Resign, Janner

There is a new rule in the House of Lords, according to Michael Ashcroft. Because of the enormous and embarrassing size of the membership of the Lords, the House of Lords Reform Act 2014 states that if a peer is unable to take an active role in the work of the House, he or she should resign.

Ashcroft has indicated that he will do this. 

As far as I understand the person is allowed to retain their title and but ceases to be allowed to take part in the proceedings of the chamber or to collect the tax free salary paid to participants ...some £300 a day plus expenses.

Greville Janner is apparently, as a result of dementia, too ill to answer serious charges relating to sexual matters with under-age boys. He has to the best of my knowledge not resigned from the House of Lords. 

Surely if you are too ill to face charges under the law of the land, you should also be considered too ill to be making laws of the land.

Mr Janner should resign immediately.
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Marco Biagi was interviewed by Jim Naughtie on the Today Programme this morning. He explained that, despite all the BBC journalists talking about Ed refusing a coalition with the SNP (the SNP having already ruled out any such thing), that what Nicola had been suggesting, offering to Ed last night on live UK-wide TV, was an opportunity to get rid of David Cameron and bring in more progressive politics. A co-operation rather than anything formal like a coalition.

Naughtie did his job asking Marco fair and reasonable questions and Marco did a good job of answering them failrly and reasonably. Naughtie brought up the argument that, during the minority Scottish government of 2007-11, Alex Salmond's government had worked with Annabel Goldie's Tories. Marco was able to explain clearly that that was what minority governments had to do. He pointed out that they worked with the other parties too. Minority government is impossible otherwise.

It seemed a decent interview, from both parties' points of view.

Then Naughtie interviewed Margaret Curran. He put to her the simple question that Nicola had asked Miliband last night. Would Miliband walk away from the SNP and let Cameron from another government, if the figures worked out like that? She didn't answer it, of course. She said that she was working for her constituents for a Labour majority government. He tried again and pointed out that, with respect, she had not answered his question. Again she rambled about her constituents (for whom she now seems to have the greatest concern). She wanted, as they wanted, she said, a Labour government with a majority.

Naughtie tried again to get her to answer. She didn't. She said that she had been in Scottish politics for a long time and she knew Nicola Sturgeon, who had never had a good word to say about Labour. But she would not answer what the Labour party would do if NOT working with the SNP meant that  Tory or Tory-Liberal and possibly Ukip government were the alternative.

It's a big thing, I know, for a party to concede that it may not win a full on majority, and I can't honestly blame Labour for being unwilling to contemplate losing, but when the polls have shown that it is a likelihood, not just over a couple of weeks, but over months and months, is it not time to be letting people know that you have thought the unthinkable.

Sometimes in office you will have to do this. Perhaps it would be wise to show the electorate that you have a back-up plan.

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I'M SICK OF THE BBC AND BETTER TOGETHER TREATING ME LIKE A MORON

I gave up listening to the news interviews yesterday on the subject of our country’s future because they were almost unremittingly biased.

The BBC seemed to me to be taking full advantage of the fact that it has no obligation to be fair and balanced in its coverage of the referendum until the official campaign starts.

It appeared that Jim Naughtie was firmly in the camp of the No campaign, presumably with the backing of his bosses in London. I'll apologise if I've got him wrong, but I suspect that I have not.

No one, least of all Naughtie, seemed interested in asking hard hitting questions of the No side. Maybe the BBC genuinely believes that there is no need for Better Together to have a plan B, whilst it is imperative for Yes, but for the sake of decency, could they not just ask the questions about it.

The EU is a case in point. BT spreads doubt about whether or not Scotland would be accepted into EU, then whether it would be forced to accept the Euro, and then what the cost to Scotland (a rich country) would be.  But no interviewer to my knowledge has said…So Mr British government spokesman, the answer to these questions can immediately be got by you, as a sovereign state member of the EU. Why does Mr Hague or one of his minions not simply ask Brussels for that answer? They would be obliged to provide it for you.

Likewise, the question of membership of an existing sterling zone is a matter that could be settled now.

George Osborne is the Chancellor at the moment; notwithstanding accidents or serious fallings out with Cameron before October 2014, it is more than likely that he will be the Chancellor at the commencement of negotiations between Scotland and the UK.

Why hasn’t an interviewer put it to a No spokesman that Osborne has not ruled out sharing the pound?  After all he hasn’t, despite the silly hints from Alistair Carmichael that George Osborne usually gets what George Osborne wants (an interesting insight into Cabinet government in London and the habits of spoiled rich boys).

We all know the reason. By hinting and suggesting that it would not be

allowed, by international public law (rubbish) or by convention (rubbish) or by George Osborne (who knows) or Ed Balls (who may or may not ever be chancellor even if Labour wins the next or subsequent elections), the No campaign spread doubt on Scotland’s position.

 If they made a definite statement and said that certainly there would be no sharing, then the doubt would pass to sterling and its future.

International money markets would begin to consider seriously that, in the event of a yes vote and Scotland adopting a totally different currency, the pound, losing the massive petro boost, not to mention the large export contribution of Scotland to its value, would sink like a stone.

I even heard this morning that they were saying again that Scotland would be forced to join the Euro, despite it being impossible to join the Euro without first having spent two years in the ERM, and only starting that two years once the present currency meets economic equivalence with the Euro. Germany has had to spend too much money bailing out wayward economies to accept that Scotland should be able to skip all the preliminaries and go straight to Euro membership.

Surely someone in the BBC knows this, but chooses to ignore this, because it doesn’t fit with the agenda.

I wonder though, what is the point of this, particularly on Radio Scotland and Radio Four. By and large the audience is intelligent and thinking. If I can see through the imbalance in the reporting, so can the rest of the listeners. There are radio programmes with audiences which will swallow whatever the BBC throws at them. ‘Good Morning Scotland’ and the ‘Today Programme’ aren’t them. 

So isn’t the Beeb really shooting itself in the foot?

It’s strange that Labour seems to see no good at all in the paper when the Unite Union has already said that they are pleased to see some of the suggestions that the government has made with reference to industrial relations. You'd have thought that there would have been a similarity in what these two organisations, so closely associated with each other, would have thought was interesting.

The headline in the “Scottish” Daily Mail today was half a page of blistering attack on Scotland’s Future”. Even given that they are a bit on the mad side, I was taken aback by the vitriol. I haven’t read the document yet, but I'm always wary of anything the Daily Mail approves of. So I'm assuming from the paper’s outburst of visceral hatred that the document doesn’t contain any Xenophobic or Fascist policies, no cull of the poor or sick or Muslims.

So that’s a relief.