Government defeat over Gurkhas

The defeat of Gordon Brown's government today means much more than just justice for our retired Gurkha soldiers. It is a signal that his authority and ability to bully Labour MPs has been lost.

You can probably guess my position on the settlement of retired Gurkhas, I'm also a big fan of Joanna Lumley, so I'm doubly pleased.

TA cuts confirmed

A small article tucked away on one of the inside pages of the Evening Standard confirms the bad news that I predicted on this blog and on ConservativeHome almost two weeks ago. The TA is going to face massive cuts despite its recent and ongoing support to the regular army in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I wonder whether the coverage of MPs expenses and a possible swine flu pandemic was seen as a good day to bury bad news?

The Booze Bus

On Friday night I went up to Waterloo to spend the evening with people too drunk to walk, talk or control their bodily fluids.

I'm the Chairman of the London Assembly's Health & Public Services Committee and we are near the completion of a major investigation into youth drinking. We are looking both at underage drinking and binge drinking. My night out was part of that investigation.



The London Ambulance Service spends a great deal of it's time ferrying people who are dangerously drunk to hospital. On weekends, particularly in the summer months, this ties up a huge proportion of its assets, the Booze Bus is a way to deal with this situation.

The bus is in fact and ambulance and the initial part of the care/treatment is performed by paramedics on board. Rather than picking up one person, taking them to hospital and then returning to pick up another, the Booze Bus has room for up to five people and the wait until they are full before taking anyone in. It doesn't take long to fill up.

I had planned to join the team at 11.00PM, but had to wait because they were already taking their first bus load in. By the time I got in at 11.20 they had another two people, comatose with big sick bags around their necks and intravenous drips giving them the fluids lost through vomiting. Not a pretty sight.

Half an hour later we had two more people and were heading to UCL Hospital. The triage nurse wasn't too pleased with the arrival of four people so drunk they couldn't open their eyes or respond to stimulus.

Chatting to the ambulance staff in the A&E it is clear that there is a lot of frustration about this situation. "How do pubs and bars let them get this bad?", "Why aren't we allowed to send the the bill?", "Why can't we just take them to a central drunk treatment centre rather than tie up A&E beds?" were three questions which came up an number of times.

A couple more ferry trips later and it was 3.00AM on Saturday and I had to head off home. "just half a shift then?" they joked as they explained that 3.00-6.00AM was their busy time!

My night was a real eye opener and I would like to that Brian Hayes (who you can see on the video above) of the London Ambulance Service for setting up the night and to the booze bus team for putting up with me and doing the job that they do.

Brian Coleman embraces technology in his "Commend a Copper" campaign

My London Assembly colleague, Brian Coleman, isn't someone who would describe himself as a technophile. But..... He has set up a facebook profile (you can become a friend of his here) as a prelude to his campaign to encourage support for the police.

There has been a lot of criticism of the policing of the G20 summit and Brian feels that much of the criticism is unfair. He has a sound point. Public order policing is a difficult and dangerous job and the vast majority of police officers go about their work with great professionalism.

Clearly I cannot (and will not) comment on individual cases as they are under investigation but it should be remembered that there was nothing like the scale of violence or damage that has occurred in protests in the past.

We must be willing to identify failings in the planning or implementation or at individual officer level but the widespread vilification of the police is unfair and counterproductive. Brian says enough is enough and I agree with him.

Happy St George's day

Smiling like an idiot

What is going on?

Gordon Brown is talking about a serious issue here, MP's allowances and expenses need reform and have been the cause of public disquiet. So why the smiling?

Brown is shocking in front of camera, we all know that, its old news. But given the opportunity to use his dower public image to his advantage he starts grinning like an idiot. It is also clear that he isn't really listening to what he is saying, the grins come at the most random points.

It is genuinely sad to think that this man is the public face of the UK government.

Hat tip: Iain Dale

Budget secrets

What ever happened to the content of the Budget being a closely guarded secret?

There are sound reasons for this. Nothing in the budget is official until it is announced and by its nature the content can have dramatic effects of things like share prices, commodities etc. Getting early sight of some or all of the budget's content could give a company or individual a financial advantage.

Also the budget is a complete system, one proposal needs to be paid for with another, there is always some good news for some and some bad news for others. Selectively releasing the good bits is fundamentally dishonest.

But it seems that the desire to for this government to eek out whatever good headlines that they can from this budget overrides any of the long held reasons for secrecy.

Happy birthday Your Majesty

Today is the Queen's birthday (her real one, her official one is in June (so is May week, by the way)).

Yesterday Boris fulfilled a long standing promise to hang a portrait of the Queen in City Hall. Unfortunately I was at the back of the crowd of staff, members and visitors who were watching the unvailing so couldn't see a thing.

North Cray Neighbourhood Centre

Cllr Don Massey, James Brokenshire MP and I visited the North Cray Neighbourhood Centre on Friday of last week to look at the work that they have done with local youngster and listen to concerns about the 492 bus route.

Gary Redding, the centre manager, had some very good ideas about youth provision, they also had better coffee than I usually get.

Labour selection farce in Erith & Thamesmead

Labour clearly wants Colin Bloom to be the next MP for Erith & Thamesmead, which is funny because Colin is the Conservative candidate.

While Colin has been working hard Labour has infighting, scratching and biting. The various factions have been doing everything, fair and otherwise (including vote tampering?), to get their favoured candidate into what the BBC described as a safe Labour seat. As safe as Crewe and Nantwich, I wonder?

It's interesting to see that Labour are just as dirty, discredited and dysfunctional locally as they are national.

Treasury to cut TA by a third

In the furore of the weekend this little horror story got overshadowed. A good day to bury bad news?

Despite providing the largest levels of support for the regular army since the Korean War there are plans to cut the TA by almost a third. As Liam Fox said, this plan is "utterly indefensible”.

An MoD spokesman said: “Its aim is to ensure that our reserve forces, including the Territorial Army, are correctly structured, supported and resourced to meet current and future challenges.” how does that fit with a senior TA officer (not me) who said: “Treasury bean counters have ordered the Ministry of Defence [MoD] to cut all budgets, so TA units will have to be axed or amalgamated and the number of training days cut to way below the minimum.”

What a great way to repay an organization which has stepped up to the challenge and provided (and lost) soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

.....................................................................

Serjeant Chris Reed of 6th Battalion The Rifles (6 RIFLES) was killed in action in the Garmsir District of Helmand Province on the 1st January 2009.

Serjeant Reed was attached to C Company of the 1st Battalion The Rifles (1 RIFLES) Operational Mentoring and Liaison Team (OMLT) Battle Group and was Second in Command of his team of 8 Riflemen working alongside their Afghan National Army (ANA) counterparts. The Molts assist and teach the ANA in all aspects of military operations.

Serjeant Reed was killed by an improvised explosive device whilst conducting a vehicle patrol alongside the ANA in the desert of Helmand.

Speaking when the whistle went

Goodbye to Sir Clement Freud, one of my favourite voices from radio.

The BBC has a great tribute to him here.

You must read this.....

Alice Miles of the Times has written an article holding her hands up and confessing that she and the rest of the Westminster media have been culpable in the smearing of politicians who opposed Gordon Brown.

This is a brave move, it will alienate her from some of her colleagues and from the behind the scenes briefers who support Brown. The article also blows apart the idea that the traditional press is inherently more fair, even-handed and trustworthy than blogs.

She is right to write it and she deserves the support of everyone who values open and honest politics.

Could this be the end of Brown?

There are plenty of people on the left who are just as disgusted by the Draper/McBride emails as anyone in the Conservative party, these people include MPs, commentators and activists.

There are also plenty of people on the left who have had more than enough of Gordon Brown and feel that ditching him, while damaging, won't be as bad as going into a General Election with him as Prime Minister.

Could these two unrelated situations converge because of Brown's unwillingness to take responsibility for the actions of his core team?

So hard to say sorry

I knew that Brown would make a hash of the apology letter.

He has managed to string the story out so much that it is the news lead for a fourth day, you couldn't make it up.

Brown could not have played this worse

The smeargate affair show Gordon Brown and the nasty cabal at the heart of New Labour in as bad a light as it is possible to be.

The plan was nasty, spiteful and childish. More than a decade in office Labour are still more interested in attacking Tories than running the country.

The perpetrators assumed that because Guido Fawkes was giving them a hard time on his blog he must be in the pocket of the Conservative party (about as far from the truth as it is possible to be), thus making personal attacks on Conservative MPs fair game.

The crushingly inept execution of the plan highlights just how much they don't get modern media and that they thought it might be effective shows just how out of touch they are with the mood of the British people. It also forces stark comparisons with Blair regime, could you imagine Blair and Campbell getting themselves into this mess? No, me neither.

It will be interesting to see the text of Brown's apology letters, I bet that he manages to botch that up as well.

.......gate

The suffix "gate" gets overused in politics and political media. Every minor embarrassment or cock up gets the word gate appended to it.

Even the least tuned-in to political history will know that the use of "gate" comes from the Watergate scandal that engulfed Nixon in the 1970s. I won't go into the details of the Watergate scandal, you can read about it here, but it grew out of a desperate attempt to re-elect Nixon using a dirty tricks campaign.

Watching the emerging Number 10 dirty tricks story I feel that the suffix "gate" may be appropriate for the first time in British politics. It indicates a desperate and morally corrupt administration, willing to do almost anything to get re-elected.

The thing I find amusing about this whole sorry episode is that it shows, once again, that Labour just don't get online campaigning. Iain Dale, Guido, ConHome, Dizzy, etc. are all independent of the Conservative party and form a powerful right of centre voice, indeed their very Independence gives them their authority and the ability to be much more direct in their attacks on the government, it's policies and actions. If Tim, Iain or Gudio screw up, break the law etc, it is their screw up not the Conservative party's, shadow cabinets or David Cameron's. Because of Brown's obsessive centralizing he will find himself at the heart of this maelstrom.

This won't just be embarrassing, as the Number 10 spinners are trying to claim, this will be terminal.

To shake or not to shake?

Just seen this:



Very funny.

On Bob Quick, again

I like Bob and have always felt that he was an effective police officer. But allowing a secret document to be photoed and nearly compromising an investigation was deeply embarrassing and I can completely understand why Bob felt that he had to stand down.

Bob made a serious mistake and took responsibility for his actions. You don't see that very often these days, do you?

I'm sorry to see Bob go but I am comforted greatly by John Yates being appointed as the head of Counter Terrorism Command. I might organise a whip-round for him and buy a briefcase for him as a congratulations present.

Why not just give them quarters?

Yet more bad news about MPs housing allowances!

I completely understand that MPs need to have a base in or near their constituencies and many also need a place in or near central London. Politicians do work funny hours and a regular commute isn't always feasible. But why are they expected to find their own accommodation?

Members of the armed forces get moved around the world on a fairly regular basis. An army officer could be based on Germany for a few years, then across to Tidworth (Hampshire) for a bit, up to Glasgow, a stint in London at the MOD, back to Germany etc. It is regarded as part of the job. Single soldiers live in barracks and married soldiers live in married quarters. The Army understands that the job means geographic displacement and acts accordingly.

If it's Good enough for our brave boys it should be good enough for our MPs.

I think that parliament should buy up a number of flats near to central London, 500 should do the trick. There are developments going up in Chelsea, Battersea, etc which most people would give their right arm for. They can be of mixed size to cover everything from single MPs to those who want to base their family in London, the block could have centralised security and be fitted with a secure IT and comms system.

MPs will be allocated a flat when they get voted in and hand it back when they get voted out. Easy.

It might be a bitter financial pill to swallow in the short term but would clean up the system and help to restore confidence in the financial integrity of our MPs.

Why so much anger?

The Bexley Times have done an interesting piece on the reasons behind youth aggression. They spoke to Jimmy Mizen's father, a police officer, a youth worker, a criminologist and myself about our thoughts on the issue.

Read it here.

All change

My old political stomping ground of Lewisham East is getting interesting. Both the incumbent Labour MP, Bridget Prentice, and the Lib Dem PPC are standing down. This will make Jonathan Clamp the longest serving candidate when the election comes.

I quite like Bridget, she has always been civil to me and was I enjoyed standing against her in the 2005 General Election, although she does have a habit of cheating at little (see here and here). I don't claim to have the same relationship with the Chris Maines, the Lib Dem ex-PPC.

Chris stood against John Horam MP in Orpington a number of times and had a nasty habit of playing the man rather than the ball. Having lost to John no less than four times he came to Lewisham initially as their mayoral candidate and then as the PPC. The word around the campfire is that he has put a number of noses out of joint since coming across and the results at the London mayoral elections killed off any chance of Lewisham East being a Lib Dem target seat.

The question that I ask myself is: Did they jump or were they pushed?