Monthly Archives: June 2009

I was pleased to hear this morning that my Parliamentary question on where the money is coming from to build the new homes has been followed up by the media, only to discover the Communities Department has not identified the cuts to pay for the houses. On The Today programme on Monday morning Mr Mandelson [...]

Today the PM announced £1500 million extra spending on housing. He implied it was being “paid for” by cutting spending elsewhere. I asked him what he was cutting. He declined to answer. It makes a mockery of Parliament that he wont even answer that.

It is depressing that so many in the media are still following the Labour line that the choice is “investment” in public services or “cuts”. You woudl have thought that after the MPs expenses and the BBC salaries rows it would now be obvious to everyone that there are plenty of costs to squeeze out [...]

There was some good news this morning for a change. I heard that “There may not be time in the legislative programme” to sell a minority stake in Royal Mail to a foreign company. It was presumably phrased like that by the BBC because they have both been told it has been dropped from the [...]

The government wants to recruit up to 100,000 existing and former teachers to act as tutors to pupils falling behind in English and maths. There are worse ways of spending the money. Let’s hope it does help lift standards. It leaves open the quesiton of why, after 12 years of large increases in cash for [...]

Yesterday I attended a rather grand seminar in Oxford, to discuss the current state of world politics. It was a curious experience. Most people talked in soundbites from long gone spin doctors, or in media hype. The first sessions concentrated on how Obama had made a difference. Instead of forensic academic analysis which I was [...]

Labour tells us we need full time MPs. What a good idea. It is the Labour government and the Labour majority in the Commons that makes all MPs very part time. My main job is to hold the government to account. It is to cross examine them over their policies, to request they put things [...]

Yesterday enough Conservative MPs stayed in Parliament to defeat the government. By the time we got to the votes there were only just about 100 Labour MPs still there. The government was busy trying to set up yet more regional government bureaucracy and supervision in England. It was a pleasure to help vote down one [...]

I have always told my electors I do things as well as being an MP. I have kept my local electors informed through the local newspaper. Doubtless now new rules are being brought in for disclosure of earnings, the national media will run a series of stories, as if this were all new or news. [...]