Two reasons for Labour shame

Two things came out of the Labour conference that real made me angry. I can put up with Labour ministers banging on about how Gordon Brown saved the world and how the Tories are planning to throw pensioners into the sea etc etc but the sight of ex-terrorists being allowed to return to the scene of one of their most infamous atrocities on an official ticket, to be able to mingle with Cabinet ministers and turn up to parties sponsored by the Grauniad really makes me doubt the character of the people responsible. We all know who I’m talking about; his name doesn’t get mentioned on this blog.

What the IRA did to the Grand last time they visited

I don’t need to go into the details of the Brighton bomb, which happened 25 years ago next month. Suffice it to say that I refuse to believe that it never occurred to the Labour Party what an inappropriate situation this was. It’s just the small, petty, spiteful and vindictive actions of a party that has lost its self-respect. No doubt next year they’ll be heading down to Eastbourne to hold the Labour conference outside the former home of Ian Gow. I don’t agree with Norman Tebbit about much but I certainly understand why he is not happy. Strangely, the BBC reports this only in its Northern Ireland coverage rather than the main conference section.

The second thing that made me mad was Gordon Brown‘s proposal for 16 and 17-year old single mothers to be housed together in shared accommodation rather than single flats. I can imagine the utter furore if a Conservative government had come forward with similar proposals. This is the politics of victimhood – of Labour saying to people “You’ll never amount to much but if you stick with us, we’ll protect you from the Conservatives who want to cut you loose in society.” Wrong.

The way to tackle teenage pregnancy is break the cycle of poverty and lack of opportunity that teaches young girls the only way to get on in life is to have babies because with those come houses and income through benefits. Young people need teachers who can instill self-worth in them, social workers who have the power to tackle parents who don’t give a damn and clear and distinct paths of opportunity to make their lives better before they bring babies into the world to share them.

It would also help if teachers didn’t hand out contraceptives to girls barely old enough to write their own names and if our culture wasn’t so wholly dominated by images of sex and peer pressure to engage in it. There are other enjoyable pursuits in life for young people – but if sex is all they know, it’s inevitable that it will become a preoccupation. It is up to government to enable the alternatives. It makes me mad that Labour has no intention to do this while telling everyone it cares about young mothers. It is not interested in single mothers – only their votes – and bunging them all together in block accommodation is a ghastly piece of ignorant and exploitative legislation that has no place whatsoever in Parliament.

I hope DC refers to this in Manchester. The Conservatives should be able to do a lot better.

The blog of Olly Wells

I did promise that I wouldn’t be blogging on individual Lib Dems unless they blogged on individual Conservatives or executive decisions in a new spirit of shared common purpose. So imagine my delight when Olly Wells mentioned my name in his latest offering on the parking charges in Woking.

Despite my lack of imagination, I felt the best thing to do was to leave a comment for him underneath. So now I’ve exhausted my mind for this afternoon, I’m off to lie down.

Update 26/9: To his credit, Olly Wells allowed my comment to stand and replied to it but I’m not even slightly convinced. For those who don’t wish to read  it on his website, here it is in full:

Thank you for your comments. To answer your questions I am in favour of reducing parking prices and charging hours to ensure parking in Woking is competitively priced to ensure as many people as possible are able to visit Woking. This will be good for local businesses. I favour reducing the number of cars on the road by increasing the amount of public transport available, making it easier for local people to come to Woking town centre. I would spend the profit from parking (reduced by reduced charging) on improved sustainable public transport. I do not accept that the council’s present flawed financial model is the best or only model available. I believe that this model can be changed to improve revenue and reduce costs. Your next likely comment might be to ask me to tell you how. For this I suggest you vote Liberal Democrat at the next local election, after reading our literature of course. The Liberal Democrats propose real change and real change will not come from simply looking to make small changes within the current boundaries such as reducing staffing levels or increasing council tax. The boundaries need to be changed, this will require our imagination and innovation.

So Cllr Wells is in favour of reducing the car parking charges and times that are charged for. Result – more cars in the car parks and on the roads and good news for business. He’s also in favour of reducing the number of cars on the road through better public transport. Result – fewer people using the car parks and impaired revenue from them. Alongside this, his idea is to spend the “profit” from the car parks on the public transport and that Woking Borough Council should run this transport system (or at least fund it). Result – a great big hole in the budget.

So we have more cars in the car parks and fewer. We have income to boost public transport generated by users that we are trying to drive away. And we have the council’s accounts being meaninglessly broken down so we can state for political purposes than one section makes a “profit“. What about all the other sections of the council that make a “loss”? How does he think that corporate management and member services are paid for?

Cllr Wells avoided answering my question about how you re-organise the council’s accounts to make this work. Instead he told me to read Lib Dem literature (sorry, I’m reading the new Dan Brown book at the moment, at least that’s partially based on fact and it’s a good deal more interesting) and vote Lib Dem in 2010 to find out.

If the Lib Dems have a plan to revolutionise Woking Borough Council, why didn’t they deploy it in 2006/7 when they were in control, instead of ducking the difficult decisions that had to be made by the Conservatives in 2007/8 and are still ongoing? Isn’t this the party that criticises DC for not stating his policies? And I’m supposed to believe that if I vote Lib Dem next year, they’ve got a cunning plan that will allow endless investment in services that are supposed to be provided at other tiers of government?

The only other option is borrowing. And that’s a subject that I’ll be returning to before long.

In the meantime, Cllr Wells may think I’m stunted in this area but I recognise the difference between imagination and fantasy. I’ve also asked enough questions of politicians in my time to know a question dodge when I see one.

Taxing around the houses

Vince Cable deep in thought

Up until today, I thought the Liberal Democrats had some good ideas about fair taxation, even if I disagreed about the end result of implementing them. They had argued to replace council tax with a local income tax because they didn’t believe the rich were paying enough and the poor were paying too much. There’s something to be said for that, certainly I feel the council tax is capable of improvement.

But where does this “tax income, not property” stance fit in with Vince Cable’s “£1m homes tax” proposed at the Lib Dem conference? It appears to throw that whole idea out of the window in a headline-grabbing exercise.

Let’s look at this properly. People who own homes worth £1m-plus largely, but not exclusively, have large incomes to match. The Labour government has already increased the top rate of income tax to 50% and I think that is right – I would even support it going higher on a temporary basis but I hope that in due course that it will return to 40%. People who earn enough to pay mortgages on large homes have already paid stamp duty, tax on their mortgage, tax on their income and high council tax bills. I think that’s enough punishment for owning a big house (or a not-so-big house in a sought-after area),

Go to the other end of the scale. A widow, 85, has lived in her family home all her life. Her husband fought in the RAF and subsequently worked for the same manufacturing company for 35 years as a middle manager – he died three years ago after a long illness on which the couple had to spend some of their savings to fund treatment. She has the resultant widow’s entitlement to his pensions and her own state pension.

The family home, which has been in their ownership since 1912, is a 5-bedroom house in a desirable part of Andover, Hants, and would fetch around £1m on the market today (who’s measuring this, by the way?) She has two children, one of whom has expressed an interest in living in the house and they have been putting money aside to pay inheritence tax.

Where is this £2,000 a year going to come from? Her income largely goes on heating, maintaining and paying council tax on the house. If the children are to pay it, that is a mis-directed tax and Vince’s tax should be on them (a tax on parents, the mind boggles). Should she spend more of her savings on paying the tax, even if that means she can’t afford healthcare at a later point?

Should she transfer ownership to her children now, forcing her to relinquish ownership early? How illiberal. Or sell up? Similar. This lady was born in the house and wants to die there – surely she should not be denied that dignity? She also wants to pass it on to her children – it forms the only significant asset of her estate. I cannot believe any party could contemplate legislation that would put that basic wish in jeopardy.

The LDs argued against council tax for precisely these reasons – that there is a small but significant section of society that is capital-rich but revenue-poor. They know very well the impact on pensioners in possession of historical but valuable assets of laws intended to catch the rich.

So why come forward with this poorly considered idea other than to catch some headlines during a conference that is sure to be eclipsed as the autumn continues?

McCarthyism is back

There is one Labour MP whose media profile is being inflated by a concerted PR effort and that is Kerry McCarthy, the highly prolific Twitterer who in between tweets is also MP for Bristol East.

Having managed 4,555 updates in 36 weeks – that’s 126 a week, or an average of 18 each day – @KerryMP has now been “officially” appointed as Labour’s Twitter Tsar by Douglas Alexander, who was not only a very poor Secretary of State for Transport but will now look after Gordon Brown‘s general election campaign.

The very fact that anyone would be foolish enough to take on such a job is reason enough in my mind to doubt their judgement and to appoint a Twitter Tsar seems to institutionalise Twitter in a way that is the very opposite of its original intended purpose. That MPs have to be trained on how to use it is damning of the calibre of people that sit in parliament – most 14-year olds seem to pick it up in a few days.

So the thrusting of @KerryMP, willingly no doubt, into the limelight (she’s also in PR Week today as well) may seem like a good plan but I doubt that Twitter is going to win many votes at the next general election. Most people on Twitter are there, by their very nature, because like me they’ve already made up their mind and have something to say.

And Twitter is the perfect ether into which to spray their rants, prejudices and humour in the hope that some like mind will be found to appreciate it.

PS: @KerryMP ought not to spend too much time Twittering because her Bristol East seat is vulnerable. In 2005, neighbouring Bristol North turned yellow, overturning a Labour majority of 4,500 to give a majority of 5,000 to Stephen Williams. @KerryMP (majority 8,500) is facing ex-West Byfleet Tory councillor-turned Lib Dem PPC Mike Popham in the seat in 2010, which is packed full of students (ironically as a result of Labour’s accessibility programme). Will she hang on? Electoral Calculus predicts a Conservative gain of all things!

The Thoughts of Chairman Wells (part 1)

If you are ever unfortunate enough to entertain Lib Dems to tea, make sure you bake two cakes – one for them to have and one to eat. Having moaned for ages that Woking parking charges were too high, they are now moaning that the action the Conservatives have taken to reduce charges at commercially sensitive times are inadequate.

His latest blog, imaginatively entitled Parking Charges seem to go up and up under the Tories, offers nothing new in the way of ideas about how to address this issue. Yes, charges have gone up. Yes, the council needs to increase its revenue to cover increasing costs.

“I wonder if in Woking parking charges should be linked to cost of providing
parking services and public transport and that the money raised should not be
spent on other things. In Woking this would probably mean a threat to
services that are paid for by the profit from parking.”

He muses. Profit from parking? Can Cllr Wells please explain what this profit is – the parking service is not run as an independently operating financial unit but as part of Woking Borough Council, which doesn’t make a “profit”.

“The money raised should not be spent on other things”- yes, he’d like that, wouldn’t he? Then the nasty old Tories would have no money to provide any other services, which he would then be able to crow about when they got cut. The Conservatives will not cut front-line services in Woking.

“What about restricting any additional income from rises in parking charges to be
ring fenced to only be spent on improvements in parking facilities and better
public transport.”

This gets funnier. Is Cllr Wells seriously saying that Woking should hand over part of its income to Surrey County Council for it to make improvements to public transport in other parts of the county? Are the Lib Dems saying that they would do that? And the parking facilities have only just undergone a multi-million pound capital overhaul. Where is he going to spend this ring-fenced revenue to any effect?

Car parking income is dropping because the recession means that fewer people are using their cars and they are not buying so many goods. The increased cost can never be a good thing – but it is not the primary factor for most people staying away. Woking Borough Council’s experience in the past is that dropping the charges has no effect on takeup.

Cllr Wells’s pie-in-the-sky nonsense shows a total lack of understanding about local government finance, the respective responsibilities of tiered authorities, not to mention a great deal of naivety about how to bring about increased revenues, a vibrant town centre and transport improvements.

God help us if this is the level of the Lib Dem thinking we can expect if they take control next year. But mark my words – if they do, car parking charges will increase in the same way that they have this year.

When the Lib Dems were last in charge, parking charges in Woking went up twice in the same year.

Hannan offence

Yes, Minister had an apt quotation for Alan Duncan’s little mishap earlier in the week and it seems only right to furnish Daniel Hannan with one too.

“You know what it’s like with politicians – after a while they start to believe their own speeches”

says Sir Humphrey to a similarly contemptuous colleague.

And the problem with Daniel Hannan is that he seems to believe that one YouTube hit makes a political heavyweight. But for the second time this week, we’ve got a high-profile Tory going strongly off-message on a subject of considerable importance.

In case he hadn’t noticed from the confines of Brussels, the British people are rather fond of the NHS. Or at least, they are rather fond of the idea of it. I don’t disagree that its concept is a noble one and a good deal better than the system currently found in America. Firstly, what the hell is Daniel Hannan doing on American TV? And why is he wading into the debate about President Obama’s healthcare reforms? If the US wants to copy the NHS model, let them. Personally, I think it would be very interesting to see how an NHS startup would look 50 years on. It’s got nothing to do with us.

Secondly, if you’ve got a problem with the NHS, that’s fine and there’s no reason for Central Office to prevent debate on this. No reason, that is, unless anyone is actually stupid enough to start one. This is exactly what Labour wants – a battle in their territory and Hannan has handed a key tactical advantage to Peter Mandelson, who has done what he does best and capitalised in the media.

Thirdly, the time to talk about NHS reform is one year into a Conservative first term, when there are four years of the term left and the reforms can be put down to economic necessity rather than political ideology. The NHS desperately needs reform – Tony Blair himself attempted it with Foundation Trusts - but there is no way of discussing this as Conservatives without ceding the political advantage. So forget it.

The truth about the NHS is that it is not free because we all pay through the nose for it. It is hugely wasteful and over-administered, it is downright unfair in its provision of expensive life-extending drugs and many of the staff – be they angels or not – are not sufficiently well trained or qualified for the responsibility they hold. For many, the NHS is the employer of last resort.

But like democracy, it’s the worst system apart from all the others that have been tried and we must make it work. Conservative politicians ought to understand that there is no value in engaging in the #welovetheNHS hysteria. It is a trap into which they can only fall and not escape.

Duncan’s a doughnut

From the BBC’s reaction to Alan Duncan’s admittedly fruity comments that MPs had to “live on rations” and were “treated like shit”, you’d think that he’d gone to war with France. One also can’t help but wonder whether, on the day that Mervyn King gave a stark warning about the economy and where unemployment (perhaps including me) reached nearly 2.5million, some Labour lackey hasn’t been storing this one up for a while to feeding to the media at a timely moment.

The point about Alan Duncan is that, to quote Jim Hacker’s chief whip:

“In politics, you have to learn to say things with tact and finesse, you berk.”

I actually agree with Alan Duncan’s sentiment, which I am confident is shared by many in Westminster. They’ve been made scapegoats for an outdated and over-generous system meekly implemented by a lax Fees Office regime. They feel that they only acted within the rules and that a higher standard of self-regulation than they understood to be necessary has been retrospectively applied by the media and public in the face of circumstances that didn’t exist when these claims were made.

There has been a gutful of hypocrisy from journalists whose expenses are equally questionable but not publicly accountable as well as the man in the street, who is happy to criticise in the knowledge that if he could get a second home plus fixtures and fittings on his expenses, he’d jolly well do so.

But until reform is forthcoming, Alan Duncan and others would do well to bite their tongues and keep their self-pity, however justified, to themselves. Particularly when speaking to people who’ve been filmed on You Tube digging silly shapes into their well-manicured lawn.

Another fine mess…

Yes, they’ve done it again. The Home Office, or whatever components it has now been split into, has managed to make another decision that will play badly with voters.

First they tell the Gurkhas to shove off back to Nepal in the belief that getting tough on immigrants will be popular. Wrong – not the kind of immigrants who have stood ready to shed blood for the nation.

Now they’ve decided to employ the touchy-feely approach that they should have used on the Gorkhali to a member of a 15-strong gang that brutally robbed a mail train and broke out of jail to escape British justice – and his stretch – in favour of living it up in Rio.

Wrong again. When Ronnie Biggs did return to Britain it wasn’t because of the call of his conscience or remorse – it was because he fancied leeching off the NHS rather than staying in Brazil for his medical treatment. That was in 2001 and I’m sorry, his original 30-year sentence should stand as well as a further sentence for jail-breaking out of Wandsworth.

He might be ill, but eight years isn’t enough for his crimes – that he still doesn’t show full remorse for – and I don’t think the public will feel kindly towards a man, however old or ill, who has robbed the nation before fleeing its justice only to return when it suited him.

Ronnie Biggs has only ever cared about one person – Ronnie Biggs. Whatever the government may think, I believe people will find it difficult to share the joy of a violent, self-serving gangster.

Repeat offenders

Releasing “news” time and time again is not something that is unheard of with the Labour government and it seems that even the BBC is not trying to hide it for them anymore.

We heard today (well, actually it was leaked to the NoW yesterday) from the Home Office that a brilliant “new” scheme of gaining citizenship was going to be pioneered, with points awarded for good behaviour until pop – the passport’s in the post.

But we’ve also heard it before, as a quick glance in the See Also column on the right hand side of the story shows. First in June 2007 for goodness’ sake and then again in January this year as Brown’s desperation mounted.

This is not new – instead of peddling the press release to the public once again, the BBC ought to be pressing on why something mooted two years ago is no further to delivery. Especially if they can’t bothered to spare the government’s re-spinning blushes anyway.

Cameron’s four-letter rant

Well, here’s the thing. DC went on Absolute Radio this morning and – presumably completely on purpose – used the words “twat” and “piss” (the latter as a verb) to get his point across.

Swearing doesn’t really bother me much; having worked in a newsroom for the former part of my career I got pretty used to it and even, I dare say, may have uttered a few choice phrases myself.

But there’s no need for DC to stoop to this kind of “Hague’s baseball cap” lowest common denominator. He’s a great interviewee and superb speaker with effective messages. He has a talent, like Tony Blair had, of capturing the issues that the public care about.

So I agree with David Hughes’s analysis in the Telegraph – it’s all a bit desperate and contrived. I thought Peter Mandelson had cornered the market there with his “underdog” confession on behalf of Labour. Sadly I was wrong.

More worryingly, this whole episode wasn’t spontaneous despite the immediate apology. The apology itself calls into question the tactic – did he mean to use those words? If not, why did he? If he meant to, why apologise? Is this a double bluff? Or a triple? It’s all a bit confused and DC, who’s normally spot on with this PR stuff, seems to have made a bad call.

The Telegraph Tories won’t like it and although they’ll probably vote for him anyway, it will leave a strange, unfamiliar taste in the mouth. That’s sometimes necessary – but surely not here?