Randomly Selected Article or Link

Iain Dale and "Yellow Peril" variously "broke" a "news" story yesterday about a chap being arrested in Spain apparently over some kind of spat over a business deal gone wrong. From what we can understand so far, it appears that his bankers decided to pull the plug after some dealings with another rich bloke that once had something to do with a famous football club that the guy had tried to cover up or some such when they tried to sue him or something.

Great. So? Well of course the political bubble down in London is all abuzz with it now, because the person concerned, one Michael Brown, of uncertain abode it seems, donated a lot of money, by party standards, to the Lib Dems last year. A donation that drew some attention, most notably in the Times, owned by a man who thinks he owns most of the world's politicians anyway, because it was unclear whether it was a permissable UK based donation. You can read Iain Dale getting all excited about it here:

Iain Dale's Diary: EXCLUSIVE: LibDem Donor Faces Fraud Charges:

So, I just want to say that I cannot get terribly excited about this.

First - it was well known within the party at least, if not at the time, then shortly after the donation was made public (the first most of us wee foot soldiers knew of it), that Mr Brown had made his fortune in property speculation in Florida in double quick time and was on a wanted list for one or more rubber cheques he had written while apparently dirt poor at the start of his meteoric rise. No doubt he had pissed off some counterparty in his property deals at some point. If nobody ever accepted money from anyone who had ever issued a cheque their account could not cover, especially when they were hard up, I suspect there would be precious few donations ever made to anyone, political or otherwise. But Americans are more anal about this sort of thing anyway, so on a wanted list he remains.

Second, and probably most importantly for me, I was personally pissed off that the party had accepted any such donation in the first place - I mean size wise and from one person. We have long traded on the fact that as a party we raise most of our money from local supporters and a few charitable type research organisations' donations such as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. I don't eat Weetabix since I discovered they were once big donors to the Tories, and I steer as clear of Sainsbury businesses as I can because of their connection with Labour donations. I don't knowingly smoke Philip Morris products (Marlboro cigarettes in the main) because of their funding of George Bush.

But, from what I can gather, despite people continually dredging the donation up, the Electoral Commission has confirmed that it was permissible and that matter is closed. No doubt someone will correct me, excitedly, on that if they have evidence to the contrary.

What I am pissed off with though is the fact that some chap who apparently did not seek any influence in the party at the time his donation was made has subsequently been pushed, or has pushed himself, into a position of making singularly unhelpful comments about the way the party has moved in the past year or so, with Stewart Wheeler-esque "threats" that he would give more money if they did things the way he hoped they would when he gave the money. As if he actually had some influence, which, in any kind of ballot about it amongst the membership I think I can confidently say he doesn't. I hoped on every occasion that they would have the balls to say "thanks but no thanks" and so far as I can see, they have. And he has gotten increasingly petulant about it. So he did, really, seek some kind of influence, even if after the fact.

I don't know the guy - he seems like quite a fun character. He seems to have gotten involved in funding a political party without really understanding the ethos and independent mindedness of its members. But Ming was right in October - there was nothing at that stage that appeared to make him unacceptable as a donor if he had wanted to give more and the commission said he was acceptable. I would not have accepted it, but then I'm only a foot soldier paying for my own Focuses at election time and so on, and not involved in how much money it takes to run the party as a whole and how easy it might be to raise equivalent sums required in this sad modern world of big money politics from small donations.

And finally, I certainly won't cry for HSBC if they feel wronged in this. As readers will know I couldn't give a fig for the already over-privileged world of bankers and the usury they inflict on society and might even rejoice at one of them having had the wool pulled over their eyes by a relatively small financial operator - if you sup with the devil....

And if somehow, though it seems unlikely, they get the right to demand his money back from us, I will probably be the first in the queue with my thirty-five quid share to make sure we can do so and not have to rely on big donors like this again. And I hope others in the party would do so likewise in proportion to their wealth and level of commitment.

So an ICM poll for the Telegraph today claims that:

"Sunday's survey provides some good news for Mr Brown - 65 per cent of those questioned support his 42-day plan, with backing coming from voters across the political spectrum.

Thirty per cent think the limit should stay at 28 days, the position favoured by the Conservatives."

Now, aside from the fact that I must be in the five per cent not even mentioned there, because I support no extension on the 2 days before charging that applies for other crime, I don't think I know a single person that supports any extension on the 28 days already permitted.

In his acceptance speech when he took over the leadership, Nick Clegg suggested (and I do believe) that most people in Britain were inherently liberal. So just who are the 65% that support this gross extension of the state's ability to "disappear" people. This is not Chile of the seventies for goodness' sake.

I've asked before, and the point was made by Shami Chakrabarti on Question Time on Thursday night with some force (she really laid into the boy Milliband to my delight!) why it is the British police and prosecution services are unable to get far enough on with their investigative work within two or four times the amount of time other countries have to charge people with something that could keep the accused on remand if necessary, with the introduction if necessary, as they do in many European jurisdictions, of post charge questioning.

I don't have the prescience to know where this country is heading, but with that 65% for one of the most egregious attacks on our civil liberties - remember we're talking about effectively disappearing people for up to six weeks without even telling them why, leaving families in limbo, probably losing the victim of the disappearing their jobs and so on, but I don't like it.

I've not left this sceptered isle for about twenty years (and then it was only a work trip to the emerald one next door) having had the travel bug knocked out of me by twenty four hour journeys to Tanzania, Kenya and Nigeria as a youngster. I don't even have a valid passport at the moment, and was content not getting one now that the intrusive questioning to get one has started, but I'm afraid I'm thinking that now I have to think about making plans for somewhere else to go when this country eventually becomes such an affront to civil liberties that I can no longer stomach being here.

Courtesy of the Libertarian Alliance blog, I am drawn to a commentary on the Libertarian Party UK blog about an article by someone called Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. at mises.org (how's all that for being damned by the company I keep, or in this case the blogs I read!) about the relationship between the "state", the politicians who try to make us believe they are "running" it and the people in whose name they are supposed to be doing so.

It introduces me at least to the idea of the "personal" and the "impersonal" state.

The personal state is where the regime in power for the time being is synonymous with the state. Most obviously this is an absolute monarchy for example. The monarch is the state. When the monarch dies the regime dies with them and another replaces it. It may be largely the same but it is still a personal fiefdom if you like of the monarch in charge.

In the impersonal state, the predominant form for the past several centuries (ironically in Britain probably traced to the "Protectorate" or at least the Restoration), the state, its bureaucracy, apparatus and most of its policy direction go rumbling on from one regime to the next. The leader is the manager not the owner, if you will.

He says the political system, of parties, elections and so on, are a chimera, making us believe we are in a personal state. That is we elect a manager who cocks up somehow we just elect another one and everything will be different. But who is really in control?

I'm sure most of us active in politics used to chuckle at "Yes, [Prime] Minister", but we all know there is more than a grain of truth in the message that the bureaucracy just rumbles on, sometimes even deliberately frustrating the will of the current elected managers, knowing that if they hold out for long enough another lot of managers will come along who may be more to their tastes.

And I don't mean that this is a personal thing - that there is some conspiracy between individuals wielding power in smokey rooms and dark corridors. It's just the way the thing works in a big state. Look at the comment the other day by a Labour minister that she thought that by the time of the next General Election the ID card system would be so far down the line that it would be impossible for any new government, even one elected purely on a platform of opposing ID cards, to stop it.

Okay, I think, I hope at least, we can take that example with a large bucket of salt - after all, unless it's been designed by Cyberdine Systems to become "self-aware" on or before 5th May 2010, there will still be an "off switch" on the mainframe! But you get the idea. And if you've been a local councillor, you see it every day in the workings of your council bureaucracy - the same old surly faces, sometimes frustrating the ideas of the politicians and so on. We have come to know some of that as the "can't do" culture.

Rockwell's conclusion is that the political "game" is futile. Ideas can move the world, but they can't shift the bureaucratic apparatus of the state at the same rate. And I have to say, since I combine my party political presence with real action on alternative structures such as Community Land Trusts and social enterprise, that bears out. Indeed, whenever we need the imprimatur of the state, such as in planning issues and so on, the byzantine apparatus seems to do its utmost to frustrate or delay us.

I tend to disagree. Obviously, I suppose, since I remain involved in party politics. But I do recognize that for all the "change" we talk about, Nick Clegg talks about, Obama talks about, whoever talks about, it does seem that most things will just grind on the way they always have. We will complain about them. We may even blame Gordon Brown or someone else for them personally. But if we continue to play that same game we will never really change them.

I am in politics because I believe those big ideas can be introduced through the political system. So did our political forebears like Lloyd-George with his 1909 budget - he at least had the balls also to go head to head with the establishment that rejected his big ideas but still, essentially, lost. I don't advocate violent revolution, though at times it seems that little short of that will actually achieve the change necessary. But I do want us to grow the cojones to be radical, to propose the "ideals" not the "manageables", to aim high and be different. And to demolish this all powerful leviathan and start from the ground up again.

I return again to the idea that we are in an age of epochal change. Of the unprecedented ability for us individually to communicate with others all round the world. We have to begin to ask just how much of that "impersonal state" we need any longer. Cobden had it about right when he said that "peace will come to the earth when people have more to do with each other and governments less." Politicians, let humanity grow up. Realize your limits. Let go and do something productive for a change instead!