As the election campaign kicks off for real today, David Cameron has told us that we face a choice between him and Ed Miliband as the next Prime Minister.

What an arrogant thing to say. There is no fundamental law of the universe that says that the Tories and their mates in the Labour party have a divine right to take it in turns to rule over us. The choice of the next Prime Minister is up to the British voters, not up to David Cameron.

I'm not sure which makes me angrier. That Cameron takes the electorate for granted like this, or that the electorate will happily go along with it, voting for Labour and the Tories in their millions.

There has been much talk recently of the fact that Maria Miller MP over-claimed about £90K on expenses, and thanks to the fact that her mates were in charge of discipline, all she had to do was to pay back just under £6K of it and issue a half-hearted apology. No criminal charges, no sacking, no proper consequences of any kind.

It goes without saying that if you or I swindled the taxpayer out of £90K, say through a fraudulent benefits claim or by under-declaring our income on our tax return, we'd probably be facing a prison sentence.

It seems that some people think it's unacceptable that Miller gets to keep her job, as well as the money.

Well, of course it's unacceptable, but it's also completely unsurprising that she's got away with it and that the Tory party leadership are as relaxed as they are about the whole thing.

Remember the 2009 expenses scandal? The political classes learned a valuable lesson from that.

That lesson was that they can fiddle their expenses as much as they like, and even if they get caught and get a slew of dreadful headlines in the press and a great feeling of anger against them, it doesn't matter.

Remember the 2010 election? The vast majority of votes went to Labour and the Tories, despite all their criminal behaviour over their expenses.

The lesson the political classes learned from the 2009 expenses scandal is that they don't have to give a shit. The plebs will keep voting for them anyway.

While listening to the radio this morning, I heard a debate in Parliament that filled me with despair. I don't think I can remember ever hearing anything that has made me think worse of the politicians who run this country, and that's saying something. Regular readers of this blog will be aware that I don't hold our politicians in high regard, and that in general I consider them to be a useless bunch of shits who are only interested in their own pockets and power bases.

The debate was about a terrorist suspect, Mohammed Ahmed Mohamed, who had recently escaped from the security services. Apparently, he is suspected of being a terrorist, though he has never been convicted of any terrorist offence.

The debate was almost entirely focused on how terrible it was that Mohamed had escaped and what the government was going to do to make sure he was caught. Almost no-one picked up on the fact that this is a man who has not been convicted of any offence, so the government has absolutely no business restricting his movements in the first place.

An honourable mention must go to Julian Huppert and Jeremy Corbyn, the only 2 MPs who spoke in the debate who expressed concern about restricting the liberty of an innocent man. The remaining MPs came up with riduculous authoritarian nonsense such as suggesting that the solution to the problem was to ban wearing burkas or to repeal the Human Rights Act.

But still, he's called Mohammed, and he's brown, so he's bound to be a terrorist, right? I find it really depressing that it seemed to be taken for granted that he was a terrorist, just because he's "not one of us". I can't help thinking that if he were a middle-class white guy, a few more MPs might haved questioned the wisdom of doing away with all that pesky "fair trial" malarkey and just going straight for the punishment.

Presumably the security services had slightly more to go on than simply that he was brown and called Mohammed. Perhaps they had some intelligence that he was involved in terrorism. Yeah, well the security services had intelligence that Jean Charles de Menezes was a terrorist as well. There's a good reason why a civilised society puts people on trial before punishing them.

For all I know, maybe Mohamed is a dangerous terrorist. If he is, then he should be put on trial. You know, one of those things where you have a judge and a jury, and a chance to defend yourself. If he were tried and found guilty of terrorist offences, then sure, lock him up and throw away the key.

But it's a really important principle that we are all innocent until proven guilty. The fact that only 2 of our MPs appear to understand that is something I find deeply scary.

The London Borough of Merton has recently designated the entire borough as a "controlled drinking zone". What this means is that, although it is not an offence per se to drink alcohol in a public place, if you do drink alcohol in a public place anywhere within the borough, a police or community support officer has the right to require you to stop drinking and to confiscate your drink. In fact, you don't even have to be drinking: you just have to have a bottle with you. Even an unopened bottle can legally be confiscated.

I find this worrying.

Controlled drinking zones (known by the legislation as "Designated Public Places Orders") were designed to reduce anti-social behaviour in specific areas where there was a problem. Stretching a zone to an entire borough seems an extraordinarily broad interpretation of the legislation, and may be open to legal challenge.

What worries me in particular is that this appears to be something that is aimed at restricting the liberties of the poor and marginalised. Technically, if I were to have a picnic in the local park with a nice bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape, my bottle could be confiscated. But I bet it won't be, because I'm white, middle-aged, and middle class.

What do you think is likely to happen if a police officer comes across a black teenager from a deprived neighbourhood drinking a can of lager in the street? Maybe if the teenager is engaging in violent and abusive behaviour, that could be justified (though also completely unnecessary, as being violent and abusive is illegal in its own right). But I dare say there are teenagers from deprived neighbourhoods who can't afford to go to the pub who enjoy drinking a few cans of lager with their mates on street corners. In fact I've seen groups of youths out on the street doing just that, and I've never yet seen any of them causing trouble.

No doubt some people do cause trouble, but it seems totally disproportionate to restrict the liberty of those who don't just to tackle a problem of antisocial behaviour from a minority, especially as violent and antisocial behaviour can be tackled in other ways.

This won't lead to any great political fuss, because the people who are being harmed by this controlled drinking zone are those who lack political power. Most of them probably don't even bother to vote. So politicians don't care about their rights. As stated above, the controlled drinking zone may be unlawful. If it infringed the rights of the middle-classes, you can bet that there would have been a legal challenge by now. To the best of my knowledge, no-one is planning a legal challenge.

One of the Merton MPs, Siobhain McDonagh (who also happens to be my own MP) was tweeting about this the other day. It's clear she supports the policy.

I tried to ask her why she thought it appropriate for the ban to extend to the whole borough (3 times, in fact). In true politician form, she completely avoided that question, and instead answered the questions she'd liked me to have asked her. Here is how the conversation went (for ease of reading, I've arranged the tweets with the oldest ones at the top):

I find it very disappointing that my elected representative not only supports a policy that harms marginalised members of society, but also refuses to engage in a meaningful discussion about her reasons for doing so. Politicians sometimes express surprise that no-one trusts them. When they so stubbornly refuse to engage with the concerns of their constituents, is it any wonder?

In all the reminiscing about Margaret Thatcher that we've heard lately, it seems that many people believe that one of her greatest achievements was curbing the power of union bosses. Now, to be fair, the power of union bosses was a genuine problem in the 1970s. Their democratic legitimacy was questionable, and the damage they did to the economy with repeated strikes was very real.

It was clear that "something must be done": the classic politician's syllogism. Politicians faced with the challenge that "something must be done" tend to focus more on doing "something", rather than on whether that something is the right something.

In Thatcher's case, it certainly wasn't. She took power from union bosses, but she gave even greater power to multinational corporations, particularly in the financial sector. Anyone who has followed what's happened to the economy since 2008 will know that that didn't end well.

Fast forward to the current Conservative government. One of the big problems they have decided to tackle is the benefits system. And yes, again, we do have a genuine problem. About a third of all government spending goes on benefits. That's clearly unhealthy and unsustainable.

Something must be done.

In this case, that "something" appears to be shafting some of the most vulnerable people in our society. Radical changes to the benefit system are only now starting to take effect, so it's too early to be sure what the results will be, but I fear it is likely that many vulnerable people will be left in misery and destitution.

So to me, Thatcher's legacy is that the Conservative party feel free use the excuse of solving one problem to further their ideological agenda while creating even bigger problems.

The news is full of stories about horse meat in processed food at the moment.

Why now? I don't know for sure, but I rather suspect it's because people have only recently started testing for horse DNA, and not because no-one ever put horse meat in cheap processed food before. It would not surprise me one little bit if it turned out that this sort of thing had been going on for years.

The problem is that the consumer demands cheap food. Meat should not be cheap. We'd like it to be cheap, but the reality is that it really shouldn't be. To rear animals for food in an ethical and humane way is a very resource intensive process. If you're doing it right, it's going to be expensive. Once supermarkets and other food suppliers start responding to consumer pressure to supply meat at rock-bottom prices, then it's inevitable that corners are going to be cut.

Clearly somewhere along the line, someone has been actively dishonest. Somewhere between the abattoir and the supermarket shelves, someone knowingly sold horse meat as beef. There's no excuse for that, of course, but in a multibillion pound Europe-wide industry, it's inevitable that there are going to be some less than scrupulous players.

But what of the supermarkets' role in this? Are they the innocent victim of someone else's fraud?

Absolutely not, IMHO. It is their job to know where their meat comes from. In an ideal world, a conversation in a supermarket buying department might go like this:

Buying underling: "Boss, I've found a new supplier of beef for our burgers. They're only charging half the price of our existing supplier!"

Buying boss: "Well, that's a suspiciously large difference in price. I think we need to be careful here. If you think this is worth pursuing, then let's get our quality assurance department to pay them a visit and make absolutely sure that they're not cutting any corners."

I'm guessing that what actually happened is more along these lines:

Buying underling: "Boss, I've found a new supplier of beef for our burgers. They're only charging half the price of our existing supplier!"

Buying boss: "Sounds legit. Where do I sign?"

Now, I'm not saying that the supermarket buyers are necessarily evil people. But here's the thing. There is relentless pressure to keep costs to a minimum. If you find something that's a bit cheaper than it really should be under those circumstances, I'm guessing it's all too easy for a bit of cognitive dissonance to set in. You know, deep down, that the prices are a bit too good to be true. But you don't want to believe that there's anything wrong that's going to scupper this great new deal that could get you a promotion. So you ignore that little nagging doubt that you have.

So are the supermarkets the real bad guys here? Partly, but, and I know this isn't going to be a popular opinion, I believe that we also have to blame consumers. Consumers want cheap meat products. Supermarkets are responding to that demand. They don't actually have a huge amount of choice about that if they want to stay in business.

Politicians are currently expending a lot of hot air on how shocked they are that so many supermarket meat products contain horse. (Are they really shocked? I'm not. Did you really expect that a beef lasagne costing just £1.60 contains only wholesome pure beef?) They will no doubt introduce some more regulation that makes it harder to get away with selling horse meat passed off as beef.

So that will solve the problem, right?

Wrong. The problem is that people expect their food to be produced on the cheap. When the horse meat problem is fixed, other problems will come along and take their place. The only solution is if consumers start to take a bit more of an interest in where their food comes from and are prepared to pay a little more to make sure that their food is produced properly.

Yes, I know that times are tough and there are many who struggle to get by. But there are many ways of eating cheaply without buying processed foods. Not everyone is lucky enough to live near to a local butcher, but for those who do, there are plenty of cheaper cuts of meat that can be delicious (one of my personal favourites is hand of pork). And there's no need to eat meat at all: a vegetarian diet is far cheaper, and healthier as well as an added bonus. If you can't afford to eat good meat every day, it's far better to have it occasionally as a special treat than eat meat of dubious provenance regularly.

So until consumers change their shopping habits, then I'm afraid we are going to see more food scandals. If not horse, then something else. It's inevitable.

Just a thought, but has anyone been checking the supermarket meat for rat DNA?

Yesterday, the government announced that the new Governer of the Bank of England is to be Mark Carney, a Canadian citizen.

I must confess I don't know much about Mark Carney. Everyone seems to say he's a very capable chap, and I have no reason to doubt that. I wish him well in what is certain to be an extremely difficult job.

But what strikes me about this appointment is that it's yet another example of the "one rule for us, one rule for them" culture that's so prevalent in British politics. The government love to make up enormous quantities of rules and regulations that the rest of us (the "plebs", as they would describe us) must follow, but aren't so keen to follow the rules themselves.

Carney's nationality has caused some comment in the media. The government have responded by pointing out that the important thing is that he's the best person for the job, so it makes perfect sense to offer it to him.

This is, of course, a perfectly reasonable argument. It just happens to be one that's not open to the plebs.

There are no doubt many thousands of small businesses up and down the country who have vacancies to fill, and some of those will find that the best person for the job is a foreign national. So, applying the government's logic, they would want all those small businesses to appoint the best person for the job, irrespective of nationality, right?

Wrong.

It seems that the concept of appointing the best person for the job is an option only available to the political elite. If a small business wants to employ a non-EU national, they must first wade through ridiculous quantities of red tape. Even if they have paid all the relevant fees and filled in all the forms (and in practice, this requirement alone is enough to make employing non-EU nationals simply too complex to be practicable for the majority of small businesses), it is still illegal to appoint a non-EU employee if it is possible to find a resident worker who could do the job (but not necessarily do it as well).

No doubt big businesses suffer from these regulations as well to some extent, although they would at least have the resources to comply with all the onerous requirements of employing non-EU nationals, which would be impossible for most small businesses.

(BTW, does anyone remember our Prime Minister talking about cutting the burden of red tape for businesses? Wonder whatever happened to that plan?)

It is pretty clear that, even if Carney was the best person for the job, there were British candidates who could have done it. So the government are failing to comply with the spirit of the law that they impose on the plebs (although I dare say there will be some loophole that will mean they are still acting within the letter of the law).

I am not suggesting that the appointment of Carney was motivated by anything other than a desire to find the best person for the job. But nonetheless, this does come across as yet another example of the government showing that they themselves are not willing to follow the rules that they impose on the plebs.

One rule for us, one rule for them.

The Labour Party leader, Ed Miliband, has recently announced a new Grand Plan to Fix All Society's Ills. This particular GPFASI is called "predistribution". The idea is that rather than tackling inequalities by redistribution (ie taxing the rich and giving money to the poor), Miliband will fix society so that the rich are less rich and the poor are less poor in the first place, so no redistribution is needed.

It has struck me how much this has in common with David Cameron's pet GPFASI, namely the "Big Society". The idea of the Big Society is that we all come together and help each other out, so the various mechanisms that the state has for helping people out will no longer be needed.

What do these two GPFASIs have in common? Well, for a start, they are both great dog-whistle policies designed to appeal to their traditional voters: for Labour, the idea of robbing from the rich to give to the poor, and for the Tories, the idea of scrapping state mechanisms of looking after the vulnerable.

They are also both, on the face of it, splendidly desirable ideas. It really would be good if there were less inequality in society to start with so that government redistributive policies were unnecessary. It would also be really good if everyone in society was nice to each other and looked after each other, so there was no need for the state to get involved.

But the main thing they have in common is that they are both ridiculously idealistic and impractical. Both are couched in vague aspirational terms. Neither has the slightest hint of any specific policies that have a snowball in hell's chance of working in the real world.

There's a wonderful scene in The Life of Brian in which the People's Front of Judea sit around endlessly discussing the need to take action, rather than actually taking any. If you haven't seen it for a while and your memory needs refreshing, here it is.

This is exactly how our political leaders are dealing with the recent revelations of rampant corruption within the banking sector. It is clear that action is required. But instead, our political leaders are sitting around talking about it.

So what action is required? It's pretty simple really. There is excellent prima facie evidence that fraud has happened on a massive scale, and those responsible need to be prosecuted.

When I say those responsible, I mean not only the traders who were actually perpetrating the fraud, but also the entire board of directors of Barclays, and indeed any other banks found to have been joining in. Traders would not be breaking the rules on this kind of scale if the directors of the company had set a culture of honesty, rather than one of greed.

I am not a lawyer, so I'm not sure which specific offences may have been committed, but it seems obvious that if the allegations we've heard in the media have any basis whatsoever, then any half decent prosecutor ought to be able make a pretty good case under either the Fraud Act 2006, the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, or (particularly in the case of the directors) the Companies Act 2006.

Prosecutions, with meaningful penalties (ie imprisonment) for those found guilty, would send an important message that this kind of thing is not acceptable. Directors of other banks would act pretty sharpish to clean up their corporate cultures if they thought that they could be held personally liable for any wrongdoing that happened on their watch. Fining the bank just doesn't cut it: what that actually means is that ordinary people saving for their pensions are the ones who get hurt, as I've written before. I honestly believe that going after the directors in this way would solve a lot of problems.

But that doesn't seem to be what our politicians are doing about it. On the one side, the People's Front of Judea Conservative Party are arguing that there needs to be an inquiry led by a senior politician. But the Judean People's Front Labour Party disagree, and insist that the ludicrous and transparent ploy to kick this issue into the long grass inquiry must be led by a judge. This kind of petty squabbling suits the political parties nicely, as they love to be seen to disagree, to keep up the narrative that there is somehow an important difference between them.

In reality, however, both political parties are united against the common enemy, the Romans ordinary British people. Setting up inquiries, or even better, arguing about how to set up an inquiry, is simply a way of avoiding taking any action.

Let's face it, politicians and bankers have a lot in common. It's not that long since MPs were perpetrating fraud on a massive scale in the form of claiming expenses to which they were not entitled. With the exception of a token number of politicians that you could count on the fingers of one hand who did actually get prosecuted, they got away with it. We already have a couple of token resignations from the board of directors at Barclays, but the bankers will probably get away with it too.

MPs and bankers are both dishonest elites who consider themselves above the law. Is it surprising that when the chips are down, they look out for each other?

No doubt much has been written about today's Queen's Speech, and much will continue to be written, but I want to focus on just one sentence:

"My government will introduce legislation to establish an independent adjudicator to ensure supermarkets deal fairly and lawfully with suppliers."

Just think about that for a minute. We need new legislation to ensure that supermarkets act lawfully.

Er, hold on a minute: shouldn't existing legislation, by definition, be enough to ensure that everyone, even supermarkets, acts lawfully?

Apparently not.

Something has gone horribly wrong here. Why should we need new laws in order to make sure people act within existing ones? Well, I think the problem is this. Despite promises by governments of all parties to cut red tape, what actually happens is that governments seldom do cut red tape, but just introduce new laws in a steady stream. We end up with such a complete mess of laws that they become unenforceable.

After all, laws don't enforce themselves. We have the police to enforce the important criminal laws, but the police don't have the resources even to do that. When my office was broken into a few years ago, the police said they'd give me a crime number for the insurance, but that's all they would do. They simply didn't have the resources to investigate. And that was despite the burglers having a key, which narrowed down the potential list of suspects considerably.

So seriously, what chance is there that the police are going to enforce the niceties of employment or competition law?

No, the fact is that each new set of laws requires a new enforcement body. And most enforcement bodies are also under-resourced. The Information Commissioner's Office is supposed to enforce the Data Protection Act, but doesn't.

Even when laws are enforced, as I've written before, they are often not enforced in a meaningful way.

So I suppose there is some kind of logic to the new legislation. Supermarkets are probably breaking the law left, right and centre, but without anyone with the specific job of enforcing the law, they will continue to do so. So we need new legislation to enforce existing legislation.

This is madness. It is a clear sign that we have way too much legislation. What we need is to stop introducing new, unenforceable laws, and scrap many of the existing ones, which, let's face it, were mainly designed to make money for lawyers rather than serve any useful purpose. When we have a meaningful number of laws that are actually necessary, I dare say their enforcement will become a whole lot easier and stop needing new laws.

Cash for Cameron

A major shitstorm erupted over the weekend after a sting by the Sunday Times, in which one of their journalists posed as a potential donor to Tory party funds. The then Tory party treasurer Peter Cruddas, who has since resigned, was filmed explaining that a donation of £250K would buy access to the Prime Minister and influence on government policy.

Shock horror! People who donate huge sums of money to political parties end up having influence on the party! Who knew?

David Cameron's initial reaction to this was to go with his gut instinct as a politician, and do what any seasoned politician would do in these circumstances: he lied through his teeth. He said that this was unacceptable and not all all how they do things. Oh no.

That's bollocks, of course. It's not exactly a secret that donating large sums of money to the Tory party gets you access to the Prime Minister. In fact, the Tory party website itself advertises dinners with David Cameron as one of the perks of making large donations.

But really, how much of a surprise is any of this? Surely no-one is naïve enough to think that people would donate a quarter of a million quid to the Tory party just for fun? Why would you donate that sort of money if you didn't expect anything in return?

Well, the Labour party were quick to get on their high horse and say how shocking it is. As if they'd ever let their funders influence them. Oh wait, didn't Ed Miliband only get elected as party leader because he was the choice of Labour's funders, the trade unions? The Labour party MPs or members didn't want him.

But hold on, I hear you cry, that's completely different. At least trade union funding of the Labour party is based on deep historical reasons and is completely transparent. Well, maybe. But do we really think that individual wealthy donors don't also get to influence Labour party policy? Remember Bernie Ecclestone? He was the boss of Formula One racing, and donated vast sums of money to the Labour party. When the Labour government introduced a ban on tobacco sponsorship of sporting events, amazingly, Formula One was exempt from the ban. Coincidence? I don't think so.

So for the Labour party to look shocked at this and pretend it's a party political issue is the height of hypocrisy.

And let's not pretend the LibDems are exempt from this. The Tories let them share the chocolate Hobnobs at cabinet meetings, which in percentage terms represents a gigantic contribution to LibDem funds. And in return, the Tories get to dictate LibDem policy on tuition fees, the NHS, and a whole host of other things.

It's not as if the latest revelations are a one-off for the Tories. Doesn't it seem a little fishy that Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, received significant donations from a private healthcare company shortly before introducing a bill that seeks to dramatically increase the role of private providers in the NHS? The fact is that of course donating large amounts of money to party funds buys you influence. Why would anyone do it if it didn't?

The response of the mainstream media doesn't really seem to have recognised this reality. It's gone for the knee-jerk reaction of “Ooh, here's a scandal! Shock horror! How terrible!”, and I haven't seen much attempt to look at the wider issues. Yes, many in the media have started talking about the wider issue of political party funding. Banning donations above a certain amount is back on the agenda, and rightly so. But I think there's a deeper problem that even a thorough clean-up of how parties are funded wouldn't solve.

The problem is that an elite group at the top of political parties, whether or not they are influenced by outside donations, has too much power. This isn't democratic. In theory, we vote for an MP, and the MP who best represents a constituency gets to vote on the issues of the day in parliament in accordance with the wishes of their constituency members. But it doesn't work like that in practice, because of the whipping system. Most MPs vote the way their party whips tell them to. On the whole, it's not good for an MP's career to defy the whips. So we don't really get the policies of the person we voted for, we get the policies that are imposed on them by their party elite. I'm pretty sure most of the Labour MPs who were elected in 2001 weren't belligerent warmongers, but nonetheless they mostly voted to invade Iraq in 2003 because Tony Blair told them to.

Many LibDem MPs promised before the 2010 election to vote against increasing student tuition fees, but many of them broke that promise because Nick Clegg (having presumably been bribed with some chocolate Hobnobs) told them to. This isn't democratic. The LibDems have traditionally prided themselves on being more democratic than the other parties in the way they make policy, but they can't pretend that that's true any more. Their recent conference voted against supporting the controversial Health and Social Care Bill, but the LibDem leadership told LibDem MPs to support the bill, and most of them did. This is not democratic, and LibDem voters have every right to feel thoroughly betrayed.

So what we have is a system in which an elite few get to make policy, and the votes of the electorate have only a limited effect. Obviously it's completely wrong that wealthy individuals should be able to buy influence over that policy, so if recent events push reform of party funding up the political agenda, then that will be a good thing. Personally, I would like to see a ban on large donations to political parties just to be sure that people cannot buy influence. And I'd define “large” fairly meanly. £500 sounds about right to me.

Of course, this will leave the political parties short of money, and some will argue that they should receive taxpayer funding to make put the shortfall. That would be a travesty. Using our money to prop up the political elite would be completely indefensible. It makes the assumption that political parties serve a public good. They don't. They serve only their own purposes. Political parties have no automatic right to exist. If they do not have a wide enough appeal that they can get the funding they need from modest subscription fees from their own members, then frankly, that's their problem. It simply reinforces the point that they do not appeal to the general public, and only strengthens the argument against taxpayer funding.

I hope that recent events will result in progress being made on cleaning up our political system. But please let's not fall into the trap of thinking that how parties are funded is the only problem.

I was struck by the juxtaposition of 2 stories I heard on the radio this morning: the problems that some benefit claimants are facing because of delays by the medical assessment company, Atos, and a debate in Parliament about the terrorist suspect Abu Qatada. I think it says something quite worrying about the state of our society.

Atos first. If you didn't know, Atos is a private company which is contracted by the Department of Work and Pensions to assess claimants for certain disability-related benefits, such as Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), to make sure that claimants genuinely have a level of disability that entitles them to whatever benefits they are claiming.

The rules for ESA require that an assessment be done within 13 weeks of claiming. Benefits are initially paid at a reduced rate, but the rate is increased after the assessment is done, assuming that it finds the claimed level of disability is genuine (whether the assessments are done fairly is a whole other story, but one I'm not going to get into here).

But there is a problem.

Although Atos are required to do the assessments within 13 weeks, they are not doing so. There is a huge backlog. This means that many claimants are still on the initial reduced rate even after 13 weeks. The reason for this is simple: Atos are crap. Oh sure, I dare say they have their excuses: it was the wrong kind of snow, it was the Royal Wedding, etc etc, but the simple fact is that they're crap.

So what happens when an important organisation providing a vital service to government doesn't fulfil its obligations because they're crap? Does it lose the contract? Are the directors fined? Are the people in government who chose Atos in the first place sent to jail for gross incompetence?

Er, none of the above. Nothing happens.

The second story is that of Abu Qatada. The British government would like to deport him to Jordan to face trial for terrorism charges, but the European Court of Human Rights have ruled that they can't, because he would not face a fair trial. The court found that the case that would be brought against him in Jordan was based in part on evidence obtained by torture.

Now, the British government clearly doesn't have a problem with torture as they would be quite happy to send Abu Qatada to Jordan despite their use of torture if they were allowed to do so, but torture has no place in a civilised society. Not only is torture itself reprehensible, but evidence obtained by torture is completely unreliable — when you're having your fingernails pull out you're probably going to tell your interrogator whatever it is you think he wants to hear, whether it's remotely true or not — so no civilised justice system should use it.

Thankfully, however, the we have the European Court of Human Rights to remind us that torture is bad.

This didn't seem to be good enough for some MPs. I felt a sense of utter dispair listening to the debate about Abu Qatada in Parliament yesterday. One MP, Jason McCartney, suggested that the British government simply ignore the court's ruling and pay the fine, and offered to chip in £50 out of his own pocket (presumably to be claimed back on expenses). Another, Peter Bone, similarly asked the Home Secretary to ignore the court's ruling and send Abu Qatada to Jordan anyway.

I find it a matter of great concern that MPs consider themselves to be above the law in this way, and that they are making perfectly serious suggestions (which, to her credit, Thereas May resisted) that we should simply ignore the law when we don't like it. That's not how laws work. They need to be obeyed by everyone, even MPs.

I think we have a serious problem in this country with the accountability of government to its citizens. Government should be accountable to the law in the same way that everyone else is. If Atos, acting on behalf of the government, is required to assess benefit claimants within 13 weeks and they don't, then there really need to be some serious consequences. Any benefit claimants who didn't comply with the rules of the benefits system would be likely to find themselves in prison: why don't the same rules apply to those running the system?

MPs also seem to think they are above the law, no doubt heartened by how few of them faced any meaningful sanctions after more than 300 of them had fraudulently claimed expenses. Most of those who did simply offered to pay back what they had claimed fraudulently, and that was the end of the matter. Do you think the same thing would happen to someone making a fraudulent claim for disability benefit?

In a democracy, government should not be above the law. We should all be worried when our lawmakers believe that they are.

A story in the news today has intrigued me. This is the story that 5 local councils in the north of England are launching a scheme to help first-time house buyers by loaning them money for the deposit on their house.

On one level, this sounds great. Although mortgage rates are currently low by historic standards, many first-time buyers struggle to save enough money for the deposit on a house, given that few mortgage lenders these days are prepared to loan more than about 80% of the value of a property, and some much less. It's not affording the mortgage that's the problem, it's finding a big enough pot of cash for a deposit up front. The size of the pot of cash required is outside the reach of most normal people.

We are told in the news story that the councils get a generous rate of interest on the loan. That seems entirely fair and reasonable. So in theory, this isn't costing council tax payers any money, as presumably it's being done at commercial rates of interest. I don't know what rate of interest, and when I phoned the first contact on the press release announcing the scheme, she also didn't know. Apparently it's up to Lloyds TSB, who are participating in the scheme, and I would guess that the rate of interest would vary according to the circumstances.

However, this scheme raises some interesting questions. If the loan is being given at a commercial rate of interest which is expected to cover the risk of people defaulting on their loans, then you have to ask why the banks themselves aren't providing a similar service? After all, one of the main functions of banks is to lend money, isn't it? Banks could easily make the councils' scheme unnecessary, either by offering 95% mortgages, or by offering specific loans for deposits, separately from a mortgage.

I can only think of 2 possible explanations why banks are not making these kinds of loans themselves. One is that the loans are a perfectly viable commercial proposition, and the banks are acting irrationally in not offering the service. It wouldn't be the first time that banks have acted irrationally. The second explanation is that the local councils simply haven't understood the risks of people defaulting on the loan, and are putting council tax payers' money at risk. Both explanations seem perfectly plausible. I have no idea which is correct.

It's worth noting in passing that this scheme may be an example of the "Big Society" in action, as it has been organised by Sector Treasury Services, a private company who appear to be running public finances for some local councils. I assume they are being paid for this scheme, and whether that had any bearing on encouraging councils to go down that route is something we can only speculate about. No, what am I talking about: that's totally far fetched, isn't it? Surely commercial interests would never have anything to do with important decisions about public finances made by responsible public servants, would they?

Anyway, all that aside, there is something else that worries me about this scheme. A big part of the reason why so many people struggle to buy their own home is that house prices are way too high. Housing minister Grant Shapps has recently argued, very sensibly in my view, that a period in which house prices fall in real terms would be a thoroughly good thing.

Helping a few first-time buyers by loaning a deposit will of course be a great help to those buyers who are able to take advantage of the scheme. But in the long run, I fear it will only make things worse for first-time buyers, as it will help to fuel increases in house prices. In some ways, first-time buyers being unable to afford houses could be a good thing if you take a longer-term view, as that situation is unsustainable, and will have to result in house prices stabilising or falling. That's just the sort of outcome that Grant Shapps has said he wants, and which I think most other sensible people would also want.

Surprisingly, then, we are also told in the story I linked to at the top if this article that Mr Shapps welcomes this scheme enthusiastically. That puzzles me. If he would like to see house prices stabilise, why is he supporting a scheme that is likely to contribute to their continued inexorable rise?