Tom Harris is right, MPs should not have to tell us where they live
Dear Tom Harris,
Openly admitting to agreeing with Labour MPs is not something I do lightly. I spend the majority of my time distancing myself from our faltering government and the sleaze allegations that seem to reveal themselves with alarming regularity these days. On Monday evening, the Commons voted to change the rules on the publication of candidates’ addresses. Since then, both Iain Dale and Guido have vented their anger at MPs like yourself. Even so, your belief that MPs’ home addresses should remain private is correct.
As elected representatives, some people think that all MPs should therefore make themselves contactable at all times, while others are of the opinion that they need your home address in order to establish whether you live in the constituency that you are representing. Iain Dale made the point that company directors have to put their home addresses on public record, so there is no reason why MPs should not be forced to follow suit. As the electoral roll contains the address of every voter in the country including MPs, there is also the argument that the information is technically public already so MPs trying to keep their addresses private is a fruitless task. Some other commentors and bloggers have pointed out that the publication of MPs’ addresses has stood for a long time so why change it now. Sadly, none of these arguments have much merit. People seem to forget that MPs are elected to represent us in Parliament, hence the name ‘Member of Parliament’. You are not elected to be best friends with your constituents, nor are you elected to be contacted at any time of day or night by a voter turning up on your doorstep. To establish whether someone lives in the constituency, publishing an entire address is not the only option. What about their street name or the first part of their postcode? Iain’s point that company directors have to publish their home addresses is, in my opinion, a reason to tighten the law on company director details being public rather than dragging MPs down the same road. The point about the electoral roll is not as clear cut as it might sound, because there could be several people called ‘Tom Harris’ listed anywhere in the country and finding the right one is not exactly easy. The fact that these rules have stood for a long time is completely irrelevant – the death penalty was legal for a long time but that didn’t make it the right thing to do.
What really bugs me is that there are many bloggers, politicians and writers who openly take on the mantle of ‘defenders of civil liberties’ when it comes to 42-day detention and photographing policeman, yet when it comes to protecting our right to privacy – surely one of the most basic civil liberties in this country – they disappear into the shadows. I regularly rant against the outrageous intrusion into private lives from newspapers and magazines, yet few bloggers if any share my disgust at people’s lives being ruined by media intrusion. However, when it comes to MPs wanting to keep their families safe and protecting their privacy, everyone’s all up in arms about how unfair it is. For the sake of perspective, how do you think teachers would react if all their pupils’ parents were given their home address? How many people would hang around in the NHS if doctors had to give patients their home address? MPs are elected to represent us in Parliament and every single one of them offers surgeries and contact details – and that is all that should be required of them. If councillors or anyone else wants to publish their contact details, fine, doesn’t bother me, but the choice should always be with the individual.
We must not confuse the issue of protecting privacy and fiddling expenses. Protecting privacy is almost always the right thing to do, regardless of who is involved. That said, Guido’s point about this being another way of fiddling expenses is perhaps the only argument worth discussing. MPs being able to keep their addresses private while changing the rules on Second Home allowances is appalling and clearly open to abuse. The ideal solution would therefore be:
1. MPs’ addresses should be kept private, save for e.g. publishing the first part of their postcode
2. Company directors’ addresses should be kept private
3. The Second Homes allowance for MPs should be scrapped, to be replaced by a £75 a night hotel allowance to cover the cost of staying overnight in London during the week, or alternatively using the funds from the Second Homes allowance to purchase London properties / hotel rooms for MPs to stay in to make the Second Homes allowance redundant
Civil liberties protected, MPs’ families protected, company directors protected, accountability to the public maintained, less taxpayers’ money wasted. Any complaints, Tom? Sounds pretty good to me.
Yours sincerely,
A.Tory
Ah but ZaNuLabour has encouraged councils to SELL the electoral role to junk mail companies so that mountains of useless crap can be shovelled through your letterbox. How about we criminalise that practice and then look again at publishing the addresses of the people who sold out our details to the marketing boys? Does that sound fair?
Point taken, but it’s still missing the broader point about privacy. I think that MPs’ children being kept off the ContactPoint database is outrageous, but that doesn’t mean that MPs’ addresses should be published just to ‘get back at them’. These issues are completely separate in terms of legislation and should be dealt with as such.
What’s next? Are you going to tear up the electoral register? I agree with Iain and Guido. This is wrong. It’s another example of one rule for them and another for us. The fact that it is has remained the same for a long, long time is clear evidence that thousands of people elected MPs have had little or no problem with publishing their addresses even during times of war and the IRA campaign. Your ideal solution is irrelevant because it will never happen. They do what benefits them, removing addresses, changing the green book, meanwhile there is no change in the expense system only now it is harder to find the expense fiddlers and hold them to account.
These issues are completely separate in terms of legislation and should be dealt with as such.
Legislatively, yes but they are connected by a common theme: privacy and then show a desire to protect our overlords in ways we proles are not. Your kids will be on a database. Your details are freely available. Theres will not. Hiding behind the fact that two or more pieces of legislation are involved in bringing about this privilleged poition for people elected, comically, to be our servants/representatives is neither here nor there.
While MPs allow our electoral (voter) details to be sold to marketing companies, they’re addresses should also be published. If they don’t like it, they don’t have to stand for election. We, however, don’t get a choice – they just sell our details anyway.
Seeing as MPs are still private citizens even if they hold a public office, I see no reason why they shouldn’t be allowed the same right to privacy as anyone else has. That means they should be allowed the right not to have their address published, just as everyone else should.
“Civil liberties protected, MPs’ families protected, company directors protected, accountability to the public maintained, less taxpayers’ money wasted.”
Sensible suggestions. And if a clear, present threat to MPs families were ever identified, I’d be happy to see these impliemrnted instead.
But is there one? I’m not convinced – the real nutters will find you if they want to, regardless. So I can’t see the reson to change the status quo. As has been pointed out over at Iain Dale’s blog, this was never necessary at the height of the IRA bombings. Why is it now?
Answer: it isn’t.
That means they should be allowed the right not to have their address published, just as everyone else should.
Have a look at this: Google
And then tell me how ‘not-published’ you feel your address is.
Shaun, I agree with you, but that is an argument for better protections on our privacy, not exposing MPs’ private details as well just to make us feel better.
Everyone should have a right to privacy and this includes stopping people find out who I am and where I live from the electoral roll as well as keeping MPs’ addressed out of the public arena. This situation has less to do with security than some are making out and much more to do with basic civil liberties – which I thought all the libertarians in the blogosphere were supposed to care about….
Shaun I didn’t say ‘is’ I said ’should’.
The argument about MPs being under threat is a red herring – and the media do a pretty terrible job on this front as well (think of the Mirror publishing the daily route the Leader of the Opposition takes to work on his bike every day and consider what implications that could have for security). We don’t, however, demand that all teachers, doctors, fire fighters and policemen publish their home addresses. With a coherent strategy on the keeping and publishing of personal information there would be no reason whatsoever to require that Mps addresses be published.
I don’t think everyone would be quite so angry if the government weren’t so insistent on knowing every little detail about us!
It’s grossly unfair that we should be constantly spied upon by bin and fag police, CCTV, DNA databases etc. and the politicians are “untouchable” no matter what they do (even break the law).
They are so insistent on their own rights to privacy but couldn’t give two flying figs for ours!!!
Shaun, I agree with you, but that is an argument for better protections on our privacy, not exposing MPs’ private details as well just to make us feel better.
I am arguing that our Overlords should have the same vulnerabilities as the rest of us, particularly when they preside over a system that expands our vulnerabilities and loses private data as though it were water. Its not about me feeling better, it’s about me wanting them to experience the same outrage over loss of privacy that they seem happy to force on the rest of us. As they tell us constantly, if they have nothing to hide, there’s nothing to fear, right?
Sue, I know that the double-standards is painful to watch and Shaun is right to say that they should have the same vulnerabilities are the rest of us.
My point is that no-one should have any vulnerabilities in the first place, hence why I support MPs’ addresses being kept private.
Like you LFAT, I would not wish to put any MP at extra risk, or to create worry for them or their families. As a married man with children, I feel very protective of my family and their wellbeing and I do not expect any MP to feel any differently.
Despite this however, I feel distinctly uneasy about removing the obligation to publish adresses.
In the modern world, these MPs have removed a huge amount of the privacy and freedom that we as ordinary subjects used to enjoy. Everything from our Electoral records to DVLA details are availlable to private companies which use them to either harass us at tea time every night on the phone, sell to us or fine us for not obeying rules which they make up at will. At the same time, government agencies use this information to fine us, no matter how inaccurate the information is, as we are unable to prove our innocence ‘because the computer says we are guilty’.
If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear: We are told this all the time by government. But how much do they have to hide? If we are not to know where their home is, how do we know if their expenses claims are legitimate over it? The home secretary has made difficult for us to believe that MPs have nothing to hide.
So in principle, we should allow them this privacy. In return we insert a few caviats:
1) There should be a proper parliamentary standards regulator, employed directly by the crown (and totally independent of government & MPs). The Queen should be able (and willing), if there is a considerable fraud proven to have been perpetrated by the government or its ministers, to request the resignation of that minister or dissolution and General election. (If the power existed, the Queen would use it wisely and its existence might remove the need for its use).
2) The state should stop using draconian powers to access our info to harass us over minor infringements, it should not be enough that the ‘computer says so’ to prove guilt. There is too much law for everyone to stay on the right side of it all the time!
3) All sale of personal info held by government to private companies should cease forthwith, and the information gathered should be used for its original purpose only. All info must be audited for relevence at intervals, and should be destroyed if no relevence is clear.
4) The right to enter property, (by baliff/inspectors/government agencies) should be removed to the extent it was in 1997-court orders or warrants necessary.
Does this seem a fair quid pro quo to you LFAT?
(P.S. Sorry for the length of the rant, but I do get a bit worked up on privacy, as you might have noticed!)
We already have the address of every MP; it is “[name], House of Commons, London”. Letters addressed thus will arrive safely. We don’t need their home address.
So I will support MPs in their desire to keep their home addresses private. Just as soon as they take my address off http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk. And stop DVLA giving it out willy-nilly. And take my children’s details off ContactPoint. And stop the NHS database. And the ID card database. And stop selling the electoral roll. And, somehow, rescue the lost Child Benefit CDs and all the data that was on them.
In the meantime, given that they routinely allow the publication of my address for anyone who feels like obtaining it, I’ll have theirs too, thank you. But just the Labour MPs, and any other MP that voted in favour of any of the above disclosures of my personal details.
You do realise, of course, that hiding their addresses will make no difference to the nutters and criminals? Do footballers publish their addresses?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/7922363.stm
All it does is give the yet further impression that MPs think they are insulated from the plebs they claim to represent.
Oh and BTW Mr Harris the other days asked how many people had been personally affected by Labour’s assault on civil liberties. I ask Mr Harris and other supporters of the ruling class how many of their number have been victims of crime due to the publication of their addresses. I suspect it is very few.
That’s a good list at the end. Brave MPs (like Enoch Powell) would still make their home address and telephone number publicly available, others would chicken out. I’m not sure what I would do, to be honest.
But the £75 per night idea is hokum. What they should do is buy a tower block or two with 646 one-bed flats not too far from Central London, sorted.
You have pinched some of my Tom Harris comment from his blog!
Like you I was surprised to be agreeing with him. Like you, I can see the solutions to the dilemma. Mr Harris won’t agree to them though.
He would like housing allowance and anonymity.
Tom Harris is wrong. Democracy requires that our elected representatives do not hide themselves away. Or perhaps they do have something to hide?
If it was a security problem, why wasn’t it some years ago when the “war on terror” started or when we had tanks at Heathrow?
The reason most people are outraged is that you and I know perfectly well that it has everything to do with them making their fiddles harder to detect, and nothing else. The security aspect is just a smokescreen.
It is not a coincidence that this just happens after all the outrages with allowance abuses coming one after the other, as well as the rewriting of this green book.
Those people confirm once more that they have absolutely no shame.
Sorry Bill, I didn’t realise you’d already covered some of this. Well done for beating me to it!
I don’t buy the whole ’security’ argument and I completely agree that MPs’ expenses are too easy to abuse. I am not naive enough to think that MPs are about to give up their second homes allowance, but I still support the principle of privacy for everyone. The sale of personal data by central government is absolutely unacceptable and should certainly be stopped immediately.
BE, I remember that post by Tom Harris about Labour and civil liberties, it was a pretty stupid thing to say and the commentors had a field day.
Tom Harris is wrong. Democracy requires that our elected representatives do not hide themselves away.
They’re not hidden. They’re in a big palace, in Westminster, just next to the river. You can’t miss it – look for a huge great clock stuck at the top of a tower.
)
What they’re proposing is to keep private the location at which they reside when they’re not lawmaking. Which I think is sensible. I just happen to think they should extend the same courtesy to me, first.
I always knew where my MP John Major lived. Mind you, there was always an army of police when he was PM. You couldn’t miss it when he was at home!
Anyways………..all I want to know is that my MP lives or has a place locally and that he does in fact live locally when away from parliament and thus knows the locale, has a finger on the pulse and all that local jazz. Of course, my MP will have a constituency office and I’m perfectly happy to know it’s address and just that my MP lives locally. I don’t need to know his or her exact address. If I want to, I’m sure the electoral role or some other such database will contain it.
They’re not hidden. They’re in a big palace, in Westminster, just next to the river. You can’t miss it – look for a huge great clock stuck at the top of a tower.
You missed a bit off the end:
“tower…surrounded by a 1 mile exclusion zone from protests, armed police and snipers on the rooftops and security checking entrants – all things clearly designed to promote the ‘accessibility’ of those we elect to represent us.”
The government is taking our privacy from us, but MPs want to give themselves privacy protections that they never used to have, have lived perfectly well without up till now. And this is right why?
btw, It is not outrageous that MPs children should be exempted from ContactPoint. What is outrageous is that everyone else’s children should be on it.
You missed a bit off the end…
Yes, fair point. Add that to the list of prior demands, then!
When I have special forces snipers guaranteeing my security in the vacinity of my workplace, MPs can have their addresses hidden, mkay? Anyone would think that like The Harpy, they were afraid of their constituents. Although, tbh, if I were one of this shower, I’d be pretty terrified of meeting regular people too. Which isn’t to say they don’t deserve to live in fear… Its interesting, though, that we are unjustifiably afraid of crime which, our Masters insist, is falling to unprecedented low levels, but they need body armour to walk the streets during the day. Honestly, kids, I hope they are feeling the *love*…
Lord Norton (http://lordsoftheblog.wordpress.com/2009/03/03/individual-registration/) has expressed concern on who should have access to the full electoral register. My comment should be up soon but, essentially, I have no truck with those who want to force MPs private home addresses to be made public.
It is my understanding that company directors no longer need give their private home address.
Whoops, bit ahead of myself, update:
From 1st October 2009 every director must provide Companies House with both their usual residential address, and for each directorship they hold, a service address. The service address will be on the public record and will be public information but the residential address will be protected information. A director can choose any address as the service address including the registered office address of the company. The address must be where documents can be delivered and an acknowledgement or receipt can be provided if required. The address can not be a PO Box or a DX number. If the director chooses to use his residential address as the service address the fact that the two addresses are the same would not be apparent from the public record.
http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/companiesAct/implementations/oct2009.shtml
It is my understanding that company directors no longer need give their private home address.
Wow, someone hop in a time machine and inform Companies House for the 08/9 year…
Interesting that whilst MPs have a statutory right to know all of our addresses, by way of their access to the full electoral roll, they feel that we shouldn’t have the same right of access to theirs. Yet another example of them believing that there is one law for them and another, less advantageous, one for the rest of us.
However on the day that the full horror of the Civil Contingencies Act came to my notice a further example of self serving hypocrisy on the part of our parliamentarians seems to pale into insignificance.
I don’t like the double standards, believe me, but I am still (unjustifiably) optimistic that the Conservatives might spot the hypocrisy once they form the next government.