Party Political Animal

So far this week:

• the government drops half-witted proposals to reintroduce dog licences, which would have penalised 6m good dog owners and failed to sort out the few thousand bad ones – all just before an election
• no doubt that policy was dreamed up by a special adviser, so the political class contrived to ensure that yet another professional politician was levered onto the short list for James Purnell’s seat
• at a time when taxes are going up for everyone, Lord Ashcroft is again in the news for avoiding UK taxes while sitting in the Lords as an unelected lawmaker
• Labour, who were elected 13 years ago promising a democratic Lords and an end to non-doms, announce that if re-elected they will democratise the Lords – haha
• turns out that Ashcroft pulled the wool over the eyes of both the Lords Appointments Commission – manned, again, mainly by career politicians; and Hayden Philips, then the civil servant responsible for signing off the deal and later the patsy put in charge of party funding reform – both the Commission and Hayden Philips were apparently not aware that Ashcroft’s promise to become a permanent UK resident still would not subject him to full UK tax. Why should they know? They’ve never lived or worked in the real world.
• the PM announces that he lied (not exactly the word he used) when telling Chilcot that defence spending had gone up every year since 1997 – it also turns out that on one measure spending is the lowest since 1930 – Brown, who must have known the real facts, pulls up short of an apology

Yup, a bad week in politics…

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