Select a Committee

It all seemed to be going so well...or at least a little bit well...as the Parliamentary Select Committees had behaved with decorum over the past few months in their search for what might pass for truth in the phone-hacking inquiries. Tom Watson, a little-known back bench MP who, until recently, came to greater public attention with the Culture, Media &Sport Committee and his questioning of the Murdochs and other alleged ne'er-do-wells involved at News International. 

Mafiosi Enjoy a Lovely Evening Out?

Forget for a moment the odious, face-altered Tory chick-litter Mensch and her personal drive for stardom through her best-selling novels  and disappearing from the committee to look after the little Mensches; it was Watson's turn to have a minor implosion. It's a shame, really. He'd become a kind of champion of truth in the war against the Murdoch empire (that's the one that Vince Cable once said he would use the "nuclear option" against and then didn't) but then, right at the near-death, he blew it. Puffed up with a misguided sense of his own importance and errantry, he went for high drama and accused Murdoch Junior of being a mafia boss. And not just any old mafia boss. No. A mafia boss that didn't know he was running a criminal empire, or "enterprise" as Watson chose to describe it because he hadn't watched the right movies. So not only was James Murdoch, in Watson's view, a mafia boss but he was a pretty shitty one, seeing as all other mafia bosses were and are quite clear on the issue of criminality, inasmuch as they understand that they are criminals, even if they aren't that fussed about the laws that the rest of us are required  to observe.

The Murdochs at the Office?

The accusation of Murdoch being a mafia boss might have resonated if Watson hadn't absolved him from guilt on the basis that he didn't know he was running a crime enterprise. This silly line of questioning was accompanied by an allusion that the mafia code of "omerta" was also employed by the "enterprising" mafiosi. This might have been close to some kind of truth, given that the Murdoch heir was quite clearly, according to his own evidence, in the dark on just about everything that his employees had been up to when it came to phone-hacking and other alleged skulduggery.

But let's not be too beastly to Watson for this minor folly. On the whole, he's made some progress at the CM&S committee albeit largely on the back of the celebrity witnesses and the decisions by the BBC to move some of the proceedings from the exceptionally dull Parliament Channel to the more mainstream medium of BBC2 and then hyped it almost as much as they have Ricky Gervaise's new series about a dwarf , "Life's Too Short"(which is shit, by the way, and not anywhere near short enough, as it goes). The coverage of this latest inquisition of Murdoch who, possibly unreasonably, must now be in the top one hundred most mistrusted people in the world and therefore in the same company as Ahmedadinajad, also focussed on his tie. That's what we do, of course, with the world's most-mistrusted; concentrate on their dress-sense as it may provide us with a psychological window on their craven souls. So little Jimmy's tie was the colour of peat-bog mud. Maybe he hoped that an oddly-coloured tie might make commentators ignore the more worrying stuff (like being the world's worst mafia boss), and if he'd gone for shocking pink then the plan wouldn't have worked. And neither would it have done if he'd gone for a BNP motif or a KKK pointy-headed hat. No, a mud-coloured tie, shouting a bit at a dark blue suit was a perfectly subtle decoy.

The Culture Media and Sport Committee's powers are limited, especially where foreign nationals are concerned, but their influence on decisions made elsewhere is massive and written larger by the coverage on prime time Television and other mainstream media (even appropriately spun on Fox News). Up until a few years ago, the Parliamentary Select Committees had little in the way of public profile, seeming rather dull affairs if one read transcripts of their business. The idea is, that as not all of successive parliaments' business can be conducted in the main chambers (Select Committees operate in both the Commons and the Upper House), committees are established to do some of the "grunt" work and then report to Parliament where decisions can be made and legislation debated and enacted.

The Commons Committees work in three areas; Spending, Policy and Administration, relating to all Government Ministries so, within that deliberately vague brief, they can look at, investigate and report on just about everything that happens in the business of government and thereby, everything that happens in our lives here in the UK. In the Lords, the committees are more restricted and focus on European Union, Constitutional matters, Economic Affairs, Science & Technology and Communications. Lords have smaller brains than MPs, clearly, or just a restricted attention span or perhaps just attention deficit disorders.

So who is chosen to go on the scores of Select Committees? The House of Commons Committee of Selection (which in itself is a Select Committee) is responsible for the Standing Orders (no, not the things that one does at a bank) for Public Business in Parliament and this covers the appointment of members of Select Committees. The Committee of Selection is chaired currently by Geoffrey Clifton Brown Tory MP for The Costswolds, adjacent to Dave's constituency, so that's cosy. Apart from Clifton-Brown, all the the other eight members are whips; three more Tories, four Labour and one Lib Dem MP, Mark Hunter. A bit like a Max Mosley party, then; you just can't have too many whips, it seems.

As the rise of the Select Committees seems now inexorable along with their media-enhanced power, then the role of the nine selectors becomes even more powerful.

There are many other committees in both the Commons and the Lords, all of which have members who have been selected by the Committee of Selection and those committees that are not "Select" can recommend that they either become "Select" or that a Select Committee be established to look at something that has come up in their ordinary committee that might need a "Select" one. All of this stuff bubbles under a parliamentary veneer; the only view of the system of government that's relatively easy to see and, even then, often only through the eyes of commentators like Nick Robinson or Simon Hoggart who, let's face it, have their own agendas.

I love living in a democracy or, at least in what I believe to be a democracy. But when one looks at just this one aspect of the business of government and parliamentary governance with its layers of bureaucracy and administration, it's a wonder anything gets done. The tip of this gargantuan iceberg may have been the immolation of the corporate career of Murdoch Junior but there must be so much more going on that we could possibly get a handle on. For example, I didn't know what the "Hybrid Instruments Committee" looked at and now that I've been on their web pages, I'm still not sure. There are the committees for Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish "Affairs" but, of course, there isn't one for English Affairs, presumably because there's no Ministry for England (come on, Dave...the only people that vote for you live in England). There's a committee called the "Scrutiny Unit" that provides specialist advice to...guess what...the Select Committees, and it employs no fewer than fourteen lawyers along with several accountants, and economist, a statistician, a raft of Commons Clerks and administrators. And that's just to give advice!

Slaughtered so that our "Noble Lords" may
swagger about looking like twats?

It's no better in the Upper House. It's just so utterly worse. They have, for example, the DPRR - The Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, made up of a ten Lords whose job it is to examine Bills before the Lords (so that's all of them that had previously made their way through the Commons, I suppose) and then report on powers proposed to be delegated to Ministers; you know, those frightfully common oiks in the lower house that are required to observe some bowing and scraping from time to time. Haven't they heard of the Parliament Act. The Commons can do what they like without their bleeding lordships grace or favour, ta very much.

What a waste of time, money and, when all said and done...stoats.

The Lords Privileges and Conduct Committee looks at, well, the privileges and conduct of Lords. They could just be the Conduct Committee in reality, seeing as all the Lords are bloody privileged in the first place whether through inheritance or through the rewards of their appointment to peerage in public life. Anyway, looking at the outcome of this committee's review of  The Conduct of Lord Taylor of Warwick the decisions taken beggar belief. Taylor, in a nutshell, stole several thousands of pounds by fiddling around with his parliamentary allowances, got nicked and served some time at Her Majesty's pleasure which is ironic, seeing as she approved his job in the first place. He appealed both to the criminal courts and to the Lords committees and lost all appeals. So..banged to rights, then. Now, when I was employed, if I'd nicked some money and had been sent to prison for twelve months and therefore missed work quite a bit, then my employer would have been quite right to sack me and no Employment Tribunal in the land would have sided with me. Taylor, on the other hand, was "...suspended from the service of the House for twelve months..."!

"I whole-heartedly agree with the
Select Committee's decision...
look at my nice hat"

The Chair of this "Lords Committee of Parliamentary Poodles for the Privileged Class" is Lord Brabazon of Tara who is one of the  ninety oxymoronic "elected hereditary" peers remaining in the house after the attempted putsch under the House of Lords Act in 1999. Brabazon has an astounding voting record in the Lords, according to the Parliament web pages. Four times in ten years he's voted and, even then, is reported as having voted "moderately" twice and both "for and against", twice. Sorry, I don't understand that, either - obviously a Lordy quirk so that they can all sit on their landed fences and not make any real decisions about anything at all. And this is the guy that we rely upon to chair the committee that will decide whether convicted felons should be stripped of their peerage or maybe just told to take a year off, have a bit of a laugh and then tootle on back to your comfy seat. What an arse...

The Commons Select Committees, on the whole, appear to be required in the complex management of the business of Government, otherwise Dave, Giddy, Theresa et al would have to make all the decisions themselves (after asking Nick, of course) and that just wouldn't do. The Lords Committees, on the other hand, are about as pointless as the privileged twits that populate that chamber; convicted criminals and law-abiding types alike.