The large steel slab works at Redcar is in serious trouble. The collapse of steel prices allied to the loss of customers and demand leaves its future in doubt. The local MP calls for government support, but when cross examined the support he seeks is small and limited. A better system of trade credit insurance and retraining grants are unlikely to save the plant. The government has made it clear there can be no general subsidy, and no nationalisation of the assets.

Two large conglomerate banks acquired too many foreign banks and investment banking business by merger, and over expanded their loan books. They were given access to unbelievable sums of public money, were part nationalised, and are now allowed to grow fat at the taxpayers expense. The CEO of one has just been given a pay package that could amount to an eye watering £9.7 million, all signed off by Ministers who tell us bankers’ bonuses need to be curbed. Instead of acting as lender of last resort and telling the banks they had to cut costs and sell off surplus businesses to survive, the authorities rolled over and subsidised their crazy ways.

How does this apartheid treatment of business marry with Labour’s values, or indeed with commonsense and fair play?

Ministers tell us they will do whatever it takes to protect jobs and see people through the recession. Tell that to the 2.4 million now out of work, and say it again to the workers at Redcar.

So what should they be doing? They should not have subsidised and nationalised RBS and LLoyds/HBOS. There was a much cheaper and better way of avoidng the collapse of Nat West and HBOS, and one which would have meant those banks would now be further down the road to having sustainable and profitable businesses than they currently are.

Nor should the government nationalise and subsidise a steel works which has lost its main customers. What it should be doing is seeing how it can help British business reduce its cost base to become more competitive, and using public spending to boost sensible infrastructure investment that we need which will use local steel, concrete, aggregate, bricks and tarmac. It would have more scope to do that – and more scope to cut dangerous levels of borrowing – if it had not decided to waste so much taxpayers money on banks that got it wrong.

Perhaps the BBC no longer approve of me as a listener, as well as disliking my views as a contributor. I have found it increasingly difficult to pick up Radio 4 on FM at home. I have to put the radio in a contorted position and turn the volume up full to get some sound out of the machine. Yes that’s with new batteries, and at a time when other channels would blow my ears off at full volume.

Friends with digital radios are not finding them very good at delivering a good signal either , and they of course prevent you hearing the cricket on 198.

Are the BBC deliberately wrecking the FM signal to force people to try digital? Is digital compression now so compressed that nothing is going to work? Why does Radio 4 on my car radio regularly get interrupted with interference? I usually find modern technology is better than old, and I look forward to the future being better than the present. When it comes to digital radio it seems to be bad followed by worse. The BBC is making itself unpopular by threatening all owners of older radios with the sack or forcing them to buy an expensive new radio they do not need or want. Now they seem to be compounding their felony by degrading the transmission of FM.

The BBC commented that there were not many of us in for the debate on Afghanistan yesterday. The truth was more of us went in than could speak, because once again the time allowed for the debate was too short. Those who did speak were limited to 6 or 8 minutes. I left it to colleagues who specialise in defence and who have visited Afghanistan.

It was a serious debate which abandoned party lines. There were several Conservatives strongly in favour of the war and the need to press it more vigorously. There were Labour MPs who disagreed with our presence there and felt we should get out as soon as possible as honourably as possible. Most MPs agreed we needed to provide the equipment needed, though there was more disagreement on party lines on whether that was currently being delivered.

It is now emerging that the UK has many helicopters that are not being committed to Afghanistan, whilst our troops in Afghanistan have access to far fewer helicopters than their US allies. The government is right to say that not all journeys can be made by air, and that some of the tragic deaths could not have been avoided by the presence of helicopters. The critics are right to say that the way to protect more troops more often against the latest Taliban tactic of bombs on roads is to fly more . After the bluster and spin, the government will probably get round to sending more helicopters. Why on earth don’t they change their line, say the Taliban tactics have evolved and as a result it is their priority to send more suitable transport to the troops and they are straining every sinew to do so? And then why don’t they do it?

I have been sent this by a Tory blogger, www.trueblueblood.com:

John Laity comment:

This weekend is the Royal Air Tattoo at Fairford.

I live in the MATZ for Fairford and have been watching aircraft arrive at low level all day. It is great as we have a 1000 ft cloud base which means you can waive at the pilots ;0)

Today I have seen:
4 Medium Helicopters kitted our for radar and anti-submarine
2 Medium Helecopters kitted out for anti-ship & Anti-submarine
2 Attack Helecopters (to be fair possibly low level training)
4 Medium Attack Helecopters (Italian I think)
2 F15 Eagles

All in the space of 20 minutes.

What this must mean is that the 8 nm airspace between Fairford and Lynham (containing Wootten Basset) is now better protected than our troops in action. Small comfort for those arriving back I am sure…

Mr. John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): Is my hon. Friend aware that in their latest proposals the Government talk about a £20,000 tax on prudent pensioners—if they still have a pension left. That will be a £10 billion-plus a year tax on the very people who have saved to look after their future. Is that not a disgrace, and does it not sum up the Labour approach to poverty in old age? They want more people to be poor, because they want to tax them more.

Mr. Waterson: I am grateful to my right hon. Friend, who makes a powerful point. The people who should always beware of the Government’s Green Papers and White Papers are, of course, those who have taken the precaution of saving for their old age.

Mr. John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): When will work begin on the first new nuclear station and carbon storage plant identified in the Secretary of State’s statement? If it is not soon, the epitaph of this Government will be that they turned the lights out and left us all in the dark.

Edward Miliband: The right hon. Gentleman obviously practised that one in advance. Construction of the new nuclear stations begins in the early part of the next decade because we have to go through the consultation, the strategic siting assessments, and so on. It is a bit rich of the Conservatives to accuse us of being too slow on these questions given that they opposed our proposals right up until the last minute. We want to move forward as fast as possible on carbon capture and storage.

After hearing Mr Miliband announce the dawn of the new low carbon era and after a later vote I walked my way to the tube to go to a meeting about the economy outside Westminster. To my surprise there were still large numbers of Ministerial cars parked all round the Commons waiting to drive their Ministers back the few hundred yards to their Whitehall offices.

When I returned to the Commons the air conditioning was still on full, keeping the place cooler than I would like, with all the lights blazing on a summer afternoon. Ministers and their supportive MPs were still busy planning long trips by air to visit foreign countries.

Is the new low carbon era just to be a private sector phenomenon? Apparently the government has two policies which are going to push our carbon use down sharply – recession, followed by running out of electricity.

I asked Mr Miliband when his much advertised new nuclear stations and carbon storage schemes were going to be built. If there is no action soon I suggested the epitaph of the government would be they had turned the lights off and left us all in the dark.

Mr Miliband misinformed the House that I must have spent a lot of time rehearsing that one, before avoiding answering it. Let me reassure Mr Miliband that I made it up once I had heard his statement. It’s an old fashioned approach to Parliament to listen to what others say before joining in, but one I would recommend to him. Answering questions would also be helpful.

The Daily Mail has gone to town today on the 74 Labour MPs who signed Early Day Motions criticising the one sided Extradition arrangements with the US that the government signed up to, and demanding UK justice for Mr McKinnon. Their failure to vote for the Opposition Day motion which repeated their demands from the EDMs was not their finest hour.

I have been a consistent opponent of the lop sided extradition the government forced upon us, and am not surprised to see the government’s weakness on this issue with the US now causing harm. Today I want to say a little more about those EDMs.

EDMs are Parliamentary graffitti. They fall into three broad cartegories. There are the harmless ones invented by MPs to launch a local press release. These might congratulate a soccer team on winning a competition or praise a UK sports star for performing well.

There are the few designed by a group of MPs for a political purpose, as part of a much wider campaign to change the government’s mind or to change their party’s stance on something. The MPs designing them know they can’t work on their own, and are but the more visible part of what they are doing. They will, however, normally stick by their public declaration.

There are then many drawn up by lobby groups outside the House, tabled by an MP, and circulated to the members or contacts of the lobby group. People then send in an email, letter of postcard drafted by the lobby group urging MPs to sign the lobby group’s motion.

This latter industry implies that EDMs matter. The person sending in the card or email is invited to believe that if enough MPs sign the EDM the matter will be fixed. As yesterday shows, that is complete nonsense. Yesterday 74 Labour MPs showed they did not mean their signatures on EDMs. If they had voted for the Oppositon version of the EDM, then something could have changed. The EDMs just sit on the Order paper collecting some names and much dust.They have no impact whatsoever, and are never debated.

My advice to constituents is not to be taken in by the EDM mongers. EDMs don’t work. If you want to change a Minister’s mind you need to put something to the Minister that he or she has to respond to. Better still, you need the Opposition to table a motion, and then need to persuade more Labour MPs to see the need to vote against their government. But that of course, is altogether more difficult.

Conservative peer Lord Jenkin of Roding has tabled a couple of important amendments to the Parliamentary Standards Bill which assert Article IX of the Bill of Rights and Parliamentary supremacy, “notwithstanding any provision of the European Communities Act 1972, the European Convention of Human Rights or the Human Rights Act”. I understand this has official Conservative party backing. That’s a good move in view of the nature of this legislation.

So far I have avoided comment on the great pandemic.

In the early days Ministers and government told us they were valiantly combatting it, to stop it reaching us. I bit my tongue. It reached the UK.

Then Ministers told us they would stop it spreading in the UK. I kept quiet. It spread.

Government implied it was virulent and serious. They would fight it in the hospitals and in surgeries, with huge quantities of drugs. Fortunately so far it has proved quite mild for most people catching it, unless they already have some other serious condition.

Now we are told flu is flu. This one is like regular flu. You may not need drugs at all, or if you do a phone call to the GP should suffice to sort it out.

Why has the governemnt line kept changing? Why has so much effort be expended to so little effect? Why did they pretend they could stop it in the first place? How much has all this cost? Has anything they have done made any positive difference?

Prudence was divorced long ago by the government, as we can see from the state of the public finances.

Now Prudence is to be penalised and punished,

If you have saved, you will be offered practically no interest on your savings.

If you have saved through a pension fund, it now has to pay tax on the dividends.

If you are in a final salary pension scheme, you may find tax and regulation are squeezing it to death. You may no longer be able to add additional years service to your pension.

And to cap it all, we learned yesterday that the next plan might be a further tax on the prudent to pay for the costs of those who need residential care later in life.

The message from the government is clear. Spend all you can today, and rely on the state tomorrow. I warn you. Do not be prudent under this government, and do not grow old.

The government today will announce carbon budgets for all, with precise targets for reductions by 2020 and 2050.

All this comes from a government which still has not learned how to run a cash budget for its spending. Never have the public accounts be so out of control as they are currently.

I doubt the public sector will be any better at running carbon budgets than they are at controlling spending. I see no evidence today, at the dawn of the new measured carbon era, that Westminster has got the message. When I arrived in my office some system or person as always had used power to draw the mechanical blinds overnight, so I had to use more power to let in some daylight. The lights were on in the public areas, although there was no-one around needing to use them. (There are no local switches to switch many of them off and no people sensors for automatic mode). The heating and air conditioning are centrally controlled, often producing a room which is too hot in winter and too cool in summer.

People in the many parts of the public sector are not in control of their costs and are not made responsible for their costs. This applies to energy use like everything else. Until that changes, the government is unlikely to adhere to its own green budgets.

Mr. Redwood: I thought that the hon. Gentleman was keen to disagree—I am delighted that I have the agreement of the Labour Back Benchers. They do not wish to intervene and tell me that I am wrong to want more time to discuss these matters. Please will the Minister reconsider, will he see that this has broken any chance of consensus and will he grant us more time? There is plenty of time this week or next week.

Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab): Will my right hon. Friend the Minister guarantee that there will be sufficient time to discuss the important issue of politically motivated leaders of local authorities who deliberately try to keep registration at a low level? The Minister will recall that I have given the example in previous debates of the Liberal leader of Islington local authority, who, when approached by the Labour group to have a registration drive before an election, was adamantly opposed to that idea because that was how Liberals won elections. Will there be sufficient time to discuss these important issues?

Mr. John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): It is a pity that the Government wish to rush through what could turn out to be a bungled and unsatisfactory piece of legislation. Given the problems that candidates for the deputy leadership of the Labour party got into under the law that the Government introduced before, one would have thought that the Government would have seen the need for simpler and clearer legislation and for more time to prepare it so that everyone could buy into it, understand it and comply with it. I am sure that right hon. and hon. Members wished to comply with the earlier legislation, but they got into difficulties because it was complicated and not fully understood. That legislation had not been thought through or debated sufficiently so that all could grapple with its complexities.

I have the same worry, only more so, about this Bill, because it has a troubled history. We now learn that consensus has broken down between the main parties on this issue, but the Bill requires consensus and agreement because it relates to the methods of election of people of all parties and none to this House. Surely it requires as much time as Parliament thinks it needs or deserves to try to reach sensible agreement. It is not satisfactory to have a whole set of new proposals put before the House at the last minute.

I cannot understand why we need 80 days off this summer, but that is the Government’s wish. If they are sticking with their 80 days off, there clearly is not time to do this Bill properly. They have an easy answer—they could put on another couple of days next week and get this thing done properly. I do not see the Minister rising to offer to do that. I find it very difficult to explain to constituents why there is not enough time to make our case or to do our job when we are then forced to take an 80-day break when some of us would be happy to work longer to see things through properly.

If we must have this kind of legislation, the Government should let us have the time to debate it. Indeed, why cannot we go longer this week if colleagues already have holidays planned for next week? We could meet later on Wednesday or Thursday to accommodate the need to consider these measures carefully. I think that it is a great tragedy that the Minister will not rise from his seat and offer us that— [ Interruption. ] Does the hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane) want to intervene?

Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab): No, sorry. I thought that the right hon. Gentleman was going to finish.

Mr. Redwood: I thought that the hon. Gentleman was keen to disagree—I am delighted that I have the agreement of the Labour Back Benchers. They do not wish to intervene and tell me that I am wrong to want more time to discuss these matters. Please will the Minister reconsider, will he see that this has broken any chance of consensus and will he grant us more time? There is plenty of time this week or next week.

Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab): Will my right hon. Friend the Minister guarantee that there will be sufficient time to discuss the important issue of politically motivated leaders of local authorities who deliberately try to keep registration at a low level? The Minister will recall that I have given the example in previous debates of the Liberal leader of Islington local authority, who, when approached by the Labour group to have a registration drive before an election, was adamantly opposed to that idea because that was how Liberals won elections. Will there be sufficient time to discuss these important issues?

Mr. John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Straw: Of course—not least so that I can have a cough.

Mr. Redwood: I am pleased to give the Secretary of State an opportunity to sort out his cough; I hope that he will soon feel better. Will he tell the House the position in European law? Presumably, the Bill means that in European elections—and a European referendum, if we held one—no one could intervene to fund the campaigns from the continent, for example. That does not cause me any trouble, but I wonder how it squares with European law.

Mr. Straw: I shall have to come back to the right hon. Gentleman on the question of European law, and I will do so. My recollection is that the same rules on donations apply to elections for the European Parliament as to any other elections, notwithstanding the fact that there is some difference in the franchise, as he will be well aware.
Mr. Redwood: As we have been reminded by the Secretary of State, the voluntary tradition in all British parties is an important part of what we do and, in that sense, it makes our democracy special. What my hon. Friend is saying, however, is that all this is complicated and difficult and that no one who is sensible would want to be a voluntary treasurer and have to sign off on this kind of thing. That would apply to Labour and the Liberal Democrats as well as to Conservatives.

Mr. Djanogly: My right hon. Friend makes a very basic, and yet very effective, point that will be reality.

Mr. Redwood: How does somebody buy an election? Did Labour buy its victories in the last few elections?

Mr. Prentice: I am going to come to that point.

Mr. Redwood: If the Government are worried about the issue, should they not say that nobody who wishes to be a Labour peer should give the Labour party any money? On the Government’s theory, it would be wrong to give a peerage to anybody who had given money, would it not?

Mr. Cox: My right hon. Friend may well be right.

Mr. Redwood: We heard the authentic voice of Labour in that speech from the hon. Member for Pendle (Mr. Prentice), who has insulted the British electorate in a big way. I do not believe that it is possible to buy an election in the way that he suggests. No matter how many millions the Conservative party might have spent in 1997 if the rules had been different, we would have lost. No matter how much money Labour spent in the European elections this year, they would have lost. The British public are quite able to discern what they want and who they want, and they are not driven by the biggest-spending party on any given occasion.

The hurried and perhaps botched amendments that we are considering worry me for both general and specific reasons. I think that they are botched because, as the Justice Secretary kindly admitted, he will have to return to them in the other place, as he knows that they do not deal with all the matters that are coming out in this rather short debate, and that will come out as further consideration is given to the Bill. That shows the danger of legislating in such haste, after quite a long period in which proper consideration could have been given, both in the Chamber and in more general consultation.

My general concern about the new proposals is that they are part of a drift to ensnare our politics in so much legalese and complexity that it puts off many amateurs who would otherwise be involved and be able to participate. I referred in an intervention to the plight of a party treasurer of whatever party. It is difficult enough to conform with the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000. We have seen all parties get into difficulties—inadvertently, I am sure. I am sure that they are trying to comply. Even that legislation has proved quite demanding and quite complicated, but as we have heard from Front Benchers of both main parties, it has the merit that all that the treasurer or other responsible official has to do is prove that the individual is registered to vote in this country and is on the electoral roll. There is a roll to which they can refer, and which is reasonably accessible, to establish that they have had due diligence.

The proposals before us involve considerably more complication, in that three separate tests would be applied, and then a person would have to try to ascertain whether all the forms had been accurately filled in. I understand that there is to be self-certification by the individual seeking to make the donation, and that is where the burden will lie. As my hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Djanogly) explained, that individual could genuinely be unsure, or they might make a perfectly accurate declaration, but the facts and circumstances might change subsequently. Given the speed with which events can occur during an election campaign, it would be quite possible to imagine members of different parties making mistakes. There would be a long legal process afterwards to try to sort it all out.
In a fast-moving democracy that relies on volunteers and voluntary donations, it would seem to be bad law to make things that complicated. The danger is twofold.

First, it means that politics becomes about the process of politics, and it means that individuals and parties hurl allegations at each other in a way that can only damage the general reputation of politics and drag all parties further downwards. If, under clause 8, one party finds something wrong with somebody’s declaration, the natural reaction of the other parties will be to find things wrong with the alternative party or parties, through the declarations. They would then throw allegations—perhaps fair, perhaps unfair. That will become part of a process of making politics about whether parties stick to the box-ticking letter of the law, rather than about the big issues that concern constituents and enliven political debate and general elections.

When we get into that kind of snare or trap, we will find that all parties will want to go for more state funding instead. As the Justice Secretary has rightly said, that would be exceedingly unpopular with voters of all dispositions at the moment. However, the more it is made difficult for individuals, companies and trade unions to put their money into political parties on a voluntary basis, the more the political parties will seek other ways of finding state funding—and at a time when the state does not have any money and is having to borrow it all. The public would think that that was extremely unreasonable.

Kelvin Hopkins: The simple answer to all that is to have a savage cut in permissible spending on elections.

Mr. Redwood: I have rather more sympathy for that view. I have said that I favour a tighter cap on election spending, affecting all the major parties. It would be much easier to control any problems that parties may see in the current system through spending controls, rather than through donation controls. That would be easier to police. We know that it is quite possible to police a spending control because there is one in place at the moment; such a control applies to each one of us when we seek re-election, and applies at the national level to each major party. There have not been too many problems with those spending caps. That is a productive and sensible suggestion. I cannot see why we need also look at limiting categories of people who are allowed to donate.

As hon. Friends have said, if someone is entitled to vote in an election, surely they should be entitled to back their vote with a donation. If someone is allowed to run for office in an election to gain even more influence, what is to stop them making a donation to support their or someone else’s campaign? The whole thing is quite absurd if looked at from the outside. It makes sense only if one goes down the route taken by the hon. Member for Pendle and reveals the raw politics behind the rather elegant legal debate that we have had, for most of the time, this afternoon.

I urge the Government to think again. Such changes cannot be made without consensus. They relate to the system of election for all parties, and they need to be seen to be fair by all parties involved, but that clearly is not so with this Bill. Such changes cannot be made in haste, and the latest, very chunky, amendments that we are considering have been drafted very quickly, in a way that not even the Government think is reasonable.

Mr. Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Cotswold) (Con): As always, my right hon. Friend makes a cogent and logical case. Does he not agree that the logic of his case extends to those people, whom all political parties have recognised, who live abroad and have resided in this country within the past 10 years—the period has been varied, but it is currently 10 years—and who are entitled to vote? They ought also to be entitled to give a political donation, if they wish.

Mr. Redwood: That is exactly my view, and the view shared, I think, by most Conservative Members. I recommend it to the Government, because they will have supporters in a similar position—supporters who will feel cut out by the unwillingness of the legislation to allow them to participate fully in the way that other legally registered British voters can by virtue of residence.

It is a dangerous principle to say that someone has to pay tax in a country to participate in its politics. There are all sorts of people in our country who, for good reasons, do not pay tax. Full participation cannot be linked to taxpaying. It is rather divisive to say otherwise, and I find it surprising that that view is taken by the Labour party, which normally stands up for people without much money who do not pay tax for that reason. It is strange to apply the argument in one direction but not in the other, when it comes to the issue of taxation. The American democracy may well have been based originally on the principle of no taxation without representation, but we do not want the principle that there can be full participation only with taxation. That would be a very odd principle indeed in a society where some people do not pay tax for good reasons.

I hope that the Government will take the proposals away and think again. We know that they will think again, because their Front Benchers have promised that other amendments will be necessary to try to make sense of the inadequate amendments before us. I repeat what was said in an earlier exchange: it is quite wrong that something so important and fundamental to our democracy—issues relating to the participation rights of a wide range of British people—should be handled in such a way, at the last minute, without proper time for consideration of the amendments, without a further attempt to create consensus across the Chamber, and without proper discussion of the final amendments, which needs to take place.

Yesterday was another day that captured the mood of a broken Parliament and a government in steep decline.

Jack Straw was the main performer. He is one of the few government Ministers that takes Parliament seriously, and does understand the need to respond to the debate. Yesterday he laboured under two severe handicaps. His bad cough made it difficult for him to speak. The government he serves had decided to do a U turn and accept left wing amendments to the bill on political parties and funding which were partisan. He came across as a respresentative of an administration in collapse, desperately trying to mend its fences with its left wing, realising it did not have much other support.

It was an excellent day for the left. Two independent schools fell foul of Labour’s legislaiton on charitable status, whilst their government was busily trying to stop some rich Conservative donors from continuing to fund their party through new law. Those are the kind of things some Labour MPs love doing. The days of Labour being the party of rich donors seem long gone, a bad nightmare for the left and a golden age for the Ministers who enjoyed spending the money when they had it.

As Jack Straw himself pointed out, we had two parallel debates. One was conducted mainly between lawyers, about how practical it is to define who can and cannot donate. If you move away from the easily understood and relatively easily checked proposition that anyone registered to vote in the UK can also donate in the UK, how fair and how easy to police will it be? The other brought out the tribal partisans. Gordon Prentice rent the atmosphere of civilised debate by saying he wanted to stop people being able to buy elections.

I asked him how they could do that. There was no answer. I pointed out that even if the Conservatives had been allowed millions more from rich donors in 1997 and been allowed to spend it, they would still have lost. If Labour had been able to raise and spend large extra sums this year on the European eleciton, they would still have lost by a country mile.

Some Labour MPs think that if they could just stop the Conservative propsective candidate in their marginal seat from spending anything on leaflets and communications, they will hold on. They after all have their £10,000 taxpayer funded Communicaitons allowance each year which they can spend on leaflets telling people what they are doing.

They want state funded politics, because at the moment they have a majority and can write the rules. They have more incumbents so they want to help incumbents. They might find such a system is not so much fun in opposition. That leaves aside the question of if a rich person can really buy an election, can a Trade Union also buy one? Is that any more acceptable? If you think elections can be bought, you must have a very low opinion of electors.

Click here to read John’s contributions to the Political Parties and Elections Bill debate.

Today we are promised a statement from UKFI on the future of the nationalised banks.

I expect to agree with them that Northern Rock should be an early disposal, but I do not agree that all its tricky liabilities should remain with the state. The point of the sale should be to get rid of as much risk as possible.

I expect to disagree over the conglomerate banks. If UKFI say they will wait and then sell shares in RBS and LLoyds at prcies they think more acceptable, I say “No”. These mega banks should be split up and sold in bits, to increase taxpayer value, to cut risks and to create a better structure to Uk banking.

In future the competition authorities should block mega mergers that damage markets and weaken financial underpinnings for banks. ABN Amro and HBOS were mergers that should have been banned. The government was wrong to ignore competition advice and wrong to allow or encourage these mergers. It can now be put right because the government owns the lot on behalf of taxpayers. Its the price of their mistakes that they do so. If they had blocked mega banks earlier we would not be in the pickle we are now in.

There are fewer marriages and more divorces. Iain Duncan Smith is about to produce some more work on what could be done to keep more marriages alive, fending off divorce, and how people could be helped before entering a marriage to give people more chance of long term happiness. These are good intentions. People with good marriages draw great pleasure, companionship and security from them. The greater permanence which marriage can bring to relationships can help a couple bring up children.

We also need to recognise that marriage law and the nature of the contract was designed for a different social order. Society has changed far more than marriage. Marriage was a contract created in ages when there was men’s work and women’s work, when it was assumed the man would go out to earn the money and the woman would run the home. The law needed to offer security to both sides – the woman needed reassurance the husband would continue to provide the cash for their home, and the man the reassurance that the home would be run. The society accepted these roles, and people knew they had to carry on even with unhappy or bad marriages, because the two in the marriage were literally each other’s other half. It was rare for there to be divorces, and if one was agreed it was important to offer a generous financial settlement to the wife who could not earn her own living in a world hostile to paid female employment.

Today we live in a mutli tasking world. Women go out to work and earn money. Men cook and clean, and there is pressure on them if they don’t. When a marriage breaks up there is need to ensure fair contributions to looking after any children. The way divorce law still sees the end of a marriage as an oppportunity to long and expensive law cases to haggle over the winnings from the combined estate puts energetic and financially prudent people off marriage. The lack of clarity over pre nuptial agreements and their enforcability is one of the issues that needs resolving. In a multitasking world based on equality between the sexes the marriage contract needs to be designed so it ensures proper care and provision for children without allowing adventurers of either sex to demand large portions from people they have married and then fallen out with.

This morning I heard that Michael Crick for the BBC is going to produce a programme on the growing taxpayer cost of politics. I am glad they are going to draw attention to this trend, which has gathered huge momentum in the last decade.

Labour is happier with politics as a great nationalised industry. There are new armies of advisers on the payroll, to add to the Councillors. MPs, and regional governments. Like most nationalised indistries, the politics corporation is overmanned, costly and not very efficient. Labour has introduced more elected officials in London, Scotland and Wales, more unelected or indirectly elected officials in England’s bogus regions, and a huge increase in the number of political advisers, spin doctors and researchers across all levels of government.

Labour have consistently tried to prevent private money coming into politics, as they fear other parties will be better at attracting voluntary donations than they are. It is now much more difficult to accept money from outside without falling foul of some sleaze test. Money from overseas is banned altogether, at a time when business is much more global and when Labour wants us to be more European.

Meanwhile the Labour model is for much greater spending. Instead of MPs and Councillors doing their own research and handling their own statements and press conferences, people assume now that politicians need researchers and press people to do all that for them.These people need salaries which need paying for. There are difficult issues about the dividing line between politics and government, between what a Council or government spokesman can say and what a political party wants them to say, but not sufficiently difficult to put the politicians off having the paid officials at their side.

Nationalisation cocnentrates power in the hands of the party machines. People who want a “career” in politics instead of wanting to serve the public and contribute to public debate have to conform more and go along with the “professional” political advice from the army of advisers. It leads to a jejune soundbite culture which stifles proper debate. It leads to a bigger burden on taxpayers. It leads to worse government.

What should be done? We need fewer payers of government, fewer elected officials, and fewer advisers. We need a better spread in sources of funding for what political parties do need to do. We need a lower ceiling on how much a political party can spend for an election. Let the elected officials who remain do more and say more, to earn their salaries.

The advent of the public spending crisis has encouraged the Lib Dems and some left wing Labour MPs to return to the idea that the UK should not renew its nuclear deterrent. It is touching that even they now understand that the UK public sector is spending too much and needs to rein in its appetite to flash the plastic. They are right that this is the time to challenge old assumptions concerning spending.

Cancelling Trident is not where I would start, however. The defence budget is one of the smaller departmental budgets, and it is the only one which this government has kept under some control. That should not make it immune from cuts, but spending reductions should concentrate on doing more for less, not on doing less for less. I have never understood why we need more admirals than warships, nor accepted it should cost so much more to buy military equipement when the MOD draws up the specifications and tenders. The most popular defence cut today would be phased withdrawal from Afghanistan , and a decision not to fight a major war for a bit whilst we sort ourselves out.

The governemnt’s defence of the war in Afghanistan is that it is making our streets in Britain safe. How do they work that out? Our streets in the UK will be safe if all living in the UK today are united in opposing terrorism and if we have well controlled borders to sotp potential terrorists from visiting. There are no signs that fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan is about to stop terrorist training or Taliban activities in Pakistan.

Over the next few years it looks as if more rogue states and potentially hostile countries will obtain or strengthen their nuclear arsenals That does not seem like a good time to announce that the UK is stoppping its nuclear defence, and is open to nuclear blackmail.

I do wish to see more progress with multilateral nuclear disarmament. That is one thing Mr Obama may be good at, and it is to be encouraged. That may offer us savings in due course on our nuclear programme. In the meantime, for all those of us who do seriously want to cut the deficit by spending less and spending better, the big budgets are welfare, local government, nationalised banks and quangoland. They offer considerable scope for reductions. Are the Lib dems and Labour up for that?

Alastair Darling used a strange phrase when describing what he needs to do on public spending. Maybe he has a sharp sense of humour. He promises to tell us more about the lie of the land: more than the PM wishes to tell us, less than a full scale public spending review which would need the PM’s permission.

Perhaps he did have in mind that the “lie” of the land is the false choice between Labour investment and Tory spending cuts. Apparently the Chancellor does not use the crude language on this topic which emanates from next door, perhaps because he realises that it does not resonate with the public any more than it represents reality. The Chancellor seems to know they are running out of money fast, that they have to rein in public spending, and turn their attention to doing more with less.

We learn that £170 billion of public spending is beign examined around the proposition that it cannot increase so they had better find better ways to spend it. That’s a sensible start, but we are going to have to do that with most spending. We agree across the Parliament that we do not want cuts in schools and hospitals, certainly not in their front line services and professional staff, but no budget can be immune to the question can we do this better and for less? If we can save money on what we buy to run a school by better purchasing , or can adminster it more cheaply to a good standard, we should do so.

I invite readers to blog in with their view on what are the great lies in the land. For my part the great lies revolve around the refusal of some in the government to accept that some of the increased spending has been wasted, the stubborn wish to interpret anyone who wants better value for money as a health cutter, and the denial that we do have to take action now to control the massive deficit. Borrowing is just deferred taxation. Poeple will pay tax for worthwhile services, but they are fed up with paying tax to finance Labour’s bloated and inefficient public sector. Any public sector which can offer £9.7 m to a CEO of a loss making bank, and can press on with “voluntary” ID cards has not begun to understand the need to control spending.

Eight young soldiers dead in a single day in Afghanistan is a heavy price. It has woken the media up to the dangers of Afghanistan, and led to the start of a debate about what we are doing there, for how long we might be doing it, and what winning might look like. We all send our condolences to the families, and salute the bravery and selflessness of our troops.

Readers of this site are strongly of the view that we should not be in Afghanistan. They are worried that the terrorists can operate from Pakistan as well as from remote and difficult areas within Afghanistan. History should warn the great and lesser powers of the problems of interfering in the complex and dangerous civil wars that have shaken this country.

The government must engage in both the issue of our force and its protection, and the bigger issue of how long we will remain committed and when we might be able to hand over to the civil power. The Afghan war needs the government’s urgent attention. We need a change of policy, not just more spin reinforcing old soundbites about terrorism.