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Exciting Times

Political and Parliamentary and Constituency life feels so packed full of excitements and momentous events that it’s hard to know what to focus on, even harder to predict where it will all end up. Just think about the last week.

Global stock markets are in complete turmoil, although they finished up quite close to where they started off; international banking systems reeling from the credit crunch, and a record interest rate cut from the Federal Reserve to try to see off Global Recession; a rogue trader in France losing his bank £3billion, which presumably means that someone else made it; the housing market nervous, energy prices through the roof; all of the pundits talking about economic catastrophes to come. In the middle of all of that, we have Peter Hain finally resigning thanks to the third police investigation of Labour’s funding in as many months, the Prime Minister once again having been too indecisive to sack him; a similar indecisive muddle over the continuing Northern Rock crisis; Parliament bogged down in debates over the EU Constitution which the Government is trying to ram through in open defiance of its pledge to hold a referendum on the matter; Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan in continuing turmoil as the PM jets off to China and India trying to look statesmanlike. “Its Tuesday, so it must be Delhi.” Locally unprecedented flooding, Post offices and local hospitals threatened, and weirdly unseasonal weather.

Where will it all end up? Perhaps it’s: “You’re all doomed,” as Private Fraser used to say in Dad’s Army. Or are we? My instinct is that none of these things need be such a catastrophe in their own right, if only the Government and Prime Minister would act decisively and in a statesmanlike manner on each of them. Flannel, prevarication and indecisiveness have been their hallmark. Northern Rock need not have been such a shambles, and would have made less of a contribution to stock exchange and banking wobbles had the Prime Minister and Chancellor but gripped the situation from the start. The Labour Party need not be in such disarray if only they observed their own rules about funding transparency, and if only Mr Brown had had the vision necessary to sack Mr Hain the moment the irregularities became known. We need decisive and clear action on Global warming, the housing market, the Middle East and defence spending and in so many other areas of national and international life. But Mr Brown and his colleagues seem incapable of clear swift decisive action on anything.

By the time you read this, I will be near the end of a visit to our troops in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. I am flying out in an RAF VC190 from RAF Brize Norton to Kandahar, thence by Lyneham-based Hercules to Camp Bastion in the desert and then on to the front line at Lash Kagar. I’m much looking forward to the visit, and just getting a flavour of what our troops - so many of them from this area - are experiencing on the front line. I’ll report back next week.

Flooding

There can be few worse experiences than having your house flooded. The damaged carpets and furniture, the temporary homelessness which may result, the filth, smell, squalor. Our hearts go out to all of those in North Wilts, and across England who have been flooded out in the last week or so, and especially to those for whom it may be the second or third occasion. One lady who I visited in Kellaways over the weekend was flooded twice in the last week, and there are particularly bad cases in Christian Malford,  Tockenham, Wootton Bassett and Crudwell amongst others. I visited as many of them as I could to try to see for myself on Friday, although the water had subsided a little by then.

The Defra Select Committee on which I serve in Parliament is currently enquiring into flooding, its causes and what we can do about it. One of the conclusions we seem to be coming to - and it is certainly borne out by our experience locally - is that there are a myriad of different organisations with some involvement in flooding, which makes it virtually impossible to work out who actually is in charge. The EU with its Water Directives and compensation schemes, the Government and its agency, the Environment Agency who have responsibility for some rivers and streams but not others, the County Council looking after flooding on roads, the District Council doing smaller streams and keeping the “riparian owners” who are actually supposed to keep streams flowing up to the mark, Agricultural Land Drainage Tribunals and the water and sewerage companies – Thames and Wessex in our case who have the drains and sewers under their control. It’s a muddle and it needs sorting out. I have offered to help try to bring these various bodies together locally, perhaps by convening a “cross-agency work force,” or some such, and the District Council is moving in a similar direction. None of that will really help the unfortunate people who have been flooded this time, but it may help avert the risk for the future.

Flooding risk is assessed as “likely to occur every X years.” The flooding which we have been seeing locally is probably something like a 1 in 50 year occasion, which makes it odd to say the least that it has occurred twice in one year! I suppose statistically that may mean that nothing similar now will happen for a hundred years, but I fear that I doubt it. All of the indications are that heavy rainfall and the flooding chaos which it brings are here to stay, presumably as a by-product of climate change, El Nino, La Nina, the swerving away of the Gulf Stream or some such natural or man-made phenomenon.

A large audience of people from North Wraxall and district quizzed a group of us about all of this at an excellently organised public meeting on Friday night. I admitted to a change in my view on Global warming. Having been pretty sceptical ten or fifteen years ago both about whether or not it existed and even if it does whether it is man-made or just cyclical, I have been increasingly convinced that it really is happening, that we are responsible and that it is down to us all to do something urgent and significant to stop it. So, for example I am strong supporter of the Climate Change Bill currently going through Parliament, although I have reservations about some details in it. Anyhow, it seems to me that if it turns out that Global Warming is all a huge myth it won’t have done us much harm to safeguard against it. But if it turns out to be for real – and local flooding experiences tempt me to that view- then we will look pretty silly if we have ignored it!

Larkrise to Candleford

Most people in North Wiltshire live in towns, but the flavour of life is still “rural” to a remarkable degree - the pace of life, the environment, the countryside and landscape. The talk in my local pub on Sunday lunchtime was all about how five out of the six lanes out of the village remained blocked, whether or not it was worse than the 1968 floods, which planning applications or filling in of ditches might have made it worse and whether or not global warming existed anyhow. A reassuringly rural discussion which would not have felt out of place in locally filmed Cranford, nor on Sense and Sensibility on television that night.

A – for once – thoroughly excellent evening’s viewing on the BBC included Dawn French in a lovely production of Larkrise to Candleford, which was largely filmed in and around Neston Park, and then Dawn French again in the Vicar of Dibley. Rural, out-of date, escapist? Well you could argue that. Sense and Sensibility doesn’t have much to say about the Hain funding scandal; Cranford is silent on the war in Afganistan. But surely the reason why all of these programmes have such stupendous viewing figures is not because they are escapist and out of date; its because they do indeed speak to us about the human condition and about circumstances in which we find ourselves today. Jane Austen’s remarkably robust young women shrugging off their many woes, dealing with homelessness, poverty, rejection by “society”; Cranford’s introverted curtain-twitching; The Vicar of Dibley interfering in a District Council by-election to try to  improve bus services to the village against the squire’s indifference; all of these things ring a bell with so many of us in semi-rural North Wilts.

The first episode of Larkrise to Candleford was all about the social differences between the two neighbouring villages, and whether or not Larkrise should enjoy the same services as Candleford – in particular whether or not the eight miles separating the two meant that the poor folk in Larkrise had to pay 3 shillings and sixpence to receive a telegram while the rich folk in Candleford did not. And here we are today – 200 years later – debating whether or not the people of Yatton Keynell, Lacock, and Bradenstoke need their own post office, or whether they can travel to nearby towns for the services. Plus ca change……

Those who care about our post offices should be getting their letters off to Post Office Ltd in good time for the end of the consultation period on 31^st January. The key must be numbers – entire villages should be writing; and it’s important to try to find reasons why the Post Office’s argument in favour of closure are wrong. Yatton Keynell, for example,  are arguing strongly that a recent change of management makes their post office wholly viable; Bradenstoke pointing out an error in the Post Office’s information about bus services; Lacock in discussion with the National Trust about what can be done to keep it open. So do of course make the general arguments about how important it is to keep the post office open, but bear in mind that 2500 other communities around England are making the same argument, which is therefore likely to land on a fairly unhearing Labour Government’s’s ear. So do your best to differentiate your arguments from others.

Post offices, village halls, local schools, pubs, churches. The lifeblood of our villages and our rural life depends on them. It is up to all of us to fight to keep them, just as the people of Larkrise did two hundred years ago.

Eleanor Rigby

Who could fail to have been touched by the story – which achieved national coverage including a leader article in the Daily Telegraph - of Kington St Michael’s very own Eleanor Rigby, Miss Olive Archer, whose story was uncovered by local minister Miss Akasha Lonsdale. Apparently entirely friendless and without any known relations, Miss Archer died alone in a care home and the minister was rightly concerned that she would also be alone at her funeral. I rang to offer to attend, but was relieved to hear that several friends and acquaintances from Miss Archer’s Swindon days had in fact come forward, and a number of other good souls who simply felt moved by the story had also volunteered to attend the service.

As the New Year breaks, we all have so much to look forward to, and we are all busy making all sorts of plans. The World is our oyster, life is a blank canvass on which we can now paint whatever picture we like. But it must have been that way for Olive Archer too perhaps on the very day she had that rather fetching fur-framed picture taken. “Remember, man, as you pass by; As you are now so once was I. As I am now so must you be. Prepare therefore to follow me,” is the old memento mori found on a few gravestones.

We only get one chance at life, and we’ve got to live every second of it as if it was our last; and we’ve got to be sure that if it is our last, then at least a few people will remember us kindly. It was with those rather uncharacteristically sobering thoughts at the back of my mind that I set about planning my political and Parliamentary year. Here are a few of my resolutions, although like all resolutions there is no guarantee of performance!

My resolution when I was elected to Parliament to try to contribute something every day in the Chamber, in Committee, on the media, or in a speech elsewhere, has slipped a bit, so I return to Parliament with renewed determination to achieve it. I plan to be as active as I can on the Defra Committee ,the Council of Europe and Western European Union of all of which I am a member, and to be as active as I can as Chairman of the All Party Parliamentary committees on the Army and on MS. DEFRA, Defence and Foreign Affairs will remain my main Parliamentary interests, but perhaps I should look around for some areas of diversification? It would be good to find something really meaty to get my teeth into nationally or locally. In the constituency there is so much to be done - on Post offices, unwanted development, defence matters, our appalling train services. I resolve to take a more systematic approach to my Fridays filling them up with as many Constituency visits, meetings and events as I can. It’s probably time that I visited at least some of the 60 or so parish councils in my patch, and perhaps I should have some surgeries in the rural areas as well as the four main towns.

I remember my predecessor, David Eccles who was MP here from 1942 to 1962 writing to me at the time I was first elected. I had asked him of what he was most proud, always bearing in mind that he was a distinguished Cabinet Minister, Privy Councillor, later created a Viscount and with a host of distinctions to his name. But despite all that he answered my question “I tried my best to serve the people of North Wiltshire.” What better New Year’s Resolution could there be than that; and what better epitaph when that time comes?

Christmas

I hope that you have enjoyed a Very Happy Christmas and New Year break, with plenty of good company and good cheer; that you have carolled your hearts out, attended church at least once; received and perhaps more important given some lovely presents, stuffed yourself with turkey and the odd glass of festive cheer. 6000 of you attended the traditional Boxing Day Meet of the Avon Vale Hunt at Lacock (at which I managed to avoid falling off my borrowed horse, and was glad to wear a badge supporting the campaign to Save Lacock Post Office.)

And I hope that you have spared a thought for the elderly and lonely, the homeless, the ill and the poor and for those who for professional reasons miss out on some of the festive fun – those who keep our essential services going, those on duty in our hospitals, like the wonderful people in Chippenham Hospital where I sang carols round the wards on Christmas Eve; the postmen and women who I visited in Wootton Bassett Sorting Office who literally bear the burden of our Christmas post; all of these and so many more do so much to make our Christmas and New Year special and are well worthy of our heartfelt thanks.

My late father took new Year especially seriously. He paid all his outstanding bills, (if only….) made up any disagreements he may have had, tied up the loose ends of the old year; he even made sure that he had a haircut and trimmed his nails! He used to open the back door at a moment before midnight to see off the old year, and then knock on the front door as Big Ben chimed to bring in the New, after which he always delighted in rather a raucous rendition of  the old Scots song “A gude New Year tae one and a’, and mony may ye see; And during a’ the year tae come, O happy may ye be….” And despite my 32 years in England by comparison with 20 in Scotland, I still preserve the Scots’ rather mawkish sentimentality with regard to Hogmanay. (So often disguised – by others north of the Border – beneath a sea of whisky which also helpfully obliterates life until about the 3^rd of January!)

I ponder the ups and downs of the last 12 months – of which there have been a fair few – and try to map out where my life will take me over the next 12 months.  It’s been a political helter-skelter both nationally and internationally, which shows no sign of abating. I was horrified by the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, who I knew slightly in Oxford, and fear for its consequences both for Pakistan and the Middle East as a whole, and I am already looking forward to returning to that political hothouse in Westminster next Monday.

Exciting times lie ahead of us; but through all of it, I hope that your 2008 will be Happy, Healthy, Prosperous and Safe.

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