Category: Blog

The Today programme this morning told us that scientists report a “dim” (as opposed to a “cool” ) sun. Apparently sunspots and flares are not what they used to be.

Is this the beginning of a U turn? Is the BBC about to tell us it is our patriotic duty to generate more carbon dioxide to offset the collapse of the sunspot? Are we about to have warring scientists on the airwaves, with the astronomers in the cooling corner and the climate specialists in the warming corner?

I doubt it. That’s why they said “dim” not “cool”. The warmers still control the BBC and have the bulk of the public research money.

Some of us still want a big drive to cut the use of fossil fuels. We want a greener and cleaner environment with much less dependence on imported oil. There are still good reasons for that.

Chris Grayling, the Shadow Home Secretary, writes:

Good Government is about achieving a sensible balance. We need to protect our society against those who would destroy it. But if we throw away the founding principles of a democratic state to do so, then we are doing the terrorists work for them. So I think that whenever we look at security issues, and potential new weapons for the fight against terror, we should ask one simple question – will this improve the protection of our citizens without undermining our core freedoms? Too often this Government has failed to find the right balance. Indeed, they seem to have lost any sense of proportion about the things that they are doing. The terrorist threat has become an excuse for introducing draconian new powers, and those powers have developed mission creep which means that the intrusion of the state seems to be spreading across our society.

We will seek to restore that balance.

So we will continue with the introduction of biometric passports – but we will scrap the compulsory ID cards that this Government seems to determined to pursue.

We will retain the electronic systems that will record who enters and leaves our country – but we will end the situation where the Government plans to store full details of the holidays, companions and payment details of every citizen for a decade.

We will end the mission creep for anti-terror laws, and limit the use of surveillance powers to the investigation of serious crimes. There is no place for the use of intercept evidence in council tax enforcement.

And there will be no giant big brother databases established under a Conservative Government.

It really is time for a change.

There are two themes from many of the contributions. Will I put my views about more widely in the media? And will the Conservatives take the advice if elected to government?

Yes, I willingly put my views in the wider media when opportunity presents. I have written two Sunday Express articles and a Telegraph article, and carried out half a dozen radio and TV interviews in the last month, including Newsnight and the Daily Politics booked in for today(now cancelled by BBC at last minute – obviously my views on the budget were too sensible for them!). This website, however, is a good way to publish views. It does get read by opinion formers and by government and Opposition advisers. I don’t have one set of views for this site and another watered down set for mainstream media! Views here do count.

I will set out from time to time what the Conservative response will be to problems I and my readers have raised, just as I regularly set out the government’s response. Today I have a reply from the Shadow Home Secretary to the issues surrounding the “Surveillance Society”.

In support of my argument that Parliament meets too little and is forced to pass things without proper debate I have been sent the following figures for the Commons:

1947-97 136 timetable motions curtailing debate on a Bill ( under 3 a year)
1997-2007 438 timetable motions ( 44 a year)

Politicians and the media will try to build up the drama of Budget day. In truth you’ve had the budget already, in two senses.

You’ve had it over the last year, as the government has heaped spending on spending, commitment on commitment.

And you’ve had it in the last week, as the government has seen fit to leak its own “ideas” on necessary changes to the ever expectant media.

The government cooked its goose – and ours – when it took over £3,000,000,000,000 of bank liabilities. It is delaying making those banks own up to their lossses and sort out their mess.

The government cooked its goose – and ours – when it kept money too tight for too long and intensified the downturn. We will experience a big revenue loss from the economic fall, and a big increase in spending on benefits.

The government cooked its goose – and ours – when it decided to undermine its own VAT revenue on top of all the other “spending pressures” and “reflationary measures” it took to get the PM over each media event in recent months.

So now we have the “cupboard is bare” budget.

Subsidies for electric cars that are not in production, tax increases for a future government, and employment subsidies on a small scale.

What we need is an honest budget, setting out just how much financial damage has been done, and setting out a course to correct it. In this government of the spinners by the spinners for the spinners I expect we will once again have the opposite. They can’t even own up to the extent of last year’s borrowing, so don’t expect them to get this year’s right.

I am heartily sick of all these hand wringing interviews about how difficult it is to cut public spending. They usually ask people if they want to cut schools or hospitals, the nonsensical Labour spin. The “better” ones do go on to offer the interviewee chance to cut defence or some other public service.

Businesses regularly have to cut their spending. They do not agonise over whether to cut production or the service they give to customers, as they know they need to sustain both if they are to stay in business. They debate whether they can buy their raw materials cheaper, how many people they really need to produce what they are producing, whether there is a smarter way to make it. They look at cutting what they spend the money on – staff, raw materials,semi manufactures, adverts, transport etc, not at cutting the final output or service.

If we are to have a sensible debate on the public sector that’s what we need to look at. The only small hope in the whole debate is the way some are now asking questions about MPs’ expenses. Did the MP need the patio heater to do the job? Does an MP who lives 9 miles from Westminster need a second home?

These are sensible questions, opening up a needed review of the rules on spending. We need to do the same type of questioning for all public spending. Does the highly paid CEO need the assistant? Does the CEO need to be paid so much more than a Cabinet Minister? Does a government department need 100 spin doctors? Does the quango need to exist? Do we need the extra 300,000 civil servants Labour has added? Did they need to send out all those glossy brochures?

We are not going to get anywhere all the time lazy people in the media conduct interviews about how difficult it is to cut spending because it means cutting schools or hospitals. We need to cut through Labour’s lie that their opponents came into politics to sack teachers and make nurses weep. I know of no MP who has ever wanted to do that. You can have all the nurses, doctors, teachers, military personnel, fire staff, police and other front line public servants we already have for under one quarter of public spending. So let’s start asking soem questions about the other three quarters. Let’s apply some of the efficiency driving logic from the private sector to the public sector.

And let’s start with some popular cuts, like scrapping ID cards, centralised computer schemes and unelected regional government. Cutting public spending can be both easy and popular, because the public sector is so bloated and does so many things we do not need it to do.

When I wrote my piece for today’s Sunday Express on how to cut public spending in a popular way, I should have made more of the need to cut the number of Spin Doctors and allied trades employed at the public expense.

One of the ironies of the present government’s difficulties, is that the Spin doctors are now briefing against each other. Gordon Brown will not know who to trust.

Is Mandelson right, or should he still listen to Ed Balls? Is Charlie Whelan on side now he is in a new role? Would Campbell do for Gordon what he did for Tony? How did McBride go so wrong? Who can the PM trust?

Those who live by spin will die politically by spin. The public is being pillaged to pay for the most complex advisory and spin structure ever. Now it is turning on itself.

The stories today about how No 10 works and who steers the spin machine are gripping reading. Those of us who have known all was not well and sometimes been on the wrong end of these black arts are delighted to see it start to come out. The problem is, so much of it is public money that is being abused to produce all these unpleasant nonsenses and needless power struggles.

The following transcript has come to me by telepathy from the thought police, Ministerial Mind Reading Section. Unfortunately the Minister concerned was referred to only by a secret Code Number which I cannot crack:

” It is now clear Gordon cannot win the election. We’re at 26% and the skids are under us. The game is up, as our Spin doctors are all at war with each other, and even Ed Balls is now being briefed against. If things get worse I could even lose my seat. Either way I am bound to lose my Ministerial job next year when we do have to face the music. It might be best to resign now, whilst staying as friendly with the powers as be as possible. I will have a quiet word with the PM and say at his next reshuffle I would like to stand down for personal reasons. It could help him to have another job to offer someone. Then I should be able to find some sort of extra post, or talk to Headhunters about what I could do next before the balloon goes up and they are all looking for something. I remember I used to laugh at all those washed up Tories who couldn’t get a job after their defeat in 1997. It doesn’t seem quite so funny now it’s happening to us”

If you are a Minister in a government that has lost its way, is trampling on the beliefs and ideals of its own party, and busily briefing against its own people, in the end you have to resign. You carry on, trying to avoid having to defend the indefensible, picking your way carefully through the mistakes, gross injustices and bad spin.

You live on in the hope that you will win the next battle in Cabinet, that you can persauade the Prime Minister to do the decent thing for a change, or in the hope that you will be allowed to make a difference in your own area. One day, if you wish to restore your own self respect and start the real battle for the soul of your party, you have to resign. It is a liberating experience. You feel so much better for it.

There are now so many reasons why any decent Labour Minister who can remember the principles and ideals that brought him or her into politics should resign.

If you came in to uphold and extend our civil liberties, you must be ashamed of how they are being damaged and abused by this government.
If you came in to see a better Health Service, you must be appalled at the numbers of deaths of patients from hospital acquired infections and even from malnutrition.
If you came in to defend workers rights you will be furious at the botched semi privatisation proposals already pushed through for the London Underground and now about to hit the Post office.
If you wanted to see better equality of incomes you will be scandalised by the public sector rich list and by the pensions for retiring bankers in state owned banks.
If you came in to see an ethical foreign policy you must be struggling to defend the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and extraordinary rendition.
If you came in to see a rise in standards in public life, you will be bitterly disappointed by the vicious spin used against Labour figures, even if you are not so worried about lies against the Tories.
If you came in to see public spending champion better lives for the poor, you must be feeling uncomfortable about the extent of public spending on the privileged and powerful.
If you believed it when you told us the government had abolished boom and bust, do you now feel let down and lied to by the Prime Minister who presided over the credit binge and the crash?

When you look at yourself in the shaving or make-up mirror in the morning, are you any longer proud to be a Minister in this government?

Last night I attended a meeting of around 100 angry and worried local residents. Their story could be the story of so many in modern Britain. Most of them work hard, pay their national taxes, pay their Council tax and pay their water bills. All they want is that the authorities maintain the flood defences properly, and strengthen them if needed. The authorities seem incapable of doing either of these things.

I and my constituents are given the run round every time we complain. The Environment Agency, the Water Company and the local authority argue over who is responsible in any given case. They claim they do not have any money to do what is needed. They have plenty of money to pay highly paid executives to tell us nothing can be done, plenty of money to get legal and other professional advice to avoid responsibility, plenty of money to plaster websites with maps and stories about how many of my constituents homes are at risk of flooding, to put up their insurance bills.

I have tried to make it easy for them. If it is water from the local river causing the flooding problems, as in many cases it is, that is the responsibility of the Environment Agency. If it is foul water from the wastewater system that is the Water Company’s responsibility. If it is surface highways water that is the Council’s responsibility. What people expect is for public bodies and near monopoly companies to know and discharge their responsbilities. Somewhere in their massive budgets they ought to have reserved some cash to keep the drains, culverts and grilles clear. Somewhere there ought to be some cash to clear the river so it flows sensibly. And somewhere in the capital budgets there should be some improvement money to add the extra culverts, bunds and sluices we need to handle the extra water run off the new developments are creating.

The government fails to take proper account of the impact of extra development when it overrides the local Council and gives planning permission for more tarmac and concrete. The government fails to issue the right priorities for the Enviroonment Agency. The Agency fails to make strong enough respresentations against development in some cases where it will make the flooding worse.

No-one seems to want to spend any money from the huge sums they receive from the taxpayers on some hours with a digger to clean existing culverts and cut whatever new ones are needed. No-one wants to spend modest sums on throwing up some bunds around suitable fields to take the surplus water when the run off is too fast.

Next week the three responsible authorities are all going to meet together to ask what can be done. I guess that’s progress. I have been telling them what needs doing for years. It is not difficult, and much of it is not that expensive. The Dutch learned to keep the more challenging waters of the North Sea out of their country hundreds of years ago without the advantage of modern JCBs and strimmers. Why can’t we manage something a bit easier in 2009? Why do we get so little that we want from all our taxes?