nigel hastilow

The lady's not for burning

2012-01-13T17:19:00.002Z

Having now seen “The Iron Lady” I can understand why most people hate it. Funded by Channel 4, the National Lottery and the French, it concentrates on Mrs Thatcher’s dementia. You can imagine the left-luvvies gloating about how the mighty are fallen. But really it’s just disgustingly cheap, cruel, merciless tat, for all that Meryl Streep’s impersonation is uncanny.

It’s stunning how apparently grown-up and apparently intelligent adults can be reduced to gibbering, malevolent balls of fury by the very mention of the name Margaret Thatcher.

The new Meryl Streep film “The Iron Lady” has given them yet another opportunity to dust down their prejudices and blame everything from the credit crunch to the world domination of Google on Britain’s only female Prime Minister.

Surprisingly, women are among the most vehement in their loathing of Baroness Thatcher.

As one of her many sworn enemies says: “Everything now flows from the Thatcherite view of selfish individualism.”

You might think they would applaud her achievement in rising to the top in what is still supposedly the “man’s world” of politics. But no.

Instead, they portray her as an aberration, someone who disliked her own sex and never represented the “female virtues”.

They are of the Harriet Harperson school of politics – they seem to think if only women ran the world, we would all be happy, prosperous and peaceful.

So they can’t cope with the idea that this woman’s reputation rests partly on her victory in the Falklands War and, even more so, her victory in the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

She is accused of every evil in the book and yet the evidence points strongly in the opposite direction – she is not, after all, a Tony Blair.

Far from wasting taxpayers’ money on monumental follies, newly-released Government papers reveal Mrs Thatcher took the view that our cash should never be spent unnecessarily – even on Prime Ministers.

When the Department of the Environment announced it was spending £1,736 refurbishing Number Ten, her reaction should shame all of her successors.

She said they didn’t need to buy new bed linen, she would supply her own, she rejected the idea of spending £123 re-polishing furniture and said she would buy her own ironing board to save the taxpayer £19.

She went on to tell the Welsh Secretary to obtain new quotes after being told it would cost £26,000 to refurbish his one-bedroom flat in Cardiff. In the end, the work cost £12,000.

You could call this penny-pinching but – as the MPs’ expenses scandal revealed – we are right out of politicians who realise the money they spend comes from our pockets.

This little piece of evidence of Mrs Thatcher’s care for our cash has rather disappeared from view compared with the other “revelation” that came out in 30-year-old Government papers released for the first time.

That is the suggestion raised by the then Chancellor, Sir Geoffrey Howe, that the Thatcher Government should abandon the city of Liverpool to “managed decline” after the Toxteth riots.

This has been taken by Mrs Thatcher’s many enemies – it’s too mild to call them critics, given their foam-flecked fury at the very mention of her name – as proof of the uncaring nature of her Government.

What they ignore is that Mrs Thatcher did not abandon Liverpool to its fate. On the contrary, she sent Michael Heseltine there with pots of money and told him to sort the place out.

You might argue she would have been wiser to do nothing, on the grounds that Scousers would never vote Conservative and their gratitude for Government help would be about as deep and heartfelt as the Scots’.

But, for all the allegations that Mrs Thatcher’s Government created a me-me-me world where there was “no such thing as society”, her intervention in Liverpool proves these claims are unfounded.

It is true she was pretty fond of her own opinion and didn’t take kindly to backsliders who tried to trim the Tories’ policies.

It’s also true that she was clear about what was necessary and single-minded in trying to achieve it.

She did allow large parts of British industry to die – but they would have died anyway. That was the point.

And it’s true she tried to curb Government spending, which some of the harridans of the left have always hated.

But if only her successors had followed her example we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in today.

As for the film, I haven't seen it yet and probably won't bother. Apparently it's hideously bad despite Streep's performance. It's basically a study in dementia which is cruel because it's about a real person and the episodes from her career are one-sided and ridiculous.

Even so, one of her critics complains: “Meryl’s magnificent performance humanises a politician many of us find monstrous.”

Lady Thatcher has been proved right in almost everything she did and said. What led to her political downfall, for instance, was the failure of people like Heseltine and Howe to see her wisdom in refusing to integrate further with the European Union.

What people loathe about Margaret Thatcher is what others admire so strongly. When she was rejected for a job at ICI in 1948, her interviewers wrote: “This woman is headstrong, obstinate and dangerously self-opinionated.”

Will we ever see her like again?

Unknown quantity

2012-01-09T09:54:00.001Z

Oh dear, looks like I am leaping into the unknown by speaking at a lunchtime event at Blackwells in Oxford on Thursday. I'm talking about my novel "The Smoking Gun" and about politics in general but will anybody turn up?

It seems the answer is no-one knows. Previous speakers have attracted anything from more than 400 (a TV celeb) to one (for a well-known poet).

So if anybody fancies meeting up, Blackwells bookshop in Oxford on Thursday might be the right time and place for us to have a chat....

For more info, go to the Blackwells website.

For more about the book, please go to www.thesmokinggun.co.uk

And a happy new Euro to you too

2012-01-03T19:38:00.000Z

As the economy recovers, England win the 2012 European Cup as a celebration of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee while the London Olympics are a worldwide triumph.

What more could we ask from the coming year?

We may as well look forward to it with a sense of optimism; we might otherwise persuade ourselves our prospects are as gloomy as Greece’s.

But the coming 12 months could be triumphantly happy for the country.
Take the economy. All the official statistics are pointing south but that doesn’t mean we’ll actually be hit by another recession.

The best brains across the entire European Union – the largest economic bloc in the world – have spent months sorting out the crisis with their single currency.

All the pundits predict the implosion of the Euro and financial crisis in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Ireland.

But the best brains in Euro-politics can’t all be wrong, can they?

Despite evidence to the contrary, they must know what they’re doing. So we must assume they will guide the Continent’s currency to broad, sunlit uplands.

As a result, our own economy will pull back from the brink of recession and, as optimism returns to the whole of the EU, we’ll see a revival in our own fortunes.

We will export more and create the jobs necessary to replace those being lost through public sector cuts.

This could all start to become obvious as soon as Chancellor George Osborne’s Budget in March, when the turnaround in the mood of consumers and the positive predictions for the future will get a further boost.

The Chancellor will realise that to give the economy an extra shove in the right direction he needs to introduce significant tax cuts.

This will lead to a reduction in VAT – and a drop in the rate of inflation as a result – as well as lower taxes for families to counter the last few years of wage freezes and rising costs.

As a sense of enormous well-being sweeps the country, celebrations begin for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in June.

The Monarch, with Prince Philip newly-restored to robust good health by her side, will tour the country to general acclaim and gratitude for her years of devoted service.

The trials and tribulations her family has faced over the long years of her reign will count for little when set against the new recognition of the debt we all owe to Queen Elizabeth II.

The mood of support for the Monarchy spreads far and wide – even to Scotland, where the people abandon thoughts of independence from the rest of the United Kingdom and reaffirm their loyalty to the Crown.

With all this new-found national confidence, it is no great surprise to find England beating France 5-0 in their opening match of Euro 2012.

The contest, which takes place in Poland and the Ukraine, is not without its dramas and back at home there are growing complaints about the shortage of Polish plumbers.

Even so, the nation is glued to the TV as England’s team of perfect gentlemen compensate for the disaster of the last World Cup to make their way into the thrilling final where they beat Germany 4-2 after extra time.

After a month to take all this in, we are again on the edge of our seats as the Olympic Games get off to a spectacular start in London.

The opening ceremony is neither boring nor embarrassing – a world first for the Olympics.

Luckily, there are no strikes by air traffic controllers, public transport workers or refuse collectors.

The public sector unions have calmly accepted changes to their pension arrangements because the hard-pressed taxpayer can no longer afford to be as generous as in the past.

Among other benefits, it means all those fears about terrorism scares and chaos on London transport are proved groundless as the entire event goes off without a hitch.

While the British team scoops a record number of medals, the greatest winner is the nation itself.

Visitors go home reporting on how hospitable the people are, how good the food is and how extraordinarily punctual the public transport has become.
They even give five stars to the traditional British weather.

Indeed, the reputation of this country is so enhanced around the world that even the tourists who stayed away to avoid the Olympics crowds come rushing over as soon as the games are triumphantly closed.

By the time of the autumn party conferences, Ed Miliband has finally accepted that, as long as he remains leader, the Labour Party doesn’t stand a chance at the next General Election.

So he stands down and the party elects Mrs Balls, Yvette Cooper, as its first female leader.

It doesn’t make much difference to Labour’s standing in the polls but at least it gives a boost to the British fashion industry which was in the doldrums a little because the Duchess of Cambridge has had to limit her public engagements since giving birth to a daughter.

When we come to look back on 2012, we will remember it nostalgically as the year everything went right.

You never know…

And a Happy New Euro to everyone

2011-12-31T15:40:00.006Z

As we celebrate the anniversary of the birth of the Euro – and let’s hope the damned thing doesn’t exist by this time next year – here’s a festive New Year Eurovision quiz (answers at the end).

1. In 2005, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Eurovision Song Contest, an international panel chose the top 10 Eurovision songs of all time. At Number 8 was a song which did not win the contest in 1968. What was the song?

2. What was the name of the song which did win in 1968?

3. Why did La La La win?

4. In the all-time Eurovision Top Ten, what song came in at Number One and who was it by?

5. The first Eurovision Song Contest involved 7 countries. Did the UK take part?

6. Switzerland won at home. Who came second?

7. The 2012 Eurovision takes place in Baku. Where on earth is that?

8. Who was paid a fee of $90,000 for giving one speech in Azerbaijan?

9. Last year, Azerbaijan was condemned for “human rights violations and oppression of opposition forces”. Condemned by whom?

10. Our friends in Europe say we should lose the rebate to the EU. At the moment we are the second-highest net contributor at £4.1 billion. If we lost our rebate, how much would that increase to?

11. An analysis of voting in the Eurovision song contest by Surrey University shows there was “collusive voting” – ie voting for your chums – for six years between two countries, each of which won once during that time. Name the two countries.

12. From 1981 to 1985, there was “collusive voting” between Germany and two other countries. What were they?

13. There has been collusive voting between Cyprus and Greece and Sweden and Denmark. But Sweden’s victory in 1999 depended on three other countries in what became known as the “Viking Empire”. Name two of these countries.

14. There is now a clear Balkan bloc vote which determined the winners in 2003 and 2005. What were the winning nations?

15. In what year did Birmingham stage the contest?

16. Why was the winner, Israel’s Dana International, described as the “most controversial winner in Eurovision history”?

17. How many times has Norway received no points

18. Is Norway a member of the European Union

19. A total of 43 countries took part in the contest in 2011. How many countries are members of the European Union?

20. When did Greece first default on its sovereign debt?

Quiz answers

1. Congratulations by Cliff Richard
2. La La La by Massiel
3. The result was fixed by General Franco
4. Waterloo by Abba
5. No
6. All the others: Holland, Belgium, Germany, France, Luxembourg, Italy.
7. Azerbaijan
8. Tony Blair
9. The European Parliament
10. £12.4 billion
11. UK and France
12. Israel and Sweden
13. Norway, Iceland and Estonia. Half a mark for Finland, Latvia and Lithuania.
14. Turkey in 2003 and Greece in 2005
15. 1998
16. S/he was a transsexual
17. Ten times
18. No
19. 27
20. Some experts claim the world’s first sovereign default occurred in the fourth century BC when ten city states in the Attic Maritime Association reneged on loans given by the Temple of Delos, the mythical birthplace of Apollo. On the other hand it could be argued that it was in 594 BC precisely, when the poet Solon passed a law cancelling all debt and the enslavement of debtors.

Latest BBC rip-off scandal

2011-12-16T10:48:00.003Z

Scandal of the day: Why and since when has the BBC carried advertising on its news website?
It’s scandalous enough that the corporation is destroying private sector regional news organisations by wasting hundreds of millions on its website.
It is even worse that the lumbering Leviathan is now creaming off advertising revenue to support its abominable nationwide poll tax of licence fee revenue.
I trust our politicians will address this question urgently.
In view of the comment below, please note: I did not view the website from abroad (unless you call Scotland "abroad"; I was in Edinburgh).

All Cameron has vetoed is a referendum

2011-12-09T12:19:00.003Z

The BBC claims: “PM David Cameron has effectively vetoed an EU-wide treaty change to tackle the eurozone crisis, saying it was not in the UK's interests.”

That’s not what he’s done.

All he has done is avoid being forced to hold a referendum on the EU while allowing the rest of the Eurozone countries to do whatever deals they like irrespective of their impact on Britain.

He has talked tough and grabbed some positive reviews for his “handbagging” of our EU friends.

But he hasn’t prevented the creation of the Superstate and, as it progresses, it will become clear that we can’t continue to be both in and out of the EU.

Eventually we will have to resolve the question on way or the other once and for all.

The only question is whether the Euro collapses before then. Which it probably will.

Just what do you think you're doing, Dave?

2011-12-08T18:35:00.000Z

What a marvellous idea – the EU wants to spend £900 million of our money on a computer to forecast future disasters before they hit. This is because the combined efforts of the world’s economists failed to predict the banking crisis or the Eurozone crisis.

They could more than pay for it by sacking all the economists and who cares if the computer gets it all wrong? It will be no worse than the self-styled best brains in our top universities and businesses. And here’s betting EuroHal would never have recommended a single European currency in the first place.

Actually, maybe they should just ask most people in this country what common sense dictates and save all that money they haven’t got.

Raising the bar

Am I alone in looking on the London Olympics as an extravagant nonsense that we simply can’t afford? At £7 million an hour for the opening ceremony alone, it’s a stunning waste of money which will, as usual, benefit only Londoners.

Death to life

When they abolished the death penalty for murder we were promised life would mean life. We all know it can mean nothing more than a couple of years in a cosy cell followed by a new identity and anonymity for life. Now they want to downgrade killing another human being even further. Pretty soon you’ll get longer for posting a Facebook message or tapping a celebrity’s phone than you’ll get for murder.

It's grim down south

2011-11-29T18:25:00.000Z

Variable pay in the public sector? That must mean the Government wants to pay people more to work in London and the South East and less if they’re north of Watford.

This is, of course, precisely the wrong way round. The Government would be much wiser to reduce pay for civil servants in London and the South East and/or increase it elsewhere.

At the moment, the capital city attracts too many people and costs the rest of us too much money.

A North-South divide in public sector pay would make that much worse.

Prices would rise in the South and fall elsewhere as the “regions” accustomed themselves to becoming second-class citizens.

The more affluent the capital becomes, the more affluent the capital becomes. It’s a vicious circle. It sucks in all the money we can spare so they can have Olympic arenas and cross-city railway lines.

It concentrates power and influence in the hands of those who already regard the possession of power and influence as a birthright. And it leaves the rest of the country out in the cold.

One small example: for every £1 per head spent on public transport in the West Midlands, they get £10 in London and the South East.

Londoners say that’s because their needs are so great, their city is so over-populated and it takes so long to get from A to B.

They’re right. But that’s because London sucks the lifeblood out of the rest of Britain.

It doesn’t have to be like this.

One of the few positive policies adopted by the London-centric media-political axis which runs the country was to force some of the luvvies at the BBC to move to Manchester.

It’s not grim up north but you wouldn’t know it from all the whingeing that’s gone on as a result of this modest adjustment in the way our money gets spent.

Favouring the South because travel costs are high and house prices are extortionate will not simply undo any good the BBC’s move has done. It will be a thousand times worse.

It will make it impossible for most people to move from the regions to London because they will never build up the capital required to find even the most modest lodgings in the capital.

It will entrench the privilege of London and the South East and leave the rest of the country even poorer in comparison than it is now.

The only answer is to reduce pay in London. Get rid of “London weighting” and then get rid of a bit more so that comparable public servants are worse off there than they would be elsewhere.

At a stroke, you would reduce overheating in the South East – where, even now, house prices continue to rise – and give a major boost to economies elsewhere in the country.

Overall, there would probably be a saving to the public purse as well. It would certainly be cost neutral.

People outside London and the South East should not be treated as the poor relations. We should not beg for crumbs at the rich man’s table. We should be given the respect, and the money, we deserve.

Yes, let’s have differential public sector pay scales. But not so that Londoners can be even better off than they are already.

Diddly-squatters' rights

2011-11-29T16:04:00.000Z

The woman on the checkout at Budgens said it all: “Why do they think they can go on strike for better pensions when people in the private sector have ten per cent of diddly-squat to look forward to? If you ask me, I’d take away all their pensions.”

*****

Welcome to plan B – more money for infrastructure, more money for businesses, more money for housing developments. But most of what will happen depends on the Bundesbank.

****

Why is the British taxpayer paying £110 million for redundancies at BAE?

****

With record immigration and the borders agency in chaos, when will the Government do something about getting the numbers down or have they abandoned the idea altogether?

****

Energy Secretary Chris Huhne says our fuel bills will fall even though he has agreed to let them rise as a result of pointless “green” taxes. He cannot justify his claims – unless we all freeze this winter. And how can we take the man seriously when the police are investigating his alleged motoring offence?

Auf Wiedersehen? Not yet

2011-11-18T12:06:00.001Z

As Germany flexes its muscles and as the whole of Europe hangs on its every word, it’s worth wondering if Mrs Thatcher wasn’t, as usual, right to be worried about the resurgence of the country.

Amid all the euphoria at the time of German unification, she was nervous.

Lord Waldegrave, who was Europe Minister in 1989, says Mrs Thatcher was alarmed Germany would be an "unstoppable force" in an unbalanced Europe.

She told Russia’s President Gorbachev: "Although Nato had traditionally made statements supporting Germany's aspiration to be reunited, in practice we were rather apprehensive.

"All Europe is watching this, not without a degree of fear, remembering very well who started the two world wars."

Of course, she failed to slow the unification of Germany, admitting: "If there is one instance in which a foreign policy I pursued met with unambiguous failure, it was my policy on German reunification.”

In order the better to try to understand the Germans, she invited several historians of Germany to a meeting at Chequers on Sunday March 24, 1990.

According to the memorandum of the meeting drawn up by her foreign policy advisor, Sir Charles Powell, this included "angst, aggressiveness, assertiveness, bullying, egotism, inferiority complexes and sentimentality".

As David Cameron meets Chancellor Angela Merkel and German MPs start attacking Britain’s approach to the EU, it’s clear the real power in Europe rests in the Bundestag and the Bundesbank.

You could reasonably argue that we are, at the moment, witnessing examples of this “aggressiveness, assertiveness, bullying”.

The German Government and its bankers are calling the shots. They have deposed the elected leaders of Italy and Greece and replaced them with hand-picked, unelected placemen.

Now they are drawing up plans to take over failing economies via a European Monetary Fund.

It will only work – everyone acknowledges this – if there is genuine political union within the Eurozone, a Superstate with a centralised economic policy.

No nation state will wear this but that won’t stop the plan. It seems it even involves circumventing Cameron’s legislative pledge to hold a referendum on any change in EU treaties.

Chancellor Merkel says: "The task of our generation is to complete economic and monetary union, and build political union in Europe, step by step. That does not mean less Europe, it means more Europe."

Germany seems to think it can hide its own ambitions behind the façade of the EU. The truth is that Germany runs the EU and proposes to mould the EU in its own image.

You could argue that this is a positive development. The southern basket-case economies would be forced to submit to Teutonic discipline.

On the other hand, you could argue that Germany has exploited the Euro to make its products cheaper and more competitive.

It has, in effect, been pouring money to Spain, Italy, Greece and elsewhere so that these countries can afford to carry on buying Germany’s manufactured goods.

Who is to blame when the borrower over-borrows and can’t repay his debts – the borrower or the lender?

Obviously the borrower in the first instance but, if we castigate the banks for pouring away billions of pounds in unaffordable loans, why not also blame a wealthy country like Germany for encouraging its poorer neighbours to carry on borrowing to finance a lifestyle they couldn’t afford?

Germany is guilty of lining its own pocket at the expense of other Eurozone countries and therefore has an obligation to bail them out.

Indeed, the real solution to the crisis would be for Germany to withdraw from the Euro altogether and bring back the Deutschmark.

That’s not an attractive idea in Berlin and Frankfurt because, suddenly, German products would become unaffordable and German manufacturing would take a hit while all its rivals within the EU would receive a hefty boost.

That is a reasonable long-term alternative to a European Superstate.

And there is one snag with all these proposals for “more Europe” – nobody has actually asked the peoples of the EU if it’s something they want.

They don’t ask the question for a very good reason. They know the answer would be no.

Climb up here, Rolf, you'll soon be flying

2011-11-09T11:55:00.002Z

He was awarded an MBE in 1968, an OBE in 1977 and a CBE in 2006 but the time has come – give Rolf Harris the knighthood he so richly deserves.

Rolf may be an Australian but that didn’t prevent them giving Edna Everage a Damehood so why not the man who gave the world the Stylophone, the wobble board and the digeridoo?

Rolf is an excellent artist – and at least you can tell what it is he’s painted – and he’s never flogged a decomposing dingo in formaldehyde for several millions and called it “Art”.

More to the point, Rolf is responsible for some of the modern classics which should be in every household’s collection of all-time greats.

Consider, for instance, “Tie Me Kangaroo Down” with The Beatles
or the famous “Waltzing Matilda”.

Then there’s the definitive version of “Stairway to Heaven”
as well as the world’s first ambient music track, “Sun Arise”,

He may be an Aussie but let's not hold that against him. Give this man a Knighthood now.

44 varieties of rioter

2011-11-07T16:17:00.000Z

Why should it come as a shock to discover that rioters from 44 countries were involved in the summer’s riots?

This country has become the last refuge of scoundrels from all over the world.

Many of them come here to get as much as they can out of our welfare state. Some will lie and cheat to fiddle the system in their favour – and, in fairness, the system is set up to make that as easy as possible.

So if there’s looting afoot, no wonder they take whatever they can get. Smash-and-grab raids result in instant gratification and flat-screen TVs.

If you’re here to get what you can get in any case, it makes perfect sense to join your fellow migrants on the rampage through our towns and cities.

These people aren’t poor, starving, huddled masses. They co-ordinated their activities via Blackberry Messenger – what a pity the system didn’t crash earlier.

A friend saw a couple of them arrive outside the Bull Ring in Birmingham with a sack full of hoodies which they handed out to their fellow thieves so everyone could enjoy some anonymity from the CCTV cameras as they went about their rampage.

Admittedly the majority of the summer rioters were home-grown. But as the prisons fill up with those who have finally been brought to justice, 14 per cent are foreign.

They are from all over the world: the courts have jailed rioters from Afghanistan, Cuba, Ethiopia, Samoa, Jamaica, Somalia, Poland, Colombia, Iraq, Congo, Vietnam and Zimbabwe.

They weren’t rioting over “the cuts” – they were just enjoying the feeding frenzy and taking what they could while the going was good.

The Government is supposedly planning to get tough on these rioters. The Immigration Minister Damian Green has said more than once that foreign-born criminals should be thrown out of the country.

He declared at the time of the riots: “We strongly believe that foreign-national lawbreakers should be removed from the UK at the earliest opportunity.”

It sounds pretty straightforward – conviction, imprisonment, deportation.

What could be simpler than that except, maybe, deportation without imprisonment? Why should we pay for their board and lodging even in an overcrowded jail?

But we know already nothing is that simple when it comes to the way this country bends over backwards to accommodate undesirable aliens.

Tough-talking Mr Green has been forced to tone down his rhetoric. He now says: “Foreign nationals who were convicted of offences during the riots will be returned home wherever possible.”

Note, please, the weasel words “wherever possible”. It’s Mr Green’s get-out clause.

You might think the Government Minister in charge of immigration would have some power to say what is, and what is not, possible when it comes to chucking out foreign criminals.

You would, of course, be hugely disappointed if you put much faith in the Minister’s pronouncements.

For Mr Green is at the mercy of the European Convention on Human Rights which, as we all know, won’t even allow us to deport terrorists.

All they need is some lame excuse and they get to stay in this country no matter what they’ve done.

They may have a boyfriend and a nice cat; they may already have convictions at home which they want to avoid; they may even have British children and wives.

It’s easy to wriggle out of deportation. New Home Office figures show that – excluding the rioters – more than 5,000 foreign criminals have managed to escape being sent home.

In May this year there were 3,775 criminals who had been released from immigration detention centres because there was “no prospect of them being deported in a reasonable time”, according to John Vine, chief inspector of the UK Border Agency (not that we can trust a word that useless organisation says).

Of those, 3,259 had served sentences for low-level offences, another 429 for more serious crimes, and 87 for the most serious offences – including murder, rape and paedophilia.

On top of that, 1,600 were still behind bars after completing their sentences – costing us £55 million a year – because nobody knows what else to do with them. Another 12 had simply disappeared.

Not everyone used the Human Rights Act to escape deportation. Some refused to say what country they called home or they were due to return to “unsafe” countries.

But Mr Vine says that between February 2010 and January this year, 425 foreign prisoners – a third of those who appealed – won human rights cases against deportation. The Home Office gave another 151 permission to stay.

How much all this is costing us in Legal Aid payments to the serried ranks of human rights lawyers is anybody’s guess. But you can be pretty sure it would more than cover the cost of repairing the damage caused by the rioters in Wolverhampton and West Bromwich.

Mr Green is speaking for the vast armies of law-abiding people when he says foreign rioters should be kicked out of the country as soon as possible.

His party, he may recall, promised to scrap the Human Rights Act.

Luckily for the rioters, we have a Coalition Government and the Liberal Democrats won’t let the Conservatives do any such thing. Isn’t democracy wonderful?

Food, glorious food

2011-10-30T14:51:00.000Z

Sorry but it needs saying: without the banks we’d all be broke.

It’s easy to hate the banks. We all need a scapegoat and City spivs with their snouts in the trough are the best targets of all.

That’s why the anti-capitalist activists who set up a camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral in London have won a surprising degree of support.

We are all anti-capitalists now – if that means we all deplore the excesses of a system which imploded a few years ago and has still not recovered.

It’s not in the least fair that the people who perpetrated this crime against capitalism still get millions in bonuses and keep getting bailed out by the world’s taxpayers.

The Eurozone crisis – and it will go on being a crisis for months to come – is the latest example of the two-faced hypocrisy of a system which rewards the failure of the rich by impoverishing the poor.

It’s wrong, it’s not fair. But what’s the alternative?

To find out, I visited the small encampment outside St Paul’s as Europe’s leaders were gathering for yet another failed make-or-break summit on Brussels.

If a couple of hundred middle-class crusties can close down one of the nation’s most imposing landmarks, I reasoned, they must know something I don’t.

There’s a famous wartime photograph of St Paul’s defying the Blitz. Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, says we are now fighting an economic war so maybe it’s appropriate the anti-capitalists picked the cathedral for their protest.

But at 8.30am there are few signs of life from the orderly lines of cheap tents. The occupants haven’t surfaced though as most of them go home at night for a bath, a change of clothes and a decent meal, they probably aren’t there at all.

(There was no justification for the closure of St Paul’s, by the way. Worshippers and tourists could easily get in and out despite the tents.)

Commuters march past without glancing at the “occupy London” camp. The only protester in evidence is an apparently-drunk Pole singing loudly but tunelessly before breaking off to say to no-one in particular: “What the xxxx do you want?”

The posters are more helpful though their messages are confusing. One says simply “End wealth”, another demands “Let's have a maximum wage”.

We are urged to “Investigate the 13 families that run the world” while being assured “Capitalism is crisis” and “You are an artwork”.

The campers have a recycling centre, a first aid tent and another offering “tea and empathy”. It’s all calm and well-organised though there is a nasty smell of drains.

Early in the morning is clearly not a good time for an insight into the protesters’ plans for a post-Capitalist world.

But I think we can get the general idea from the poster which declares: “Capitalism so far embodies insufficiently damped positive feedback loops.” (Honestly, that’s what it says.)

In due course there will probably be an attempt to move these people on.

When that happens, there will be wall-to-wall TV coverage of the event and the usual suspects will have great fun playing to the cameras and getting themselves arrested – just as they did at the Dale Farm gipsy camp eviction.

What we see at St Paul’s is an incoherent howl of rage. It would be utterly insignificant but for the fact that the protesters chose such an iconic landmark, bamboozled the Church authorities and closed down the cathedral.

The fact remains, though, that while they have secured worldwide publicity for their protest, it is impossible to discover what alternative they propose to the capitalist system.

There was a horrible moment back in 2007 when it looked briefly as if every major bank in the USA and Britain – and quite possibly around the world – might go bust.

Never mind how we got to that terrible state, imagine how much worse it would have been for all of us if the banks had been crushed under the weight of their bad debts.

We are all paying the high price of the rescue in job losses, smaller pensions, fewer Government services and lower living standards.

It’s hard to believe but the destruction of our entire financial system would have been worse. We would all have been left penniless, jobless, with debts we couldn’t pay and assets turned worthless overnight.

Banks are a necessary evil. We need them to run even the most basic economy. We cannot live without them.

Banks are not to be confused with bankers, however. I have long believed legal action should be taken against some of the individuals who grew rich while plunging the world into the worst financial crisis in history.

They are not solely to blame, of course. Lazy regulators and over-optimistic politicians are just as guilty. So are those of us who borrowed as if there was no tomorrow.

Actually, the St Paul’s protesters are lucky we still have a capitalist system left to complain about.

Without it, nobody would have the time to stage juvenile demos on cathedral steps. We’d all be too worried about where our next meal was coming from.

Whatever happened to Euro stability?

2011-10-28T10:02:00.000+01:00

I hate to say I told you so but I was looking back over my book “The Last of England” published in 2004 and now out of print.

In a chapter on why it would be disastrous for Britain to join the euro, it says:

The truth is that economically – never mind politically – the euro just will not work….

How is it possible to tie in the various economies of Europe so they are always marching in step and in the same direction? One answer is the imposition of a “stability pact” which forces all the Governments of the eurozone to curb their freedom to tax and spend, in the interests of the common good.

The euro’s supporters will tell anyone worried about the economy of the eurozone, and the single interest rate needed for the euro, to be reassured because this pact sets a ceiling on the level of public deficit allowed, at three per cent of GDP and aims to ensure no country boosts Government spending to a level which would have an impact on the Eurozone interest rate.

We are told … the Eurozone “stability pact” ensures the economies keep on walking at the same pace in the same direction. The pact in effect allows the European Central Bank to control tax levels and public spending in the eurozone countries.

The problem is that the stability pact is being undermined and ignored, even by those who first insisted on it. The IMF has said it is being “wrongly undermined by inadequate policies” in France, Germany and Italy. Romano Prodi, the President of the European Commission, said: “I know very well the stability pact is stupid, like all decisions that are rigid.” No wonder the Bundesbank says the problems are “definitely causing a dangerous situation for monetary union”.

It is no surprise the stability pact is being undermined. Consider what happened in Germany in 2002. Growth was down to half a per cent this year. The German Industrial Association said the economy faced “stagnation”. Germany wasn’t able to meet the stability pact demand for a three per cent limit on its budget deficit. Siemens threatened to cut investment in Germany because of the high taxes demanded by the stability pact. Germany, once the economic powerhouse of Europe, before the advent of the euro, is in a double-dip recession, endures unemployment of at least 4.3 million and, according to some people, 6 million.

It saw 40,000 insolvencies in 2002, the worst since the war, while one of its political historians has declared: “Today’s crisis can be compared to the end of the Weimar republic. There is no Hitler in the wings today but the symptoms of economic and political disaster are the same.”

And why is all this happening? According to the Nobel-prize winning economist Milton Friedman the answer is simple. In an interview in Germany, he said: “If it wasn’t for the euro, then Germany would not have its current problems. A single European monetary policy is not possible for the countries of the Eurozone.”

In France, the Government refused to accept the 0.5 per cent spending cuts required to meet its stability pact obligations and when it tried to cut public spending, there were riots in the streets, as there usually are when the French people dislike what their Government is up to.

In the summer of 2003, President Chirac officially concluded that, for France, the stability pact was a dead duck. He sent his Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, to Brussels to announce that France would not even try to control its budget deficit to keep it below the three per cent limit until 2006 at the earliest.

He argued that this was necessary because France needed to boost state spending as a way of breaking out of the recession which, not coincidentally, had been dragging back the eurozone economies since the creation of the euro itself.

Likewise, Portugal has seen strikes provoked by the spending cuts announced by the Government to stay within the bounds of the stability pact. Italy, too, has taken unilateral action which defies the stability pact agreement.

Meanwhile, even a Labour Chancellor, Gordon Brown, supposedly dedicated to taking Britain into the euro eventually, rejected the idea that he should cut spending to keep in line with the stability pact requirements. “I don’t think the British public want the European Commission to cut £5 billion a year from spending, as is implied by these proposals,” he said at the time – and he is right.

No Chancellor will willingly abandon his freedom to fiddle with the economy and his ability to boost public spending in time for a General Election just to keep in step with the rest of the eurozone.

The truth is that the stability pact is a lovely theory but won’t work in practice.

It is sometimes argued against this that a currency union works perfectly well in the United States, so why shouldn’t it work in Europe? But there are big differences, according to Professor Martin Feldstein, President of the US National Bureau of Economic Research. For instance, the US has a flexible labour market, the EU does not; the US has a mobile labour market, the EU does not; and, crucially, the US has a centralised tax system. Without these things, according to Prof Feldstein, the EU will see “as a minimum” higher cyclical unemployment and “from a strictly economic point of view, they are liable to run into some serious problems ahead”.

The daring dozen

2011-10-25T15:21:00.000+01:00

Congratulations to the following West Midlands MPs for not being creeps and yes-people and voting in favour of a referendum on Britain’s relations with the EU:

Tories: Dan Byles, Warwickshire North; Marcus Jones, Nuneaton; Chris Kelly, Dudley South; Jeremy LeFroy, Stafford; Karen Lumley, Redditch; James Morris, Halesowen & Rowley Regis; Mark Pritchard, The Wrekin; Richard Shepherd, Aldridge-Brownhills; Robin Walker, Worcester.

Labour: Roger Godsiff, Birmingham Hall Green; Steve McCabe, Birmingham Selly Oak; Gisela Stuart, Birmingham Edgbaston.

Dumb and dumber

2011-10-20T11:49:00.001+01:00

We won’t get a referendum on our continuing membership of the European Union.

It’s all been stitched up in advance. A three-line whip of Tory MPs scuppers any realistic hope of getting the vote through the Commons.

A decent minority of principled MPs will support a referendum – mainly Conservatives but with a smattering of Labour MPs.

The Lib-Dems should also vote in favour of the referendum because, despite their Europhilia, they have in the past acknowledged the need for the consent of the people to the creation of a Superstate.

But they won’t want to risk a No-vote in a referendum and will hide behind the Coalition whip.

In a free vote, it is still possible there wouldn’t be a majority in Parliament for a referendum even though we all know there is a sizable majority in favour of one in the country at large.

But we shall probably never know.

Monday’s Commons vote is a rare opportunity for MPs to “speak for England”. Alas, the majority will almost certainly remain dumb.

...and another thing

2011-10-19T19:02:00.002+01:00

How can the taxman get it so wrong and expect everyone to pay for his mistakes – when he can let giant corporations off millions with deals done over dinner? It’s the price we pay for a massively complicated system and IT systems which, as usual, don’t work. Why can’t tax be simple – then, perhaps, more people would pay it?
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MPs are taking another week’s holiday. This is a cause for celebration. It means that’s another week when they won’t be able to meddle and make things worse.
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I can't see anything wrong with a "boob tax" but with so many people now doing "cash-only" jobs is there a danger that surgeons may be pushed into the black economy? The real answer is to cut taxes.
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As the London luvvies were getting excited about Liam Fox I met some soldiers at a Help for Heroes event who were much more concerned about their comrades being killed and maimed in a pointless, endless war.
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The world's population hit 7 billion this month. Isn't it time all foreign aid was aimed at stemming the absurdly dangerous global birth rate?

Now who are the fruitcakes, Dave?

2011-10-14T09:10:00.002+01:00

Who are the fruitcakes and loonies now? Those people who said the European Union was bad for Britain – or our beloved Prime Minister?

David Cameron, in one of his many unguarded moments when the PR façade slips for a moment, condemned Eurosceptics as “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”.

Now they have been proved right, can we expect an apology? Of course not.

Instead, a great fuss is being made about the promise of a Commons debate on whether to hold a referendum about Britain’s membership of the EU.

Will this be the liberating moment? Could it be the watershed when all that has gone wrong with this country because we are governed from Brussels starts to come right?

Don’t bet on it. Nobody knows what sort of referendum we’ll get. Should it be a simple “in or out” question or something more complicated about bringing back some of the powers we have lost?

William Hague called the Euro “a burning building with no exits” and, with the flames licking around Greece and Italy, surely nobody doubts he was right all along.

Yet the last thing the Government wants at a time of Eurocrisis is the infinite complications of a referendum which forces it to extricate Britain from the failure that is “ever-greater economic and political union”.

It’s not just the single currency.

We saw this week that Theresa May, the Home Secretary, thinks the European Convention on Human Rights is a ridiculous piece of law which should be abolished.

Admittedly she did her case no good at all by wittering on about an illegal immigrant from Bolivia who couldn’t be deported because he had a pet cat called Maya.

The flying fur over Mrs May’s catastrophic “kittengate” contribution to the Conservative conference should not distract us from the fact that we have a Home Secretary who abhors our human rights laws.

The country can’t deport convicted murderers and rapists because it may be in breach of their human rights. Mrs May spoke for millions when she said it was time to restore sanity.

While the Euro burns, the Eurocrats are busily working away at their plans to create a single Superstate no matter what the peoples of the EU might want.

Take another of their challenges to our country. The Government has been given a two-month deadline to bring our benefit payments into line with their demands.

It means we could end up paying billions more to “benefit tourists” from across the EU if they find themselves better off on our social security than they would be at home.

We could soon be forced to pay child benefit, child tax credit, state pension credit, jobseekers' allowance and unemployment support allowance to any citizen of the Superstate.

Iain Duncan Smith, the Pensions Secretary, believes it could cost us £2 billion.

He says: “At a time when the British people are tightening their belts, and the European Commission orders us to open our doors to benefit tourists and pay them benefits when they arrive here, I have a simple message for them: No, no, no.”

If you think that’s expensive, what about the EU bailout fund? This started off at 400 million euros and has already rising to 2 trillion but even that won’t be enough if Italy goes the way of Greece.

Don’t think this is just a problem for countries which swapped their currencies for the euro. Some of it will be our money. We are, to coin a phrase, all in it together.

So our Government is planning to print more money. They call it quantitative easing but really it’s no different from going to a printing press and running off a load of forged £50 notes.

The impact is the same – inflation. Prices are already rising sharply and the Bank of England seems to have abandoned its job of keeping the rate down to two per cent.

Inflation is the only way the Governments of Europe can convert their massive debts into something manageable – inflation makes their debts worth less and hang the consequences for the little people with pensions and savings.

Chancellor George Osborne says Europe’s leaders “have got to get out and fix their roof, even though it is already pouring with rain”.

He also questions why they “plunged headlong into the euro without thinking through the consequences”.

He’s right, of course. It beggars belief that the most powerful and, you might have supposed, intelligent men and women in Europe should have been so caught up in their own fantasies they led us into this situation in the first place.

The very few who warned that it would all go horribly wrong were derided as right-wing Little Englanders.

These “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists” have banged about the EU and been ignored, mocked or sidelined for years.

Now we have a Chancellor, a Foreign Secretary, a Home Secretary, and a Pensions Secretary all lining up to condemn our involvement in the EU.

It’s time they did more than complain. They must give us a referendum – in or out? They won’t – because they’re afraid of our answer.

DIY NHS

2011-10-04T15:20:00.002+01:00

How is it possible that NHS spending has tripled over the last ten years and yet nurses are so over-stretched they can’t help to feed their patients?

The Government pours billions into the ever-open mouth of the health service – yet its staff are so rushed off their feet they can’t spoon food across the parched lips of the elderly and infirm.

Some nurses think of themselves as too qualified to care. The problem is they have degrees and they have spent hours in classrooms and lecture theatres.

They learn lots of theory and no doubt get detailed medical instruction but they’re not used to looking after people’s basic bodily needs.

In 2008, Tory Peer Lord Mancroft brought the wrath of the NHS down on his head when he recounted his experiences as a patient at the Royal United Hospital in Bath.

He said it was a miracle he was still alive after his experience of filthy hospital wards.

He went on: “The nurses who looked after me were mostly grubby – we are talking about dirty fingernails and hair – and were slipshod and lazy. Worst of all, they were drunken and promiscuous.

“How do I know that? Because if you’re a patient and you’re lying in a bed, and you’re being nursed from either side, they talk across you as if you’re not there.

“So I know exactly what they got up to the night before, and how much they drank, and I know exactly what they were planning to do the next night, and I can tell you, it’s pretty horrifying.”

Lord Mancroft’s experience may be rare. But Peter Carter, head of the Royal College of Nursing, still thinks nurses have too much work to do.

He plans to extend hospital visiting hours so relatives can feed patients, help them go to the loo and make sure they have something to drink.

One of the reasons for this, he admits, was that newly-qualified nurses were “simply not up to the mark” because they spent too much time in the classroom and not long enough on the wards.

At the same time, Dickon Weir-Hughes, chief executive of the Nursing and Midwifery Council, is complaining that the healthcare assistants who are regularly employed to do the nurses’ dirty work have no qualifications.

Professor Weir-Hughes wants this army of 300,000 people to be required to obtain a qualification – and be segregated from graduate nurses by being forced to wear a different uniform.

This kind of nursing apartheid is inevitable. The last Government encouraged nurses to become over-qualified.

As a result, some of them are not trained or encouraged to deliver the care which most patients assume is at the very heart of their profession.

You can’t blame nurses themselves. Many are wonderful, maintain the very highest standards of care and deserve the old epithet of “angels”.

But the NHS is designed and run for the benefit of its staff, first and foremost. It has been perverted from its original aim of looking after people and is now the most inefficient, indulged and indolent of all the public services.

We spend about £120 billion a year on the health service. The last Government tripled the budget from £37 billion in 1997.

The Coalition has pledged to “ring fence” NHS spending, despite the cuts, though this hasn’t stopped the healthcare industry warning of death and disaster as even they are asked to take greater care over how they spend our money.

Yet NHS productivity hasn’t improved and this is a national scandal no politician dares to address.

The inquiry into the deaths at Stafford Hospital shows day by day how low the NHS has sunk.

It is astonishing that Sir David Nicholson, one-time head of Staffordshire Strategic Health Authority, should now be chief executive of the entire NHS. Nothing succeeds like failure, it seems.

He admitted he appointed the wrong man as chief executive of the hospital where up to 1,200 patients may have died as a result of lack of care and he admitted he had no idea there was any cause for concern.

Lessons, he solemnly declared, would be learned.

They always say that, as if it makes the sacrifice, pain and misery of patients and their families somehow acceptable.

As the vast ranks of “healthcare professionals” manoeuvre in pursuit of pensions, pay and privileges, the long-suffering patient remains an inconvenience best left to someone else.

The nursing profession’s separation from patients was marvellously illustrated by East Kent Hospital where staff went around dispensing drugs while wearing tabards warning patients: “Do not disturb.”

The aim was to prevent nurses being interrupted as they made their rounds handing out pills.

Luckily the outrage this caused has forced an about-turn but even now the nurses will wear notices declaring: “Drug round in progress.”

It’s not quite as rude as the original but it’s still symbolic of how removed from their patients some nurses have become.

We need nurses to offer kindness, care and compassion. Qualifications are all very well but sometimes all a patient needs is a hand to hold and a word of sympathy.

Coming soon - 'The Smoking Gun'

2011-09-26T19:50:00.000+01:00

In "no-smoking Britain" the Coalition Government has stubbed out cigarettes once and for all. But it's politics as usual.

So why is MP Acton Trussell being forced to resign? Who stitched him up? Why does the Prime Minister want lipstick lesbian Lucy Loxley in Parliament? Will the Coalition’s ‘fixer’ Compton Dundon help Clifford Chambers slither up the greasy pole? Who planted the smoking gun?

A romp through the corridors of power and the streets of a Midland town as the Coalition Government faces a crucial by-election in the safe seat of Barset.

As old loyalties are tested and new alliances formed, is this low politics, high farce - or both?

My new novel is coming soon.

The BIG issue

2011-09-19T10:58:00.001+01:00

It wasn't until I started going to the gym that I realised how easy it is to put on calories – and how hard it is to lose them.

Pounding away on a running machine gives you time to contemplate the fate of those of us who have put on a few pounds.

It’s boring, hard work and takes forever to work off the ill-effects of even the most modest-sized Mars bar.

The Health Police are getting more and more noisy about how obese we’re all becoming. And the latest survey listing the towns where kids are fatter than their parents isn’t flattering for those of us in the West Midlands.

It seems Tamworth in Staffordshire is the worst offender in the country. In at number one in the obesity league, almost one third of Tamworth’s children are larger than their parents. Cannock is ninth; Sandwell 12th equal.

A separate survey claims Wolverhampton is the fat capital of the region with one in ten people described as obese.

But, wherever you look, there is no doubt that people are getting bigger.

A walk down any High Street reveals an alarming number of people whose paunches, muffin tops and lardy arses are crying out for a diet.

A surprising number of fatties seem so unconcerned at their size they’re usually to be seen stuffing their faces with something containing over their body-weight in calories.

Before I started writing this column I thought it only right I should do two things which I have studiously avoided for years.

First I weighted myself and then I worked out what my Body Mass Index was.

BMI, as weightwatchers everywhere will know already, tells you if you are healthy, overweight, obese or – imagine – too thin.

I was surprised to discover I was actually nervous about checking out my BMI rating.

I know I’ve put on a few pounds over the years but it’s only because everyone’s making such a fuss about obesity that it’s started to bother me.

It turns out that the NHS and the World Cancer Research Fund agree. My BMI rating of 27.9 means I am overweight, which I knew already, but not obese, which comes as a bit of a relief.

It’s not good news but at least I can carry on moaning about the wobbling flesh we see around us with the superior air of someone who is – officially – not excessively gross.

The alleged epidemic of obesity is, of course, the result of living in a land of plenty.

Despite the new austerity, we still have enough money to eat ourselves stupid.

My 88-year-old father has a theory that his generation is so long-lived because they grew up in the 1930s depression and the Second World War when food was scarce. They had no choice but to eat small meals.

And they didn’t have the TV to slump in front of when they were young so they had a lot more exercise.

As a result, he and his contemporaries are living longer than any previous generation. He reckons the sedentary lives and indulgent diets of today will reverse that trend.

But if kids are putting on weight, are their parents guilty of child abuse?

The mad health police in Dundee want to snatch four children from their family home and send them to be “fostered without contact” because they’re too fat.

Three daughters, aged 11, seven and one, and a five-year-old son, will be ripped from their parents and given away, presumably to people who won’t feed them very much.

This is taking health fascism to unacceptable extremes. It’s not difficult to feel sorry for chubby children and wonder what on earth their parents are doing allowing them to get so fat.

The parents may well need more advice about how to feed their children. You could even imagine some earnest social worker standing over them at mealtimes dictating what they may and may not eat.

Even so, tearing the family apart because some of the kids are overweight is simply unacceptable in a free society.

What we really do not need are lectures from officious do-gooders telling us how to live our lives let alone breaking up families in the name of healthy eating.

Before we know it, the Government will slap 20 per cent VAT on fast food, biscuits and other indulgencies.

We’ll be told this is in the interests of the nation’s health. In reality it would be in the Treasury’s interests bringing in about £5.6 billion-a-year in tax revenue.

The health police would argue that a “fat tax” would reduce consumption and create a healthier society.

Actually it’s just another tax and we already have far too many of those.

We all know about the perils of obesity. Those of us who need to shed a pound or two know what we must do and how to do it.

But lead us not into temptation. Stick a few chips under the nose of even the most dedicated dieter and their will-power crumbles almost as fast as a vegetarian’s faced with the delicious aromas of a bacon sandwich.

The triumph of hype over experience

2011-09-07T09:10:00.000+01:00

The hype over PJ Harvey's album "Let England Shake" has been so relentless I felt it must be worth buying so I did.

Sadly this is nothing more than a feverishly adolescent girl's First World War history project set to what could be described as music. It's Kate Bush without the charm, imagination or musicality. Dreary is a polite term for it.

How it gets to be voted the best album of the year in the Mercury Music awards is beyond me.

The Virgin Pendolino trains look OK from the outside but they are dark and pokey within. That wouldn't matter too much if it were not for the fact that every carriage in steerage class (and quite possibli in Posh Class as well) stinks of what might politely be called "drains".

The loos are so badly designed it seems Virgin can't, or won't, rid their inter city services of the constant stink of human effluent. All very nasty and at £120 return a rip-off to boot.

Former Wolverhampton Poly lecturer Howard Jacobson's novel "The Finkler Question" now out in paperback and destined to be a best-seller on the strength of winning this year's Booker Prize.

If this is the best novel written in the past 12 months then we are really in trouble. It's about who wants to be Jewish and what sort of a Jew they want to be. But it is tedious, dull and how anyone could have described it as a "comic masterpiece" is beyond me. The only time I smiled was when I reached the end - out of relief that at last it was all over.

Am I really going to buy this year's Booker Prize winner?

The Euro - well into extra time

2011-09-05T12:52:00.000+01:00

There is one thing we should all be very grateful to Gordon Brown for – he kept Britain out of the Euro.

As Chancellor, he refused to allow Tony Blair to lead us up the garden path to be swallowed by the giant Euro-monster.

If the economy is managing to keep its head above water, it’s only thanks to the fact that we have a cheap pound and we are not stuck with the Euro.

Manufacturing exports are one of the few bright spots in the gloomy economic landscape and that’s almost entirely because British goods are cheap compared with those made in the Eurozone.

Sadly, what happens in the Eurozone affects jobs in this country whether we like it or not.

The turmoil over the Euro-Pigs (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) has already led to a slow-down in British exports and the crisis is far from over.

There are only two options left for the European Union.

One is to wave goodbye to the Pigs, let them bring back the Escudo, Lire, Peseta and Drachma and create a hard core Eurozone of countries which can be trusted to run their national budgets properly.

The other – the one favoured by the Brussels empire-makers – is to continue bailing out the Pigs and impose new rules and restrictions on national governments.

The Pigs would be better off if they were left to sink or swim outside the Euro. They could devalue their currencies and enjoy the prospect of some sort of prosperity in the foreseeable future.

They would still be saddled with massive debts, of course, and they might go bankrupt. The problem is they owe billions to banks all over the world, though mainly in France and Germany.

Allowing them to escape the Euro straitjacket isn’t appealing to the Euro’s masters in Berlin, Paris and Brussels. The banks would be massively out of pocket and require yet another taxpayers’ bail-out.

The snag is that if the EU presses on with further bail-outs through its planned “European Financial Stability Facility” – a £400 billion slush fund – the Germans will not be happy.

The EU was formed after the Second World War as a French initiative to contain Germany’s ambitions and it’s done a pretty good job.

The Euro gave Germany a cheap way to sell its goods to a captive market. The country has grown rich thanks to the Euro.

The price is massive debts built up by the profligate Pigs of the Mediterranean.

The German people aren’t sure they want to prop up these countries any more.

They squander their money, they don’t pay their taxes and they retire early – at 50 for many Greeks and on 95 per cent of their working salaries.

Hard-working, prudent, industrious, law-abiding, tax-paying Germans are starting to wonder how long they will have to carry these spendthrift spongers.

Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel is losing support from her own party and a recent poll said 76 per cent of Germans opposed a “Eurobond” bailout.

They don’t want to take on responsibility for other people’s debts – and who can blame them?

The problem for Chancellor Merkel, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and the Eurofanatics is that the creation of a huge collective debt – most experts think £400 billion is just the start – can’t happen without the voters noticing.

Brussels bureaucrats may be unaccountable but national politicians must eventually submit themselves to the will of the people.

The EU has – though another sleight of hand – recently inserted a clause into the Lisbon Treaty ruling out referendums on Euro-bailouts.

Even so, voters are not as dumb as their leaders seem to think.

A European debt union, which is what Brussels hopes to create, will not survive if public opinion in Germany and France refuses to put up with it.

The only way to keep the Euro alive is to create a single financial system for all the countries using the currency.

That means one tax system and centrally-imposed public spending limits – in short, a European Superstate.

For decades that’s been the ultimate aim of the Brussels elite. They see this crisis as a real chance to build that Superstate.

While that state may, in theory, be run from Belgium, the power will lie in Berlin.

Germany would call the shots and impose its own standards of financial restraint on its wastrel neighbours. But it would also be lumbered with debts which will take decades to clear.

Europe’s politicians refuse to admit the dream has turned into a nightmare. They will deny the peoples of Europe a say for as long as they possibly can.

But it can’t go on for ever. The Greeks, Italians, Spanish and Portugese won’t want their countries run by Germany; the Germans don’t want to run these countries.

The Euro will die. The only question is whether they insist on giving it a long, lingering and increasingly expensive death or they go for a short, sharp shock.

As the famous commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme said on a previous occasion when Germany was forced to admit defeat: “They think it’s all over… It is now.” It soon will be, anyway.

It's Disneyland under martial law

2011-09-01T08:44:00.000+01:00

A bonus-rich banker sits down for tea with an MP and a rioter. There are 12 biscuits on the table. The banker takes 11 of them and warns the politician: "Look out for that looter, he's after your biscuit."

Top bankers, all-expenses-paid politicians and looters have one trait in common – naked greed.

It's not surprising rioters are described as greedy.

That's just what they are – greedy for life's little luxuries: flat screen TVs, computer games, new clothes.

The nationwide outrage and righteous indignation at their behaviour is entirely understandable.

But what, really, is the difference between a hoodie skipping out of H&M with armfuls of clothes and a banker demanding bonuses running into millions even after he has brought the entire capitalist system to the brink of collapse?

And how does a lout smashing a shop window in pursuit of stolen goods differ from an MP forcing the taxpayer to foot the bill for trimming his wisteria?

The banker and the MP are both betraying the same basic instinct as the looter.

They both want to exploit their positions for their own financial gain.

They have no thought about the cost to other people, they just think that if they can get away with it, they might as well.

They would rationalise it by arguing that everybody else is lining his own pocket so they would be foolish to deny themselves.

That’s what the rioters thought, too.

They saw Londoners apparently smashing their way into shops and walking off unmolested with their booty so why not try it in Wolverhampton, West Bromwich and Birmingham? Especially as the police often stood back and did nothing to stop them.

They may well have had a sense of entitlement and a feeling of resentment.

We have all been aghast at the way our leaders have behaved in recent years.

Admittedly a few politicians have been jailed and a few more have lost their seats as a result of the Parliamentary expenses scandal.

But most of them got away with what, in other walks of life, would have been treated as fraud.

Our MPs may think the rest of us have forgiven and forgotten their systematic milking of the taxpayer. They would be wrong. Their greed is not to be dismissed lightly.

The bankers are, of course, an even more hideous example of how the law-abiding, tax-paying majority are treated as mugs.

The collective greed of top bankers brought the Western world to the brink of ruin. We will be paying the horrendous price for their folly for decades ahead.

We have had to come to their rescue – and it's not just the banks we now own which have been bailed out. They all needed our money to keep them alive.

Yet these masters of the universe, the untouchables at the very top, continue to trouser vast sums of money the rest of us can only dream about.

How do they manage to get away with it? Why is nobody answerable? How come bankers don't go to jail?

When confronted by so much gross and offensive injustice, it's not surprising the least well-off decide to take what they can when they can.

Isn't that what greedy MPs and bankers have been doing for years?

The differences are obvious. Some greed is entirely legal – the bankers, it seems, have not broken any laws. They are simply offending against what most of us see as fair, reasonable, moral and decent.

Some greed you can get away with simply by filling in a few expenses forms. There's no threat to life or limb. Nobody's hurt.

Young, ill-educated, badly brought-up thugs have no opportunity for subtle forms of greed. Their only option is the smash-and-grab raid.

It's criminal. It's wrong. We must crack down hard on them. But is it really such a shock when they have before them every day the example of their supposed betters?

Back in the 1980s, many people subscribed to the mantra "greed is good" even though the phrase originated in the film “Wall Street” and we were supposed to be shocked by such sentiments.

It seems the idea never really went away but there is a vast difference between hard-earned wealth and the bung-and-bonus culture which created this recession and destroyed our faith in politicians.

People who work hard, build businesses and create jobs are making the rest of us richer. They’re not greedy – they’re saviours of the economy.

But when the courts are handing out jail sentences of up to four years for a couple of kids posting some fatuous message on Facebook, it beggars belief that the people who ran our banks have got away with it.

The looters are being punished for their greed but most MPs got away with theirs while the people who created the greatest global recession in history are still making money hand over fist.

I don’t condone greedy looters but we all know where they took their inspiration from.

Of course, everyone is equal in the eyes of the law but, as Bob Geldof said: “Justice isn’t blind, it just looks the other way.”

Bleeding heads bleeding hearts

2011-08-16T20:41:00.001+01:00

The most appalling sight during the summer riots was police officers in full Darth Vader riot gear standing aside and watching as criminals loot and destroy.

The helmeted officers, clutching their shields and apparently armed to teeth, had all the bite of a soggy egg sandwich.

They were not protecting life and liberty, they were merely directing the traffickers to the nearest electronics superstore.

Ineffectual policing is not the fault of officers on the front line. It’s the fault of their masters who have forced them to become an arm of the social services rather than the body employed to maintain law and order.

Their chiefs aren’t criminologists these days but sociologists.
They concentrate their efforts on what is known as “community policing”. That means sitting around listening to the whingeing of each and every allegedly oppressed minority.

It means offering a shoulder to cry on rather than stretching out the long arm of the law.

When police officers might think about getting tough, they’re intimidated by the threat of being pilloried by the BBC and Labour MPs or sued under European human rights laws.

In short, the police have gone soft.

The rioting of the 1980s may have been provoked by social conditions and youth unemployment.

But their result has been 25 years of appeasement-policing where officers are forced to pussyfoot around to avoid hurting anyone’s delicate sensibilities.

They offer care in the community even when the idea of “community” is highly misleading, because it implies one cohesive group of people and in most of our stricken cities nothing could be further from the truth.

In too many places, these “communities” are divided and discordant, with few shared values and very little sense of belonging – except, perhaps, for those in one of the violent drug gangs which too often seem to rule the roost.

The police know about these gangs. Indeed, it is because they were trying to deal with a leading thug that they ended up shooting Mark Duggan, provoking the first of the riots.

This may seem to counter the argument that the police have gone soft but if Duggan was a known gang boss – as we are led to believe – why wasn’t he banged up long ago?

Whatever the circumstances surrounding his death, the riots that resulted have nothing whatever to do with police brutality, Government cuts or social deprivation.

We have been witnessing opportunistic young thieves exploiting the police’s failure to control the streets.

When a woman can actually try on shoes before she steals them, a young lad can cycle home with a shopping basket of contraband and hooded youths can walk past riot police carrying stolen flat-screen TVs, law and order has broken down. This is anarchy.

It’s no use senior officers saying they will arrest the thieves later. Why not nick them in the act before clever lawyers and feckless parents can line up bogus defences for them?

The average policeman, for all his fearsome appearance, is afraid to act. Not because he’s worried about a bit of physical violence but because of the backlash if he happens to do these little darlings any harm.

When drunken 47-year-old paper seller Ian Tomlinson stumbled among the G20 rioters in London and died after being struck by a policeman, there was outcry.

No police officer is going to risk his career, pension and reputation by delivering a telling blow or two if he knows he’ll have to spend the next two years going through tribunals, inquiries and trials to justify himself.

We expect the police to protect us from harm but those who govern the country are not prepared to give them the ability to do their jobs properly.

Nobody wants to see a police state where officers are above the law and can get away with any sort of abuse.

But surely we have to accept that, in the face of lawlessness and looting, it is better to see the police crack a few skulls than to watch them stand back and admire the flames.

Most of those taking part in this riot of robbery were not much more than kids.

They have grown up, you can be pretty sure, without any discipline at home while, at many schools, teachers are in despair over their inability to control some of their pupils let alone get them to learn anything.

These thieving kids are used to getting their own way. The results have been seen on the streets of our cities.

They know no fear because they have little or nothing to fear. With the Government set to empty our jails and cut prison sentences, it’s not surprising looters laugh at the law.

These may be longer-term issues that need to be addressed. In the meantime, the police must win back respect for their office and the laws they are paid to uphold.

Robust policing is called for, tough and uncompromising.

Most appalled, law-abiding onlookers would like to see the a few more bleeding heads among the troublemakers and far fewer bleeding hearts among the ranks of the police.

A luxury you can't afford

2011-07-29T18:34:00.000+01:00

The deadline for comments on plans for an HS2 train from London to Birmingham has now passed and I still don't understand the massive enthusiasm for it - especially as the trains will have to be built abroad and the real beneficiaries will be London, Manchester and Leeds (in that order) and I still find it hard to believe they can find the money.
The service will be the railway equivalent of the M6 Toll, smart and very nice to use if you can afford the price.
But with Virgin from London to the NEC now about £240 return (first) and £120 (second) how many people will stump up maybe £400 and £200 to save half an hour?
I know "time is money" but there are limits. Civil servants and other people who are not paying their own way will be the only users so the majority of rail travellers will see no benefit.
To make matters worse, the train goes to Euston so passengers will have to use the tube to Kings X if they want to connect with Eurostar.
Hvaing just endured a standing-room-only train from Bristol, I am more than conscious of the need for extra capacity on the railways. But when you get on a four-carriage push-me, pull-you going all the way from Penzance to Edinburgh you have to ask why on earth they can't simply add more coaches to existing trains.
HS2 is a rich man's dream, a taxpayers' white elephant and a politician's stab at leaving a permanent mark on the country. But with a bill running into countless billions it is still a luxury we cannot afford.

More people; no more jobs

2011-07-22T09:50:00.000+01:00

Is it good news that the population of the Black Country has increased in the past 12 months by 4,500?

It’s supposed to be, at least for the Black Country Consortium in pursuit of its 20-year “vision”.

The Consortium is a quango run by the leaders of the local councils with other public sector worthies and a few businesspeople thrown in for window-dressing.

It is dedicated to increasing the area’s population.

So it will be happy with the latest figures showing there are now 1,096,500 people living in the Black Country (or “residing in the sub-region” as the officials put it).

It seems the biggest increase was in Sandwell where the population rose 1,800 to 292,800. Dudley is the most densely populated area, with 307,400 residents, while 256,900 people live in Walsall and there are 239,400 in Wolverhampton.

The Consortium’s stated aim is to increase the area’s population to 1.2 million by 2033 so it’s well on its way.

The question is why the leading lights in the Black Country should feel the need to state this as one of their main purposes in life when – without trying – they are bound to reach the target.

It surely hasn’t escaped their attention that the population of the whole country is growing faster than at any time in history.

It’s risen by 3.1 million in the past decade. The Office for National Statistics puts the country’s population today at 62,262,000.

The ONS reckons the population will rise by another 4.3 million by 2018 and hit 71.6 million by 2033.

These are massive numbers. They are due partly to everyone living longer, partly because young women are having more babies – especially the more recent arrivals into this country – and because of the unstoppable rate of immigration.

If the Black Country Consortium can’t entice another 100,000 or so to move to the area then it really will have been a waste of space.

As the population will soar with or without the help of a 20-year vision for the Black Country, the real question is what on earth will all these extra people do?

It’s all very well hoping for a bustling and busy metropolis with lots of shiny, happy people in it. But how is everybody going to earn a living?

The prospects are not good.

First off, the Consortium wants us to earn an average of £3,806 a year more (excluding inflation) than we do now. It’s a nice idea and one I’m sure we can all support.

Surprisingly, the Consortium thinks it’s already making progress. It says average pay in the Black Country rose by £228 a head – double the national increase – in the past year.

It’s hard to believe, especially when the number of people earning anything at all is on the slide.

The Consortium wants to create 112,613 new jobs just to bring the Black Country employment rate up to 80 per cent of the national figure.

But their own “state of the Black Country” report suggests we are further away from that than ever.

At the moment, almost one person in every five of working age has no work, compared with 12.5 per cent nationally.

That’s 124,890 people who could be in jobs but are actually workless.

The Consortium thinks it needs to get 39,578 of these people, almost a third, off the dole if it is to achieve its ambitions.

Unfortunately the number of workless people soared 16 per cent in the past nine years and there are few signs that the trend will be reversed in the near future.

There is only one way more jobs can be created and that’s if private-sector businesses grow and flourish – especially as public sector jobs are falling.

So there will have to be more companies setting up shop or expanding. At the moment there are still 32,350 businesses in the Black Country and let’s hope they all continue to prosper.

Last year 3,270 new firms opened for business in the Black Country but the start-up rate has fallen by a third in seven years. And the area needs 1,000 more new companies every year to reach the national average.

It seems the Consortium is pinning its hopes on a boom in advanced manufacturing, building technology and construction, aerospace, business services and – with depressing inevitability – green industries.

Let’s hope this analysis of the economy consists of more than simply looking at what businesses are doing well and hoping for the best – though I doubt it.

There are many excellent companies in the Black Country. Mostly they will live or die according to national, European and global economic trends well outside the control of a few local councillors.

What they need from the locals isn’t fatuous reports and pie-in-the-sky targets.

They need lower local taxes, better roads, cheaper parking and no bus lanes, easier planning permissions, fewer rules and regulations and better-educated school-leavers.

They need encouragement and opportunity – not the dead hand of bloody-minded bureaucracy.

It’s hard to believe encouraging more people to move to the Black Country is likely to help – unless all the newcomers are rocket scientists, I suppose.

MPs 0 Murdochs 1

2011-07-19T17:19:00.000+01:00

What kind of security is that? How can protesters get through to attack someone at a Parliamentary hearing?

It sums up the whole fiasco of the phone-hacking inquisition which was largely a pathetic non-event.

The only person to come out of it well was the News International emperor himself.
Rupert Murdoch started off like a deaf old man who needed his wife to keep him upright. But gradually he became forceful, passionate and you realised how this man could have built himself a global media empire.

While the father was by turns humble, proud, forceful and self-righteous, James was largely rational, reasonable and realistic.

The MPs clearly had very little idea of how a multi-national corporation is run but James’s level of ignorance of detail was somewhat surprising, given that he’s had nothing else to think about in the past couple of weeks.

And it may well be he’s had the wool pulled over his eye by his executives from time to time.

He should have known more and found out more before his appearance but still, the
MPs weren’t exactly penetrating.

This won’t put the scandal behind them but the Murdochs certainly didn’t do themselves or their empire any harm.

This will be pored over for weeks but really it was a dreary piece of afternoon telly.

Who? What? Where? When? Why? How?

2011-07-18T09:22:00.000+01:00

1. If the Head of the Met resigns for employing a News International deputy editor who was not, at the time, implicated in the phone hacking scandal, where does that leave the Prime Minister?

2. The claim is that, unlike Sir Paul Stephenson, Cameron was not responsible for investigating the allegations and is therefore in a different position. But is that right?

3. Was Cameron warned and warned and warned again about the dangers of employing Andy Coulson (originally on £400,000 a year)?

4. If he chose to ignore the warnings, why was that? Was it because of the overwhelming desire to ingratiate himself with News International and the Murdoch empire?

5. If that was the case, was it justified as the only way he could win power?

6. If the answer to that is yes then how come he didn’t actually win and was forced into this unholy alliance with the Lib Dems?

7. If Cameron were forced to quit over the scandal – unlikely I know but not, now, entirely impossible – would Nick Clegg become Prime Minister?

8. Why is no-one talking about the much bigger scandal at News International – the fact that it pays scarcely any tax in this country? When will someone address that question?

9. Which is most hypocritical: the BBC’s gleeful coverage of the whole affair; Steve Coogan’s spluttering and incoherent rage; the idea that somehow Ed Miliband has come out of this well; or Gordon Brown’s rant against the evil empire?

10. Is anyone surprised to learn that some police officers accept a bung now and then from News International reporters?

British railways hit the buffers

2011-07-16T18:51:00.000+01:00

This story has been sidelined along with many others by the witless witterings of a world holding its hands up in dismay like a maiden aunt at the phone hacking scandal but any day now, the nation which gave the world the railway will no longer be able to build a single carriage or engine.

The nation which created the world’s greatest train journeys – across Canada, India, Africa, and South America – is giving away the last vestige of its proud heritage.

The nation which built France’s railway system and sold them 6,000 steam engines by 1880, the nation which not only built but drove Germany’s first train, is consigning another of its once-great industries to the history books.

That nation is, of course, our own. The Government has chosen to hand a multi-billion-pound contract to build trains for London’s new Thameslink line to Germany.

As a result, Britain’s last surviving train manufacturer is to lose 1,400 jobs at its Derby factory and the remaining 1,600 employees are working on borrowed time.

The Canadian owners, Bombardier, will run-down the plant while it finishes existing contracts.

Then it will almost certainly have to close – another nail in the coffin of this country’s once world-beating industry.

There are many reasons for the long-term decline of the British rail manufacturing. If the Derby train works were still British-owned, the bosses might have fought harder to save it.

But responsibility for this rests squarely with our benighted Coalition.

Its decision is unbelievable, inexcusable and unforgivable.

It’s unbelievable because no other industrialised country would let it happen. French railways buy French trains, German railways buy German trains, Japanese railways buy Japanese trains.

Only here are we prepared to destroy our own industry and throw away good, well-paid, productive, home-made, high-skill jobs.

The decision is inexcusable because Ministers are feebly trying to shift the blame for this pathetic decision onto either the last Labour Government or the European Union or, preferably, both.

Transport Secretary Philip Hammond refuses to discuss the details of why Germany’s Siemens bid was better than Bombardier’s.

He claims that, if they had wanted to protect British manufacturing, the last Government should have adjusted the tender document when it first asked companies to bid for the contract.

And he says he might get sued by Siemens if he went back on the deal now.

These excuses won’t wash. The Government has had a year to do something about this before making a decision on who wins the contract.

In a complicated £3 billion deal it is not beyond the wit of even this witless crew, to secure British jobs, British skills and British expertise.

Labour and the EU may be partly to blame – but that is no excuse for this craven Coalition’s bid to pass the buck.

Mr Hammond points out that Siemens will create 2,000 jobs in this country as a result of the contract – but those jobs would have been created in the supply chain if Bombardier had won so that’s irrelevant.

The decision is unforgivable because Prime Minister U-turn-Dave has been trying to convince us his Coalition is devoted to the development of British manufacturing industry.

In March, he shipped the entire Cabinet to Derby in a PR stunt which managed to fool some captains of industry into the delusion that the Government actually cared about their future.

Yet the writing was on the wall a year ago when the Government cancelled an £80 million grant to Sheffield Forgemasters aimed at helping the company develop products for the nuclear power industry.

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg was accused of betraying his own Sheffield Hallam constituents.

He preferred to spend £80 million on a pointless national referendum on electoral reform, which shows where his priorities really lie.

The economy is struggling to recover from recession. Living standards are falling. Public sector workers are planning an autumn of discontent.

Why, then, would any half-way competent Government fail to take advantage of a rare opportunity to boost this country’s manufacturing industry?

The truth is the Government doesn’t give a fig about manufacturing. Its economists think our future is in selling services to other countries – we’re particularly good at banking, they say, to ironic jeers all round.

They think it’s “protectionist” to spend taxpayers’ money on our own manufacturers. And it would be – if there were a truly free market anywhere else in the world. But there isn’t.

Our political masters don’t care if companies like Cadbury and Jaguar, our sea and airports, our leading football clubs or our national newspapers are all foreign-owned.

Before he became a national joke, Business Secretary Vince Cable promised us a “Cadbury law” to protect British companies from foreign ownership.

But like Mr Cameron’s Cabinet meeting in Derby, he wasn’t serious. It was all to look good and grab a quick headline.

It’s still not too late for the old LMS works in Derby. Perhaps some of our MPs can earn their money for once.

U-turn-Dave could reverse this decision especially as it pulls the rug from under one of the Coalition’s other dreamtime schemes – the colossally expensive high-speed rail link between Birmingham and London.

If the trains aren’t even going to be built in this country, there goes yet another excuse for our political masters’ vanity project of the century.

Why I will buy the 'News of the World'

2011-07-06T23:05:00.000+01:00

I shall buy the “News of the Wold” this Sunday for the first time in years – as a small protest at the nauseating hypocrisy of our politicians and the BBC.

The phone-hacking allegations aren’t good. If it’s illegal, it should not happen.

But the queue of MPs desperate to condemn News International via the BBC – effectively a commercial rival of BSkyB – is even more dismaying.

Usually, they fawn on Rupert Murdoch and employ his cast-offs like Andy Coulson but now they pretend they want to prove they are somehow more moral than him and his organisation.

Actually they want to seize the opportunity get their retaliation in for the stories his papers have written about them in the past – and the stories they fear may be written about them in the future.

Of course, those other papers not involved in phone hacking – largely because their editorial budgets wouldn’t stretch to it – are sanctimoniously clambering aboard the bandwagon in the hope of settling old scores.

But the real victim of this flammed-up furore will be press freedom. The result will be new regulations on the press, a reduction in the ability of newspapers to make mistakes – and a sharp increase in secrecy, concealment and hypocrisy in high places.

It’s what politicians want. It’s what Hugh Grant wants. It’s what the BBC seems to want as well.

Buy the “News of the World” and support freedom, democracy and the right to know (even if it does mean supporting the right of newspapers to make mistakes sometimes).

Why subsidise lazy Londoners?

2011-06-28T12:20:00.000+01:00

Yet another Government U-turn is expected, this time over the plan to limit the amount of money a family can claim in benefits to £26,000 a year.

It seems this is not enough money to keep the undeserving poor in the manner to which they have become accustomed.

So there is every danger that David Cameron, who must giddy from all the U-turns he has completed in the last couple of weeks, will order yet another.

It would be one of the most unreasonable and unfair of all the twists and turns his Coalition has taken so far.

How could anybody complain that £26,000 a year in benefits isn’t enough money for the average work-shy family when most families in the Black Country already make do with less?

Wages in the Black Country are below the average for the West Midlands and they, in turn, are below the national average which is, itself, below the £26,000 benefits cap.

Average pay levels across the Black Country are running at £22,369 – and even that varies between £21,200 in Sandwell and £23,155 in Dudley (the figure for Walsall is £22,537 and for Wolverhampton it’s £22,584).

Yet the average for the region as a whole is £23,807 while the national average is £25,520.

So, under the Government’s existing plans, anyone who lives on benefits can secure an income – tax free, please note – which is almost £4,000 a year more than the average Black Country worker gets.

Last year, Chancellor George Osborne announced the £26,000 cap arguing it was unfair 50,000 families received more in handouts than the average family earned from going out to work.

The limit, which won’t be imposed for another two years, would apply to the total received from jobseekers' allowance, income support, employment support allowance, housing benefit, council tax benefit, child benefit and child tax credit.

It means that some people now living in expensive rented accommodation, especially in London, will have to move somewhere cheaper.

Yet it seems the “London lobby” is now demanding changes to the plan because they claim the cap is unfair on the poor of Kensington and Chelsea.

The Government is right to want to reduce Britain’s massive benefits bill – it hands out more than £164 billion in benefits yet revenue from income tax comes in at only £140 billion.

Someone on the average Black Country wage of £22,369 can expect to pay £4,795.72 in tax and national insurance.

This is a huge amount from a relatively modest pay packet – especially when the money is being used to subsidise people who don’t work at all and prefer to live off the State.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, condemns the Government for bringing back the idea of the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor – as if there’s something wrong in that.

There’s no doubt many people on benefits are perfectly capable of fending for themselves, they just prefer not to.

The snag is, as even Labour leader Ed Miliband has finally acknowledged, we live in a culture where it is perfectly acceptable for some people to milk the system and do nothing in return.

“Red Ed” admitted Labour was guilty of supporting “those on benefits who were abusing the system because they could work – but didn’t.

“We did too little to ensure responsibility at the bottom. I say – no more. We will be a party that rewards contribution, not worklessness.”

Successive Governments have been content to sit back and watch the benefits culture grow and blossom.

Many people regard a life on the dole as a perfectly reasonable career option – especially when, as some do, they can supplement their income in various shady ways.

When even the leader of the Labour Party realises something has to give, it offers a little encouragement for the vast majority of grafters who slave away to keep their financial heads above water.

Some people must wonder why they bother to work at all when they can see their workless neighbours living high on the hog.

A friend of mine was complaining only the other day that the “workless” family over the road has a better car, Sky TV and foreign holidays which he and his working wife simply can’t afford.

Where, he wondered, did all their money come from?

One answer is that it comes from him and the millions like him – honest taxpayers doing their best to make ends meet and look after their families.

If thousands of families want more money so they can continue living in London, the answer is not to lift the £26,000 benefits cap. It’s to encourage them to get a job.

It’s not as if work in London is in short supply. At the moment, all the low-paid jobs go to immigrants (legal and illegal) because they are prepared to put in the hours and make the effort required to earn a living.

If lazy Londoners really can’t be bothered to work, they should move out and go somewhere where the rents are lower.

Not that they’ll be coming to the Black Country to work – they couldn’t afford the drop in income.

Ofcon

2011-06-13T10:54:00.000+01:00

Which is the lesser evil: starving or freezing? That will be the choice facing some pensioners this winter as fuel prices soar higher than ever before.

Very few old people starve to death and very few die of cold. But it happens.

And you can be certain the latest price rises announced by one of our six monopoly gas and electricity companies will make matters worse.

Most of us won’t be faced with quite the same life-or-death dilemma but a staggering increase of 19 per cent, or £200 a year, does make you wonder how the power companies are allowed to get away with it.

There are only six companies and between them they represent a price-fixing cartel which is supposed to be policed by a quango called Ofgem, the Office of the Gas and Electricity Markets.

Ofgem is a £50 million-a-year organisation which claims: “Protecting consumers is our first priority.”

This is, of course, the usual corporate bull. It claims to regulate “the monopoly companies which run the gas and electricity networks”.

But instead of tackling what Ofgem itself calls a monopoly, it busies itself worrying about global warming and “helping the gas and electricity industries to achieve environmental improvements”.

All very nice and cosy – another neutered watchdog with no teeth.

No doubt the failure of Ofgem to protect consumers is one reason why foreign investors are so keen to buy up British energy companies.

Of the “big six” gas and electricity suppliers, only Centrica and Scottish and Southern Energy are British-owned.

E.ON is German so is NPower, Scottish Power is Spanish while EDF is French.

They clearly view this country as a profits goldmine and why shouldn’t they when the watchdog responsible for policing them is so hopeless?

Ofgem flounders around whimpering feebly: “We are concerned that energy companies still have not done enough to make the market work on behalf of consumers.”

And it trumpets as some kind of triumph the news that it has forced energy companies to give us 30 days’ notice of price rises. Whoopie-doo.

These companies don’t need to sit down in a room together to fix prices.

They simply wait for one of them to lead the way – as Scottish Power has done with its 19 per cent hike – then they all pile in afterwards.

There are price comparison websites and it’s easier to change suppliers than it once was. But they still manage to pull the wool over our eyes.

My own experience with Scottish Power is not unusual. Over the past 12 months, we were paying them £215 a month for gas and electricity.

At the end of the year, we got a statement telling us we were £574.49 in credit – in other words, we were over-paying by almost £50 a month.

To add insult to injury, they slipped into the statement the news that our monthly payments for the following year would be £231 a month – an extra £16 when we were already paying too much.

We called to complain and, immediately, without question, they offered to reduce the payments back to £215. But we tried E.ON and the bill is now £146.50 a month.

No doubt we are under-paying but I’d far rather owe money to my utility company than use it as an interest-free savings bank.

Many people don’t shop around and suppliers rely on consumer ignorance to boost their little profiteering scams.

Ofgem would no doubt claim credit for allowing us to switch suppliers. But the quango’s own statistics show what a feeble job it’s really doing.

It produces a quarterly report on energy prices which breaks down the customer’s bill into various components: the actual cost of the gas and electricity, VAT, environmental costs and other charges and the companies’ operating costs.

It then shows the profit per customer – what it calls the net margin – that the energy companies actually make.

According to Ofgem, in March this year – before the latest round of price hikes – they were making a profit per customer of £75 on an average fuel bill of £1,170 a year.

Back in March 2007 – only four years ago – the average bill was £955 and the companies only made a profit of £20 per customer.

In other words, our bills have risen 22 per cent which is bad enough. But energy company profits have risen 275 per cent per customer.

If Ofgem was doing its job, it would have already enforced a price cut of £55 per customer.

If the cost of producing gas and electricity has risen, it may be reasonable to expect the customer to pay more. But why should the profits of these companies be allowed to soar at the same time?

Of course, if you complain about excessive profits, Ofgem and its clients, the energy monopolies, will witter on about security of supply and investing in the future.

These are necessary evils and the industry is supposedly spending £200 billion over the next decade to secure our “low-carbon energy needs”.

That rather suits an ineffectual watchdog like Ofgem because boils down to a lot of hot air and wind.

Private sector bad; public sector worse

2011-06-07T08:58:00.000+01:00

All the criticism around Southern Cross is aimed at the American private equity firm Blackstone, which bought the business in 2004, floated it on the stock market two years later and sold all its shares in 2007 at a huge profit. But what none of these complains seems to recognise is that a seller needs a buyer. If it was such an asset-stripping scam, how come investors put money into it? The new owners are not entirely stupid, are they? If between them they found £425 million to buy Southern Cross, they must have thought there was money to be made despite the sale of the company’s properties. If blame is being handed out and everyone is looking for a greedy villain, surely the buyers and owners today are more culpable than the people who sold them the business.

Opponents of the private sector are rubbing their hands with glee over the potential collapse of Southern Cross, the largest provider of old people’s homes in the country.

The company crisis has led to demands for the Government to step in and rescue the business in much the same way as it was forced to bail out the banks in the depths of the recession.

It would be mad to do so. The taxpayer cannot be expected to step in every time some badly-run business gets into trouble.

And while this is not a particularly good advertisement for private-sector provision of public services, it doesn’t mean the State has to run things.

It’s not a good time for the private sector. Apart from concern over any collapse of Southern Cross, there’s the BBC’s exposure of a care home for people with learning disabilities and autism.

“Panorama” revealed “torture” by staff at Winterbourne View in Bristol, the police have been called in and the owners, Castlebeck, say they are “shocked, disgusted and ashamed” by what’s been going on.

Meanwhile the “Financial Times” says care at one in seven privately-run homes is “poor” or only “adequate” compared with one in 11 in the public and charity sectors.

Critics are queuing up to attack the private sector for putting profits before patients, for inadequate levels of care and for threatening old people with being turfed out of their homes – and with some justification.

The Southern Cross debacle is based on an over-expansion in the days before the recession, when the company in effect borrowed to expand.

It provides care for 30,000 old folk in 750 homes and is now desperately trying to cut its rent by 25 per cent to stave off bankruptcy.

It may succeed because the owners of these properties have been enjoying over-the-odds income from the company for some time and if they rejected the move they would probably end up even worse off.

There is a danger, though, that even this rescue won’t succeed and Southern Cross will go to the wall. The company’s share price has already plummeted. It’s now worth about £12 million compared with £1.1 billion in 2008.

Clearly the business is deeply flawed. The expansion plans drawn up at the height of the Brown-Blair boom have been blown out of the water. The company is struggling to keep afloat.

The people who run Southern Cross are not victims. They are guilty of bad planning and abominable business skills. They wouldn’t make it past round one of “The Apprentice”.

But if the company does go broke, that doesn’t mean its homes have to close. It doesn’t mean the public sector should step in. And it doesn’t mean the taxpayer should be expected to cough up even more money.

Southern Cross, like Castlebeck, relies on the taxpayer for its income anyway. It’s a substitute for council-run care. It has a secure income as long as it can provide good care for old people.

If it went into administration, other companies would want to snap up its empire at knock-down prices. It would be a valuable opportunity for a buyer which wasn’t too greedy or reckless.

The residents themselves, elderly, frail and settled in their homes, would not necessarily see any difference at all.

The worst thing for them would be months of uncertainty over the fate of the roof over their heads.

The private sector stands accused of poor levels of care. But the Government has armies of inspectors responsible for ensuring standards are maintained.

If they are inadequate then the Government, as the ultimate paymaster for these businesses, has sanctions it can impose. If Government inspectors are failing, they must share the responsibility for low standards – just as bank regulators were asleep on the job.

Of course, a case like Winterbourne View is unforgivable and, for all we know, it may not be an entirely isolated incident.

But care, whether of the elderly, children or people with mental disabilities, is fraught with difficulties. Among the hardest tasks is recruiting and keeping genuinely caring members of staff.

Low pay is part of the problem – if employers insist on cutting wages to the bone they shouldn’t be surprised if the only people who will work for them are the desperate or the dubious.

All of this makes the Government’s plans for more private-sector provision in the NHS look even more controversial.

Yet there is nothing wrong with the profit motive itself. Companies can make decent returns on their investment while at the same time providing good quality care for their customers. There are many excellent private homes for the elderly.

We would be in terrible trouble if we reverted to the old “public sector good, private sector bad” attitude of the taxpayer-funded classes.

At the Alexandra NHS hospital in Redditch the Care Quality Commission found patients weren’t even given water to drink – something I know to be true because doctors there turned their backs on me when I was searching for a tap to fetch water for one of their parched patients.

And that’s in the public sector.

The fog of war

2011-05-25T07:20:00.001+01:00

Talk about creating a diversion – the new “military covenant” is no better than a smokescreen to hide what’s really going on.

Ministers want us to forget our armed forces are fighting one and a half wars while they impose defence cuts and boost foreign aid by billions.

Our armed forces are still dying in Afghanistan in a war we will never win. David Cameron has admitted as much by announcing troops will be withdrawn by 2015 whatever is happening in that benighted country.

We are taking part in fruitless bombing raids on Libya where Colonel Gaddafi is still dodging the bullets and our Government is talking about sending in ground troops.

We are scrapping aircraft and carriers and handing redundancy notices to soldiers on the front line.

No wonder “Commander in Chief” Cameron says he has “robust” debates with service chiefs. They must wonder what planet he is on when he’s ordering our troops into battle while at the same time reducing their numbers and their firepower.

Yet he promises a “military covenant” promising, among other things, free IVD courses and priority housing for ex-soldiers.

Into this mess plunges Defence Secretary Liam Fox, opening up a new front in the Whitehall battle by criticising the Coalition’s plan to increase foreign aid by 34 per cent.

It’s not just the Ministry of Defence which can’t understand why we are throwing good money after bad on foreign aid when every other aspect of public spending in being cut.

Foreign aid is a wasteful bucket with a hole in the bottom. Much of the money ends up funding civil wars or in the Swiss bank accounts of bloodthirsty dictators and their henchmen.

It is hard to tell what good it does. Yet we are already spending £7.5 billion. Some of it is going to countries like China and India which both enjoy massively booming economies.

These countries are so wealthy their billionaires are busy swallowing up bargain basement Britain’s remaining assets – MG Rover and Jaguar Land Rover are a couple of obvious examples.

They don’t need our help; if anything, we should be holding out the begging bowl to them.

Yet Mr Bleeding Heart Cameron proposes to increase foreign aid to £11.4 billion in the next two years.

It’s so embarrassing for International Development Secretary that Andrew Mitchell has won the nickname “Lord Bountiful”. He’s apparently even using the title when he sends text messages.

Unlike his Cabinet colleagues, the Sutton Coldfield MP is wandering the world with an open cheque-book wondering what to do with all his loot.

It’s true that, despite everything, Britain is still an affluent country. And there are places where people’s lives are nasty, brutish and short.

It may be the judicious application of aid from richer nations can make some difference to their lives.

But while we offer these handouts, we are expending billions more fighting losing battles in the Middle East.

Mr Cameron “announced” the withdrawal of 400 soldiers from Afghanistan this week but, as it was planned anyway, it’s meaningless and there will still be 9,000 people risking their lives over there.

We are taking part in half-hearted bombing raids on Libya though nobody can agree whether we’re supposed to be protecting civilians, which is legal, or killing Col Gaddafi, which isn’t.

And while our troops are no longer in Iraq, our depleted Royal Navy is still patrolling the Gulf.

The defence cuts – which, let’s not forget, even envisage sharing aircraft carriers with the French – have been imposed by our politicians.

Yet these same politicians don’t seem to have noticed they can’t afford to strut the world stage any longer as if they owned the place.

The cuts are necessary. Partly because the Ministry of Defence has overspent by a cool £38 billion and partly because the country is broke.

But if David Cameron is reducing our military capability and making front-line soldiers redundant, surely he must accept he can’t go round threatening mad dictators with retribution.

Gunboat diplomacy went out of fashion in the Victorian age yet here we are, ineffectually bombing Libya as if our political masters still think of this country as the world’s policeman.

Even the Americans are wisely taking a back seat during the “Arab spring” while Dave and Nicolas Sarkozy of France come over all belligerently humanitarian.

The “military covenant” is a nice idea. Few people would object to the idea that the Government promises to look after its troops once their active-service days are done.

Free bus passes for the wounded and better schools for their kids are all very well but they should not be allowed to draw attention away from the real battle about Britain’s role in the world.

We are not rich and powerful. We can’t afford to impose our will on “poorer countries”. Nor can we afford to send Mr Mitchell off dishing out money we have to borrow to spend to those same banana republics.

The “military covenant” will cost £45 million a year – the Taxpayers’ Alliance says Mr Mitchell’s department will soon be wasting £1 billion simply administrating its great international giveaway.

Does Dave actually want a Tory Government?

2011-05-14T18:55:00.000+01:00

If David Cameron really wanted a Conservative Government, he should call a snap General Election now.

A year after the Coalition was formed, it’s clear the Tories’ deal with the Liberal Democrats is falling apart.

The two parties face months, if not years, of wrangling over every decision and every piece of legislation.

The Lib Dems look like dead men walking. It’s hard to imaging a way back from their humiliation at the local elections and in the Alternative Vote referendum.

Whatever happens, they will still be viewed by most voters as having propped up a Conservative Government. Nick Clegg will get the blame for unpopular policies; the Tories will get the credit when things to well.

The Prime Minister has the chance to call an election which might well give him the majority Government he failed to secure a year ago.

With the Lib Dems already down, an early election would provide the knock-out blow.

Labour might pick up a few seats at the Lib Dems’ expense but the Tories would gain more.

And Ed Miliband is hardly a credible option as Prime Minister.

If the Coalition actually lasts a full five years, Labour may see sense and replace Ed with another leader – quite possibly his brother David or even Ed Balls.

Either of these would be a more attractive proposition than the present Labour leader and, therefore, a more formidable foe for the Tories.

So with the Lib Dems likely to get another kicking from the voters and Ed Miliband struggling to revive the Labour Party, this is the ideal moment for Mr Cameron to win a working majority at Westminster.

He may recall the autumn of 2007, when newly-chosen Prime Minister Gordon Brown was ahead in the polls and his supporters were urging him to hold a General Election.

There was a good reason for an early poll. Mr Brown arrived at Number Ten thanks to a stitch-up in his own party. He had never faced the voters as party leader and run the risk of defeat.

If he had called an election in October 2007, he might well have secured a full five-year term and seen off David Cameron into the bargain.

He bottled it. Instead, he endured economic meltdown, personal humiliation and electoral defeat.

Mr Cameron’s position is different. For a start, he’s promised us five years of Coalition Government and he would be accused of betrayal if he broke the deal so soon.

On the other hand, few people seriously think the Coalition will last a full term whatever the promises made by Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg at the height of their rose garden romance a year ago.

After their drubbing at the polls, the Lib Dems will seize every opportunity to frustrate, harry and undermine their Conservative partners.

Eventually, as electoral reality bites, there will be plenty of Mr Clegg’s MPs who refuse to follow him any longer. They will walk away from the Coalition.

There may well come a point, long before the five years are up, when the Coalition crumbles away, forcing Mr Cameron to call an early election.

Before then, though, he will have to deal with arguments, dissent and splits not only with the Lib Dems but with his own MPs as well.

There are plenty of Conservatives who dislike the Coalition, despise their traditional Lib Dem enemies and see no reason why they should make further concessions to a party which is so weak politically.

If Mr Cameron insists on “bigging-up” Nick and offering him a few open goals, just to shore up his position as leader of the Coalition’s minority party, many Tory backbenchers will squirm with fury.

Every time the Government pays our money to bail out countries in the Euro, for instance, or abides by absurd human rights rulings, Mr Cameron’s supporters will blame his desire to keep the Lib Dems happy.

This makes the job of running the country – especially the task of trying to revive the economy – increasingly difficult.

For many Conservatives who already think the Lib Dem tail has been wagging the Tory dog, the prospect of following a policy of appeasement for the next four years is hard to swallow.

Mr Cameron could resolve these difficulties by calling an election now. The chances are that he would win an outright majority and set his party free.

It would be a gamble, of course. The alternative is years of confused, incoherent and carping Coalition when what the country needs is clarity and purpose.

Unfortunately for the Lib Dems, Nick Clegg is Mr Cameron’s human shield.

It’s not just that the Deputy Prime Minister protects Mr Cameron from his opponents in the country. His presence in Government also defends Mr Cameron from his Tory critics.

Without his Lib Dem whipping boys, Mr Cameron would be exposed. He’s happier leading a Coalition than a Conservative Government with a clear working majority.

So he will struggle on for as long as possible – he doesn’t want outright victory at an early election. He might have to introduce genuine Conservative policies and that would never do.

Labour Scotches the United Kingdom

2011-05-07T10:18:00.000+01:00

Now it’s Scotland that matters most. Defeat for Labour north of the border is a disaster for Ed Miliband.

Worse could be in store if, as seems likely, the SNP goes ahead with a referendum on independence for Scotland.

Labour would be wiped out at Westminster and lose any chance of forming a Government for a generation if the party were deprived of its cohort of Scottish MPs.

The Scots won’t care about that. They will vote for independence if they think it’s good for Scotland.

When push comes to shove, I suspect they will think they are better off as part of the union than they would be as an obscure region of the European super-state.

But who knows? The Scots have given Alex Salmond an overwhelming vote of confidence.

That is partly because of the slump in support for Nick Clegg’s Lib Dems who are seen as propping up a Tory Government. But Labour did very badly in Scotland as well and there is no excuse for that other than a rejection of the effete Metropolitan Mr Miliband.

It would be tragic if the legacy of Cameron's first Government were the break-up of the United Kingdom but the Tories would be tempted to support the idea because it would leave them in power at Westminster for the forseeable future.

They know how you voted

2011-05-05T18:37:00.000+01:00

I suppose I’m the last one to notice but it has finally dawned on me there is no such thing as a secret ballot in this country.

The foundation and bedrock of our democracy is no more.

Why has it taken me so long to notice?

When I went to vote in the AV referendum the elections officer took my polling reference number and wrote it down on a list.

Next to my number was already printed the serial number of the ballot paper he gave me.

Obviously, the ballot paper had the same set of numbers. It's like a cheque and a cheque stub.

It follows that if some dubious Government official wanted to discover how I had voted, he could work back from the ballot paper, match its serial number with the number on the officer’s list, read across to the polling reference number and identify me as the voter.

Or you.

Mostly this doesn’t matter. Nobody would bother to check if we voted Yes or No to AV or Tory or Lib Dem in some dull council election.

But suppose you wanted to vote Communist, Socialist Worker, BNP or UKIP. Suppose you backed Sinn Fein or any other fringe party of which the Establishment disapproved.

It wouldn’t be difficult to sort out the relatively few ballot papers with an X by a controversial candidate’s name.

It wouldn’t be difficult to take the serial number and compare it with the elections officer’s little list of voters’ numbers.

And there you are – the secret ballot is no longer secret. They know who you voted for.

I asked the bloke who took my number and gave me my voting slip what happened to the papers once they’d been counted.

He said they were stored somewhere secure. How secure? Oh very, he assured me. For how long? He didn’t know. What happened to them in the end? He didn’t know.

In an era when privacy is disappearing – not because of the media and the courts but thanks to charlatans posing as our friends (Apple, Sony, Google, Experian etc), it’s probably too late to worry that the secret ballot is a fiction.

But it’s another reason not to bother voting.

(And in case you wondered, I voted Yes to AV not because I approve of it but because I disapprove of David Cameron forcing this ridiculous debate on the country when we’re financially up the creek and I wanted to register my protest).

Walking on sunshine

2011-04-22T16:55:00.001+01:00

How tickled Ken Dodd must be to discover the Government is trying to get us all to sing his old hit “Happiness”.

The Diddymen in Downing Street are spending £2 million trying to find out what makes us happy.

What with war, unemployment, cuts, chaos in the NHS and the blubbing of Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, you’d think they had enough to worry about.

But be warned, this Ken Dodd politics boils down to a new way for the Government to control how we live.

They will conclude we are happy if we are healthy and therefore they’ll order us to stop smoking, drinking and eating the “wrong” food.

Actually it’s none of their business how we live our lives. Governments cannot make us happy.

Their job is to keep us secure and reasonably prosperous. The rest is up to us.

Luckily we don’t take this nonsense terribly seriously. Responses to the Office for National Statistics survey of what makes us happy include looking at pretty girls, better pies, cheese and tomato toasties with ketchup on the side and better TV programmes.

Even being allowed to smoke in pubs would make some people happier, it seems.

It’s impossible to measure happiness or even define what it is.They can’t accurately measure Britain’s balance of trade, the inflation rate, the level of economic growth, the crime rate, how many people are unemployed or what the number of illegal immigrants in this country really is.

We treat the statistics as Gospel but they’re not. They are approximate stabs at coming up with something roughly near the mark.

You’d think adding up numbers would be simple but if they can’t manage that how can they possibly measure something as nebulous as “happiness”?

What is it? How long does it last? Is it the same as contentment? Is it a one-off emotion sparked by something nice happening to you – or is it a state of mind?

I was happy last week when we went away to Cornwall for a few days and walked the dogs on a beautiful, near-deserted beach in glorious spring sunshine. Does that mean I am happy?

I doubt it – if only because there are so many things our Government does, from needlessly “reforming” the NHS to madly waging war, which make me angry.

If you took all the advice on the internet, you’d end up miserably confused.

A quick search shows that – according to “scientists” – happiness is contagious and spreads among family and friends; the more we try to be happy the more miserable we become; the colour blue makes us happy; money does buy happiness; no it doesn’t; happiness is earning more than £50,000 a year; being rich makes you unhappy.

Having a fourth child makes you unhappy; fathers talking to their teenage sons make them happy; you’re happy if you earn more than your friends; you’re happy if you eat pizza in front of the TV and live in Norwich.

You can be happy if you don’t marry a neurotic, don’t worry about your career, to go church and stay thin; or if you sleep six hours a night, enjoy four shopping sprees a month and take two holidays a year.

This whole nonsense began, of course, in America, land of the neurotic, where “the pursuit of happiness” is written into the Constitution.

It’s been imported by David Cameron’s personal guru, Steve Hilton, and no doubt when their happiness report comes out we’ll be told we’re all actually quite cheerful really.

It wasn’t happiness but “the economy, stupid” which Bill Clinton saw as the one and only issue when he was running for President.

He realised the job of a Government was limited to creating a stable society we can build our lives around.

It’s still the economy, stupid. Our financial well-being has a direct effect on our happiness. Having a job, a decent income, a roof over our heads and enough to eat – Governments can help us achieve these things.

When the economy goes wrong, the most worthwhile contribution politicians can make to the sum of human happiness is to repair it.

But beyond that, what makes life worthwhile is not in the gift of any politician and they shouldn’t pretend it is.

They don’t choose our friends and loved ones. They don’t give us sunshine on deserted beaches. They don’t give us nice sandwiches or enjoyable telly.

I’m all in favour of spreading a little happiness. A new organsiation called Action for Happiness wants to do just that.

Yet I can’t help thinking this isn’t about encouraging random acts of kindness but about controlling how we live.

Especially when you know the Government has a “Behavioural Insight Team” aiming to find “intelligent ways to encourage people to make better choices for themselves” about diet, obesity and alcohol.

When he became Tory leader, David Cameron told the party faithful to “let sunshine win the day” which presumably makes him and Nick Clegg the Morecambe and Wise of British politics.

Even so, they may like to know that Ken Dodd’s greatest hit was not “Happiness” but “Tears”.

More fool us

2011-04-18T09:06:00.000+01:00

We are at war and we are officially getting poorer. So what do our MPs do? They give themselves more expenses.

A few ex-MPs have been jailed for fiddling their expenses; others have been forced into humiliated redundancy; a few – those with duck houses, moats and porn videos – have become laughing stocks.

Yet still our politicians think they can milk us for all we are worth.

And what do we get in return? A supine Parliament where a pathetically feeble 13 people voted against the latest in the series of wars we have been waging in the past few years.

Just 13 people out of 650 had the courage, temerity or conviction to object to yet another headlong rush into a war with no apparent end and no defined objective.
They just did as they were told by the whips of all three main parties.

They didn’t, for instance, object that defending civilians and ousting Mad Dog Gaddafi were not the same thing.

They didn’t vote against the war on the basis that there’s no exit strategy. They didn’t vote against because the Government’s defence cuts mean we have no weight to throw around any longer.
They didn’t vote against bec
ause there’s no money for more missiles or because putting British lives at risk for a few hundred miles of sand is none of our business.

They didn’t even vote no because, once you start trying to police civil war in the Middle East, then who knows where it will stop?

They voted yes – by 557 to 13. You may wonder why we bother with MPs at all if they can be so overwhelmingly in agreement over our latest Blairite military adventure.
Many people think there’s something wrong with the whole idea of “humanitarian bombing raids” but not our MPs.

There are a few honourable exceptions. Tom Watson (Lab, West Bromwich East) abstained, saying: “I cannot give the Prime Minister carte blanche to execute an unconvincing military plan. I've done it once before and I'll regret it for the rest of my life.”

And David Winnick (Lab Walsall North) voted against, pointing out: “In Yemen, the regime slaughtered 45 people last week. They were protesting. And Saudi Arabia actually took military action to intervene in Bahrain. Has anyone suggested that we should intervene against Saudi Arabia? Of course not.”

As well as bombing-for-peace, there’s another issue which unites most of our MPs –their expenses.

After they were found to be on the fiddle and on the take, we were promised ever so humbly that never again would our politicians betray our trust or thrust their hands deep into our pockets in order to line their own.

That contrition lasted right up to the General Election. It looked for a while as if they had learned their lesson, especially as ex-MPs like David Chaytor and Eric Illsley are now behind bars.

They were the fall guys. It’s hard to say their scams were very different from their colleagues’, from David Cameron (wisteria-cutting) and Gordon Brown (domestic cleaner) down.

Between them, our MPs repaid the taxpayer more than £1 million.

Ever since the election, MPs have been whingeing about how hard done-by they are as their expenses claims shrank from £2 million a month to £800,000.

The body set up to police them – the Parliamentary Standards Authority – came under more fire than a Libyan tank column.

Even the Prime Minister joined in, warning he would abolish the quango entirely unless it became the MPs’ flexible friend.

So they’re now getting a special Parliamentary credit card – British Excess? That’ll do nicely – to meet their home and office costs.

Another 31 MPs will be allowed to claim for second homes even though they live in commuting distance of Westminster.

Even more bizarrely, MPs will get a benefit of £2,500 per child even though they’ve voted to axe child benefit for higher-rate taxpayers.

All this extra featherbedding takes place in a period of extreme austerity.

We don’t need half a million protesters, or anarchists occupying London’s top stores, to remind us these are tough times.

The Government’s own Office for Budget Responsibility admits households face falling standards of living for at least another two years.

According to one estimate, a typical family’s disposable income is expected to shrink by £1,500 this year. Another claims we’re £1 a day worse off.

Either way, everyone except bonus-rich bankers is feeling the pinch.

So where are those “I feel your pain” MPs when you need them?

The only time they take their snouts out of the trough is when they trot through the voting lobbies without thinking, without questioning and – in some cases – without even knowing what they are voting for or against.

We seem to have elected a parliament full of yes-men and yes-women milking the system for all we are worth while the rest of us get poorer and our country is yet again fighting a war that’s got nothing to do with us.

The new expenses system comes into force today. But it’s the voters – not our MPs – who are the April Fools.

Plus ca change....

2011-04-13T08:51:00.000+01:00

Amazing isn’t it? The Government abolishes Advantage West Midlands and the Government Office of the West Midlands and the word “regional” is more or less banned from the civil service vocabulary. So what happens?

The Department for Business opens a regional office; the Department for Transport sets up a regional unit; the Department for Communities and Local Government sets up a regional office to process applications for EU funding; the Department for Business plans a “sub national” Coaching for Growth business support programme; a changed regional international trade operation is introduced; the Skills Funding Agency keeps its regional structure; the Cabinet Office keeps a regional structure for emergencies from floods to terrorism; the Home Office encourages police forces to collaborate to save costs; and the Environment Agency keeps its regional structure to deal with flooding.

HS2 - the Birmingham by-pass

2011-03-28T22:46:00.001+01:00

How come nobody seems to have mentioned the planned HS2 high-speed rail system will actually pass us all by?

Instead of the West Midlands becoming the heart of the country’s rail system, we’ll be left in the sidings.

We’re constantly told the HS2 scheme is brilliant for business and only cure to all known economic ills for Birmingham and the rest of the region.

It’s bluff and nonsense.

If HS2 is built, the only area to definitely lose out in the long run will be the West Midlands.

Short journey times to London from Birmingham are irrelevant but from Manchester and Leeds they might make a difference.

It is simply not in our interests to see the thing built – but nobody seems willing to acknowledge that.

In these days of austerity, the idea of splurging £32 billion on a shiny new railway line seems like Imelda Marcos shopping for shoes with the starving at the palace gates.

Yet the Coalition is determined to press ahead even though HS2 is not a British initiative. It’s just another stage in the European Union’s plan for high-speed trains to go whizzing all round its domains.

Our Government’s just following orders. Our local leaders are all on board the HS2 gravy train as well.

They argue it will create construction jobs, boost the region’s economy by unfeasible billions and somehow transform our image and fortunes.

The full scheme is not for a London-Birmingham link. It’s for a route to Manchester and another to Leeds with the line dividing to east and west around Lichfield.

Indeed, if you look at the maps, Birmingham’s on a branch line. The main route by-passes the city completely.

Not a single financial figure put out by those promoting this scheme is worth the paper it’s written on. It’s entirely guesswork and almost certainly wrong to the power of ten.

But let’s pretend the forecasters know what they’re talking about because, even if they don’t, their sums give some indication of what’s going on.

A study in Leeds claims HS2 will generate “productivity benefits” worth £2.3 billion.

But where are these benefits to be felt? Well, £750 million of them go to Leeds and another £420 million to Sheffield. London prospers to the tune of £550 million.

What about us? According to this analysis the Birmingham City Region gets £100 million. In other words, we lose out.

Transport Secretary Phillip Hammond claims HS2 will benefit Britain to the tune of £44 billion.

Much of that will go on jobs created to build the thing in the first place. And obviously, if you spend £32 billion on a new train set, it’s going to provide work for people.

But assuming you had £32 billion to spend – which we haven’t – could it be better used in other ways?

That’s another question nobody is prepared to answer.

We’re told the great benefit of high-speed trains is much shorter journey times. But few people will pay a rail fare of about £320 to save half an hour travelling between Birmingham and London.

That alleged benefit doesn’t take into account the time it takes to drive to the station, park the car, get a ticket and wait for the train. Nor does it account for time spent at the other end getting from the station to your destination.

High-speed rail won’t change any of that.

If you’re travelling to Manchester or Leeds, the amount of time spent faffing around will be the same but it won’t matter as much because you’re going farther, faster.

The recently-axed quango the Commission for Integrated Transport said high-speed rail was worthwhile for travel between 180 and 375 miles.

Manchester-London is 181 miles, Leeds-London 195 miles so they both just scrape in. The Commission said there was “little benefit” for journeys of less than 180 miles. Birmingham-London is 109 miles.

The only place in this country which has so far enjoyed the dubious privilege of being a through station on a high-speed line is Ashford in Kent.

The economic benefits to the whole county were much-trumpeted in advance but, since it opened, various studies show Ashford’s economy has remained virtually untouched, unlike the Kent countryside.

It seems the small-print for HS2 suggests we may be forced into high-speed travel by the cancellation of some existing rail services between the West Midlands and London.

It may be the only way to make passengers pay a premium for the dubious pleasure of saving half an hour on the train.

So why is it deemed “unpatriotic” for people in the West Midlands to argue against HS2?

There are some vested interests at work: Birmingham Airport thinks it will become the third London airport, for instance; local politicians like to be regarded as men of vision; construction and engineering companies hope to get a hefty slice of the action.

We keep getting told HS2 is vital for the future prosperity of the West Midlands.

But how can any of us back a scheme which leaves the region standing on the platform while rich passengers rush past at 250 mph between London and the north?

Prolier than thou

2011-03-23T13:40:00.000Z

Wha has happened to the le-er T? George Osborne and Ed Milliband have both delivered Budge speeches oday which omi he soun of the le-er T a every oppor-uni-ey.

Es ow posh people lower their social sta-us and pre-end hey are men of the people. Bu e wo work. E jus bogus.

Gizza public-sector job

2011-03-23T13:10:00.000Z

If we knew then what we know now, most people would have gone for a career in the public sector.

Not because it’s particularly lively, stimulating or exciting – though, no doubt, it has its moments – but for the job security and the gold-plated pension.

Most private sector workers nearing retirement – if they have managed to stay in work throughout their careers – will be contemplating a bleak future. Their pensions ain’t what they used to be.

Before Tony Blair became Prime Minister, this country had one of the most secure private sector pensions industries in the world.

Thanks partly to the greed and stupidity of some major employers but also thanks to Gordon Brown’s £5 billion-a-year raid on pension funds, all that’s now been destroyed.

For many workers, there are few if any pension arrangements in place; for the rest, inflation-proof final salary pension schemes are a relic of past prosperity.

Yet public sector workers still enjoy lavish pay and pensions.

There was a time when pensions for teachers, nurses, soldiers, local government workers and civil servants were reasonably generous to make up for their relatively modest salaries.

They were looked after in old age because they were paid low wages in their working years.

All that changed under the Labour Government. Pay rose so fast that public sector workers earn an average of £2,000 a year more than those in the private sector.

Family doctors are now on £150,000, some “town clerks” earn more than the Prime Minister and teachers’ average pay has shot up from £22,000 to £35,000.

Pension entitlements rocketed as well, costing taxpayers more than £32 billion a year.

And, of course, if you work in the public sector you get to retire while you’re still young and fit enough to enjoy it – or get another job.

If you’re lucky, you can enjoy generous early-retirement deals. The public sector is especially keen on these when it comes to getting rid of someone who’s no good at their job – so much nicer than sacking them.

It’s got to stop because, even if we had the money in the boom years, we certainly can’t afford it any more.

The Coalition is struggling to deal with the massive public debt but even David Cameron and Nick Clegg are reluctant to admit how massively in debt this country really is.

Officially, we are borrowing £900 billion, rising to £1.1 trillion later this year.

In reality, the figure’s closer to £2.2 trillion already, if you take into account the money we’re spent on the banks, the mortgages taken out through the public finance initiative and our unfunded pension liability.

We’ve run out of money. Taxes are rising, the economy’s in the doldrums, the “squeezed middle” has been squeezed dry. You can’t get blood from a stone.

Former Labour Cabinet Minister Lord Hutton’s reform plans aren’t terribly radical or far-reaching.

For a start, they won’t have much effect on anyone over 50. And they mean the lowest-paid public sector workers will benefit more in retirement than their fat-cat bosses.

In future, public sector pensions will be based on average career earnings rather than the salary at retirement.

This cuts the burden on the taxpayer but it still leaves most public employees better off than their contemporaries.

Lord Hutton says his proposals are about fairness, not just that the taxpayer can’t afford to carry this weight indefinitely.

It cannot be right for private sector workers to endure poverty in old age simply to maintain the lifestyles of those lucky enough to work for the State.

Don’t forget the burden on the taxpayer gets greater every year because we’re all living longer. The average 65-year-old man will live until he’s 82; a woman can expect to reach 85.

In 1955, life expectancy was 67 for men and 72 for women.

No wonder Lord Hutton thinks the retirement age for public sector workers should rise to 65 and, in due course, to 68, in line with those in the private sector.

We are victims of our own success – but there is a price to pay for living longer, healthier lives.

Lord Hutton has not made himself popular by telling the one-fifth of us who work in the Government to work longer for less money.

The unions are, of course, warning of protests, marches and strikes to protect their pensions. But it’s just self-serving bleating from people who really don’t seem to understand how well-off they really are.

If they’re only interested in a fat pension, today’s school-leavers would still be better off sticking to the public sector.

There’s another difference between the public and private sectors. People not employed by the State don’t get expensive public inquiries into their pensions – they scarcely get consulted at all.

They just get told what’s been decided, like it or lump it. No wonder they cast envious eyes at the public services and wonder why on earth they bothered with the private sector in the first place.

Private sector workers create the wealth – but many won’t enjoy the fruits of their labour in retirement. Where’s the fairness in that?

Cameron is turning into Blair

2011-03-17T09:00:00.000Z

So our wonderful Government wants a no-fly zone over Libya. Have they learned nothing from Tony Blair's disastrous years in Government - or have they learned far too much?

We do not have the money, manpower, aircraft or carriers to enforce this ridiculous idea never mind the strategic necessity. And if we start threatening Mad-Dog Gaddafi's bonkers regime, where do we stop?

Why not Bahrain? Why not Saudi Arabia? Why not Zimbabwe for that matter?

It's time we accepted we are not the world's policeman, we are a third-rate bit-part player in the games of superpowers and we should mind our own business.

Petrol prices push us over the edge

2011-03-15T19:45:00.000Z

The petrol station wanted to charge me £1.42.9 per litre. I can’t think in litres but I knew that was a lot of money. I’ve now worked it out. They wanted to charge me £6.48 per gallon. What an outrage.

I didn’t stop. Instead I wasted some of my precious fuel driving five miles down the road to another one where the price was £1.35.9 – a mere £6.20 per gallon.

It seems I’m not the only one balking at the high price of petrol. We’re all shopping around for lower prices, apparently.

Sometimes we are so reluctant to fork out for over-priced fuel we cruise around, even if the gauge is on red, until we run out altogether and have to call the AA.
We can’t go on like this – yet the price of petrol only ever goes up.

Admittedly it can fluctuate, and sometimes it does fall a little, but the trend is obvious. The price of oil is high and it’s likely to keep on rising.

Who is to blame and what are we to do?

We can always drive more slowly to save fuel. The up-side is it may make the roads safer but, if you stick to the speed limit already, it’s difficult to go much more slowly anyway.

Have you tried sticking to 70 on a motorway? It’s a nightmare. You’re going more slowly than almost everyone else and even in the slow lane you find massive lorries bearing down on you as if they’re in that old Steven Spielberg movie “Duel”.

We could trade in our gas-guzzlers for environmentally-friendly eco-cars. I’ve tried that but the advertised 63 miles per gallon for a Volvo V50 turns out to be a disappointing 51 or 52.

Try as I might, I can’t get better fuel consumption than 54 mpg even if I do 30 on a dual carriageway – and who in their right mind does that?

We could try working from home but for most of us, most of the time, that’s impossible.

You have to go to meetings, meet customers and clients, work with other people or with machinery which won’t fit inside the average spare room. Home-working is a nice idea but mostly impractical.

There is always public transport, of course. Some journeys are best made by train and bus but most are not.

For the majority of us, it’s not an option no matter how much cheaper it may be than driving – even if you can stand the long delays, inconvenience, discomfort and unreliability of most services not to mention the indifference of the service-providers.

Given the chaos in the main oil-producing countries of the Middle East, the day of the £2 litre can’t be too far off.

Unfortunately, we depend on oil from corrupt and unstable countries. A quarter of world supplies come from the absolute monarchy of Saudi Arabia, 10 per cent from the mad mullahs of Iran, 8.6 per cent from Iraq.

Few of the world’s oil-supplying nations can be trusted to keep selling us with reasonably-priced crude. And even if they could, most of it is being bought up by the new superpower of China.

Even so, it is possible to cut the price of petrol and stop it rising ever-higher. Thanks to Government taxes, Britain has the second most expensive petrol in the world.

Only in Holland do they pay more – and they get about on bicycles because it’s so flat.

Despite all the oil price rises, without tax the cost of a litre would be just over 50p.

Another 1p tax increase is due next month though Chancellor George Osborne may well cancel that in his Budget on March 23.

We shouldn’t be grateful if he does because January’s VAT increase added almost 3p a litre to the price.

Of course the Government must pay off the massive debts Gordon Brown left behind.
But the price of petrol is now so high it isn’t just forcing ordinary motorists off the roads, it’s adding massively to business costs, making Britain even more uncompetitive.

With the economy in the car park, if not heading for the scrap yard, our promised “Budget for growth” must do something about the way fuel taxes are holding back the whole country.

Forcing us out of our cars has always been the aim of the green environmental do-gooders who dominate Government these days.

Even they, though, might worry we still don’t have a viable alternative to the internal combustion engine.

Electric cars are unlikely ever to become a practical option – and, anyway, until we build a new generation of nuclear power plants, generating electricity will itself be environmentally unfriendly.

Drivers are an easy target for tax-gatherers but petrol prices are becoming prohibitive.

At £2 a litre our roads, rather like the Ritz, would still be open to everyone – but only the rich will use them.

And as long as the whole economy depends on road travel to keep it moving, our politicians will have to do better than cancelling a 1p rise in fuel duty.
Either that or we’ll all have to take up horse-riding.

Bloody-minded fruitcakes

2011-03-06T13:56:00.000Z

The following is the text of a speech I gave the other day to a meeting of the Campaign Against Political Correctness in Dudley:

INTRODUCTION
I’ve said it before and it’s got me into trouble - and I will say it again.

Enoch was right.

I know we are talking about political correctness and political correctness wasn’t really invented in Enoch Powell’s heyday.

Nevertheless, and in the context of political correctness, Enoch was right.

But I don’t intend to talk about immigration this evening. We’re here to talk about political correctness.

And in this context, I want to argue that there is nothing more PC – and, as a result, nothing more dangerous – than the way the politically-correct establishment has succeeded in destroying our national sovereignty.

(This was videoed and can be seen on YouTube)

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

I am delighted to have been asked to talk to you tonight. I don’t get out much these days.

Having mentioned Enoch Powell in an article in the Express & Star, there aren’t that many people who find me socially acceptable any more.

I don’t mind. I’d rather that than give up the right to free thought – even if, partly thanks to political correctness, free speech is now illegal.

Political correctness is the scourge of our time. It distorts reality and it is used as a form of social engineering by people who think they know better than us what is good for us.

It is often insidious. It often happens when you don’t even notice.

About 15 years ago, when I was still editor of The Birmingham Post, I drove into work one day and noticed all the posters advertising the city’s Christmas lights.

And I noticed that not one of these posters mentioned the word Christmas or contained any religious symbols.

We investigated whether this was a deliberate policy. We found that it was. We ran a story “Birmingham cancels Christmas” which the council hated.

Interestingly, they made the point that they had adopted the same politically-correct advertising the previous year – and nobody had noticed.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the point. Nobody noticed. They cancelled Christmas and we were too busy getting on with our lives to realise.

If they’d got away with it for a few more years, you can be sure there would be no mention of this great Christian event in Birmingham today.

Even after the council’s first failed attempt to abandon Christmas, they didn’t give up. You will remember their attempts to rebrand the festive season as “Winterval”.

I hate, loathe and despise political correctness in all its forms.

Though the idea that one might hate, loathe or despise anything is – almost certainly – in itself an offence against political correctness.

We know all the stories.

Everything from the girl who was refused a job by the Environment Agency because she was “white English” not “white Welsh, Scottish or Irish” to the latest nonsense that says one company director in every four must be a woman.

Each example of the tyranny of political correctness makes our blood boil and is another turn of the screw which limits, prohibits, confines and denies us our freedom.

Most examples are the stuff that make grumpy old men like me seethe, spit and throw things at the TV.

Anti-racist mathematics.

Bed-and-breakfast landladies stitched up by gay rights activists.

Conservative Party all-women shortlists.

Not a day goes by without another example.

On Monday it was the ruling that a Christian couple who have already successfully fostered many children may no longer do so because of their views on gay sex.

Yesterday the European Court of Justice flew in the face of common sense by making it illegal to favour women when it comes to the cost of car insurance – and at the same time penalising men over pensions.

Women are safer drivers, so they merit lower insurance premiums; men die earlier so their pensions won’t be as costly. The insurance industry knows this and prices accordingly. But sex discrimination laws apparently make this illegal.

Today comes news that in Essex, a specialist team is to be employed to remove a pensioner’s rubbish after health and safety experts ruled the local dustmen – should that be waste executives – might injure themselves on his wheelie bin.

Everywhere we look, political correctness is changing our world.

It moulds our society, our government and our lives.

IMMIGRATION

I do not intend to talk about immigration. I suspect most of you know my views on that subject and, with every day that passes, I am more than ever convinced that what I said was fair, reasonable and in line with the – suppressed – views of the majority of people.

If the price of discussing this is to be labelled “racist” then it’s a price one must pay.

I do not believe I am a racist.

I do not believe it is racist to warn that uncontrolled immigration will change – has changed – this country dramatically.

I do not believe it is racist to evoke the name Enoch Powell – the first, and almost the only, politician of note prepared to stand against the tide.

ENOCH ON EUROPE

So I shall again evoke the name of Enoch Powell. In the 1970s, he was one of the few politicians willing to stand out against the tide of politically-correct opinion running in favour of the Common Market.

Here are a few quotes. He said:

It would “strip the British Parliament of its historic right to be the sole source of legitimate power in this realm”.

He said this country would be reduced to “a province of the new super-state of Western Europe”.

Membership was “a renunciation of Britain’s parliamentary and political independence. The question of Britain and the EEC isn’t a question of the price of butter. It’s a question of the national existence and independence of Britain itself.

“The whole business of food prices and the Common Agricultural Policy is a specimen on the degradation of Britain from a nation to a province.

“In small things and in great things alike, there is no future for the British people that they will find tolerable except as a sovereign, self-governing nation state.”

HOW POLITICAL CORRECTNESS DISTORTS POLITICIANS’ JUDGMENT

I think he was right and I want to look at the way political correctness has so clouded and distorted the judgment of politicians that our country has given away its sovereignty and independence.

We are run by alien institutions – the European Union, The European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights.

Our politicians chose to give away our sovereignty.

I contend they did so for politically-correct reasons.

And the destruction of our national independence is perhaps the ultimate example of the insidious process of political correctness at work.

Let’s go back to the days of the Common Market.

Do you remember that expression?

It referred to a free-trade area where countries could co-operate with one another freely and happily.

After Europe’s long and bloody history of wars, a free-trade zone was a good idea.

It’s quite understandable and worth supporting the concept that the destruction of barriers to trade would create a better understanding and peaceful co-operation between countries which had so recently been at each other’s throats.

When we had our referendum on the subject of a Common Market, very few people suggested this would lead to the creation of a European super-state.

But you only have to look at how the name of this entity has evolved to see how its ambitions have insidiously grown:

Common Market; European Economic Community; European Community; European Union.

We allowed this to happen. Our political leaders, our opinion-formers, our universities, our civil servants, our journalists.

We allowed this to happen.

We allowed the Common Market to become the European Union. We let it take on the trappings of a superpower.

We are still letting it happen.

And I contend that the reason for this is that being pro-Europe rapidly became the politically-correct position to adopt.

In 1976, left-wing Socialists like Tony Benn opposed Britain’s entry. A decade later, Europe was as a means of imposing Socialism even on Thatcherite Britain.

And there have been plenty of Conservatives willing to go along with this conspiracy.

What was once a noble attempt to prevent the countries of Europe going to war with each other has become the unthinking default position for the politically-correct establishment classes in this country.

Europe has, of course, been embraced by both Labour and the Liberal Democrats. The Tories, who might be expected to assert this country’s independence and sovereignty, have been dogged down the years by leading figures who have chosen to adopt the politically correct position of supporting the EU.

THE SINGLE CURRENCY

In the late 1980s, Nigel Lawson as Chancellor and Geoffrey Howe as Foreign Secretary brought down Margaret Thatcher because of her Euroscepticism.

If you recall, Lawson created the recession of the early 1990s by refusing to devalue the pound.

He did this by manipulating interest rates, thus slowing down the whole economy. And his whole aim was to maintain an artificial price for the pound against the Deutschmark.

The reason for this was to prepare Britain for entry into the European exchange rate mechanism, the forerunner of the single European currency, the imaginatively titled Euro.

This led in the end to the political disaster and economic triumph of Black Wednesday when John Major, Norman Lamont – and his aide David Cameron – were humiliatingly forced to abandon the European exchange rate mechanism.

They were victims of the collective belief that to be “good Europeans” we had to abandon our economic sovereignty and hand it over to Brussels.

Luckily for us, the markets saw through all this and refused to allow our misguided politicians to get their own way.

And the greatest achievements of Gordon Brown – perhaps his only achievement – but an achievement nonetheless – was to stop Tony Blair repeating the same mistake.

If we were in the Euro today, our recession – bad as it undoubtedly is – would be far worse.

One of the saving graces at the moment is that British manufacturing has had a modest revival.

This is because of the weak pound. The pound is, in my view, under-valued against the Euro but that is no bad thing.

It means companies like Jaguar can sell their cars at competitive prices abroad. Indeed, someone told me the other day that Japan now regards this country as a low-cost manufacturing base in the same way we used to think of China.

Look at poor old Ireland. Having struggled for years to free itself from the British imperial yoke, what happens?

They hand sovereignty over to Brussels and after the illusory Celtic Tiger disappeared in a puff of smoke, they are stuck with the Euro. They can’t devalue.

They are stuck with an unrealistic exchange rate and their economic crisis will be long and dismal. Entirely as a result of believing the Euro propaganda.

Thank goodness the politically-correct view of the Euro did not prevail here.

It wasn’t for want of trying.

Tony Blair was desperate to be a good European. He thought it marked him out as a progressive, liberal socialist.

That’s why he signed us up to the disastrous European convention on human rights.

I don’t think there’s any doubt he would have signed up to the Euro as well had Gordon Brown not refused to play along with him.

The point, though, is that, since the early 1980s at least, it has been politically incorrect to argue against ever-increasing union across Europe.

FRUITCAKES, LOONIES AND CLOSET RACISTS

Sceptics and opponents of the EU have for years been marginalised.

David Cameron called UKIP members “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists” and that is the attitude of the majority of our mainstream metropolitan elite.

There have always been politicians willing to oppose the EU’s ever-increasing influence on our lives. But the strength of the Coalition of Lib-Dems, Blairites and pro-Euro Conservatives has ensured they remain marginalised.

The politically-correct position is hard to oppose. This is especially so because what might be called the organs of the state are so rapidly Europhile.

I could go on ad nauseam about the way the BBC opposes Britain and the British at every turn.

The point is, though, that it is still the most influential medium that we have. It is not all-pervasive and it does face competition.

But if it were not a Government mouthpiece paid for by its own dedicated poll-tax, it would have been broken up and sold off years ago because it enjoys an entirely unwarranted monopoly position in our media.

I should add, incidentally, that the vast sums it now spends on its website and internet presence are astonishingly anti-competitive. Its millions are partly to blame for the demise of a daily Birmingham Post and the decline of all our regional newspapers.

The main point, though, is that political correctness dictates it is racist, xenophobic and basically nuts to believe that this country’s laws should be determined by the people of this country through their elected representatives.

GEORGE ORWELL

We have come a long way since we joined the Common Market. We no longer think of a free trade area. We talk of a Union – the United States of Europe.

I am constantly reminded of George Orwell’s 1984. Three great powers: Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia are constantly at war.

In this world, you are not allowed to think for yourself. If you have an unacceptable opinion, you are subjected to political re-education.

The Ministry of Love is in charge of the thought police.

The Ministry of Plenty deals with food shortages.

The Ministry of Peace fights the wars.

The Ministry of Truth keeps everyone subdued by its constant diet of propaganda.

And, all the while, big brother is watching you.

In Orwell’s world, thoughtcrime is an offence. Just as it is today.

He was writing of a world which was the logical extension of the totalitarianism – fascist and Communist – of the 1930s and 1940s.

Life is not as bad as Orwell imagined. We do have some freedom. I am free to express my contempt for the politically-correct world we live in.

But those freedoms are limited and circumscribed. If I was not careful, I could find myself accused of some sort of thoughtcrime.

There are so many ways of inadvertently committing a thoughtcrime offence. Jokes are among the worst.

I might refer disparagingly to female linespeople, for instance, suggest there might be something not quite right about gay marriages or, as the rugby commentator Brian Moore did, make a joke which apparently disparaged disabled people.

Thoughcrime can destroy people’s careers.

Rousseau said “Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains”.

We are not slaves. We are free men (free persons). But we are constrained by the diktats of the politically-correct elite.

The pressure groups, politicians and pundits who tell us what we may and may not think and say and feel.

Political correctness is a deliberate policy used to deny us freedom of speech and freedom of thought.

Political correctness is not just a joke or something for grumpy old men like me to get cross about.

It has become so all-pervasive it colours everyone’s judgment – we are all afraid of thinking, let alone saying, something which could offend the thought police.

Thanks to political correctness, it has become almost impossible to have a real debate on the great issues of the day.

One example, as I have said, is how we have handed away our sovereignty – and with it our national identity – to Brussels while the politically-correct thought police have stifled and silenced dissent.

It is dangerously insidious process. It takes time. That doesn’t mean it isn’t winning.

Each small victory for political correctness leads on to the next and the next.

It has to be challenged at every step. I don’t know whether it can ever be halted.

I hope it can. But it won’t be easy.

You have to be courageous or foolhardy to stand up for any belief that runs contrary to the politically-correct mainstream.

Luckily, the English are bloody-minded enough to give it a go.

You wouldn’t be here tonight if you were not bloody minded.

Congratulations on your bloody-mindedness.

In an interview with Al Jazeera this week David Cameron declared: “I don't believe an In/Out referendum is right, because I don't believe that leaving the European Union would be in Britain's interests.”

The incredible arrogance of this takes your breath away.

It is the epitome of politicical correctness. Mr Cameron won't let us have a vote because he assumes we will vote in what he regards as the "wrong" way. He doesn't trust us. He doesn't trust democracy.

I’ll finish with another quote from Enoch Powell:

“Of all the silliest sayings, one of the silliest is the saying, ‘You can’t put the clock back’

“If course you can put the clock back and you often do. If a clock is showing the wrong time, you put it back or forward, whichever is necessary, without the slightest hesitation.

“If a mistake has been made we ought to put it right if we can.

“We ought always to be on our guard against those who whisper in our ear, ‘It’s done now and it can’t be undone’. Those are commonly the voices of cowardice or indolence and sometimes of downright evil intent.

“The mistake Britain made in becoming a part of the European Economic Community is not irreversible.”

Just don't fall ill

2011-02-23T09:12:00.000Z

Is anyone really shocked to discover the National Health Service betrays Britain’s elderly?

The report by NHS Ombudsman Ann Abraham details ten cases where patients have been neglected, left hungry, without water, in squalor and in pain.

As anyone involved with the sordid saga of Stafford Hospital could confirm, these are not isolated incidents. Shabby treatment is commonplace.

Surely the time has come for us to accept the NHS is not the magnificent social benefactor we like to think it is.

Free health care – or, at least, care which is free when we need it – is a wonderfully humane ideal we all enjoy. The last thing we want is to be reaching for the credit card in the middle of a heart attack.

On the other hand, the very nature of the NHS leads its vast army of employees to see themselves not as the servants of their patients but as their masters.

The NHS is an organisation whose principle aim is to care for the welfare of its own staff. Second come politicians who claim credit for pouring our money into its ever-open maw. The patients come a poor third.

Horror stories of maltreatment at the hands of the NHS are legion.
After Ms Abraham’s report, the finger of blame has been pointed firmly at nurses whose duty it is to tend to the basic every-day needs of their patients.

Nurses do, indeed, deserve much of the blame. According to an old-school “angel” I was talking to the other day, what many modern nurses lack most of all is compassion.
There is little fellow feeling for the human beings they are supposed to be looking after.

My friend said she recently held the hand of a very sick man who was on his last legs. He smiled wanly at her and said: “Do you know, you are the first person in this hospital who has showed me any sympathy?”

It is not all the fault of nurses, though. The whole of the NHS culture needs to change.

Because we patients do not pay directly for our treatment, NHS staff see no need to treat us as customers who pay their wages.

They think they are doing us a favour by deigning to minister – however half-heartedly – to our needs.

At the start of the fifth inquiry into the Stafford Hospital scandal, his second as chairman, Robert Francis QC said he’d already heard “many stories of appalling care”.

As he listened, “the question that went constantly through my mind was, why did none of the many organisations charged with the supervision and regulation of our hospital detect that something so serious was going on, and why was nothing done about it?"

After his last inquiry, Mr Francis said: "The deficiencies were systemic, deep-rooted and too fundamental to brush off as isolated incidents."

The terrible truth is that the “systemic, deep-rooted and fundamental” deficiencies at Stafford Hospital can be found throughout the NHS.

In some cases, our hospitals kill patients who should survive. In others, they cause pain and humiliation.

Yet still we regard the NHS as some kind of totem, to be worshipped and protected from every attempt at change or reform.

One terrible day, each of us will fall into its clutches. When we do, of course we want happy, well-paid and well-trained staff to care for us.

The Government’s plans to reform the NHS, by giving family doctors the money to buy services, may help. Perhaps they will refuse to send patients to the most inhumane and degrading hospitals which will, as a result, be forced out of business.

Somehow I doubt if it’ll work like that. GPs are part of the problem. Every time I see my own doctor’s BMW with its personalised number plate, I think we must be paying him too much.

I never get a chance to discuss this with him, however, because it’s almost impossible to get an appointment in less than three weeks’ time.

Perhaps he thinks that, by delaying it so long, the patient will either be cured of their ailments and won’t need to be seen at all or they’ll be dead.

What was it Enoch said?

2011-02-22T11:28:00.000Z

Today's news:

More than three million migrants came to Britain under the previous Labour government, campaigners claim.

Migration Watch UK said official figures to be released on Thursday will show for the first time that net migration since Labour came to power in 1997 topped the three million mark.

Sir Andrew Green, the think-tank’s chairman, said: “The sheer scale of what has occurred is changing Britain fundamentally and irrevocably and in ways the majority of the population did not ask for, were not consulted about and did not wish to see.”

Read more: http://www.expressandstar.com/uk/uk-news/2011/02/22/labour-let-in-3-million-migrants/#ixzz1EgbnQyvd

Steamed up about free speech

2011-02-03T09:41:00.001Z

Speech isn’t free in this country. You never have had the right to say anything you want. And sometimes it’s extremely expensive indeed.

Sky football commentator Andy Gray knows the high price that can be paid if you speak your mind, even in private.

But imagine you’re no more than a devoted steam railways fanatic and you find yourself with a legal bill of £335,000 as a result of something you wrote in a newsletter distributed to 413 people.

That’s what happened to Tom Watson and Richard Corser when they were involved in publication of an article in a newsletter for the 400 members of the 6024 Preservation Society.

The society is dedicated to preserving an old Great Western Railway steam engine called King Edward I. If you’re a steam buff, King Edward I is one of your pin-ups.

It was built in 1930, at a cost of £7,500. It ran for over 30 years hauling services such as the "Cornish Riviera Express", "The Bristolian", "The Inter City" and the "Cambrian Coast Express" sometimes travelling at over 100 mph.

It was withdrawn from service in 1962 and sent for scrap. It was rescued by the preservation society and moved to the Birmingham Railway Museum in Tyseley in 1989.

It was back on track the following year and has been hauling excursions ever since, largely thanks to the enthusiasts of the 6024 Preservation Society.

Unfortunately, they fell out with their chairman Steve Underhill. Luckily I don’t know the details of the dispute so I can’t run the risk of repeating what turned out to be a libel.

What I do know, however, is that Mr Underhill took exception to what was published in the society’s newsletter, “The King’s Messenger”.

It was so bad, he sued Mr Watson and Mr Corser for libel. And, instead of sitting down and coming to a sensible compromise, the two sides headed for our learned friends and the High Court.

This was a potentially disastrous decision for both sides – the proverbial sledgehammer to crack a nut.

A nasty squabble turned into a fully-fledged legal battle with the preservation society promising to back Mr Watson and Mr Corser.

In effect, the society put its ownership of the steam engine on the line. On the other side, Mr Underhill risked penury.

One side had to lose and the loss was bound to be devastating for somebody.

The train buffs argued that whatever they may have said about Mr Underhill was privileged because the newsletter only went to its own members.

Mr Underhill’s lawyers discovered it had also been sent to 13 people who send in photographs of the steam engine and were not members of the society.

As a result, the society lost its claim of privilege.

So then it was faced with arguing over the libel itself and, at this stage, the society threw in the towel, apologised to Mr Underhill for whatever it may have said, and agreed to pay him damages of £7,500.

Mr Underhill’s reputation was restored and the money he received was reasonable, given that only 413 people read the original allegations in the first place.

The society, on the other hand, was presented with a legal bill for a truly staggering £335,000. It has been forced to sell the engine to one of Britain’s richest men, Investment manager Jeremy Hosking.

To be fair, a hearing in the High Court is never a cheap option. Our learned friends like to think of themselves as taxis for hire but they tend to be taxis to the moon.

It is hard to imagine why either side was prepared to risk so much for so little. Admittedly, Mr Underhill emerges without a stain on his character and it does matter when someone is unfairly maligned in print.

Even so, the risk was enormous. He says: “Had my lawyers not believed in my integrity and agreed to fight this case on a ‘no win no fee basis’ after my own funds and those of my partner had run out, I would have been left with no means of removing a dreadful slur on my character.”

Had he lost, Mr Underhill, not the society, could be facing the massive £335,000 bill.

He might well say that, as the injured party, he would never have lost – but the law is a lottery. Just because you’re in the right doesn’t mean the law will come down on your side.

This country’s law courts are routinely used as a libel casino by the rich and famous from around the world.

It would be a pity to close off this opportunity for our flagging economy to earn some foreign currency.

But small societies and ordinary people must remember – the law is for the very rich and the very poor only. It is not for the likes of you and me – never has been, never will be.

If you find yourself in a serious dispute, my advice is try rock-paper-scissors. It’s cheap, there’s always a clear winner, and the result will be as fair and just as most decisions in the High Court.

Tales of the riverbank

2011-01-21T13:34:00.000Z

“If you sit by the river long enough, you will see the body of your enemy float by,” according to the Japanese proverb.

And so it is with Andy Coulson, the ex- News of the World editor who claims he was ignorant of the phone-tapping activities which yielded him some of his exclusives.

Mr Coulson resigned from the job when the scandal broke but got taken on at an exorbitant salary by David Cameron who claimed he was giving the newspaperman “a second chance”.

Now Mr Coulson’s past has come back to haunt him and I maintain what I have said before: either he was a lousy editor for not knowing how his stories were obtained or he has not been telling the truth about what he did know.

Neither incompetence nor a cavalier approach to the truth is something you would wish to see in the Government’s head of communications so it’s not surprising he’s finally gone.

You could say it was “incredibly stupid” of Cameron to employ him as it was “incredibly stupid” of Mr Coulson to think he could evade all responsibility for his newspaper’s illegal activities.

A few years ago Mr Coulson engineered my resignation as Tory candidate for Halesowen and Rowley Regis by insisting I sign an apology which said I had been “incredibly stupid” to mention the name Enoch Powell in an article about immigration.

I had said Powell was right to warn that uncontrolled immigration would change the country dramatically. I would not sign Mr Coulson’s statement of apology and chose to resign as a candidate instead.

Having been sitting on the riverbank ever since, I cannot help but feel a frisson of schadenfreude when I see the body of one of my enemies go floating by.

What happens when you speak for England

2011-01-18T12:58:00.000Z

Why has Dudley South MP Christopher Kelly found himself ridiculed at the hands of his own party?

The answer is that the Conservatives decided to bully him because he put his country before his party.

The newly-elected 32-year-old had the courage to stand up to intimidation from “Flashman” Prime Minister David Cameron and defy the Government whips over their decision to hand more of our dwindling sovereignty to the European Union.

Mr Kelly, who is well known as a Eurosceptic, was one of 37 Conservative MPs who tried to strengthen new laws to make it clear that ultimate power rests with Westminster not Brussels.

Yet having defied his party, Mr Kelly found himself branded a cry-baby and accused of being more frightened of his father than he is of his party leader.

Mr Kelly’s father is Chris Kelly, the owner of Keltruck, the highly-successful truck business which is headquartered in West Bromwich and famous for the huge flag of St George which flies proudly next to the M5.

There was so much nonsense in the weekend’s attack on Mr Kelly it’s difficult to know where to start.

But, of course, any young man starting out on a Parliamentary career is liable to be shocked when his leader warns him: “You’re making a bloody terrible mistake. It will do your career and reputation no good at all. And you can bloody well forget about being a minister.”

Nobody wants the boss to behave like the public-school bully Flashman when they’ve only been in their new job a few months.

It would have been a shocking and very upsetting encounter – yet Mr Kelly went ahead and voted with his conscience anyway.

This is, never forget, what Mr Cameron promised us we’d get from our MPs under his regime. He declared months ago that Tories would put their country before their party.

That’s what Mr Kelly did. And his reward? Ignominy.

Someone in the Conservative Party Whips’ office deliberately went to the papers with a twisted tale of how Mr Kelly’s encounter with Mr Cameron had left him in tears.
To add salt into the wound, they invented the story that Mr Kelly was too scared of his father – a long-standing supporter of the Conservatives – to toe the party line.

Mr Kelly says: “For the record I did not cry or even come close to crying. There is footage of me in the Chamber completely dry-eyed sat close to my colleague Bill Cash MP as he concluded the debate at the very time it is alleged that I was 'in tears'.

“The whole story is utterly bizarre. I always vote according to my conscience and what I believe is best for the residents of Dudley South – nothing else. I will always put my country first.”

We could do with more MPs like that and we could do with a Prime Minister who respects political differences rather than bullying and intimidating his own supporters while bending over backwards to accommodate his opponents in the Liberal Democrats.

It may be the animosity towards Mr Kelly is personal as much as political. He seems to be the subject of a malign campaign against him which, among other things, seeks to attack him through his relationship with his father.

It’s only natural that the MP shares some of his father’s views. But he is his own man and, as I understand it, he rarely if ever consults his father before making a political decision.

Mr Kelly is far more likely to consult his constituents and his conscience. And this is what he did over the EU legislation.

Alas, his noble deed has been swamped in the filth of day-to-day political reality. It wasn’t enough for the Government to stamp on the poor man, it has gone out of its way to humiliate him even to the extent of publishing lies about him.

Politicians of honour and integrity are thin on the ground these days. Mr Kelly has discovered the hard way that putting your country before your party is the ultimate crime among the sleazy greasy-pole-climbers and slippery placemen who run our governing party.

U-turn? They don't want to

2011-01-17T10:46:00.000Z

Why are our High Streets turning into ghost towns populated with charity shops? Why are more and more people shopping on line? Why are HMV closing 60 shops?

One reason is that local authorities have spent the past ten years waging war against motorists to the point where it’s too expensive to shop in town centres.

The last Government wanted us all to travel by bus or metro. It ordered councils to do their best to stop us using our cars to get to the shops or the office.

Parking charges soared. Some councils just wanted the money.

Others deliberately made parking expensive because they thought it was the “green” environmentally-friendly thing to do – as if forcing the local greengrocer out of business was somehow going to save the planet.

Apart from encouraging the success of out-of-town shopping centres like Merry Hill – where parking is free and motorists are positively encouraged – the councils didn’t achieve much.

More than 100 local authorities lost money on car parking charges in the year 2008-9 even though motorists forked out a total of £1,338 million. Wolverhampton’s traffic wardens made a profit of only £18,000.

High parking charges deter shoppers. Stores don’t make any money so they close, turning High Streets into wildernesses of charity shops.

Eric Pickles, the local government secretary, has now announced an end to the “war on motorists” and given councils the freedom to develop their own parking policies.
In theory, this means parking charges could be cut. The Black Country councils have already said they will look again at the whole question.

Wolverhampton Council obviously knows charges deter shoppers otherwise it wouldn’t be offering an hour’s free parking in Market Street and School Street throughout January and February to attract more people to the struggling markets.

Could the whole city centre get free parking and enjoy a boom in business? Don’t bet on it.

Councils will claim they can’t afford to reduce revenues at a time when the Government is axing their grants.

In the long run, it would pay them to revive their dying town centres by encouraging visitors.

Lost revenue from axing parking charges is a small price to pay if it leads to busy shops and buoyant business rates income.

But that’s a bit far-sighted for most local authorities, alas.

For years, motorists have been a favourite target for Governments wanting to raise money.

One small example this week was the case of Michael Thompson, who had to pay a £175 fine, £250 costs and a £15 victims’ surcharge for warning fellow motorists of a police speed trap.

The poor man simply flashed his lights at oncoming traffic, advising drivers to slow down. This, supposedly, amounts to “wilfully obstructing a policewoman in the execution of her duty”.

Surely he could argue he was trying to prevent the crime of exceeding the speed limit.

What this case proves, though, is that it will take more than an announcement from Mr Pickles to bring a cease-fire in the war on motorists.

For instance, less than a year ago, Birmingham Council adopted a new 34,000-word policy document announcing a clampdown on parking and promising “lower standards”.

The council is pledged to cut long-term parking spaces in the city centre and Sutton Coldfield; limit parking spaces for new developments; impose ever-higher prices for long-stay parking; use SMART cars fitted with CCTV to police parking offenders; introduce more bus lanes; and expand pay-and-display beyond the city centre.

The report says: “Whilst the Council cannot directly control car ownership, polices for charging for, and the supply of, both on and off-street parking can influence parking demand, parking space turnover and, ultimately, car use and ownership.

“Parking policies seek to restrain unnecessary car travel, especially for local trips within the city, and reduce the need to travel or at least encourage the use of more sustainable travel choices.”

Had all this nonsense been announced a decade ago by some newly-elected right-on, politically-correct New Labour local authority, you might not have been surprised.
Yet this is official policy of a coalition of Conservatives and Liberal-Democrats.

In some cities it’s even worse. Next year, Nottingham will be the first place in the country – so far – to impose workplace parking charges.

The tax will be £1 per space per day “to begin with” and you can be sure it the price won’t go down.

The excuse is that the money will pay for more trams.

Try telling that to the businesses in the city which will have to fork out hundreds of thousands of pounds but still can’t get their lorries in and out of Nottingham.

It would be marvellous to discover that, thanks to Mr Pickles, our councils realised the car played a vital role in encouraging prosperity. Without visiting motorists, our town centres will become impoverished wastelands.

Cynics, though, may wonder about the timing of his announcement. It came on the day that rises in VAT and fuel duty sent petrol prices soaring.

Maybe Mr Pickles was just trying to divert attention away from the fact that motorists are still the Government’s favourite tax target.

Global politically correct freezing

2011-01-04T19:03:00.000Z

Here's a quick New Year quiz. What are the politically correct terms for the following:
1.Black Coffee
2.The black economy
3.Ladies and gentlemen
4.Happy Christmas
5.Christmas tree
6.You’ll just feel a little prick
7.Three Little Pigs
8.School pupil
9.Baa baa black sheep
10.Blackboard
11.Bouncers
12.Brainstorming
13.Yankee and Zulu
14.Fireman
15.Hairdresser Sarah Desrosiers was found not guilty of racial discrimination by an industrial tribunal but still had to pay Bushra Noah £4,000 compensation for hurt feelings. Why?
16.Why was Deva Jynarasiri forced out of his job as a Postmaster at a Post Office in Nottingham and thrown out of the Liberal Democrats. Why?
17.In 2002, Steve Thoburn announced that his newborn son Jay weighed 3,790 grammes. Why?
18.Gangland boss Colin Gunn is serving life for a double murder. But he recently won a human rights case. What was his claim?
19.The Government paid undisclosed damages in compensation to a group of prisoners for invading their human rights by forcing them to stop taking drugs while they were in jail. How many prisoners were involved?
20.Who said: Earlier on today apparently a woman rang the BBC and said that she’d heard there was a hurricane on the way. Well if you’re watching, don’t worry, there isn’t”?
21.Why is Ewen McCallum, the chief meteorologist at the Met Office, white faced?
22.Last year we endured the coldest winter for 31 years. In the autumn of 2009, what did the Met Office predict?
23.What was the name given to the e-mail scandal involving Professor Phil Jones, director of the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, which suggested he was falsifying statistics on global warming?
24.They are the world’s largest source of CO2 emissions. They also emit methane, which warms the world 20 times faster than CO2, and more than two-thirds of the ammonia which causes acid rain. What are they?
25.When did the River Thames last freeze over?
26.Britain’s sunniest month, with 383.9 hours of sunshine, was recorded in Eastbourne, Sussex, one July. Which year?
27.The lowest daily temperature in Britain had been recorded on three occasions, in 1895, 1982 and 1995, twice in Braemar, Aberdeenshire and once in Altnaharra, Highland. How cold was it?
28.Experts claim 2010 was:
The hottest year on record
The coldest year for a decade
The wettest year for 30 years
29.In September 2007 the frozen North West Passage across the Arctic Circle was opened up for the first time in recorded history because of global warming. When did this recorded history begin?
30.In 1999, Indian scientist Syed Hasnain gave a phone interview to a reporter from the New Scientist. Nine years later, what he said became central to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on global warming. Two years later, everyone admitted it was all bollocks. What was the claim?

And the answers are:What are the politically correct terms for the following:

1. Coffee without milk
2. The hidden economy
3. Men and women
4. Happy Holiday
5. Festive tree
6. You’ll just feel a little scratch
7. Three Vertically-Challenged Swine
8. Learner
9. Baa baa happy sheep
10. Chalk board
11. Ejection technicians
12. TGE (thought generating exercise)
13. Yellow and zebra
14. Fire-fighter
15. She turned down Ms Noah for a job as a hairdresser because she refused to work without wearing her headscarf.
16. Because he put up a notice telling customers they should speak English in his shop.
17. In 2001 he was convicted of selling vegetables using imperial measurements only. He was initially convicted and given a six-month conditional discharge.
18. He said it was disrespectful to be called by his surname, Gunn, only and demanded that prison officers called him Mister Gunn.1
19. 98
20. Michael Fish
21. He promised a “barbecue summer” in 2009
22. A milder than average winter.
23. Climategate
24. Cattle.
25. 1814
26. 1911
27. -27.2(C) -16.96 (F)
28. The hottest year on record
29. 1979 when satellite monitoring started. The Northwest Passage was open in 1903 and used by the sailor Roald Amundson and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Arctic patrol made regular trips in the early 1940s.
30. That climate change would melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035.

Pickled red-herring

2010-12-15T22:41:00.001Z

What is the point of making voters in a dozen cities up and down the country elect Lord Mayors without dismantling the whole local government system and starting again?

Eric Pickles, the Cabinet Minister responsible, is determined to foist these small-town Boris Johnsons onto us whether we want them or not.

Yet there is no sign his alleged reform, supposedly giving great power to elected mayors, will be of much benefit to the cities which get them.

The guinea pigs for this grand scheme are Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Coventry, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Sheffield and Wakefield.

In his generosity, Mr Pickles is prepared to let other cities go for elected mayors as well.

Wolverhampton, for example, could have one if it really wanted but I don’t hear the crowds clamouring at the gate to be granted this special privilege.

Apart from a few professors of local government and professional politicians, I don’t know anyone who wants elected mayors. It’s not exactly a burning issue down the Ferret & Firkin.

Even if elected mayors were a good idea in theory, they’re pretty pointless without wider changes.

Take Birmingham, for instance. It has 120 councillors costing the taxpayer £2.6 million in allowances and expenses.

It also has a Chief Executive on £233,000 in salary and pension contributions not to mention the other 13 officers who pick up six-figure salaries.

What’s going to happen to that little lot if an elected mayor takes over? You won’t need 120 councillors for a start. The London Assembly gets by with just 25 members.

Admittedly the capital has a layer of local authorities beneath its Assembly but then it is much bigger.

The Pickles dozen would be quite capable of functioning efficiently with a quarter of their existing councillors.

Actually they would do an adequate job on a quarter of their councillors without the additional fuss of an elected mayor.

The cities certainly won’t need all their councillors when the mayor has the power and takes the decisions. There won’t be anything for the average councillor to do so why not get rid of them?

Mr Pickles has no plan to cut the number of councillors. He says councils could do so if they wanted – but can you imagine that happening? Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas.

Equally, why would councils need chief executives and senior officers when an elected mayor and his cronies are in place?

Mind you, they won’t come cheap. Boris Johnson bags £140,000 a year and doubtless these smaller-city bosses will demand something similar.

One of the assumptions behind the plan for elected mayors seems to be that it would increase democracy and improve the quality of the people who run our cities.

What are the options in Birmingham?

Sion Simon would have us believe he gave up his place as Labour MP for Erdington so he could run for mayor of Birmingham – a decision he made even before there was officially a vacancy.

He could be challenged for the Labour nomination by the veteran group leader Sir Albert Bore.

Mike Whitby, who has been council leader for the last six years, must be in with a chance but Tory leader David Cameron says he wants someone outside politics to do the job.

That means ex-lawyer Digby, Lord Jones of Birmingham, must be in with a shout. He was briefly in the Labour Government but somehow managed to avoid joining the party.

Apparently the suggestion is he stands as an Independent. But would the other parties give him a free run? And, if they did, where’s the democracy in that?

Before they can vote for any of these potential candidates, the electors must first decide if they actually want elected mayors.

Without real reform of the whole system, it must be questionable whether it’s worth it.

Will mayors really have any clout? Most Governments – including this one – talk about devolution and localism but when it comes to parting with cash or power, they decide Whitehall knows best after all.

Councils are told how to spend their money. It goes on schools and social services mainly. That won’t change.

And what is the point of supposedly powerful mayors being kings of their little castles when the Government is also setting up Local Enterprise Partnerships which will cross council boundaries?

Mayors won’t want to see their influence diluted by dealing with these new quangos.

The Coalition is feverishly trying to paper over the cracks emerging from its decision to axe development agencies like Advantage West Midlands by introducing LEPs.

These supposedly business-led bodies will die of neglect if elected mayors take over the big cities.

What self-respecting captain of industry would want to devote time and energy to them when the mayor of the biggest place on the map is too busy to be bothered?

No doubt all this is the result of Mr Pickles’ time as leader of Bradford Council, where he manipulated a hung council to ensure the Tories clung onto power.

The one-time “Beast of Bradford” thinks he’s giving us radical reform. Sounds more like pickled red herring to me.

The night of the living dead

2010-12-08T19:33:00.000Z

The good news is the economy is growing nicely, spending cuts are not as bad as feared and the Chancellor is talking about tax reductions for big businesses.

The bad news is that nobody's noticed and small businesses are still going to the wall with the Government mainly responsible for the bankruptcies.

Economists tell us they see green shoots of recovery springing up everywhere but most business people think it still feels like bleak mid-winter.

That, I fear, is because economists look at trends over months and years while businesses look at what happened yesterday and the day before.

Official statistics show a drop of 17 per cent in company insolvencies. That sounds like good news, even when you discover that 58 per cent of all winding-up orders come from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.

Alas, the taxman has been bailing out hundreds of companies for a couple of years under its “time to pay” scheme.

The taxman has been holding off asking for the money. It’s now telling companies to pay up the money they owe.

Unfortunately many of them are “zombies” – they look as if they’re still alive but as soon as they have to repay their debts, they’re dead.

True the economy isn't as dire as it was two years ago when the banks looked like they might disappear completely, taking the entire capitalist system with them.

For an economist looking at his graphs and charts, that means things are improving.

For ordinary businesses, it just means utter destruction has been replaced by a never-ending fight for survival.

The Christmas spending binge may be a bit better than last year – but only because the increase in VAT to 20 per cent on January 1 will encourage some people to buy sooner rather than later.

It means sales in the New Year will get off to a slow start. On top of that, public spending cuts are only just starting to bite.

Job-losses in the public sector, we are told by the Office for Budget Responsibility, won't be as high as forecast.

They'll still be huge. Birmingham Council, for instance, announced this week it was axing 7,000 jobs.

To judge the scale of that, remember there’s only one private sector company in the whole city employing more than 7,000 people in total – and that's RBS bank which is actually owned by the taxpayer as well.

And when councils or Government department wield the axe, they start with their private-sector suppliers.

There are thousands of small firms which rely on work from the public sector for their livelihood. That work will, in many cases, dry up completely.

When it doesn't, they face a serious price squeeze. Either way, it makes for grim prospects.

Confidence, we are repeatedly told, is the key. If only businesses had the confidence to expand and consumers had the confidence to spend, all would be well.

But faced with tax rises, spending cuts and the turmoil in the eurozone – where entire countries are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy – it's hard to feel positive.

The Coalition Government is taking heart from the latest surveys saying the economy will carry on growing next year.

It is a vindication of Chancellor George Osborne's decision to get his cuts in as fast as possible.

However unpleasant they may be, at least it means we won't go the way of Ireland, Greece, Portugal and even Spain by begging for help from the EU and the International Monetary Fund.

No wonder that, according to one of the many hilarious WikiLeaks we have enjoyed recently, Bank of England Governor Mervyn King was worried about the inexperience of Mr Osborne and David Cameron.
Mr King is probably right they hadn’t “fully grasped the pressures they will face from different groups when attempting to cut spending”.
Even after the cuts, total Government debt will carry on rising until 2015 when it’s due to hit a staggering £1,300,000,000,000 (we’re talking over a trillion).

The Governor knew we needed to stave off national bankruptcy – but that's no consolation for small businesses.

Already they can see a drop in demand, consumers switching to cheaper goods or saving rather than spending. Even big corporations are now sitting on money rather than investing it.

It doesn't make good economic sense to save when interest rates are low. Savers lose out whereas borrowers get money on the cheap.

But everyone’s nervous. We don't like debt any more. We want cash for a rainy day. It's called lack of confidence.

I was talking to a businessman who does corporate finance deals. He says things are looking up. Investors have money and companies are looking to expand.

To prove it, he told me about one big deal he's working on. The company involved thinks there's a lot more work it can land in the New Year and wants a cash injection to help it grow.

This was excellent news, I thought. At last, signs of life in the economy.

What does the company do? I asked him. He told me: They're insolvency experts.

Welcome to the night of the living dead.

I counted them all in... errr...

2010-11-30T18:41:00.001Z

The Government is finally cracking down on immigration – and if you believe that, you'll believe anything.

The Coalition's first stab at it is aimed at cutting the number of "skilled migrants" we welcome to these shores.

But there are two snags: the numbers don't add up and they're aiming at the wrong target anyway.

Theresa May, the Home Secretary, told us this week it was time Britain did something about mass immigration.

She complained: "Over Labour's time in office net migration totalled more than 2.2 million people – more than double the population of Birmingham.”

At last, you might think, a politician is doing something about the big issue that dare not speak its name.

But look at the numbers and you discover Mrs May is actually doing little or nothing to reduce the 196,000 people a year moving to this country.

Please note, by the way, that the figure of 196,000 is not the total number of immigrants, it’s the net figure. In 2009 we saw total of 567,000 immigrants – but that was offset by 371,000 people who left this country.

These are official Government figures so, inevitably, they can’t be trusted. It’s pretty much guesswork.

As a Commons committee pointed out the other day: “Until exit checks are implemented in the form of e-Borders, it is not possible to count individuals out of the country, and so figures on the inflow and outflow of migrants cannot be matched.”

Mrs May is reducing the number of “skilled workers” allowed into this country without a job offer from 14,000 to 1,000 – a big cut, you might think.
This is for people of “exceptional talent” – footballers, nuclear scientists, ballet dancers and the like.
At the same time, Mrs May is increasing from 13,700 to 20,700 the number of people welcomed into this country if they already have a job offer.

Taken together, it would appear she has cut the total number of skilled workers allowed into the country from 27,700 to 21,700.

It’s only a cut of 6,000 but, at first glance, it seems like a modest step in the right direction. But that’s not the whole story.

The Government has imposed no limit at all to the number of people allowed into Britain under “intra-company transfers”.

That means thousands more people are exempt from any limits at all if their employers want to move them to Britain – more American bankers, for instance.

Last year, intra-company transfers added another 22,000 people to the immigration numbers.

This shows Business Secretary Vince Cable has won the first round in the alleged battle to curb immigration. He was lobbied hard by the CBI and other employers’ organisations which said industry needed the ability to move staff from one country to another without let or hindrance.

Mrs May has put a couple of limits on these transfers. They must earn at least £24,000 a year to be allowed here at all and, to stay longer than a year, they must be paid at least £40,000.

But few companies would want to move low-paid staff around the world anyway, so these limits are just window-dressing.

At best, Mrs May has cut immigration by 6,000; at worst, because of intra-company transfers, it won’t be reduced at all.

Either way, few people are bothered about the temporary importation of highly-skilled individuals who may well be of benefit to the British economy.

What we have is a minor adjustment to an almost irrelevant group of people masquerading as a bold new initiative to tackle immigration.

Mrs May’s plans will do nothing to meet David Cameron’s pre-election pledge to cut immigration by at least half, to “tens of thousands” a year.

The real numbers are in three categories which, so far, Mrs May has not dared to touch: students, family members and EU citizens.

We are told there’s nothing we can do about migration within Europe. We have open borders and anyone can go anywhere.

We could do something about it – but our politicians refuse to do so. They would rather be “good Europeans” than good Britons.

As for family members, the Government could change the rules on arranged marriages and the ability of one immigrant to bring over a large number of relatives.

It won’t because it’s afraid of falling foul of human rights laws – yet “family reunification” accounted for 48,000 immigrants last year, 64,000 in 2008 and 69,000 in 2007.

That just leaves students. Mrs May has already said she wants to cut the number supposedly looking for education below degree level.

The numbers are staggering. Last year, according to unreliable Government figures, 311,135 students came to Britain bringing another 30,170 dependents with them.

How many “students” were on bogus courses or dropped out and disappeared? No-one knows.

Meanwhile universities, desperate to boost their income now British students must mortgage their futures to get an education, have found a champion in Vince Cable.

He won’t let the Tories do anything drastic.

So will the Coalition get tough on immigration? It doesn’t seem likely. Rather like the statistics, on this issue the Government doesn’t know if it’s coming or going.

You've got to be cruel to be kind

2010-11-18T09:10:00.000Z

The Government plans to make the long-term unemployed get up in the mornings and go to work. And if Archbishop of Canterbury condemns it then common sense tells us it must be a good idea.

He thinks making the work-shy get off their backsides will drive them to despair. But whenever Governments come up with a sensible plan you can be sure Establishment figures will be rushing for the barricades.

As if Archbishop Rowan Williams didn’t have enough trouble in his own vestry, he’s set himself up as the champion of unemployed.

Caring for the poor and dispossessed is, of course, what the Church of England is supposed to do. The Archbishop may think he’s being true to his calling.

But if he really wants to help the needy then giving them money to stay at home watching daytime TV is not the way to do it.

We have the deserving poor. For them, a life on benefits is a daily humiliation. They desperately want to work and they should be given every help to succeed.

We also have the undeserving poor – people think a life on benefits is theirs by right.

Why should they give up “Bargain Hunt” in exchange for some grotty job which doesn’t leave them any better off than they are sitting around doing nothing?

And we all know there are some people on benefits who actually manage to do very nicely thank you – because they claim benefits and work in the black economy.

Sadly, our welfare system has been distorted by such people. It’s no longer a safety net to catch people when they fall, it’s a cosy blanket to wrap everyone up and keep them warm.

Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan-Smith is talking sense when he argues that a life in work must be made more attractive than a life on the dole.

It cannot make sense for the taxpayer – or to people on benefits – to discover a life of idleness pays better than a bit of hard graft.

The Archbishop says: “People who are struggling to find work and struggling to find a secure future are, I think, driven further into a sort of downward spiral of uncertainty, even despair, when the pressure’s on in that way.

“And quite often it can make people start feeling vulnerable – even more vulnerable as time goes on – and that’s the kind of unfairness that I feel.”

He is right to say the five million people on out-of-work benefits are not “wicked, stupid or lazy” but he’s wrong to claim they are being penalised simply to save money.

Actually, those suffering from uncertainty and despair must do so from having no hope, nothing to look forward to and nothing to do.

Being stuck at home all day with no money and nobody to talk to isn’t much of a life.

Getting out and about, working with other people and re-learning some self-discipline must be a good first step on the road back to real work.

That’s not a punishment, that’s a benefit. For most people, it would restore some of their pride, give them a new purpose in life or, at the very least, a reason to get up in the morning.

Ambitious young students give their services free to potential employers for weeks at a time just to get some experience and so they have something extra to offer when it comes to real job interviews.

The same must apply to people who are out of work for a long time. At least if they get their hands dirty doing something socially-useful, it shows they’re trying.

True, there is a shortage of jobs at the moment. But there is also a surplus of imported foreign labour because so many Brits can’t be bothered to take the work that is on offer.

Of course, if Iain Duncan-Smith’s plans succeed, it will save us all billions of pounds. But that’s not the only reason he’s right.

Living on benefits is hard and not much fun. But for some people it’s become a way of life. The Archbishop should recognise that sometimes it’s necessary to be cruel to be kind.

Not with a bang but a wimper

2010-11-10T08:48:00.001Z

Guy Fawkes tried to blow up Parliament and now, 405 years later, David Cameron has done the job for him. At least no-one was hurt.

The European Court of Human Rights has decreed that prisoners in British jails must be allowed to vote in elections and, six years after that decision, we’ve caved in.

We’re told David Cameron is “exasperated and furious”.

As a response, that’s as pathetic as having to share our armed forces with the French.

As a betrayal, it’s even worse.

The Prime Minister came to power promising to scrap the legislation, imposed by Tony Blair, which created the human rights industry in this country.

Labour signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights, something we had resisted doing for decades.

It was originally drawn up to save less happy lands from dictatorship. It aimed to defend the sort of human rights violated by people like Franco in Spain, Mussolini in Italy and, of course, Hitler.

Mercifully, we have never suffered that kind of evil Government so we never had a need for laws which enshrined our basic human rights – we had Magna Carta in 1215 and it served us well enough.

But in their desperation to be “at the heart of Europe”, Tony and his cronies gave us human rights which, in turn, gave every terrorist, murderer and whinger an excuse to take the Government to court at our expense.

Before the General Election, Cameron and Co pledged to scrap the human rights legislation and replace it.

Their plan for a British Bill of Rights would probably have been no great improvement but it was a start.

That plan has now been dropped. Instead, we must admit that British sovereignty no longer exists.

Our Parliament has decreed several times to ensure prisoners can’t vote. Yet one European Court ruling and elected representatives become irrelevant.

Mr Cameron’s decision to cave in proves our Parliament might as well not exist. Our
laws are made by unelected foreign institutions we have no control over. It’s as if we had surrendered to a foreign power.

It is disgusting that prisoners, people who have committed serious crimes, should have a say in choosing how we are governed.

One of the many offensive aspects is that the Government has caved in as a result of a case brought – with Legal Aid, of course – by a mad axe-man.

John Hirst killed his landlady with an axe. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. He got out of jail after 25 years.

While he was inside, he discovered a desire to vote. Having taken the Government all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, he is out of jail and able to celebrate.

This vile specimen had the effrontery to post a YouTube video where says: “Well, I’ve got the joint, I’m going to celebrate. I’ve got the bottle of champagne and I’m going to celebrate because last night it was announced that prisoners have now got the vote, which I’m really chuffed about.

“I’m now going to celebrate for the 75,000 prisoners who will be getting the vote. That includes murderers, rapists and paedophiles. All of them will be getting the vote because it’s their human right to have the vote.”

Thanks to an assortment of judges, many from some of the farthest-flung corners of Europe where human rights have only just been invented, murderers, rapists and paedophiles may yet decide the course of British politics.

This, in itself, is a staggering betrayal by Mr Cameron. It shows, among other things, that he is the willing victim of his coalition with the Liberal-Democrats.

They, in fairness, actually believe prisoners should be allowed to vote – though they kept pretty quiet about it before the election. They also believe in Britain being run by Europe.

Now they’ve got their way – another case of the Lib-Dem tail wagging the Tory dog.

The people who now make British laws are the European Court judges. Among them are human rights expert Ganna Yudkivska, from the Ukraine; university lecturer Nebojsa Vucinic from Montenegro; and Khanlar Hajivev, president of the supreme court of Azerbaijan.

Did you vote for any of them? No, nor me.

I’m sure they’re all honourable and learned. But what do they know about this country? Indeed, what do they know about democracy and the vote?

David Cameron is guilty not just of the usual politician’s double-dealing. He is guilty of betraying his country.

He has surrendered to a foreign power without the least resistance.

This is not just about whether 70,000 convicts should be allowed to vote. It’s about who runs Britain.

If we concede defeat to the European courts, we can be as “exasperated and furious” as we like but he has submitted to an unelected foreign dictatorship.

The only consolation is that when prisoners do get to vote, even they will realise it’s not worth bothering if our Government can’t be bothered to run our country any more.

Guy Fawkes thought we needed a massive explosion to destroy Parliament. David Cameron’s done it with a damp squib.

Tories suspend S Staffs party

2010-11-08T12:22:00.000Z

The Conservatives have suspended one of its most successful constituency parties and axed three senior officers, two of them councillors.

The 500-member South Staffordshire Conservative Association has been put on "special support" with ex-Birmingham Northfield MP Roger King parachuted in as chairman.

Coun David Billson and Coun Sonja Oatley have been forced to resign from the association's ruling executive by the Party Board over unfounded allegations against their chairman Lyndon Jones.

Mr Jones has also been forced out and has quit the party over the "kangaroo court" which sealed his fate.

The departures follow a high-level two-month inquiry into allegations against Mr Jones carried out by the Tories’ Staffordshire Area Management Executive chaired by Mr Charles Boote.

The inquiry's final report concludes that “an undercurrent of bad feeling” was in danger of “spiralling out of control”.

It says there was “strong evidence of an attempt to undermine the chairman. In particular there have been unproven rumours of previous membership of the National Front or similar organisations and charges of rigging of a selection vote. Both of these could be highly damaging to the party were they to be reported in the press”.

Mr Jones was also accused of using his position to win a pay rise for his wife, who is the association’s organising secretary. But he was cleared by the inquiry which said he “behaved properly in absenting himself from key decisions affecting his wife’s employment contract”.

The report said South Staffordshire District Councillor Oatley had to go because she was guilty of leaking confidential information to members and undermining Mr Jones.

It says of Coun Billson, who is a district and county councillor, that he “has taken certain actions and made a number of allegations that have undermined the chairman. None of these allegations have turned out to be true and Coun Billson has presented no evidence to support them.”

Both councillors have been removed from the local party executive.

The report says of Mr Jones: “The chairman has exhibited a high degree of dedication to the association during his term in office.

The report also states: “However, he has permitted the paid employees to assume responsibility for issues with, and write e-mails to, volunteers that rightly fall within his remit. In doing so, the chairman has abdicated an important responsibility and has allowed situations to develop and fester.”

Mr Jones commented that as paid employees it would be part of an Organising Secretary’s job to respond to emails.

The report says the association must introduce new employment policies “as a matter of urgency” and it would be “inappropriate” for Mr Jones to remain as chairman.

Mr Jones said he had repeatedly told the area management executive that the Organising Secretary already had both a contract of employment and a job description, but he was ignored.

He became chairman 18 months ago following a selection where he was voted as Chairman by a large majority of the members and at the time of his election the Conservative Party wrote to the association confirming there was no objection to Mr Jones getting the post even though his wife was an employee.

A furious Mr Jones said: “I was never in the BNP and I never took part in any decisions regarding the Organising Secretary’s wages. I asked for advice from the party and they immediately suspended the association, told me we could not hold any more meetings, and launched an investigation.

“I do not know what I have done wrong. This is a stitch-up kangaroo court. They are really scraping the barrel if it’s because I didn’t personally reply to all the e-mails we receive.

“I have never been allowed to defend myself. As a convicted criminal I would have more opportunity to defend myself than this.”

He said some councillors may have been angry because he had tried to ensure the local party stuck to the Conservatives’ rules on the selection of council candidates.

Mr Jones added: “I am very disappointed I have had no support from our
MP Gavin Williamson after I was his chief aide and had three weeks off work for the General Election. I was with him every single day of the campaign,” said Mr Jones.

“As his Association Chairman, I would have expected his support. I am a working man who was doing a good job and feel very let down by the Conservative Party. Obviously I do not fit in.”

At the General Election, the Conservative majority in South Staffordshire increased from 8,847 to 16,950, making it one of the party’s safest seats in the country.

Coun Billson said: “I have been struck down from the executive, so has Mr Jones and one other person but I am not allowed to talk about it and that would be the situation at the moment.”

Eric Pickles - a correction

2010-11-04T14:10:00.000Z

Turns out I was wrong to complain the Staffordshire South Conservatives were only “bullied, browbeaten and betrayed” by Eric Pickles. They were blackmailed as well.

The Tories’ answer to John Prescott told them that if they insisted on choosing Nigel Hastilow as one of the six candidates to be interviewed for the seat, he would have no hesitation in suspending the whole association and imposing three candidates of his choosing on the local party.

When asked about the letter he sent me (see blog from January 17) he just shrugged.

More news about South Staffs Conservatives coming soon

Telephone banking? Hardly

2010-10-26T18:24:00.000+01:00

Another hideous story about banks and recession reaches me. The boss of a small company had to call in the receivers – because he couldn’t call in his bankers.

For months the poor man has been trying to attract the attention of his friendly neighbourhood bankers.

Though we, the taxpayers, own this bank, its staff ignored him, never returned his calls, didn’t bother to look at his e-mails and were “not in” when he visited. As the company’s cash-flow got worse, the boss grew desperate.

Last year he cut his employees from 26 to 13. Things have looked a bit better in the past few months.

Unfortunately, he makes children’s toys so the best time for business is in the build-up to Christmas.

To get to the most profitable time of year, he needs to spend money before he can accumulate it again. This is where the bank is supposed to help with loans and overdrafts.

Our man needed £50,000 – not much in the great scheme of things. He never got it.

Now the banks are under scrutiny, they are reluctant to say no to someone like my toy-maker. They might get into trouble with the politicians – and then what would happen to their multi-million pound bonuses?

It’s much easier to pretend your customers never even bothered to ask for your help. Ignore them and hope they go away – or go bust – without the need to turn them down flat.

The truth is, banks have changed. A few years ago, they threw money around like confetti.

These days, they won’t lend you a penny unless you pay hefty charges, extortionate rates of interest and promise them your house, car, golf clubs, wife, kids and dog if it all goes wrong.

On Tuesday there was a little demonstration outside the Council House in Birmingham as Unison members held a sing-song in protest over the axing of 200 jobs.

A young woman handed me a leaflet calling on me to join a “stuff your cuts, we won’t pay” demo outside the International Convention Centre on October 3 when the Conservative Party conference kicks off there.

To add extra potential for unhappiness, it seems the police are trying to divert the protestors away from the ICC.

This is all in aid of protecting heavily unionised public-sector workers, who seem to think they are on the “front line” when it comes to the new austerity.

They are mistaken. The first blast of cold air is already rushing through the private sector. Look what’s happened to the public housing maintenance firm Connaught.

Quite why it went bust is a bit of a mystery. It had contracts with local authorities and, even if they were being run down, that doesn’t really justify calling in the receivers.

It’s clear, though, the threat of Government spending cuts had already hammered the company’s share price.

It’s happening to dozens of businesses, especially construction firms which have seen plans to build new schools shrivel and die.

Supposedly, we have clambered out of recession and the economy is improving. Most experts think it’s unlikely we’ll fall back into another one – the much-feared “double dip” – but it is a real possibility.

We won’t know the full impact of Government spending cuts until October 20, when Chancellor George Osborne delivers the bad news.

What’s worrying is how Ministers go on about what desperate financial times these are. I understand they want to place all the blame on Gordon Brown.

But they lay it on so thick it’s enough to make the average consumer stay at home and hoard tins of baked beans rather than stimulate the economy by going shopping.

David Cameron’s rhetoric is making things worse. The economy needs public spending cuts and they will have nasty consequences, in the short term anyway.

When the marchers reach the ICC next month, when public sector workers go on strike, when riots take place in Westminster and when tax hikes lead to a spending slump, do people like Cameron and Nick Clegg have the courage to stick to their plans?

Even if the dynamic duo stand firm, will their parties? The Lib-Dems are already pretty flaky.

Few of their MPs or members signed up for the toughest austerity package in history – an election tomorrow and they’d be out on their ears.

In opposition, their hero Vince Cable, now an unhappy Business Secretary, was full of talk about reining in the banks, tackling obscene bonuses and forcing them to lend to small businesses again.

Since getting power? Nothing.

For the Coalition to survive, the least it must do is make sure private businesses also survive. That means dealing with the banks.

There are options. Vince could, for instance, prevent banks demanding personal guarantees from company directors. He could make banks take on the debt many companies now have with the taxman.

He could insist that all bank bonuses are paid into a fund to support small businesses and the money could only be taken out after five years.

If he could make bank managers answer the phone once in a while it would be a start.

A Government in a hurry

2010-10-26T18:20:00.000+01:00

David Cameron banged on about fairness at the Conservative conference in Birmingham. But there’s precious little fairness in what he’s planning to do.

Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith was garlanded with praise for his overhaul of the benefits system but actually he’s proposing to make the existing unfairnesses worse.

Chancellor George Osborne unveiled his big idea, which is axing child benefit for top earners. Yet within minutes, his plans were unravelling because they were so unfair.

Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke insisted it was right to make prisoners work and promised to pay them £12,000 a year. But how can it be fair to offer jobs to criminals when honest men and women are out of work?

The Prime Minister told us “fairness is giving people what they deserve”.

OK then, let’s look at who gets what in our Big Society.

Child benefit won’t go to anyone earning the top rate of tax. That means a married man with a non-working wife will lose child benefit when his earnings hit £44,000 a year. But if he and his wife each earn £43,900 – totalling £87,800 – they will get child benefit.

It took only moments for even Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne to realise that, as leaders of the self-proclaimed “party of the family”, gunning for middle-class mums is a monumental miscalculation.

So they cobbled together a promise to introduce a tax allowance for married men which will doubtless wipe out the £1 billion saved by the benefit cut.
Fairness was not their guiding light. They just wanted to screw more money from the better-off.

Then Mr Duncan Smith announced that in future nobody would be entitled to State benefits of more than £500 a week.

Has he considered how that compares with the income of ordinary working people?
He might be interested to know that half the workers in the West Midlands earn £456.40 a week or less – and they have to pay tax on it.

His benefit cap is £26,000 a year. To earn that much, somebody in work needs to have a salary before tax of £35,000 because tax and National Insurance will cut his take-home pay to £26,000.

You need to be in the top 15 per cent of all earners in the country to have a salary of £35,000.

Ironically, the average taxable income is £25,800, more or less equal to the maximum Mr Duncan Smith would give you for not working.

Out of that, someone in a job must pay tax and National Insurance so his real income falls to £19,725.65 – £6,000 less than you might get for sitting at home and doing nothing.

One reason for the cap is to stop the State paying massive rent bills for families on benefits living in Mayfair and Belgravia. They will have to move out of their London mansions into more modest accommodation.

This will lead to an exodus from the capital as people are forced to find cheaper places to rent. In other words, London will simply export its problem families and dump them on the rest of us. That’s not fair either.

Then Ken Clarke declares it’s time to put prisoners to work. It’s a nice idea, especially when he says a quarter of their earnings will go to their victims.

Out of the £232 a week he wants to pay them, prisoners will get £20, presumably to buy drugs. Some of the rest will pay for their bed and board and a little may even find its way to their families.

This “porridge pays” policy would see crooks and thieves inputting computer data, repairing shoes and recycling rubbish.

These jobs could all be done by people on the outside. Is our economy so desperate for workers that nobody else is available?

Of course not. If paid jobs are on offer they should go to people who, even if they would prefer a life of leisure, at least have the merit of not being in prison.

Where is the fairness in giving jobs to criminals at the expense of people on the outside who might be grateful for the work?

If fairness is “giving people what they deserve” then mothers who stay at home to look after their children do not deserve to be denied benefits which still go to families with two working parents.

This is a Government in a hurry. It may be because the Tories have been out of power for so long or because they’re afraid they won’t stay there very long.

Either way, in their rush for “change”, they are making terrible mistakes and storing up more trouble for later.

Worse still, they were clearly so frightened of the backlash over child benefit cuts they dashed out a promise to help married couples overnight.

That tends to suggest they don’t have the courage of their convictions. When the going gets tough, they hoist the white flag of surrender.

Emptiness of Dave's Big Society

2010-10-06T15:38:00.001+01:00

Pity Dave has abandoned giving speeches without notes. His party conference address in Birmingham was drearily filled with rhetorical piffle and meaningless politico-speak.

You could tell it was written for him, not by him, and it was made worse because he didn't actually read his speech terribly well and stumbled over the words.

You could also tell that some marketing guru thought it a brilliant wheeze to fill it with silly phrases like “beating, radical heart” and “we are the radicals now”.

The big phrase was, of course, Big Society. This is still a most bizarre concept. Dave clearly wants it to be his legacy. But it’s like a label which gets put on even the shoddiest products to make them look shiny and new – Big Society is the new eco.

Just as every spiv and charlatan has taken to labelling his wizard wheezes eco- to make it look cool and trendy and on-message, now everyone will pretend their products and services are part of the Big Society.

Labour gave us the meaningless twaddle of “stakeholders”; Dave gives us “Big Society”. They are equally empty.

Listening to our Prime Minister, I was left wondering whether, rather than trying to convince the rest of the country of the merits of his case, he was actually trying to convince himself.

This is luxury you can't afford

2010-10-04T19:35:00.000+01:00

How much longer must we endure being dictated to by the European Union? Its latest edict means we must find up to £2.5 billion a year to entertain “benefit tourists”.

Refusing them handouts breaches their human rights. So we must give them jobseeker's allowance, employment support allowance, pension credit and income support.

People from across the Continent will make a beeline for Britain if, as the EU demands, we are forced to dole out money to all Europe’s benefit scroungers.

This is just the latest in a long line of offensive decisions imposed on us by our lords and masters in Brussels.

Ministers are at each other’s throats over spending cuts – with Defence Secretary Liam Fox issuing a stark warning about the damage they will do to the armed forces.

It would be madness for us to take on the burden of funding Europe’s down-and-outs just because the Brussels bureaucracy thinks its human rights laws are more important than our struggle for economic survival.

In 2007, when he was still making his way as Leader of the Opposition, David Cameron offered crowd-pleasing opposition to EU human rights laws imposed on Britain a decade ago by Tony Blair.

He was protesting over the fact that the law prevented the deportation of Italian-born Learco Chindamo, who killed headmaster Philip Lawrence, even though the Home Office considered him a threat to the public.

Mr Cameron said: "It has to go. Abolish the Human Rights Act and replace it with a British Bill of Rights, which sets out rights and responsibilities. The fact that the murderer of Philip Lawrence cannot be deported flies in the face of common sense.

"It is a glaring example of what is going wrong in our country. What about the rights of Mrs Lawrence? The problem for this Government is that the Human Rights Act is their legislation and they appear to be blind to its failings."

You would think from comments like these that one of Mr Cameron’s first acts as Prime Minister would be to abolish the legislation.

Yet even before he failed to win the General Election, he was watering this down. It turned out his Bill of Rights would still leave this country ruled by the European Court of Human Rights.

Then, to cobble together his coalition with the Liberal Democrats, Mr Cameron has abandoned these plans altogether. There will be no cancellation of the human rights laws and the Bill of Rights has been shelved.

The boost to benefit tourism will cost us between £1.3 billion and £2.5 billion a year – yet the Government is desperately trying to cut welfare spending and crack down on benefit cheats.

How could it possibly justify hammering its own citizens when it offers an open door and a blank cheque to people from Lithuania, Latvia and Romania?

The European Union is not only trying to impose its bizarre view of human rights on us, it is also seeking to rob us blind.

The EU’s Budget Commissioner, Polish economist Janusz Lewandowski, is campaigning to end the “rebate” Mrs Thatcher negotiated with the EU back in 1984 when she declared: "We are simply asking to have our own money back."

Tony Blair did a deal which will has seen the rebate halved from £5 billion to £2.5 billion. Mr Lewandowski wants to see it axed altogether.

Even with the rebate, we are giving the EU £8.3 billion this year and, under Mr Blair’s deal, that increases to £10.3 billion by 2014.

Where is all this money coming from? How can we afford it?

It’s bad enough Ministers protecting the foreign aid budget which sees millions of pounds leak into the hands of monsters and terrorists. How can they justify increasing our payments to Brussels?

The EU boasts about how much money Britain received in grants from Brussels. It’s so desperate to win the propaganda war that any development completed with EU support must fly the blue European flag with its gold stars.

It even fines people who forget this little detail. It cost development agency Advantage West Midlands £200,000 and the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce £77,609.
Yet for every £1 the EU gives us, we give it £2. That is not, and never has been, a good deal for Britain.

The blight of benefit tourism won’t simply be the amount of money it costs. What will all these people do with themselves all day long if they have no work and no intention of looking for any? We can be pretty sure their activities will not all remain on the right side of the law.

Rather like being a member of a golf club or subscribing to Sky TV, EU membership may have been one of life’s little luxuries. It allowed our leaders to jet around Europe at our expense being important.

Surely the time has come when we have to say to our friends across the English Channel that their Union is a jolly nice idea and we wish it well but money’s a bit tight and we simply can’t afford the cost of membership any longer.

BBC needs more reality TV

2010-09-21T09:56:00.000+01:00

It’s not surprising Sir Michael Lyons is giving up as chairman of the BBC Trust. He knows when he’s onto a loser.

The former chief executive of Wolverhampton and Birmingham councils was appointed to the job by the old Labour Government. He was one of their trusties, having been a Labour councillor at an early stage in his career.

With the BBC under scrutiny as never before, we can reasonably assume he quit before was pushed out of his £204,000-a-year three-day-a-week job.

Things are getting nasty at the Beeb and they’re not likely to settle down any time soon.

The broadcasting unions are threatening to black out part of the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham next month. We may also face blank BBC TV screens when the Government unveils its controversial spending cuts on October 20.

The 48-hour strikes over plans to limit the BBC’s generous pensions scheme will not do the national broadcaster any good.

Instead of causing the viewers and the Government maximum inconvenience, which is usually the aim of any strike, all it will do is play into the hands of the BBC’s rivals.

The unions live in the dark ages when the BBC enjoyed a near monopoly over the airwaves.

These days, there are hundreds of TV channels to choose from. This bewildering, and often dispiriting, variety of output does not guarantee quality, of course.

Some of the stuff you get with a Sky TV subscription is so embarrassingly bad it’s a wonder how the stations which churn it out can survive financially. And many of the Freeview channels are not worth wasting your life watching.

Even so, politics junkies can find more than enough coverage of party political conferences and Government spending reviews without having to go anywhere near the BBC.

The Corporation is still a national institution like the NHS. We seem to love it for all its faults. Yet if you look closely at what the BBC does, you have to wonder whether we need it any more.

We pay £145.50 for the privilege of watching television, whether we ever look at a BBC programme or not.

Most people, most of the time, still seem to think this is decent value for money. The licence is certainly a lot cheaper than even the most basic Sky package.

If payment was voluntary, rather than being the legally-enforced poll tax that it is today, the BBC’s income would fall substantially from today’s £3.5 billion but it would still yield a small fortune.

Sadly, we don’t have that option which is why the Corporation is under such scrutiny over how much it pays its stars like Jonathan Ross and why its executive directors’ salary and expenses are now public property.

It may be OK for BBC Director General Mark Thompson to claim £2,236.90 and £1,277.71 to cut short family holidays and fly home to deal with urgent business but it doesn’t look good. Especially when you know he was paid £778,000 last year.

The BBC attracts hostile attention partly because the papers and TV stations on the attack are owned by commercial rivals. They see the Corporation’s privileged financial position as a distortion of a free market in broadcasting.

That helps to explain why it seems to be under constant bombardment from the rest of the media. But it doesn’t invalidate their complaints.

The BBC’s expansion – especially its attempt to dominate the internet – are rarely justified by its public service broadcasting charter.

That’s because, even though they are highly-paid, it’s executives do not really know what the organisation is for any more.

If “public service” were the real objective, the BBC wouldn’t need all the TV and radio channels it now owns. It would not produce pap aimed at winning an increasingly-irrelevant ratings war. And it would not fork out millions on “talent”.

Apart from the sacred cow of the NHS, everyone in the public sector is facing huge spending cuts. They must be applied to the BBC as well.

Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt will soon embark on new negotiations over the licence fee. The time has come to debate the options. One would be to close down many BBC activities, sell them off and cut the fee to no more than £100.

In my view, it would be better if the whole monstrous edifice were sold off in a massive privatisation which could make billons for the Government at a time when cash is short.

Luckily for the BBC, though, it is still valued enough by viewers and listeners that a sell-off is not on the cards.

Even so, it’s a fat, monstrous old auntie sitting complacently on its sofa sucking sweeties paid for by the hard-up taxpayer. It needs a fitness regime if it’s to survive.

The unions may think blacking out the Tory party conference is a dramatic statement of intent but they’re asking for trouble.

Sir Michael has six months of his contract to go. He should give the BBC a dose of reality TV. If he switches off now, the unions shouldn’t complain if the rest of us switch off too.

Mr Incredibly Stupid

2010-09-03T14:58:00.001+01:00

If ex-News of the World editor Andy Coulson did not know his reporters were illegally tapping the phones of various prominent people then he is incredibly stupid and utterly incompetent. If he says he didn’t know but, actually, he did, then he is a liar. Either way, he shouldn’t be employed at the heart of David Cameron’s Government. For once, it’s hard not to sympathise with John Prescott.

I suppose only an appalling cynic would wonder if the furore over William Hague not being gay, and Mr Coulson's embarrassment were in any way connected but it is coincidentally a useful smokescreen for the ex-News of the Screws boss to hide behind. Let's wait until the smoke clears.

Bounty hunters? Try paradise

2010-08-26T18:23:00.000+01:00

David Cameron is right to employ bounty hunters to crack down on benefit cheats. But why stop there? What about bounty hunters to crack down on tax evaders as well?

They cost the honest taxpayer far more than the unemployed underclass.

Some estimates put the “tax gap” at £120 billion. The taxman says it’s £40 billion.

The Coalition is to employ an army of snoopers, on a five per cent commission, to trawl through people’s bills and financial records in search of benefit frauds.

No doubt they’ll find a reasonable number of people. Mr Cameron claims fraud costs the honest taxpayer £1.5 billion a year.

The benefits system is so complicated, though, that genuine mistakes by claimants and the Government come to another £3.7 billion of money “wasted”.

Some fraudsters aren’t hard to spot. Court cases crop up regularly involving the bloke who claims he’s laid up with a bad back and is out cleaning windows or someone with a gammy leg who turns out for his Sunday league side every week.

It may be that Dave’s army of curtain-twitchers and dustbin-snoopers will save us a fortune. Let’s hope so.

But if we’re taking a high moral tone about the feckless and idle, what about the rich and industrious?

We can’t really be sure how much benefit fraud costs because it’s a crime people try very hard to conceal. In the same way, nobody really knows how large the “tax gap” is either.

Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, our official tax-gatherers, put the figure at £40 billion. Other experts say it’s three times as much.

Either way, the Government is missing out on a vast sum of money.

The difference between what the Revenue thinks it ought to receive and what it actually gets – the tax gap – includes illegally evaded taxes and those which are legally avoided.

There is nothing wrong with making sure you tax bill is as low as possible. It’s up to the Government to make sure the laws are watertight.

If big multi-national companies and lucky billionaires can find ways to cut their tax bills and stay on the right side of the law, good luck to them.

Some people claim it’s immoral to keep your tax bill to the legal minimum. But few of us would willingly pay more tax than necessary – especially when we see how much of it is wasted. Morality has nothing to do with it.

Tax avoidance is fair and reasonable. It’s up to the Treasury to deal with loopholes in the law.

But there would be no harm in appointing an army of bounty hunters to go after individuals and companies which actively evade paying tax.

Imagine who might fall into that category. For instance anyone who has paid a builder in cash, to avoid the VAT, or failed to declare their earnings, could be ripe for investigation.

The black economy – or “shadow economy” if you’re politically-correct – is worth billions and set to grow when VAT hits 20 per cent in January.

But a few cash-jobs are chicken-feed. From time to time we hear of great HMRC triumphs when a gang of VAT cheats or cigarette smugglers get brought to justice.

In May, 21 people, including nine men from the West Midlands, was jailed for a £37.5 million VAT fraud.

Last month, Wolverhampton car-parts dealer Balbir Baden was jailed for evading £270,000 of VAT and income tax.

Even these cases are only the tip of the iceberg.

HMRC says in its annual report that “the proportion of UK taxpayers who are willing and able to pay their taxes has increased from 49.1 per cent to 51.6”.

This is apparently seen as something of a success. But it means that almost half of the people and companies in Britain are either unwilling or unable to cough up. That’s a lot of potential for our bounty-hunters.

One of the most bizarre legacies of Gordon Brown’s time at the Treasury is that he spent many years cutting down the number of tax-gatherers.

For someone desperate to spend our money, it’s surprising he was so negligent about collecting it all in the first place. But he was.

As a result, the revenue doesn’t have enough experienced staff to crack difficult tax cases. They are far more likely to come down hard on the corner shop-owner than they are on the multi-national corporation.

There are one or two household name businesses which manage to pay little, if any, tax in this country or anywhere else for that matter.

So why doesn’t the Government accept its own customs men aren’t up to the job and hand the task of chasing the missing billions to the private sector?

The vast sums of revenue the Government misses out on – maybe more than ten times as much as it pays out to benefit fraudsters – must be worthy of investigation by a few privatised bounty hunters.

There is a simple alternative, of course. Cut taxes so drastically it’s no longer worth trying to evade payment and Government income would actually go up. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be an option.

We can still make it

2010-08-13T11:49:00.001+01:00

Anyone with any sense watches “Top Gear”. The larking about by Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond is the only thing that saves the BBC from drowning in political correctness.

But they did something unusual for the last episode in the series. They performed a requiem for the British motor industry buy taking a Lotus Elan, a TVR S2 and the Jensen Healey for a spin across the country.

They visited the shut down Jensen factory in West Bromwich and went on to the similarly abandoned TVR plant in Blackpool.

There was plenty of messing about and schoolboy pranks on the way but in the end this was a plaintive lament for the death of the British motor industry from three of its all-time fans.

At one point in the show, Clarkson kicks around the Jensen factory and says: “In the 1970s, 26 per cent of the British workforce was employed by manufacturing. Today it’s nine per cent. It’s not that we don’t make sports cars any more – we don’t make anything.”

The other day I drove past the old Longbridge plant in Birmingham, once the biggest car-factory in Europe. A bit of building is going on but most of it’s a flattened wasteland.

For someone who was brought up just down the road from “the Austin”, it’s a sorry sight.

Even so, Clarkson and co are wrong. The British car industry is not dead. Actually, it is alive and well.

The difference these days from the lamentable past is that it’s foreign-owned and the unions seem to have learned their lesson the hard way.

Globalisation, consolidation and rationalisation put paid to the dozens of famous old names and marques we used to know and love.

Instead, the industry is owned by a handful of multi-nationals. Like the big banks, some of them are incompetently run and rely on Government handouts to keep them alive – just ask General Motors.

Yet while successive British Governments have cared less and less about the ability of this country to make things, somehow industry has carried on regardless.

Astonishing as it may seem, British factories are manufacturing hundreds of thousands of cars a year. And many of them are being exported to foreign countries.

We are not the world power we once were when it comes to sheer numbers. We’re 11th in the world car-production league table which puts us behind Brazil, Mexico, Canada and Spain but we’re still ahead of Italy.

Jensen Motors ceased trading in 1976. The following year, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, British industry manufactured no fewer than 1,315,972 cars and commercial vehicles.

That was, admittedly, down on the 1.9 million the industry hit at its peak in 1972 but even in 1976 people were talking about the death of British manufacturing –warning it was on the way unless the unions backed off.

They didn’t, as we all know, and so famous companies started to go to the wall. A lot of old names are no more: Hilman, Riley, Triumph and Sunbeam to name but a few.

Even so, new models and new manufacturers have taken their place. This country still makes Minis, for instance, and very successful they are too.

OK, so they are made in Oxford by German-owned BMW but, given the fiasco that MG Rover became after it was flogged off to the Phoenix Four, we’re lucky anything was salvaged from the wreckage.

Meanwhile companies like Ford and Vauxhall continue to make cars here as well as Nissan, Toyota and Honda.

Because they’re foreign-owned there is, perhaps, more chance that they will abandon ship and go elsewhere. But plenty of British-owned companies have done that already so patriotism won’t help much either way.

What we can say, though, is that things have not got any worse since Jensen stopped making cars in West Bromwich.

The British motor industry may employ fewer people but that’s because the manufacturing processes are so much better. And it churns out pretty much the same number of cars we were making 34 years ago.

In 1980 we made 1.3 million vehicles in this country. In 1990, the number had risen to 1.5 million. In 2000, it was 1.8 million and was still at 1.6 million in 2008.

Admittedly last year was a nightmare for car-makers. As we all know, factories shut down for months on end and nobody wanted to buy anything because of the credit crunch and the recession.

In 2009, the number of vehicles made in this country only just squeezed above the one million mark at 1,090,139.

But the industry has bounced back this year. In the first six months, we made 701,266 vehicles. And guess what? No fewer than half a million of them were for export.

We might not make Jensens and TVRs any longer but Clarkson is wrong to sound the death knell for British manufacturing. We still have the engineering, the design, the technology and the workers to compete in world markets.

It’s just a pity we don’t seem to have the bosses and the investors to lead the way.

What's so special about this relationship?

2010-07-27T10:26:00.000+01:00

What’s so special about our “special relationship” with the United States?

David Cameron was at it again in Washington after his meeting with President Obama, waxing lyrical about how much the countries have in common.

Even then, he admitted Britain was the “junior partner” – though “America’s poodle” might be a better term.

Why are we so subservient to the Americans? True, it’s a good idea to stay on the right side of the self-proclaimed “most powerful nation on earth”.

But it’s a very one-sided relationship. We do the Americans’ bidding; they kick us, especially when we’re down.

This week, Congress has been up in arms about why the Scottish Government released Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, who is alive and well and living in Libya.

The accusation is that the Blair Government sold out the victims of that terrorist outrage in exchange for lucrative oil rights for BP.

BP – or “British Petroleum” as Mr Obama likes to call it – is Corporate Enemy Number One in the USA because of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

The Americans are desperate to distance themselves from this disaster and, as a result of their hectoring, there’s every chance one of Britain’s most famous and successful companies could disappear.

The Lockerbie fiasco is being used by the Americans as another stick to beat BP with. Yet instead of standing up to defend the company, Mr Cameron promises an inquiry.

This is typical of the way our leaders behave towards the Americans. Even Winston Churchill was forced to treat them with kid gloves – and he was half American.

The USA has never rushed to our side in our hours of need. Americans think the 1914-18 Great War started in 1917 when they finally agreed to play some part in the struggle.

As for the Second World War, we are now celebrating the Battle of Britain which took place during the summer of 1940.

Why did Britain stand alone against the might of Hitler’s Nazi war machine?

Why was the beacon of liberty a guttering flame kept alight by a few RAF airmen and the bloody but unbowed attitude of the British people and its wartime Prime Minister?

Because the Americans wouldn’t help us. They were desperate to stay out of the war.

Churchill did everything he could to interest President Roosevelt in taking an active part but he refused to commit. It wasn’t until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour in December 1941 – more than two years after the outbreak of war – that the United States were finally forced into action.

For Britain, the Japanese attack was a turning point even if it may not have felt like it at the time.

Finally, the Americans became our allies and comrades in arms. Not because they wanted to support us but because suddenly, out of a clear blue sky, they had no choice.

By the end of the war, Churchill was able to coin his “special relationship” phrase which we’ve been saddled with ever since.

It hasn’t been plain sailing, though. Mainly because the relationship is not between equals or even senior and junior partners. It’s more like master and servant.

Almost 100,000 British troops supported the Americans in the Korean war from 1950 to 1953. Three years later this country was humiliated around the world when the United States refused to back our defence of the Suez Canal.

Mercifully, Harold Wilson refused to commit British troops to America’s war in Vietnam. That may help explain why America found it impossible to back us when Argentina invaded the Falklands.

Though Mrs Thatcher and Ronald Reagan worked well together to bring an end to Soviet Communism, it was still a fairly one-sided affair.

Britain became America’s European aircraft carrier, the home for cruise missiles and bombing raids on Libya.

If only Tony Blair had shown some of Harold Wilson’s mettle, British soldiers would not have invaded Iraq on the basis of sexed-up dossiers and they would not be dying in Afghanistan.

Those two wars, more than anything, show the shameful nature of this country’s relationship with America.

If Mr Cameron and Mr Obama plan to withdraw from Afghanistan in five years’ time, their promise is an admission of defeat.

Meanwhile British soldiers will continue to lose their lives during a long, painful and humiliating retreat.

Yes, America is a great country; we should be on friendly terms.

That’s different from slavish fawning just because they’re strong, we’re weak and we happen to speak more or less the same language.

For all their dominance, Americans are sensitive souls. It seems they’re unhappy because Mr Cameron, talking of his admiration for their country, said: “I think of my grandfather going ashore at D-Day, with the Americans in support of the British.”

Grandfather Cameron may have made it onto the beaches but every American knows Tom Hanks liberated Europe for the Yanks.

And what do the Americans think of the “special relationship”? Nothing at all. As the novelist Julian Barnes said: “Any foreigner visiting the United States can perform an easy magic trick: buy a newspaper and see your own country disappear.”

Home is where the wallet is

2010-07-14T19:48:00.000+01:00

House prices are stagnating and may not improve until 2015. Good. That’s what got us into this mess in the first place and it’s about time we looked on a house as a home not an investment.

Moat is no martyr

Why is anybody sorry the police ended up killing Raoul Moat? Some kids seem to regard him as an outlaw hero and he certainly ran rings around the police. Even so, it was not the police’s job to keep Moat alive and we’re well rid of him.

Nazis in wigs

A radio host has lost a fight to clear his name after calling a councillor a Nazi for banning smokers from adopting children. But it’s the High Court judges who are the Nazis. Because whatever you think of the council ban, surely people have the right to criticise. The word Nazi may be offensive but if we lose the right to be rude to people we lose a precious slice of our remaining freedom.

Berks and burkas

It’s tempting to want to follow the French in banning the burka, described across the Channel as a “walking coffin”. I hate them and, far from oppressing women, I believe they are used by many as a deliberate rejection of the society they live in. There are certainly times when people should be required to show their faces: at banks, when asked to do so by the police, at border controls or in job interviews, for instance. But we must not follow suit because people must have the freedom to stand out from the crowd no matter how anti-social or undesirable they look. Or are we saying that women who wear burkas are all terrorists?

Fun in the sun

Looks like we’re taking fewer foreign holidays because of the recession. Holidays at home are great if the weather’s good but they are invariably more expensive than abroad. Have you tried paying for a hotel recently? We stayed at a complete dive the other night and it cost a fortune.

In the wrong

Nobody cares about the schools in Sandwell – not Michael Gove and not Ed Balls. This is about politics, not education.

Time for another mutiny on the bounty

2010-06-03T16:48:00.001+01:00

If charity begins at home and Britain faces cuts running into billions of pounds, why are we planning to increase spending on international aid to China?

Why, for that matter, are we planning to spend more money in India, which has one of the few booming economies left in the world?

Or Zimbabwe, which is run by Robert Mugabe, a dictator every bit as unpleasant as Saddam Hussein ever was?

Or the Pitcairn Islands, for that matter?

The coalition Government is adopting a slash and burn approach to public spending.

Thousands of jobs will go as Ministers struggle to bring down Britain’s massive debt from £163 billion.

We had a small taste of it this week when Chancellor George Osborne detailed how he would save a modest £6.2 billion this year.

Even that provoked howls of anguish – imagine how much more unpleasant things will get when Mr Osborne has had time to go through the books in more detail.

Yet international aid is safe. Actually not just safe – the Government plans to spend more money on it than ever before.

This year we are spending £9.1 billion. Ministers may think that’s a small price to pay for keeping Bono and Bob Geldof off their backs.

And of course vast swathes of the world are impoverished. People are dying of disease and starvation. Everybody should do what they can to help.

Except that large sums of aid end up in the hands of corrupt dictators and murderous warlords.

If we can’t afford to spend as much on welfare and schools at home, surely we should spend less abroad as well.

Yet in the Queen’s Speech the Government promised spending on international aid would carry on growing.

The speech declared piously: “We won’t balance the budget on the back of the world’s poorest people.”

This self-righteousness “will place Britain in a position of clear international leadership, encourage other countries to live up to their commitments and generate momentum ahead of September’s UN summit on the Millennium Development Goals”.

That’s all very nice and fluffy and will help International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell, MP for Sutton Coldfield, sleep soundly in his bed at night.
But why protect international aid? Why, for example, are we spending £40.2 million in China?

China overtook Britain as an economic superpower in 2006 and will be second only to the USA by the end of this year.

It may be an undemocratic, dangerously unstable abuser of human rights but a few million quid from little Britain won’t change it.

Especially when some of the money we spend in China goes on teaching children to campaign against climate change.

Britain’s biggest financial commitment goes to India, which gets over half a billion pounds.

We’ve all seen “Slumdog Millionaire”. We know the divide between India’s rich and poor is enormous.

But India is already the world’s 12th largest economy and will, according to experts, overtake Britain within the next five years.

India is so rich its top industrialists come over to here to buy up what’s left of our manufacturing industry. To them, we’re the Third World, not the other way round.

Naturally, we spend hundreds of millions in Pakistan but we can’t even get them to promise not to torture people.

We’re spending £79 million teaching conservation farming techniques in Zimbabwe – a country which bans the BBC because its dictator wants to hide how he is destroying it.

Aid for Zimbabwe farmers wouldn’t be needed at all if Mr Mugabe hadn’t allowed the farms to be over-run and destroyed by machete-wielding thugs. Our money is keeping him in power.

Then there’s the Pitcairn Islands (pop 50), in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, home to descendants of the mutineers who kicked Captain Bligh off his ship, HMS Bounty.

Our £2 million pays for a prison to house six men jailed for sex abuse.

True, we give money to deserving causes as well. Places such as Hungary and Croatia, even Saudi Arabia have all been beneficiaries of our generosity.

It may be there was a time when we were so rich we could afford to spread our money around like a drinker at the Last Chance Saloon. You’d have thought those days were over.

The Government is using foreign aid as a reasonably cheap way of extending its appeal to bleeding-heart Liberals. Britain is now world leader in giving away taxpayers’ money to undeserving causes around the world.

Even when it goes to countries in desperate need, there’s every chance it will only make matters worse.

International aid worth billions has poured into Sudan yet the country is starving. Civil war in Darfur has left two million people homeless and killed maybe 200,000. It’s home to Al Qaeda’s terrorists.

Britain spent £54 million on Sudan’s elections earlier this year – and they were even less free and fair than our own.

Spending cuts may be necessary but they will be hard and unpleasant. Ministers need to think again about those parts of the world where they want to lavish even more of our money. Call it mutiny on the bounty.

Prescott gets his just desserts

2010-05-28T18:09:00.001+01:00

Good to see John Prescott joining the upper toffs after all these years. Give a class warrior a sniff of ermine and suddenly the workers can look after themselves. Champagne, comrade?

If the coalition isn't split it should be

2010-05-28T10:04:00.001+01:00

Vince Cable claims the coalition is not split over plans to raise capital gains tax to 50 per cent – to which the only answer is that it should be.

What are the Cameroon Liberals playing at? A young entrepreneur told me today: “I feel very strongly about this.

“Eight years ago, I took a risk. I was offered a good, safe, extremely well-paid job but I set up my own business.

“If this tax rise goes through, even if my business goes as planned, I would have been better off taking the safe job – and I wouldn’t have had to spend the last ten years worrying about money and where the next contract is coming from.”

As my friend points out, using CGT to hammer people with second homes and a few shares will only leave them worse off and more likely to become dependent on the taxpayer in their old age.

Meanwhile the major buy-to-let landlords can afford clever advice to make sure they get registered abroad and probably don’t need to worry about tax at all.

There is a terrible irony here. It was a Labour Government which cut capital gains tax to 18 per cent only to discover the reduction was being abused by the very rich, who converted income to capital.

But it was still a good idea. It may need reform to prevent abuse – such as the re-introduction of a taper so you can’t cash in on short-term investments.

The point has to be, though, that long-term investment and entrepreneurial risk-taking must be encouraged by the tax system – not punished.

And if the Conservatives in Cameron’s coalition don’t understand that then we might just as well have voted Liberal in the first place.

Much as I loathe Alastair Campbell, it was pathetic of Cameron's "communications team" to refuse to put a Cabinet Minister on BBC's Question Time programme just because the former Labour spin-freak was on it.

Is there nobody in the Cabinet capable of taking him on? Is there nobody willing to defend the Government's first week of work just because there isn't a Shadow Cabinet Minister in attendance?

Much as I loathe the BBC, the corporation was quite right to refuse to be dictated to.

Stitched up like a Ukipper

2010-05-18T23:09:00.000+01:00

In all the euphoria over the new civil partnership between David Cameron and Nick Clegg, we seem to have forgotten that the Conservatives should be running the country on their own.

Mr Cameron had an open goal and he shot wide. He missed out on a majority in parliament and now he has sold his party to the Liberal Democrats.

Why did the Tory leader blow it so spectacularly? Why, when he was opposing the most unpopular Government, with the most inept leader, during the worst recession for decades?

How could Mr Cameron have missed?

One answer is that in his desperate desire to cosy up to the Liberals even before the election was called, he betrayed his own natural supporters.

And it’s all because he refused to honour his own “cast iron guarantee” to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

The treaty, you will recall, is now signed, sealed and delivered.

Among other things it gives us the very first President of Europe, Hermann van Rompuy, and “the most powerful woman in Europe”, an obscure Labour peer called Baroness Ashton of Upholland, who has never been elected to anything.

The Treaty is the latest and biggest step down the road to a European superstate.

Given half a chance, the people of Britain would vote against it. For a few months, it looked as if a new Conservative Government led by Mr Cameron might actually offer that rare opportunity.

Then the treaty was ratified by all the other countries of the EU and Mr Cameron surrendered without a shot being fired.

He thought it would all get too messy if Britain withdrew from the agreement after it was in place.

Instead, he’s promised he won’t agree to any further attempts at “Eurocreep” – but it’s too late for that because no further treaties are necessary.

Ardent Conservatives are purple with apoplexy when they look at the election results, demanding to know why anyone in their right mind would vote for the UK Independence Party.

UKIP – dismissed by Mr Cameron as “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists, mostly” – polled more than 900,000 votes at the General Election.

It didn’t do them any good. They didn’t win a single seat.

Even Nigel Farage, who thought he could oust the Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, came down to earth with a bump.

But UKIP did achieve its main aim. That was to deprive the Tories of seats they might have won without the Eurosceptic party’s intervention.

Various experts estimate the Tories were, as a direct result of this, deprived of 19 or 20 seats at the General Election.

Another 20 seats would have seen Mr Cameron over the line into an outright Commons majority.

If he had simply honoured his original “cast iron guarantee” of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, most UKIP support would have melted away.

The Tories would be home and dry and Nick Clegg would be yet another also-ran leader of the Liberal party.

The terrible irony is that in the nauseating Parliamentary love-in we have witnessed this week, Mr Cameron has clambered into bed with the most committed Europhile party in British politics.

The Lib Dems positively want a European superstate. They would sign up to the Euro tomorrow. They would willingly surrender British sovereignty to Brussels.

One sceptic MP has warned: “Europe is developing into an empire, not a military or hereditary one, but an empire run in the interest of a narrow elite.

“Anyone familiar with the Austro-Hungarian Empire will recognize the characteristics and that in attempting to hold itself together this latter day empire became more and more repressive.”

These are the words of Gisela Stuart, the German-born Labour MP who was the British representative on the committee which drew up the European Convention.

Ms Stuart saw what was happening at close quarters and recoiled in horror. No wonder she managed to cling onto her Birmingham Edgbaston seat when all around her Labour MPs were falling like nine-pins.

If the Conservatives had adopted Ms Stuart’s tone in their approach to the EU then there would be no need for UKIP and no need for coalition politics.

The irony is this was not only the Tories best chance for years to win an outright majority in a General Election but possibly their last chance ever.

Now they have copped off with Mr Clegg, a former Eurocrat and Euro-MP, we may lose our first-past-the-post electoral system and get proportional representation instead.

That means hung parliaments for ever, with the Lib Dems permanently holding the balance of power.

Instead of the promised referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, Mr Cameron will be offering us a referendum on electoral reform.

With luck, we will reject the idea of constant compromise, back-stairs deals and cobbled-together coalitions. But we might not.

All this means the people who voted UKIP have actually got the very opposite of what they were hoping for.

By depriving the Conservatives of an outright majority, they may have lumbered Britain with a permanent Lib Dem dictatorship.

The blame rests firmly with Nick Clegg’s new best friend.

Cabinet Ministers are not taking a pay cut

2010-05-13T19:08:00.001+01:00

Ministers, we are delightedly assured, are taking a five per cent pay cut.

That is not true. All that’s happening is backbench MPs who have been jolted into the Cabinet are getting a massive pay rise – just not as massive as it would have been if they were in a Labour Government.

A pay cut is when your salary goes down. What we are seeing is a reduction in the rate of pay for the job. That’s a very different thing.

Employers in the private sector do it all the time when a long-standing employee leaves and they recruit a replacement.

Let’s not be fooled by talk of pay cuts any more than we should be taken in by the idea that when a majority of the Commons opposes the Government the Government doesn’t have to resign.

If our MPs accept the 55 per cent-against proposal, they will have proved themselves even more supine than previous Parliaments and dealt yet another blow to the fiction of Parliamentary sovereignty.

Compromises are all very well but we’re supposed to be in a new era of democratic accountability – yet the first thing our new masters do is stitch up a special deal to guard their backs and protect themselves against the day they fall out of love again.

Marry in haste....

2010-05-13T07:58:00.001+01:00

It’s a marriage made in hell. Surely it can’t last.

Over optimistically, the first stitch-up of the new coalition is fixed-term five-year Parliaments which means the next election is in 2015.

It’s hard to believe David Cameron and Nick Clegg seriously think their new found love-in will last the course. They have bound themselves together for better or worse, for richer or poorer, for half a decade.

Yet, like cynics at a shotgun wedding, everyone’s wondering if it will last a matter of months never mind years.

On the very eve of the wedding day, Nick couldn’t resist one last flirtation with a Labour Party willing to dump Gordon Brown to make itself more attractive to the Mr Darcy of British politics.

If was a flop. But the attraction remains. There are thousands of Lib-Dems who would like nothing better than a quick romp with a Socialist.

Some of them are positively repelled by the idea that they have been forced to sell themselves to the Tories. And the feeling is mutual.

For Conservatives who do not suffer from a lust for power at any price, the idea of getting into bed with the Lib-Dems is about as appealing as a night on the town with Harriet Harman.

For many Tories, it is a duty to oppose the Labour Party but a positive pleasure to loathe the Liberals.

In many parts of the country, the Lib Dems are the real opposition to the Conservatives. Worse still, the Lib Dems have a well-deserved reputation for fighting dirty. No blow is too low for them.

Now we have the spectacle of the two parties plighting their troth to one another in a ceremony as bizarre as anything Las Vegas could conjure up.

Dave was not up to it on his own; Nick was pregnant with votes. This is a forced marriage. We’re assured it’s the new way of doing things.

What that means – and this is a benefit of coalition – is that the more outlandish, mad and extreme policies of the two parties will be abandoned.

The Tories have dumped their promise to cut inheritance tax for the very rich; the Lib Dems have dropped their plans for a mansion tax on their homes.

The Lib Dems have decided a replacement for the Trident nuclear deterrent is OK after all and they’ve ditched the notion of an amnesty for illegal immigrants.

But the great Cameron give-away includes a pledge to abolish taxes for anyone earning less than £10,000 a year and a new holidays tax.

Worse than that, he’s showered Mr Clegg with wedding presents – fixed-term parliaments, State funding for political parties and a referendum on “unfair voting” via a form of proportional representation.

It’s no wonder the Lib Dem leader was seduced by the Tories. He was offered a pre-nuptial agreement most minor parties would die for.

With a bouquet of Ministerial jobs to go with all of this, the honeymoon between the two parties should be happy and fulfilling.

But like all hasty marriages, once the first fling is over and reality dawns, the chances of the couple living happily ever after will disappear rapidly.

The rot sets in when they start to bicker about money.

The Conservatives are determined to get on with the job of taking the axe to public spending. They don’t really have any choice because the markets will force it on them whether they like it or not.

This will be painful and deeply unpopular. Mr Cameron may think he’s done himself a favour by tying the Lib Dems into this.

But when Mr Clegg’s colleagues discover just how drastic and painful the cuts must be, there will be rows, tantrums and tears.

For decades, Lib Dems have enjoyed the luxury of being able to promise the earth, safe in the knowledge they would never have to deliver anything.

Suddenly, they’re in the spotlight and they won’t like it when their party is accused of conniving with the Conservatives to cripple the public sector.

Usually, the Lib Dems get by on extravagant spending promises. Today they have bound themselves to the very opposite.

In time they will complain they’re being taken for granted.

As the euphoria of the wedding breakfast and the heady days of the honeymoon become distant memories and they deal with the daily drudgery of trying to dredge the economy out of the depths of despair, the Lib Dems will question why they got into this in the first place.

By then, they will have committed themselves to a full five years in an unhappy relationship.

A newly revived Labour Party under a new leader will present itself as “the other party”.

The Lib Dems will be casting longing glances in the direction of the Labour Party even while they are stuck in this relationship with the Tories.

Mr Clegg may even start talking about divorce and throw himself at Labour. It probably won’t do him any good, though – hell hath no fury like a Labour Party scorned.

This coalition is a marriage of convenience. It will end in bitter divorce.

We just got fooled again

2010-05-11T19:02:00.000+01:00

What a far-sighted political genius David Cameron is. First he becomes the “heir to Blair” then he turns the Conservatives into the Liberal Party then he absorbs them into a coalition Government.

Was this the outcome he was hoping for all along? Is that why he did so well in blowing his party’s best chance of winning outright victory at the General Election since 1979 (John Major didn’t have such a good chance but he won anyway)?

All we need now is a stitch up over proportional representation and the Tory party might as well cease to exist for all the good it will ever do.

I tip my hat to the new constitution,
Take a bow to the new revolution...

The parting on the left is now parting on the right....

Let down, hanging around

2010-05-07T22:34:00.001+01:00

David Cameron has let down his party. He was elected leader on the promise that his new, smiley, PC-friendly Conservatism would deliver election victory. It didn’t.

He may be the next Prime Minister but he has achieved a watered-down version of power only if he can win over the Liberal Democrats and keep them on board.

His failure is staggering. A year ago, he was favourite to walk it. He was competing against the most unpopular Prime Minister since Neville Chamberlain and in the midst of the worst economic crisis since, well, Neville Chamberlain.

Yet his “heir to Blair” project came off the rails. The voters turned their backs on the A-list “Dave’s doxies” and UKIP’s 900,000 votes could have delivered dozens of more seats for the Tories, had they chosen to promise a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

Nick Clegg did worse than expected. Gordon Brown did badly, as expected. David Cameron was the biggest failure of the election and yet he is about to negotiate himself into Downing Street.

Lucky him. Unlucky Britain.

Looks like we'll hang 'em high

2010-05-05T10:37:00.000+01:00

I have no idea what the outcome of the election might be. The polls are all over the place.

One puts the Tories on 37 per cent of the vote, another on 32 per cent. One has the Lib-Dems in the lead on 33 per cent and another puts them on a mere 23 per cent.

Nobody’s got a clue who will win which is why it’s all such fun (If you’re not participating and if, like me, you think the outcome won’t make much difference because we all know the next Government has only one task and that’s a nasty one).

Before the campaign started I expected a Conservative majority of 30. That looks a bit unlikely now, though it still wouldn't surprise me.

Still, for what it’s worth, based on a cursory study of the conflicting polls and assuming they have some veracity, here’s a prediction: Conservatives 303 seats, Labour 242, Lib-Dems 76, others 29. That would leave David Cameron with the largest party.

He would have to form a minority Government and dare the Lib-Dems to bring him down. It might last 18 months or more.

Friday's on my mind

2010-05-04T19:56:00.000+01:00

It’s the elephant in the room. The huge monstrous object in the corner everyone knows about and no-one wants to discuss.

It’s the Government’s massive debt. On May 7, no matter who wins the election, the elephant will lumber onto centre stage.

It’s a terrifying prospect because – despite endless manifestos, never-ending discussions and four and a half hours of leaders’ debates on TV – we still don’t know how it’s going to be dealt with.

We borrowed £163.4 billion in the last 12 months. We owe £890 billion in total. By the end of this year, it’ll be a trillion pounds.

A trillion is the sort of sum few of us can really get our heads round. It’s a very big elephant in a very small room.

Actually, if you include the money the Government has spent on building new schools and hospitals and managed to hide, thanks to the Private Finance Initiative, we already owe £1.34 trillion.

The next Government, whether it’s red, blue, yellow or a combination of these, has no option. It will have to start paying off the debt.

At the moment, the interest on our loans comes to £35 billion a year – that’s more than we spend on defence, transport or law and order.

We can’t go on like this. As every bankrupt knows, there’s a price to pay for a mindless spending spree.

Just ask the Greeks – their day of reckoning has arrived and the country is in turmoil. Their debt has been downgraded to junk making the home of democracy Europe’s first sub-prime borrower.

Public sector workers are taking big pay cuts – 30 per cent in some cases – taxes are rising and jobs are disappearing. Protesters are taking to the streets.

We’re not as badly off as Greece mainly because we aren’t in the euro (one of the decisions Gordon Brown got right was to resist Tony Blair’s desperate desire to sign up to the straightjacket currency).

But our debts have to be tackled and, when we go to the polls next Thursday, we really won’t have a clue what our politicians will do.

Worse than that, it doesn’t really make much difference who we elect. The crisis will be the same and the cuts will be similar.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies reckons there are massive black holes in each party’s plans.

The Conservatives, according to the IFS, can’t account for £59.4 billion of cuts and tax increases. Labour can’t account for £47 billion. The Lib-Dems are £42.7 billion short.

Whoever wins, according to the experts, we face the biggest public spending cuts for decades. That’s on top of tax increases which will come to £15.8 billion under Labour, £10.1 billion under the Tories and £19.7 billion under the Lib-Dems.

Call me a bigot but I’d say the truly bizarre aspect of this election campaign has been the refusal of the parties to address these issues openly and honestly.

Cast your mind back to the days before Cleggmania swept everything before it and you will find Labour and the Tories arguing earnestly over a £6 billion increase in National Insurance.

“A tax on jobs,” they said, claiming to have identified ways of saving enough money to reverse the increase.

But it’s a sideshow. They’re squabbling about £6 billion. They should be debating how to fill a gaping hole worth maybe ten times that much.

It’s partly our fault the parties have carefully skirted round the subject. When the Tories warned we were facing “an age of austerity” their poll ratings fell and they’ve never really recovered.

We are as bad as our political leaders. We don’t want to know. We can’t really face the consequences and we’re likely to vote against anyone who puts it to us straight.

You can’t put all the blame on the parties. They’re fighting an election. They all want to win.

Like the Marxist-style cover to the Labour manifesto, with its happy family looking over the green countryside to the new dawn, they want us to believe things can only get better.

It won’t be like that. Cuts will be drastic. A hit-list from the Taxpayers’ Alliance gives us some idea of what we’re facing.

They say child benefit and free bus passes for pensioners should be abolished. Some public-sector workers should have a 15 per cent pay cut, the rest should have a pay freeze and their pension contributions should rise 30 per cent.

The Taxpayers’ Alliance wants state pensions frozen, ten per cent of public sector jobs to go and the interest subsidy on student loans abolished.

Taxes will rise – everyone thinks VAT will hit 20 per cent yet no politician is prepared to admit it – and we may well dip back into recession.

I am absolutely convinced the next Government faces widespread civil unrest – strikes, protests, riots – as reality bites.

This is not an elephant in the room, it’s a stampeding herd of elephants charging towards us while our leaders point in the opposite direction and pretend everything’s OK.

We won’t know what hit us when, after the election, we all get trampled under foot.

• It probably took about three minutes to read this article. In that time, the national debt increased by £930,636.

They think it's all over for Gordon... It is now

2010-04-28T13:07:00.000+01:00

Whoops… Gordon Brown meets a pensioner, can’t deal with her questions and ends up calling her a bigot. And she’s a Labour voter – or she was one until earlier today, anyway.

Still, at least we got to hear the authentic comments of the authentic Prime Minister. It may not be very respectful of the voters but what did we expect?

It would be interesting to hear the private comments of the other party leaders when they’ve just met someone who questions their policies and judgment. Would they be any less grumpy?

What we have here is the campaign gaffe everyone has been hoping for. Reporters don’t traipse around after party leaders hoping to catch their pearls of wisdom.

All they want is the rogue voter, the unpredictable John Prescott punch, the gaffe or – and this is gold-dust, the unguarded comment.

If it was going to happen, it had to happen to Mr Bean. It will be played ad nauseam at least until tomorrow night’s election debate.

It may well go down in history as the moment Labour finally lost the election and, in the event of a hung parliament, it will be used as proof that Mr Brown is unfit to be Prime Minister.

Mainly, though, it’s just an amusing insight into the desire of all politicians to stage-manage their public appearances.

Mr Brown’s gripe isn’t really with Gillian Duffy, the pensioner, it’s with his aides for lumbering him with an embarrassing encounter with a real person with genuine concerns who isn’t going to let him have an easy time.

Our leaders detest that sort of thing above all. Which is why Mr Brown complains the encounter was a “disaster”.

It’s only after he’s asked what Mrs Duffy had to say that he complains she was a bigot.

He privately thought their discussion was disastrous… it is now.

Hark! The sharpening of knives

2010-04-23T10:53:00.000+01:00

“He may not do a Hague and resign the day after the election but the knives will be out for David Cameron if he doesn’t deliver a victory on May 6.”

That was the considered opinion of a staunch Conservative supporter I spoke to the other day as we discussed the Lib-Dem surge and Cameron’s weak showing in the first TV debate.

Though he improved in the second, it was only to draw level with Nick Clegg. And that’s not good enough to deliver a majority Conservative Government.

Time is running out for a Tory revival. Many Conservatives gritted their teeth and went along with the new model party with its centrally-imposed shortlists, its favoured candidates, its dubious economic policies and its abandonment of grammar schools.

They even swallowed the abandonment of the “cast iron guarantee” of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

They were willing to change and compromise because they felt it was a price worth paying for the promise of a Conservative Government. Half a loaf is better than no bread.

A watered-down, pale-blue, Blairite Conservatism was, in the eyes of most of the party’s long-term supporters, an attractive proposition compared with the alternative of another five years of Old Labour with added Harperson political correctness.

Now there is a serious danger we will be lumbered with the worst of all worlds – Old Labour, Herpersonism and added Lib-Dem lunacy on Europe, nuclear weapons and immigration.

Worse still, a Lib-Lab coalition would undoubtedly press ahead with electoral reform landing Britain with smokeless smoke-filled rooms and horse-trading, unstable Government for ever more.

It’s not too late for the voters to see sense and reject the telegenic Mr Clegg’s blandishments. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

The people who voted for “dancing pig” John Sergeant or the hopeless Jedward twins are not likely to be deterred from enjoying this opportunity to go for the political underdog.

They are especially likely to back the Lib-Dems on the grounds that by doing so they deliver a slap in the face to both the mainstream parties.

Before the TV debates, it seemed disillusion and discontent with the whole political class was only likely to find expression in votes for fringe parties and maverick independents.

It wouldn’t have been a mass movement or made much difference to the outcome of the election.

Now, however, the voters have a focus for all that unhappiness.

Nick Clegg may be a posh public schoolboy whose entire career has been in and around politics. But, for many, he is still the outsider and that, alone, is why they will vote for him. He may be a novelty act with no serious track record – but that’s what David Cameron was relying on to propel him into Number Ten.

Suddenly Cameron is being seen as part of the problem, not part of the solution.

He has been badly let down by many of his MPs. The Tories were no worse than Labour in the Great Expenses Scandal except that they chose to claim for more baronial items – duck houses, moat-cleaning, tennis-court maintenance, wisteria-cutting and so on.

There is now a real prospect of the Conservatives losing a fourth General Election in a row. The blame for such a terrible outcome will be spread widely but in the end it comes down to leadership.

If David Cameron does not win, his followers will not only feel he has betrayed them, they will feel they have betrayed themselves and their own political instincts.

Politics may be the art of compromise but all the concessions Cameron has demanded from his loyal party members were part of a deal.

Members reluctantly accepted the abandonment of some of their principles because, they were persuaded, only then could the party win back power.

Now it looks as if Cameron won’t be able to deliver his side of the bargain.

God help Harry, England and St George

2010-04-22T23:23:00.000+01:00

When Sajid Javid stood for selection as the Conservative candidate for Bromsgrove a few weeks ago, he was asked what legislation he would bring in if he had the chance.

Mr Javid, a bus-driver’s son who went on to become a successful banker (should we hold that against him?), announced he would bring in a Bill to make St George’s Day a Bank Holiday.

That went down well with the Tory ladies whose votes would decide who took over from Julie Kirkbride as MP for what is probably even now a safe seat.

This may have been political opportunism on Mr Javid’s part. As a Muslim, he would have known that something patriotically English would help win over any sceptics.

Even so, it is evidence that the desire to celebrate English patriotism is gathering pace. The Welsh, the Irish and the Scots all make a big deal about their patron saints but, until recently, the English have been reluctant to celebrate St George.

That’s partly because the flag of St George is closely associated with football hooligans and right-wing nutters. Yet there is a growing sense that England is losing its unique identity in the multi-cultural melee that is Britain today.

A week after St George’s Day, we get the May Day Bank Holiday. This was introduced by the Labour Government in 1978 to mark International Workers’ Day. In Moscow they still parade tanks and rockets past grey old men in the Kremlin.

Why do we get a day off to celebrate Socialism around the world when poor old St George is almost universally ignored?

Our rulers – civil servants, politicians, the BBC and other members of the New Establishment – hate the very idea that the English should assert their own nationalism or celebrate the glories of our nation.

To them, the words “English” and “racist” are synonymous. Only on the sports-fields of the world is it politically correct to celebrate English patriotism.

Yet there is an overwhelming desire among the people who live in this country to assert our independence and individuality.

A new ICM poll by Power2010 shows growing support for an English parliament and English votes on English laws.

This is especially important if, as now seems highly likely, we end up with a hung parliament after the General Election.

The Scottish and Welsh Nationalists are desperate for such an outcome because they think they can squeeze a cobbled-together Westminster Government into giving even more concessions to their parts of the United Kingdom.

That would further entrench the unfairness and imbalance between England and the other three – much smaller – parts of the UK.

Already the Scots enjoy all sorts of concessions denied to England and yet subsidised by the taxpayers of England – from free prescriptions to free university places for every student in Europe except anyone from England.

If the English were invited to vote on Scottish independence, we might well come down in favour of it.

In the meantime, the least we can expect is that Scottish and Welsh MPs, whose devolved governments make all the decisions in their own countries, must be denied the right to change the laws of England.

And when we finally get our independence, we should celebrate by making St George’s Day a Bank Holiday.

The English may well be a mongrel race but this is a green and pleasant land and, despite all its many drawbacks, we should be free to express our pride and affection for it.

What better than to ditch international socialism and give St George his rightful place in the calendar?

St George is on the march. Across the country, people are organising parades and events in his honour – though last year Sandwell tried to ban theirs on the grounds that it would be taken over by racists.

Actually, it is the critics of “the English” who are the real racists. We are constantly insulted by our near neighbours and we’re expected to endure it in silence.

We must be free to assert our own nationality in our own country, otherwise “God help Harry, England and St George”.

Could Cameron become the new Kinnock?

2010-04-19T10:56:00.001+01:00

Nick Clegg is almost as popular as Winston Churchill was in 1945, allegedly. Not much encouragement for the Lib-Dem leader, then.

After all, Churchill lost the General Election that year despite defeating Hitler.

We shouldn’t get too excited about the Lib-Dem surge. Mr Clegg has still got two TV debates to go and suddenly the underdog outsider will be the centre of attention. Can he really maintain his position under intense scrutiny now the novelty is wearing off?

The problem for David Cameron and Gordon Brown is that in the Commons they can ignore the Lib-Dems and encourage their MPs to laugh them off as an irrelevance.

They can’t do that now Mr Clegg has been given equal billing. And if they attack him too vehemently, uncommitted observers may well come to his defence.

The British sense of fair play, which even worked in favour of Nick Griffin when the BNP leader stumbled through “Question Time”, will work in Mr Clegg’s favour if the other leaders gang up on him.

It will, among other things, show that nothing can change. It will suggest we are stuck with a two-party system where the main parties put their own narrow interests ahead of the country’s.

As a result, Mr Clegg may win even if he loses. That’s despite the Lib-Dem’s many mad policies, most notoriously their devotion to the European Union and all its works.

Still, the person who should be most worried is David Cameron. What worked in his favour to get him elected as Tory party leader has backfired spectacularly.

The young, telegenic, charismatic leader has been up-staged by someone who is, in effect, a newcomer on the national stage. Mr Cameron suddenly looks tired and old-fashioned.

The real disaster for the Conservatives is that they are not already well in the lead. Tony Blair walked into the 1997 election a good 20 points ahead in the polls.

The best Mr Cameron can claim was a ten point lead. And for all his talk of “change”, nobody is convinced that anything very much would change under a Tory Government.

For all the dancing on pin-heads involved in the argument about the economy, there is fundamentally no difference between Labour and the Conservatives on the central issue of the election – the public sector deficit.

Whoever wins on May 6 will be forced to impose swingeing cuts. No department will escape – not even the NHS where Labour are already working through some pretty significant reductions.

There is no way Mr Cameron would reverse those, so even his pledge to protect the health service counts for nothing.

The real tragedy for the Tories is that they did not have a coherent economic policy before the recession started.
They pledged to “share the proceeds of growth”. This was, on the one hand, an attempt to appease Conservatives who instinctively want less public spending and smaller government and, on the other, a bid to attract wavering Labour voters scared by the Tories’ (undeserved, alas) reputation as the party of cuts and savings.

If – before the recession – the Cameroons had made a principled case for lower taxes, less State interference and less Government waste, what they said now on the economy would command some credibility.

Instead, they aped Gordon Brown so much they are now tarred with the same brush. His failure is theirs as well because they never offered an alternative – until it was too late.

This abandonment of traditional Conservative values was aimed at winning over voters in the middle ground who were disillusioned with Labour but didn’t trust the Tories.

That’s why the party has spent the past four years desperately sucking up to every special-interest group and minority it can find. Mr Cameron wanted to prove he had changed his party.

He certainly has managed to select a new range of candidates which conforms less to the upper-middle class, white, heterosexual male stereotype he and most of his Shadow Cabinet embody.

But it has forced the party to pussyfoot around without any clear messages. The fear of alienating any small group in Mr Cameron’s Blair-like “big tent” means the Conservatives are an anaemic, bloodless version of their former selves.

By trying to be all things to all people, Mr Cameron has made the party blurry and indistinct. The only change he offers is the change of not being Gordon Brown.

His big idea of the “Big Society” doesn’t resonate with most people. The idea that armies of old folk and school leavers will suddenly get out there and become volunteer social workers may sound quite nice. It may be laudable and right.

But it won’t swing an election where the voters are disillusioned with all politicians, dismayed at the state of the economy and desperate for something to change for the better.

I have an axe to grind. I was blackballed by Mr Cameron and his cronies because I wrote that Enoch Powell was right to warn that uncontrolled immigration would change the country dramatically.

I’m sorry, I have always been sorry, if anyone regarded that as racist. It’s not about racism. It’s about the capacity of this country to accommodate millions more people.

Next to the economy, this is the biggest issue facing Britain today. Notably, it was the first question in the first TV debate between the leaders.

Nobody was listening to what they said, though, because we were all too busy taking in the novelty of the situation. In reality, though, there is little to choose between the three parties.

The tragedy for the Conservatives is that a party which should be marching towards a straightforward election victory is sliding away in the polls.

If Mr Cameron can’t deliver an outright victory at a time when the present Government should be utterly discredited then he will go down in history as the Conservative Party’s answer to Neil Kinnock.

Kinnock, you will remember, spectacularly threw away the 1992 General Election when he had everything going for him.

Until now, I have been pretty sure Mr Cameron would get in with a majority of about 30. Not that I’ve been looking forward to such a victory but because it seemed to me this was an election no half-way competent Tory leader could possibly lose.

Now, I am not so sure. I do not believe the polls will stay as they are. Mr Clegg won’t be the shiny new golden boy by polling day. He and his policies will be exposed and largely discredited.

He won’t be telling his members to go back to their constituencies and prepare for Government but some of his popularity will stick.

The blame for this rests squarely on David Cameron. He failed to set out a radical and real alternative to the present Government when he had the chance.

He talks of hope but his leadership has been marked all along by fear – fear of alienating any possible voter other than the traditional old-fashioned Tory who, he believes, has nowhere else to go.

And, of course, it was Mr Cameron who had most to lose by agreeing to the TV debates in the first place.

Presumably he thought the charm and charisma which worked on the Conservatives five years ago would be equally effective on the nation as a whole.

It has even been claimed by his cheerleaders that Mr Cameron’s lacklustre performance was the result of Old Etonian politeness. It’s hard to believe.

Unless he can muster up a bit of passion and some raw conviction, instead of big-tent platitudes, he really does risk blowing the election.

Still, democracy is a wonderful thing and it may be that a hung parliament is actually what most people want.

Tongue-lashing for Cameron

2010-04-16T19:16:00.000+01:00

Nick Clegg may have been the winner but in my view Gordon Brown wasn’t the big loser, David Cameron was.

Clegg sounded normal; Cameron’s dry-throated tenor, permanent frown and chubby pink face did him no favours.

But, above all, his spin doctors should tell him to stop pursing his upper lip and sticking his tongue out.

Spot the flying pig

2010-04-13T14:31:00.000+01:00

David Cameron is obviously not a Pink Floyd fan. If he was, he'd know that Battersea Power Station is the venue for the cover of their "Animals" album which features a famously flying pig.

The pig still flies - went to a Roger Waters concert two or three years ago where it hovered over the audience as he sang:

Big man, pig man, ha ha charade you are.
You well heeled big wheel, ha ha charade you are.
And when your hand is on your heart,
You're nearly a good laugh,
Almost a joker,

As they say, "The end of another day. All objectives met. All quotas achieved. All reports in. All customers happy and satisfied. All staff eager and enthusiastic. All pigs fed and ready to fly."

YouGov if you want to

2010-04-12T10:30:00.001+01:00

A disconcerting e-mail reaches me about the selection of Nadhim Zahawi as the Conservative candidate for Stratford on Avon.

Among the claims it makes is that conservativehome, the party grass-roots website, is refusing to post, let alone answer, any questions relating to its links with the polling company YouGov “because of their financial interest in YouGov”.

Can this be true?

Jonathan Isaby, the web-site's Co-editor, says: "We regularly publish comments that are critical of YouGov on the site, and furthermore we regularly declare that Stephan Shakespeare of YouGov has a stake in ConHome.

"In respect of any specific allegations about individuals, we naturally have to be careful when difficult-to-prove allegations about someone's personal financial dealings are made, as would any reputable publication."

Round the bend

2010-04-09T10:22:00.001+01:00

“Tory win best for economy say top bankers” declares the “Daily Telegraph”. Bad news for Cameron.

An endorsement from the most reviled people in the world is not calculated to set people’s minds at rest.

Meanwhile, Mr Cameron told the “Today” programme he was in favour of tolls on new roads “to begin with”.

In other words, a Conservative Government will almost certainly start imposing tolls on existing roads. It’s a nice little earner and can be explained away as good for the environment.

With petrol prices roaring ahead and the £6 gallon on the way, that’s not exactly reassuring for the millions of people for whom the car is still the only way of getting about in this country.

These pigs will fly

2010-04-07T15:41:00.001+01:00

David Cameron and Gordon Brown clashed over the rise in the cost of National Insurance again today at the last Prime Minister’s Question Time of this Parliament.

Dave says it’s a tax on jobs which puts economic recovery at risk. Gordon says it’s either that or put schools, hospitals and the police at risk by losing the revenue and being forced to make spending cuts.

They’re both right, of course. The only question is which one is more right than the other.

It’s true the nation’s business leaders have come out against the NI increase. They rightly say it is yet another burden on the creation of wealth and jobs.

The snag is that if the Tories cut NI, where will they find the money to balance the nation’s books?

Either they will have to cut public spending even more drastically than either party would have to do anyway (Brown’s schools, hospitals and police) or they will have to raise the money some other way.

The Conservatives’ sums don’t add up. Neither do Labour’s but you wouldn’t expect them to.

George Osborne pulls tax cuts out of his hat and everybody sits up to applaud. He’ll do it again with allowances for married couples.

We should be a low-tax economy and our Government should use the tax system to encourage what is best for society.

But we have to reduce the State’s dependence on the taxpayer first. That must mean drastic spending cuts – even in the NHS.

There is no credibility in the Tories’ ideas for the economy if they insist on protecting the Government’s biggest-spending department, waffle on about efficiency savings and deny they will raise VAT to 20 per cent.

This is a pig-in-a-poke election. I looked up the origins of the phrase and found the cartoon above and this:
John Heywood included this in Proverbes and Epigrammes, 1555-60:
I will neuer bye the pyg in the poke:
Thers many a foule pyg in a feyre cloke.

Banana republic

2010-04-06T17:41:00.000+01:00

The campaign has only just started but don’t you feel you’ve heard it all before? Worse still, do we seriously think we’ll discover anything new over the next four weeks?

There’s nothing to choose between the Tories and Labour on economic policy or anything else for that matter.

The small parties, the fringe groups and even the independents will do well. So will the “None Of The Above” party.

But they won’t get any MPs and in the end it’s still a two-horse race with only one winner.

David Cameron can’t possibly lose this election. He will get a majority of 25 to 30.

It would be a catastrophe for him personally, and for his party, if he achieved anything less than that given the incompetence of the Government he will be replacing.

There won’t be a hung parliament – that’s just some false hope for the Liberal Democrats, constitutional experts and reporters to get excited about.

Talk about hung parliaments takes place in a vain bid to interest us in this dismal democratic process and to pretend the Lib Dems have some sort of serious role in all of this.

Mind you, they’re a bigger threat to the Tories than Labour in the sense that they will probably hang on to most of the seats they’ve already got (barring Solihull, which will almost certainly revert to type).

They might, if they’re really lucky, pick up a seat or two from Labour. That would be a novel experience for them.

But in the end they will stay more or less where they are now, or lose a few seats to the Conservatives.

There is a bit of excitement about the possibility of mavericks, marginal parties and independents winning the odd seat or two. That is possible.

It would be entertaining to see Nigel Farage get rid of John Bercow, for instance. But by and large the odds are stacked against anyone outside the mainstream. There won’t be a powerful wedge of men in white suits after the next election, no matter how excited people get at the prospect.

It’s doubtful if even the three head-to-head-to-head TV debates will make any difference. They’ll only be watched by the committed.

And the committed won’t alter their view no matter what their chosen leader may say or do.

The undecided will stay undecided. They may conclude the best thing is simply not to vote. So while there is still supposedly “everything to play for”, there isn’t really.

The floating voters will float on past the polling stations on May 6 or cancel each other out if they do bother to turn up.

And who can blame them? Our would-be leaders will tell us this is the chance in a generation to change Britain (or keep Britain from changing for the worse). That’s nonsense, of course.

It’s simply yet another opportunity for the farce of democratic accountability to be played out in front of a paying audience whose views will not, in the end, make a blind bit of difference.

We won’t get asked what we think about the EU, for instance, or wars in various far-flung places. We won’t get immigration controls. We will still get Big Government and State interference in every aspect of our lives.

The policies of the last lot will be taken up by the next lot with scarcely a pause. Everything from the massively expensive waste that is the 2012 Olympics to the entirely unnecessary High Speed Rail Link will continue to absorb unprecedented billions.

We will still have an unhealthy health service, under-educated school leavers, cheated graduates, armies of people dependent on the state from cradle to grave.

We will carry on exporting jobs, ingenuity and hope. We’ll carry on bunging bankers big bonuses and sending our soldiers into battle without adequate equipment.

David Cameron may be urging us to vote for change and it’s almost certain that we will buy into that. There will be change – there will be new faces in Government, new faces on the back benches, new faces in Opposition as well.

In 1997 lots of people felt a new wave of optimism when Tony Blair led Labour to their triumph. Many people felt things really could only get better.

There is none of that optimism now. We all know things are bound to get worse whoever is in Downing Street, in office but not in power.

A Cameron victory will be welcomed by many people. But they won’t be putting out more flags and dancing in the streets.

There will be change but no difference. We are like the people of a banana republic gazing on resentfully as the limousines of the rich and powerful sweep past in the days following the latest coup d’etat.

At this election, we will get a change of Government but the more it changes, the more it stays the same. The words “deckchairs” and “Titanic” spring to mind.

Why the election will take us back to the 70s

2010-04-03T19:12:00.000+01:00

The writing was on the wall for Labour when Prime Minister “sunny” Jim Callaghan flew home from the Caribbean in the depths of the “Winter of Discontent”.

He was so laid-back about the chaos in the country he provoked the headline: “Crisis? What crisis?”

The unions were running wild, with strikes everywhere. Rubbish piled up in the streets. The dead went unburied. Hospitals treated emergencies only.

In the winter of 1978-9, punk was taking over. Bands like the Stranglers spat at their audiences in much the same way as the union leaders were spitting at the people of Britain.

Labour lost the 1979 General Election to Margaret Thatcher. Callaghan had bottled the chance to hold an earlier election which he might have won. Some things never change.

QWe've had an Easter of unrest, a Prime Minister who chickened out of an earlier election, financial chaos and strikes coming thick and fast.

Chancellor Alistair Darling even had to brave a gauntlet of pickets on his way to the Commons to deliver his damp-squib Budget.

Civil servants walked out again. British Airways is in chaos. We still face rail and gas strikes. Even university professors are threatening to down quills.

Is this just a terrible coincidence or a co-ordinated effort by the unions?

Many people thought Mrs Thatcher killed off the last of those dinosaurs in the 1980s but it looks as if they’re coming back to life like some monster from beyond the grave.

As we all know very well following the BA trolley-dollies’ strike, the Unite union has given Labour £11 million since Gordon Brown became leader.

Unite is Labour’s Lord Ashcroft pumping money into Labour seats and running the party’s campaign in marginal constituencies.

You’d have thought the unions – which, in effect, own the Labour Party – would not want to bring down this Government.

They way they are behaving suggests they’d like to see Labour kicked out in much the same way that Jim Callaghan’s lot were ousted in 1979.

It looks as if pre-election strikes are part of a long-term plot to gain control over Labour when it’s in Opposition and turn it into the left-wing Socialist party the unions have always yearned for.

Leaked e-mails from union barons show they are determined to get more value for their money.

One of them promises: “In the past unions had large parliamentary groups but few MPs actually bothered to take account of our policies. This will change!”

The unions may be flexing their muscles as a warning to the Conservatives – and, possibly, the voters – that there is much worse to come under a David Cameron Government.

Mr Darling’s Budget skirted round the terrible black hole in the Government’s finances. After the election, someone must start filling it in.

That means higher taxes and public spending cuts. Look what’s happening in France. President Nicolas Sarkozy’s plans to cut public spending have led to humbling defeat in local elections and nationwide strikes.

Of course, it could be our union barons are simply the dumb, pig-headed bullies they always were.

They certainly have no concern for the best interests of the people who pay to keep their members in jobs.

But it is baffling to watch them hammer the final nail into the coffin of this Labour Government.

Gordon Brown doesn’t really need their help to lose the election – he’s got taxi-for-hire Stephen Byers, Geoff “Buff” Hoon and Patricia Hewitt to secure defeat for him.

Even so, if the unions own Labour and they want to use their power, you’d think it was in their interests to get Mr Brown re-elected rather than see the Conservatives take over.

Yet every strike or dispute so close to the election is another good reason for people to vote Conservative.

Without the help of the unions, Mrs Thatcher would not have won in 1979. They convinced voters that the country was in a hole and it was time to stop digging.

History is repeating itself though, now we don’t have any heavy industry, the unions’ shock troops are air stewardesses and railway signalmen rather than miners and car-workers.

Labour Governments traditionally collapse amid economic chaos, industrial unrest and allegations of sleaze and graft.

This time, the unions appear to think that a few years of a Tory Government with a small majority is a price worth paying if they can seize control of Labour when it’s in Opposition.

For that plot to work, they must assume Labour could win the election after next and Britain would welcome into power a party led by someone like Ed Balls.

Chillingly, they may only be warming up for battles to come. There is a real risk they will confront a new Conservative Prime Minister just as the unions took on Mrs Thatcher in the early 1980s.

There will be riots on the streets before the year is out.

Only then will we find out if David Cameron is just “the heir to Blair” or whether he’s got some of the Iron Lady in his soul. For the sake of Britain, let’s hope he’s a Thatcherite after all.

We're all better off grounded

2010-03-26T09:53:00.001Z

The British Airways cabin crew trying to disrupt people’s flights over the coming days and weeks are just another nail in the coffin of the aviation industry.

If you aren’t caught by a strike at home, there’s every chance you’ll be hit by an air traffic controllers’ dispute in France or a baggage-handlers’ go-slow in Spain.

And you can pretty much guarantee your plane won’t take off or arrive anywhere close to the scheduled times.

While we protest mightily if a train is half an hour late, we sit in stunned acquiescence as airlines fail to tell us what’s going on for hours on end and dump us at our destinations at midnight rather than mid-day.

That’s always assuming they actually take us to the place we want to go.

It’s quite normal to expect to return to Birmingham Airport but actually land at Luton or for the flight to Madeira to be diverted to Tenerife where there is no-one to find you accommodation let alone tell you how they intend to get you to your destination.

Air travel is an abomination.

Last time I went through airport security I was frisked, quizzed, humiliated and hounded no fewer than eight times by “security”.

Every time I fly, I swear it’s the very last time. The whole process is a slow, painful, dreary exercise which makes travelling abroad the last resort.

From the moment you arrive at an airport and try to park the car on some grossly over-priced wasteland before breaking your arms manhandling your cases onto a random “shuttle bus”, you enter the 24 circles of Hell.

You are ordered to arrive two or even three hours before the departure time. That’s so you can queue.

First off it’s the check-in desk – or, in some places, the first security scanning desk – where you hang around for hours while officious little girls who speak little English ask inane questions like “Did you pack your own baggage?”

What would they say if I said, “No, my wife packed it”? Would they rip it apart in search of bombs? Would they take me to one side and strip-search me? Would they ban me altogether from the flight? Obviously I wouldn’t dare risk a joke with these harridans.

I once resisted a surcharge imposed because my single case was too heavy though, as it contained clothes for two people, it was way below our combined allowance.

After being threatened with arrest I was forced to go and buy a new case, rearrange the luggage, and go to the back of the queue. It might have been cheaper to cough up in the first place.

Then there’s security, immigration and passport control. They are often quite pleasant people who are only doing their job. We all want safe flights. But it’s more queues.

You have to remove most of your clothes – including your shoes, which means remembering to put on socks without holes.

They rifle through your hand luggage throwing out any bottled water you may have because the airport wants to sell its their own at excessive prices once you’ve made it into the shopping mall known as the departure lounge.

Here, you while away the hours waiting for your flight to be called. There’s nowhere comfortable to sit unless you go to one of the many food and drink outlets and blow the holiday money on a couple of cappuccinos and a croissant.

Finally you get to departure gate 273 by traipsing down endless corridors where the travelators don’t work. And you sit. Usually on the floor because the 100 seats available for the 350 passengers are all taken.

At this point you might pluck up the courage to ask one of the BA staff why the flight is two hours late so far and when they think they might deign to take off.

They order you, in not very polite terms, to go away and mind your own business. As soon as they have some information to impart, they will let you know.

Finally you queue again to have your boarding card and ticket checked. At length, you’re allowed onto the plane.

The cabin crew look on disdainfully as you turn right into the cheap seats and struggle to squeeze yourself in beside the fat bloke in the aisle seat who is your companion for the next four hours.

You can’t sleep because the seats are too uncomfortable so you let yourself graze on the disgusting food all the time knowing the plastic trays themselves would be more nutritious.

And all of this takes place as you check out your fellow passengers to identify the terrorist and remember those stories, real and fictional, about planes plunging from the skies.

A strike is the best service BA could offer its customers. That way, we can book to go somewhere exotic and enjoy a fantasy holiday without enduring the grim reality of having to go through with it.

Robert Louis Stevenson once said “to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive”. Obviously he’d never flown.

Cash for contacts - it's a Byers market

2010-03-22T09:18:00.001Z

Either Stephen Byers is greedy and boastful and his eyes lit up at the prospect of easy money or he was telling the truth in his interview with Channel 4's “Dispatches” programme.

He can’t, surely, get away with claiming he was merely full of hyperbole and actually he has never influenced anything.

But of course Byers and his fellow ex-Cabinet Ministers Patricia Hewitt and Buff Hoon are not alone in seeking to turn their contacts into cash.

Dozens of MPs of all persuasions will be on the jobs market on May 7 and many of them will be casting around for a way to replace their expenses with as little inconvenience as possible.

The price a commercial company might have to pay to change the law is probably small in comparison with the costs they might face if the Government is not talked out of whatever mad ruse or regulation it has got in mind.

A tame MP on the payroll is almost certainly money well spent.

The scandal here is as much about the idiocy of Government – and that means any Government of whatever party – as it is about the venality of our MPs.

Whitehall rarely considers the commercial consequences of its legislation or, if it does, it assumes that big business can somehow shoulder the financial burden without any consequences for the economy.

This is nonsense, of course. Every new law and regulation has a price. It makes this country less attractive and exports jobs, expertise and, in the long run, diminishes our shrinking economy still further.

There should be no need for lobbyists like Byers, Hoon, Hewitt and the dozens of others we don’t know about.

But “influence” is a valuable commodity in a corrupt political system where the simple expedient of asking our Parliamentary democracy to make the decisions has been abandoned.

Was Byers offering to take money for nothing or did he actually have valuable influence and contacts which could help companies buy their way to a better future? Was he being "economical with the truth" to the TV or is he being "economical with the truth" now?

Do we really think ex-Cabinet Ministers have no power to influence decisions in Whitehall? And do we really think they are not prepared to sell that influence to the highest bidder?

Lots of departing Tory MPs will be licking their lips at the prospect of a Cameron Government. Suddenly all those years in opposition will not have been wasted.

It’s significant that retiring Bromsgrove MP Julie Kirkbride, the expenses queen, was approached by “Dispatches” but turned down their offer.

She said she did not regard the approach as credible and duly alerted her Tory colleagues to the threat of a sting. Very clever, Julie, at least that’s one scandal you’ve managed to avoid.

She did not say she would have refused the work if it had been genuine. If the “Dispatches” reporter had been a bit more credible, would she have been so honourable? I wonder.