horsemouth watched a parliamentary debate (freeview 232) on the parliamentary standards office (the mechanism by which MPs discipline themselves) a debate where MPs argued largely about the process of how MPs discipline themselves rather than about the real issue of what restrictions should they place on themselves and their ability to earn large sums of money doing advocacy work while also receiving a generous £82k/ year salary (their expenses are paid separately).
that this can lead to problems can be seen by the case of owen paterson (now an ex-MP, he has ceased to be) who was receiving £8k a month from a medical equipment company who went on to win £500 millions worth of government contracts during the covid epidemic. the problem for owen paterson was that he was bang to rights (said even the tory members of the committee) but there weren't enough lawyers involved and it violates notions of 'natural justice' (something of a buzz-phrase with the tories after robert jenrick's deployment of it) said his tory supporters.
by resigning paterson escapes suspension by the standards committee and a recall petition, whether he can go on to escape criminal charges and still get his lordship are other matters.
one problem with the tories covid response was that they went to their network and that network was the old boy network of plausible businessmen and large scale subcontractors (like dido harding and G4S for example). now if this works and it's not too expensive nobody complains, it's just a ticking off when the dust settles desperate times require desperate measures etc. but the problem is that it hasn't worked and it has cost billions (and not just ordinary billions but hundreds of billions).
this makes the real tory aim to get out in front of this and knobble the regulator before the angel of death starts scything through the tory party. getting owen paterson off the hook was just a pretext. boris has had serial (ok 3) run ins with the regulator and there are more to come.
of course in this vain hope it resembles the lloyds names scandal (that too was supposed to scythe through the tory party destroying their majority). (hint: this never happened).
of course no one would want to see a return to the days when MPs were carted off in handcuffs for their expenses and paid advocacy fiddles (and bullying and sexual harassment) because there was no mechanism within parliament to remind them not to engage in illegal activity and to gently usher them back onto the straight and narrow.
the new preferred form of the regulator would be something like the independent expert committee (that deals with accusations of bullying and sexual harassment). this is a judicial process has lots of lawyers involved in it and has so far (to horsemouth's knowledge) only convicted one MP who remains an MP (this must be a great comfort to the victim and any whistleblowers).
more blasts from the past last night horsemouth watched helen steel and dave morris fight off mcdonalds in the mclibel court case live from the COP26 youtube feed (at about 9 hours and 19 minutes in). they are ably assisted and supported by a young keir starmer. on appeal (and defending themselves against a multinational behemoth because legal aid is not available for libel hearings) they manage to win on the majority of the claims in their incredibly carefully worded leaflet.
he applauds their sheer bravery and pig headedness and their stamina. the tendency now is to view it as having had a big effect on the healthy eating debate (morgan spurlock's supersize me etc.), at the time many would have viewed it as being about the animals, but dave and helen make it clear that their aims were broader.
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this morning horsemouth was just discussing the communal endeavour with sten. to do this successfully horsemouth has to infect sten with his utter pessimism. sten has correctly identified the policy horsemouth is advocating as 'managed decline' - the endeavour shrinks in size (we adjust to this and we continue on).
there are of course lots of things the endeavour could do but the only policy that people are unequivocally in favour of is do nothing. the housing stock is old victorian houses - the kind that are difficult to heat, difficult to insulate, and increasingly becoming difficult to let. retrofitting them to move them towards net zero is a hell of a task.
daryll is just off out (sten should be later but he's not yet).
horsemouth has finished reading elizabeth costello by j.m. coetzee (or as he will be renaming it eight lessons and a postscript). coetzee has novelised his non-fiction (including his the lives of animals). if horsemouth was conscienious he would re-read
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