Lords Show Why We Need Them

The House of Lords have long been dismissed as an anachronism in this modern age. Appointed, not elected, its members were seen as unaccountable to the omnipotence of the British voters and, therefore, it was argued, the entire House should either be abolished, or simply elected. The last Labour government tried mightily to bring about this ransacking of the ancient constitutional arrangement of the people's House of Commons and the Peer's House of Lords. Unwilling to countenance that anything was beyond his election-and-power-winning spin machine, Tony Blair set his sights on Lords' reform and managed to expell nearly all hereditary Peers, in favour of appointed members. Now the merits of Lords' reform - whether it has gone far enough, or too far already - is a worthy topic in itself, but it's not the topic of this post.

No, the reason for this post are the issues at stake in the debate now raging in the Lords about the proposed referendum on voting reform. Most conservatives hoped that David Cameron's ascend to the doorstep of 10 Downing Street would be the end of ill-considered constitutional meddling. After all, the Conservative Party is usually most hesitant to carry through reforms of the ancient constitution. But us small-c conservatives hadn't counted on the Lib-Dems joining the government and being thrown the bone of a referendum on introducing the AV voting system. Mr. Cameron then compounded the matter by tacking onto the referendum bill is demands for boundary changes and a reduction of the number of Commons seats.

Having introduced this hybrid bill the Government set about whipping its Commons majority into supporting it, which given that both the Tories and the Lib-Dems got something they wanted out of it, shouldn't have been much of a problem. Nevertheless it took the controversial measure of 'guillotine motion' - a procedural order cutting short the time allocated for debate - to get to an aye vote. But unlike the Commons, the Lords have no such procedure and are now showing they do not stand ready to be run over rod-shod. And time is of the essence: if the bill does not get approved before February 16th, there will be no referendum on the desired date of May 5th.

So with the Government wanting the bill to pass, and a sizeable part - if not a majority - of the Lords wanting to at least decouple the referendum part from the boundary and number of seats part, the Upper House is being kept in sessions. They have been at it straight since 3.38 pm yesterday and have so far debated two out of more than a hundred proposed amendments. The Leader of the House of Lords, Lord Strathclyde is already accusing the Labour Lords of using dishonourable delaying tactics:

'The opposition have dragged their feet. They've had their fun." He added: "The situation has become urgent because the Labour Party has decided to go on a marathon go-slow since we started the committee [to consider the bill]."'

But Lord Falconer, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lords has rejected this, saying: "This bill is motivated by party politics... It has been introduced without public consultation or pre-legislative scrutiny." And he is completely right in saying so.

Linking up two unrelated matters in a single bill is base trickery intended to making it impossible for people to oppose it, since rejecting one part you don't want means also rejecting something you have previously stated publicly you do support, leaving you open to charges of flip-flopping. Seeing as I don't support either part of this bill I have no qualms whatsoever is saying I support Labour Lords in their efforts to at least decouple the bill.

As the Upper House the House of Lords is there precisely to give proper consideration to bills that have been rushed through the Commons. It is a House of reflection not of politicking and I believe that it's current make-up - that of unelected, and therefore independent members - is very-well suited to this role. To open the Lords to election would be to lose this vital instrument of careful consideration. The Lords would be whipped into line for fear of losing their seat at the next election and would thus go along with whatever the government wanted. As it stands now if the government introduces a mistake-riddled bill, it might be spotted before it comes law and not afterwards, when all the wrong it causes has already been unleashed on the public.

So hurrah for the Lords! Hurrah for standing up for wisdom and scrutiny! May they keep at it for as long as it takes!

Playing the Name Game

In the eyes of some it may be a miracle but every once in a while Benedict XVI says something eminently sensible. In a mass in the Sistine Chapel yesterday the Roman Pontiff called for parents to end the craze of giving their children 'fashionable' names like Lily and Ashton, and to return to traditional Christian names. The Pope, being a religiously-minded octogenarian, naturally couched his call in religious terms:

'"Every baptised child acquires the character of the son of God, beginning with their Christian name, an unmistakable sign that the Holy Spirit causes man to be born anew in the womb of the Church." He added that a name was an "indelible seal" that set children off on a lifelong "journey of religious faith"'

And while we may disagree with the religious rethoric, I'm sure we can all admit that naming your son Venerdi (Friday), as one couple in Italy did, is irresponsible. Little 'Friday' will, later in life, find himself the butt of jokes and the target of snide comments, and perhaps even find it hard to secure a good job as employers will likely wish to hire someone with a respectable, 'normal' name. He will carry the stigma of his parents' desire to be unique for the rest of his natural life. A British Catholic Church official hit the nail square on the head when he said: '"Naming children after perfumes, bicycles and countries is putting a limit on their potential. They are not merchandise or commodities.'


This trend of 'unique' names is most popular with celebrities, both in Britain and abroad:

'Sir Bob Geldof has daughters named Pixie and Peaches, while Victoria and David Beckham called their first son Brooklyn, after the district of New York. Katie Price, the glamour model, named her daughter Princess Tiaamii. ...  Francesco Totti, the footballer, recently decided to call his daughter Chanel, while Flavio Briatore, the Formula One boss, named his newborn son Falso Nathan.' 

These children will not face the risk of hearing 'sorry, we've hired someone else instead' from employers - their parents are wealthy enough for that. Yet they are, or will be, most certainly the victim of behind-their-back sniggers at their ridiculous names.

With regards to these celebrities the Pope has a point. However, his call, while admirable, is perhaps still a bit premature. As it happens, today saw the release (Dutch language alert) of the latest statistics on the most popular given names in the Netherlands. And as it transpires, the top 20 for both boys and girls consists almost exclusively of good, old-fashioned names like Lucas, Tim and Thomas, and Sophie, Julia and Emma. In fact out of the top 20 girls' names, only Noa and Lynn strike me as odd - of course spelling wise there could be improvement. With the boys' names the field is a bit more muddled with Sem - not Sam - being the most popular name and Milan, Jayden and Finn making the cut as well. Still, as far as the top 20 goes, not bad from a traditional point of view.

I also looked up the statistics for the UK and found that the top 10 for both genders consist mostly of names I would consider for my own children. What did strike me was the tendency of British parents to christen their children shortened versions of names, like Charlie and Evie and Jack. Why not give them the full version and use the shortened one in every day life, for example Prince Henry of Wales, better known of course as Prince Harry? The Office for National Statistics indicates that this is indeed a recent trend and that this shortening of names was 'rarely permitted' in the past.

Looking at the Netherlands and Britain, then, the Pope's call is slightly premature. But still, given that this silly-names bussiness is popular amongst celebrities and people do tend to follow celebrity trends, it is a good thing he warned us. I don't say this very often, but well done you, Pope Benedict XVI.

God Forfend: Is Ed Milliband Starting To Grow On Me?

When the Labour party last September elected, rather surprisingly, Ed Milliband as leader over his older brother David, I thought that would close the door on my returning to the left wing fold in the foreseeable future. While both brothers were the supreme epitomes of the techocratic MP, David appeared to have far more political acumen as well as sounder policy ideas. Ed, on the other hand, gave off the impression of being a highly opportunistic fellow, willing to discard his old ties to Gordon Brown, the unions and the left wing, socialist divisions of the Labour party in order to gain the leadership. And that's not to mention the commiting of that most dishonourable of sins, fratricide. So young Mr. Milliband, with his deer-in-the-headlight eyes and lack of any centrist charisma, in my view would not amount to much.

All this was confirmed during his first months in the position as his first press conferences and sparrings with David Cameron across the dispatch box during Prime Minister's Questions revealed a man grossly out of his depth. He did not have a firm grasp of his policies and figures and stumbled when pressed on even the most basic of policies, until he was so hard pressed that he announced a general policy review in lieu of having to come with up anything himself. In all not a very auspicious start for a new, relatively untried leader of the opposition. Then came the questions about his private life - as an unmarried co-habitating father he had neglected to sign his name on his first child's birth certificate - and his party's inivisible presence during the university top-up-fees debates. Oh woe was Ed Milliband, who by now seemed certain to be a short-lived Labour leader.

The arrival of the New Year, however, has been kind to Mr. Milliband. The rise of VAT has for the first time signalled to the general public that the Coalition Government's policies will hurt them in their wallets and pockets, at least in the short term. For some reason - maybe his Christmas dinner brought him good fortune or he made some propitous New Year's Resolution - his first press conference (See here for a, perhaps a little overly sympathetic, live blog) of 2011 showed him in a different, far more agreeable and capable light than his first. More relaxed and in control, Mr. Milliband the Younger showed he might yet have a future as Prime Minister. That these thoughts have entered into my usually conservative mind may be because they are being roped in by my growing dislike of David Cameron, who after a strong start in Number 10 is starting to appear as a somewhat pantomime politician, incapable of making promises he can keep.

Even some of his policy suggestions are starting to make sense. To even impugn that I might find Labour ideas sensible in any way, shape or form would have been repugnant and hideous to me but a few short months ago. I especially appreciated his calling for Royal Bank of Scotland's chief executive - a state-owned bank - not to receive a multi-million pound bonus and that the unions should not strike in a coordinated fashion to bring down the government. That, Mr. Milliband the Younger says, is the job of the opposition in Parliament, not the opposition on the street. Very well, it is not yet anything I'd vote for, but if he keeps on going, Mr. Milliband the Younger will at least make me think of Labour as a party I could see running the country.

And the most important impression I came away with today is that Ed Milliband seems to believe in what he says, something that I can never recognize in Mr. Cameron these days. As we learn from Cicero, only a politician who's is convinced of the truth of his own ideas can hope to convince the voters. That is what Mr. Milliband the Younger needs to do and that is, indeed, what he seems to be doing.

Be Wary of the Chinese Dragon

Last Thursday, the Chinese ambassador in London, Mr. Liu Xiaoming wrote an article in the Telegraph describing what he sees as a warming of ties between Britain and China. The ambassador's article comes on the eve of the visit of China's Vice Premier Li Keqiang to the UK next week. This visit, Mr Xiaoming writes, 'will bring another Chinese warm breeze to the UK.' Economic co-operation between Britain and China has been growing steadily over recent decades and, according the Mr. Xiaoming at least, the two countries share a plethora of common ideals:

'We both call on the international community to step up macroeconomic policy co-ordination and reform international economic and financial governance structures; we both uphold free trade, oppose trade protectionism and work for an early conclusion of the Doha round negotiations; we have had close dialogue and co-ordination in relation to the Iranian nuclear situation and other hotspots. China and the UK need to work together to address global issues.'

However, in light of last week's events in France, the UK and its political and commercial leaders should be aware that with China things are not always what they seem. Three senior employees of French carmaker Renault have been suspended pending an investigation into suspected industrial espionage. Now it seems that the French government is looking into possible Chinese involvement in the matter.

'A member of the DCRI [Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur, the French intelligence services] told Le Point that French companies had underestimated the potential damage of industrial spying: "French companies don't have a sense of economic intelligence," he said.
He added: "This is a classic case of spying. The Chinese are masters of this and they've gone on the offensive."'

Any country that is on the charming end of a Chinese trade mission should do well to remember this: China gives with one hand and takes with the other, although the latter might be hidden from sight.

That China not always plays by the rules the West expects it to adhere to should not come as a surprise. George Grant wrote a column in the Telegraph detailing the Middle Kingdom's many rather insidious dealings 'round the world, including arms trading with countries like Zimbabwe and Sudan, not places particularly famous for their peaceful and human-rights-upholding practices. But if China's involvement in the Renault espionage case can be proven it would be a new low for China. Never before has there been any concrete evidence that it is engaging in what is usually considered unfriendly behaviour in the relations between states and a reason for the swift suspension of diplomatic intercourse.

China is still - or should that be already - too powerful for any Western country to take such steps but this espionage matter would certainly open the eyes of many government officials in the West to the true nature of the Dragon. And it should lead us to be wary of China and to not only see the piles of money but to remember the old Shakespearian (from the Merchant of Venice) line: 'all that glisters is not gold.'

Government Wants to Change Your Mind

I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories. For instance, I do not believe Prince Philip and his friends the lizard people ordered MI5 to assassinate Lady Diana; Nor do I believe that the world is ruled from a hotel called Bilderberg near Arnhem; Nor that the vaults of Area 51 are filled with UFOs that somehow keep hitting the earth without anyone noticing. So as a sceptically inclined person I scoffed at the suggestions made by Brendan O'Neill in a blog post he wrote for the Telegraph. In the post he argued that a Whitehall taskforce is trying to influence the way people behave by 'nudging' them into certain modes of behaviour. He gives three examples:

'for example, by offering less well-off shoppers health vouchers to encourage them to buy Hellman’s Light Mayonnaise rather than a King Sized Mars Bar; or by changing our local community infrastructure to make it harder to drive a car and easier to ride a bike; or by having cashpoint machines ask us: “Would you like to make a donation to a charity?”'

 O'Neill continues by invoking the terrible, nightmarish government practices of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and saying that 'the whole nudge thing is spectacularly Orwellian'.

But while I dismissed at first the entire idea as a rather simple project of subisdies by a coalition government inept at marketing its proposals properly, it was O'Neill's last paragraph that got me thinking:

'A Cabinet Office document says that because the masses make decisions “outside of conscious awareness” (ie. we’re a bit thick), the government should aim to become our “surrogate willpower”, making decisions on our behalf. In short, the authorities should colonise our minds and do our thinking for us. It is pure Big Brother. The state-approved lifestyle is no life at all.'

You see, I rather like the ability to think for myself and resent anyone, whether he be prime minister or professor or bin man, to assume that he can do manipulate the cogs and wheels inside my head. But then, as those same cogs and wheels started doing their thing, I remembered that the Lib-Dems are part of this government. And the Lib-Dems, as we all know, have no clue what to do if someone actually gives them power to do anything. So I'm not too worried about Big Brothers Cameron and Clegg puppet-mastering my every move.

What's more, governments have been doing this for ages. The last Labour government was especially prone to just throw money at a problem hoping that the mere sight of the Queen's head on a piece of paper would change peoples' minds. And if Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson didn't manage to take away our free will then I doubt this government will pull it off. What I think worries O'Neill most of all is that he assumed that a Tory government would be above such practices. But a government is inclined to try to use its power to control anything and everything. Maybe we should attempt to collectively counter-'nudge' Cameron and Clegg to stop bothering us with this transparent trickery and get on with doing something useful for a change.

Belgium: 207 Days and Still No Future In Sight

Belgium is a country that has little to live for. Jeremy Clarkson - in one of his rare existentialist moments - called Belgium "a country invented so that Britain and Germany would have somewhere to sort out their differences." And it is true that without the interference of the Great Powers in 1830, Belgium would not have existed, but would have been split between the Netherlands and France. Now the Belgiums are coming to realize that they could have saved themselves the trouble of 180 years of national bi-linguistic co-existence. After 207 days (Dutch language alert) of coalition negotiations (Britons, take note: coalitions can take this long to form. Your five day wait was easy) everybody is ready to throw in the towel. The issues dividing the Dutch-speaking Flemish and French-speaking Walloons are too much to overcome.

The Dutch Volkskrant newspaper concludes (Dutch language alert) that Belgium now has but two options left: the first is an emergency government and the second is another general election. Neither will provide a real, lasting solution. An emergency government will eventually have to be replaced by a government with a democratic mandate and elections are unlikely to shift the political landscape so dramatically as to open up new avenues of negotiation opportunities. So what is Belgium to do? Nobody seems to know anymore.

There is, however, a third option that few appear willing to countenance: a break-up of the country into two independent states: Flanders and Wallonia. Now as most of my British friends will know, I'm not the biggest fan of Belgium. Still, I would be sorry to see it dissappear from the map. And to be honest it is unlikely to go anytime soon. The stakes are too high for everybody involved: the Walloons know that without the financial backing of Flanders, Wallonia is a dirt-poor country, with no high-tech industry to speak of. The Flemish are aware that they are to small a country to go it alone and cognizant that their only hope is to rejoin the Netherlands, which would be a national humiliation.

Finally there is the European Union. Belgium, as a bi-lingual country, is in fact a wee version of the state of EU wants to be. So letting Belgium fall apart would be to admit that linguistic differences are impossible to reconcile and, ergo, that the EU is doomed to failure. Yugoslavia, a similarly divided country was allowed to dissolve itself in the early 1990s because it was on the fringes of Europe. But for Belgium, right in Europe's heartland, to break up would be of a different magnitude, even if it will be a peaceful separation. The EU will therefore do everything in its power to prop up Belgium. Whatever it takes Belgium must be maintained.

And long may it live, for it will give the rest of us something to make fun of, this oversized border between the Netherlands and France.

On a side note, that Belgium has been without a government gives us another thing to ponder. Does a country need a government to function? Apparantly not. It can exist perfectly well with just a Parliament and some bureaucratically-minded civil servants. Who would have thunk it?

On the Joys of Travel Disruption

In the run-up to Christmas last December an amount of snow that would hardly have perturbed the average Moscovite, Swede or Canadian crippled the national infrastructure of Britain and the Netherlands, along with most other countries in Western Europe. Planes no longer took off from ice-covered airports, cars and trucks got stranded in snow drift-blocked motorways, and passengers were stuck in freezing trains and stations as the tracks were unusable. This post will not add to the chorus-voice of anger and shock at the inability of any company or government in any country impacted to help with the situation. Sometimes no agency 'neath heaven can do anything about the vagaries of weather.

Rather, it is about something that made me feel better about my fellow man. I myself had foolishly decided to undertake some travelling during the 'snow-storms'. First a flight home from London to the Netherlands, then a trip by train to my little brother in Maastricht, and finally a number of journeys around the country to visit more family and friends. Admittedly, I could have done without all the disruptions: a flight cancellations, long delays and detours on the trains, yet as I was stuck in airports and trainstations I observed a genial dichotomy in the behaviour of people. On the one hand there was understandable anger and annoyance at the delays, but at the same time people seemed kinder, more patient, and keener to interact with their fellow travellers.

The anger was also not directed at the sometimes hapless ground staff of the airlines and the station personnel of the railways. People understood that they themselves were almost as ignorant about the situation as the traveller himself. No, people were angry at the larger companies for their inability to inform even their own staff of the situation and the seemingly complete lack of effort to fix anything. I noticed this when, stuck at Eindhoven train station on my way to Maastricht, people joked with staff about the broken signals somewhere down the track. The NS (Dutch National Railways) member of staff showed what information he had on his little handheld device. It told him, he said, that the signal would be repaired when it would be repaired and not any sooner and at some point the NS would decide to schedule replacement bus services, but he did not know when. He said that all he knew was that the bus would come eventually, unless it got stuck in the snow too. Not a good joke, but people smiled all the same, for they realized that the chap knew as little as they did, but at least understood their predicament and sympathized.

Then, when the busses eventually came, we all got on and began to share our stories of being stuck at some small one-tracked village station waiting for a train to emerge out of the blinding-white curtain of snow; or like me, scrambling at some airport to book the last seat on the last flight to take off before ice overwhelmed the tarmack. Instead of coccooning ourselves in our little worlds of I-phone games and head-phone music, we listended and nodded and laughed with each other. For a little while we understood, to paraphrase John Donne, that we were not islands, entire of ourselves, but part of something larger.

And when the busses finally brought us to the next station where we all took trains to our separate destinations we said quick goodbyes, wished each other happy holidays, and - as I assume most people will have done - totally forgot about this brief shared experience. Still, it all made the long waits at stations and airports a little more bareable, and maybe if the harsh winters keep coming something about the joys of talking to each other, even people you don't know, may stick and teach us all a lesson about social behaviour. Or not. The dreamer that I am can hope, of course, but the cynic in me is not holding his breath. But at least I got free coffee from the NS for waiting patiently, so I'll always have that memory to look back on.