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The Select Committee So Mark took along the report detailing all the discrepancies in the registers to the Select Committee. They grilled him for nearly two hours and Mark told them that on the issue of transparency and accountability, public bodies were rotten to the core. The only way to solve this would be to radically reform the system so that it wasn’t a means of the great and the good furthering their cvs or in fact, their business interests. He suggested that one way of getting more members of the public on these bodies would be to draw them by lot, maybe using a system similar to a jury service. After all, if members of the public are clever enough to understand the complexities of a trial when someone’s future is in the balance, they should be able to understand the work of these bodies, especially when there's just some wine tasting and apples and pears to worry about. The committees should also sometimes operate outside of London and hold pubic meetings at weekends . Finally he also recommended that no-one should be allowed to serve on more than one public body; that there should be an agreed percentage of seats open to the public and that those failing to declare interests should be asked to resign immediately. The Chairman of the Committee, Tony Wright, asked Mark what he thought of MPs before reading out Mark’s New Statesman article: “when it comes to sucking up to royalty, no one does it quite so eagerly as MPs whose dribbling corgi like eulogies make The Daily Mail look calm by comparison… Had the Queen’s dead mother made a Lazarus like recovery, risen form the dead and stood in the way of MPs charging back to Parliament they would have knocked her to the ground and trampled her back to death in their rush to express the nation’s gratitude for her life… The MP’s trail of slime inched forward towards their knighthoods”. Difficult to respond to that really. But Mark tried by explaining where all the distrust came from: "I think that the people that I work with, that I regard as my peers are intelligent; they care passionately about a whole range of social issues; they are incredibly knowledgeable; they’ll go out of their way to find out information; they’ll set up alternative means of distributing information. They believe so much in human rights and the rights of people within the environment that they are often prepared to be arrested for these issues. These people that I regard as my peers they really, and this is no offence, but they don’t trust you. They don’t want anything to do with you. They don’t want anything to do with government. And if you extend the powers of a government body to investigate itself, then as far as they’re concerned you’ll merely perpetuate that exclusion from the publicly democratic process and you’ll perpetuate the feeling that actually they’re not involved in this. The feeling that it doesn’t matter what happens here, it doesn’t touch their lives in any real tangible way…" Note: Mark's submitted report is in the process of being published and will be put up on the Parliamentary Website very shortly. BE SURE to check the site when it's up as it will be Mark's full report, published under the safety of Parliamentary Privelage which basically means Mark can say what he like without fear of being sued!
Mark's report to the Public Administration Committee (to be published in May sometime)
Quangothon Mark did ask the committee to join him after the session for the “Quangothon” – a telethon where Mark and invited guests Jo Guest, Howard Marks and Bernie Clifton phoned some of the people on the public bodies mentioned in the report that appeared not to have their interests registered properly. The MPs declined but Bernie, Howard, Jo and Mark did quite well. In two hours they got seven and a half apologies between them.
The following day’s Financial Times reported that as a consequence of Mark’s evidence the DTI would be launching an inquiry into “declaration of interest procedures”. The Secretary of State for Trade and Industry is Patricia Hewitt. The same Patricia Hewitt who is Chair of the Council for Science and Technology whose declaration of interest procedures are being investigated by the DTI. Mark happened to bump into her in the street and asked her whether she would be probing herself. She wouldn’t answer his question but did say several times that it was always a pleasure to see him. Which is nice to know.
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