MP’s have voted on the Government amendment to the Constitutional Reform Bill going through parliamentary stages, which commits a government to holding a referendum on a change to our voting system by October 2011.

Hansard records the debate. Unfortunately not how MP’s voted. From the earlier vote on the bill I’m sure ours, sensibly, voted against this amendment.

I listened to a smidgen of the debate on the BBC’s Democracy Live website, and it was utter drivel from the LibDems David Howarth, who was saying that no-one either read or took any notice of party manifesto’s. Here’s the bit I heard,

“That is even laying aside the fact—obvious to everyone in politics—that no one outside the political bubble reads manifestos.”

“Manifestos are mainly for internal consumption.  That is the reality that people do not seem to be willing to accept.”

What complete tosh. I’ll come back to this debate later.

Barclays Bank chief executive John Varley told the House of Commons Treasury Committee today that he thought the worst of the banking crisis is over, in this graphic quote:

“The meteorite passed without striking, thank goodness, and I think that the system today, although it’s not in rude good health, as a result of intervention by government and central banks, the system survived.”

Seems the Labour Party have made robocalls – a call to your phone with an automated [disembodied] message seeking your support for a political party. I know, I know, a really unattractive thought.

The BBC reports that Labour have been told by the Information Commissioner to stop making these calls, as they breach privacy laws. The LibDems were also warned to stop making similar calls, this time an automated call from their leader Nick Clegg.

The conclusion my companion came to; in a recent conversation about Gordon Brown, and how he gets away with the stream of disasters and lies he leaves in his wake; was it’s the fault of the media. Their constant and urgent need for the new means there’s no time for scrutiny. Is this a modern truth? Sounds about right to me.

The media’s compulsion to chase the new damages our politics, in my companion’s view. It lets Gordon Brown and Labour continue to lie, create dud policies, and to squander our money without serious scrutiny.

Here’s one very recent example of a Gordon Brown lie, spotted by Daniel Finkelstein, that’s now just history. Imagine how hard it must be for Fraser Nelson, who’s continually nailing Gordon Brown lies, only to find the news agenda has moved on.

Ending our conversation, I mentioned that Guido Fawkes calls Gordon Brown the Prime Mentalist.  Oh how we chuckled, concluding that Gordon was in fact mad. What a state we are in.

The emotional intelligence thingy that Gordon Brown so obviously lacks, which Alastair Campbell tried to correct in Gordon’s weepy Piers Morgan interview is a one-shot game. We expect or national leaders to be tough, not emote, thank you very much.

Enough of Gordon, onto Alastair Campbell. Funny thing is that the emotional moment he had in his interview with Andrew Marr is also a one shot ploy. It works once, perhaps, to set up some sort of apology for events; an unspoken apology of course, Labour don’t do real apologies, do they?

This ploy of on-screen emotional authenticity aims to ‘put out there’ the sensitivity to loss, and tragedy. Fine. But will editors and interviewers want to interview people who can’t stand up to hard questioning? I don’t think so. I see Alastair Campbell’s media personage fading fast. Damaged goods, don’t you see. I’m detecting the first signs of this fade with David Hughes in the Daily Telegraph, who says, It’s time Alastair Campbell piped down, and the Times going in hard on Campbell’s TV emote, saying it was both ’repugnant’ and ‘outrageous’. Finally, Iain Martin suggests Campbell keeps his ‘upset’ to himself.

I’m inclined to think that this my second Momentous Moment, a really significant change in attitudes.

Monday in the Daily Telegraph is of course  Boris Johnson’s word-fest day in print. This week he tackled the absurdities of LibDem leader Nick Clegg and their support for a proportional representation voting system [PR]. Just had to remind you of Boris’s wonderful word play. Here are my best bits from his article – Gordon Brown will be in power for ever if Nick Clegg gets PR:

“It seems I just can’t get away from him [Nick Clegg] at the moment. They have the 24-hour news running in my outer office, and every time I come out for a breather – there he is. He’s churning the airwaves with his Polyfilla sound bites,..”

[About the LibDems] “They remain a dustbin for the votes of all those whose policy on cake is pro-having it and pro-eating it, and who think you can govern the country by sucking and blowing at the same time.”

“It is, of course, bare-faced cheek from Gordon to suggest that we should change the voting system just as the country is about to use that system to eject him from office. It is positively Mugabe-esque.”

[About PR] “All these are grave defects, but there is one final and overwhelming reason why Britain should not and will not adopt PR – that it always tends to erode the sovereign right of the people to kick the b––––––s out.”

A fitting words on which to end.

Two new words have entered our lexicon to describe the snow fall experienced in America over the past few days. Is a snow fall of four feet, a snow-pocalypse, or is it snow-maggedon?

Me, I prefer snow-maggedon as it scans better than snow-pocalypse. I’m using the -maggedon suffix ad-nauseam at home. Wifely tolerance stretched to breaking point.

It’s the ‘events dear boy, events’, which Harold Macmillan was famously reported to have said that blow governments of course. It’s these same events that are moulding David Cameron into a man of mettle. Public outrage at the MP’s expenses scandal has found Gordon Brown wanting, being both slow to react, and reluctance to see radical change to Parliament. Meanwhile, David Cameron has displayed commendable directness and speed to inflict censure on wrongdoers. Cameron’s firmness of purpose may well reflect well in election polls. We’ll see later this week I guess.

Here’s a taste of what David Cameron said in his speech on Rebuilding trust in politics: [Note, my emboldening]

But if anyone thinks that cleaning up politics means dealing with this [expenses] alone and then forgetting about it, they are wrong. Because there is another big issue that we can no longer ignore. I’m talking about lobbying – and we all know how it works.  … So we must be the party that sorts all this out.

Today, the guidelines state that former ministers shouldn’t lobby government for at least twelve months after leaving office. We will start by doubling that to two years.

When it comes to the firing [MP's], we’ve said we’ll introduce a power of recall to allow voters to kick out MPs mid-parliament if they have been proven guilty of serious wrongdoing.

… we’ll create a right of initiative nationally, where any petition that collects one hundred thousand signatures will be eligible to be formally debated in the House of Commons. Any petition with a million signatures will allow members of the public to table a Bill that could end up being debated and voted on by MPs.

… we will put every item of government spending over £25,000 online and for all to see. We’re going to do the same for every public sector salary over £150,000. We will set government data free, and we will give the public a right to request any government data on anything they want that is currently locked up in a vault.

 Strong stuff, which we desperately need to rebuild trust in politics and to remove the taint of spin and lobbying.

Ian Cowie in Saturday’s Daily Telegraph notes,

“It’s a sad fact that, for all the posturing of our Prime Minister on the international stage, there are precious few ways in which Britain leads the world these days. …. First, and most obviously, there are the Armed Forces. Second, and much less obviously, Britain is still a major global force in the provsion of financial services.”

Ian Cowie laments the Labour government’s inability to properly fund the Armed Forces, and wish to tax the financial services industry out of existence, saying of them both, “we’ll miss them when they are gone.” Wonderfully, he supports his case with an excellent graph. You know I like graph’s, they say so much, in such potent ways.

…. from my office window. Be gone Winter, come on Spring.