Mark Irvine - Blogger, Campaigner, Organiser

The Sunday Times contained an interesting opinion poll at the weekend - one which suggested there is great public support for toughening up the rules at the Palace of Westminster - where MPs and 'noble' peers go about their work. Now I think the answers to the questions are quite predictable - because a great many people hold politicians in contempt these days even though not all of them are corrupt and completely useless. But the problem is that there are far too few, if any, politicians who are selfless - who give the impression that they really do want to clean up the Palace of Westminster - without playing party politics and by tackling the vested interests on their own side. The point about MPs is that they should not, as a general rule, be able to take up other paid jobs - which mean that they are absent from day jobs on a regular basis or for any significant length of time. As far as the House of Lords is concerned, the place is a joke and a hug...

Scottish Labour leader - Johann Lamont - has sacked her finance spokesperson Ken Macintosh, and replaced him with her predecessor as Labour leader, Iain Gray. I can't be the only person to find this move rather strange especially as Ken actually beat Johann in the Labour leadership vote amongst ordinary Labour members. Yet again the trade unions are responsible for defying the wishes of individual party members - as they did at a UK level when the trade union vote handed victory to Ed Miliband when his brother David Miliband - actually won the support of a majority of Labour party members.  One Member One Vote (OMOV) is the obvious solution to this farcical situation - which the party leadership must face up to at some stage. Labour Loser Wins Again (18 December 2013) The new leader of the Scottish Labour party - Johann Lamont - has not been elected by individual Labour party members. In the individual ...

Scotland's First Minister - Alex Salmond - deserves credit for telling the 'stuffed shirts' at Muirfield golf club that they can stick their invitation to this year's Open Championship - where the sun don't shine. Now, of course, the First Minister used more polite language that I've just employed to convey his message, but his point is still plain for all to see - exclusive 'all male' golf clubs in this day and age are ridiculous and a terrible embarrassment to Scotland. I don't know who decides where the Open Golf Championship will be held  every year, but whoever it is - they should grow up and decide that, in future, they will boycott any golf clubs that deny membership to women players. Now that would include the home of golf course - the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews - which has a long standing tradition of offering honorary membership to the principal of St Andrews University. Yet that...

I've been scouring the internet searching for news of the Saudi Shurah Council - to see if this body has finally decided whether women in one of the most conservative of Muslim countries in the world - are able to drive. Not able to drive in a physical sense, of course, because women in Saudi Arabia are able to operate plenty of other mechanical devices - ones that came along long after the motor car - such washing machines, air conditioning devices and TVs.  Yet the country's religious rulers don't seem to have a problem with women getting their 'hands dirty' on these domestic contraptions - so why do they get their knickers in such a twist about women being able drive a car. It's a control thing, of course - whatever will these pesky women want next: the right to control  when and if they have children, perhaps, what clothes they want to wear or the right to a decent education - and a job with a career. ...

Labour's Number Two Ed - Ed Balls - gets mercilessly mauled in the latest edition of Private Eye quite rightly, in my view - for his 'head in the sand' approach to the UK's mammoth debt problem over the past few years. But now Ed has seen the light, so we are encouraged to believe, yet as the Private Eye and others have pointed out - there's a long, long way to go before the country gets back on its feet. Now if Labour would stop treating the voters as 'useful idiots', I would start thinking about supporting for the party again - although at the moment, I have to say, we are rather a long way from that too.    Ed Balls unveils his grand strategy to solve Britain's debt problem By Our Political Staff Peter O'Bore Labour's Shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls, stunned the political world yesterday by revealing his radical blueprint for slashing Britain's £1.3 trillion national debt. Previously, Mr Balls ...

John Rentoul was spot on with this recent article in The Independent - in which he asks, rhetorically - what's the point of voting Labour? - if they are following virtually the same economic programme as the Conservatives by 2015.   A very good question, if you ask me. Recovery means... dumping Labour policies Protected by the amulet of Saint Clem, Ed Miliband could go on to bury John Maynard Keynes By John Rentoul That is what Ed Miliband was up to in his speech yesterday, in which he pointed out – a brilliant touch, this (no, really) – that Clement Attlee balanced the budget It's like that moment in a fairy tale when the long winter is ending, the forces of darkness recede, and there's a CGI sparkle in every hedgerow. Government ministers think the economy is on the turn, although they can't say so in public, so they do the next-worst thing, which is to tell journalists. George Osborne will not say anything remotely upbeat when he...

Here are two interesting pieces of information - the first is an extract from the Court of Session, Scotland's highest civil court, in which three senior judges unanimously threw out an appeal from South Lanarkshire Council. The second is an extract from an article in The Sunday Herald newspaper by Tom Gordon and Paul Hutcheon - the final part of which I have highlighted in bold, for easy reference. The thing that puzzles me is that South Lanarkshire Council now appears to be arguing that their aim is to protect 'sensitive data' as 'an important issue that's worth defending'. Yet in the Court of Session the Council made no fuss or challenge on that particular point - the Council's main concern at that time being whether Mark Irvine had any legitimate interest in seeing the data - which the Scottish Information Commissioner (SIC) decided that I had. In the event Lords Marnoch, Brailsford and Mackay agreed with SIC - and so South Lanar...

So the Labour Party has finally stepped in and put an end to the shenanigans in Falkirk - where the Sunday Herald newspaper exposed voting irregularities in the contest to replace the sitting, former Labour MP - Eric Joyce. The key allegation made by the Sunday Herald was that Unite members were suddenly joining the Labour Party in Falkirk in suspiciously large numbers - presumably in an organised attempt to influence or possibly manipulate the ballot - since some of the individuals concerned were apparently unaware that they had even become Labour Party members. All of which stinks to high heaven of course - so the Labour Party has sensibly taken control of the contest and announced  that any members who joined after Eric Joyce stood down on 12 March 2012 - will not be allowed to take part in the selection vote . Predictably, the Unite trade union has thrown its rattle out of the pram and blamed the selection farce on a conspiracy within ...

The Moors murder - Ian Brady - made the most of his appearance at a mental health tribunal the other day where he complained in a self-obsessed, narcissistic way - that he was a 'monkey in a cage being poked with a stick'. An apt description, if you ask me - but something he has brought entirely on himself after the cold blooded sexual torture and murder of five young children all those years ago in Yorkshire back in 1966. When asked why he committed these foul crimes, Brady replied - for the 'existential experience' - which in plain language (rather than his purple prose) means that he  committed these horrific acts for no better reason than he wanted to see what it felt like at the time. The cost of providing this convict with the opportunity to impress the world with his contrived vocabuarly and interest in Shakespeare and Plato is estimated at £250,000 - much of which will be spent on legal fees for some of the ...

Simon Jenkins made a fair point in The Guardian the other day - more often than not public enquiries are a convenient and hugely expensive way for Governments and politicians - to kick awkward issues into the long grass. The only recent exception I can think of is the Hillsborough Independent Panel (HIP) which finally exposed the scandalous behaviour of the South Yorkshire Police Force - and its complicity in the unecessary deaths of 96 innocent supporters of Liverpool Football Club. But on second thoughts the HIP was not a traditional public enquiry - of course. No, its great strength lay in eschewing the 'usual suspects' approach and a judge led inquiry of the great and good - instead the HIP was made up of independent minded people - who possessed complementary skills  and were drawn from all walks of life. So, broadly speaking, I agree with Simon Jenkins and my instinctive reaction whe...

I was relieved to learn yesterday that the boffins have dipped back into the official statistics and declared that the UK economy did not experience a 'double-dip' recession - in 2011/2012 after all.   So all that time people spent at night worrying what they would wake up to the next day - was just so much hot air - and a waste of good words as politicians traded their insults in the press and media - and at the Mother of all Parliaments in Westminster. Not that it changes a great deal on the economic front - except to say that it's wise to treat what all politicians say with a great big pinch of salt.