Three-brained Liam sparkles

Liam Byrne is a three-brained minister.

He was before PASC yesterday. I told him I had difficulty in reading the language of a recent speech of his. It was in a language that’s derived from English, but it’s not the English that we all know and love.

Try this sentence:

‘Today’s world is too big, too varied, the horizons too high, for the state to be able to crowd people into some kind of corner. In fact the reverse is true.’

Horizons are near or distant. It they are high then a tsunami is on the way. Bright ideas are struggling to emerge from his litany of originals slogans. He ran a successful dot.com company and he is exited about the widening prairies of Internet information. He onece was a minister with three jobs – one for each of his brains.

His master plan is to ‘free up the frontline. At its heart, more freedom to draw on a bigger range of innovation, specialism energy, enthusiasm, insight, and yes, love and care.’ He left out mother love and thornless roses.

In his next sentence, his soaring adjectival excesses stumble at a practical impossibility.

'Freeing every police force from the bureaucracy of targets bar one; the confidence of the public they serve.’

I’ve discussed this new wheeze with my local Gwent Police Force. They welcome the end of target- chasing. Too often targets are measures of failure not success and distort priorities. But ‘measuring the confidence of the public’ is a chaotic science.

Gwent crime has dropped 20% in three years. Violent crime, car crime, burglary are all down. Present measures, although inexact prove this.  But public confidence is malleable and shaped by the perception of crime in the media.  The public believes that crime levels are up – because that is what they are fed every day. Assessing police efficiency by public confidence is meaningless.

My first meeting with Liam was a farewell party for Terry Davis who resigned in mid-term to become the Secretary General of the Council of Europe. He was the aspirant MP. I had written a book on How to be a backbencher.’ I hope I was not too patronizing.  There was no precedent in my book for a high-flyer with Liam’s dazzling talents. Ideas, insights and aphorisms leap from his fertile brain.

PASC was left reeling by the Liam Byrne experience. How do his civil servants cope?

 

PC Davies

Full time policeman and part time MP Monmouth’s David Davies lived down to his reputation.

We were all grateful that Constable Davies could find time from his busy life to attend the St David’s Day debate yesterday. Not that he stayed long. He intervened on the speeches of others, and then left. Previously I have commented on his poor voting record. He voted less often that Jessica Morden in one period when Jessica had a baby.

I am grateful to Tomas Livingstone of the Western Mail for drawing attention to his woeful attendance record on the welsh Affairs Select Committee. He is bottom of the class attending only 8 of 42 meetings. His fellow Tory David Jones got to 35.

As Gilbert and Sullivan said ‘When constabulary duty's to be done, to be done, a policeman’s lot is not a happy one.’

MP/Meetings Attended
Dr Hywel Francis (chairman) 42 out of 42
Stephen Crabb (discharged 17th Dec 2007) 4 out of 8
Wayne David (discharged 8th Nov 2007) 0 out of 2
David TC Davies 8 out of 42
Nia Griffith 18 out of 42
Sian James 23 out of 42
David Jones 35 out of 42
Martyn Jones 16 out of 42
Alun Michael (added 8th Nov 2007) 31 out of 40
Albert Owen 25 out of 42
Mark Pritchard (added 17th Dec 2007) 19 out of 34
Hywel Williams 28 out of 42
Mark Williams 30 out of 42

Comments

[Graham Marlowe]

Surely the sober truth is that Byrne is such a "yes-man", so anxious to toe the party line, to stay "on-message" that, in the end, he just comes out with verbose nonsense that means nothing. He probably doesn't even know what he is talking about himself. Perhaps he needs a meeting with the Plain English Society. Urgently.

Quite frankly when I see some of these young fogeys described as "up and coming" it makes you fear for the future of the Labour party.

[Gareth]

Not exactly a scintillating record for the Labour members either. In fact, the only member of any party who turned up more often than David Jones was Hywel Francis, and, as chair, he's paid extra to be there!

[Paul Flynn]

Not brilliant for Labour but hey did turn up four times as often as Constable davies.

[Paul Flynn]

No Graham, he is far more than a 'yes man'. When you have threes brains working simultaneously, it's yes, maybe and no.

He is full of bright ideas. He is keen on fresh ideas but he certainly not the nodding dog new Labour. He creates
his own policies and presents them rationally.

[Graham Marlowe]

Is there a degree of snobbery here at work, I wonder. Much is made of the fact that Mr Davies is a "P.C.". Perhaps had he been a Chief Constable?.....

At least he is doing a useful job, and not destroying a bank and then getting richly rewarded for it.

Or been a pen-pusher in Brussells and then come back to this country to pretend to be a "business minister".

I have no love of the Tories, but perhaps this man doesn't find it so easy to get away as others would?

It would be interesting to know the attendence record of Westminster MPs - apart from the Gordon & Dave Show on Wednesdays, where everyone turns up to be in the studio audience, the benches are quite empty quite often at other times.

[Paul Flynn]

Don't be deceived by the empty benches. There are dozens of other things going on in parliament - including committees of all kinds.

I sometimes go days without entering the chamber but I am booked with meeting from 9.00 to 7.00.

[Graham Marlowe]

I know other work is going on Paul, but what is worrying is that so many MPs do not listen to the debates in the House - yet vote on important matters that affect us all, usually on party lines, and not because they have listened to the evidence and made up their own minds. I know that suits people like (for example, in the past) Clive Soley, who would have voted for slaughter of the first born if "Tony" had wanted it.

On The Week In Westminster yesterday, for example I heard the oleaginious Barry Gardner, a bag carrier for Mandelson, for example, discussing with Linsey Hoyle the Mandy part-privatisation of Royal Mail: he didn't come out with one original or compelling argument: you could hear he was merely repeating what his master has said in previous interviews. Quite clearly a man who doesn't listen to argument and has no mind of his own. Oily-voiuced though he was, Gardner just demonstrated the poverty of his imagination.

I don't blame Labour for this alone - the Tories are just as bad - that idiotic "didn't fix the roof while the sun was shining" soundbite is on so many mouths, it just shows how lazy they are.

[Kay Tie]

Next time you read if a bishop arrested and assualted by police for photographing his child, or children threatened with arrest for drawing a hopscotch grid, you might want to rethink the idea that a P.C. is necessarily doing a useful job. In my view, a large number are tearing apart society every bit as much as errant bankers.

[Graham Marlowe]

Well, Kay Tie: You can't blame the police for enforcing the laws put upon them by an authortarian government who seem to think we need checking up on: they are only enacting the laws that Parliament makes. You can blame a succession of right-wing bigots who have been our Home Secretary in recent years.

On the whole, though some coppers are officious, on the whole they do more useful work than Ffred Goodwin, Peter Mandelson and those involved in the "media".

Who is more useful: the average police officer or Jeremy Kyle?

[Kay Tie]

Jeremy Kyle or the police? Hmmmn. I rarely encounter either, but according to the niece of the Duchess of Longford (Harriet Harman) we don't need laws now - only the court of public opinion - and so the police are redundant. Logically it's Jeremy Kyle who is more useful.

[Graham Marlowe]

I had to endure Mr Kyle in a hosptal waiting room once. He managed to make an hour seem like a whole day. Believe me, a police officer is far more useful - and you never know, one day you may need one if you're in trouble.

[One of Liam Byrne's Civil Servants]

"PASC was left reeling by the Liam Byrne experience. How do his civil servants cope?"

With difficulty.

[Graham Marlowe]

I can imagine! He is a young(ish) man in a hurry, leaping about in all directions and going nowhere (with any luck)