What now for the Home Office ?
This morning's Cabinet re-shuffle has seen John Reid replace Charles Clarke as Home Secretary. Charles Clarke returns to the back benches - hooray !
Hazel Blears appears to have been moved to be Labour Party chairwoman. Who will replace her as Minister of State (Policing, Security and Community Safety) ?
What this means for the other Home Office Ministers or for the Permanent Secretary Sir David Normington, is still unclear.
John Reid is now on his 7th. (?) Ministerial position. He has only exhibited slavish loyalty to Tony Blair, without any notable achievements in any of the Departments where he has served.
As an MP for a Scottish constituency, (Airdrie and Shotts) , the "West Lothian Question" applies i.e. John Reid will be presumably making some laws which only affect England & Wales, whilst not being electorally accountable to English or Welsh voters.
He does not appear to have any grasp of complicated technical issues, as can be seen from his legacies of the complicated, insecure and hugely expensive National Health Service IT "data spine" scheme and the tradional complexities of Ministry of Defence weapons and IT systems.
We still remember his stupid utterances about ID Cards and terrorism during the General Election campaign.
John Reid is alleged to have had some role in the debate within Cabinet over the "Wilson Doctrine"
Is John Reid's self proclaimed "political tough guy" image justified, will he be the strong leader needed to effectively reform the Home Office, or, like David Blunkett and Charles Clarke before him, prove to be a combination of bullying and ineptitude ?
Comments
It is supposed to be the ministers job to stand up to the home office to defend our civil liberties against an ever present back room dictatorship. Is John Reid capable of doing that? We can only wait and see, but until we have somebody with true libertarian values in the Home Office who will fight to actually reverse some of the legislation that has given law enforcement agencies so much power, we will never see any real change.
After all, it's the policy, not the personality that needs changing.
Posted by: Jake Long | May 5, 2006 2:53 PM
I take it you read this on the Wikipedia West Lothian Question:
"Executive Power Hierarchy
The Scottish Parliament was formed by statute - the Scotland Act 1998, and is, thus a creation of Westminster. The enactment of the Scotland Act 1998 conferred no sovereign status on the Scottish Parliament, and has, crucially not changed the status of the Westminster Parliament as the supreme legislature of Scotland, with Westminster retaining the ability to over-ride, or veto, any decisions taken by the Scottish Parliament. The Westminster parliament remains the executive body; power is devolved rather than handed to the Scottish Parliament.
As a consequence the ability of all Westminster MPs to vote on Scottish legislation has not been legally diminished by devolution, as made clear by Section 28(7) of the Scotland Act 1998, which states that the legislative powers of the Scottish Parliament do ...not affect the power of the Parliament of the United Kingdom to make laws for Scotland [1].
During devolution, a convention was created to manage the power of Westminster to legislate on matters within the legislative competence of the Scottish Parliament. This is known as the Sewel motion, and the related Scottish parliamentary motions are known as Sewel Motions [2]. These motions (of which there are around a dozen per year) allow all English, Welsh and Ulster, as well as Scottish MP's to vote on issues under the jurisdiction of the Scottish Parliament. They require that the Westminster Parliament obtain the consent of the Scottish Parliament to pass acts that are within Holyrood's legislative competence. However, given that the Sewel Convention is an informal and uncodefied procedural device [3], and the UK Parliament has legislative supremacy; were the Scottish Parliament to deny consent, Westminster could go ahead and pass the law anyway."
Anyhow, sadly, the Home Office still controls Scotland's immigration and national security so is very relevant to us. Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see an independent Scotland, but when it comes to electoral accountability England has a piss poor record when it comes to imposing things on Scotland a la the Tories.
Posted by: Grant | May 5, 2006 6:33 PM