I am delighted to hear that Baroness Cathy Ashton is to be the new EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs.  Typically, there has been some sniping from Tory Euro-phobes like Timothy Kirkhope MEP, demonstrating yet again that the Conservative Party have difficulty understanding what the term “national interest” means in the context of the European Union.

Why is this good news?

Firstly, it is recognition of the hugely impressive work she has put in as EU Trade Commissioner – following on the similarly impressive role played by her predecessor, Lord Peter Mandelson.

Secondly, the new role is going to be pivotal in the EU and may at least initially turn out to be more significant than the part played by the new President and having a Briton right at the heart of the EU will ensure that the UK is not sidelined.

This is particularly important now that the Conservative Party have taken themselves out of the Centre-Right mainstream by the bizarre decision to withdraw their MEPs from the EPP grouping.  In the event (remote, of course) of there being a Conservative Government after the next General Election, it will be important for the UK’s standing in Europe that the UK is not seen as being only represented by swivel-eyed phobics.

Thirdly and most importantly, she will do a good job.  She demonstrated as Leader of the Lords that she could build consensus (she was genuinely a Leader of the whole House and not just of the Labour benches), and as a Minister that she could master complex detail (steering hugely complicated and difficult pieces of legislation through the House – not least the Bill ratifying the Lisbon Treaty).

My only regret is that this means that she will remain on “Leave of Absence” from the House of Lords while she remains in post.

And, of course, I also feel sorry for her husband Peter Kellner, who was one of my local Labour Party members when I held my first political office as a Party Branch Secretary when I was still at school almost 40 years ago.  I bumped into him a few weeks after Cathy’s appointment as EU Trade Commissioner, greeting him with the words “When did you last see your wife?” and detected a whiff of sadness when he replied defensively “Sunday night”.

Lord McNally, the Leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords, made a characteristically flamboyant contribution to the debate on the Motion for an Humble Address.  In it, he referred to the “GOATs” and called some of them “pouffes”.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown appointed a number of people -previously outside politics – to the House of Lords as Ministers, as part of a “Government of All the Talents”.  And inevitably these Ministers became known as the GOATs.

Today, McNally went further:

“This year I should like to bring another concept—“pouffe”. “Pouffe” is what happens when a notable talent joins the Prime Minister’s Government as one of the GOATs. They appear at the Dispatch Box; we all admire them—and then “pouffe”. The noble Lord, Lord Jones—“pouffe”. The noble Lord, Lord Carter—“pouffe”. The noble Baroness, Lady Vadera—“pouffe”. The noble Lord, Lord Darzi—“pouffe”. The noble Lord, Lord Malloch-Brown—“pouffe”.

There are two notable exceptions. Who can read the first lines of the epic poem “Casabianca” without bringing into mind the behaviour of the noble Lord, Lord West of Spithead? We all know the first lines:

“The boy stood on the burning deck,

Whence all but he had fled”.

The admiral, good sailor that he is, has clearly decided to go down with the ship. In contrast is the case of the noble Lord, Lord Sugar, who seems to have gone from landing stage to lifeboat without bothering to join the ship at all. [Laughter.] The Benches opposite are not supposed to laugh at that. The noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, is not laughing.

The sad fact is that the Prime Minister is now a very lonely goatherd.”

I make no comment …

Lord Kamlesh Patel has revealed the secret of what the civil service consider to be a “good” answer to a Parliamentary Question.  In his speech seconding the Motion for an Humble Address (the formal Parliamentary response to the Queen’s Speech always proposed and seconded by back-benchers from the Government side), he recounted his experiences on becoming a Whip (he has since resigned) and his desire for training, in particular on the arcane art of answering Parliamentary Questions.

This is what he said:

“I had to learn a great deal as a Minister in the Whips’ Office. …. The first is that you have to answer a lot of parliamentary Questions, often on subjects about which you know little. I take this opportunity to thank noble Lords for their forbearance and patience with me during the times when this was abundantly clear to them.

I can assure noble Lords that, despite their doubts, I sought guidance and advice about answering parliamentary Questions. Surely, I thought, there must be some sort of guidance—a course, an induction programme, perhaps, that I could go on. Early on, I sought advice. “No, you do not need a training course on this”, I was told, “you just need to learn a few golden rules”. I was told a story that perfectly illustrated what the golden rules were. Let me share this with noble Lords.

A Minister and a senior civil servant are being driven to some remote government establishment. The car begins to travel deep into the countryside, it is getting late, and the fog closes in. The car gets slower and slower and finally the driver, dimly seeing a passer-by, rolls down the window and shouts, “Where are we?”. Back comes the answer, “You are in a car in the fog”. The civil servant immediately jumps up and says, “Do you realise, Minister, that that is the perfect answer to a parliamentary Question? It is short, it is absolutely true and it tells you nothing that you did not already know”.”

So now we all know ….

I spent some time tonight at the Cyprus High Commission viewing a very powerful exhibition of photographs showing how a huge number of churches and places of worship have been desecrated in those parts of Cyprus that were invaded and occupied by Turkish forces in 1974.

The photographs were taken by Doros Partasides who settled in London with his family after the 1974 invasion (he also photographed the invasion itself and its aftermath).  In the last few years, it has been possible for him to return and, as he puts it, that it was “with great trepidation” he finally visited his father’s village in the occupied area for the first time in over thirty years.

He writes:

“It was if time had stopped there in 1974.  It was immeasurably moving for me.  I decided then to record these tragic images and so this long photographic journey began.

The first church I photographed was in the village of Gerolakos.  … The doors were shut.  Inside, a hut had been erected next to the altar labelled ‘KEBAB’.

From then on, wherever I went, the message of devastation was the same.  I encountered abandoned churches to the point of collapse, interiors desecrated with animal and human waste, precious frescoes defaced, altars and icon stands damaged beyond recognition; churches transformed into mosques, places of entertainment, military headquarters and watchtowers; cemetaries strewn with broken headstones, the graves themseves dug up.

My camera became my weapon.  The anger and horror I experienced served only to give me the strength to continue recording this terrible destruction of my religious heritage.”

It is likely to be “nasty, brutish and short”.

Tomorrow is the Queen’s Speech and I know no more than anyone else about what will be included, but in any event the reality is that few if any of the Bills announced tomorrow will make it in to law before Parliament is dissolved for the General Election.

Look at the arithmetic.

The House of Lords will in practice be the limiting factor.  There are normally three sitting days each week in the Lords for Government business.   (This rises to four in July and October, but that is not relevant to this calculation.)

After the Queen’s Speech debate finishes next week, there will be ten full days available for Government business before  Parliament rises for the Christmas Recess on 16th December and one of these is already allocated for a full day of consideration of the Eames Report on reforms to the House of Lords Code of Conduct (and another day may also be lost to consideration of the Senior Salaries Review Board review of House of Lords allowances).  At best, this means nine days before the end of December.

Parliament reassembles on 5th January and rises again for a “half-term” recess on 10th February.  This provides another seventeen days for Government business.

Parliament then restarts on 22nd February and is unlikely to run past the end of March before the Easter break and the likely dissolution of Parliament for a May General Election.  This gives at best another eighteen days for Government business.

No more than 44 days in total.

Most of the Bills in the Queen’s Speech will begin their passage in the House of Commons.  This is the norm for controversial Bills and for “flagship” pieces of legislation (as most of the Bills to be announced tomorrow are likely to be).  Such Bills cannot reach the Lords until they have completed their Commons’ stages.  so as a result, nothing substantial is likely to be ready for Lords’ consideration until end-January at the very earliest.

Three Bills have been the subject of Carry Over motions and have already had some consideration in the Commons.  In theory, these might reach the Lords a little earlier.  However, none are likely to get a swift passage once they get there.

One is the Equality Bill, which is substantial and likely to receive particularly rigorous line-by-line consideration in the Lords.  Another is the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill, which is also wide-ranging and because of some of the changes proposed in it for the House of Lords and, in particular, the remaining hereditary peers is also likely to attract especially thorough (and slow) Lords scrutiny.

So how many Bills will emerge from the 2009/10 Parliamentary Session as Acts?  My guess is no more than a handful – and possibly none of the major ones.

They will all have to wait for a reinvigorated Labour Government to announce them in the Queen’s Speech next June ……

Parliament has been prorogued. The 2008/9 Parliamentary Session ended on 12^th November 2009 and the new Session begins with the Queen’s Speech on 18^th November 2009.  I suspect the 2008/9 Session will be remembered for the expenses and other scandals that engulfed both House rather than for the legislation enacted during it.  However, some major Bills were passed and became Acts of Parliament.  These included the:

• Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act:  this provides a statutory framework for and a right for 16-18 year-olds to apprenticeships; gives employees a right to request time-off for training; gives local government responsibility for funding education and training for 16-18 year olds; changes school inspection arrangements; creates a new parental complaints service; and strengthens accountability.
• Banking Act:  this provides a permanent system for dealing with failing banks; and gives the Bank of England a new “financial stability” objective.
• Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Act:  this changes the rules on naturalisation; gives new functions (and new duty to safeguard children) to the UK Border Agency; and introduces powers to control all those arriving in the UK from the rest of the Common Travel Area.
• Business Rate Supplements Act:  this gives upper tier local authorities (in London, the Greater London Authority) the power, following consultation, to levy an additional business rate for economic development purposes (including Crossrail in London).
• Coroners and Justice Act:  this reforms and updates the law on coroners; extends the laws on child pornography to cover non-photographic images; increases the flexibility on hearing evidence from vulnerable witnesses etc.
• Health Act:  this gives statutory force to the new NHS Constitution and sets out the responsibilities of patients and staff; introduces direct payments for health services to give patients greater control over the services they receive; makes provision for more information on service quality to be made available to patients and others; and introduces new measures to protect young people from the harm caused by smoking.
• Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act: this makes provisions to encourage the greater involvement of people in local authority decision-making; creates an obligation on councils to respond to petitions; establishes a new body to represent the interests of tenants; and places a new duty on local authorities to assess economic conditions in their area and to work with Regional Development Agencies to produce a single regional strategy.
• Marine and Coastal Access Act:  this reforms the law on marine regulation, fisheries management and marine conservation; and enables the creation of a walkable route around the English coast.
• Parliamentary Standards Act: this created the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority.
• Policing and Crime Act: this strengthens police accountability; creates an offence of paying for sex with trafficked or coerced women; tightens regulation of lap-dancing clubs; and amends police powers for dealing with young people drinking in public.
• Political Parties and Elections Act: this strengthens the powers of the Electoral Commission; alters the definition of election expenses; and requires greater clarity on the source of political donations.
• Welfare Reform Act: this abolishes Income Support and moves all claimants on to either Jobseekers’ Allowance or, if sick, on to Employment and Support Allowance; introduces a new regime of sanctions for non-attendance at JobCentres; and provides additional powers for the enforcement of child maintenance arrears.

In addition, the House of Lords spent seven full days debating the Postal Services Bill, which would have enabled a minority stake in the Royal Mail Group to be sold whilst ensuring that the Group remained in public ownership, would have transferred the Royal Mail’s historic pension deficit to the Government and would have created a regulatory regime for the postal services sector under OFCOM.  In the event, the Bill, having passed all its stages in the Lords, was introduced in the House of Commons and then abandoned.  The Bill has now fallen with the end of the Parliamentary Session. Three major Bills that have had their Second Reading debates and some Committee discussion in the House of Commons have been the subject of Carry Over motions, which means that they have not fallen with the end of the Parliamentary Session and their progress through Parliament can be resumed in the new Session.  These are the:

• Child Poverty Bill:  this would give statutory force to the Government’s 1999 commitment to eradicate child poverty by 2020, placing a duty on Ministers to meet income poverty targets and requiring the regular production of a child poverty strategy.
• Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill:  this would end “by-elections” to replace the remaining hereditary peers that sit in the Lords when they die; would make it possible for members of the Lords to resign or to be suspended/expelled; introduce a new Parliamentary process for the ratification of Treaties; establish a statutory basis for the running of the civil service; end the Prime Minister’s role in appointing senior judges; introduce new rules on protests around Parliament and a variety of other constitutional adjustments.
• Equality Bill:  this would harmonise and extend anti-discrimination legislation; would place a unified duty on public bodies; extend discrimination protection to the membership of private clubs; require employers to review and publish gender pay differences within their organisations; extends age discrimination legislation outside the workplace; and much else besides.

The number of defeats suffered by the Government this session is the lowest in any full session since the Labour Government was elected in 1997.  This session the Government was defeated on 24 occasions (out of 89 votes in total).  Last session there were 29 defeats.   By contrast there were 45 Government defeats in the 2006/7 session and 62 in the 2005/6 session.  To put these numbers in context: the last Conservative Government under John Major suffered only 62 defeats in the entire 1992-97 Parliament.

Labour now has 212 members in the Lords and is the largest Party, but this only amounts to 30% of the total membership of 705.  There are 190 Conservative peers (27%), 183 cross-benchers (26%), and 71 LibDems (10%) – the remainder comprise 26 Church of England bishops/archbishops and 23 non-affiliated or other. The reality of these numbers is that the Government does not have an automatic majority to carry through its legislation.  At any one time, the opposition parties can combine to defeat the Government, particularly as a significant proportion of the cross-benchers will usually vote with the opposition, depending on the issue.

The BBC has picked up on yesterday’s mini-row about the curse of “Reply All”.  What started the problem was an email from Mark Pritchard MP asking, what he no doubt thought was an innocuous question, about who might be interested in joining a new All-Party Group on Cyber-Security.  He had sent it to all MPs and Peers on the Parliamentary email system.  This in itself is not uncommon.

Derek Wyatt MP then responded to say – I paraphrase – that, as one of the handful of Parliamentarians interested in and knowledgeable about cyber issues, he  hadn’t known that Mark Pritchard was also concerned about such matters, that there were a number of other All-Party Groups in existence that looked at cyber questions and, given the extraordinary number of All-Party Groups in general, was an additional one really necessary.  Perhaps in an effort to stifle the fledgling prior to birth he pressed the “Reply All” button and sent his comment to all MPs and Peers.

This then prompted, first, a cascade of MPs and Peers agreeing with him that there were far too many All-Party Groups (all sent using “ReplyAll”) and, second, a torrent of MPs and Peers complaining about the excessive use of the “Reply All” button (some of them were quite intemperate in tone, typed in capitals and used red ink) but also – no doubt to emphasise how irritating it was – sent “Reply All”.

There are, of course, two issues here.

The first is why for so many people is it their default reaction when responding to something to tell an entire mailing list that unfortunately they cannot attend a particular meeting or whatever it might be.  No doubt, it is assumed that their presence or otherwise is so crucial that the response of others will be determined by what they say.   This is sheer arrogance.  If they are that self-important, there are other outlets – they could take up blogging, for example.

Parliamentarians are not, in fact, the worst offenders.  I find members of the London Assembly and their staff are even more profligate with the “Reply All” button.

The second issue is the extraordinary number of All-Party Groups these days.  If you want to count them, look here.  There are so many that it is often impossible for them to find a room, however small, in the Parliamentary Estate for a meeting.  Often there are so many competing Groups meeting simultaneously that most of them are lucky to get more than two or three Parliamentarians even to look in for a few minutes.

And just for the record I responded to Mark Pritchard saying this was a topic I was interested in and in which over the last few years I had been actively involved.  I didn’t press “Reply All” – my reply was just to him – but I also said I had some sympathy with the view that the issue could be pursued ender the umbrella of one of the existing groups.

I intervened in Lords Question Time today on the issue of terrorist websites.

This is my second contribution to Question Time in three days – I am beginning to fear that it may be habit forming …..

For those who are really interested, the full exchanges were as follows:

3.23 pm

Asked By Lord Naseby

To ask Her Majesty’s Government how many websites have been closed under the Terrorism Act 2006.

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office (Lord West of Spithead): My Lords, the police’s preferred route for removing potentially unlawful terrorist content is through informal contact with the internet service provider. They are happy with the impact of this approach to date. As a result, it has not yet been necessary for them to use the formal powers given under the Terrorism Act 2006 to close any websites.

Lord Naseby: My Lords, is it not extraordinary that—after an Act was passed following the 7/7 bombings, in response particularly to pressure from Prime Minister Blair; and in view of the emphasis that the current Prime Minister puts on terrorism—according to the Answer that the noble Lord has just given, we are still allowing these websites to exist and to be the lungs of publicity for the terrorists, modified only by the judgment of someone in the police force?

Lord West of Spithead: My Lords, my Answer did not say that we are allowing those things to happen; we have a whole raft of measures. We are removing websites on a voluntary basis with the ISPs. We are countering them by putting our own stuff on them. We are talking to local community activists, who put stuff on the websites. We are looking at how we can filter them. We have talked to all the various providers to ensure that we do that filtering, and we have looked at reducing access in areas of search engines and in things like Facebook. We are doing a huge raft of work. Indeed, I would be embarrassed to stand here, having been doing this for two years and pushing it, to find that we had not done that. We are out there in amongst it really trading blows toe-to-toe. We are doing that and we are actually getting somewhere on this. Now, that does not mean that we do not have to keep working—it is very difficult. As we know—and this is part of the Cyber Security Strategy—a lot of this is international. A lot of this is abroad—it is carried on by ISPs abroad. We have to deal with them internationally. However, I can assure this House that we are really working hard in this area. We will jolly well get there, and we will jolly well knock them for six finally.

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer: My Lords, can Minister say a little more about how his department co-operates with other countries which are hosting websites of this nature?

Lord West of Spithead: My Lords, the noble Baroness touches on something that is very difficult. We are in negotiation with a number of countries about this; as I said, the issue impinges on our whole Cyber Security Strategy. Cyberspace is global—that is one of the problems with it—and many of these actors are acting elsewhere. Finding out who has done something, finding out which server the information is on and where it has come from, is very difficult. It takes very detailed and hard work. I am glad to say that we have some of the best people in the world doing this work, but it is highly complicated.

We deal with those countries, negotiate with them and talk about these things. However, some countries are not willing to do this—it is quite difficult—which is when we have to confront the problem and approach it in other ways. But we are working with many countries and trying to get international agreements. We have managed to do that in terms of paedophilia and child pornography and we need to try to do the same in this area, but it is much more complicated. What is violent extremism and what it is allowable for someone to say involve difficult nuances.

Lord Swinfen: My Lords, are some of these websites a source of information in the battle against terrorism?

Lord West of Spithead: My Lords, I do not think that I want to talk about that.

Lord Harris of Haringey: My Lords, my noble friend indicated that it had not been necessary to use the powers under the Terrorism Act 2006 because of the levels of co-operation and work being done with internet service providers to block access to particular sites. Is that co-operation forthcoming from all the internet service providers operating in this country, or are some providers perhaps less co-operative?

Lord West of Spithead: My Lords, so far, the police have not found it necessary to use what they could use from the Act. That means that they have managed to achieve what they want to achieve. It would be wrong to say that everyone is as co-operative, because they are not. There is one area of weakness that I thought someone might ask me about, and that I am not happy with. It is that because police forces are operationally separate, they have probably not recorded formally as well as they should exactly when they have shut down a site. We are in negotiations about that. When we passed the Act in 2006, we laid down a requirement to make such records, but it has not really been done. The Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism is now talking in great detail to the Association of Chief Police Officers, and the requirement will be met. We need to make sure that records are properly kept because we need to have precise facts to work on. The successes of the police forces are not being registered, and that needs to happen.

Baroness Neville-Jones: My Lords, apropos of the Minister’s last remark, did he say how many sites have been recorded as having been shut down?

Lord West of Spithead: My Lords, I would be nervous of giving a figure because it would be meaningless as records have not been kept by all 51 police forces around the country. That is why we are doing this work now to ensure that records are formally kept. We are talking with ACPO about the need to get the precise figures. We need statistics and figures that are meaningful and can be accepted and used within this House.

The Earl of Erroll: My Lords, surely the terrorism websites should be closed down by the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, not by local police forces.

Lord West of Spithead: My Lords, we operate in this country by letting the local police carry on and take those particular actions. SOCA is very closely involved in some of these arenas, as is GCHQ and others, but the police take the action.

The Earl of Onslow: My Lords, can we have some advice on websites that instruct people on how to make bombs and are, in effect, sources of information rather than terrorist websites? It is unfortunate that people can just Google the question, “How can you blow everybody up?”.

Lord West of Spithead: My Lords, the noble Earl identifies a difficult area. If that is tied to things that are inciting people to take action, it is much more straightforward, but it is very difficult when it is just straight information. One of the reasons I am concerned about the whole area of CBRNE—chemical, biological, radiological and novel explosive-type stuff—is that the availability of such detailed information on the internet is quite worrying. A lot of that—for example, stuff to do with biological—we cannot take off because there is no reason why it should not be there. However, it is extremely worrying because, more than ever, there is access to things that are very dangerous.

Lord Pearson of Rannoch: My Lords, when we use the word terrorism in this context, are we mostly referring to violent Islamism, to the jihadists, or are other sects involved when we use that word, in which case how many and to what extent?

Lord West of Spithead: My Lords, the word terrorism applies to a whole spectrum of people. The greatest threat to our nation at the moment, without a doubt, is al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda-inspired terrorism, but there are a number of others. I would not wish to go through them all, but all of them are monitored and have action taken against them if they are breaking the law.

The Parliamentary Session is due to end some time tomorrow and the Lords and the Commons are now playing ping pong – trading amendments so that Bills can be finally approved by both Houses in the same form so that they can receive Royal Assent before Prorogation.

The Coroners and Justice Bill has now returned to the Lords.  The Commons have reversed some of the changes made to the Bill by the Lords at earlier stages.  One of these was an amendment proposed by the Liberal Democrats and carried with the support of the Conservatives that – in effect – would have enabled the fact of sexual infidelity as being a mitigating factor in arguing that a charge of murder should be reduced to manslaughter.

The House of Commons disagreed with the amendment and returned the Bill without the amendment to the Lords.  The Liberal Democrats have today re-proposed their previous amendment (in a different form).  On this occasion the Conservatives abstained and the LibDem bid has been defeated by 157 to 63.

There was an excellent speech from Baroness Joyce Gould – as a non-lawyer, in a debate dominated by barristers – in which she said:

“My Lords, I rise to oppose the amendment and ask for the reintroduction of the original clause.  …..

I do not have and cannot give examples of what has happened in court; I cannot cite cases. I can cite the views of many hundreds of women who feel absolutely outraged that this House deleted the clause in the first place. The Women’s National Commission, of which I am chair, and which, as my noble friend said, represents 550 very varied women’s organisations, large and small, around the country, was inundated with queries as to how that could possibly happen. No one believed that it could. As a consequence, I was asked as chair whether I would write to the Secretary of State for Justice expressing the concerns of those many women, which I did. I was delighted—as I am sure they were as well—to see it back. I hope that it stays in the Bill.

The Women’s National Commission has long known from our work with the violence against women sector the devastating effect of domestic homicide on families and communities. In the UK, two women a week die at the hands of their partners. That level is clearly unacceptable, but until violence against women is eradicated, we must ensure that justice is served on those men who commit such crimes.

As has been said, the law of provocation has a long history. The killing of a wife or girlfriend by a partner because of an actual or suspected infidelity—she may never have done anything, but he thinks that she has—has often been used in the past to reduce murder to manslaughter. The law should be clear that it is no longer acceptable in the 21st century—not the 18th century, the 21st century—that anyone owns anyone. The penalty for infidelity—which in itself is not a crime—should not be one of killing by anyone. Those partners who believe it right to kill should always go on trial for murder. In this instance, our concern is that men who kill women should not be able to plead the traditional argument that she was unfaithful, or that she might have been unfaithful, to support a plea of loss of self-control.

The noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, cited the Humes case of 2002. The point about the Humes case was that the judge accepted the manslaughter provocation. It did not go a jury, and yet we have heard an awful lot about how the clause is unnecessary because juries would understand in this modern age. That case did not go to a jury; the judge took the decision. Therefore, the argument in respect of juries collapses. I find it extraordinary that those arguments have been put.

It is vital that the Bill is amended once more to reintroduce the clause and to return it to the Commons. Without the clause, the Coroners and Justice Bill will allow men who perpetrate violence against women to operate with impunity. It is vital that we protect women and children by supporting the clause. Infidelity alone cannot and should not provide a defence for murder.”

I have a confession to make.  At least once a day I read Iain Dale’s blog.  Sometimes I find it amusing and sometimes I find it interesting, particularly as a means of understanding the modern Conservative mindset.  Occasionally, of course, I read it as an antidote to low blood pressure.

Today, he had a good rant with “This Pseudo-Fascist Plan Must be Scrapped“.  This relates to the proposals on communications data and the need to preserve these for law enforcement purposes.

Reading the rant, I was surprised – not at its tone (Iain Dale is renowned for giving good rant), but at what I naively assumed was the factual trigger for the rant.  It sounded as though the Government was pressing ahead with legislation on this with a view to getting it passed this side of a General Election.  I was surprised for two reasons: first, that I had missed the announcement; and second, I had understood that this was not what was intended.

However, such was my faith in Iain Dale that I have only just got round to checking the facts.

And what did I find?  The entire rant was based on absolutely nothing.

The Government has NOT announced that it is pressing ahead with legislation.  All it has done is publish the results of its consultation exercise on the issue.  And sensible commentators (not Iain Dale) have recognised that the plans have been shelved.  The idea of a single Government database had in any event been dropped months ago.

I have two warnings for Iain Dale.

First, if he gets himself this worked up about something that ISN’T happening, he will need to be on heavy-duty tranquillisers long before we get into a General Election campaign.

And second, as I have pointed out before, there is a real and serious issue here that any Government must address.  As I said before the consultation was launched:

“At present, telephone companies keep data on their subscribers who make telephone calls, who they connect to and for how long.  They do this, so that they can bill people.  For many years, it has been possible for the police to access this data as part of their investigations into crime.  To do so, they have to get proper authorisation, certifying that accessing the data is proportionate to the crime being investigated and each case has to be considered individually.  The data can be used as evidence in Court and does not involve tapping the call and listening to the content.  Many trials rely on this evidence for criminals to be convicted – there is a murder trial under way at the moment where the crucial evidence is which mobile phones contacted each other just prior to and immediately after the murder took place.

But – and this seems to have passed the pundits by – technology is changing.  Telecoms companies (both fixed line and mobile operators) are building new networks based on VoIP technology.  This is cheaper and more flexible and - critically – does not require detailed call-by-call billing.  The data on which so many trials now rely will soon cease to exist.  The Government is therefore quite rightly going to consult on what can be done to capture this information and allow it to be used in criminal investigations where necessary.

It is not about giving the police more powers to pry into people’s personal lives.  It is about not losing vital material that is currently used to catch criminals.

And, of course, new forms of communication are being created all the time (eg. on social networking sites and chat facilities built into on-line gaming).  Should the police have powers to find out who is communicating with who in these new ways?  That’s what the consultation is about.  It is not some monstrous new assault on civil liberties.  It is allowing a sensible debate about how existing powers should be modified to reflect the changes in technology.”

Unless Iain Dale wants to see the police having to fight serious criminals with even less information available to them than they have at the moment, this is a nettle that is going to have to be grabbed.