Peter Hain appeared before the select committee today, to answer questions on the Wales Office annual report.
I may be mistaken, but Peter does seem a different person since he was restored to the cabinet. He is considerably less belligerent and partisan and more willing to accept reasonable criticism.
Perhaps it’s a consequence of being involuntarily reminded that a political career does not always follow an upward trajectory. Whatever the reason, it becomes him better.
Matthew Parris has written a sensitive and intelligent article for today’s Times, which I strongly commend to readers.
Under the headline Why sacrifice free speech to squash a gnat? Parris explains why those who believe in liberal democracy should be prepared to go some considerable distance to tolerate the expression of all views, even such as those so inarticulately pronounced by Nick Griffin in his Question Time appearance:
Nor do practical liberals like me believe in free speech regardless of its effect; they would not support free speech if they expected it to lead permanently to great harm.
But nor do they believe in free speech only when confident that their preferred opinion will win the immediate argument. They know that free speech can help bad ideas to gain ground as well as good. But they have enough faith in the persistence of human reason to believe that in the ebb and flow of argument, and over time, the better argument will eventually prevail.
Parris is entirely right and Peter Hain, among others, should take note. Griffin’s performance on Thursday evening was lamentable; his website may have attracted a surge in hits after his appearance, but I’d guess that most visitors were prompted by curiosity to learn what sort of oddball could justify his public appearance with a Ku Klux Klan leader on the grounds that the organisation was “almost totally non-violent”.
Griffin knows that he performed badly under the Question Time spotlight. He has now filed a complaint with the BBC, saying that he was “bullied” on the programme. Oh dear; what a dreadfully un-Ku Klux Klan-like way to behave. Perhaps he will therefore decline the QT invitation the next time it drops through his letterbox.
We are an old democracy, in which extremism has never been able to take root, and are well capable of dealing with the odd Griffin who pops up from time to time. Our usual, and best, reaction is to laugh at them.
Any nation whose response to Adolf Hitler was to characterise him as a monorchic, Teutonic version of Charlie Chaplin knows exactly how to see off the likes of the BNP.
In the wake of what was a disastrous Question Time for Nick Griffin, when it would be sensible to allow the BNP leader’s intellectually threadbare argument to speak for itself, Peter Hain still can’t resist sticking his oar in:
“This could end up blighting the lives of many decent people in Britain just because they are not white. The BBC should be ashamed of single-handedly doing a racist, fascist party the biggest favour in its grubby history.”
I know Peter means well, but he really ought to leave this one alone. The BBC actually did everyone a favour by allowing Griffin to hang himself politically.
I would criticise the Beeb, however, for allowing the questions to linger too long in Griffin’s comfort zone of race. If they had ranged across the gamut of contemporary political issues, they would have done more to highlight the fact that the BNP is in truth nothing more than a lame and unattractive one-trick pony.
Peter Hain makes an extraordinarily serious and unfair accusation against the BBC when he says that its executives have become “apologists” for the British National Party by allowing the BNP’s leader, Nick Griffin, to appear on Question Time this evening.
I have absolutely no doubt that the very last thing the BBC wants to do is to give airtime to Griffin and his loopy politics. However, he happens to be a Member of the European Parliament and over 900,000 people voted for the BNP at the last Euro election, so to deny him a platform would have been a clear act of political censorship.
Griffin, in the meantime, is openly laughing at the BBC, Hain and the rest of the political establishment in this morning’s Times:
“I thank the political class and their allies for being so stupid. The huge furore that the political class has created around it clearly gives us a whole new level of public recognition.”
Griffin is the leader of an unpleasant party of chancers which, despite its title, is deeply un-British. It is intolerant, xenophobic and atavistic and cynically abuses our dearest symbols – the Union flag, the Spitfire and even the image of the Conservative, sometime Liberal, Winston Churchill – for its own odious ends.
Griffin himself is a gadfly who knows how to use the media. He knew that to liken our generals to Nazi war criminals, as he did earlier this week, would gain him masses of free publicity. Hain’s strident reaction to his appearance on Question Time has handed him more of the same.
My own feeling is that the more that British people see of Griffin and his friends, the more they will be revolted.
The best way to destroy the BNP is to shine the spotlight on it.
Tomorrow, the Welsh Grand Committee will debate the proposed Welsh Language legislative competence order (LCO).
The LCO has attracted a considerable amount of attention in Wales and was the subject of a report by the Welsh select committee shortly before the Parliamentary recess. The committee expressed a number of concerns about the original draft order and made several recommendations as to how it could be improved.
Last week, Peter Hain, the Secretary of State, issued his response to the select committee’s report, in which he accepted many of its recommendations. The order, he said, would be amended to reflect that.
So far, so good; and, as regular readers will know, I am a strong supporter of the Grand Committee, so I am pleased that it will now have the opportunity of debating the LCO.
There is, however, one significant problem: the amended draft order has not yet been published. This means that the Grand Committee will, ludicrously enough, be debating a document that none of its members – not even the Secretary of State – has yet seen.
I know that Peter is anxious to show he is cracking on with the LCO, but this, frankly, is ridiculous. It shows no respect for Parliament or the people of Wales and makes a mockery of the legislative process.
If the Grand Committee’s debate is to mean anything, it should be postponed until the new draft LCO has been published.
Posted in Peter Hain, Welsh Affairs Committee, Welsh Grand Committee
Tagged Politics
The Telegraph reports that Gordon Brown was disappointed when Katherine Jenkins refused an invitation to sing The Red Flag at the close of the Labour party conference last Thursday.
“Senior party figures” pleaded with Miss Jenkins to add a deperately-needed touch of pizzazz to the gloomy Brighton gathering but were told that she was unavailable:
“She keeps her politics to herself, and prefers to keep it to the voting booth,” says a spokesman for the Neath-born mezzo-soprano. “Katherine was already doing a whole day of programmes for Welsh radio stations that day.”
I do hope, for his own and his party’s sake, that Neath MP Peter Hain was not one of the “senior figures” deputed to do the pleading; he already has an unfortunate record of displeasing Miss Jenkins.
Prior to the 2005 general election, Hain was obliged to issue an apology to a “furious” Katherine after using her photograph on his campaign literature.
Miss Jenkins’s manager commented at the time:
“Katherine has no political leanings whatsoever. People have been coming up to [her mother] Susan in the street and saying, ‘We didn’t know your Katherine was a Labour supporter.’
“I have spoken to Peter Hain’s agent who says he is anxious to get hold of Katherine to explain but she is not interested in an explanation. What she wants is an apology.
“This has really upset Katherine’s mam, who is anything but a Labour supporter. It has horrified her.”
In the circumstances, any approach by Hain to the diva would have been rather like waving a red flag at a bull.
According to the Sunday Times, Lord Mandelson has disclosed that he is ready to accept a job under a future Conservative government.
Peter Hain, however, says that he would never do so.
It’s hard to know what to be more grateful for.
Welsh Secretary, Peter Hain, has said that he intends to boycott BBC TV’s Question Time over proposals to invite the British National Party to take part.
Quoted in the Western Mail, Peter rails:
“I was horrified when I heard about this, because it makes them [the BNP] appear as if they are another political party sitting on a panel along with democratically-elected parties.”
It appears to have escaped Peter’s notice that, sadly, two BNP candidates actually were democratically elected to the European Parliament last June.
The BNP are an unfortunate fact of life and if mainstream democratic parties don’t take them on in debate, it will be to the shame of those parties and to the advantage of the BNP.
I do hope Peter Hain thinks again.
If open rebellion hasn’t yet broken out within the Parliamentary Labour party, it is fair to say that barricades are being manned – or, in the case of Harriet Harman, personned.
It was Harriet herself who threw the fat in the fire yesterday by stridently demanding that a female MP should always form part of the Labour leadership team. That provoked a pretty blunt response from John Prescott, who berated her roundly in his blog:
I know you don’t choose the headlines. But you did choose the words in the interview.
You said: “I don’t agree with all male leaderships. Men cannot be left to run things on their own. I think it’s thoroughly bad to have a men-only leadership.”
Quotes like this just raise leadership issues once again just at a time when we should all be pulling together and defending our record.
But Harriet in the meantime has opened up a campaign on a second front by falling out with Peter Mandelson, who apparently refused to discuss her proposals for extended maternity leave at the recent cabinet awayday in Cardiff.
Mandelson and Harman are apparently taking it in turns to mind the shop during Gordon Brown’s absence on holiday, an arrangement that appears only to have added to the friction that exists between the two.
Eric Joyce’s implicit reference to his boss, Bob Ainsworth, as “politically bonkers” has also stirred up a hornets’ nest. One unnamed minister said that Joyce should be “toast” for his insubordination, but Joyce remains stubbornly and embarrassingly in situ.
Meanwhile, Alan Johnson’s protestations that he is unable to stop the extradition of Gary McKinnon to the United States because to do so would be illegal have been undermined by his former deputy leadership rival, Peter Hain, who last night criticised the way the Government had handled the case, asserting that it should have been referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions to consider possible charges in a “British context”.
It doesn’t look good; in fact, it looks awful.
And while all this mayhem is breaking out, there is nary a word from Downing Street, not a squeak from Gordon Brown, who sits, brooding, somewhere in the Lake District, while what little was left of his authority is publicly, comprehensively and humiliatingly shredded.
Posted in Bob Ainsworth, Gordon Brown, Harriet Harman, Labour Party, Peter Hain
Tagged Politics
The Welsh select committee today published its report on the proposed Welsh language legislative competence order. This will please a certain well-known Welsh journalist, who has talked of little else, and has probably scarcely slept, for several months.
The report recommends a transfer of competence to the Welsh Assembly, albeit hedged with many caveats, provisos and reservations.
The Welsh Assembly Government will now have enter into a negotiating process with the Wales Office to determine how the proposal should progress.
Peter Hain, for his part, has made it abundantly clear that he expects significant changes to be made to WAG’s original proposal:
“The committee is calling for a fundamentally different approach to the Welsh Assembly Government’s proposed Welsh language LCO and this will need very careful consideration and discussion in the weeks to come.”
The story isn’t over yet; this one will run and run.
Posted in Peter Hain, Welsh Affairs Committee, Welsh Assembly Government, Welsh language
Tagged Politics
The Western Mail’s Wales Online website carries an interesting piece about fifteen former Welsh rugby captains who, together with team coach Warren Gatland, plan to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, next month in an effort to raise £1 million for lung cancer research – a very praiseworthy endeavour indeed.
What particularly intrigues me about the story, however, is that it is illustrated by a picture of six of the former stars accompanied by what looks suspiciously like the recycled Secretary of State for Wales, Peter Hain. There is, however, no mention whatever in the article of his name or of what he is actually doing there.
Are we to infer that Peter, a native of neighbouring Kenya, will be accompanying the athletes on their expedition to the mountain’s 19,330 ft summit?
Or should we take it that, perhaps more likely, he just knows a good photo opportunity when he sees one?
MPs were, to put it at its mildest, somewhat surprised when a press release from Peter Hain appeared on the Wales Office website on Tuesday evening announcing that:
A Welsh Grand Debate on the Welsh Affairs Committee report on the Welsh Language Order, expected for publication in the next fortnight, will be held on Wednesday, July 8, to allow MPs to fully debate the content and scope of the Order and its proposed impact on Wales, particularly Welsh business and industry.
Regular readers will know that I am a strong supporter of the Grand Committee and approved wholeheartedly of Paul Murphy’s decision to increase the frequency of its meetings. However, even I raised an eyebrow at the prospect of a Grand Committee debate on July 8.
The problem, you see, is that the Welsh Affairs Committee hasn’t reported yet. It is likely to do so in the relatively near future, but for the Wales Office to arrange a debate before the report is even published looked a tad premature.
The response of the committee’s chairman, Hywel Francis, to the announcement was a study in glacial pique. He has, quite simply, told Peter Hain where to get off:
“I have informed him he will need to consult with me and the opposition parties before a Welsh Grand Committee can meet to discuss my Committee’s Report.”
Hain has now done a swift U-turn and confirmed that the debate has been called off.
And the Wales Office’s excuse for not consulting the chairman? Well, they did try to give him a quick bell, but couldn’t contact him because he’d lost his mobile phone.
Perhaps, just perhaps, they might consider a letter or even an e-mail next time round.
Posted in Peter Hain, Welsh Affairs Committee, Welsh Assembly Government
Tagged Politics
Brilliant speech by William Hague in this afternoon’s debate on the motion for the dissolution of Parliament. It sounded all the better after a particularly wooden and partisan speech from Peter Hain, to whom the lot had fallen to reply to the debate.
William, by contrast was devastating in his criticism of the Government, yet at the same time wonderfully funny. This is a flavour of his speech:
The Lord Mandelson, denied the opportunity to become Foreign Secretary by the sad combination of a Prime Minister too weak to remove his Foreign Secretary and, equally, a Foreign Secretary too weak to challenge the Prime Minister, has gone around instead collecting titles and even whole Departments to add to his name. His title now adds up to, “The right hon. the Baron Mandelson of Foy in the county of Herefordshire and Hartlepool in the county of Durham, First Secretary of State, Lord President of the Privy Council and Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills”. It would be no surprise to wake up in the morning and find that he had become an archbishop—[Laughter]. That is exactly what happened with Cardinal Wolsey.
We are left with a Government held together solely by fear. The Prime Minister is unable to remove Ministers in whom he has lost faith, for fear that they will quit altogether; Ministers are unwilling to challenge a Prime Minister in whom they have lost faith, for fear that they will no longer be Ministers; Labour Back Benchers are unwilling to remove a Prime Minister in whom they have certainly lost faith, for fear of having to have an election—and all of them are living in fear of one Minister with a very long title for whom, at the last election, no one in the country ever voted at all.
That is the situation. The Government are locked together in an embrace of mutual terror and diminished legitimacy, but their refusal to face the voters can no longer be defended. There comes a point when democratic renewal is indeed necessary, and the country knows and understands that that is now.
Welsh Questions today, and the return of Peter Hain to the dispatch box as Secretary of State.
Nothing had changed; he was his old, combative self, abrasive almost to the point of rudeness. Almost every answer contained a swipe at the Tories, with dire warnings of the “spending cuts” that will ensue if the wicked Tories are elected to power – a theme developed later by Gordon Brown at PMQs. Clearly, this is the new, last-throw-of-the-dice, Labour strategy of despair.
The Daily Post carried an interesting interview with Hain a few days ago. In it, he was remarkably frank about the dog’s breakfast Labour have made of running the country:
“We haven’t been governing well for too long. The Gurkhas issue was symptomatic of that.
“I’m not going to blame an individual for that; it was the government as a whole.”
Awfully good of Peter not to point a finger at any particular colleague, but to say, rather, that all of them are incompetent. But why stop at the Gurkhas? There are raftloads of ways in which Labour have fouled up. Readers may, for a bit of fun, care to suggest a few.
Anyway, Peter has decided things can’t go on this way; magnanimously and self-sacrificingly, he has decided to intervene and shake the whole dozy shower up:
“It was clearly a big mistake and we can’t afford to repeat it. That’s why I have come back to government.”
Well done, Peter; it’s so good to see a man putting country before self. And I’ve no doubt that the country is duly, sincerely grateful.
Retreaded Welsh Secretary Peter Hain is manifestly really, really cross over Labour’s abysmal showing in the Euro elections. Quoted on the BBC website, Peter admonishes:
“I think it sends a very clear message to everybody in Wales – if you don’t vote Labour, if for example you vote Plaid Cymru, you will get the Tories.”
That’s a pretty arrogant, finger-wagging sort of statement and illustrates the extent to which Labour have taken Wales for granted over the years. It doesn’t seem to occur to Peter that the Welsh electorate are not sheep and that they actually wanted the Tories to do well and to give Labour a good kicking.
It also doesn’t seem to register with him that the people of Wales have taken stock of the last twelve dismal years of Labour rule and have noted that Wales is the poorest part of the UK, with appallingly high levels of deprivation and economic inactivity.
Why should they continue to support Labour, from whom they have received precious little apart from contempt?
They are as tired of them as the rest of the country and are more than ready for a change.
