Senior politicians and businessmen are among more than 100 people listed by Nigerian anti-fraud police as being unsuitable to run for political office…
The BBC’s Caroline Duffield, in Abuja, says fraud charges are no barrier to standing in elections, and some of those named are already campaigning.
But EFCC officials say that they believe those facing prosecution should not be endorsed as candidates.
The commission is appealing to political parties to select only “credible candidates” and not those on the list.
Cornish Conservatives clearly do things differently as Lib Dem Cllr Alex Folkes has reported:
Cllr Robertson and Council Chief Executive Kevin Lavery held a press conference to announce the proposed budget. Lib Dem Group Leader Doris Ansari went along to hear what they had to say, only to be thrown out of the event because apparently:
Yesterday in Parliament Adrian Sanders and 22 Conservative MPs voted to reduce the maximum number of ministers allowed in the Commons in line with the forthcoming reduction in the number of MPs:
If the number of constituencies in the United Kingdom decreases below 650, the limit on the number of holders of Ministerial offices entitled to sit and vote in the House of Commons referred to in section 2(1) must be decreased by at least a proportionate amount.
Reducing the number of ministers is something I’ve supported …
Working through the bureaucratic-speak and acronyms in the police’s report to the Metropolitan Police Authority about the draft London Transport Community Safety Strategy I discovered that the police intend to, “Contribute to the step change in the walking experience”. I hope there was at least a smile on the face of the person who typed up that one…
Earlier today Vince Cable gave a pugnacious speech, bashing bankers to use the tabloids’ favourite phrase, but doing so in the name of industry:
I can see Richard covering his eyes and groaning, alarmed that I may be about to embark on a round of “banker bashing”. What I can tell him is that businesses – including a lot of CBI members – keep telling me that I am not bashing them enough.
Of course, there is no point in engaging in a sterile public exchange of insults. But no one listening to the Chancellor’s statement last week will be under any
The government is planning a “very radical” overhaul of the state pension, Business Secretary Vince Cable says…
Mr Cable, speaking to BBC One’s Breakfast, said the government wanted to “get away from what we’ve had for the past quarter of a century where state pensions have fallen behind the rest of the economy”.
“What Steve Webb and his colleagues want to do is to particularly protect the position of women, who because they weren’t covered by contributions don’t have a proper state pension,” he said.
Women frequently fail to qualify for the full basic state pension because they have stopped
Over on the IEA blog, Mark Littlewood recently repeated a very commonly made point by those of a more low tax persuasion:
It’s worth noting that the relatively affluent in Britain pay a very high proportion of the overall tax take. In terms of income tax, the highest earning 1% contribute nearly a quarter of all receipts and the top 10% account for well over half.
There’s no prizes for guessing what conclusion Mark drew from this, but turn the point on its head and it serves just as well for the opposite political perspective.
This is an update of the post I did earlier in the year, this time including the data for 2010.
Here’s the proportion of local election candidates of the three main parties who were female over the last twenty-five years . As you can see, proportions for all three parties grew in the late ’80s and since then have stalled (Lib Dems, Conservatives) or only crept up (Labour), with all of them remaining well under 40%.
The dips every four years are due to county council elections having a much lower proportion of female candidates than other local elections.
Exhibit A: “I would also like to state that every word written on my blog is absolutely true.”
Exhibit B: “My blog is 70% fiction and 30% fact. It is written as a tool to enable my constituents to know me better and to reassure them of my commitment to Mid Bedfordshire. I rely heavily on poetic licence and frequently replace one place name/event/fact with another.”
PS Nadine, on the off chance you are reading this – don’t blame Twitter for my sceptical views of your attitude towards accuracy. Blame the fact that you and your office declined to …
A new website you may have missed – British Political Speech, which holds texts of speeches given by Conservative, Labour and Liberal/Liberal Democrat Party leaders going back to 1895. Well worth a browse.
Two social workers sacked over the Baby P tragedy have lost their claim for unfair dismissal, it emerged today.
Gillie Christou and Maria Ward claimed they were unjustly fired by Haringey council in response to the public outcry about the toddler’s horrific death.
But an employment tribunal panel ruled that the local authority acted reasonably in dismissing them because of serious failings in their care of the child.
Conservative MP Nadine Dorries says her blog was ‘70% fiction’ – The Guardian. Surely the weirdest successful defence against expense allegations we’ll see.
The headlines have been caught by the Home Office’s formal annoucement today of a review into the vetting and barring system:
The review will examine whether the scheme is the best way to protect children and vulnerable people and, if so, how many roles it should cover.
Home Secretary Theresa May suspended the “draconian” scheme in June.
Launched in 2009, critics said it cast too wide a net and risked poisoning the relationship between generations.
Home Office Minister Lynne Featherstone said: “While it is vital that we protect the vulnerable, this scheme as it stands is not a proportionate response.
David Willetts said he disagreed with one of the main proposals of Lord Browne’s radical blueprint for universities, published last week.
Browne, former chief executive of BP, recommended ministers allow universities to set tuition fees – currently £3,290 a year for students in England – as high as they thought they could command.
Browne said institutions charging more than £6,000 should have to pay a rising percentage of each additional £1,000 as a levy to government. This would mean a university that charges £7,000 would receive 94% of the fee, while one charging £10,000 would receive 81%.
It’s not unusual for me to be less than impressed with Parliamentary debates on election law matters as so many of those deciding on what legislation should say have so many large gaps in their own knowledge. It’s particularly galling where the subject under debate is something piloted in the long-running series of electoral pilots under Tony Blair – because you get MPs who voted to spend money on the pilots then, a few years later, debating the same topics without any apparent knowledge that the pilots took place or what lessons were learnt from them.
I commented yesterday on the good deal Chris Huhne has got for environmental spending (due to go up by a fifth in cash terms over the spending review period). The best settlement for any ministerial area however looks to have been secured for Sarah Teather’s early years education brief – assisted by Nick Clegg’s own repeated insistence on prioritising the area.
Here’s what Sarah Teather wrote yesterday to fellow MPs about the education settlement:
Today’s Comprehensive Spending Review involved some very difficult decisions that we had to take to deal with the black hole in public finances left to us by
Trawling through the details of today’s spending review, Liberal Democrat concerns for the environment look to have got a pretty strong showing, with overall a 21% increase in environmental spending in cash terms during the spending review period. That makes the environment one of the areas to benefit most from the limited amounts of extra spending, and the initiatives include:
A Green Investment Bank – heavily trailed, but going ahead with a capitalisation of £1 billion plus money from asset sales.
Carbon Capture and Storage – at least £1 billion will go on funding a demonstration project.
Here is Nick Clegg’s email to party members about today’s spending review. What’s notable about the content is the strong continuation of the ‘love everything the coalition is doing in public’ line – rather than talking up what is being done differently because Liberal Democrats disagreed with Conservatives.
Notable also is the continuation of Nick’s strong emphasis on the importance of early years education. It is an issue that he has consistently spoken passionately about being one of his priorities even though, as recent events have shown, the party more widely has often preferred to place a great emphasis on other …
Welcome to another in my occasional series on useful, interesting or controversial findings from academic studies. Today’s it is the question of speed cameras, for which a study of international evidence has recently been conducted:
To evaluate the effectiveness of speed cameras, the authors examined all eligible studies, that is, studies that met pre-set standard criteria. We analysed the effect of speed cameras on speeding, road traffic crashes, injuries and deaths by comparing what was happening in road areas before the introduction of speed cameras and after their introduction, and also by analysing what was happening in comparable road areas where no speed cameras were introduced during the study period.
The authors accepted a total of 35 studies for review which met the pre-set criteria. All studies reporting speed outcomes reported a reduction in average speeds post intervention with speed cameras. Speed was also reported as either reductions in the percentage of speeding vehicles (drivers), as percentage speeding reductions over various speed limits, or as reductions in percentages of top end speeders. A reduction in the proportion of speeding vehicles (drivers) over the accepted posted speed limit, ranged from 8% to 70% with most countries reporting reductions in the 10 to 35% range.
Twenty eight studies measured the effect on crashes. All 28 studies found a lower number of crashes in the speed camera areas after implementation of the program. In the vicinity of camera sites, the reductions ranged from 8% to 49% for all crashes, with reductions for most studies in the 14% to 25% range. For injury crashes the decrease ranged between 8% to 50% and for crashes resulting in fatalities or serious injuries the reductions were in the range of 11% to 44%. Effects over wider areas showed reductions for all crashes ranging from 9% to 35%, with most studies reporting reductions in the 11% to to 27% range. For crashes resulting in death or serious injury reductions ranged from 17% to 58%, with most studies reporting this result in the 30% to 40% reduction range. The studies of longer duration showed that these positive trends were either maintained or improved with time.
The quality of the included studies in this review was judged as being of overall moderate quality at best, however, the consistency of reported positive reductions in speed and crash results across all studies show that speed cameras are a worthwhile intervention for reducing the number of road traffic injuries and deaths.
To affirm this finding, higher quality studies, using well designed controlled trials where possible, and studies conducted over adequate length of time (including lengthy follow-up periods) with sufficient data collection points, both before and after the implementation of speed cameras, are needed.
Amendments 265 and 266 to the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill may not have grabbed any headlines but they mark a very welcome change in policy – for under them the fees paid to referendum counting officers will only be paid in full if they meet an adequate standard of performance. Poor performance will now mean less pay.
At the general election, the returning officers in Sheffield and Hackney voluntarily decided to forgo their fees following the major organisational failures in the elections there. However, this was purely a voluntary act as there was no system for judging performance before …
Trial by Jeory has the story from the contest to be Mayor of Tower Hamlets:
Lutfur Rahman’s campaign does seem to have galvanised a section of the Tower Hamlets community and many, if not most, are certainly very angry young people who are fuelled by a fair degree of hatred.
That bitterness has been targeted in almost equal measure at the Labour NEC and the party’s official candidate, Helal Abbas … There are many in the Labour party who believe the level of vitriol is similar to that experienced by Oona King in 2005 when she was beaten by Respect and
The government says £750m ($1.2bn) will be saved over four years on the Trident nuclear deterrent missile system by cutting the number of warheads on each boat from 48 to 40 and reducing the number of missile tubes from 12 to eight. The UK’s nuclear warhead stockpile will be cut from 160 to less than 120. The final “main gate” spending decision on Trident will also be delayed until 2016 – after the next general election.
Party President Ros Scott has emailed party members, saying
Imagine the conversation later this year, somewhere in Whitehall:
Civil servant Good news Minister. Our new arrangements for buying furniture are coming up to the end of their first year and everything is looking really good.
Minister Excellent news. Do you mind letting me have some figures on how the arrangements have performed compared to the previous contracts?
Civil servant I’m terribly sorry Minister, but we haven’t kept all the records of the previous contract.
Minister What about the records just from 2009 then?
Wondering what to get people for Christmas presents? Here’s a selection of what various Liberal Democrat bloggers suggest:
Jonathan Calder recommends Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music by Rob Young: “Anyone with an interest in folk music will find this book engrossing. Young traces the rise of the genre from Cecil Sharp and other Edwardian song collectors like Ralph Vaughan Williams and George Butterworth, through the post-war radialism of Ewan MacColl and Charles Parker, to its electronic heyday in the hands of Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span. He finds the visionary spirit living on in unlikely artists such as …
Party members have been receiving emails today from Tim Farron and Susan Kramer setting out their pitches for party president. Of course, the emails can only go to party members for whom the party has an accurate email address. So I’ve reproduced the emails below – and if you’ve missed out but would like to get future party emails, get in touch with Membership Services on [email protected]
If reading these messages moves you to want to ask the candidates a question, don’t forget the online hustings coming up.
Susan Kramer
Dear Mark,
We in the Liberal Democrats are facing a time of …
Nick Carthew posed the provocative question on Twitter earlier today:
If cyberwarfare is the biggest threat in the 21st century why do we need to renew our nuclear deterrent? http://bit.ly/bNkBXn
There are of course a range of nuances to that question which can’t be squeezed into one tweet, but at its heart is a spot-on observation.
On the one hand, we’re now often told how internet hacking poses one of the biggest threats to our country’s future security and how illegal activities such as the hijacking of computers via bots are widespread and an extremely profitable form of crime.
Published last week, Lord Young’s report for the government into health and safety regulations has gone largely unreported, even though “it’s health and safety gone mad” is such a common refrain in the media. The reason? Mostly, I suspect, because the report leads on health and safety for employees at work whilst the stories the media most love talking about are usually about health and safety more widely, such as for visitors to museums.
Reading through the report, it comes across as one from a Conservative rather than a Liberal Democrat: hence the frequent references to the problems of over-zealous health and safety rules for business but much less about the problems of over-zealous health and safety rules in restricting people’s lives or depriving them of opportunities. This is primarily a report about business, not about missed playing opportunities in childhood, though the report does say:
My proposals aim to ease the administrative burden on teachers that the current health and safety regime has brought about to ensure that children do not miss out on important experiences.
Missing too are the sorts of criticisms that can fairly be made of central government for its own over zealous procedures, most notably at the Ministry of Justice where staff are urged to have four different official forms in their car at all times if they ever drive for work matters.
So what does the report say?
While the ubiquitous media reports may cause little more than a raised eyebrow to the reader they hide a serious point; the perception of a compensation culture results in real and costly burdens for businesses up and down the country. Today there is a growing fear among business owners of being sued for even minor accidents.
And it’s not just a media phenomenon; the rise of claims management companies over the last decade has had a dramatic impact on the way we perceive the nature of compensation. When laws were amended to allow ‘no win, no fee’ agreements with lawyers, it led to aggressive and, I believe, wholly inappropriate advertising…
It’s a climate of fear compounded by the actions of some health and safety consultants, many without any professional qualifications, who have a perverse incentive to take an overzealous approach to applying the health and safety regulations. As a consequence they employ a goal of eliminating all risk from the workplace instead of setting out the rational, proportionate approach that the Health and Safety at Work etc Act demands. It is a problem exacerbated by insurance companies, some of whom insist on costly and unnecessary health and safety risk assessments from external consultants before they will even consider offering accident insurance policies to small and medium sized businesses.
There is a welcome recognition of the continuing importance for the original motivation behind the Health and Safety at Work etc Act:
Today we have the lowest number of non-fatal accidents and the second lowest number of fatal accidents at work in Europe. In my review of the workings of this Act, none of my recommendations applies to hazardous occupations where the present system, although probably overly bureaucratic, is nevertheless effective in reducing accidents at work
Little is said about how to improve the existing systems to further reduce the number of accidents though.
The report includes several recommendations for local government, both telling councils what to do whilst also making data more available to the public:
• Combine food safety and health and safety inspectors in local authorities.
• Make mandatory local authority participation in the Food Standards Agency’s Food Hygiene Rating Scheme, where businesses serving or selling food to the public will be given a rating of 0 to 5 which will be published in an online database in an open and standardised way.
• Promote usage of the scheme by consumers by harnessing the power and influence of local and national media.
• Encourage the voluntary display of ratings, but review this after 12 months and, if necessary, make display compulsory – particularly for those businesses that fail to achieve a ‘generally satisfactory’ rating.
• The results of inspections should be published by local authorities in an online database in an open and standardised way.
• Open the delivery of inspections to accredited certification bodies, reducing the burden on local authorities and allowing them to target resources at high risk businesses.
A welcome new announcement in the report is that efforts are being made to ensure that this report does not simply get commissioned, get published and then get ignored:
I am also committed to ensuring that the recommendations in my report are put into place. All too frequently reports of this nature are left to gather dust on the shelves of Whitehall, so I have agreed with the Prime Minister that I will continue in my role to deliver all the reforms identified as being necessary.
On its own, the report does not deliver what a Liberal Democrat majority government should do. It does however propose many simplifications, particularly of the relevant parts of the legal system, which are welcome. The challenge for Liberal Democrats in government is not so much to argue over the report as to ensure that the report is only one part of what the government does.
Liberal Democrats in Southwark claim the council is £26 million pounds worse off because of decisions the Labour-run body has taken over a regeneration scheme for Elephant & Castle.
This figure has been the subject of political debate, it’s been mentioned in the council, it’s been mentioned in the press and it’s been mentioned online.
So what happened when Liberal Democrat councillors tried to put the figure in a motion to be debated at the council? The council said no – the figure is secret and can’t be mentioned.
Paul Walter has picked up on some less than flattering comments, including from an anonymous Liberal Democrat “grandee”, about Danny Alexander:
Danny has gone completely native…He should be the Lib Dem man in the Treasury. But he has turned into the Treasury man in the Lib Dems. Perhaps Danny could look slightly less pleased with himself and wipe that smile off his face.
Paul’s full post is here but some better news is over in The Mirror, echoing a point also made in the report Paul quotes:
Cold weather payments to the elderly and the poor were saved yesterday in a
Simon McGrath The author, rather oddly says "Anthropic’s latest model, is reported to be three times better than its predecessor at biology "
He seems to think this is a b...
David Allen Very clever Tristan, to pick up my rhetoric about "the planet burning" and turn it back against me. Unfortunately you've also missed my point. PFI wasted gove...
Tristan Ward @David Allen
"Thanks for the link". No trouble! Neidle is worth following.
"we also need to persuade middle-income people to pay more tax"
Thus cl...
Neil Sandison Perhaps in this increasingly busy political market . The bird of liberty needs sharpen its beak and talons and regain some street credibility on the core issues...
David Allen Tristan,
Thanks for the link, which is interesting. Neidle's "taxes people want to raise" are ideas like wealth tax, which Neidle thinks wouldn't work well....
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New chair of North Northamptonshire Council stands down over social media posts
Are Labour going to cross another red line?
Simon McGrath 
David Allen 
Tristan Ward 
Neil Sandison 