Monthly Archives: March 2010

Nuclear dilemma

Posted on March 31, 2010 | 2 Comments

I am delighted that Horizon Nuclear Power, a joint venture of the German energy companies E.ON and RWE, has announced its intention to build a new nuclear power station at Wylfa, Anglesey.  The station will not only help keep the lights on, but will also provide high quality jobs in the very poorest area of the United Kingdom.

My delight is shared, it would appear, by Ynys Môn’s Welsh Assembly member, Mr Ieuan Wyn Jones, who is also Plaid Cymru leader (or, at least, one of them).  Here’s how the Daily Post reports his reaction:

Ieuan Wyn Jones said the news was very welcome given the job losses suffered on the island during the previous 19 months.

“I will be working with Coleg Menai and Bangor University to ensure that we have the skills in place to ensure local people are best placed to secure jobs at the plant,” he said.

“Coleg Menai has set up a fabrication and engineering unit to train people for the new job opportunities that come up. We must now work with the company as they develop their plans to ensure that we maximise the economic benefit the project will bring to Anglesey, in terms of the jobs that it will create in the building and operational phases.

“Local business must also benefit from contracts on the site and from supply chain opportunities, and this will need to be built into any consents.”

Great to see such unequivocal enthusiasm from one of Plaid’s leadership triumvirate.  However, as this blog has previously noted, Mr Jones surely has a bit of an ethical dilemma here.  He, after all, signed off Plaid’s European election manifesto, which stoutly declared:

we reaffirm our total opposition to the construction of any new nuclear power stations in Wales.

Couldn’t be any clearer really, could it?  No wriggle room whatever there.  They even put it in bold print.

So what, we must ask, is Mr Jones going to do?   Will he be prostrating himself  in the path of the bulldozers as they attempt to cut the first sod?  Or will he be resigning his leadership of Plaid in the Assembly?

If he does neither, he will effectively be saying that Plaid’s anti-nuclear policy, for which he is personally responsible, doesn’t apply in his own little corner of Wales.

And that wouldn’t be right, would it?

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Posted in Ieuan Wyn Jones, nuclear power, Plaid Cymru

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The future’s fair; the future’s orange

Posted on March 30, 2010 | 1 Comment

 

Tuned in to Sky News this evening to be greeted by the astonishing sight of Tony Blair singing the praises of Gordon Brown.

Who’d have thought it, eh?  Three years after the not wholly bloodless coup that saw him ejected from Downing Street and his auld adversary installed in his stead, there was the maestro, back in the limelight, centre stage in the incongruous surroundings of Trimdon Labour club.

Not that he looked that much like the old Blair, mind.  The last three years have not been kind to him.  His hair had greyed and thinned and he was almost painfully gaunt, the expensive Savile Row suit hanging from his narrowed frame.  Most startlingly, he was orange.  Bright orange.  Tangerine.

But it was Blair, all right.  There was no mistaking the gulps, the blinks, the jerky gestures, the faux emotion of the halting delivery, or the idiosyncratic enunciation: “Britain acted” became “Britain actud”.  Yes, there he was: Tony Blair lauding Gordon to the rafters.

But will it do Labour any good?  Hard to say.  Blair was a big hitter, of course, and the most successful Labour leader in history.  He is still sprinkled with stardust.

There again, he brings with him a lot of bad vibes, too, the very worst being the memory of Iraq.

But what cannot be doubted is that Gordon Brown must be feeling pretty desperate to trot out Tony Blair at this stage of the game.  Brown has always been desperate to make his own mark, not to go down in history as just the man who came in on Tony Blair’s coat-tails, only to be blown away at the next general election. 

It must have hurt him deeply – really deeply – to authorise Blair’s intervention today.

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Posted in Gordon Brown, Labour Party, Tony Blair

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Passion for the pier

Posted on March 26, 2010 | 5 Comments

The second Victoria Pier meeting was again extremely well attended.  I’d estimate that at least a couple of hundred people turned up at Colwyn Bay’s St Paul’s church, which was a much more spacious venue than the Town Hall.

Candidates for membership of the steering committee came forward and all spoke with passion, not only about the pier, but about the town itself.  All of them clearly loved Colwyn Bay and all were anxious to see it regenerated.

The meeting unanimously approved the election of the members of the committee.  Now we can make progress.   I will meet the committee after the general election to discuss the way forward.

I have enormous admiration for the people of Colwyn Bay.  They are proud of their town and its history and want to see it improve.  Let us hope that the issue of the pier can become the catalyst for something even bigger.

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Posted in Colwyn Bay pier

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First toe in the water

Posted on March 26, 2010 | 1 Comment

Timesonline has announced today that it will start charging for its online content with effect from June.  The daily charge will be £1; a week’s access will cost £2.

John Witherow, editor of the Sunday Times, points out that the charging structure will be the equivalent of a cup of coffee a day.  Fair point, but the site is still likely to lose thousands of readers, who have become used to unlimited free content on the web.

No doubt other online news sites will be carefully watching the Timesonline experiment before deciding whether to follow suit.

Perosnally, I may be tempted to subscribe on a weekly basis if the product is sufficiently attractive.  Timesonline says that it will be offering a free trial period, which I think will be crucial to the decisions of many as to whether or not to sign up.

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Posted in Miscellaneous

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Good news for Gordon

Posted on March 25, 2010 | 2 Comments

In an interview with Nick Robinson today, Alistair Darling has conceded that if Labour are re-elected at the general election, they will be obliged to impose cuts that are “tougher and deeper” than those implemented by Margaret Thatcher.  I’m sure that will go down really well with Gordon “Labour investment v. Tory cuts” Brown.

Today, also, the RMT has announced a series of rail strikes starting on 6 April, the day it is widely expected that the election will be called.

I’ve no doubt Gordon will love that one, too.

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Posted in Alistair Darling, Gordon Brown

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Read all about it

Posted on March 24, 2010 | 1 Comment

Budget day, and the Telegraph publishes a remarkably detailed prediction of the measures to be announced by the Chancellor.

I know that the sensible tradition of Budget purdah was effectively abandoned by Gordon Brown some years ago, but if there has been such an extensive press briefing by the Treasury, there will be very little purpose in Members turning up at the chamber today.

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Posted in Alistair Darling, Gordon Brown

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Rewriting history

Posted on March 23, 2010 | 7 Comments

With this Parliament limping its way to its dissolution, the Government is anxious to push through as much business as it possibly can. 

The consequence is a positive avalanche of statutory instruments.  This afternoon, I sat through three of them. One was an Order in Council relating to culture in Wales.  Elfyn Llwyd, the Plaid Cymru MP for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy, used the occasion as an opportunity to have a go at Cadw, the Welsh heritage body.

Elfyn clearly has a thing about Cadw.  He hadn’t a good word to say for it.  He had, he said, written to Cadw about the condition of a footpath in his constituency reputed to have been used by Owain Glyndŵr, but Cadw had shown no interest at all.

The problem with Cadw, he fulminated, was that it was fixated with Norman castles and couldn’t care less about anything that had happened before.

All very stirring stuff, until one remembers that the Norman dynasty came to an end in 1154 and Glyndŵr’s rising didn’t start until 1400.

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Posted in Elfyn Llwyd

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Byers of influence

Posted on March 21, 2010 | 3 Comments

This morning’s Sunday Times contains a report of a “sting” operation carried out by the paper and Channel 4’s Dispatches programme, in which a number of MPs were filmed offering their services to a fictitious lobbying company.

The report contains specific allegations against three retiring Labour Members, Stephen Byers, Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt.  The charges against Byers, a former cabinet minister under Tony Blair, are the most serious and startling.

According to the Times, Byers, who said that he was “a bit like a sort of cab for hire”, made two specific claims. 

First, he said that, after he had intervened on behalf of Tesco, Peter Mandelson (whose friendship Byers considered to be a “trump card”) arranged for a burdensome proposed food labelling regulation to be changed.

Second, he claimed that he had acted on behalf of rail company, National Express, when it was trying to negotiate its way out of the loss-making East coast line franchise:

“So between you and I, I then spoke to Andrew Adonis, the transport secretary, and said, ‘Andrew, look, they’ve got a huge problem. Is there a way out of this?’ And then we, we sort of worked together — basically, the way he was comfortable doing it and you have to keep this very confidential yourself.

“He [Adonis] said we shouldn’t be involved in the detailed negotiation between his civil servants and National Express but we can give them a broad steer. So we basically got to a situation where we agreed with Andrew he would publicly be very critical of National Express and talk about, ‘I’m going to strip you of the franchise’ and be very gung-ho.

“And we said we will live with that and we won’t challenge you in the court, provided you then let us out by December, by the end of the year, and we can keep the other two franchises for a little longer. So, and that’s what we managed to do.”

Both these claims, if true, go to the very heart of the way this Government does business. 

They may, of course, be wholly untrue and a complete fantasy on the part of Stephen Byers.  However, there can be no doubt that both Lords Mandelson and Adonis should clarify their positions as a matter of absolute priority.

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Posted in Geoff Hoon, Peter Mandelson, Stephen Byers

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Perfect union

Posted on March 19, 2010 | Leave a comment

A report in today’s Telegraph has the whiff of real scandal about it.

The paper has discovered that, over the past decade, Unite – the union that is now apparently doing its best to destroy British Airways – and the two unions of which it is the merged product, Amicus and TGWU, have received almost £18 million of taxpayers’ money.  During the same period, the Labour party has received over £29 million, or over 24 per cent of its revenue, from the three unions.

Over £17 million has been paid to the unions from the Union Learning Fund, established by the Government in 1998 to help train union representatives and members.   Funding for the scheme was increased shortly after Gordon Brown became Prime Minister in 2007.  However, Unite does not give details of how the money is applied and evaluation reports ceased to be published years ago.

In addition, Unite has received over £380,000 from the Union Modernisation Fund, administered by Lord Mandelson’s Business Department, which has the ostensible aim of helping trade unions improve their management structures.

Unite, therefore, has received a huge wodge of cash from the taxpayer without, extraordinarily enough, having to tell the taxpayer where a single penny of it has been spent.  What the taxpayer does know, however, is that:

  • Unite is the Labour party’s biggest donor;
  • its political director, Charlie Whelan, is now once again ensconced in Downing Street, where he is helping Peter Mandelson  mastermind Labour’s election campaign;
  • Jack Dromey, Unite’s deputy general secretary and Harriet Harman’s husband, has just been selected for the safe Labour seat of Birmingham Erdington from what was supposed to be an all-women shortlist;
  • 108 Labour MPs, or almost a third of the Parliamentary party,  are members of Unite.

On Wednesday, at PMQs, David Cameron suggested that the Labour party is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Unite.  It’s hard to disagree with that.

Today, Francis Maude, the shadow Cabinet Office minister, commented that the financial arrangement uncovered by the Telegraph “looks like money laundering – taxpayers’ money is being funnelled into Unite then put straight back into Labour’s coffers.”

On the face of it, it’s hard to disagree with that, too.

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Posted in Charlie Whelan, Gordon Brown, Harriet Harman, Labour Party, Unite

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6 May it is

Posted on March 18, 2010 | Leave a comment

Harriet Harman announced today that the House will rise on 30 March for the Easter recess and return on 6 April.

It seems likely that the Prime Minister will visit the Queen the same day and that the general election will be held on 6 May.

The waiting will soon be over, thank heaven.

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Posted in general election, Gordon Brown, Harriet Harman

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Apology awaited

Posted on March 17, 2010 | 1 Comment

Gordon Brown today acknowledged that he had inadvertently misled the House last week when he asserted that the defence budget had risen year on year under Labour.  He also acknowledged that he had inadvertently misled the Chilcot inquiry:

Tony Baldry (Banbury)(Con): The Prime Minister told the Chilcot inquiry and the House that defence expenditure rose in real terms every year. The House of Commons Library has now produced figures that clearly show that that assertion is simply incorrect. This is the first opportunity the Prime Minister has had in the House to set the record straight. Will he now do so? Will he also write to Chilcot to ensure that the inquiry’s record is also corrected?

The Prime Minister: Yes, and I am already writing to Sir John Chilcot about this issue. Defence spending rose from £21 billion in 1997 to about £40 billion this year; it rose every year in cash terms. For a number of operational and other reasons, the real-terms rise in the defence budget was 12 per cent. over the past 13 years. Because of our expenditure on Afghanistan and on Iraq we have spent £17 billion more than the defence budget, but because of operational fluctuations in the way the money is spent expenditure has risen in cash terms every year, in real terms it is 12 per cent. higher, but I do accept that in one or two years defence expenditure did not rise in real terms.

There was, however, no apology for the misstatement.  Given the distress that the Prime Minister’s repeated protestations must have caused to our forces and their families, one might have been expected to be offered.

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Posted in Afghanistan

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Fleecing the pensioners

Posted on March 17, 2010 | 2 Comments

Welsh Questions today, and I decided to piggy-back on a question on pensions tabled by Clwyd South’s Martyn Jones (for whom today was his swansong, as he is standing down at the general election):

Mr. David Jones (Clwyd, West) (Con): Many Welsh pensioners would now be enjoying a considerably more comfortable retirement if the then Chancellor, the current Prime Minister, had not decided in 1997 to abolish advance corporation tax credits for pension funds. Does the Secretary of State think, 13 years later, that that £100 billion raid on pension funds was right?

Mr. Hain: The truth is that pensioners are a great deal better off under this Labour Government. Pensioner households in Wales will be £1,500 better off this year, and the poorest third of pensioner households will be £2,100 better off. Why does the hon. Gentleman not stop his party, and its candidates and Members of Parliament, attacking policies such as free bus travel and free prescriptions for pensioners in Wales?

It is hardly surprising that Peter Hain refused to give a straight answer to the question.  Gordon Brown’s smash and grab treatment of the pension funds is probably one of the wickedest acts of this Government, damaging confidence in the British pensions system and rendering the retirements of hundreds of thousands of pensioners less secure. 

Labour should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

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Posted in Labour Party, pensions, Peter Hain

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Waiting for the off

Posted on March 16, 2010 | 1 Comment

A strange atmosphere in the House today.  Not so much end of term as fin de siècle.

The Welsh select committee held its final meeting of this Parliament, signing off what may turn out to be its most important piece of work: the report on the Welsh Assembly Government’s relations with Whitehall.  We then said our goodbyes to one another, all friends and colleagues despite our separate party affiliations.  I will miss them.

This evening, in the Adjournment dining room, Labour Members were in raucously ebullient mood, laughing loudly, embracing one another and having their photos taken by the waitresses.  It would not have been in the least surprising if they had broken into a chorus of Auld Lang Syne.

At the next table, a lobbyist was in loud and earnest conversation with a senior Labour MP, assuring him that there was a place for him in his organisation if things didn’t go the way he hoped.  The MP nodded with reluctant enthusiasm and promised he’d be in touch.

Truth is, the decks have almost been cleared now.  We’re just waiting for the starting gun.  And there’s no doubt at all that it will be fired the week after next.

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Posted in Parliament

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Whither Adonis?

Posted on March 15, 2010 | 3 Comments

High praise must go to the courage of the Transport Secretary, Lord Adonis, for his unequivocal criticism of the Unite union’s conduct over the BA strike.

Speaking on The Andrew Marr Show, Adonis said:

“The stakes are incredibly high. I absolutely deplore the strike;, it is not only the damage it is going to do to passengers and the inconvenience it’s going to cause — which is quite disproportionate to the issues at stake — but also the threat it poses to the future of one of our great companies in this country.

“It’s totally unjustified. I do call on the union to engage constructively with the company at this late stage.”

Contrast Adonis’s admirable plain speaking with the mealy-mouthed comments that have thus far come from Gordon Brown, who has merely said that “the disruption to services is unacceptable”.

Readers who have spent the last three years marooned on a remote desert island may wish to know that:

  • Charlie Whelan, Unite’s political director, is Gordon Brown’s former spin doctor;
  • it is widely anticipated that Whelan will have a central role in Labour’s general election campaign;
  • Labour has received up to 25 per cent of its funding from Unite since Gordon Brown became Prime Minister;
  • Unite’s deputy general secretary, Jack Dromey, was recently selected as parliamentary candidate for Birmingham Erdington.  Proposals that the selection should be made from an all-women shortlist were overruled by Labour’s National Executive Committee;
  • Mr Dromey is the husband of Labour’s deputy leader, Harriet Harman.

Sadly, I strongly suspect that Lord Adonis’s political career is unlikely to advance significantly further.

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Posted in Gordon Brown, Harriet Harman, Labour Party

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Beware banana skins

Posted on March 12, 2010 | Leave a comment

After years of having their logo mocked as “the dead parrot”, I’m not sure why the LibDems thought it a good idea to adopt a banana as their general election emblem.

More appropriate for David Miliband’s Labour leadership campaign, one would think.

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Posted in David Miliband, Liberal Democrats

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