The Monty Python team had Johnson’s pusillanimous character type down to a tee way back in 1975 in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Like Sir Robin, “Sir” Boris has plenty of previously form, as recorded by the minstrels of the fourth estate.
“Sir” Boris is first and foremost famous for evading a journalist by hiding in a fridge; and while he was Foreign Secretary in Theresa May’s administration, Johnson typically avoided a Commons vote on the expansion of Heathrow airport (concerning which he had previously vowed to oppose, saying he would “lie down in front of the bulldozers“. Ed.) by disappearing to Afghanistan for the day
On Tuesday your ‘umble scribe was at a meeting of the Bristol Clean Streets Forum, which brings together community activists, council officers responsible for waste management and enforcement and the council’s own waste management company, Bristol Waste.
A frequent plea your correspondent has been making for years was again repeated on Tuesday, namely to make greater use of the local media to deter littering, fly-tipping and other environmental crimes. as per the example of neighbouring North Somerset and South Gloucestershire Councils, who frequently have successful enforcement actions written up in the local press.
The meeting was informed that press releases were indeed issued to highlight successful enforcement actions but the local press preferred stories from the two local authorities mentioned above to anything produced in the newsroom down the Counts Louse.
Well, something finally happened yesterday. Bristol Live reported that the council had agreed to increase the charges imposed under its FPN scheme for environmental crimes such as littering. fly-tipping and fly-posting.
The Jane Street fly-tipping hotspot looking unlovely – as per usual.
FPNs for littering will be increasing from £100 to £150, with the discount for early payment rising from £65 to £75.
Councillors also agreed to double penalties from £200 to £400 for breaches of the “household duty of care”, which requires residents to take reasonable steps to ensure waste produced at home is only handed over to licensed waste carriers for disposal.
Since 2017 the council has earned a surplus of £220,000 from these fines and these proceeds have been spent on measures to keep streets clean, including removing fly-posting, anti-littering campaigns, equipment to litter-picking groups, clearing graffiti and additional enforcement according to Kye Dudd, the Cabinet member for climate, ecology, waste and energy.
Members of Parliament are traditionally all referred to in the chamber as the Honourable Member for (name_of_constituency).
However, whether their behaviour is indeed honourable is questionable at times. When assuming office, all members of the House of Commons take an oath, but that oath is only to bow and scrape before the monarch of day and any heirs who might take over within the member’s term of office.
There’s not a mention of such notions as honesty and integrity anywhere in the oath’s two short sentences.
It’s left to the Code of Conduct for MPs to deal with honesty. This states that “Holders of public office should be truthful“.
As regards integrity, the Code states the following:
Holders of public office must avoid placing themselves under any obligation to people or organisations that might try inappropriately to influence them in their work. They should not act or take decisions in order to gain financial or other material benefits for themselves, their family, or their friends. They must declare and resolve any interests and relationships.
However, it seems that some of the House’s members have been less than honest and shown no integrity when it comes to claiming their parliamentary expenses.
Today the BBC reports that four dishonourable members – one SNP MP and three Conservatives – have been asked to repay motoring fines which they had included in their expenses claims.
Amanda Solloway
Simon Hoare
Dave Doogan
Bim Afolami
The most egregious of these were the claims by the Dishonourable Member for North Dorset, one Simon James Hoare, who claimed four times for £80 fines issued in November 2019. When not indulging in expenses fiddling, Tory Simon fills his time in parliament chairing the Northern Ireland Affairs Select Committee.
The most prominent of the fines fiddlers revealed today was another Conservative, junior minister Amanda Solloway, currently attempting to be Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Energy Consumers and Affordability, who claimed an £80 fixed penalty notice issued by Transport for London in 2020. When it comes to current ministers in trouble for motoring fines, before the details of Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s speeding fine emerged, she asked in her early days as a dishonourable member whether MPs could claim speeding fines on their expenses. This was naturally answered in the negative.
Any reasonable person would have thought that members of parliament might have cleaned up their act after the parliamentary expenses scandal of 2009, but it seems some present members are ignorant thereof, don’t think the rules apply to them.
When it comes to being honourable, your ‘umble scribe cannot help but think of Mark Antony’s funeral oration in Act III, scene II of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Throughout the speech Antony repeatedly refers to Caesar’s assassins as honourable.
Ever since the so-called United Kingdom disastrously withdrew from the European Union, the supporters of Brexit have been promising Brexit bonuses. The first of these could have finally happened, if the photo below of a display in a foreign exchange bureau in Bristol is telling the truth.
$600 for a fiver? Your ‘umble scribe couldn’t believe his eyes! Have the economies of the EU27 gone into total meltdown in the last couple of days?
Perhaps all those air miles clocked up by Kemi Badenoch, Secretary of State for Patronising, are paying off as told to the Europhobic hacks at the Daily Brexit (which some still call the Express. Ed.)
Well, if Brexit really is going that swimmingly, your correspondent reckons he’ll shortly be seeing unicorns on the Downs – Bristol’s answer to the sunlit uplands.
Is this a Brexit bonus or a mistake? Have your say below in the comments.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, whom the voters of North East Somerset were foolish enough to elect as their Member of Parliament, has a reputation for not living in the present. So much of a problem that Tim Fenton of Zelo Street refers to him as “the member for times past“.
It now appears Jacob has trouble in understanding the English language too.
Yesterday’s Independent carries a report on The Mogg’s speech to the far-right National Conservatism conference yesterday in which he criticised the new voter photo ID rules that were introduced in time for the recent local government elections in England, elections in which the Tories did particularly badly, losing over 1,000 council seats.
In his speech, The Mogg stated the following:
Parties that try and gerrymander end up finding their clever scheme comes back to bite them – as dare I say we found by insisting on voter ID for elections.
We found the people who didn’t have ID were elderly and they by and large voted Conservative, so we made it hard for our own voters and we upset a system that worked perfectly well.
Gerrymander, Jacob?
Voter suppression, surely?
It’s at this point that a dictionary comes in handy. The dictionary definition is “to divide an area into election districts (= areas that elect someone) in a way that gives an unfair advantage to one group or political party.”
One would have thought someone who has been a politician as long as The Mogg would know that, but poor old Jacob was badly educated, first at Westminster Under School, followed by Eton College and finally at Trinity College, Oxford.
As regards gerrymander itself, it has an interesting etymology. It’s a portmanteau word originating from the USA in 1812. The gerry element is a reference to Elbridge Gerry, one of the country’s Founding Fathers, whilst the mander element is derived from salamander.
While Governor of Massachusetts, Gerry signed into law a bill that rearranged the state’s electoral districts to give advantage to the Democratic-Republican Party, although Gerry himself was said to disapprove of the practice. When mapped, one of the contorted districts in the Boston area was said to resemble a mythological salamander. Thus the term was born with its spread and popularity sustained by a political cartoon depicting a strange animal with claws, wings and a dragon-like head that supposedly resembled the oddly shaped district.
Today the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) reports that the European Parliament’s two competent committees – the Committee on Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO) and the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) – today voted by a large majority to protect Free Software in the EU’s AI Regulation. Furthermore, non-profit organisations and small Free Software projects up to the size of micro-enterprises, are largely to be exempted from this regulation.
In addition, the FSFE comments that this principle must be anchored in the Cyber Resilience Act and Product Liability Directive and the parliament’s forthcoming votes.
Alexander Sander, FSFE’s Senior Policy Consultant, explains as follows:
Instead of putting the responsibility on the Free Software developers, it should be put on the companies that profit from it on the market. Smaller organisations and non-profit activities, for example by foundations, must be excluded. With this vote, the Members of the European Parliament are thus recognising the reality of Free Software development and trying to protect it. The principle of transferring responsibility and liability to those who profit on the market instead of focusing on developers must also be anchored in the Cyber Resilience Act and the Product Liability Directive. This is the only way to not only protect Free Software and its contributors but also consumers and customers.
The final vote on the AI Act is expected in the next few weeks, after which discussions on the final text will take place between the Parliament, Council of Ministers and the Commission. The Parliament is currently discussing the amendments to the Cyber Resilience Act and the Product Liability Directive which have been submitted.
Expressing political opinions on walls is a practice that reaches back at least 2,000 years to Roman times – as in the case of Pompeii and other Roman towns and cities – and possibly even earlier.
One wall at the start of Whitehall Road in Bristol has displayed various messages – all of them anti-Conservative – over the years (see posts passim here and here. Ed.), of which the one below is the latest.
It appeared some time before last week’s English local government elections. However, your ‘umble scribe does not know the extent to which this particular slogan contributed to the Nasty Party’s disastrous losses of over 1,000 council seats and – more locally – its loss of overall control of South Gloucestershire seeing as it lies on a well-used commuter and bus route between the city and that neighbouring local authority.
Yes, you did read that correctly; license [sic]; twice; in two sentences.
Either Auntie is employing an American to curate the BBC Politics Twitter account or an illiterate.
If the latter, some remedial English lessons are clearly needed, as well as practice, particularly if use of the verb to practise is contemplated in future. 😀
In amongst the predictable responses from licence fee objectors and refuseniks, numerous replies to the tweet pointed out the basic orthographic difference between British and American English. However, no acknowledgement or correction of the error has been forthcoming over 10 hours after the original tweet was posted.
In 1647 during the English Civil War a series of discussions – the Putney Debates – was held in St Mary’s Church, Putney between 28th October and 8th November about the political settlement that should follow Parliament’s victory over Charles Stuart, the arrogant autocrat commonly referred to by history as Charles I.
A transcript of the discussions can be found here.
The main participants in the debates were senior officers of the New Model Army who favoured retaining a monarch within the framework of a Constitutional monarchy, and radicals such as the Levellers who sought more sweeping changes, including One man, one vote and freedom of conscience, particularly in religion.
Amongst those Levellers whose words were transcribed is Thomas Rainsborough (pictured right), a colonel in the army, who is on record as favouring government by the consent of the governed, as expressed below.
I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think it’s clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under; and I am confident that when I have heard the reasons against it, something will be said to answer those reasons, in so much that I should doubt whether he was an Englishman or no that should doubt of these things.
Rainsborough was in particular supported by John Wildman and Edward Sexby. Sexby’s most salient contribution to the debates is as follows:
Our case is to be considered thus, that we have been under slavery. That’s acknowledged by all. Our very laws were made by our Conquerors… We are now engaged for our freedom. That’s the end of Parliament, to legislate according to the just ends of government, not simply to maintain what is already established. Every person in England hath as clear a right to elect his Representative as the greatest person in England. I conceive that’s the undeniable maxim of government: that all government is in the free consent of the people.
These sentiments were opposed by senior officers in the New Model Army, particularly Henry Ireton, and especially as they feared universal suffrage would remove the privileges that property ownership bestowed upon them.
In saying so, Rainsborough, Wildman and Sexby were men well ahead of their time, given the extremely limited nature of the franchise in those distant days. The franchise was not really increased to any great extent until the so-called Great Reform Act of 1832, which extended the right to vote (but still limited it by a property qualification) and abolished the so-called rotten boroughs. Even after the extension of the franchise, in a city the size of Bristol with a population at the time of over 100,000, only 15,000 had the vote. Working class men like my two grandfathers did not receive the vote until after World War One. At the same time the franchise was also extended to women over 30.
The incompatibility of monarchy with democracy was highlighted and put to good comedic effect by the Pythons in their 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
You enjoy your bling bonnet day at our expense, Mr Mountbatten-Windsor, but just remember one thing: WE didn’t vote for you!
Your ‘umble scribe will be ignoring all that nonsense in London SW1 involving Mr & Mrs Charles Mountbatten-Windsor for something far more vital to the health of the nation.
Their bling bonnet day in Westminster unfortunately clashes with a regular event of local importance – the monthly Barton Hill community litter pick.
Stuff the coronation. This IS important!
Last month four of us turned out for an hour’s cleaning, managing to clear several bags of litter (as well as reporting half a dozen instances of fly-tipping. Ed.), having a bit of gentle exercise with tea and coffee afterwards, all punctuated by good company and good conversation.
If you can join us outside the Wellspring Centre (formerly the Settlement) at 10.00 am on Saturday, we’d be very pleased to see you.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, whom the voters of 
As regards gerrymander itself, it has an interesting etymology. It’s a 
Today the 
In 1647 during the English Civil War a series of discussions – the Putney Debates – was held in 
