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……

Ken Livingstone’s campaign to stand as Labour’s London Mayoral candidate in 2012 is attracting an increasing number of Labour leading figures in London Government.

According to Labour List who are keeping a tally, he now has the support of six of the eight Labour members of the London Assembly: Len Duvall (Leader of the Labour Group on the Assembly), Nicky Gavron, Joanne McCartney, Murad Qureshi, Navin Shah and Val Shawcross.

He is also supported by six Labour Council Leaders (including the three women Leaders – Ann John in Brent, Claire Kober in Haringey, and Catherine West in Islington; along with Liam Smith in Barking and Dagenham, Julian Bell in Ealing, and Peter John in Southwark).

They are joined by four Labour opposition leaders (Croydon, Hammersmith and Fulham, Hillingdon, and Westminster) and another 35 Labour Councillors around the capital.

It is a pretty impressive cross-section – all of whom know how important it will be to have a strong and effective advocate for London as Mayor after the 2012 elections.

Speeches in the House of Lords are often extremely good: usually knowledgeable and well-informed; frequently incisive; and often very witty.  However, they are rarely passionate.

Today – for once – there was passion in abundance, when Baroness Patricia Hollis rose to demolish the “spiteful” Government Bill that would deny Norwich (and Exeter) the status of being unitary authorities.

She was in magnificent form:

“My Lords, I declare an interest as former leader of Norwich City Council, and also a former Norfolk county councillor. Perhaps I may add that nothing I will say in any way casts aspersions on the integrity of my fellow Norfolk Peers or indeed on the Minister herself, whom I hold in high regard.

I fully accept that the judicial review has cut across this Bill, which means that we did not pursue the issue of hybridity and we did not argue the case before the Examiners. Not surprisingly, therefore, the examination was exceedingly short. We also accept that, together with the Minister, we need to clarify the electoral situation of councillors. However, the Bill is before us and that is what we are debating, so I want to say something about local government reorganisation more generally, and then analyse the reasons for what I regard as a spiteful little Bill.

In 1974, Norwich and Exeter had been unitary councils for more than 600 years. They had ratepayer democracy half a century before county councils were even invented. By the 1930s, Norwich County Borough not only exercised all of today’s district and county council functions, including the police but ran the massive non-voluntary hospitals and public health chunk of the future NHS, all of today’s Anglia water authority and the major utilities, as well as a large part of the social security system. Norwich’s budget would have been between £1.5 billion and £2 billion, I calculate in today’s prices, compared with our current non-housing budget of £50 million.

With that record, it is insulting when Eric Pickles of unitary Bradford, a mere village when Norwich was the second city of England, or the Minister, from the unitary London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, invented only in the 1960s, tell us that unitary status is fine for them but not for us. From 1888, when Norfolk County Council was invented, until 1974, almost every initiative of note in the county was pioneered by the city. That is what cities do.

We are the largest non-unitary authority in the country. We are already considerably larger than many existing unitary authorities. Our population will be 160,000 in eight years’ time. We have two cathedrals, two universities, a major FE college, an international airport, a thriving theatre and the greatest collection of medieval churches in western Europe. What are we lacking—apart, obviously, from the fact that Mr Pickles is not our MP? We have recently been shortlisted alongside Birmingham, Sheffield and Derry/Londonderry for the title of City of Culture. Disinterested observers might think that Norwich was up there with the major cities rather than down there with the rural district councils.

Into that respectful and complementary partnership between county borough and county council—at the time, I was a city councillor—came 1974. Peter Walker wanted unitary counties. I was a member of the AMA. We fought for, but failed to save, most of the county boroughs. The history of local government reorganisation since then has been that of remedying the folly of Peter Walker’s policies by both parties. In the early 1980s, the Conservatives got rid of the met counties and made Mr Pickles’ Bradford unitary. Whoopee! In the mid-1990s, as my noble friend said, the Conservatives, under David Curry and John Gummer, to whom I pay tribute, made a whole swathe of cities unitary: Leicester, Derby, Nottingham, York—all former county boroughs, like Norwich and Exeter—Milton Keynes, Peterborough and Basildon, which do not have such a history or track record. Norwich and Exeter were on that list. Norfolk should have come under the wire then, as the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, has agreed and admitted, but the county Tories in Norfolk fought it off.

That drive to unitary status as the most effective local government structure for cities continued under the Labour Government. My noble friend made this point very well: do your Lordships know of any counties that would now wish to turn the clock back to district councils for their cities? Does Derbyshire want to do that to Derby, Nottinghamshire to Nottingham, Leicestershire to Leicester, Buckinghamshire to Milton Keynes? No, they value and support their cities, recognising how much they bring to their county’s economy and growth. Why, by contrast, is Norfolk so bellicose and so fearful? I will come back to that.

Following the 2006 White Paper, 26 cities and large towns made their bid. The Boundary Committee was requested to consider Norwich’s and Exeter’s proposals, and twice, with unerring instinct, produced the only solution that none of the local authorities, including the county council in Norfolk, wanted: a return to a Peter Walker unitary county. However, the Boundary Committee would not listen, so JRs followed. As Paul Rowsell, the senior civil servant responsible, said in his court witness statement of 22 March this year, had the Boundary Committee reported on time, not nine months late, implementation would have already happened and this spiteful little Bill would not have seen the light of day. Had the Boundary Committee reported on time, the Secretary of State could, as the judge suggested, have consulted on the additional criteria, the JR would not have succeeded and, again, this spiteful little Bill would not have seen the light of day. Max Caller and his Boundary Committee team have wasted a lot time and money and have served local government very badly indeed.

So what are the professed reasons for this spiteful little Bill? Page 7 of the impact assessment—I had to request extra copies, but the Minister was good enough to put them into the Printed Paper Office—is headed “Rationale for Change” and is personally signed by the Minister as a fair and reasonable view of costs, benefits and impact. It gives four reasons for the rationale for the Bill. First, she says, it is in the coalition programme. So what? That programme was negotiated after the election by two minority parties and has no electoral mandate. In any case, as the noble Lord, Lord Low, pointed out in the Queen’s Speech debate, it is utterly at odds with the rest of the localism programme in the coalition programme.

Secondly, the Minister states that these two cities becoming unitary would be expensive and poor value for money, a point hammered home by the noble Lord, Lord MacGregor. For the first six years of transition, the total net non-discounted cost of Norwich and Exeter going unitary comes to around £300,000 per authority, or £50,000 per year per authority. The impact assessment allows, grudgingly, that there should be savings thereafter but, oddly, it does not estimate them. Funny, that. Your Lordships might just think it relevant that over the following six years those savings would equate to at least £20 million or upwards and would grow each year thereafter. These figures are certified by Deloitte and, for what it is worth, they have been crawled over by me. Will the Minister tell me how an expenditure of £300,000 in the first six years to generate savings of £20 million or more the next six years is expensive and poor value for money? For the impact assessment to give costs, but not savings over time, means these statistics are not worth while.

Thirdly, the Minister buttresses her case, which was much quoted by the noble Lord, Lord MacGregor, by quoting the Permanent Secretary as saying that a unitary Norwich and a unitary Exeter represent poor value for money, and that “therefore” stopping these unitaries is good value for money, but compared with what? What the Minister does not say, and did not say in her impact analysis or in her speech today, what the impact assessment should have said and what the House is entitled to know is that the Permanent Secretary, when arguing that city unitaries were poor value for money, was comparing them not with the status quo of the Bill, as you might expect, given that it is supposed to be an impact analysis, but with unitary counties, which are not introduced by the Bill, which were indeed the cheapest option, but which nobody but the Boundary Committee and the Permanent Secretary appear to want.

The Permanent Secretary’s comparison is completely invalid. Indeed, it is worse than that because what the Minister does not tell us, which again the House should surely know, is that her solution—the status quo—is the most expensive of the three options. It is far more expensive than unitary Norwich and Exeter, as I have shown. On costs versus benefits, it is far more expensive than the Permanent Secretary’s unitary Norfolk. Her version of value for money is to save £300,000 for each authority over six years and forego savings of £20 million over the next six years. That is not mentioned—funny, that.

As Ministers, many of us have signed impact analyses. We know what we are talking about, so I say with the utmost seriousness that this impact analysis is greatly misleading, makes false comparisons and suppresses relevant information. I am sad that the Minister, whom I respect most profoundly, could put her name to it. It really will not do.

The fourth of the Minister’s arguments is in the rationale on page 7 of the impact statement. She argues that the 2006 non-statutory criteria were not followed. As we argued at that time, additional criteria were added: that is, a sensible response to the recession. The High Court judge, Mr Justice Ouseley, has nullified the orders because the DCLG failed to indicate in December 2009 that “compelling reasons” such as the recession might lead to a proposal being accepted that did not meet all the 2006 proposals. The Boundary Committee’s tardiness has meant there was no time for further consultation.

We, the city of Norwich, have been urged to appeal on constitutional grounds that such action—striking down not just the actions of the Secretary of the State, which can happen, although infrequently, but the will of Parliament itself—has not been taken. I may be wrong, but I have been told that such action has not been taken by any judge hitherto below the level of the Law Lords and now the Supreme Court. At £200,000 or so, Norwich cannot afford the risks of challenge. Of course, the JR reviews the decisions of a Minister, but one High Court judge striking down the express will of Parliament over seven hours of debate is somewhat unsettling.

In consequence, we did not pursue the issue of hybridity: that Norwich and Exeter were being singled out for unfavourable treatment compared with the other authorities that had gone through. That argument has also gone by default. Why, then, are the Government so determined that Norwich and Exeter in particular should not be unitary? Clearly, the four arguments in the impact analysis are a work of constructive fiction.

Some years ago, when I fought a Norfolk seat with a large rural hinterland, a farm worker rang me from a public phone box. I said that I would drive over, but he said, “No, no. I will come on my bike”. I said, “But it’s eight miles”. He said, “It’s more than my job or my cottage is worth to be seen speaking to you”. That was the Norfolk I experienced as a county councillor. People were decent and public spirited but with an unshakeable belief in a right to rule over pheasants, farm workers and Norwich. The city was gifted to them in 1974 and what they have they hold.

Over and beyond property rights, money is the second reason why Norfolk county councillors—two-thirds of whom are also rural district councillors—have fought us. Urban Norwich subsidises the rural county at a severe cost to its own services. Even the Boundary Committee acknowledges that Norwich has been poorly served. In 1974, we handed over six comprehensives, from four of which you could go to good universities, as did my two sons who went through the state system. On Norfolk’s watch, one comprehensive has been closed and four of the remaining five have been taken into special measures. Why? Rather than raise the rates to keep open small rural schools, which I support, Norwich schools have been run down instead. Poorer Norwich council tenants see their services run down to ensure that the rates on affluent Broadland homes are kept low.

The third reason for the Tory county opposition is because cities, especially unitaries as my noble friend argued, generate jobs and growth. Half of Norfolk’s jobs are in Norwich, but, as I was told on the county council by one Norfolk county councillor who was also a farmer, no local employer wanted the competition from more new jobs because that would push up wages.

The final reason is of course politics. Norwich is a left-of-centre city. It celebrated the French Revolution with a maypole in the market square. It has been the home of dissenters, Chartists, Liberals—at least until now—and now Greens. A unitary Norwich would be stronger not only economically but politically, and I am not sure which is the greater offence.

My dismay is particularly with the Lib Dems. Norman Lamb is the MP for North Norfolk. With no formal connection to Norwich, he and the national party of the Lib Dems have overruled the local Lib Dems on the city council, who initiated the move to unitary status and who have fought heroically for unitary status. They view the actions of their London party with utter fury. Norman Lamb’s position is also at odds with the position of the new Lib Dem MP for Norwich South, Simon Wright, who is also committed to a unitary Norwich. On 9 March, Norman Lamb told the other place that he wants progressive city councillors to remain on the county council—that is why he does not want Norwich to be a unitary—so that, in his words, one party, a Tory party, does not,

“rule for the rest of Norfolk for ever and a day”.

That, he said, would be,

“an outrage”.—[Official Report, Commons,9/3/10; col. 252.]

For Norman Lamb, a Tory county would be an outrage—before he joined the Tory coalition, of course—so he supports the Tories nationally to block Norwich’s unitary status in order to better fight the Tories locally. How twisted, and how cynical, is that?

This remains unfinished business. Be in absolutely no doubt that Norwich will become a unitary authority, although it may take us several years longer than we had hoped. In the mean time, the people who will pay the real bill are the people of Norwich and the county of Norfolk. They will be denied a strong, focused, unitary city that could bring them the jobs and growth they so desperately need.”

Mayor Boris Johnson used the opportunity of speaking to the London Congress of Borough Leaders to outline his wish-list of new powers.

The City Hall press release quotes Eric Pickles, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, as saying:

“I welcome this contribution from the Mayor of London. The new Government is committed to genuine decentralisation of power. In London, this means transferring power and responsibility down from Whitehall and its quangos progressively downwards to City Hall, to London boroughs and to local neighbourhoods.”

He also indicated that the Government would be publishing a Localism Bill in the autumn that would provide an opportunity to amend legislation.

So does the phrase “welcome this contribution” amount to an endorsement of the Mayoral package?

I am not sure that it does.

I raised the issue in today’s Lords Question Time (on a question about whether there would be a consultation about the role and number of elected mayors).  The exchange with the Lords’ Parliamentary Under Secretary at the Department for Communities and Local Government was as follows:

“Lord Harris of Haringey: My Lords, I add to the congratulations to the noble Baroness on her appointment. I fondly remember working opposite her on many occasions when she was a stout defender of traditional London boroughs and structures of local government. The Mayor of London today has made a power grab to take over the London region of the Homes and Communities Agency, the Olympic Park Legacy Company, the Royal Parks Agency and the Port of London Authority. It has also sought greater powers over traffic control and awarding rail franchises on routes into London and the allocation of the adult skills budget in London, and to have a greater say in health provision in the capital. Are those proposals supported by Her Majesty’s Government and, if so, will they be the powers on offer to the other prospective city mayors?

Baroness Hanham: My Lords, I appreciate that the Mayor of London is looking for greater powers and devolved policies. As the noble Lord will know, we welcome the contribution that the Mayor of London makes, and the new Government have already committed to genuine decentralisation of power. That may mean transferring further powers to the mayor, but that matter is still under consideration.”

Again, “the contribution” made by the Mayor was welcomed.

But then the put-down (I’ve added the emphasis): 

“That MAY mean transferring further powers to the Mayor, but that matter is still under consideration.”

 Sounds like a touch of the long grass there …..

Thr first Lords drama of the new Parliament took place this afternoon.  And I missed it as I was chairing a seminar away from the House (no expense allowance for me today, then!).

The issue was whether the Coalition Government’s Local Government Bill should be referred to the Examiners of Petitions for Private Bills and the Government lost the vote by 154 to 150.  As a result, the Bill did not have its planned Second Reading today.

The Bill itself is a spiteful measure designed to prevent Exeter and Norwich from becoming unitary local authorities as agreed by the last Parliament.  The Coalition is determined to do this despite unitary status being the wish of the overwhelming majority of the residents of the two cities concerned and regardless of the extra costs associated with stopping the reorganisation in mid-flow.

The motion was moved by Lord Alan Howarth and the reason it was successful was that many Crossbench peers accepted his argument that because the Bill singles out Exeter and Norwich the Bill should follow the (more convoluted) procedure that governs any legislation that appears to apply to one group of individuals differently from other similar individuals.

These are complex arguments that Lord Alan Howarth summarised as follows:

“My Lords, I declare an interest as a resident of Norwich. I want to put it to the House that there is a strong prima facie case that the Local Government Bill is hybrid, and that it should therefore be referred to the Examiners to determine whether that is so. As soon as they saw it, a number of experienced colleagues said surely this Bill is hybrid.

The noble Lord the Leader of the House just told us the definition of hybrid Bills in the Companion , but perhaps it would help the House if I quoted the words again. The definition states that they are,

“public bills which are considered to affect specific private or local interests, in a manner different from the private or local interests of other persons or bodies of the same class, thus attracting the provisions of the Standing Orders applicable to private business”.

In the next paragraph, the Companion goes on to say:

“It is open to any member who considers that a public bill may be hybrid … to move that the bill be referred to the Examiners. Such a motion is usually moved immediately before second reading”.

These semi-mythological creatures, the Examiners, are the Clerks of Private Bills in both Houses.

I recognise that hybridity is not for amateurs. These are deep waters and a prudent politician does not even get into his bathing trunks, let alone plunge in. But I fear that, unlike my right honourable friend the former Prime Minister, prudence has never sufficiently been my watchword.

I regret that I was unable to give the House more notice of this Motion. The difficulty has been that the Government have advanced this Bill with extraordinary speed. We saw the Bill only on the eve of the long bank holiday weekend. That was followed by a day when the House was not sitting, so I was not able to consult the Clerk of Public and Private Bills until the following day, last Wednesday. I then had to discuss with Norwich and Exeter City Councils whether they wished to seek the advice of parliamentary agents and counsel. The lawyers then worked at top speed, with e-mails flying around all over the weekend and late at night. Counsel’s formal opinion and a letter of advice from parliamentary agents were delivered yesterday, and in the light of them I tabled the Motion on the Order Paper for today. We could not have got to this point more quickly, and I have had no desire to wrong-foot the House.

In any case, while the concept of hybridity may be obscure and elusive, the issue before us now is simple. Do we consider that there are sufficient reasonable arguments that the Bill is hybrid to warrant referring it to the Examiners?

Plainly, the Government have sought to draft this Bill so that it is not hybrid. However, they are navigating tricky waters, and the House ought to satisfy itself on this point, since there are major implications for how we proceed depending on it. If the Bill were judged by the Examiners to be hybrid, after Second Reading, as I understand it, the Bill would go to a Select Committee which would receive and examine petitions and question witnesses and then report to the House before following the usual course of a Public Bill.

It seems clear to me that the Bill is hybrid on this ground most obviously, although there are others. Norwich and Exeter are treated differently from other local authorities under this legislation for the following reason. Since the Bill, significantly, does not repeal Section 1 of the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007—the Act that permits the Secretary of State to invite a local authority to make a proposal for reorganisation into single-tier government—the Bill contemplates that authorities will in the future, after the Bill has become law, have the opportunity to make such proposals. However, the Bill specifies that Norwich and Exeter—just those two named authorities—are not to become unitary authorities. It seems plain as a pikestaff that the local interests of Norwich and Exeter are especially prejudiced for the future. In the language of the Companion , Norwich and Exeter are affected,

“in a manner different from the … local interests of other … bodies of the same class”—

other councils that may wish to propose unitary reorganisations.

However, I speak merely as a politician and not as a lawyer. Far more significant are the views of learned counsel. I will not attempt to paraphrase either the lengthy opinion of Mr Peter Oldham QC or the shorter but densely argued advice of Mr Alastair Lewis of Sharpe Pritchard, parliamentary agents. Both those documents came in after the Clerk of Public and Private Bills had given his opinion that this particular Bill was not hybrid. I will just say that Mr Oldham concludes his opinion with the words:

“In my view, there are proper and reasonable arguments that this Bill is hybrid”.

Mr Lewis says he believes that a further line of argument that he has put forward,

“represents a strong argument in favour of saying that the Bill is hybrid”.

What I am not proposing to the House in this Motion is that the House should decide here and now that the Bill is hybrid. Nor is this a debate about the rights and wrongs of the Government’s policy on Norwich and Exeter—that is for Second Reading. What I am proposing is that the House should recognise that there are various views about whether this Bill is hybrid, all put forward in good faith by serious people—professionals who are competent to make such a case—and agree that all these arguments should be considered carefully and expertly by the Examiners so that they can determine whether the Bill is hybrid in accordance with the procedure that Parliament has provided.

It has long been established that there should not be a high hurdle for referral to the Examiners. Mr Lewis notes that the Companion says at paragraph 8.214 that the threshold for the hybridity test is whether there is a prima facie case. That means, as he puts it, that,

“if there is any doubt, the Bill should be referred to the Examiners”.

In that, he is following rulings of the Speaker in another place. The Speaker ruled on the Local Government Bill in the 1962-63 Session, at HC (1962-63) 669 col. 45:

“I accept the true position to be this, that if it be possible for the view to be taken that this Bill is a Hybrid Bill, it ought to go to the examiners. There must not be a doubt about it”.—[Official Report, Commons, 10/12/62, col. 45.]

Again, in the 1966-67 Session, the Speaker, at HC (1966-67) 732 col. 1221, referred to the “duty” to refer a Bill to the Examiners when the Bill was prima facie hybrid. The House will, I hope, acknowledge that, given the advice that I have quoted from two eminent experts, the threshold for referral has beyond doubt been crossed.

I hope that the Government will not oppose this Motion for political reasons. I hope that they will not seek to take advantage of the new-found situation in this House, since the formation of the coalition, in which they can use their majority simply to crush propositions that are inconvenient to them, rather than, in the tradition that makes this House so valuable, respect the arguments and respect the rights of minorities. Your Lordships’ House is not a House where machine politics should operate. It would reflect poorly on us and it would certainly cause bad feeling outside if the House were to dismiss without fair and proper consideration the arguments put forward in these opinions.

In the matter that we are dealing with now, the responsibilities of us all are as parliamentarians. We are dealing not with the merits of the Government’s policy but with the status of the Bill and with the responsibility of Parliament to ensure that it is scrutinised according to the correct procedure. It may be that the Examiners will, after due consideration, endorse the Government’s view of the Bill’s status, but we owe it to those whose lives and fortunes will be affected by the Bill to ensure that we do indeed follow the correct procedure. I beg to move.”

Had I been there the Government would have been defeated by five.

Ken Livingstone has announced that one of his objectives if re-elected as Mayor in 2012 will be to make London the world’s first “Smart City”.

The examples he give include:

• easing parking chaos in London if re-elected by bringing in a system like that used in San Francisco, where 6,000 of the 24,000 metered parking places are fitted with sensors that allow drivers to find spaces via wi-fi. The American city’s $23 million network shows available spots on motorists’ mobile phones and electronic street signs. If drivers want to add more time to a parking meter they can also do it by mobile.
• using real-time “smart meters” to cut energy use in homes and businesses. In Sweden these have resulted in a 24 per cent reduction in energy use.

He expands on his ideas in more details at LabourList.

What he demonstrates is a long-term strategic vision for London that would not only benefit its residents but give London the edge in international competitiveness.  His ideas also highlight the lack of strategic vision currently displayed by the Conservatives in London.

According to the Evening Standard, the post of Minister for London has been quietly abolished by the new Government.  The argument is that there is not going to be a Government Office for London and that as London has an elected Mayor, it no longer needs its own Minister.

However, there are three Cabinet Ministers who have territorial responsibilities for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – all parts of the United Kingdom with their own devolved administrations and elected leaderships.

It is worth reminding the Coalition that London has a population greater than that of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland combined and, as the key driver of the UK economy, is of more importance to the country as a whole than Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland put together. 

London needs and deserves its own unique voice within the central Government machine.

According to the Standard:

“Ironically, at the same time as abolishing the post, Mr Cameron has decided to boost other cities across the country with their own “city minister”.”

So those other cities matter more to the Prime Minister than London.

Is it because his school “friend” Boris Johnson is the Mayor that London has been snubbed in this way?

Of course, one solution would be to give the Mayor of London a peerage and put him in the Cabinet as Minister for London.

And that would solve another problem: it would stop all this talk that Boris Johnson is  pursuing a hidden agenda of toppling David Cameron from the Conservative Party Leadership, as he couldn’t lead the Conservatives from the Lords.

The more I think about it, the more it’s a no-brainer.

Give Boris Johnson a peerage now.

It was rather like watching a train crash in slow motion – fascinating but nauseating at the same time.  It fell to Lord De Mauley, Old Etonian, “elected” hereditary peer and Government Whip, to repeat the statement in the Lords given in the Commons by David Laws MP, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, on the spending cuts announced on Monday.  He responded to this challenge by reading the statement exceedingly slowly and in a monotone.

He was followed by Lord John Eatwell, a serious economist and President of Queens College, Cambridge, making a welcome return to the Labour frontbench, who was in devastating form:

“My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, for repeating the Answer given by his right honourable friend in another place. I congratulate him on his new responsibilities, and express the hope that he will display the same forensic ability in economic affairs displayed by the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, in the previous Parliament.

It is an axiom of sound financial management that actions have consequences. What is striking about the Statement made by Mr Laws is that the consequences of the expenditure cuts are not spelt out at all. Instead we are presented with £6 billion-plus of cuts in government expenditure, but not told what the true consequences will be. Of course I can understand the sheer delight with which the Chancellor imposed swingeing cuts on the Department for Business—or should it now be called the department for closure? That will teach Vince Cable to declare earlier this year that,

“cutting spending further … would be extremely dangerous”.

Try a cut of £836 million on for size, Vince!

The rationale for the cuts is declared to be,

“to start tackling the UK deficit and secure the recovery”.

The Chief Secretary cites the United States as following a similar policy. That is arrant nonsense. On the very day that Vince Cable suffered the unkindest cut of all, President Obama announced a £30 billion new initiative to support small businesses. Has the noble Lord read the speech of Professor Christina Romer, chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, delivered at the William and Mary College last week? Professor Romer said:

“I worry that policymakers may take the return of growth as license to withdraw the support that has been essential to the recovery. That is exactly what happened in 1936 and 1937. President Roosevelt, Congress and the Federal Reserve switched to fiscal and monetary contraction before the recovery from the Great Depression was complete. The result was a second recession in 1938 that pushed unemployment back up to 18 percent and delayed the return to normal for another three years”.

That is the potential cost of this Government’s deficit hysteria.

So will the noble Lord tell us, first, what is the Treasury’s estimate of the increase in unemployment directly attributable to these spending cuts? Secondly, what is the Treasury’s estimate of the number of business failures that will be directly attributable to these spending cuts?

The Government claim continuously to be protecting front-line services—a laudable objective. To enable your Lordships’ House to assess the Government’s achievement, will the noble Lord give the House a precise definition of what is a front-line service? A precise definition would enable your Lordships to assess whether the £1.7 billion of the contracts and projects delayed or stopped are front line. Can the noble Lord tell us exactly what the contracts and projects to be stopped might be? Can he also tell us exactly what are the £1.7 billion of local authority services that are no longer to be ring-fenced? Are they front line? Is the removal of funding to underwrite children’s futures in the children’s trust fund front line—they look jolly front line to me.

The Government have presented a policy without consequences, because they are unwilling to spell out the true consequences. It is a pretty poor start to open, transparent government. What is transparent is the evident relish with which Mr Laws wields the budgetary axe. He revels in the policy of shock and awe. Mr Laws is the Donald Rumsfeld of economic policy, and we can expect his activities to achieve equally constructive consequences. Lloyd George would be ashamed of him.”

Answers came there none.

As other Peers asked further questions, the responses became even more abbreviated and Lord De Mauley looked more and more discomfited.

And as the minutes wore on the Tory Leader of the Lords, Lord Strathclyde, stared fixedly at the clock – as though willing the minutes to pass so that the time limit for questions would be over and Lord De Mauley’s would be ended.

A quiet – bordering on the boring – meeting of the Strategic and Operational Policing Committee of the Metropolitan Police Authority suddenly burst into life this afternoon when it was asked to authorise £10.6 million to provide kennelling for another 400 dogs seized under the Dangerous Dogs Act.

I growled that it would be a lot cheaper just to shoot the dogs rather than cage them (which in itself is fairly cruel for large dogs) for six months or more while the legal processes following their seizure grind through the courts.  Much to my surprise, the sentiment attracted unanimous support from other Committee members – even the saintlier-than-thou Jenny Jones AM admitted that she didn’t like attack dogs.

It was agreed that the DCiC*, Deputy Mayor Kit Malthouse AM, Chair of the MPA, who has been making his name tackling the issue of dangerous dogs in London, should write to the new Home Secretary, Theresa May, asking her to agree fast-track culling powers for the Police in relation to the animals.

However, even though everyone knows that the new Con/Lib Coalition** Government walks on water, it was decided to authorise the money just in case the new powers take a bit of time to come through.

*     Dog-Catcher-in-Chief

**  aka “the mongrel” – copyright Mayor Boris Johnson

We now have the (nearly) final results of the London Borough Council elections and Labour has done impressively well.

There are now seventeen Labour majority Councils, eleven Conservative majority Councils, two Liberal Democrat majority Councils and two with no overall control (and in one of these Labour has the largest number of seats).

The Conservatives have been humiliated by losing outright to Labour in Ealing, Enfield, and Harrow.

Labour won Islington outright from the Liberal Democrats.

And the Liberal Democrats’ poor performance was reflected in their outright loss to the Tories in Richmond-upon-Thames and their failure to defeat Labour in Haringey (where Labour’s majority has increased from one to eleven).

Labour won majority control in the following Councils where there had previously been no overall control with various varieties of Tory/LibDem administrations: Brent, Camden, Hounslow and Southwark, and in Waltham Forest which had had a Labour-led minority administration.

Labour also eliminated the British National Party in Barking and Dagenham.

Labour’s three elected Mayors were re-elected: Jules Pipe in Hackney (who will now presumably become Chair of London Councils); Steve Bullock in Lewisham (who will now a majority again on the Council); and Robin Wales in Newham.

All in all, an excellent set of results for Labour – another reason why Mayor Boris Johnson will not run for re-election in 2012.