Parliament is currently not fit for purpose. It isn’t just the corruption – the expenses scandal, the recent Rifkind-Straw venality, the link between life peerages and party donations reported yesterday. More insidious and even more damaging is the way that Parliament presently operates fundamentally undermines any serious degree of democratic accountability. Tribalism (my party right […]
Posts Tagged ‘Accountability’
Parliamentary reform should be major objective for next government
Mar 24th, 2015 by Michael Meacher.
Agreeing with Harry Phibbs on accountability in local governemnt
Mar 18th, 2015 by Jon Lansman.Far be it for me to agree with Harry Phibbs (and possibly even Eric Pickles), but it seems that, on this one issue at least, I do. Harry Phibbs was the man who got the Federation of Conservative Students shut down for being too right-wing but is now the local government editor of ConservativeHome and a right-wing […]
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Reform of Parliament should be prime target for next government
Mar 6th, 2015 by Michael Meacher.People understandably are angry at what they see as a raucous and rowdy mob at PMQs and at the MPs’ expenses scandal recently rehearsed by the Rifkind-Straw scandal of access for cash, but these are the more visible aspects of Parliament’s activities. Sadly it is the much less visible dimension of how Parliament routinely works […]
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Whistleblowers do more to hold governments to account than parliaments
Feb 26th, 2015 by Michael Meacher.Whistle-blowers are worth their weight in gold, though governments certainly don’t think so. Some of the most important things we’ve learnt about the nature of the societies we live in have come exclusively from whistle-blowers, without whose help the democratic holding of governments to account in critical areas of policy would have been impossible. The […]
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HSBC: Ministers who lie or refuse to tell the truth should be made to strand down
Feb 13th, 2015 by Michael Meacher.The lies, mis-statements and blatant evasions over the HSBC Swiss bank are beginning to build up. We were initially told that no Minister had any knowledge of wrongdoing at HSBC Suisse until this last week. This has now been contradicted by several different sources. Lin Homer, the besieged and rather ineffective head of HMRC, told […]
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Our corrupt, self-protective, unaccountable Establishment
Dec 29th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.By chance several events in the few days before Christmas highlighted poignantly how the British Establishment – the small political-economic-financial elite who went to the same public schools and the same universities (usually Oxbridge) – automatically close ranks to protect each other when they come under pressure. Jonathan Burrows, a former MD of Blackrock Asset […]
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Tristram and Schools – What can we expect in government?
Nov 22nd, 2014 by David Pavett.The People’s Parliament organised by John McDonnell MP recently held a meeting on education under the title Re-thinking schooling: class & education. The panel of speakers included Christine Blower, the General Secretary of the NUT and Diane Reay, a Cambridge university sociologist specialising in questions of class. The contributions were excellent and were followed by […]
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Where’s accountability over Shaun Wright, Rotherham child care, police apology 3 years late?
Sep 3rd, 2014 by Michael Meacher.I never expected, having called for bankers, doctors, business executives, MPs, police, media to be held to account for serious wrongdoing by sacking and/or prison in the worst cases, that the imperative for such accountability would be so quickly manifested. On 26 August Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, was finally forced to apologise, […]
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Holding public figures to account must lead to prison in worst cases
Aug 25th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.Once again it is instructive how they do things in the US, the citadel of capitalism, which is so very different from the secretive British State which protects its elites even from their worst wrongdoings. The Bank of America has just been fined $16.7bn for misleading investors in its mortgage-backed securities, a colossal sum which […]
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MPs, press, police, bankers – none can be left to regulate themselves
Apr 9th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.Cameron’s obstinate defence of Maria Miller against the large majority of his own party and the public who want to be rid of her for her greed, arrogance and sheer callous disregard for decent standards in public life needs some explaining. Maybe he wanted to put in the knife himself in his own time in […]
