though he has not been accused of any wrongdoing Labour Party MP Ronnie Campbell on Friday wrote a letter to Sir Christopher Kelly, chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Standards in Public Life, saying that he wants pay back £5,000 of expenses that he claimed for furniture for his second home.

At a public meeting the previous Saturday in an Asda supermarket in Cramlington in northeast England, Mr. Campbell was the butt of criticisms. One man muttered a swear word under his breath. “Say it to my face, lad,” the burly Mr. Campbell, an ex-miner, told him. And he did: “You greedy f-, claiming that money,” Mr. Campbell says he was told.

Financial compensation is a hot button issue in any country. In the U.S., members of the House and Senate receive a much higher flat salary than the Brits, earning around $174,000. But their annual budget of $1.3 million to $1.9 million is to pay for travel, staff salaries and office costs, and does not cover the sort of allowances their U.K. peers earn. Elected members of France’s lower house get around €63,000 ($85,900) a year in salary, plus a €70,000 allowance for costs like office and apartment rent, €108,000 for staff salaries and travel costs. Italian senators get €67,356 in basic pay, plus up to around €90,000 a year in various allowances.

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A Brief History of British Political Scandals

1820

King George IV orders Lord Liverpool, the prime minister, to secure a divorce from his wife, Caroline, from whom he separated in 1796, after both became embroiled in scandal. The effort was abandoned because of opposition in Parliament. The king threatened to fire the government but failed to carry through his threat. 

1912

Senior politicians in the Liberal government of Herbert Asquith are accused of profiting from insider knowledge of government dealings with the Marconi Company. A committee of inquiry confirmed the allegations but those accused stayed in office. 

1922

The government of David Lloyd-George is shown to be selling knighthoods, peerages and other honors for campaign cash. His coalition government falls that year. 

1951

The Labour government of Clement Attlee sinks $100 million into planting three million acres of peanuts in East Africa. Five years after it starts, only 65,000 acres have been planted. Mr. Attlee’s government loses a general election that year. 

1963

John Profumo, secretary of state for war, resigns after confessing to an affair with a woman who was reputedly the mistress of a Russian spy. A few months earlier, Mr. Profumo had lied about the affair to Parliament. 

1992-97

A host of “sleaze” scandals, suggesting corruption and hypocrisy among senior Conservative politicians (including cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken, above), helped send John Major’s Conservative government to a landslide election defeat in 1997

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Norman Tebbit, chairman of the Conservative Party under former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, says he woke up the morning after winning his first parliamentary seat and realized he would be taking a pay cut of more than 25%. He asked his wife: “What have I done?”

Mr. Tebbit says politicians had been doing “minor fiddling” with boosting their expenses before. “Hard-up members would head back to the north of the country four of them in one car, and they might make four claims” on the expense, he said. But “the idea that comfortable-off Conservatives, or Liberal or Labour [politicians] would claim for the dog food or taking the wisteria off their chimneys would not have happened,” he said.

That steadily changed over the next two decades, especially during economic downtimes when members of Parliament wanted raises, but not the public outcry that would come with them. Quiet back room deals were proposed to put more money in members’ pockets.

Mr. Campbell says that, in 1992, he was approached by Conservative Leader of the House Tony Newton with a proposition: if you vote down a large increase in wages proposed in Parliament, the body would increase the amount you can claim on petrol by 2 to 3 pence a mile. Mr. Newton did not return calls for comment.

Mr. Campbell voted for the pay increase, which passed. But it was the last big hike for MPs that went through. Since then, politicians’ wages have not gone up by much, but their allowances have. Mr. Campbell said that party whips, politicians whose job is to force a party line, put peer pressure throughout Parliament to vote down pay rises on the understanding that they would get an increase in allowances.

That represented a big shift in practice. As late as the 1960s allowances were limited to free telephone calls out of London, train and gas costs of traveling to London, and free postage on official mail. Through the years new allowances were added and old ones increased; for instance, a change in 2001 allowed MPs to claim over £20,000 in an “additional cost allowance” to cover the cost

__________

Norman Tebbit, chairman of the Conservative Party under former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, says he woke up the morning after winning his first parliamentary seat and realized he would be taking a pay cut of more than 25%. He asked his wife: “What have I done?”

Mr. Tebbit says politicians had been doing “minor fiddling” with boosting their expenses before. “Hard-up members would head back to the north of the country four of them in one car, and they might make four claims” on the expense, he said. But “the idea that comfortable-off Conservatives, or Liberal or Labour [politicians] would claim for the dog food or taking the wisteria off their chimneys would not have happened,” he said.

That steadily changed over the next two decades, especially during economic downtimes when members of Parliament wanted raises, but not the public outcry that would come with them. Quiet back room deals were proposed to put more money in members’ pockets.

Mr. Campbell says that, in 1992, he was approached by Conservative Leader of the House Tony Newton with a proposition: if you vote down a large increase in wages proposed in Parliament, the body would increase the amount you can claim on petrol by 2 to 3 pence a mile. Mr. Newton did not return calls for comment.

Mr. Campbell voted for the pay increase, which passed. But it was the last big hike for MPs that went through. Since then, politicians’ wages have not gone up by much, but their allowances have. Mr. Campbell said that party whips, politicians whose job is to force a party line, put peer pressure throughout Parliament to vote down pay rises on the understanding that they would get an increase in allowances.

That represented a big shift in practice. As late as the 1960s allowances were limited to free telephone calls out of London, train and gas costs of traveling to London, and free postage on official mail. Through the years new allowances were added and old ones increased; for instance, a change in 2001 allowed MPs to claim over £20,000 in an “additional cost allowance” to cover the cost of staying away from their main home while performing their duties.

Not taking into account inflation, parliamentary wages have gone up from £26,710 in 1990 to the current £63,000. The expenses that MPs claim — on everything from staff costs of over £100,000 to the additional cost allowance of up to £24,006 and a so-called incidental-expenses provision of £22,190 — have soared.

While the broad dimensions of such payments have been public, the specifics of what members of Parliament were using the extra money for have been shrouded in secrecy. That came under attack in 2004, however, when Heather Brooke began her campaign using the recently passed Freedom of Information law as her weapon. Meeting opposition every step of the way, she sought itemized, rather than aggregated, expenses for each MP.

She finally won a court victory over the House of Commons authorities, run by the speaker Michael Martin, in May last year. Mr. Martin is now under pressure from MPs to resign.

Ms. Brooke said of the furor on Friday: “I never really expected anything like this would happen.”

She says her work has boosted Britain’s political system, not undermined it. “I think it’s fantastic. I think people are really engaged in politics now. For the first time in hundreds of years, people can see that it’s not one law for MPs and another law for everyone else.”

Richard Shepherd, a Conservative MP and a strong backer of the Freedom of Information Act, said the act had helped shine light into practices that needed to be exposed. That was a good thing, he said Friday, “however uncomfortable it has made us and however low it has brought us.”

That’s the sanguine take. A corrupt system has finally been exposed. In the long run, politicians will have to behave better.

In the meantime, the scandal has left even the famously tolerant and unflappable British public dazed.

Shaf Mohammad Rashid, who sells newspapers from a kiosk in a subway station in east London, said he has always voted Labour. But at the upcoming elections, he says, nobody is going to get his vote. “I’m fed up with them all, to be honest. I’ve lost faith.”

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Full article and photos: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124243166814925657.html

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Greece puts brakes on Street View

The Hellenic Data Protection Authority wants more information.

Greece’s data protection agency has banned Google from expanding its Street View service in the country, pending “additional information” from the firm.

Street View gives users a 360-degree view of a road via Google Maps.

Authorities want to know how long the images would be kept on Google’s database and what measures it will take to make people aware of privacy rights.

A similar street mapping service, run by local ISP Kapou, was also suspended for the same reason.

In a statement, Google said that it had not seen the full details of the The Hellenic Data Protection Authority’s request, but had taken steps to protect people’s privacy.

“Google takes privacy very seriously, and that’s why we have put in place a number of features, including the blurring of faces and licence plates, to ensure that Street View will respect local norms when it launches in Greece,” the statement read.

“We have already spoken with the Hellenic Data Protection Authority to ensure that they understand the importance we place on protecting user privacy.

“Although that dialogue is ongoing, we believe that launching in Greece will offer enormous benefits to both Greek users and the people elsewhere who are interested in taking a virtual tour of some of its many tourist attractions.”

First launched in the US two years ago, Street View has now covers nine countries, including the United Kingdom and Google wants to expand the service to cover all of Europe.

Users zoom in to a given location in Google Maps, and then drag the “Pegman” icon above the zoom bar on to a given street.

A picture view of that street appears, which users can control to get a 360-degree view of the area or to progress on street level, throughout the city.

Google says the service shows only imagery already visible from public thoroughfares.

Under fire

However, it has come in for criticism from some quarters, being accused of an invasion of privacy.

While many of these charges have been dismissed, either through the courts or by regional information commissioners, in some cases people have taken a more direct approach.

In April, residents near Milton Keynes blocked the driver of a Google Street View car when he started taking photographs of their homes saying the service was “facilitating crime”.

Google’s street mapping cars are, for now, being kept in neutral.

The Pentagon has also banned Google from filming near or inside its military bases, saying it posed a “potential threat” to security.

The director of the UK-based privacy watchdog Privacy International, Simon Davies, said the Greeks’ decision would set a precedent for other nations.

“This is fantastic news. The Greek regulators understand the risks of future technology creep. They have watched what has happened in the US and UK very carefully and will be familiar with the arguments on both sides.

“This highlights the difference between regulators – some will allow the public space to be exploited, others acknowledge that people’s privacy needs to be protected.

“Now we wait for the domino effect, as the Greek decision sets an example that others may follow – we will see what happens next in Central Europe.”

__________

See also:

All clear for Google Street View

http://abluteau.wordpress.com/2009/04/24/all-clear-for-google-street-view/

Broughton residents challenge Google camera

http://abluteau.wordpress.com/2009/04/03/residents-challenge-google-camera/

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See also:

Street View under fire in Japan

Residents say the Street View images let users see more than they should.

Google’s Street View service suffered a second blow this week after numerous complaints in Japan forced the firm to start reshooting all the photos.

Cameras attached to the Street View car were “too high” for Japanese buildings, allowing them to see over walls into private areas.

Google said it would lower the cameras on its cars by 40cm (16in).

On 12 May, Greece’s data protection agency ordered Google to stop filming because of privacy concerns.

In a statement, Google said it would make “locally appropriate modifications to ensure a better user experience”.

“We have lowered the height of the camera due to the unique characteristics of many Japanese roads; they tend to be narrow, without pavements and driveways, and houses are built close to the street,” the statement said.

“We think the new camera height allows us to get a high-quality image of the street while respecting the privacy of homeowners.”

The Street View service covers 12 cities in Japan, including Tokyo and Osaka.

Timeline

First launched in the US two years ago, Street View now covers nine countries including the United Kingdom, and Google wants to expand the service to cover all of Europe.

Users zoom in to a location in Google Maps, and then drag the “Pegman” icon above the zoom bar on to a given street.

A picture of that street appears, which users can control to get a 360-degree view of the area or to progress on street level, throughout the city.

Google says the service shows only imagery already visible from public thoroughfares.

However, it has come in for criticism from some quarters, being accused of an invasion of privacy.

Earlier this week, Greece’s data protection agency banned Google from expanding its Street View service in the country, pending “additional information” from the firm.

Authorities want to know how long the images will be kept on Google’s database and what measures it will take to make people aware of privacy rights.

In the UK, residents near Milton Keynes blocked the driver of a Google Street View car in April when he started taking photographs of their homes saying the service was “facilitating crime”.

The Pentagon has also banned Google from filming near or inside its military bases, saying it posed a “potential threat” to security.

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Full article and photo: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8049490.stm

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The linguistic divide

A Botox treatment can mask your age – but the way you speak gives you away.

A University of Toronto sociolinguistics professor has discovered that those under 40 are much more likely to use the word “like” when narrating a story, than those over 40. As in “I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’ ” instead of “I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ “

This linguistic difference is a key demographic marker, says Sali Tagliamonte, who has published a paper exploring the use of “be like” in the scholarly journal Language Variation and Change.

“The use of ‘like’ is a watershed. It captures a change in how people narrate their stories,” she says. “We think it came from California in the 1980s and it gained prestige as a trendy and socially desirable way to voice a speaker’s inner experience.”

She and her research team painstakingly analyzed more than 300 hours of recorded conversation with 200 volunteers and identified subtle differences in speech pattern and storytelling.

“The new trends reflect the evolution of Canadian society,” Prof. Tagliamonte said.

The volunteers all grew up and live in Toronto, one of the world’s most multicultural cities, and varied in age from under 17 to 80.

The study found that the rate of use of “be like” was, for example, 65 per cent for 17- to 19-year-olds, 29 per cent for 30- to 34-year-olds, 18 per cent for 35- to 49-year-olds, and 0 per cent for 80-year-olds. “People are really identifiable by the way they speak,” she concluded.

Older people often criticize the use of “like,” which peaks at about the age of 30. But it doesn’t reflect stupidity or poor grammar – it is merely a recent linguistic trend. In fact, Prof. Tagliamonte says, it’s not really so new any more, and has reached a saturation point in common conversation. In formal linguistic parlance, the use of “like” is called a “quotative” – a storytelling device used to indicate who said what.

There are several other conversational markers that divide the generations. For example, the under-40 set also tends to use the word “stuff,” as in “I have the stuff in my bag,” and “right” as a sentence ender, for example, “It’s a girl, right.”

Also popular is the use of “so” as an intensifier (“it’s so cold outside”), and the use of have as a “deontic modal,” as in “I have to go.” Prof. Tagliamonte has identified these trends as she records the particular characteristics of “Canadian” English. Canadians are known to follow both American- and British-style English, she says, and are best known for lexicon such as eh, tuque, two-four (beer), washroom and mickey (small bottle of liquor).

But the professor has found other, more subtle trends, including the development of the tense system and the use of qualifiers. The under-40 set in Toronto is more likely to say “I’m going to the store” instead of “I’ll go to the store,” she notes. As well, Canadians say “I have to go to the doctor,” whereas those born in Britain say “I’ve got to go to the doctor.” There is not a lot of social class differentiation in Canada by speech, she adds, unlike in Britain.

“This research matters because we can look at who the agents of change in language are, and what direction the language is going in,” she says. As Canada’s demographics shift, so too does its language. Some words or expressions will be lost forever. “No one says doth, shall, shan’t or sayeth any more,” she says. “Some people mourned this loss.”

Prof. Tagliamonte’s childhood inspired her to study sociolinguistics. She is Italian on her father’s side, but it was the speech patterns of her maternal relatives in rural Southern Ontario that intrigued her. “The accents my aunts and uncles had were mind-boggling to me,” she recalls. “They sounded alien. They would say things like ‘I come up from the garden and I seen a skunk.’ They used very old features.”

These days, she eavesdrops on her four children, aged 5 to 17, hoping to discover the latest teen bon mot. Her current research project – to be published this fall – involves studying how gays and lesbians act as agents of linguistic change.

It’s so, like, interesting.

Newspeak

Here are words that under-40s use more than over-40s:

“Like” as an approximating adverb (e.g. It’s like three blocks down the street.)

“Stuff” as a generic  (e.g. I have the stuff in my bag.)

“Stuff” in extensions (e.g. The place has rivers and valleys and stuff like that.)

“Right” as a sentence ender (e.g. It’s a girl, right.)

“Have” as a deontic modal (e.g. I have to go.)

“So” as an intensifier (e.g. It’s so cold outside.)

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Full article: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090417.wllanguage17art1631/BNStory/lifeMain/home

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Today in history, on February 10, 1763, the Treaty of Paris was signed

When the final Treaty of Paris was signed in February 1763, Britain had acquired Quebec, Florida, Minorca and large additional parts of India and the West Indies.

Although the war was undoubtedly costly in terms of lives and finance, it meant, for almost the first time, that Britain was truly a ‘world power’. France and England/Britain had always had an uneasy relationship.

In the mid-1750s, tensions continued to build between the two countries, specifically in relation to their dealings with the colonies. Britain declared war in May 1756 and the French retaliated by seizing British colonial bases. The conflict took place in a number of spheres – America, India, the Mediterranean and northern Europe.

In 1760, in Canadian Montreal the remaining French troops surrendered. Nevertheless it took over two years, till February 1763, before a peace treaty was signed. It had to do with the fact that there was fighting on the European mainland as well.

“Prussia was positioned on one side in central Europe together with England, Hanover, Hesse, Braunschweig, Schaumburg-Lippe-Bückeburg and Saxony Gotha and on the other side Austria, France, Russia, Sweden, the Holy Roman Empire, Saxony and Spain. England, France and Spain opposed each other overseas,” Dr. Luh, a military historian from Potsdam University explains.

The Prussian king Friedrich II had triggered off the continental war with his assault on Silesia, which belonged to the Austrian Crown. Many States were obliged, because of alliances, to give their support to one side or the other.

“Strictly speaking, for France it was a question of their position in the world, that meant North America and India and in the same way for England, who fought for the colonies and the expansion of their power and commercial interests overseas,” says Dr. Luh.

With the Treaty of Paris in 1763 England had gained supremacy over the all the North American colonies. It didn’t bring peace for the Indian tribes, however, as they were driven further and further from the settlements.

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Full article: http://www.todayinhistory.de/index.php?what=thmanu&lang=en&manu_id=1363&tag=10&monat=2&weekd=&year=2006&weekdnum=&dayisset=1&lang=en

Photo (and text of the Treaty): http://www.tlfq.ulaval.ca/axl/amnord/cndtraite_Paris_1763.htm

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Downing Street not amused by Sarkozy attack on Brown tax cut

A protester wears a Nicolas Sarkozy mask last week: the French President has pledged not to repeat Britain’s mistakes

French officials scrambled to salvage the entente cordiale today after President Sarkozy publicly disparaged Gordon Brown’s response to the global economic crisis.

In a 90-minute grilling carried simultaneously on three TV channels last night, Mr Sarkozy promised not to repeat Britain’s economic “mistakes” and said that the Prime Minister’s flagship VAT cut had “absolutely not worked”.

This morning the Elysée Palace attempted to smooth ruffled feathers, assuring officials at Downing Street that Mr Sarkozy’s comments had not been intended as an attack on British economic policy.

But a Downing Street spokesman left little doubt of the irritation that Mr Sarkozy caused at No 10, telling reporters: “The Elysee have been in contact this morning to assure us that these remarks were not meant as a critique of UK economic policy – which is nice.”

The spokesman declined to say whether this morning’s telephone conversation between officials in Downing Street and the Elysee was initiated by London or Paris.

Sarkozy and Brown

Challenged over his own plans to boost the French economy by infrastructure spending rather than tax cuts, Mr Sarkozy said: “Britain is cutting taxes. That will bring them nothing. Consumption continues to decrease in Britain.”

Predictably enough, the Tories jumped on Mr Sarkozy’s comments.

“President Sarkozy is the latest international leader to condemn Gordon Brown’s main policy for tackling the recession,” said George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor.

“We said at the time that Brown’s flagship VAT cut would only make things worse and would be an expensive failure. That view is now echoed not just by British retailers, but by foreign governments, including France, Germany and Holland.

“Gordon Brown claims to have saved the world. It would appear that world leaders increasingly disagree.”

In his television interview, Mr Sarkozy said he understood the concern of those who joined mass demonstrations last week but would not be swayed from his plans for trimming France’s costly public sector and reducing taxes on business.

“It’s normal that the French are worried. It’s a crisis the like of which the world has not seen for a century,” he said. “We have a lot of protests in France. If you have to stop every reform because of a protest, then you’d be be better off not having any reforms.”

He added: “Naturally, I will continue to reform the country. This is the mandate I received, it is my duty. It is the only way for France to emerge from the crisis stronger than going into it.”

The French President revealed he was not certain he would seek re-election in 2012. Asked why, he explained: “Because my job is very difficult. It needs a lot of energy, a lot of strength to do it and I have put all my strength into doing it as well as possible.”

“There are still three-and-a-half years,” he added. “I give no undertaking in one direction or the other. You run for a second term if you have the strength to chase another dream and people have confidence in you. It would be shocking if I had been able to make such an important decision less than half-way into my first term.”

Mr Sarkozy refused to follow President Obama in setting a ceiling for the salaries of bankers whose firms had been bailed out by the government. He said that successful managers deserved their pay, but that he was shocked by the system of pay enjoyed by financial traders.

“That’s what you have to forbid,” he said. France would review its relations with neighbouring financial havens such as Luxembourg, Andorra and Monaco, he added.

Mr Sarkozy also confirmed that he would seek to put pressure on French carmakers to prevent them selling cars in France made by cheaper factories abroad.

The opposition Socialist party characterised Mr Sarkozy’s television appearance as a show of impotence. “He was incoherent, hesitant and showed that he does not understand the crisis,” Benoit Hamon, a spokesman for the party, said.

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Full article and photo (1): http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5675801.ece

Photo (2): Manchester Guardian

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Britain’s House of Lords atwitter over corruption scandal

The silhouette of the Palace of Westminster appears against a winter sky today in London.

Their robes are red, their fur cuffs are white and now a corruption scandal has Britain’s House of Lords feeling blue.

The British government announced Monday that it had launched an investigation into four members of the venerable, if anachronistic-seeming, institution after they allegedly told undercover journalists they would be willing to influence legislation in return for money.

The accusations in the Sunday Times newspaper threw Britain’s upper chamber into turmoil and touched off a brouhaha that some are already calling “Erminegate,” after the delicate trim on the crimson gowns that the lords and ladies of the house wear on ceremonial occasions.

In an extraordinary scene broadcast on live television, the leader of the House of Lords, who is appointed by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, told the assembled “peers of the realm” that an investigation into the allegations was underway, as well as an inquiry into sanction procedures for any member found in violation of the chamber’s code of ethics.

“This is damaging, my lords, not just to this house but, I believe, also to Parliament and to politics itself,” said Janet Royall, baroness of Blaisdon, the house leader. “We in this house have a responsibility to adhere to high standards . . . to ensure trust in the whole of our parliamentary process.”

That prompted two of the lords being investigated to rise from their red leather benches and protest their innocence.

“If I have done anything that has brought this house into disrepute, I most humbly apologize,” declared one of the accused, Thomas Taylor, lord of Blackburn. “I feel within my own conscience I have followed the rules and the directions that have been given in this house over the 31 years that I have been a member.”

Taylor and the three other men, all peers belonging to the ruling Labor Party, were approached by reporters masquerading as lobbyists for a foreign businessman who supposedly wanted to open a chain of stores in Britain. The journalists pretended to be seeking help for their client in winning an exemption from a bill that would impose extra taxes.

The newspaper reported that the four peers appeared willing to take up the fictitious client’s cause to get the legislation amended, for consultants’ fees of up to $150,000. Taylor allegedly suggested that he could talk to government ministers and to the civil servants in charge of drafting the bill.

“I will work within the rules, but the rules are meant to be bent sometimes,” Taylor said, according to the newspaper.

Rules of conduct technically forbid members of the House of Lords from accepting financial rewards for exercising their parliamentary influence, but much depends on the rules’ interpretation. Even proven violations do not strip someone of his or her standing as a peer or automatically curtail the right to sit in the upper chamber, which would require an act of Parliament. For example, Conrad Black, the fallen press baron who traded in his Canadian citizenship for a British peerage, remains lord of Crossharbour, even though his lordship’s residence is now a Florida prison cell, to which he was dispatched last year for a fraud conviction.

Another of the peers now under investigation, Lewis Moonie, a former defense minister, allegedly boasted of his impunity.

“The thing with the Lords is that there’s virtually nothing they can do with you, unless you break the law,” Moonie was quoted as saying, adding: “There’s nothing they can do but jump up and down.”

Nonetheless, the prime minister was keen to be seen acting quickly on the budding scandal, mindful that the “sleaze factor” was a major contributor to the fall from power of the opposition Conservatives nearly 12 years ago.

“It’s important that you don’t prejudge these investigations, but these are serious allegations,” Brown said at a briefing with foreign reporters. “We’re determined to get to the bottom of what’s happened, and whatever action needs to be taken will be taken.”

The Sunday Times’ sting operation against the four lords made use of a tactic favored by many British newspapers to get stories that take the rich and famous down a peg. In the past, such machinations have netted an anti-marijuana lawmaker’s son for allegedly selling pot and a party-boy earl for selling cocaine to two reporters who dressed up as rich Arabs and plied the young aristocrat with alcohol.

The current imbroglio has invited renewed scrutiny of the House of Lords as an institution that a political scientist once described as “one of the most curious of the curious anomalies in British public life, defying all logic of democratic and secular politics.”

The House of Commons, whose members are elected by voters, retains ultimate power to make laws in Britain. However, the Lords can try to amend or delay legislation.

The upper chamber remains an unelected, unsalaried body, though its composition has changed greatly. In 1999, then-Prime Minister Tony Blair axed the automatic right of most of the 750 hereditary peers — heirs of dukes, earls and the like — to sit in the house.

Now, the vast majority of the 732 members are political appointees, named lifelong peers for their public service, expertise or coziness with the ruling party. Critics suggest that it merely swapped toffs and twits who referred to one another as “my noble friend” for smarty-pants and politicians’ pals who still refer to one another as “my noble friend.”

After news of the scandal broke Sunday, Royall, the leader of the House of Lords, acknowledged on a television news program that there was no way to throw anyone out for ethical lapses. But she suggested that having one’s misdeeds read out in the chamber, to the disapproving clucks of one’s fellow lords and ladies, was punishment enough.

“Now, to people out there, that may not seem like very much,” Royall said. (“No,” her questioner was moved to interpolate.) “But believe you me, to peers themselves, it is extremely serious.”

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Full article and photo:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-lords-scandal27-2009jan27,0,3490813.story

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