David Cameron is sinking in a Sea of Troubles

Posted on October 29, 2010 by maryhoneyballmep

If you were so inclined, you could almost feel sorry for David Cameron.

Yesterday Boris took to the airwaves being utterly Borisly bonkers talking about “Kosovo style social cleansing” in relation to the coalition’s housing benefit proposals while pole cat Tebbit regaled us with “Vichy style betrayal” on the EU budget. Wow, it’s not exactly cricket is it?

Some us thought any tensions within the coalition would be between the two parties, Liberal-Democrat against Conservative. Instead we have Tory against Tory, and it’s stratospheric. The London Mayor goes leftie in a big way and a high-profile grandee delivers a devastating right-wing one liner.

One, of course, one is right while the other is wrong.

I never thought I would say that Boris Johnson is right, but he is on the proposed housing benefit cuts. There is general agreement that a cap on housing benefit will drive people out of high rent properties in central London. Local authorities in the capital have already block-booked bed and breakfast accommodation out of London, as reported in my blog post on Monday. Mark Field, Conservative MP for the Cities of London and Westminster, said the same on the Today programme this morning.

As for Lord Tebbit, he is one of a number of Eurosceptics spitting blood at what they perceive as David Cameron’s failure. Daniel Hannan MEP on Channel 4 News yesterday evening and Roger Helmer MEP on the Today programme this morning were not at all shy in coming forward. Their message was simple and direct: Cameron should have stood firm and not agreed to any increase in the EU budget.

Roger Helmer’s argument is interesting if completely unrealistic. He thinks that Cameron should have held out against the treaty change Angela Merkel is demanding to improve the stability of the Euro, in return for a freeze in the EU budget.

In the event Cameron has gone with the European Council’s 2.9% with hardly a murmur. The claim by William Hague that Cameron has achieved some kind of consensus with other EU leaders that the next EU financial perspectives from 2014 to 2020 will take account of member states’ efforts to move their deficits on to a more realistic path will, I am sure, be seen as the political spin it obviously is. 2014 is a long time away and 2020 even further. Agreement on an unpredictable future which starts four years hence is really not difficult to find. We can all coalesce around a fantasy.

So the Tories are splitting, and the government has very little in the way of either a defence or constructive forward thinking.

We may well be seeing the beginning of Europe emerging in reality, as well as speculation, as the coalition’s fault line.       

PS  Just to give you further evidence that David Cameron was completely wrong to accuse Labour MEPs of voting in favour the EU budget last week, you may like to click on this link to the Channel 4 News blog fact checker.

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Margaret Thatcher, David Cameron certainly is not!

Posted on October 28, 2010 by maryhoneyballmep

Following much hot air from David Cameron he has revealed just what an empty vessel he really is.

Conceding defeat the prime minister told fellow European leaders ahead of today’s summit in Brussels that he accepts the £107bn EU budget will have to increase by a minimum of 2.9%, the figure already accepted by the European Council, reports the Guardian.

Cameron’s much vaunted telephone offensive which included Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, and Herman van Rompuy, the president of the European council about the budget obviously got nowhere.

David Cameron is revealing that he is no Margaret Thatcher and has failed to stand his ground.  The Iron Lady famously stood up to the EU and negotiated a rebate for Britain which has endured to this day. Cameron, on the other hand, has thrown in the towel with undue haste.   

It’s hardly surprising that the Tory Eurosceptics, who have been urging Cameron to fight for a freeze or a cut in the EU budget, are angry. They supported David Cameron because they thought he was one of them.  Yes, Cameron did make sure the Tories in the European Parliament left the centre right European People’s Party to join up with a group of right-wingers whom Nick Clegg famously called a “bunch of nutters”.

However, Cameron is not delivering for the Eurosceptics now and they are not holding back in putting forward their point of view. Bill Cash, Peter Lilley and a host of others were very much in evidence in the Commons Chamber yesterday.

All this goes to show that when a politician does something for short term gain, such as Cameron promising anti-EU measures to get himself elected as Tory Leader, this will come back to bite him very hard when the day of reckoning comes and he cannot deliver his promises. While Margaret Thatcher did deliver hers, David Cameron is proving unable to do so.

Perhaps David Cameron’s assertion that Labour MEPs voted for the 5.9% increase in the EU budget which came before the European Parliament in Strasbourg last week was part of his plan to assuage his Eurosceptic wing.  Who knows?

But what David Cameron said was incorrect. Labour MEPs voted against the final vote to adopt the EU budget. We were very sure that it was wrong at the present time to ask for such an increase in EU spending.

Fortunately Chris Leslie MP, one of Labour’s Treasury Spokespersons, was able to put this right in the Commons debate.

I wonder why Cameron got it so wrong. He does, after all, have an army of researchers at Number 10 and in Whitehall and the EU votes are published a few hours after the votes are taken. He also has several Conservative MEPs who would have known the score.

It could, perhaps be that he wished to discredit the Labour Party by putting out deliberate misinformation. If this is anywhere near the truth, Cameron and his Tory cohorts will brings politics further into disrepute and should be ashamed of themselves.

The European Parliament vote is important in the EU final decision making process on the budget.  As a result of various decisions over the past few years, both the European Parliament and the European Council (the EU member state governments) have equal weight in coming to an agreement on the budget. 

This means that although Cameron has accepted the 2.9% increase, this may not be the final outcome as negotiations between the European Parliament and the Council are currently underway to come to a compromise.

Despite all the brouhaha, the EU budget is not on the formal agenda of today’s European summit but will only be discussed in the margins. If the 2.9% increase is agreed, Britain will contribute an extra £435.2m. If a higher percentage is negotiated, Cameron’s coalition government may get even more than they were bargaining for.

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David Cameron is wrong about Labour MEPs and the EU Budget

Posted on October 27, 2010 by maryhoneyballmep

Shortly after the end of Prime Minister’s Questions today I heard that David Cameron had accused Labour MEPs of voting in favour of the EU budget last week. He, of course, castigated this and said we were wasteful, profligate and generally not fit for purpose (or words to that effect).

In fact, Mr Cameron, Labour MEPs are none of these things since we voted against the budget in Strasbourg last week.  Since Labour MEPs are utterly responsible we took the view that while many member states, including the UK, are facing financial difficulties, the EU should also rein in its spending.

I, and no doubt my Labour MEP colleagues, look forward to an apology from the Prime Minister.

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The LSE considers going private

Posted on October 27, 2010 by maryhoneyballmep

The London School of Economics has presented plans about going private to its governing body in the wake the coalition’s cuts to higher education.  Apparently, along with Cambridge University, they feel there may comes a point after which it is simply not worth them staying in the state sector, even if they charge the proposed top rate of fee of ₤7,000 a year. 

The 40% cuts that the coalition is proposing for the higher education sector is going to disproportionately hit arts and humanities subjects, and LSE, being a world leader in social and political sciences, will feel the brunt more than most.

A letter signed by the chairman and director of the LSE, sent to Vince Cable regarding his statements on the Browne Report, strongly criticises his emphasis on subjects which provide specific skills, such as science and technology, over others.  The letter states that:

“No case is made in the report to suggest that the teaching of the social sciences, or indeed the humanities, are incapable of providing these skills or providing public benefit.  In fact, the social sciences provide students with many of the high-level and flexible skills desired by employers, including training in rigorous policy analysis, oral and written communication, and problem solving.”

As a history graduate myself, I find the idea that the coalition can have so little regard for subjects such as history, politics, social science and philosophy, deeply troubling, especially since many of members of the government have degrees in just these subjects.  The LSE does not offer any science or technology based courses, but is an institution of world renown that attracts the highest quality of student from the UK and abroad.  They go there because they know that the skills they can learn will be invaluable.

Furthermore, as a Labour representative, I am acutely aware of the role that the London School of Economics and its founders Sydney and Beatrice Webb, played in the early years of my party’s history.  That an institution built on the principles of social democracy and equality is considering becoming a private institution is disturbing, to put it mildly. 

A spokesperson for the LSE made it clear that they had to consider all available options in the light of the spending review.  The coalition is running the risk of putting too much strain on the institutions that make Britain a world leader in higher education. It would certainly not be in the national interest to undermine the excellent standing in which our best universities are held. Britain stands to lose a lot by falling behind in higher education, both at national level where our own students would not have the option of the highest level of learning and internationally where Britain is at the very top of the tree.

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Britain has the most undemocratic Government since the 1950s

Posted on October 26, 2010 by maryhoneyballmep

I was very struck by the article We’re Not All in This Together by Mehdi Hassan in the New Statesman.

Hassan informs us that 22 out of 29 cabinet ministers (76 per cent) are millionaires: Philip Hammond’s net worth is £7.5 million, George Osborne £4.6m, Jeremy Hunt £4.5m and Iain Duncan Smith £1 million.

The pattern is replicated throughout the present government. The Topshop boss Philip Green (£4.4bn), whose wife lives in the tax haven of Monaco, has been put in charge of cutting government “waste”. The former BP chief executive Lord Browne (£45m) has been appointed as the lead non-executive on the Cabinet Office board while the banker Stephen Green (pension pot: £19.1m), outgoing chairman of HSBC, is to join the coalition as a trade minister in December.

In fact, Britain has not been governed by politicians representing such a narrow social base since Harold Macmillan’s administration in the late 1950s.

This matters. It matters not because 66 percent of Cabinet ministers were educated at private schools or because over three quarters of the Cabinet are extremely rich per se. It matters because extremely wealthy Conservatives know nothing of life as it is lived by the overwhelming majority of the British people.

With the average wage at just under £25,000 a year and an estimated 288,000 people paid below the minimum wage of £5.93 an hour, most people are a million miles away from the millionaire lifestyle.

Self evidently we are not governed by men (and a few women) who share our worries and concerns and possibly have no idea about what makes us happy and what makes us sad.

And this is even more true for Conservative MPs who are millionaires for the very simple reason that many safe Tory seats are prosperous, reflecting the lifestyle of their MPs. Yes, of course there are pockets of poverty and deprivation in Runnymede (Philip Hammond) and Chingford (Iain Duncan Smith), but such deprivation is limited and unlikely to affect Conservative majorities.

This is very different from Labour MPs seats. Safe Labour constituencies are never well off, constituents face unemployment and welfare benefits are essential for many of those represented by Labour MPs. Moreover Labour MPs see all of this at their surgeries.  This means that even though MPs are in the top 10 percent of national earnings and some Labour MPs had privileged upbringings, those representing the vast majority of safe Labour seats see with their own eyes what life for most people in Britain is really like.

The importance of this first-hand experience should never be underestimated. I first became fully aware of what poverty means when I was Chief Executive of the lone parent charity Gingerbread. Contrary to the pervasive stereotype, the overwhelming majority of single parents are not feckless teenage girls getting pregnant to secure a Council flat, but women in their 20s, 30s and 40s bringing up children on their own as a result of divorce, desertion or death. Most Gingerbread members lived on benefits, many were unable to afford even a telephone and almost all bought their children second hand clothes.

Although I had never lived on benefits I came to realise what poverty is about.  Somehow I doubt whether Messrs Osborne and Hunt have done the same kind of thing.

Millionaires truly lack any idea of life outside the very small circle of the very rich and since 76 percent of the Cabinet are millionaires they are utterly unrepresentative.  This is extremely bad news for a democracy.

I truly believe our Parliament should be made up of a representative sample of the British people, including proportionate numbers of women and ethnic minorities. The Cabinet should also be representative and its members know what life is like for the majority of those they govern.  The Cameron-Clegg (both of whom are also very rich) government self-evidently does not meet the representative test. It is therefore not truly democratic.

I believe the reason why George Osborne has felt free and able to cut back so drastically on welfare and social housing is that his government quite simply does not understand lives other than their own and can therefore make ideological cuts with no constraints of compassion or empathy. Lack of proper representation at the highest level is consigning more and more people to poverty, ghettoised housing with the very real danger of the kind of crime and anti-social behaviour that goes with what used to be called “social ills”.

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Over 80,000 Families to leave London if Coalition’s Housing Cuts get through Parliament

Posted on October 25, 2010 by maryhoneyballmep

Simon Hughes was clear that the Coalition’s housing benefit cuts will not get through parliament when he spoke on Channel 4 News yesterday evening.  The Liberal -Democrat Deputy Leader is clearly no lightweight and his warning should be taken seriously.

Hughes has obviously taken on board the reports that London local authorities have block-booked bed and breakfasts and other private accommodation outside London – in Reading, Luton, Hastings and other places – to house those who will be priced out of the London market. According to yesterday’s Observer Councils in the capital warned that 82,000 families – more than 200,000 people – face losing their homes..

The Coalition is set to drive poor people out of wealthy inner cities and London councils are preparing a mass exodus of low-income families from the capital because of the cuts in  benefits.

Housing is as important to our welfare as a city and a country as health and education. I therefore find it puzzling that while the Coalition has ring-fenced NHS spending and agreed the £1billion education premium for disadvantaged children, housing is up for grabs. While I would never deny the importance of health and education, welfare and housing are equally important.

The statistics are very telling. According to Shelter nationally more than two million people find their rent or mortgage a constant struggle or are falling behind with payments. Over 1.7 million households are currently waiting for social housing. Some homeless households – many with dependent children – wait for years in temporary accommodation.

Furthermore 1.4 million children in England live in bad housing. 7.7 million homes in England fail to meet the Government’s Decent Homes Standard and in 2008/09, more than 79,500 households were found to be homeless by local authorities.

Given these figures, and never forget the statistics represent real people, families living in appalling conditions, Shelter is absolutely right when they say: “The UK is now more polarised by housing wealth than at any time since the Victorian era.”

And the Coalition is determined to polarise it even further. Housing Associations will now charge new tenants 80% of the market rent as opposed to the one third previously in place. The additional money is supposed to be used for new build, the target for which is 150,000 homes nationally in the next four years. While new homes are badly needed, this is not the way to do it.

George Osborne is meanwhile capping housing benefit from April next year at £400 a week for a four-bedroom house, £340 for a three-bedroom property, £290 for two bedrooms and £250 for a one-bedroom property. From October 2011 payments will be capped at 30% of average local rents.

At a meeting of the Commons work and pensions select committee last Wednesday, the day Osborne announced £81bn of cuts in the spending review, MPs were told by London council chiefs that the housing benefit cuts could have devastating results.

According to the Observer Nigel Minto, head of sustainable communities at London Councils, who works closely with the capital’s housing directors, told the committee that since June London councils had been “procuring bed and breakfast accommodation” in outer London and beyond. Jeremy Swain, chief executive of the homelessness charity Thames Reach, said he was particularly worried about the impact on numbers sleeping rough in London. “We have reduced rough sleeping dramatically and we have a target of zero rough sleeping in London by 2012. For the first time I’m thinking that we will not achieve that,” he said.

Karen Buck, Labour MP for Westminster North and shadow work and pensions minister said: “The sheer scale and extremity of the coalition proposals means almost a million households are affected across the country.”

Karen also appeared on the BBC Politics Show London yesterday along with Stephen Hammond, Conservative MP for Wimbledon and three very angry Londoners about to lose their homes. While Karen made the excellent point that the Coalition is indulging in “government by anecdote” and making huge cuts to deal with the problem of relatively few excessive claims in areas with high housing costs, Mr. Hammond tried to deny that the IFS claim that the spending review would hit the poorest the hardest. Meanwhile Mayor Boris Johnson appeared to deny there was a problem at all.

The Coalition’s true colours were  well and truly nailed to the mast last week when Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, said the unemployed should “get on the bus” and look for work. Reminiscent of Norman Tebbit’s infamous “get on your bike and look for work” exhortation, Duncan Smith’s comment takes us fairly and squarely back to Thatcher, another demonstration that their cuts are ideologically driven.  

Dagenham and Rainham Labour MP John Cruddas, put it very well:”It [benefit cuts] is an exercise in social and economic cleansing”…”It is tantamount to cleansing the poor out of rich areas – a brutal and shocking piece of social engineering,”

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Honeyball’s Weekly Round Up

Posted on October 24, 2010 by maryhoneyballmep

 

The big news this week was the analysis of the coalition Government’s Comprehensive Spending Review. Ploughing through the papers the following day there was so much to take in. But there was one revelation within the annoucement’s which struck me more than anything else, and that was the cut by £50 for new recipients of the winter fuel allowance.

The move came despite a pre-election promise from the Prime Minister to safeguard benefits for the elderly, including winter fuel payments. In addition the Government is making plans to increase the state pension age to 66, it was revealed.

Last winter, any household with someone aged 60 or more received a £250 winter fuel payment. For those over 80, it rose to £400.

Those rates were increased by Gordon Brown in 2008, by £50 and £100 respectively. You can read a full analysis of the winter fuel payment cuts in The Telegraph here.

Also last week, the Government was left embarrassed following a gaffe by the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander, when he inadvertently revealed that 490,000 public sector jobs would be lost by 2014 as a result of spending cuts.

The revelations were made after Alexander left a briefing note on display which was then photographed and snapped by the crowd of photographers.

And the cuts also hit the BBC which was forced to accept a 16% budget cut, with the licence fee frozen for six years…and the corporation taking on the responsibility for the World Service which had been funded by the Foreign Office previously.

Patrick Wintour wrote in last week’s Guardian that the negotiations left the BBC stunned, with insiders claiming that a license fee settlement that would normally take years to thrash out had been imposed in three days. The extra financial burdens are equivalent to the cost of running the BBC’s five national radio stations. You can read the full story on cuts here in the Guardian.

I was also pleased to read earlier in the week how three feature length films are to be made over the next six months in Bristol.

Bristol is a growing hub for film, with both the makers of Wallace and Gromit and the graffiti artist, Banksy, originating from there.

The films will be made with a mixture of public and private funding. The projects are aimed at inspiring young talent and at stamping Bristol firmly on the map as a center for film making in the UK.

Perhaps the Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, will follow the success of these films, and consider his decision to axe the popular and much needed UK Film Council, an organisation which works with young and emerging talent in this country to both inspire and  support them in their projects.

Hunt’s short sighted and quick action to abolish it have undoubtedly set back the UK film industry but projects like this will help to keep the UK film industry on the map. Read about the Bristol films in The Guardian here.

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Feature on foreign languages – is English enough?

Posted on October 22, 2010 by maryhoneyballmep

I have blogged before about the importance of language learning, particularly in the UK where enthusiam for language subjects such as French and Spanish is in rapid decline. While English remains the international language, demand for linguists is soaring. There can be no doubt that British businesses will lose out if they do not make an effort to overcome language barriers.

I recently took part in an interview, organised by Quadrant, to debate this issue. You can watch it online here.

The UK must do more to ensure that we communicate better with our European partners. This will be good for political relations, but will also have significant educational and cultural benefits for young people.

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The cuts are reckless and regressive.

Posted on October 21, 2010 by maryhoneyballmep

Many will be left reeling after the revelations of yesterday’s Spending Review, a long list of savage cuts which threaten 500,000 jobs and the welfare of millions. In announcing this strategy, Chancellor George Osborne claimed to be driven by the demands of fairness; if this is true, it is painfully clear that he has a very distorted concept of what ‘fairness’ entails. Few could describe as fair a budget that impacts disproportionately on the poorest half of the nation, slashing already squeezed social housing provision and reducing care provision whilst allowing the City to emerge unscathed. Even The Telegraph readily admits that this is a political budget, shaped by ideological imperatives as much as economic demands.

Already, the plans have prompted a surge of compelling critiques from think-tanks and charities shocked by their regressive implications. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (hardly a voice of radicalism) has warned that the impact on the poorest tenth will be five times that on the richest, Shelter has expressed fears that homelessness will surge, and the Social Market Foundation has pointed out that protecting the schools budget meant big hits for all-important early years services.

Acknowledging all of this is hugely important, but it is also crucial that we include gender in the picture and recognise the particularly pernicious effects these cuts will have on women. As the Fawcett Society outlines, it is women who will be the main losers as jobs are cut, public services are rolled back and benefits are slashed. Of the 500,000 to be cut from the public sector, two thirds will be women and, as primary carers, it is women who will assume the extra burden of responsibility when provision for children and the elderly is scaled back. We must challenge this: if it goes unrecognised, women’s services and benefits will remain a soft target, vulnerable to a Coalition all-too-often governed by expedience.

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European Parliament votes for 20 Weeks Maternity Leave at Full Pay

Posted on October 20, 2010 by maryhoneyballmep

The European Parliament has just voted for 20 weeks maternity leave at full pay.

You will see from my article for the Guardian Comment is Free section yesterday that Labour MEPs did not support this.  We calculated that a woman on the UK national minimum wage of £5.93 would be £650 a year worse off with 20 weeks maternity leave on full pay than under the British system whereby she would receive 6 weeks at 90% of  full pay followed by 33 weeks at £124.88, the statutory rate of pay. 

The proposal adopted by the European Parliament does very little for lower paid women and quite a lot for those who are better off.  This is not how Labour MEPs wish to see EU member states’ scarce resources used.  We want to target the low paid not the better off.

Of course, the Draft Directive on pregnant workers written by Portuguese member of the Socialist and Democrat Group Edite Estrela now has to be agreed by the European Council – the body comprising the national governments from all the EU countries.

There have been strong rumours that the Council will not agree the 20 weeks maternity leave on full pay.

So the European Parliament may just have made an utterly futile gesture. Not at all what we want for our new mothers.

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