Keeping the faith

March 2, 2010 — admin

Time for a decisive, DC - what's it to be?

It all seems as though it could go terribly wrong after a YouGov poll found that the PM was on course to claim another five years in power, something unimaginable even four weeks ago. DC gave his speech on Sunday in Brighton to a generally good reception but couldn’t avoid a look about him that was rather too close to someone living out their nightmares. I thought it was a solid speech and nothing more – designed to steady the ship and motivate the crew rather than inspire a nation through new discovery. But I remain confident that Cameron the performer will outshine either of his rivals whenever he gets the chance.

What he needs to start to do is give people a reason to vote Conservative – something I’ve been telling the party locally for a number of months now. Gordon Brown remains our biggest asset and I have no doubt that whatever the polls say, he will not win the election. But that doesn’t mean a Conservative victory – as the Times put it, it is isn’t that people don’t think DC is capable of being a good PM, it is that they don’t understand why he wants to do the job.

I know that DC feels the desire to reform our country, he is deeply interested in social justice, cares hugely about health and education and wants to address Britain’s copious social problems. He wants to foster an economy that allows people to reach their potential and steer a dignified course on the world stage. Why? Because it’s the British Way – fair play, compassion, reward for the successful and support for the struggling. I think the term “patriotic duty” was taken out of context by the press but it wasn’t the most wise; I know what he meant but I’m not sure it was the best way to express it. He needs to express it how the man on the street would ie the country at the moment is in a mess – unfair and injust after 13 years of Labour failure. DC wants to be the person to put that right.

But we need to spell out in practical terms what the Direction of Travel is and how that’s done. And we need to give people some reasons to vote Conservative as opposed to reasons to vote against Gordon. I think DC’s policy of attacking the PM has reached its optimum effectiveness and has now started to decline. I want to see less barracking and more focus on what a Tory government will deliver. Cllr Richard Lowe, an emminent Tweeter, collated the following:

1. A cut in net immigration of 75%

2. No more early release for convicted criminals

3. A two year freeze in council tax

4. The abolition of inheritance tax for all families except millionaires

5. Cutting politics with 10% cut in the number of MPs and 5% cut in pay

 6. Headteachers to be put in charge of school discipline

7. Restoring the link between the basic state pension and earnings

8. New laws that will give householders more rights against burglars

9. The budget deficit cut in half by 2014 so future generations don’t live in debt

10. Abolition of Labour’s expensive ID cards

I’m more comfortable with some things than others on that list but politics isn’t an all-or-nothing craft. These would be 10 reasons that if nothing else explain to a public fed up of waiting what the Conservatives stand for. And most of them represent current policy - not that you’d think it from our reticence in coming forward. So come on DC, let’s hear about them and let’s have a bit of fearlessness. Ignore those who say that we are losing support because we’ve gone to the left and keep to the centre ground. Stop bashing Gordon – tempting though it is – and start selling yourself, selling the party and its promises and selling a Conservative Britain as a place that has voted for change and is fairer for all.

I don’t believe that Labour will win the election, the polling in key marginals is still heavily in our favour. But we must show some mettle, some work ethic and a willingness to let people into our confidence if we are to finally summit the mountain we have struggled for so long to conquer.

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Wasted opportunity for change

February 25, 2010 — admin

The debate tonight in council over whether to change the voting system in Woking to one all-out election for councillors every four years instead of the contrived thirds system we have at present was a frustrating experience. I had hoped against hope that the sensible cross-party voices of David Bittleston, John Kingsbury, Peter Ankers, Ric Sharp and Richard Sanderson would pursuade some of those with fears about all-out elections to take the plunge.

It was a big ask and needed a two-thirds majority (24 out of 36 councillors) to get through – in the end it was defeated 16-17 by those wishing to stick to the current system. There were some really good points, ranging from the structural ie that all-out elections provides a period of election-free space to encourage longer-term thinking and decision-making by councillors to the equitable ie that resident in three-member wards such as Horsell West get to vote three times as much as those who live in one-member wards like Brookwood.

There are also questions of clarity for voters, of being able to spend less time electioneering and more time engaging with residents and of the £100,000 three-years-in-four cost benefit. But the sticklers, of whom the “radical” Liberal Democrats formed the backbone, won through, obviously worried about their seats and the prospect of four years in the wilderness. Denzil Coulson told the chamber that in 2011 he was sure the Conservatives would be unpopular and thrown out of administration – and then proceeded to defend the thirds system by way of it being more “democratic” because it forced people to work together and gave councillors contact with residents.

Lib Dem leader Ian Johnson too said that the council was best when it worked together on projects and made out that all-out elections would somehow preclude this, allowing one party to bully its agenda through. Other thirds supporters opposed the idea of too radical a change in the council’s makeup after a four-yearly election, with it taking time to retrain new councillors. Yet successful authorities like Guildford, Elmbridge and all the Berkshire unitaries – as well as all London boroughs – are elected this way and seem to overcome these issues.

More to the point, the strong leader model adopted by the council tonight also seems to point to the need for a all-out election, as the leader’s four-year term should co-incide with the council’s. By keeping thirds, members have essentially nullified the strong leader idea and kept the system we have now. Woking is a good council but it is not helped by its marginal and shifting control. It needs a stability and permanance that at present only the officers of the council enjoy.

A number of members felt that those in safe seats were more in favour of all-out elections because they were less likely to find themselves booted out for four years. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again – as someone who is standing for election in a marginal ward, I’d rather lose the seat and not have the opportunity to stand again as a consequence of the best system than win it and have to work within a second-best model that hinders strategic thinking and bold decisions.

It’s a shame that I have to get party political but I think that the Liberal Democrats have let the borough down by not being bold enough to embrance this change. It is only fair for me to mention Cllrs Ian Eastwood, Ric Sharp and Richard Sanderson as the honourable exceptions to this – they voted against the rest of their party in the free vote and also Independent Peter Ankers for coming down on the visionary side too. Interesting to note that Lib Dem PPC Rosie Sharpley, your agent of change if the Lib Dem literature is to believed, didn’t feel able to vote for it on this occasion.

The next opportunity to get rid of our thirds system is 2015. By then I hope the case will be clear.

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Constitutional choices

February 16, 2010 — admin

Away from all the excitement of electoral mud-slinging, there are some very important changes being debated at a meeting of full council on February 25. They surround whether a) the council should be run by a strong leader and cabinet or have an elected mayor and b) whether the council should elect all its councillors every four years or, as it does now, elect a third of councillors three years in every four.

Last week, the executive took the decision not to endorse any one of these options and to allow the full council to have a debate and free vote on the issues. The understanding I have formed from the discussions I have had is that councillors will not vote for change and will keep a strong leader model elected by thirds – but they could of course prove me wrong!

In the first matter, they are entirely correct to eschew an elected mayor, who would have the power to appoint members of the executive committee from any party regardless of the wishes of councillors. This is in fact nothing short of amateurish political engineering by Labour – hoping that they can claw their way back to power in local government by getting a few Labour (or “independent”) mayors elected in what usually amounts to a silly popularity contest and running the council contrary to the wishes of members genuinely elected locally by their communities.

In such instances, the mayor would be able to pack the executive with members of minority parties and potentially run councils with as little as 20% of the council membership. Clearly that sounds quite attractive to the PM, but has he thought about areas outside London that might be fruitful ground for the BNP and how this silly mayoral idea could help that party control its first council? I hope that members reject this senseless scheme outright – Woking simply doesn’t need and wouldn’t benefit from an elected mayor.

On the second issue, I believe there are compelling reasons to favour all-out, once-every-four-years, elections. It saves money, saves people voting every single year and gives administrations a proper four-year term to get things done rather than worrying about the electoral consequences all the time. In addition, it aids member independence and makes it more difficult for officers to start running the policy show.

But among political parties, it’s not so popular. It means that they get out of the campaigning habit and have to re-invent the wheel every four years. It also means that if any member gets voted out, they have to wait four years for another go – and the same goes for overall control of the council. Losing your seat in a local election contest is a grisly business – I’m beginning to properly understand the work that needs to be put in and for all that to come to nothing must be dreadful. 

But there are worse things than being in opposition as a councillor – it’s an opportunity to re-group, reassess the area’s needs and your policies and to come up with something worth fighting on. I’ve seen all-out work well in Surrey Heath, Guildford and Waverley and I believe it is right for Woking too.

Losing seats and control is all part of politics and members must make a decision on this for the good of the borough. My feeling is that four-year terms are conducive to better decision-making and member-led authorities. That may not be the decision that will be reached – but I hope that it if is not, it will be for concerns other than members of all sides fearing the effects of losing power. If that were the case, Woking would be missing an opportunity – and not for the best of reasons.

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Cadbury cremed by bad law

February 2, 2010 — admin

I’ve always been partial to Cadbury’s Creme Eggs and for the past two weeks, I’ve been buying boxes and bringing them into the office, exhorting my colleagues to “eat them while they are still British”. Alas, no more. At 1pm today, the iconic British company became the plaything of an American conglomerate whose trademark cheese products are, astonishingly, even less related to actual cheese than Creme Eggs are to eggs.

PM has been busy lately, launching a attempted decapitation strategy on DC yesterday in a speech filled with more chutzpah than a New York second-hand car dealership. Now he’s been to meet the Kraft CEO, who’s not averse to audacity herself on the evidence of this takeover, he is sagely warning that he’ll be looking for more detailed assurances in the coming months. I don’t think that’s going to worry Irene Rosenfeld much – she’s only 4% short of the shares she needs to take Cadburyoff the stock exchange altogether.

And what PM is less keen to let you know is that it was Labour, through the Companies Act 2006 that effectively removed the right of government to protect our long-established businesses from takeover. The act implemented the EU’s Takeover and Transparency Obligations Directives, which harmonise takeover law throughout the EU and prevent company boards from doing anything to frustrate takeover bids. But surprisingly, it’s not the EU’s fault.

Despite the obvious agenda of EU member states to fix takeover legislation to favour their own subsidised corporate environment (ever wondered why so many German, French and Spanish firms can afford to buy British companies and infrastructure?) the directive did leave EU governments free to restrict takeoever law in their states. Labour didn’t take that opportunity and so the government is now in a very weak position to do anything about Kraft or dictate terms to it once Cadbury is bought.

There’s nothing intrisically bad about large British companies getting taken over. It puts money into shareholders’ pockets and since many shareholders are pension schemes, it helps to boost flagging pension values. Certainly Kraft has chosen to pay well over the odds for Cadbury. But it is important that we have British companies continuing to develop and emerge on the global market as players.

And with little or no protection from foreign predators, that is less, not more, likely to happen.

Posted in Economy, Europe, Labour, Law. Tags: , , , , , . No Comments »

Faint praise

January 6, 2010 — admin

Faint praise from the future powerbrokers

A decent performance at PMQs doesn’t mean much when your own party starts tearing into you a few minutes later. The PM is in real trouble at the moment, not because people love DC or because of the polls but because a large section of his own party have no confidence in him as their leader.

Worse, some of them are so convinced that the election is lost that they are prepared to challenge him – why would you do that if you thought there was a cat’s chance that you could win? The news channels have been doing this to death all afternoon and evening, although they have been successfully spun by the government into the “Ministers back Brown” line.

Actually, they’ve been doing no such thing. While Ed Balls and Alan Johnson did give clear messages of support, it is to note that others have not. The Chancellor satisfied himself with:

“As far as I’m concerned we should be concentrating on the business of government and getting through the recession. The PM and I met this afternoon and we discussed how we take forward economic policies to secure the recovery. I won’t be deflected from that.”

Not a ringing endorsement, then. Harriet Harman, ambitious deputy leader said she the Cabinet were “getting on with our jobs as ministers in a government that Gordon leads”. She might as well have added “for now” on the end of that statement. So too David Miliband who, despite not responding at all for ages, eventually chipped in with an account of his day, saying he “was working closely with the prime minister on foreign policy issues” and “supported the re-election campaign for a Labour government that he is leading”.

For now. And is that he Gordon Brown or he David Miliband?

Balls and Johnston aside, if I were Gordon Brown, I would be really worried. Clearly most of his cabinet are sticking with him for the sake of the election rather than the fact that they believe his leadership is right for Britain. How many of them seriously believe that he would make a better leader of the country than DC? Are they prepared to guarantee that they would support his continued leadership after the election? Or even if they won it?

Lobby journalists have been busy assuring us that most backbenchers support the PM – of course they do. Lobby rumours spread quickly and no-one wants to stick their necks out to leaky journos. I’d keep an eye on this one – it’s possible that at this very late stage the Labour party can’t be bothered to get rid of the PM. But if there were two years to run, he’d be gone. And it might happen yet.

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Sky is the limit

January 1, 2010 — admin

Only class war to offer voters

No such slacking over at Sky News, where clearly the fact that the company doesn’t get a £3.5bn windfall from the government every year means that journos have to be in over the New Year period.

It doesn’t seem to have made them any less subservient to the PM though as they dutifully report his pitiful whingeing about what he thinks the country would look like under the Conservatives. I’m happy to quote:

“The Prime Minister says he was resolved to delivering “radical” public service reform, “a new, cleaned-up politics” and tackling terrorism as priorities in the new year. Mr Brown also promises to publish the first part of a “prosperity plan for a successful, fairer and more responsible Britain” later in the week. The proposals include investment in high-speed rail, aerospace, the digital economy, clean energy and other “industries and jobs of the future”.”

Radical public service reform went out of the window with Frank Field in 1998, his talk about cleaning up politics would be more believable if it were backed up with action and, er, I thought that we’d been tackling terrorism since about 1969. And we know that Labour tackling terrorism is code for taking away more civil liberty.

As for his prosperity plan, we’ve had stories about high-speed rail before, aerospace is anyone’s guess, clean energy is nothing new and the “other” stuff is just bluster. Investing in all of these things is easy to announce – far more difficult to deliver on time, to specification and to budget. Government, particularly during the Labour tenure, has a dreadful record on overspend and delayed capital projects from the MoD to IT systems across all government departments.

And where is all this investment going to come from by the way? It’s just nonsense. Labour has nothing new to offer apart from class war and divisive rhetoric. I hope the public votes for an alternative  – and frankly that includes the Lib Dems in northern inner-city seats where the Conservatives won’t win – to deliver a strong verdict against this shambles of a government that has led Britain to the brink of bankruptcy and hastened our decline.

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Hutton for punishment

December 23, 2009 — admin
Wide-eyed but not bushy-tailed

John Hutton

Up until yesterday, I didn’t care much for John Hutton – a particularly strident Blairite who failed to make any impact at all in work and pensions, business and regulatory reform and defence. Quite a list of cabinet jobs to be rubbish at.

However, the revelation that he was able, along with the rest of us, in 2006 to see that Gordon Brown would be a disaster (he used a rather more colourful adjective to proceed the word “disaster“) as PM leaves at least a vestige of his reputation intact. Eddie Mair extracted this information from him yesterday in a fantastic interview that suggested Hutton has rather given up on Parliament – he was certainly not combative in his attempts to deflect the question.

It all asks the obvious poser of why, when big beasts such as Hutton, John Reid, Alan Milburn and Stephen Byers were all pretty much implacably opposed to Gordon becoming PM, they didn’t put up more of a fight to stop it. I suspect that although Hutton may have only recently given up on Parliament, they all gave up a while ago.

How strange too that Hutton couldn’t show the same perceptiveness about the war in Afghanistan that he reserved for the leadership of his own party.

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Martyr’s Lane is safe

December 15, 2009 — admin

Surrey County Council announced today that it was no longer pursuing Energy from Waste Plants, known to you and I as incinerators, in Surrey. Thus ends one of the most expensive and fiercely fought policy battles in the area’s history.

capel

There will be no incinerators in Surrey - including Martyr's Lane

The county council has obviously come to the conclusion that residents in all affected areas would fight any proposals to the wire and they couldn’t justify the cost in terms of money and time in battling their own residents. It’s a message that should have got through a while ago – when you find yourself being taken to court by the people who fund your wages and pensions, something is not quite right.

There is an hint of new brush as well, with Cllr Andrew Povey making what I hope will be the first of many sensible and pragmatic decisions in his new regime and change of direction with what came before. Instead of the waste plants, there will be an Eco Park that will cost a quarter of the £200m Surrey wanted to spend on its incinerators and a gasifier and anaerobic digester will be among the “attractions”.

So that means that Martyr’s Lane will not be the site of an EfW plant, which is a relief following the recent good news about Heather Farm. Whether or not it’s the future of waste management, the authorities failed to convince residents of its need and there is no reason why a government should do anything to make its people sleep less easy at night.

And I’m delighted to see some common sense finally emanating from county hall.

One final thing though – the Surrey Joint Waste Management Strategy for 2006-2025 still says:

“Whilst acknowledging the concerns of some people, but with due regard to the waste hierarchy, we consider energy-from-waste recovery via incineration (with the most up to date controls on and effective monitoring of emissions by the Environment Agency as the most practicable (sic), financially viable and sustainable approach currently available for that residual part…[that cannot be dealt with any other way]“

Will this strategy now be changed? And won’t that require all 12 Surrey councils’ consent?

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UKIP’s major point

November 28, 2009 — admin

An interesting story in The Times today about the relationship between UKIP and the Conservative Party, which threatens to become even more bitter than that between the Tories and the parties of the left.

The story says that UKIP offered to not fight the general election if the Conservatives gave a written guarantee (as opposed to a cast-iron one) that a referendum would definitely be held after the election and that its MPs would be given a free vote in a Commons ratification. He got no answer, although both the BBC and The Times say that Lord Strathclyde acknowlegdes the meeting have taken place.

In case anyone didn’t know, UKIP elected a new leader last week, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, to take over from Nigel Farage. This is obviously his attempt to make some headlines and announce his presence on the scene and that’s all fine. I’m glad that six months ago, the Conservatives had the foresight to see that Lisbon might be ratified ahead of an election and that this delicate siutation required careful planning, not more rash promises. In addition, a pact with UKIP endorses an openly Eurosceptic view, which may have caused further conflict within the party. We were right to reject their silly politicking.

What is interesting to me is the idea that, this one policy demand satisfied, UKIP was prepared to stand down from elections. In addition, Lord Pearson continued:

“And then when we had the referendum – which we believed we would win – we would then be out of the European Union and then at that point UKIP, well it would have been up to UKIP, but it would probably have disbanded because its major point would no longer be in existence.”

I thought this was a major party with policies on a range of issues. It appears, in fact to be a single-issue pressure group that stands for election and paradoxically ends up taking votes from the one mainstream political party that can deliver its single issue objective. It’s an incredibly short-sighted organisation.

If, as I hope it will, Britain ends its membership of the European Union within the next 10 years, there is a great deal that will have to be planned for to ensure that we remain competitive and politically engaged inside and outside the EU. For 35 years, our politics has operated on various fringes of Europe and to place ourselves outside that will require plenty of adjustments. Adjustments for the better, perhaps, but adjustments nevertheless.

But as soon as the exit from the EU is achieved, that appears to be UKIP’s tipping point to disband according to its new leader. Never mind the implications of the exit, never mind the work that follows it – we’ve got we wanted and now we’re off. This group doesn’t know the first thing about running a country – it’s only interested in tunnel vision politics and single issues. Successful politics understands that issues tend to happen simultaneously and everything, as Lenin once said, is connected to everything else.

So if you aren’t that keen on Europe and are thinking about voting for them in Woking or anywhere for that matter, try asking this of your UKIP candidate when they come knocking – what happens during life after the EU? Then ask yourself whether you really want people bought into a party with no concept of strategy to be your MP or local councillor.

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If only they’d learn again

November 18, 2009 — admin

 

Balls - politics comes before opportunity in education

Balls - politics comes before opportunity in education

For goodness’ sake – Ed Balls is at it again. I spent yesterday writing about Labour’s total misunderstanding over how resources fit into strategy and how all too often they have become the strategy.

Judging by today’s lead story in the Telegraph - can’t think where they got it from – he’s been chasing headlines again with the second plank of Labour’s confusing non-strategy, legislation. When there’s no strategy and resorces fail, Labour’s next instinct is to legislate. But without a strategy and resources, they usually end up legislating the unenforceable or ineffable.

A legal right to a good education is a total nonsense. It is impossible to legislate adequately for, to enforce and shows an alarming lack of faith in the comprehensive system to be necessary in the first place. On the other hand, a moral right to a good education is part of every government’s contract with its people. But to confuse the two is ludicrous and could be disastrous.

I can imagine left-wing organisations being formed to sue a Conservative government five years’ hence on the basis of this bill. A decent and effective education system available to all and free at the point of use is a vital cog in society and the supreme aspiration of any administration. But it’s impossible to eliminate altogether individual shortcomings and this silly piece of idiocy from Balls is a dangerous and malicious blight on the future education system, which may become less effective through fear of litigation.

The man is patently unfit to occupy such a great office of state and his department unfit for purpose if it believes this to be beneficial to young people. Shameful, shameful, shameful. And it still doesn’t address issues of underachievement in education.

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