Friday 11th December 2009

8:45

With an 8.45 start, I met the education boss of Wirral, Howard Cooper, with Cllr Phil Davies who is the council's lead spokesman.  Where to site Birkenhead's new Academy was one issue we discussed. 

I was anxious not to use the Park High school site as this threatens the long term existence of Ridgeway.  But there aren't many other suitable sites - the best one is off Borough Road, but we are told by two activists that the Resident's Associations here are adamantly opposed.  If we are to get the money for the school before the clamp down occurs ahead of the election we simply don't have time to challenge how representative these views are.  I have dug in and insisted that the University of Liverpool is the lead sponsor. 

10:00

Photo courtesy of JAMES MALONEY/LIVERPOOL ECHO

By 10 o'clock I was at Birkenhead Timber Supplies in Campbelltown Road.  Almost two years to the day the business was burned out of existence, but Barry Pilgrim has brilliantly fought back and rebuilt the business with his son keeping together the staff during this wretched period.  It was wonderful to salute his spirit and determination to maintain jobs in Birkenhead. 

11:00

Photo Courtesy of Jill Quayle, Tranmere Community Project

Just as poor education results are likely to lead to permanent poverty, so does very young single parenthood.  The Tranmere Community Project would take some beating as the most innovative voluntary group in the country.  Here I am discussing with Jill Quayle what young mothers have told her with respect to being in families as a teenage parent, as well as beginning to plan how parenting can become part of the national curriculum.

12:45

By 12.45 I was visiting the residents in Over Leasowe in Eleanor Road.  This property was donated to Age Concern who then sold it on to a Housing Association. The Association now wishes, possibly, to redevelop the site.  It illustrates that, what was seen originally as a new arm to the housing movement which would attack the bureaucracy of local government administration, these programmes are now in danger of becoming as bureaucratic as the body they replaced.

13:30

Then on to the Noctorum Pensioners' Christmas Dinner, although I'm not pictured eating my share of the spread.  Some of the Ridgeway pupils were on hand supplying an entertainment which stretched through the generations.

14:00

It was then off to Wallasey to meet Jon Ward our area police commander.  We discussed the changing nature of anti-social behaviour, from a small number of lads being out of order to one which is now more cruelly operated by neighbours from hell.  Jon, as always, gave me a number of ideas which I shall try and turn into legislation.

15:15 

The next stop out was to meet two tax credit officials, Darren Snowball and Anne Cadman, and a constituent who has been sorely messed around by tax-credits' inflexibility.  My constituent who is in the TA and fought twice in Bosnia and also served in Iraq deserves a first class service rather than the shabby treatment that has been handed out.  I will be doing the appeal with my constituent.

16:00

I was in the same building for my next meeting with Brian Simpson who heads Wirral Partnership homes.  It was interesting how WPH is reinventing the wheel.  They have found that there officer in Noctorum, working along with the police and confronting parents with the yobbish behaviour of their offspring, has had a dramatic effect.  These two agencies working together have simply informed parents that if the yobbishness continues their tenancy is at risk.  This is the way housing authorities used to behave. 

17:00

Then on to my surgery in the Treasury Building.  This used to be known as the Golden Tower. It proved itself unsafe and now all that remains is the little stump of the building in which I hold my surgery.  At WPH I learned they were taking down another tower block in Birkenhead. 

19:30 

The day finished in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King for SAMM (Support After Murder and Manslaughter)'s annual memorial service.  Linda McDermott and Roger Phillips read the list of those murdered and who came from the Merseyside area.  The list was painfully long, and with each name was a devastating tragedy for each family.  As the list was read I couldn't but reflect on the trendy prison reformers who keep asserting that the murder rate is dropping!

Here are some of the candles lit for those whose lives were wickedly snubbed out.  

Afghanistan

What must have gone through the mind of British and America troops in Afghanistan yesterday when reports came through of the British Prime Minister and the American President signalling a time limit to the Afghan War?

Relief perhaps that the nightmare might now have an ending. But no doubt incredulity too.

The Taliban have proven themselves to be determined fighters, but it is surely an own goal to assume they cannot read or listen to broadcasts. Talk about shooting oneself in the foot.

The Taliban now know that the political leaders of most of NATO's effort in Afghanistan want out at a certain date. Taliban tactics will change. If they can survive the next few years they know they will win unless NATO ceases to count voters at home that think this war can be over quickly.

Both British Prime Minster and American President have caved into domestic pressure in talking about an end date, and have therefore increased significantly the chances that troop sacrifices will prove futile.

Of course a political leadership needs to have an end-strategy in mind - it would have been useful to have had one before we went in to Afghanistan. But to announce the date raises huge questions about the people that are advising both men.

Both are surrounded by advisors who have never fought in a war themselves and therefore do not bring to any discussion the practical - as opposed to the technical - knowledge crucial for conducting successful warfare.

This crude political pandering sadly swamps the good news in the President's strategy. He sees the war as one of countering insurgency and that mean the NATO strategy is now one that might lead to a successful conclusion if not a win.

Parliament

Another bullet went into the foot of the House of Commons authorities almost as soon as they announced an appeals system for MPs feeling aggrieved over the arbitrary Legg judgements imposed upon them.

Sir Thomas Legg was commissioned by the Prime Minister to carry out a an audit on the expenses of Members over the past five years. The good Sir Thomas simply went about his task making up his own rules.

The House Authorities obviously realised what a clanger they have made here and have therefore wisely instituted an appeal process.

Reading the note about the appeal process and the press release and you could be forgiven for thinking that at last and for the first time the House authorities got onto the front foot on this whole issue. But immediately the lobby reported that the Speaker's spin doctor was spinning like mad that the appeal was merely presentational and that it was really to clear up queries about Sir Thomas' inability to add up correctly. Indeed MPs failing to pay the Legg fines will have reductions made to their salaries or pensions.

None of that appears in the official statement so here is another wonderful example of the Speaker shooting himself in the foot. Wouldn't a better approach have been to say that the House Authorities accepted that there was a need for an independent appeal but that it hoped those MPs using the appeal process would bind themselves in to whatever conclusion the judge - Sir Paul Kennedy - comes to. This might have voluntarily brought a conclusion to the whole issue.

Instead the nasty little spinning operation was at work feeding the media with the sort of rough talk they love to report.

It was of course a huge error for the Speaker to even think about appointing a spin doctor. If there is one group more despised than MPs it is spin doctors.

What the public wanted was a Speaker who would talk directly to them. Needless to say the appointment of a spin doctor never came before the House, it has never been approved, and was appointed arbitrarily by the Speaker.

So instead of getting on to the front foot on this issue, this front foot now bears another brilliantly crafted self inflicted bullet wound.

For some time now it has been possible to see the four horsemen of the apocalypse on the horizon. Most economic commentators ignore their existence and the potential damage that could be inflicted on our economy if they all swept through at once.

Horse one symbolises the ruinous state of public accounts. The government first claimed the deficit to be around £85bn. This was revised in the pre-budget report then revised again to £175bn in the budget itself. I argued that these estimates looked conservative and the latest guesstimates on the deficit this year come in at £200bn and maybe even £220bn.

This sum has to be borrowed this year, and for the foreseeable future. Whether there are any lenders out there who will lend to this tune we do not know.

The government has busily been printing money and practically the whole of this funny money has been used to buy government debt.

So those economists employed directly by banks, or those dependent on bank contracts, again mislead when they prattle on about long-term interest rates being held. We simply do not know to what level long-term interest rates will go once the game of printing money stops.

Horse two is the harbinger of inflation. It simply isn't possible to increase the money supply by 300% and for there not to be a megadose of hyperinflation built into the system. Inflation is the cruellest of redistributors taking away from those who have saved and penalising most those on low earnings who have limited or non-existent collective bargaining powers.

Horse three warns of a rapidly collapsing tax base. Hamish McRae - one of the few commentators who doesn't buy the current cosy consensus - has been looking at the catastrophic fall in income and corporation tax.

VAT receipts are running 8% lower year on year which is perhaps understandable given the cut in VAT, but taxes on production - mainly income and corporation tax - are down by around 16% year on year.

There is going to have to be a mighty change around in the economy for this falling collection of tax-revenues to be reversed. Falling tax revenue means an even longer period in debt with the budget deficit in this country continuing to be far worse than any of our competitors in the G8.

Horse four sounds a jobless recovery. One of the reasons why thankfully unemployment has not risen to the level the government projected is that employers have been hoarding labour. On all counts this is welcome. But it does mean that when the economy starts to grow again - assuming it doesn't bob around the bottom for too long - employers will be using this hoarded labour to match increased output rather than enter the recruitment market.

The economic and political outcome is too grim to describe if all four horses of the apocalypse swoop down at once.

Failure to convince the markets that UK Ltd is a going concern will initially result in the rising of long-term interest rates. A killer to long-term recovery.

Then we stand to lose out on credit rating. Worse still would be if the government cannot then, even at record long-term interest rates, raise the necessary capital to bridge the huge deficit on the public accounts.

At this point it is a fight to maintain the currency.

That is why the present debate about maintaining the so-called stimulus is so naive. If only the world were that simple.

I believe we need to cut, and cut quickly, if we are to prevent the scenario I have just described coming into full force. It isn't a choice between protecting the recovery by keeping in and cutting at a later date. If we don't convince the market how serious we are about cuts soon, there simply won't be any recovery whatsoever and that is putting out future prospects using the most moderate of language.

David Cameron's speech isn't simply a raid into Labour territory. The speech declares war on Labour's reason for existence.

There have, over the past hundred years, been disputes over what Labour is or should be about. Whatever individual views protagonists have pushed, most have agreed that Labour exists to protect and advance the interests of the poor.

It is this belief in our very being that Cameron attacks by looking at this Government's record. His choice of figures is in a few instances dodgy. The data on those at the very, very bottom of the income scale are not that reliable.

But Labour has spent undreamt sums financing its anti-poverty programmes. Despite this expenditure the programme has in recent years stalled. Labour has been slow to draw the right lessons.

This has given Cameron his opportunity. Read the speech assuming you do not know who has given it.

I guarantee that most people would conclude that this was a speech by Tony Blair who had carefully blended in the best of Labour's left-wing thinking. That is the size of the challenge we now face from David Cameron.

On one track he takes the argument back to the advent of new liberalism. The idea that people should simply be free is not for him.

The conditions for freedom have to be created. And then the new Tory state ‘must actively help people to take advantage of this new freedom'.

Cameron also asks why it is that, when Labour has spent record sums on welfare, the results are disappointing. He cites the Institute for Fiscal Studies, report that the Government's ‘current strategy of increasing (means-tested) child tax credit is effective at reducing poverty directly, but its indirect effect might be to increase poverty through weakening incentives for parents to work'.

A more rounded conclusion would have been more devastating. Tax credit penalises two-parent households and therefore actively seeks to break up the natural social ecology within which children are successfully raised.

Acting audaciously he argues that the alternative to New Labour is first, to make opportunities more equal and then, second, actively, to help create a stronger and more responsible society.

There is a lot here for Labour to pinch in renewing itself. How can Sure Start and education be delivered in a way which most favours the poor while also increasing the power of parents and local communities?

His ideas are thinnest - but then everybody else's are as well - on how the state burns itself up in creating a stronger society. But at least he has started the debate on the role of social entrepreneurs and community activists.

This thinking needs to be taken much further, but it is a wonderfully bold beginning and Labour must rise to the challenge.

Labour's normal stock response of trying to ridicule him simply will not do. Cameron's aim is clear. It is to turn traditional party politics upside down. The time for jeering at Cameron is over. Labour's survival will now entail outmatching his programme.

Only now, we are told, are the markets beginning to register the fear of growing inflation.  After months of propaganda on the dangers of deflation a few of the dunderheads that run our financial system are beginning to wake up to a spark of reality. 

One sign of the change is the demand for US Treasury-protected securities which has accelerated in the past month.  Supplies for such bonds held by Wall St. dealers are at their lowest level for three years.   

Even before the last round of "quantitative easing", the Bank of England increased the money supply by a cool 280% to fight off recession.  This action may have lessened the immediate impact of the recession.  But increasing the money supply in this way massively increases the likelihood of run-away inflation. 

Most of the funny money has been used to buy Government debt.  We still have no idea, when the Government stops the printing presses and floats its record debt on the market, who out there is going to buy. 

This is where the economic debate has been made juvenile.  The Government has continuously argued that to cut back on its reflationary measures will push the country into deeper recession. 

These inflationary measures centre on the cut in VAT and similar small scale initiatives.  I say small scale initiatives because these sums have to be compared with the major reflation of borrowing £200 billion a year for goodness knows how many years in order to meet the Government deficit.

What this debate takes no account of is what will happen once the Government has to test the market with its debt.  It is here that the commitment and timing of public expenditure cuts are so important.

There will be a cost even if the markets are convinced by Government and Opposition alike that they will bring the mega deficit under control.  It is inconceivable that long term interest rates won't be pushed up that will poleaxe investment programmes on which our sustained long-term recovery depends.  The sooner the markets believe we mean business the smaller will be the rise in long term interest rates.  

Far from there being a sustained period of deflation that most commentators have signed up to, the Governor of the Bank of England will shortly have to write the Chancellor explaining why on the fiddled inflation index, prices have risen above 2% and it won't be long before we are looking back at the "good old days" of 2% inflation.  

David Aaronovitch's fury that erupted in The Times on Tuesday was doubly distressing. First, it was just riddled with factual errors some of which I tried to deal with in the letter which The Times published yesterday.

But, secondly, it was also unfair as well as being so inaccurate. Balanced Migration is not a front for me as Aaronovitch claims. Our genesis is as follows.

I had noticed in our debates in the Commons that Nicholas Soames was the brave lone spirit raising questions about the impact of the rate and scale of immigration on British society. He was initially heavily criticised by Ministers replying to those debates.

As I sympathised with Nicholas' position I joined in these debates so that he was not a lone figure trying to bring into the House of Commons the views of the vast majority of voters.

It was directly as a result of these initial debates that the idea of a cross-party group on Balanced Migration was conceived.

Nicholas was the initiator of this move. I was simply somebody who wished to support him.

Since then we have both tried to offer leadership for our campaign and no decision is made and no communication released without both of us agreeing to it, irrespective of which side of our partnership suggests the initiative.

When the history of this time is written up and historians try to understand why a desperately out of touch elite tried to impose their views on the vast majority of the community and who was first in the parliamentary arena to challenge this dangerous nonsense the name of Nicholas Soames will stand tall.

Open Primaries will change how voters view general elections. My guess is that open primaries will only operate in safe seats.

In the couple of hundred seats that will very rarely change hands voters will want a direct say in selecting the candidate who will carry the colours of the certain winner.

The practice I guess will be different in marginal seats. Here closed primaries will operate with only party members choosing the candidate. The electorate then will decide which of the party candidates they prefer in a general election.

But in safe seats the voters will know the real contest will be in the primary. They will push to select a candidate nearest to their views.

This will not only make controlling MPs in Parliament more difficult - people will have direct mandates for their particular views from their own constituents - but I guess that once open primaries are established in safe seats, the voters' interest in general elections will largely collapse.

We will therefore have as we did in the middle of the nineteenth century a very large number of seats being uncontested at the general election.

Shouldn't the money for open primaries therefore to come from the same source as general election funding? If the cost of general elections fall as a result of open primaries, what would be wrong in transferring those 'unspent sums' to financing open primaries?

When Labour came to power in 1997 we were fixated with the idea of spending to save, i.e. spend now to save lots of money later.

Shouldn't such a similar campaign begin in spending some of the general election money up front in order to safeguard democracy?

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Soon after I joined the Child Poverty Action Group in 1969 I began preparing our pre-budget report. When completed it went under the title The Poor Get Poorer Under Labour.

The Wilson Government took very little notice of us deriding our claims by asserting that nobody in the country would believe our findings

In the run up to the 1970 election Peter Townsend, CPAG's chair and I lobbied Iain McCleod the Shadow Chancellor to respond to our Poor Get Poorer Under Labour McCleod pledged to increase family allowances.

McCleod died weeks after the Heath Government was formed and his successor, Tony Barber, ratted and introduced what was then called the Family Income Supplement. Later it was named Family Credit and now it flies under the flag of Tax Credits.

How was CPAG to lobby a government that had ratted on one of its main election pledges? Access to a Prime Minister is always very limited.

One task I did every day at CPAG was to read the court page of the Times. Information was much fuller then and would give me not only the billing of official dinners, but also the guest list.

Access to Number 10 might have been very limited for CPAG. But who were the friends that Heath liked to have around him at official gatherings.

I noticed how two names regularly occurred. One was Dame Peggy Shepherd and the other was Diana Elles. Diana was the first person I contacted.

She proved herself to be not only wonderfully professional but a committed social reformer. Our link with Number 10 was made, but also to other Ministers as well.

I well remember in those early days asking Diana to come with me when I went to see Sir Keith Joseph. During the meeting he disputed one aspect of CPAG's work.

Diana intervened. If he doubted what the CPAG said he should stop the meeting now to go with her and visit area where she was a voluntary worker.

The Department for Health and Social Security as it was then named had headquarters in Elephant and Castle, and Diana waved her hand to the window described where she would take Sir Keith.

He was obviously just testing our argument and he immediately changed tack. But it was telling of Diana that she was not only at that meeting, but that she was prepared to challenge her Secretary of State in front of CPAG.

I never lost touch with Diana. She continued the work that Eleanor Rathbone had begun to equalise the distribution of income within families. Her high intelligence, brave heart and noble spirit marked her out from many of her contemporaries.

Diana's obituary was published in The Times on Friday.

A new group, Open Up, is calling for all MPs to submit themselves to an open primary before the next election. This is the one move, the campaign claims, that would do more than any other to purge the political system of the expenses scandal.

All campaigns overplay their hand. Open Up is no exception.

A renewal of our political system will take more than open primaries. But the campaign's message is a thoroughly good one and would begin the long process of reform.

How can it be taken forward? Take my own case. I have long campaigned for open primaries, especially in safe seats.

When I first mentioned this idea to colleagues a Parliament ago I was accused of simply wanting to draw attention to myself. "You know you will win so what's your point?", was the common retort.

I would now like an open primary in Birkenhead more than ever. I have been accused, with polite language, over my expenses.

I have replied to Sir Thomas Legg about the cost of my second home.

I await his reply but I still feel unclean. His letter bangs around in my head incessantly. This is the basis of my renewed interest in an open primary.

Such a move would allow my constituents to pass a specific judgement on the question of my expenses, but also my record as their MP. They would have a choice between me and other candidates wishing to stand in a safe seat.

This is not a choice that my constituents get in a general election. Whenever that occurs they also have to consider how their vote will affect the formation of a government and who will be Prime Minster.

So, over to you, Open Up. If I can persuade my local party to back me, will you come and organise the contest?

The Totnes open primary cost £40k. Does your campaigning extend to raising the money to put your idea into practice?

For you not to respond positively would be a lost opportunity to expand the means by which democracy is renewed in our country.

Failure to respond positively would also label Open Up as part of the campaign that is much enjoying denigrating MPs but which is not coming up with anything positive.

As MPs we have much to answer. But there is a huge danger in this expenses campaign. It is doing much to boost newspaper sales, but it has yet to begin influencing the renewal of our form of representative and responsible government.