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.

The Conservatives must be mightily disappointed with their performance on Thursday in London.  The assumption had been that the “conspicuous benefits” of having a Tory Mayor in the capital would produce substantial gains for the Conservative cause when it came to voting in the General Election.

And what actually happened?  There were, of course, some major  scalps – for example, Martin Linton in Battersea, Tony McNulty in Harrow East and Andrew Dismore in Hendon.  However, the Conservatives were hugely disappointed not to beat Karen Buck in Westminster North, Andy Slaughter in Hammersmith, and Sadiq Khan in Tooting.

Labour still holds more Parliamentary seats in the Capital than all the other Parties combined – so much for the Tory target of forty or more seats in London.

The counts in the local elections are not yet complete (hardly started in some instances), but we already know that Labour has taken control of the Boroughs of Harrow and Enfield that were previously Tory-controlled.  (I make no comment on the huge Labour victory over the Liberal Democrats in Islington or Labour’s increased majority in Haringey, as in both of these the Tories were totally irrelevant.)

Boris Johnson and his Mayorality delivered worse results for David Cameron than almost any other Region of England.  some people are already speculating about a hidden agenda (“It’s all gone tits up, call for Boris” indeed) ….

I had always understood that the rule used to be that provided an elector had turned up at the polling station by 10pm they would be allowed to vote.  If the queue stretched outside the polling station, then a presiding officer would go outside and stand at the end of the queue – anyone arriving later would be refused a vote but all those queuing before 10pm would be given ballot papers.

So what went wrong today?

It looks as if the Electoral Commission have taken it upon themselves to tighten up the rules by saying that only those to whom a ballot paper had actually been issued by 10pm would be allowed to vote.  This is demonstrably unfair because if local council election administrators fail to employ enough polling station staff there will be queues and the problems we have seen tonight will occur.

I hate to be partisan but who runs Sheffield City Council (where the problems were first reported)?  The Liberal Democrats.

After voting, I spent the morning campaigning in Wood Green in one of the wards that will be pivotal in determining whether Haringey Council remains Labour and whether LibDem Lynne Featherstone is replaced as MP by Labour’s excellent Karen Jennings.

I  had originally intended to work today in Hornsey Ward – the area I represented for 24 years until 2002.  However, I was told that they already had at least forty committed helpers there alone – a support level never achieved in the six local and seven national elections that I remember in that Ward.

In Wood Green, amongst the electors that I saw, not only was the Labour vote holding up, but also there was an enthusiasm to vote that was extremely encouraging.

Again, there was only a minimal Tory presence – it amounted to a gas-guzzling car parked outside the polling station with a large Conservative poster on its side and the engine running in case the parking attendants came by.

Members of the House of Lords are like convicted prisoners and people detained under the Mental Health Act – we don’t have a vote in UK Parliamentary elections.  I am tempted to believe that when the franchise was framed those drafting the legislation equated the inside of the House of Lords with a penal establishment or a lunatic asylum.  However, I expect the real reason is that as we are already Members of Parliament we do not need further representation in the House of Commons.

We do, however, get a vote in elections for the European Parliament and for local elections.

So this morning I was able to play my part in the democratic process.  It also set a test for Haringey’s electoral administrators as to whether I would be issued with the right ballot paper – a test I am pleased to say they passed without me having to prompt them!

I cast my three votes, of course, for the three Labour Council candidates – all of whom will make excellent councillors if elected.

Two notable features.

First, the polling station was busy.  The presiding officer, who has been presiding there for as long as I can remember, said it was the heaviest morning voting that she could recall and that there had been people waiting outside to vote at 6.50am.  So, it looks as if there is going to be a high turnout.

Second, there was a complete absence of the Tory Party.  There were tellers outside the polling station from Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, but no Conservatives – even though this was a constituency that was continuously Conservative up until 1992.

The LibDems to use Dad’s Army’s Corporal Jones’s phrase “don’t like it up em”.  They clearly did not expect the orchestrated attacks on Nick Clegg and their Party, which according to Nick Robinson were organised by Conservative Central Office and Team Cameron.

This is a bit ironic coming from the Party that excels in this tactic at local level and in by-elections.

I know that one should never generalise from one canvass session.

I also know that my unexpected appearance on the doorstep may have a strange effect on the house-holder concerned.

It is, of course, well-known that my charm, sunny demeanour and general all-round people skills (note the repeated use of irony) will have a strangely persuasive effect on those subjected to its full force.

However, in the space of 90 minutes this evening I came across four people who had previously voted Liberal Democrat but were now undecided …..

Something strange is happening out there.

There are moves afoot to cancel next week’s meeting of the Metropolitan Police Authority because “we are in the election period ?[and] this will have an effect on debate.”  It has, of course, been known for some time that there would definitely be London Borough elections on 6th May and it was an increasing certainty that the General Election would be held on the same date, so it is a little disingenuous to suggest that this has suddenly come as a surprise nine days before the scheduled meeting.

It is also nice to know that there is “debate” at Police Authority meetings – something that I had previously missed.

And, of course, it would never do if politics intruded.  Not that it ever has before (can you spot the heavy irony?).

I suspect the real reason is to avoid comment – let alone “debate” – about David Cameron’s strange statement in the first Leaders’ Debate about the number of uniformed police officers working in the Metropolitan Police’s HR Department.  I had tabled a question asking the Commissioner for his comments on this and the Met have already made a statement explaining that the officers concerned are overwhelmingly involved in training other police officers.

Still it would never do to have the Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis saying in a public forum a week before polling day that the Leader of the Opposition was talking garbage.

And no-one would want to highlight the fact that either the Leader of the Conservative Party doesn’t trust the Conservative Mayor and Deputy Mayor of London enough to check his facts with them OR that he dislikes them so much that he is prepared to highlight their failure to sort out what he clearly perceived as a problem.  It could, of course, be both: he doesn’t trust them AND he wanted to put the boot in.