Labour Party in moral free fall

The Labour Party, of which I was once a keen and passionate member, is in crisis..worse than crisis..it is in moral free fall. I believe the rot started with Bliar and his easy avoidance of all the codes that had kept Labour on the straight and narrow in his relentless pursuit for money. There was Bernie Ecclestone, cash for honours and other indications that 'New Labour' was prepared to turn a blind eye to where money came from provided it benefited the Party.

Then Bliar finally sailed off into the sunset to be replaced by new squeaky clean Gordon promising a new safe pair of hands administering a sound ship.





What has happened in the last few months? Problems over immigrant numbers at the Home Office - carefully concealed by Jacqui Smith. Problems with 25 million address and bank details lost by Revenue and Customs, government labs leaking foot and mouth, and now the third General Secretary in as many years has resigned because he knew that £600,000 had been donated to the Labour Party illegally. Peter Watt seemed to be a good, sound competent Secretary, yet here he is suggesting that he defied the rule book which he of all people should have been aware of..and now he has quit.



Does anyone really believe that Watt is other than the fall guy in all this?. Hot on the heels of Watt's resignation, that pathetic excuse for a Deputy Leader , Harriet Harman, announced that she would 'send back' £5000 she got from the same source as the £600,000 to fund her Deputy Leadership campaign. No suggestion that she should resign of course! Yet her loss would be of considerably less severity.





Ms Harman claims she didn't know the money was a 'proxy'. You know what? I don't believe a word of it and I'm beginning to doubt every goddamn word this government says..particularly when it comes to funding, for its not an ethic they seem to take particularly seriously. The Conservatives have asked Harman why, in any case, she accepted this money after the Deputy elections were over, and the donor, one David Abrahams, is now being investigated over some attempt to gain planning permission for a major property development. The whole thing stinks of corrupt fiscal opportunism.

Despite the appearance of calm assurance with which Gordon Brown assumed the helm, he is now beginning to look like a man not in control of his Party - a grim irony given that he worked pretty hard to make Bliar look as if he (Bliar) had no control when Brown was Chancellor and making life difficult by plotting against his leader. Tony must be laughing his socks off.

But all the while the nation gets more disillusioned and while Brown appears to be captaining a sinking ship and having no idea where to steer it, the beneficiary is chinless wonder Cameron and his clueless Tories..now 14% ahead in the polls. Rarely have I seen British politics at such a low ebb..and after Bliar and Iraq thats quite something. Brown needs to get Labour's act together ..and fast! He could do worse than use the £5000 donation as an excuse to sack Harman and get someone decent in the Deputy's job!!

Rudd victory leaves Bush with few friends

The stunning victory for Kevin Rudd and the Australian Labor Party was one of the most comprehensive annihilations of a ruling party in recent Australian history. Not only did John Howard's Liberal Coalition lose power after Howard had spent 11 years as Australian Prime Minister but it looks as if Howard is to suffer the added humiliation of losing his own Parliamentary seat in Sydney to former journalist Maxine McKew.





Prime Minister elect Kevin Rudd



Labor achieved a swing of 6.3 %, the second largest since World War II, and look to gain a phenomenal 30 seats in Canberra's House of Representatives. The battle was effectively won on domestic issues, as elections usually are, Howard having presided over the scrapping of a lot of workplace agreements on holidays and overtime for example,a situation the Australian voters signalled very early on they were not prepared to accept.

Outside Australia, however, the new regime will be recognised for its clear foreign policy statements which reverse Howard's long standing claim to be President Bush's stoutest friend. Rudd has sworn to endorse the Kyoto treaty which Howard, in company with the Americans, refused to do and he has also pledged to bring all Australian troops home from Iraq.

President Bush was among the first to send a telegram of congratulations to the new Australian leader and Rudd was equally speedy in thanking the President and resssuring him that Australia remained a firm friend and loyal ally. But before the ink dried on his congratulatory letter, Bush must surely have suffered a slight shiver of loneliness with regard to his middle east policy which now has few if any international friends. Howard stood shoulder to shoulder with the American government on nearly everything but the wind of change has blown very strongly across the southern hemisphere today..and its a change that seems to make many Aussies, particularly those celebrating wildly in London this afternoon, very happy.

One delirious young lady who gave her name as Anne said "After more than a decade I feel proud of my country once more." It seems to be the prevailing mood and the new young Prime Minister has a lot to live up to but he seems to relish the task.

For President Bush, however, on the last leg of his journey as US President, he must be looking around desperately for friends he can turn to. The landscape now looks very bleak indeed!

Are we trusting computers..and the people who run them..too much?

The recent fusion of our Customs and Excise and Inland Revenue, now called Revenue and Customs is at the heart of a massive data loss scandal where CDs containing 25 MILLION addresses of people in receipt of child benefit have gone missing. The data includes name, address, telephone number and bank details.




It doesn't take much thought to imagine what the consequences of this could be. In financial terms mass fraud could be enacted and people's details stolen and in social terms there is a concern that paedophile rings could now have access to the details of 25 million families with children. So the effects are massive, wide-ranging and potentially disastrous. The police have been called in and questions are being asked in Parliament, the opposition even suggesting that Chancellor Alistair Darling should be called to account.

Well I think that's ridiculous. It's not like the Met Police shooting where the whole methodology could be questioned from the top down. It is stupid to suggest that Mr.Darling could possibly have a direct responsibility for how a junior officer in the Newcastle office of Revenue and Customs chose to post a CD but it does call into question how blase we have become about computers, how much we store on them and how casual we have become about the awesome amount of data which is now held on one tiny file.

It seems that like most huge organisations there were a whole set of conflicting e mails went out from management about costs. The whole Revenue and Customs organisation has just been massively cut on staff and e mails had gone out about 'doing things cost effectively' and other mails asking that data be sent out ' as securely as is reasonably possible'. There seems to have been a huge opportunity for personal judgment about what that meant and one junior officer sent a CD out by courier, without any recorded delivery being paid for. I bet he has done this 100 times before and there has never been a problem. No one it seems laid down any hard and fast rule that said 'If you are sending private details of thousands of people you must always send recorded delivery, you must always..etc etc'

So, in a blame culture, who is to blame? The Government? The senior official who has resigned over this, the junior officer who made what is now considered a mistake..although its probably worked fine many times previously. The postal service who lost it? Who? Its not clear.

Some things are clear though. Too many organisations hold too many details about us which are not sufficiently audited by an outside body to see if they are necessary. Once we have computers we are acquisitive. We are also sloppy. Years ago when we had hand written letters, copies were kept in filing cabinets and locked away. Now you see CD's in IT departments, some containing thousands or millions even of people's details, lying in in or out trays.

The British Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, has welcomed a move by the Govermment which was introduced this week 'after the horse had bolted' which allows his department now to visit organisations, unheralded, and check that they are in compliance with Data Security regulations. Before the Government made this hasty change the Information Commission had to book an appointment to check compliance. What use is that?

I think this current scandal is the tip of the IT iceberg and we need a total shake up in our complacency about handling the personal details of others. Too many organisations, the Police, the Vehicle Licensing Authority, Health Service, credit card companies, social services etc etc have way way too much information on everyone..and what this Revenue and Customs glitch shows is that much of it is processed in a very cavalier fashion. Major changes are necessary ..and soon...but government seems more concerned with recording even more information about us rather than worrying too much how that information is protected. I hope this is a wake-up call.

Politics is such a game of subtlety and stealth

I was thinking yesterday, after listening to Prime Minister Gordon Brown's speech at the Guildhall, just what a subtle maze of coding politics really is. The Lord Mayor of London's banquet is traditionally the occasion on which the Prime Minister of the day sets out his vision of the world and indicates the priorities he sees as facing the British Government over the coming year.

Mr.Brown's priority, it was quite clear, was to restore Britain's relationship with the United States. Since he succeeded Tony Blair as Prime Minister 4 months ago, his every action on the foreign policy front has seemed determined to place as much distance as possible between Blair and himself, and in the process, ruffling the feathers of our closest ally.



Brown' s decisions to pull British troops out of Iraq, in addition to allowing his ministers apparent rein to criticise the Bush Administration and to indicate that, from now on, Britain would be nobody's lap dog, seem designed to appease those in the Labour Party and in the country who wanted a new independent assertiveness by Britain. It seems to have worked and Brown's standing in the polls benefited as a result.

But yesterday, at the Lord Mayor's banquet, Brown clearly and with very definite forethought, took a different tack. It was a bit like one half of an engaged couple telling the other, "I know I've been a bit cool with you recently because I don't want you to take me for granted...but I still love you really."

He clearly stated that he had 'no truck' with Anti-Americanism either here in the UK or among our European partners, clearly signifying to Washington that he was not becoming sympathetic to any Franco-German resistance to American influence.

He supported the case against Iran suggesting that Britain and America - and the rest of the EU - should act as one to resist Iran's nuclear ambitions.

But then, having suggested that the US and Britain should act together to limit Iran's nuclear expansion, he clearly set out what steps he believed should be taken by both countries to achieve that - and none of those options included the use of force.

The speech was quite a cleverly thought out one in that it said, quite warmly, 'America you are still our best pal' while clearly and politely indicating what steps Britain believed 'best pals' should take next with regard to troublesome foreign powers.

It is an interesting conjecture whether these 'best pals' would stand together should the US decide on military action against Iran. Somehow I doubt it, and the manner of Brown's speech seemed to imply 'and don't compromise our friendship by suggesting it'

Can the Met kill an innocent man - and NOBODY be accountable?

Yesterday the Metropolitan Police was found guilty of breaching health and safety regulations when they shot dead Brazilian immigrant Jean Charles de Menezes on a train at Stockwell tube station on July 22nd 2005, two weeks after the suicide bombs that killed over 50 people on three trains and a bus. The facts are now known. The police had been keeping watch on a block of flats where Hussain Osman, a terrorist suspect, lived. Tragically for him, Mr Menezes lived in the same block and, when he left home to travel to Stockwell, police became confused.



Jean Charles de Menezes

The result of that confusion was that armed officers pursued Mr. Menezes onto Stockwell station and then onto a tube train where he was shot seven times at close range with special bullets designed to flatten inside the body rather than go straight through. These were officers trained to kill and fully intent on doing so. Nothing was left to chance - except that they got the wrong man.

Now the time was very fraught. Fifty five people had been killed two weeks before and the capital was on a knife edge. The police were only too conscious of the awesome responsibility of preventing more deaths of innocent people and knew only too well that their firearms experts might be called on to deliver fatal blows in a situation which was far from normal.

But however fraught the situation, however much the police were under strain, they undoubtedly screwed up big time - and an innocent man lost his life.

At the outset of the case, the prosecution outlined NINETEEN areas in which the police failed to take adequate steps to prevent the kind of tragic accident which ultimately occurred. The police denied these failings but the jury ultimately found the Met guilty and they were fined a total , including costs, of around half a million pounds.

Now nobody wants witch hunts against an organisation which is paid to protect the public, and which they were quite clearly trying to do. But Mr.Menezes was an equally innocent member of that public..and he lost his life. Of the nineteen failings highlighted at the start of the trial many were highlighted as operational failings. The litany of accusations is filled with the expression 'failure to communicate'. There was confusion over what the strategy was between the control room, the surveillance team and the firearms officers. There was no contingency plan for dealing with and clearly identifying people who left the flats other than the suspect. Official briefings were described as 'inadequate'. There was a failure to stop Mr. Menezes before he reached the tube station at which point armed officers considered they had only one option. The shift Commander, Cressida Dick, was not kept fully informed about the whereabouts of firearms teams, despite the fact that her decisions were ultimately decisive.



Cressida Dick

Now the jury made it clear that they don't hold Commander Dick responsible for what happened. The Home Office has made it clear that they don't hold her boss, Chief Constable Sir Ian Blair responsible either and he will continue as London's top policeman despite the Force having been found guilty of serious and grave failings which led to a man's death.




Now Sir Ian seems to be a decent kind of a man who has the best interests of the public at heart. I am sure Commander Dick is of similar mind. They are good conscientious police officers.

But they are also in positions of responsibilty. Responsibility for what turned out to be a day of chaotic communication failure which had tragic consequences. If neither of them was responsible for the picture of indecision and muddle which has emerged from July 22....then who was? Surely it is not right that Britain's most powerful police force can so mishandle a suspected terror operation which led to a frightening assassination of an innocent man without someone carrying the can?

Yet thats the way it looks. The Force is nailed for half a million pounds by a jury as being completely culpable in a man's death yet NOBODY pays the price? It used to be considered honourable for bosses in this situation to fall on their proverbial swords but maybe our politicians have themselves set the trend for committing appalling errors of judgment yet failing to resign.

I suspect this affair is not over yet and, although Sir Ian is reputed to be a top class policeman and his loss would be considerable, he might do well to think further about the viability of his position and the integrity of his Force.