Month: January 2007

For once when I asked the government a written question I received an answer.

I asked?? <em>"How much carbon dioxide is put into the atmosphere each day ,and what proportion is from human sources"</em>

The answer stated "The amount of carbon dioxide emitted from human sources is small in comparison to natural flows:at around 3% emitted from the land and oceans to the atmosphere"

The Minister also told me "In 2004 the UK emitted approximately 1.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per day "(I think from human sources). This compares with?? the "25 billion tonnes emitted each year globally" from human sources and the total emissions of 800 billion tonnes from all sources.

It is just useful to understand the scope of the problem and the UK human component.?? According to the government the UK human component represents 2% of the world total human emissions, or 0.06% of total emissions.

So what should we conclude?

Climate change theorists point out that the human element may be very small, but it is the one which is growing quickly, and at the margin will do the damage. People who follow the precautionary principle say this theory may well be right, so we had better act. Many other people say they believe the theory but do not act – like the Prime Minister who tells us this is a serious crisis, but he has no intention of cutting his air miles.

Common sense suggests that because the UK represents such a small part of the problem, we are going to depend on decisions in India, China and the USA to make a bigger impact on human emissions. Of course our government should seek to influence them, and stress the value of greater fuel efficiency and stricter controls on emissions. We should also continue to cut our own fuel use at home, at work and on the move. Technology can be our ally in this.??Prudence??nonetheless dictates that we should take action now to proect ourselves against the possible bad consequences of??global warming.

There are two main bad consequences put forward for the UK. The first is a possible water shortage in the drier south and east of the country. The second is too much water in some rivers at flood time, and in the sea, leading to inundation.

Government should take action now to build stronger sea defences, especially close to the London conurbation where most people are at risk. This could be paid for by creating new land in the shallows of the Thames estuary, and selling this for development to finance the higher tidal surge barriers we will need.

The government and the water regulator should include a capacity target in the regulatory structure, to require the industry to put in more water capacity – whether by way of mending pipes more quickly or building extra reservoirs – to eliminate anyt possibility of water shortage. The Environment Agency should order works on our main rivers to guarantee better containment of flood water levels, or safe deposit of excess water on flood plain.

Yesterday the Opposition held a debate in the Commons on the worrying presence of the killer bugs, MRSA and CD, in some of our hospitals. We did so because we are concerned by the number of deaths and serious illnesses contracted whilst in hospital. We did so in the spirit of wanting the government to cure the problem, not in??a sensationalised or partisan way.

How did Ministers respond? They spent much of their time trying to run down Conservative health policy. They told us there were cases of MRSA as long ago as 1992, implying that the present strains are the great great great..grandchildren of tory bugs, as if that absolved the present government from responsibilitiy. They told us dropping targets from the centre would make the problem worse, and they told us MRSA infections are now falling, whilst carefully sidestepping the question of??CD infections.

It was another disappointing performance. When a Minister faces such a serious problem as unacceptably high death rates in NHS hospitals we should expect some humility, a lot of analysis, and some positive recommendations of action to put matters right – not a crude political bash of their opponents. Ministers are paid high salaries, given ministerial cars and other perks so they can do a high level job. I don’t begrudge them that, but I do expect them to offer some value for the money.

Health Ministers could redeem themselves by answering the following questions, to show they are analysing the problem properly. They have access to the best advice the country can find to help them.

1. Why are many private hospitals free of killer bugs?

2. Why are military operating units in Iraq free of these infections?

3. What is the pattern of infection? Do healthy people on the staff or visitors contract these diseases, implying it can be passed on by touch of inhalation? Is it just patients who contract it? Is is usually a result of invasive surgery and a wound? Is it related to patients on antibiotic treatments which can lower immune system responses?

4. When we know the pattern of disease and the likely transmission mechanism, then we can set about prevention.

5. If it is usually the result of surgery we need to concentrate on the cleanliness regime in operating theatres. If it is the result of being an in patient we need to look at ward hygeine. If sufferers are usually on drugs we need to ask about the drug regime. If it affects the healthy we need to think about screening all poeple going into the hospital for the presence of the bug. Minsiters should give us a clearer view of its prevalence, its likely causes and the remedial action being taken by experts in the hospitals.

It is no use getting sidetracked by a debate about whether this is something Ministers should be involved in or not. Under current arrangements Ministers are ultimately responsbile, and Parliament has a duty tomdebate matters of grave concern about the NHS. If Ministers want this to be solved entirely at the local level then they can require and defend that proposition. If they want to offer guidance or set targets they can do so. What they can never do is duck out of answering MPs and public questions about why this is happening and what is being done about it. Yesterday revealed a worrying lack of understanding at the top.

Gordon Brown has dined out on his success in making the Bank of England independent. Many give him credit for this and assume it has led to a uniquely favourable out-turn for interest rates and inflation.

In practise the UK has continued to pay a price. Our interest rates have been continuously higher than US, Japanese and Euro rates throughout the period. Japan’s rates have typically been under 1%, ECB rates around 2% and US rates around 3% compared with 4% plus for the UK since "independence".

Now our inflation rate, always well above Japan’s, is also above Euroland’s and the US, so the extra pain of higher rates is not giving us the gain of lower inflation.

In parctise there has been plenty of political intervention in the workings of the Bank. The msot notorious was the foolish decision to shift the target rate from the RPI to the CPI in 2003. This was a deliberate and misguided politcal decision to try to bring us more in line with the Euro. From this point onwards our path has diverged from Euroland as our inflation rate has accelerated, and our growth advantage has eroded. It seems to have encouraged easy money for a bit at the Bank, when they cut interest rates before inflation was under control. It is all part of the continuing price we pay for the Euro dream – just as the Bank of England and Gordon Brown were keen advocates of the ERM and have never said sorry for their mistake, shared with the Conservative government of the day.

In addition Gordon Brown appoints a majority of the members of the Bank of England, and Ed Balls clearly takes a close interest in what they do. The Chancellor has both delayed appointments unreasonably, and made some controversial choices.

The Bank has been thrown off course by the CPI switch and are now having to inflict higher rates on us to rein things back. The Bank and the system are not independent enough, and Gordon’s infallible knack for making the wrong call, as he did with the ERM, has not deserted him.

London’s economy is growing twice as quickly as North and west. The South-east is also a relative hot spot.

Labour began by wanting to even things up, but now they want to bulldoze the surplus houses in the North, whilst concreting over the south. Instead they should ask themselves what is making?? London and the South-east so much more successful.

It’s not the fact that London has an elected Mayor. He is part of the problem, not the solution. His Congestion Charge has burdened Londoners with enormous bureaucracy, and has priced the lower paid off the roads. Far from making London a more inviting place to live in and do business, it makes our city the most spied on??area in the world.

What has worked in London is the financial service industry.?? It has attracted much of the talent coming out of UK universities. It has welcomed in skilled people and capital from all round the world. They have been nimble at finding new ways of doing business outside the grip of the ever tightening regulation.

This has been supplemented by offering favourable tax status to rich people from abroad who want to spend some of the year in London. That has been very beneficial, helping build the large financial area with their cash and contacts.

London and the south-east gives us the formula for success – combine well educated people with an openness to foreign?? capital, and you can grow quickly. Other parts of Labour’s Britain base their hopes on public sector activity, and ever higher taxes. That does not work.

Yesterday we debated the government’s proposals to reorganise local government and local health services. As so often with this government they spun a good yarn. They told us there needed to be more local decision taking, greater freedom for Councils, and more patient involvement in the work of the NHS.

If only. That is exactly what many of us have been seeking for a good few years. As we probed the detail, we discovered that once again the government’s idea of devolution was to let us do locally whatever they think we should do.

Let’s take the issue of whether a locality should have to answer to an unelected regional government. I am pressing for the abolition of the Government of the South-east. It’s a waste of money and often makes us do things we do not want. When the government held a referendum in the North East on whether they wanted regional government or not, the people said? No? . The government ignored that: we still have to pay for an unelected version the North-east doesn’t want. In the south-east we don’t even get a referendum. I asked Ruth Kelly what part of "No" she did not understand. The answer was we need regional government – so the people got it wrong! It’s like all those EU referenda where people have to vote again if they dare vote down another power grab by Brussels.

If a Council wants to have a committee structure so that all Councillors can be fully involved in the work of the Council, that will be against the law. Why? An area has to decide on an elected Mayor, or an indirectly elected Leader, but cannot have the committee based system which most Councils used successfully for many years.

The Secretary of State told us she wants to legislate to give elected Council Leaders security of tenure, so they can have three years in the job to achieve something. Yet she conceded that a Leader would have to quit if he or she lost a motion of No Confidence, so I don’t think an unpopular Leader will be sleeping any easier at night.

Worse still, at exactly the same time as we are told local government will have more say and more control, the government is determined to settle more planning issues nationally. My constituents write to me more about planning than any other issue. They clearly want more planning decisions taken by local Councillors in touch with their views, than by remote quangos and Inspectors who so often side with the developers. They will discover that this latest brand of devolution? takes more planning power away from local Councils.

The Health proposals are no better. We used to have Community Health Councils which allowed interested local people to represent patients’ views to the NHS and through local MPs to the government. This government abolished them, perhaps because they were too candid about the problems. Ministers then spent a lot of our money on setting up patients forums, only for these now to be given the last rites by Ruth Kelly’s latest Bill. We are instead to create new local involvement networks?. That will mean more money spent, more disruption, and another couple of years when the people who ought to be offering constructive criticism of the NHS will be worrying about their own positions.

Giving more power to local people and to local Councils would be a good idea, but the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill will not be bringing that anytime soon. Instead we have a government riding rough shod over local communities, determiend to implement a regional government led scheme to bring us into line with the EU model.

Today in the House we will debate the government’s Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill.

Despite??this long winded and apparently democratic title, we discover the Secretary of State wants powers allowing her to decide whether Counties and Districts should survive or whether they should be abolished. The costs of compulsory reorganisation would, of course, fall on the hard pressed Council taxpayers. She wants to design a Balkanised England suitable for Brussels to run.

What we want instead is a bill which abolishes all the unelected regional government in England, and gives the powers of regional government to elected Councils??where there needs to be any government involvement, and abolishes them where there doesn’t. We want a bill which gives local communities more say over the important planning issues that this government increasingly settles in the centre by overrriding local wishes. We want a bill which gives more scope to Councils to make their own decisions, and to keep the tax bills down where that is the wish of local electors.

Instead we have more top down bossiness. The government still thinks it knows best. It still rides roughshod over the wishes of the North East, who decisively voted down regional government, but still labour under an unelected version of it.The government refuses to give the rest of us referenda on regional government, knowing how strongly we feel against it.

Why is this government so pig headed in wanting to implement the EU regional scheme, and in the meantime, so keen to force communities to do things they don’t want to do through the dictats of Whitehall and the regions? Why won’t they give local communities more say over how much building there should be, and how they run local services?

Ten days on, and still no boardband or phone line. The engineer who came on Friday to fix it told me it was probably a fault in the exchange, and he was not qualified to deal with that! It almost as bad as it used to be when BT was a nationalised monopoly. We need more competition in the provision of the lines, to match the competition for phones and call services.

Either the??critics are right, and the government is witholding important?? and incriminating information in the cash for peerages enquiry, or the government is??paying the price for losing the confidence of the public and the trust of?? the police because of the way they have behaved in recent years.

If the government is found to be witholding crucial evidence then the resulting trials will be even more serious – it will be like Watergate where the cover up became the issue. If the government does not in the end face charges against individuals, then we are left asking why did the police and so many others think there was a case to investigate?

It shows how low trust has fallen in this regime, and how important it is that the political parties move quickly to new standards on fund raising. Why won’t the governemnt accept the proposal to limit single donations to a maximum of ??50,000? That would start the clean up boldly. Then more poeple would be less cynical about party political fund raising.

It is ominous that we have been unable to get clear assurances from the government that any proposed transfer of power to the EU that might arise from the Merkel plan will be put to the British people in a referendum. I will table written questions tomorrow to seek further clarification, but it looks as if they will go along with?? a Merkel plan for a mini constitution, called something else, and claim this does not merit a referendum vote. The government declines to keep us properly informed of the negotiations before summits, and seem to be co-operating over common borders, a common police force and a common defence and foreign policy, eroding our veto and right to have an independent policy in these crucial areas on the way. It makes it even more imperative to try to force them to a vote, on all the power they have transferred in recent years – Social Chapter, common asylum and immigration policy etc as well as the propsective surrender of the common foreign and security policy and criminal justice powers.

It was not good this morning to hear the "Prime Minister in waiting" tell us the UK had to use hard as well as soft power, and going on to say that we need to threaten the use of force and use it when necessary.

It would be good to know who the enemies are in his view. Tony Blair has spent much of his time as PM supervising the use of UK force, including assisting the US with full scale invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Our armed forces have performed magnnificently, despite the lack of proper equipment and back-up. Is the PM in waiting suggesting he wants to invade more countries as part of the so-called war on terror? If so, which countries does he think harbour terrorists, and why does he think invading them will make us safer?

Mr Brown spoke more sense when he talked about winning hearts and minds?? of young people in the UK who might otherwise be tempted by extremist and anti democratic messages. There is little evidence that successful invasions of Middle eastern countries lower the threat of terrorism, and plenty of evidence that it is difficult to help create stable democracies once a power vacuum has been created through toppling the original regime.