Horgan

Next week I am going to China as part of a trade delegation. This includes representatives from Basildon Council, Chelmsford Council, Essex County Council and a number of Basildon and Essex businesses. Now, I am perfectly aware that one reaction on hearing ot such a trip is to assume that this is some sort of 'junket' designed for the pleasure of those travelling as opposed to the service of the public. You do hear of some Councils' foreign travel where the rationale seems, well, weak. However, Basildon Council does not indulge in such things for entertainment. When we go anywhere it is for the benefit of the people of our District and our track record in securing investment in Basildon as a result of being represented at events abroad is pretty good. We fund a great deal of economic development through involvement in a European New Towns grouping for example, and our work at the European MIPIM event has brought in millions of direct funding, never mind attracting general investor interest in Basildon. This has added up to infrastructure, jobs and homes that vastly outweighs the cost of plane tickets and hotels. These are not holidays, just work done somewhere else, and that is how we treat any foreign trip.

I have never been to China before, but Essex County Council has developed relationships there for a number of years with the aim of connecting Chinese and Essex business for mutual benefit. This trip is a first for Basildon, and so while we know what we want to achieve we will have to see if it returns the value that we hope. It certainly appears to have few of the characteristics of a 'junket' though. Industrial cities in China are not really holiday locations, and the weather is pretty much the same as here. Its an 11-hour flight, and we seem to have a reasonably full itinerary. This seems to fit my definition of work rather more than what most people would describe as fun.

Many years ago I heard Frank Field MP speak, and one of the themes of his speech was the evil of means testing for benefits. His view was that this created benefits traps, with huge marginal rates of tax if people tried to improve their situation, and discouraged thrift. In fact means tested benefits as they operate today mean that it makes economic sense for the poor to stay poor, because increases in income or the accumulation of assets are punished by the withdrawal of means-tested benefits. Unfortunately, Labour under Brown are obsessed with means testing, which is one reason social mobility has decreased under the current government. Despite this, Gordon Brown's latest brainwave is to replace the current system of tax relief for childcare vouchers with, you guessed it, means testing. The argument is that too many people who can afford to pay for childcare are benefitting from tax relief. So, a system that works well is to be replaced by one that gives people an incentive to stay poor. That is even if they take up the benefit at all, becaue means-tested benefits have a much worse take-up rate than universal benefits.

Of course, there is also a political dimension because with an election coming up quite a few Labour MPs have worked out that withrawing childcare tax relief won't be, well, popular. There is already a large online petition against the move and dozens of Labour MPs have stated their oppositon to Brown's policy. These do not include one of our local MPs though. Angela Smith has been in the local papers telling us what a good idea it all is. She is Brown's PPS after all, so not much choice there.

Finally the government has accepted that the UK needs new nuclear power stations. These are zero carbon and there is enough uranium in the world to power human civilisation for at least a thousand year. The trouble is that it is all a bit late. Power stations take quite a while to build and the best estimates are that as old power stations are decommissioned our country will have power cuts unitl the new capacity is online. Labour have fought shy of nuclear power for years in the vain hope that renewables could fill the gap. This might have been reasonable a decade ago, but it has been obvious for years that the majority of the nation's power would have to found elsewhere. It is only now that even large sections of green movement have come round to a pro-nuclear view that Labour have got off the fence. Meanwhile, other countries haven't been sitting about and our long-term competitiveness is now under threat. Just one more Labour screwup...

Top of Sky News this morning was the poor bereaved mother of a soldier who has fallen in the Afghan war. She received a letter of condolence from Gordon Brown that got her surname wrong and was littered with misspellings. She was distraught at the loss of her son, her boy, her baby, speaking with a grief that was truly heart-rending. There was also bitterness that all he amounted to from no.10 was a scrawled letter that would not have passed muster from a 10 year-old.

Gordon Brown has bad eyesight and apparently his handwriting isn't very good, and you have to give him some credit for doing the letters himself when he could so easily delegate that painful task. For something like this though excuses will not do. A letter like that has to be right. It is not just his fault though. His private office should have made sure they got the soldier's name right at least, and someone should have had the guts to tell him that the letter simply wasn't good enough.

So, Gordon Brown went to the G20 and sprung the idea of a universal tax on financial transactions as a way to prevent further financial crises? Oddly enough, most other governments told him to shove off, leaving us wondering what he is playing at. If you want to make far-reaching changes to the way the international financial system works that involves the co-operation of just about every nation on earth than surely you need to do a little preparation with them, instead of just pulling your rabbit out of the hat and expecting instant accord. What he Brown think was going to happen? That they would say, 'Good God man, what a brilliant idea! Why didn't we think of that? We must adopt it immediately'? It is pretty disturbing that the man leading our country could be that out of touch with, well, people.

Councillor Chris Black, Liberal Democrat Councillor from Rayleigh, posted the following comment to the previous post on the this blog:

Steve, this is off topic, but can you please post something about this 'ban' on your colleagues speaking about Travellers, as reported in the Echo?

Seems very odd to me.

From that excellent blog:

A new prediction has been posted on 2 November 2009 at http://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/

Following the party conference season, the Conservative lead over Labour has increased slightly, and is broadly around the same level that it has been for most of the year.

Populus (Times) has a Conservative lead of 10% (down from 14%),
Ipsos-MORI has a 17% lead (up from 12%),
ICM (Guardian) also has 17% (up from 14%),
YouGov (Daily Telegraph) also has 13% (up from 12%), and
ComRes (Independent) also has 13% (up from 12%).

Overall, the Conservative lead is 14%, which is up 1% from last month.

The current national prediction is that the Conservatives will have a majority of 66 seats, winning 358 seats (+11 seats since 4 October 2009).

It could be argued that the Conservatives were always going to lose the 1997 election. Despite the economy being on the up, after 18 years of Tory rule the mantra of change was hard to argue against. It could also be argued that what turned a defeat into a landslide was Conservative eurosceptics who never forgave John Major for the Maastricht treaty and so tore him down at every opportunity. So, we ended up with barely 200 Conservative MPs and Labour could dominate the political debate in a way that they could never have done with a more numerous opposition in parliament.

At this point some of those same eurosceptics jumped ship into UKIP in order to carry on with their life goal of preventing Conservatives getting elected. This is the root of Brown's betrayal over Lisbon. With most of the UK population very wary of the encroaching power of EU institutions those most exercised about the issue have conspired to ensure that eurosceptic views have the least representation in Westminster. Their cry is always that the UK parliament doesn't matter any more because everything is decided in Brussels. Yeah, right. Brussels didn't take us to war four times. Brussels didn't give us the worst recession, ever. Brussels didn't open our borders for uncontrolled immigration. Brussels didn't even ratify the Lisbon Treaty. With that last act the usual suspects appear to be blaming the Conservatives for not offerring a meaningless referendum instead of Labour for not offering us a real one. Hell, with a handful more MPs David Cameron could have got have got a referendum vote through parliament because many Labour MPs were sickened enough at their party's betrayal of its manifesto commitment to vote with the opposition. There weren't enough Conservative MPs, but there might have been if those broadly on the same side of the European debate had stood together.

With a general election coming up I expect that the same supposedly eurosceptics, people who have allowed a minority federalist view to dominate British politics, will be up to their old tricks. They will be demanding a referendum on a signed treaty, showing a breathtaking ignorance of the way international relations operates, and rubbishing any real an practical suggestions on repatriating powers form the EU. The threat will be that if the Conservatives don't do what they want then they will campaign for a protest vote. Well, that's what you have done since 1997 and look where it has got us. Lisbon is at least partly your fault.

Don't blame me. I voted Conservative.

Some time ago BBC journalist Norman Smith was commentating on the Today Programme on a George Osborne speech to be delivered that day in which he suggested a Conservative government could learn from local government. Mr. Smith was dismissive, saying that local and national government were different and offering up the fact that local Councillors faced surcharges and could be 'banged up' as an example. In fact the legislation under which Councillors could be surcharges was repealed years ago and the bizarre claim that Councillors can be imprisoned had no basis in fact. He was not corrected by any of his colleagues in the studio and so a very misleading impression of the operation of local government was given, as well as a wholly misleading impression of the validity of George Osborne's speech.

I was pretty annoyed at this, so I sent in a complaint. After some delay, the BBC have now responded:

I would like to assure you that we have forwarded your complaint to Norman Smith who acknowledged that you are quite correct and that surcharging has been abolished. Accordingly he acknowledges this error and offers his apologies for the mistake.

Shadow Europe Minister Mark Francois was on Newsnight earlier this week debating the possibility of Tony Blair becoming European President with his Labour opposite number. During the interchange we were informed by the Labour chap that supporting Tony Blair was a patriotic duty, and this theme has been echoed by Labour blogger Luke Akehurst:

I'd go so far as to suggest it is unpatriotic to try to block a Brit from becoming President.

• Firstly, his past is catching up with him. The Iraq war was a foreign policy disaster, largely due to the ineptitude of the Blair and Bush administrations, and the Continental Europeans have not forgotten. As a result there is a echoing void where support for a Blair presidency among other countries should be.
• Secondly, the British Conservatives have let it be known that they would engage in years of trench warfare with the EU if Blair became president. Given the possibility of a Conservative government then this is a serious threat.
• Thirdly, and most importantly, Tony Blair has Gordon Brown's full support. So, we can expect off-the-record briefings from third-tier political players and clumsy attempts to influence behind the scenes while the Prime Minister himself says nothing. If you are going to get support it is generally better to get it from people with a bit more ability that the current crowd at no.10.