A couple of days ago a speech that MP and Minister David Lammy made to the Fabian society was published on Liberal Conspiracy. The speech was largely devoid of content and was little more than a rallying speech about how amazing American politics is compared to UK politics in engaging people...apparently. What it did try and touch on, however, was parliament and government and how perhaps both can be more open to sources outside the Westminster Village.

What a shock and a shame it is to hear today then that in a vote on expenses made yesterday, parliament made it fairly clear that such an idea is very far from the minds of politicians. Expenses and perks of the job first, fair and representative politics second (if even that high) it seems!

During my viewing of the 42 day debate I was most surprised by Keith Vaz and his sudden change of heart over the poposals. The leader of the Home Affairs Select committee, he and the committee announced in December that there was be "no evidence" for the legislation to take place. This is an important distinction as the evidence for and against the legislation did not change at all between December and the vote in June.

Now the telegraph is claiming evidence of at best ministers being blase about the feelings of the public on "paying off" people for support in votes, and at worst that Keith Vaz, who had prominent time in the debate with a speech of his own, has been promised reward for his allegiance to the party.

So the bloody David Davis hand-wringing continues. "Boo hoo, why won't the Lib Dem's stand", "Oh woe is us, DD doesn't fit out 100 point check list of a libertarian so we can't support him", or "Oh dear me, I can't possibly believe an MP can resign on a single principle without a direct hidden agenda!" is all I seem to hear from all but a select few. Quite frankly it's pathetic and getting more so as time goes on. Add to this some usual petty politics and over reactions on the blogs and this issue of 42 days is fast getting absorbed into the ether like a fidget in quicksand.

All it would take is 4 or 5 Labour MPs to change their vote from aye to no to turn the 42 day majority around. So who are the blighters that decided to vote against 90 days but for 42?

The MPs that we need to be asking questions of are... Michael Clapham, Ann Cryer, David Hamilton, Doug Henderson, Siân James, Sadiq Khan, Mark Lazarowicz, Tony Lloyd, Andrew Love, Chris McCafferty, George Mudie, Dennis Skinner, Peter Soulsby and Jon Trickett. These MPs, including at least one who has worked for Liberty, and many that have been all too happy to rebel on issues such as Trident, are the priority as far as I'm concerned. If you live in their constituency or know someone that is get a letter written to them and let's see what their reasoning is.

It was supposed to be nothing to do with Brown. The 42 day legislation was not a test of his leadership they said. Yet by the way the final result fell any chance Brown had of avoiding direct assessment on his own performance and abilities was dashed in to the wind. Prime Ministers and world leaders frequently say that they will never negotiate with terrorists (at least with the public knowing about it), to do so shows weakness and opens to door to manipulation and extortion. By managing to only win this issue through alleged personal involvement in coercing MPs from other parties such as the DUP he has shown in no uncertain terms his weakness, and why "doing the right thing" sometimes means dropping bad legislation and not negotiating on terror legislation.

News is coming out that one potential route to "overcome" the issue of MP expenses and the outcry over what they spend their money on is to...well...properly hide their actions from us so we can't outcry any more!

However this isn't the worst of it, as they are saying they'd like to do this by giving every MP £23k "for their second home", in a move that would both mean that receipts and accounts would seemingly not have to be kept for what they are spending our taxes on, but also meaning some MPs will receive more money every year than they usually spend on their housing needs, effectively wasting even more of our money on what looks amazingly like a pay rise.

Gordon Brown has responded to the absolutely DEVASTATING result in Crewe and Nantwich by claiming that he is "listening", a desperate sense of language that almost pleads with the electorate to trust him going forward in to the future...and rightly so. He should be pleading, he should be begging, in fact he should be display a whole host of traits that are both simultaneously apologetic to the electorate that he and his government have betrayed so badly in the last 6 months and non-conducive to him remaining the leader of this country.

Luckily for now it's only in one newspaper, but the story is that some of the victims' families are doing what is only to be expected and calling for Steve Wright to be murdered by the state. I don't begrudge the families of murdered people the freedom to lose all sense of proportion and reason but I do wish that people wouldn't buy in to it so much.

I still will never understand, however, the hypocrisy of individuals that will watch a man be convicted of choosing to kill people without remorse, and then ask the state to do this to that man for them by proxy. Quite aside from insisting that "Government look at returning the death penalty", we should be insisting that any kind of lapse on the part of individuals to revert to more primal tendencies should be discouraged and not glorified, lest they give more people like Steve Wright the idea that they somehow have the right to do with another what they deem to be right.

You'd think that a government passing an Age Discrimination bill for employers would understand that everyone should be treated without their age in mind, yet some in Parliament have commended the use of "Mosquitos" to disperse youths from areas by sending out a high pitched sound that only those under the age of 25 can hear.

Finally in this trilogy of posts on the issue of poor and sometimes frightening governance by Labour, and in this case to a degree parliament as a governing body, I cover the now well trodden subject of MPs and just how much power the government should be giving them. In particular this post is spurred on by the recent news about bugging MPs, but stems from the wording of anti-terror legislation on several counts, the debacle over police pay and partly how the idea of electoral reform has been dealt with.

Let's first look at the most recent furore, that of bugging MPs...

I am sitting here feeling pretty incensed after reading the news on the BBC news website about Labour , linked initially from Paul Linford's blog. Firstly because it is typical cowardly Labour who admit one thing in their government initiated report yet make some startling admissions about the "value" that they put on certain criteria in their practice, and secondly because it has spawned an absolutely piss-poor article from the BBC.

In the end the facts are simple. Labour hold between 48 and 96 seats more than they should based on public opinion, and despite there being working examples in our own union of PR systems working, not being too complicated, not reducing turn out, and making government more representative of the people this government is going to do whatever it can to keep hold of FPTP until it gets over the hurdle of what will be a messy general election between 2009 and 2010. It's despicable, it's an example of everything that's wrong with modern "democracy" and it is authoritarian bullshit that has to end as soon as possible.