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Tuesday 7 October 2008

The Spectator's Notes

In the cut and thrust of debate, David Cameron won easily against the Chancellor in the Budget battle.

Mrs Clinton keeps saying that she wants Barack Obama to be her running-mate. Mr Obama points out that he is ahead of her in the popular vote and number of delegates, so her offer is rather cheeky. The only time I ever met Mr John McCain, about three years ago, he told me at length what an admirable person and wonderful politician Mrs Clinton was. If Mr Obama pulls through and beats Mrs Clinton for the Democratic nomination, he presumably would not offer her what she offered him and, even if he did, she couldn’t accept it. But perhaps Mr McCain should ask her to be his running-mate. Wouldn’t theirs be an unbeatable combination? Or would it enrage the Republican base so much that the whole thing would fall apart?

Lord Vinson is a tenacious peer who is worried about the fact that three quarters of our legislation — because it now comes from Europe — is not properly debated in Parliament. He also suspects that when it is debated, the debate makes no difference. Three times, in slightly different forms, he has asked a question in the House of Lords about how often the European Union has altered legislation as a result of recommendations from select committees of either House of Parliament. Each time, the relevant Minister, Lord Malloch-Brown, has given the same written answer, which is ‘The information requested cannot be provided without incurring disproportionate public cost.’ So now Nigel Vinson has narrowed his question down: can the government ‘give any example of the incorporation into European Union legislation of a recommendation of the EU scrutiny committee of either House?’ It might be painful for the government to answer the question, but it surely cannot argue that it would be disproportionately expensive.

There has been far too much argument about the effect of ‘24-hour drinking’, due to the government’s change of the rules last year. The truth is that there is not, in reality, 24-hour drinking, and the reform has neither caused nor cured the mass drunkenness of boring young people in the centres of towns and cities. Much less attention has been paid to other aspects of the same Act. One is that the licensing of premises was transferred from magistrates to local councillors. This has politicised the granting of licences, and made people suspect that they now go to chums of the ruling parties in each council. Which greatly increases the resentment against new licences.

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