The Queen's Speech - is it a legislative program?

The proposals for the Queen's speech are being announced - some have been trailed in the press over the weekend - so much for the 'Governance of Britain' proposals that the legislative program would be announced in advance and comments and discussion invited of the proposals.

The proposals trailed include a new bill to deal with Bankers' bonuses - but apparently not to interfere with existing contractual obligations but to deal with future contracts only - and only then if the FSA decide that the bonus packages are themselves 'risky'. I simply don't understand what is actually being proposed and if it is a repeat of the 'purposive' regulation, then I suspect that it will sound good but in practice be impossible to administer and enforce.

This new FSA bill will apparently allow the FSA to punish individual companies and individuals that break the rules and suspend certain forms of business. What forms of business we shall have to discover - when the FSA will have that power, we shall have to wait and see? No doubt, those lawyers who practice in this field will soon be pulling down their books on judicial review and brushing up on irrationality, illegality and unreasonableness.

Apparently 350,000 people will be provided with free home care - if this is the reversal of the anomaly in England that means that medical and personal care for elderly people are separated and that people who are not provided medical care pursuant to the NHS rules receive no contribution to their personal care needs, whereas people who recieve medical care also receive contributions to their personal care ancillary to that medical care, then I suspect that people will be pleased that the anomaly is being removed. But wasn't this announced before and where is the money going to come from? Surely not the 50p tax rate ...

NHS patients will receive private health care if they are not treated within 18 weeks - given the difficulties with the way in which targets in the NHS have been recognised as creating problems, is this wise? Surely the only targets we should really be considering are outcomes - the targeting of waiting lists will only result in systems being put into place to limit the ability of people to fall outside the specific target and if we introduce targets that deal with waiting lists, the targets that we really care about; hospital acquired infection rates, mistakes in hospitals and in diagnosis and outcomes when compared with other major economies tend to get left behind.

Apparently students will be entitled to free one-to-one tuition. Where and how this will work and how it will be paid for will be interesting to discover ... how much tuition and to what effect and for what purpose will be interesting for parents up and down the country.

The reality is that this is not a program for Government, it is merely a program that is designed to emphasise the 'dividing lines' between the parties - if that is the case, perhaps consideration should be given in future to bills of attainder so that the Labour Party and those who promote this Queen's Speech can contribute to the costs of a program that is partisan ... and ultimately is of no legislative purpose whatsoever.

Arguments about helicopters - Gordon Brown's letters of condolence

I understand the feelings of anger and resentment that are felt by the bereaved. I know of the resentment that is felt by serving men and women about the lack of adequate resources and equipment that they feel are required for the operation in Afghanistan. That resentment resonates down the ages, although individual decisions such as that made about funding (for example, in relation to helicopters) do appear to have exacerbated problems and difficulties.

Persuading people that the reported number of helicopters are adequate for the task, when the major threats are IEDs in what we would have called 'bandit country' in my time, will be almost impossible. We all read of the increased number of supply convoys travelling by road ... the increased number of IED attacks ... and with great sadness, the increased numbers of casualties. Each one a tragedy, a loss, provoking real anger and despair. We all read of the comparative undersupply of helicopters for the task the British Army is undertaking, compared with the number of helicopters in use by the Americans.

(Gazelle Helicopters at Middle Wallop, from MOD website)
For a short period (a little under a year), I trained to become an Army pilot. The altitude ceiling for helicopters designed for use in Europe is about 10,000 ft. In Afghanistan, altitiudes for flying are often significantly above that height and so considerable work needs to be done to adjust the helicopters so that they can be effectively used in Afghanistan. On top of that, debris (espiceially in the form of sand and dust) has significant impact on the helicopters' blades and engines, requiring extensive adjustment prior to deployment and servicing and maintenance when 'in theatre'. Finally, we need to have people trained to fly helicopters in the environment in which they are to deploy, before deployment ... and we have to accept that some will be trained but will not reach the acceptable minimum standard for flying on those operations. Each of these factors will affect the number of helicopters available for deployment as a proportion of the total number available - and those who look at the numbers will have to understand that for every helicopter that is deployed there will ideally need to be at least 3 others and probably more in the fleet for training, maintenance or for use elsewhere.

The result is that the arguments are much more complicated than they might at first appear - such is the life of political argument. That Gordon Brown writes a handwritten letter of condolence to each family is, of itself, remarkable and, in my view, to be commended. The genuine sense of anger that a mother feels at the loss of her son, combined with the anger at the reported lack of resources and equipment means that it was almost inevitable that some sort of confrontation would occur at some stage. That it is occurring through the front page of one of our more sensationalist newspapers is very sad indeed.

Three things ...

I have spent the weekend in hospital with my 3-and-a-half-year old son.

The point of telling you this is to explain that I am delighted by the care and professionalism of the staff, even though it is a little difficult over a weekend to get answers to all the daft questions a worried dad wants to ask.

(Picture from the Times website)
In Sunday's Times, Lord Falkland becomes the subject of an investigation into his expenses. You can read the story here.

Asserting that you were 'encouraged' to find an address outside London so that you could claim allowances for temporary or secondary accommodation and then agreeing that the claims you put in were 'nonsense' rather suggests that he was completely daft to make the claims in the first place.

What on earth makes the individuals who made claims like these think that they could properly do so? I simply do not understand the mentality.

So Gordon Brown has decided to suggest a Tobin tax - something that the Treasury has, I understand, repeatedly rejected when GB was Chancellor of the Exchequer.

The Americans and others have rejected it out right.

Why has he suggested it now? Might it simply be something to mollify Labour activists?

Declarations and u-turns

(Image from Wikipedia website)
Yesterday, Jack Straw announced that the rule he introduced that required Judges to say publicly whether they were Masons would be scrapped - see here for a Guardian report on this story.

Apparently, he is reported to have said that "existing safeguards, such as the oath, the availability of a complaints procedure and the independent appointments commission, were enough to support "the proper performance of judicial functions"."

Wasn't that also true 12 years' ago? I suspected at the time that this was a sop to politics rather than a real effort to improve things or deal with a problem that actually existed outside the minds of conspiracy theorists ...

Having had this welcome u-turn, can we please have a u-turn on the registers of interests for unpaid parish councillors? While you at it, can we also get rid of the ISA and start having systems that place responsibility back on individuals and employers, please?

The irony of having CRB checked employees of a nursery convicted of some hideous crimes at the same time it was being reported that 2 police women were being threatened with proceedings if they continued their informal childcare arrangements without what officialdom described as 'adequate checks' was not lost on me ...

'We will not let matters rest'

For those who say that the Conservative policy on a referendum for the Lisbon Treaty has changed, I simply disagree - sorry Daniel, to the extent that you believe that the position has changed since the election campaign in June, I disagree with you - sorry Roger, I disagree with you too. We are all opposed to the merger of the three pillars of the EU - but I understood the nuance in the pledge over a referendum and discussed it in this blog in September 2008.

Now, David Cameron has set out a policy on the future relationship between the UK and the EU. It is a pretty clear political agenda and we shall wait to see how in practice it will work, but today, I will set out which bits I like and which concern me.

The 'referendum lock' amendment to the 1972 Act is interesting although it is of course subject to repeal by subsequent Parliament. Given the politics of it, I suspect that it is politically astute, although I am not certain whether as a matter of law it will make much difference. Having said that, it will be first time 'referenda' have been proposed as a systematic response to particular changes in our governance and that is also legally interesting.

The 'Sovereignty Bill' sounds interesting; and seems to reflect the contents of some of the entrenched Constitutions on the continent. As such, I find it very difficult to see how it would operate in our constitutional settlement and await the details to see how it would work.

Parliamentary approval of any operation of the 'ratchet clause' in the Lisbon Treaty is another change that is interesting - and politically astute.

Seeking to recover the power of employment, social and criminal justice policy and reversing our acceptance of the Charter of Fundamental Rights are things that I agree with - how easy it will be to recover those policies will be interesting to watch. I disagree with those who say it will be impossible, but I accept that it will be exceedingly difficult.

What is interesting about the proposals is that they may not appear to be very substantial, but the last of them appears to me to be so substantial that it is potentially explosive - almost as explosive as Margaret Thatcher's rebate, so shamelessly reduced by Tony Blair for virtually nothing of substance. Remember the accusations about 'social dumping' and 'competitive devaluation'? To a significant degree, I suspect that we shall watch similar accusations, exceedingly silly when considered in the cold light of day, but deceptively easy to 'sell' politically, being made about the recovery of powers over employment and social policy and a new opt-out from the Charter of Fundamental Rights.