View From The House - 30th October 2002

Reprinted From The Lichfield Mercury

A phoenix rises! I visited Chase Terrace Technology College last week to speak to the students studying A level politics on ‘the work of an MP’; at the same time I was able to hear of the progress of the rebuilding of the School following the fire. It is remarkable to witness how the School has been able to re-establish itself so soon after the devastating fire. The spirit of Burntwood survives undiminished. And when the new building is completed, the School will become one of the best equipped in Staffordshire. The sense of camaraderie in Chase Terrace Technology College is tangible and has been forged stronger through adversity and I wish them all well. But Chase Terrace, like so many other Schools in the County suffers the twin burdens of underfunding and excessive paperwork which has to filled in by teachers.

* The National Institute of Economic and Social Research predicts that Gordon Brown must break his “golden rule” on borrowing to plug the gap in public finances. How might this affect us in Staffordshire? To avoid putting up taxes before the next general election, the NIESR claims, the Chancellor of the Exchequer will need to raise £20 billion as economic growth drops below targets to maintain public finances. “The longer-term fiscal outlook is gloomy - in order to sustain public sector solvency, new measures are required to raise an additional £20 billion of tax revenue by 2006,” says the NIESR. Gordon Brown’s frequent boast that he has eliminated ‘boom and bust’ is beginning to sound hollow.

Well, the fight is on to provide fair funding for Staffordshire’s school children and for Staffordshire police. Despite all the promises made by Labour politicians before the ’97 election, it now looks as if Staffordshire could actually end up worse off than before. But the good news is that most of Staffordshire’s Labour MPs have finally had enough and are joining our County’s remaining three Conservative MPs in fighting the Government’s funding plans.

This is important. The projected gap in Britain’s finances could affect other services in Staffordshire too. Will the Government cough up the money required for the new hospital in Lichfield? Will there be adequate financing for the Staffordshire Police Authority? We shall soon find out the answers. The Government is expected to make a statement before the end of the year.

* Meanwhile, Estelle Morris has resigned. The resignation of the Secretary of State for Education was very different from normal ministerial departures. It was partly brought on by her feeling that she could not manage the Department adequately and because of a number of failures recently (and rightly) exposed in the newspapers: the most recent being mistakes made in A level marking.

But she also resigned because she couldn’t cope with the personal intrusion by the press into her private life and that of her relatives. The view from the House is that the press have gone too far. I have long argued that there should be a privacy law in this country which allows – indeed, encourages - the press to investigate matters of ‘public interest’, but not matters merely of ‘salacious public curiosity’ designed to sell more newspapers. Our present libel laws have skewed British press reporting. Rogues like Robert Maxwell were never exposed because of legal ‘gagging orders’. Yet innocents like Estelle Morris - and other, less public, figures - have had their lives ruined by personal press intrusion. Of course, any change of the law must be considered with care. Our free press is still something to be admired and press censorship is to be avoided. But this balance has been achieved in a number of western countries outside the United Kingdom including several States of the United States where the freedom of the press is enshrined in the nation’s Constitution.