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2012

It’s so good to be truly proud of something British, for once - our magnificent athletes returning with a record number of medals from Beijing. What an inspiration they will be to our younger generation, and I hope that we’ll see a huge increase in fitness and sport of all kinds as a result of their role modelling, and a concomitant decline in video games and TV watching as a result. Maybe we’ll even see a small improvement in track and field events before 2012! But I do have to say that the medals around the necks of Team GB (as it was incorrectly called since that excludes Northern Ireland), should be reward enough without the “honours” which the Prime Minister rather in-advisedly promised them, presumably in the hope that some of their prowess may vicariously rub off on him!

But do you remember that nostalgic scene at the end of “The Great Gatsby”, where the long hot summer of partying is over; the shutters are being put up, a few leaves blowing around the swimming pool, the glitterati gone? Well I guess it must be feeling a bit like that in Beijing today after what must rank as one of the most lavish parties, the most superb PR opportunities in history. The wonderfully orchestrated opening and closing ceremonies, the tens of thousands of well-drilled performers, security guards, customer hosts, the world’s leaders gracing the ice-water chilled seats, brilliantly run games themselves, the city’s environment and air quality improved, press comment carefully controlled, hardly a mention of the T word (Tibet…shh…don’t mention it.) But today: they’ve all gone just like the party goers at the end of the Gatsby Summer.

So now its London’s chance, but didn’t you just hate that effort at self-promotion – a red bus, David Beckham, an ageing strummer from Led Zeppelin, dear old Boris looking a shambles. Is that really all that London can offer the world? And anyhow, should that noblest of competitions the Olympic Games really have become such a showcase for the host country? Is it really right that China spent £18billion, that we will spend £9Billion, not on improving sports facilities, not on training for our athletes, but on fireworks displays? Are the twirling umbrellas, the giant footprints in the sky, the graphic description of the way that China invented printing really anything at all to do with sport at all? I think not.

So I’d like to celebrate our great sporting achievement, to laud the games themselves which are the pinnacle of the sporting world; to use them as inspiring role models for our youngsters, to invest heavily in sports facilities (remember what a battle we had locally to save the Lime Kiln Leisure Centre in Wootton Bassett and those in Calne and Cricklade too?); in other words to use the ancient Greek notion of the Olympics to promote sport; but to do our best to escape from the lavish self-promotion which seems to have become such an integral part of the Olympic movement.

So here are some messages for my Conservative colleagues, Seb Coe, Colin Moynihan and Boris Johnson, who are to run our games in 2012:- let’s get it back to what the ancient Greeks intended. Let’s celebrate sporting prowess in the simplest and purest sort of way; let’s show the world that we don’t need billions of pounds worth of fireworks to promote London, but that we are ready to spend money on the real thing, the main thing: athleticism. A Guards Band and HM the Queen declaiming “Let the Games Commence” should be the British – the understated - way.

Malmesbury

Malmesbury – the opening of whose splendid new Athelstan Museum I attended on Friday – really is a very special place.

“This turf and twig I give to thee as free as King Athelstan gave to me and I trust a Loving Brother thou wilt be” as the Steward of the King’s Heath intones as he strikes a new Commoner of the Oldest Borough in England three times on the back with a birch twig. The freemen of Malmesbury claim direct male descent from the Malmesburians to whom King Athelstan gave the freedom of the Borough. The Abbey of course is redolent with history and traditions – Eilmer the flying monk who so nearly invented flying in the year 800; the famous chronicler, William of Malmesbury; Hannah Twynnoy, the servant girl who was eaten by a tiger from a visiting fair in 1703; the town’s canny handling of the English Civil War.

Malmesbury has a fascinating political history too. The town returned two MPs until the Great Reform Act of 1832, they being chosen by the Old Corporation, reputedly on the strength of the value of the gold coinage hidden under the pewter dinner plates at a pre-election banquet paid for by said prospective parliamentary candidate! The Old Corporation tried to persuade me that that was a tradition worthy of revival – a kind invitation which I sadly had to decline! But that old tradition is commemorated by the town’s coat of arms high in a stained glass window in St Stephen’s Chapel in Parliament, through which I pass every day on my way into the Chamber. Charles James Fox was one of the MPs so chosen – to this day Wiltshire folk call a fox “a Charlie” in commemoration of his wily ways. Then there was Walter Powell the MP and pioneer balloonist commemorated in the name of the Little Somerford Primary School, who was last seen sailing off into the Atlantic in his hot air balloon waving his handkerchief in farewell. One keen local balloonist suggested a re-enactment recently – another invitation I was unable to accept for fear of a by-election! Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan, and best remembered by his discussion of whether or not life needs be “nasty brutish and short” was born and brought up in Malmesbury, and is commemorated every year by rather a special dinner.

Local history and especially local political history is one of my keenest personal interests, and Malmesbury, and its splendid new museum are fertile grounds for rooting around and remembering those who have gone before. “Remember, Remember the fifth of November, Gunpowder, Treason and plot.” (A plot said to have been hatched in the King’s Head Pub in Chippenham, which served for a time as the Conservative Party HQ locally!)  Remember history or be condemned to repeat it. Or as one famous historian, EA Freeman said: “History is past politics and politics is present history.” Maybe those wisdoms, and some of the simpler lessons from the Athelstan Museum would be well remembered by the statesmen of today – in Georgia and Russia (the Soviet Empire); in Afghanistan (Nineteenth Century wars in the North West Frontier and beyond); in Iraq (The Mesopotamia Question); in the Balkans (The Assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo in 1914) and in so many other ways. Maybe even Mr Brown would do well to remember 1979!

Olympics

How can President Bush and Prime Minister Putin have carried on enjoying the Olympic festivities in Beijing as Russian planes bombed civilian targets in Georgia in an action rather reminiscent of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, or even perhaps of Hungary. The politics of South Ossetia are beyond most of us. But surely it could be sorted out without the appalling bloodshed and refugees we have been seeing on our screens. It even seems to amount to a kind of ethnic cleansing.

Meanwhile in the Olympic stadium itself, anyone found to be in favour of democracy, or anyone who is foolish enough to unfurl a flag of St George to support an English athlete risks being carted off to the Gulag (in the week that Soljenitsyn died.) Anyone mentioning their view that Tibet might have some kind of a right to self-determination will be suppressed just as brutally as the South Ossetians, who also suffer from that mild form of self-delusion – that they should be allowed democratically to decide their own future.

In a four hour orgy of self-praise costing billions of pounds, which of course could not be watched by a vast swathe of Chinese subsistence farmers far too poor to afford a TV, the world’s leaders were regaled with propaganda about how magnificent is the last great Communist dictatorship in the world – the nation which prevents voting of any kind; the nation with the highest capital punishment rate in the world, many of the executions being in public; the nation responsible for Tiananmen Square.

Now I happen to be a great lover of China, their culture and their people. But I have no hesitation in condemning so much that goes on there. I am also much in favour of individualism. If people want to protest about Tibet, why not let them? I’ve always been in favour of protests such as the hideously ugly mess in Parliament Square in London created over many years by peace protestor Brian Haw. I’d much rather that these rather daft eccentrics were amusing themselves daubing nonsensical posters in Westminster than sitting at home making bombs. Suppressing protest as the Chinese have done makes their brave efforts to try to make themselves look positively Western in their civilisation really rather nauseating.

I would love to welcome China to the real world. But if she wants to join us, she must also be ready to accept our high standards of human rights and civil liberties.

Incidentally, call me a miserly old curmudgeon if you will, but I really do hope that the London Olympics in four years time will dump at least some of the razzmatazz. Four hours of performances bearing little if any relationship to athletics felt like a thoroughly unhealthy orgy of politically motivated self-praise. Let’s get the Olympics back to what the ancient Greeks intended them to be – true trials of strength and athletic prowess. So I hope that Seb Coe and Boris Johnson and the others involved in planning for 2012 will opt for a simple opening ceremony. A Guards band and HM the Queen declaiming “Let the Games Commence” will suffice. Something like that would seem to me to be much more in tune with the Olympian spirit, and frankly altogether more British. (Always assuming that unlike the Ossetians and the Tibetans we are still allowed that national pride and independence of thought).

Parish Councils

I understood- and rather enjoyed – the letter in the gazette a couple of weeks ago which enquired “Where do all the MPs go when they leave the Chamber after PM’s Questions on a Wednesday,” and why is the Chamber always so empty when you look in at any other time? Let me answer the question briefly:- to any one of the forty or so Committee Rooms where the real business of Parliament is carried out, and which are full from 9 to 5 every single day of the week; to any one of the 2000 or so other rooms round the Palace for a variety of meetings; to one’s own room to try to keep up to date with the 1000 or more communications we receive a week; to the constituency for some vital event or meeting; or to any one of the dozens of other places and people and events which constantly demand an MP’s attention. Quite frankly if we sat in the Chamber for eight hours a day simply listening in to what may well be a fairly humdrum debate we really would not be getting our work done.

Rather the same when the long Summer Recess starts – oh that’s the MPs all off for their three month holiday. Rather like clergymen who are often accused of working only one day in the week, nothing could be further from the truth. A few days here and there on holiday, but the rest of it firmly taken up with Constituency engagements of all sorts, and always with keeping on top of the ceaseless letters and emails. This summer, for example, I have set myself a target of visiting as many as I can of the fifty or so Parish and Town Councils in the area, and I am greatly enjoying doing so.

In many respects, the work of the parish councillor is one of the most important, and perhaps sometimes least appreciated, of all of our layers of elected governance. They deal with so very many aspects of our day to day lives, pavements and tracks, grass cutting and cemeteries, village halls and recreation grounds, public lavatories and so much else. They also play an important advisory and lobbying role in areas like parking and planning. Their role seems to me likely to become even more important in the years to come for two particular reasons.

First, despite their best efforts to the contrary, the abolition of the district councils from next June to be replaced a by a single-tier “Wiltshire Council” will inevitably mean some degree of centralisation in Trowbridge, which by definition will also mean a greater degree of remoteness from our local areas. Parish Councils should in my view be aiming to help bridge the gulf by making sure that local interests are well and truly represented and heard in the corridors of power in County Hall.

And second, there seems to me to be a progressive sucking of local services into the neighbouring urban areas at the expense of our villages. Post offices closing, doctors surgeries amalgamating into polyclinics, cottage hospitals closing, village shops disappearing, schools merging, businesses moving to the outskirts of our towns, village transport non-existent; these and doubtless many similar trends, risk turning our once vibrant villages and market towns into dormitory areas devoid of real local services. Parish and Town Councils can have a very real role in fighting against that trend by constantly revitalising our rural communities.

So I salute the work of parish and town councillors who I have been meeting on my rural peregrinations. They do essential work, and their role in the future will be, if anything, even more important than in the past.

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