Brillo brings the Knife from the Kitchen

I have a lot of time for Mr Kitchen, as I will always know him, the new leader of the Libertarian Party. I also have a lot of time for his blog although some of the language is not to everyone's taste. He occasionally wishes nasty diseases or a painful death on authoritarian bigots as a conclusion to his demolition of their arguments. What cannot be ignored, however, is that he does demolish their arguments far more times than not, exposes them for what they are and then adds some choice abuse. On many subjects he writes with care and authority, for example much of his writing on the great global warming hoax is now becoming mainstream. The "bad" language is little more than window dressing. There is no more chance of him visiting physical violence on the victims of his linguistic attacks than there is of me winning the lottery.

On the first 5th of November stroll I chewed the fat with Mr Kitchen over a few pints and found him every bit as sincere, serious and knowledgeable as I expected. At that time Ian Parker-Joseph was the LPUK's leader. On his resignation from the position a few months ago Mr Kitchen was elected leader. At the time it was obvious that his sweary blog would be used against him. A so-called interview on the Daily Politics show on the BBC consisted of Andrew "Brillo" Neil summarising some of the things said in one post on his blog and asking whether it was appropriate for the leader of a political party to write such stuff.

Some have commented that this was an irrelevant and unjustified approach, (for example, here) but I don't agree. Nor, it seems, does Mr Kitchen who has closed his old blog and started afresh as Mr Knife. Dabbling in politics as an observer and commentator is one thing, asking people for their vote is another entirely.

I know that my vote is practically powerless in a constituency occupied predominately by those dependent on the State, those naive enough to believe big government does good and those rich enough to put their money out of the way before spending other people's. That doesn't diminish my vote in any way in my eyes. It still puts me on a par with everyone else on election day, it is still something my parents' generation fought to retain and it is still something most of the world would love to have if only they could. It also counts in the overall voting statistics which have relevance above and beyond the result in any one constituency.

A new political party has a choice between being serious and being frivolous. I have no doubt LPUK is intended to be serious. It might only have 450-odd members now and it might only be fielding one candidate at the general election, but every party has to start somewhere and I agree with much, but by no means all, of the general policies it puts forward. It represents a serious line of political thought. And that is the problem. It is putting itself forward as a serious, albeit small, political party and is standing behind a leader whose intemperance of expression is so unorthadox that it distracts attention from what the party is trying to say.

Not only does it distract attention but it provides a different focus for attention. With politicians of the main parties we spend a lot of time asking what they really think. We hear them speak against a background of distrust caused by too many years of flim-flam, flip-flop and fudge, so we dig around and see what we can find about them when they are not "on-message". Much of the material dug up by such enquiries formed the basis for Mr Kitchen's vitriolic character assassinations. No doubt he wrote from the heart. He was not "on-message" because there was no message only a calculated analysis of the failings of others. Now he has stepped into the limelight and complaints are made (vicariously, I have not heard any complaint from him) that he should not be subject to the same treatment. Sorry chaps, it doesn't work like that. Sauce - goose - gander.

Blank - the bureaucratic default position

Just when we thought the scandal about MPs' expenses and allowances couldn't plumb new depths the Parliamentary authorities released copies of relevant documents but deleted so many details that a lot of the documents provided no relevant information at all. In some cases the whole document was blanked-out, yet still it was released for public consumption. The only real pleasure in this exercise has been the reintroduction of the verb "to redact" to everyday usage, thereby dredging it from its old home in the Chancery Division of the High Court, a home in which it gave many of us enormous pleasure for years.

When challenged about the futility of revealing documents that don't allow a clear examination of whether expenses or allowances were properly claimed, the response from the politicians concerned has been a unified "nothing to do with us guv". In a way they are correct. They assert that the decision to edit receipts and expenses forms was taken by civil servants without guidance or instructions from any of our elected politicians. If this is correct, it is indeed nothing to do with them but only in a narrow sense of them not having taken the decision. In a wider, and I believe more accurate, sense it is everything to do with them because they failed to ensure that the material released would satisfy the purpose of the exercise, namely to allow the little people to assess whether claims for reimbursement were valid.

Taking their narrow point at face value, what has happened is a good indicator of one of the most significant problems with bureaucracy. By definition bureaucracy is concerned with implementing a system and not with whether that system is effective or efficient. It is about following procedures whether or not they make sense and whether or not they deliver a benefit. We have seen this at work in so many fields of the public sector recently.

The Financial Services Authority concerned itself with the procedures followed by banks and other lenders rather than with the substance of the effect of the loans on the whole financial sector. A bank that advanced a large loan to someone with no realistic prospect of being able to service the interest payments let alone repay the capital raised no FSA eyebrows provided the correct forms were used. Hospitals have had to provide streams of statistical material to the Department of Health (or whatever they are calling it this week) rather than spending the resources involved on treating patients or keeping wards clean. Policemen are kept off the streets to fill in forms. And armies of pen-pushers have been employed at taxpayers' expense to shuffle information up and down the hierarchy in every government department. Filling in the form is often more important than what the form contains. After all, the information on the forms can usually be interpreted to say almost anything the government wants it to say. The job of the bureaucrats is, both literally and figuratively, a matter of form rather than substance.

And so it is with the redaction of MPs' receipts and claims. There can be no doubt that some information on these documents should not be released because to do so would compromise the privacy of innocent third parties or because they are simply irrelevant. For example, a document might disclose the home address and telephone number of an MP's secretary as well as showing how much he or she was paid; it is the latter information that matters, the former is usually not only irrelevant but is not something the public has any legitimate right to know. An MP who submits an invoice from a shop containing five items of which only one is claimed as an expense can reasonably expect the other items to be blanked-out because they are none of the public's business. But what happens if redacting an ostensibly irrelevant detail, or one which might be thought to be none of the public's business, results in the document becoming ambiguous or even meaningless? That defeats the whole purpose of the exercise, so a balance has to be struck between the need to ensure the validity of expenses claims can be assessed and the need to keep irrelevant and personal details from prurient gaze. It is not only in the current climate that assessment of the validity of claims must be paramount. For example, where the MP's secretary's address is the same as the MP's address that fact is, on the face of things, a legitimate factor in evaluating the claim for reimbursement because it can cause perfectly fair and reasonable questions to be asked.

Redacting documents requires the exercise of judgment. It requires substance to be placed above form and sometimes involves a difficult balancing exercise between keeping private that which is genuinely private and exposing that which is necessary to be disclosed even though it is private. I am not at all surprised to find that things were done as they were because that is the nature of bureaucracy, it is non-judgmental. The default position is the path of least resistance - arrive at 9am, follow the guidelines slavishly, tea break at 11, follow the guidelines slavishly, lunch between 1 and 2, follow the guidelines slavishly, cup of tea at 3.30, follow the guidelines slavishly, go home at 5pm. Do not think for yourself, do not seek to exercise judgment, push that pen, shuffle that paper, tote that barge, lift that bale, never get a little drunk and land in jail.

Now, let me see ...

A number of prominent news stories crossed my mind today as I watched England's cricketers limp and hobble their way to failure in Antigua. My thought-process was: Antigua - cricket - Stanford - anti-terror laws - banks - Madoff - MPs' expenses.

Nothing is as big in Antigua as cricket. For those who don't follow these things, England were scheduled to play a match against the West Indies on Antigua's new ground last week but it had to be abandoned after a short period of play because the ground was unfit. To the enormous credit of Antigua's cricket authorities a replacement match was arranged at very short notice on the island's old ground, and it is that match that ended today with England snatching a draw from the jaws of certain victory. Antigua's greatest living hero is the retired cricketer Sir Vivian Richards, a man of fearsome talent who graced the professional game for about 20 years from the mid 1970s. Sir Viv was knighted in 1999 under the system of honours set up by his home country the previous year.

There are not many Antiguan knights, another is a fellow by the name of Allen Stanford. Sir Allen Stanford has dual citizenship, being American by birth and having adopted citizenship of Antigua & Barbuda in later life. He holds a lower rank of knighthood than Sir Viv, which might explain why The Times refers to him as Mr Stanford. He hit the front page of The Times today as a result of having got himself into a bit of a pickle with his accounts. All sorts of allegations are being thrown around but the only thing that is known for certain is that no one seems to know what has happened to the money paid to his financial and banking businesses. Time will tell whether he has also been in the baking business and has been cooking the books. Sir Allen Stanford rather enjoys cricket and has sponsored some vastly remunerated tournaments. That, however, would appear to be all in the past because the US financial authorities are investigating his businesses and have frozen his assets.

For more than a day Sir Allen was nowhere to be seen. Noted for his keenness to be photographed as well as his love of cricket, it seemed somewhat odd that he was not lording-it-up with Sir Viv and the rest of the West Indian cricket glitterati, but champagne and dolly birds were there none. He'd done a runner. Where had he gone? No one knew. It can't have been the US because their impeccable anti-terrorist border security systems will have made it instantly apparent that he was there. Ah, woops. He was found in Virginia as the result of a tip-off. When discovered he was served with legal papers relating to the freezing of his assets and of those of his businesses. One of those businesses is the Stanford International Bank which boasted of making extraordinarily large profits for investors year-on-year. Once rumours circulated of the investigation by the US authorities there was a run on the bank and a number of governments had to intervene to stall claims while investigations continue into whether it is a Northern Rock with bad investments or a Ponzi scheme with no investments.

Obvious parallels are being drawn with the recently-exposed Madoff fraud. Whether there is a true comparison will only become apparent later in the course of the enquiry, but what is clear is that nothing is clear. Nothing is clear because the accounting practices adopted by the Stanford Financial Group's accountant (allegedly a one-man firm operating from a small office above a fish and chip shop) were not concerned with transparency. Lack of transparency does not itself cause fraud, but it does allow fraud to go undetected. Madoff took advantage of this for years, as did many fraudsters before him.

It's not just fraud that can remain hidden where rules do not require absolute financial candour. Similarly, the need for candour in financial dealings is not just so that fraud can be eliminated. Companies insist on receipts to back up expenses claims because they only want to pay for expenses that were actually incurred and they need to be able to prove those expenses further along the accounting chain. That they also want to ensure their employees are not cheating them is part of the story, but only part of it. The other part is the need to ensure money is being spent for proper purposes. And that's how my brain arrived at MPs' expenses.

If ever there is a proper use of the phrase "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" it is in relation to "expenses" payable by the taypayer to those who sets the levels of tax. Transparency is the only way to deter jiggery-pokery.