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Pre Budget Report

The economic gurus will chew over Alistair Darling’s Pre Budget Report till the cows come home. My own instinct is that a 2.5% cut in VAT will not make a blind bit of difference, not least because most retailers are already offering that kind of discount and more, and anyhow, there is no VAT on such essentials as food. What’s more, total borrowing of £117 billion, especially at a time when Governmental income is going down and expenditure going up strikes me as being absolutely barking mad. If you are up to the eyeballs in debt, you should stop spending. As a wise old lady said to me at a lunch in Ashton Keynes on Sunday “You can’t have Rolls Royce ideas on a push-bike income.” Having spent eleven years trying to fool the electorate that he stood for “prudence,” that he would apply his fiscal rules in good times and bad (rules which he has now completely abandoned) and that he had put an end to “Boom and Bust,” Gordon Brown has now slumped back to an old Labour “Tax and Borrow and Spend like there’s no tomorrow” mentality, which I suspect will do neither the economy nor his own electoral chances any good at all. The electorate are not quite as dumb as he apparently believes. A Boomerang Budget indeed, which will come back to bite us.

How it all makes me yearn for the “Good Old Ways of the Good Old Days” when debt was acknowledged to be an illness. After all prior to the early Nineteenth Century there was no such thing – could be no such thing – as “The National Debt”, and until comparatively recently Governments often reiterated their determination to pay it off. Happy days. Consumerism and indebtedness to pay for it will lands us all in the Debtors Prison.

By contrast, there is something rather charming - rather old fashioned and gentlemanly - about John Sergeant’s decision to pull out of Strictly Come Dancing for fear that he might - quite unjustifiably in real terms - win it. He realised that he had “become the story” rather than the dancing itself. “Gentlemanliness” was a sentiment to the fore at the wonderful tributes paid to my late predecessor Daniel Awdry who was Chippenham MP from 1962 to 1979 at his Memorial Service in Melksham on Thursday. Daniel was truly a gentleman in everything he did, in his many contributions to local society - as MP, as Mayor of Chippenham, as senior partner in that sadly disappeared old Chippenham Lawyers Company, Wood Awdry and Ford. Daniel put so much more into society than he took out of it, which was George Bernard Shaw’s definition of a true gentleman.

Perhaps that’s where Mr Brown and the Pre Budget Report has gone wrong - we are all taking more out of society than we are putting into it. And that way lies, as Mr Micawber would remind us, disaster.

Jobs

For eighteen months or so, we have all watched glassy eyed at newspaper headlines screaming about “The Credit Crunch,” “Impending Recession,” “Superman Brown saving the World.” We all know that something rather nasty is happening out there, but quite frankly pretty few of us have had much idea of what it really means, how and if and when it would all affect us personally. (Two clear exceptions are those whose savings are linked to one of the Icelandic banks, and those pensioners with Equitable Life, for both of whom we should have profound sympathy.)

But I am now becoming increasingly concerned that this entire - hitherto rather academic - crisis is now starting to come home to roost. Dolby Systems in Wootton Bassett announced this week that 70 jobs are to go; I hear that the Barnes Group in Corsham are facing difficulties too; the Faccenda factory in Sutton Benger closed recently with 200 or so jobs lost; before that it was Hygrade in Chippenham, the St Ivel Factory in Wootton Bassett and of course the Dyson move offshore no doubt amongst others. The unemployment rate in North Wiltshire, while still lower than some places, is inexorably rising, and I am starting to see some very worrying cases in my surgeries involving unemployment and poverty. In other words, the “real economy” is now starting to feel the pain, and I fear that it will get much worse over the winter.

I am simply not a good enough economist to know whether the interest rate cuts, the billions pumped into the banks, the talk of increasing public spending and of cutting taxes will have any real affect on the economy locally. Lots of people far cleverer than me seem to have divided opinions on the subject. But we must all do whatever we can in our local ways to stave off the worst of what may be to come, and I will certainly keep doing everything I can to secure jobs for this area (which I have to admit is probably not all that much.)

For example, I hear that a long-term care home which would mean something like 80 full or part-time jobs is applying for planning permission on the old St Ivel site. Let’s hope there might be more job creation of that kind to come, and I implore the planning authorities to do what they can to remove any possible obstacles from initiatives of that sort wherever they may be.

I remain very concerned about what may happen when the Hercules fleet finally leaves Lyneham in 2012. There are 750 civilians employed at Lyneham, and a large number of others “indirectly” employed - pubs, shops, schools and so on associated with the RAF base. It’s beginning to look quite likely that the Joint Helicopter Command may well be persuaded to move there in the end - discussions are at a crucial stage. The MoD are apparently concerned about what local people’s reaction might be to the increased noise inherent in helicopters by comparison with Hercules. My advice to local people will be, I think, that the environmental downsides of helicopters may well be less than, for example, commercial jet planes, or a new town which might well be the alternative, and that sacrificing a little bit of peace and quiet under carefully controlled conditions may well be a price we have to pay to avoid even greater economic pain for the area. I will be canvassing views on all of this over the next few months.

Remembrance

This year’s Remembrance Sunday had huge poignancy as the people of North Wiltshire thought particularly about those young men and women – so many of them from this area – willingly risking and in some cases giving their lives in service to Queen and Country in Iraq and Afghanistan. As usual I attended the Memorial Garden outside Westminster Abbey on the Thursday, then the small ceremony in Malmesbury, the parade, service and Cenotaph ceremony in Chippenham, lunch at Hullavington barracks with IX Supply Regiment, and then the War Memorial ceremony, church service and march past at Wootton Bassett.

I was particularly pleased this year to be accompanied at all of those events by my friend Mitra Pariyar. He is the talented son of a Nepalese hill farmer who acted as my guide and interpreter when I was monitoring the Nepali Elections earlier this year. Despite his modest family background – his father’s subsistence farm was many hours walk to the nearest tarmac road – Mitra got a scholarship to the school in Pokhara, thence to Kathmandu University, and now he has become the first Nepali Dalit (“Untouchable” in old parlance – from the lowest caste in what is still a caste-ridden society) to study at Oxford University. He is doing an M.Phil in Anthropology at St Hugh’s College and I am immensely proud of him, and have been glad to try to help with financing his studies. It was good to introduce him to some Ghurkha soldiers during the day, but sad to think that the route along which I was invited to march with Wootton Bassett’s Royal British Legion would the following day witness the return of the body of a soldier from the Second Battalion of the Royal Gurkha Rifles. What a lot our Nation owes to Nepal. And how good it is to try to repay some of that debt to people like Mitra.

I was glad to introduce Mitra to Andrew Mitchell MP, the Shadow Secretary of State for International Development who was the guest at a superb Conservative dinner at Bowood the night before, and I was glad that he reiterated my Party’s determination to raise International aid payments to 0.7% of Gross Domestic Product. We remain one of the richest nations in the world, and it is only right that we should use a good chunk of taxpayer’s funds – even in hard economic times like these- to help those most in need around the World, and to a degree to repay some of the debts we owe our colonial exploitation of India, Africa and much of the rest of the world.

The whole weekend was about Remembrance. “Remember, remember the fifth of November,” (but try to forget that Guy Fawkes did at least some of his plotting in the King’s head Pub in Chippenham). Some people were kind enough to remember my birthday on the 7^th (although I wish we could forget it). “They shall not grow old as we who are left grow old; age shall not weary them nor the years decay…” as we say so memorably on the day of the ultimate act of remembrance - Armistice Day. But I am glad that just as the Wootton Bassett War Memorial’s statue of children’s hands encircling the Globe reminds us that the whole point of warfare is for the future (“ For your tomorrow we gave our today” in the words of the Kohima  Epitaph), I am glad that Mitra’s presence allowed me not only to remember the past, but also to think of the future and the rest of the World and to contemplate what we can all do to try to make it even a slightly  better place.

Role Models

Whether or not you are ‘in’ to motor sport (and I have to admit that I never really was, but have been proud and inspired by the presence in my Constituency of the last privately owned race track in the UK- at Castle Combe,) we must all of us have had a frisson of excitement as Lewis Hamilton overtook on the last corner of the last lap to come fifth in Brazil, and thereby to become the youngest ever, and the first black, World Formula One Champion. How proud we should all be. Let us for once try to emulate the huge national pride the Americans would have shown if it had been one of their citizens. Away with British modesty for once, and lets celebrate a National Champion.

By the time you read this said Americans will be celebrating the election of either Senator McCain or Obama as their President. My own suspicion is that both are fine men, and whichever it is will need every ounce of their obvious ability to address the monstrous problems facing our World. But I particularly salute them, and all of the millions of workers who have been campaigning for them, simply on surviving the marathon effort which the US Presidential race has become, and by doing so re-igniting a fascination with politics and current affairs which is the envy of the rest of the world. Whoever wins: they deserve it and deserve our congratulations and support for the future.

Lewis Hamilton and the two Presidential candidates – like our own Olympic stars so newly back from Beijing - are role models in a modern world which is sadly short of them. Worse than that, some of the younger generation’s role models seem to me to be exactly the wrong kind. I have to admit that I have never found Jonathon Ross anything more than mildly amusing, and have never heard Russell Brand, but like the vast bulk of the decent British population abhor the vicious and unpleasant prank they played on Mr Sachs. Whether or not Mr Ross will miss the million pounds or so he has effectively been fined out of his eighteen million three year contract is another matter. But what I found truly worrying is that as highly professional broadcasters, they presumably believed that what they did would appeal to their particular audience. So it must be that there were some people sitting at home who found their disgraceful phone calls amusing.  And what an awful commentary that realisation is.

The shenanigans of Messrs Rothschild, Deripaska, Mandelson (and with a walk-on part Osborne) are out of the headlines at last. And I am glad of it as the whole episode seemed to me a diversion from the real world. Multi million pound yachts, villas, champagne, private jets and the like. Not much of that around Chippenham, I’d say. But perhaps that’s why it lasted so long in the headlines – it was a story about a way of life of which most of us can only dream, an escape from the dreary realities of everyday life. Maybe that’s why people listened to Ross and Brand.

And maybe that’s why we must all be doing more to try to provide decent role models for the young. So give me dear old Terry Wogan any day. Highly amusing, wry, professional, and intelligent. Give me Messrs Hamilton, Mc Cain, and Obama. But spare me Ross, Deripaska and Mandelson.

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