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 just returned from the celebrations marking the thirtieth anniversary of the Haringey Cypriot Community Centre with which I have been closely associated throughout its history.

The Centre was conceived by a dozen local Cypriot groups in 1977 in the aftermath of the 1974 invasion which had seen the existing Cypriot communities in Haringey (already numbering between 40,000 and 50,000) augmented by some 11,000 refugees.  The concept was a Centre that would bridge the communal divide (there were both substantial Greek speaking and Turkish speaking communities in the Borough) and provide support structures within the communities themselves.

Thirty years on, the Centre still flourishes, continues to act as a bridge between the different sections of the Cypriot community, and provides a range of valued services (including a luncheon club for elders and a meals-on-wheels service, classes and training, advice services etc).

Guest of honour today was the President of the Republic of Cyprus, Demetris Christofias – quite something for a local centre to be singled out in this way by a Head of State (although he and his wife have visited the Centre in the past before he was President).

The significance, of course, is that President Christofias is now engaged in face-to-face talks with Mr Talat, the leader of the Turkish Cypriot community on the island – talks which may lead to a settlement of the divisions on Cyprus.

The Haringey Cypriot Centre, where the leadership of the Centre (both Greek-speaking and Turkish-speaking) cooperate together to deliver services that meet the needs of all sections of the community, is a living model of what a future united Cyprus might be.

In his speech, however, the President did not minimise the difficulties that remain.  Although it is ground-breaking that 35 years after the invasion direct face-to-face talks are happening, there remain substantial issues: not least over the objective of a unified Cyprus as a bizonal, bicommunal federation with a single citizenship and undivided sovereignty (as specified in successive UN resolutions) versus the concept of a confederation of two equal states tacitly favoured by the Turkish government.

The people of Cyprus – of all communities – deserve a successful outcome to the talks.  The Community Centre in Haringey demonstrates that collaboration and cooperation between the communities can work.  And in that vein, I wished the President well in his negotiations.

It appears that nine Wiltshire Councillors (six Conservatives, two Independents and one Liberal Democrat) are living on the Planet Zog and are trying to persuade the rest of the Council to join them there.

They have put down a motion calling on the Council to withdraw its support for the Nottingham Declaration on Climate Change – a declaration supported by the vast majority of English local councils.

They are not doing this because they believe that such declarations are not worth the paper they are written on unless they are backed up by real actions.  Nor are they doing it because they feel that Wiltshire is failing to do enough to merit being a signatory.

Their reasons are apparently that they believe that the Declaration itself is “contentious, unreasonable and ultimately damaging” and that the idea that climate change is man-made is “founded on the sand of uncertainty” and relies on “the unproven significance” of man-made greenhouse gas emissions in determining climate.

It remains to be seen what their colleagues on the Council will make of this, but I suspect – despite the eco-friendly noises made by the Party Leadership – this is a fair reflection of what the Conservative Party (or at least its grassroots element) really believes.

The Conservative Party in Europe has already linked itself to the Planet Zog fraternity by leaving the EPP Grouping (already a pretty broad Church).  Here is more evidence of a Party occupied by Zog dwellers.

Even though Parliament isn’t sitting, each week Hansard publishes the written answers to Parliamentary questions tabled before the recess started and whose answers have finally emerged from the civil service sausage machine and been signed off by the relevant Minister.  I have just caught up with the latest list, which includes the answer to the question I tabled five or six weeks ago on electromagnetic pulses (EMP) and the National Security Strategy.

My question followed on from a scary briefing I had attended on the threat of EMP attacks on the critical national infrastructure.  (Some comments have suggested that the briefing was scare-mongering rather than scary, although I remain convinced – as subsequent discussions I have had with people who know about the subject have confirmed – that the subject has real substance and should be taken seriously).

The answer I have received from Lord Alan West is as follows:

“The Government’s updated National Security Strategy takes into account the threat posed to UK interests, including the critical national infrastructure, by the full range of “threat actors”, a definition that includes natural hazards, as well as individuals or organisations with malign intent. The associated Cyber Security Strategy of the United Kingdom, published alongside and reflected in the National Security Strategy update, considers a number of methods of cyber attack, including those that generate high levels of power that can damage or disrupt unprotected electronics.

In addition, the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI) provides advice on electronic or cyber protective security measures to the businesses and organisations that comprise the UK’s critical national infrastructure, including public utilities companies and banks. CPNI also runs a CERT service which responds to reported attacks on private sector networks.”

Reading between the lines, I take this to mean that EMP attacks (and including natural pulses emitted by the Sun) are considered as part of the Strategy and that the CPNI provides relevant advice.  I am reassured by the first part of the answer, but less convinced by the second part – I received similar-sounding answers to my questions a few years ago about the advice that the CPNI (or its then predecessor) were giving about information security.  And the big question remains: it is only advice, is anyone actually doing anything?

Frank Field has written a perceptive article in the latest issue of The New Statesman. In it, he makes the case for taking a longer-term and wider perspective on the threats to national security that the UK faces.  And let’s be clear those threats are more than just terrorism (and I acknowledge that that’s the case, even though a good chunk of my week is spent overseeing the work of the police in combatting terrorism).  We also need to recognise that the focus of the Ministry of Defence has to be wider than the UK’s presence in Afghanistan, and that climate change is not the only long-term global issue.

As the sage of Birkenhead puts it:

“The threat now is not just one of terrorism. Since Labour came to power, the world’s population has grown by 930 million. By mid-century it could rise still further, from more than six billion to nine billion. The UN estimates that already 15.2 per cent of the world’s population goes hungry every day. In future, world security will face growing threats from disputes over control of and access to water and food supplies, and over the raw materials that China is so energetically engaged in cornering.”

World population growth – exacerbated massively by climate change – will put enormous strains on global food production over the next twenty or thirty years.

Demand for energy is likely to grow by 50% in the next 25 years and most of that energy will continue to be found from fossil fuels, but fuels extracted in increasingly extreme conditions and from those parts of the world with the most volatile and unstable political conditions.  And as the sage puts it:

“In 2005, the Times carried a hair-raising report on where the continent gained its energy. Most lines led to the KGB. The article was not rude enough to mention the agency by name, but no one could doubt that the Russian secret service had western Europe by the throat and could at any time turn off the oxygen supply to European industry.

On 5 August, No 10 released a report on energy security by Malcolm Wicks, the Prime Minister’s special representative on international energy issues. It received disappointingly little coverage, but it contributes to the new politics of survival. It showed Britain is becoming ever more dependent on others.”

Within thirty years, two-thirds of the world’s population will live in areas of water-stress.  Shortage of fresh water will become a major driver for further political instability.  Indeed, water shortages will be coupled with environmental changes to cause a world-wide shortage of arable land – made worse by the intensification of agriculture.  There is also likely to be huge pressure on world fish stocks.  The combination of famine and the shortage of fresh water is likely to trigger mass migrations, often in areas affected by environmental change and/or armed conflict.  It is naive to assume that the UK will be unaffected by any of this.

The control of supplies of oil, gas, minerals, water and food will be critical.  It can be anticipated that nation states will take political and military steps to secure or safeguard such supplies.  And those countries that can control those supplies will have political leverage over the rest.

I believe very strongly – as clearly does the sage of Birkenhead – that the UK Government has to start thinking much more strategically about these issues.

So is there any sign that these big strategic questions are going to be at the heart of political debate between now and the General Election?

Not much hope …..

Don’t panic, Mr Mainwaring!

My attention has been drawn to Kevin Anderson’s very sensible and balanced analysis of the Gary McKinnon extradition case.  It is far more measured than Mayor (and part-time Telegraph columnist) Boris Johnson’s rant.  I wonder who earns the most from his journalism – the one who provides analysis or the one who rants with cavalier regard for fact?

I attended a meeting this morning where in passing there was a reference to the new British Telecom network upgrade (21CN) that is now underway.  The presentation had just included a warning to British businessmen travelling to China (after all, even a senior No10 aide had been caught).  Then it was pointed out that a key component of 21CN was manufactured in China by a manufacturer with close links (don”t they all?) to the Chinese Government, that Government departments and most businesses allowed at least some of their key data or their voice communications to go over BT networks.  So by implication any malign intervention wouldn”t require a honey-trap on someone visiting China but could be done remotely via the components in 21CN.

Apparently, one of the suppliers of 21CN”s Multiservice Access Nodes (and let”s be honest, I am not sure precisely what these are, but they sound important) are Huawei Technologies.  Huawei promise that their success in winning the contract will create “many new jobs in the UK”.

Obviously, it is possible for people to be paranoid (and many are) that anything electronic manufactured in China (or anywhere  else that we don”t trust this week) might contain “hidden” code capable of broadcasting back the contents of communications or even allowing control of equipment to be passed to those with malign intent overseas.  But as we know being paranoid, doesn”t mean that people aren”t out to get you.

So how worried should we be about the security of British business and of the UK”s critical national infrastructure?

I cannot assess the real scale of the threat, although there does seem to be a growing consensus that the Chinese Government are building up their capacity to wage cyber war and that there is the intent to achieve cyber dominance by 2050.  The Chinese are certainly investing heavily in high technology and there is substantial US concern about the Chinese capacity for conventional and industrial espionage by electronic means.

What I am clear about is that as a nation we do not take information security as seriously as we should – and this applies both in the public sector but also in the private sector.  If there is a threat from BT”s 21CN, it may now be too late to do anything about it, and that leaves the real question what is being put in place to ensure that the threat is being mitigated.

I”ve just been reading David Aaronovitch”s “Voodoo Histories: The role of the conspiracy theory in shaping modern history“.  It is an enormously enjoyable review of a variety of conspiracy theories that have engaged millions over the last hundred years – sometimes with devastating consequences.  He starts with the insidious “Protocols of the Elders of Sion” whose origins were nothing to do with the Jews (nor even aimed at them) but arose from a satire on Louis Napoleon involving an imaginary dialogue in Hell between Macchiavelli and Montesquieu.  The text was then adapted to produce the anti-semitic nonsense used by Hitler, believed by people like Henry Ford, and still being cited as fact by the Iranian regime.

Subsequent chapters deal with Stalin”s terror and the Moscow show trials, McCarthyism in the United States, inevitably the assassinations of the Kennedys, the deaths of Princess Diana and Marilyn Monroe, the blood-line of Jesus Christ (as popularised by “The Da Vinci Code“), the 9/11 “truth” movement and the death of David Kelly (including a devastating hatchet job on the book by the LibDem MP, Norman Baker).

Part of the interest for me is that I have read many of the books describing the conspiracies that Aaronovitch debunks.  Maybe I am a potential believer in such nonsenses, although I can say that I have never been entirely convinced by the tomes I have read, despite the myriad of pseudo-learned footnotes and quasi-academic references.  So yes, I did read “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail“, while on holiday near Rennes-le-Chateau (allegedly where the secret scrolls were found) – I also remember a local Anglo-French resident telling me very sniffily that it was written by former “Dr Who” script-writers.  I have read Mark Lane”s “Rush to Judgement“, books about Marilyn Monroe”s “murder”,  and Norman Baker”s “The Strange Death of David Kelly“.  I not only read ”Unlawful Killing: The Murder of Hilda Murrell“, but employed its author, Judith Cook, for a while.

The widespread belief in conspiracy theories does not make those theories true, but the desire to believe in them does tell us something about people”s attitudes to authority.  The theories themselves are by no means harmless: they are corrosive to trust and can lead to violence and oppression.  Nonsense needs rebutting.  And as consiracy theories are resilient, their nonsense needs to be challenged repeatedly.

This morning I took part in a breakfast discussion on the Lords Terrace (over orange juice and croissants, but fortunately under cover as it was pouring with rain) with Lord Young of Graffham and Lord Razzall about what can be done to re-energise the British technology sector.  The occasion was the launch of the Micro Focus Technology Manifesto, “Making BrITain Great Again“.  It was well-attended and the Q&A session at the end was lively and could clearly have continued for much longer.

The central theme was that Britain has the potential to generate a much larger proportion of its GDP from the technology innovation-driven sector and the manifesto is designed to kick-start a debate about what can usefully be done to create an environment in which the sector can thrive, expand and create new and sustainable jobs in the UK.  The manifesto has five strands:

• increasing the supply of world-class technology talent in the UK
• harnessing the expertise and goodwill of successful leaders around the world to mentor leaders of UK-based emerging technology businesses
• changing substantially the tax incentives available to companies and individuals who want to invest in growing technology businesses in the UK
• implementing fiscal incentives for UK-based companies seeking to take forward world-leading R&D
• encouraging overseas technology companies to invest in a UK hub

I hope that the manifesto does kick-start a debate on these issues and that all the main Parties will commit to following the direction of travel indicated.  Indeed, I would hope that the core principle would be readily endorsed.  Future UK prosperity can only be sustained if the country is able to offer something significant to the world economy and that something in my view has to be that Britain is able to exploit innovation effectively and can deliver substantial value-added in technology and intellectual property.  The UK will never compete by trying to cut wage costs to Third World levels, we no longer have a heavy manufacturing base and there is a limit to how much national income that can be generated from tourism and heritage.  The only route to sustainability has to be through becoming a leading force in innovation and technology.

I remain concerned that too many young people do not see careers in technology as exciting, that too many further and higher education courses are irrelevant to the technology sector’s needs, and that for those who do emerge from further and higher education there are too few entry-level job/training opportunities.  Moreover, as a country we do not do enough to foster entrepreneurialism, nor to support investment in innovative start-ups and to support the growth of such enterprises as they develop.  The Micro Focus manifesto contains a number of suggestions as to how these issues may be addressed.  I am sure it is not definitive, but the future of the UK economy requires that this debate starts now and is taken seriously.

I have to admit to being a Bill Keegan fan, ever since I was a little boy in the late-1970s and worked in the Economics Division of the Bank of England and Bill was brought in as a Special Advisor to the Governor to bolster the (minority) Keynsian faction within the Bank.  He is in magisterial form in this morning’s  Observer.

He tells us that:

“Lately I have been especially worried by all these inspired reports that Messrs Cameron and Osborne are deep into the study of how the Thatcher team of 1979 approached government. It seems that for the Cameron Conservatives, the big new idea is an old idea. After a brief flirtation with Caring Conservatism, the emphasis is on cuts, cuts and more cuts. Meanwhile our beleaguered prime minister is being attacked on all sides for resisting the cuts that so many commentators regard as not only inevitable but also desirable.”

And goes on to remind us that:

“But let us be clear that the first years of the 1979-83 Thatcher period were an almost unmitigated disaster. The new government inherited an inflation rate of around 10%, promising to reduce it by means of an alchemist’s formula known as monetarism, and within a year, thanks to obeisance to that false god and other errors of policy, the inflation rate was more than 20%.  The fashion for “cuts” during that period was determined by the obsession with lowering tax rates, although the overall tax “burden” continued to rise well into the 1980s. Unemployment went up, and up, and up.”

In a few short paragraphs he spells out why the current terms of debate on economic policy are just plain wrong:

“But let us return to that wider economy to which the financial system has administered so much collateral damage. Things are rough. Consumers who were encouraged by the financial system to become overindebted are drawing in their horns. Businesses that have been hit by the credit crunch are not investing, and hardly a day goes by without our being told that a major company has, if not actually announced more redundancies, then put part of its workforce on short time or leave and/or demanded pay cuts as an economy measure to ensure its survival.

Cutting the wage bill may sound sensible for the individual firm, but across the board it does not exactly boost what economists call “effective demand”. On the contrary, it makes the overall economic situation worse, at a time when there are growing doubts about the prospects for early economic recovery.

Which brings us back to those “cuts” in public spending that are so fashionable, to deal with “the problem of the deficit”. Unless and until there are sure signs of recovery, even the Cameronian Conservatives should stop losing sleep over the government deficit.

At a seminar earlier this year Dick Sargent, a distinguished former government and bank economist, put it well: “Some people think that the national debt is like a company debt, owed to people outside the company. But most of our national debt is owed to ourselves, ie to UK residents (individuals, pension funds, trusts, banks, charities and so on). Since the government has the power to raise taxes to pay the interest, there can never be a question of default (‘the country going bankrupt’, as the media like to say).”

Another veteran economist, Professor Max Corden, pointed out in a recent paper that there is a flaw in what he calls “the Conservative allegation” that the current fiscal stimulus is bound to have adverse effects later.

As he says, this does not take into account the asset side – “the total value of the bonds [and equities] acquired by savers as a result of the rise in incomes brought about by the stimulus”. These constitute “a set of assets that exactly offsets the liabilities on which conservative critics of stimulus policies have focused”. Moreover, “one must allow for the reasonable possibility that some of the extra public investment that took place in the first period as part of the fiscal stimulus turned out to be socially productive”, thus becoming a “positive legacy”, not a future drag on the economy.”

Labour politicians may find these paragraphs helpful in stiffening their resolve that Government economic policy is unequivocally in the right direction.  And maybe others in the commentariat ought to read Bill Keegan’s words and stop feeding a consensus in favour of the “voodoo economics” (the description used by George Bush Snr to describe his predecessor’s monetarism) espoused by Cameron and Osborne.