View From The House - 5th December 2002

Reprinted From The Lichfield Mercury

Farmers suffered badly in Staffordshire during the foot and mouth crisis. Local vets told me the Government were incompetent in their handling of it. Now it’s official.

The European Parliament's Inquiry into Foot and Mouth have concluded that the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) is guilty of “ineptitude” and “massive dereliction of duty” and “unpardonable delays in decision making”. And that ties in with what everyone was telling me here.

Meanwhile a House of Commons DEFRA Select Committee (which is a Labour dominated Committee) published a report on 14 November. It said that MPs were “pessimistic about DEFRA’s ability to ensure that Government Departments will do more than pay lip service to the objectives of sustainable development.” They also found that “confusion about the respective roles of DEFRA and the Agency is affecting the delivery of services in rural communities” and that “DEFRA's record in (rural) proofing its own policies is not impressive.” An Environmental Audit Committee Report published on 26 November found DEFRA's handling of the voluntary pesticides initiative to be “bizarre and deplorable”.

Not much change there then………. When will the Government take rural areas like Staffordshire seriously?

The Economy

Policemen on bicycles that have to be donated by local businesses; plans for a reduced health service to local people; cutbacks to education funding in Staffordshire; and now University top up fees……. You can tell when Gordon Brown has got something to hide. He comes into the Commons Chamber, looks petulant, then makes a bombastic speech quoting as many percentages as possible to make us all glaze over as the barrage of figures explode above our heads. Then in come the heavy guns: intermittent shots of words and phrases like “prudent”, and “golden rule”, and “no return to boom and bust!”. No one can take this all in. What would be presented in a company Annual Report as a pie chart or in some other graphic form is spewed out in a long line of numbers. While the Opposition side of the Chamber looks numbed, Labour MPs nod sagely and cheer when they think it appropriate. Of course, the “great economists” on the Government benches have as little idea what it all means as we do. This was the Chancellor’s budget statement a couple of weeks back.

Very shortly after the 1998 budget, I met Gordon Brown in a Commons toilet just by the Chamber. (This was not a pre-arranged meeting, I hasten to add). I commented that his budget statement seemed to go down quite well. He said yes, but he’ll really know what people think of it after they have had a chance to analyse it in the cold light of day and do the number crunching which normally takes up until the weekend. Well, the crunching has been done and we are in a mess.

Boom is rapidly becoming bust and this is all of Gordon Brown’s making. Manufacturing is in the longest recession since just after the war. Up until now, though, Gordon Brown has been protected by low world interest rates which has allowed him to pay off some of our borrowings and for Britain to enjoy low mortgage rates. Now he has had to borrow at least £20 billion. There’s an old saying in politics: “Never believe your own propaganda”. Gordon has done just that. By setting spending plans 3 years ahead and making wild forecasts of high economic growth, he has left himself with no room for manoeuvre. He set himself an impossible 3 year industrial target just like in the old Soviet Union where they used to boast about imagined tractor manufacturing output in their always unattainable 5 year plans.

At the time of making his high growth forecast he also said he had taken into account the world slow down. In fact, the world slow down has been less than he forecast, but Britain’s slow down has been more. This is because like an old socialist, Brown has stolen money from businesses and pension funds and put it into areas where it has unfortunately been squandered. So NHS waiting lists are up not down. And Staffordshire school children still get less than their counterparts in Hertfordshire. Meanwhile, you have to be very rich or be prepared to borrow if you want to go to university. It is no good throwing tax payers’ money into the public services unless reforms go with it. The NHS is now the world’s single biggest employer. (And while there needs to be some reform of fire fighter’s practices, if Blair had spent as much effort reforming the NHS as he does in picking a fight with the firemen, we would have had a wonderful new hospital on the site of the Victoria by now and the Hammerwich Hospital would still be open. Let’s be clear about this. Most of the reforms demanded by Government of the firefighters were agreed by the Fire Brigades Union weeks ago).