We Live in Strange Times
A few weeks ago Parliament voted to privatise key parts of the probation service and Labour MP's sitting opposite me cheered because they had narrowly forced this controversial measure through. More recently still Conservative and New Labour MP's - including all but Dennis Skinner here in Derbyshire - combined to ensure that Britain took a premature decision to renew the UK's nuclear deterrent for another 40 years.
A New Labour Minister from Sheffield had the cheek to ask me the next night on a TV programme, how the Liberal Democrats would find the money for their Citizen's Pension proposals designed to replace Brown's means tested nightmare - one of the lowest pensions in Western Europe. No prizes though for guessing how she had voted on the £75Billion Trident programme!
The same New Labour/Tory coalition forced through the passage of the Education and Inspections Bill which paves the way for schools in future to opt out as Trust schools. Fully funded by the taxpayer - like Blair's City Academies - but free to start 'selecting' the best pupils and parents by various backdoor methods. The same coalition again of course voted through the illegal and disastrous invasion of Iraq.
Under the Conservatives this country sold arms to dodgy dictators like General Galteiri of Argentina and Saddam Hussein of Iraq and then had to face the same weapons with our soldier's lives. Labour promised an ethical foreign policy instead but has now even scrapped a Serious Fraud Enquiry into alleged corrupt arms dealing between Britain's largest weapons manufacturer and Saudi Arabia.
The sorry list could go on but the closest of all to home here in Chesterfield is this Government's disgraceful treatment of Council Tenants who vote the 'wrong way' and wish to keep the Council as their landlord - as 70% did here in Chesterfield. Three quarters of all Right to Buy receipts from the sale of Council houses are taken away by Gordon Brown to spend elsewhere such as on the London Olympics. That was £6Million last year plus £3Million taken away from Chesterfields Council rents. Yet if these houses were privatised to a Housing Association the new private landlord would be allowed to keep all the money. Worse still this Government are forcing Council Rents up by more than inflation every year to try and get them up to Private Sector levels but every extra penny will go to Gordon Brown rather than into improving Chesterfield's Council Houses.
Meanwhile, forty years after 'Cathy Come Home' shocked the nation and led to the founding of Shelter to campaign for homeless people, Britain is sleep walking into a housing crisis all over again. Nationally Council waiting lists have gone up from a million to a million and a half under Labour. In Chesterfield they have trebled, in Sheffield they have quadrupled. On a weekly basis I see elderly people who want a Council Bungalow - but there are not any. I see young families who want a family house instead of sleeping on parents and in laws sofas. They cannot afford private rents but there is a chronic shortage of Council Houses. 'Affordable Housing' is a meaningless term when even key workers with good steady jobs often cannot afford to get onto the home owing ladder.
When will this Government abandon the dogmatic ideology of Blair and Brown and look at the reality of life in this country?