Chris Whiteside's Blog

Misty morning in Whitehaven - popped out a couple of times to see if I could spot the eclipse but although people in other parts of Cumbria such as Penrith appear to have seen it, there does not have been anything to see here. Of course, I would not have been looking directly at it if there were ...

This morning this blog passed 300,000 pageviews since the traffic counters went on about eight years ago. (I have been running the blog for about ten years, which is Methuselah in political blogging terms.) Thanks to everyone who has taken the trouble to read the blog in that time, hope you found it interesting. And thanks to all those who left constructive comments.

I dare say Ed Balls would complain vigorously if we described this as the most unlikely endorsement a Tory chancellor has ever had, but the following quote certainly does not appear consistent with any argument that yesterday's budget was a disastrously bad one ...  

Stephen Haraldsen, Conservative candidate to be MP for Copeland, has commented on the situation in North Cumbria's hospitals as follows: "The West Cumberland Hospital and the Cumberland Infirmary are having trouble dealing with the volume and complexity of cases at the moment, struggling to get people well and out of hospital. "Just last week the Government gave the trust an extra £3 million to treat more patients, on top of the extra £47 million they got last year. "This major incident isn't the hospital's fault, but I hope they can work to sort it out as soon as possible so patients get the treatment they need."

A joint statement has been issued on behalf of the NHS in Cumbria about the issues at the hospitals today. All non-urgent elective operations have now been cancelled today and tomorrow at both the Cumberland Infirmary in Carlisle and the West Cumberland Hospital in Whitehaven. The statement refers to difficulty admitting and discharging patients, long waits in the emergency department and high numbers of patients in acute hospital beds awaiting discharge as the reasons for the crisis. It goes on: "To help alleviate these pressures, NHS organisations across north Cumbria have jointly agreed to categorise the current situation as an internal major incident, in order for the hospital trust, NHS Cumbria Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG), Cumbria Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, ambulance services and the local authority to divert resources, to ensure patients get the best possible care." A spokeswoman for North Cumbria University Hospitals NHS Trust said that the declar...

Even before the revisions in yesterday's budget removed what faint validity the claim had, Caroline Flint looked pretty silly on the "Sunday Politics" show when she trotted out the Labour argument that the Conservatives want to cut spending to 1930's levels. Flint was unable to  answer the question of how much (in today's money) the government was spending in the 1930s. It's about a tenth of what the coalition is spending today, vastly less than was proposed in last year's autumn statement, and a lower share of GDP than was proposed in yesterday's budget.

The News and Star website reports this morning that a major internal incident has been declared at north Cumbria's hospitals by the Trust in charge of the Cumberland Infirmary in Carlisle and the West Cumberland Hospital.   The News & Star has learned that staff were called to a meeting at 3pm yesterday, at which they were told that the hospital is now at "escalation number five", which is an internal major incident. A spokeswoman for North Cumbria University Hospitals NHS Trust told the News & Star that the declaration is across the trust, but the Carlisle hospital is more acutely affected. The News and Star says that the hospital simply ran out of beds yesterday afternoon, and had no option but to declare an emergency and call for help from its partner agencies. A full statement from the trust and HS Cumbria Clinical Commissioning Group is expected later.

Balls misses the ball ... Channel Four's "Fact check" has just published a piece which draws out how many of the statement made by the Labour leadership in general and Ed Balls in particular have been completely wrong, which you can read at http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/factcheck-labour-wrong-economy/20443 As they point out, Balls was wrong with his predictions that the coalition's policies would fail to produce growth, when in fact, quote "Britain’s economy grew faster than any of the other G7 countries in 2014, according to the IMF ." He was wrong to predict that the coalition's policies would not help businesses to provide more jobs when in fact, quote "there were more than 1.8 million more people in employment in the last quarter of 2014 than in the first quarter of 2010. Some 73.2 per cent of the economically active population are in work now compared to 70.2 per cent at the time of the last election. There is no doub...

"It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority." (Benjamin Franklin)

I was interested to read on the excellent Political Betting website a comment on George Osborne by a poster using the name "Fenster" which I suspect may bear more than a little resemblance to how history will judge him: "Fenster" wrote: Fenster Posts: 567 7:58PM edited 8:00PM                        "I think Osborne has done a good job over the five years. If we set aside the left/right politics of it all and accept that we live in a country addicted to debt with an electorate with unreasonable expectations of our public services (me included), then no Chancellor was ever going to eradicate the deficit in five years. It wasn't politically or electorally feasible; not without riots. He inherited a disastrous set of numbers, I think everybody accepts that, regardless of who was to blame. Then the disaste...

Good news for farmers in Copeland that they will be able to spread profits over five years: in an occupation where income can very so enormously from one year to the next as a result of good or bad weather affecting harvests, this was long overdue. Good news for farmers and everyone else that the chancellor has frozen fuel duty again, cancelling an increase due in September under the previous "escalator."

You can view on the Copeland Council website here the council's proposed allocations of land for development in the council's LDF. (LDF stands for Local Development Framework - that's John Prescott language for what used to be called a Local Plan.) Information is given by geographical area. You can also use the CBC website to comment on the proposals (follow the same link above).

Chancellor George Osborne writes: "Today I set out the last Budget before the election on May 7th, and I have a clear message. We have got a plan that is working, and a Budget that works for you. Thanks to our long-term economic plan, Britain is now walking tall again: A growing economy A record number of jobs Rising living standards The deficit down And, confirmed today, our national debt starting to fall as a share of the economy Britain is the comeback country. But we need your help - to support our long-term economic plan please donate today. Because we now face a critical choice. Do we return to the chaos of the past? Or do we keep on working through the long-term economic plan that is delivering for you? With this Budget we choose the future: We choose stability - committing to run a budget surplus and keep our debt share falling We choose jobs - backing business and skills that will create full employment , and supporting pubs and brewers by cuttin...

  If you want to make sure income tax cuts benefit the poor and not just the rich, the most effective way to do it is to raise tax thresholds so that workers in the least well paid jobs are taken out of income tax altogether. That is what this government has done, and today's budget included further rises in income tax thresholds.    The last Labour government doubled the income tax rate on the least affluent workers by scrapping the 10p tax rate. This government has eliminated the income tax rate for thousands of the least affluent workers by taking them completely out of the income tax net.

It is now just fifty days - seven weeks and one day - until what looks to be possibly the closest General Election of a lifetime and the most important for a generation. And it is all still looking too close to call. Today's budget may break the stalemate but at the moment it is impossible to predict whether David Cameron or Ed Miliband will be in number ten as a result of the election in fifty day's time. What you can be certain about it is that 1) It is very likely that the result will be close, and 2) that means your vote could make all the difference.

Labour's record on affordable housing came under attack recently from their own housing spokesperson on the Greater London Authority. Tom Copley, Labour’s housing spokesman in the capital, said that Margaret Thatcher’s government had built more council flats and houses in a single year than New Labour’s managed in its entire period in office.   This is correct.  The official data shows that the Blair and Brown governments built 7,870 council houses (local authority tenure) over the course of 13 years. (If we don’t include 2010 – the year when David Cameron became PM – this number drops to 6,510.) Mr Copley has contrasted this figure with the record of Mrs Thatcher’s government, which never built fewer than 17,710 homes in a year.   More details given at the "Full Facts" factcheck site here .   If you look at total social housing built including housing association properties, the contrast between Labour and Conservative housebuilding achievement...

Stephen Haraldsen, Conservative parliamentary candidate for Copeland, and John Stevenson, MP for Carlisle, met Dr Greg Clark MP, minister for Skills and Universities this week to lobby for support to Cumbria on the day £47 million of taxpayer investment in Cumbria was signed.   Stephen and John also raised the vexed question of the A595, which turned out to be particularly timely given the terrible figures for traffic accidents and deaths on the roads which have just been released (see post earlier today.)    

Anyone who lives in West Cumbria depends on the A595 and knows how dire long stretches of that road can be. Figures released following a freedom of information request by the North West Evening Mail show 116 road accidents on the A595 in 2014 compared with 96 the year before – a rise which has been described as “shocking” by a local campaigner. Last year there were 62 incidents which Cumbria police rated as “serious”.  The number of fatalities rose from two deaths in 2013 to five last year. County councillor for Millom, Brian Crawford, said most journeys along the road see a “near miss”. Cllr Crawford said: “I’m up and down that road all the time to Barrow and to Whitehaven so I know what it’s like. Most journeys I encounter a near miss. You get people misjudging corners and overtaking in the wrong place. I’m like a defensive driver because I know there are quite a lot of people out there who drive too fast just to gain a few minutes.” Some of the A595 is s...

After years of being a Facebook holdout I set up a Facebook page a few days ago for my mayoral campaign, https://www.facebook.com/pages/Chris-Whiteside-for-Mayor-of-Copeland/661109930660808 Facebook promptly started nagging me to add various bits of information some of which I had not originally considered relevant. It is hardly a secret that I work for BT, so I added this, to find that Facebook still lists the old brand name "British Telecom" in brackets after the company name. It is now fully a quarter of a century since the company dropped the brand name "British Telecom" in favour of "BT" and paid Wolf Olins millions of pounds in 1990 money to organise the rebranding.  I think this says something about the strength of habit - when a name, nickname or brand name gets into the human mind it can take a long time to go away

Today is the feast of St Patrick, patron saint of Ireland: a very happy St Patrick's Day to everyone reading this.

The Conservative (formerly Tory) and Liberal Democrat (formerly Whig) parties have both survived for three and a half centuries since coming into being during the reign of Charles II, as the two sides of the question of whether James II should have been excluded from the throne because of his catholic beliefs. The Labour party is a comparative newcomer at 115 years old. Given the resilience all three have shown, the idea that one or more of them might not exist in ten years time seems strange. But that is what Labour MP Jon Cruddas has suggested - a remark which was of course reported in the media as his suggesting that Labour might disintegrate within that time frame. (Honestly, was he surprised?) Asked whether the Labour Party might "not exist" within ten years, Mr Cruddas, replied: “Yes, yes.” “There is no safe ground for any orthodox parties and the stakes could be high potentially. They could just disintegrate in real time. And I include in tha...

One of the most important responsibilities of the new Mayor of Copeland will be to appoint the council's executive. The present executive consists entirely of Labour councillors, and meets during working hours at the Copeland centre in Whitehaven. I believe that making the Executive more broadly based, accessible and accountable, and engage with local residents, is key to making the council the servant of the electorate rather than trying to be the masters. If I am elected as Mayor * I will streamline the executive with fewer members than now to keep costs down * I will seek to appoint a broadly based executive based on ability, and not restrict the posts exclusively to my own party or yes-men who will always agree with me. * currently there are three groups on the council with three or more members: Labour, Conservative, and Independent. If that remains the case I will offer at least one seat on the executive to members of each of the three gr...

Lord Heseltine has never been a man to pull his punches, and he doesn't pull any in an article in the Daily Mail here  which compares the UKIP leader's recent remarks on immigration with Enoch Powell's infamous "I seem to see the river Tiber foaming with much blood" speech. I disagree with Tarzan on many things, particularly the EU, but he is an immensely talented man and often worth listening to - and his comments on the need to discuss the enormously difficult issues of immigration in ways which do not open the door to worse community relations and the return of open racism are dead on.

The outgoing Labour administration on Copeland  Borough Council has been rubbish at rubbish collection for years. They managed to make Copeland look ridiculous in the national press when they prosecuted a bus driver with four young children because his wheelie bin was four inches too full. They require octogenarian pensioners in rural areas to push their bins long distances to a collection point -and accused them of being "Tory troublemakers" when they complained. (Actually most of them were just concerned local residents, but I think a few more of them started voting Tory after that little sally.) It's not good enough: Copeland residents deserve better, and if elected I will try to change it. One of my first actions if elected mayor will be to order a review of bin collection, to address fairness, cost, recycling efficiency, and frequency. If any central government help is still available in the next parliament to improve refuse collection, I will apply for it. ...

The budget passed by the Copeland Borough Council for 2015/16 included £100,000 for the salaries of the mayor and, if he or she decides to appoint one, a political assistant. If I become mayor, I will not be making such an appointment. Copeland needs more money spent on front-line services and on cutting costs to residents more than it needs extra money for politicians and their assistants. I will seek to vire the money saved by not appointing a political assistant to front-line services and reduced parking charges. I will publish a proposal for reduced parking charges in Copeland Borough Council car parks before the end of this month.

"Is Cameron wrong to stand by his man, even one as unappealing as Jeremy Clarkson? The calculating political rationalist would say “yes”, but there is something slightly noble about the Prime Minister’s instinctive defence of his friends. "Not all will agree. But if personal loyalty, that most basic human impulse, is regarded as a weakness in British politics, a deficit in the game of any self-respecting political professional, is it any wonder that the public detest politicians?" ( Article about political loyalty on "Labour uncut"   here which I presume was written by the site's editor Atul Hatwal )