The text reads:

I pledge to vote against any increase in tuition fees in the next parliament and to pressure the government to introduce a fairer alternative

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British National Party GLA member and leadership challenger Richard Barnbrook has expressed his disgust at what the anti-democratic sabotage of his official website by the web designer of fellow leadership challenger Eddy Butler.

and

the disgraced traitor former BNP webmaster Simon Bennett

and

Although Bennett had of course been suspended from the party for his treason, it was Mr Butler’s right to employ whoever he wanted to in his campaign team, despite the obvious questions over Bennett’s suitability.

Nice to see the BNP having a falling out with itself.

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Given Mr Hollobone’s previous statements that the burka is ‘against the British way of life’ and ‘offensive’, it is fairly clear to me what its intent is.

Three points.

Firstly, this is deeply illiberal. I shouldn’t need to say much more, but I will. I understand that there are times – airport security, for instance – where we do need to make sure that the person matches the passport and we seem to be managing just fine with providing an area where people who wear the burka can be identified and so on. However, if people are just going about their daily business, I think they should be able to wear more or less what they want. Short of that, this must rank as an extraordinary expansion of the writ of the state and I don’t want the introduction of some sort of sumptuary law.

Secondly, this isn’t the way to go about it. If we assume that the burka is indicative of oppression and isolation, I don’t see how a ban will remediate the situation. If the premise is that women are oppressed and forced to wear the burka, they can be compelled to remain at home or only leave it occasionally. If the premise is that they are an isolated community, ditto, with the additional bonus of feeding into the extremists’ (al-Mujahiroun, the Daily Express…) narrative that it is impossible to reconcile being British with being a Muslim. Mr Hollobone and his fellow-travellers in UKIP haven’t talked about education or reaching out, just about bans.

Thidly, unintended consequences. It is far too easy for me to see how a badly-worded bill could lead to situations like welders’ masks having to be removed if you’re not welding for more than half a minute and not being able to dress up as a ghost for Hallowe’en. The alternative is to specify that this law only applies to Muslim women.

Ultimately, I don’t think this is about covering one’s face. I think that is being used as a proxy for Islamophobia.

I find this proposal abhorrent and I’m glad to say that, as Mr Hollobone came seventeenth out of twenty in the ballot for Private Members’ Bills, I don’t think it stands any real chance of making progress. The second reading will be on December 3rd, by which point the text of the bill should be available.

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Whenever they get it right, they are joyless jobsworths sucking all the pleasure out of life. When they get it wrong, they are criticised for putting children at risk; viz., Godstone Farm.

The short version of the story is that Godstone Farm, a petting farm, did not have adequate measures in place to prevent people, principally children, from picking up diseases from animal dung. Ninety-three people became ill as a result of infection with a nasty strain of E. coli, O157, and it seems that some of the children who were infected will require dialysis for the rest of their lives. Insufficient attention given to handwashing at the farm seems to have been the original cause, coupled with an inadequate response from the Health Protection Agency. The independent Griffin Investigation reported yesterday.

I would make a few points about what might be considered by some to be unwarranted intrusion on our ancient liberties and so on.

Firstly, it’s not obvious. Just because it’s obvious to you (and as a reader of this blog, I can only assume that you are of quite exquisite intellect and positively overflowing with common sense) doesn’t mean it’s obvious to everyone. While I was aware that rolling in cow dung was probably not a good idea, it’s easy enough to see how the meme about children needing to get exposure to pathogens to strengthen their immune systems coupled with a lack of knowledge about, say, E. coli could lead parents to think the risks are lower than they are; in this case, there was a particular criticism that the risk was considered lower than it should be as, although the probability of it happening was low, the outcomes could be very negative. Moreover,

Secondly, people are used to a certain level of safety. Although we have evolutionary predispositions to react to certain dangers (in my case, to jump out of my skin when I see, hear or suspect a dog), we live in a relatively benign world. People are used to their environments being safe; strangely enough, we don’t like our gas pipes to leak or our computers to electrocute us, so there are systems and processes in place to prevent that and countless other dangers. The result is that we blithely go about our business, perhaps without remembering that there are dangers out there.

Thirdly, it’s about providing information so people can make decisions; in this case, providing better signage and information about handwashing.

Fourthly, if we’re going to draw a line, we have to err on the side of caution.

Fifthly, there have to be systems in place to deal with, for instance, outbreaks like this. The Griffin Investigation talks about greater awareness and co-operation between organisations involved with healthcare near Godstone Farm in particular and open farms in general. It would be very easy for that to be criticised as ‘excessive bureaucracy’ or somesuch. It’s too easy to criticise something where a successful outcome is ‘nothing happening’.

Sixthly, a lot is blamed on health and safety as it is a convenient and believable excuse. I happen to think, for instance, that people should have healthy and safe workplaces and so there are some rules and regulations (turns out asbestos is a bad idea). More frequent than this, I would warrant, are people using ‘elf and safety because they want to avoid litigation or just don’t understand why something has been done.

Yes, there are mistakes; I suspect, though, that the media take those few examples of poor decision-making and represent them as symptomatic of the entire health and safety culture, leading people to think that there are armies of clipboard-equipped bureaucrats just waiting, after a risk assessment, to jump out and ban whatever it is you enjoy doing.

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PS Before anyone says anything, I know this came under the remit of the HPA rather than the HSE, but the points stand.

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There isn’t much to add to the above except that, even though I have political differences with Luke, I know his experiences at all levels of the party would make him a valuable member of the NEC as we rebuild the party.

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In short, it isn’t anything to do with his actions in the chair. There are grumblings from all sides about him being insufficiently unbiased, which I regard as being par for the course. Rather, it is because certain members – not least Nadine Dorries – dislike him because of his move towards the centre over recent years and that he was elected because of Labour’s support with a perceived desire to stick it to the Tories.

That may or may not be true, but so far as I can tell he has not been biased in his chairing. As the Speaker must be an MP, they will always have a party political past. The mystique comes from them rising above party politics, to the extent of their seat being uncontested. As none of the people contesting Mr Bercow’s Buckingham seat came close to winning (Mr Bercow has a majority of over 12,000, David Cameron ordered the local party to toe the line and the UKIP candidate came in third), there is no challenge there.

No, the challenge comes from within Parliament. It is much easier to break the spell than to make it; indeed, it may be impossible to remake it. Given the nature of our Constitution, that strikes me as quite an un-conservative thing to do.

By breaking the spell, the Speaker and future Speakers may now feel more at ease in defending their record; indeed, if there was an election despite a sitting Speaker, it would not be unreasonable for the incumbent to talk to their record. Given the last election for Speaker saw people standing on platforms, it is not hard to see the Speakership becoming more political. I don’t think that is a good thing, and I don’t think Ms Dorries would see it as a good thing either.

As I said, our constitution operates on nods and winks and I feel the debate around Mr Speaker’s re-election is symptomatic of broader constitutional issues. Too often, it feels that the immutability of precedent is in fact very mutable and is dependent on the interpretation of a few high priests – and, yes, I’m thinking of Vernon Bogdanor. Here’s the rub; if the operation of the constitution is dependent on acceptance of unwritten norms that are increasingly being challenged, it becomes relatively easy to tinker with the constitution without anyone’s approval, without anyone’s consideration or even without anyone’s noticing.

More at Conservative Home and New Statesman.

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