Chris Whiteside's Blog

Britain used to be a society which understood what Voltaire was getting at when he said "I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Within reason and the law, obviously - there is and should be a law of libel, and as another famous saying has it, freedom of speech does not confer the right to shout "Fire" in a crowded space (unless there really is one.) But freedom to express controversial opinions does not seem to be what it was, as the case of Katharine Birbalsingh demonstrates all too well. I was in the conference hall for the speech about education at Conservative party conference by Ms Birbalsingh, who at the time was a deputy headteacher working in a school supported by the diocese of Southwark. Her speech was passionate and controversial, along the same lines as the Melanie Phillips argument. (She used the line "All Must Have Prizes," which is the title of Ms Phillips' book, early in the speech.) My exper...

Another set of road closures in West Cumbria: one set of closures at Cleator Moor high street is causing diversions and affecting traffic flows all over central and North Copeland, and affecting public transport. There is also a road closure at Albion Street in Whitehaven where Copeland Council is undertaking emergency work on two buildings which have been designated as dangerous structures. The Dusty Miller and Hanratty's will be open as normal during the works.

Former Copeland Council CEO Liam Murphy died yesterday morning from cancer at the age of 46, leaving a widow and three children. I didn't always agree with Liam, but during his tragically brief period at Copeland before retiring because of the illness which was to kill him, I felt that he did make a real effort to shake up the culture and improve the effectiveness of the council. Our thoughts are with his family at this sad time. Rest in Peace

I attended the first meeting yesterday of a Copeland Council "Improvement Group" which is reviewing the siting and effectiveness of the polling stations for elections in the Borough. We agreed that as part of the exercise we should consult the public. Details of this will appear on the council website and in the local press very soon. In the meantime, anyone who has a view on the suitability of polling stations in Copeland at recent elections (including any gaps in coverage) is encouraged to write to Jessica Hall at Copeland Council centre, Catherine Street, Whitehaven. The review has to be completed by January.

Hat-tip to Mike Smithson at "Political Betting" for pointing out some more interesting press responses to the CSR. Simon Hoggart in the Guardian wrote here that: “Labour has, on the whole, decided that the deficit isn’t its fault. It has, you would imagine, been invented by the Tories purely in order to allow them the cuts which they are imposing with an odious relish.” Andrew Rawnley is on the same lines in yesterday’s Observer, here , when he writes “Labour’s attacks on the government have so far failed to gain traction. The new shadow chancellor, Alan Johnson, will not get a serious hearing for Labour’s arguments until his party has restored its own economic credibility and that can’t start to happen until the opposition’s spokesmen and women stop sounding like people living in a fantasy universe in which there is no deficit to address and a Labour chancellor would have been able to announce free holidays in Barbados all round.” Rawnsley - who, remember, used to be very c...

The post below was put up fifteen years ago in 2010 to suggest some spoof alternative words for the "Phantom of the Opera" trailer. The point of the joke was to suggest that the debt and deficit inherited by the new Coalition government led by "Dave and Nick" (Cameron & Clegg) from the New Labour government was underlying all the painful decisions the new government was having to take. "Sarah" is Sarah Brightman who was singing the role of the opera's heroine, Christine, and "Steve" is Steve Harley who was singing the role of the Phantom. "CSR" refers to the Comprehensive Spending Review which was ongoing at the time the post was written. Amusingly, it took friendly fire from people who thought the suggestion was that the debt was a phantom. I presume they hadn't seen the opera ... I have put in a replacement link to the trailer as the original one stopped working at sometime in the last fifteen years. Above: Sarah...

The Independent, one of the newspapers usually closer to Labour, asked today " Where is the Labour alternative? " The article will not have made good reading for Red Ed or Alan Johnson. It begins "On Wednesday, George Osborne's Comprehensive Spending Review laid out the most drastic fiscal consolidation since the Second World War. It was, therefore, a golden opportunity for the Opposition to propose an alternative approach to Britain's economic predicament. But Labour's response fell flat." The Independent leader article continued that "the party's new leader, Ed Miliband, said he would not oppose every cut announced by the Coalition. He was right to do so. The price of economic credibility is support for policies that, though unpopular, are necessary for the country's long-term economic health. Labour would have had to cut public spending too if the party had won May's election ." They concluded that Labour appeared to have delegat...

Nobody goes into politics to carry out the sort of measures which the Chancellor had to announce yesterday Cuts on the scale which had to be made to clear up Labour's mess cannot be made without causing real pain to nearly everyone in society, including some of the less fortunate. That is no cause for celebration. But the fact remains, that borrowing one pound in every four you spend is simply not possible. Governments have more flexibilty about how much they borrow and spend than an ordinary household but there are limits to what they can get away with for any length of time, and the fiscal position which this government inherited was way outside them. There is no way that any responsible governnment - which the present one is, and the last one was not - could have avoided either heavy tax increases, severe spending cuts, or both. Nobody will have liked most of the measures announced yesterday. But anyone who criticises them has to say what they would cut instead, of how they woul...

SIR – At the recent meeting of the full Copeland Borough Council, amid the political point scoring (from the Labour benches in particular), the leader, Coun Elaine Woodburn, referred to one of my members as an “alleged member of the public.” I wonder if the leader would like to clarify Copeland Borough Council’s definition of ‘member of the public’ and enlighten us as to when it was altered to exclude members of the Conservative Party? Stephen HARALDSEN Deputy Chairman, Copeland Conservative Association Hillcrest, Whitehaven

One of the things which least impressed me about Labour's response to the difficult measures today was the expression on Red Ed's face when the chancellor announced that the government had actually accepted one of the requests from the opposition, limiting the extent of the cuts to hit any one department. He could not hide his disappointment. But I also noticed that Alan Johnson, the Shadow Chancellor, made a comment diametrically opposed to one particular fairy story which Labour's Jamie Reed put in just about every piece of propaganda they issued in Copeland during the run-up to the last election. Jamie Reed alleged that the Conservatives had voted against every penny of government investment in West Cumbria. Yet today, Alan Johnson said that the Conservatives had SUPPORTED "Every penny of our spending plans" up to 2007. I don't actually accept that either of these statements gives a fair picture of the Conservative position. But what is indisputable is that...

Also in the Chancellor's speech, Cumbria will be one of the areas to benefit from a pilot scheme to extend superfast broadband to rural areas

The Chancellor has confirmed that spending on schools will rise in real terms every year for the next few years. Surestart programmes will also be protected in cash terms. Although the BSF programme has been scrapped, this does not mean that there will be no new school building: the chancellor said that six hundred schools will benefit from investment in new or improved buildings.

I was delighted while watching the Chancellor's statement today, in which he announced some very difficult decisions to tackle the government deficit, that he specifically confirmed that the West Cumberland Hospital rebuild and refurbishment will go ahead. (This was one of three hospital rebuild programmes mentioned in the speech.) He also confirmed that total NHS spending is being protected from the cuts and will increase be more than inflation every year in this parliament.

When I am asked why Conservative governments are unpopular, I usually answer "Because they've had to do unpleasant things to clear up the mess left by Labour governments." Today the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition will have to dish out one of the most painful doses of medicine ever inflicted by a British government in order to clear up the worst mess ever left behind by a former British government. National Debt doubled - the last Labour government borrowed more than every previous government in history put together The worst deficit ever left by a British government - this year HMG will borrow £140 billion, more than Britain spends on the NHS More interest to pay on the national debt - £25 billion a year, more than Britain spends on schools, not to pay back the debt but just to service the interest on it. And if we don't get a grip that amount will keep on going up. This situation cannot be allowed to continue: failure to take firm action now would condemn us to the s...

Having had to listen to a whole host of silly political questions from Labour at Copeland Council last week, none of which made it into the local papers, I was taken by a reference on Political Betting comparing Labour's current opinions to the G&S Opera Ruddigore in which the main characters admit that their opinions are irrelevant in a trio with the chorus line "It really doesn't matter" which includes phrases like "If I were not a little mad and generally silly I would give you my opinions on the subject willy nilly ... " The political betting post concerned referred to this link to Spitting Image's portrayal of the Labour G&S Society under Neil Kinnock, the "Red Ed" of the 1980s, performing their version of Ruddigore, with Neil K singing, almost too fast to make out (which is part of the joke).  Here is the original song "It really doesn't matter" from Gilbert & Sullivan's opera Ruddigore, which is being parod...

I was horrified to learn from "The Guardian" here (with a hat-tip to Political Betting) that Labour's Lady McDonagh, in a a written statement in defence of Baroness Uddin (who has been ordered to repay more than £125,000 in wrongly claimed expenses), accused the House of Lords' ethics committee of showing “little or no cultural understanding of being a Muslim women born outside of the UK”. WTF? Lady McDonagh could not have done more to boost the BNP had she secretly been on their payroll. If there was ever an example of "the soft racism of low expectations" that was it. The committee found that Lady Uddin had first claimed her brother's flat, then a flat she owned in Kent, as her first home when in fact she rarely stayed away from her real main home four miles from central London. Let's be absolutely clear on this: any member of either House of Parliament who claims more than a hundred grand of taxpayer's money more than they are entitled to, i...

Nasty cold today and found at church that I had lost my singing voice. The celebrant at St James's, Revd Canon Kelly, was kind enough to notice and express the hope that I would be in good voice again soon. Quite unusual really - when a politician loses his voice most people hope it will stay lost for as long as possible !

Simon Jenkins has been infuriating the left with an article in the Guardian which you can read here , suggesting that "The coalition is fast becoming the most leftwing British government since the war. It has clobbered the middle classes on child benefit. On Tuesday it accepted advice to impose a swingeing loan repayment regime on rich graduates. Today it said it would wipe billions in tax relief from private pension plans. This is from a government that is the first to stand by a top-rate tax rise, to 50%, since the Labour government of 1974. Nothing is sacred. Rightwing this is not." I don't go all the way with this argument. The coalition has also axed 200 quangos, cancelled Labour's jobs tax, and capped the benefits available to families where nobody has a health or disability problem at the income level they could earn while working at an average wage. The examples in Jenkin's article, those quoted above and others in the body of the article, were clearly sel...

The decision to axe nearly 200 quangos was referred to today as a "Bonfire of the Quangos" which is ironic as this was a term coined when they were in opposition by New Labour back in the 90's. One of many things they promised but didn't do. By no means all quangos are unnecessary: some do good work, some of the things which used to be done by quangos will now have to be done elsewhere. But pruning them back is necessary to maintain accountability and check waste - unless this is done every so often there is a marked tendancy for the number of quangos to grow like topsy. Some of the bodies whose demise was formally announced today are more significant than others - some had already been virtually eliminated. For example, the once-mighty British Nuclear Fuels had already had its functions transferred to other bodies. At a Copeland Council briefing a year or so ago one of the outgoing managers at Sellafield described what was left of BNFL as being a secretary and a fili...

I'm sure people around the world will be celebrating the amazing rescue of all the 33 men who have been trapped 2000 feet underground in a mine in Chile for two months. A fantastic triumph for the discipline and determination of both the miners themselves and their rescuers. Mining towns and communities tend to have a strong and tightly-knit sense of identity within themselves and with each other. Sixty and a hundred years ago Whitehaven received messages of sympathy and support from mining communities all around the world after terrible disasters: I am sure today the thoughts of millions of people all around the world will be with the people of Chile (and Bolivia) in their joy at the wonderful news that these men have been rescued.

The government has opened the re-consultation on the Nuclear Policy planning documents, and has dropped both Kirksanton and Braystones from the list of proposed sites on the grounds that neither are considered suitable for deployment by 2025. Sellafield is still very much on the list - this was of course both my preferred site in West Cumbria and that of Copeland council.

Speaking personally, I loathe the idea of tuition fees for University education, and was very happy to stand in 2005 on a manifesto of scrapping them. But that was in the very different financial position five years ago. When we fought that previous election on the platform of scrapping tuition fees, it was before Labour had doubled the national debt, taking the cost of paying the interest on that debt up to £25 billion a year, more than the country spends on schools. It was not at a time when the government was spending four pounds for every three coming in. That is why we didn't repeat the promise to scrap tuition fees in the 2010 election. We knew it was no longer affordable. And it is why I reluctantly followed the party's advice not to sign the NUS pledge to oppose any increase in tuition fees. Nick Robinson missed the point that the Tory promise to scrap fees was made five years ago, in a totally different financial situation, and was not repeated in this year's elect...

Copeland Council met at 5pm this evening. As is growing depressingly familiar, there was the usual splurge of questions from Labour councillors inviting Labour executive members to complain about how terrible the cuts are. The fact that these cuts would not be necessary had not the Labour government presided over a gigantic government deficit, doubled the national debt, and left behind a situation where the government was spending four pounds for every three coming in was, for some reason, never mentioned by any of the Labour speakers. One particular own goal was scored by the Labour councillor who asked for an impact assessment in Copeland of the job losses at Sellafield. These may indeed be serious, unless the coalition government changes the policies of its' Labour predecessor. But as I pointed out, the coalition has not changed government policy in this area. The policies and budgets which have put jobs at Sellafield at risk were put in place by Labour: indeed, the first warnin...

A survey carried out by the University of Glamorgan and reported on the TV channel Dave alleges that Brits start to lose our sense of humour at the age of 52. Supposedly a poll of 2000 people found that adults have less to laugh about as they age: on average adults laugh out loud around four times a day, according to the findings, but by the time we reach 50 this falls to just three times a day and to 2.5times a day at the age of 60. Dr Lesley Harbridge from the University of Glamorgan said: "The Lifetime of Laughter Scale shows that there really is a law of diminishing returns when it comes to laughter. "We laugh twice as much in our teens as we do in our fifties. And our findings suggest that it's all downhill from 52." Well, this is obviously no laughing matter, and the other Dave MUST pass a law AT ONCE to tackle the national laughter deficit by requiring Dr Harbridge and all other academics from the University of Glamorgan to spend at least two days a week from...

Having a surname beginning with W, I noticed a long time that society's preference for doing things in alphabetical order can inflict a number of mostly trivial nuisances on those with surnames at the end of the alphabet. Because of voter laziness, one form of usually trivial discrimination against people with alphabetically high names is in being always placed at the bottom of the ballot paper. In the ward where I did most of my campaigning during the very first election I was involved in - the general and local council elections of 1979 - we had a classic example of this. A few of those who had turned out to vote for the general election, when given their local government ballot paper, just ticked the first three names. Because it was a close election, those three were elected - one Conservative, one Labour councillor, and one Independent. My mother, whose maiden name began with L, told me that she noticed the difference when marriage to my father took her from the middle to the ...

THere is always a sense of "End of Term" about the last day of a Conservative conference: doubly so because for journos and exhibitors it is not just the last day of this conference but that of the whole conference season for the year. Nevertheless a reasonably happy mood and some intreresting contributions on Defence and Foreign affairs, the "New Politics" and political reform. One of my Copeland colleagues has coined the phrase "Evidence-Based Scepticism" to describe the public's (largely-justified) concerns about the quality and responsiveness of public services and the extent to which politicans and other public servants of all parties and kinds do - or don't - engage with and respond to them. Now all eyes are on DC's speech this afternoon.

Having been back in Copeland for a meeting last night I was up very early to drive back to Conference for the Health and Education discussions. Arrived in the hall just as the Health session got under way. Both the public service sessions - health and education - featured people involved in providing the service, from doctors and a first responder to a group of teachers. Andrew Lansley is in the almost unique position among government ministers in that his budget is ring-fenced - but rather tha sit back and assume things will be easy he described measures being taken to reduce bureaucracy and transfer the money saved to patient care. He also described measures being taken to get greater tranparency and accountability of how health money is spent. Michael Gove gave a very impassioned speech about the the need to raise standards and improve school discipline so as to give children who want to learn the strongest possible opportuities and incentive to do so. Then to a very interesting Nuc...

Tuesday's memorable image was of controversial American education reformer Geoff Canada addressing the conference. He runs a group of schools in one of the most depressed areas of Harlem which have had an amazing record in raising educational attainment for the disadvantaged, largely black, kids in the area. His most memorable quote was "If our kids don't do well, neither do we."

A stall, presumably run by the same people who were selling "Gordon's Porky Pies" last year. This one was called "Red Ed's Diner - Beer and Sandwiches" (with a picture of Ed Miliband.) The beer was "David's bitter."

"Mr Miliband, don't you dare claim to be a friend of working class people. Don't you dare to claim to be a friend of ethnic minorities; and don't you dare claim to be a friend of people from the north. I am all of these things, and Mr Miliband you are no friend of mine!" Baroness Sayeeda Warsi