Category Archives: Parliament

Public Order Bill: who are the real criminals here?

Clive Lewis: he wants us to know that the Public Order Bill is targeting the innocent and protecting those who should be criminalised.

Clive Lewis makes an excellent point in this Twitter thread.

He calls attention to the fact that the Public Order Bill, increasing restrictions on protest, is returning to Parliament today (March 7).

And he points out that the Bill targets the wrong people – by criminalising protesters against environmental destruction in order to protect those who are responsible for causing it.

Here he is:

He’s right – right?

Maybe there’s nothing to be done about it right now – but we need to remember for the future.


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Rishi Sunak explains new Northern Ireland trade deal to Parliament

UK prime minister Rishi Sunak has struck a new deal with the European Union on the movement of goods to and through Northern Ireland – and it looks like it’s a good one!

Here, he explains the details of what’s being called the Windsor Framework:

The gist is that there will be a ‘Green Lane’ for goods going into NI, and they won’t be checked, while goods going through the province and into the Republic (or the other way, and into the UK) will be subject to customs procedures.

That’s what the EU offered before, and the UK rejected, but I understand the mood music playing in Westminster at the moment is saying we shouldn’t worry about that at the moment.

It will be interesting to see what the Democratic Unionist Party in NI will have to say about it – will they be able to find a reason not to resume their seats in the Stormont Assembly?

And what will the Conservatives in the European Research Group (ERG) have to say about it?

We know what UK Labour leader Keir Starmer said about it. Here he is:

He said he wouldn’t snipe – but he did!

One wonders how long the apparent detente between the two largest political parties will hold.

The BBC has published a checklist of the changes and new measures in the Windsor Framework, which I reproduce below. We’ll all be able to use it to check if anything goes wrong:

Green lane/red lane

  • Goods from Britain destined for Northern Ireland will travel through a new “green lane”, with a separate “red lane” for goods at risk of moving onto the EU
  • Products coming into Northern Ireland through the green lane would see checks and paperwork scrapped
  • Red lane goods destined for the EU still be subject to normal checks
  • Mr Sunak said this would mean food available on the supermarket shelves in Great Britain will be available on supermarket shelves in Northern Ireland.
  • New data-sharing arrangements would be used to oversee the new system
  • Where smuggling is suspected, some custom checks may still be carried out on green lane goods
  • Business moving goods from Northern Ireland to Great Britain would not be required to complete export declarations
  • Bans on certain products – like chilled sausages – entering Northern Ireland from Britain would be scrapped

Pets, parcels and medicines

  • No new requirements on moving pets from Northern Ireland to Britain
  • Pet owners visiting Northern Ireland from Britain (but not travelling on to Ireland) only have to confirm their pet is microchipped and will not move into the EU
  • Under old rules, pet owners had to have vet-issued health certificate and proof of up-to-date rabies vaccination, while dogs needed tapeworm treatment before every visit
  • Medicines for use in Northern Ireland would be approved by UK regulator, with the European Medicines Agency not having any role
  • Parcels will not be subject to full custom declarations

VAT and alcohol duty

  • Under the Northern Ireland Protocol, EU VAT rules could be applied in Northern Ireland
  • Under the new deal, Mr Sunak says the UK can make “critical VAT” changes which include Northern Ireland
  • For example if the government raises or cuts alcohol duty this will apply to pubs in Northern Ireland as well as the rest of the UK, he said

Stormont brake

  • Under the protocol, some EU law applies in Northern Ireland, but politicians had no formal way to influence the rules
  • New agreement introduces a “Stormont brake” which allows the Northern Ireland Assembly to raise an objection to a new rule
  • The process would be triggered if 30 MLAs (representatives in the Stormont Assembly) from two or more parties sign a petition
  • 14 day consultation period would follow, after which, if 30 MLAs still support it, there would be a vote in the assembly
  • To pass, it would need support from both unionists and nationalist representatives
  • The brake cannot be used for “trivial reasons” but reserved for “significantly different” rules
  • Once the UK tells the EU the brake has been triggered, the rule cannot be implemented
  • It can only be applied if the UK and EU agree
  • This new process is not subject to oversight by the European Court of Justice oversight
  • The document states that: “Any dispute on this issue would be resolved through subsequent independent arbitration according to international, not EU, law.”
  • The EU has its own safeguard – if Northern Ireland starts to diverge significantly from the bloc’s rules, the EU has its own power to take “appropriate remedial measures”

Northern Ireland Bill scrapped

  • Government has confirmed it is ditching the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill
  • The controversial legislation, introduced under ex-PM Boris Johnson, would have given the UK the power to scrap the old protocol deal
  • Legal opinion published by the government says there is now “no legal justification” for going ahead with it

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Matt Hancock in new row over ‘I’m a Celebrity’ cash

Matt Hancock: is the former Health Secretary really so thick that he doesn’t understand the difference between gross and net earnings?

Former Tory Health Secretary Matt Hancock has got himself into yet another fix over money.

It’s only a little more than two weeks since we learned that he gave only a little more than three per cent of his I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here fee to dyslexia campaigns – the reason he said he was doing the show.

Now we find it wasn’t even that much, because his fee wasn’t £320,000 – as he claimed – but £400,000.

So – only 2.5 per cent went to dyslexia. What a deceiving skinflint.

Hancock’s problem now is that he lied in Parliament’s Register of Members’ Interests.

He was duty-bound to enter all of his earnings on Celebrity – the gross amount – but didn’t.

Here’s Robert Peston to explain what we know:

Hancock did respond to Peston’s inquiries later. Here’s his update:

Peston is being too charitable in his last two tweets. Gross is gross – the whole of the amount a person is paid. ITV paid Hancock £400,000. That is his gross earning from that engagement. What he did with it afterwards – handing £80,000 to an agent, handing £10,000 to dyslexia organisations – was his decision over his money.

Those are the rules for the rest of us. If they aren’t the rules in Parliament, then we should be told when they will be changed – and we should demand that they be changed retrospectively.


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Nadine Dorries is stepping down as an MP. Let’s see some of her greatest hits

With Parliament in recess, those of us who comment on politics may scrape around for stories, a bit.

Happily, people like Nadine Dorries are gifts that keep on giving!

Here’s a run-down of some of her greatest (for us) moments, courtesy of Politics Joe:


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Former Culture Secretary and ‘window-licker’ gaffe MP Nadine Dorries is quitting

Nadine Dorries and her finest hour [Image: The Prole Star.]

Don’t all cheer at once!

Here’s the story from Sky News:

I look forward to writing a retrospective on her career, taking in her appearance on I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, her “window lickin’ Twitter trolls” tweet, and her attempt to privatise Channel 4.

Who’ll be next to go?


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Should MPs get medals and bigger payoffs when they leave Parliament?

Twilight in Westminster: should MPs get a medal and a large ‘golden handshake’ payment when their days here are done?

MPs leaving Parliament should be awarded with medals and a more generous redundancy payment in order to help them move into other jobs, according to a committee… of MPs.

The claim is that some MPs face “financial challenges and hardship” after leaving Parliament, with the average loss-of-office payment being far less than in comparable countries.

That’s all very well – but MPs are already paid much more than the average UK wage. Many of them have second (or multiple) jobs as well. And of course we know of infamous instances when MPs also used their positions to corruptly feather their nests.

The issue was discussed on the BBC’s Politics Live show:

Watching the clip, though, do you think the panel got to the heart of the matter? Or did they avoid the more difficult points?

This Writer certainly thought there was more to it, as my tweeted commentary bears witness:


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Nadine Dorries’s constituents: She’s the shame of Bedfordshire | Dorset Eye

Nadine Dorries: I should get a more recent image of her. But I can’t be bothered. Hopefully she’ll be gone soon.

The people of Bedfordshire are to be saluted for realising what Nadine Dorries really is:

There is not much more that can be said about Nadine Dorries. Therefore, let us leave it to her constituents to summarise.

Source: Nadine Dorries’s constituents: She is the shame of Bedfordshire – Dorset Eye


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Now we’re being told Jeremy Corbyn has ‘unconscious bias’ against Jews. Or does he?

Jeremy Corbyn is clearly not an enemy of the Jewish people.

Look at the state of this:

Baddiel is saying that, although on the surface Jeremy Corbyn is absolutely not anti-Semitic, he has an unconscious bias against Jewish people.

He has cited the case of the Mear One mural featuring bankers playing Monopoly while sitting on the backs of the poor, saying they all bore caricature “Jewish” facial features. Mr Corbyn defended the artist.

People forget that only (if I recall correctly) two of the bankers featured in the mural (they were all based on real people) were Jewish, so they could not all be representations of the anti-Semitic trope of a Jewish capitalist banking conspiracy. They were simply caricature representations of bankers in general and what the artist considered them to do to the poor.

Mr Corbyn saw that. Baddiel seems to have a blind spot there.

I know it’s just one example, but might it not be more accurate to suggest that it is Baddiel who has the unconscious bias, if he can’t understand that Jeremy Corbyn’s opposition to racism in all its forms is genuine?

Others do:

Mr Corbyn had his faults as a Labour leader, certainly. He didn’t clear the right-wing factionalists out of the party machine to stop them clogging it up, for one thing.

But on anti-Semitism, he acted decisively. He brought in measures that reduced the amount of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party to a lower level than anywhere else in the United Kingdom – even while being hindered by those right-wing factionalists. But this is ignored.

And now his successor, Keir Starmer, is behaving in openly anti-Semitic ways but gets a free pass because (it’s thought) the mainstream media do not see him as the threat to the Establishment that Mr Corbyn was.

So Starmer can kick any number of left-wing Jews out of Labour without being questioned at all:

One has to question, also, why Mr Corbyn and anti-Semitism keep being dragged back into the spotlight. Is this a distraction from the issues facing us now?

So it seems that, rather than there being a hierarchy of racism in Mr Corbyn’s mind, there is a hierarchy of bias instead.

Jeremy Corbyn isn’t biased at all; David Baddiel has an unconscious bias against Corbyn; and the media have a very conscious bias against him. Am I right?

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

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Boris Johnson earns £1m in six weeks, but taxpayer gets his bill for legal fees | The Times

Money, money, money: but Boris Johnson never seems to use any of his own – it’s always yours.

This is the story – and I should have got to it before The Times, of all places:

Boris Johnson has earned nearly a million pounds in just over six weeks – but is claiming public money for legal representation at the Partygate inquiry – and the amount seems to be limitless.

Sadly, the story is behind a paywall, so this is all I can show you –

Boris Johnson has earned nearly a million pounds in just over six weeks, it has been revealed. The former prime minister registered more than half a million po

– plus the link below.

His earnings were mentioned in a previous Vox Political piece, here.

And his public-money funding for Partygate is the subject of this article in the Graun, although it’s covered by many other media outlets if that one isn’t your cup of tea.

Entitled arseheads like Johnson really take the biscuit, don’t they?

He’s taken a million quid on the side – that’s additional to his MP salary, and has anybody actually seen him in the House of Commons lately? – but he wouldn’t dream of using any of it to fight the Partygate allegations.

He’ll happily take it from you and me instead.

That’s how they stay rich and you stay poor.

Source: Boris Johnson earns £1m in six weeks, but taxpayer gets his bill for legal fees | News | The Times

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MP suspended over vaccine comments wants to take professional camel-muncher to court. Can he?

Well, yes he can, on the face of it.

Andrew Bridgen has threatened Matt Hancock with legal action after the former Health Secretary and I’m A Celebrity contestant accused him of using anti-Semitic language:

It is true that Hancock is protected from a lawsuit based on what he said in the Commons Chamber by Absolute Privilege – an exemption from the law that allows MPs to denounce dodginess committed by the powerful without fear of vexatious lawsuits against them.

Hancock made the same claim on Twitter, using no different words – but he may be sued by Andrew Bridgen for this – as I understand it – because tweets are not protected by Parliamentary Privilege.

It doesn’t matter whether the tweet was, almost word for word, what was said in Parliament.

As it happens, though, it is true that Parliamentary Privilege was successfully used to make allegations about the Teesside Free Port:

An MP has called on the Prime Minister to launch an inquiry into the transfer of publicly owned shares in the Teesworks site to private ownership in what he calls “crony contracts”.

At Prime Ministers’ Questions today (Wednesday January 11), Stockton North MP Alex Cunningham told Rishi Sunak that “taxpayers are set to lose tens of millions of pounds” as a result of the transfer of public assets to two Teesside businessmen.

But Simon Clarke and Jacob Young, two neighbouring North East Conservative MPs, accused Mr Cunningham of using parliamentary privilege to make a series of “damaging insinuations”

Here are the “insinuations”:

In a statement to The Northern Echo, Ben Houchen disputed Alex Cunningham’s claims, saying: “The Joint Venture Partnership Alex refers to, which it should be said was signed off by all local authorities, including Labour led Stockton Council, has been instrumental in unlocking the site which without them would still be sat empty costing the taxpayer at least £20m a year to keep safe.

“From the devastation seven years ago to the transformation that we promised and are delivering now is incredible.

If there is anything in the Teesside allegations, then we may have Bridgen and Hancock to thank for drawing them to our attention.

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

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