CentreRight

Christopher Beazley and Caroline Jackson are wrong about the EPP

By Roger Helmer MEP.

Shortly after I was first elected in 1999, a Conservative Press Release announced that British Tory MEPs would have a new arm's-length relationship with the EPP -- "merely an administrative umbrella" -- and would have full independence.  I rejoiced, thinking in my innocence that the vexed EPP question had been resolved.  Then I arrived in Brussels to find that it was business as usual.  Nothing had changed.  My first lesson in politics: announcements in press releases may be less than they are cracked up to be.

So my ten years as an MEP have been dominated by this issue of the Tories sitting in a passionately federalist group.  Four years ago I was expelled from the EPP and lost the Conservative whip for a while -- I now have the whip back, though I remain outside the EPP.  A year ago, Dan Hannan was also expelled from the EPP in very similar circumstances, though the Conservative delegation, perhaps chastened over my own experience, refrained from withdrawing the whip from Dan.  It was Dan's status as a Non-Inscrit member that allowed him to make that magnificent speech on Tuesday attacking Gordon Brown to his face -- the only Conservative to speak in that debate.

Then David Cameron was elected Leader on a commitment to take us out of the EPP.  That started out as an immediate commitment, which then became "months not years", and finally became years.

Now, however, the die is cast.  A couple of weeks ago William Hague formally advised the EPP that we would be leaving in June, and our plans to form a new group are well advanced.  And the predictable backlash from the uber-euro-quislings has begun.  Caroline Jackson (SW), retiring this year, launched a sad but vitriolic attack, saying: "It is a serious mistake and will leave the UK even more semi-detached from the rest of Europe. The danger is that it will leave both the Tories and Britain isolated in Europe and the decision is simply not in the interests of either our party or the country".  Of course Caroline's MP husband defected from Conservative to Labour a while ago.  Caroline says (indecisively) that she is "minded to leave the Party", and will presumably join her husband on the wrong side of the tracks.  No quips about rats joining sinking ships, please.

Do we risk a Gilt Strike?

Yesterday a sale of Government debt flopped.  This is not normal. The last time there was such a serious failed auction was 1995. Financial newscaster Bloomberg describes it as a vote of no confidence in Brown by investors. It may be seen as a dull old business page story, but depending how it runs, it could be one of the year's most serious things for all of us.

The Conservatives and George Osborne have repeatedly warned that running a deficit budget, trying to borrow our way out of recession with already stratospheric levels of public debt and making no credible plans for balancing the budget will lead inevitably to disaster. 

And looking at the hard numbers they are absolutely right.  Sterling has collapsed on World markets - falling by some 30%.  Our recession will be deeper than elsewhere, with a 3%-5% contraction on the cards this year. Our budget deficit at 10% of GDP will be higher than elsewhere. If the World is your oyster, why should you buy British Government debt when interest rates are so low and the risks so high?

MEPs also indulge in "doughnutting"

When television cameras were first allowed into the Commons in 1989, viewers were warned about  "doughnutting".

This is the practice - which was already familiar in countries with televised Parliaments - where MPs gather around whichever of their colleagues is on their feet (like a ring doughnut, geddit?) in order to create the impression that there is a packed chamber, full of rapt politicians.

Well, I have just been sent the below photo by the author of the excellent Letters from A Tory blog, which was taken in the European Parliament in Strasbourg yesterday.

Gordon Brown is ringed in red, and if I'm not very much mistaken, the seats directly behind him are all taken, whilst elsewhere in the chamber, there is a considerable number of empty seats...

Talking of trilemmas

At what point does a technical word or phrase acquire the critical mass (a case in point) to make the transition from specialist usage to common parlance? Yesterday saw the first appearance in the British media of the trilemma, a concept formerly confined to Christian apologetics or monetary theory. Harvard professor and telly-don Niall Ferguson brought the term to light in a dazzling lecture to the Centre for Policy Studies last night. Not only did Ferguson establish his credentials as the most compelling intellectual of the centre-right, he may also have succeeded in bringing the trilemma into mainstream political language, where it looks set to be widely adopted (and adapted). Michael White puts it on a high-wire in today's Guardian; in the Indie  Deborah Orr applies the device to the 'Daily Mail problem' of rights and responsibilities. At the Centre for Policy Studies we'll be tracking the trilemma's progress over the coming weeks and months - trilemma-spotters welcome, email [email protected] - or tell me here at Centre Right.

I was right when I said we'd see less of Gordon Brown in 2009

Forgive me for being so brazen as to highlight my getting something right - but a prediction I made in a CentreRight post in December appears to have been on the money.

On 19th December I wrote:

"I would wager that we in Britain will be seeing even less of Gordon Brown in 2009... I fancy he'll be taking every opportunity he can next year to escape Britain to strut his stuff on the world stage in the hope of further suggesting that our problems are not the fault of his Government and that he's somehow seeking to persuade others to act to solve them."

How true that now seems, with Gordon Brown today missing Prime Minister's Questions for the second time this month on account of being overseas.

Even if he must insist on gallivanting around the world, can the Prime Minister not plan his travels so that he can at the very least be held to account for what he's up to just once a week in the House of Commons? Is it that much to ask?

Shuffling the educational deck chairs

Today’s impromptu release of the new plans for the primary school curriculum, drawn up by former Ofsted chief Sir Jim Rose, have been met with a mixture of concern and bemusement.  The ‘stripping down’ of the curriculum in terms of specific content that teachers are forced to deliver will be welcomed by many in the teaching profession.  However, the same cannot be said for some of the other proposals.

While there is a clear argument for introducing an element of web-based learning and technological skills, it appears that this will come at the expense of literacy and numeracy.  As discussed in an upcoming report by Policy Exchange, the reality of literacy and numeracy standards in primary schools is truly horrifying.  Just 56% of the boys and 66% of the girls who left primary school in 2008 could read, write and count to the minimum standard. In fact, 50,000 pupils left primary school last year without reaching the minimum standard in any of the core subjects – English, maths and science.  Sir Jim’s proposals to combine individual subjects into six ‘learning areas’ (which amounts to little more than shuffling the educational deck chairs) and the greater emphasis on addressing “societal concerns” about health and well-being (which recent pilot studies showed to have no positive effect on children according to parents) are unlikely to have any tangible impact.

Furthermore, there seems to be remarkably little interest in whether these changes will improve literacy and numeracy standards.  The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority has previously stated that the changes being put forward by Sir Jim are ‘supported by research’. However, this research merely consists of “listening to and summarising the views of thousands of primary children and parents”, “seeking the views of thousands of practitioners”, visiting schools and attending seminars. This is a typical way of evaluating pilots but it fails to answer the fundamental question of whether any of the above proposals will help more children to read, write and count properly.  This suggests that the upcoming (and substantial) changes to the curriculum will go down as yet another hugely expensive yet ultimately unsuccessful and unnecessary set of reforms.

Tom Richmond is a Research Fellow in Policy Exchange's Education Unit. 

Hazel Blears versus The Guardian

It shouldn't even be an issue but Hazel Blears has taken exactly the right position on Dr Daud Abdullah of the Muslim Council of Britain.  Dr Abdullah is Deputy Director-General of the MCB and recently signed The Gaza Declaration.  The Times records what the Declaration states:

"The declaration, drawn up during the recent conflict in Gaza, backed Hamas, endorsed action against any, including Britain's armed forces, who prevented arms smuggling into Gaza and included a series of obligations to the "Islamic Nation", including calling for the continuation of "the jihad and resistance against the occupier until the liberation of all Palestine."  Hamas, the militant Palestinian group backed by Syria and Iran and which won an election in Gaza in 2006, does not recognise the existence of Israel."

Ms Blears has threatened to disengage with the MCB if Abdullah remains in post.  The Government's strategy on Islamic extremism is very muddled - as Paul Goodman MP has documented - but Ms Blears is right on this one.  Nonetheless,  a leading article in today's Guardian accuses the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government of "grandstanding" and "folly".

James Forsyth at Coffee House identifies one particularly bad passage in The Guardian's leader:

“The government's chief quarrel is with the hypothetical suggestion that resistance would be appropriate if UK forces were ever used to intercept arms destined for Gaza. Very many Muslims, and indeed many non-Muslims, would agree with that."

James is rightly furious: "The Guardian believes that there is nothing inherently wrong or unreasonable with believing that it is justified to use violence against British forces attempting to prevent the shipment of arms to a genocidal terrorist organisation. This is as incredible as it is shameful."

Related link: The Muslim Council of Britain finds a new excuse to boycott Holocaust Memorial Day

The future of democracy by Walkers Crisps

What is the biggest vote currently facing the nation? Is it the local elections? The European elections. Fat chance.  Does the answer lies in crisp packets?

In the old days, when a company wanted to develop a new product they might have a few boffins create the idea, followed by focus groups and some marketing here and there. After, the new product would appear on the supermarket shelves. It would succeed by its advertising and by a bit of luck. 

Walkers Crisps have turned this approach on its head. Instead of centrally announcing a new flavour of crisps to a munching public, the company invited people to send in recipes which were then voted on - by the public via the text or internet. The winning flavours were reduced to just six.

The company then released these six flavours onto the market and, as crisp lovers will know, are available at most outlets.  But Walkers didn't stop there at this exercise in crisp democracy.  Every packet bought carries a coloured rosette and allows you to vote (again by text or internet) as to which of the six flavours is preferred. The intention is that after the voting ends, Walkers will introduce the extra flavour based on the voting public's final say so.

I expect many political die-hards will watch Walker's Crisp Democracy with cynicism at another marketing exercise. Yet the truth is that more people will know about this Crisp vote than who their MEP is or local MP for that matter.

A duty of care

Last Saturday I read an article by the Chief Rabbi, which talked about the need for a new moral basis to the market economy - to return to a time when if someone said "my word is my bond", they meant it. The Chief Rabbi's argument was that bankers had got away with making huge errors, not just because of failure by Government or the market, but through the weakening of social capital - of values that differentiated between right and wrong.

I thought about this as I attended a dinner yesterday evening. A famous Peer and tough self-made businessman (who started one of our most famous retail chains), began to talk about the concept of 'duty of care'.   His argument was that the main reason for the financial failures by the bankers was not because of greed (this vice had always existed and would continue to exist in the future) but because of a failure of 'duty of care'.  In contrast to nurses, doctors and teachers, bankers and City folk were not bound by a duty of care - and this had led to the disastrous decisions that had helped ruin our economy (alongside Gordon Brown).  Rather than regulating, establishing a duty of care, would solve the problem of bankers mis-managing assets and savers deposits etc. 

Duty of care is defined by Wikipedia as:

" A legal obligation imposed on an individual requiring that they adhere to a standard of reasonable care while performing any acts that could foresee ably harm others. It is the first element that must be established to proceed with an action in negligence......

Duty of care may be considered a formalization of the social contract, the implicit responsibilities held by individuals towards others within society. It is not a requirement that a duty of care be defined by law, though it will often develop through the jurisprudence of common law."

I think this businessman had a fascinating thesis - the question is how one would establish a duty of care for bankers et al, that would be supported and respected by the profession and recognised by the appropriate authorities?  Incidentally, this businessman also said that he had once offered to fund with substantial sums of money, a Chair of Economic Ethics for a famous University in London. His proposal was turned down by the Dean on the grounds that economics was a science and did not have an ethical dimension.

Who are the "leaders" of the Republican Party?

On 7th November 2006, the Republican Party lost control of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Two years later, the party's presidential nominee John McCain was blown out the water by the young Illinois Senator Barack Obama by a margin of 365 electoral votes to 173. For the first time since 1994, the Republicans control none of American's three levers of governmental power.

The party, for all intents and purposes, lies in a state ruin; rudderless, leaderless.

Like the post-97 British Conservative Party, the numerous disparate voices clamouring for the affections of the party faithful - and the all-important independent voters - stike an imperfect cadence. The modernisers, the traditionalists, the small-staters, the big-staters, the religious conservatives, the urban liberals; the list is almost endless.

In this piece, I intend to explore some of the figures and influences who may help turn the fortunes of the Republican Party around after two of the most devastating election cycles in the party's history.

Bribing the Taliban will only prolong the fighting...

Advisers to President Obama are reportedly split over whether the US should try to bribe moderate elements in the Taliban to defect.

It is certainly true that many Afghans joined the various mujhaddin factions and later the Taliban because the offered a pay packet - in a country where aid agencies are the largest employers and often the only ones offering a living wage.

However, history tells us that bribery can never provide a lasting solution to 'the Afghan problem' as local people call it. Neither can it provide President Obama with his desired exit strategy from Afghanistan. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the British colonial administration pursued a similar policy in the tribal areas between what is now the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan (NWFP) and what in 1895 became the border of Afghanistan. The Pushtun (Pathan) tribes were given muwajib - an 'allowance' to live peacefully. They accepted the allowance, then a year or so later rose up against the government until they received another allowance...!

Inheritance Tax

There seems to be some doubt about our Party's position on Inheritance Tax. 

No doubt about mine.  Here's what I said in 2005:

Inheritance tax in the UK should be abolished altogether - as it is in Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The US plans to phase it out at a federal level by 2010. It is unjust, it deters individuals from being financially responsible as they get older, and it obstructs them in trying to pass on to their loved ones the property and capital that they have, through their endeavours, accumulated during their lives.

Should you be of a mind to, you can read the whole thing.

Alastair Campbell: Where do your children go to school?

Among the articles in this weeks New Statesman, guest edited by Alastair Campbell, is a survey of whether newspaper editors use private health care and whether they send their children, if they have them, to fee-paying schools.

The whole thing was a bit of an own goal. For Conservatives there is no great difficulty. It would be a practical matter. Is there a good state school near where we live? Can we afford to go private? There is no question of hypocrisy as we don't claim there is anything wrong with using the independent sectors.

So, for instance, Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail, answered the questions. What does not seem to be on the website edition but was included in the print version were those editors who refused to answer. They include Richard Wallace, Editor of the Daily Mirror, Tina Weaver, Editor of the Sunday Mirror and Lloyd Embley, Editor of the People. All staunch titles backing Labour with plenty of class war rhetoric. There is also James Harding of The Times who doesn't reply. Campbell used to work for The Mirror and is now a regular contributor to The Times. But he seems to have meekly accepted their refusal to respond to his enquiries.

The last thing the British economy needs is higher taxes - the government will just get lower revenues

I'm reading Arthur Laffer's excellent book, The End of Prosperity - How Higher Taxes will Doom the Economy - If We Let It Happen and I'm struck by one particular passage on then Senator Obama. He was caught out last year when he said that he wanted to raise the level of Capital Gains Tax, even if revenues went down, because it was "fair".

Are we poised to do the same thing with a higher rate of top income tax and retreating from an inheritance tax cut because we want to look fair?

In the short run, revenues may rise a bit, but government will swiftly find that they will quickly drop off. Some of us still dare to think that there's plenty of room and public support for cutting public expenditure instead. As Roger Bootle said in the DT today;

"On the latest figures, while pay in the private sector was down over the year by 1.1pc, in the public sector it was up by 3.7pc. If you are employed by the public sector you don't know what recession is all about. No reductions in salary or disappearing bonuses; no worries about your pension; no anxiety about losing your job; no increased tensions at work because of the pressure. You just sail blithely on. Whenever I travel about the country I never cease to be struck by the depth of anger about this contrast. It is going to intensify.But this contrast will be temporary. For there will be yet another stage to the recession. As soon as the economy starts to recover, and maybe even before, the next government will have to bring in massive cuts to public expenditure programmes".

What does your desk look like?

Earlier today I Twittered a photo of my desk at home:

ConHome regular Mark Fulford has now submitted a photo of the place from which he leaves his erudite comments:

Email in some pics and I'll post your desk view too...

4.30pm on 23rd March: Here are some images I've been sent. Top marks to Andrew Shackell for having ConHome on his screen AND an iPhone!:

"We are going to move heaven and earth to show that we are not the party of the wealth creators"

My alternative title to Tim Montgomerie's post on Tory Diary.

Which thirty million?

I think Peter is quite right to highlight Jonathan Porritt's renewed call to cut the British population.  There is a horrible sense that such a view is becoming ensconced as another unquestioned prejudice of our tranzi elite.  After all, the Times couldn't even find someone in their address book of the influential and powerful to actually criticise Porritt's position.  The closest we got was George Monbiot arguing the toss over whether people or prosperity are the greater problem.  No one was given a chance, or took the chance, to stand up for prosperous human beings as a good thing.

All this shows the ideological roots of the modern environmentalist movement.  The Population Bomb and The Limits to Growth are canonical works for that movement, arguing that the incredible achievements of free market capitalism in doubling incomes every generation alongside massive increases in population cannot continue and will run into inevitable and awful Malthusian blocks.  Those books were proved dramatically wrong and the author, Paul Ehrlich, of the Population Bomb lost an expensive bet on his theory.  In light of that, the theory has been reinvented.  Now the problem isn't that we can't keep increasing human prosperity and population but that we can, and that is a bad thing as global warming provides Gaia with a means to take revenge.

What these theories always underestimate is human potential.  Just as Malthus was proved wrong by the unexpected boon of the Industrial Revolution, technological progress has and can overcome other natural limits to our prosperity.  That's where Jonathan Porritt's limit of thirty million comes in.  In among that sea of people who wouldn't exist if Mr. Porritt had his way, it is entirely probable that there will be those who might otherwise prove vital to our coping with whatever challenges nature throws our way.

Whoops Apocalypse

The Sunday Times reports today that the environmentalist campaigner Jonathan Porritt will this week repeat his assertion that population control in Britain is vital if we are to build a 'sustainable' society.' 

Or rather, he goes somewhat futher than that: the country needs to reduce its population to around 30 million.

When Porritt first pointed out that we should limit the amount of babies we are having for the sake of the environment, one could fairly assume that he was aiming his diatribe at those whose ears would already be open to his message: white, middle-class and with an 'environmental' conscience.

In which case, he needn't worry. This part of the population - indeed, the whole of what was once called the indigenous but is now more frequently referred to  as the 'traditional' population - are reproducing less and less.

The welfare trap comes in many forms

My father is a retired teacher.  Like many retired teachers, he lives in an area in which schools need more teachers.  As a result, he is often asked to do some supply teaching.  Sometimes, he did so.  But he recently got a letter from HMRC saying that if he continued, his pension would be diminished.  So now he just says no.

Joined up government, eh..?

Galloway banned from Canada

As reported earlier this week, George Galloway's disgusting support for Hamas - he boasts about financing a group most Western countries have rightly designated as terrorist - has got him banned from Canada.  The AFP reported at the time:

"Galloway said he personally would be donating three cars and 25,000 pounds (35,000 dollars) to Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniya as he dared the West to try to prosecute him for aiding what it considers a terror group."

There are also other grounds for Canada's ban, such as his calling for a coup against the Egyptian government:

"So I call, in conclusion, on the great people of Egypt, on the heroic armed forces of Egypt, and the heroic army of Egypt of 1973, to rise up and sweep away this tyrant Mubarak."

Given the conditions set down in Canada's Immigration Act, reported in the Guardian, that's pretty clearly the kind of breach that makes Galloway inadmissable.  The Canadian Government refused to make an exception for someone who had breached rules designed to protect Canadians' security.

That is why this is so different to the case of Geert Wilders.  In that case, the Government actively stepped in because the "Secretary of State is satisfied that your statements about Muslims and their beliefs, as expressed in your film Fitna and elsewhere would threaten community harmony and therefore public security in the UK".  That case was about freedom of speech.  Mr. Wilders was banned not because he was inciting or commiting violence, however objectionable his positions there is no allegation he has done anything of the sort.  It also doesn't really make sense to suppose that he posed a public order threat because his supporters might go on the rampage; he was set to speak in the fairly civil House of Lords.  He was banned because his opponents do not respect his right to freely express his views and might cause trouble as a result, the British Government cravenly gave official support to their attempts at censorship.

Galloway's facile case that he too is being censored is undermined further by the fact that he supported the ban on Geert Wilders entering the UK:

Stone me!

A couple of observations coalesced into something approaching a feeling of foreboding this morning.

I came home from St Petersburg yesterday evening, very tired, passport-clutching, shuffling my way to the front of the weary immigration queue, not very here-and-now to be honest. So I forgot that on top of my bald head was a flat cap, worn both to protect myself from the freezing temperatures of the Russian weather I’d just left behind, as well as to signal Hey! I’m into indy jangly guitar type pop music to anyone interested. These semiotic signifiers, eh! I handed my passport over to New Labour’s frontline of border protection, a young woman resplendent in the toy-uniform designed by John Reid to give the impression that some sort of control is maintained over the country’s porous borders.

-- Could you take your hat off, please?

-- Oh, sorry, yes of course.

But here’s the thing. As I’m pulling the cap off, I look at her properly. Her entire head is wrapped up in a Muslim scarf, with only her eyes, nose and mouth visible: no forehead, no scalp, no chin on view. Fair enough. But my head is practically naked by comparison. I wonder, and I don't know, but if I had a headscarf on, would I have had to remove that? We look at each other a bit, then share a giggle. She can read my mind very easily.

America is in the grip of a new McCarthy witch hunt... against bankers

Yesterday evening I was thinking that I must pen a quick blog on the AIG bonus fiasco as soon as I can, and was a admittedly a little concerned that Andrew Lilico would beat me to it. Then I remembered...he’s no longer blogging for CH! I must admit, I will miss his missives, and wish him all the best with his new role at PX.

Now, to the bonus fiasco in the US. It's very rare that when legislators pass laws with haste (especially rage filled haste), that such laws are sensible, practical or reasonable.  So it was with the first reading of a special tax bill that the US House passed yesterday – which, if signed into law – will impose a 90% punitive surtax (that’s a tax on top of existing taxes) on any income above $250,000 paid to an employee of an institution that has been the recipient of US$5bn or more of government money. If there ever was a stupid law passed anywhere in the developed world since the onset of the global recession, this is it. US legislators, Democrat and Republican alike, far from behaving like representatives of a modern, stable democracy, have descended to the antics of a banana republic. It's the McCarthy witch hunt era all over again.

This law will not only impact institutions that are already on their knees like AIG, Citibank and Bank of America Merrill Lynch, but also the ones just about still standing, such as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan. What was the point of pumping government cash into these banks, only to cripple them right after? There is no doubt that these institutions will now do whatever they can to repay the government as early as possible, instead of keeping the extra capital until things stabilised. If the legislators were going to do this, what was the point of rescuing the banks in the first place? Better to have let them gone bust, as I have argued in the past, through a pre-packaged type bankruptcy arrangement. 

Should our MPs take a lead from their 1930s predecessors and take a pay cut?

My attention has been drawn to the below table from the House of Commons factsheet on MPs' Pay.
 
It shows that as the Depression took hold in the 1930s, MPs took a 10% pay cut, seeing their annual salary decrease from £400 to £360 in 1931, in line with a similar cut in the pay of all public sector workers.

I generally take the view that MPs' pay is currently on the low side, given the hours that most of them work. However, if there are savings and economies to be made across the public sector, there is certainly an argument to say that there should be consistency and that MPs' salaries should be included in any across-the-board reviews.

And to any parliamentarians worried about the idea of following this lead, just look at what happened a few years later in 1937: they got a 50% rise in one go!

The EU – an issue that will not go away

CentreRight has, of course, all the best stories. But the two stories that really caught by eye this week related to the news that European Parliamentarians have been told to use gender-neutral language and a quite spectacular poll that was discussed on BBC2’s Daily Politics show on Wednesday. The nonsense over gender-neutral language can be easily dismissed and I’m just wondering how the speakers of most of Europe’s languages, bar English, are going to cope as these splendid tongues are steeped with gender affiliations in a way that English is not.

But the poll is something else. The results were really quite special. When the sample of people were asked if they thought Britain benefits overall from membership of the EU in terms of jobs and trade only 44% thought so whilst 51% did not. And when asked whether Britain should leave the EU but maintain close trading links 55% agreed whilst 41% did not. Closer inspection of the figures that every age group favoured leaving, as did people in every region and in every social class - bar the ABs where there was tiny preference for, one speculates, staying in the EU. (I say “speculates” because those who disagreed with the proposition may believe that Britain should leave the EU and not maintain close trading links!)

This was at first sight a staggering result – but perhaps it should not be so surprising after all. We, Global Vision, have conducted several polls asking people what sort of relationship they thought Britain should have with the EU. All our polling showed that the majority of people are unhappy with the current relationship. Roughly a half wanted a looser relationship with the EU based on trade and cooperation and a quarter wanted to leave altogether, whilst a quarter wished to maintain the status quo. Clearly when people are given the option of withdrawing from the political institutions of the EU whilst continuing to trade then this option is their favoured option.

Labour isn't holding up-to-date information on where taxpayers' money is going to 'prevent extremism'

By Paul Goodman MP.

I asked in the Commons last Wednesday where this year’s tranche of  Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) money has gone.  Hazel Blears is spending some £70 million on preventing violent extremism over three years.  She’s been stonewalling my question about the 2008-9 slice of PVE money since January.  She also stonewalled the previous year, 2007-8 – but was eventually forced to send me details, with an apology.

Alan Duncan, the Shadow Leader of the Commons, raised the matter during Business Questions the following last Thursday, and I pitched in again.  Conservative Home kindly published the exchanges.

Blears has now backed down.  She wrote to the Speaker yesterday to confirm that the information will be published before the end of the financial year.

But that’s not quite the end of the matter.

She writes that the DCLG “is working closely…to collate information setting out progress on the development of local partnerships and action plans.  This includes information on engagement, including details about which community groups are funded for leading local projects”.

What this gobbledegook means, in plain English, is that the DCLG doesn’t hold up to date information about where the money’s gone – hence the delay in publication.