Friday, January 23, 2009
Monday, January 19, 2009
Now what about DD?
Reaction to the Tory reshuffle and the return of Ken Clarke has been generally positive today - well, from Tories at least. But as I made clear in this post last Friday, I was hoping David Cameron would have the courage to bite the bullet and invite his old rival David Davis back on board as well.
Although I am not a Tory supporter, I hate to see men and women of geniune ability languishing on the backbenches and if Cameron really wants to put the strongest available alternative government before the electorate in May 2010 he needs to find a place for DD in his team.
What is interesting about the Clarke comeback is that DC and KC have agreed to overlook what is a huge and fundamental policy difference between the two of them over Europe, recognising, quite rightly, that the future of the British economy is currently much more important than that.
By contrast, DC and DD have no major policy differences at all, certainly not on the 42-day detention issue that led to Davis's resignation. Their only difference was a tactical one on how to respond. Sure, Cameron's pride was probably wounded by what happened, but that is no excuse for Davis's continued exclusion.
Although I am not a Tory supporter, I hate to see men and women of geniune ability languishing on the backbenches and if Cameron really wants to put the strongest available alternative government before the electorate in May 2010 he needs to find a place for DD in his team.
What is interesting about the Clarke comeback is that DC and KC have agreed to overlook what is a huge and fundamental policy difference between the two of them over Europe, recognising, quite rightly, that the future of the British economy is currently much more important than that.
By contrast, DC and DD have no major policy differences at all, certainly not on the 42-day detention issue that led to Davis's resignation. Their only difference was a tactical one on how to respond. Sure, Cameron's pride was probably wounded by what happened, but that is no excuse for Davis's continued exclusion.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Heathrow: the regional angle
Much of the criticism of the Heathrow decision has centred on what it says about the government's environmental credentials, but there is another angle worth exploring. Here's today's Journal column.
If the old saying is true that the first casualty of war is truth, so it is probably also the case that the first casualty of a recession is usually the environment.
The last time there was a serious upsurge of interest in environmentalism in Britain was in the late 1980s, when the Green Party looked briefly like it could replace the Liberal Democrats as the country’s “third force.”
It reached its apogee in the 1989 euro-elections, when the Lib Dems finished a distant fourth in terms of share of the popular vote behind the Greens.
Then came the recession of the early 1990s, and interest in green politics faded. It took years - and the prospect of runaway, irreversible man-made climate change - before it assumed the same kind of prominence on the political agenda.
Now, as Britain and the world once more face the certainty of tough economic times ahead, the environmental lobby is again struggling to make its voice heard.
Against the backdrop on the economic downturn, there was never any real doubt that Gordon Brown's Labour government would give the go-ahead to the £9bn scheme for a third runway at London's Heathrow Airport this week.
New Labour's three top priorities used to be education, education, education - but it is clear from what the Prime Minister has been saying over the past fortnight that they are now jobs, jobs, jobs.
And with unemployment set to head towards the 3m mark by the end of this year on some projections, most would say quite rightly so.
The government points out that construction work on the new runway could create 65,000 new jobs alone, in addition to the 100,000 existing jobs in the aviation industry that would be safeguarded by the project.
The additional tonnes of CO2 that will be belched into the atmosphere as a result are seen as a very secondary consideration, despite the government's pledge to reduce such emissions by 80pc by 2050.
In an effort to appease critics, Transport Secretary Geoff Hoon said airlines using the new runway would be required to use the newest, least-polluting aircraft.
Few will be convinced by that though. In reality, the Heathrow decision drives a coach-and-horses through any pretensions that Mr Brown may have had to “going green.”
But if the decision is hard to defend on environmental grounds, so too is it when seen from the perspective of regional policy.
In pure cash terms, it is another £9bn of public expenditure being channelled into the London and South-East economy on top of the £16bn already committed to the Crossrail deep tube link and heaven-knows-what for the 2012 Olympics – also hailed by Mr Brown this week as an important job-creator in the face of the downturn.
Vague talk of a more high-speed rail links between East and West and North and South to complement the runway project sounds suspiciously like political window-dressing designed to keep Northern Labour MPs quiet.
I recall that similar things were said by the Tories when the Channel Tunnel was given the go-ahead. Yet the "regional eurostars" that were supposed to link Newcastle to Paris were never used and were eventually sold-off for use elsewhere on the rail network.
Throughout the lifetime of the Blair-Brown government, it has taken the view that the prosperity of UK plc depends vitally on the economic health of London and the South-East and its ability to act as a "driver" for the economy as a whole.
Rather than seek to create a more balanced economy, it has sought to make a virtue out of the current very unbalanced one by pumping more and more resources into the capital.
However much the government may talk about regional policy, this is in fact no such thing. It is, rather, a national economic policy in which, in effect, one region is expected to deliver prosperity for all the rest.
The Heathrow decision takes this logic to a further level. If Heathrow is vital to the economy of London and the South East, which in turn is vital to the UK as a whole, then it follows that Heathrow is vital to the whole of the UK.
After 12 years in power, this particular leopard is unlikely to change its spots now, particularly as the financial centre of London and the South East is now as much in the eye of the economic storm as any other region.
Yet there was surely an opportunity here to address some of the regional economic imbalances that continue to bedevil the UK and its most outlying regions in particular.
Building a third runway with the possibility of a new North-South rail link as an afterthought was surely a reversal of what should have been the government’s priorities.
It was nice to hear the Tories talking in such terms this week, although it’s a shame they couldn’t have thought of that while they were busy creating the North-South divide in the 1980s.
The other point to be made about Heathrow is that it is on the wrong side of London. If you were building a new airport from scratch today, there is no way you would put it there.
The city's mayor, Boris Johnson, at least recognises this. His long-term dream is to move London's main airport to the Thames Estuary and retire Heathrow, enabling European flights to arrive without having to cross the city to land.
Since the outer reaches of the estuary are currently largely uninhabited, this would have had the additional merit of causing the least amount of disruption to people.
Instead, the third runway project threatens to make the communities of Sibson and Harmondsworth the modern-day equivalents of Dunwich, the lost village which fell into the sea in mediaeval times.
The political battle lines over the runway project are now clear, with Labour playing the jobs card and the Tories taking up the cause of the “little people,” threatened by noise, pollution and ultimately the loss of their homes.
But it would be naive to assume that the question of whether or not the runway will go ahead will depend entirely on the outcome of the next election.
Even if the Tories were to win, the future of the project would surely depend on what sort of state they find the economy in, and specifically what the jobless figures are looking like.
For all his supposed green credentials, it would be a brave Prime Minister Cameron who put the environment ahead of 165,000 jobs.
If the old saying is true that the first casualty of war is truth, so it is probably also the case that the first casualty of a recession is usually the environment.
The last time there was a serious upsurge of interest in environmentalism in Britain was in the late 1980s, when the Green Party looked briefly like it could replace the Liberal Democrats as the country’s “third force.”
It reached its apogee in the 1989 euro-elections, when the Lib Dems finished a distant fourth in terms of share of the popular vote behind the Greens.
Then came the recession of the early 1990s, and interest in green politics faded. It took years - and the prospect of runaway, irreversible man-made climate change - before it assumed the same kind of prominence on the political agenda.
Now, as Britain and the world once more face the certainty of tough economic times ahead, the environmental lobby is again struggling to make its voice heard.
Against the backdrop on the economic downturn, there was never any real doubt that Gordon Brown's Labour government would give the go-ahead to the £9bn scheme for a third runway at London's Heathrow Airport this week.
New Labour's three top priorities used to be education, education, education - but it is clear from what the Prime Minister has been saying over the past fortnight that they are now jobs, jobs, jobs.
And with unemployment set to head towards the 3m mark by the end of this year on some projections, most would say quite rightly so.
The government points out that construction work on the new runway could create 65,000 new jobs alone, in addition to the 100,000 existing jobs in the aviation industry that would be safeguarded by the project.
The additional tonnes of CO2 that will be belched into the atmosphere as a result are seen as a very secondary consideration, despite the government's pledge to reduce such emissions by 80pc by 2050.
In an effort to appease critics, Transport Secretary Geoff Hoon said airlines using the new runway would be required to use the newest, least-polluting aircraft.
Few will be convinced by that though. In reality, the Heathrow decision drives a coach-and-horses through any pretensions that Mr Brown may have had to “going green.”
But if the decision is hard to defend on environmental grounds, so too is it when seen from the perspective of regional policy.
In pure cash terms, it is another £9bn of public expenditure being channelled into the London and South-East economy on top of the £16bn already committed to the Crossrail deep tube link and heaven-knows-what for the 2012 Olympics – also hailed by Mr Brown this week as an important job-creator in the face of the downturn.
Vague talk of a more high-speed rail links between East and West and North and South to complement the runway project sounds suspiciously like political window-dressing designed to keep Northern Labour MPs quiet.
I recall that similar things were said by the Tories when the Channel Tunnel was given the go-ahead. Yet the "regional eurostars" that were supposed to link Newcastle to Paris were never used and were eventually sold-off for use elsewhere on the rail network.
Throughout the lifetime of the Blair-Brown government, it has taken the view that the prosperity of UK plc depends vitally on the economic health of London and the South-East and its ability to act as a "driver" for the economy as a whole.
Rather than seek to create a more balanced economy, it has sought to make a virtue out of the current very unbalanced one by pumping more and more resources into the capital.
However much the government may talk about regional policy, this is in fact no such thing. It is, rather, a national economic policy in which, in effect, one region is expected to deliver prosperity for all the rest.
The Heathrow decision takes this logic to a further level. If Heathrow is vital to the economy of London and the South East, which in turn is vital to the UK as a whole, then it follows that Heathrow is vital to the whole of the UK.
After 12 years in power, this particular leopard is unlikely to change its spots now, particularly as the financial centre of London and the South East is now as much in the eye of the economic storm as any other region.
Yet there was surely an opportunity here to address some of the regional economic imbalances that continue to bedevil the UK and its most outlying regions in particular.
Building a third runway with the possibility of a new North-South rail link as an afterthought was surely a reversal of what should have been the government’s priorities.
It was nice to hear the Tories talking in such terms this week, although it’s a shame they couldn’t have thought of that while they were busy creating the North-South divide in the 1980s.
The other point to be made about Heathrow is that it is on the wrong side of London. If you were building a new airport from scratch today, there is no way you would put it there.
The city's mayor, Boris Johnson, at least recognises this. His long-term dream is to move London's main airport to the Thames Estuary and retire Heathrow, enabling European flights to arrive without having to cross the city to land.
Since the outer reaches of the estuary are currently largely uninhabited, this would have had the additional merit of causing the least amount of disruption to people.
Instead, the third runway project threatens to make the communities of Sibson and Harmondsworth the modern-day equivalents of Dunwich, the lost village which fell into the sea in mediaeval times.
The political battle lines over the runway project are now clear, with Labour playing the jobs card and the Tories taking up the cause of the “little people,” threatened by noise, pollution and ultimately the loss of their homes.
But it would be naive to assume that the question of whether or not the runway will go ahead will depend entirely on the outcome of the next election.
Even if the Tories were to win, the future of the project would surely depend on what sort of state they find the economy in, and specifically what the jobless figures are looking like.
For all his supposed green credentials, it would be a brave Prime Minister Cameron who put the environment ahead of 165,000 jobs.
Friday, January 16, 2009
The Tories' elephant in the room
I've not written anything thus far over the big issue gripping the Tories at the moment, namely the potential return of Ken Clarke to the political frontline, but that's been more due to lack of opportunity than lack of interest. As it happens I am a huge KC fan and nothing, bar the appointment of fragrant Yvette Cooper as Chancellor over the head of her bumptuous other half Ed Balls would give me greater pleasure than to see him back in the Shadow Cabinet.
Will it happen? Well, David Cameron has allowed expectations of Clarke's return to reach such a point now that it would be a serious setback for the Tories if it didn't, which probably means it will. But it should be as Shadow Chancellor rather than Shadow Business Secretary. Gideon Osborne is a smart operator, as he proved in autumn 2007 when his inheritance tax ploy frightened Brown into cancelling the election, but he lacks the essential gravitas for the role at these troubled times and would be much better employed as party chairman and key strategist for the 2010 campaign.
Cameron should also bring back David Davis as Shadow Home Secretary in place of the ineffectual Dominic Grieve, and Iain Duncan Smith as Shadow Defence Secretary in place of the lightweight Liam Fox. Defence is one of the big jobs in a Tory government alongside Foreign Secretary, Chancellor and Home Secretary, and a "Big Five" line-up of Cameron, Hague, Clarke, Davis and Duncan Smith would for me have the look of a formidable government in waiting.
Meanwhile, here's regular cartoonist Slob's take on it all. What I like about this image is that it shows how the Clarke conundrum is currently dominating Tory politics, Heathrow, recession and Gaza notwithstanding.
Will it happen? Well, David Cameron has allowed expectations of Clarke's return to reach such a point now that it would be a serious setback for the Tories if it didn't, which probably means it will. But it should be as Shadow Chancellor rather than Shadow Business Secretary. Gideon Osborne is a smart operator, as he proved in autumn 2007 when his inheritance tax ploy frightened Brown into cancelling the election, but he lacks the essential gravitas for the role at these troubled times and would be much better employed as party chairman and key strategist for the 2010 campaign.
Cameron should also bring back David Davis as Shadow Home Secretary in place of the ineffectual Dominic Grieve, and Iain Duncan Smith as Shadow Defence Secretary in place of the lightweight Liam Fox. Defence is one of the big jobs in a Tory government alongside Foreign Secretary, Chancellor and Home Secretary, and a "Big Five" line-up of Cameron, Hague, Clarke, Davis and Duncan Smith would for me have the look of a formidable government in waiting.
Meanwhile, here's regular cartoonist Slob's take on it all. What I like about this image is that it shows how the Clarke conundrum is currently dominating Tory politics, Heathrow, recession and Gaza notwithstanding.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Monday, January 12, 2009
Riverrun
The peerless Jonathan Calder - peerless in the sheer range of esoteria featured on his Liberal England blog - has recently highlighted a plan to restore some of the Lost Rivers of London to their natural glory.
The Lost Rivers have long held a fascination for me. They merited a chapter in that wonderful book London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd - the man who should have been Mayor of London all along in my view - and, many years earlier, a whole book of their own in Nicholas Barton's The Lost Rivers of London (1960), which is probably now out of print but well worth snapping up if you ever come across it in a secondhand bookstore in Hay-on-Wye or Cromford or some such place.
Jonathan draws our attention to a little-reported proposal to open up some of the rivers of south and east London, including the Effra and the Ravensbourne, which have long been culverted beneath parks. A brilliant example of what can be achieved by this can be seen in Sutcliffe Park, near Kidbrooke, where Gill and I lived before we moved to Derbyshire in 2004. A sterile open space has been utterly transformed into a natural river valley by opening up the River Quaggy, which had previously been submerged since 1964.
But in my view, the Environment Agency's plans don't go far enough. If they really want to do something radical which would make Central and North London a much pleasanter place to live and work, they should open up the Fleet, which wends its way from its source beneath Hampstead Ponds through some of North London's grimiest streets, flowing into the Thames just south of Fleet Street.
The river which gave its name to the national newspaper industry has been buried for more than 150 years and for much of that time was a sewer, a fact which some will doubtless regard as deeply symbolic.
Ackroyd records in his book that at one point, the noxious gases in the underground river built up to such a point that it exploded, taking three houses in the Kings Cross area with it. If tape recorders had been invented at the time, this would probably have constituted the loudest recorded fart in the history of the world, ever.
The Lost Rivers have long held a fascination for me. They merited a chapter in that wonderful book London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd - the man who should have been Mayor of London all along in my view - and, many years earlier, a whole book of their own in Nicholas Barton's The Lost Rivers of London (1960), which is probably now out of print but well worth snapping up if you ever come across it in a secondhand bookstore in Hay-on-Wye or Cromford or some such place.
Jonathan draws our attention to a little-reported proposal to open up some of the rivers of south and east London, including the Effra and the Ravensbourne, which have long been culverted beneath parks. A brilliant example of what can be achieved by this can be seen in Sutcliffe Park, near Kidbrooke, where Gill and I lived before we moved to Derbyshire in 2004. A sterile open space has been utterly transformed into a natural river valley by opening up the River Quaggy, which had previously been submerged since 1964.
But in my view, the Environment Agency's plans don't go far enough. If they really want to do something radical which would make Central and North London a much pleasanter place to live and work, they should open up the Fleet, which wends its way from its source beneath Hampstead Ponds through some of North London's grimiest streets, flowing into the Thames just south of Fleet Street.
The river which gave its name to the national newspaper industry has been buried for more than 150 years and for much of that time was a sewer, a fact which some will doubtless regard as deeply symbolic.
Ackroyd records in his book that at one point, the noxious gases in the underground river built up to such a point that it exploded, taking three houses in the Kings Cross area with it. If tape recorders had been invented at the time, this would probably have constituted the loudest recorded fart in the history of the world, ever.
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