Prisoners from Guantanamo Bay

Apparently Gordon Brown has agreed to accept prisoners being released from Guantanamo Bay to help President Elect Obama out of a hole.

The thing is, these people will have no link what so ever with the UK.

Presumably they have been held on Cuba becuase they were considered a threat of some kind. They deserve a proper, just, trial and if found not-guilty should be released to where they came from or to make appropriate applications to countries considereing to take them.

So why are we agreeing to take them, apparently without precondition?

Empty Shops and Empty Pockets?

Now, some people might think that I'm a bit tight. (I prefer to think of myself as appropriately frugal). Anyway, I went shopping for a Christmas present today for one of my God Sons. We'd agreed not to see them until the New Year and I had, genuinely, not had time to find the present prior to Christmas.

I therefore spent a couple of hours at Castlepoint and the shopping centre on the old bus depot site opposite.

What was astounding was firstly how few people there were about, the car parks were busy but by no means full and the shops were equally busy but there were virtually no queues at the tills.

More surprising for me was the lack of stock on the shelves. Admittedly, we are at the end of a week in which there is little stock coming in to the stores, but even so there was a very limited choice of goods. This wasn't just the case in the electrical stores, but also in the food shops as well.

It's a poor augry for the coming year. Little money to spend, both by consumers and by retailers stocking their shelves will surely have a circular and knock on effect, one thing leading on to the other. It doesn't bode well and it proves how wrong the Government's policy of borrowing wildly to pay for tax cuts that have had little effect and to bail out the banks who continue to refuse to lend is.

Labour choose their candidate

The Labour party have chosen their candidate for Mid Dorset and North Poole, Chris Thompson.

Chris is also a blogger, his blog can be found here.  His first post is a response to the comments I've made about proposals for the BBC to start local internet news services and the threat they pose to local newspapers.

Welcome to the fray Chris!  

When is a tax cut not a tax cut....?

You know when you hear something on the radio news and you don't quite believe you heard it so have to make sure you listen to the next bulletin in case you misheard it.

I had one of those moments today listening to the radio 4 news this afternoon.

Yvette Cooper MP, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury was talking about what the Government was doing to help people hit by rising prices.

She told us that they were 'cutting taxes' like 'removing the additional 2p rise in fuel duty on a litre of petrol'.

So that would the Government cutting a tax they haven't imposed yet.  You can't cut taxes you haven't imposed, and in this case you shouldn't be imposing a tax in the first place.  

The preposterousness (is that a word?) of the Government's justification of the mess they have us in just get worse.

Labour's Bin Tax Scheme

ConservativeHome.com are reporting that no councils have signed up to Labour's proposed trials of the 'bin tax'.

This would be exactly the kind of scheme that the 'chips in bins' were designed for.  I've been opposing the use of this technology and the proposals for this kind of taxation since I was first elected to Bournemouth Council back in 2005.  

The removal of refuse from the home is one of the fundamental services provided by local councils.  It's one of the services that's been consistently provided by local authorities and it is exactly for this kind of service that local taxation (be it rates, community charge or council tax) has been paid by residents.

If your council doesn't take away your rubbish as part of your local tax, then why have a local tax in the first place?

Good on those councils who have refused to join in the scheme.  Let's hope the refusal of local authorities to cooperate with the Government over this will kill the idea for good.

Tourism Minister can't stand the heat

Tourism plays a huge part in Dorset's economy. It's also been totally neglected by this Government.

It would seem that the Minister responsible for the tourist industry has finally been told a few home truths by one of its leading backers. (The Daily Mail has the story here).

About time too. It's a shame that her response, and that of her party has been to attack the comments rather than listen to the cry for help they contain.

Proposed Planning Bill: More Centralisation; More Control Freakery; Less Democracy

The BBC are reporting growing opposition amongst Labour MPs to the proposed Planning Bill here.

Good for them!  These proposals place decision making powers over 'major' projects in the hands of an unelected commission.  Local councils, MPs and even government minsters would have no say in planning proposals referred to the commission.

The proposed commission would presumably be similar to the unelected and unaccountable Planning Inspectorate, deliberating remotely on planning applications without reference to local peoples' views.

We need more accountability, local control over planning decisions and greater transparency in the process.  This Bill will result in the exact opposite, more centralisation and less democracy.  

Peter Hain's donations

Undoubtedly there is an enormous amount of comment about Peter Hain's undiscolsed donations to his Labour Party Deputy Leadership campaign.

The part of the story that confuses and concerns me most is what on earth he found to spend over £180,000 on.

To put this in context, in the last year we have written over 40,000 letters, printed and delivered over 280,000 pieces of literature and sent tens of thousands of e-mails. All of this campaigning, which has been enhanced with canvassing, setting up street stalls and attending meetings, has been carried out with a budget of less than £20,000.

Addmitedly there are clearly very many more members of the Labour party than there are residents of Mid Dorset and North Poole, however I can't imagine that there are more than nine times that number.

Mr Hain has numerous questions to answer, not least how he managed to expend so much money on an internal party election.

It really is time for change...

Further to my last post, it would seem prudent to emphasise the fact that this Government is smelling of cheap incompetence. As this HMRC scandal deepens – with another six packages unaccounted for and evidence of recorded phone calls being sent on CD to bemused householders across the country – we look back at a Brown premiership that has encompassed an evasive Home Secretary who attempted to cover up the true details of the country's asylum seeker situation. We have also seen the Northern Rock fiasco, a by-product of the credit crunch and of Gordon Brown's haphazard control of the Treasury for over 10 years, and not to mention the latest loans scandal which threatens to undermine further the credibility of senior Labour Party officials.


And, if that wasn't enough, further evidence of Gordon Brown's incompetence can be linked to the aforementioned HMRC scandal. Why did he cut the budget from that agency, thereby minimising the opportunity for proper checks to be carried out to trace data and to ensure that only appropriately-trained staff had access to such data?


Gordon Brown has been prided as a man of strength and of conviction, yet his premiership is derailing fast and it actually seems that he has been a very convincing actor for the past 10 years and a very unconvincing prime minister for the last 5 months.


And in the same way that he has allowed Alistair Darling to remain as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he also found the time to promote Dawn Primarolo from her previous job of Paymaster-General (a post she held from 1999 until June 2007, which exercises direct control over HMRC and made her the de facto minister in charge of that agency) to Minister of State for Public Health. So we have a prime minister who is incompetent, a Chancellor who cannot run his own Treasury, and a minister in charge of our public NHS who has a previous record of laying the (dis)organisational foundations for this HMRC crisis.


Wonderful.


Isn't it time that the citizens of the UK had the chance to vote on this crippled Government? When can we vote for change and for optimism? For real fiscal prudence and free market economics? For sharing the proceeds of growth and cutting stealth taxes? And, above all else, when will Gordon Brown give us the chance to vote for a new Conservative Government that will deliver the fair and just society that Britain desperately needs?

A Matter of Competence

No doubt by now commentators elsewhere are highlighting the horror of the loss of 25 million personal records by the Revenue and Customs.  

Errors occur in every business.  Post goes astray.  These kind of things are often unavoidable.

What is avoidable is allowing a 'junior official' the access to so many personal records, the ability to download them and the authority to send them willy nilly to another agency without there being any system to authorise, track or confirm receipt of the information.

It is a matter of competence.  Yes, Revenue and Customs are a semi detached agency of the government, but the responsibility for their operation still lies, ultimately, with the Treasury.  That means the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

If he has an honour at all he should resign.   

Gardeners' Question Time and Council Funding

Not normally found together in the same sentence, I fully admit.

I quite enjoy listening to Gardeners' Question Time on Radio 4.  Invariably their are questions asked that apply equally to my own gardening experience.

I was listening last week and heard a question from a member of the audience in Durham about what to do with the plastic plant pots she obtained from the garden centre when buying new plants.  She complained that her local authority, Durham City Council, did not offer a plastic recycling service and wanted some ideas from the panel as to other uses to which the pots could be put.

The panel comprised members who mostly lived in the South and expressed surprise that Durham didn't offer a plastic recylcing services as all their local councils did.

It dawned on me that this is a symptom of the imbalance in funding for local government which we suffer from so severely here in Dorset.

Presumably, Durham City Council don't have the same cost pressures that our local councils do and therfore have not been 'encouraged' to bring in a wider recycling scheme to cut their land fill waste.  The logical conclusion must therefore be that not only is the Government's financial settlement for local authorities unfair, it's also not very green. 

Where our money's gone

The Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne has a commentary in today's Sunday Times.

This part of the article stood out for me:

for every extra £100 that Brown has spent since 1997, only £30 has been used to improve frontline public services. Thanks to the way he has run the Treasury, the rest has gone on cost-inflation, bureaucracy and waste.

That says it all about this Government really doesn't it? It also tells you exactly why I am running for Parliament.

No to ID Cards

Averil King (no relation), who is the chairperson of Mid Dorset and North Poole UKIP has a letter in tonight's Daily Echo making some very good points in opposition to the Government's plans for ID cards.

Good for Averil.

I'm opposed to the ID card scheme. It will be a huge intrusion in to our privacy and it wastes money which could be so better spent elsewhere (for example, helping the Home Office keep track of convicted offenders).

PCSO's

The Government has reneged on its election manifesto pledge to create 24,000 Police Community Support Officers by 2008.

Their plan to roll out the national non emergency number has also been revoked.

I've come across a number of PCSO's in the last few weeks, they undertake an excellent job supporting the local police. People want more uniformed officers on the streets, not less.

Increasingly the attention of the police is centred on Poole and Bournemouth town centres, particularly at the weekend. PCSO's provide a vital service in retaining locally knowledgeable and responsive officers, we should be finding ways to fund more rather than less.

A parliament for England?

This may be a strange topic to raise on the 300th anniversary of the treaty that lead to the Act of Union. However, my attention was drawn this evening to this report on the BBC.

Apparently Tony Blair believes that an English parliament, in whatever form it might take, is "unworkable" and "unnecessary". The first word that comes to mind reading that is "inequitable". Continuation of the current system is unfair and unless it is dealt with the possibility of dissolution of the Union becomes more rather than less likely.

I'm totally with the Prime Minister when he comments that keeping the Union with Scotland is crucial to both national security and our economy.

However, continuing to allow Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs to vote on matters that only effect England must in the long run be untenable.

I'm not in favour of a separate English Parliament, there are already enough layers of bureaucracy and government. I don't see however why the House of Commons can't sit as an English chamber when it decides purely English policy.

Yes, this may prove problematic on occasions when the UK parliament and the English Chamber have different parties with a majority. The Government, Prime Minister and Cabinet would of course be drawn from the majority party in the UK Parliament. Allowing only English MPs to vote on English issues must however be good for democracy and, ultimately, for the continuation of the Union.

Defence questions

Just back from a meeting tonight in Poole, very nearly missed the deadline for writing something today, which would of course not do, as it would break my resolution about writing something every day.

I was asked a number of questions tonight about the provision of sufficient support to our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. The concerns raised by people were largely as a result of the C4 documetary last night, which I'm afraid I didn't see.

I was very pleased to be able to relay the statement released by Liam Fox this afternoon:

A future Conservative Government will spend what is required to guarantee the security of the United Kingdom. There is a constant choice between commitments and resources. In the current environment, we will either have to increase the resources reaching the front-line to match our commitments, or reduce our commitments to match our resources.

Personally I feel that the resources for the front line will need to be found. We punch above our weight in the world partially because of our history. More importantly it's because of the professionalism and dedication of our armed forces who we commit to missions on behalf of the international community. Support for our front line troops is vital, as I said on Sunday, there's something seriously wrong when the government spends more on their headquarters than they do on their soldiers.

Homes for MOD staff

The Sunday Times is reporting that the Ministry of Defence are spending £2.3 billion on a contract to refurbish and run their headquarters in Whitehall. You can read the full story here.

The Conservatives are requesting an investigation by the National Audit Office in the scheme.

Expenditure on the new home for ministers and civil servants will include:

• Luxury office chairs worth more than £1,000 for each of the 3,100 civil servants


• 
  The purchase of more than 3,500 oak doors for a total cost of £3m, or up to £1,200 each
  


• The restoration of a “terrazzo” marble and stone floor in the renovated “pillared hall”
  


• A restaurant, a coffee bar, three large plasma screens on each of the 10 floors, a gym and “quiet rooms” where staff can take a break.

The MoD expects to spend £75,000 per person working in the building on refurbishment and upgrades over the next ten years. This contrasts with an anticipated expenditure of £25,000 per person for those living in MoD accommodation, this figure includes ongoing maintenance.

This Government has asked our armed forces to undertake enormously challenging missions, while simultaniously cutting investment in them.

Our role as a leading western democracy places responsibilities on us in the fight against terror. It will be our armed forces who are required to fulfill much of this responsibilty for us. We should therefore be ensuring that proper investment is made in those who undertake these tasks, in their equipment and in their welfare.

Spending £2.3 billion on new offices isn't to my mind investment in the right place, we're right to be asking for the whole scheme to be properly audited and reviewed.

What the government don't know......

First it was the number of failed asylum seekers still in the country, then the number of illegal immigrants in general. Now it's the number of prisoners to have absconded from Open Prisons. The Government doesn't know how many people there are in each of these categories?

And yet this Government has an obsession with collecting data on everything else. It's created an army of bureaucrats to collect data on business, on the health service and on our schools just so they can quote their beloved targets and tables.

It absolutely beggars belief!

A suggestion: Let's spend more time scrutinising those who break the law and leave the rest of us who are law abiding to get on with working hard to improve our communities and our country. Wouldn't that solve the problem?