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Summer Recess

It is always with some sense of relief that we reach the end of the Summer Term, and the House breaks up for the Long Recess. July is hot and claustrophobic in London, the legislative process is nearing is often bad-tempered end, and MPs and staff alike are quite frankly tired out and longing for a break. That is especially true this year after what has by any standards been a pretty torrid period, what with the banking crisis and the recession, unemployment and financial worries, the MPs’ expenses scandal, resultant changes to the way Parliament runs, Iraq and Afghanistan, political turmoil of the most dramatic kind with constant questions about the future of the Prime Minister culminating in the dramatic Norwich North by-election. So whatever the tabloids may say about “82 day holidays,” we do all need a break.

Some organisation is circulating a questionnaire about how we will be spending our Recess, and apparently threatening to turn up at events and take photos of us all. Well it may not surprise you to hear that I will not be playing that particular game. But I am happy to tell you that my holiday this year amounts to a snatched three nights in Italy, although I suppose to many people living in as wonderful a part of the world as this could itself be thought of as holiday. I have a variety of events booked over the summer in the constituency- my usual surgeries, visiting  parish councils, attending Conservative party events of every kind, holding my regular political supper clubs, attending or opening assorted garden parties and fetes, attending the Parliamentary South West Regional Grand Committee in Exeter, the Party Conference in Manchester, judging and presenting the Wootton Bassett in Bloom competition, a week in Tibet as part of a Parliamentary delegation, speaking to the Rotary Club, attending a couple of Defra Select Committee meetings in London, and a variety of similar engagements. So it’s a useful time to re-engage with the constituency. The emails continue to pile in at an astonishing rate over the summer, as do the hundreds of letters and phone calls, and staff holidays mean that I will deal with a fair bit of it myself. And I do manage a bit of reading and writing in what really is the only time in the year that we get an opportunity to do so. So its not an idle time by any stretch of the imagination.

But there’s another point which the tabloids are missing. If indeed- as they seem to imply – Parliament should be in session for a great deal longer than it is, then all that would happen would be that we get a great deal more legislation, regulation, red tape, bossiness and interference in our everyday lives than we do at the moment. I have always been a libertarian and a minimalist in terms of legislation. It would be great to imagine a Queen’s Speech where Her Majesty stood up and intoned “My government will be repealing a large amount of legislation and regulation but will introduce no bills at all.”

So while –especially in the aftermath of the Expenses scandal – a degree of slightly self-righteous outrage at the “82 days holiday” is only to be expected, not only do I think that it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what Parliament is there to do (longer is not necessarily better in that context), but it also ignores the vast amount of work which is done by all of us during the Recess. My job is not necessarily to sit in an empty Chamber listening to backbenchers droning on. And the rest of the work carries on pretty relentlessly over the Summer. And anyhow, while I make no complaint about it, a year’s worth of 80/90 hour weeks, usually 7 days a week, and at pretty immense pressure is mentally and physically exhausting. And just a little bit of R and R here in glorious North Wiltshire is all I ask for.

Community

I was very touched and struck by the sheer exuberance and enthusiasm shown by the wonderful group of students from Malmesbury, South Africa who I visited last Friday morning as they sang their wonderful National Anthem, Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika to that magnificent and redolent Causa tune. Why can’t we be as straightforward and just joyful in our performances, I thought to myself in rather an unpatriotic sort of way. I was forced to eat my words that evening when I was privileged to hear the wonderful Avebury Vocal Ensemble performing in the private chapel at Bowood, and again on Saturday when I very much enjoyed the amateur performance of The Taming of The Shrew in the Victoria Gardens in Bath (and thankfully it stayed dry throughout!) So we Brits are just as enthusiastic (and professional) performers.

There’s more to it than that. We here are fortunate that ordinary people get out and about and simply DO things. We have a community where people entertain each other, help each other, have fun together. The performers as much as the African children were enjoying entertaining us almost as much as we were enjoying being entertained by them. It’s all about people escaping from their TV screens and front rooms and getting out into the community.

For example, in the last week or so I have attended: a London dinner hosted by some Yorkshire Farmers concerned about the state of the industry, been filmed by Caron Cooper from Fosse Farmhouse taking tea on the Terrace of the House of Commons to help promote her relations with Japan; attended three sad repatriations in Wootton Bassett attended by so many thousands of people; welcomed the Chippenham primary schools to Parliament as they took part in the excellent Children’s’ Parliament initiative; attended the Meat and Livestock BBQ and the All Party Beer Group annual dinner; spent a couple of days campaigning in the by-election in Norwich; held surgeries in Chippenham and Corsham and attended a BBQ in Crudwell.

Now the point is that none of those things was essential. None of them required for the better running of the country. But each of them in their own very different ways contributing to Society – to Community – to people intermingling with one another, having some fun, making a contribution in one way or another. Communing.

All of that is what marks off a successful, caring, jolly, involved sort of community from the starkly lonely communities which we might find especially in some parts of our inner cities. It is that sort of activity which makes life worth living; which teaches our young how to behave properly in a decent society. It is the glue which holds a worthwhile society such as ours together. So long may it last, and all strength and encouragement to the enthusiastic individuals who make all of these things happen. They can always be certain of every possible help and encouragement from me in all of their many and varied initiatives and activities.

The Place Where People Talk

“Parliament” – the old French, I think, for “The place where People talk.” And we certainly do plenty of that in Westminster. In the Chamber debates, Question Time, points of order; in Westminster Hall minor debates on  a variety of matters; in any one of the forty or so committee rooms which are in use 12 hours a day; or in the corridors, bars and restaurants. People meeting up and talking; changing their opinions; persuading each other; plotting. A physical meeting may sometimes at least lead to a meeting of minds.

That was rather illustrated by three of my constituency engagements last weekend. The Malmesbury Area Board of the new Wiltshire Council, which like the other 17 area boards across the County was launched last week, will be a useful forum for the collection of local opinions, and no doubt the dissemination of Council policy on various matters. It covered areas of discussion as diverse as Community Area Partnerships, town and parish councils and their ongoing role, update from Police, Fire Service and NHS. The Malmesbury Boy Racers obliged the meeting by roaring round and round the Town Hall usefully illustrating a particular problem under discussion. If indeed, as the police said, the outrageous souped-up exhaust noise they were making was within the law, then it is a demonstrable case of the law needing to be changed. I invited the Chief Constable to write to me to say so, and I will take it up with the Home Secretary. It was particularly good to see some Year 9 students from Malmesbury School presenting the results of their recent Opinion Survey amongst the whole school. Who said young people were not interested in what is going on around them?

Year 9 students from Hardenhuish and Sheldon Schools in Chippenham, from Corsham and Wootton Bassett, from John Bentley, Springfield  and St Mary’s in Calne, and from Bradon Forest in Purton, came together in the Council Chamber in County Hall, Trowbridge on Friday. They were craftily disguised as National Delegations attending the UN Conference on Climate Change which is to be held in Copenhagen in December, and I had the tough task of judging their presentations. Each had spent a large part of the previous three days discussing climate change, how it would affect their particular countries – from Chad,  Opec, Iceland and the smaller islands, through Brazil, India and China, to the US, UK and Russia – and what they could individually and collectively do to combat Global Warming while still looking after their own interests . (A tough job, especially for OPEC!) There were some outstandingly good presentations, again demonstrating the nonsense that is often talked about young people not getting engaged with current affairs. St Mary’s Calne won the gold award, but Springfield School were particularly commended at Silver level for their efforts with Bradon Forest coming a very commendable third. Once again it was all about people of different backgrounds coming together to try to find some kind of a meeting of minds.

And my surgeries in Wootton Bassett and Malmesbury on Saturday were as well attended as ever by all sorts of people seeking my views or assistance with a wide variety of problems and issues. They could have done it by letter or email. Of course they could, and some MPs cancelled their surgeries long ago as being out of date and superceded by modern IT. But I don’t agree with them. Meeting constituents face to face in the privacy of my surgery enables me to get a far better feel for the issue than any email ever would.

Building a Better Future for Britain

                                    Building a Better Future for Britain

The hottest day of the year saw an exhausted looking and slightly sweaty Prime Minister come to the House to make a Statement entitled Building a Better Future for Britain. “But – hang on a minute,” I thought. “Isn’t he the guy whose been running Britain for the last 12 years? Maybe he means he’s going to call a General Election. That would ensure a ‘Better Future for Britain’. I’d better go along to hear the glad news.” Sadly, of course, I was wrong.

Mr Brown seemed oblivious to the obvious irony of this latest attempt at a relaunch of his premiership. He seemed unaware that by announcing his legislative programme for the next Session of Parliament he was most ungallantly pre-empting Her Majesty The Queen. He seemed unembarrassed that most of the minor policies he was announcing were either a re-announcement of some pretty ancient stuff, or in a few instances ideas stolen from the Conservative party. And he seemed unashamed that despite Mr Speaker Bercow’s exasperation, his spin doctors had announced most of the ideas in the national newspapers 24 hours previously. So I have to say that if our only hope of ‘Building a Better Future for Britain’ is this tissue of insubstantial, re-announced or wholly unfunded minor ideas, then we’d better all start planning to emigrate.

Lord Mandelson had anyhow fundamentally undermined his boss that morning by announcing on the Today Programme that there was to be no further spending review this side of an Election. Well in that case, how could Mr Brown be announcing all sorts of new spending initiatives? I am afraid it just doesn’t stack up.

The whole debate over public spending in the last week or two has been rather phoney. The facts are that for a variety of reasons – by no means all of them made in America or round the World as Mr Brown would have us believe- we are now indebted more than any country in the history of modern economics has been indebted. The interest payments alone on our national loans come to more than the whole of the health and the defence budgets put together. It is touch and go as to whether or not the “gilt auctions” by which Governments finance their debt can continue successfully, failing which we are technically a bankrupt country. And with that as background, it seems to me as plain as the nose on your face that one thing we just can’t do is go on trying to spend our way out of trouble.

I’m not close enough to it to know whether we have to cut some public spending – although I am sure that we will do some like the £16 billion planned for the pointless ID cards project – or whether there may be some necessity at some stage or another to increase taxes. But in my own simple way, I am clear that the one thing we can’t do is just go on the way we are, bury our heads even deeper in the sand, and hope that our debt mountain will go away. It won’t. And no amount of dopey new initiatives entitled things like “Building a Better Future for Britain” will make it.

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