North Wiltshire Conservatives - Blog

Monday 17^th Worst Great Western Train is late as usual, so only just make it to Parliament for an 1130 interview on Palace Green – the lawn across from Big Ben - with ITV West about the campaign to reverse the threatened cuts in Chippenham Hospital. A quick meeting with An Air Marshall, and rather against my better judgement, Tory renegade MP Quentin Davies to discuss how we can improve relations with the armed services. I tell him in no uncertain terms that if Ministers apologised for the almighty muck-up in Iraq and properly explained the very good reasons why we are in Afghanistan for the longhaul, and then if they gave our forces the equipment and personnel they need, any annoyance at uniforms in our high streets would disappear. I bet he won’t deliver that message to his new masters! Back over to the The Green for an interview with Abu Dhabi TV, look into a St Patrick’s Day Reception, then into the Chamber to ask a question about small rural schools and how to avoid their amalgamations. Another radio interview on hospitals and a private dinner to round it off.

Tuesday 18^th. Into Parliament by 8.30 for a meeting to discuss NATO. 1030 sees me making an impromptu speech in a Statutory Instrument Committee about why it is that despite their promises the Government are going to charge £17.50 to renew driving licences; 1230 – take part in a Westminster Hall debate about TB and badgers; 1pm: lunch with Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust to discuss amongst other things, the Great Bustard Project on Salisbury Plain which I visited last weekend; 2.30 ask a question about Chippenham Hospital; look into the Defra Select Committee discussing British Waterways; 7.00: Speak at a large meeting of the Bow Group about the Conservative Party Security at Home and Abroad policy group on which I served last year; grab a bite in the tea room, before five budget votes, each of which takes quarter of an hour or so. My Adjournment debate on Chippenham Hospital doesn’t get off the ground as a result until 1115, by which time all of my colleagues except Westbury’s Andrew Murrison have headed off home. A worthwhile debate, despite the Government and PCT seeking to take the wind out of its sails by announcing a doubling of the saved beds in Chippenham Hospital during the afternoon. I don’t mind. It means that the campaign has had the desired effect! Off to bed about 1230 pretty knackered after seven or eight speeches or interventions, and three or four media interviews.

Wednesday 20^th. A morning in the office wading through paper until Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Questions at 1130, PMQs at 1200, a Statement on Security Policy at 1230 and an Opposition Day debate at 1.30 on Post Offices, in all of which I try to “catch the Speaker’s eye”, and in all of which I fail. Feast and Famine, although I do manage to speak briefly at the end of the day on behalf of Lacock Post Office, now tragically closing, and Yatton Keynell, still hanging on by its fingertips. It is disgraceful that Labour MPs who are campaigning locally to keep their local post offices open, nonetheless accepted their whip and voted in Parliament to close them. They will pay for their rank hypocrisy at the ballot box. Eventually lose the vote by only 20 –one of the narrowest majorities in recent times.

I have to admit that I rather drifted off during Alistair Darling’s First (and very probably last) Budget speech last week. It was almost studiously boring. The economy is in such dire straits, with apparently worse to come, that any overt increase in taxation was out of the question, yet saddled with Gordon Brown’s massive debt burden and a politically driven reluctance to make any savings at all in Government expenditure, there was really very little indeed that he could do apart from drone on for an hour or two, and hope that no-one would notice some of the very damaging announcements which he tried to slip out in the accompanying press statements. (£120 per year extra tax for every family, beer tax making family pubs like those locally run so well by Wadsworth potentially unviable as businesses.)

Anyhow, as I was quietly day dreaming, it occurred to me to think that I was not listening to a Socialist – nothing as exciting as that for Mr Darling nor his puppet-master Mr Brown. I was listening to a Seventeenth Century Puritan. A roundhead to David Cameron’s rather Cavalier swash-buckling charm. Parliament had slipped back a few hundred years to the cheerless Cromwellians telling everyone in minute detail what they must do in their private lives, abolishing or taxing anything that was even remotely “fun” and seeking to impose their own self-righteously dreary way of life on the whole country.

This Government’s certainty that they know best, and that everyone must be just like them, lay behind the Adjournment Debate which I called in Parliament on Tuesday, which will be reported in detail elsewhere in this week’s Gazette. They don’t understand Rural areas. They don’t like them. Why should Chippenham have a hospital? Why can’t you Wiltshire types neatly conform with what we are doing in our Labour controlled inner-City areas? What’s wrong with the fact that we pay you £1155 per head for healthcare in Wiltshire, £300 per head less than that in Labour controlled Northumberland and London? Why won’t you just shut up and do what the Chairman and Chief Executive of the Wiltshire Primary Care Trust tell you to do?

Jeff James, the Chief Executive is the latest in a long string of unfortunate Government puppets given office in PCT HQ in Devizes to implement Gordon Brown’s health cuts, and the Chairman, Tony Barron, a life-long Liberal Democrat activist and political agent is no better. Their job ought to be to stand up for the people of Wiltshire, and argue the case for more funds and better provision. My experience of them is that they shamelessly spin the Government’s tale, and implement deep and damaging cuts in our healthcare. Chippenham Hospital cannot survive with 10 beds rather than the current 43. It will not be a hospital in any real sense. I call on the PCT Board and Officers to stand up for the people they are supposed to be serving, and to abandon this disgraceful plan to wreck Chippenham Hospital. If they refuse to do so for careerist reasons, Oliver Cromwell – and Alistair Darling- would be proud of them.

Parliament’s Central Lobby – the magnificently over the top Gothic centrepiece of the Palace of Westminster - has a feature which is unique amongst the World’s Parliaments – it is a public room, in which all British citizens are welcome. Any voter who survives the increasingly rigorous security procedures, can go up to the Reception Desk and ask to see his MP. A little green form is filled up, and despatched round the 2000 rooms in the Palace in the hope of summonsing said MP to have his ear bent by his constituent. Try that in any other parliament and they’d lock you up! Now it is perfectly true that the attendant very rarely manages to find the MP. But most of us will at very least write the following day to enquire about the constituent’s interest. Mass lobbying of this kind can be very effective at very least in bringing an issue to the top of an MP’s overbrimming in-tray, if not actually changing his mind on it.

I very much welcome visitors of all sorts. In the last week or so I have welcomed a group seeking the referendum on the Lisbon Treaty of which we were so cruelly robbed by the Liberal Democrats; I met a gang of farmers with Winnie the pig demonstrating outside Downing Street on the catastrophic times facing pig farmers in Wiltshire; I showed a group from Grittleton School around, and had an hour with the Malmesbury Chamber of Commerce; I met the Chief Executive of the Prospect Hospice in Wroughton, and took tea in the House of Lords with the Royal Artillery Hunt. Each and every one of them came to Parliament with an agenda and their views, together with the tens of thousands of others expressed every day in the House by lobbyists, journalists, interest groups, friends, constituents, amalgamate together into the giant stew which is legislation and government. The quality of the end product is entirely dependent on the mix going in, although of course it is often hard to say which particular ingredient was the most decisive in the end result.

I cannot say, for example, that my two oral questions this week- calling for a gallantry medal for soldiers killed or injured in Afghanistan (to be called the “Prince Harry”) and castigating Worst Great Western and asking Ruth Kelly to consider reopening their franchise - will necessarily result in the ends I was seeking. After all, I must have spoken, intervened, voted, tens of thousands of times since I became an MP and since my Party is in Opposition, I apparently lost every one of them. But who can say whether or not my small voice may or may not have added to others to tip the occasional balance in our favour? (Or at least so we Opposition MPs must keep telling ourselves, or we’d risk going mad with frustration.)

The way in which opinion is formed, law made, the administration of our country influenced, is a mysterious and multi-faceted thing. All one can be sure of is that if we do nothing; if we fail to raise our voices, fail to write our letters, fail to take part in mass lobbies, fail to vote, write letters to the papers, bend the odd journalist’s ear, take part in TV debates and interviews; if we shirk our responsibilities to do these things, then one thing is for sure: our opinion stands no chance of holding sway. “ Evil triumphs if good men say nothing.” So I very much welcome visitors, letters, phone calls, emails. I may not agree with them; I may not act on them. But I very much respect the trouble which has been taken to let me know people’s views. Parliament – Old French, I think for “the place where people speak”. And speaking, writing, emails is the oil which lubricates the vast machine which is our Parliamentary democracy.

I very much applaud Prince Harry’s determination to serve in

Afghanistan

with his men, and am glad that the press blackout lasted long enough for him to have seen action without his presence in any way endangering those with whom he was serving. I salute the young Prince (as I do all of his colleagues in Afghanistan), for his bravery and determination, alongside his sheer professionalism and cheerfulness under pretty awful conditions. He is an example to the Nation, and that we are justly proud of him is demonstrated by the wall-to-wall coverage of his deployment since Thursday when the story “broke.”

How ironic it is that at the same time as we are celebrating a member of our Royal Family’s commitment to his duty and his Nation, Parliament is at the same moment busy signing away yet more of our Sovereignty in the Lisbon Treaty. We Conservatives voted against the Treaty as a whole since we believe that it is a further and probably irrevocable step towards a “United States of Europe” which we abhor. At very least if we are to go down this path, then the people should be given the opportunity of voting for it or- more probably – against it, in the referendum which all three parties promised in their manifestoes at the time of the last General Election. Labour have reneged on that promise on the wholly spurious grounds that this “treaty” is quite different to the “Constitution” on which they promised a referendum – a claim acknowledged by all to be utter nonsense.

Most deceptive of all – and rather foolish to boot- are the Liberal Democrats who are so committed to an “ever closer European Union” that they too are terrified of a Referendum which might well result in a “no” vote, and which would at very least expose their federalist credentials by forcing them to campaign for a “yes” vote. In a vain attempt to cover their embarrassment, they tried to propose an amendment which would have resulted in an “In/Out” referendum, ignoring the fact that that could not possibly be included in the Lisbon Treaty, because it is beyond its scope. The Speaker ruled their motion out of order, as a result of which they staged a childish protest with them all walking out of the Commons Chamber and their Foreign Affairs spokesman being ignominiously banned form the Commons for 24 hours for his bad behaviour. Nick Clegg is now trying to impose a “three line whip” abstention on the Conservative call for a Referendum, which at the time of writing looks like risking a substantial rebellion by his backbenchers, especially those from the West country who realise the electoral consequences.

If this treaty is as fundamental a change in the way that we in Britain are to be governed in the future, then it is only right that the people should decide and should do so in the referendum which we Conservatives demand.

Meanwhile in a truly democratic move, hundreds of people attended a public meeting in Chippenham on Saturday to protest at the proposed cut in beds at the Hospital from 43 to 10. The Chairman and Chief Executive of the Primary Care Trust with whom I had a stormy meeting the night before were too scared of the outcry to attend the meeting. Their cowardice and their disgraceful plans to wreck Chippenham Hospital stand at the other end of the spectrum from the example set by Prince Harry.