Coming soon - 'The Smoking Gun'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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'

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?

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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....

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

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

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

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

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

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.