ceedee’s posterous

Green goddess: after her victory on immigration rights for Gurkha veterans, Joanna Lumley has now thrown her support behind the Greens in the Euro elections

Joanna Lumley is urging voters to shun mainstream politicians and instead back the Greens in next week's Euro elections.

Fresh from her triumph in securing immigration rights for Gurkha veterans, the actress has thrown her support behind the party for the 4 June poll. Party insiders believe Lumley's popularity will provide a huge boost to their campaign for the European Parliament.

Lumley, who so far has not shown interest in being a politician herself, said the public should make a “positive vote” for the party and has given her personal backing to Green Party leader and South-East MEP Caroline Lucas.

The actress and campaigner said: “Caroline Lucas is a tireless campaigner in the European Parliament, staunchly defending human rights and strongly promoting greater protection for animals.”

Both women have campaigned against human rights abuses in Burma and Lumley said the Green Party was “the obvious choice for real change”. “I urge you to cast a positive vote for a better future by voting Green in the European elections,” the actress said. Ms Lucas said: “I feel honoured to have her support.”

In Has our electoral system contributed to the MPs expenses scandal?, 'Mark Reckons' attempts to trace links between safe seats and dodgy expense claims.

After this, it got me thinking even more. I decided to do a little bit more analysis on this. I divided the data set up into 4 sections. The top 25% of safe seats, the second 25%, the third 25% and the bottom 25%. Because 647 does not divide perfectly into 4 I have had to make them very slightly different sizes. I then totalled up the number of implicated MPs in each quartile. I have taken a snapshot of the result from Excel and put it here:

Now again, I need to caveat that this is not scientific etc. etc. However, using this methodology again there is a clear increase in the likelihood of an MP being implicated in the expenses scandal the safer their seat. It is in fact a fairly steady progression until it leaps up in the top quartile. Using this data, an MP is more than 3 times more likely to have been implicated in this scandal if their seat is in the top quartile as compared with the bottom quartile. They are almost twice as likely when comparing the top quartile with the second quartile.

I had suspected there might be a correlation but I had not expected it to be this stark.

If I am right about this then there are surely very serious questions to be asked about our electoral system. Advocates of First Past the Post always claim as one of their main arguments that the constituency link needs to be maintained (even though STV, a much more proportional system with multi-member constituencies that the Electoral Reform Society and Make Votes Count advocate also has a constituency link). However looking at the above analysis it strikes me that FPTP does not serve its constituents well at all when it comes to this scandal.

See also Himmelgarten Cafe's We need fair votes to restore faith in our system.

Almost two thirds of voters want a general election to be held as soon as possible amid mounting public anger at MPs' expense claims.

A poll by ComRes for BBC Two's Daily Politics programme found that 65 per cent of those surveyed felt there should be an election while 33 per cent disagreed.

Politicians who have been "named and shamed" in the expenses revelations should be forced to quit Parliament, according to 64 per cent of those questioned.

The poll also suggests that fears the controversy over MPs' expenses will effect voter turn out at the next election are unfounded.

Although 28 per cent said they were less likely to vote in next month's local and European elections following the revelations, 25 per cent said it had made them more likely to cast their ballot.

Another 47 per cent said the scandal had not affected their decision.

ComRes spoke to 1,011 voters between May 13 and 14.

Lords Truscott and Taylor are first to be suspended from Lords since 1643

Two Labour peers will be suspended from the House of Lords until the autumn after being found guilty of offering to try to change the law in return for money.

An investigation into the so-called "cash for amendments" affair has concluded that Lord Truscott, a former energy minister, and Lord Taylor of Blackburn, broke Lords rules saying that peers must "always act on their personal honour".

They will be the first peers to be suspended from the upper house since 1643, when parliamentarians removed those peers who had taken up arms in support of King Charles I.

Two other Labour peers implicated in the affair, the former MPs Lord Moonie and Lord Snape, have been cleared of any wrongdoing but ordered to apologise to the Lords for "inappropriate" conduct.

He made the rich richer and the poor poorer.
The Labour party can't go into the next election under Brown's leadership

The one character who has been tested to final destruction is Gordon Brown. The music stopped on his watch, first for the economy and now MPs' sleaze, for which the government of the day takes most blame. Labour used to lay claim to higher moral ground, while the right always said greed was the motor of growth. When he first talked of his moral compass, Brown should have cleaned up party funding, MPs' expenses and honours – and linked these reforms with curbs on the power that money breathes over the nation's affairs. The expenses mess would not be fatal if the prime minister were upright and strong. But Labour is already ­dangling over a cliff, and this affair prises its fingers off the edge.

It's all over for Brown and Labour. The abyss awaits. As long as he remains leader, there is nothing that wretched Labour candidates can plausibly say on the doorstep at next month's European elections. They are struck dumb. Why should people vote for them? The horse manure bought on expenses is garnish for a decomposing government. The heart of the matter is the economy, and Brown's responsibility for the bubble years. He personally is to blame for Labour's failure to ensure that ordinary people on median incomes and poor people at the bottom received a bigger share in national growth: it turns out that they fell back and only the wealthy prospered. Labour made the rich richer and the poor poorer: growth for the few, not the many.

That is a failure so fundamental to Labour's purpose that the party can't go into the next election led by the man responsible.

Government accused of flouting court ruling over retention of data

The genetic profiles of hundreds of ­thousands of innocent people are to be kept on the national DNA database for up to 12 years in a decision critics claim is designed to sidestep a European human rights ruling that the "blanket" retention of suspects' data is unlawful.

The proposed new rules for the national DNA databaseto be put forward tomorrow by the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, include plans to keep the DNA profiles of innocent people who are arrested but not convicted of minor offences for six years.

The proposal would also apply to children from age 10 who are arrested but never successfully prosecuted.

In cases of more serious violent and sexual crime, innocent people's genetic codes will be kept for 12 years.

It was widely expected that the DNA profiles, samples and fingerprints of 850,000 innocent people kept on the database would be destroyed in response to the ruling by the European court of human rights last December.

But the proposals fall short of those expectations and contrast sharply with the situation in Scotland, where only the DNA profiles of suspects arrested for serious violent and sexual offences are retained for a maximum of five years.

Human rights groups, and opposition politicians united tonightin expressing dismay that the Home Office had rejected that option and predicted a race to the courts to challenge the new policy.

"The government just doesn't get this," said the shadow home secretary, Chris Grayling. The Liberal Democrats' Chris Huhne added: "This is an undignified rearguard action designed to give as little as possible."

Liberty's Shami Chakrabarti said: "Wholly innocent people – including ­children – will have their most intimate details stockpiled for years on a database that will remain massively out of step with the rest of the world."

But Home Office ministers say their ­proposals do comply with the landmark S and Marper judgment in Strasbourg which declared unlawful their policy of keeping all unconvicted suspects' DNA profiles indefinitely because of its "blanket and indiscriminate" nature. The police are now to be asked to spend up to two years trawling the existing 850,000 DNA profiles – the numerical digital code recording the individual's DNA – of innocent people on the database to see if any of them have a criminal record for any other offences.

The Home Office say 350,000 are known to be linked to entries on the police national computer. For the remaining 500,000 it is not yet possible to say whether their arrest led to a conviction or not and their DNA profile will be removed only once this check has been made.

The package proposed by the home secretary to meet the ruling include:

• Retaining indefinitely all DNA profiles and fingerprints of those convicted of an imprisonable offence.

• Keeping for 12 years the DNA profiles of those arrested but not convicted of serious sexual and violent offences.

• Keeping for six years the DNA profiles of those arrested but not convicted of minor offences.

• Removing the profiles of children when they reach 18 only if they have been arrested for only one minor offence.

• Adding the profiles of 30,000 more criminals convicted abroad or serving community sentences for serious offences.

• Destroying the genetic DNA samples held by the police once they have been converted into a DNA profile.

The home secretary said the database proposals would ensure that "the right people are on it, as well as considering where people should come off".

The Home Office estimates that even this package will mean 4,500 fewer crimes each year being detected ­compared with the current policy of retaining indefinitely the profiles of all those arrested.

"It is crucial that we do everything we can to protect the public by preventing crime and bringing offenders to justice. The DNA database plays a vital role in helping us do that and will help ensure that a great many criminals are behind bars where they belong," said Smith.

But Grayling said: "Ministers are just trying to get away with as little as they can instead of taking action to remove innocent people from the database." Huhne added that the number of innocent people on the database had risen to 925,000 since December's ruling.