There Might Be Such A Thing As A 'Free Lunch'

I read in this weeks County Times that Channel Four’s Dispatches programme has had the temerity to ask John Bufton MEP about the curious European Parliamentary practice, common on Fridays apparently, of signing the register, claiming the daily expenses and then going home. His defence of having “meetings to attend” or more expansively “I’ve got some work to do and meetings to attend” does, on the face of it, seem a little less than robust. No details of either the work done or the meetings attended are given, nor the names of the people being met, but to be fair to our illustrious MEP, perhaps he wasn’t asked the right questions. However, in the light of the recent difficulties over expenses experienced by Westminster MPs, one would have thought that Mr Bufton would have provided the interviewer with sufficient information to ensure that he was absolutely in the clear. Still, all this should be easy enough to check and as a result we might find out what the meetings were about. They must have been important to have been scheduled on a Friday.

What worries me is that we may still be electing representatives who think they have a right to claim expenses simply because they are provided for in the rules of the institution, rather than taking a minute or two to decide whether they have a moral right to those particular expenses on that particular day. It puts me in mind of County Councillors who used to claim back the cost of eating lunch at the Council’s subsidised canteen forgetting that had they been having lunch anywhere else on that day, they would have incurred some cost to themselves. Presumably that practice has stopped in the last couple of years.

Reflections on the Youth Justice System

As a bit player in the criminal justice system, I sit on referral order panels for young offenders, I often find myself reflecting on the sentences handed down by magistrates and I wonder what they hope to achieve when they issue referral orders. And I do this in the context of a sociology essay I wrote nearly forty years ago as an undergraduate.

I don’t have the essay to hand but it was on the purposes of punishment and dealt with notions of retribution, reparation and rehabilitation. In my experience as a panel member, the victim, especially in cases of crimes of violence, is seeking retribution. They’ve been hurt and they want to hurt back. In rather primitive terms, they are looking for revenge on a sort of eye for an eye basis.

The community on the other hand, and as panel members my colleagues and I may loosely be said to represent the community, is looking for some sort of reparation. The victim sometimes is also looking for reparation, either directly or indirectly. Reparation in the sense of making good, the offender being required to ‘make good’ the damage he or she has caused to the victim directly or to the community in a wider sense.

Those professionals working within the criminal justice system are focused on rehabilitation, they take a longer view and are trying to ensure the young offender understands and learns from the damage, hurt, or whatever, he or she has caused and is predisposed never to repeat the offence or in any other way come into contact with the criminal justice system again.

So retribution, reparation and rehabilitation, all understandable if not all laudable aims of sentencing, but are they all achievable to an equal degree? The answer to this question has to be – rarely. So it really comes down to a question of balance, to try to devise an order that firstly, allows the victim to feel that they have obtained a sense of justice; secondly, to persuade the offender that he/she must do something constructive for the victim or community that enhances their understanding of the consequences of their misdemeanours; and thirdly, to ensure that help and support is provided so that there is no question of re-offending. It’s a very difficult balancing act, but one I feel would be made easier if more people properly understood the workings of the criminal justice system and were more willing to engage with it and actively support it in whatever way they feel is appropriate to them.

Perhaps this is really a message to Ken Clarke, the Justice Minister. If your ‘Big Society’ is to mean anything, you have to find innovative ways for many more people to become actively involved in the workings of criminal justice system and by doing so they will support that system because they understand it rather than criticise it because they don’t.

Blair's Foreign Policy - Did You Know?

I’ve recently finished reading Tony Blair’s memoir ‘A Journey’. It is an interesting and ultimately worthwhile read, and it confirms much of what I knew or suspected before. My reason for reading it was to see if it threw some new light on why he took the decision that will forever define his premiership, why he took Britain into an illegal invasion of Iraq.

In his rather egocentric account, Blair would have us believe that his frustrations with the European response to Kosovo and his subsequent feelings of indebtedness to Bill Clinton for American support in that NATO action laid the ground for the invasion of Iraq on the coat-tails of the USA. After 9/11 we all should have seen what was coming, especially if we had taken notice of what Blair had said to the Economics Club of Chicago in April 1999. And this is the point, until the publication of this memoir a month or so ago, I hadn’t even known about this speech, Blair’s ‘Doctrine of the International Community’. The thrust of it is this: ‘… intervention to bring down a despotic dictatorial regime could be justified on grounds of the nature of that regime, not merely its immediate threat to our interests’. Does this mean that, in spite of his many denials, the dodgy dossier and all the evidence to Hutton and Chilcott, the invasion of Iraq was all about regime change, after all?

This doctrine is breathtaking in its arrogance and, in the light of subsequent events, it is more than a little disingenuous, take these five major considerations when considering intervention:

“First, are we sure of our case? War is an imperfect instrument for righting humanitarian distress; but armed force is sometimes the only means of dealing with dictators. Second, have we exhausted all diplomatic options? We should always give peace every chance, as we have in the case of Kosovo. Third, on the basis of a practical assessment of the situation, are there military operations we can sensibly and prudently undertake? Fourth, are we prepared for the long term? In the past we have talked too much of exit strategies. But having made a commitment we cannot simply walk away once the fight is over; better to stay with moderate numbers of troops than return for repeat performances with large numbers. And finally do we have national interests involved?”

Did the Labour Party debate this extraordinary deviation from the rather narrow view of national interest? Was there ever a wider public debate? Was this why Blair chose to outline this new thinking in America rather than at a Labour Party Conference? What really is chilling for me is that we, the British people, let him do this with so little debate, with so little opposition until it was too late. We let Blair and his tiny inner circle play cops and robbers on the international stage because of his sense of obligation to both Bill Clinton and George Bush, and once Blair had signed up the whole show was run by the extreme hardliners, Cheney and Rumsfeld.

Surely British foreign policy is too important to be left to a ‘maverick’ politician and his sycophantic acolytes to make up as they go along?

It's All In The Detail

Yes, I know I must seemed obsessed by Councillor Gary Price, but he seems so contrary and devious that I find him a fascinating character study and one I am intending to use in a piece of fiction at sometime in the future.

If our local weekly newspapers are to be believed, and that, in itself, is a issue of some considerable doubt, Councillor Price claims to have been a member of Plaid for some eighteen months or so. This implies that he was a member of Plaid before he attached himself like some demented limpet to the group on Powys County Council formerly known as the Montgomeryshire Independents. In fact, Gary’s decision to join them caused the group to change its name to the Shire Independents just so they could accommodate the Radnorshire maverick. He so impressed them that he quickly got himself elected as Vice-Chairman of this independent, ‘Glyn Davies admiration society’ and then displaced a long-serving and well respected councillor for Blaen Hafren, Gwilym Evans, on the Council’s Board.

What’s so strange about all this is that a member of the Shire Independents now claims that membership of any political party automatically precludes a councillor from being a member of this ‘independent’ group of councillors. The obvious implication being that Gary Price must have mislead the group’s members as to his political allegiance when he persuaded them to accept him in to the group.

Another thing to note is that the Mid Wales Journal claims that Gary was born and educated in Llandrindod, yet I distinctly remember him telling me a few years ago that he was born in Beulah or was it Carmarthenshire? I know this is a trivial matter of detail, but it does raise issues regarding the extent to which he is to be believed.

Is This Really 'News'

After four and a half months of silence, I couldn't resist posting on this earth-shattering news item concerning the most important man in Mid Wales, Councillor Gary Price. After years of toying with the Tories, and a year or so with the Montgomeryshire Independent councillors on Powys County Council and their giving him a seat on the Council's Board, Councillor Price, that fiercely Independent councillor, he who consistently boasted that 'independence' of political parties was the most important attribute of any councillor, he who was elected Mayor of Llandrindod a year after storming out of the council chamber in high umbrage and forcing an expensive by-election, has finally pitched in with that bunch of no-hopers, the Party of Wales. I hope Plaid realise what a valuable asset they have acquired.

Well done, Gary! I look forward to your nomination as Plaid's candidate for Brecon & Radnorshire at the forthcoming elections to the Welsh Assembly. If you secure the nomination, Plaid will at last have found a candidate worthy of their xenophobia. What really amazes me is that the BBC should consider this 'defection' even remotely newsworthy. It must be the silly season again down in Llandaff.