Criminals are not barred from becoming MPs - but that's set to change

As it happens, I have interacted with quite a few elected politicians who had done time for serious offences. Most of them were members of Sinn Fein, and the rest were members of the Progressive Unionist Party.

Their backgrounds were well known. When Martina Anderson was elected to the European Parliament with 150,000 people voting for her, the fact that she'd done 13 years on explosives charges was not obscure trivia.

I realise this will seem like obscure provincial stuff compared to the question of whether Yookay parties do their due diligence on candidates.

On basic principle, if someone is entitled to vote they're entitled to stand for election. It's up to the parties to do due diligence, and up to the voters to exercise their judgement.

I do not believe that any additional qualification introduced by the current regime will be used for any purpose other than screwing over candidates who might be inconvenient to the current regime.

Now to be fair, in the case of Sinn Fein, they have been bringing in younger candidates and the old IRA lads are gradually moving into retirement.

At least at the level of elected representatives. There's a tacit agreement not to look too hard at who actually runs Sinn Fein, and it's not the elected reps.

Even as the circle spun, I re-read that in my head.

Many apa-loguies - feel free to roast me when I get it wrong 😀

So getting all conspiratorial about what is going on is just silly.

Its bad enough that politicians are the puppets of the mass media, but would like to think those on FWR were of a more independent, feminist perspective thinking.

Have you met your scolding quota for the day?

Do you think the tabloid press forced Ken Livingstone to defend the serial rapist Gerry Healy for decades, even long after Healy's death?

I got mine from seeing that Sinn Fein are the largest party in the NI assembly.

What planet does yours come from ?

If this was (maybe it is) the law in Russia what would Putin do?

The answer is, use the police to target any potential opposition so that they couldn't run against him.

This decision to bring this in as law in the UK is totally undemocratic. Full disclosure for all candidates maybe okay, at least they could state the circumstances and timings of their arrest/ prosecution but anything beyond that, is a terrible terrible idea.

Sinn Fein are a legitimate political party.

It is quite telling that given how few of them there are, that Reform wannabes are featuring in exposures.

I think it's mostly telling of who is the Inner Party and who is the Outer Party.

We all know about, for instance, the Scottish Greens being riddled with perverts, but nobody seems particularly interested in looking into that story. Because, for all their wadical posturing, they're a reliable part of the cartel.

I agree. I don't see most criminal convictions as being a bar to becoming an MP. Fraud, offences against children, possibly murder (but not necessarily), terrorism (probably, bye bye Sinn Fein)?

The power is not selecting who can work with children. Perpetrators self-select out by reason of abhorrent behaviour.

I suppose the only good think about the system we know have is the ongoing revelations about how many Reform politicians turn out to have very lax moral standards.

Another way of putting that is, we know which politicians Hope Not Hate is motivated to publish hit pieces on.

HNH is a curious body that manages to combine charitable status, close links to Labour bigwigs like Morgan McSweeney and David Lammy, generous funding from the Home Office on the grounds that they're experts in "extremism", and blatantly partisan campaigning which would seem to be in tension with their charitable status.

It also targets women whose views on trans issues it deems insufficiently "inclusive".

It's always been assumed that anyone who is eligible to vote, should be eligible to run for office.

If they were serious about this (spoiler: they aren't, it's posturing) then the suggestion would be to maintain that principle and prevent criminals from voting.

And not all candidates are put up by political parties. Some are independents. So you're going to have to be fair to all parties.

I think it's about time we had more vetting of people standing for public office but I really disagree with it being done this way. Political parties should not be the arbiters of who is suitable for public office, the voting public should be. People who stand for election should have their criminal records released to the public. It is the public who should get to decide if they consider the conviction too serious to vote for or not.

I'm going to be deliberately vague on this because it may be outing, but there's a particular issue in Northern Ireland with people who've been released under the peace process. You have to do your due diligence, but you also have to have some regard to the need to reintegrate ex-prisoners into the community.

So there was a case I was involved with where someone with a spicy personal history was under consideration for a job, and there was quite an in depth discussion about this, and the final conclusion was that luckily his conviction was only for murder; if it had been fraud we could have held that against him.

The basic point being that a past conviction may be relevant if it reflects on propriety in a similar role, or if there's a safeguarding issue, but if someone has kept his nose clean since release, you can't hold it against him that he got involved with the paramilitaries when he was a teenager in the 1970s.

More so, I think, for MPs, because their past will be part of the election campaign and the voters will have the opportunity to have a say.

You criticise my comments about the difficulty of getting the balance right, OP, but then seem to concede that point when you talk about Simon Weston.
To be clear, I obviously agree that anyone who has committed offences against children or violence against women, or serious fraud, should not be allowed. And honestly, the way that recent legislation has gone, I'm far from convinced that the right balance could be struck.I fear this is an opportunity for a Jim Hacker-style, "let's show that we're doing something".