Skunk: A person regarded as obnoxious or despicable.

Sir Fred has been shredded.

But it was done with considerable input from a political lynch mob, and as a symbol of the banksters (= banker + gangsters), and I’m left with more questions than answers.

Was it a correct decision, and was it made on a correct basis, and should it apply to Peers as well as Knights, and where should we draw the lines, if any?

Let me try a few examples.

Should Sir Richard Branson have his Knighthood quashed because he launched his career with a significant Purchase Tax fraud, for which he was never charged.

Does it make much difference that he’s raised significant charitable funds, in addition to his own profile, since, and built a major business?

Should Lord Hanningfield be expelled for having been locked up for 9 months for False Accounting?

What about Lord Paul, who overclaimed £38,000 but paid it back?

What about non-financial offenders, such as  Lord Bell, who masturbated (without any requests, it should be noted) to several women through his bathroom window in Hampstead in 1977, and was convicted of indecency?

Or Baroness Uddin, who lied about her circumstances, but was found guilty by the House of Lords Privileges and Conduct Committee, rather than by a Court of Law? Her intention was to return to the Lords, so that her fiddled expenses would be paid off from more expenses claimed from the taxpayer.

Should former Ministers, who have been found to have fiddled significant sums, be prevented from receiving the traditional Life Peerage which comes up with the rations for Cabinet  Expenses?

Jacqui Smith, for example, admitted on Question Time that she had disgraced herself with her excessive claims for £116,000, and stated that she would be unlikely to go to the Lords.

And what about more trivial offences? Should shoplifting have cost Antony Worrall-Thompson a Knighthood if he had one?

Alistair Darling that we need a process, and one outside rough and tumble politics, to the risk of this becoming a method of political assassination of opponents:

“I’m not here to defend Sir Fred… I just think we’re getting into awful trouble here if we go after people on a whim and we don’t have a clear set of principles against which we can judge people, it’s not right.”

But where do we draw the lines and how do we define the principles?

If things stay as they are in the Lords, my poster child for expulsion from the Peerage is none of the above, but Michael Martin, Baron Martin of Springburn.

To my eye Martin’s most serious offences are not his own highly questionable expenses, nor his attacks on individual MPs, nor that he behaved as a bastard child of Captain Mainwaring and Compo.

His most serious offence was to facilitate corruption of the processes within Parliament, from his vigorous defence of the ability of MPs to hide their expenses, to his allowing officials to shred receipts for MP Expenses from 2001 to 2004 while High Court action about access to Expenses Receipts was in full swing.

Looking through the list above, I don’t care about Knighthoods, and I’m tempted to suggest a scorched earth solution to the Lords.

Or should we solve it by starting from scratch with an elected Lords, so that the whole apparatus of determining acceptability can be swept away.

Which would allow crooks can be elected to the Lords on the same basis that they can currently be elected to the Commons.

Hmmm.

Skunk as a Lord? is a post from: Anna Raccoon

When Peter Singer contrasted the ability of a prawn swimming across Botany Bay and making a choice whether to turn left or right, with the lack of ability to make a choice on the part of a new born baby – he concluded that the right to life was intrinsically tied to a being’s capacity to make choices.

This argument was seized upon and used to found the animal rights movement. Singer himself has debunked this thesis, saying that the interests of animals should be considered because of their ability to feel pain – and that the notion of ‘rights’ was not applicable.

However, despite its ‘guru’s’ misgivings, the animal rights movement has flourished, and, as with all such movements, seeks to be accepted into the mainstream of opinion.

I was surprised the other day to read one of the official House of Commons briefings for MPs, and to discover that it was promoting the idea that Animal Welfare Agencies should be admitted to cross-reporting Child Protection meetings.

The theory of cross-reporting is a sound one, in that all interested bodies, social services, the police, and health authorities, should share information when a child is considered ‘at risk’.

The problem is that the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) works on what is termed ‘soft information’ as well as criminal convictions. ‘Soft information’ means literally gossip and hearsay. There has been considerable coverage of the problems created for individuals, nurses for instance, where information has been anonymously laid with the ISA which results in that individual being unable to work with children.

Adding another layer to the list of people who are considered reliable sources of ‘soft information’ is something that should be approached with great care.

The report is as objective as you would expect an academic report to be, employing phrases such as ‘it has been suggested that organisations that work with animals should be included in the safeguarding agenda’ without saying suggested by whom. Again we see ‘In 2001 the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) hosted conferences discussing the link between animal cruelty, domestic violence and child abuse’ without further information.

I went in search of more information on the author, a Dr Fiona McEwen, who has been funded by the Medical Research Council to provide this information to parliamentarians.

I discovered other articles, far less reticent in bringing Dr McEwan’s beliefs and philosophies into the limelight. In a 2006 article for Spiked, Dr McEwen looks at an editorial in the Veterinary Journal by Helen Munro which seeks to establish a connection between the sexual abuse of animals and that of children. Here Dr McEwan says that ‘there is no good research to base precise figures on’. By the time she came to write the House of Commons briefing paper, Dr McEwan was emboldened to state that ‘However, the recent draft Joint Protocol between the RSPCA and London Safeguarding Children Board assumes that suspected animal cruelty or neglect in a home with children is sufficient grounds to deem a child at risk of harm’ without mentioning that there was ‘no good research’.

My concerns are two fold. First, the problems with ‘soft information’ – the idea that this gossip could be added to by Mrs Giles down the road reporting that she didn’t think ‘X’ was feeding his canary well enough, scarcely bear thinking about, but there is also the issue of cost.

If the RSPCA and NSPCC are joining forces to insist that a representative of one of the animal welfare outfits is to be present at all suspected child abuse cross-reporting conferences, then there will have to be a ten fold and more increase in the number of said animal welfare employees. Who is to fund this? The RSPCA is a voluntary body – no sooner are they invited to have a seat at this currently fashionable table than they will be looking for funding to carry out their ‘statutory duties’.

The Animal Rights activists have made tremendous inroads into parliament. There is  an annual prize giving ceremony awarding prizes of several thousand pounds for those researchers who are most successful in communicating their ideas to parliamentarians.

They were almost certainly responsible for planting the idea of banning fox hunting on the grounds that it was cruel to foxes. The notion of farmers being plagued with foxes that were cruel to their chickens and new born lambs was dismissed. ‘Little Foxy must be saved’ screeched the metropolitan elite. The metropolitan elite don’t seem to be so keen on saving Little Foxy now that he has moved into the towns and is feasting on their children. He has miraculously become vermin that must be exterminated.

A pity that Dr McEwan didn’t also disclose that she is a practising veterinary surgeon when she wrote that briefing paper. A biography that has now been removed from public view but still available in Google cache. I might have been less suspicious of it.

I shall keep an eye on her.

Animal Right’s Activists. is a post from: Anna Raccoon

Back when Noah was still drawing up the blueprint for his Ark, long before I was born, my Aunt stood against a certain Bessie Braddock as Conservative candidate for St Anne’s Ward in Liverpool. Aunty vanished without trace of course, apart from one vote found lying under the counting officer’s table, probably, though not certainly, cast by my Grand-mother.

The same fate befell everyone who stood against Bessie. Carter-Ruck’s would not be the force it is today if Bessie hadn’t employed young Peter to obtain damages from someone who had unwisely said she had ‘danced’ on the floor of the Commons – nobody could accuse Bessie of being frivolous; she was the consummate professional, dedicated to her electorate. Bessie needed no advice on the ethical way to conduct her expenses, nor anyone to tell her the ‘right’ way to behave in the House of commons.

That piece of family lore fascinated me, and when I was around 10, my Aunt took me to London for the day to show me where she would have worked – had Bessie been hit by a nuclear explosion the night before the election. I remember little of the personalities of that visit, no great political insight gleaned, but one memory stayed with me, that of the Ladies Powder Room in the Central Lobby with its vast labyrinth of gleaming copper pipes heading in a myriad directions, each junction formed by an equally gleaming brass connection, presided over by an old crone with an ever busy polishing cloth.  Pugin’s pipework – a sight to make the ten year old heart beat faster! Who could have imagined!

Just as well it stayed in my mind, for some ten years later I found myself exceptionally gainfully employed plucking anything in Rupert Bear trousers that ended six inches above their ankle off the streets of London and into a sales pitch that only culminated when they became the proud possessor of a suitable ‘lot’ of Florida swamp land that could be viewed anytime they acquired a glass bottomed boat, and built on when they  earned enough to undertake the draining thereof – and got rid of the crocodiles.  Parliament Square was my favoured hunting ground for such stray and unsophisticated Americans. In the winter months the House of Commons became my refuge from the cold and lack of suitable conveniences.

In the early 1970s, you could still stroll in without identifying yourself, and mingle with the great and the good as they went about their business; you could climb the steep stairs to the public gallery without impediment and while away a warm hour or two listening to Shirley Williams or the still squeaky voiced Margaret Thatcher lambasting all and sundry. I was fascinated this time. You would meet them in the Ladies Powder Room; the pipes still gleaming, the old crone, I assume the same one, still anxiously watching lest anyone leave a finger print mark anywhere on her proud domain.

One afternoon, she raised a hand to motion me to wait; a woman in a fur coat, still a common sight on the streets of London, was repainting her lips. A few seconds later another woman emerged, in a coat so magnificent it took your breath away. The mink that gave their lives for that coat had never seen a factory farm; they had been indulged and cosseted from birth, fed whatever they desired;  the coat glimmered and shimmied in the light. It was several seconds before I tore my eyes away and took in the sheer beauty of the woman wearing it – no photograph ever did justice to Princess Margaret. She was stunning.

Last Thursday I returned to my old stamping ground. I had taken a stroll to Parliament with Old Holborn. The building was now surrounded by ugly lumps of concrete, metal crash barriers firmly joined together. A phalanx of policemen lined the steps. You could no longer stroll in as you pleased.

We were photographed, interrogated, advised what manner of dress was acceptable to these Policemen. We had to plead for our right to enter. When we did enter we were corralled and followed, eyed suspiciously and informed that we ‘had no rights’ from the outside world, we were now under the control of the unpublished ‘House Rules’ – a copy of which could only be acquired by filling in the correct form and applying to the Sergeant at Arms. One of our number was cautioned for wearing a hat – only the cleaners, the Police, the Sergeant at Arms, the Queen, (and several women we noted) can wear a hat, if the ex-military  – all improbably dressed for a Chav wedding – so decree.

We climbed the stairs, little changed, apart from the Policeman stationed at every turn. We passed through more metal detectors, we handed over our phones, our handbags, our lighters, our coats; we felt like criminals. Finally we were admitted, behind a bullet proof screen, to listen to the disgraced MP Elliot Morley, still in his well paid position as the ‘Honourable’ Member for Scunthorpe, lecture a handful of MPs on the evils of global warming. We might not have the democratic right to eject him from Parliament, but we still, just, have the democratic right to insist on our right to listen to him drone on in person.

We outnumbered the other Honourable members interested in listening to him several times over.

As we left, I managed to slip away from the Kremlin type guards that had dogged our every step, and walked purposefully towards the Old Ladies Powder Room. It was still there. It no longer smelled of Patchouli and  Worth’s  Je Reviens. The Old Crone had gone, her raison d’être, the plumber’s pride and joy, the Pugin tiling, all had been hidden behind false walls. The white tiled walls bearing a tick box sheet telling you how many hours it was since it had last been inspected for cleanliness. Nu-Labour’s obsession with statistics reaching even the smallest room.

On the back of the cubicle door was this sign.

Truly they are a skaggy lot in Parliament these days.  The women too.  It’s no longer the Ladies Powder Room – it’s just the ‘Women’s Toilets’.

Could you imagine the likes of Bessie Braddock, or Margaret Thatcher, needing to be told what was acceptable behaviour?

The world has changed since I first went there 50 years ago. We have all changed.  Not for the better.

50 years ago, I wouldn’t have dreamt of nicking their sign.

The Women in Parliament. is a post from: Anna Raccoon