Category: Blog

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.

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.