And another thing…

LAST week the Electoral Commission (“No we can’t!”) sent me a copy of a report which concluded that in Glasgow, only 74 per cent of adults who would otherwise be eligible to vote were actually on the register. And even that figure was subject to an accuracy measure of 77 per cent.

Strangely, although Glasgow’s Electoral Registration Officer (ERO) voluntarily took part in the research, it seems that he is now, a week after the report was published, contradicting that conclusion, insisting that the real figure is 89 per cent – 15 higher that the EC’s figure.

I’ve today written to the council’s chief executive (and returning officer) asking why these figures are so at odds and why, if the council knew of the commission’s findings, why it didn’t contradict them earlier.

This is serious. If the commission’s figures are correct, more than 150,000 people have been missed off the register – the equivalent of more than two Westminster constituencies and nearly three Holyrood ones. It’s complacency in the extreme on the part of John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde University, to dismiss this situation as unlikely to affect the result in the city’s seven constituencies; even in the safest seats, increasing the electorate by a third could have a major effect on the result. And even that is missing the point: just because you live in a “safe” seat, it does not mean you should have any less right to vote.

Glasgow, although easily one of the worst in the Britain for registration levels and accuracy, is not alone in failing in its democratic responsibility. All over the country, electoral registration is not seen as the priority it once was. And that is a disgrace.

If you don’t want to vote, don’t vote. But you should be on the register anyway. If you don’t want to be registered? I. Don’t. Care.

One of the questions I’ve asked of Glasgow’s returning officer is how many people have actually been fined for failing to return a registration form. I may be surprised. I may be told that the figure is in the hundreds or even thousands. That would establish, for me, the fact that Glasgow is serious about democracy.

If, however, my fears are confirmed, I will be told that the figure is closer to zero than to, say, one.

I’ll keep you posted.

One of the most outrageous and almost surreal conclusions in the letter from the Electoral Commission was that, although Glasgow had achieved just 74 per cent registration with 77 per cent accuracy…

The 2008 performance standards assessment for Glasgow, (sic) the ERO met all of the ten standards. The assessment for 2009 showed that Glasgow either met or exceeded all of the standards.

“… either met or exceeded all of the standards.” Seventy-four per cent registered. Seventy-seven per cent accuracy. Oh, did I mention that the judgment as to whether the performance standards are met is down to self-assessment by the EROs themselves?

A TRIUMPHANT – and yes, emotional – conclusion to the tenth Doctor’s reign.

JOHN Kampfner’s decision to support the LibDems should come as no surprise to anyone.

I recall a truly bizarre feature in the New Statesman in the few weeks running up to the 2005 election in which readers were invited to vote tactically against Labour MPs. That’s right – against! He was one of the delicate flowers, I assume, who think large Labour majorities are just too, too fwightening, and so wanted to curb our power with an injection of opposition politicians.

(Intriguingly, almost all of the Labour MPs so targeted were on the so-called “Blairite” wing of the party – go figure!)

As Neil Kinnock rightly points out today in a letter to The Guardian, Thatcher got her best result when the SDP/Liberal vote was at its highest.

Why hasn’t Kampfner sussed the fact that any swing away from Labour and towards the Liberals can only benefit the Tories?

Or maybe he has.

JAMES Mackenzie of Two Doctors fame greeted me with a less-than-friendly Tweet this morning, casting doubt on my human compassion in light of the asylum debate that’s been kicked off again by the terrible events at the Red Road flats in Springburn on Sunday.

This kicked off an exchange of Tweets and eventually led to James suggesting that we cross-post, so that both our views on this issue could be seen by readers of both our blogs. Here they are, with James’s first:

by James Mackenzie

First, a word of thanks to my host today. However much I disagree with Tom, I’m grateful he’s agreed today to swap blog posts about asylum policy following a brief debate on Twitter. His post on my blog is here.

Nothing tells you more about a government than how it treats the vulnerable, especially those who cannot vote. Labour’s most striking domestic failure of this sort has been their approach to people fleeing persecution and torture: successive Home Secretaries since 1997 have sought ever more uncompromising ways to make their lives harder once they get here.

Very few of us will have experienced the kind of mistreatment which is commonplace amongst those seeking asylum. I’m not in danger of being arrested for being in the wrong political party, like my Green colleagues in Rwanda and China are. My family don’t come from a marginalised group being subject to ethnic cleansing. I don’t know anyone who’s seen family members executed for attending peaceful anti-government protests.

>But do the thought exercise: what if that had happened? If Scotland had become as brutal and lawless as the Democratic Republic of Congo, if state-sponsored “disappearances” or a round of ethnic cleansing had begun here, I’d want to know I could seek sanctuary in India or Ireland or Indonesia and have my case taken seriously.

And in those circumstances, I wouldn’t want to be spat at in the street or forced to present stigmatising vouchers in supermarket queues to buy the basics. If the Scottish expat community was in Delhi, I wouldn’t want to be forcibly settled in Varanasi. It would mystify me to be told I couldn’t work and contribute, then read Government Ministers complaining that I’m somehow scrounging off the hard-working locals.

If I had kids, it’d fill me with despair to see them locked up in adult detention centres and subjected to levels of brutality that would inevitably remind me of what we’d all been though in the first place. If I’d had Kafkaesque bureaucracies ranged against me at home, a life of endless forms and interviews in a foreign language without proper legal support would seriously jeopardise my mental health: imagine if an irritating call-centre also had the power to deport you back into danger, or if they sang racist songs at you mocking your plight.

Yet all of this is the reality of Labour’s asylum policy, the legacy of their thirteen years in government. No Daily Mail headline has gone un-pandered to, no dog-whistle to racist voters has gone un-blown – and waiting in the wings is a Tory administration that backed every last clampdown. It’s not a casual or frivolous decision to leave your home country and come here to face racist abuse, to become a stock figure of hate for tabloid editors and the politicians who love them, but there is no softer target to demonise, not even those “feral children” we are also encouraged to fear and hate.

Yes, we need a system which checks individuals’ claims, not one which accepts everyone who just says the magic word. But the priority with this system should be to ensure no-one gets sent back to face torture. The price of someone without a decent claim being accepted by mistake is low if unfortunate, but the price of a false rejection could be someone’s life. The system should move quickly to a fair decision, but we should bend over backwards and help those who apply to make their case.

We Scots fancy ourselves (especially in our Tartan Army incarnation) as responsible visitors to other countries, and like to think of this as a welcoming country. In many ways it is, but without an end to Labour/Tory domination of asylum policy this will never be the whole truth.

by Tom Harris

THE TRULY tragic case of the three asylum seekers who committed suicide by throwing themselves from the high-rise block of flats in Glasgow has resurrected the debate on our asylum system.

We still don’t know enough about this specific case to be able to make a judgment as to what actually occurred and why. The media have, at various points, described the deceased as Russian and Kosovan. One report suggested at least one of them was suffering from severe mental illness. They may or may not have successfully claimed asylum in Canada before arriving in the UK.

The fact is we don’t know how much, or if any, of this is true. And it would be irresponsible in the extreme, in the meantime, to make hysterical accusations based on rumours and speculation.

Which is why, presumably, Robina Qureshi has been all over the Scottish media doing just that.

Robina, with whom I’ve crossed swords before, is the director of a branch of Solidarity housing “charity”, Positive Action in Housing, who provide support to failed asylum seekers in Glasgow. Yesterday, in the immediate aftermath of the terrible news breaking, she told The Times that “if the suicides had anything to do with the Border Agency telling the victims that they could not stay in the country, then the agency was culpable”.

But despite her qualifying her own conclusions with that “if”, she organised a demonstration outside the Border Agency office in Glasgow today, telling Radio Clyde and anyone else who would listen that what happened in Springburn was a direct result of official threats to return the asylum seekers home. She’s also called for a public inquiry, although since she’s already decided what the facts are, I’m not sure why she needs one. If Robina had her way, every claim for asylum should be awarded and public servants who enforce the law are barbarians.

She also said:

We believe there should be a public inquiry into these deaths, and the impact of the UK Border Agency and its terror campaign – disguised as asylum policy – on the lives of asylum seekers who have lived here for years.

Yes, many of them have lived here for years – illegally and after being told repeatedly that their asylum claim had been rejected because there was no threat to their safety in their home country. And by describing asylum policy as a “terror campaign”, Robina is demonstrating why no-one other than a few gullible hacks take her seriously.

Even the normally sensible James Mackenzie, who works for Holyrood’s two Green MSPs, accused me of a lack of compassion in the comments I made to The Times. Fair enough. I’ve been dealing with this issue too long to expect people to approach it objectively and without recourse to emotive language (see his guest post above).

Even if it emerges that the deceased threatened officials with suicide if they attempted to remove them, surely that threat could not be allowed to be a veto over legal process?

When phoned by The Times yesterday, I knew I couldn’t talk about this specific case – apart from the fact that we didn’t really know what had happened, the deaths didn’t happen in my constituency – but agreed to talk about general asylum policy.

But until the facts, rather than speculation and rumour, hold sway, it would be most unwise to make subjective judgments about this case, however tempting it would be for some to try to make political capital on the back of such a human tragedy.

THE headline says it all, really.

NO-ONE was terribly surprised when Dan Hannan MEP poured scorn on the NHS to try to impress his right-wing American fanbase. Few people even doubted that Hannan’s views were more representative of rank-and-file Tory members than were Dave’s publicly expressed views on health.

So it’s little wonder that when the Grauniad reported that leaders of the Young Britons’ Foundation (YBF), described as a “Tory madrasa”, were preaching similarly extreme views to Tory candidates, no-one batted an eyelid.

Is this because it’s no longer a surprise that Tories believe man-made global warming is a scam? Or that Tories believe the NHS is a waste of money? Surely someone in the media thought it a bid odd that an organisation which promotes US-style liberal gun laws in the UK should be patronised by so many senior Conservatives?

The YBF chief executive, Donal Blaney, who runs the courses on media training and policy, has called for environmental protesters who trespass to be “shot down” by the police and that Britain should have a US-style liberal firearms policy. In an article on his own website, entitled Scrap the NHS, not just targets, he wrote: “Would it not now be better to say that the NHS – in its current incarnation – is finished?”

Blaney has described the YBF as “a Conservative madrasa” that radicalises young Tories. Programmes have included trips to meet neo-conservative groups in the US and to a shooting range in Virginia to fire submachine guns and assault rifles.

The group’s close ties to the Tories were cemented this week when the Conservative party chairman, Eric Pickles, and the shadow defence secretary, Liam Fox, spoke at the annual YBF parliamentary rally at the House of Commons, which was chaired by Blaney.

A few weeks ago I blogged about a similarly extreme group called Nurses for Reform, how they had secured an hour-long meeting with Dave in his House of Commons office and of their confidence that, if he reaches Downing Street, they had “no doubt” they would be invited to meet him and his policy team again.

Let’s be clear: the Conservative Party has not been sympathetic to the ideals or principle of the NHS since the leadership of Ted Heath. That has not changed under Cameron.

They don’t give a stuff about climate change because of the politics, not the science. How scary is that?

The Grauniad report states that “At least 11 prospective Tory candidates, an estimated seven of whom have a reasonable chance of winning their seats, have been delegates or speakers at training conferences run by the Young Britons’ Foundation, which claims to have trained 2,500 Conservative party activists.”

Who are these 11 candidates? What was their justification for attending these meetings? And how much of the extremism preached by the leadership of the YBF are they prepared, publicly, to reject?

LORD ASHCROFT – sterling chap. Thoroughly decent cove, if you ask me. Done absolutely nothing wrong. Salt of the earth, and all that.

So there’s absolutely no reason why any Tory MP or candidate should be embarrassed or shy about coming clean about whether their campaign has been funded, directly or indirectly, by him. Is there?

Tories’ Pavlovian reaction to “Ashcroft” is to bark “Unions!”. Fair enough. I am happy to publish details of all donations received by my campaign from any trade union (must check if I’ve received any recently – I fear not but you never know).

Will Tory candidates now do the same re Ashcroft money?

“I wish to respond to speculation in this morning’s newspapers that I vote Conservative. It has also been suggested that in 2001, when my husband, the Labour MP Tom Harris, first stood for parliament, I campaigned actively for his Tory, nationalist, Liberal and Trotskyist opponents. It is also reported that I tampered with the brakes on his car just before he drove to the council headquarters to lodge his nomination papers. This allegation, along with the allegation that I stood outside a polling station holding a placard reading “Anyone But Harris!!” and shouting into the faces of elderly voters cannot be proved.

“I will, of course, offer my husband the same level of support at this election that I have always offered.”

ONE OF the tell-tale signs that Labour, in the 1980s, was unfit for government was its obsession with issues that had no resonance with the public: unilateral disarmament and internal party “democracy” being two obvious examples.

In Labour’s defence, at least it could be argued (unsuccessfully at the time) that both issues impacted on UK citizens’ quality of life, directly and indirectly.

So how does the Tory Party justify its peculiar obsession with John Bercow and his future as Speaker of the House of Commons? The latest contribution to The Debate No-one Outside Westminster Cares About comes from Lord Tebbit, who says Tories in Mr Bercow’s Buckingham constituency should be free to campaign for candidates other than the Speaker (I wonder who he could possibly mean?).

There are always plenty of MPs who are unhappy with any particular Speaker; even Betty Boothroyd had her detratctors among Labour’s ranks during her tenure. And there seem to be an awful lot of Tories who are not just unhappy about Mr Bercow’s election to the chair of the Commons – they’re absolutely beside themselves with fury.

Why? John Bercow was elected by a good majority in a secret ballot of all MPs. Isn’t that democratic enough for the Tories?

But we all know the reason why some Tories, particularly from Norman Tebbit’s wing of the party, dislike and distrust the current incumbent, don’t we? John Bercow started off his political career on the far right of the Tory Party – and then he committed the ultimate act of Tory apostacy: he changed his mind.

He was open to arguments which countered his previous world view. He was willing to consider the arguments and willing to change his mind. This, naturally enough, annoyed some of his fellow travellers who felt Bercow was not only challenging his own beliefs, but challenging theirs also.

So he was cast out. He became a hate figure. No longer “one of us”.

Strange, then, is it not, that Dave has not suffered the same fate? After all, he claims to have gone through precisely the same Damascus experience as Bercow; he claims to recognise what the Tories did wrong before, he says Conservatism under previous regimes was too exclusive, too uncaring, not green enough.

So why the different Tory attitudes to two apostates? Is it simply that Dave is the leader and Bercow is not? Hardly – imagine the revolt if Bercow had become leader!

No, the answer lies in the party’s perception of the sincerity of the conversions. Bercow is unpopular because his views have genuinely changed. Dave? Well… Let’s just say the party is more tolerant of his “conversion” for some reason.