From 25th September 2009:

The Parliament Education Service runs an annual Discover Parliament Programme aimed at 16-18 year olds studying higher level politics, citizenship and general studies.  This afternoon I met 80 students taking part in the Programme.  They were from three schools in Pinner, Chelmsford and Bristol.

As ever on such occasions, the questioning was lively, sometimes challenging and extremely wide-ranging.  We covered – amongst other things – such topics as:

• aren’t MPs too old (I’d explained that the average age of members of the House of Lords is 69);
• why aren’t 16 year olds allowed to vote or to sit in Parliament;
• what did I think of Gordon Brown;
• should taxes be put up in the current economic situation;
• should the age for getting a driving licence change;
• what were my views about David Cameron, Lord Mandelson and the BNP (interesting grouping);
• what should be done about knife crime and gangs;
• was “kettling” of G20 protesters fair (from a teacher);
• should children be taught more about current affairs;
• did the LibDems have a better record on MPs’ expenses;
• is the threat of terrorism rising;
• should there be limits on immigration;
• was the war in Iraq right; and
• did I think Labour would win the next General Election and when would it be?

As I said, a lively hour – and an exhilarating one too.

Effectively, these Discover Parliament programmes can only take place during school term time and when Parliament is not sitting.  In practice that means they are only possible for about four weeks a year from the early part of September.  A by-product of Speaker John Bercow’s proposal to shorten Parliament’s summer recess might well be to end these programmes. Whatever the merits or otherwise of Parliament sitting in September (something I personally would favour), it would be a retrograde step to lose this outreach work with young people.

I have already explained that I really don’t mind.

However, just in case you really really want to cast your vote for this blog in the Total Politics annual beauty parade, this is what you have to do:

The rules are:
1. You must vote for your ten favourite blogs and rank them from 1 (your favourite) to 10 (your tenth favourite).
2. Your votes must be ranked from 1 to 10. Any votes which do not have rankings will not be counted.
3. You MUST include at least FIVE blogs in your list, but please list ten if you can. If you include fewer than five, your vote will not count.
4. Email your vote to toptenblogs@totalpolitics.com
5. Only vote once.
6. Only blogs based in the UK, run by UK residents or based on UK politics are eligible. No blog will be excluded from voting.
7. Anonymous votes left in the comments will not count. You must give a name.
8. All votes must be received by midnight on 31 July 2010. Any votes received after that date will not count.

So I’m not asking you to do it, but I really won’t mind if you do……

Earlier tonight, I went to “An Audience with David Miliband” hosted and chaired by Simon Fanshawe in Wood Green.  The 150-strong audience listened first to David Miliband being probed by Simon Fanshawe on his beliefs and ideology and on his views on where the Labour Party is now and where it should be going.  This was followed by a lively Q&A session in which the audience elicited some genuinely inspirational responses from the former Foreign Secretary, particularly on education, the role of community activism, and the need to safeguard the recovery and build sustainable growth for the future.

Those there who were undecided before will have come away enthused.

I have already explained that I really don’t mind.

However, just in case you really really want to cast your vote for this blog in the Total Politics annual beauty parade, this is what you have to do:

The rules are:
1. You must vote for your ten favourite blogs and rank them from 1 (your favourite) to 10 (your tenth favourite).
2. Your votes must be ranked from 1 to 10. Any votes which do not have rankings will not be counted.
3. You MUST include at least FIVE blogs in your list, but please list ten if you can. If you include fewer than five, your vote will not count.
4. Email your vote to toptenblogs@totalpolitics.com
5. Only vote once.
6. Only blogs based in the UK, run by UK residents or based on UK politics are eligible. No blog will be excluded from voting.
7. Anonymous votes left in the comments will not count. You must give a name.
8. All votes must be received by midnight on 31 July 2010. Any votes received after that date will not count.

So I’m not asking you to do it, but I really won’t mind if you do……

Earlier this evening I heard Sir Paul Stephenson, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, deliver the Police Foundation Annual Lecture (given each year in memory of Lord John Harris – no relation).

Sir Paul’s lecture, entitled “Fighting Organised Crime in an Era of Financial Austerity”, was insightful and thought-provoking.

And the thought it provoked in me was how does tackling serious crime fit into the Coalition Government’s agenda?

The answer, if you listen to Sir Paul (although he was much too polite to say it so explicitly), was that it doesn’t.

The lecture spelt out the impact that serious organised crime has directly and indirectly on communities and its financial and economic cost to the country.  And Sir Paul then pointed out that, despite the significant improvements in recent years:

“The specialist resources devoted by the police service to addressing the threat from organised crime remains uncoordinated.  ….  the  service has no organised crime strategy, no established national tasking process and no meaningful performance measures.”

He didn’t say – although he could have done – that the Coalition’s Programme for Government doesn’t mention serious organised crime in the chapter on “Crime and Policing” and the closest it gets to a mention anywhere in the document is in the chapter on “Immigration” which promises to:

“create a dedicated Border Police Force, as part of a refocused Serious Organised Crime Agency, to enhance national security, improve immigration controls and crack down on the trafficking of people, weapons and drugs. We will work with police forces to strengthen arrangements to deal with serious crime and other cross-boundary policing challenges, and extend collaboration between forces to deliver better value for money.”

Refocussing SOCA on immigration hardly solves the problem Sir Paul was describing.

He did, however, reveal that the Government is now drafting a paper on organised crime – so I suppose that must be progress.  However, before we get our expectations too high, he warns that this:

“must not be a collection of fine words and generic statements.”

…. perhaps he’s seen the draft.

And he concluded with a stark warning:

“I wonder how many Chief Constables across the country are going to be able and willing to balance the very proper desire and requirement for local community policing, with the challenge of maintaining at least existing capability to deal with the high end but often less obvious demands of serious organised crime.  And is the situation about to get even more complex?  Will the new accountability and governance model for police forces, incorporating directly elected local individuals, lead to the unintended consequence of further eroding existing limited organised crime capability?”

And, if the Coalition omits tackling serious organised crime from its programme for crime and policing, what will happen with directly elected police chiefs?

I hope we don’t have to wait for a Sicilian-style breakdown of civic authority before tackling organised crime reappears on the Coalition’s priority list.

I am not looking for any recognition, as you know these things don’t matter to me at all and I am profoundly disinterested in where this blog comes in the annual Total Politics ranking of political blogs, so I really am not asking for you to vote for me or my blog ……..

but ……..

should you be so inclined (and I repeat I really, really don’t mind one way or the other), this is what you have to do:

The rules are:
1. You must vote for your ten favourite blogs and rank them from 1 (your favourite) to 10 (your tenth favourite).
2. Your votes must be ranked from 1 to 10. Any votes which do not have rankings will not be counted.
3. You MUST include at least FIVE blogs in your list, but please list ten if you can. If you include fewer than five, your vote will not count.
4. Email your vote to toptenblogs@totalpolitics.com
5. Only vote once.
6. Only blogs based in the UK, run by UK residents or based on UK politics are eligible. No blog will be excluded from voting.
7. Anonymous votes left in the comments will not count. You must give a name.
8. All votes must be received by midnight on 31 July 2010. Any votes received after that date will not count.

So I’m not asking you to do it, but I really won’t mind if you do……

“It’s the economy, stupid” was famously the theme of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign against the incumbent, George Bush Sr.

George Osborne is now trying to use the same message to pretend that the scale of the planned public expenditure cuts are justified by the state of the British economy and the scale of the deficit that the Coalition Government inherited.

However, an article by the estimable Bill Keegan in today’s Observer demonstrates yet again that what is driving the Coalition Government’s stance on public spending is ideology not economics – a desire to finish the Thatcherite evisceration of the public sector.  It is rather as though Thatcher’s children – aka Cameron, Osborne and Clegg – have a psychological drive not only to obtain parental approval, but a desire to achieve more than that parent – just as George W Bush seemed to feel he had to emulate his father’s invasion of Iraq and then take that invasion one stage further to regime-change and beyond.

Bill Keegan describes the Coalition Government’s economic policies as “fiscal masochism” and “Born Again Thatcherism” arguing that:

“The pretext for Thatcherism Mark One was the threat of accelerating inflation in 1979/80. The acceleration in inflation was assisted in no small way by some injudicious decisions taken by the Thatcherites, decisions that served to embed an inflationary shock emanating from the second oil crisis. This time the pretext is the fiscal deficit, the significance of which our new government has been grossly, and irresponsibly, exaggerating.

Last week, I pointed out how minor the public debt “crisis” of today appears when compared with the situation that faced chancellor Neville Chamberlain when he introduced his deflationary budget of 1932. Chamberlain, and the “Treasury View” that lay behind his budget strategy, have rightly been castigated by economic historians for that deflationary approach. Yet the debt problem facing our strange coalition is hardly on the same scale.”

He then takes the Coalition’s arguments neatly to pieces:

“The figures are worth repeating: the latest budget red book puts UK debt at 61.9% of gross domestic product in 2010/11 (against 177% in 1932) and debt interest at 6.3% of total public expenditure in 2010/11 (against 40% in 1932).

And the invaluable annual report of the Bank for International Settlements (the “central bankers’ bank”, based in Basle) contains some impressive charts and tables that suggest our new prime minister and chancellor, along with their Lib Dem collaborators, should be prosecuted under the Trade Descriptions Act for distorting the scale of our fiscal problems.

I give you chapter and verse: on page 68 (Part V) you will find that Britain is top of the league when it comes to the length of time before its debt has to be refinanced. The “average maturity” of the UK’s debt is 14 years; by comparison, other leading industrial countries, including the US and Germany, have maturities of under 9 years. This is not to say there is anything wrong with the US or German position – few can gainsay the fiscal rectitude of the Germans; and the US, whatever its fiscal problems, remains the pre-eminent reserve currency. But it shows how hysterical the debate in Britain has become.

Again, on the same page, the BIS report contains a graph comparing different countries’ dependence on overseas finance. “Non-residents” hold approximately 70% of Greek government debt, just under 50% of US government debt, and below 30% of UK government debt.”

So the debt is not as bad as suggested, the scale of the debt interest needing to be paid each year is not as serious as we have been told, and the UK’s vulnerability in terms of refinancing and of overseas debt holdings is far less than the Coalition Government would have us believe. 

So it’s not the economy, but ideology.  And Tory ideology at that.

I’ve mentioned before being told by a (slightly tipsy) Conservative MP before the election that the Tories’ political strategy, if they won, would be to declare that the state of the economy was much worse than had been expected and then embark on a programme of “Ridley-ite” cuts that would make Margaret Thatcher proud.  And that was before the full scale of the global recession had kicked in.

And now as Bill Keegan reminds us even the markets are getting jumpy:

“While Osborne has been fomenting fears of how the markets might react to insufficient austerity, the theme of the market reports last week – following the commitment to fiscal masochism that emerged from the G20 meeting at the weekend – was that those financial markets that brought us the crisis and then called for austerity are now concerned about the effect this might have on economic growth – and hence on those budget deficits they seek to reduce!”

Maybe I am having an “0ld f*rt” moment, but didn’t there used to be something called “budget secrecy” and something about Ministers making statements to Parliament first before leaking all the content of statements to the media in advance.

If I remember rightly, a Labour Chancellor had to resign because he dropped a hint to a journalist about the contents of his Budget statement on the way into the Chamber to deliver it.

And in the last Parliament Labour Ministers were frequently reprimanded by Speaker Bercow for not making statements first to Parliament.

So why are we getting such detailed pre-briefings about the Budget due to be delivered later today?

Will Speaker Bercow act?

Will George Osborne resign?

I suspect I can guess the answers.

It has been reported by Reuters that 178 people suspected of cloning credit cards have been arrested in a major international police operation initiated by Spanish police.

The scam itself was worth €20 million.  In Spain alone, where76 people were arrested, 120,000 stolen credit card numbers and 5,000 cloned cards were discovered and six cloning labs were dismantled.

Police in fourteen countries participated the two-year investigation and there were also major raids in Romania, France, Italy, Germany, Ireland and the United States, with additional arrests in Australia, Sweden, Greece, Finland and Hungary.

According to the police, the detainees are also suspected of armed robbery, blackmail, sexual exploitation and money-laundering.

Hardly the time for the Coalition Government in the UK to be cutting the money it gives to the national Police e-Crime Unit.

I remember being told by a (slightly tipsy) Conservative MP before the election that the Tories’ political strategy, if they won, would be to declare that the state of the economy was much worse than had been expected and then embark on a programme of “Ridley-ite” cuts that would make Margaret Thatcher proud.

And, so far, so true.

The objective, of course, is to make the eye-watering severity of the cuts in public spending seem inevitable and try to blame the previous Government for all that happens.

It is, of course, one of the oldest tricks in the book.  I am sure I could find it in Macchiavelli’s “The Prince”, if I looked.

Therefore, it is important that people try and keep hold of a sense of reality and proportion, while David Cameron and George Osborne, plus their faithful assistants Nick Clegg and Vince Cable, attempt their political and economic sleight of hand.

Today’s “Observer” provides a helpful primer for those who want to remind themselves why the Coalition Government is wrong and why there should be no inevitability about the economic cul-de-sac down which George Osborne wants to take us in just over a week’s time.

Katie Allen’s Q&A, “Spending Cuts: Be Concerned but There’s No Need to Panic” has a message that needs to be repeated every time the smug inevitability mantra emerges from the mouth of a Tory/LibDem apologist and I make no apologies for repeating it here:

“Has Alistair Darling really left the public finances in an even worse state than we thought?

The public purse is pretty threadbare, but it is unfair to suggest Darling left hundreds of skeletons to tumble out of the cupboard – and the former chancellor takes the idea as a personal affront. The figures bear him out: the latest official statistics showed a massive tax windfall at the end of the financial year to April, and as a result the deficit was revised down by £7bn. In fact, it is now £11bn below Darling’s final budget forecast.

Is there no alternative to drastic cuts in public services?

The fact that the deficit figures are not quite so horrific in itself raises questions over macho austerity policies and the £6.2bn of cuts already announced. Yes, we do need to bring the deficit under control, but too much austerity too soon could strangle a fragile recovery.

But won’t my tax bill go up if we don’t cut spending?

There will be a mix of spending cuts and tax rises. One of the big issues is getting the balance right between the two. Concentrating too heavily on cuts could hurt the vulnerable in society, but hefty tax rises, particularly on high earners, can be self-defeating because people avoid paying.

If we don’t tighten our belts enough, won’t our debts run out of control?

People tend to think that the government debt is like a household debt and needs to be managed very tightly. But as Leslie Budd at the Open University Business School says: “This… belongs to the less well known branch of economics called Ignorance Economics.” It is sensible to cut waste, but slashing spending indiscriminately to deal with fiscal crises can do more harm than good. Public spending is an injection into the economy that boosts national income and employment.

Hold on, though, didn’t David Cameron say our debt interest was rising to £70bn a year? That sounds bad.

Yes, it’s certainly not a good place to be. Debt service payments are set to rise from £41.6bn pencilled in this year to about £70bn in five years’ time. It is, as Cameron says, “a terrible, terrible waste of money” and more than the combined budgets for education, climate change and transport. But it is not a new figure and, to put it in perspective, households spend a similar amount of their income servicing their debts and many companies spend far more. Also, it’s not unusual for any country to spend a large part of its revenues on servicing debts.

But I heard that we are in a worse position than Greece.

Nowhere near. Britain has never defaulted on its national debt. Our debt has a long time to run, with an average of 14 years to maturity, twice as long as most European countries, including Greece. In simple terms, that means the UK government needs to refinance less of its debt in any given year and is less sensitive to rising interest rates.

Hmm. But I also heard Cameron say we are “indebted on an unprecedented scale”.

This is the kind of phrase that enrages economic historians. Some context is needed. On paper, the deficit of £156.1bn for the last financial year is indeed the highest since records began at the end of the second world war. But as any economist will tell you, it’s not hard for any nominal figure to be a record after more than 60 years of inflation.

So that’s all right then?

Debt has been higher than this at many points in wartime and peacetime since the creation of the national debt in 1690, according to Glen O’Hara of Oxford Brookes University. The 18th century saw particularly large increases in the size of the armed services and each successive conflict saw public debt peak at a new high. The level of our debt is a cause for serious concern, but not panic.”