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The local elections last week in Wirral gave us a foretaste of the general election.
 
I thought David Cameron immediately after the last election would have gone for a short-term arrangement with the Liberal Democrats while awaiting another election six months hence. I was wrong.
 
Instead the Prime Minister formed his coalition. The original Tory decontamination strategy has failed. Decontamination would now be continued by joining up with the Lib Dems.
 
I had always thought the process would end up with one party gobbling up the other, either by having a coupon election with a single coalition candidate against Labour, or by reinventing the National Liberals who would pledge themselves to take the Tory whip in the next Parliament.
 
The Lib Dems had no candidates in Wallasey so gave the coalition partners a free run. But was there also a payoff in Birkenhead?
 
Before the election Jeff Green laughed that Labour would easily win Prenton but that we would not take Oxton. I thought it was up to voters to decide who would win.
 
There was no Tory campaign Oxton and there were rumours that the Tories gave information about their members and voters to the Lib Dems.
 
Our local elections were therefore an evolutionary stage to the big fight in 2015. Will we see Liberals withdrawing in many seats, as in Wallasey, or will there be in other areas more informal arrangements as in Oxton, where successful candidates are returned by courtesy of the Tory high command?

Friday was a return visit. I had already been to The Lauries to meet ‘Get into Reading’.
 
I met, yet again, a wonderful group of young people. All of them had an extraordinary tale to tell.
 
Some months ago I was invited to speak at the National Literacy Trust’s conference. The intention was to speak on the ‘foundation years’ report but the other speakers were so good that I stayed for most of the day.
 
The organisers asked the assembled company who couldn't knit. I was the only person to put up their hands.
 
The audience was then asked who were really good knitters. Practically every hand went up to proclaim their skills. Who can't knit very well produced a few hands.
 
At this point a huge ball of wool was produced. “Who will now teach Frank?” was asked.
 
For one horrible moment I thought I would be allocated to one of the brilliant knitters. As soon as I was told that I would be taught by a less-good knitter I relaxed and in no time I was knitting away.
 
This was the model that the National Literacy Trust scheme uses. As mums begin to read they help another mum. Like me with the knitting the new mum is put at ease because the person helping her isn't, yet, a smart aleck.
 
And so it was last Friday. The small group had transformed their lives by reading and were now all helping other people surmount the barriers they faced. Congratulations.

The Duchess of Cornwall visits the Tranmere Community Project this week. The purpose is to see at first hand the innovatory work the centre is undertaking.

How can we ensure that very young mums and dads build the best possible world for their child?
For children the best start in life requires two parents.

That is why this project attaches such importance with the young dads.

Their absence has a big effect on their child's life chances.

It also is likely to have a big effect on them, their feelings about themselves and how they are to build successful lives. But I guess many of you are thinking as to whether it is sometimes too early to be a mum.

You are right and some of the young mums are going into schools with this message.

The Duchess has come to Birkenhead because she is genuinely interested to learn more about this work but also she is very committed to what happens to children in the first years of their life.

She knows how important they are. Which grandmother does not?

So the visit throws up a challenge to Birkenhead and to the entire country.

We need to think much more seriously about young people learning about parenting in schools and also to ensure that all the services we pay for as taxpayers are wrapped around young people and their needs.

Here’s a totally new agenda and I hope to report to you soon on a number of path breaking initiatives.

THE Children’s Commissioner for England has released a report on school exclusions.

I have written to David Armstrong, Wirral’s Chief Officer, to ask how Birkenhead schools fare.

Governments insist that schools ensure that an increasing number of pupils leave with minimum school leaving requirements.

Michael Gove tells heads to crack down on disruptive pupils. But schools get a bad mark for excluding the troublemakers.

So what do schools do? According to this week’s report schools, like any other body, try and get around regulations.

Schools admit that they are illegally excluding pupils by sending them home for unrecorded “cooling off” sessions, coerce them into other schools or refuse to allow them back until their parents come in for a meeting.

I have asked David Armstrong whether he would ask heads, anonymously, to tell him what is really going on in Birkenhead schools.

It is very difficult to teach well with disruptive pupils in your class. But there are often very good reasons why those pupils are disruptive, and there is only so much teachers and heads can do to control bad behaviour.

We know that a baby’s life chances are possibly determined at age three and certainly by five. Schools can only make a 10% difference on a child’s outcome after this date.

10% is crucially important for life chances, but much of today’s uncouth behaviour is set in those early years.

I hope, once David has the information, we can have a meeting with Birkenhead schools so as to spread good practice.

A highlight for me last Friday was the meeting in Oxton on how to deal with the owners of dogs who foul our pavements. This little summit was called by Matthew Patrick who heads the Labour Action team in the area.

The widespread publicity for our meeting had already galvanised the Council into action. There will be a doubling of the numbers of the officers on dog patrols.
 
The meeting asked me to follow up on four issues. Does the local authority already have the power to fine dog owners who are not carrying dog bags when walking their dogs?
 
The meeting also wanted to know whether the local authority has the power to reintroduce dog licenses, to chip stray dogs and whether the council could toughen up its policy in publishing names and photographs of anti social dog owners.
 
The meeting asked Oxton Society representatives, who run their own scheme making dog dirt bags easily available in the village, if they would help spread this practice to other community based groups. Yet another suggestion was whether residents could call on Neighbourhood Watch schemes to help report anti-social dog owners.
 
The Council to its credit has increased significantly the number of fixed penalty fines on dog owners, up from one the year before to eighty in the last year.
 
The action team will be reporting back on all these issues to local residents. It will also be distributing an easy guide to residents so that they can report to Streetscene antisocial dog owners.

Two events stand out from the trips I made on Friday. Cathy Earlam is a star on any criteria. With supporters she has established Tomorrow’s Women. This project for women who are on probation, or have been in prison, is simply uplifting.

It is how voluntary organisations should be run. There is almost no money and every pound the project gets is matched by one hundred pounds worth of effort and commitment by the volunteers.

It challenged my views about prison, particularly for women with children. With a project like this, working closely with probation, why are mothers sent to prison? Shouldn’t working with Tomorrow’s Women be the first option that Courts suggest?

And how might the rest of the voluntary sector respond? Women leaving Styal Prison have to make their own way back to Wirral by bus and two or three train journeys. Could not local churches run a rota to make sure that every woman is met and brought back safely to Tomorrow’s Women?

The theme of goodness in this world was picked up again at the Wirral Youth Heroes Awards, established by Martin Dickson and Jaimie Fernihough as a Christian response to last year’s riots.

Martin unashamedly spoke about the role of love and grace in making this world a better place. It was stunning as was Andrew Lancell’s comparing that took up this theme.

But love is not, sadly, a strong enough motive with which to govern the world. Justice is, which brings me back to Tomorrow’s Women. 

MOST of the reforms I propose are suggested to me by constituents. Last week, a constituent wrote to me over the monopoly position United Utilities has in our area in supplying water and providing sewage services.

Why, my constituent asked?

Why indeed?

The case the Thatcher government made for privatising the Utilities – gas, electricity and water – was that competition would bring down the prices. That was the promise. I have not yet been able to find out what the reasons are for water to be treated differently from gas and electricity. I’m still burrowing.

I cannot see why supplying water is different from supplying gas or electricity. There is a national grid for all three services. Gas and electricity companies sell supplies on the basis that they put back into the  national system what they sell. What works for gas and electricity could surely
be made to work for water.

But my constituent set me thinking about how we as consumers can get the best deal from the privatised utility companies.

Cool Earth, a rainforest charity I helped to establish, is generously supported by an energy company called Ovo.
Ovo has a fair price pledge whereby they guarantee to offer customers the cheapest electricity and / or gas deals. And, at the end of the contract period, will automatically pro-actively offer the next best deal for their customer.

Why shouldn’t the Government compel gas and electricity companies to supply the same service to all customers as Ovo does? And include the water supply in this initiative?

THERE are real problems with our Local Authority. Much public attention has been focused on politicians, but I believe we are missing a bigger issue.

I have had the privilege of representing Birkenhead for well over three decades. Over this time I have been concerned about the quality and judgement of a number of our chief officers. It was on this very issue that I called a debate in Parliament yesterday.

Here I was able to detail a whole series of major failures. There was a failure by the present chief executive to submit on-time an application for a £5m grant to English Partnerships. The money was lost.

Then there was the appalling decision to use £14m to invest in the Cheshire Lines building even though Wirral had the building on a rental agreement, and the money could have been spent on Birkenhead Town Hall.

Then there is the failure to apply on time for a new Academy in Birkenhead. A £40m grant was lost.

We now have two major reports being discussed next week at Council which again question the abilities of some of our chief officers. The independent review of the Council's response to claims made by Martin Morton is exclusively centred on the quality and judgement of senior officers.

I also referred to the Audit Commission a major contract tendered by officers in the Technical Services Department.

That is why in Parliament this week I called for the Government to send in Commissioners to look carefully at which officers are up to standard and which should leave the authority forthwith.

I Chair the Liverpool City Region Child Poverty and Life Chances Commission and the press have got hold of one of our recommendations.

It concerns a minimum pricing for alcohol.

The recommendation is partly in response to the representations many of you have made to me. The complaints cover small general stores and the pricing in large supermarkets.

Some of you may have heard on the radio last week of shopkeepers saying that they can now buy their alcoholic stock cheaper at a supermarket than they can gain it from their wholesalers.

A number of constituents have also complained to me about the behaviour of some small corner shops who both sell very cheap alcohol and who sell to underage customers.

Wirral Standards have followed up on all of the complaints that I have passed to them on this second score, but they are powerless on the first.

Hence the recommendation that of the Commission.

Our recommendation is that each of the six Merseyside boroughs should enforce a minimum 50p unit cost on alcoholic sales. This will be welcomed by many of you. But other constituents will have some justice on their side if they claim that, as they only drink moderately, why should they be penalised by higher prices by people who cannot hold their alcohol.

It is a fair point. But I think the argument is swayed nevertheless in the other direction.

I would nevertheless be very pleased to hear how we might improve on the policy the commission is advocating.

LAST week I published a pamphlet on extending the right to buy to housing association tenants. How would that policy work out in Birkenhead?

When I first came to Birkenhead, housing was the number one issue at my surgeries. That issue then disappeared. Now it is back with a vengeance. Why?

Part of the answer is that tenants now want better accommodation. Wirral Council responded by pulling down many of its properties, thereby cutting supply.

Another reason was that much of the best council stock was sold off and not replaced. So why sell more?

I may have been the first to advocate the sale of council houses. Back in 1975 I tried to persuade Labour’s Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan to make “sales” Labour’s policy.

Civil servants reported it was impossible. Mrs Thatcher got in and showed that governments could sell on a mass scale.

But Mrs Thatcher changed one key part of my original proposals – that all the money from sales should be used to build new homes.

Housing associations now have some of the best stock and most tenants in the best houses have no intention of moving. These homes rarely come up for reallocation.

My idea is to see how many of these tenants would buy, releasing capital to build new homes.

This policy would give local housing associations capital to begin a serious building programme which itself will create local employment.

It seems to me to be a win-win situation. Will the government?

JOHN Syvret and his team at Cammell Lairds are now working hard to reform technical education on Wirral.

They are is leading a consortium, backed by other employers, Mersey Maritime Group, the Universities, Wirral Council and educationalists, that is bidding to establish for a new University Technical College.

The Germans began serious technical education in schools well before the 20th century. And despite the 1944 Butler Act, well over half a century later, technical education never really took off here. The purpose of the Baker Dearing Trust, of which I am a Trustee, is to make technical education a real option for young people.

Already a number of University Technical Colleges have been established and early in the new year the government will announce another ten.

The first results from the colleges are encouraging. On average they seem to be on course to gain 70% five GCSEs including English and maths.

In one or two areas heads were known to try and persuade their difficult students to opt for their UTC. Yet attendance at those already established is better than their mainstream counterparts, even though the college day is longer and there are fewer holidays. This is a real opportunity for Wirral and I am so glad that Cammell Laird, one of Birkenhead’s most successful businesses, has worked to ensure its success. We should know in the spring if Birkenhead has landed this education prize.

I went with the Mayor to a Christmas concert in aid of the Clatterbridge Hospital League of Friends.  As many of you will know All Saints’ Church in Thornton Hough is part of a rather beautiful village, much of which is the creation of the First Lord Leverhulme.
 
I was surprised by two aspects of the concert.  The first was the quality of the music.  One expects good singing and organ playing.  But here, too, was the Rock Ferry Salvation Army band.
 
It was of stunning quality.  Brass bands, I am told, are dying out.  There is no sign of that in Rock Ferry. 
 
The age range of the band varied from teenagers right up to senior citizens.  I wonder how many other organisations continue to present opportunities for youngsters to learn instruments?  And isn’t this particularly important when schools are having to cut the range of music activities they can provide?
 
Then a second, double, surprise.  The Mayor, speaking at the end of the concert, talked of the importance of, when she was a nursing sister, the purchases that the Friends made of quite basic things – curtains between beds – as well as making sure that those people who had no relatives received Christmas presents.
 
Ken Edwardson is a retired surgeon who operated at Clatterbridge then talked of the Friends providing some of the basic equipment for operating theatres. 
 
I somehow think we will be hearing more about the importance of the League of Friends in the years to come.

And so to the Older People’s Parliament.  I had agreed to speak on anti-social behaviour.  I had no idea just how engaged the Parliament would be with this topic.
 
I have looked at Labour’s strategy to counter anti-social behaviour.  I lobbied against the form it took.  I believe modelling it on the criminal justice system was a mistake.
 
The aim of the policy must be to prevent anti-social behaviour, not create criminals.
 
The Coalition Government is undertaking a review as the number of orders is falling and the numbers of people breaking the orders is growing.
 
The idea I have put to the review is to put communities not officials in the driving seat.  There is already a statute that allows neighbours affronted by anti-social behaviour to go into court, to ask for a warrant to be issued against the offenders but, because the Bench will rule that this is a private action, the warrant is not enforced by the police.
 
The simple reform I proposed to the Government is to give magistrates the discretionary power to rule that the neighbours before the Bench do represent a public and not just a private interest.  Once it’s a public interest the magistrates can instruct the police to enforce the warrants and bring the culprits into court that day.
 
Neighbourhood watch schemes would be an ideal body through which to pilot this reform.  That was the suggestion made by the Older People’s Parliament and it is one which I have put to Lord Henley, the Home Office Minister undertaking the review on anti-social behaviour.

The strength of local communities in Birkenhead never ceases to surprise me. 
 
In my local Church, St. Peter’s in Rock Ferry, for example there is a thriving group of devoted individuals who not only safeguard the church, but run in it all manner of organisations for the public good.
 
On Friday I finished my day at the Mayor’s fashion show at House of Fraser.  There was a real buzz there and our Mayor reported that well over £800 had been raised for her chosen charities in one evening’s work.
 
I did not however want to miss out on the Oxton Art Fair.  I have only once I think made the opening night but I have always called in during the following days.  I gather the opening on Friday was heaving with enthusiasts and supporters.  I visited on Saturday morning.
 
My first surprise was to see the number of people walking to the Williamson to gain entrance.  I thought I might have the gallery to myself but there must have already been 100 people there. 
 
The friendliness of the gathering was so marked.  We were enjoying seeing what local artists had produced over the past year and we were enjoying talking to one another.
 
Future events by the Oxton Society were strategically advertised on one of the tables.  Mr Cameron, if he wants to learn about the big society, ought to come to Birkenhead. 
 
The Big society is alive and thriving although its existence and health seem to have escaped some of our major politicians.

My Westminster work and the work I undertake in Birkenhead naturally overlaps.  It did so rather dramatically a week ago. 
 
A couple of years ago I was asked to chair the King James Bible Trust.  Our single aim was to celebrate during this year the 400th anniversary of the great book's publication.
 
I confess that the reason I accepted the invitation was not religious.  I did so because of the role I see the King James Bible playing in developing our culture.
 
400 years ago was a time of great creativity and I am not sure whether an English language as we now understand it came into existence then because of a number of supreme writers, like Shakespeare.  Or whether this huge talent was merely incidental. 
 
Whatever the truth is we gained a translation of the Bible which people, as themoved around the world, they took with them.  English became, as a result, one of the great world languages. 
 
This side of the King James Bible, as well as its importance as an agent of Revelation, was celebrated last week in Westminster Abbey before Her Majesty The Queen, The Duke of Edinburgh and The Prince of Wales.
 
A huge coach load of pupils from The University Academy of Birkenhead were present at the service and one of their number, Riona Kelly, read the longest and most difficult of the lessons.
 
Riona was outstanding.  At a small reception afterwards The Prince of Wales asked to meet her so that he could personally thank her and comment on her extraordinary abilities.

The one topic above all others that my constituents raise with me is immigration.  This, despite the fact that Birkenhead is far less affected by the arrival of newcomers than many other areas of the country. 
 
In response to this legitimate lobbying from Birkenhead voters I established a cross party group calling for balanced migration.  The British economy benefits from some workers coming here but our group is gravely concerned about the scale of current immigration.
 
When MPs wanted to improve their standing with the public the Common’s authorities hit on the idea of allowing rank and file voters to choose topics MPs would debate.  Recently we put online a petition that Parliament should debate immigration.
 
The response was extraordinary.  Before the first seven days were up over 100,000 voters had registered a request for an immigration debate.
 
I appeared earlier this week before the group of fellow back benchers who decide which topics will be debated.  I made a plea.  We should have a full day’s debate on how we prevent our population from being grown primarily by immigration.
 
A Labour member of the committee, significantly, made the comment that she thought her colleagues should be mindful to grant this debate even without the runaway success of the e-petition.  But the e-petition is increasing the pressure.
 
It is not too late for more Birkonions to make their views known.  The site where you can register your opinion for this vote is here.  
 
The selection committee is expecting the numbers to continue to soar.  Please do not let them down.

The Prime Minister is wrong if my post bag is anything to go by.  Constituents do want a referendum on the EU.
 
I spoke and voted in the House on Monday in favour of the country having such a referendum.  But why did the leaders of all three parties impose a three line whip in support of the government line?
 
As part of repairing the damage to politicians’ relationship with voters the government  instituted an e-petition system.  A hundred thousand voters signing the same petition could trigger a debate here in the Commons. Monday’s European debate was decided largely by constituents emailing a request for such a debate.
 
The main reason why I voted for a referendum was that voters feel that they have been deceived on this issue, and that they have never been told the truth.
 
Edward Heath negotiated terms for Britain’s EU entry, without any authority from the electorate.  Heath made much afterwards of how he had tricked the electorate into voting for a common market when the aim was a single European state.
 
I voted for the amendment partly to repair some damage with the voters.  The Labour government promised a vote on the Lisbon Treaty and failed to deliver.  The Tories offered a vote and then said, once in power, it was too late to have one.
 
My guess is that when we have the referendum – and we will have a referendum – most people will want to strengthen the government’s hand by demanding a major return of powers from Brussels to Westminster.  And what is so bad about that? 

Last week Wirral Council published its anti-poverty strategy.  There couldn’t be a better moment.
 
Unemployment in Birkenhead now equals 3,724.  The numbers of poor children have also risen. 
 
This is where Wirral’s anti-poverty strategy comes in.  The council’s budget has been cut by the government and the quest is on as to how to use the budget more effectively.
 
A Liverpool headteacher, who lives in Birkenhead, wrote to me on Monday describing the state of some children aged 3 for whom she cares.  This headteacher underscores the point I made in The Foundation Years report I submitted to the Prime Minister before Christmas.
 
The life chances of children are probably determined by the third birthday and are certainly decided by the fifth.  Hence the importance of moves Wirral Council have recently made.
 
Sure Starts will be working with Home Start who have an excellent record in reaching families for whom Sure Start and other statutory services are intended.
 
One can’t be surprised if people find the task of being a parent difficult for as yet no one ensures that everybody is taught how to be a good parent.
 
The overall aim of the programme must be to ensure that each year more children are ready to start school.  We can only be successful in this goal if we work alongside parents for it is they who spend most time with their children.

The government has announced a second wave of University Technical Colleges.  Five exist already and 13 more will join those ranks and offer a new kind of education.
 
I am anxious that when wave three is announced, next year, we will have one of these colleges in Birkenhead.
 
For most of my time as MP I have been conscious of how we fail many young people by offering school courses which bore them.  I had long talks with Mrs T trying to persuade her to establish a network of technical schools.
 
So when Lord Baker, himself an education secretary under Mrs T, set up a Trust to establish a string of UTCs I jumped at his invitation to join his Trust.
 
Our aim is to allow young people the chance at 14 to begin to gain a high class apprenticeship.  My own view is that many young people who successfully gain quality apprenticeships earn more over their lifetime than quite a few students who go to university.
 
Our bid will be headed by John Syvret at Cammell Lairds and when we’re successful, it will be the first UTC headed by a successful business man.  Other colleges have a lot of support from business leaders and companies, but no bid has yet been headed by one.
 
It’s crucial of course that our proposed UTC works with existing providers of apprenticeships, and particularly the Metropolitan College.
 
Esther McVey has been very helpful in keeping ministers informed of our developments that are backed by Wirral Council.

One of the first cuts the government made was to abolish the Educational Maintenance Allowance as we have known it. The scheme was massively expanded under the last government as a means of encouraging poor students to stay on in further education.
 
The first term under the new scheme has now started and the figures show how the cuts are working.
 
Under the old scheme pupils received £1100 if their parents were on a low income.  Students also received a daily contribution to their main meal.
 
I asked our Sixth Form College in Birkenhead how many pupils received help last year and how many are receiving help this year. There were 349 first-year students and 345 second year students gaining EMAs last year.  And now?
 
11 students have been awarded the guaranteed bursary of £1200. A further 129 students have gained the discretionary bursary but this amounts to only £300 a year plus a £320 meal allowance.
 
Many of the parents whose offspring stayed on in further education believed they would gain the £1200 grant and feel that the government's literature misled them. Compared with last year however 220 less first year pupils received support.
 
When the government was pushing these cuts through the Commons I argued that Labour should do a trade off.  To cover this cost the government should allow class sizes to rise a little.  There is no evidence that the size of classes particularly benefits poorer students.  EMA however did encourage poorer pupils to stay in education.

I have more news for you on the Boundary Commission’s proposals for Birkenhead. You may remember that two weeks ago the Boundary Commission published potential new seats for the whole of England. The Wirral was obviously affected.
 
Parliament gave the Commission it's terms of reference. Previous Commissions, when setting constituency boundaries, had to take into account such important matters as local communities and natural boundaries, like rivers and motorways. This time the Commissioners were told to draw seats of equal size.
 
Three of the Commission's proposals for the Wirral are generally sensible. Wallasey has an identity and this is protected. And so too does Birkenhead, except for the proposal to move Bidston Ward into Wallasey.
 
There are a considerable number of Tory voters in Wirral and the Commission created a seat that will generally return a Tory member. The three other seats will usually return Labour members including the Mersey Bank seat which has a strange geographical shape.
 
Birkenhead Labour Party met last Friday and agreed unanimously to support the Commission's proposals, providing the Bidston Ward comes back into Birkenhead. This will require Birkenhead surrendering one of the additional wards it has been allocated.
 
The local Labour Party also agreed unanimously to write to the National Party saying that its alternative proposals for Wirral, with three constituencies running from the Mersey to the Dee, do not have Birkenhead’s support and cannot be presented to the Commission as a consensus view of our area. We are determined to protect Birkenhead’s identity.

How can we protect the identity of Birkenhead in the new world where Parliamentary seats must be made up of equal numbers of voters (and increased numbers from the last election)? 
 
That is the task of the Boundary Commission which, last week, transferred part of the heart of Birkenhead, Bidston and St James Ward, into the Wallasey constituency.
 
For Wirral the Boundary Commission proposed a ‘Conservative’ seat on the Dee side, and three ‘Labour’ seats on the Mersey side, the most southerly extending into Cheshire.  I shall tell the Boundary Commission that I accept the broad sweep of their findings.
 
The Bidston Ward however comes to within a couple of hundred yards of Birkenhead Town Hall.  It is a nonsense to think that this could ever truly be part of Wallasey.
 
To make up the numbers, the Boundary Commission has added the Bebington and Upton wards to Birkenhead.  Both wards have a claim to be part of Birkenhead as they were both part of the old County Borough.
 
But I don’t want to propose anything that damages Wallasey, and for Bidston to be transferred back to Birkenhead, Wallasey’s numbers will need to be lifted. 
 
Will Wallasey publicly support a rearrangement to put Bidston back into Birkenhead and, in return, take another bordering Ward?
 
If Wallasey and Birkenhead Labour Parties make proposals to protect the integrity of our two towns then it is likely the Boundary Commission will back us.  If both parties fight for their own corner, it probably won’t.

Keep the Cash! is an organisation that helps students to take a long hard look at where money comes from and how best to spend it.
 
They were in the University Academy of Birkenhead last Friday and I went along to see what the pupils made of it. I had to declare a double interest: I chair the Academy’s governors and I also suggested that Keep the Cash! might come in to the school.
 
The project succeeded way beyond my expectations. The pupils were divided into six households.
 
Of the five members of each household only one was in work, and four were on benefit
 
A first task for each household was to sign a tenancy agreement.  The landlord refused to negotiate on the rent or the fixed term agreement. Tenants were locked in for the usual 12 months.
 
The four members on JSA all to quickly realised that the payment they would get in housing benefit nowhere near covered their share of the rent. The money would have to come from their weekly benefit income which was meant to cover all other items too, food, clothing, and everything else.
 
I could only stay for an hour before moving off for the rest of my engagements. But I talked to each group. Every household reported on the same terms. Getting a job is crucial. Life on benefit is not for them.

The Sunday Telegraph and the Guardian have covered the amendment that Nadine Dorries and I have tabled to the Health and Social Care Bill which will be debated in Parliament next week.  The reports both misunderstand the point of the amendment and the Parliamentary procedure which will be followed.
 
The aim of the amendment is to ensure that the advice and counselling services, which tax payers provide for women when considering abortion, are provided independently from the body that carries out the abortion.  The abortion charities are reported as seeing this as an attack on their work.  It isn’t.
 
What has been noticeably missing from these bodies are data which would show the amendment to be unnecessary.  I hope before we reach the debate next week each of the main abortion charities will publish how many women make use of their counselling services and how many following this service do and do not go on to have an abortion.
 
The Government, I understand, will announce in the relevant clause establishing a duty on local authorities to provide public health services, that it should, as part of its purchasing programme, ensure that the advice and counselling provided should be separated from the abortion providers. 
 
There will be a debate on this clause but I’d be surprised if the speaker would allow any amendment to it.  I shall be seeking from the Government information on whether it intends merely to ask local authorities when purchasing abortion services to keep counselling separate from the service itself, or whether it will seek power to impel a separation.
 
If the first option is taken it will be up to Local Authorities to separate services or keep them as they are. If the Government is seeking to compel local authorities to purchase advice and counselling separately from the abortion services, then it will need new legislation.  If it goes down this road I’ve asked that it brings forward the Statutory Instrument in a form that the whole House of Commons can debate and vote on.
 
What has surprised me most about the campaign against the amendment is that, I think, it has missed the main point.  I don’t believe the amendment poses any threat to women wishing to have an abortion. 
 
On a separate point, I do think that the transfer of abortion monies into the public health budget might well limit the size of these budgets, unless they are ringfenced.
 
Let me argue by way of analogy.  Sure Start budgets were maintained in money terms (although not real terms) and put into a new unringfenced budget for local authorities.  The overall budget was called the Early Intervention Grant and it was up to local authorities to decide how it spent the money within that fund.  Many local authorities have decided to cut Sure Start budgets and spend the money on other intervention services. 
 
Is the Government going to go down the same route with the abortion budgets being merged in a general local authority public health budget which does not ringfence the abortion monies?  It seems to me that those who are rightly watchful about abortion services might now address themselves to this issue. Any threat to abortion services will come from a failure to ringfence the monies currently spent on these services, not from separating the counselling services from the abortion services.

Last week I reported that over 2,500 applications had been received for the ASDA jobs. The work ethic is alive and well in Birkenhead. 
 
That number however drives home the point of just how many people would be working in Birkenhead if the jobs were available.
 
But that does not mean that everyone is as keen to work as these 2,500 applicants.  There are some constituents who have never worked since leaving school, who have totally unrealistic aspirations about the jobs they will accept, and are in denial over what they can offer an employer.
 
Of course these younger constituents have to take some of the responsibility for their own predicament.  But I think an equal culprit is our political system.  Successive governments have been reluctant to bring some young claimants’ demands about jobs and pay into the realms of reality.
 
The one really good move the last Labour Government did was to introduce the Future Jobs Fund.  Dole money was used to offer places with real employers. 
 
Once we have such a scheme again I believe we should cease paying benefits to young people who disregard such a scheme.  Young people will be working for their benefit and gaining real work experience in the process.
 
Each of them would know what is required about getting up on time, of fitting in with one’s workmates, and putting in a day’s work.  This will make the chances of getting the next job that much more realisable.

By the time applications closed for ASDA's 400 jobs, 2500 people had applied online. This shows just how strong the work ethic remains to so many in Birkenhead.
 
Getting an application in online is only the first hurdle. Asda is now going through the 2500 applications to choose those who will move into the interviewing process.
 
Two thought struck me. How many other big companies insist on applicants applying online? It cannot have been that long ago when a young person wishing to make a new start, could apply in person, impress the boss, and as a result be offered a job.
 
Once in the company a young person could prove their worth and win promotion. Now, however, that young person wishing to make a new start has to be at the very least IT literate.
 
My other thought comes from a conversation I had last year with a small group of young people who had never worked since leaving school. Their views are not typical of most young people leaving school, but do present a particular challenge.
 
These young people told me they wouldn't even consider a job unless it was paying £300 a week. The young people could hardly read or write and yet expected an above average wage.
 
This group is clearly not going to find work no matter how many Asda opportunities come to the town. How will the next Labour government face this challenge?
 
I'll have a go at answering this question next week.

The public meeting is alive and well.  That is the conclusion I draw from last week’s public meeting on Arrowe Park Hospital.
 
It was well ordered, dealt with a single issue, and kept to time.
 
We met at Charing Cross Methodist Church at 7pm last Thursday and finished dead on 8.30.
 
The meeting was called to see how far staff and the public shared the concerns of Wirral MPs on falling staff morale.  A whole range of staff spoke.
 
All showed a degree of courage in doing so, and particularly those who showed how happy they were in their jobs, as they were rowing against the tide.
 
But the majority of contributions concerned falling staff morale.  It is on this score that Arrowe Park is doing badly.
 
In the last year most hospitals have recorded a fall in staff morale.  In Wirral however it has declined faster than elsewhere.
 
There were three members of the Trust Board at the meeting.  They supplied answers to some specific questions. They also reported back to their chair who wrote to me the next day. The Wirral MPs will meet him soon to discuss the meeting’s outcomes.
 
I was left with one overwhelming impression.  The NHS has taken the place that Christianity once held in the affection of our nation.
 
Voters will watch health changes with hawk eyes.  But changes there will be over the next decade.
 
Politicians will need the best skills to deliver a health service to meet the public’s expectations.

I suppose the growth figures could have been worse - but not much worse. The official line claiming that the extra bank holiday for Kate and Will's wedding accounts for the poor results shows how precarious the move out of deep recession is.
 
Worse, there is no obvious political remedy.
 
There is no question in my mind that the government's tough talk about cuts in future years has had a stabilising effect on Britain's long-term interest rates. If these rates begin to rise, and currently they are just above the German rates, and less than a fifth of those applied to Greek government debt, our future recovery will be put in jeopardy.
 
But it is also clear that, with all this tough talk, and inflation coming in at well above wage levels, consumers cannot or will not spend. And without increased spending, it is unclear where growth is going to come from to ensure the government can meet its deficit reduction target.
 
This dismal analysis points to a sustained period of very slow growth. The government must at some point make a strategic decision.
 
It has to make a fine judgement. To do nothing will expose its deficit reduction plan as being unobtainable in the timescale is a set.
 
This could trigger a fatal increase in long-term interest rates which would then put a kibosh on any growth prospects.
 
But to announce tax cuts and key benefit increases could have a similar effect on the money markets in pushing up long-term interest rates.
 
The government may wish to leave matters for a month or two to see if better figures are in the pipeline.
 
If I was the Chancellor I would use this time to ask the Office of Budgetary Responsibility to model both scenarios. But I wouldn't make public the fact that I had made this request.
 
My guess is that the OBR would, on balance, favour the second option of tax cuts and selective benefit increases.
 
I would then ask them to set out the new timescale, adding additional years for deficit reduction, stating clearly when they would expect the budget reduction programme to be successful.
 
I would then use the publication of this report to claim that I had behaved responsibly in asking the OBR for the report.
 
The only option he now has is to choose between these different risks. It's a risky strategy for the Chancellor. But that's what we pay him for.

The public eruption of disgust at News International's operation of hacking the phones of ordinary individuals seems to miss two key aspects of this horrible drama.  The most serious side of it for me is the allegations of police corruption.  Similarly I don't believe it weights properly the influence of the Blair political leadership. 

Empires, including media empires, rise and fall.  That law of nature will inevitably apply to the Murdoch empire.  

But we ordinary citizens need a police force beyond reproach.  The most seriously long-lasting consequence of this phone hacking scandal is the bungs that have been paid to the police. 

A Judicial Inquiry needs to root out this corruption.  And that Inquiry must be helped by an independent investigation into the Metropolitan Police. 

The Met Police are now part of the problem not the solution. 

Similarly, Labour needs to face up to the corrupting influence on public life of Blairism.  Blair, Brown and Cameron all compromised themselves by allowing Murdoch chiefs to be part of their private social lives. 
We pay prime ministers to remain independent. 

But we also need answers that enable us to understand to what extent Blair's craven actions towards the Murdoch empire encouraged that empire to believe it was beyond the law? 

I nominated and voted for Ed Miliband for one key reason.  I believed his success would ensure that that part of the Blair project, which I believe to be corrupting of public life, would have no place in the new leadership. 

His subsequent judgment on this score is not without some questioning.  But on the broad sweep he has cut loose from those old bearings and that is a most important piece of news for the country.

I shall vote to delay a decision on BSkyB. However that is the easy part of what now needs to be done.

The Bank of England has estimated the loss of output since the great crash. At the same time it has made its most explicit proposals yet on the future of our banking system. Andrew Haldane, the Bank's Director for Financial Stability, puts the loss of output from a bank generated recession at £7.4trn for the UK.

He puts the hidden cost to taxpayers of implicit support to the big UK banks at more than £50bn.

No wonder he has views on banking reform - or, as he might have put it, how can we stop these banks buggering us up again.

There is a debate raging between the government and its allies on the one hand, who argue for strengthening the existing tripartite system, and the Bank of England, with the Tory Party in tow, who argue for splitting off retail banking from the speculative activities which almost brought the world's banking system crashing down around our ears.

Andrew Haldane's stance is important because it adds intellectual weight to the Bank's stance. It also makes the following decisive point.

He compares the US banking system as it was under the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 and the modern Basel Two International Capital Regime.

He observes ‘Glass-Steagall was simple in its objectives and execution. The Act itself was only 17 pages long (but its effect on the banking system lasted) well over half a century without a significant systemic event in the US'.

Haldane then contrasts the regime that followed, namely, the Basel II. ‘This was anything but simple, comprising many thousands of pages and taking fifteen years to deliver (and was) overwhelmed by the recent crisis scarcely after it had been introduced'.

Equally telling is Mr Haldane's comments on the collective intellectual stature of the banking community: ‘this crisis has provided many examples of failures rooted in an exaggerated sense of knowledge and control. Risks and counter-party relationships outstripped the banks' ability to manage them'.

This is the most important statement that has been made from within the banking community about what future direction the country should take in reforming the banking system. I read three daily papers, the Independent, The Times and the Financial Times. What does it say that it was only the Independent that carried a report on Andrew Haldane's paper?

Is this a topic of which Times' readers should remain ignorant? And how can the FT explain its silence when it devoted two thirds of one of its pages to a photograph of Mr Blair and his speech yesterday?

It is hardly news for the previous Labour Prime Minister to support his colleagues in the coming election battle. It might have been worth a two thirds of the page had he refused to do so.

The FT's silence on the Banks' report shows an extraordinary set of priorities from our country's leading financial newspaper.

The Government today recycles much of its previous statement on social care. A compulsory levy will be introduced to create a universal system of social care for adults in England, according to the plans now unveiled by ministers.

What will follow is Labour wins? At best a new commission will be established to look at when and how the fees should be applied. If we are lucky we will then get a new system implemented in the parliament after next.

During my time as an MP I have undertaken two major funding pieces of work. The first was on building up a funded pension scheme to wrap around the current state pay-as-you-go scheme. The aim was to pay a pension above means-tested assistance for every citizen who played the game.

The second piece of work centred on, as it was called then, long-term care. I believed we were entering into an age when the size of the state would be questioned.

I was anxious for this not to be a negative debate with downsizing being equated with cuts in what the government does.

I certainly believe the government should get out of some of the areas in which it is now involved. But part of the new contract with taxpayers was to welcome its exit from areas we can best look after ourselves, and encourage new forms of collective provision covering new needs.

This was part of how I hoped we would renegotiate the national insurance contract. If we are going to have a system that rewards those who play by the rules, then national insurance will have a growing role and means-testing a diminishing one.

The two pieces of work made the following distinction. As practically all of us retire we need to save for that retirement, i.e. transfer existing income to a claim on future income.

But most of us, thank God, will not need long-term care. Hence my argument for a reinvention of national insurance where the risks are spread over all of us and not concentrated on the one in seven or one in eight of us who will need intensive care for longish periods towards the end of our lives.

The idea was to have this new scheme up and running before the end of the 1997 Parliament.

The details of these publications can be found here.

Acres of newsprint and hours of media time have been taken in discussing Alistair Darling's revelations on the Jeff Randall show on Monday. The BBC's political editor, for example, suggested that the Chancellor was demob happy. Whatever the results of the General Election he thought Alistair Darling's time at the Treasury was now limited.

I think there is a much more plausible explanation. When the Prime Minister last shuffled his Cabinet he was intent on putting Ed Balls into the Treasury.

But that re-shuffle was done at a point of weakness for the Prime Minister. Ministers were resigning and, if the media reports are to be believed, Alistair Darling insisted that he stay at the Treasury - or he too would quit the Government.

What surprised me was how ‘easily' he rolled over with respect to the content of his Pre Budget Report, towards the end of last year.

How we deal with our mega debt issue is now the prism through which all political issues must be viewed.

The titanic struggle between the Prime Minister and Chancellor resulted in the Prime Minister greatly moderating the serious message on cuts. Some of their details should have been published in the Pre Budget Report.

Now wind fast forward to last Monday. My guess is the Prime Minister is again doing his heavy treatment on the Chancellor trying to ensure a pre election Budget.

The Chancellor, above all people, is strategically placed to know that if such a dish were to be served up to the bond markets there could be a sterling crisis and a failure to sell an ever-increasing number of tranches of government debt.

So, unlike the BBC political editor, I don't for one moment think the Chancellor is demob happy. I think he has recovered the steeliness he showed at the last reshuffle. My guess is there will be increasing tension between Nos. 10 and 11 Downing Street right up to the presentation of the Budget itself - and then beyond.

It is very difficult to get space for the counter argument to the meddling of neo Keynesian views about the economy. Last Friday the FT carried two letters with a huge appendage of signatures making what is now thought to be the Keynesian line, on the dangers of cutting back before the recovery gets underway.

I have been trying to argue that this is a false dichotomy. The issue is whether people will go on lending us money now that the Government has halted printing funny money to buy its own debt, and has a clear limit on how much of any gilts issue it can force the banks to buy.

While the FT has carried in the past 12 months one letter of mine it has refused an article and, similarly, decided not to print my reply to Friday's onslaught.

Here is the letter and people can judge for themselves. It is a theme I have been trying to introduce to the public debate since shortly after the pre Budget report in November 2008.

One development since I wrote this letter is that the Governor of the Bank of England, before the Treasury Select Committee today, has given the broadest hint possible that the government will start printing more funny money to buy its own debt. The Governor presumably believes there are not the buyers out there in the absence of a clear cuts programme from either Labour or the Conservatives. Sterling fell as a result of the Governor's statement. How long will it be before there is a full scale sterling crisis and possibly a gilt strike?

Yesterday in the Commons we debated potential reform of the voting system. The Tories charged the Government with conducting a cynical exercise to try to win votes at the pending election. But nevertheless the issue of reforming how Britain votes is crucial.

I have written before on the twin principles of representative and responsible government underpinning our democracy. Making our voting system fairer - in the sense of making each vote more equal, wherever it is cast in the UK - can impinge on holding governments responsible for their actions.

In a typically well crafted and intelligent speech the Liberal Democrat spokesman, David Howarth, pooh-poohed the idea of the mandate. That may be partly because he is a member of a minority party.

As the election campaign gets underway properly, and particularly when the party leaders are quizzed together on television, what is in the manifesto, and whether the ideas stack up, will be increasingly important. Look at how the Tories have got into a mess over their cuts programme which will be an important part of their mandate.

In the past the idea of representative government has held together with responsible government, i.e. a government being accountable for its actions, because our electoral system usually delivers a party with a clear majority in the House of Commons that is in charge of its programme. Nobody in yesterday's debate considered how making votes more equal, and with it the possible rise of a multi-party government, might begin to knock away and undermine the idea of responsible government as we now know it.

That is why I made a plea that yesterday's efforts should be considered the opening stages of a debate which ought to occupy parliament at regular intervals over the next five years.

There were two outstanding speeches yesterday. Roger Godsiff made the most powerful case for change. It certainly set me thinking on whether I could continue to hold the position I put forward.

The most fiery contribution was from George Galloway who is the outstanding orator in the House. George didn't consider how radically changing the voting system might make it even more difficult for voters to hold the government to account. But he made it impossible to defend the status quo.

The news that Britain has just crawled out of recession deserves at least a cheer. We were the first country into recession and the last one out. It is hard to agree with the Prime Minister that we were better prepared for the recession than any other country.

Most of the commentators have centred on how this sickly figure will affect the major parties at the polls. Almost no comment has been made about how this will affect those who have lost their job or, have taken pay cuts, to keep their job. Nor has there been any comment on what these figures tell us about the danger that has stalked the economy since we entered into recession.

The growth figures are not good news for those who are unemployed and seeking work. The unemployment total, thank goodness, has not risen to a record level - this is after all a record recession - largely because employers and employees have done deals on holding back real wages. Indeed some people have taken real cuts.

But the danger to the country is clear once we break down the total that gives the 0.1 per cent growth rate for the previous quarter. Performing disproportionately well have been those sectors affected by the VAT reduction and the car scrappage scheme. I was sceptical about both moves.

At best they bring forward consumption - they do not boost consumption permanently. My fear is that goods that might have been bough in January/February were bought before VAT returned to its 17.5% rate. Likewise people have brought forward car purchases to make use of the hefty subsidy tax payers were offering to individual buyers.

There is therefore every likelihood that the next set of figures, made worse by the length of the cold weather, may show a fall in output. And uncommented upon is the fact that this month sees the end of the Government printing money to buy its own debt.

The Treasury is clearly in panic over the Government's fuzziness over its expenditure cuts that are urgent and how this will affect gilt buyers when the Government has to go to the market to borrow. My guess is that Ministers will try and duck this issue until the election.

I guess we will see another round of printing funny money to buy Government debt. I also guess we will see the FSA directing banks to buy more Government debt as a way of (hopefully) shoring up their balance sheets.

Poor old country.

In May, I expressed my worries to the Pensions Regulator that the pension fund custodians, far from protecting pension funds, were gambling with assets committed to their safe keeping. In December the Pensions Regulator reported back to me on their survey of Trustees and on Friday published a statement accepting the need for much more stringent control on the safety of fund and therefore pension assets.

Robert Maxwell "borrowed" assets from the pension funds of the firms he owned and failed to repay them plunging funds into crisis. Parliament responded by establishing custodians of funds so that no owner could misuse the assets of pension fund members. Some custodians are clearly running rings round safety measures Parliament put in place which have probably resulted in pension fund losses.

The specific case I referred to the Pensions Regulator was of a medium size pension fund that was using a high street bank as the custodian for its pension funds.

Unknown to the Trustees the bank was lending out both shares and gilts owned by this pension fund. In spite of current pressures on UK gilts, they are one of the safest bets in the world. In return, however, the pension fund was being given gilts from third-world countries which, while they had the nominal value of the UK gilts, would have proved almost valueless had the bank gone under and the pension fund tried to sell the replacement assets.

Pension funds were being paid for the risk of lending their assets but the returns were miniscule. Some figures cited to me was a return of £900 in every £1M pounds lent. The bank, I believe, was pocketing practically the whole of the fee it gained from lending out the pension fund shares.

I also asked the Pensions Regulator to refer to the FSA a practice which I thought was going on whereby the pension custodian was lending assets to its own bank so that they could appear on the bank's asset register so that in this way the bank would be meeting FSA asset requirements although not owning the assets themselves. The Pensions Regulator's and the FSA's letters are attached.

That new guidance is coming into place shows the Pensions Regulator is concerned about the safety of pension assets. I believe these regulations should be mandatory and have tabled an amendment to the Financial Services Bill currently going through Parliament. Lord Vinson has echoed this amendment in the Lords providing cross-party and cross-legislature action to protect the safety of pension fund assets.

How do we explain why social mobility has been on the decline? I look at part of this debate in my Liverpool Echo column today. The term ‘social mobility' is used in at least two ways. The first is how I have used it in the article - meaning how many people from a less advantaged background move into more advantaged positions. The immediate post war period was marked by a big increase in the welfare state and middle class jobs. This made upward mobility a lot easier.

A more radical view of social mobility is to measure movements both up and down the occupational/income ladder. Can children from middle class families fall in the hierarchy with their places taken by those from poorer homes? In this sense social mobility can work even if there is no expanse in more prosperous jobs.

I suggested that a key reason not yet considered in trying to understand why social mobility in the first sense has stalled is a dramatic change in parenting, particularly in some poorer homes.

A tough love approach appears to be highly beneficial in developing cognitive skills in children and it is these skills that make it easiest to learn.

My Liverpool Echo column is here and so too is the address I gave on Monday when the think tank Demos launched its commission on character.

Balanced Migration's aim is to stop Britain growing its population by immigration. We have advocated two major policies. The first is to break the link between people coming here to work and automatically becoming citizens. The other policy has been simply to reduce significantly the number of immigrants being granted citizenship places.

Before Christmas, Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, seriously engaged with Balanced Migration in breaking the link between coming here to work and automatically becoming a citizen. The Home Office is investigating how this is can best be achieved and we expect an announcement soon.

This was one of the key policy proposals Balanced Migration has put forward as a means of achieving its goal. The other means is to cut significantly the numbers of people settling permanently in this country.

Over the weekend David Cameron's statement suggests that he is now seriously engaging with the Group's, and more importantly the public's, concern about immigration. He has given a commitment that a future Conservative government would reduce the numbers of net new arrivals to this country to the level of the early 1990s. That means a reduction from about 150,000 to 180,000 a year net in migration to one in the very low teens.

Balanced Migration welcomes both these two initiatives. Our aim now must be to get both parties to make binding commitments on both policies in their election manifestoes.

I have just returned from Demos' launch of its Commission on Character. David Cameron, Camila Batmanghelidjh and I spoke in support.

Character used to be central to Labour politics. It was the cornerstone of building up a culture of respect and self-respect.

Our characters are first nurtured for good or ill within families. The address that I gave - which is can be found here - gave emphasis to the teaching of good parenting in schools.

Good parents can affect our life chances whether we come from rich or poor homes. Good outcomes at school can cut the supply routes to life-long poverty. We should therefore judge how pre and post-natal services, Sure Start, as well as schools are achieving that objective.

I would suggest that instead of having league tables on exam results - which are massaged - we should begin a debate on the following outcomes.

How is each school, each year, achieving the goal of

Reducing to nil the number of young people leaving school who do not go into either education, employment or training;
•Increasing the numbers and percentage of young people leaving school who go into skilled employment; and,
•Reducing the numbers of young men and women who begin families before they are 18.

Let the political debate on the importance of character recommence.

The House of Commons yesterday debated the Government's Fiscal Responsibility Bill. The Bill's aim is to cut the size of the Government debt over four years.

I probably sounded the most grave warnings of anyone in the debate. I am not against the Bill, but I think it is too little and far too late. I've been on about this issue following the 2008 Pre Budget Report.

The one action I greatly regret in my thirty years here was not to press the Government on what they would do on day two after invading Iraq, which I supported. I thought there were enough brown-nosers in this place without me joining them asking such an easy question.

I believed it was inconceivable that the Government hadn't thought out a plan once Saddam Hussein was toppled. We all know that such an obvious question had not been answered.

So the main point of my contribution yesterday was to make a plea for the Government to have plans for a whole series of days two. As long-term interest rates begin to rise, (which they will as the Government tries to float a record amount of debt each year for goodness knows how many years) what actions will the Government take to stop this move triggering a full-blown crisis?

With long-term interest rates rising, we may have our credit rating threatened. What actions have the Government got up its sleeve to prevent this happening?

And then, heaven forbid, what actions are the Government planning for the worst possible scenario - of one week the Government Debt Office reporting it simply cannot sell the Government debt. At that point the Pound would collapse.

I didn't expect answers to these questions as they would simply as the answers would simply add to the panic. But the Government now needs a counter-crisis strategy and, for all our sakes, I hope it is being formulated.

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?

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.

How fair is my comparison of Sir Thomas Legg's imposition of a retrospective 5 year claw back on MPs' housing claims with a similar retrospective decision to change the speed limit?

I have likened Sir Thomas Legg's application of the rule on expenses to the scenario of a motorist who drives at 25 miles per hour in a 30 mph limit zone then five years later, once the speed limit has been changed to 20 mph, discovers he has been fined for speeding following a decision to back-date the claim.

Emails have pointed out that I'm wrong to use this analogy. The speed limit should not have been 30 mph in the first place. It should have been 20 mph all along. Yes, that is presumably why the Highways Agency has taken the decision to reduce the speed limit. But should the change be introduced retrospectively and fines imposed?

I have never made an ACA claim which I thought was unfair to the taxpayer. I would be ashamed if I had. Indeed only by assuming that I was intellectually inadequate could one take the view that I was using my housekeeping bills as a means of boosting my personal income. The total of all of my claims over the past five years have ranged from 50 per cent of eligible sums to 30 per cent last year.

The main point that I was attempting to make in my column for the Liverpool Echo was that Sir Thomas has arbitrarily imposed a cap on only cleaning and gardening expenses. At no stage has he explained this, nor why he has restricted his cap to only gardening or cleaning costs.

If his precedent had been followed consistently Sir Thomas would have applied his retrospective rules to all the main headings allowed in my claims. He has not done so.

Robert Verkaik in today's Independent goes further. He argues that Sir Thomas Legg's decision is not akin to retrospective changes to the criminal law, but to the changing of tax loopholes or windfall charges on corporations who have benefited from unintended legislative consequences.

The charges arising from the closing of tax loopholes, however, are never retrospectively imposed.

But if Robert Verkaik's argument is to hold, and there is much attraction to it, shouldn't the new retrospective rules be applied consistently across all main headings of expenditure?

From honourable member to rogue. That, thanks to retrospective and unprecedented changes Sir Thomas Legg has made to the rules on MPs' expenses, is how I feel.

You may remember that last year I was part of the small band of MPs who voted to make details of our expenses public. It was a mystery to me why the then Speaker and his allies opposed being open to taxpayers. They were later defeated in the courts.

As soon as the details of our expenses were given to MPs I put mine on my website. The Daily Telegraph who bought all of this information published a ‘rogues and saints' gallery. Having considered the evidence, they placed me in the latter category.

For the last five years, I claimed, for my home in Birkenhead: £11,250; £12,006; £11,509; £9,573 and, for the year ending April 2009 my claim was £7,303, 30% of the total allowance. I did not claim anything approaching the maximum annual £24k simply because I did not need to claim such an amount.

However, late on Monday I received along with other MPs a letter from Sir Thomas Legg. He recommends I repay just over £7,000: £1,000 housekeeping costs for each year; £1,800 of other household bills, and £230 which I should have claimed from other allowances.

Sir Thomas correctly points out that over the five year period I claimed twice for three bills amounting to £117. The bills shouldn't have been presented twice nor paid. I regret this and have paid the money back.

My concern is that nowhere has Sir Thomas explained why he has changed the rules which have resulted in his recalculations. No matter what the cost of maintaining a second home in my constituency has been, a £3k cut-off point was retrospectively imposed.

Imagine that you have been driving, perfectly legally, through a 30 mile an hour zone at a speed of 25 mph. Imagine then your reaction when, five years later, you receive multiple fines as a decision has been taken to change, retrospectively, the speed limit to 20.

Sir Thomas has also suggested that other household bills were wrongly claimed telling me that the Fees Office had told me such claims were invalid. Sir Thomas is simply wrong. There is nothing in the file to support his assertion. He has misread a letter between Officials dated after this period relating to another issue. The actual file shows that at no point were objections raised to my claims.

Last week I replied to Sir Thomas. I was dazed that, as someone who has always been open about my expenses, his arbitrary decision should link me with the abuses known all too well to voters. I have requested that he withdraws his suggestion, but I am not holding my breath.

I share the electorate's anger with how some have played the system. But the Legg Review does not seem to have taken on the abuses. What he has achieved is simply to move around some of the characters in the honourable members and villains galleries.
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Smoking tobacco can kill. There is no question about that. What the House of Commons has to decide today is what further steps it will take to prevent people from smoking which will kill some of them.

Up until this point the Government's campaign has been to prevent people from smoking in public places. I have supported these moves, with some reservation.

Most people do not now smoke, and I guess the majority of us now do not like being in public places where other people are smoking. The ban was well judged and I cannot recall a single prosecution for breaking the new prohibition.

This restriction has meant, however, a severe curtailment of the freedom of smokers. They have to smoke outside the doorways of cinemas, pubs and places of work.

The House of Commons today has the opportunity to ratchet up the restrictions against smoking. Today we could cross a threshold.

From early days minors have not been allowed legally to purchase tobacco. But most of the Government's anti-smoking campaign has been to prevent people smoking in places where it can either damage the workforce - bar workers in pubs or colleagues in shops and offices - or where it is unpleasant for the general public.

MPs are now being asked to ban any signs that tobacco is sold at newsagents and other outlets. Retailers will be able to stock supplies of tobacco but will not be able to have any of these stocks on display.

I shall be voting against these further restrictions on the grounds that the ban will prove pretty futile. I cannot believe that selling tobacco from under the counter is going to prevent anyone from acquiring a smoking habit. Indeed it might increase its attractiveness.

My vote against these proposals is based on different grounds. I think we have reached the end of the line in a free society in trying to curtail the smoking habits of our fellow citizens of which we do not approve.

I am not against using sanctions, but I do believe they should be proportionate and above all they should be effective. I do not believe these rules will lessen the numbers of people smoking.

I also believe they are now disproportionate in respect to the various mortality values. When one looks at death rates we see a growing number of people dying from heart disease and its consequences, and yet we take very little action to prevent people stuffing themselves with poly-saturated fats or trying to encourage people not to join the mega overweight brigade.

How do we as legislators justify yet more penal actions against smokers, while we are as yet unwilling to take the first simpler action to prevent people dying from excessive obesity?

There is scope for governments to try and modify our behaviour but the limit to this approach has, I believe, now been reached in respect of smoking. Our attention should now be focussed on the other big killer in Western Societies that is linked to overeating.

George Osborne gains marks for being the first front bench politician of either of the two main parties prepared to spell out the details on the cuts which will have to be made to balance the budget in the longer term. Brave certainly, but not brave enough.

The Government is spending way beyond the revenue it raises. It calculates that when the economy has returned to growth a £90bn deficit will remain despite the increases in revenue that growing economic activity will bring.

The question for British politics is how to eliminate this deficit before the country succumbs to the next recession.

Putting the question like this shows how modest George Osborne's contribution is. By far and away the biggest cut is a single year freeze in most public sector pay - £12bn.

But this is a one off saving. There won't be a £12bn saving the following year unless the freeze is continued.

What is required are permanent cuts in expenditure if the deficit is to remain reduced, and on a course to elimination.

Ita is misleading to report the Osborne package as a £22.5bn savings over a parliament. For once we need to keep focussed on the early cuts total. How do the cuts shape up to a permanent £90bn reduction?

Apart from a year's public sector pay freeze, a further £12bn from cuts was announced. £1bn of that comes from savings on incapacity benefit which have proved in the past notoriously difficult to achieve. Even more questionable is the £7bn savings from cuts in the Whitehall bureaucracy. This Government has been trying to cut the bureaucracy and yet the cost of government continues to rise.

The only clearly deliverable and sustainable cuts in the whole package amounts to £3.5bn: £1.5bn scrapping of child trust funds for families earning over £16k a year and the £2bn savings in cutting back on the eligibility to tax credits. The cap on top civil servants' pensions is estimated at a £1bn saving but is calculated over a decade.

Full credit to George Osborne for starting the debate on the theme ‘we are all in this together', but these spelled out savings are tiny in comparison with what is required.

The next big cuts speech better take the theme: you haven't seen anything yet.

Labour last week understandably played down the loss of The Sun's endorsement. But an understandably laid back response shouldn't hide the seriousness of this loss of support.

Look at Peter Kellner's piece in the current issue of Progress. Kellner is vice president of YouGov and has analysed the difference between those voters who previously voted Labour, and who say they won't this time around, and those who have remained faithful.

Kellner, I believe, misjudges his main conclusion. He emphasises that most ex-Labour voters have not been attracted to the Opposition, so not all is lost.

So why aren't these voters putting their X against Labour candidates? The finding is pretty damning. 78 per cent of the one-time Labour voters say Labour used to care about their concerns while only 14 per cent still believe so.

This is a more important conclusion I believe than the finding that these ex-Labour voters are not positively being attracted to the Conservatives. Analysts who pushed this line seem to forget that it is the government in power and who makes the news, reminding us of their presence 24 hours a day.

This is where the loss of The Sun's support is so important. Of those reading a morning paper over a third are The Sun or The Star readers. In other words a third of one-time Labour voters will be reading a newspaper that shares their view that the Government doesn't act for people like them.

By all means let's cheer ourselves up by publicly saying that the loss of The Sun's endorsement doesn't matter that much. But don't let's be fooled by our own propaganda.

We have a Herculean job on our hands to win back those one-time Labour voters. Prattling on that we are the underdogs and that we have got a fight on our hands mustn't hide from us the basic fact that voters want us fundamentally to change if they are to support us.

And if you still need persuading here is one last point. Nearly thirty per cent of those who remain loyal to Labour do not believe the Government cares about people like themselves.

Over to you Gordon Brown.

I cannot now remember when I first met David Layton. I was probably introduced to him by Philip Rowntree. What I can remember was from that first meeting, and at every meeting, David exuberated a sense of fun and kindly mischief.

It was Philip Rowntree, and David Layton, who were the financial instigators of the Low Pay Unit. Philip decided to back the establishing of the LPU with a tranche of monies which had been given to Seebohm Rowntree on his retirement from the chocolate factory in York. Philip and David were the trustees with whom I worked most closely during the early years of the Low Pay Unit's life.

David once told me very touchingly about the response of his father to the news David gave him concerning the establishing of Income Data Services. David's father, Sir Walter Layton, was one of the great public figures of the inter-war period, as editor of The Economist and chairman of the wonderful News Chronicle (The News Chronicle was the first newspaper I bought every day as a fifteen year old sixth-former).

Growing up with such a powerful father would be difficult for anyone, particularly if the father made few concessions to his offspring. But Walter Layton's response to David's news on IDS was that he thought it was the outstanding public act of his life.

In many ways it was, but David also has credit for swinging behind the Low Pay Unit. At the time of its establishment in 1974 no-one, apart from NUPE - the trade union for lower paid local authority workers - was interested in the minimum wage and that includes the mighty trade union barons who sat on the TUC.

Once the Unit was established we could employ Steve Winyard - now with the Royal National Institute for the Blind, Chris Pond who was an MP and Minister, and Marie Brown - who worked on Peter Townsend's mammoth poverty study - as full-time officers. They were soon to be joined by Jill Hendey who has spent almost 20 years working with me in the Commons.

The Unit did change the debate. Wage councils met regularly and gave more substantial increases in the minimum wage than they had done in their entire history. The Unit's campaign for a statutory minimum wage saw its fulfilment with the election of a Labour Government in 1997.

Philip Rowntree and David Layton were the two behind the scenes backers of these achievements. And while Philip died sometime ago, David's innings of 95 years ended only a couple of days ago.

This week's New Statesman gives full billing to the latest and most dangerous economic heresy. If only we could live in the world that Danny Blanchflower and Mehdi Hasan believe we are in.

Hasan cites Blanchflower and Robert Skidelsky. Have we learnt nothing from Keynes he asks? Only idiots would cut government spending before a recovery was well underway.

Said like that, who could disagree?

But all three of these distinguished authors are preaching Keynesianism for a closed economy. Our financial system is not sealed. Furthermore we are borrowing hand over fist in order to pay today's bills.

This year's borrowing alone will probably top £200bn. It is simply untrue to say that we are borrowing less than other G8 countries. We are borrowing a higher proportion of GDP than any of them.

Each week the Government's debt office offloads another huge tranche of debt. The debt is, and here it comes, largely bought by money the Bank of England is printing.

Soon, we are told, there will be no more of this printing - or as we call it in polite conversation, quantitative easing - although there are already one or two voices at the Bank suggesting the policy should be extended.

The crunch point will come shortly when there is no more of this funny money to buy the Government debt. At this point the Government's cuts programme will be in the dock and the jury will be composed of those countries and institutions that might lend the British Government money.

If the jury judges that the Government isn't serious about restoring balance to the nation's accounts before the next boom gives way to a recession we will be in serious trouble.

Interest rates will rise and maybe, as I suggested to Robert Skidelsky in a radio discussion back at the time of the pre-Budget Report, the Government will not be able to survive, if it cannot finance its weekly dollop of debt.

So the judgement on the inevitable cuts programme is not a simple one about not cutting public expenditure before recovery is well underway. If only that was the question that had to be decided.

Balanced against that issue is the need firstly, to prevent long-term interest rates rising significantly in order to attract gilt buyers - for long-term interest rates will cripple the recovery as well as impose further debt on future generations. And then, secondly, to prevent the nightmare scenario of there simply not being enough lenders to buy up the whole of each week's debt flotation because they don't think we are serious about reigning back on expenditure we cannot pay for.

The decision on whether to cut or not is one therefore which requires real judgement. Cutting too soon would harm any recovery while cutting too late could result in a devastating gilt strike.

It is this decision we need to focus on. Predicting what Keynes would have said now is simply the latest form of escapism on the left.

Is there not a link between the abuse Fiona Pilkington and her family suffered for more than a decade and Carol Hill, the dinner lady who spoke out to the parents of a girl being bullied at school?

I have found it impossible to read fully the reports of the decade long thuggery against Fiona Pilkington and her family. We have had examples like this in Birkenhead, although similar cases in which I was involved took place a few years ago now. I am not saying that there are no such examples in Birkenhead, but the pattern of gang warfare that Fiona suffered for a decade has subtly changed in Birkenhead.

I now get many, many more complaints about the behaviour of adults rather than young people. And I cannot help wondering whether it is some of those young thugs of yester year who have now graduated into being parents themselves.

If this is true then it is doubly dispiriting - dispiriting because of how these individuals wreck other people's lives. But dispiriting also because it denotes a change in what is up until now been a traditional pattern of ‘criminal' behaviour.

That pattern was for some working class lads to get themselves on the wrong side of the law. But this pattern of criminal behaviour for most would cease once they were into their twenties. Setting up home and beginning a family seemed to transform the lives of most of these lads.

That prospect now seems closed to many of them. Too many of them leave school without being able to read or write, are paid benefits indefinitely and never have a job.

Any partnerships they form are usually short-lived and the chaotic life style of the gang is reproduced in the home they form with their partners. Many of these partnerships appear transient.

Dealing with the yobbish behaviour of these families clearly calls for different skills than those needed to deal with the yobs that drove Fiona to commit suicide. Part of any strategy, but only part, is to break in to the supply chain of yobbish behaviour.

That is what Carol Hill tried to do in informing the parents of a little girl who she discovered tied up and being whipped by a group of boys at the school where she is a dinner lady. Mrs Hill has been sacked for unprofessional conduct.

The Sunday papers hint there may be more of this story to come out. But it is difficult to see what could come out that could overthrow the urgent need now to consider a network of laws and rules which make the exercise of a generous public spirit a sackable offence.

The big failure with Labour's anti social behaviour strategy has been that it is exclusively mechanical, and worse still, the machinery is largely run by middle class professionals who do not live in the areas most blighted by anti social behaviour.

The details being given at the inquest into the death of Fiona Pilkington and her daughter Francesca should silence any politician who claims that this strategy against anti social behaviour is working. But no serious rethink can begin without looking at the sacking of Carol Hill.

The aim must be to move back to a self-policing society where neighbours, friends, dinner ladies, voluntary workers, are all singing from the same hymn sheet. Part of this singing is to speak out, and, where possible, act against this tide of yobbism which has already begun to destroy what was once a relatively peaceful self-governing society.

One almost sympathises with the Prime Minister. No sooner had he started to promise cuts and cuts and cuts again than the difficulties the Government is going to experience - unless they face the issue head on - became glaringly obvious.

The Government is naturally enough committed to cutting waste and the Prime Minster promised to cut unnecessary programmes.

I can't believe I'm different from the average voter. If there are unnecessary programmes what the hell are we doing providing them?

The same is true when his faithful colleague Ed Balls wades into the debate. If there is £2 billion to be saved from cutting waste, again, why hasn't that already been implemented? It shows a pretty scant disregard for tax payers' money, many of whom in my constituency earn less than one ninth of his salary and still manage to raise two children.

If the Government is not going to drown in the stream of new rhetoric flowing over our political debate it better cut to the chase quickly.

The Government badly needs to say what our essential goals as a party are and be prepared to disengage from other objectives. Otherwise we will get pulled down into a debate that demands cuts across the board.

In this way, the cuts agenda allows a radical Government to set new objectives, while disengaging from some of its current activities.

The debate urgently needs to focus on the outcomes of taking money from taxpayers to achieve public good. Broughton Hall in Merseyside is a model of how the new politics must operate.

The school has benefited from Building Schools for the Future, but it has also revolutionised its results. If we take out the handful of young women who ceased to attend the school, every pupil barring one achieved 5 GCSEs - with over 60% of them including English and maths. Now look at the schools in your area, what were their results like?

Broughton Hall is the objective for reforming the public sector. Budgets should be frozen now and those public sector workers with the ability should be encouraged to gain greater and greater outputs with what will in fact be falling real budgets.

Broughton Hall has shown the way. The Government desperately needs to get on to this attack rather than literally offering to take an axe to waste. That is the plea I made in the House of Commons.

The next few weeks are crucial in deciding how Labour holds on to its rump vote. It will not do so by obfuscating. It needs to show just how radical a cuts programme can be.

It is a distraction whether or not the prime minister utters the c-word today - or any other day come to that. The plain fact is there will be mega cuts. Two crucial questions are how big they will have to be to restore some sanity to the national accounts and when should they start?

A weekend poll shows the strong preference of voters for public expenditure cuts rather than tax increases. What I don't know, but will be crucial politically, is whether these are views based on today's phoney war over cuts or whether they are based on a more accurate appreciation of just how serious the position is.

This economic phoney war atmosphere has been made up from two contradictory forces. Voters have been bombarded with tales of extreme economic woe ever since Northern Rock bit the dust.

One of the prophecies was a recession as bad as that following the 1931 crash. In terms of national income falls that prophecy has already been borne out.

But we are now much richer so that cuts in national income fall on a much fatter body. Likewise, the government has been reflating, borrowing on a scale unknown before and printing shedloads of money. So many of us are still being protected.

At some time these policies will have to go into reverse and then there will be major economic hardship that could change the public's view on cuts. The question is, when will the cuts strategy be implemented? This debate has so far been won by those who argue that it is wrong to cut in times of recession. To do so would risk any recovery, they say. This is important, but only one dimension of what should be a two-dimensional debate. Not cutting now might also harm the recovery.

Each week the government unloads another shedload of debt on to the gilts market. There will be at least 38 more auctions between now and the expected date of the next election. Up until now the main buyer of this debt has been the Bank of England, which has been printing money to make these purchases. It has an Alice in Wonderland quality about it, doesn't it?

But the Bank has now declared a cessation to printing yet more money. Very shortly, therefore, the market will be tested on who is out there that wants to buy British government debt. All of the countries in the G8 group are also in the market selling debt and we will be trying to borrow a higher proportion of our GDP than any other G8 country.

Selling this debt will be far from easy. Long-term interest rates will inevitably rise, which will make borrowing capital more expensive and so harm any potential recovery.

One way of moderating the rise in long-term interest rates would be to convince the market that the government is serious about balancing the national accounts sooner rather than later and has published a plan to achieve that goal. Moreover, lower interest rates will mean that a smaller proportion of future national income will be impounded to both debt charges and repayment costs.

Britain is therefore in a lose-lose situation. To cut too early might harm a sustained recovery should that be forthcoming. Not to begin cutting soon will push up interest rates, which will not only harm any recovery but see a larger proportion of the country's future living standards confiscated to pay the money lenders.

For reasons that are obvious to readers of this blog, I favour an early cut strategy. For the gilt market to strike and not to buy future debt will have catastrophic economic and political consequences here. This is the real danger that has still to be registered in a tired and still very timid debate over public expenditure cuts.

It is predictable but deeply depressing. Up goes the cry that any review of NHS expenditure MUST result in cuts to consumers.

The debate on public expenditure cuts need to be focussed on output and not input. Over the first ten years of this Government's life productivity FELL in the public sector while increasing by 26 per cent in privately run organisations.

It is on this mega discrepancy that the debate should be exclusively concentrated. Going for a debate on cutting or non-cutting is simply a cop-out. It continues the error of public sector reform debate for as long as I can remember.

The NHS budget stands at £94.5bn - a tripling since 1997. If the NHS had delivered the same productivity as was registered for the private sector over the same period, they very same NHS output could have been gained on a total bill REDUCED by £26bn. The political kaleidoscope needs a radical shake up.

A first move would be to insist that the poorest performing hospitals equal the productivity of simply the current average. That move alone would save £2.4bn with no increase in resources.

A second move would be to insist that all hospitals perform as do the best units.

A third move would be to move the whole of the NHS in productivity terms to equal simply the average of the private sector.

A final move would be to ensure that the NHS leads the productivity league table of both public and private sector.

How do we make the most important changes in our health services since the NHS was established in 1948? It is by concentrating exclusively on NHS output rather than inputs.

Those who love the NHS have a duty to insist that this is the only debate in town. It will be a far from easy one to win but success will transform British politics.

The UK's population has now hit 61m and is growing twice as fast as in the 1990s and three times as fast as in the 1980s. On present forecasts the UK will hit 77m in 50 years' time and will outnumber France and even Germany.

Will it ever happen? Long term population forecasts are notoriously unreliable but, at the 20-year range, the Office for National Statistics has been accurate to within 2.5% in the past half-century. Its present forecast is 70m in 2028 and must, therefore, be taken seriously.

It is important to disentangle the two major influences: birth rates and immigration.

The birth rate in England and Wales is now 1.96 children per woman, close to the replacement rate of 2.1. This is partly due to immigration since women born outside the UK have 2.51 children on average compared to 1.84 for UK-born women.

Last year, for the first time in many years, natural change (births minus deaths) exceeded net immigration. But the full effect of immigration over, say, a 20-year period must take account of the children of those immigrants. A more sophisticated calculation of this kind shows that immigration accounts for nearly 70% of population growth.

It follows that immigration policy is critical to the future size of our population and is, of course, the only aspect of population growth that the government can directly influence.

Everyone agrees that we need some international migration to provide skills unavailable in Britain, at least until British workers have been trained. But what really matters for the population is how many people stay on and settle. The government's recent proposal to split economic migration from settlement is a major step forward.

But much more needs to be done. Net immigration must be brought below 50,000 a year if the population of the UK is to be held at less than 70m. If we want to stabilise our population at 65m we must get immigration into balance with emigration. That is the target of our Cross Party Group on Balanced Migration.

There is still a long way to go. Yesterday's figure of 118,000 net inflow was the raw data from the International Passenger Survey. The ONS will make adjustments to this for asylum seekers and those who change their intentions. These normally add 35,000 to the total so even in a deep recession we have net immigration of about 150,000.

There is no silver bullet to achieve the reduction we need. The first step is for both main political parties to commit themselves to restraining our population by limiting immigration and then building the necessary measures around it. This was the recommendation of the Select Committee on Economic Affairs of the House of Lords who reported in April 2008. We think that is the right approach and strongly commend it.

This blog first appeared on the Guardian's Comment is Free site.

I fear that many people could add their own experiences chiming in with the report the Patients' Association released today. The Association reports a consistent pattern of shocking standards of care that patients have experienced up and down the country. The Association believes that its report highlights the persistent unacceptable behaviour by nurses.

Their examples reflect my own experience. As my mother got frailer the numbers of trips to hospitals became more frequent.

It was when she was in Eastbourne Hospital that I first noticed how callous the attitude was of a whole group of nurses. Lunch had been served and the woman in the bed next to my mother had had a stroke.

As my mother ate there was terrible noise from the neighbouring bed. My mother encouraged me to go and feed her neighbour, and this I did.

The woman was paralysed and unable to reach her food. It was regularly placed there at meal times and then simply taken away uneaten.

The nurses commented how kind it was of me to feed the old lady. I didn't have the courage to tell them that it was their job; and that they had stood in a group gossiping, watching what I was doing. I was fearful that they would take it out on my mother if I did so.

Similarly callous and uncaring treatment was on display all too often in London hospitals. On one occasion I was walking down a mixed ward to clean my mother's teeth and was confronted by an old man who had fallen out of bed and somehow got his nightgown over his head.

His sounds of alarm were terrifying. I picked the very frail old man up, helped him back into bed, and proceeded to clean my mother's teeth. The old man's bed couldn't have been more than six feet away from a group of nurses who were trying to chat up doctors.

On another occasion my mother reported she had asked for a bed pan only to be told that staff were too busy. She should wet her bed and they would change her later. Not only was this incredibly humiliating for my mother but it must have led to more work later and higher laundry bills for the hospital.

Uncouth behaviour must have been part of hospital life through the centuries. Nursing reform I believe has made the situation worse.

The rush to professionalise nurses, and to make it a degree occupation, has brought significant changes in its wake. Nurses are now mainly trained in the classroom and not on the ward - so there are fewer people to help run a ward.

Making it a degree profession begins to change who is admitted to the nursing ranks.

Ticking the boxes to get a professional qualification is now weighted higher than the practical skill of caring, or indeed loving the patient.

That role, if it is performed at all, is likely to be performed by the ward orderlies. Composed largely middle-age mums this group has acquired many of the tasks that nurses feel are beneath the status of a profession, degree-carrying worker. But the orderlies are restricted in what they can do.

So patients have the worst of both worlds. A group of orderlies whose strict work routine forbids them from carrying out little acts of care for which it is absurdly judged that they are not trained to do, but many would like to do. And nurses, who have taken themselves upmarket in shadowing the role of the doctor.

There is no way these nursing reforms so called will be reversed. But there is a case for the Patients' Association continuing a campaign so that callous and wicked nurses are sacked. Hopefully the Association will also campaign for setting free the ward orderlies to do many of the tasks which previously nurses willingly undertook for their patients.

Britain will soon be in an era of unprecedented cuts in public expenditure. Yet one item of expenditure is set to rise - our contribution to the EU.

Figures dug out by Lord Vinson show that today's reports on our rising subsidy to the EU are wide of the mark - awful as the figures were. The Treasury's Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses 2009 shows net expenditure rising from £5.4bn in 2007-8 to a whacking £7.9bn planned for 2010-11.

By then MPs will be inundated by constituents fighting each cut in the monies going to public services. I have stressed before that this needn't be the outcome. If the public sector had the same productivity as the private sector, everything we buy today could have been procured at £58.4bn less.

The Europhiles will need to be on their mettle to defend a record 46 per cent increase in taxpayers' money going to the EU over a three year period when belts are being tightened all over Britain. But the position is far worse than the near record £8bn contribution. This is a net figure. Britain will receive some of its much larger contribution to the EU back for approved programmes.

Here, a British Government, who has raised the money from British taxpayers, will not be able to direct the money as they think best. Our money will only be forthcoming from Europe providing we spend the money in the way the EU decides.

There are two other news stories that have emerged today which again question the type of organisation to which Britain now finds itself signed up.

One of Mrs Thatcher's Governments took powers to try and regulate video nasties. We now find out that while the British Parliament passed the legislation to control the sales of these items, the British Government didn't tell Europe of its intent.

It is the first time that I, as a legislator, have heard that those areas which are not directly controlled by the EU, are in fact indirectly controlled. The Government is being forced to reintroduce the Thatcher measure and get EU agreement. In the meantime video nasties can be on sale without any restrictions whatsoever.

As if to compound our sorrows, Panorama last night reported on the impact the working time directive will have on the quality of our life and the way we wish to lead that life. Wardens of sheltered accommodation are being phased out as their existing contract is negated by the working time directive.

Panorama reported pensioners unwilling to lie down and take this cut in a standard of living for which they are paying. Worse still will come in a few days when the working time directive will hit hospitals.

Nobody is in favour of people being sweated. But what was the crime of a warden of sheltered accommodation, gaining free accommodation, simply being on call, if they were around, if a resident got into difficulties?

Likewise changes have been necessary in the way we ran junior doctor regimes in hospitals. But come September 1 any of us using hospitals will immediately see the difference in the quality of care for which we have paid.

The Government's borrowing figures out today are worse than what it had planned, no matter what silk phrases the Treasury utters. At this rate the Government is on target to break through £200 billion in loans for this year, as I feared at the pre-budget report and despite counter statements.

The borrowing data gives the other side to the unemployment figures, which, at best, are contradictory. The income tax take, the levels of national insurance contributions and the returns from corporation tax give a picture of how the real economy is being wrecked by the recession.

July is normally a bumper month for tax receipts. Yet all three indices hint at how hard the recession is imparting on the economy.

Compared with July a year ago, the national insurance contributions are down by 1.1% and corporation tax is down by a staggering 38%.

Income tax returns, including capital gains tax, are 14% below what is was 12 months ago. Add to these figures a 10% increase in benefits spending and we have a picture of public accounts chaos.

For the first time under this administration, the Government is forced to borrow in the month of July in order to have enough revenue to meet July's liabilities. This month's £8 billion borrowing brought the borrowing total for the first four months of this financial year to almost £50 billion or nearly 57% of GDP, the highest since records began 30 years ago.

The cost of Government borrowing consequently rose, and with it the amount of our future income, which we are yet to produce, that will have to be foregone just to pay the interest, let alone the repayment, of record public borrowing.

So far the gilt market has been assuaged by the thought that a future Tory government may mean business in bringing a sense of order to the nation's accounts. But with many more months' figures like these, the market will need a much clearer picture of what action is planned by both the Government and the opposition if long-term interest rates are not to be pushed up significantly.

The Government will then face a cruel choice, whether it lets rates rise, so putting off the pace of the recovery, or it begins serious to cut public expenditure now, and in so doing, according to many economists, wrongly I think, delaying the start of the recovery.

With public borrowing coming in at £200 billion, and the printing of money as though there is no tomorrow, it is difficult to understand the reasoning of those voices who prattle on about the dangers of cutting public spending now. If these totals are not reflationary it would be difficult to know what would be.

Action will be forced soon in order to avoid the gilt strike.

The Independent on Sunday yesterday carried the '50 smuggest Britons'. How did they make this choice? The article was billed in the following terms:

'They are pleased with themselves, very often with no discernible cause, and our stand-in PM, Lord Mandelson, proved last week he is the Daddy of them all'.

The IoS assured its readers that it had deliberated long and hard over who should feature in their 50 'cats that got the cream'.

One of these, high up in the table, is Simon Cowell. The IoS bills him as 'the man who owns the TV show which makes the stars who make the records which Simon sells by the truckload'.

That is one description of him. But there is another, much more flattering reading of his abilities.

He thrives in a host of talent-spotting shows by being brutally frank. Goodness knows why most of those appear wish to appear. Some of them must be chosen because they are so inept, and one hopes they can put their lives together quickly enough after the audience has ceased laughing at them.

But Simon Cowell's strength, as I see it, is not simply in allowing and indeed encouraging people to make fools of themselves, his specialism is being frank about their talents.

Part of his appeal is that this sort of character, that used to be common in all different stages of our lives, is now almost absent. People are not told early on that they are wasting their time and that their talents could be better used in other directions.

It seems to me we don't want less of what the IoS describes as ‘the smug Mr. Cowell'. We want more, although not necessarily of him, but of the brutal truth that he brings to his role as decision maker.

One can but imagine how different the British economy would have been if employers had had his insight, and backed it with the necessary ruthlessness, in ensuring that British manufacturing modernised. Instead of earning their pay, all too many of these employers took the quiet option, took the money and never confronted their labour force with brutal truths about international competition for a country so dependent as we are on international trade.

Likewise wouldn't the Labour Government have turned out so differently had Tony Blair had the courage after John Smith died to tell Gordon Brown to challenge him? Instead of being brutally frank, telling Gordon that he welcomed a challenge and that he would humiliate him - as I believe he would have done - the weak compromise was born of an inoperative power sharing agreement which crippled the last three Labour governments.

So three cheers for Simon Cowell. The PLP could do with someone of his abilities to tell them what the options are if the party is not to collapse into a mega electoral defeat next year.

On Saturday, I visited Wallington, a National Trust property in Northumberland. It was one of the homes of the Trevelyans and was given to the National Trust by Sir Charles Philip Trevelyan a Liberal, and then a Labour politician. His brother George Macaulay Trevelyan, was perhaps the greatest and certainly the most successful historian of his day.

I also visited Craigside - the house that Lord Armstrong built for himself for what was once a wonderful view over Northumberland's stunning countryside. I say was because the National Trust has allowed horrible conifers to grow so the view that Lord Armstrong saw is now literally cut off.

This is not a plea for the National Trust to cut back some of these conifers to restore the site to what it was in Lord Armstrong's day, although that would not be too bad an idea. It is rather to comment on the darkness of both houses.

Saturday in Northumberland was a proper summer so that, at times, sunlight would have lit up both houses. But both establishments appeared dressed for a funeral. In Wallington, in particular, blinds were drawn in some rooms, to keep out the natural light.

The house does not have fine pictures as do some great country houses and other establishments. But there are personal collections of considerable interest.

The best room for paintings was what is called Lady Trevelyan's Parlour. Here there are works of Edward Burne-Jones, by Turner, by John Ruskin, Lord Leighton and William Bell-Scott.

The room was so gloomy that it was impossible to see the paintings as visitors were moved through a very limited corridor with most of the room roped off on both sides. The Trust offered a plastic folder so that in the semi-darkness visitors could "see" what was on the walls. One could not properly see the pictures oneself.

When we came out into bright sunlight to have coffee, I read the guide which told me who the artists were of the pictures I couldn't see. We went back and asked for readmittance.

Here is one of the great strengths of the National Trust. Each room was well attended and the two volunteers staffing the door were only too pleased to allow us back in to see whether we could spy better what we now knew to be the paintings.

More farce was to follow. Once back in the room, I discovered from the plastic folder that one of the paintings behind the door was by Roger Fry. But the door was open and the area in front of it was roped off. Try as I may to hold on to the door, and get my head around it to get as near as I could to the Fry painting, I could not see the work, even in outline. What I could not see on the wall I went back to view in the plastic folder.

What is the National Trust up to? Anyone can understand why a room would be screened from bright sunlight. But even in an English summer that sunlight rarely lasts for the whole day on the same room.

For the first time in my life I came away with a different view about the National Trust. I watch gangs of tourists, from the UK and abroad, being taken round London with their guides holding up umbrellas yelling about moving on to the next site. It is like a military operation. The parties seem happy enough to move and tick off another building from their itinerary.

But does the National Trust realise that, if Wallington is anything to go by, visiting one of these great buildings is being changed significantly for the visitor. Is one going to be given enough light and be able to get near enough to exhibits to enjoy their splendour? Or are we moving to the foreign tourist guide party where quick squeaks from guide operators take visitors on to the next room and then the next building?

The selection of the next MP for Totnes by open primary throws a much needed life-line to our drowning political parties. It will in retrospect rate much more highly than the establishment of a supreme court which has caught the attention of some commentators.

Political parties are dying, but they play a crucial role in delivering representatives and responsible government in this country. The choice of candidates allows people to elect representatives who roughly match their views. Party discipline ensures that the majority party can be held responsible for its programme at a general election. Our system of democracy is now dependent on the party system for without political parties it is difficult to envisage how representative and responsible government can be made effective.

But from their post-war peak public interest in political parties has disintegrated. Many of the safest Tory and Labour seats have only a handful of activists running their affairs. All three main political parties have attempted reforms to involve the wider public, but none of the parties have so far been prepared to surrender power to their new recruits, let alone to a wider group of the electorate.

Last year, I called for a system of open primaries in safe seats. One or two such primaries have been tried by the Tory party in hopeless seats, but while the experiments were interesting, and gained not too bad a turn out, the open primary could not really decide anything.

A third of seats shared between both major parties return a candidate of the same party label at every conceivable election.

Under this new system, the dominant party would have control of who the candidates in the primary would be and in Totnes they opened up to all interested parties.

The party drew up a shortlist of three. The Mayor was nominated and so was the leader of the council. But so too was a local doctor who wished to become involved in politics because, only by helping to change the country's drug policy, did she believe she could offer local addicts the chance of a better life?

I am writing this blog before we know the results of the poll in Totnes when the whole constituency could decide who they wished to see as the next Tory candidate, and therefore the next Member of Parliament. But even if the outsider - the doctor - does not become the candidate, it is now going to become increasingly difficult for other political parties in safe seats not to follow the Totnes example.

Other changes will follow too. Once these open primaries catch on my guess is we will see more unopposed returns at general elections. If the electorate has been given the chance to vote in the primary - and everyone in Totnes got a postal ballot - then those parties without a chance of winning are unlikely to put up candidates in the general election.

I also believe we will move fairly smoothly to a two tier type party membership; there would be the core activists which will of course continue to remain important in safe seats. But thereafter the membership will become blurred. In safe seats where the electorate choose their candidate, I would guess that many voters who would not normally support the dominant party in the area would nevertheless help raise funds and participate in events to support who they will feel is "their" candidate.

There will be lots of other consequences which we now cannot even envisage. But the bravery of the Totnes Conservative Party in holding an open primary marks the death of the old party system. Long live the party system.

The Government today makes a major move towards the objective for which the Cross Party Group on Balanced Migration has been campaigning since its inception. It intends to break the automatic link between people coming here to work and, thereafter automatically, gaining citizenship.

The Government has a points-based system to determine who comes here to work. A committee headed by Professor David Metcalfe adjudicates where there are skills shortages in the economy and sets a points-based system to reflect these vacancies.

While the system has resulted in a decline in immigrants coming to work it has only indirectly operated on the numbers of people becoming citizen and thereby growing our population. It is the growth in population that is the major challenge.

The UK population will, on the Government's own estimates, grow to over 70 million in less than a quarter of a century. 70% of this growth will be due to migration. This increase of 7 million is equivalent to the building of 7 new Birminghams.

Recently the Home Secretary has reported not to be losing any sleep over this gigantic increase in the numbers of people in the UK. He may not be losing any sleep but he has certainly been spending his waking hours to good effect.

Announcing the new scheme today the Government has admitted that it is not so much the numbers of people who come here to work and service our economy that are the problem but the number who wish to stay on and wish to become citizens. The Government intends to break the automatic link between working here and becoming citizens by introducing a points system for citizenship.

This is a first crucial move, but it is only the first. A points system alone will not stop Britain's population surging towards 70 million and then growing still further. If the Government is intent on controlling the growth in the population it needs to cap the numbers of people who can become citizens.

The UK population today stands at 61 million. To prevent the population hitting even 65 million by 2025 requires that the number of new individuals granted citizens to be no greater than the numbers of people leaving the country. On past form any increase in the population by immigration affects only England and within England the south-east is the area experiencing fastest growth.

I doubt whether it has escaped the Government's notice that, while the northwest have many marginal seats, most marginal seats are south of the Wash.

That Grandmother's grieving cry of anguish three weeks ago as the body of her grandson passed her by in Wootton Bassett, was more than a cry of a family's anguish at losing a young member. It signalled what will be a decisive change in public opinion (link).

In early July the Sunday Times carried a poll showing that one in five voters wanted troops out. Today's Independent reports that that figure has risen to one in two of the electorate wishing to see British troops leave Afghanistan.

Equally decisive for the Government trying to impose some politics onto this war is the finding that six out of ten voters do not wish to see any increase in troop numbers. Or, come to that, more equipment.

These findings come as the Government is at last stirring itself. Yesterday the Foreign Secretary and the International Development Secretary both began to hint that talking with the so-called "sensible" Taliban should be part of the war strategy.

But that strategy would most likely work if there was a sustained period where the Taliban realised they couldn't win against Western forces. That does not now look like a likely option.

Negotiations therefore begin from a position of weakness. It will not take the Taliban long for their intelligence to relay back the results of polls in this country and it is this country that is important as a dressed up NATO campaign is largely being fought by the British and the Americans.

We are in Helmand Province where most of the war is taking place. NATO troops are dispersed elsewhere in areas where little fighting is reported. By expressing its unwillingness to send more troops now the Government is committing the country to a long war of attrition in Afghanistan - or an abrupt withdrawal.

The strategy has changed significantly over the last couple of months. From a policy of clearing the Taliban and moving on - with the Taliban quickly moving back once troops had departed - the Government is now committed to a clear and hold policy.

The aim is for, once the Taliban have been cleared, a series of development initiatives to take place in the "secure areas". But development takes time. If the Government is serious on this front, which I am sure is, it will have to commit our troops to remain in Afghanistan way beyond the election.

And here the politics at home kicks in. Today, four more bodies will be brought home and the now familiar news coverage will rightly gain high profile for the rest of the day. It is those coffins moving slowly through Wootton Bassett which is now driving public opinion on a war which increasingly the electorate believe we cannot win.

The Government is fighting on two fronts - the Taliban in Afghanistan and now public opinion at home. With the cost in lives of holding the first line, it is difficult to see how a Government will be able to defend a second line against voters in this country.

How can the BBC be saved? It certainly is not going to survive in its current form.

There are powerful commercial pressures who simply want a slice - and a growing slice - of the license fee. There's growing disquiet over the license fee poll tax. Why should poorer people pay an equal sum to richer people, especially as they are less likely to view BBC programmes?

If that wasn't bad enough, there's the digital revolution. The BBC was set up at a time when the means of broadcasting were very limited. Now there is almost no horizon to the possibilities of delivering programmes.

The BBC also contains the seeds of its own destruction. To justify the license fee it is compelled to put on programmes that attract huge audiences. Many of these programmes seem a direct attack on the public service broadcasting ethic which the BBC is there to enshrine.

Hence the pamphlet David Rees and I have just written - Auntie's Dying: Long Live Public Service Broadcasting.

Our main proposal is for the license fee revenues to go to the new public service broadcasting commission. This body would be the custodian of what we as a community might mean by public service broadcasting.

And they would make that ideal effective in the programmes that they would commission. We suggest that under this scenario, BBC Two and Four and Radios Three and Four and the World Service would survive. Most of the other BBC material would be broadcast commercially.

Commercial stations would be able to bid for public service broadcasting money so would individuals or groups.

David and I are part of the 2011 Trust which will celebrate 400 years of the King James Bible with, we hope, 400 major events testifying the impact this book has had on establishing the English language as a worldwide phenomenon. Under the proposed reforms the 2011 Trust would be able to bid for money to commission programmes celebrating this great event. We would then look for programme makers and outlets for our productions. Public service broadcasting would therefore be partly people driven.

The reform also envisages the provision of a great online library containing all the digital programmes commissioned under public service broadcasting. It would also pay for bringing previous broadcasts like the proms online so that users could choose what they wish to see when they wish to see, from a growing body of past public service broadcasts.

Some people have interpreted this as an attack on the BBC. It is, rather, a championing of Public Service Broadcasting, which the BBC was brought in to advance and on which it has a truly great record.

But that is becoming less so. The dividing lines are between those who will defend the BBC as an institution, and those whose loyalty is not to an institutional structure but to a hugely important cultural and democratic impact of public service broadcasting.

I think those who are loyal to the ideal, rather than the institution, will, in the long run, win.

For the sake of our culture and democracy I hope so.

A grandmother's piercing cry as the coffin of her grandson moved in front of her sounded of more than the anguish of one family. It heralded, I believe, the end of the Government's current strategy in Afghanistan.

The grandmother's cry, that was carried on the news broadcast two weeks ago, has done more than all the groups campaigning against the British strategy in what Neville Chamberlain would have called a "faraway country". The intensity and drama of the pain has made the bringing back of soldier's bodies a media and hence a political event of real significance.

What began as a politically thought out campaign to overthrow a Taliban government has become war that dictates the politics. Putting back the politics into the war is urgent.

Tony Blair managed, as usual, to confuse the issue. A new government that did not support or give cover to Al-Qaeda was required. The Taliban government was overthrown by invading forces.

This key issue of a non-supporting Al-Qaeda government was wrapped up in the most daring of liberal agendas. The war was also being fought for the equality of women; although that is a goal that is yet to be fully achieved in our own country.

The Taliban-enforced inequality is symbolically represented by the burqa. But what can those solider make of this kind of campaign when we allow such symbols to reign in some areas of our own country?

The most urgent task is to give our troops the very best equipment, including helicopters, pilots and more troops, but this must only be a holding operation.

Politics must now come into the fore. How much longer can we go on supporting a corrupt government who cannot even deliver order? Sooner rather than later we need to be talking to the Taliban.

There is a huge difference between our wish to impose a Western-type democracy of Afghanistan and of the political tradition of that country being able to respond positively. The one objective on which we should have majored is a Taliban that would attack Al-Qaeda as effectively as they have been fighting us.

We owe it to those Afghans who have supported us to take some time in letting them know that a change in policy might be on the way. They must be given the chance to make their own deals long before we cut and run.

Those chilling pictures of the South Vietnamese struggling to get on the last helicopters leaving Saigon are a reminder of how a withdrawal should not be accomplished.

Those who criticise this line argue that the front line in fighting Al-Qaeda is clearly drawn in Afghanistan. I agree with them. The debate, however, has to be how we defend that line.

How many more coffins will have to come home before the political class realise that our strategy is losing this very war.

The chief of staff should argue rigorously for resources. But it should be the politicians that dictate the politics of the wars. At the moment the two sides are playing out the other's role.

In other context R. H. Thomas wrote of nailing our doubts to an untenanted cross. That single piecing cry of pain from one grandmother has ensured that a growing concern about the war is now being nailed to that cross. It cannot be long before British politics responds to the sounds that nailing.

Some Birkenhead GCSE results are deeply disturbing - as some are in most other areas of the country. I do not believe this is because young people have suddenly become thick. Nor do I believe it is because the teaching profession has collapsed.

It would be sensible to consider a number of forces at work - the rise of chaotically run families would certainly deserve more than a mention.

But central is how schools are organised and what they are allowed to teach. The biggest cause of our present discontent lies here. The 1944 Education Act proposed a tripartite system of Secondary Education that was never implemented. Grammar schools flourished, but technical schools were notable by their absence.

A binary system should have centred on an expansion of grammar schools and a flourishing of pucker technical schools. Instead, grammar schools were frozen like Lot's wife and the vast majority of us were herded into secondary modern schools that, by and large, offered a watered-down grammar school education. Even Plato couldn't have made this system work.

Here is the route of our desperately poor examination results. We don't cater for different forms of excellence so this is where our proposed academy schools come in.


Our proposal is to close Rock Ferry, Park and Ridgeway High schools and open a new all boys academy and a new mixed academy. Both will offer courses that will lead to professional qualifications for professional tradesmen and women.


Of course there is much more to success than this. But academies, I believe, offer the chance to point our schools in the right direction. Up to ten days ago this was just a dream that a few of us shared with David Hughes, the sponsor of the new school. David is a North End boy who made good, and who now wishes to put something back in the town that gave him a start in life.

On Monday the Education minister signalled an amber light to the long process of establishing a new academy. Three days later, on the Friday, David and I announced in Birkenhead the opportunity to establish a new academy. We were generously supported by the Heads who have worked so hard to offer young people opportunities in the hopeless system in which Governments have insisted they work.

The next stage is in September when the minister will hopefully turn the amber light to green. This will be the first stage in the legal process that the idea can go out for consultation and discussion.

At the moment Labour and Liberal Democrat Councillors are behind the scheme being discussed in public, and for this discussion to be a serious event as part of a wide-ranging consultation process.

The council is anxious to get into that stage, but its plan goes beyond one new academy. Phil Davies, who is Wirral's Cabinet member for young people, intends that this great opportunity should be seen as part of a wider plan. There are some other plans that will be announced just as soon as Wirral have the legal right to do so. These plans centre on how all the schools in Birkenhead can develop radically so to improve the life chances, of not just the 30-40% who gain minimum leaving requirements, but of every one of our pupils.

These blogs will report progress as the discussion opens up.

The PCT is progressing well and building a new health centre to replace the old workhouse buildings on the St Cath's site. It is part of their aim to transform how NHS services are delivered to us. I was given a presentation of the scheme on Friday and I was thrilled to be told what is planned.

The local historical society asked for the most significant parts of the old building to be preserved and all of them will be. You can see how they have used that impressive gateway into St Caths as part of the new hospital grounds. The gatehouse is also being preserved.

There will be mega public expenditure cuts announced before too long. I am very anxious to get this major project approved and, as far as possible, the money allocated, before the cuts start to have an effect. I hope therefore everybody in the Wirral area is going to work hard to ensure that this very important development, which will signal the regeneration of the Church Road area, gets maximum support. Delays may lose Birkenhead a new centre of excellence.

The Government threatened what it liked to call the rebels that voting against them was a nuclear option.

The thumbscrews were applied. If the new clause blocking the Budget was passed Armageddon would begin.

From 18:00 that evening the Government would not have been able to collect taxes. Taxes so far collected during the current financial year under the temporary taxing powers granted to all Governments to get their Budget proposals through by August 5th would be annulled. The Government would be compelled to return taxes already collected in this financial year.

The threat worked. In the end only sixteen Labour members voted in what was our last chance to rectify a Labour Government increasing taxation for those on lowest income by abolishing the 10p starting rate.

But did the Government's response suggest Armageddon might occur in other, equally awful ways? The Chancellor maintained that there would not only be tax chaos but this would domino into the debt market. A gilt strike would occur, the currency would collapse and unemployment would surge.

Faced with such a prospect, an administration determined to survive would immediately have called a confidence vote on its tax-raising powers and this would have been passed long before Parliament shut up shop at 10 p.m.

But the Government's scenario assumes that it would stand idly by, feebly rubbing its hands, like some clapped-out Uriah Heep. Merely to accept that this was the scenario - and that Chancellor assured us there was no option two - suggests that the Government had given up the will to live.

That life might be ebbing away might be due to the state of Labour's heart. For while we were dubbed rebels, the term rebel can surely be applied to those at the heart of the Government who dared to think, let alone act upon an attack on the living standards of low wage earners.

The one golden threat that links together Old Labour, New Labour and just Labour has been a belief that on whatever else we might get wrong due to human frailty, we were in business to protect those who have least in life.

Whatever state we have been in nationally or locally, no matter how useless our Parliamentary candidates have been, Labour voters knew that we possessed a common DNA. We would go down fighting against all manner of odds to defend the position of those who had least - particularly those we keep mumbling on about when we talk of the decent hard working families of this country.

The abolition of the 10p was an assault on Labour's core value.

When the results of the next election are published, and the detailed surveys are completed on what made people vote which way, I cannot help feeling that the 10p abolition will be the issue on which poor and rich voters alike concluded there was nothing special about Labour - New, Old or Ordinary - to distinguish it from the other political parties.

By refusing to find the minutest fraction of the sums we shovelled towards the banking community, historians may conclude that it was not the rebels, so-called, but a Labour Government itself that pushed the nuclear button.

I was stung by John Humphrys' observation on the Today programme that those Labour members attempting to get justice for lower-paid workers who lost out with the abolition of the 10p starting rate of tax were rebels. In one sense we are, but not in the more profound sense.

The rebels are surely Gordon Brown and his then cohorts at the Treasury who overturned the most basic of Labour's commitment to the poor. The abolition of the 10p starting rate of tax raised most of the revenue to fund a 2p cut in the standard rate of tax.

Instead of Labour moving to ease the burden on those earning the smallest wage packets, it increased it to lessen the tax burden on the rest of the community. It is this injustice that Labour members will be trying to finally overturn in today's budget debate.

At the weekend, the Labour whips repeated to the press that they were very relaxed and confident about seeing off the amendment. If they were so relaxed, then Labour members could safely vote with their consciences.

The whips' campaign changed direction yesterday, claiming that the amendment was out to wreck the budget, and that if it was passed the government would not have the power this evening to continue levying taxes.

Rubbish. The government is raising revenue, as all previous governments have done, under a measure that allows its tax-raising powers to go on while a budget is being debated in parliament.

These time-limited powers run out on 5 August. So there will be plenty of time before that deadline arrives for the government to bring forward a full compensation package for the 10p losers, have the package implemented and gain tax-raising powers for the rest of the year.

The other line the whips are peddling is that hardly anyone gets letters about this issue nowadays, so the 10p injustice has subsided in the country. It is true there are fewer emails and letters, but can we be so sure that lower-paid workers have forgotten about the issue - or have they simply given up any hope of influencing Labour MPs to deal the justice card dealt to them?

I still get a small but steady stream of letters and emails on this topic. The sense of hurt and anger at the government has not subsided, if these communications are anything to go on.

The abolition of the 10p rate sent shockwaves through Labour's core vote. We will only know its longer-term damage when the ballot boxes are opened at the end of the general election. My guess is that it will count against us in a significant way.

The politics of today's amendment is about abating that anger. For the government, even at this late stage, to make a determined effort to make sure no 10p taxpayer is still a loser might just bring closure to the issue when people come to vote.

The number of 10p losers, on the most conservative of estimates, was well over half of Labour's vote at the last election. I find it incomprehensible that a government whose strategy is now to shore up the core vote is still intent on defeating the 10p motion tabled by a significant number of Labour MPs.

The News of the World this week carried a news story - I don't know why it has been resurrected - about assisted suicide, which involved me. The tale is as follows.

One of my great friends was Barbara Wootton - one of the most intelligent people of the last century. We would have tea regularly in the House of Lords where she was a distinguished Member.

On a trip to her barn outside Dorking she told me she had joined Exit. She was intent to take her own life if she became severely incapacitated.

Better still, from Barbara's point of view, she had persuaded more than one of the Lords, who was also a doctor, to prescribe the necessary drugs for her to carry out her objective.

At the time Exit was in the news. A daughter had come home and heard a terrible commotion upstairs in her mother's bedroom.

She rushed into the room to find that a representative of Exit was sitting by the bed with a woolly hat on eating a banana sandwich. There was a plastic bag over her mother's head. She pulled the bag free.

I told Barbara that surely she didn't want to have an end like this. She assured me that she would not, but she was a paid-up member of Exit.

I thought nothing more of this until I received a phone call from what were then called geriatric wards telling me that Barbara was a patient. I went down to see her. On being taken to the bathroom Barbara called to me that she was keeping a note in her handbag of the differences between hospital and prison, adding the list wasn't very long.

Soon afterwards she was transferred to a residential care home and on the occasions when I visited her I expected her to ask me to go to her barn and collect the prescription that had been given to her.

I knew what the consequences would be. I believe people have the right to commit suicide at the end of their lives. But I believe it proper that the law protects them by prosecuting those who help in this act.

If Barbara had asked I would have helped her by collecting those drugs. The consequences would be that I might be imprisoned and would lose my seat.

I believe that to be just. How else can people like Barbara be protected from people posing as close friends who might, for example, be main beneficiaries under her will?

I was not in this position. So that part of the question never arose. But I believe that the present law protects vulnerable old people from this abuse.

It was also protects them in another equally important respect. Once we change the law on assisted suicide old frail people - and perhaps frail young people - might feel that, as they were a burden, they should put an end prematurely to their lives.

It is very noticeable that no-one charged under the existing law has been sentenced. So the law acts wisely. It acts as a safeguard. And I believe that this status quo is better than any alternative on offer - including the latest attempt by Lord Faulkner to reform the law on assisted suicide.

I have no objection to MPs declaring their outside earnings; although I don't think the debate will unfold in quite the manner that some of the reformers believe. Let me wind the clock back.

Back in April the Government's side has girded itself up for another attack on the Tories. The campaign went we would stuff them over their part-time earnings.

The resolution was passed by the House so that details of earnings should be declared in detail from today. Linked into the motion was a clause compelling MPs to detail the amount of time they spend on gaining part-time earnings.

The aim, I thought, was to expose Tories who pick up large sums from the City but who do little work for it.

For reasons that I explained on Monday, this move will begin to change the sort of people that come into the Commons. It will make our form of representation less varied and much more uniform and drawn from a dying political class.

Yesterday in the House I returned to this subject and told the Justice Secretary, Jack Straw, who is having a pretty rough time with the Bill, that I would not on principle fill in the time information, nor could I for practical reasons do so.

Here is what I said:



He dealt me a get out of jail free card.

The Bill regulating MPs is slowly disintegrating and will be finished off by the Lords if the country is lucky. The clause setting up the body that will regulate our allowances will of course survive, and so it should.

The Bill is an attack on my conception of public service. When I came into the House I thought myself wonderfully fortunate to be representing a real place - Birkenhead - that wasn't chopped and changed with every boundary report as are most other seats.

I also viewed myself doubly fortunate in that I was going to gain a salary. I don't have private means, and therefore I don't have a private income. I saw my salary as giving me that private income which in the past had allowed people from privileged backgrounds to devote their lives to public service.

Practically all my public activities are about being a more effective MP. I write articles purely to try and win political debates. I produce books because they are on things which I think are important in our public life. Such a concentration might make me boring, and I accept that, but that is the state of play.

I deeply resented the aim of the Parliamentary Standards Bill which suggested somehow that all my working hours should somehow have been bought by the House of Commons and that, far from having the freedom I thought a salary gave me to pursue a public life, I have in fact been sold into some form of slavery where I have to account for every part of the day that couldn't be justified in a technical sense as parliamentary business.

Jack Straw is one of our most able performers. That he is in real trouble with this Bill suggests to me that it was not his Bill in the first place. It seems that because of his parliamentary skills, he has been landed with trying to get something through the House of Commons. Unfortunately there is still much more work to do on this measure.

Another day, another mess. Yesterday it was the Government's turn to bugger up Parliament.

Under the guise of bringing necessary reform to the payment of MPs' allowances - which is necessary and could have been quite a short Bill - the Government has introduced a whopping ill-thought-through constitutional landmine of a Bill. It would be serious if one thought such a measure would last any time at all on the statue book.

I along with Richard Shepherd divided the House on the second reading - and these votes show whether we agree with the principle of a Bill.

The Government emphasised to the point of tedium that this measure had all Party support. While we only gained a single vote in opposition to the measure, what was devastating for the Government were their numbers. They had only 290 odd.

Given that the Liberals seem to be voting with the Government, and the Government has 349 MPs, they ought to, on that score alone, have registered 412 votes.

Of most significance however was that not a single Tory voted for the measure. If there is a change of Government at the next election this absurd measure will be quickly on the exit chute.

The measure is not compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights and the Parliamentary Committee that judges these matters has not even had a chance to sit on the Bill, which was published only last Thursday.

New categories of crimes are created for MPs and yet as the Tory spokesperson Dominic Grieve so effectively pointed out, the attempt of the Government to appear extra tough with MPs turns out to be nothing of the kind - although I'm sure that was not the intention.

Currently we have a fraud measure going through Parliament with sentences of up to 10 years. Why in this measure do we create a new offence for MPs but have only a one year maximum sentence?

I centred on the absurdity of insisting that MPs not only declare their part-time earnings - I'm all in favour of that - but having to give an account of the hours worked for these earning is not only demeaning, it is unpractical.



Start the clock . . . egg timers soon to become vital equipment for MPs to measure the time spent on second jobs

This impracticality was brought home to me just before the debate.

A banker asked to see me. He was anxious to discuss the feasibility of whether his village could collectively bid for Gas, Electricity and the other utility supplies thereby pushing down prices.

I immediately saw this was an idea relevant to the mutual of which I am a non-executive director in Liverpool - Medicash. After our meeting I wrote to the Chief Executive to see whether this might give Medicash an additional lease of life.

How do I time that activity? When was I carrying out my MP role and giving advice and at what point should I have clocked on for Medicash?

Of course I could make a return, but would it be honest and accurate? And should we have rules which discourage honesty, we have too many of them in the welfare state and we all know the consequences there.

More importantly, if moonlighting is to be dubbed an offence, why aren't the biggest offenders - Ministers - having to set out how much time they spend on their job as opposed to their duties as an MP?

I suggested we would all have to be given hourglasses so that we could give accurate estimates. But when would I start the hourglass when writing an article? When do the first thoughts come into my head?

The real aim of this measure of course is to drive out of the Commons MPs with other interests. We have no serious trade union leader, business leader, entrepreneur, musician and the only IT innovator - Adam Afriyie - has had to give up this role while he is on the opposition front bench.

This nasty little measure will change what we mean by being a representative in this country, converting it into membership of a very tightly drawn and declining political class.

To help dislodge the whole measure I will refuse to put in the hours worked for my part-time earnings, although I shall attempt to make an estimate for my website.

This will land me with a fine of up to £5,000, which I won't pay. I shall resist the bailiffs taking goods to that effect so finally I will be landed in prison.

I would prefer to spend time honourably with inmates in prison than with a Parliament cowered into submission by a Government that has given up any appearance of knowing the difference between its ear and its elbow.

No dark thoughts interrupted two stunning visits in Birkenhead on Friday. There were other visits too which gave me huge pleasure, but they illustrated problems rather than the town's successes.

After a good meeting on what I call the Market Renewal Programme, and the safeguarding of our budget in these precarious times, I went off to Faiveley Transport, a company with a beautiful setting in Morpeth Dock and gave a hint of what the site will be like once Peel Holdings gets fully underway.

In the old days it would have been said that Faiveley Transport makes parts for railway carriages. In fact in today's market they are at the top of the technology cusp adding real value to railway carriages most of what we now come to think is the most attractive feature of rail travel. The control of temperature, information about where the train is going, vehicle door systems, as well as the braking system.

Faiveley Transport is in for two major contracts resulting from the huge public investment in modernising our railway system. The first is helping to produce a new fleet of Intercity Express trains and the second working on carriages for the much-anticipated Thameslink service. If anyone wants a lesson in how international companies have replaced in many respects the role the nation state once had in determining orders and thereby livelihoods they need go no further than Morpeth Dock and talk to workers at Faiveley. The customer service after care part - which are mega orders in themselves - is where Faiveley Tranpsort UK comes in.



Frank lends a hand at Faiveley Transport

Most of the employees I met at Faiveley were male. Here is one company moving against the trend in Birkenhead and elsewhere where employees can still earn good family wages. That is what is so missing now in poorer areas and it is for this group that is catered for by Jill Quayle and her hugely dedicated team at Tranmere Methodist.

The national figures on NEETs - not in education, employment or training - are appalling. Birkenhead's figures are even worse and both nationally and locally the totals are higher than when Labour came to power in 1997.

Jill's team works largely with young people excluded from school. Friday was the day on which certificates were handed out for success and success there was in abundance.

95% of last year's group are now back in employment, education or training. No other project has a success rate like this and no other project takes young people more difficult to bring up to the starting point in life.



Successful Members of Tranmere Community Project

The average cost of this success is £710 per young person. It puts New Deal and every other Government programme to shame. One of the things which, please God, will happen when public expenditure cuts start to get politicians focussing on objectives will be to shift part of the smaller budget into those areas which bring most success.

What shocks me to the core about the BBC expenses story is not the sums involved. Nor is it that people earning £250,000 a year still can find time in what we hope are very busy lives to record and reclaim the minutest of expenditure.

No, the real shock comes from charging up presents that they give to their friends and acquaintances. What does poor old Bruce Forsyth now feel about that bottle of Krug Champagne?

There might have been a passing pleasure that a "friend" sent him a £100 gift.

But the basis of a gift is surely to give something of your own. The best gifts come when people make things for you or give you their time.

The gift relationship has more recently been converted into presents. But at least one felt people were giving up income they may have spent on themselves to give to us.

Now poor old Bruce realises that this act of friendship to mark his 80th birthday was really nothing of the kind. Mark Thompson didn't put his hand into his own £647,000 salary, but charged it up to us license fee payers. So, Bruce, it is a very belated Happy 80th Birthday from all of us, and not, as you might have thought, from solely the BBC's Director General.

There is another side to the expenses saga. Although it won't be popular, I hope nevertheless it will be worth telling.

When I first came into the House thirty years ago, older Members told me to claim my allowances. They had been told by the then Chief Whip in the Wilson Government that pay was being frozen, but Members were expected to claim their enhanced allowances. And so the story was handed down as though it was some part of an apostolic succession.

Over the last three decades I cannot recall a time when MPs were given their pay increase in full. I am sure there were some occasions, but most governments have been too feeble to implement recommendations from the top salaries review body. No trade union would have put up with this behaviour. Nor would any professional body such as teachers or doctors.

Instead of implementing the recommendations in full, the Whips would go about spreading the weasel words about claiming the allowances in place of a full pay increase.

So that is the culture I came into and which has been massively strengthened over the years. All too many MPs have come forward once they were exposed by the Daily Telegraph and said their claims were within the rules or worse still blamed modestly paid staff in the Fees Office.

Only the exceptional MP has replied that they were told to claim the allowances and that is what they had done. My expenses were put up on my website as soon as possible and I was the first MP to publish them and they have since been published again by the House of Commons.

Now we are into the next round of beating up MPs and humiliating them. The House passed a resolution that all our outside earnings should be published. And mine will be published here when they are sent to the authorities.

That has not stopped the Sunday Telegraph trying to jump the gun. They have sent a beguiling email asking us within a day to provide not only details of the earnings but how long we take in earning these sums.

Their enquiry to me and my reply are posted below. I am reluctant to disclose how long it takes me to write articles as I fear for the jobs of highly paid journalists once editors see how quickly copy can be put together.

But there is a bigger issue at stake. I think it is good that MPs have outside interests and earnings. It is crucially important that none of the earnings are ever used to influence votes here in the Commons. But the process of Government - making laws which affect real people's lives - is enhanced by having real people with a real spread of interests here in the House of Commons.

During my time here I have seen a big change in who becomes an MP. And the numbers who had lives before politics has gone down, and the numbers who have only had a political career, being researchers, or MP's assistants, or working by lobbying government, have significantly increased.

The result is a poorer House of Commons. I believe we should move to a system where those MPs without substantial outside earnings gain one rate of pay. There should be another option for those MPs who have substantial earnings outside the Commons.

I do not think it necessary to list what those earnings are. I think it is none of my business or the public's business.

We have no serious trade unionists in the House. There is an almost total lack of big businessmen, there are few entrepreneurs, there is no-one representing the big interests in the country - like women's organisations, sports clubs, centres of musical excellence, IT innovation and I could go on.

Why should any of these people ever think of coming in to the House of Commons, which is in danger of becoming so frightened of the media, asked to provide information you would never ask of your best friend and would be embarrassed to learn it of your neighbour?

I shall as resolutely as possible oppose moves that come to the Commons that are meant largely to acquiesce to unjustified media campaigns against politicians. The campaign against MP's earnings will make the House of Commons poorer, and better government, even more difficult to achieve.

The standard of MPs and governance will not increase as a result of these campaigns. That will come from MPs having the courage to take power back from the Government, to control our own timetable so that every measure opposed by the Government that affects our constituents' lives can be properly considered before being passed into law.

We won't raise our own moral by endlessly succumbing to the latest media hunting party. It will come when the public see at last that we are behaving as MPs traditionally have done down the centuries and that is to hold the Government to account.

Sunday Telegraph Enquiry - (to protect sensitive information about Sunday Telegraph employees, the following has been redacted).

From: FIELD, Frank

Sent: 25 June 2009 14:32
To:
Subject: RE: MP's second jobs survey - Sunday Telegraph

Dear ,

Thanks for your e-mail. In the spirit of the new rules which you cite, I will happily send you my return after I have sent it to the Registrar. My worry however is filling in the amount of time it takes me to write articles. For I fear that once the management of the Telegraph sees how quickly good copy can be purchased at such reasonable sums more jobs at the Telegraph may be at stake.

With best wishes,

Frank Field

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: [mailto:]
Sent: 24 June 2009 14:42
To: FIELD, Frank
Subject: MP's second jobs survey - Sunday Telegraph

Dear Frank Field

We are conducting a survey on MPs' second jobs for this weekend's Sunday Telegraph, ahead of the introduction of new rules due to come into effect on July 1.

According to the Register of Members' Interests, you have listed the following remunerated employment, office, profession or directorships:

Directorship: Medicash Health Benefits Ltd.

Regular column for PensionsWeek, a publication owned by Pearson. (Up to £5,000)

Occasional articles for:

Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph. (Up to £5,000)

Times and Sunday Times. (Up to £5,000)

Mail and Mail on Sunday. (Up to £5,000)

Guardian and Observer. (Up to £5,000)

The Spectator. (Up to £5,000)

The Independent. (Up to £5,000)

Occasional appearances on BBC Radio 4 . (Up to £5,000)

In the spirit of the new rules, could you please tell us:

1 a) the precise amount you earned in the 2008-09 financial year from each of the above interests?

b.) the nature of the work carried out in return for that payment?

c.) the number of hours worked during the period to which the payment relates?

d.) the name and address of the person, organisation or company making the payment - except where it would be "contrary to any legal or established professional duty of privacy or confidentiality"? If you are withholding details under this exemption, please can you state the reason why?

2. a.) Could you also please tell us, from July 1, what outside remunerated employment will you continue to undertake? - if same as above, please state.

b.) what precise amount you expect to earn from each of these interests in the 2009-10 financial year?

c.) the nature of the work carried out in return for the payment?

d.) the number of hours you plan to work?

e.) the name and address of the person, organisation or company making the payment - except where it would be "contrary to any legal or established professional duty of privacy or confidentiality". If you are withholding details under this exemption, please can you state the reason why.

We would be most grateful if you could reply to this message by lunchtime on Thursday June 25th. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to call on the numbers below.

Yours sincerely,

and  ,

The Sunday Telegraph

020 7, 0797 or 0779 
 

Congratulations to John Bercow on his election as Speaker. It is a great office to hold at any time. It is now a crucial one in helping to salvage the good name that should be associated with politics.

Two things trouble me, however. The new Speaker made much about how honourable the vast majority of Members of Parliament are. That is not how the public sees us, I'm afraid.

In one sense that doesn't matter too much. The allowance system is to be reformed by the Kelly Commission. Our past expenses are also to be subjected to an audit by a new independent body which will cost the taxpayer another £600,000 each year. They will presumably treat the Speaker equally with the rest of us. What will they make of flipping a main home? And where does it leave the standing of those Members who have already repaid money back to the Fees Office.

More troubling was the Speaker's acceptance speech. Prime Ministers and Speakers are never more powerful than at the point of election. Any reforming Speaker is going to face huge resistance here in the Commons.

That is why I was disappointed that the acceptance speech was not mainly devoted to outlining the changes the Speaker intended to bring in immediately.

Shouldn't notice have been given that his Speakership depended on establishing a Business Committee of the House which had total control over how it spends its time? No other reforms come near to touching this one for importance.

Shouldn't the Speaker have let it be known, even in the gentlest tones, that he had nailed his Speakership to this reform? Likewise wasn't this an opportunity to say that the appointment of the Grand Committee's Chair on Thursday ought be selected by secret ballot, and that he would receive nominations on the Committee's membership directly from Members. He could then pass on his recommendation on the Committee's membership to the Committee of Selection.

What was wonderful about yesterday's proceedings was that the Speaker will thoroughly enjoy his role, this is an attribute not to be under valued. We need somebody who combines the serious intent of a reformer with a character that believes no matter how difficult the decisions that now face us, we should make them with good humour and believing the best in our opponents' motives.

The Labour leadership question is at the moment settled. The Labour side is beginning to recharge its political batteries. One would expect by this weekend for the focus to return to the Speakership race.

This Speakership will differ from others in that the holder of this office will need to help rebuild trust amongst voters in the parliamentary system. The Speaker therefore needs to have a reach into the world outside parliament. But a Speaker must also, at the same time, command support amongst all the parties here at Westminster, including their own.

While I have received a large amount of support from the public, the lack of support from colleagues in my own party is at the moment a significant weakness. Unless that support is forthcoming I will not be a candidate in the election, though it may be that the Labour block may begin to break up over the next week.

It is important that our election of Speaker is seen to be one that is not driven by party advantage. If that is how the public perceives it to be then the next Speaker will be broken-backed when it comes to helping rebuild the trust in our Parliamentary system.

Because I believe the next Speaker has to be different from other recent Speakers, and that the Speakership could play a pivotal role in negotiating a new contract between the House and the government, and the House and the electorate, I will continue to put up material on my website on how I would like the new Speakership to take shape.

Productivity in the public sector fell by well over three percentage points between 1997 and 2007. This finding, published by the Office of National Statistics is the starting point of the new politics that will dominate the next ten to fifteen years.

Most politicians are still singing from the same old hymn sheet which is now irrelevant. The theme music has been an ever expanding public budget.

It was obvious this time last year that Britain faced a major budgetary crisis. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research estimate that by 2012 public expenditure even after taking into account the changes the Government have announced for after the election will come in at 48% of GDP. By then the Government estimates the economy will be again booming, but the tax revenue from this booming economy will come in at 'only' 38% of GDP.

How are the public accounts to be balanced? That is the big central question which needs to come centre stage if the debt market is to be convinced that Britain is worth lending to.

The ONS report is the most useful of pointers to the politics of the new era. Not only has the central assumption of social democracy - that increasing gains can come from increasing public expenditure - been tested to the point of destruction, but the new politics needs to pick up the debate from this very point.

Each of the major public budgets must be set the task of winning those non-existent productivity gains that should have been forthcoming as undreamt of sums money were allowed to slosh around the public sector. New skills will be required for the new politics.

The key people that have to be promoted in the public sector are those whose eyes are firmly on the new agenda of delivering more for less. Job security can only come if public sector workers embrace change to deliver those productivity gains which have failed to materialise since 1997.

Politicians too will need new skills. Move one is to tear up the old hymn sheets. Move two is to write the new music. The idea that one is a good Minister because one successfully defends ones budget against attack has to become old hat.

Ministers should only be promoted because they start delivering more services with a smaller budget.

Labour supporters claiming that the European results were not a catastrophe for the party can only do so by inventing a new meaning for the word catastrophe. Whether one looks at them on a national, regional or local level the picture is pitiful.

The results reflect the collapse of support for the Government in the country. They also ring a clear verdict on the EU.

Take the Wirral results, which cover four Labour Westminster constituencies. The Tories romped home with almost 21,000 votes. Labour was in a poor second place with 16,000.

In Wirral there is considerable resentment against the current EU. It may be that all of these natural voters deserted their natural party to support one of the clearer anti-European tickets, but I doubt it.

Even so the two parties standing in the election who hold the strongest views against our present relationship with Europe far out stretched the Labour vote, and almost toppled the Tory vote.

The BNP came in with 4,666 votes and UKIP's vote totalled more than 13,000.

Don't let anyone kid themselves that this was an unimportant election where voters felt they could make a clear protest vote. Unless something changes significantly on a national level these results would be reproduced at a general election.

Labour cannot win with the present Prime Minister. I was one of the seven who would not support his coronation after Tony Blair was shoehorned out of Number 10. But even I didn't think a Brown administration would be as inept as this one.

The Brownites are attempting to terrorise Labour MPs into inaction. If they succeed then we deserve our fate.

It is simply absurd to argue, as does No. 10, that the next leader must call an immediate general election. A new leader, when being invited by the Queen to form a government, should inform the Monarch that he or she intends to return in April of next year to call for a General Election on May 6.

The new Prime Minister would make that a part of a message brought back from the Palace.

Similarly, the failure to deal with immigration and Europe is poisoning our political system. I have set out in the Balanced Migration campaign how we should counter positively the BNP. Similarly, we need to cut loose European politics from our domestic politics. Voters have no party to represent their worries on this score, only the BNP with their evil interests.

Part of the great political reform programme to be generated from the Commons will entail a head-to-head with Government. The aim, as I have said before, is not the Romantic one of trying to move back to the 1860s when MPs made and unmade Governments and were seen as great initiators of legislation. That was the age when only 3% of males had the vote.

Responsible government - in the sense of governments being held to account by voters - necessarily entails party Government. Trying to go back to a pre-party age will drive the reform programme into a cul-de-sac.

The aim of the Commons must be to ensure that the Government's programme is better prepared and, to use that horrible phrase, "fit for purpose". There will always be emergencies to which a Government must react. But outside this narrow area all legislative proposals should start with the publication of a green paper which:

• Explains why the measure is necessary.
• Justifies why the new measures cannot be achieved under existing legislation.
• Sets out the reasons why Ministers believe the option they are proposing is the right one.
• Analyses the costs, benefits and risks of the different options that have been considered.
• Lists the discussions that have already taken place and the timetable for further discussion.
• Invites the relevant select committee to help shape the main parts of the Bill.
• Gives a timetable when the Commons might expect a Bill.

There is nothing revolutionary here. Much of this was agreed by the House in 1997 following the Scott report, but never implemented.

The House also needs to establish a Committee of equal weight to the Public Accounts Committee which would be concerned exclusively with the Government budget, its size and the main headings of expenditure. This new Committee is urgently needed for reasons I have explained elsewhere. This reform is urgent if the Commons is to play its role in helping the Government shift, over the short to medium term, the record levels of debt it needs to market.

One of the other necessary reforms I have already mentioned in the establishment of a Business Committee which sanctions the Commons' timetable. This Committee would be responsible for ensuring that all Government measures are properly debated and amended by the weight of argument. But it would also be responsible for delivering back to Government its Bills on an agreed timetable.

The Business Committee would also be responsible for ensuring that Select Committee reports are properly debated soon after publication. It would also timetable space for Select Committees to introduce legislation resulting from their reports.

But the overall aim of the Committee should not be more, but less legislation, and of course better legislation.

We are only 8 days into a 34-day contest for the Speakership. Already two characteristics stand out.

The first is the lack of declared candidates. Sensibly the potential aspirants to the Speaker's chair are seeing what support they have. The successful candidate needs to have good support across all three main parties.

A second characteristic is how the reform agenda is developing or, rather, how the party leaderships are responding to rapidly changing events.

There appears to be a growing agreement that the Commons needs more control over its own timetable. The leaderships are offering more time for backbencher measures and, perhaps, a secret ballot for select committee membership and chairmanships. Nick Clegg is proving to be the most radical on this issue.

What is not being conceded yet is for all Commons' activities to be controlled by the Commons itself.

This is crucial for a healthy realignment of power between Commons and Government. Governments have a right to get their mandated election programmes through. How else can they be held accountable by voters at an election? No, or less whipping, as the Commons considers the details of a Bill, would be a good move.

But what of measures that have never been presented to the electorate? Given the volume and importance of the swathes of European legislation, how can the Commons get real and devote what perhaps might be one or two days a week, to debating, deliberating, changing, and if need be, rejecting European legislation?

Reforms on this front are all issues that, in normal times, could be considered by a Speaker's Conference. But, given the mire we are in, the next Speaker needs to develop his or her role in becoming the voice of the House, not only in the media, but in extending the reform agenda and enabling MPs fully to make such a programme their own.

In the past Speaker's Conferences have considered a single aspect of reform and have had small membership. A 21st Century Speaker's Conference could divide itself into a number of working parties each considering part of the emerging reform agenda. It will be the new Speaker's task to bring these working party reports into a coherent reform programme.

Such a Speaker's Conference could involve all those backbench MPs willing to play a role in one or more aspects of developing a truly revolutionary change in how politics operates in this country. Such an agenda would cover the following.

•How voters select candidates - should this be by open primaries or are other, better, methods available to candidates to be more representative in their views of the constituents who return them?



•How would this reform on open primaries reflect how MPs are elected? Much of the debate now is how to make MPs in safe seats more accountable to voters by changing the voting system. Would open primaries change this aspect of the debate?



•Voters are increasingly footloose with respect to party loyalty. Will this willingness to vote for third party candidates give such groups a fairer representation? Or are new measures necessary? To what extent should the Boundary Commission be asked to take into account third party representation when drawing up new boundaries?



•Increasing voter power over the selection of candidates would impact on the whipping system. Successful candidates, while still coming in on party labels, would feel more independent than candidates chosen by small and often declining party memberships. What other measures are necessary to strike a more mature balance between being able to hold a government accountable for its programme and treating MPs as mature specimens of the human race? David Cameron is moving on this issue.



•To what extent would open primaries serve as an effective recall measure on poorly performing MPs? Is mid-term recall necessary and, if so, how can MPs representing unpopular views, and who make our national debates more representative by sticking to their line, be protected against intolerant pressure groups who could wield power way beyond their true influence? Gordon Brown is right to stress the dangers of reform here.


There are still 26 days left in debating what sort of Speaker we need in the next parliament. What could be one of those once a century flowering of debate on parliamentary reform looks as though it is going to take off, thank goodness. Hence my delight in seeing a rolling reform programme. Let's hope much of what is proposed here may look old hat by the time MPs choose the next occupant of the Speaker's chair. I am sure in 26 days time my blog entries will show just such a progression.

My next entry will be on how the Government needs to clean up its act.

One wag reported, on hearing the news of the death of Metternich, "Now what did he mean by that?" The actions and sayings of Alan Johnson will likewise be analysed. So what did he mean by raising the question of electoral reform?

Here was a cry for traditional British politics to re-emerge. What Cabinet Government was like is still within living memory of older voters. It was not uncommon then for major figures in a political party to engage voters in a wider debate.

Alan is right in insisting that the reform of Parliament has to go beyond electing a new Speaker. The new Speaker could have a key role in driving through a new contract between the Commons and the voter but also, as Alan suggests a new contract between the Commons and government.

This is the central issue of the Speakership election. But is Alan right to back the Jenkins proposals? Again what is so good about Speaker Martin's delayed resignation is that the country now has perhaps a unique opportunity to debate not that tired old phrase "constitutional reform" but to remake our democracy.

We must move to a system where minority parties are better represented in Parliament. But is any reform which contains a list system, however modified, going to satisfy an electorate fed up to the teeth at what is sees as a conveyor belt of party hacks being thrown at it?

For that is a key aspect of the Jenkins proposals. An element of proportionality will be brought into the system by "electing" members from a list system dominated - yes you've got it - by the party caucus.

We surely do not want more of that. One of the tasks of reform is to lessen the grip parties have in a way which doesn't destroy a party system delivering responsible government i.e. a Government that is able to be held to account.

I have long advocated the French system. This keeps the constituency link so that every Member of Parliament knows that the buck stops with them. But it does ensure that every MP is elected by 50% plus one of the voters.

On the first Sunday of an election those representatives passing that margin are declared elected. On the following Sunday French voters turn up to decide between the top two candidates from the previous week when neither had passed the 50% plus one barrier. This system is capable of delivering not only authority to the MP, but better representation for minority parties. Take my Birkenhead result in 1979.

On our first part of the post system, I gained 49% of the poll, the Tories were second, the Liberals third. Under the French system I would have probably won with Liberal Votes switching to me.

But suppose the Liberals had come a good second and I was still a good way from gaining the support of the majority of voters. I am not so sure in those circumstances that the Conservative voters, not to mention a whole chunk of Labour voters, would not have moved on the second ballot to elect a Liberal Member. The closer the parties are in votes, i.e. the further any candidate is from gaining 50% plus one of the votes, the greater the "upset" is likely to be.

The other system I have advocated is open primaries. I believe in Birkenhead the law should allow the local Labour party to put me up with other Labour candidates in a primary and allow all voters, Tories and Liberals, to select the candidate who will in all likelihood the next Member of Parliament.

Not only would such a system prevent the wasted vote syndrome that there is in the safest seats. But it would likely result in a large number of such seats seeing the successful candidate from the primary being elected in a General Election unopposed. The fight could have already taken place in the primary.

Why not let parties hold such primaries should they want to? A small change in the electoral law would give a green light to greater voter choice of their representative.

For more information please see my Policy Exchange pamphlet "Life Support".

We are all reformers now. This will be the refrain of all the candidates for the Speakership. It is a phrase that hints at the opportunity, but also the danger. Will the election open the way to the most powerful Speaker in our history?

Both candidate and programme are of equal importance. The next Speaker has to be strong enough to get the reforms through.

Speaker Martin has done the Commons a great favour in setting out a leisurely election process. It will be the first campaign ever in which candidates will be required to publish manifestos and possibly to participate in hustings.

But the election will go further than that. The public will want their say in who they see as their Speaker. Local newspapers are likely to run their own polls on who constituents would most favour. And this is likely to be the first election in Britain where the internet plays a key role.

The next Speaker will only be the most powerful in history if he or she is elected on a programme that points to the next phase in our Parliamentary development. I have been asked whether I will throw my hat into the ring. I am thinking about that as I accept that there maybe too many colleagues on my own side who would block any such possibility.

I will therefore spend the next ten days or so developing the details of a programme, and I shall be happy to support anybody who is more likely than I to drive through the programme of reform. I will make an announcement on whether I am a candidate after we return from the Parliamentary recess.

I have already given the headings of what I believe that manifesto should cover in my previous blog, I intend to develop over the next ten days or so each of its ideas in more detail.

Any great reforming programme has to take the two central ideas that underlie our democracy - representative and responsible government - and reinterpret them for a Parliament in a deep crisis that goes, way, way beyond expenses. The Commons is failing to fulfil its historic role.

We MPs only get responsible government because parties are elected on a programme and are then held accountable for this programme by voters at the following election.

Crucial to the delivery of that responsibility is the political party.

Without political parties we would be in a worse state than the fifth French Republic. But voters increasingly loathe how parties operate.

No new contract is going to be successful unless a new balance is found on the need for the government to gain its programme through the House and a revitalised House of Commons being as a representative assembly. We will never get that revitalization until the Commons itself controls its own programme by its own business committee.

But that business committee has to go beyond simply "receiving" government Bills.

How can the representative arm of our constitution be strengthened in totally new ways so that Parliament's consideration of government Bills allows the representative arm of our constitution new powers. But, likewise, how can these powers be exercised in a way that is effective but does not threaten either the Government's existence or it being held accountable at the end of the day by voters for the totality of its programme.

I will pick this point up in my next blog.

When the Speaker stands up today at 3:30, he has to deal with what might become a complete breakdown of trust in our Parliamentary system, by voters, as a result of the expenses fiasco. The question of expenses rightly angers the public, but the Speaker is now offered a unique opportunity to reform Parliament.

His statement will hopefully cover five areas:

1. He should announce zero tolerance to fraudulent claims. Those in the outside world guilty of the worst abuses that have been uncovered would face prosecution. MPs should not be exempt from the criminal law. My guess is a lot of local parties will also begin the process of deselection. Failure to do so will see incumbents challenged by anti-sleaze candidates, who will probably win their seat.

2. The Speaker needs to announce immediate measures governing all allowances while awaiting the Kelly Commission on Standards in Public Life to report. All expenses from the beginning of this financial year should go online, the moment they have been agreed by the fees office. A slim-line Additional Cost Allowance should be announced with the clearest of guidelines outlining what can be claimed - not what cannot be claimed. The Communications Allowance should be abolished, no allowances should be used for supposed "services" received from local parties, and MPs should be forbidden to allow their local parties to use their offices in the constituencies.

3. The Speaker should announce that he has requested the Kelly Commission to report by mid-July. MPs can then debate the proposals before the summer, but they need to approve them without changing a dot or comma. The Fees Office would then have the summer recess to bring in the totally new system operating from the autumn.

4. The Commons must recognise that we live in an age of party governments, and that parties are crucial for delivering responsible government. Failure to get through their election programme would result in governments not being accountable for broken election promises. As a part of a new clear contract between the government and the Commons, while accepting the need for party government, the Speaker should announce today that it is up to the House of Commons to decide how the Government gets that programme through the House. He should set out that he intends to propose new machinery for managing House of Commons business, so that the Commons itself will in future organise its own timetable to consider Government measures, as well as its own measures.

5. The House of Commons must now better represent the views of voters. This should naturally follow from the Commons gaining control over its own timetable. The Government needs to be much more relaxed about the details of their programme so that MPs, better representing their constituents, can make measures contained in government Bills are more fit for purpose. Similarly, the Commons needs to elect the Chairmen and Members of each of its own Committees by secret ballot. The Select Committee system should also be enhanced not only in a pre-legislative role on Bills. It needs to extend its works so that serious issues raised by constituents are reported upon making it easier for those issues to be translated into future reform programmes.

Further reading:

Expenses are just a symptom, parliament must be remade - Sunday Times.

"And take upon's the mystery of things As if we were God's spies...."

William Shakespeare, King Lear

Today's Times has another exposé, not this time on MPs' expenses, but on the spy rings that operated against this country leading up to the end of the Second World War and beyond. Here's a personal note.

This paper has a strong record in exposing espionage. It led the campaign over what was known as the "Fourth Man" in the Cambridge spy network. The great investigator was Peter Hennessy.


Hennessy was getting too close. The Times was fed, I guess, misleading information from questionable sources in the security services and named the wrong B (as he was known).

B turned out to be Sir Anthony Blunt.

Years on the Times returns to this topic and writes up an exposé on the Oxford spy ring. They name Arthur Wynn as a key player.

I know Arthur's wife, Peggy, from my days at the Child Poverty Action Group. She was and remains a grand figure influencing British life in two significant ways.

The first was the research she undertook looking at how families were unfavourably treated in the tax and benefits system. She wrote a seminal work, Family Policy, which was a fitting tribute to the work Eleanor Rathbone began in her campaigns for family endowment and documented in her great book, The Disinherited Family.

In my days at CPAG, and on official visits to Sir Keith Joseph, then the Health and Welfare Secretary of State, Margaret Wynn's book would be either on a shelf behind him, or on the table itself. It was he who told me about the importance of the book, that I should read it and as they say - the rest is history.

But not quite. That book certainly started to change the Heath Government's policy towards families which has more recently run into the sands. For some reason best known to themselves, the Government has devised an unbelievably generous tax and benefits system which is totally blind towards whether the family has one or two parents. Not a move Margaret Wynn would have supported.

But Margaret, who is still alive, and her husband had an even more dramatic effect on British politics. As part of my job with CPAG I edited the group's journal - Poverty.

The Wynns- submitted me a piece on the worrying trend of a falling birth rate amongst more prosperous families and a significant increase in the birth rate of poorer families. Keith Joseph, a CPAG member, read the piece and used it for a speech just prior to the challenge to Heath's leadership.

He pointed to this trend and to the dangers it held for a prosperous country. Of course it had overtones of the Eugenics debate of the 1930s which had widespread support and which was quickly buried, thanks to the evil Hitler regime's policies on racial purity.

But not to look at how societies are changing, and what benefits or challenges this throws up, is simple irrationality bordering on the idiotic.

There followed a huge hullabaloo in the press and as a result of the media coverage Sir Keith Joseph announced he thought he was not suitable to challenge Ted Heath for the leadership of the Tory party. It is at this point that Mrs. Thatcher realised that, if there was to be a challenge, she had to be the challenger.

Two rather good footnotes to history on God's spies of families, do you not think?

There is literally no obvious way out of the appalling mess in which MPs now find themselves over our allowances. The opportunities we have had - in deciding how to disclose information about our allowances - were squandered.

Worse still we have given up any attempt to control events. Authority has been passed to the Kelly Committee on standards in public life.

What we can therefore do now is limited. But we are not totally without influence. The leadership should come from the head man. The Prime Minister should act today.

He should invite again the leaders of the other parties to join him in Downing Street. The purpose would be to agree an all party leadership recommendation to the Kelly Committee and they should not leave Downing Street until the outline of an agreement is made. If he doesn't, one of the other party leaders should take the lead.

They should then ask the Kelly Committee to speed up their enquiry. It should be asked to report on the second homes allowance within a month.

Can the second home allowance live up to its name? Should Members who are required to have a second home not loose out financially compared to London MPs?

If that is answered in the affirmative then some reforms fall immediately into place.

The Kelly Committee should list what it believes it would be legitimate to expense. Parliament should accept without amendment the Kelly proposals. Naturally all expense claims each month must go online as soon as they are cleared.

But how does the political class get some sense of authority and dignity back? Only the electorate can give this back. And it will not come back by simply holding a general election. We have to be much more radical.

We will know from opinion polls whether what Kelly proposes is supported by the voters. If it is not so, then Kelly and MPs must sell the proposals to the country by way of debate, and, if needbe, by calling a referendum.

The voters who pick up our bills must approve.

And I don't kid myself that that will be nice for MPs. Voters are pretty angry and may well be in vengeful mood. The only way we can make a new beginning is to submit our allowances to the electorate to decide.

I don't for one moment think the course of action will be an easy ride for MPs. But do we deserve one?

I didn't think I would feel so sad. How wrong can you get?

Friday was my last day in Birkenhead Town Hall - the place where I have held surgeries throughout the past thirty years. The Council has kindly fixed me up with accommodation across the square in the Treasurer's department. But I hadn't realised what a wrench it would be.

In those early days, I had a tiny boxroom on the ground floor which just held me, a constituent, two chairs and a very small table. People would come in to the Town Hall on a ground level and would sign in to see me.

It was in this little room that I first met Edmund Dell after being selected in January 1979 as the prospective Labour candidate for the town. Edmund was a glorious person and part of his glory was in his shyness.

The shyness prevented him from looking straight into my face. But, steadily directing his eyes towards to the wall I was facing, he gave me two pieces of advice.

The first was not to rush in and increase the numbers of surgeries that he held. It is very easy, later, to make surgeries even more regular, but it is very unpopular to cut the number. That advice I have followed to the letter of the law and it is only been over the last five, or is it ten, years that I have held surgeries as he did on the second and fourth Friday in the month, but now include the fifth Friday as well.

The other piece showed his optimistic nature. "One day", he told me, "you will be famous. People will ask you to speak in their constituencies.

You can only ever lose votes in an election. Accept every one of those invitations for it is better to lose votes in someone else's constituency that your own".

I fear I have failed Edmund on his second prophesy, but all those memories came flooding back to me on Friday evening.

These surgeries play a crucial part in my role as MP. I don't mean here the traditional role that constituents should be able to go to their MP and, if possible, seek redress for any legitimate grievance. This role is crucial importance and becomes more so.

Part of one's job as an MP is to say there is no redress. But my role is to try and change the law.

This has been a really valuable side of surgeries for me. The have been my constant tutorial over the past thirty years.

All the good ideas I've had in proposing reform have had their genesis in that little room in the Town Hall. On another occasion I will list some of the best ideas and best reforms you, my constituents, have taught me.

But now I leave the Town Hall. It is up for sale. Will anyone buy?

More importantly, what will it do to Birkenhead not to have a Town Hall? Having a place to meet cheaply is another public service drastically cut back by this latest closure.

Two glorious opportunities to give Birkenhead Town Hall new life have slipped through our fingers. It was the obvious site, being at the centre of the borough, for being the office of the new Wirral authority.

The Labour group decided that was where the Central Office should be and Labour councillors in Bebbington, West Wirral and, of course, Birkenhead voted for it.

But the Labour councillors in Wallasey voted with the Tories throughout the borough to have Wallasey. How stupid can you get?

The other splendid opportunity was when the current council was looking for decent accommodation in Birkenhead for some of its staff. A Senior Officer (without authority) signed a contract to remodernise the Cheshire Lines building.

How stupid can you get again? The £11M - or whatever the huge sum was that was spent on Cheshire Lines - a building we will never own and on which we pay rent - could have been used to make Birkenhead the second council centre in the borough.

And guess what? That chief officer who acted in this way remains in post!

The political economy of the crisis moved on significantly both yesterday and today. Yesterday the Commons debated the second reading of the Finance Bill - the Budget in other words.

I had already tabled an Early Day Motion, backed by Vince Cable, calling for a rational debate about public expenditure cuts that are on the way, and for the Commons itself to setup a committee that would recommend how public expenditure - forecast yesterday by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research to come in at 48 per cent of GDP in 2012 - is brought into line with the Government's optimistic projections for revenue coming in 10 per cent lower at 38 per cent in the same year.

Supposing the market simply can't digest all the debt the Government intends shovelling out this year, next year, and for many years to come. So in yesterday's debate I made a plea that the Government and the House should have a plan B.

£25bn in debt has been successfully sold this year - leaving about £200bn to be offloaded. What will happen if the Debt Office tells to the Treasury, then to the Prime Minister that the market is refusing to buy?

The Treasury Select Committee has just reported that the cost of floating this debt will rise i.e. even more of future budgets will be ear marked for interest repayments.
Please God the day will never come, but if the Government cannot shift its debt even at higher interest rates, it will have to act that evening before the markets open the next day.

Failure to do so will see the value of Sterling plunge through the floor. In attempt to safeguard the currency the Government will be forced into a slash and burn policy with respect to public expenditure. It might also be forced into forming a national Government. It may even have to adopt both approaches.

My plea has always been that in the run up to the election shifting the debt will prove much more difficult than the optimistic souls that run the Government believe and, that we should get a plan B in place now. Hence the plea for the House to act to start planning the new radical politics of achieving key goals while cutting severely the level of public expenditure.

That was the theme of the amendment I tabled to the Finance Bill Second Reading yesterday and I again was joined by Vince Cable and his deputy Jeremy Browne.

This topic is no longer confined to a no-go area of debate. There is now the beginning of movement on the Tory benches. What was noticeable, however, was the totally impassive way Treasury Ministers sat in the debate while MPs, now of all three parties are raising their concerns on whether it is simply possible to raise the levels of debt the Government believes is necessary to balance the book. .

An equally important report was issued today by the shadow monetary policy committee run by the Times and the IEA. At long last this group has begun to expose one of the dangers with the Bank of England's strategy for printing money, or as it is euphemistically called, ‘quantitative easing'.

There might be a case for such a policy but, given the banks' failure to lend adequately to businesses, surely this money should have been used to buy corporate bonds and debts, rather than Government gilts.

The result of concentrating on gilts has meant that far from injecting money into the economy, quantitative easing has seen the money go abroad, as it is foreign holders of Government gilts who have been quickest to sell.

Surely there must be a halt to this policy until a careful analysis has been done of the impact so far of a printing money policy. There may well be a case for this strategy if it is targeted on the corporate sector.

But soon, surely, somebody is going to put their good brains to the question of how one withdraws the printed money from the economy. For unlike the bank, I don't believe the inflation genie is safely secured inside the lamp.

The Government is to wipe clean its DNA database. That was the headline, although careful reading suggests that not all will be lost.

What is lost, or missing from this debate, is the view of those who believe that this craven act, in response to a European court ruling, weighs the criminal justice system even more towards the thug and against the decent citizen.

So this blog carries a health warning. I am in favour of the police keeping records people like me who are not criminals who have everything to gain from being part of a national DNA database which would catch many murderous suspects and bring their trail to a safe conclusion.

Look what the figures tell us. I asked the Home Office back in March 2006 for the number of major crimes solves due the use of the police DNA database.

Thanks to an amendment to the police and criminal evidence act in 2001 - so we are talking about a fairly short period of time - 8,493 profiles of individuals have been linked to crime scenes involving 13,964 offences.

These offences included 214 murders, 55 attempted murders, 116 rapes, 68 sexual offences, 119 aggravated burglaries and 127 supplying controlled drugs.

More recent figures are even more impressive there are 3100 DNA matches per month and over the period from April 1998 to March 2008 there have been over 272,000 detections which probably would not have been made otherwise.

It is worth rereading those figures again. The likelihood is that none of those criminals would have been found, brought to trial and sentences had it not been for the police DNA database. Criminals have everything to fear from this database and we innocent citizens had no such fear.

In my constituency a young mother was murdered but no-one charged. Years later the murderer set alight to the little shop which was used as the local mosque when an individual was inside. DNA samples from this site linked back to the murder scene. He was convicted of murder.

Would it not have been better to put the resources which are being wasted on ID cards into building up this most effective way of weighting justice in favour of effectiveness? Should this not have been an area where Government sought a derivation from the human rights legislation so that balance of our criminal justice was kept in favour of the innocent and not the guilty?

What about a movement by those of use who would quite happily offer our DNA sample to be included on the database? We have nothing to lose other than those criminals who wish us harm.

To balance the national accounts, taxes will have to go up and public expenditure will have to come down. Both changes offer huge opportunities to radicals.


The necessary tax increases should be used to move our tax system from being, at best, proportional, to become more progressive. Similarly, cuts in public expenditure should concentrate the mind on what key reforms would most significantly change our society for the better.

I have outlined before how I believe a radical pension reform, guaranteeing all pensioners over time an income above mean-testing, would help to begin to transform the public accounts.

The means test bill - £15bn and rising – would start to decline as more and more pensioners qualified for a decent minimum. The £15-16bn of tax subsidies to pension savings could be phased out over a fifteen year period and a closure put on any new entrants to public sector pensions.

Higher education awaits similar radical proposals. At one time our great universities were independent of Government and great powers in the land – rather like medieval Barons. It was they who shaped higher education policy, not transient bureaucrats in Whitehall.

In a letter in today’s Financial Times, I call on the Russell Group of universities – the best endowed – to declare independence before it is forced on them by the next radical Government. Their task should be to set out how many students they believe they should take and on what terms. They should cease taking orders from any Government.

The objective of 50 per cent of the population going to university was always unsound educationally. It is now financially impossible.

What the universities must not get into is a “game” with the Government whereby this absurd target is pursued when the size of individual undergraduate budgets being cut. Governments will continue to set the amount tax-payers will be asked to fund higher education. When naming their price per student the universities would determine the numbers going into higher education and what courses are offered.

We are likely to see some universities close. But isn’t that better than duping successive generations of students to undertake courses which make them worse off in terms of salaries than if they didn’t go to university in the first place?

The ground would then be set for a blooming of other forms of education (although they may not be so named) catering for those who have both been to university and those who have not. The one thing we can be sure of is that this new sector, paid for by consumers, will be stunted at birth while central Governments run a Stalinist-type command economy for higher education.

The potential threat facing the country is as great as the actual one was in 1940. The country needs to be roused to the challenge that faces it.

In 1940, Churchill did not offer the country ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat' to then postpone efforts until after an election. He asked for an immediate coming together of the best sides of the nation. Today the country cannot be roused to the huge financial challenge it faces if the two main parties duck and tell us that they'll be back once the votes are counted.

It is vital that politicians and the media move on from the bread and circus agenda of MPs' expenses and get real. The big issue confronting the country is whether it can raise huge, unprecedented shedloads of debt.

Vince Cable and I have tabled today an Early Day Motion calling for a serious debate now, and not after the next election, on how to balance the nation's accounts.

Both major parties are stringing the voters along, teasingly suggesting that big cuts in expenditure and tax hikes will be necessary, but neither has any intention of disclosing their plans to rational debate before the election. What both major parties overlook is that the money markets may not be compliant in a game of party politicking over the country's future.

Even on the Government's own figures, Britain will proportionally be trying to borrow more money to balance its accounts over the medium to long term than any other G8 country.

The markets are already showing some nervousness as the Government sets out to raise a record £220bn of loans this year. It costs more, for example, to insure against the Government defaulting on its gilts than it does, say, to insure against Cadbury's being unable to redeem its company debt.

If the Government has difficulty in finding the necessary borrowers there could be a swift collapse in our currency bringing economic chaos in its wake. If this scenario is allowed to develop the Government will be forced to slash and burn public expenditure projects.

It is to prevent this scenario, and for the country to begin a rational debate on how tax and revenue streams are brought into balance in the medium term, that Vince and I have tabled today's motion. The Government's expenditure programmes currently come in at 48%, yet the Budget Red Book shows that in 2013/14 less than 38% of what we produce will be raised in revenue to meet this bill. These figures not only highlight the danger to which the country is now exposed - can the gap be filled by borrowing? - but they usher in a new political era.

The size of the State or - what Governments can do - is going to change. If we don't have an open and full debate the new politics will quickly take on a reactionary bent.

The new politics offers a once in a generation opportunity for radical politics. The first concern in increasing taxation is to ensure that those on modest to low incomes do not bear once again the main brunt of tax rises.

Similarly, the new politics offers the opportunity radically to rethink what the Government's objectives should be. I have detailed elsewhere how the goal of eliminating pensioner poverty could be achieved while at the same time cutting back over a fifteen year period the tax subsidies to pension savings, the cost of public sector pensions and, because the single thrust of Government policy is to abolish pensioner poverty, a significant reduction and then elimination of the pensioner means-tested programme.

It is reforms like this that have a single objective which can be achieved over the medium term that will transform the national accounts. We now have time to set out how the nation's finances can be transformed.

The stranglehold on this debate by the two main political parties must be broken. Failure to convince the money-lenders than the country is serious about balancing its books could lead to a failure to raise the shedloads of debt any government must raise in the short run, resulting in a further collapse in the currency (already down by 30%) and untold economic chaos and misery.

If the two major parties fail to act, the House of Commons must seize the initiative to begin plotting a new safe course for the country.

The key issue that has bugged me since the Northern Rock bust up has been whether there have been enough money lenders out there, with enough money, to buy up the shed-loads of debt the Government is going to shovel out into the market. At long last, thankfully, in the last couple of days, one or two members of the commentariat have begun to join the discussion.

During this year the Government will be looking for £175bn of new debt on to which it will reschedule some past debt, giving a total £220bn. Let's remain in optimistic mood and assume the Government has, for once, got its calculations right.

We are not, however, the only country in search of lenders. Every other G8 country is in the same boat.

That is why it is so fatuous of some commentators to assure us that everything will be alright on the day because our debts now are nothing like the size they were during the Second World War. Surprisingly, Sam Brittan of the FT is leading this particular charge.

The two positions could not be more different, except that at both times our poor old country was in hoc. During the war years America, and those countries that lent to us, were in substantial surpluses. Moreover none of them were trying to borrow while we attempted to balance our budget.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, of the Sunday Telegraph, headed his column this week with the caption: ‘The capital well is running dry and some economies will wither'.

He cites "Commerzbank said every European bond auction is turning into an "event risk". Britain too finds itself some way down the AAA pecking order as it tries to sell £220bn of Gilts this year to irascible investors, astonished by 5pc deficits into the middle of the next decade".

To drive his point home, Evans-Pritchard cites the US hedge fund Haymen Advisors which is betting on the largest wave of state bankruptcies and restructurings since 1934. The worse profiles, according to Haymen Advisors are almost all in Europe ‘the epicentre of leverage and denial'. American banks have written down half their assets compared with only 17% of their European equivalents.

Evans-Pritchard also countered another foolish piece of whistling in the dark. The tune being bellowed here is that Western Governments have been successful in the past in borrowing from the petro-powers as well as China, Russia and other emerging nations, so why shouldn't they be as successful now.

This source of capital has been turned off. China is using a huge chunk of its surplus to reflate its own economy - in the hope of preventing widespread disorder and perhaps revolution. The crash in the oil price has seen Russia and Venezuela drastically revising their surpluses and, as if to put the boot in, these countries have become net sellers of US and European bonds.

There have been significant national bankruptcies before and there is nothing special which will prevent a similar scenario today. We kid ourselves that we are now much more knowledgeable in how to manage crises.

We may be, but we do not have time left to debate this point. What we do know is that the international institutions which we set up to create world financial order are themselves struggling to come to terms with the new world in which they, and we, now find ourselves.

All this makes it near criminal that the Government and the official opposition are bent on not spelling out now the tax changes and public expenditure cuts they envisage to bring the public accounts into balance in the short to the medium term.

Their failure to do so leaves Britain dangerously exposed in the world ranking of safe havens for other people's money. It now costs significantly more to insure British government debt than it does the debt issued by Cadbury's. The loss of our triple-A rating beckons.

That is why it is urgent that the political class in Britain gets real. We still have time - hopefully -to debate calmly tax and expenditure changes. Above all we still have time to make those changes radical.

As soon as the Government finds it nigh impossible to raise the next necessary tranche of debt there will be a wholesale exit from Sterling. The Government will then be fighting not simply for its own life, but for that of the whole country. Politicians must now act to head off that looming possibility.

St. George's Day, falling today, will not be officially celebrated. It would be farcical if it were, as governments seem to do all they can to deny our national character.

It will of course be celebrated in the hearts of millions of loyal English men and women. Some of these men and women come from old stock. Others have newly arrived to make their lives in a land of their choice.

What sort of land do we now have? The present government thinks it is doing us a favour by endlessly prattling on about Britishness.

This is a fatuous exercise. What our rulers do not seem to understand is that no new sense of Britishness can inspire our different nations until the English Question is settled.

None of the young people growing up in Birkenhead are given any sense of what is expected on them to be a citizen of England. Not one official minute is spent in schools setting out a guide to being a good citizen.

The first requirement is that everyone should feel honoured to be a part of this country, to respect it, and hopefully grow to love it. Second, we need to learn again that the cardinal English value of freedom can all too easily be abused.

Fifty years ago a refugee gave his opening lecture at Cambridge. This great historian, Geoffrey Elton, spoke of why he had come to our shores after living in most other European countries.

He said that the English were not without their faults. But they had discovered the great secret of how people in a crowded country can live together peacefully. We naturally exercise respect to our neighbour knowing that our neighbour exercised respect back to us.

Geoffrey Elton could not make that statement today. Freedom not voluntarily policed with respect quickly degenerates into anarchy. We urgently need to relearn how to respect one another.

Over time we English have been a pretty brutal sort of race. Then, a little over a hundred years ago we began to change. A culture of respectability swept through the country.

This culture and respectability made England the country that Geoffrey Elton wanted to join. Crucial to this transformation of our character was how families raised their children. We were taught how to control the nastier side of our nature.

We need to reinvent good parenthood. We need also to reinvent all those events which once marked out rights of passage.

Of course lots more work needs to be done in a country rediscovering the wonders and beauties of being English. But that task is being made impossible by the government's open doors immigration policy.

Most of the newcomers to this country have settled in England so immigration is largely an English question.

Not one of the new people here has been required to sign up to an English contract that should also be taught in our schools. Our political class has been criminally negligent on this front.

This does not mean that people have to deny views that they hold dear. What is does mean is that our first loyalty has to be to England.

We can have other loyalties - I might be a Christian or a Muslim, and to hold a number of identities - but we simply cannot go on thinking it does not matter that an increasing number of people have never thought that their primary loyalty has to be to this country.

And we will never regain our sense of identity by pretending there isn't a big problem here.

So on this St. George's Day true English men and women, from whatever country they have originally come from, will want to celebrate our national day quietly in their own hearts. But let us pledge ourselves that we do want a government that helps us to recover our sense of national identity. This will not be a Herculean task but one, when it is finally achieved, that will have been well worth it.

At a few minutes to one o'clock today the country's fate passed from the Chancellor and was cast on the waters of the money markets. Public borrowing will be £175bn this year and £173bn the following year.

From the very start of the crisis the Government has consistently underrated its severity. Even so, Britain will proportionately be borrowing more than any other G8 country.

Are the funds out there to meet the colossal requirements of G8 countries? Where do we rate in the international league tables as to whom colossal sums should be lent?

In these very early stages the Government is finding the gilts market sticky when it comes to issuing its endless new tranches of debt. What happens if the gilt market proves itself even more difficult in coming up with the funds for the gilt floatations? At some stage, maybe soon, gilts will be sold at lower prices, thereby pushing up long-term interest rates and damaging the recovery.

Even worse is the outlook if significant increases in the long term rate of interest still do not attract the necessary loans to balance this year's books. That could lead to a run on sterling.

If the Government has to revise soon its borrowing requirement for this year it would be well advised to accompany that statement with the announcement of either an increase in taxes or real cuts in public expenditure.

Panic in the money markets will lead to a much more deadly confrontation than the one seen of depositors peacefully lining up outside Northern Rock to lift their savings. Investors in gilts will act much more ruthlessly.

The 10p injustice returns to practical politics this week with Wednesday's Budget. This long drawn out and wretched saga, acts like a cautionary tale of the Government's loss of direction.

The story is well known. In his last Budget Gordon Brown announced a 2p reduction in the standard rate of tax to be paid for, substantially, by the abolition of the 10p starting rate. While most people gained, there was a very significant number of lower paid workers who lost out.

The Government, at first, thought it could bluff its way out of the crisis. Parliamentary questions were simply not answered and then, after threats of raising the issue with the Speaker, replied to at the very last possible moment, i.e. minutes before I was due to move an amendment calling on the Government to progress over the next 12 months a full compensation package. No such package was forthcoming.

The Government has been less than frank in another respect. The Labour Party champions individual taxation believing that it strengthens the position of women in households. The Government has refused to present information on the number of individual losers from the 10p rate's abolition: it only gives the number of households made worse off by its move.

This statistical sleight of hand minimises the number of losers. Most of those who lost out from this tax change were women for the very simple reason that they are, generally speaking, on lower earnings.

Many of the losers live in households where, again generally speaking, male workers gained from the reduction of 2p in the standard rate. If the total household income showed a plus, the Government excludes it from its official data on those households who lost out - where one member, usually the woman, lost out.

A diary highlighting the main events in the 10p saga is appended. Under pressure the Government brought forward a compensation package that was so cack-handedly constructed that, despite spending £2.7 billion, 1.1 million households and 6 million individuals were still left worse off.

Given the amount the Government was spending on the rescue package I did not believe it expedient to proceed with a blocking motion to the Budget. I also doubted whether I would carry enough Labour MPs with me to take the Government to the wire. I also believed the reassurances Government ministers gave that they would do all in their power, later, to compensate fully the losers.

Some Labour MPs were critical of my tactics and they have been proved to be right. The promise that this issue would be dealt with as fully as the Government could in the November 2008 Pre Budget Report proved bogus. So today, 32 Labour MPs have signed an Early Day Motion Greg Pope and I have tabled calling for action in Wednesday's budget. The EDM's wording is:

That this House records with real disappointment that up to 3.8 million individual taxpayers are still worse off as a result of the abolition of the 10 pence tax rate; registers that the two measures the Government have since announced do not yet compensate them fully; and calls on the House to secure justice for this group of low tax paying workers at the next Budget.

Aneurin Bevan once remarked that the language of socialism was priorities. I want to believe that Wednesday's Budget will show such a great ranking of priorities that ensures justice for all the 10p tax losers.


The 10p Timeline 
 
 
 

Harold Wilson asserted that the Labour party was a moral crusade or it was nothing. The McBride affair has left Labour members looking at nothing. That is the reality check that McBride has wrought on the party.

The whole of the government's energy should be spent on governing now and building a programme from which, within and year, we will be seeking permission to rule for another five years.

Far from helping sketch out a new roadmap, the McBride activities shine a searchlight on the paucity of the government's programme.

Week after week MPs have been turning up but with almost no serious work to do. There is the odd bill to be sure. But there is no legislative programme to speak of. Even the debates that are put on to fill in time are ones that deny MPs a vote. The whole exercise is vacuous.

Labour MPs are left staring into the abyss - that nothingness of Harold Wilson's statement. There is a wish amongst all sections of the PLP for the government to start governing. We wouldn't care too much whether the ideas were Blairite or non-Blairite, as long as we could give the impression of supporting a government that was using the next year to mark out why we should stay in office.

We have lived through an age of record public expenditure provision, but are now entering one of increasing cuts. There have been some beneficial results from this huge tax-payer largesse, but they in no way match up to what radicals predicted would be the outcome.

Have we been on the wrong track, and if so, what should now be our approach? Or is the task to look much more carefully how each pound of tax-payers' money is spent so we get a much bigger bang for our buck? Instead of this debate, we see the energy at the heart of Number 10 going into trying to smear the opposition.

It is this contrast between how we should be behaving, and what has been exposed, that is the real killer. A necessary government information machine has been corrupted by a spin that seeks not to inform but control and, if needs be destroy. And it has been in existence for over a decade.

McBride sat on the Prime Minister's political War Cabinet. If this is the war the Prime Minister thinks the country wants he is in for a very rude awakening. In the meantime, Labour supporters are left bewildered and wondering what happened to the moral crusading side of our mission.

Poor old Labour party.

A good Lent reminds us that we're at another stage in the year, and another stage in our life. One of the failures of a society that has, in a sense, walked away from, or banished God, is that it does not have these regular points in the year where it is reminded about its own existence: the need to take stock, the need to make new beginnings. So, for example, if you think about baptism, in the First World War, most people being sent to the front were baptised. That was not only a sacrament, it was also a way in which society said, ‘You are being welcomed into a larger family than your immediate family.' One of our failures in modern Britain is that we somehow thought we could not only lose God, but that we could lose all that wisdom of giving life a rhythm that religion gave us. So for example, I think we should reinvent baptism as an initiation service that, as you sign on for child benefit, there should be a little celebration of the family saying ‘Well here we are, we're presenting a new child,' and society saying ‘Welcome. Now this is what we want you to do for this child and these are the resources to make sure that you do a really successful job.'

So Lent for me is not just the ‘sackcloth and ashes'. It's this wonderful dividing up both the year and one's life to reflect on the purpose of our being. I'm always struck by those who claim that they don't believe in God, how moral they are. The first time I really noticed this was when a friend of mine, Barbara Wootton, who was one of the cleverest people of the last century, said that she realised the point at which she did not believe in God. The next move she had to make was to decide how to draw a set of beliefs by which she would live a moral life? What she had done was largely take what she thought the best of Christian morality and lived her life accordingly. It was a life one of service. It was a life about exploring how you ennoble individuals and ensure individuals can lift themselves up. I do think that we've got out of the habit as a society of doing that.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, when doubt was springing up and devouring people, the cleverest of individuals thought, ‘How can we have Christian morality without Christian dogma?' They realised you could not live your life in a vacuum; you could not do it without guidance. The miracle of their success in inventing what in fact became a public ideology, the agreement we all subscribed to without even thinking about it, was that it lasted for so long. Partly by sheer accident, the Christian morality was secularised by a group of individuals known as the English Idealists. They wouldn't have said that that was what they were doing, but, I think looking back, most people would say that's what they did. They took the stumbling blocks away from Christianity, particularly that you had to believe in the miracles, they reinvented worship as service, and they also taught us that God was present in all of us, but that the Creation was never complete - neither in God nor ourselves. That part of this journey was to achieve our best selves, or ourselves as moral beings.
We fell in love with that way to approach life, and this approach was shown and reinforced by an extraordinary period of the care that we gave to the nurturing of children. The English have always been a pretty brutal race. Then all of a sudden, we changed dramatically. Our natures didn't change. We changed because we decided we should live as a community. That was the success of this secularised Christianity. So whether you were a teacher, whether you were a policeman, whether you were a magistrate, whether you were a Sunday School teacher, everybody knew what the purpose, what the train journey was about, why we were on that train, and where that train was heading. The late Victorians and the Edwardians that put so much effort into this failed teach us one critical thing, however, and that was that we have to keep remaking ourselves. We did not change our DNA - but we hit on a marvellous way of people voluntarily choosing this kind of freedom or self-governance.

One of the big events that happened in my lifetime - and I'm a war baby - is that we ceased doing the work on nurturing children and raising citizens in the way that our immediate past did. The effects of that are to be seen all around us, where young lads in Birkenhead reply with with ‘Why?', when I say ‘I don't think you should be doing that.' You realise that you can't run a society where everybody thinks they can say ‘Why?' to every suggestion that's ever made to them. We have to have a ‘Highway Code' that we all are happy to use to navigate life by. We fell out of love with nurturing our children. Of course lots of people still do this job brilliantly, but increasingly, parents do not.

The reasons why we fell out of love with living in this way are complex. It's far too easy to say ‘Oh it was the ‘60s, where everybody let everything hang out.'

The effort of winning that war, the Second World War, the surrender of freedoms, the commitment to the common good was so enormous that, I think afterwards, people wanted break from the personal cost of that. One also had living standards beginning to rise very substantially, and therefore there were choices, or ‘temptations', which were there for the first time. The fruit of the tree was to be tasted - and why not? That's what human nature is about. I also think that we became too confident that somehow we'd cracked the way that we raised children. That somehow that this was in the air that we breathed and hadn't realised just how recent it was that English society moved from being pretty vicious to being a peaceable kingdom.

The case that I make is not that somehow we've always been very civilised; but rather we had an extraordinary interlude. We see how sharp the present change is if we take any parliamentary seat like mine. During the last year for which data are available, there are more violent crimes against the person in my seat, and in every other seat like it than was in the whole country fifty or sixty years ago. And I use that not to suggest there's anything very peculiar or awful about Birkenhead - far from it. It is that those restraints have gone, have collapsed, which we somehow thought we could take for granted. The problem is how do we draw back and begin to remake our characters again?

That is why I'd like to see a secular Lent to run alongside the Christian one, because I do think we, as a society, need these different festivals and, and seasons of the year, to help us take stock in building our best selves. If you look back a hundred or so years, we had lots and lots of collective services, but they were not run by the State at the centre. We'd run our own local hospitals, or we would have charitable foundations doing that. There were many more independent or church schools then, with their own governing bodies. The Victorians fell in love with the Greeks, and their ideal of citizenship was what they tried to reproduce in England's green and pleasant land.

The vote was conceded in this country because people like Mr Gladstone saw that, in fact, the working class were running their own welfare states, their friendly societies, their mutual aid societies, their hospitals, their trade unions. How could you say that this group didn't deserve the vote? By their very nature, the way they behaved, the sort of people they were, they showed they had actually earned the right of full citizenship, which included the vote. We as a nation somehow felt this was a once and for all operation, and was not something that was continuous. That not only had we to renew it daily amongst ourselves, but we had to do it through the generations. And I think that, with rising living standards, wanting the freedom after the efforts of the Second World War, led to us becoming very careless about who we were, how we should gain respect and what we think is worthwhile and In the end, what we really thought about our own country, because our country's only us writ large.

I'm anxious that we look across the various religions in this country and examine how much of their teaching on how we should live our lives as individuals, in families and communities, is common to all of them. From that basis we could establish our social ‘Highway Code.' This self-governing, peaceable kingdom is another way of talking about a land where order is not imposed, not run by law, not centrally directed in the way we are now and one that is natural to us. But we need the guidance to do that.

Finally, this social ‘Highway Code' needs to be backed up by contracts. We have contracts in employment, if I buy a house, I have a contract buying the house. And I think we need contracts - to establish what we should expect? What are the different parties going to bring to our education system, including the pupils themselves? The biggest Government budget is welfare. It is absurd to think that we can change people's behaviour on smoking, but we cannot change their behaviour through the way welfare is paid. So there needs to be contracts in that area as well. They're not once and for all - we're not coming down Mount Sinai with them. They're ones which somebody has got to start and say ‘Here's my first effort. But, as time goes on, we will improve them.


On one occasion, while I was listening to the Archbishop speak about children, Peter Bottomley made the most wonderful suggestion that we should have a guide to ‘5-star parents' so that you could know you were a ‘5-star parent.' I said ‘Peter, for what are the stars to be awarded?' He replied ‘Well the first one is that you get your children up in time and they have something to eat and they are at school in time.' Then I asked what the other four might be. This year we were both at the Advent service in Westminster Abbey. He began scribbling on the service sheet, and he passed me down the other four stars, which he put on his website.* That is a start. The aim of him putting it on the website was for people to improve on it.

So, if you haven't had a wonderful Mum and Dad, and you feel cast adrift, you can easily catch up on the ground rules. We need to give people the confidence to do what their gut tells them is right, and to do so even if they might look silly. This whole exercise in making good citizens has to become once again a passion of the whole of society. Here is the theme for a secular Lent; by which we stir up a passion again about becoming - all of us - first class citizens. That great adventure will simply get nowhere unless all parents begin the wonderful task of nurturing their young.

*Peter Bottomley's "Five Star Parent Guide" - one star awarded for each of the following
1. Get each child to school each day on time, fed and in the right clothes.
2. Have a planned event in the child's diary on one day next week.
3. Have a meal together with another family at least once a fortnight.
4. Be on the best terms possible with the other parent.
5. If in doubt, the child's best interests come first, but usually there should not be any doubt.

(This post was originally broadcast by BBC Radio 4 as a part of their Lent Talks Series.)

The Prime Minister deserves full marks for the sheer effort he put into the G20 summit. But . . .

The summit has not agreed anything concrete on the central danger facing the world economy. The slump into which we have now been thrown is unique. Its origin lies in the banking system which has ricocheted into what some people like to call the real economy.

Britain, let alone anywhere else, has yet to deal effectively with the toxic assets which are paralysing the banking system's willingness to lend to businesses.

There are warm words in the communiqué, but they simply mask the lack of any new concrete actions. Until this central issue is grasped, the world's economies lie in mortal danger.

We only have to go back to last weekend in this country, with the collapse of the Dumbarton building society, to realise how frail the banking system remains, despite having huge sums of tax-payers' money thrown at it.

The sense of unease is increased over a central plank of the communiqué which focuses on the new monies for the IMF. Here, unfortunately, the Prime Minister, comes with a track record.

If the last twelve years have taught us anything, it is the Prime Minster has a near-pathological weakness in recycling and recycling again monies already committed and then to present them as new initiatives.

I would expect a careful analysis of whether the "new sums" going to the IMF will show that much is already committed, or worse, they are sums that will never be paid.

Of course it is helpful to strengthen the IMF and the role it might play in protecting the prospects for developing economies. But while making sure the ambulance is more fully-equipped for a crisis has some advantages, the IMF efforts might best be seen as yet more diversionary tactics.

The summit was silent on the timetable and the agenda for the next round of trade negotiations.

Surprising, really. For making world trade easier is crucial for the developing countries.

And while it is of less interest to the US, which has a much more contained economy, it is equally vital for Germany, the great exporting power, and to a lesser extent ourselves.

Despite the hype, the G20 summit not surprisingly fails to provide any new international economic architecture.

If the world is to prosper it won't come from such high-falutin talk, but from months of hard slog negotiating that next trade round.

The Clatterbridge Oncology Centre is under threat. That is the view of the local members of parliament. What is the threat and what are we doing about it?

Sometime last year, the local members of parliament learned that the Merseyside Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) had initiated a study on cancer services in our area. Nothing wrong with that. Indeed, I applaud bodies that are proactive.

But local MPs were not involved and, as it were, found out by accident. No marks there.

The plan, as described to me, had an unbelievable degree of unreality about it. A new centre was to be built the other side of the Mersey costing £150 million.

That proposal has now been vetoed, but anybody who is part of Merseyside politics knows that some of these big blue-sky thinking type projects have a habit of returning.

So the review is now concerned with access to radiotherapy treatment. National guidelines stipulate that no patient should have to spend more than 45 minutes travelling to reach their treatment. I assume they mean by private transport. Given the state of public transport, and despite huge subsidies to the bus companies, a 45 minute time limit would make for a very limited catchment area. It is worth noting that over 90% of patients attending at Clatterbridge travel by private transport, taxi or ambulance.

So the local MP Ben Chapman, who has been leading the campaign, is asking for a detailed breakdown of the 45 minute catchment area. He wants to know how many people north of the river seeking treatment are outside a 45 minute journey to Clatterbridge.

The most advanced technology currently available in the UK to deliver radiotherapy comes in the form of the Linear Accelerator machine (LINAC). A radiotherapy base is to be built at Aintree hospital, and a second centre is apparently to be built merely five miles away at the new Royal Hospital in Liverpool.

Will these developments downgrade the position at Clatterbridge? That is what so concerns Wirral MPs. Will some of the LINAC machines at Clatterbridge be moved or mothballed? If that happened then it is quite clear that the centre of excellence at Clatterbridge hospital will be downgraded - no matter what the experts say now.

And what might that in the longer term mean for the provision of the very best cancer services in Merseyside and Cheshire?

I've been around long enough to have seen huge sums of public money, partly wasted, in rebuilding the Royal Hospital. It is now down for rebuilding yet again, and while the absurd grandiose schemes have been trimmed back, history seems to have a habit of repeating itself.

Under a then new Chief Executive, the Royal boasted it was going to become the cancer centre in our area. It now claims no such objective, but one cannot help wondering.

So, if the plans go ahead unamended, we will have three centres in the inner area of Merseyside providing advanced radiotherapy. But the possibility of building up Clatterbridge to become centre of excellence to counterbalance the wonderful centre at the Christie Hospital in Manchester will be lost.

Here my main worry comes into play. Advanced cancer treatments are amongst the most expensive offered by the National Health Service. In an age of public expenditure cuts, any Government will be looking for today's centres of excellence to provide the new cutting edges to develop new cancer services. The restricted budget of future Health Secretaries will demand this approach.

And where will Merseyside stand in this new scramble for new funds? Will we have one centre of excellence that can become a country leader in providing cancer services? Or will we have a near broken-back service in Merseyside spread over three sites?

So the campaign that Ben Chapman is leading is not merely an old fashioned turf war dispute. It is about how our cancer services should develop in Merseyside and Cheshire and whether the political decisions involved should include elected political representatives, like MPs, or should such a decision be left to the PCTs, who have a statutory duty here in developing certain services, but who, through no fault of their own, are not elected.

What Governments do and say can affect the course of an economic crisis. Their actions and statements can affect the all-important expectations of the rest of us. But once a crisis is underway Governments are powerless to rewind the film.

On this score the Government has proved clumsy. The delay, allowing the Northern Rock crisis to fester over that long weekend where depositors queued to take their savings, left the Government well behind the curve.

Likewise with its so-called stimulus package. Why so much of our limited room to manoeuvre was wasted on a VAT cut still awaits a sensible explanation. I thought the move ill-judged and I was the only MP on the Government side to vote against it.

Similarly with the G20 summit. For over a month the event has been talked up way beyond what could reasonably be expected from a short day meeting, even if that meeting has been backed up with some careful work beforehand, as it obviously has been.

The danger here is that the all important financial markets will take away a message of division and lost opportunity, and act accordingly in becoming even more cautious about the world economy.

Victory can still be snatched from the jaws of defeat. For this to happen four key moves need to be made.

First, the G20 would be well-advised to drop all talk about further reflationary measures. Britain certainly has no room in its collapsing national budget to find such money anyway.

But the reflationary sums being spoken of are puny compared with the deficits Governments are already running up.

Over the next two years the British Government will be borrowing probably in excess of £380 billion. Imagine the impact on demand if these sums were not forthcoming. Now put that sum against the Government's £20 billion reflationary package.

All the G20 Governments are into big borrowing. This, surely, is the mega fiscal stimulus that is hopefully going to prevent major economies collapsing. The message that should go out from the G20 meeting is to emphasise on the size the reflationary borrowing to which all Governments are committed.

This leads to the second important announcement. Let's remain cheerful and assume that these record sums are out there somewhere to be borrowed. A key task of Governments is to coordinate their issuing of debt and to do so in an ordered and staged manner.

Such an approach will lessen any turbulence that might be felt if the debt demands are not spread out evenly throughout the next few years.

Third, while it sounds good to pontificate on the need for new worldwide financial controls, such a distant goal is of less importance now than bringing to book some of those whose actions have brought us to this sorry pass. When will we take action, for example, against the main players who have brought near financial ruin to all of us?

We do not need to wait for any new regulation. What is most urgently required is to throw the existing regulatory rule book at offenders.

The FSA's rulebook lays down eleven principles rather like the ten commandments which must guide the actions of our country's main financial players. These are:

1. A firm must conduct its business with integrity.
2. A first must conduct its business with due skill, care and diligence.
3. A firm must take reasonable care to organise and control its affairs responsibly and effectively, with adequate risk-managements systems.
4. A firm must maintain adequate financial resources.
5. A firm must observe proper standards of market conduct.
6. A firm must pay due regard to the interests of its customers and treat them fairly.
7. A firm must pay due regard to the information needs of its clients, and communicate information to them in a way which is clear, fair and not misleading.
8. A firm must manage conflicts of interest fairly, both between itself and its customers and between a customer and another client.
9. A firm must take reasonable care to ensure the suitability of its advice and discretionary decisions for any customer who is entitled to rely upon its judgment.
10. A firm must arrange adequate protection for clients' assets when it is responsible for them.
11. A firm must deal with its regulators in an open and cooperative way, and must disclose to the FSA appropriately anything relating to the firm of which the FSA would reasonably expect notice.

It would not be that difficult to start handing out sentences for the breech of any one, let alone all these principles.

When is the FSA going to give up its absurd quest to create the most complicated and rigourous form of new regulation and start, instead, implementing the existing measures? The G20 countries should agree to instruct their regulatory authorities to begin legal action now against the main culprits.

Fourthly, a beguilingly simple, but important reform could be agreed that leads to re-establishing the split between retail and merchant banking. There clearly will be pressure against such a change. President Obama's chief economic advisor, Larry Summers, was largely responsible for its destruction in America. And I do not need to mention who was responsible for an equally dangerous move here.

This reform will begin to build and effective firewall between the deposits we as ordinary members of the public make into our banking system, and with it the expectation conservative banking policy, and those of us who want to invest their savings in more risky ventures in what was once known as the merchant banking system.

Such a reform would be an important insurance against a return of the economic devastation that we are beginning to experience as a result of the whole of our banking system believing it could make big bucks on the cheap. It would also restore individual confidence in at least one part of our financial institutions.

And nobody could talk down a summit which agreed these four proposals as being anything but a success.

Is the failure yesterday to sell the next modest tranche of Government debt due to the Governor of the Bank of England's call against further reflation? Or something much more serious at work? It will be sensible to plan for the latter scenario.

The magnitude and force of this financial and economic crisis is throwing the public accounts into even greater disarray. Governments of all parties have never found ways of taxing us beyond 38 per cent of GDP. Yet we as voters like governments to spend up to 50 per cent of GDP on public services. This growing gap between expectations and tax revenues was apparent before the banking implosion, and these two forces alone put at risk our entire economy.

For it is on to these fast disintegrating public accounts that the Government is set to borrow at an unprecedented peace-time level. The Government's early estimates of this borrowing spree always looked unrealistic at 7 to 8 per cent of GDP.

Ernst and Young's item club group now forecasts borrowing at 12 per cent of GDP by 2009-10, but I wonder what odds one would get for the Government exceeding even this level. The country is well and truly in uncharted territory with worse news coming with practically every new batch of statistics.

Tax receipts have plummeted by 9 per cent over last year, and last month's figures show a 10 per cent decline. Contrast this with the Chancellor's prediction of only a 2.6 per cent fall in revenues.

Expenditure is up. Last week's claimant count when revised will show that the unemployment level for February surpassed the level the PBR predicted for the end of the year, i.e. it was ten months ahead of planned expenditure levels. The failure to sell all the gilts on offer yesterday is probably a judgment on how fast the public accounts are disintegrating.

If that wasn't bad enough the Government remains hampered in grappling with an unprecedented crisis by its failure to deal effectively with the banking crisis. Much of the poison of those wretched toxic assets remains in our banking system. With bankers deeply distrustful of other bankers, believing them to have larger stocks of these poisonous assets than they have publicly admitted, inter bank lending remains stalled and the hope of getting working capital to viable businesses remains blunted.

Into this economic and financial maelstrom the Government has added the new dangerous ingredient of printing of money. No-one knows what the longer-term consequences will be of such a strategy.

Yet cheers went up when the first venture of using this new cash to buy back government debt was five times over subscribed. That institutions and countries are quitting holding what is supposed to be this country's safest of assets, is surely grounds for alarm and not congratulation.

Now wind the clock forward. Soon the Government will be trying to offload what many expect to be at least £180bn of debt in each year, for as long as it dares to predict.

Yet we are not the only government set on this course. The Americans, to take the largest example, will be attempting to sell over $1,750bn of government debt this year and for many a year to come.

Even if the credit is out there, we cannot assume that Britain necessarily ranks high on the list of safe destinations. And it certainly won't be if the failure to get a grip on the widening imbalance in the public accounts leads to the loss of our AAA credit rating. The results of yesterday's efforts in the gilts market suggests that there may well be growing difficulties in selling government debt as each new tranche is issued.

Our currency has too often in the past been our Achilles' heel. And this weakness may not necessarily the time around be countered by a floating exchange rate. What will happen to the price of sterling if the debt management office reports that it is unable again to sell all the next tranche of government debt, or only if long-term interest rates rise?

These are treacherous days for the Government and they make the delayed Budget perhaps the most important one in living memory.

Will the Government be able to float new debt on its projected scale without convincing the market that it is dealing now, and not after the next election, with the huge structural imbalance in the national accounts? I doubt whether the international money market will wait for ‘resolute' action for another year.

Here is the test for both Gordon Brown and David Cameron. The test of the Government will come in April's Budget which needs to contain announcements of immediate tax increases for this financial year, over and above those already set out in the PBR for after the next election. If we are to have any hope in the shorter run of raising the debt we need to have an agreed timetable within which to balance the accounts. Similarly, and as a first move, the public expenditure budget has to be cash limited.

David Cameron will soon have to declare his hand that the appalling state of Government finances makes the introduction of tax cuts in the next Parliament, or the one after that, an unrealisable possibility.

British politics is being transformed. For well over one hundred years a central belief has been that social progress comes from expanding government expenditure.

Government expenditure will be cut in real terms, not just now, but over the next two Parliaments. So the drive must be to get better results for less money. That is the least that taxpayers are going to demand as their tax bills soar.

A progressive centre left will insist that any tax increases go onto those with the broadest shoulders. A cool additional £6bn revenue would result from allowing pension tax subsidies at the standard rate only. Surely this must be just one of the measures to increase tax revenue in the next Budget.

Likewise, we need to take seriously Aneurin Bevan's assertion that Socialism is the language of priorities. While events already unfolding look like testing this belief to the point of destruction, its sentiment still offers the best prospect there is of protecting the poor from the economic gales now besetting us.

Jeff Green, the Tory leader in Wirral, has launched what some people may want to see as an attack on establishing new academies in Birkenhead. There are a number of people with vested interests who, it seems to me, are prepared to defend the indefensible even to the point of metaphorically being taken to the stake.

The facts are pretty plain. Is it unreasonable to expect that, after twelve years of tax-payers' investment, at least 95% of our young people should leave secondary school with minimum leaving requirements? I do not think so.

Now compare that eminently reasonable objective with the facts. Despite heroic efforts by teachers, and the heroic support of some parents, no state school in Birkenhead achieves half that target.

Indeed, all too many pupils leave hardly able to read and write.

Clearly there is something wrong with the education we offer many young people in Birkenhead - and elsewhere.

All our schools have a national syllabus that mimics an academic grammar school education. That is not a suitable education for perhaps the majority of young people.

The advent of the academies will allow some schools to offer what we have failed to do since the 1944 Education Act promised a tripartite system - a pukka technical education. All academies will be able to adapt the national curriculum to local needs.

Now take the actual results of Birkenhead schools and transfer the results to imaginary hospitals. Here we would have a success rate for operations of 23%, 26%, 37% and 44%.

What would the response be for, say, hospitals where 80% of patients were maimed or died during an operation? We would demand that they were closed that day.

So why have we accepted an education system which has a similar maiming rate for our young people? We clearly need to bring back to the drawing board our idea of schooling.

That is what the new academies will offer us in Birkenhead.

So back to Jeff Green. My guess is that his policy is now to oppose anything the ruling Labour coalition proposes up until next year's local elections. His strategy is nothing to do with me.

But I make a plea to him not to play those party politics with the future of young people in Birkenhead and beyond. Every political strategy is worth an exception. And we will get our minimum success rates up towards that 95% mark all the more quickly if everybody puts their shoulder to the wheel. And Mr. Green is too important a person not to help in this great endeavour.

A month ago the experts were predicting an era of deflation once the retail price index was published. I cast doubt then and do so now on this analysis. The danger for the British economy is inflation not deflation.

This morning's press was again full of the experts predicting a negative rate for the RPI. The guesstimates were for a fall of between 0.5 and 0.8 per cent. (It is the oldest and most comprehensive index. It excludes only some atypical households)

For the second month running the experts are wrong. The RPI registers this month an overall nil increase in prices.

Examine the inflation target set for the Bank of England. The bank is to aim for a 2 per cent rise in the Consumer Price Index. Last month it was 50% above this level but it still did not stop the commentators shouting about deflation. This month it has risen up to 3.2 per cent. It will be interesting what the Governor says in the letter he now has to write to the Chancellor.

Look at the other indices as well at the Consumer Price Increase. The All-Items RPI, excluding mortgage interest payments, rose from 2.4 to 2.5 per cent.

The core inflation rate - excluding energy, food, alcoholic and tobacco - rose for the third consecutive month up from 1.1 to 1.3 and now stand at 1.6 per cent.

The British economy is in a big enough mess without policy makers fighting the deflation dragon which shows not much sign of yet appearing on the scene. The 30 per cent collapse in sterling has still to be fully registered as an upward movement in these measurements. And the Government has embarked on a printing money policy which can only lead to ginourmous inflationary pressures.

It is inflation not deflation that is still the public enemy.

Another day and yet another scandal over an MPs' expenses. A setup where a senior member of the Government lodges with their sister, or has their parents living in their constituency house, is clearly unacceptable. There is something wrong with the rules if such payments are in order.

Public anger is currently concentrated on the allowance MPs have for a home in their constituency or, if that is where their main home is, a home in London. But only a few months ago it was employing members of an MPs family who were not all good examples of the Protestant work-ethic.

Most voters accept that MPs need to run an office so they can do their job properly. I have argued since I first came here that MPs should be able to choose their staff but the staff should be on the House of Commons establishment. This would mean that outside advisors would judge that the successful candidate for a post has the skills to carry that out properly. Such a reform would also guarantee that MPs did not direct any of the money themselves.

I cannot now see any alternative other than for the House of Commons to own these second homes and to service them. I know where the next media attack will be, on the bureaucracy in the House of Commons needing to run such a system. But I do believe that the current system is so damaging to the political process that the most drastic reform is now necessary.

In this way, MPs would not be open to big capital gains or losses on their second homes. The cost of running a second home would be met directly from the House of Commons not by the MPs claiming back expenses.

We have had long enough trying to put our own house in order and we have failed. We are now into a period when taxes will need to go up and public expenditure cut. There is no way that our allowance system can survive the new politics that are being ushered in by the current mega financial and economic crisis.

How does our Balanced Migration campaign run outside Parliament? Yesterday, Nicholas Soames and I met up with Roger Godsiff in Birmingham. If we could get a proper hearing here, without our political motives being unfairly questioned, we would have established a bridgehead that would encourage further work.

Our first port of call was with the editors of the Birmingham Mail, Post and Sunday Mercury. In the minefield of immigration politics, could we persuade our hearers that our single and only aim was to try and persuade the political elite to join where the overwhelming majority of the electorate is on this issue?

That events turned out positively owes most to Roger Godsiff.

It is strange how events can show one's colleague in such new light. I had never questioned Roger's integrity. I had watched him debate too much on the immigration question to have any doubts on this score.

It was Roger, after all, who exposed the unbelievable fraud in local government postal voting. He did so in a city where very shortly white voters will be in a minority. His success was in asserting that what might be acceptable electoral practices, say on the Indian subcontinent, are not acceptable in this country. That postal voting arrangements are being overhauled owes everything to him.

As Roger spoke I could not help letting my mind go back to my first ten years in Birkenhead when the Trotskyites were by simple thuggery trying to take over the Labour Party. The campaign was so awful that I decided not to make my main home in Birkenhead. So while it was my duty to fight the corner and never to surrender an inch if that was at all possible I had another life outside of Birkenhead to argue my case.

But Roger's home is in Birmingham and those few of us who are prepared to raise the question of the levels of immigration in Parliament do not get an easy run - although it is getting easier. Roger did not only rely on integrity. We had arguments and facts as well. If present levels of immigration continue we will need to build the equivalent of seven new Birminghams. The arrow of our argument landed a local bullseye.

We also developed the argument that despite all the razzamatazz about the use of class politics, immigration was essentially a class issue. Both long established citizens, as well as more recently established citizens, believe the government is wrong in its open borders policy. Our initial poll to launch Balanced Migration showed there was no statistical difference in the proportion of Black or White citizens, or older established or newly established citizens, in their wish to see the number of new arrivals drastically reduced.

Studies in the East End of London have shown how the complaints of the White working-class fifty years ago that the Bangladeshis were putting pressure on the housing and schools, are now identically voiced by well established Bangladeshi families equally concerned about how new arrivals are affecting their families' chances for better housing and better schools.

The other lesson of the day was the contrast between power of leaders in the print industry to respond to political campaigns compared with the BBC's chain of command.

The three-MP delegation to Birmingham had an equally constructive meeting with the BBC regional political staff. But it was quite clear from our conversations that, in order to, in a sense, preserve a BBC line, the command chain in the BBC is lengthy.

I could not help think, while sitting in the meeting, that one of the reforms the BBC must think about is how does it pass real editorial power down into its regional offices, so that it can let the regions begin to change how the Corporation approaches emerging political topics.

In a 24-hour news medium, is it appropriate for a line to be held until a decision is made and so the whole Corporation jumps to a new position? Wouldn't a better approach be to let those areas where a political issue is more important - say the levels of immigration into the West Midlands - respond appropriately, knowing that this may begin to set the new line which the whole Corporation would in time adopt?

Our next trip to the regions will be to Liverpool and Manchester. After Birmingham we have a yard stick against which to measure our attempts to get the regional media reporting seriously on the immigration we have.

(this blog initially appeared on the Guardian's Comment is Free site)

At least its timing has not deserted the government. With unemployment surging through the 2m barrier today, perhaps heading for 3m, ministers were able to get their Welfare Reform bill out of the Commons on Tuesday before the Grim Reaper published his figures.

I spoke in total opposition to the bill. The bill was designed for the land of the never-ending boom. We are now stuck in the quagmire of recession.

The government has been axing Jobcentre Plus offices, and cutting staff, as though there is no tomorrow. Now my constituents face a situation of a much-reduced Jobcentre Plus service, and a massive increase in the demands placed on that service.

But what are those demands? Good, upstanding citizens, who have worked practically every day of their lives since leaving school or college, now find themselves with the increasing numbers who have been made redundant.

They are not interested in the highfalutin' supply side of things that the government has been concentrating on over the last ten years or so. None of them are work-shy. Work is part of their DNA. Yet they will be subjected to the same old roughing-up treatment that the government has been half-heartedly applying for a decade to claimants it suspects of being half-hearted in trying to find a job.

These men and women who have been made redundant, perhaps for the first time, expected that their NI contributions would offer a soft landing so that they can scramble back into work. And by "scramble back", I mean it - the desperation is real: studies show that unemployed people with good work records often take a job paying far less than their previous role, as work is a central part of their dignity and self-confidence.

Our proud boast when we were elected in 1997 was that we would reform the welfare state to meet the new strains and stresses of a global economy. Now, at the feast promised by pegging into the global economy, we have an unwanted ghost wearing the ugly face of 1930s unemployment.

A Welfare Reform bill aiming to help counter the recession would have centred on two points. It would have reformed the redundancy payment scheme to make the payments adequate, so that our newly-unemployed constituents are compensated. Lindsey Hoyle, the Member for Chorley, introduced such a bill last Friday, only to find the government attempting to block it.

Similarly, instead of drawing up more measures to get the supposed work-shy into work, the government should have been radically overhauling the National Insurance-based Jobseekers' Allowance. People around the country are complaining to me of being gobsmacked when signing on for the first time and finding that not only do their decades of insurance contributions qualify them for a mere £60.50 a week - exactly the same as if they had never gone to work in the first place - but that Jobcentre Plus skills are not honed to helping them get jobs.

Ever since Balanced Migration was established, we have campaigned for a revolution on the issuing of work permits. Approximately 150,000 skilled workers came into this country from outside the EU during the past year. Not one of these applications was tested by insisting that jobs were first advertised at Jobcentre Plus.

Whisper it, but in the last few days, the government has made a most welcome u-turn. From April 1, no work permits will be issued unless the jobs have been advertised at Jobcentre Plus for two weeks. Here is a real achievement. British jobs will first be offered to unemployed British workers.

Here is one really good piece of news showing the government doing its best to protect British workers. Why aren't the prime minister and all his colleagues singing this message from the roof tops?

Today's headlines scream abuse with one accord at the latest bailed-out company insisting on paying grotesque bonuses. The Financial Times is the most reserved with "Outrage at $165,000,000 AIG Bonus Payments" adding that the Obama Administration expresses its anger.

So things are slightly different in the United States. The new Government is prepared to condemn such outrageous behaviour from financial institutions which have got us into this mess, after being bailed out at huge expense to the tax-payer, yet still want to grab last year's bonuses.

That this grotesque acquisitiveness is now such a set pattern makes me wonder whether something much more fundamental is afoot.

Is it, I wondered, walking back after buying the FT, that the nature of capitalism has changed in a fundamental way.

Our economic text books taught us about entrepreneurs being driven to make great fortunes and, hopefully, benefiting the rest of society.

Then came the revisionist stage where the Labour Cabinet Minister, Tony Crosland, popularised academic work emphasising the roll of managers that now controlled these vast industrial empires.

These managers would be well paid; they would get many more times the salary of an ordinary worker, but still inhabit the same planet.

Latest figures show that the industrial leadership now gets not ten times or a hundred times the average wage but three hundred times, as shown below.

© Financial Times

Is this the new stage of capitalism that managers now expect to make great fortunes as did the entrepreneurial class? If it is, it perhaps begins to show why there is such brass neck resistance to any modification to their grotesque bonus system.

Lord Lawson, a one-time Tory Chancellor, writes in today's FT to support the campaign Liam Halligan has been spearheading for a reintroduction of the Glass-Steagall Amendment which the current head of Obama's economic team did so much to destroy back when Bill Clinton ruled the waves.

Lord Lawson argues that it is only when there is a crisis in the commercial or retail banks that the economy is so adversely affected.

Preventing retail banks undertaking the functions and the risks of investment or merchant banks is a crucial reform towards which we should be aiming.

Lord Lawson also puts his finger on this change in attitude which I have been describing. "We now live in an age in which the acquisition of wealth appears to count for more than reputation."

If Lord Lawson is right, and the thirst for wealth is a greater motivation than being regarded as a good upright citizen, then one of the most significant changes imaginable has taken place in human society.

How do we prevent vulnerable children being killed by toerags passing off as parents, or, as likely, by the mother's latest boyfriend? That is a question to which Lord Laming has again given his judgement.

Way back, David Hunt and I went to the then Health Secretary about Wirral's chaotic children's department. I asked the Minister whether our children's department was the worst in the country. The expression of the face of Lord Laming, then the Government's Chief Social Work advisor, suggested to me that it may well have been.

David and I therefore spent the rest of the meeting asking what could be done to turn around this broken-backed department. Under pressure following a debate I held in the Commons, one Director of Children's Services was shoehorned out and the council did not renew the contract of another.

Lord Laming promised to help find us a new Chief Officer worthy of that name. The long-haul to rebuild children's services began at that point.

So there is no greater fan than I of Lord Laming. But let me give you one example of how our children's services can sometimes operate in Birkenhead which questions whether this huge emphasis Lord Laming puts on procedure - rather than judgement - is quite the right balance for running the most difficult brief in local Government.

I was at one of our primary schools, like practically all of them run by a brilliant head, who told me the following tale. She was worried about two of her children who were looked after by their mother, an alcoholic. The mother would be seen driving around Birkenhead with the children falling about the back of the car. Meetings had been arranged with children's services, only for the meetings to be cancelled when the Headteacher and Classteacher arrived at the council offices.

On one occasion the children did not arrive in school. Immediately on the following day, when there was again no sign of the children, the head asked the police to investigate.

They broke down the door, found the mother dead and the children greatly distressed. Being eminently sensible, the police then took the children into school. The Head, calling children's services, was told not to worry as the children would now be put on the "at risk" register.

The Head replied, I would guess with some anger, that the children had been at risk, and that she had been trying to draw attention to this fact. With the mother's death they were no longer at risk. What they needed was not an entry on the "at risk" register but a foster parent that night.

Having guidelines on what to do is crucial for all of us, and social workers are no exception. My worry is that we are beginning to develop a culture where ticking the boxes, which covers your back if things go wrong, is not only immensely time-consuming, but defocuses social workers from exercising judgement.

On some occasions, social workers have to be extremely brave. No-one is suggesting that the group of adults surrounding Baby-P were anything other than the most awful thugs.

None of the professionals involved with Baby P exercised any judgement whatsoever. It would have been judgement, that something very serious was wrong, despite whining protestations from Baby P's family that could have saved a life. If we are to save more children's lives then the exercise of judgement, not just by social workers, but by neighbours, friends and voluntary works is what will do it.

In the meantime, my thanks again to Lord Laming who exercised his judgement all those years ago over a Chief Officer's qualities in Wirral.

The Bank of England, it is reported, has every reason to be pleased with the initial market reaction to its printing money policy. The newly-printed money process began last Thursday.

The bank seems to have three options on how to spend its new money. What appears to have happened from last Thursday on is for the bank to buy its own existing debt.

By stepping in with unprecedented amounts of new money, the Government's aim was to push up the price of its own debt.

The hope was that as prices rose, and thereby the rate of interest fell, those selling gilts would not use the money to buy other gilts but, hopefully, put the money into company bonds or elsewhere in the economy where there is a better return.

When the printing money debate began, the Treasury was clearly briefing the media that the printed money might be used to go into the corporate bond market. By purchasing long term debt being floated by major companies, it was hoped that companies would use their increased capital supply to invest, and thereby help lay the foundations for a more hopeful recovery.

It does not seem yet, but it is early days, that this policy has been pursued. But there is of course a third alternative which is not mentioned.

At the moment, the Government is operating in a market trading in existing Government debt. At the same time as refinancing loans that expire, and thereby keeping the level of Government debt constant, the Government knows it is in the business of offloading additional debt, the size of which we have not seen since the financing of a World War.

My concern is how the markets are going to react when large tranches of new debt run alongside the operation and sales of existing debt.

This will be the test about how confident the market is in the Government's long-term financial stewardship. Will additional buyers be found for £140 billion debt for this year and every year into the far-distant horizon?

I doubt it. Why should economies like Brazil, that have currency reserves, lend to a country that has helped get the world into the fine old mess we now face?

The only way of attracting buyers will be to push up interest rates, i.e. it will be the only attraction in trying and persuade people to part with their currency reserves and so sure up British Government finances.

Such a scenario would be serious as rising long-term interest rates would undermine and timetable for industrial recovery. But it might not be the worst scenario.

It may not be apparent to the lay-person's eye just what quantity of new debt the Government is offloading at any one time. Every week the life of gilt issues comes to an end and the Government, unless it wants to cut the size of public debt, issues new bonds, to take the place of those expiring.

It won't be easily apparent to our eyes that the new bonds are renewing existing debt or are about increasing the level of debt. But the market will know as the size of the amount of bonds at any one time being offloaded will begin to increase dramatically. If there are not enough buyers for this enlarging debt market the Government may be forced to turn to that third use of its newly-printed money, i.e. it will be forced to buy its own debt.

What will be the effect then on sterling? What will those people that hold sterling do in such circumstances?

My guess is, sadly, they will sell and once the Government encounters difficulty in finding buyers for debt other than itself, sterling will collapse.

So, we therefore will get a first-rate sterling crisis even though we have a flexible exchange rate. It is the combination of rising long-term interest rates and a dramatic collapse in sterling that will test whether the Government can survive.

Likewise, a similar collapse of sterling will occur if the Government loses its triple-A credit rating, as has already happened to Spain and Italy. As neither of these countries have reserve currency status, and both of them are now in the Euro where Germany is now propping them up.

Should that scenario occur, the Government will have to overnight convince the market that it is serious about beginning to get the public finances back into shape.

That will require immediate tax increases and, as a start, cash-limiting public expenditure. The test will be whether the present administration regains the confidence of the markets under the set of circumstances I have described.

But look at the strains within the Eurozone, bond markets in Italy in Spain show significantly higher interest rates than in Germany. The printing money story has only just begun in terms of its likely consequences.

James Purnell, Work and Pensions Secretary, is being increasingly forced to look as though he is Old Mother Hubbard going to the cupboard and finding it bare. His latest initiative to help unemployed professional workers find work is well meaning but pretty fatuous.

For the next month, professionals who sign on will get one-to-one meetings with a personal advisor; attend group sessions for similarly jobless people at new style "job clubs", be given help to brush up their job-hunting skills and receive advice on changing careers.

The Government will also pay specialist recruitment agencies, such as Reed, to help people seeking executive posts.

But many of the people made newly unemployed are not just professionals but highly skilled people whose jobs have gone up in smoke thanks to the banking crisis.

As I have said before, these people have got work stamped through their DNA. While being treated well at Jobcentre Plus, not having to mill around for too long with young lads who have remained unemployed despite 3 million new jobs being created since 1997, today's statement smacks of yet another New Labour initiative. It sounds good but . . .

There is one move the Government could take immediately to increase significantly the job chances of unemployed skilled workers. Making this move won't look as though they are fiddling as people's economic prospects burn.

Last year the Government allowed in over 150,000 skilled workers under its work permit scheme. These workers came from outside the European Union.

50,000 plus were allowed in on the basis that they had a degree qualification, even if they had no job to come to. And it is unknown what job they gained, if any.

100,000 or more are brought in under the Government's skill shortage scheme. The test of a shortage here is whether Professor David Metcalfe and his colleagues calculate a shortage occurring.

All this activity should be confined to the dustbin of the boom. The one sure test of whether there are skills shortages in this country is to have all jobs advertised in Jobcentre Plus throughout the country. If a job hasn't been filled in, say, a month, employers would then, and only then, gain permission to import a skilled worker from outside the EU.

When old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard and found it bare, she didn't simply build another cupboard. Had she been Work and Pensions Secretary it is unlikely she would have cooked up another recipe for nonexistent ingredients, i.e. yet another new deal.

She would have sought ways of filling the cupboard. James Purnell urgently needs to fill the empty job cupboards, by disallowing work permits for any job which has not been advertised at Jobcentre Plus. The Government is still, sadly, fighting the last welfare war, and not the one that has now engulfed us.

For what the Government might do, see my recent piece in last Friday's Daily Telegraph and other posts here on the blog.

The news is through at last that Birkenhead's independent all-girls' school has safely made the journey from being independent to becoming Birkenhead's first academy. What a wonderful gift to what the Cabinet Member for Children, Phil Davies, has called "the family of schools in Wirral".

There have, of course, been those people who have tried to prevent this wonderful gift being bestowed on young people in Birkenhead. I have opposed them resolutely all along the line.

My support for, and the now-silenced opposition to, Birkenhead having its first Academy rest on clear assumptions on how best we can raise standards in schools. For most of my lifetime the comprehensive argument has won. In theory, it is difficult to find a better line to plug. Children all happily come together from different backgrounds and the outcome is not only greater social harmony, but higher educational attainment.

Forty years later you have to be pretty "determined" to peddle this view. I never accepted it in its heyday, so I am unlikely to give it much support now.

I do not see most social and educational advance arising from a top-down approach trying to enforce standards or structures. Progress is most likely to be achieved when there is a variety of provision and where there is competition between the different suppliers.

My life was changed by winning a scholarship. I wish there were more grammar school places for Birkenhead children. But I am equally clear how, over the past sixty or more years, Governments have failed a huge proportion of young people.

It staggers me that after twelve years of state education all too many young people in Birkenhead can hardly read or write. Many of these people I admire: they come from "homes" which would have probably sunk me.

So while each of us has some responsibility in making the most of our best selves, decades of schooling which fail to get the vast majority of children up to and way beyond the minimum school leaving requirements must be deeply troubling. It certainly troubles me.

Look at our results in Birkenhead, despite the real efforts of our many devoted teachers. If a hospital was advertising that it had a 20 per cent success rate, but that 80 per cent of the operations would fail, none of us would go near that hospital, yet we are still intent that children go to schools with a similar success/failure rate.

This state of affairs is now coming to an end. The Birkenhead High School for Girls will be the first of a number of academies in Birkenhead, and with the academy will come freedom and responsibility.

The structure and Governors of the schools will be different. But given the devotion of teacher in our current schools getting such "modest" results we do need to look seriously at how our schools are organised and what is taught.

The system I grew up in did not fail me, but it did fail a huge number of other young people who were denied a pukka technical education.

Germany has always known the value of very serious technical education for a very large proportion of German pupils. More than that, Germany has built a parity of esteem between technical schools and academic schools.

Now change is at long last coming to Birkenhead schools. We can begin a real debate about planning for success - not a success for say 30 per cent of our pupils. We must surely aim for ensuring 95 per cent of pupils, at least, gain the minimum qualifications needed either to continue their education or to win them a place at work which guarantees over time real increases of wages and salaries.

So three cheers for Birkenhead High School for Girls and their Trustees who have made this key decision. But let the school know that they better not sit on their laurels. As the other new Birkenhead academies are created, there is going to be intense competition for the coveted prize of best school in Birkenhead.

Voters will join up two of today's main stories even if politicians do not. About 140 thousand manufacturing jobs will be lost this year according to the Electrical Engineering Federation Industry Group.

And the other story? Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin wall, Western Leaders were told yesterday that five million jobs could be lost in the ‘new' European Union countries of the East, unless radical action is taken to bail them out. If we take no action it is likely many of these unemployed workers will be heading our way.

Let me add a third story, which none of the media had the sense to hunt out. Last year over 150,000 work permits were issued allowing workers from outside the E.U. to come and work here.

50,000 of these permits were given to workers with degrees, and on this basis were allowed to come to Britain to search for a job, not having a known job to come to.
The other 100,000 plus work permits went to people outside the EU who had skills which, it was claimed, could not be filled by local or EU labour.

Surely the Government is making a link in its mind between the projected 140,000 loss in manufacturing jobs and the continual influx from outside the EU of workers coming to fill skilled ‘vacancies'?

The Home secretary has announced that the bar is being raised to non-Europeans coming here to work on spec. In future they will require a higher degree qualification.

Given the inability of our border controls to work effectively, I am not holding my breath in this move making much impact on skilled workers coming to search our job market for jobs.

Likewise, on the skilled vacancies front, the Home Secretary has merely referred this issue to the Metcalfe Commission, that body, established in the height of the boom, had the task, rather like the fortune teller at the fairground, of prophesying where skilled vacancies would continue to register in the British economy.

Skilled workers in great numbers are now being laid off, and even at the height of the boom there were real difficulties for some workers in finding work, let alone suitable work.

The Prime Ministers says his intention is ‘British jobs for British workers'. Let us put that on the shelf with all the other absurd prime-ministerial objectives. Let us adopt the more modest of not disadvantaging British workers in the face of competition from their foreign comrades.

If the Government is serious about creating a level playing field, and minimising what is now a growing risk of serious disorder in the summer months as unemployment surges, it will this day restrict access to the British labour market.
The one simple move it should make is to require employers, who are now in the habit of going abroad to find their workers, first to advertise their vacancies with Jobcentre Plus. Without these vacancies being advertised for a couple of weeks, say, no employer will be given a work permit to import a non-European worker into the British Labour market.

Such action this day would not only hint at a smack of firm Government. It would simply be doing that.

Further, at the same time, doesn't the Government need to begin EU discussions on limiting the movement of workers until we start to come out of this depression.

Why the extraordinary fuss over Sir Fred Goodwin’s pension? Isn’t there a danger in concentrating on this boil and losing sight of the pox-ridden body of which it is such a nasty part?

It is this main picture that has always distressed me. Hardly a week goes by without my coming across a constituent, or a correspondent from a wider field, managing to bring up a family on something around £11,000 a year. I know there might be tax credits on top of this sum, but it is usually the bureaucratic failure to get tax credits right that introduces me to the constituent.

For decades now we have been awash of news of the loads of money brigade flaunting ‘their’ wealth in our faces. One of the big political failures for most of my lifetime has been the Centre Left’s inability to see any distinction between self-interest, selfishness and greed.

This simple failure to appreciate the subtlety of human nature and to applaud self-interest, also left much of the Centre Left speechless when it came to playing a role in helping to curb the unpleasant excesses of human nature. New Labour found this fertile ground to promote its amoral philosophy.

I think it was St. Augustine who said we should preach all the time and sometimes use words. We have a culture, thank goodness, where actions speak louder than words.

What words does New Labour have to help remake a moral map and compass for negotiating today’s mega economic crisis when four Cabinet Ministers defend their expenses as being within the rules, when practically the whole country is appalled by their behaviour?

Back to Sir Fred. These pensions, rewards and expenses are disgusting in a country where families nobly manage to survive on salaries with five or more of the end noughts missing.

Of course the whole RBS pension package is obscene. But that the Government nodded it through says everything about our warped sense of fairness.

In the natural world, few of us are ten times taller than the shortest, nor ten times brighter than the least bright person.

So how can salaries or pensions that are ten thousand times greater than those of the humblest individual ever be justified at the bar of history?

Today's Telegraph/YouGov poll puts immigration as a key concern for both Labour and Conservative voters. 62 per cent of Conservative and 42 per cent of Labour supporters polled agreed that immigration to this country must be reduced. These results sound the most sombre warning. Unless the two major parties respond to the legitimate worries of voters, they will punish them horribly at the European elections in June.

So, there is a danger of rising interest rates as the Government begins to offload their huge deficits onto the bond market. It has been part of the denial line that there is any such danger.

Angela Merkel, thankfully, has let the big cat out of the bag. She is worried, as she has every right to be, about the consequences of Governments trying to raise over £2,000 billion in loans during this year alone.

The German Chancellor has many abilities, but I doubt whether they extend to regimenting an ordered issue of bonds from debtor countries. Her aim is not only to coordinate Europe, but the whole world! There is simply too much debt coming from too many countries for that!

What Mrs Merkel has not factored in, in public, at least, is the credit ratings of the debtor countries. When your credit rating is in free fall, you are not going to stand in an orderly line supervised by Mrs Merkel: you will have to bob and weave like mad to get the money, and pay over the odds. Hence the rise in long term interest rates. It is almost certain that Britain will lose its triple-A credit rating later this year.

Sorry, not yet to have any cheering news. The Government needs now to start planning if it is going to counter a sterling crisis and a gilts strike that will whack the economy sideways later this year.

The downturn in the economy, which is severe, is no doubt going to test still further the manufacturing base. Last Friday in Birkenhead was a tonic for lowly spirits. Part of the day I spent visiting LT Print Group. Based in Hamilton Street, and the bigger works over in Wallasey, LT Print Group is a model of what Britain has got to become if we are to maintain, let alone improve, living standards.

Here are the pointers for the future. The firm is owned, but more importantly, led by Robert McWilliams, who knows that British manufacturing (and the service sector as well) can only survive and prosper by embracing new technology.

In both the Birkenhead and Wallasey works, the firm thrives on an investment programme using the latest techniques. Success is also seen in other tangible ways.

Forty plus people are employed by the company, and as I moved about the two plants with Robert, it was also noticeable how busy people were but how this industry also helped create a happy environment. There did not seem to me to be any passengers living off the efforts of their colleagues.

Another tangible sign of success was the number of men employed. I am going to go on about this point over time until people are incredibly bored, but the most important change in local social ecology since I have been part of Birkenhead has been the collapse of male jobs paying family wages.

I noticed soon after the loss of a third of manufacturing jobs under Mrs. T, the rise of very young single parents. That horrendous cull of jobs (and a similar cull on a much smaller base over the last ten years) disenfranchised all too many males from becoming effective breadwinners.

It is when we add to this already dangerous cocktail a social security system that gives independence to very young, single mothers, largely closing a blind eye to fraud that makes the cocktail evil, if the nurturing of children successfully is to be a key goal of our society. Robert McWilliams shows what can be done. LT Print Group is one of the bigger private employers in the Wirral. He has also got some very interesting views about how schools should perform.

As we begin to reorganise secondary schools in the Wirral, I hope his voice and others like his are going to play a larger part in serving up a real New Deal for young people.

The UK's race relations lobby has a mixed record. For the very best of motives it succeeded for all too long in closing down a debate on the changing composition of Britain's population.

The reason for this is as understandable as it was wrong. The race relations industry feared a racial backlash from British citizens.

This approach was part of the two long decades of deceit that the political classes practised in Britain. Never was the obvious question asked on why there might be a backlash.

Had such a question been posed, I believe there would have been two answers. The first was that when forces were at work that fundamentally change a society, that society should have the right to decide whether or not they approve the changes.

Following on from this answer would have been a plea to moderate substantially the rate of change. The political classes seem to have been born without the common sense of voters that integration takes time and real effort.

The race relations industry knows it has now lost the argument - badly. But it still peddles its politics of deceit.

Take the Royal Commonwealth Society's response to yesterday's figures that one in nine people in Britain were born abroad. Do not worry, we are assured, immigration to Britain had to be seen in the light of hundreds of years of Britain as a hub of people on the move - "immigration adds to the patchwork of Britain".

The deceit is clear. Of course Britain has had open borders from its very inception. It is the numbers coming - coming in at twenty five times any record peak, and for that peak to be maintained for such a long period of time that is the deep cause of discontent.

The Government knows that the electorate is likely to settle the accounts at the next European election and at the following general election - hence the quick footwork to try and re-establish a new position.

But no amount of prattling on about the new points based system makes much difference. Modelled on the Australian system, it has the key component missing. Australia starts with a number of people it is prepared to admit to its shores, and it calculates this figure on how well these people can be integrated as Australian citizens.

Look at the Australian application form. One question is: "Can you speak English?"

The one in nine statistic is deeply troubling because the political classes have made no attempt to set out what it means to sign up and be full members of UK ltd. Failure to limit citizenship to signing up fully to our way of life, and pledging first loyalty to Britain, means separate communities have been created in this country.

It is now a hundred times more difficult to begin that process of integration. But that will be the task not only of the next radical Government, but one that is not prepared to blink first.

Does the Government have much of an idea the outcome of spending 40% of the national income? Well the answer is not very much, sadly.

Graham Allen, the Nottingham Member, brought together a small group in the cabinet office today. There we met Steve Aos, who runs for Washington State, USA, a research unit that tries to answer the question of how to spend public money to best effect. It was an impressive display.

I could not but help wondering whether we were not missing the obvious. Steve outlined a whole host of intervention programmes, the success rate, and the amount of savings to tax-payers by employing each of the schemes.

He made a passing reference regarding trying to reduce crime. The one intervention with least effect was where the offender had very little contact with the programme.

We ranged over the whole list of interventions, pre-schooling, starting school at a younger age and so on. I couldn't help wondering whether the real impact of these programmes was that someone was taking an interest in the recipient and his or her family.

Most of us know that our lives can be touched by a good teacher who tells us what we can achieve. Might not the same happen for those families in receipt of an "intervention programme"?

Might not the most effective intervention be to give the Mum of the family a buddy, whether it be an adopted "brother or sister" or an adopted grandparent? The buddy needs to have the skills of raising successfully their own family. Might not the most effective intervention programme be to give that bit of extra long term help and real interest in a family succeeding by employing this sort of approach?

Any legislation coming before Parliament has to have the financial impact of the bill and also whether it fits within the human rights legislation. I suggested at the meeting that those MPs present today should propose a Bill that no expenditure programme would be approved until the receiving organisation sets out what, say, the three major objectives it believes it would achieve. Continued funding would then depend on research being carried out on the impact of the expenditure.

I will report back more on Friday when a group of civil servants and I are up in Nottingham to look at how Nottingham City Council has bought in a very very early intervention strategy.

It was wonderful to sit down and listen to senior officers contribute to a debate so constructively and, thereby, add to the collective wisdom of the whole of the group.

The debate over the Wirral Council's Strategic Asset Review has been backward looking. I much prefer to look to the future to see how common services might best be provided.

The Government is committed to a programme called "Building Schools for the Future". The aim is that every secondary school will either be rebuilt or significantly repaired and brought up to standard over fifteen investment waves. We will be getting our share of this programme in Birkenhead and I am anxious that the local authority thinks imaginatively how their services might be delivered from a new system of schools that are community based and are open from 12-14 hours a day.

It all sounds fine, but here is the possible hiccough. Most of this programme will be financed by what are called PFI contracts. Money is borrowed from the private sector and paid back over twenty or twenty-five years.

It was mentioned on the BBC at the weekend, then in the Financial Times, that there may be severe difficulties is raising this capital to pay for Building Schools for the Future. It is because I was worried about what would be the impact of the recession that I was anxious that the first parts of our programme were signed up and agreed.

When Labour came to power in 1997, I argued (if that is not too strong a word) with Gordon Brown that pension funds needed some long term bonds of fifty years of more, and why didn't the Government issue these bond specifically designed to balance portfolios of pension funds.

The argument was squatted on the grounds that the debt would appear on the public balance sheet. It does not now appear on the balance sheet, but it is, as we will realise only too soon, part of the public debt.

I therefore argued that, if the aim was to keep things off the balance sheet, then surely a Labour government would go down the road of allowing local authorities to issue bonds. The great reforming mayor of Birmingham, Joe Chamberlain, largely financed the rebuilding of his city by the issue of bonds.

Bonds have an early claim on local authorities' revenue. There is not much risk attached to them. Furthermore, pensioners and others are always trying to seek safe havens for their funds with reasonable returns, and never more so than today.

If the PFI programme goes up in smoke I will be pressing the Government to allow local authorities to raise capital by their own bond issues.

When I last asked, Wirral's PFI programme was being repaid plus 16.3% interest as well as management charges. No-one could tell me what these management charges were!

In today's climate anyone with savings would be jolly pleased to get a safe haven promising a 5% return.

So who knows, we may see over the next five to ten years a total rebuild of our schools, the schools to be used as centres for our libraries and children's services, and financed by Wirral bonds paying modest but much sought after rates of interest.

That is my take on the Strategic Asset Review and the fine old financial mess into which the Government has helped land our beloved country.

Our economic policy makers are clearly suffering from a form of psychological hysteresis. This wonderful word, hysteresis, re-emerged after the early Geoffery Howe budgets had send the economy into a nose-spin, during which a third of our manufacturing industry was wiped out.

Somebody clever thought up using the word hysteresis to describe a market economy where its decline has been so severe that any normal propensity to rebuild for recovery became paralysed. In such circumstances only a great stimulus from outside could help revive the market economy.

The same seems to have happened to the brains of your financial and political leaders. For six months now they have been chuntering on about the dangers of deflation. In Michael Hestletine's famous phrase, "it is all balls."

As I keep commenting here, inflation is an ever-present threat, particularly in the medium term (i.e. before, in Lord Keynes' view, we are all dead.)

The Bank of England managed to stir up a cohort of commentators to build up over the weekend and on Monday that the latest inflation figures would show a further dramatic drop, heralding a great fear of deflation.

So what happened? The figures were published yesterday evening, and practically the whole of the press reported that we were heading for deflation.

The only financial journalist, that I have read, whose brain is not suffering from hysteresis, is Norma Cohen in the Financial Times. She writes inflation is more entrenched than many economists had imagined.

Despite all the projections, the Consumer Price Index rose in January at a year-on-year rate of 3%, a mighty reduction of 0.1% over the December figures.

But, as Norma reports, retail prices - which more accurately measure household prices - deny economists' expectations of a contraction and registered an 0.1% year-on-year rise in January.

The Financial Times gives a wonderful spread on the main parts of our budget - bread and cereals up almost 10% in the last year, dairy products by 8.5%, coffee and beverages by over 16%, alcohol by nearly 6%, electricity and other household fuels by a cool 36%+

It is one thing to have the residents in the mad house sounding off with their latest delusions. It is desperately worrying when those residents are actually running the economy.

There will be no end to the economic crisis until the Government acts decisively to restore confidence in our banking system. Our policy of throwing money at the banks clearly has not worked. The root of the evil lies in those toxic assets into which the banking elite so greedily bought.

So I come back to a topic I keep banging on about. How the Government deals with the Lloyd's Banking Group crisis, which is largely of its own making, will dominate, no doubt, today's headlines. But the big issue of today and tomorrow and forever after, until the Government acts, is getting the bankers to own up on the size of their dud assets.

The FT Weekend had reports that President Obama was moving in this direction but there were problems on how to value these assets. Surely this conventional wisdom is wrong on this score.

The main issue surely is to get banks to assign those assets to a new national holding bank. Valuation can come later. The Government needs to then promise enough tax-payers' money to recapitalise banks.

It will be expensive. But it has been expensive up to now with the Government merely throwing money at the banks with little to show in terms of increased credit flowing to would be customers.

Parliament, which is in recess this week, needs to return to the task of both supporting decisive intervention on these lines, but also setting up its inquiry into who is responsible. The cost to savers and future pensions is huge.

Such an inquiry needs to go beyond traditional select committee hearings. There needs to be a special select committee of the whole house which pieces together both the genesis of the mega crisis as well as its latest manifestations.

Looking at the Lloyd's TSB and HBOS debacle could illustrate how such an inquiry will work. The inquiry needs to detail from known sources what the role of the Prime Minister was in this deal, was Sir Victor Blank the chairman of Lloyd's TSB a willing suitor, and how involved was the board of Standard Life whose Chief Executive Sandy Crombie, was the only figure from the financial services sector to receive a knighthood in the New Year's Honours - in Standard Life's public welcome for the fatal merger between Lloyd's TSB and HBOS? The committee could also look at the papers regarding Sir Sandy.

The role of the committee would then be to present their evidence to the main players and to ask for their comments. It would then be up to the respected boards to sack those chief players whose actions have helped bring the country to this sorry pass.

I usually try and balance the main part of the blog with a more cheerful comment. I cannot think of one today, try as I might.

The National Statistician, Karen Dunnell, has every right to feel sore this morning. Without exception the Establishment has been encouraging her to develop the independence of her office. In a democracy this can only be good.

One suspected all along that there were a number of weasel voices joining in the general cry who were probably none too keen on her efforts to give substance for an independent national source of statistical data. She now knows who her friends really are.

When I saw the data she published yesterday, showing a significant rise in British-born workers losing their jobs, and an equally significant rise in the numbers of non-British-born workers gaining jobs in the country, I was loathed to comment. I fear, in the long-run the grass roots political backlash to such data. My cowardliness was combined with a sense of failure to get the Government to live up the danger it has been creating over the last ten years in allowing unrestricted immigration.

Nicholas Soames and I, the joint chairmen of the Cross Party Group on Balanced Migration met with Phil Woolas yesterday afternoon. We publicly made it plain to Phil that we had no intension of commenting on the figures because we were scared of a growing backlash against foreign workers whom the Government has been inviting to come to our shores and work.

On other occasions I have made it plain that any anger must be directed at the Government, and not at those workers who have taken up opportunities expressly opened to them by Ministers. We have kept pointing out the huge danger to which Government was exposing the country to by failing much more effectively to control our borders.

The Government says that it has no intention now of letting our population be grown largely by immigration. On current trends the population will rise to 70 million by 2028 and to 80 million at the midpoint of this century unless new arrivals wishing permanently to settle in this country are reduced drastically.

This 70 million target is based on the annual net immigration figure of 190 thousand. In fact, we are still well above that level with a net migration figure of 237 thousand last year.

The Office of National Statistics was thankfully not attacked by leader writers for helping the debate by saying that if the Government wished to keep the population below 70 million it needed to reduce net migration to 60 thousand. The Government's much-flaunted points system will reduce last year's net migrant total of 237 thousand by a mere 12 thousand.

Balanced Migration has been pushing the Government to take action before it is forced to. It should abolish the tier one scheme. This allows in each year 50 thousand supposed very skilled workers to come to the UK who have no job to come to and we do not know what job they actually take up. It needs also to ask the Metcalfe Commission on skills vacancies to report monthly instead of annually. Likewise, it needs to encourage employers who have any skilled vacancies to register those at Job-centres so that local people can have first chance of applying. That new Job-centre data should be then used by the Metcalfe Commission when setting out what the true level of skills scarcity in the economy.

A third move would be for the Government to ensure that universities abide fully by the proposal that overseas graduates can work here but for only two years once they graduate.

Watching the Government's response from Northern Rock onwards has been like witnessing a crash in slow motion. Every action the Government has taken has been late. The plea Nicholas and I made yesterday, and which has just been simply ignored by the leader writers chasing after the National Statistician, is that on immigration the Government must get ahead rather than acting when it is too late.

Join the club Ed. When the pre-budget report was published I said here that is was sheer moonshine. The two trip wires which could trip the Government into reality came from two single sets of figures in the entire report. The first was on public sector borrowing the other was on unemployment.

I did not believe the Government borrowing figures were anywhere near accurate and, sadly, I believed the unemployment levels suggested for the end of 2010 would be crossed by the middle of this year. Tomorrow’s unemployment figures will be another step in that prophecy becoming true.

I suggested that this crisis could be as bad as 1931 because of the sheer loss in GDP. Back in 1931 it fell by 5.1%. If we take the period when GDP fell and project it through for 12 months then we are going to come up with a very similar figure I’m afraid.

I did stress the differences between then and now. National income is many times higher and therefore we would not expect to see general hardship and desperate poverty associated with the 1930s depression.

What we will see is an equivalent loss in national income and in this sense the whole society will be poorer than we need have been, and the unemployed much poorer.

This is where the role of the banks come in. One understands why Ed is trying to spread the blame again internationally. But who was it Ed that set up the present regulatory machinery, who was standing on the burning deck of developments?

All through this crisis I have argued that the Government has acted too late. Setting up a banking enquiry is yet another pitiful example. We do not have to run the banks to give our representatives instructions to cancel all bonuses. The argument these are highly valuable people who will go off elsewhere if we tame them in this way is absurd. Where are they going to go? Unemployment in the financial services is and will become even worse than in other sectors.

And as for their contracts? Had tax-payers not risked their future by bailing out the banks these contracts would be as worthless as some of the toxic debt that these bankers have been so busily buying.

What the Government also has not realised is that failure to act decisively here will see the anger of voters against bankers being transferred to politicians. The best piece so far by a political commentator on the evolving political/economic crisis is by Rachel Sylvester in today’s Times. She is too kind to say that this anger is likely to be such that the only way that Labour MPs will be able to go out in public will be in heavy disguise – such will be the public ridicule.

She also hits on the emerging fault line in New Labour. Peter Mandelsohn argues the dangers of unleashing anger against wealth creators. On the other side are those of us who far from seeing the bankers as wealth creators view them as wealth destroyers who have permanently impoverished our community. It is this that makes that comparison with a 5% GDP wipeout in 1931 so fraught with danger for New Labour.

The weather brings two tales of not being prepared. The first, serious snowfall in Britain led to an almost total close-down of the UK plc. But doesn't that make it easy for Governments to have contingency plans to swing into operation when it does? Of course such plans need to be regularly updated. It is the updating of plans that is going to be the undoing, I guess, of the Australian Government. Bushfires there are a regular occurrence. What strikes me from looking at news reports is obviously the horror given a vicious twist by the deeds of those who have deliberately started or restarted fires. But also coming through the news reports is a Government that acts as merely spectator and not a very good one at that. As Kevin Rudd tried to deliver as though he was thinking on his feet a charge of mass murder against the arsonists, I could not but think how Tony Blair would have “performed” in similar circumstances. I cannot believe the Australian electorate is not going to force the Government to make contingency planning against bushfires a key priority. My fear is that, as the snow melts here, so too will any demand that we rethink our contingency planning for violent swings in the weather.

The Government asserted on Monday, not once but many times, that it would be unlawful for any jobs to be so designated in this country that they were open only to British competition. The strikers have therefore not only won an important victory, which will have, I would hope, big repercussions around the country, but have now put the spotlight on the Government.

Will the Government now move and say that the agreement is unlawful and tell the negotiators to start again? If they are not prepared to do this are they conniving in breaking European Law? Or, worse still, did they not inform the House and country properly not only on Monday, but right the way through this dispute. If the agreement struck today is legal, why didn't the Government not only say so earlier, but back such a sensible compromise? I have the feeling we will not even hear a squeak out of the Government on this score. But it does suggest to me that European law is much more flexible than the Government would sometimes have us believe.

The latest estimates for the severity of the downturn are almost as bad as I feared. Our Gross Domestic Product shrunk by 2.1% in the second half of 2008 and is likely to fall by a further 2.7% during this year. From the first quarter of 2008 when the economy was still growing, through to the third quarter of this year the NIESR predicts a 3.6% fall in national income.

The figures have a clinical ring about them, but they will herald very substantial misery for individuals and families across the country. In earlier blogs, I suggested that this downturn would be as serious as 1931 although most commentators were still talking up the situation.

If these estimates are correct (and I fear they may turn out to be an underestimate) we will experience the sharpest economic contraction apart from 1921 and 1931.

Not surprisingly therefore the Prime Minister made a Freudian slip at Question Time when he talked about the economic depression. It will only be a matter of time before the dreaded word slump becomes a part of the common currency.

The daily toll of redundancies, and these figures, make welfare reform more, not less, urgent. I had a few emails from across the country from people who have worked the whole of their lives and are gobsmacked when their national insurance contribution record delivers them a princely sum of £60.50 benefit a week. As these correspondents observe that is exactly the same sum as individuals who have never worked (although some have tired while others have never lifted a finger to do so) and they deeply resent this fact.

This afternoon I met Tony McNalty to discuss further the alarming figures that since Britain won the Olympic bid, and determined that the games should be held in Newham, over 50,000 new national insurance numbers in that borough alone had been issued to non-British workers. He is following up on this disturbing fact as I will be when I meet the Olympic delivery authority tomorrow.

But the Minister also promised to discuss within the department, and I hope within in the cabinet, the idea of reforming the national insurance jobseekers' allowance so that it takes into account an individual's work record. Surely someone who has paid five years' continuous contributions should gain a larger benefit than £60.50 a week and similarly someone who has worked for ten years should be rewarded at a higher rate reflecting their years of contributions.

At the same time, with rapidly rising unemployment, it is important to reward people taking risk getting back into jobs. Those with good work records but now unemployed may be hesitant at taking a job which does not look too permanent.

The other reform I am therefore pressing on the Government is to make it easier to requalify for the insurance JSA.

When compiling new deal successes the Government judges a claimant as landing a full time job when they have been in work for thirteen weeks. I suggest therefore that a thirteen week period of continuous employment and contributions should therefore requalify a worker for six months' insurance benefit. In this way claimants willing to take risks with the next job will be rewarded.

Greenpeace irritated a number of MPs at the weekend by bombarding them to such an extent the parliamentary email server crashed. The targets were not those MPs voting in favour of the extension, but those who had suggested they might vote against. Frank, in this blog describes how he feels these actions may well have led to last night's vote going in the favour of the Government.

DWP publishes today a report showing how ineffective the Government's sanction regime is in smartening up claimants none too keen to find work. The report is released a day after the Commons debated the Government's new welfare reform bill.

This bill was conceived for an age in which boom and bust had been abolished. Over the past ten years over three million new jobs have been created but the workless total has fallen by a mere 400,000 claimants. Nine out of ten of the new jobs have been taken by immigrants.

Even through the age of continuous boom the Government's welfare reform measures clearly are not working. Worse still they are totally inappropriate to the conditions which an increasing numbers of families will face as the economic hurricane gains pace.

New Labour has made much of reforming welfare to match the new Labour market. Those worklesssness figures - 5.1 million at the last count - give a hollow ring to such claims.

A welfare reform bill that looks forwards instead of backwards would centre on two measures. Large numbers of citizens with impeccable work records are going to be sacked. They will then find out that their continuous National Insurance contributions gives them a princely £60.50 a week benefit. That is precisely the sum an individual gets who has never worked.

A relevant welfare reform bill would lay the basis for linking the size of this contributory JSA to a claimant's work record. Somebody who has worked continuously for five years would get double the payment and somebody, for example, working ten years would see the insurance benefit tripled.

The new arrivals to the benefit roles have work DNA'ed into their very being. They will be actively seeking work and will take work just as soon as they can. To encourage them to take risk with the next job they should be able to reactivate their old contribution record once they have been in work for thirteen continuous weeks - the definition the Government gives as a success in placing New Dealers in the job market.
New Deal for Young People becomes less successful as the months go by. Ten years ago it placed half of New Dealers into employment. Now two thirds fail to get a job.

This money, and the benefit money paid to single claimants under 25, should be used to finance a new green community programme. The one success of the Wilson Government in the eyes of the unemployed was a community programme that offered real jobs in their community to claimants.

Such a scheme cannot be run from the centre - (another big failure of the all the Government's welfare reform measures). Local authorities should be invited to initiate these programmes again with a special emphasis on protecting the environment and cutting fuel consumption and CO2 emissions.

The age of supposedly training people to take one of the never ending new jobs is over. Serious welfare reform now is about creating some real jobs.

DWP publishes today a report showing how in effect the Government’s sanction regime is in smartening up claimants none too keen to find work. The report is released a day after the Commons debated the Government’s new welfare reform bill.

This bill was conceived for an age in which boom and bust had been abolished. Over the past ten years over three million new jobs have been created but the workless total has fallen by a mere 400,000 claimants. Nine out of ten of the new jobs have been taken by immigrants.

Even through the age of continuous boom the Government’s welfare reform measures clearly are not working. Worse still they are totally inappropriate to the conditions which an increasing numbers of families will face as the economic hurricane gains pace.

New Labour has made much of reforming welfare to match the new Labour market. Those worklesssness figures – 5.1 million at the last count – give a hollow ring to such claims.

A welfare reform bill that looks forwards instead of backwards would centre on two measures. Large numbers of citizens with impeccable work records are going to be sacked. They will then find out that their continuous National Insurance contributions gives them a princely £60.50 a week benefit. That is precisely the sum an individual gets who has never worked.

A relevant welfare reform bill would lay the basis for linking the size of this contributory JSA to a claimant’s work record. Somebody who has worked continuously for five years would get double the payment and somebody, for example, working ten years would see the insurance benefit tripled.

The new arrivals to the benefit roles have work DNA’ed into their very being. They will be actively seeking work and will take work just as soon as they can. To encourage them to take risk with the next job they should be able to reactivate their old contribution record once they have been in work for thirteen continuous weeks – the definition the Government gives as a success in placing New Dealers in the job market.

New Deal for Young People becomes less successful as the months go by. Ten years ago it placed half of New Dealers into employment. Now two thirds fail to get a job.

This money, and the benefit money paid to single claimants under 25, should be used to finance a new green community programme. The one success of the Wilson Government in the eyes of the unemployed was a community programme that offered real jobs in their community to claimants.

Such a scheme cannot be run from the centre – (another big failure of the all the Government’s welfare reform measures). Local authorities should be invited to initiate these programmes again with a special emphasis on protecting the environment and cutting fuel consumption and CO2 emissions.

The age of supposedly training people to take one of the never ending new jobs is over. Serious welfare reform now is about creating some real jobs.

Extending Heathrow is a really good example of how not to behave if you are the Government, but also how not to behave if you are a powerful and well-organised pressure group, like Greenpeace. The Government has said that Heathrow will be extended, but is fearful of having a vote here in the House of Commons, so, no surprises, the Tories have called a vote on Wednesday and 58 Labour members, knowing this is what the Tories are up to, have declared they are against an extension of Heathrow. I am in fact more radical than that, I think a real determined radical Prime Minister would announce the date when the last flight leaves Heathrow. But in the meantime, we have to campaign against the extension, which I think is wrong on environmental grounds. I also think it is wrong in having an extension to our main airport when planes, in this age of terrorism, fly most of the time over our capital city. 
 
At the weekend, Greenpeace has been lobbying by email those 50-60 Labour MPs who said they are not prepared to vote for an extension. This is the way not to conduct a campaign, I am absolutely furious with them, because they have actually crashed our email system. They have made it difficult for my constituents to get in touch with me, and if they think that bombarding me from all around the country with fatuous emails is actually going to change my vote, they have another thing coming. Except to the point I’m now so annoyed with them, if I did vote with the Government it would be because of this crass campaigning; somehow you think MPs are up for being pushed around by sending emails, that is not how I see our role.

I’m sure my resolve will be soon strengthened, because I am leaving this Blog to meet with the Deputy Chief Whip who phoned me on Friday, who is coming down to London early and clearly wants to try and twist my arm, and change my vote. I think he will disappointed on that score, but I will report later in the day how I get on with him.

The FSA Chairman is always worth listening to. Lord Turner has a proven track record. But what are we to make of his speech last night? Banking capital ratio rules should be used as a counter-cyclical device.

This is a welcome, but pretty late announcement. When the Government first started pumping huge sums of tax-payers’ money in to our banking system, to increase its capital base and free up the flow of credit to businesses, the FSA tightened its expectations on the banks’ capital ratio. In a single stroke much of the good that could have come from this move was neutered. So there should be much pleasure in heaven over this repentance. And the speech comes a day after the FSA sensibly began back tracking on its previous policy.

As far as his pro-active agenda, I hope Lord Turner will now start to rebuild the firewall between high-street and merchant banks. The twin architects of this destruction – Messrs. Greenspan and Summers – ought to be called before an Economic war crimes tribunal for they more than anyone who are guilty of letting off the lead the greed of bankers. Sadly Mr. Summers in ensconced back in the White House where he did so much damage last time, under Bill Clinton.

The FSA therefore needs to resist robustly the financial lobby that is already girding its loins to defend the status quo. The representative was on the Today programme telling us that it was us poor consumers that were demanding these highly-developed financial products.

B******s. That is simply untrue. The overwhelming majority of us demand no such products. We want a banking system that does not rip us of with unfair charges. Similarly occasionally we like to negotiate loans for big purchases such as our homes. It is the financial sector that promotes us making all the running.

If the financial industry wants to create fancy products and fancy prices, they should do so in a clearly defined sector that does not affect the rest of us.

That is what used to reign in the division in between merchant and commercial banks. Of course this will result in a major restructuring of the high street banks. But it is that division that the FSA needs to re-establish pronto.

I hope members of the cabinet’s economic war council were hard at work long before I dictated this blog. The second round of bank rescue measures announced on Monday were pretty thin gruel. True, tax-payers’ potential liabilities were massively escalated, but the Government could not explain much of the details of how the scheme will work in freeing up credit.

Even without the details it was pretty clear the wrong decision had again been taken. Insuring against toxic bonds is a very different operation from trying to bring them all together in a bad bank, as it is so politely called. 
 
It was in mid-December that MPs on both sides of the chamber were calling for the establishment of a bad bank and for the details to be worked out in double quick time.

That must be today’s job for the economic war cabinet, gathering amidst another set of horrendous economic figures yesterday. The pound has fallen this week by 4.5% against the Euro, 5.8% against the Yen and 6.1% against the Dollar – a fall of 34% since November 2007. We don’t hear much now, thankfully, from those cheerful souls boasting falling Sterling will boost exports.

National debt is on line to rise from a little over 500 billion pounds to 800 billion by the beginning of the next Parliament. That figure could simply double if the guarantees the Government has made with tax-payer’s money arrive as bills and the loans against assets turn out to be less than the bargain us tax payers hope for.

So two dread announcements are now pending. The next unemployment figures, out today, will erase the last stretch of credibility attached to the Government’s roadmap to recovery contained in the pre-budget report.

At the same time we can expect Standard and Poor will give its judgement on the credit worthiness of the British Government. When that is announced, not only will the economic war cabinet need to hold onto its hard hats, we too should don ours, as the fall out of economic debris will greet us at every turn.

Mega crises sort the men out from the political boys. Michael Oakshot in his famous lecture on political education drew distinction between practical and technical knowledge. He talks of how “the boys might acquire the technical knowledge, but only the men would combine this with practical knowledge of affairs”. Over the past week I couldn’t but recall Oakshot’s famous words. The economic crisis is just beginning. Maybe a few more people now are accepting as I did at the beginning that it would be surprising if the recession/slump becomes as severe as I fear that our political institutions will remain intact. I suggested there might have to be a National Government. Three members of that National Government are beginning to identify themselves. Vince Cable, obviously. Peter Mandelson, who is thriving in current circumstances and must be kicking himself at not having a seat in the Commons. And the return of Kenneth Clarke, who has been through this twice before will quickly emerge in the views of politicians (he’s already there with voters) as one of those who might form this new Government.

Nearly full marks for Alan Johnson for publishing The NHS Constitution . As this is hopefully the beginning of the debate rather than its end, here are three ideas. What should be the role of constitutions, or as I argue contracts in our lives. First, we need similar constitutions/ contracts across most of our public life now as a way of allowing decent citizens to know what is expected of all of us. I’ve tried to pilot this idea in schools where the pupils themselves where the pupils themselves have come up with some pretty remarkable findings (see Neighbours from Hell). Any new contracts and going to be fairly rough and ready at first and the aim ought to be to get them, after much public discussion, revised quickly. It is a bit disappointing therefore that the new document talks of a revision in ten years!

The document sadly does not face up to two crunch issues. A main reason why health and equalities remain so stubbornly the same is differences in lifestyles. Of course it is so much more difficult for the poor to have a good diet. But many poor families manage and in so doing put most of us to shame. So under the section – your responsibilities – shouldn’t the first one be offering help to move to better diet and more exercise? The document simply talks about our having some personal responsibility here. I always find that action is far more likely if concrete steps are suggested.

The big hole in the document however concerns the bad behaviour against which too many staff suffer. The constitution doesn’t bite the bullet. We need to begin a public debate on whether a quickly revised constitution should clearly state that the courts will have powers, say after the second serious offence against staff, to exclude an individual’s NHS provision. Full Stop. The constitution pussyfoots around the issue. What do the public think though? Particularly as last year alone over 11500 NHS staff were subject to verbal or physical attacks.

At some stage the Government, I believe, will have to come back to the bad band idea. While the toxic assets have been repackaged to the nth degree the banks by now must have some idea of the extent of their vulnerability on this score. So I return to an idea I put forward in a Telegraph article dated 13th December. Before another penny of tax-payers’ money is given over to the banking system, the Prime Minister and Chancellor ought to lock Britain’s senior bankers in a room saying they are not being allowed out until they write down the size of their bank’s toxic debt and there be no takeaway Indian food until the exercise is complete.

Because the Government is not doing this, the Chancellor now cannot say the size of tax-payer liability from the measures he has announced this afternoon. Getting the bad debt parked on the side is likely to be the best way of freeing up credit. 
 
Two other moves would help. The “short selling ban” should be re-imposed and the FSA ought also to list the extent to which pension funds have been allowing their shares to be used in this way. What has been the net loss to those funds of allowing short sellers to devalue pension assets in this way? Pensioners have a right to know.

At the same time, the Government should make plain that it is opening up discussions with Parliament on how best to bring to account those people who are most responsible for pushing the country towards the edge of an economic precipice. So far Parliament has looked irrelevant to this fast-evolving crisis. The Government needs to act quickly to prevent an economic catastrophe and, why it might sensible to listen to what MPs have to say, the Commons does not have an executive role to play. But it could have this deliberative role in helping to bring the culprits to book and suggest how some of their ill-gotten gains might be used to offset the escalating national debt amounting from the Government’s rescue packages.

More than a page of history will be turned tomorrow. The President-Elect will become President Obama proper. Naturally British political leaders have been rushing to pick up his coat tails. But his message from yesterday is as clear as it could be. Change is coming to America because the people are going to be the agents of change. Wow, in one smart move he begins to manage any disappointment with the new President. More importantly he brings the nation together to forge that change. It is not Obama but the American people themselves who, in Tony Blair’s touching phrase, “will feel the hand of history on their shoulders”.

There are a number of firsts with this morning’s post. It arrived early. It also bought a card announcing what will be in some weeks’ time a couple’s second child. The card is a reproduction of the mother’s last scan showing a very healthy child in her womb. The scans, which have been instigated to alert parents to handicapped children, thereby opening the door for an abortion, might, in the longer run, paradoxically have a totally different effect on the pro-life/pro-choice debate in this country. While this is the first time that I have had an expected birth announced in this way, I am struck by the number of young people in schools whose own lifebook begins with pictures of them in their mother’s womb. While only some of the young people link up their womb-life with the abortion debate, these scans will, I believe, over the longer term change people’s attitude to what is an acceptable time limit beyond which abortion should not take place.



Abortion was touched on in a public discussion I was involved in last evening. I gave an example of how irrational many of the contributors to the abortion debate are when parliament discusses the issue. We did so last year and I couldn’t but compare the attitudes of my colleagues to GM foods and GM embryos. I would guess that, on a free vote, a significant majority of Labour MPs would register against GM foods. And yet I could not but contrast the horror that is expressed in our GM debates in the commons from the Labour benches on the prospect of having, say, genetically-modified potatoes compared with the non-debate and the voting last year for genetically-modified embryos, which was carried easily. This extraordinary example of where that part of the political brain deciding issues of GM crops is totally divorced from presumably another part of the political brain deciding GM embryos will soon be a thing of the past as those scanning photographs spread a new sediment across our political debate.



The Government very bravely announces today a third runway for Heathrow while making it plain that they are not so brave to allow the Commons to vote on the issue. The Tories might well mess up this aspect of the Government’s intent by offering us a vote at the end of a day’s proceeding when they decide the issue to be discussed. I hope when that opportunity arises we will have a radical alternative on offer. It is surely madness to expand a country’s major airport, with even more planes, and thereby terrorist targets, flying over the capital city. Surely the next radical Prime Minister will announce when the last flight will leave Heathrow and link this with building up an airport in the Thames Estuary or the Bristol Channel. The Government is confident it can build up a Japanese-type bullet train network to get us from London to Manchester in 40 minutes, surely the first such line could be built bringing passengers for either the West or the East and delivering them in London in less than half an hour. I wonder what the odds bookmakers are offering against that third runway ever being built?

The Churches’ Conservation Trust is forty years old this year. Set up as a joint exercise between the State and the Anglican Church, and financed from tax payers and the church commissioners, the Trust now is the custodian of the some of the finest examples of British architecture over the last 1000 years.

It is impossible to understand England without understanding its history, and its history cannot be fully understood without the role churches have played in building up our society.

I chaired the Trust for a time and Loyd Grossman, the current chairman, outlined planned for events which will make the 80th birthday party an even greater landmark. Details of the CCT can be gained from their website on: www.visitchurches.org.uk

I have always been a natural optimist about Israel’s future. Just as I have been a supporter of that country’s independence for as long as I can remember. But how much longer can Israel have an independent future?

I was struck by how many Jewish friends now believe that, metaphorically speaking, Israel will be driven into the sea at some stage, and perhaps quite soon. Whether the Americans would allow that scenario to take place is of course another question. That Israel’s friends, Jew and non-Jew alike, have such forebodings makes politics rather than war that much more important.

Throughout its short history, Israel has always been successful in facing only one immediate threat. It is now in the position – through dragging its negotiating feet – in not only having the beginnings ofan armed enemy in Gaza, but for that armed enemy to be gaining supplies from Israel’s, and our, enemy, the Government of Iran.

If I were Israel, I would pretty quickly give the West Bank sovereignty so its government could put a stop to new Jewish settlements. I would hope also that its electorate would be Palestinian and Jewish alike.

In Gaza, at the last election, when Hamas won control, it was far from clear that the ruling party wanted to move to the wretched Iranian model. Western Diplomats, in true style, rebuffed those first tentative moves the ruling party made to the outside world.

So what now?

Friends have to get over to Israel how late the hour is even if it is to survive in the short run. As a supporter of Israel, I have always been amazed at how modest the Palestinian demands are. One only has to look over the history of Israel’s establishment to realise the exploitation of Arab-land. Only in accepting the validity of the West Bank as a member of a three-state solution, can Israel hope to safeguard its continued existence.

Last week’s National Institute of Economic and Social Research finding makes grim reading. For the last quarter the economy declined by 1.5%. Should this rate continue for a whole year (nevermind escalating) the fall in national income in this recession will be greater than in 1931 which is now regarded as a depression or slump.

What Governments can do in the face of such a large economic decline is limited. The one thing they can do is to try and manage expectations so that a recession does not become a slump. To do this the Government has to act quickly, for any intervention to be large enough, and for it to be well targeted. There has to be big question marks over the Government’s strategy so far.

What can make the depression worse is to take the wrong measures. The general hue and cry is that interest rates should be cut further. I do not believe that last week’s bank rate cut will make any difference at all in the one key area where there should be most concern. This is getting credit from banks to businesses that need working capital to survive. Cuts in bank rate will not achieve this goal. New measures by the Government are urgent.

What is worrying about bank rate cuts is that officialdom does not see raising the savings ratio as part of our longer term recovery.

Government, firms and individuals have been spending too much on tick. Instead of discouraging savers by cutting rates the Government should be encouraging them so that banks have greater rather than smaller deposits. This then helps us solve the bank liquidity problem. We also need longer term as a nation to save more.

Two other measures which would help would be to insist the banks declare their toxic assets. Maybe the Government ought temporarily to suspend the banks’ capital adequacy rules which the FSA just recently tightened now the horse has bolted.

Increasing savings coming into banks, making them declare the size of their toxic debt and allow them to extend credit beyond the FSA moves would do more than any other set of proposals to lessen the severity of the economic downturn.



The media has reported Alan Milburn’s task as increasing mobility of young people from working class backgrounds into the professions. I hope Alan is taking no such limited view of his role. Most working class parents in my constituency do not see their sons and daughters becoming doctors or architects or the like. What most of them are anxious about is for their sons and daughters to gain skills to keep their children employable throughout their working lives. The biggest failure of the 1944 Act was not to implement the proposals for technical schools. The new academy programme in Birkenhead and elsewhere offers the chance to rectify this sixty-year failing. But the outlook isn’t good. Only 1400 pupils began the government’s new diploma scheme this year. Getting effective technical education into schools through the diploma scheme would do more to advance social mobility than any other move the Government could think up in a month of Sundays.

In the pit of my stomach I feel a deep unease about the Government’s strategy to counter what is euphemistically called a recession. I suppose the main cause of my anxiety is what might best be described as the Government’s inability to appreciate that there is a psychological side in economic activity, and this side is never more important when an economy may be going into deep recession. One way of describing this would be for the public being caught in a mighty huge panic. The key test of Government is preventing the panic becoming the major driver of the recession.

This side of market behaviour was pretty rampant during the boom years when people were desperate not to be gazumped when buying a new home. I saw it at its worst under the last Labour Government, when the Government then tried subsidising the prices of major items to dampen down inflationary expectations.

I argued that the programme should be as generous as possible, and that it should be generous enough that most of the money would not be drawn on. The inflationary expectation would have been cut at the root.

What in fact happened was the programme was half hearted, inflation ripped through the economy and tax-payers were left with a nice hefty bill for the subsidy programme.

The first evening when news of Northern Rock broke, and after witnessing people queuing to take out their savings, I thought we were at similar point where panic could take root. I was amazed that it took from the Thursday evening until the following Monday evening before the Government gave the guarantee over deposits, allowing the 24 hour media to broadcast peoples’ growing apprehension.

During no move since has the Government been able to get itself ahead of the curve, and thereby perhaps influence the course of events. The latest example is over VAT.

It was a fatuous move from the very beginning. And when we had a chance in Parliament sometime before Christmas to debate it I voted against, making a plea that the billions being borrowed to finance the VAT cut should be channelled into new forms of credit for viable businesses who might otherwise go under in the credit crunch.

Weeks and weeks later the Government still hasn’t announced how it can throw extra lifelines to viable companies who are being denied a working capital from the banks. Giving the banks more assets for capitalisation is almost as pointless as the VAT cut. The Government now has a small clutch of nationalised banks. Why isn’t it using them to get credit out to viable firms?

This failure alone will result in unemployment higher that it need otherwise be. Indeed the Chancellor has revised his incredibly optimistic take on an economic downturn which will be on the rebound by the middle of next year.

The Pre-Budget Report listed the expected levels of claimant unemployment by the end of 2009-10. Partly because the crisis is so serious, but also because the Government has been pitifully slow in responding (only looking quick-footed in comparison with the Tories) my fear is that the unemployment level predicted for the end of 2010 will be met, at that very point next year when the Government had confidently predicted the beginnings of recovery.

And yet the pressure is on in the media, and no doubt in Whitehall, for the Bank of England to cut further interest rates. Again the move will be worse than fatuous. It will harm even further savers.

It is quite clear that the bank rate lever is no longer connected to those parts of the economy which most need help i.e. firms requiring credit. Further cuts in bank rate will reduce the income of pensioners dependent to some extent in supplementing their income by savings interest. Why do politicians make so much fuss about the urgent need for Keynesian reflation while joining in the chorus to cut the income of the vast majority of pensioners? It doesn’t make sense to me.

Andrew Adonis is one of the most gifted ministers in this Government and his ability to think strategically in the long-term is a great prize for the Brown Government. Can he be right in putting so much energy into building a new rail network? For more years than I can remember I have been a commuter between Euston and Birkenhead while major reconstruction to the line has been taking place. For years now the defence of the crap service Virgin have given us is that this huge capital upgrade is underway. This was supposed to have been completed in the middle of December. As I write there has not been a proper service today and as I came back from Birkenhead on the 7 a.m. train on Tuesday morning it was diverted all round Klondike and didn’t get into London until 10.30 - a good hour and a half late. Given the appalling manner in which this capital investment programme in the railways has been implemented, does anyone now believe we have the expertise for such a major investment along Andrew’s lines? Why is it that the French and the Germans have brought up the standard of our water and gas industries but have kept well clear of the rail franchises? Isn’t this perhaps the one area of the British economy which we could have done with a bit of foreign ownership expertise and discipline?