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New Year 2010

Is it a sign of age, or perhaps of busy-ness, that Christmas and New Year, Remembrance Sunday, Burns Night, the Summer Solstice and one’s birthday all seem to come round quicker and quicker? Is it just nostalgia, or when I was a child, did the two weeks before Christmas really stretch out like an eternity? Even General Elections – which are separated by up to five years - seem to recur in the twinkling of an eye.

2009 – indeed a large part of the decade which we are now leaving behind with a sigh of relief- has been something of an Annus Horribilis. In a military area like this, and as we stand yet again down Wootton Bassett High Street for a Repatriation, and as we see yet another close shave terrorist attempt, and the threat of many more pending, who amongst us would not pause to ask “Is the World on 1/1/2010 really a better place than it was on 1/1/2000?” As we hear of redundancies and layoffs, of economic uncertainty, and service cuts and tax rises to come, we wonder “Has Boom and Bust really been abolished?” Are our services better? Are our streets safer or nicer places to be? Is our Global environment more secure? Is our political system still the finest in the world? Are we safer? Are we happier? Richer?” I fear that few of us would answer anything but “no” to those questions.

But was it not Confucius who said that the best view in the world was from the bottom of a ladder looking upwards? In other words, I suppose that the good news as we look forward into the New Year is that it can’t really be any worse than the last one. It’s all there to play for. And none of us –optimist or pessimist alike – should allow ourselves the indulgent luxury of predicting or worrying about the future. We can but stride out into it, doing our best, as well as hoping for the best. As King George VI so memorably said in his broadcast to the Nation at the outbreak of the Second World War: - “I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’ And he replied: ‘Go into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way!”

So of course there are things to look forward to which we hope will make our world a better place. There’s the General Election which we hope will bring about a cleansing of the electoral and political system and lead to renewed faith in politics and our Parliamentary system. Many of us hope that it will also lead to a fresh Government of a bluer hue, a renewed economy without excessive pain, rebuilding of our broken society and so many other changes. All of those things are important. But far more important than any of that is what you and I and our friends and families and communities can do in the New Year. How can we work together better? How can we make this a better place, give our friends and neighbours a better life than last year? What can we do to help those less fortunate than ourselves? These are the questions which – if answered thoughtfully and correctly - can give us all hope for the future.

So in the words of the old Scottish song which my father used to insist on singing relentlessly and tunelessly every New Years Day: “A gude New Year tae one and all; and mony may ye see. And during all the year tae come, O happy may ye be!” Or roughly translated: A Good and prosperous and Happy New Year to you all.

A Pragmatic Christmas

The vitally important negotiations at Copenhagen seem to have produced a bit of a fudge. The green lobby will be devastated, the climate change sceptics self-righteously smug. My own pragmatic view is that if we act sensibly to limit Carbon, but global warming turns out to have been a figment of the imagination as we freeze over in 100 years time, then it really won’t matter, especially since we will have benefited our own green-technology producing economy in the meantime. If, on the other hand we do nothing but we turn out to be wrong and the Globe suffers catastrophically as a result of our inaction, then we will look pretty silly in retrospect. So let’s do what we can to prevent disaster, but not get too carried away with the whole thing.

Perhaps a similar approach is right with regard to the economy. Gordon Brown constantly claimed to have abolished Boom and Bust. It sometimes feels as if Boom is the only one he did away with! The fact is that economic cycles come and go, and all we can hope to do is to lessen their worst effects on the people. Claiming to have done away with cycles is positively King Canute-ian in its foolishness. More pragmatically sensible is the following advice: - “The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.” Sounds sensible? It was said by Cicero in 55 BC.

A similarly modest, Conservative, pragmatic approach seems to me to be sound with regard to Christmas. I am full of admiration for those people who cover their entire house and garden with flashing Santa Clauses. I’m just glad I’m not an insomniac living next door to them. I’m all in favour of a decent Christmas dinner, a few carols and mulled wine, a bit of holly here and there. But I sometimes worry that Christmas has become a massive orgy of eating and drinking and present-giving, wildly disproportionate to our religious convictions. As someone said on the radio, Christmas without Christ is M and S.

So I do hope you all have a lovely time, a goodly amount of cheer, a decent dose of sentimentality. I hope that you keep the hangovers and indigestion under control and realise that family stresses are one of the most common side-effects of Christmas. I hope that you will spare a thought for those who cannot be quite so self-indulgent, perhaps particularly at this time, our servicemen in Afghanistan, our emergency services and essential service workers, our clergy.

 To them, and to all of you, I would just say: “Have a Very Happy, if pragmatically fairly modest Christmas.”

Education, Education, Education

“Education, Education, Education.” Remember that? It’s true that during the last thirteen years, the Government have spent a record amount on education. We have new schools in Abbeyfield, Malmesbury and Wootton Bassett to show for it - although there are some concerns that the Private Finance Initiative which paid for them is the public equivalent to HP. But Alistair Darling’s promise in his Pre Budget Report to maintain education spending was wildly inaccurate. For a start, there will be an extra burden from a 1% increase in National Insurance on all employees earning £20,000 or more, which will have as damaging an impact on education as on business. Anyway, some might argue that that record high spending over 13 years is to blame for the economic mess we find ourselves in - an economic mess which Mr Darling went to lengths to try to ignore. It wasn’t so much a Pre Budget Report. More of a Pre Election Report. But the press and people alike have seen through that pretty quickly.

I’ve had a bit of an ‘education, education, education’ sort of time recently. Students from Hardenhuish and Sheldon Schools and Chippenham College came up to Parliament for a tour and a bit of a chat in a Committee Room - and some Christmas shopping in the afternoon for those that didn’t come to Question Time. I also went to Hardenhuish and Bradon Forest Schools for seminars about Politics and Parliament, spoke at the A-Level Prize Giving evening at Wootton Bassett School, and not so long ago visited Malmesbury School to meet the students visiting from Malmesbury, South Africa. Last week I went to the lovely Carol Concert and Prize Giving for Calder House School in Colerne, a private special school which particularly helps pupils with dyslexia. We are so fortunate in North Wiltshire in having so many outstandingly good schools - comprehensive and private, colleges, primary and specialist.

But unlike Mr Darling, I take the view that the vast mountain of debt needs to be paid off, and paid off quickly. We calculated that during the hour or so that he was on his feet last week delivering his statement, the National Debt had increased by roughly £10 million. The £1.5 trillion we owe would, if it were piled up in £1 coins, stretch from here to the moon and back twenty-five times, or some such. And every aspect of our lives we are going to have to feel a little pain in the next few years if we are to pay off that debt, rather than sticking our heads in the sand, hoping that somehow or another it will go away, and leaving it to our children and children’s children to sort out, as the current Government seem to be doing. Or at least perhaps they’re just leaving it to someone else to clear up the mess - classic scorched earth tactics.

So as we come to the end of term and head off for the welcome Christmas break, let us take time to celebrate the excellence of the education our schools in this area provide. Let us thank the teachers, governors and other school staff who do such an outstanding job, and are more deserving than most of the break. But let us also be ready to realise that Santa Claus doesn’t bring our public funds - that can come from one place only, namely your and my taxes. And without being too scrooge-like about it, let us be ready to realise that some tough times lie ahead, and be ready to tighten our belts just a little bit.

Tax & Benefits

Sometimes as an MP you can feel like something half way between an Ombudsman and a social worker – both of which roles I greatly enjoy. I had surgeries in Chippenham and Corsham last Saturday, Wootton Bassett and Malmesbury the week before, and 30 or so constituents called in with queries varying from:- Working Tax Credits, long-term care of a disabled person; Porton Down Tests compensation, housing, central heating grants, home education, immigration, planning, Europe, political correctness, and a host of others. Very few of these issues are anything directly to do with being an MP, but I am happy to see what I can do to help anyhow. When people feel frustrated with poor official organisations, or bewildered by the complexity of modern regulations and bureaucracy, or at the end of their tether one way or another, they very often (quite correctly) turn to the MP for help.

The previous day I had had a meeting with Nationwide in Swindon who told me of the public’s lack of understanding of many of their products, and general mystification with the modern financial world; and then I was in Devizes taking part in the Carers Rights Campaign Action Day. I strongly support carers of all kinds, who quite apart from anything else are relieving the State of a huge potential burden of care, amounting we were told to some £87 billion. Here in North Wiltshire there are 7355 carers, many of them juggling work and caring responsibilities. I salute them for all they do, very often under very difficult circumstances.

It was a lively meeting which ironed out quite a few queries and ideas over the morning. But one issue which became very obvious is that too few people know about, or fully understand, the various benefits to which they are entitled. Carers Allowance, Council Tax discount, Pension Credit, Housing Benefit. All come with a maze of regulations and myriad forms. I had to admit to the meeting that many benefits are now so complex that when someone consults me in my surgeries about them, for fear of giving the wrong advice, I very often refer the constituent to the true experts on all of this, namely the Citizens Advice Bureau!

Benefits should be clear, fair, and accessible to all who genuinely need them. And much of the current benefits system fails on all three counts. Services provided by central government have become increasingly complex, the small print ever smaller, remarkably few people claiming all they are perfectly entitled to, and a few others disgracefully claiming a few things to which they demonstrably are not entitled.

I have always had a dream of a system of tax and benefits under which each of us declares our financial situation to the State, those with income then paying their taxes duly, those without drawing down whatever benefits to which they are entitled. Leonardo da Vinci used to hold open house in Florence, his guests throwing money, food or other spare items into a big basket; other friends in need helping themselves on some occasions. It is said that Leonardo always made a decent profit, with more people giving than taking. If only we could organise our tax and benefits system along the same lines!

Tale Of Two Cities

Two events in the last week – one in Parliament, the other in the constituency- made me think of that wonderful opening to A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair….”

Parliament – MPs, staff, journalists – a good few hundred of us, turned out on Monday to welcome home 19 Light Brigade recently returned from Afghanistan. Led by the band of the Scots Guards they marched through our historic Carriage Gates, halted in front of the 1000 year old Westminster Hall which has seen so many heroes return, and where, as Chairman of the All Party Group for the Army it was my honour to welcome them home and thank them for their efforts. (And then to escort them down to the Terrace of the House of Commons for a few beers!)  What an immense feeling of pride at welcoming these heroic young men and women home. It was we in Parliament who sent them to Helmand, and so it should be we who acknowledge their service.

In my speech, of course, I remembered the eighty-one comrades in arms who did not return with them, but whose bodies were carried down Wootton Bassett High Street. And again, I feel a huge sense of pride that it is that wonderful little town in my constituency which week by week stands proxy for the nation in remembrance and tribute.

Yet the pride which we felt in Parliament and down the High Street is more than tinged with sadness, with regrets, with concerns about whether or not we are doing the right thing, about whether or not our boys have the best possible equipment to do their jobs. Pride tinged with great sadness in all of it.

But of one thing I am certain. And the soldiers in Parliament on Monday were more than certain, as are those who come to Wootton Bassett: the lives of the fallen must not be wasted, and must not be thought to have been wasted. There are two parts to that. First, it is quite wrong to say: “We mourn these brave young men, and we should therefore pull our troops out.” That is not only illogical; it would mean that their lives had been truly wasted. If it is a just and necessary war, then we must wage it no matter what the casualties may be, but if it is not, then we should not be there at all, even if there were no casualties whatsoever. There can, of course, be a debate –amongst those who know far more about these things than you or I- as to whether or not our strategy and tactics are quite right. That debate is as old as warfare itself. There will always be a multitude of armchair generals ready to do that. But it’s not a debate for us.

What we did in Parliament on Monday, and what we do week by week down Wootton Bassett High Street is simply to honour the service – in some cases including the ultimate sacrifice – of our men and women of war. They carry out their orders. The orders of the generals and politicians who sent them to war. And they do so magnificently, and without question. That is why recognising their efforts in these ways, and thanking them for it, quite leaving aside any kind of political judgements, is so overwhelmingly important.

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