I have been reading the Daily Mail. But there are mitigating circumstances. My copy was number 9300 and it cost just a penny at the time it was issued at 3.30 am on Wednesday 21st April 1926. A baby girl had been born to the Duchess of York, Mr Churchill was ‘again emphasizing the fact that further economies were becoming increasingly difficult to make’ and ‘there was no sign in the fall of the franc being stayed’.
But this was the item that caught my fancy…Big Ben Blunders: A Cold in the Stomach. ‘Big Ben, the authentic mouthpiece of Father Time, deceived London yesterday. When the hands of the great clock over the House of Parliament were telling the truth and announcing the time as 3.45 pm, the chimes announced the hour and Big Ben himself solemnly rang out four times. A quarter of an hour later he declared in clarion tones it was five o’clock, and when it was five o’clock, according to rival authorities, Big Ben chimed six. After this his outraged keepers gagged and corrected him severely for he was silent at six o’clock and returned to the path of truth at 7pm. A representative of the makers said: ‘The weather is believed to have been the cause of the trouble - amounting to a slight ‘stomach ache’ which Ben quickly got over.’ I am a secret admirer of Matthew Parris…something I have mentioned before.
In today’s weekly column in the Times he put his literary finger on something he called ‘the corruption of the fabric of expectation in society’. He begins his article by discussing the Afghans who highjacked a plane in February 2000 and claimed political asylum at Stanstead Airport. Several courts have looked at their request since their arrival in this country. Each time their right to asylum has been upheld. And each time the government has moaned about it.
This week Tony Blair got involved. Here is Matthew Parris. ‘The Prime Minister is a bit muddled here. By no means had the High Court ruled that we are not able to deport people like this; the Court had ruled that such people can only be deported if their cases for asylum fail on their merits; that the Home Secretary cannot arbitrarily create a category of applicants who are to be automatically refused asylum on account of the means they employed to reach Britain. Such a category could be created, of course, but it would have to be done by law. We do not have such a law.’
As the judge pointed out: ‘Lest there be any misunderstanding, the issue in this case is not whether the executive should take action to discourage hijacking, but whether the executive should be required to take such action within the law as laid down by Parliament and the courts.’ As Matthew Parris notes this is a forlorn hope on the judge’s part. Yet we do need these rules and definitions, and we do have to respect them. It’s called the Rule of Law. Parris again.
‘I am sorry to labour what for many readers may seem an obvious truth, but I believe the late 20th and early 21st centuries have seen something of a slipping of attention to this truth in Britain, and that Tony Blair, with his rather 1970s New Seekers vision of self-evident morality and ‘natural’ law, is the worst exemplar of a dangerously lazy approach to the idea of due process, and the ideal of certainty of contract between the citizen and the State.
The other week the Chancellor of the Exchequer…without bothering to mention it in his Budget Statement… announced plans to rip up retrospectively arrangements that millions have planned for their legacies when they die. Whatever view you take of the use of trusts, the citizen must know where he stands, and where he will stand. Gordon Brown’s disregard for a whole web of presumed entitlements unsettles me. How confident can we now be that pensions really will be linked to earnings in 2012? I am talking about what we might call a corruption of the fabric of expectation in society: slow, incremental, and rather abstract; but no less poisonous for being hard to dramatise.’
Matthew Parris then takes up a subject at the centre of many household budgets…the new Tax Credit System. ‘The computer system failed to work; two million poor families were forced to repay a total of £2 billion in wrongly assessed payments during the first year. Overpayments are still running at about £2 billion a year; six million families claim credit, and there is no promise that the system will be fixed. Millions of the poorest people have had to repay what are, for them, huge sums. Millions will prove unable to. Those who have repaid will resent those who have not. Everyone will view the next big government initiative with diminished confidence. In a complicated system such as ours, confidence is the cement of what politicians call ‘social justice’ From ministers the fiasco has elicited something not far from a shrug of the shoulders, as though only intentions count.’ Here is how he ends his article.
‘I could mention the Child Support Agency; the repeated, broken promises of NHS dentistry; the virtual (undeclared) abandonment of clear Home Office rules about released foreign prisoners…to me, through all these very different problems a thread does seem to run. It is insidious: at a national level a gradual, modest but persistent corruption of the fabric of expectations: a chipping-away at confidence in the contract between citizen and State. Slowly, we are getting more like a banana republic where promises are cheap, nothing ever really happens and nobody expects it to. I am sorry to sound portentous but I fear we are losing what you might call administrative certainty, a deeply unsexy term and hard to make an issue of. Slow to accumulate and easy to squander, certainty matters.’
