pumpkinstrokemarrow

Just finished an entertaining if depressing canter through this short memoir by a dissident new labour MP - one Bob Marshall-Andrews (BMA), a chap of whom I have no recollection and who is a lawyer by trade. Perhaps I would have if I spent more time with programmes such as 'Any Questions' on which he seems to have been a regular contributor.

First impressions not too good. That is to say, the book did not have a good feel to it. Like most modern books it would not stay open at the page one was on unless held open. Then the page design, particularly that of chapter pages, was not very good and the proof reading was not very good, this last meaning that I could quite often not work out what he was trying to say. Maybe it is me but I prefer to think that it is the proof reader.

But it gets better. While BMA clearly had a good time as a new labour MP, he does not have much that is good to say about new labour.

It all got off to a bad start when Tony & Cherie blacklisted him for making a fairly mild joke at some lawyers beano at the expense of their mate Derry Irvine, the chap whom I think achieved fame for being responsible for the taxpayer buying the most expensive wallpaper ever to grace the walls of the Palace of Westminster. The blacklisting was permanent; BMA never even made it to a committee, never mind the payroll, despite his being well qualified to contribute. A spiteful business, but one which told of the unhealthy concentration of power at the centre. And as a lord once said, all power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Entirely appropriate that the remark was first made about a pope.

Part of the good time is that BMA enjoys debating. He likes a scrap of that sort, to the point whether you wonder whether he likes the fight more than the cause. But then I wonder again. As a criminal barrister he will often be dealing with cases where the truth is uncertain. No-one can be sure whether the unpleasant drunk was the chap who bashed the chap behind the jump at the pizza parlour, and a learned debate in front of a jury is the best way we know of getting at the truth. The point that is relevant here being that the learned debaters, who while in the heat of debate have a passionate belief in their cause, will also know that sometimes they back the right horse and sometimes not. They know (or at least they should know) that they do not have some divine gift of knowing the truth before the trial; the truth is what emerges during the trial. The public debate, with rules of engagement and procedure, is the core of the process. Saying that the debaters might enjoy debating is no more telling than saying your carpenter enjoys woodwork. And so it is with parliament: the public debate is important, and has, on evidence presented in this book, been degraded.

That said, one always suspects barristers who are passionate about jury trial of being in it for the money. Jury trials are a good thing for barristers. Jury trials are a good thing too, but criminal justice has become very expensive without becoming very satisfactory and barristers should recognise that politicians have a point when they try to fix the machine. There is also the point that good debaters will beat bad debaters; the quality of debate can override the quality of the evidence. So given that we need debate, we need to be able to trust the debaters to be proper and decent. Not to knowingly back a dodgy horse. To be good sorts. Something which I believe to be getting harder. Generally speaking, I believe that we have less moral fibre than our parents.

JMA objects greatly to the vast output of criminal justice legislation which poured from the new labour presses, most of which he regards as unnecessary or worse and the main result of which has been to cause immense muddle and confusion in what might already have been thought the sufficiently treacherous waters of criminal justice. Much of the worse stuff flies under the banner of the prevention of terrorism.

He observes that the new labour tenure saw the prison population getting on for double. No mean achievement at a time when it was claimed that crime was falling. (I am trying to look into this. But although I can confirm that there has been a big increase and that the prisons statistics chaps do produce bags of stuff, they don't seem to believe in simple graphs of the prison population over time. But I will keep looking).

He has much to say about the whipping system, which he believes to be much abused, with the result that there is far too much power in the hands of the prime minister and his mates. Why does so much government business have to be whipped? Why can't our elected representatives vote as they see fit, in the light of discussion and debate, rather than voting for whatever the government line of the day is - while rarely being afforded the courtesy of participation in the determination of that that line is to be. I can see that where the issue is an important manifesto commitment that there is an argument for MPs toeing the party, that is to say the manifesto line. But many issues are not like that. Do we need to have 200 people on the government side baying for the line decided by some inter coterie of former tabloid journalists and 200 other people on the opposition side baying against? Is this a good way to work out what is best? Issues which occupied some of the best minds of the day at the time when our present party system was emerging from the mists of history. Or one could go back to the Romans: they knew all about the issues here too.

Perhaps I overdo it a bit. On most of the few occasions that I have seen a bit of parliament on telly, the place was more or less empty. Which is a rather different point.

But he reserves his greatest anger for the new labour penchant for military adventures, most of which have resulted in great loss of life among the largely innocent populations of the countries concerned and at least one of which was started on the basis of a big lie. (JMA also records a small lie from the government side during debate about some aspect of jury trial (or not). The lie might have been smaller but it was still deliberate, and wrong).

Overall, one comes away with the impression that all is not well in the mother of parliaments. We have perhaps become complacent with the idea that we are good at democracy (and keen on thrusting it upon others), when actually our democracy is in a bit of a state. And it seems unlikely that things will get better any time soon.