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I'm off this afternoon to get vetted, or maybe that should be "doctored", for next year's council elections. It always seems early, but I guess it's only eight months away from elections with maybe another election in between where candidates for the next locals can get their face about a bit. I thought I would share some of my candidate approval form with you (there's some of it for the panel only I'm afraid!). Would you allow me to stand?

It is an article of faith that I do not read the Daily Mail much. It's sort of on the "Index". But I do subscribe to Hitchens' blog on there as I like occasionally being wound up by him, knowing he's probably just round the corner from me somewhere in a house that positively glows with the inner anger one feels permeates his entire being.

So it is unusual to find something with which I agree whole heartedly:

Thud! Sorry, but can't you look where you're going?

In overcrowded Britain, walking along a crowded city pavement has become a test of alertness, social skill, forbearance, and patience. Even if you constantly adjust your course and speed to allow for the movements of other people, which I always thought was the thing to do, the others are often not doing the same. Read the rest of it here.

It's partly why I cannot stand being on Lib Dem policy working parties - the thought of trying to walk the "wrong way" down Victoria Street at the evening rush hour fills me with utter dread. But it happens wherever you go - corridors in my place of work where people (and not always students it has to be said) think that it's okay to walk four abreast engaged in their little conversation...."where the f*** do you expect me to disappear to so you can get past without moving?"

Being utterly unable to melt into a wall for such people I do now take a robust view, which is probably equally unsociable but necessary to preserve one's rights against people that are, basically, bullies, and stand full square to them (and I'm no stick-insect me of course!) and if they don't move I ready my shoulder for the inevitable bump (it's better if I am returning to my desk from the canteen with a full mug of hot tea of course!) and utter one of Peter's "sorries" as they go past:

I also say 'sorry' quite a lot, in the British sense of the word that means 'You moron. Why can't you look where you're going?' but which people often take for a genuine apology from me after they have trodden on my foot or hacked my shin.

As someone who has been involved off and on in Charter88 campaigns for a Bill of Rights, who has marvelled at how enlightened a party the Lib Dems must be for having called for one for as long as I can remember being involved, I must say I am pleased. I am pleased that after so long denying it, the Conservative Party has signalled such a big u-turn on something that in my opinion has been fundamental to the rule of law and the place of the citizen in a democracy since...oh Tom Payne and before.

You see, it has been one of the huge blockages to my ability to see the Conservatories as a party I could deal with. The evidence, up till now, has been that they are a party for whom rights were divisible, that fundamentally believed that some people had fewer rights than others. This to me was the outrage of Section 28 for example. It just galled me that a party could go out seeking to claim to be able to represent all of us, yet still want to put some of us in pigeon holes and say we had fewer rights.

So far so good.

But...and you knew there had to be one...the "noises" are all wrong. They're apparently reacting (because in reality they are a bunch of old reactionaries of course) to some whipped up furore about the Human Rights Act, and, by extension, whatever they say, about the European Convention on Human Rights. Have they actually read this document? What rights enshrined in that would we not have? It's not a big document. It doesn't take long to enumerate them.

And the Human Rights Act basically does two things - bring the first responsibility for enforcing the Convention on the British courts instead of the famously slow European Court of Human Rights, and make all public bodies, including the legislature, consider their citizens' rights. For all the harumphing about the Afghan hijackers or Abu Hamza or whoever, 99.99999% of the times (at least) that the Human Rights Act is cited in anything, it is where little jobsworths and council officers all over the country have to consider the impact of their decisions and recommendations on us, the people, whom they exist to serve.

Every report of a planning officer has to consider the impact on the rights enshrined by the ECHR of the proposal and their recommendation. Every decision to award a grant to ensure public money is being used fairly and being given to causes that will not discriminate. Every time, in fact, the least of the lowest civil servant so much as takes a dump...

Indeed, when last they were in power, the Conservatories also conspired to let the ECHR do their dirty work for them (and for all his apparent new age all are equal cuddliness in 1997 this is something Mr Blair perpetuated, despite being bunked up every night with a woman making her legal reputation and fortune fighting the UK government on Human Rights). Equalization of the age of consent for gay men - won through the ECHR. The right of gay men and lesbians to fight for their country - won through the ECHR. To be treated the same by employers - yup, ECHR. Presumably now that the problem is foreigners, not poofters, these are not examples of the sort of thing the Conservatories would want to roll back?

So then I hear Dominic Grieve, and he should know cos he's something to do with the law, saying it's not meant to diminish our rights but increase them. And of course that is allowed, and it's welcome. If it were true. If that were the case, certainly in the ethos of Charter88, it would mean a real shift of power towards the individual citizen and away from government - finally redressing the truism, two centuries and more old, that we live in a dictatorship on all but one day out of four or five years. Long something the Conservatories have said they want to do, but yet again have proven they can't when in power. It means to me a need for fewer MPs and flunkies. I don't see many Conservatories saying they stood for parliament in order one day to sack themselves - something I absolutely take as a given for the Lib Dem MPs I know. To curtail and control the power of the executive. In short, a constitution.

Hard cases make good headlines, and bad law. If there is to be a UK Bill of Rights it is not something in the gift of one political party or a couple of reactionary newspapers. In a majority parliamentary system one could easily imagine what human wrongs a Bill of Rights passed by, say, the Reichstag in 1936 might have enshrined. It has to be a broad based effort - perhaps requiring a referendum, or at least an extraordinarily high proportion of the legislature, to get passed, and subsequently amended. What ought to amount to a written constitution and set of guarantees of the citizen's position vis-a-vis the state must be the work of us all.

I welcome the Conservative U-turn on this, bringing them alongside decades of Liberal and Liberal Democrat campaigning on this, but I'll bet they didn't think too carefully about what they were letting themselves, and us all, in for. One of the people I think myself lucky to inhabit the same city as is Vernon Bogdanor, onetime tutor to brave Dave. I'm with him when he said last night that if Dave were still a student of his, he might suggest rewriting this particular essay.

Technorati Tags: tories, rights, conservatives

Oh dear. Walking into work this morning at my usual clip with a slight drizzle in the air, I got to a set of sliding doors with a shiny metal plate they run on. I stepped onto said plate, slipped and eighteen stone of British beef landed on my left (fortunately) elbow.

They think it's broke. They might try to fix it tomorrow when I go and see the ornithologist, orthodontist or whatever he or she calls herself. But for the moment I am in perpetual pain with every slight movement - I've never felt more in need of a spliff in my life! Does anyone know how to chop onions with one hand?

Amazing really - I do not touch type but I can go quite quickly with both hands together. With just one, it seems to take for ever. Home, however, is preferable to the office as my desk at home is at chest height nearly so my arm is better supported.

Lawyers form a queue please. I want one of those new Mac 24" iMacs out if it (only kidding!).

PS: That's the first time I've been into the "Emergency Department" at the John Radcliffe since they opened the new department about four years ago. It's quite nice. I'm sure it doesn't look quite so orderly on a Friday/Saturday night but it's a vast improvement on the previous A&E.

And at least I didn't have to go in for an injection for piles.

It has been estimated that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac between them underwrite debt of some $5,000,000,000,000 and that US losses from the current credit crunch could amount to $1,600,000,000,000.

The entire external debt obligations of the world's 40 odd Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs) is some $300,000,000,000 - that's about 6% of Fannie and Freddie's problems. So any bailout of the US mortgage system is going to amount almost certainly to more money than would write off all that, mainly African, debt (were that the best way to proceed, which I believe it is, with conditions).

By contrast the EU has today decided to support the idea of giving the surplus it has made on the Common Agricultural Policy as a result of rising food crop prices (so it has been subsidising less) to "African farmers". That's about €1,000,000,000 - or one three-thousandth of Fannie and Freddie's problems and two hundredths of Africa's problems.

But where did they get that money from, how did it arise? Robbing those very African farmers by denying them access to our markets and subsidising dumping on theirs. Tariffs are pure evil, aren't they?

So, whenever anyone says to you that it's difficult to find the finance for debt relief in the poorest countries, you'll now know that is total bollocks.  Just think of the scale of the US mortgage debt and what such sums could do for the 600 million or so poorest on the planet.