Month: July 2009

When I was a lonely Parliamentary voice saying do not nationalise big banks because the taxpayer could lose too much money, the government told us they would make money on the transaction. I said lend them as little as you could get away with for as much security as possible and make them cut costs and raise capital.

Now we learn the Treasury thinks the two they bought could lose £77,000,000,000. That’s twice the annual defence budget, more than the education budget. That money would be lost by us, taxpayers, as we own a majority of the shares of the banks that might lose it.

That’s money we cannot afford to lose. With a deficit like the present government one, the last thing we need is banking losses on top. What a disaster if they lose anything like that much. The banks should be made to cut costs and sort their businesses out more quickly to stop that happening.

Parliament has broken up for an 82 day recess. Yes, 82 days off. There is no Parliament to go to until the second week of October. It’s the wrong decision by the majority, at a time of crisis in the public finances and a time of economic problems generally.

Some Labour MPs say they do not think people should be part time MPs. Maybe they should explain that to the Foreign Secretary, who told me in answer to a question about a week in his life that he spent 81 hours of the week on his second job as a Minister, leaving it quite tight to do a minimum 40 hours as an MP.

They should also explain to me how any MP can do a good full time job when there is no Parliament to go to for 17 weeks of the year. Yes, there are letters to answer, cases to take up, and people and institutions to visit. They can be fitted in to a busy Parliamentary day.

If any organisation in Wokingham would like me to visit or has something they want me to take up, August and September is a good time to do it, as my main job has been taken away for those months. The government can get up to what it likes and we have no opportunity to question and probe, or to get them to change their minds.

The truth is MPs are very busy on those minority of days in the year when Parliament meets for the day and the evening, and when there are many other meetings grouped at Westminister that are important to constituents. An MP just has to knuckle down and work through for 15 hours or so to get the most out of it. When Parliament is not in session there not only is Chamber to attend, questions to ask and contributions to make to debates, but all the behind the scenes meetings, meetings with people wanting to brief us and other events dwindle or disappear as well.

Labour have failed to make the Commons family friendly in its hours, and now prevent us doing our job for 12 weeks at a stretch. When there is no Parliament sitting, it’s not half the job. All I can do is write letters to Ministers. It’s not the same as meeting them daily and challenging them acorss the floor of the Commons.

Yesterday the government was in a hurry to get rid of all remaining business, so it can govern for 82 days without a Parliament to answer. In the process it can lead many to ask the reasaonable question, why can’t our MPs do their main job until well into October? The government used its majority to ensure the Commons had too little time yesterday to deal with the outstanding items, and to send us away for a long time.

Before we went the Speaker wisely granted an Urgent Question on the topic of Equitable Life. It has been the only sign of urgency around an issue where the government has dithered and delayed for all too long. The urgency was to follow up a government promise of a Statement on what compensation it was proposing before the summer recess.

The Chief Secretary to the Treasury gave a pathetic performance. He told us again that the government accepts many of the Ombudsman’s findings of maladministration by the regulators, yet it refuses to offer compensation. Instead he suggested some ex gratia payments to those who have lost out most.

Several of us asked for a deadline for the development of the scheme and for the payments under it. I also asked for some idea of how much would be paid on what basis to the losers. The Minister would not answer any of these basic and simple points.

This most profiligate and spendthrift of governments does at times combine being mean with a dogged determination to do the wrong thing. In the week of the helicopter shortage we witnessed that same lethal combination yesterday over the Equitable Life victims. Even Labour MPs looked astonished at the government’s insouciance, and told the Minister to get on with it.

When I was the Minister in charge of financial regulation, I inherited the Barlow Clowes mess. The findings of the Ombudsman in that case were clear – the regulators had failed. I did not hesitate. We compensated the victims at taxpayers expense, even though the last thing I wanted to do was to increase public spending for the sake of it. I felt we had to, as people had relied on regualtion and it had let them down. It is equally clear in the case of Equitable Life. What is the point of all this regulation, if when it goes wrong the government just walks away?

Yesterday it looked as if the government is happy for more delay, so more people will die who have lost money in this disaster. They looked like a government waiting for an election. I would love to be proved wrong, but I predicted they will not make a single payment before we go to the polls. The Minister did not protest at this. It felt as if the idea of ex gratia payments is just to get them through the Parliamentary embarrassment, and it did not even succeed in doing that very well.

Yesterday in a masterly act of self parody, the government put forward its Child Poverty Bill. Let me share with you its first two clauses, which set the tone:

1. It is the duty of the Secretary of State to ensure that the following targets are met in relation to the UK in relation to the target year –
a) the relative low income target
b)the combined low income and material deprivation target
c) the absolute low income target
d) the persistent poverty target
The target year is the financial year beginning with 1 April 2020

2. The relative low income target is that less than 10% of children who live in qualifying households live in households that fall within the relevant income group
For the purposes of this section, a household falls within the relevant income group …if its equivalised net income …is less than 60% of median equivalised net household income…

So here we have it. The government legislates to ensure a future government abolishes poverty, something this government has singularly failed to achieve.

If an Act of Parliament with a few targets in it can remove poverty, why didn’t Labour do it years ago? This was just another political press release masquerading as an Act.

Mr Brown hoped the Conservatives would oppose it. Then he could claim they did not care about child poverty. If they accepted it, he or his successors could use it to criticise Ministers in ten years time for failing to hit the targets.

I trust it will be much criticised in committee. Yesterday Miss Cooper was in her best answer no questions mode, turning every request we made into an anti Tory soundbite. She made it clear this is legislation as political stunt.

As the Conservatives pointed out, the issue is parent poverty. The solutions are many and complex, revolving around a back to work culture.

The latest surveys are depressing. There are too many empty shops. It is part of the price of economic incompetence, part of the result of the huge boom and bust monetary policy created.

There are a couple of other trends going on as well. The advance of the internet means more items are bought online and less in shops. It is becoming more and more of battle to get into town centres and then to park, making more people opt to shop in out of town centres or on line.

Councils who feign concern should look to their own anti shopper policies. It is not easy shopping from a bus or train. The car is better, as you can put all the items in the boot and go more or less door to door. Too many Councils now run rip off parking regimes, charging too much and putting shoppers on edge for fear that their car will be impounded if they run over by a few minutes through delays at the tills. Some compound this by a stunning and expensive array of humps, bumps, chicanes, no through roads and other blocks on getting to the town in the first place. If Councils want more shoppers, they need to ease congestion and make it easier for shoppers in cars to get in. Councils usually make sure their senior employees can drive to work with reserved free car parking places.

I have been critical before of President Obama’s failure to close Guantanamo and Guantanamo look-alikes. We now learn that the report on how to close it is to be delayed by six months.

Apparently the writers have discovered a problem – that the US has detained people they think too dangerous to let out of prison, where they do not have enough evidence to prosecute them! Wasn’t that always the issue?

The rules of a free society are simple. People are innocent until proven guilty, and cannot be detained without reason given and without a trial to test the allegations.

If there are people in prison who will not stand trial, they must be let out. If they are foreigners, they should be sent back to where they came from. The US need never let them into the country again. If they are US citizens, then they should be released but kept under surveillance if there are grounds for suspicion of future actions. I wouold have thought it will be difficult for them to to do anything after all the information the authroities must by now have collected about them.

Some of you yesterday in response to my piece on Labour wanted to know about the Conservatives. That’s a sign of the times, when the Opposition is more important news than the government.

Some advisers to past Conservative leaders were so much the prisoners of Labour’s spin, that they tried to emulate Blair’s strategy in the 1990s. They were always wanting to find a Clause IV momnent, when their Leader could pick a fight with the Conservative party and win, showing it had changed. It was silly thing to want to do, because the Conservative problem was not a past policy problem that went to the core of the party’s identity as nationalisation was to Labour, but the mistaken economic fashion of the ERM they had adopted in the early 1990s which true Conservatives hated anyway.

They never found a way of copying the other part of the Blair strategy, by characterising the errors of their opponents and then remorselessly repeating the negative messages. Indeed, they missed the main point about NuLabour – it was primarily a way of attacking the Conservatives. Under Brown this has been extended, so that practically all policy statements and many government actions are also just traps for the Conservatives. We have an oppositon with a majority, a group of politicians who define themselves by their caricature of their opponents. As people cease to believe Labour generally, so they cease to believe their view of the Conservatives.

So what should David Cameron ‘s Conservatives do? They should move rapidly to the post Brown/Blair era, by showing that politics is about more than messaging and positioning. It is about preparing for government and governing well. What the public wants from the Conservatives is evidence that they have thought a lot about how to turn the country round, and are prepared to take the difficult decisions that will require. Today George Osborne will set out how they will tackle the mess that it is City regulation. That is what they should be doing.

It doesn’t matter if Labour try to steal the policies – many of them will be steps too far for the spinners and adventurers of the government, and it is probably too late to save their bacon even if they now do start doing the right things for a change. It is more important that the current disaster be turned round as quickly as possible for all our sakes. The country wants some competence from its politicians. It has had enough of the age of spin, where the only thing that happens is more money is spent on the government’s advertising and PR budget, and more messages are crafted,designed to portray the government’s opponents in a bad light.

Mr Blair in Opposition decided to build a new brand, called New Labour, so he could win an election.

His media strategy had two prongs. In the first he trashed the Tory brand, and in the second he decontaminated the Labour brand. Both strategies were designed to tell people “things could only get better”.

He trashed the Tories by endless repetition of three claims – that they put up taxes, they were the party of boom and bust, and they were sleazy. The first two claims all centred around the disastrous decision to be too European, by joining the Exchange Rate Mechanism which damaged the UK economy. This was a consensus decision of all three political parties, but one Mr Blair distanced himself from very neatly when the idiocy of it came home for all to see. Mr Blair even had the gall or self confidence to claim in a less important soundbite that the Tories were isolated in Europe and too divided on Europe, because a few of us had opposed the deeply damaging economic policy the three front benches had supported.

What are we to make of Labour’s main claims now? The party that complained of boom and bust imported from Europe has now put us through a far more violent boom and bust of their own making. The party which complained of Tory tax rises has hiked taxes overall by more through their stealth taxes. The party which found a few examples of Tory sleaze and made much of them has now presided over many a Cabinet level resignation and the whole expenses row.

Decontaminating the Labour brand entailed one main claim – that Labour was no longer the party of nationalisation. Mr Blair staged a “fight” with his left wing, and took nationalisation out of his party’s aims. He said Labour would be wedded to prudence, and run the economy on sound lines. There would be no more excessive borrowing and trips to the IMF. He added that Labour was no longer the party of the Trade Unions, that it would accept the Thatcher Union reforms. It was to be sound on defence.

How hollow all those claims look now. Never has a Labour government nationalised so much, if you look at the scale of nationalisations compared to National Income. At last they saw the opportunity to nationalise the banks, a bridge too far for previous Labour governments, though one their core supporters always wanted to cross. They fought successfully to prevent those of us with an alternative to nationalisation from getting air time to put the case, and used a left wing Lib Dem, Mr Cable, to help them win their battle.

Prudence was not only divorced quite early, but in more recent months they have held a drink and drugs party on her grave. The scale of extra spending and borrowing is enormous, well beyond anything any previous peace time government has attempted.

The Trade Union reforms have been modified in some areas, as the party has come once again to rely almost entirely on Union funding. The senior politicians now meet Union bosses to hammer out common policies.

In recent years, when more and more money has been thrown at most parts of the public sector, the old Labour dislike of defence has left that budget struggling with cuts and inadequate resources. Labour has increased the spending on social security at the expense of spending on national security.

“New Labour” turns out to be a media strategy, not a brand. A successful brand requires its architects to live the message, to implement the promises, to be proud of what it stands for. New Labour’s alleged brand values of prudence, justice, fairness, honesty have failed because the government forgot that it not only needed to say them, but also to do them.