David Morris MP: Labour bears a share of the responsibility for the death of babies at Morecambe Bay

David Morris is Member of Parliament for Morecambe and Lunesdale. Follow David on Twitter.

Yesterday's revelation about the Morecambe Bay cover-up sent shock waves through my constituency, and brought fresh pain to families already struggling to come to terms with devastating losses.  There are many questions left to answer.  The hospital must prove beyond doubt that services have been transformed since the scandal.  The leaders of the local health authorities at that time - supposedly in charge of performance-managing the hospital - must come clean on what they knew about the suppressed Care Quality Commission (CQC) report. The regulator itself must provide urgent assurances that those responsible for this sickening cover-up face career-ending consequences as well as the full force of the law.

But there is another case to answer.  Morecambe Bay is the latest in a long list of hospital scandals that took place on Labour's watch.  Like Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells, Stoke Mandeville, Basildon and Stafford before it, the Morecambe Bay tragedy has laid bare a cover-up culture and tick-box inspection regime in Labour's NHS, and my constituents deserve an account of this.

As Jeremy Hunt said in his statement yesterday, the hospital regulator should be an organisation that stands up for patients without fear or favour.   Yet Labour Ministers - obsessed with avoiding critical headlines and covering their backs - tasked the regulator with ticking boxes and closing down problems. The former Chair of the CQC, Baroness Young, has made very serious allegations that ministers "leaned on" her to "tone down" criticism of NHS organisations.   She claims that "there was huge government pressure, because the government hated the idea that a regulator would criticise it".  Damningly, she revealed that this political pressure peaked under current Shadow Health Secretary's Andy Burnham's tenure as Secretary of State.  This is the man who turned down 81 separate requests for a public inquiry into the Mid Staffs scandal, and has attacked the current Health Secretary time and again for exposing and confronting "coasting hospitals".

David Morris MP: Hitachi bring new hope for British nuclear

David Morris is Member of Parliament for Morecambe and Lunesdale (including the Heysham Nuclear Power Station) and he is Chairman of Conservative Friends of Nuclear Energy. Follow David on Twitter.

I like to think of myself as an optimist but even my faith was shaken when I first heard that RWE and E.ON had put Horizon Nuclear up for sale. So this week I heaved a sigh of relief when it was finally bought by Hitachi.

The sale comes as the United Kingdom faces a cross roads in our energy policy. We claim we want to produce green energy locally but in reality we are increasingly reliant on foreign fossil fuels, particularly gas.

An obvious example is Centrica’s closure of a gas drilling platform in the Irish Sea in favour of a import station close to Barrow-in-Furness. This is an understandable move for Centrica because supplies are starting to run out. However the side effect of a reliance on foreign gas is domestic bills become tied to global commodity prices: which can fluctuate wildly.

David Morris MP: The sexualisation of our children in the name of marketing need to be tackled

David Morris is MP for Morecambe and Lunesdale.

Some weeks ago I was approached by a constituent who also happens to be a leading figure of the Mothers' Union in Lancashire. My constituent wanted to make me aware of th ‘Bye Buy Childhood campaign.’

The Mothers' Union commissioned a report and engaged ComRes to collate data. In total ComRes surveyed one thousand parents and one thousand members of the Union. The results made very interesting reading: nearly three-fifths of parents of children under 18 believe that advertising is harmful to them.

Every parent is acutely aware of how influenced our young people are by advertising. My two sons are no exception. I began to research the marketing to and sexualisation of children and discovered that marketing to children has become an industry; in fact it has become big business worth ninety nine billion pounds. This is a huge industry.

Just weeks before, I had appeared on Sky News arguing that airbrushing in magazines should be banned. I did this because our young people should not need to look at size zero models who have been airbrushed: our children need realistic role models and not some sort of manufactured unrealistic aspiration.

I then decided to table an Early Day Motion on these matters, gaining the support of a number of Members of Parliament in support of the motion stating:

“That this House notes that childhood is a marketing opportunity worth £99 billion in the UK; is concerned about the effect on children's wellbeing of the volume and some methods of advertising of children's products; is particularly concerned about the use of sex to sell to children; welcomes the Mothers' Union's Bye Buy Childhood campaign which challenges the commercialisation of childhood; recalls the Government's promise to tackle the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood; and calls upon the Government to take steps to fully prohibit sexualised media, marketing and products aimed at or easily accessible to children under 16.”