Month: Jan 2009

It was a tough day for the government yesterday, not the least the mauling they got over Heathrow’s 3rd runway. They scraped a majority of 19 and saw 28 Labour MPs rebel in the course of a Tory debate on the third runway at Heathrow.

Local Labour MP, Andrew Slaughter (Ealing Acton & Shepherd’s Bush), resigned his PPS job (unpaid junior ministerial aide) in the morning and later in the day Ealing Southall MP Virendra Sharma did the same thing so that they could vote against the government. Well done to both.

Ealing North MP, Stephen Pound, was not so brave. He chose to no show. No doubt a bit of tummy ache or dodgy curry on Tuesday night. Hope it is nothing more serious Stephen. Get well soon.

The notorious “Mr and Mrs Expenses” from neighbouring Feltham & Heston to the west (Mr Alan) and Brentford & Isleworth to the south (Mrs Ann) both managed to vote in favour of the third runway. I guess that Mrs Expenses was protecting her ministerial job as a junior health minister but apparently Mr Expenses didn’t want to vote in favour of a Tory motion as a matter of principle. Yeah! Right.

The Telegraph reports today that repenting sinner, Denis Healey, Labour Chancellor during the economic crisis of the 1970s when the top-rate of tax was 83 per cent and the IMF were called in, does not believe that Gordon Brown’s 45% tax rate due in 2011 will work. He says:

… what I learned as Chancellor were that the rich can nearly always find ways of avoiding tax that are legal, and in any case the amount raised is very small. And it does encourage people to leave the country.

He even thinks that the public sector is bloated. The quote below puts him roughly in the same place as the Taxpayers’ Alliance and I:

We’ve got far too many people working in the public sector. There’s probably twice as many people working in the public sector as is necessary.

Yes, quite!

Apparently Healey lives in the Sussex village of Alfriston. This really is an amazing old-world place with a village green. I don’t suppose the place is full of New Labour types, or even the old sort. Retired majors and the suchlike, yes. I guess Healey has moved to the right as he got older like the rest of us – shame he didn’t get there rather sooner. My Dad always respected Healey because he was a beachmaster at Anzio. He also came out of the war on the left but his journey to the right was rather quicker than Healey’s. Funnily enough Healey ended his army days as a major.

Ridiculously, at the time of writing, the Whitehouse website is not carrying the new President’s inauguration address. Apparently:

Later today, we’ll put up the video and the full text of President Obama’s Inaugural Address.

No doubt the Whitehouse web team are too busy partying. Luckily the free, non-state supported Americaintheworld website, part of the ConservativeHome franchise has it in full here. This afternoon, whilst hanging up the washing, I tuned in at:

… and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

Yes, quite. Ditto Europe. I listened to the rest of the speech but much of it flowed over me like a warm wave of lovely loveliness. One phrase jumped out at me:

And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account – to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day – because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.

As Labour MPs troop through the lobbies on Thursday to vote to keep their expenses secret I hope they remember that phrase “do our business in the light of day” and feel ashamed of themselves. I don’t think many Conservative or LibDem MPs will vote for Harman’s pernicious Freedom of Information (Parliament) Order 2009. We will see.

Last week we learnt that Harriet Harman, Leader of the House and deputy leader of the two-legs party, wants to exempt MPs’ expenses from Freedom of Information laws, see here. A statement revealing the plans was slipped out last Thursday in the Commons by Harperson, in order to “bury bad news” just as proposals for Heathrow’s third runway were made public.

MPs will vote on this proposal this Thursday. If you want to do something about it go to theyworkforyou.com and follow the instructions. I have just written to my MP, Virendra Sharma, who is MP for Ealing Southall.

Dear Virendra Sharma,

I am writing to ask you to vote against the draft Freedom of Information (Parliament) Order 2009 this Thursday and to ask you to sign Jo Swinson’s Early Day Motion number 492.

This order removes the expenses of hon. Members and Peers from the scope of the Freedom of Information Act and thus singles them out for special treatment. They will be the only public officials who will not have to disclose full details of their expenses.

This order does not reflect well on Parliament and will bring Parliament even further into disrepute. It will not reflect well on members who vote for it.

Yours sincerely,

Phil Taylor

The BBC should just come clean and headline this article “Another glorious victory for the people’s party”. The article is only short but fails the first test of journalism. It fails to record the salient facts. Labour only won this by-election contest for a totally dead safe council seat by the skin of its teeth. 64 votes were all that separated the Labour party from a humiliating defeat. You would not have guessed it from the BBC report here.

The facts are the Labour candidate polled 1,032 against 968 for the Conservatives, 581 for the LibDems and 166 for the Green Party. When people take the trouble to vote the BBC, paid for by the Licence Fee Poll Tax, might at least record the result. It is a shame so many people are wasting their votes on the Greens and the LibDems. The only way to get rid of Labour in Haringey, in London or in the country is to vote Conservative.

They played this little video at the start of the Conservative launch of their Labour’s Debt Crisis campaign yesterday. It is very well put together but understates the problem. The key line is probably:

BY 2014 OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT DEBT WILL HAVE ROCKETED TO OVER £1 TRILLION

This sent me running back to the Pre-Budget Report. Even though this document is now generally recognised to be not pessimistic enough you will see that even on its figures the Tory attack video is letting the Government off lightly. As you can see from the extract of Table B10 on page 198 below (click to enlarge), on the Government’s rather dodgy “excluding financial sector interventions” basis, we hit the £1 trillion mark at the end of March 2013. If you look a few lines further down you get an interesting international comparison. Some Treasury mandarin has calculated government debt on the Maastricht basis. This will include many of the items that the Government tries to hide such as PFI, pensions and the bank bailout (but not all). Here you see we hit the £1 trillion mark in only 2 years time, end of March 2011, and this is before the government starts to use any sort of consolidated credit services to start bringing down the debt.

You get the £17,000 figure the Tories were using yesterday by dividing the £1 trillion by the population of the UK. This is useful as an illustration but only a relatively small proportion of the population is economically active and the real debt will get to be much higher than £1 trillion. A 21st century worker is going to have to service and repay something like £50,000 per head, not £17,000. Many working couples will be working as hard to pay off the Government’s debts are they are working to pay their own mortgages.

Ridiculously we were told late last year by EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso that Britain is closer to joining the euro than ever before according “people who matter” in Britain to use his own emetic phrase. I remember the Maastricht criteria for joining the euro included one about the deficit being 3% or less and total government debt being less than 60%, see here. Traditionally the later criteria was one that the UK could easily meet. If you look at Table B3 on page 190 of the PBR you will see that we will be in no position to join the euro under the Maastricht criteria until well after 2014. By 2014 our deficit will still be above 3% and our government debt will still be well over the 60% threshold. Don’t forget these figures will get even worse by the time they are next reported in the budget. If you are in debt go to Creditfix to help with your debts. See extract below (click to enlarge):

It gives me no satisfaction to report that we are so screwed up that we couldn’t join the euro if we wanted to.