Month: July 2009

The large steel slab works at Redcar is in serious trouble. The collapse of steel prices allied to the loss of customers and demand leaves its future in doubt. The local MP calls for government support, but when cross examined the support he seeks is small and limited. A better system of trade credit insurance and retraining grants are unlikely to save the plant. The government has made it clear there can be no general subsidy, and no nationalisation of the assets.

Two large conglomerate banks acquired too many foreign banks and investment banking business by merger, and over expanded their loan books. They were given access to unbelievable sums of public money, were part nationalised, and are now allowed to grow fat at the taxpayers expense. The CEO of one has just been given a pay package that could amount to an eye watering £9.7 million, all signed off by Ministers who tell us bankers’ bonuses need to be curbed. Instead of acting as lender of last resort and telling the banks they had to cut costs and sell off surplus businesses to survive, the authorities rolled over and subsidised their crazy ways.

How does this apartheid treatment of business marry with Labour’s values, or indeed with commonsense and fair play?

Ministers tell us they will do whatever it takes to protect jobs and see people through the recession. Tell that to the 2.4 million now out of work, and say it again to the workers at Redcar.

So what should they be doing? They should not have subsidised and nationalised RBS and LLoyds/HBOS. There was a much cheaper and better way of avoidng the collapse of Nat West and HBOS, and one which would have meant those banks would now be further down the road to having sustainable and profitable businesses than they currently are.

Nor should the government nationalise and subsidise a steel works which has lost its main customers. What it should be doing is seeing how it can help British business reduce its cost base to become more competitive, and using public spending to boost sensible infrastructure investment that we need which will use local steel, concrete, aggregate, bricks and tarmac. It would have more scope to do that – and more scope to cut dangerous levels of borrowing – if it had not decided to waste so much taxpayers money on banks that got it wrong.

Perhaps the BBC no longer approve of me as a listener, as well as disliking my views as a contributor. I have found it increasingly difficult to pick up Radio 4 on FM at home. I have to put the radio in a contorted position and turn the volume up full to get some sound out of the machine. Yes that’s with new batteries, and at a time when other channels would blow my ears off at full volume.

Friends with digital radios are not finding them very good at delivering a good signal either , and they of course prevent you hearing the cricket on 198.

Are the BBC deliberately wrecking the FM signal to force people to try digital? Is digital compression now so compressed that nothing is going to work? Why does Radio 4 on my car radio regularly get interrupted with interference? I usually find modern technology is better than old, and I look forward to the future being better than the present. When it comes to digital radio it seems to be bad followed by worse. The BBC is making itself unpopular by threatening all owners of older radios with the sack or forcing them to buy an expensive new radio they do not need or want. Now they seem to be compounding their felony by degrading the transmission of FM.

The BBC commented that there were not many of us in for the debate on Afghanistan yesterday. The truth was more of us went in than could speak, because once again the time allowed for the debate was too short. Those who did speak were limited to 6 or 8 minutes. I left it to colleagues who specialise in defence and who have visited Afghanistan.

It was a serious debate which abandoned party lines. There were several Conservatives strongly in favour of the war and the need to press it more vigorously. There were Labour MPs who disagreed with our presence there and felt we should get out as soon as possible as honourably as possible. Most MPs agreed we needed to provide the equipment needed, though there was more disagreement on party lines on whether that was currently being delivered.

It is now emerging that the UK has many helicopters that are not being committed to Afghanistan, whilst our troops in Afghanistan have access to far fewer helicopters than their US allies. The government is right to say that not all journeys can be made by air, and that some of the tragic deaths could not have been avoided by the presence of helicopters. The critics are right to say that the way to protect more troops more often against the latest Taliban tactic of bombs on roads is to fly more . After the bluster and spin, the government will probably get round to sending more helicopters. Why on earth don’t they change their line, say the Taliban tactics have evolved and as a result it is their priority to send more suitable transport to the troops and they are straining every sinew to do so? And then why don’t they do it?

I have been sent this by a Tory blogger, www.trueblueblood.com:

John Laity comment:

This weekend is the Royal Air Tattoo at Fairford.

I live in the MATZ for Fairford and have been watching aircraft arrive at low level all day. It is great as we have a 1000 ft cloud base which means you can waive at the pilots ;0)

Today I have seen:
4 Medium Helicopters kitted our for radar and anti-submarine
2 Medium Helecopters kitted out for anti-ship & Anti-submarine
2 Attack Helecopters (to be fair possibly low level training)
4 Medium Attack Helecopters (Italian I think)
2 F15 Eagles

All in the space of 20 minutes.

What this must mean is that the 8 nm airspace between Fairford and Lynham (containing Wootten Basset) is now better protected than our troops in action. Small comfort for those arriving back I am sure…

After hearing Mr Miliband announce the dawn of the new low carbon era and after a later vote I walked my way to the tube to go to a meeting about the economy outside Westminster. To my surprise there were still large numbers of Ministerial cars parked all round the Commons waiting to drive their Ministers back the few hundred yards to their Whitehall offices.

When I returned to the Commons the air conditioning was still on full, keeping the place cooler than I would like, with all the lights blazing on a summer afternoon. Ministers and their supportive MPs were still busy planning long trips by air to visit foreign countries.

Is the new low carbon era just to be a private sector phenomenon? Apparently the government has two policies which are going to push our carbon use down sharply – recession, followed by running out of electricity.

I asked Mr Miliband when his much advertised new nuclear stations and carbon storage schemes were going to be built. If there is no action soon I suggested the epitaph of the government would be they had turned the lights off and left us all in the dark.

Mr Miliband misinformed the House that I must have spent a lot of time rehearsing that one, before avoiding answering it. Let me reassure Mr Miliband that I made it up once I had heard his statement. It’s an old fashioned approach to Parliament to listen to what others say before joining in, but one I would recommend to him. Answering questions would also be helpful.

The Daily Mail has gone to town today on the 74 Labour MPs who signed Early Day Motions criticising the one sided Extradition arrangements with the US that the government signed up to, and demanding UK justice for Mr McKinnon. Their failure to vote for the Opposition Day motion which repeated their demands from the EDMs was not their finest hour.

I have been a consistent opponent of the lop sided extradition the government forced upon us, and am not surprised to see the government’s weakness on this issue with the US now causing harm. Today I want to say a little more about those EDMs.

EDMs are Parliamentary graffitti. They fall into three broad cartegories. There are the harmless ones invented by MPs to launch a local press release. These might congratulate a soccer team on winning a competition or praise a UK sports star for performing well.

There are the few designed by a group of MPs for a political purpose, as part of a much wider campaign to change the government’s mind or to change their party’s stance on something. The MPs designing them know they can’t work on their own, and are but the more visible part of what they are doing. They will, however, normally stick by their public declaration.

There are then many drawn up by lobby groups outside the House, tabled by an MP, and circulated to the members or contacts of the lobby group. People then send in an email, letter of postcard drafted by the lobby group urging MPs to sign the lobby group’s motion.

This latter industry implies that EDMs matter. The person sending in the card or email is invited to believe that if enough MPs sign the EDM the matter will be fixed. As yesterday shows, that is complete nonsense. Yesterday 74 Labour MPs showed they did not mean their signatures on EDMs. If they had voted for the Oppositon version of the EDM, then something could have changed. The EDMs just sit on the Order paper collecting some names and much dust.They have no impact whatsoever, and are never debated.

My advice to constituents is not to be taken in by the EDM mongers. EDMs don’t work. If you want to change a Minister’s mind you need to put something to the Minister that he or she has to respond to. Better still, you need the Opposition to table a motion, and then need to persuade more Labour MPs to see the need to vote against their government. But that of course, is altogether more difficult.

Conservative peer Lord Jenkin of Roding has tabled a couple of important amendments to the Parliamentary Standards Bill which assert Article IX of the Bill of Rights and Parliamentary supremacy, “notwithstanding any provision of the European Communities Act 1972, the European Convention of Human Rights or the Human Rights Act”. I understand this has official Conservative party backing. That’s a good move in view of the nature of this legislation.

So far I have avoided comment on the great pandemic.

In the early days Ministers and government told us they were valiantly combatting it, to stop it reaching us. I bit my tongue. It reached the UK.

Then Ministers told us they would stop it spreading in the UK. I kept quiet. It spread.

Government implied it was virulent and serious. They would fight it in the hospitals and in surgeries, with huge quantities of drugs. Fortunately so far it has proved quite mild for most people catching it, unless they already have some other serious condition.

Now we are told flu is flu. This one is like regular flu. You may not need drugs at all, or if you do a phone call to the GP should suffice to sort it out.

Why has the governemnt line kept changing? Why has so much effort be expended to so little effect? Why did they pretend they could stop it in the first place? How much has all this cost? Has anything they have done made any positive difference?