They Blog For You

Last week I attended a TUC event in Parliament encouraging everybody to stand together for public services and specifically for the NHS. You can see me in the photo on the left - big pink hands and all - supporting the cause with Frances O'Grady, TUC Deputy General Secretary. It [...]

Having come down from my Oldham constituency this morning, I joined the march in ‘Whitehall at at 1.15pm, about an hour and a half after the vanguard had begun the march to Hyde Park.   After hearing the speeches I returned along Piccadilly where people were still marching towards Hyde Park [...]

It’s fashionable to deride Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ as being either vacuous rhetoric (as most Tory MPs think it is) or a thinly veiled cover for massive public expenditure cuts (as the Left thinks).   But his article in the Daily Telegraph of 21 February pre-viewing the long-delayed White Paper on public [...]

Whilst Big Society may be a vacuous slogan, Cameron’s commitment to deconstruct the State, as he told us explicitly two weeks ago, is very real.   Following hard on the dismantling of the NHS, he made clear that there would be no public service, with the sole exception of national security [...]

KEVIN Brennan MP has welcomed recent figures which reveal crime in Cardiff has dropped but expressed concern that Government cuts could make it difficult for the South Wales Police Force to maintain their level of service.The crime figures released recently by the Home Office show crime has decreased by 11.6 [...]

                   The government is mired in criticisms from the public sector. Only the state, they claim, can care for us. Only the traditional public sector  can look after our woods, educate our children and provide us with health care. Any attempt at reform will make things worse, they say.                 They are [...]

Could it be that the Big Society is to David Cameron’s Conservative what the Selsdon agenda was to Ted Heath’s Tories?  Both promised to decentralise power – over politics and public services in the case of the Big Society, over the economy in the case of Selsdon.  [...]

Thank you for your letter of 30 November 2010 to the Home Secretary enclosing comments from readers of your website about the Intra-Company Transfer (ICT) route.  Your letter has been passed to me to reply.  I am sorry for the delay in responding to you. We are clear that the UK [...]

MoD has run out of money again, so it would seem. Alas, we shouldn't be surprised. As long as we continue to allow a handful of powerful defence contractors to carve up the budget, there will never be enough.Labour's Defence Industrial Strategy deliberately restricts the range of companies [...]

Remember how there was going to be a Great Repeal Bill?  A law to cut all that red tape in one swoop, scrapping reams of regulation etc. The idea - first written up in The Plan - was one of a number of shiny, new ideas picked up by [...]

In the twelve months up to last October just 137 new homes were commenced by builders in my constituency. (NHBC statistics). This puts into context the big arguments underway  about how much new building the Council  should allow. Wokingham Borough is of course bigger than my constituency, but current build [...]

Today is the day that VAT rises to 20 per cent. More or less every time you buy something (with the exception of food and some other items), you’ll have to give the state a fifth of the value of the transaction.  Even with a new growth Tsar, I’m not sure [...]

No Happy New Year this time round, it’s going to be grim.   To illustrate this with some precision, I use my own constituency of Oldham as a microcosm for the country as a whole.   It is the 42nd most deprived local authority in the country and the 39th worst in [...]

                   Readers of this site will know that I have disagreed with the analysis and policy of the Bank of England ever since I set the blog  up. I have watched them lurch from too easy to too tight and then back to super easy.  Current policy was bound to produce [...]

The students were firmly kettled into Parliament Square today by overwhelming force of police numbers, many in riot gear, and the vote was lost in the House of Commons next door.   Not the best result for thousands of students who have staged three major demonstrations in extremely cold weather to [...]

Delyn MP David Hanson will vote against the Tory and Lib Dem Coalition’s proposal to treble tuition...

Delyn MP David Hanson will vote against the Tory and Lib Dem Coalition’s proposal to treble tuition fees. He also praised the Welsh Assembly Government for paying the increase for student from Wales.   David Hanson: “The Government’s plans are not necessary, not fair, and not good for higher education.   “Such [...]

There are three good reasons to hate the utility companies.   They raise prices as soon as wholesale markets rise, but when wholesale prices fall they delay a response and then don’t pass on more than a fraction of the wholesale price reduction.   They act like a cartel, and keep their bills so [...]

                        Yesterday Parliament was asked to debate the 5 Year Parliament Bill. Some of my colleagues felt strongly that this piece of legislation was wrong, tampering with a tried and tested system for keeping a successful government or Parliament for up to 5 years, but allowing an election to be [...]

Giving credit where credit is due, the Government was quite right to start the process of publishing the Government’s accounts in full – even if not  just for the Tories’ motives, but certainly for other reasons.   The Tories are keen to ensure greater efficiency for their contracts, though competitive tendering ought [...]

You have to hand it to the Tories, they really do have infernal brass neck (No, I’m not referring to Lord Young helpfully reminding us that the Tory upper classes don’t do recessions, only their commoner subjects who they may not notice below their ken).   I’m referring to the Cabinet Office Minhister, [...]