Monthly Archives: August 2010

The planning system in the Uk doesn’t work well. Many people dislike it because they still end up with too much development on their doorsteps. They do not like the density, location and style of much of the building near them. Many developers dislike it, because it entails them spending a lot of money on [...]

Most progress is being made by the government with demolishing the architecture of top down control and centralisation that the last government imposed on Councils. This week the Audit Commission was added to the RDAs, the regional housing targets and plans, the Comprehensive Area Assessments and many of the requirements and monitors placed on local [...]

In the USA the latest move from the Fed to say it will buy up some more Treasury bonds to try to stave off another slowdown or worse has been dubbed by some wags as QE2. Some here in the UK want the Bank of England to also run up another phase of quantitative easing [...]

For some the £150 milllion fine on the Uk for not displaying the EU flag on projects which received “EU” money is the last straw. It is certainly more proof of Labour incompetence. I remember investigating the use of the EU logo on Welsh projects when I was in office there. The legal advice was [...]

Throughout the Thatcher era Labour claimed public spending was being cut. Each year it rose. In 1978-9, the last Labour year, total public spending was £75 billion. By 1989-90, the last Thatcher year, public spending was £200 billion. This was up every year and up after allowing for general inflation. According to this year’s budget [...]

Listening to parts of the public sector, it’s as if they want things to go wrong. Yesterday we had to be treated to a leaked letter from the Department of Justice, enabling the media to have another round of discussions of “deep and damaging cuts”. Few point out that current public spending in cash terms [...]

Whilst many of you have written in support of withdrawing our army from Germany, some have expressed the conventional objections that we need to use the housing in Germany, and we need the tank training that the German facilities permit. These responses ignore the most important point that I was arguing – we should give [...]

The extreme difficulty of having a sensible debate about public spending in the Uk thanks to Labour’s unpleasant, personalised and biased approach to the topic has been revealed by the case of free school milk. If you listen to the debate you would think that Baroness Thatcher alone abolished free school milk, leaving it just [...]

There have been lively exchanges between Mr Fox and the Treasury over paying for the renewal of Trident, according to the newspapers. I do not quite understand all these briefings. The outcome looks clear. The Coalition government is committed to renewing Trident. Trident is a main programme of the MOD. The final settlement of money [...]

Today I wish to start a debate about why we have armed forces, what we expect of them and how they should be shaped, deployed and supported in the future. The last guidance from the outgoing government came in its vague document “Adaptability and Partnership”, a Green Paper published in February 2010 to hold the [...]