Kate Green is working hard in Parliament to get assurances from health ministers over health provision in Manchester. Unfortunately, the Conservative minister they’ve allocated the task to is Simon Burns. This is a minister who in 9 months has already cost the taxpayer £41,000 in chauffeur (so tory!!) driven trips to and from his home. The NHS is not safe in Conservative hands. They no longer pretend it’s safe in Conservative hands. If they’re in a good mood after lunch, you might get a consultation before your hospital’s taken away. But they’re alright, they’ve got a chauffeur that we’re paying for. He’s probably got a Lib Dem to rest his feet on.

Can’t pretend I like the man. But why should I if he’s wrecking the NHS?

My colours were nailed to the mast months ago. I remain in favour of the Alternative Vote for UK elections. This is not a compromise position. It simply ensures that the winning candidate is the person most of us want, nothing more, nothing less.

So I watched the Yes to AV election broadcast from last night. This was the one with the woman on the loudspeaker.

The main arguments presented were that AV would make MPs:

• more responsive to their constituents
• less inclined to fiddle their expenses
• less secure in safe seats

I’m not sure AV delivers any of these. The advantage is that voters won’t have to hold their nose whilst voting. MPs won’t be able to wield ‘Vote for me or you’ll be letting that lot in’ stick at voters. Voters can vote for the candidate that most aligns to their views.

If when the votes are counted, that doesn’t take any candidate over the line, then we’ll look at 2nd choices.

Of the other assumptions, it would certainly make some constituencies less safe, but it might make others safer (If that’s what the voters wanted). And I really don’t see it making any difference to expense fiddling.

The Yes campaign are making the worst of what should be a winning argument.

So what about the no to AV broadcast?

They’re straight in there with it’ll lead to coalitions. The problem is that we’ve been heading towards coalitions for the last 60 years. The Fib / Con coalition was delivered by First Past the Post.

Given the current popularity of the parties I’m inclined to believe that AV will not make a huge difference to the chances of more coalitions; in fact it’s been shown that in both 1979 and 1997 we’d have had bigger majority governments such was the unpopularity of the losing party. Under AV you’ll only get a coalition if that’s what the voters want.

We then had the horse race!. This is the most ridiculous analogy going. We’re choosing an MP not racing horses. If you have to use horse racing as analogy then you’d have to say that none of the horses crossed the line in the race that was shown. They ran out of steam (votes) before the finish and he race is over only when it’s over.

Finally, the broadcast resorts to this idea that some people get more than one vote. No they don’t. At the end of the count their will be two piles, those For the winning candidate and those Against.

There’s no duplication of votes just two piles.

I think there’s a valid argument for wanting Government to be a contest between two conflicting points of view – Labour v Conservative. That everything else is an irrelevance. I happen to think the complexities of modern life no longer allow for that and we damage our own parties if we do not try to respond to the changing nuances those complexities bring.

Given I’m supporting AV, I should be open about how I would tend vote in an election held under that system.

1. Labour
2. Green Party
3. Lib Dems (although their movement to the right is possibly pushing them down my preferences further)
4. Conservative Party
5. Ukip

Our present system is still a democratic system and on the whole, representatives of all the parties do work hard under it. It’s really a ridiculous time to be having this referendum when there’s so much more important stuff to address. But, if we have to have it now, we should take a considered objective view. So let’s not insult voters by making claims or attacks that can not be met.

 

This is a video from colleagues in Altrincham. It just shows we can make a difference. I’ve been out with them and I’ve just been so impressed. I’ve learned a tremendous amount from them; they are showing us all the way. Well done to Andrew, Sam and all the team.

Let’s start with the positive

George Osborne signalled two themes in his budget.

• The need for a Budget for Growth
• The need for a Balanced Economy (North v South, Manufactoring v Financial/Service Sector)

He’s right that these are the immediate requirements. We won’t be able to shift the debt unless we deliver real growth in the economy.

The UK economy is failing to re-emerge out of the trough created by the wanton indulgences of the global banking sector. This is because we allowed Nigel Lawson, Maggie Thatcher, Norman Lamont, John Major and yes, Gordon Brown, to put the short term flattery and fawning from the cretins in the City of London ahead of the fact that no nation can thrive if it doesn’t make anything.

Where’s our aircraft industry, our car-makers, our ship-builders, camera-makers, tram-makers? The lessons from our current plight are not new, we’ve known for centuries that reliance on a couple of sectors will catch up with you in the end. The fact that the banking crisis is a global phenomenon shouldn’t blinker us to the fact that countries with strong diverse economies are going to pull clear out of this quicker than nations made up of supermarkets, bankers and social workers. Look at how quickly Germany is re-emerging..

So, George Osborne is right to identify growth in a balanced economy is imperative but he doesn’t do enough.

• 1p cut in fuel duty and postponement of April’s Fuel escalator – I agree with this. There’s an argument that the VAT increase should not be applied to fuel. I don’t buy George Osborne’s explanation that this would take 6 years to get through EU regulations. Given we’re baling out Portugal, given we are in a position of negotiating strength, it could have been sorted in days. Osborne is clutching at straws with that one, but in any event, I’m not sure that we should be removing the various levies on fuel. The 1p cut is probably right at this time. But the reality is the fuel price has to increase, we’ve got to reduce our over-reliance on the car for all sorts of reasons. Politicians are not coming clean about this. Both the Conservatives and Labour Front benches are allowing the price at the pump to increase whilst positioning themselves as the friend of the motorist. It’s unpopular but if we’re to compete, we have to reduce unnecessary fuel use; it’s a scarce commodity with a price to match and it’s about time we accepted that..
• Corporation Tax reduced by 1p – I agree with this – We do have to encourage business. It’s not going to do much on its own. I’d really like to see an end to employers national insurance. We should not be taxing jobs. I’m not suggesting that companies and employers should not be contributing to our shared responsibilites (defence, health service etc.) but I’d argue that we should be focussing on the capital in the company rather than the numbers in its labour-force. The labour-intensive industries should not be contributing more than those with one man and a nuclear reactor. We want those jobs.

And that’s about it for growth. He’s made it easier for developers with a presumption in favour of planning applications. A fact lost on Conservative Councillor Michael Cornes at last night’s presentation from the Breathe Clean Air Group. Just as he was claiming that localism will make it easier for people to oppose developments, his Chancellor was pulling the rug from under his feet and saying developers can pretty much build what they like.

He’s also given the go-ahead for the northern hub linking Manchester Victoria and Piccadilly. As this potentially could improve the regularity of trains on our line in Gorse Hill, we have to welcome it.

But there’s the rub. At a time of recession we should be stimulating the economy through more investment. The northern hub is welcome but it’ll take too long to get started. The investments that would make an immediate difference are the Building Schools for the Future projects, Sheffield Forgemasters, Affordable House Building,

The supply of land needs to increase. Too much of it is held as a speculative hedge-fund by investors and the aristocracy. We tax jobs and the poor but land gets EU grants. And before Tories start saying Mike Cordingley would like to tax your gardens, I’m talking hectares not patios. There would be an argument over legitimate farming but I’m sure a sophisticated land tax could be constructed. The important thing is that we are able to build the houses, schools and hospitals needed by our people, stimulate our economy and at the same time ensure the most priviliged in our country share the burden that’s being placed by the Tories on our poorest and most vulnerable.

What you do in a recession has implications for years. It provides opportunities as well as challenges. Osborne has set all his focus on 2015, the next General Election. There’s a possibility that we might just might be reducing the deficit then (and the Tories might just reap the benefit). The problem is that we will still be relying on the same bogeymen, the bankers that got us into this mess in the first place and the economy will be as unbalanced as ever and far further behind our competitors than it is now.

“Chancellor and Treasury Ministers outside No.11 Downing Street on Budget Day” by HM Treasury, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne standing with his Budget Box alongside Treasury ministers (left – right: Mark Hoban, Danny Alexander, David Gauke, Justine Greening, Lord Sassoon) before proceeding to Parliament for the 2011 Budget statement. 23 March 2011.

I caught this tweet requesting the donation of a blog post to publicise the Manchester Twestival 2011 which is supporting the Wood St Mission as its charity this year. The Twestival takes place tomorrow Thursday 24th March. To be honest I’ve no idea what a Twestival is but I’m sure it’s good fun. However I do know of the enormous impact that Wood St Mission has had on the poor of Manchester and you can read more here.
They’ve been going for nearly 150 years and sadly there’s still a pressing need for them today. I hope you will take part.

Drastic cuts in key education services by the controlling Tory group on Trafford Council are being blamed by the Labour opposition for a serious breach of the Data Protection Act affecting 1,300 children and infuriating their parents.

Due to what the Council calls a processing error, parents who received details by e-mail of the secondary schools to which their children were assigned 12 months ago received another e-mail on Tuesday this week. This one provided information on the new schools which children would be attending from this September. The trouble is they weren’t their children.

Meanwhile the real parents of this year’s cohort of 1,300 children, who were expecting e-mails at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, were left waiting anxiously for information about which school their child had been allocated and so, no doubt, were the children.

The Council is now having to prepare letters of apology to go out to both sets of parents and will be reporting the matter to the data protection commissioner. It is also investigating how the mistake was made by its Corporate IT department.

Trafford Council has already had a small number of calls from parents concerned that information about their children has gone to the incorrect e-mail address and more are expected over the next few days.

I am horrified that this could have happened, Councillor David Acton, leader of the Labour Group on the Council, said. Parent and children’s confidentiality has been seriously breached. There has been a monumental systems failure by Trafford Council and I’ve no doubt the Tories will be looking for someone to blame.”

The fact is that the significant cuts made by them in school support and school admission services must have played a part. Council staff are becoming totally demoralised.

We raised our concerns about these cuts at a budget scrutiny meeting a few weeks ago and more recently at the Council’s budget setting meeting but the Tories simply ploughed on regardless.

The fact is that Trafford’s Conservative controlled Council has been sailing very close to the wind with their £21 million budget cuts, no doubt hoping to please the Tory-led Government. We believe this will lead to further significant service failures and deep service inefficiencies which will affect Trafford’s ratepayers.

The Tories have tried to dupe people into thinking that slashing service budgets will not affect front line services. This incident, which is an extremely serious breach of the data protection act, shows that they are wrong.

Press Release from Dave Acton on behalf of Trafford Labour Group

Image by Christelle Olivier from Pixabay