Monthly Archives: January 2007

One week on and I still have neither a phone line nor a broadband connection. I am expecting a long saga trying to get it sorted out. I have to go elsewhere to carry on blogging. Competition is the answer, and we need more of it.

Conservative Hammersmith and Fulham have got off to a great start, by cutting the Council tax and improving services. When you take over from Labour that is not difficult. They are doing it by market testing many of the Council’s activities, and reducing the administrative overhead. They are using the large savings they are making [...]

Most people in the UK strongly oppose a federal EU state. We are fed up with the continual power grab??by Brussels, and the dissimulation by this government as they give more and more power away. Yesterday in the House??Conservatives failed to get a commitment to a referendum on part of the Constitution when we pressed, [...]

When I asked the Home Secretary today to comment on why we will, according to the PM, be at war against terror for a generation, and why it would end after one generation,??he told me it was likely to last "as long as the Cold War". He said he did not himself use the pharse [...]

The memory of some who now??want out of the EU??is very hazy. Some of them voted Yes to remaining in the EEC?? when we had a referendum in 1975.It was a great pity they did not read the Treaty of Rome then . which is the origin of all the transfers of power which have [...]

Mr Blair in his closing months seems to take a delight in telling us we are sentenced to a war against terrorists which will last a generation. After the mess in Iraq, isn’t it time for a reappraisal of this war? What does he have in mind for the next twenty years? Is he suggesting [...]

Yesterday morning when I wanted to bring my diary up to date I discovered that in the middle of the UK’s Silicon Valley I had neither phone line nor internet connection. I used a mobile to phone BT. They tried to tell me it was a fault with my equipment. They then told me how [...]

It’s a bit rich that Gordon blames Conservatives and nationalists for the current unease with the bodged devolution proposals he and his colleagues gave to Scotland and forced on England without ever asking us our opinion. You reap what you sow. It was never a good idea to offer Scotland more powers of self government [...]

Last year the government and Pensions Regulator listened when business lobbied strenuously about the amount of money a company had to pay to the Pensions regulator to create a fund to take over pension funds in trouble and meet the payments to pensionsers.The levy came in?? at a lower level than orginally mooted. This year [...]

Yesterday we had another very unsatisfactory debate on the Post Office in the Commons. The Conservative front bench pointed out that 2500 sub Post Offices will close according to the government, but the top management of the business probably will close many more over the years ahead as they do not think they can make [...]