The NHS - Coalition Agreement.

22. NHS
The Government believes that the NHS is an
important expression of our national values.
We are committed to an NHS that is free at the
point of use and available to everyone based on
need, not the ability to pay. We want to free
NHS staff from political micromanagement,
increase democratic participation in the NHS
and make the NHS more accountable to the
patients that it serves. That way we will drive up
standards, support professional responsibility,
deliver better value for money and create a
healthier nation.

• We will guarantee that health spending
increases in real terms in each year of the
Parliament, while recognising the impact this
decision will have on other departments.
• We will stop the top-down reorganisations
of the NHS that have got in the way of
patient care. We are committed to reducing
duplication and the resources spent on
administration, and diverting these resources
back to front-line care.
• We will significantly cut the number of health
quangos.
• We will cut the cost of NHS administration
by a third and transfer resources to support
doctors and nurses on the front line.
• We will stop the centrally dictated closure of
A&E and maternity wards, so that people have
better access to local services.
• We will strengthen the power of GPs as
patients’ expert guides through the health
system by enabling them to commission care
on their behalf.
• We will ensure that there is a stronger voice
for patients locally through directly elected
individuals on the boards of their local
primary care trust (PCT). The remainder
of the PCT’s board will be appointed by the
relevant local authority or authorities, and
the Chief Executive and principal officers will
be appointed by the Secretary of State on the
advice of the new independent NHS board.
This will ensure the right balance between
locally accountable individuals and technical
expertise.
• The local PCT will act as a champion for
patients and commission those residual
services that are best undertaken at a wider
level, rather than directly by GPs. It will also
take responsibility for improving public health
for people in their area, working closely
with the local authority and other local
organisations.
• If a local authority has concerns about a
significant proposed closure of local services,
for example an A&E department, it will have
the right to challenge health organisations,
and refer the case to the Independent
Reconfiguration Panel. The Panel would then
provide advice to the Secretary of State for
Health.
• We will give every patient the right to choose
to register with the GP they want, without
being restricted by where they live.
• We will develop a 24/7 urgent care service in
every area of England, including GP out-of-
hours services, and ensure every patient can
access a local GP. We will make care more
accessible by introducing a single number
for every kind of urgent care and by using
technology to help people communicate with
their doctors.
• We will renegotiate the GP contract and
incentivise ways of improving access to
primary care in disadvantaged areas.
• We will make the NHS work better by
extending best practice on improving
discharge from hospital, maximising the
number of day care operations, reducing
delays prior to operations, and where possible
enabling community access to care and
treatments.
• We will help elderly people live at home
for longer through solutions such as home
adaptations and community support
programmes.
• We will prioritise dementia research within
the health research and development budget.
The Coalition: our programme for government 25
• We will seek to stop foreign healthcare
professionals working in the NHS unless they
have passed robust language and competence
tests.
• Doctors and nurses need to be able to use
their professional judgement about what is
right for patients and we will support this by
giving front-line staff more control of their
working environment.
• We will strengthen the role of the Care
Quality Commission so it becomes an
effective quality inspectorate. We will develop
Monitor into an economic regulator that will
oversee aspects of access, competition and
price-setting in the NHS.
• We will establish an independent NHS
board to allocate resources and provide
commissioning guidelines.
• We will enable patients to rate hospitals and
doctors according to the quality of care they
received, and we will require hospitals to be
open about mistakes and always tell patients if
something has gone wrong.
• We will measure our success on the health
results that really matter – such as improving
cancer and stroke survival rates or reducing
hospital infections.
• We will publish detailed data about the
performance of healthcare providers online,
so everyone will know who is providing a
good service and who is falling behind.
• We will put patients in charge of making
decisions about their care, including control of
their health records.
• We will create a Cancer Drugs Fund to
enable patients to access the cancer drugs
their doctors think will help them, paid for
using money saved by the NHS through our
pledge to stop the rise in Employer National
Insurance contributions from April 2011.
• We will reform NICE and move to a system
of value-based pricing, so that all patients can
access the drugs and treatments their doctors
think they need.
26 The Coalition: our programme for government
• We will introduce a new dentistry contract
that will focus on achieving good dental health
and increasing access to NHS dentistry, with
an additional focus on the oral health of
schoolchildren.
• We will provide £10 million a year beyond
2011 from within the budget of the
Department of Health to support children’s
hospices in their vital work. And so that
proper support for the most sick children
and adults can continue in the setting of their
choice, we will introduce a new per-patient
funding system for all hospices and providers
of palliative care.
• We will encourage NHS organisations to
work better with their local police forces to
clamp down on anyone who is aggressive and
abusive to staff.
• We are committed to the continuous
improvement of the quality of services to
patients, and to achieving this through much
greater involvement of independent and
voluntary providers.
• We will give every patient the power
to choose any healthcare provider that
meets NHS standards, within NHS prices.
This includes independent, voluntary and
community sector providers.

An Elected House of Lords Will Be Bad For British Democracy

A fascinating debate by Intelegence Squared presented by the BBC.  (You'll be able to find it on youtube when this link expires.


This presents me with several thoughts.

Open Primaries

Open primaries are a really great idea. The problem with party politics is that most people end up voting for the semi-conscious hulk of flesh wearing the right coloured rosette rather than an actual competent human being. The idea of an open primary is to have an election within the party so that the electorate can choose the best candidate for the party.

Tuition Fees.

Ok, fair warning: I have no big or clever ideas here, I'm just annoyed and need to try and work out what I think, as such this will be a kind of stream of consciousness thing. Dont read looking for any great insight, you wont find it.

Note after having written this: this is not me on form, ignore if you're not really desperate to read every word that falls off my keyboard.

fitwatch

As you make have read the met has, in its infinite wisdom, decided that censoring the web is somehow possible or desirable. To clarify then:

Dear all representatives of all governments anywhere ever,

Leave me alone. You cant censor me, that's designed to be impossible.

Yours, the internet

A letter to my MP

Dear [Name of MP redacted]

I write both as your constituent and as a regular user of social media. I am deeply worried by the recent ruling in the case of Paul Chambers. He is a twitter user who sent a tweet saying: "Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You've got a week... otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!" (For a very good background see http://jackofkent.blogspot.com/2010/05/paul-chambers-bad-joke-and-bad.html).

The judgement of the Crown Court on the 11th was that this tweet was "menacing in its content and obviously so" and that he should be fined several thousand pounds.

Prisoners

I've been getting very annoyed recently. (Shocker). About prisoners voting specifically. Or rather, not about that, I've not been annoyed at all by that, I've been annoyed by the way it's been discussed in public. And I'd like to explain now why everyone other than me is crazy and irrational.

AV

Ok, some more politics. It's been a while, I apologise but you know, work and stuff.

There will be a referendum on the 5th of May 2011(baring any last minuite changes). The question as currently in the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill 2010-11 is:

At present, the UK uses the “first past the post” system to elect MPs to the House of Commons. Should the “alternative vote” system be used instead?

Science funding

The UK is having a severe series of cuts. 25% will be cut over the next five years, ie 6% per year across all government departments except the NHS. I'm not going to comment on the economic wisdom of this because I dont know and I dont think most economists do either. However, given that fact we must decide how to lobby our government. So for the month leading up to the spending review (October 20th) lobbyists from everyone with a stake in government will come to plead thier own particular band of exceptionalism. The resounding message from across the land will be "there should be cuts, just not this ... or that ... or that ... and while you're at it can I have some more?"

The Labour Leadership

Hello, time for some more ill-advised party political stuff.

So it turns out that after Brown resigned they had to pick a new person to be in charge of the moaners, sorry, Her Majesty's Official Opposition. Now the most obvious and best person to do this would be the current temporary leader Harriet Harman, she's got several features that make her easily the only sensible candidate. A) I've heard of her, B) She's damned good at PMQs, which is basically the entire job of being leader of the opposition, C) ... well basically that's it. But that's all she needs.

Unfortunately, real world politics is never as simple as that, and she has ruled herself out, which is a very sensible move on her part. This way she gets to lock herself into the position of deputy leader forever and have a shot at a lot more power over a lot longer period than she would if she ran for leader and won, and a hell of a lot more than if she failed.

So that being done I guess we'll have to go with one of the people who has run, these are, in the order that I remembered their existence:

• David Miliband, who is apparently just Tony Blair again. Which is great if electoral success, a lot of power, disastrous decisions, being hated by everyone and getting millions selling really bad books and giving bad speeches is your thing.
• Ed Miliband, brother of Tony Blair. Apparently he's interesting because he thinks that socialism is more important than being electable.
• Diane Abbot, a black woman. Used to sit next to that ugly chap on This Week.
• Ed Balls, he's called Balls, he looks like a headtecher, but not a very successful one. I think he thinks that the teachers are planning to gang up on him at break.
• Some guy from the north.

What's shocking about this leadership contest is just how avoidable it has been. I consider myself reasonably well informed about politics, but I know almost nothing, I know there's been a background of things happening and speeches made, but hand on heart I cannot name one notable event out of this entire contest. Not one moment where someone said something stupid, racist, insensitive, angry, impassioned, not one drunken punch-up after a hustings. I know that lots of things have been said and if I'd only go and find out what they were I'd know more, but that's not the point, this is politics, it's not about me finding out what you stand for, you have to tell me. you have to make it exciting. I'm not supporting the politics of spectacle, but would one of you please do something that will cause just one little trending topic on twitter.

There are a few complexities in working out who will win, because they somehow weigh votes of the MPs, the members of the Labour Party and the members of the various trades union (yes, trades union, that's apparently the way you say it if you're pointing attention to how much more grammar than any normal person you know) against each other. That and each of the 3 electorates gets to vote by AV. But, so far the impression I get is that David M. will win the first preference contest, but that he runs the serious risk of loosing if the second preferences are skewed in favour of Ed M.

I'm not a labour party supporter, nor do I think that electing any particular leader would be so massively better than any other either for Labour or for the country that I think it's worth my while campaigning. However, I am quietly pleased by the potential for Ed M. to win.

Firstly having an alleged socialist who isn't obviously an idiot in charge of a serious political party would be a nice change, there's not nearly enough choice in our politics at the moment, and a bit of distance between the parties cant hurt. Secondly I am told by a reliable source that Ed is regarded as a geek, this is excellent, there need to be far more geeks in positions of power, for far too long power has lain in he hands of the popular people of this world, and the time for a geek uprising to claim our rightful place back is long overdue. Third, and a little bit naughtily, if Ed gets in based on second preferences that would make the AV referendum a lot more interesting.

At the moment the Labour party has for reasons apparently best known to itself chosen to largely ally with the Tories against AV. Now I for one think this is a miscalculation and best and seriously misguided at best. AV alleges to be about political reform, and until recently a lot of the Labour party seemed to think so too. Now you can argue about the specifics of AV vs AV+ vs PR and the constituency reforms and the coalition and everything else, but seriously, Labour, here's a hint, you're supposed to be reforming, progressive, as a general rule if you're fighting against a reform and with the Tories then you need to seriously ask yourself what the hell you are doing.

However, if the leader of the Labour party were to be elected by AV, and specifically by AV, against the first preferences of his party, that would make strong arguments from the Labour party as an organisation a lot harder. Which at the very least goes a way towards balancing the party firepower. Which is a lot more interesting at the very least, even if it doesn't bring about some kind of miraculous world where the parties cancel out so the winner is chosen by the arguments rather than pure politics.

Constitutional Reform

Britain does not have a constitution, whatever you may want to say about our "constitutional arrangements" or the "constitutional duties" of the Queen we do not have a set of binding laws to control our political institutions, Britain has habits. The whole of British history, every Act of parliament, ever decision be it legal or political is a precedent. Discussing this fact is a whole different blog post, but when discussing constitutional reform we have to keep this fact in mind. So with this in mind, here are the more obvious problems with the long long overdue set of constitutional reforms started (but sadly neglected) by the Labour Government and hopefully to be continued by this Coalition.

The first stage was Lords reform. To have members of the legislature in place simply because of their father is unacceptable in a modern country. So the last government removed the right to pass peerages to your children and removed most of those who were there on that basis. However, the replacement system was hardly more democratic. New Lords are now mostly appointed by the Crown (as ever the word Crown here means in practice not Monarch but Prime Minister). This has a number of advantages, there are many in the House of Lords who are experts in their field, leading scientists, charity workers, ex-soldiers etc all of whom have expertise that would be valuable in creating laws. (There are Acts on the Statute Book so badly drafted that they have no legal effect at all, so clearly legal expertise cannot be assumed in the Commons).

Here the issue has largely rested, consultation after consultation and vote after vote has not substantially changed things. The next major step will be taken by the Coalition. They have so far proposed two serious sets of changes in detail, both for reforming the Commons. This takes the form of a bill to change how MPs are elected and a proposal for fixed term parliaments. The latter is rather more complex so I'll do that at the end. Then there are coalition agreement proposals for the lords, but nothing in detail.

The first proposal is for a referendum that would introduce the alternative vote or instant run-off method of voting. The commons is based on constituencies, there are many strong arguments for this, which cannot easily be countered. And because of this it does make sense to talk about electoral system in terms of an individual constituency. If I were to get a large group to select one thing I would use AV, this is the system that clearly selects someone with a wide base of support. So if we are selecting the single best representative of a constituency then AV should be our choice. However, there are limits to this thinking, there are political considerations, in a party system AV has known effects. It tends to increase landslides (which has almost zero effect, a landslide is a landslide), and decrease small majorities. Which may (it's hard to foresee) result in more hung parliaments. In short, if you're a Lib Dem then it's the thing to want. But I'm not, so is this good for other reasons? Yes, if you believe (as I do) in checks and balances, small majorities and hung parliaments can certainly push through a firm plan of action (see the coalition), but one which has wider support, a compromise, which is likely to be far less dangerous.

There's no serious change here, it's an important debate that would change the makeup of the Commons, but not by much. Importantly it would not bring in PR, to do that you have to get rid of constituencies which seems very hard to convince people of. People like their MP. Mine is Julian Hupert of Cambridge and I know if there's ever a problem then I would e very happy to go to him. Consider the Lords however, there are many wise and noble Lords, but none I would ever consider writing to, despite them having a right to vote on bills in just the same way. This is valuable, if it is as valuable as the benefits claimed for PR is another question.

The other change in the same Bill will alter the constituencies themselves. At present constituencies are decided by the independent Boundary Commission, they make their decision largely on historical precedent and local geography, but within conditions set down by endless acts of parliament and subject to change by the secretary of state. The proposal is to change the conditions to produce fewer seats (which is not really significant in terms of costs or democracy), which are more equal in size. This is an important but again not constitutionally very significant change. Ever since the days of rotten boroughs there have been irregularities in the sizes of constituencies, some amount due to accident, but largely due to the difficulties of making regularly sized constituencies out of irregularly sized wards made from irregularly sized villages towns and areas of cities. There have been countless steps to reverse these inconsistencies and this will not be the last such.

The next step will have to be the Lords, the two problems of the Lords and the Prime Minister are inter-related. If we are to accept that political members of the Lords are acceptable then it seems hard to suggest that Lords should be selected by the Prime Minister and not by the people. There is an argument for maintaining the excellent cross-benchers, "the great and the good" but if people like John Prescott are going to be members then at least that part needs to be elected. This is the key question of Lords reform. How much of the House should be experts appointed because they have the faintest idea what they're talking about, and how much should be party political, and how should they be elected.

One anomaly can and I think should be removed urgently. The Lords Spiritual are the top 26 bishops of the Church of England, that religion should have its own voice in lawmaking, and what's more only one flavour of religion, is anathema to a modern largely irreligious nation of Sunday-Christians (though increasingly not even that). To me it seems quite clear that the Lords Spiritual should have no automatic right to vote. If they contribute, the can become Lords Temporal, if not, then why would they be able to vote? There is a problem however. The bishops are there because they are appointed by the Crown in its capacity as head of the established Church. To take the Bishops out of the Lords would damage the influence that the Church has (of course the Church will always be a strong lobby, but the same is true of Mumsnet) I think it would be fair for the Church to ask what it gets out of being the established Church. There is a question of how nominal being established can become before it becomes pointless to continue the pretence. But for another time.

The current proposals are only in the very rough form of the Coalition Agreement, which require:

a wholly or mainly elected upper chamber on the basis of proportional representation.

This leaves the possibility of leaving the cross-benchers behind, which would be quite a useful feature if the selection of such people could be de-politicised and all potential for corruption, jobs-for-the-boys, cash-for-peerages etc etc. This will take really careful drafting, but is certainly possible. As for the elected portion, this can be of a wide variety of forms, anything from STV to a closed national party list. Most likely a regional list system similar to that used in EU elections will be the compromise. Now if this is the case then there are serious questions as a result, about the prime minister, and about the commons.

Now it is possible, or rather probable, that at various times the Lords and Commons will have different makeups, with a majority party in one house not having even a plurality in the other. This leads us to a problem, the Prime Minister is that person who controls the confidence of the House of Commons, so if the Tories have a slight lead in the Commons and Labour an overwhelming majority in the Lords the PM will be a Tory, which doesn't seem to reflect the will of the people. Especially given the near-presidential power of the PM. If you've got control over prerogative power you need to be democratically accountable. Now it will be argued that the constituency link gives the Commons priority, and this may be satisfactory, however, there may come a point where this is no longer satisfactory, especially if the Lords becomes disruptive, there will be calls for a directly elected Prime Minister. And I dont see any good reason to oppose these calls. A cabinet selected by a directly elected individual would be a lot more accountable than one selected by whoever won in coalition negotiations as now.

Now a longer term consideration is the next round of electoral reform. If the AV referendum fails this may not be for decades but eventually there will be a challenge to the house of commons voting system. This is, I would like to disagree with most liberals here, something that should be resisted. We have a bicameral system, historically to reflect two separate interests, the interests of the commons and of the aristocracy. We no longer have a functional aristocracy, so we need a new reason to have the Lords. At the moment they are used as a convenient way to reward those who have been politically useful to those in power and as something for the tourists to look at (like Britain hasn't got enough of that). I suggest a new role is needed, maybe, if we retain the cross-benchers, they could be used to actually inject some knowledge and expertise into the legislative. However, either way we can ask the Lords to be a continuity chamber, blocking sudden or illiberal laws. And for that reason the Lords needs a different makeup to the commons. If you have two identical chambers there's twice the cost with none of the benefits, anything that goes through one will get through both, with different chambers it is at least reasonable to hope that a really bad law will pass one but not both. For this reason if there was in 2020 a referendum to change the Commons from AV/FPTP to the same form of PR as the Lords I would vote no. No matter the inherent virtues of PR a second chamber needs to be different. If PR was unavoidable I would argue that a different form of PR be used, or that the two houses have very different periods, say one election per 10 years for the Lords and one per 3 years for the Commons. However you do it you need two houses that do not simply mirror eachother.

The next is a proposal for fixed term parliaments. This is a lot more tricky. The current situation is that the Commons is elected, and following that the Prime Minister is decided by vote of confidence (or to be more accurate the government is). So the Prime Minister is not elected, and can only be removed by the Commons voting to say it has no confidence in the Government. If that happens then a strange period begins, the Government is obliged to resign, but before it does so the (now discredited) Prime Minister is given the decision as to what should happen next. The options are dissolving parliament (not, sadly, in acid) and calling a new election, or allowing the Leader of the Opposition to form a government. Under 2 party politics the first option was almost always the correct one, a vote of no confidence meant that a small majority had been reduced to nothing by rebellion or by-elections, it would be unusual for the opponents of a near majority to be able to command an actual majority so an election was really the only solution. However, in a hung parliament the situation is different, a loss of a vote of no confidence means that the governing coalition has fallen, but is is more than possible that some other coalition could be formed, especially very early on in the term. So here it does seem to make sense to re-negotiate rather than allow a discredited Prime Minister a second try at the election. This is for two reasons, one practical, the British people traditionally dont like being taken to the polls, especially on the hop as in 1974, the second political, a prime minister who has lost the confidence of the house is not in a position to try and bounce the electorate.

The proposal by this Coalition is that the power to call an election should be taken away from the government and given to a supermajority of the commons. This is a novelty in the British system, parliamentary sovereignty is interpreted to mean that 50%+1 of all MPs present is enough to pass any motion, and as the fox hunting ban proved the Lords is not necessary thanks to the Parliament Act. The proposal currently is that 2/3rd of the House would be required to call an early election. This is an utterly false idea and one that has no practical use. 50%+1 will still be enough to overturn this very act, and 50%+1 can pass a motion of no confidence, and then one in the leader of the opposition, and then one in whoever replaces him until the time limit to form a new government expires and an election is forced. The difference, and this is key, is time. As it is now a Prime Minister can go to the Palace at any time and there can be an election 17 working days later with no public involvement. The two procedures outlined above however take time, at least 14 days, and in this time political will can be mobilised against such a move. Under the proposed system any election held for partisan reasons can be opposed much more effectively.

Punishment or bribery?

See these figures? See how they prove that the evil Tories with the treacherous Lib Dem sidekicks are punishing people for voting labour? You can clearly see that most of the schools with cancelled building projects are in labour areas, even if we take into account the number of labour seat more labour areas are affected than conservative ones as a percentage.

Convinced? Ok, now look at this table that I made in 10 minutes from the data on the same page. (Note many projects are still open or otherwise undecided).

	stopped	unaffected	total including undecided open and academies
lab	293	235	655
con	152	61	270
lib	23	28	75

To me this doesn't look like the stopped projects are being targeted at labour areas. To me this looks a lot more like there were a lot more projects in labour areas anyway. If anything the fact that the majority of decided cases in Tory areas have been cancelled and the majority of decided cases in Labour areas haven't suggests the Labour areas are receiving positive treatment. To me this doesn't look, as some commentators have described it, like children being punished for their parents voting labour. This looks a lot more like the old government was engaged in bribery in labour seats on a massive scale. To me this looks like more than twice as many projects were started in Labour seats than Tory ones. To me, I think labour look like the bad guys here.

Sometimes I love the internet

Not just because @floopily yesterday went shopping from a punt on the Cam via his iPhone. That's an incredible kind of magic. But not what really amazes me. What I love is that today I tweeted my MP (the wonderful @julianhuppert) about a high court case I'd found out about via twitter. He sent me a message back to say he would ask the Secretary of State a question on the subject. I passed this on to one of the eminent lawyers involved with the case (the truly great @JackOfKent), who has just now contacted my MP to see what more can be done on the issue.

The internet makes this kind of democracy possible. The press have a great history of telling the world what has happened. But they dont have the power to listen, only to talk. The old model of the minister making a speech that is re-packaged and discussed within the media before being re-broadcast to everyone else has competition. Now communication with MPs and ministers is instant and more importantly, public. If I write a letter, or even an email to my MP they can fob me off with a non-answer. But in the public forum of social media, everything you say will be picked up by someone. On the internet the skeptical community, the pro-Palestinian community, the LGBT community, to name but a few, can be far more powerfully united and speak as a connected voice much more clearly than single individuals.

The world of twitter is fantastically interconnected. We can now really speak to MPs as a community in a much more direct and powerful way that was ever possible before. Not of course that there's anything wrong with going to a constituency office or writing a letter. But the ability to unite behind an idea, twitter's ability to generate hashtags to form what are essentially ad hoc lobbying groups, whilst potentially dangerous, is a fantastic tool for good if used right.

Twitter Joke Trial Fund

This is a re-post of (http://cripesonfriday.tumblr.com/post/587845442/twitter-joke-trial-fund) this is an important and valuable cause. The court of appeal case here will be as important for English Law as Singh v BCA. So I really do ask that you donate anything you can. We need to reverse the legal system's growing contempt for the internet and free speech.

Paul chambers was found guilty today after sending a tweet,(details here http://bit.ly/hackofkentsummary ) he has been fined £1,000 and now has a criminal record. His total expense now is approaching £2,000, not a small sum to anyone really, more so when you realise that a criminal record scuppers his chances of qualifying as an accountant.( I realise sympathy levels have dropped now you know he wants to be an accountant but give him a chance)
This tweet has been referred to by the media as a “threat” to which people have responded angrily saying it was a joke. I don’t think it was a joke, I think it was the type of exaggeration that everyone does in real life, and on Twitter every day. Paul wanted to visit his friend, snow was scuppering his plans.He said “Grrrrr” but said it in a way that he will regret for a long time. Anyone could have been caught by this, people on Twitter all week have been talking of revolt, burning 10 Downing Street to the ground and kicking newsreaders around the place. What if these tweets are seen to be of a “menacing nature” as Paul’s was. Who is the next person that could be arrested? This is not paranoid ravings, A MAN WAS JUST FOUND GUILTY OF TWEETING A STUPID TWEET!

Many many people have offered to donate money and because @crazycolours (http://twitter.com/crazycolours) read my DM first I am setting it up.It is a Paypal account because everyone said that was the easiest way to go about it.Go to the Paypal.com site, click on send money and fill in the details. The account name isTwitterJokeTrialFund@gmail.com (obviously the account is one I set up for the Paypal account.) You do need to have a Paypal account to donate, I will see tomorrow if there is a way around that.

I realise most of you will not know me,or have a reason to trust me but after the initial frenzy has died down I will organise for Paul/Sarah to take over the account.(Since I started this, Stephen Fry (http://twitter.com/stephenfry) has very generously offered to pay the fine, but that still leaves Paul very much out of pocket, especially if he decides to appeal.)

@crazycolours or Paul will post the link too so as to give it legitimacy. I should also state here that I have not spoken to Paul about this, he is very busy (over a thousand mentions today) I have been dealing with @crazycolours.(EDIT: I got a DM from Paul last night, people want to donate and he appreciates that.So having one “official” place to do it makes sense.)

NOTE: Paul has 21 days to decide on whether to appeal or not and will be taking advice on this over the next few days, in the event of more money being donated than is needed , the money will be donated to a UK Civil Liberty fund, I am happy to take any advice on those, I will be checking them out tomorrow.

This has all been done in a rush, and I am sure there are questions that need to be answered in my rush to get it done.Transparancy is of the utmost importance in this so please ask any questions to either the email account (twitterjoketrialfund@gmail.com) or the Twitter a/c @TwJokeTrialFund or (if I follow you,) DM me on @cripesonfriday

Graham Linehan has written an extraordinary piece here http://bit.ly/agAqgS Please read it and RT on Twitter, thanks.

The Twitter feed about this with opinions and jokes can be read here. http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23twitterjoketrial

All credit for the fund and for the various blog posts go to the many twitterers who have been so dedicated to this over the last few days. As ever with twitter, a small ad hoc community with a common goal has spontaneously formed, done a huge amount of work and become very tight knit. I feel like I've really come to know people over the last few days, and I can give my personal recommendation, all these guys are really genuine good people. They need all the help we can give them. So, spread the word if you can.

The Coalition

I dont normally write about politics, well, that's not true. But I dont normally write about party politics. I'm not partisan, there are idiots and there are brilliant minds in all parties (... well ... maybe some of the minor parties that may not be the case). And there are brilliant and awful policies from all parties. (I am for example, a huge fan of UKIP's policy on drugs and education, but am I ever going to vote for them? Oh hell no). And I dont like to ally myself with specific parties and be asked to defend some policies I dont like.

This is not to say I dont have strong tendencies, far from it. I am a fully paid up card-carrying (... well not card carrying because they dont have cards but ...) member of Pirate Party UK. They have 3 policies and I agree with all of them, so I feel it is appropriate for me to give them support. Likewise in the last election I voted for, and publicly supported, the Lib Dems. I dont like all of their policies, far from it, if I had to decide if opposing nuclear power or capping bank bonuses whilst doing nothing to salaries was the crazier idea I'd have difficulty making my mind up. But the bulk of their manifesto (on the areas of science and political reform which I care about) was very good, and far superior to either major alternative.

I'm laying all this out because I dont want to be blamed for what happens over the next 5 years. If this parliament goes badly wrong then I reserve the right to say "nothing to do with me guv". I do not support this government unreservedly, nor do I automatically applaud all it's actions. Neither the Tories nor the Lib Dems are "my guys". Not my fault.

However, I'm writing this because I have a terrible feeling. A feeling that has shocked my anarchistic soul: I'm happy with this government. I approve of the broad sweep of its policies. Not just one or two things, there are entire sections of the Lib-Con agreement that I simply love. I think this parliament has the capacity to be Great. And here's why

Political system. For a while now I have been advocating a fully elected second chamber (who hasn't) but with a fundamentally different voting system to the first. This way the second chamber has democratic legitimacy but is not simply a mirror of the first. This is important. The reason for a bicameral parliament is for both chambers to hold the other to account. The idea being that if one chamber wishes to do something very objectionable the second chamber has a chance to stop it. This is impossible if either the second chamber has no power or authority to stop destructive legislation as now or if the second chamber is going to agree with the first one anyway. For this reason I advocated a full PR system for the Lords and some kind of FPTP/AV unrepresentative system in the commons. This way we can have a real check to the power of the commons.

Fixed terms. Fixed terms are a good idea. But that's not important compared to the clause tucked on the end of this section. That it would require 55% of MPs to call an election before that time. This is truly radical. For those panicking that this is illiberal and dangerous because it raises the threshold for confidence votes, I think your worry is a good reaction, but in this case invalid. It is still the case the a government that didn't pass the budget by a simple majority would resign. The opposition has never had the power to force an election, only to force resignation of the government, a power it maintains. What is radical is what is important. It is the curious nature of our constitution's concept of parliamentary sovereignty that a group of 325 MPs is sufficient to act as unrestricted dictator. There are precedents, treaties and guidance to limit what a majority of the commons can do in practice, but in principle they have total authority. This is, in my humble opinion, a serious failing of our constitution. The principle is laudable, that it should be parliament, not the king or the gentry, who decide our laws. But this implementation is just wrong. It is not anti-democratic to say that 51% of our MPs do not have the authority to do as they please without limit. It is an empirical fact that 51% of MPs have acted in the past and will act in the future against the will of the people, and against the principle of liberality that many of us hold dear. It is a major leap to suggest that some things should require more than this, and it is a good one. There have to be limits on what MPs can do. Not to tie their hands, but to slow them down and make them think. Many complained that 40% of the US Senate could hold up health care reform for a year, this was America's fine constitution in action. That bill was bad, those who thought it was far better than no bill still agree it was bad. And it is important that no government be permitted to rush through bad laws without proper scrutiny and consideration.

The Great Repeal Act. Doesn't it just sound like a subheading in a history textbook? "The Liberal-Conservative coalition passed the Great Repeal Act in 2010, this overturned some of the worst excesses of the previous government and set the scene for a great expansion of civil liberties in the years to follow." ... maybe a tad optimistic, and we dont know the exact content. But cutting back ID cards, stop and search, Digital Economy, the DNA database etc is really really important for this country. Whatever you think about the labour government's record, their response to terrorism and their utter contempt for civil liberty is utterly disgraceful. We need to cut the vast majority of all anti-terror laws, most the powers given to the police and local councils. Simply because they are incompatible with a liberal democracy. You cannot have a free country if 40% of black men are on the DNA database compared to 5.2% of the population. You cannot have a free country where councils are allowed to follow people's moments in order to determine if they live in the catchment area they say they do. You cannot have a free country where the police can break into a man's home and handcuff him for displaying a poster calling David Cameron a wanker. Civil liberties in this country are in a grave state, we need this bill.

Coalition. The very principle of the thing pleased me. Quite aside from the deal that was struck this was the best outcome arithmetically. The other options were: the anti-Tory alliance with a majority of about 3 or a Tory minority 20 seat short of security. We got a majority of 37. I would like this majority to be smaller. I like weak government, ie government that has to do most things by consensus, this tends to produce the most clearly thought out and liberal laws. Up to a point. This point is why I prefer the majority to the minority. The US senate is again an example, I applaud the republicans for holding up health care, it's exactly what they need to be doing, holding the majority to account and making sure that their legislation is in the public interest. However. The way they did it produced very bad results. The bill as passed was a nonsense, a thousand page monstrosity of a bill with thousands of small exceptions, loopholes, special projects. This is what happens when the minority tries to sink legislation rather than improve it. So I dont think it's the case that minorities are automatically better. In this parliament in particular it is important for a workable majority to exist. Leaving economics quite aside, this needs to be the reforming parliament, it needs to pass changes to the voting system, great improvements to civil liberties etc. These require one government to be around for several years. And a minority would not produce this, a minority might have better scrutinised legislation (more likely however it would simply pass a whole lot of bribes in the form of funding to Scotland, NI and Wales) but it would collapse after at most 3 months. Probably to produce a far stronger Tory government than the current coalition, with no commitments to a great program of reforms.

Lib Dems No, really, Lib Dems, in office. This is fantastic. This will do two things: make the Lib Dems a real force in politics, and whatever you think about the Lib Dems as a party, and end to monolithic left v right arguments is something to be happy about. Secondly it will improve the Lib Dems. So often they have been dismissed as being impractical and high-minded, "that works fine if you're never going to be the government, the real politicians have to be more realistic though" is used against the Lib Dems all the time. And, often, fairly. It will be good for there to be 3 parties that genuinely know what government is like and can produce realistic and workable policies.

In summary. I'm cautious. But I'm very optimistic about this government. It may fizzle out, but it has the potential to be a parliament that goes down in history books as a major period of reform and change to the constitution,and to politics in general.

A response to the loss of Evan Harris.

This is a comment I wrote in response to this article condemning Dr Evan Harris, the Lib Dem MP for Oxford West who sadly lost his seat in the election after a sustained attack by the religious conservatives in the press.

One doesn't know where to start with this. For instance, is Dr Harris "A stranger to principle" or is he a " dogged secularist"? Secular principles are still principles no matter how much you dislike them.

The idea that "his true love was the National Secular Society" shows a real misunderstanding of what politics is. People come into politics in order to change the country. Either they know what that change is in advance and they hope to persuade people to agree, or they plan to listen to the people and decide based on that. Almost all politicians are of the first kind, this is why we need elections. Dr Harris got into politics because of a belief that secular, rational principles are the best way to run a country. He evidently managed to persuade a lot of people of that at the last election. The idea that these principles made him illegitimate is as mad as saying that Ann Widdecombe should have been bared from standing because she was simply a shill for the Catholic Church. One can argue whose principles are better, I for one would argue that a secular, rational approach to the ethical concerns of politics is far better than most of the flatly immoral principles Ann pushes. But neither makes the candidate illegitimate.

"campaign to have people of faith – any faith – swept from the public sphere" You have fundamentally misunderstood the concept of secularism. The principle of secularism is the belief that the state should not have any connection with the church. This was historically a religious movement. If we have a state which is blind to religion, that does not feel itself legitimate in acknowledging the existence of religion or irrelgion, then that state cannot attack minority faiths. The belief that people should not be penalised for their religion is one that can only be recognised by a secular state. If we have a state, such as ours, where some religions are recognised, respected, and have the ability to get laws drafted in their favour, then ipso facto members of all other religions are penalised. For instance, there are specific privileges given to Muslims in this country to wear a mask in public in situations where that would not otherwise be legal. To have this system is to penalise anyone who, for whatever reason other than Islam, wishes to wear a mask in public in an otherwise unacceptable situation. Religious people should celebrate this. If we remove the bishops from the house of lords then we promote the interest of every religion other than CoE by giving them an equal footing (note, nobody is proposing that bishops should not be allowed to stand in their own right, simply that being a bishop in and of itself is not sufficient reason to become part of the legislature). If we promote the interest of one religion we must do down the interest of all others, and if we promote religion per se we must do damage to the interest of the irreligious.

Note that this does not mean religious people should be removed from public any more than the irreligious. Neither Dr Harris nor any other secular person demands this. The point of secularism is that a religious and irreligious person should be treated equally. So when a moral issue comes up from debate religious leaders should only be asked to contribute if they are widely recognised as being moral experts in their own right, not just for their religious status. Each person has the capacity to be wise, religion in and of itself does nothing to this. We should not ask what the clergy think but what those who are morally wise think. If the clergy are worth their salt they will be in this latter category. But the Catholic Church in particular, and the socially conservative wing of religions in general have shown themselves to be very inexpert in morality. Any organisation that can can oppose the spread of condoms is one which should not be listened to on public health issues, this is not a judgement about Catholicism, there are many Catholics who have a morally good attitude to condoms, but rather it is a judgement about the moral expertise of those who claim to be the conscience of the nation. You may notice that this belief that we should not accept the word of the clergy but instead accept the ability of each person to decide for themselves has a name, it's called protestantism. To assume a protestant wants to remove people from the public sphere for being religious is mad, but when the same claim is levelled against a secular person, somehow it seems sensible.

“he supported the strange idea that terminally ill people should be helped to kill themselves.” That's really not such a strange idea. It is supported by the great bulk of the population of this country. If someone wants to die I for one belief that it is profoundly evil of us to deny them that. To represent the view of many doctors and many of his constituents in this way is not surprising. The reason you find it surprising is your profoundly backward concept of morality. Your beliefs on this are presumably either explicitly religious or based on religious principles. I dont think this makes for good judgement on issues of life and death, it doesn't recognise that the goodness of human life is not an absolute, nor is it universal. People do not all have the same sort of a life, not all of them regard their own life as precious, some are capable of enormous self-sacrifice because they regarded others as more important than themselves. I dont think one can be a martyr and not accept that some things are more important than ones own life. If we then accept that some things are more important than life, and if we accept, as I do, that the desires of people and those things that make them feel independent and free are examples of those things then we must accept that people should be able to kill themselves. It is not hard then to argue that people should be able to ask (not to demand, of course not to demand) that others help them if they are physically unable to do it themselves. This is not a strange idea, it only seems strange to your profoundly odd concept of morality.

“A drab, secular determinism was his sole motivation” determinism cannot, by definition, motivate anyone. If you believe that your actions are determined then you cannot make any decision, you believe your actions are independent of any decision you make. Also, drab? Really? Secularism is drab? Science is drab? You need to go away and watch Carl Sagan's Cosmos. Watch Prof. Brian Cox's Wonders of the Solar System. Learn anything about the joy and wonder of a world seen through scientific eyes. The natural world is full of joy and wonder and can only be considered drab by someone profoundly ignorant of science.

“His political demise will be mourned only by those with a strange fascination for death,” No. Once again you've not understood. Yes, he is praised by the many many people who support euthanasia. But more importantly he will be sorely missed by anyone who thinks that the best running of the country is best answered by people who are scientifically literate. Someone deciding on NHS policy should decide based on evidence, not on superstition, and Dr Harris was a hard-line opponent of magic beans like homoeopathy and chiropractic on the NHS. Those who believe that no-one should be censored if they want to present evidence about fraudulent claims have lost a vital supporter in the case for libel reform. Those who want sex education to be about reality not outdated dogmas have lost a firm advocate for universal sex education. Those who want equality for gays and lesbians have lost. Those who want a decent society run by reason no the church have lost. Those who dont want children being indoctrinated in faith schools have lost. Those who think that public institutions should not be allowed to be bigoted have lost. Parliament has lost. Mourn the loss of a scientist at your peril, you loose things that you literally do not understand.

Bankers

"Bankers took all the money in the economy in their bonuses and so we need to get rid of bankers, destroy the banks and get rid of capitalism." bleat ... well everyone really. I know most of my friends say this too so excuse me whilst I abuse you for a bit. ARE YOU ALL FUCKING INSANE?

You realise all of you that for all banks payroll is a negligible fraction of turnover? Millions of pounds in bonuses sounds like a lot of money and I'd be very glad to get some of that. But compared to the billions the banks deal with everyday it's small change. At every point of time other than a recession we thank our lucky stars we have the city of London and the fine men and women who risk stress levels that would literally kill most people in order to fund a good fraction of the UK economy.

Real money is made in financial dealing but in order for that to happen you need to take risks. When there's a boom on everyone yells at bankers to take more risk and earn more money so the rest of us can have the obscene levels of personal mortgage and credit card debt we all have. Then when things turn sour the same way they have done on a regular cycle since we've had any kind of capitalist economy, we blame the bankers for listening to us. You simply cant have it both ways.

I get really angry to hear on Question Time or other discussions that are supposed to be serious people suggesting things like sending bankers to the front line in Afghanistan. Seriously suggesting that you want people to die because they have been paid well and in the course of doing their job the natural fluctuation of the economy hurt many people is totally insane. These people get paid huge sums of money because nobody else can do what they do, if you seriously think that bankers are incompetent try becoming one. After you've gone through enough economic theory to melt your brain and you're thrown onto a trading floor where a you must time the manipulation of thousands of different stock prices and quantities exactly in time with everyone else who is working hard against you. You pause for 30 seconds and you've lost the company a million pounds. The shear amount of money you are responsible for and how bad things are if you fail is the result of unimaginable stress which is why you will probably retire aged 45.

I'm damn glad they get paid megabucks in the boom, because if I dont pay them megabucks (and I'm the one paying them, I've got a bank account) someone else will. And it's not like in the boom anyone is forcing you to pay them. The co-operative bank exists, if you dont like most banks then bloody vote with your feet and go to them. If you dont like funding evil oil companies and other things that make your liberal middle-class conscience feel enraged then put your money where your mouth is, take you money way from these evil bankers, stick it in the co-op. You have no idea how fast they'll change their ways.

The government now owns a large part of a lot of banks. By giving large sums of money they secured banks that should have failed. That's not how a capitalist society works, that's not the way a lot of people wanted them to do it, it's not how I wanted them to do it. But they did it anyway, because it was the safest and cheapest way to keep everyone's bank accounts intact. Without doing that they would have had a choice, RBS and a few others would have totally failed, and everyone with money in RBS would have lost all of their savings. Which would have destroyed this country and sent a wave of penniless homeless migrants flooding across Europe. Or they could have guaranteed everyone's savings, which I was in favour of at the time. This would have cost the government truly fantastic amounts of money that would have made current government debt look like a pittance.

So now we have bailed out the banks (can we please stop saying we have bailed out the bankers, the people themselves were not in debt and have not asked for our money) we now have to ask what we do with the staff at banks which are partially state owned. The whole point of bailing out the banks was to put in a small amount of money to secure banks in the short term and then get a profit when you sell them off down the line. So we want the board of RBS to act in such a way as to make RBS back into a profitable organisation, which means lending lots of money, which means lending lots of money at high risk. Are they going to do that? Bloody hell are they, the enter nation is yelling at them to put all their money in a big safe with an armed guard and a pack of wolves so none of it can ever be lost ever again. We are sending as a nation totally the wrong messages. Risky lending makes you more money on average than safe lending, we want RBS to make us money to put back into government coffers to pay for schools and hospitals. So then we shout at bankers working in government owned banks for doing exactly what is in our interest.

How should bankers be paid for working in government banks? If I'm thinking of making the taxpayer the most profit, fantastically well. You want the very best people in the world to be running RBS, and you get them with more money than HSBC or the co-op can offer. If I'm thinking of making money and not unbalancing the economy, then I want to pay them well, not megabucks, just well enough to make sure that we aren't left with Dave who did the finance for the Swansea branch of Burgerking in charge of a significant fraction of all public money. If however I'm thinking about politics I want a return to Victorian values of suffering and penitence. That's what really gets the Daily Mail all hot an bothered, a nice bit of suffering, so you make a big show of slashing the bankers money, get rid of the bonuses (because of course it's totally immoral for people to be rewarded for doing their job well), get rid of the pensions that people have been working an entire career to earn. While we're thinking politically, we also need to stop anyone taking risk, we need to get rid of the most profitable parts of the banking industry, we need to remove any mention of abolishing boom and bust from the record, we need to get angry at Fred Goodwin, even after his life has been threatened. We need to talk about putting bankers into Afghanistan to be killed and destroying the banking sector. We need to totally abandon all sense, morality, good economic practice ... and you know what. It still wont win you the election.

(Can you tell I'm in a bit of a mood?)

Why I talk about America

I'm British, but I find myself more and more talking about American politics and the American legal system. Why is this? It's not because I love America or want to move there, or that the people in the American system are in any sense notable. There's the dull practical reason that this is the internet and that the Americans own it, so it's easier to keep up to date about the states than the UK. But the key reason is different:

America has principles. Note not American politicians, that's not true, but the nation itself. If someone does something stupid in the UK you can argue against it and you can try and apeal to the idea of human rights and ancient liberty... but that has no legal or historical force whatever. There is a human rights act in the UK that aims to throw out bad and illiberal law, but it has no teeth whatever and is under constant attack from right wing newspapers. When the EU court of human rights told the government that their DNA database was totally illegal ... they simply ignored it and made cosmetic changes.

In America there is a constitution, there are principles of law. Now these are by no means absolute, nor are they universally enforced. The universal rights of the 14th Amendment are laughed off as irrelevant or ignored in the gay marriage debate. The First (free speech) and Fourth (no unreasonable search and seizure) Amendments are totally shot following the war on terror. But they still exist and the constitution still has at least some authority.

Why do I talk about America then? Because in the UK whenever something totally illiberal comes up, (42 days pre-charge detention, DNA database, internet patrols) one has to genuinely ask the people if that's the sort of society they want to live in. And sadly the right wing press tells them that they do. In America, when Guantanamo or wiretapping or the teaching of evolution or gay marrage or anything else comes up in politics, you dont have to ask if the people want to live in an illiberal society. They aren't allowed. It sounds a very strange idea, but America is not designed to be a democracy, the people are not sovereign, the constitution is. If politicians do something illiberal one cannot ask if this is what we want America to become, legally the only way to do it is either to alter the constitution (either in wording or interpretation) or to have a glorious revolution and start America again on a new foundation of bigotry and wiretapping.

This is important in debates becasue it makes things so much easier, there can be no debate about what America should be in the ordinary course of politics. When you want to change the foundations of politics you must get the supreme court behind you and jump through endless hoops and generally make it obvious that that is what you are doing. In the UK you can change the political landscape with a vote hardly anyone turns up to. Parliment is soverign and has no oversight on whatever stupid damn thing they want to do.

This is not to say that the constitution is a final arbiter of morality, there are a lot of things wrong with it. But it is a very well designed starting point for good politics. The founding fathers left extensive writings to tell us how to interpret the constitution and the rights they provide are vital. And there is danger in undermining it, recently the liberal blogosphere has been churning the idea of getting the supreme court to reduce the protection of the Second Amendment, they want to give states the right to outlaw and control guns in a way that congress is not allowed to do. This is a bad bad idea. Even if you believe that this would be a good idea insofar as its effect on gun law it is still very very dangerous to mess with the constitution. Once the clear meaning of the Amendment is altered to strip it of all power there is nothing to stop the process being repeated for the rest of the constitution. The First Amendment say, or the Fourth, or the Fifth. If congress cant inflict cruel or unusual punishment on you why not let the states?

In the UK there is nothing to stop such an idea gaining traction, there is no grand principle to appeal to to stop it happening. But when something like this happens in America you can have all the popular support and intellectual underpinning for a bad law that you like, but the Supreme court will still throw it out, you can still argue that this violates what America is about, what Jefferson would have done. And unlike in the UK if the person you are arguing with doesn't want to follow what Jefferson would have done (and fair play to him, there's no reason he shouldn't want to free himself of the dictates of a dead old white guy), there is a simple remedy: either change the constitution, start the glorious revolution and begin America anew, or just up and leave. America is a nation defined by the founding fathers, I think they were good people, but you are free to disagree. Just in the normal course of politics it is their political and moral standards things are held against. If you dont like that, feel free to move to the UK, here things are measured by the moral standards of Murdoch inc.

The PCC and free speech

Just a quickie, I'm passionate about free speech, and as such I'd like to ask you all to go along to:

http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/11/17/blogging-and-pcc-regulation-a-collective-response/

where the wonderful people are collecting signatures in response to this: http://ianburrell.independentminds.livejournal.com/8357.html The long and the short of it is that the Press Complaints Commission wants to regulate blogs. These are the same wonderful people who so utterly fail to get rid of the lies in print journalism. This is firstly a waste of time, but more importantly sets a very bad precedent. We have freedom of speech on the internet only on sufferance. Too much interference with this from governments and that can be put in real danger. As the current rows over libel law: http://www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/index.php/site/project/333/ demonstrate clearly, once bad laws are put in place to regulate speech a lot of fundamental rights go out the window.

I encourage you all to sign up to this very important campaign.

Just a quick thing

Question on any questions this week about new proposals to get rid of a parent's opt out for sex education after the age of 15. As the law stands parents can get their child out of sex ed lessons up to 19 and the child can get themselves out after that, if indeed any such lessons are provided at that age. I've had a think and I'm going to write this and then post in a few hours later to make sure i'm not ameking a rash assesment here so here goes:

Any group or person, be it the child, be it the school, the parent, the government etc who seek to deny sex ed lessons to children:

• Is putting that child at risk of STIs, early pregnancy etc
• Is putting that child at risk of being abused emotionally and physically by people who know more than them
• Is leading to that child being less able to form a healthy emotional understanding of sex, especially sex as a factor of a meaningful long-term relationship
• Is likely to lead to that child having many difficulties with understanding their sexuality in later life
  
• Is thus indirectly harming that child in many many ways
• Is not acting in the best interest of that child
  
• Should seriously consider their role caring for children.

So should parents have a right to pull their kid out of sex ed? Fuck off, no you cant. Just like you cant pull them out of Maths or English, you're stunting their development and storing up all kinds of shit for later on.