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Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): Will the Minister remind the House how many uniformed armed services personnel will need to leave the service over the next two years under the current plans, and will he tell us why this cannot be done by means of natural wastage rather than redundancies? The [...]

A £ multi million Eurofighter warplane destroyed a second-hand pick up truck in Libya today.  The air strike was called in using high tech smart bombs. "This shows the wisdom of using a £20 Billion weapon systems against [...]

The political elite in SW1 are out of touch with the public on law and order, according to the Sunday Telegraph.  In a poll commissioned by Lord Ashcroft, 47 percent of voters think that no party has the right approach. [...]

                  Based on doorstep conversations recently, and visits to speak to Conservative Associations, I encounter the following attitudes. Many Conservatives now see the Coaliti0n government as heavily Lib Dem influenced. They tell me they want changes in policy, to reflect the poor financial condition of the country and the preponderance [...]

  One day in parliament Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab): To underline his claim that prisons are well run, will the right hon. and learned Gentleman remind the House of the precise number of prisons that are free of the use of illegal drugs? Mr Clarke: I would not like to guarantee that [...]

Commenting on the publication of the National Audit Office’s report into how the Ministry of Defence manages the delivery of equipment to military operations, South Norfolk MP Richard Bacon, a member of the Commons public accounts committee, said: “ The Ministry of Defence has had problems with the [...]

  No party ever prepares for opposition. Even predictable defeats are a shock and a trigger for prolonged misery. Nigel Fisher’s book ‘How to be in opposition’ is a tale of years of arid futility occasionally enlivened by minor triumphs. Heroes of past oppositions are described for our admiration and encouragement. Neil [...]

This morning, on BBC Breakfast, Armed Forces Minister Nick Harvey gave a revealing interview . He speculated that ground troops may be used in Libya and that they may be there for some time: Mr Harvey was also questioned on whether there would be a ground force entering Libya, and whether [...]

              The government has a target to cut the administrative overhead by 30% over the life of this Parliament. This is a demanding target, but one that can be hit. It will be easiest to do so, if full use is made of people leaving public service to retire or [...]

Japan makes seven times as many cars as the UK.  China produces fifty seven times more steel than the UK. Neither China nor Japan have a carbon tax or price for carbon in their energy costs. The UK used to be the workshop of the world. It was famed for its ships [...]

  Only three MPs questioned the Prime Minister this afternoon on the developing nuclear crisis. David Cameron said he was not going to ‘rush to judgement’.  I asked him to avoid rushing to complacency on nuclear safety. ‘The pictures of the two explosions from Fukushima have already churned up deep-seated fears of [...]

               On this site I last reported  public spending up 11% in cash terms in November 2010 compared with the same month a year earlier. I pointed out that the average increase was a more modest 7% from May 2010.  November was a particularly expensive month.               It is good news [...]

I've a guest piece on Left Foot Forward this morning on the theme of defence procurement.  Having big corporate interests hijacking public policy is not in the interests of either the centre left or right.  Yet I fear that corporatism is back in vogue - in Whitehall, in domestic [...]

Alisdair Palmer asks a question that is increasingly being raised in an excellent article in the Sunday Telegraph; should we quit the EU?   In my view, there are basically two types of politician; those who primarily seek office and those who seek to make things happen.   In pursuit of office, many [...]

This is the best defense of our International aid policy that you will ever read.... http://j.mp/hl0dCf And here is the best defence of why the NHS could not carry on as it was, that and the fact that health services in other European countries ... [...]

My beef with big defence contractors is not that they sell military kit abroad. Nor even that they sometimes appear to have hijacked British foreign policy towards certain states in the interests of their business deals.    It is their influence within Whitehall that seems so malign. Britain’s defence budget is [...]

Liam Fox is reported as saying he'll name and shame those defence contractors who've been ripping off the taxpayer. Why not just stop doing business with such companies - and offer the work to those offering value for money instead? Until we end protectionist defence spending, the [...]

  Newport has been twinned with the second city in Georgia Kutaisi for twenty years.   The relationship between the two cities lies deep in communist times and has weathered terrible events in Georgia. In the recent Russian incision of August 2008, a member of the Newport twinning group was on holiday [...]

Another week, another story of defence spending waste. Regardless of which ministers are sitting inside MoD, or which technocrats oversee defence spending, things will remain inefficient as long as defence procurement remains a protectionist fix. If there was only one chain of restaurants allowed to operate in the whole of London, you’d expect [...]

  A bracing start to a Sunday Morning. The splendid BBC Wales Politics show 'Sunday Supplement' began with a forensic probe into the Big Society. They chose a great point to start by playing this from this week's PASC meeting.\   Q138 Paul Flynn:  Every idea that you’ve come up with has been [...]