Chris Whiteside's Blog

The competition is still open for anyone who wants to send me a humorous "real meaning" for any of the acronyms, initials and alphabet soup sent out by John Prescott while he had a department to run. Final close of entries will be midnight on Thrusday 1st June. The prize will be a copy of "The Little Red Book of New Labour Sleaze." However, I gather that copies of this strongly recommended book are selling fast and there are only 500 left from the original print run, so the winner may have to wait for the book's second print run. And if you were thinking of buying a copy of the first printing of this book, sure to become a collector's item, you had better hurry. Copies are available on Amazon at The Little Red Book of New Labour Sleaze Mind you, the rate the Labour government is going, there will have to be a second edition within a few weeks which will be twice as long. Just to take one example of disgraceful conduct since the book went to print. To have a ...

Two stories which came out concerning the NHS in the past few days – a woman suffering from cancer who has been refused a potentially life-saving drug costing £5,000, and an NHS Trust which asked its staff to do an audit of how many gifts such as boxes of chocolates they have received. For many people these two stories will have summed up what is wrong with the NHS. The NHS will never be an easy organisation to run. On a recent visit to my in-laws I read an account in an Irish newspaper of the controversy surrounding the man who is trying to sort out the health service in Ireland. He was quoted as repeating a comment made by Enoch Powell, then Health minister, that everyone in the NHS said how dreadful it was until the moment he proposed radical reform, at which point everyone suddenly said the existing system was excellent. Over the past 25 years both Conservative and Labour governments have increased spending on the NHS, both in cash terms and in real terms after allowing for inflat...

John Prescott had a torrid time at the dispatch box last week. Needless to say the line which got the most attention was the attempt at support from a Labour backbencher - I won't call her a toady for fear of inviting a class action from toads - who asked if he would still be "hands on". However, what was truly amazing was his attempt to claim that he was doing more than Michael Heseltine, the last Conservative holder of the post. Heaven knows Lord Heseltine has his faults, but the idea that Prescott would look good by comparing himself to Hezza was possibly the most ill-judged comparison since Dan Quayle made the mistake of comparing himself to John F Kennedy in his debate against Lloyd Bentsen. I wish that the rules of debate in the Commons could have permitted one of those present who could make such a claim to respond with "I know Michael Heseltine, I worked with Michael Heseltine; Michael Heseltine is a friend of mine. John Prescott, you're no Michael Heselt...

A recent humorous item in “The Times” newspaper on “Ten reasons not to see 'The Da Vinci Code'" included a reference to the difficulty of imagining Ruth Kelly as part of a sinister and evil organisation. The Da Vinci Code is a work of fiction, and there are plenty of things in the book and the film that I find impossible to take seriously. However, imagining a minister in the present Labour government as part of a sinister and evil organisation is not one of them. For the benefit of anyone who has spent the past few months in a monastery, the new local government minister Ruth Kelly is a member of the religious group Opus Dei, which is presented in the film as a sinister conspiracy which will stop at nothing including murder to achieve its ends, such as preventing the exposure of supposed 2000 year old secrets concerning an imaginary marriage between Jesus and Mary of Magdalen. However, perhaps “The Times” has a point in that ministers in the present government certainly ...

Now out - a compilation of articles detailing a hundred instances of corrupt, anti-democratic, or inappropriate behaviour by Labour politicians. This was written by internet bloggers, organised by the founder of Politico's bookshop, Iain Dale, with "Guido Fawkes" one of the best of the iconoclastic internet commentators on current British politics. I must "declare an interest" in this book (that expression is the code which councillors and MPs are supposed to use when admitting to not being impartial about something), as I wrote one of the articles myself. Nonetheless I strongly recommend it. If there is anyone left in Britain who believes that Tony Blair has kept his promise that his government would be "whiter than white" then The Little Red Book is a good antidote. An advert can be seen on the internet at The Little Red Book of New Labour Sleaze (URL is www.newlaboursleaze.com)

I should probably start this entry by making clear that the pro-nuclear views expressed in it are my own and not necessarily those of the Conservative party. My own position could hardly be a secret – nobody who had any doubts about the safety of nuclear reprocessing would have moved his family three hundred miles to within a few miles of Sellafield in order to fight the Copeland constituency and nobody with reservations about civil nuclear power would have made substantial personal sacrifices in the attempt to become MP for a community where about 17,000 jobs depend directly or indirectly on the nuclear industry. David Cameron has announced a review into the party’s policy on energy policy which I believe to be a genuine exercise in the sense that he has not predetermined the outcome. Because I also believe that the argument for a balanced energy policy in which civil nuclear power plays a role is overwhelming, I have every hope that those of us who support nuclear power will be able ...

At a meeting of councillors last weekend, someone accidentally referred to the UK government department responsible for local councils by its former title of “ODPM.” It was pointed out that as this department had been taken away from John Prescott, it was no longer the “Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.” “OK” asked a colleague, “what’s it called now?” While trying to answer this question I came across a suggestion from one wag that, following the appointment of Ruth Kelly, this department should still have the acronym ODPM but this would now refer to “Opus Dei Promoted Minister” To mark the long overdue end of John Prescott’s disastrous tenure as minister for local government, I am offering a small prize for the best suggestion for the real meaning of any huge number of acronyms introduced by the OPDM during the Prescott era emailed to me at chris4copeland@btinternet.com by the end of May. This may sound like a joke, but the serious aspect is that during his term of office John Pre...

In my post after Blair’s botched reshuffle I mentioned my mixed feelings that Margaret Beckett, who richly deserved the sack for her inexcusable failure to pay Britain’s farmers the Single Farm Payment cash they were due months ago, had instead been promoted. At least as Foreign secretary she can’t do so much damage to Cumbria’s farms and rural areas. Incidentally I am pleased to see that the MP for Copeland has recently made sure the local newspapers knew that he was demanding action when a company was late paying its workers. I hope he will be even more vigorous in demanding that his own government pays out promptly the millions of pounds due to farmers, especially small farmers in this constituency. I learn from the “people” diary in The Times that the new agriculture and rural affairs minister, David Miliband has appointed a new head of the rural payments agency. Apparently, “almost the instant” he arrived in DEFRA, David Miliband gave the job to Tony Cooper. It’s a small world – T...

I see that after Labour’s poor results in the local elections Mr Blair has swung the axe, sacking Charles Clarke, removing John Prescott’s department, and moving many ministers including Jack Straw and Hilary “I need an abacus” Armstrong. I have mixed feelings about the promotion of Margaret “sheep’s brains” Beckett – she deserved the sack even more than Charles Clarke did, but at least she cannot do as much damage to Cumbria’s farmers as Foreign Secretary as she did while in charge of rural policy. The new secretary of state for the Environment, David Milliband, will take over responsibility for this area. The dwindling faction of people loyal to Blair say that Milliband is very talented: if he wants to prove it a good start would be to pay our farmers the money they should have had months ago. Forget his private life – John Prescott was a disaster as a minister. It is of course an outrageous waste of public money to allow the benefits of office - including the car, the salary, and tw...

Next week the Royal College of Midwives are meeting in Torquay for their annual conference. Almost all of us owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the midwives who helped bring us into the world: I have of course no memory of the midwives who assisted at my own birth, but I have very positive memories both of those who assisted at the birth of my own children, and of those midwives I met while serving as a Health Authority member. In both cases I was impressed by their professionalism, knowledge, and common sense. Obstetricians have the most glamorous role in delivering babies but, after the mother, midwives do most of the work, and the rest of us would do well to listen very carefully to what they have to say. Which makes the recommendations of the RCM conference on all aspects of birth, including pain relief, very important. I shall be watching what the conference says about Epidurals and other forms of pain relief with great interest. Earlier this year the Education and Research Com...

Amazingly, I heard one comment over the bank holiday weekend from someone who was even more out of touch than Labour ministers ... This was the lady who rang a BBC phone in programme and complained that the released prisoners were being regarded as a threat to the public because they are foreigners. No madam, the fact that some of these people are regarded as a serious threat to the public has nothing to do with the fact that they are foreigners. It is because they have either pleaded guilty, or found by a court to have been proven beyond reasonable doubt to be guilty, of serious crimes including murder, rape, drug dealing, and child abuse. I am every bit as concerned about the threat posed on their release by British nationals who have committed serious offences, either in this country or abroad. Clearly we do not have the option of deporting the former group, and the countries where British criminals have committed offences are fully entitled to deport them back here. But then the au...

Ten years ago Conservative Central Office ran the "Demon Eyes" campaign with the slogan "New Labour New Danger" and various posters and merchandise, including a poster of a laughing Tony Blair with someone else's eyes superimposed. It made a lot of people laugh - especially the badges with flashing eyes - but not the way we wanted. With 20:20 hindsight, this campaign demonstrated that we had no idea how to deal with Tony Blair. This year New Labour, with their usual amazing ability to come up with an even worse version of the mistakes the Conservatives made when we were in government, unveiled their own version of Demon Eyes - a negative campaign against David Cameron called "Dave the Chameleon." It's intended to be subtly damning but just comes over as funny, not least because every significant criticism it makes of David Cameron is far more applicable to Tony Blair. Dave isn't rattled - apparently he asked for a copy of the cartoon for his ki...

So Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt says that the NHS is having its “best year ever.” Anyone who believes that should be a customer of the health service, not running it. Staff, patients and friends of all the community hospitals in Cumbria, and all the rest of the EIGHTY threatened Community hospitals, may wonder what planet Patricia Hewitt is living on. So will the thousands of people in Cumbria and tens of thousands across the country who have lost their NHS dental place and can’t get another. I don’t think the 6,000 people whose jobs in the NHS have gone, or another 7,000 NHS staff whose jobs are currently at risk, will agree that the NHS is having its best year ever. Neither will women of childbearing age in West Cumbria, or most of the midwives and other staff working in the maternity unit at West Cumberland Hospital in Whitehaven, where there is a possibility that part of the service may move to Carlisle, forcing about 1,000 women a year to travel up to 50 miles to give birth. ...

I am writing this in the early evening of Maunday Thursday, just at the start of the central weekend of Easter. Like, I suspect, a great many people who have not yet gone on holiday I have been having a thoroughly wretched day: half the company seems to have gone on leave and the rest are frantically trying to complete various projects that have to be done before Easter or before other people disappear for their own holidays and getting anything done seems quite impossible. Just after I finished work for the day, in a thoroughly black mood, my state of mind was lifted when I dropped my car in to a local garage to sort out a minor matter and the people there were so incredibly helpful that I finished on a high note after all. (I can strongly recommend the garage concerned, by the way – it was Coach Road Motors in Whitehaven.) In a funny way this said more to me about the real spirit of Easter than any number of Easter Eggs or fancy clothes – I was feeling down and lifted by the consider...

If we want a secure future for our grandchildren we urgently need to reduce carbon emissions into the atmosphere. In the past most of the debate about this has been about global warming, and the scientific evidence that global warming may be extremely damaging is growing steadily stronger. However, there may be an even worse problem associated with the release of carbon into that atmosphere - acidification of the oceans. Some evidence suggests that about 50% of the increased carbon released into the atmosphere in the past century has been absorbed by the sea. So, you ask, is that good news is because it takes some of the carbon out of the global warming equation? Unfortunately not, because this carbon appears to be forming enough acid to shift the pH balance of the oceans. This is extremely bad news for any marine animal with either a skeleton or a shell, and anything which eats those animals. If the seawater is more acidic, it becomes harder for fish to extract the calcium they need f...

I have been deeply unhappy for some time with the absurdly over-complicated Single Farm Payment and the problems it causes for farmers, especially in the so called “deprived areas” which it further deprives of funds. It seems that this system is too complicated for DEFRA themselves and they are now very behind with paying it. This is causing massive difficulty for many farmers. A few weeks ago I heard agriculture minister Lord Bach on the radio blustering that the money would be paid by the end of March. It has not been. Lord Bach and his boss Margaret Beckett are guilty of arrogance, complacency and incompetence. If ability to do the job had any relevance to holding office in the present Labour government, they would both be sacked tomorrow.

Results for three by elections this week for Copeland Council: Gosforth: Conservative 264 Labour 85 Lib/Dem 62 Hensingham: Labour 385 Conservative 207 Lib/Dem 38 Cleator Moor: Labour 307 Independent 191 My congratulations to all those who supported local democracy by taking part in these elections, and I would particularly like to congratulate the successful Conservative candidate in Gosforth, Cllr Alan Jacob, who won with an increased Conservative share of the vote compared with 2003 despite the fact that he faced two opponents rather than one.

I was very impressed with the spirited support for the combined campaign to support all the Community Hospitals at the weekend. The choice of April 1st for the start of the exercise was deliberate, and made the point that the idea of cutting 118 beds in Cumbria’s community hospitals is so daft that it had to be an April Fool. A chain was built with a ring for each hospital, bearing legends like “SAVE MILLOM COMMUNITY HOSPITAL”, “SAVE KESWICK HOSPITAL” and so on. The growing chain of rings was taken from one hospital to another in turn by various different routes. All three local MPs, Conservative and Labour, supported the campaign – this is too important to be party political. I went to Keswick early on Sunday morning to see of the canoist who was bearing the rings from Keswick hospital down Bassenthwaite to Cockermouth, and then took my family to Millom to to see the classic cars which arrived there at the end of the last leg. Throughout the mood was positive, friendly, and construct...

My favourite comeback this week came in an email from a listener read out on the Today programme. He was responding to an interview with an MP who was promoting a bill to control the temperature of bath water. This lady wants the law to insist on temperature regulators being fitted to baths in all new houses or when bathrooms are rebuilt. She was also very hot, if you will excuse the pun, on putting the cold water in first when running a bath. No, despite the date this is not an April Fool, and I am not joking: an MP really said that on the Today programme last Wednesday morning. There was a barrage of emails in response. The best was as follows: “My wife has just run a bath and put the hot water in first: is there a confidential government hotline I can ring to grass her up ?”

After a strike over pensions which I wrote about earlier this week, and following on from a sequence of revelations which has not enhanced the reputation of politics, MPs have done something which will further reduce the respect in which they are held. They have voted more taxpayer’s money to their own pensions. Many of the people who go into politics have enough ability that they could earn a lot more in other fields. Nevertheless, the sight of people paying themselves more out of public money is not particularly attractive, whether they are MPs voting themselves more salary and pensions or councillors voting themselves more allowances. My personal view is that the remuneration of elected politicians should not be decided by the politicians themselves. Instead the salaries, allowances, and pensions of MPs, MEPs, and councillors should be delegated to an independent panel. This would not be perfect – I have sometimes considered the recommendations of the existing panels to be too gener...

Yesterday my four-year old children were sent home at mid-day without lunch because their school was affected by “industrial action.” At the school’s main gate other children the same age had to cross a picket line to get to their classes. Across Cumbria 27 schools were affected, 14 of them in Copeland. The people who went on strike yesterday have every right to be angry with Gordon Brown and John Hutton over their pensions, but I hope that great care will be taken on all sides not to use children’s education as a pawn in an adult dispute. There are three points on which I agree with the strikers. - The first is that everyone is right to be concerned about their future pension arrangements and entitled to lobby to secure the best deal they can. - The second is that the government has shown bad faith to the public sector in general including local government workers on pensions, and much of the blame for yesterday’s strike rests with the government. - The third is that there are stre...

I completed the Swimathon in an hour and forty minutes, which represents a twenty minute improvement on last year. I am still collecting sponsorship (so it’s not too late) but would like to thank all the BT colleagues and councillors of all parties (and none) who have already sponsored me.

The difficulty of first time house buyers in finding a home is a real problem in many parts of the country. The problem gets most recognition in the South East, where exceptionally high house prices don’t just crucify young people looking for a home but make problems for entire communities as employers, including public services such as schools and hospitals, cannot find enough staff because people cannot afford to live there. But this is not just a problem in the South East – it also affects many parts of Cumbria where house prices are several times higher than they were in the year 2000. House prices in villages like Gosforth and the area around Keswick are about as high as they are in many parts of the South East: it is just about impossible for a young person setting up their first home to stay in the area unless he or she wins the lottery or inherits the cash from Mum and Dad. So I welcome proposals endorsed by Conservative leader David Cameron, to help first-time buyers and ensur...

Gordon Brown’s tenth budget was something of a non-event – long on political knockabout, short on real action, short on real news. He continues to increase real taxes by stealth using “fiscal drag” e.g. not increasing allowances in line with inflation. When Brown’s promises are examined in detail they often look more and more hollow. Take the promise to make spending in state schools match what is currently spent in cash terms in private schools. As the BBC’s chief political correspondence pointed out, If you look for the details of this promise in the Treasury's Red Book – which gives the details of the actual proposals rather than the political rhetoric - and you find that the "long term ambition" to match what private schools spend in state schools comes with no figures attached, no target date and no explanation of how it will be paid for. In other words this promise is totally meaningless. All the government would have to do to meet it is to increase spending on stat...

This is Swimathon week, when several thousand people at hundreds of swimming pools up and down the country will be doing sponsored swimming activities to raise money for charity. This year the main beneficiary is the children’s charity NCH. Unfortunately neither the Copeland pool in Hensingham (which has some rebuilding work today) nor the Keswick pool are taking part this time. I will be doing the swim in Harpenden. The one participating pool in Cumbria this year is Workington; we’ll have to see if we can get a few more involved next time. Initially the Swimathon involved a 5,000 metre swim (that’s about three miles for the non-metric amongst us) – there are now shorter challenges for those who are not up to that and a 10,000 metre challenge for those who are exceptional swimmers. I hope to try that in the next year or two but it won’t be this year – I will be quite happy if I finish the three miles. Anyone who would like to sponsor me, please drop me a line at charityswim@chris4copel...

Accordingly to a leaked report, the review group considering the future of maternity services in Cumbria was split about how to proceed, and one of the options they have considered would require about a thousand women each year to travel from West Cumbria to Carlisle to give birth. One option in the report was to upgrade the maternity units at both Carlisle and the West Cumberland hospital in Whitehaven. The other option was to downgrade the West Cumberland maternity unit to a midwife-led unit and for deliveries requiring support doctors to take place in Carlisle. Apparently the review group was not able to reach agreement on either of these options and is working on a new proposal. On the face of it, the arguments for retaining and improving doctor-led units on both sites appear overwhelming. Midwife-led maternity units have been successful in some more urban parts of Britain, but such units are usually within fifteen minutes “blue light” ambulance ride of a doctor-led maternity unit ...

Various comments from council meetings at the opposite end of the country in the past few days have set me to thinking about the importance of civility and good manners in public life. There is always a temptation for someone considering a current problem, to compare it with some real or mythical past age when such problems supposedly did not exist, and conclude either that the younger generation is dreadful or that the country is going to the dogs. I will resist that temptation, because I can remember when I first got involved in politics at the age of 17 I heard some pretty extreme examples of rudeness between politicians, and older councillors lamenting that there was much more hostility between the parties than when they were younger. Come to that, as a small boy I remember hearing my mother tell my father that there were “a lot of babies running the country” after an exchange between Ted Heath and Harold Wilson which concluded with the leader of the opposition saying that “an insu...

Giving birth can be both one of the most wonderful and one of the most agonisingly painful experiences any human can have. No man can completely understand what the women we love have to go through to bring our children into the world, but you don’t have to experience it first hand to know that even a straightforward and quick labour with no complications is a shattering experience and a bad one is beyond description. I have always found it amazing that some “natural birth” fanatics try as hard as they do to persuade women not to use pain relief during birth. Where there are genuine medical concerns about particular methods of pain relief I understand it. But people who argue against anaesthetics on the grounds that they stop people from having the whole experience of birth completely horrify me. It is the sort of argument you would expect from the Marquis de Sade on acid. I am strongly opposed to the proposal from Education and Research Committee of the National College of Midwives t...

I was most amused to see on the front of the News and Star the other day a quote attributed to the Deputy Prime Minister to the effect that he felt a right twit. Had someone slipped John “Two Jags” Prescott a truth drug ? Had he realised how daft it is to bulldoze thousands of houses in the North while simultaneously forcing councils in the South to build vastly more houses than the local infrastructure can support ? Has he finally realised how daft it is to waste millions of pounds on unelected Regional Assemblies when the only area of the country he offered a chance to say whether they wanted an elected regional assembly voted massively against “more politicians” ? Was he referring to the fact that he as minister for council tax had not paid his own ? Was he referring to the fact that while he is proud of having two jags himself, his department’s policy of restricting the parking places provided with new houses means that anyone else with two cars will have trouble finding a house w...

(Or, "Why Cumbria should keep our own police force." At one stage it looked as though the proposal that Cumbria should lose our own police force, as part of a rationalisation into huge regional police forces, would go through without much of a fight. However, all the police authorities have refused to meekly submit proposals for their own abolition by the required deadline. And I am grateful to Simon Jenkins in the Guardian for the most damning quote opposing the regionalisation of police forces in England and Wales. A very prominent politician once described the idea of scrapping the existing 43 police forces and replacing them with larger regional forces as "the most determined and least popular attempt ever made to centralise policing in Britain, to give ministers unprecedented control over the way that the police do their work, and to undermine police independence. It is driven not just by short-term cost-cutting, but by an ideology that resents local freedom, and ha...