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March 10 posts
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jgale | 
11 March 2010 at 09:23 | 242 views
The next two weeks will probably be the last of the current Parliament, and as the clock ticks down the pace of the informal election campaign is stepping up.
This week I will be taking part in an Education Debate on Newsnight with Schools Secretary, Ed Balls MP and Conservative Spokesman, Michael Gove MP.
On Friday, I will be on the BBC Radio 4 “Any Questions” panel, and on Saturday I will be at the Liberal Democrat Conference in Birmingham.
Next Monday I will be taking part in a “Times Educational Supplement” schools and colleges debate in London….and so it goes on. Indeed, on Easter Sunday I will speaking at one of the teachers union conferences!
With all these national commitments, I am enjoying the time I am able to carve out for constituency responsibilities. And this often highlights issues of real concern to people, which are not always the issues on the national “radar screen”. For example, I am getting a lot of complaints about the state of road surfaces, and as I am driving around I am coming across vast potholes in both urban and rural areas alike. This is obviously a matter for the County Council rather than the Government, but I am more than happy to take up these issues on behalf of local residents.
Later this week I will also be celebrating the construction of a new bus shelter right outside Windermere Close in Yeovil. Every time I have called in at Windermere Close, the residents have been asking for a proper bus shelter – for at least five years! I think both they and I were wondering if the shelter would ever go up, but at last it has – and I am grateful to the Town and District Councils for their support on this.
It is good to see capital spending in our area on projects such as South Petherton Hospital and the new Oaklands Primary School in West Yeovil, because it is going to become increasingly difficult to secure such finance in the years to come.
Public spending growth is continuing until the end of the current financial year in March 2011, but it seems like one of those cartoons where a character runs very fast over the edge of a cliff, and continues for a while before glancing below, and plunging to the ground!
Public spending is carrying on as if nothing has happened, but the public finances have gone over the cliff, and government borrowing is running at record levels, and at some stage very soon gravity will re-assert itself and public spending will be under an awful lot of pressure.
The moment of reckoning has been postponed for a while, not least so that spending cuts do not topple the economy back over into recession again. But spending discipline cannot be long delayed.
After the General Election in early May, a new Government is likely to have to “look at the books”, and if the economy is by then recovering – still a big if – then I would expect public spending cuts in many areas to be announced from 2011 onwards.
What is really crucial is that we should take some hard decisions to cut out lower priority spending, so we can protect the spending that is highest priority – including on areas such as schools, colleges, the NHS and policing. Cutting out “waste” will help, but that will not be nearly enough to cut a £178bn deficit – it will also be necessary to take a hard look at some programmes. Without these tough choices we will be faced either with real problems in funding our debts, or with the need to put taxes up instead – not a happy prospect.
So the public sector will soon have to face some of the tough decisions that the private sector and private individuals have already had to face. Westminster needs to set its own example of prudence, by making big cuts to the cost of Government, and reducing the number of both MPs and Government Ministers.
These are the hard choices which will face any Government after the coming General Election,
Ever,
David.
jgale | 05 March 2010 at 13:34 | 200 views
At last we are in March, and warmer weather surely cannot be far away.
Last Saturday the former Liberal Democrat Leader Sir Menzies (Ming) Campbell visited our area, and on Saturday he spoke at a Public Meeting in South Petherton on a variety of Foreign policy issues.
Ming had flown down on Saturday morning from his own constituency of Edinburgh, which was still deep in snow and ice – so by comparison he found the temperature in South Petherton to be almost sub tropical.
Ming is an enthusiastic sportsman (with a fine record of his own in athletics), and he insisted on visiting Huish Park to see Yeovil Town play MK Dons. It was nowhere near as cold watching the match as I had expected, and we were warmed by Yeovil’s excellent first half performance and by a cracking Yeovil goal. The second half was a much tougher proposition, but Yeovil fought with determination to the bitter end, and secured a very valuable three points. Congratulations to Terry Skiverton and his team on taking six points from last week’s matches – this achievement could prove to have been very important indeed by the end of the season.
There was a collection at the Yeovil match for the national “Help for Heroes” charity, which raises money for servicemen who have been injured in Afghanistan and in other theatres of conflict. There could hardly be a better cause, and I am grateful to all those who have given so generously on this and other occasions.
After the match I had return to London, to work in the office on Sunday. As usual, I caught the train from Yeovil Junction, and I was relieved this week to find that there wasn’t any engineering work, and that it was not therefore necessary to catch a bus between Basingstoke and Woking (which has been the case on many weekends this year.)
The two and a half hour train journey up and down to London is one of the most enjoyable times of the week for me. I am able to clear quite a lot of paperwork, read the newspapers, and sometimes just “switch off” for half an hour or so. For a lot of the journey, mobile phone reception is very poor, which is actually a huge blessing. Being contactable 24 hours a day, and therefore always open to disruption and distraction, is for me one of the plagues of modern life. I am afraid I am rather old fashioned in that respect!
The staff at Yeovil Junction railway station are always brilliant too – friendly, patient, and good at steering me to the cheapest tickets. These days there are so many special deals and other considerations that using a machine is just no substitute for talking to a real person.
Imagine my seething anger, therefore, when I discovered last week that those wretched senior managers at South West Trains are yet again trying to close the ticket office at Crewkerne Station for half of the week.
We successfully fought off the plans by South West Trains to close the ticket office at midday and for all of Sunday, and yet only a year or so later they are trying again. Closed ticket offices are bad news. They mean passengers cannot access the cheapest fares. They mean waiting in the cold, as waiting rooms are locked. They mean reduced safety and reduced information for passengers.
I am determined to fight these proposals again. And this week I will be meeting the Transport Secretary, Lord Adonis, and asking him to tell South West Trains to take a hike. You would have thought this company had learned its lesson last year, but apparently not. I hope that local residents will once again send a clear and determined signal. We must get these proposals withdrawn.
Later this week some of the first Education debates of the General Election campaign will begin, and I will be taking part for the Liberal Democrats. I must have at least 10 of these debates over the next month, and there is no doubt that this is going to be a very busy period.
Ever,
David.