Did you see Eric in a Pickle?

I didn't get back to the flat last night until 11.15 pm and then I broke a rule by watching politics on tv - I get enough through the day so I try to avoid it in the evening. But somehow I managed to catch the last few minutes of Question Time and the remarkable grave digging demonstration by Eric Pickles. For someone touted by the Tories as the "Great Organiser", his performance seemed to fall well short of what would be expected of one normally used to Conservative adoration. He argued that somehow the situation had degenerated into "hang an MP week." With Eric Pickles I think it was a case of give him enough rope and he'll hang himself.

The defence so far offered by the likes of Pickles, Smith and McNulty is rather Nurembergesque - "I was only following the rules."

Hopefully the review will do something to tighten up all of this, especially when the tax payer is currently subsidising what is the home of relatives of MPs. But I guess we had better not hold our breathe on that. The last time there were demands for reform, led by Nick Clegg, the proposals were torpedoed.

And finally, speaking as someone who has to live in two different places because of my job - Gateshead and London - I can speak from experience on running two homes (and I don't get a taxpayers' subsidy either!). I find the idea of monthly housing costs running at £2000, the maximum that can be claimed, rather challenging. Whilst there are clearly extra costs in the early years of owning a house (and a second one), £24000 a year seems way in excess of anything that is reasonable. If the additional cost allowance is to continue, perhaps there is a need for it to be tappered. London may be expensive, but it is certainly not that expensive.

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Contacted by not-previously-known relatives

The Wallaces have quite a history in the Whickham/Sunniside/Ravensworth area I represent on Gateshead Council. It goes back over one hundred and fifty years and one day I shall explain some of it on this blog. But a brief summary is needed here.

Mr great grandfather Henry Wallace was land agent to Lord Ravensworth in the later Victorian period. He had 3 sons and 4 daughters. The eldest son was Atholl, followed by John, my grandfather. I wasn't sure if Atholl had any descendents. Well, now I do know. His grand daughter, Cheryl Wallace, now Klein, got in touch with me today via the Gateshead Council website. She explained on her email who her grandfather was and asked if we are related. Turns out that Atholl emigrated to Canada 100 years ago. I feel a visit to Canada is coming on!

The Council website has been very useful for long lost wings of the Wallace family to track me and Dad down. A few years ago, part of the family I thought had not survived the war (they were trapped in Holland when the Nazis invaded) managed to locate us via Gateshead Council website. The result was Dad, then 72 years old, met his sister Margaret, then 89, for the first time. It's an amazing story and as I said earlier, one of these days I will tell it, and show the video of when they first met.

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Taking a day off

I have taken today off to sort my garden in London. Basically, the garden has been a poor relative of our allotment and garden in Gateshead but we have set ourselves the task of bringing it into use for food production. We have made some half hearted attempts in the past to get it into use so there is already a variety of herbs and fruit plants. But a large area is derelict and that's where the hen house is going! There will be updates on my allotment blog: www.self-sufficientinsuburbia.blogspot.com.

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Making sure of a good stuffing

The first wild crops of the year are now available and amongst them is wild garlic. I picked a bag full from one of the local woods on Saturday. First on my list of recipes was wild garlic pesto. We had it with home made pasta on Saturday. This was the first outing for our pasta machine. All worked very well.

Our newish environmental regime means meat is eaten on only special occasions. So celebrating the end of winter and the start of spring was, to us, a suitable occasion. This event may have little or no meaning to the vast majority of people who rely on the supermarket for their food supply but for those of us who are aiming to be self-sufficient, such days have much more relevance and importance.

So, this was a meat weekend. And out of the freezer came three pheasants which we had previously swapped for jars of jam. Having previously plucked them, now was the time to stuff them. I made a stuffing which included wild garlic and some of our home grown herbs. It was a bit expeimental, but it worked well.

Inevitably, I will be producing a video shortly on cooking with wild garlic. And if you want to follow our attempts to become self-sufficient, go to my other blog www.self-sufficientinsuburbia.blogspot.com.
It is not yet updated for the weekend's activities but it will be soon.
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The Monday morning blog - the re-appearance of Gordon Brown

Mark Pack at Lib Dem Voice posted on Friday a copy of a Labour recruitment leaflet that contained no mention of Gordon Brown. The only photo it contained was of Barrack Obama, not only leader of another party, but leader of another country! Clearly Labour seemed to believe that Gordon is a disincentive to people to join.

I was able to have a look at the leaflet (Mark is after all based at the next desk to mine). It led me to think I should write a post along similar lines. And then last night, in a meeting with fellow councillors from Whickham, Chris Ord gave me a copy of a Labour leaflet he had managed to recover from North Tyneside. And in it was a photo of Gordon Brown and a letter from him. Perhaps Labour in North Tyneside are not so ashamed of their Leader as the rest of their party seems to be. Or possibly, Labour in North Tyneside are on a suicide mission and know it!

North Tyneside has an elected mayor. The borough first elected a Tory mayor (and subsequently stayed Tory in a byelection). But the last mayoral election was held on the day of the 2005 general election. This was almost certainly the cause of Labour's gain of the mayoralty - all those extra Labour voters coming out to vote who would otherwise not have voted in a simple local election gave Labour enough of an advantage to seize the first prize.

Now Labour are staring into the abyss in North Tyneside. With no general election expected, the extra turnout they need to hold on is going to be difficult to motivate to get out. Nevertheless, Labour are putting in the resources. The leaflet I was given was a personally addressed survey card which was mailed out. Not cheap! With Labour close to bankruptcy (both financially and politically) they have clearly made a decision to put what few resources they have into the battle for North Tyneside.

For the Tories however this is quite a prize. North Tyneside is the only place in the whole of Tyneside where they are strong. Tynemouth constituency is one of their top targets (it was formerly a long term Tory seat until it went Labour in 1997). The Tories will trumpet a gain in North Tyneside as evidence of a recovery in the North - though the reality is that it is simply a recovery in North Tyneside, not the North East generally.

So, North Tyneside mayoral race is an interesting one to watch.

Meanwhile, I am on the shockingly early 7.20am train from Newcastle heading to London. That meant getting up at 6.20am. And even then the sun was up. We have of course passed the spring equinox this weekend. But that didn't make getting up so early any more enjoyable!
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Red kite at night Jonathan' delight

I am currently delivering Focus leaflets in the Derwent Valley. The sun has gone down but there is still some daylight. And swooping above me are two red kites. These birds of prey have been reintroduced into the area after an absence of 200 years. It's great to see them back. I've also seen them hovering over the allotment in Sunniside recently but I haven't seen then this close to houses before.

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How does the Tory poll lead really compare with the 1990s

There seems to be a debate taking place on Lib Dem Voice (http://www.libdemvoice.org/david-laws-was-right-and-mike-smithson-12647.html) and various other blogs about the true state of the Tory lead in the polls. The issue was kicked off by David Laws MP on BBC on Wednesday who pointed out that whilst the Tory poll lead is in the region of 12%, this is far less than that enjoyed by Labour in the dying days of the Major government in the 1990s.

Whilst some argue that the current polling methods attempt to take into account a respondent's likelihood of voting, it cannot explain why the Conservatives are clocking up shares in the low 40s whilst in the 1990s, Labour's share was usually in excess of 50%. Others are arguing that the Conservatives are performing well.

Maybe the explanation is simply that Cameron's Conservatives do not have the reach that Labour had in the 1990s (which has since disappeared). There are after all whole swathes of teh country, particularly northern metropolitan areas, where the Conservatives' local performance is at best patchy and at worst they are the 4th party behind the BNP.

I feel no burning urge for a Cameron government amongst the electorate whereas in the 1990s, there was a feeling of goodwill and support for a change from the Tories to the Blairite New Labour model (how times have changed!)

The Conservatives have an electoral mountain to climb. To secure a working majority they need a swing at least as large as that achieved by Labour in 1997. That gave Blair a landslide majority. The Conservatives will simply scrape in with barely a majority on the same swing. And that assumes the uniform swing will engulf Lib Dem held constituencies as well. The Tories know not to count on that. They also know they need to win 130 seats to get a minimal majority.

The task before them is not impossible but it is hugely challenging and the polls show they are still some way off achieving that.

Meanwhile, Labour, with their backs to the wall, have not yet given up the will to govern as the Tories had in the 1990s. They will come out fighting and they will attempt to pull rabbits out of the hat. The next election is by no means an certainty as it was in 1997. A great deal can still happen.

I need a copy of Private Eye

On the train tonight, I got a call telling me I need to get a copy of Private Eye. All I know is that a certain North East MP is featured and it will make interesting reading! Something to do with the unions. I'll get a copy tomorrow.
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Another bit of self-praise by this MP

Sharon Hodgson is the Labour MP for Gateshead East and Washington West (though Labour have enforced a speedy goodbye to her by selecting a much older man as the candidate for the new Gateshead constituency). She is not widely known for anything special in Parliament, other than a rather interesting early day motion that praised her a couple of years ago. It was interesting as she was the one who wrote and sponsored it!

So I guess it should come as no surprise that dearest Sharon should write a news release describing a speech she had made in Parliament as "well received". Well, I suppose someone has to say something nice about her so it might as well be Sharon herself. You can read all about her "well received" speech at:
http://iwc2.labouronline.org/165849/christianity-in-public-life-debate--110309

10,000 Flickr viewings

Some stat porn, this time from my Flickr site. I've only had a Flickr account for a few months but I am pleased to announce I have now hit 10,000 viewings. If you've nothing better to do, here's the link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonathanwallace/

The Monday Morning blog: spring is in the air

I know winter is more or less behind us when I get up on a Monday morning at 6.40am to catch the 7.40am train to London and it is day light outside. And so it was this morning, not that that made me want to get up. I only got at bed at 1am, having spent an age looking for a set of video clips on my pc, only to realise that I hadn't uploaded them from the video tape! They are of the Port of Tyne in North Shields, and include footage of the huge Nissan car park, full of new Nissan cars waiting to go for export. It was filmed back in November. Not so many head that way now.

Anyway, as I am now on the train to London, I am pleased to announce that today, National Express have failed to cancel the service! We are leaving Gateshead now.

So having had a weekend of digging up the allotment, helping people campaign against opencast mining applications, editing my conference video and meeting one of the candidates applying for Blaydon, I am heading off for a week in London of doing unspeakable things to opponents which, if you are on the Lib Dem Communications circulation list, you should have in your in box by the end of the week.

Meanwhile, I am going to catch up on my sleep. See you in London.
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Harrogate Lib Dem Conference - the video!

Here's the video I shot at Harrogate. See if you're in it!

What's coming up this weekend

It's me, I'm on the train. Yes, it's Friday evening and as you would expect, I am heading home to Gateshead for a weekend of rest. I wish! David is off to a magistrates training weekend in Durham so I have to give him a lift there early tomorrow morning. I could have prescribed a train journey but that would probably mean I wouldn't have the car this weekend! And it is a one off journey so for once I'll overlook the carbon footprint of the journey. I'll also use the journey back to check out wild food sources along the way.

David has kindly drawn up a list of things I need to do on the allotment over the weekend in his absence. I'll be there on Saturday and Sunday mornings. And a shopping list has been drawn up for me to take to the allotment garden centre in Hexham. I'm heading out to a tiny village on the Northumberland/Cumbria border called Halton Lea Gate. The area is proposed for opencast mining and I am now involved in a group that helps residents fight proposals. We are having our next meeting in the village tomorrow afternoon. I'll do the garden centre on the way back. And a bit of wild food foraging as well. I may even try and call in at one of the Roman Wall sites as well.

When I got on the train tonight, I got an email from my group leader Noel Rippeth, telling me that he had kindly arranged for 800 focus leaflets to be dropped off at my house. Fortunately they are not all for me. Some are for one of the five people wanting to be selected for Blaydon constituency. It's amazing how many leaflets I can pass on to keen candidates when a selection for a winnable seat is on the horizon. The candidate in question is coming to my house to chat about the constituency on Sunday evening. This is not meant to indicate my support for any particular candidate and any others who also want to talk to me about the constituency are welcome to call in. However, bring a bag. You will need something to carry the focus leaflets away with you!

And finally, I will be editing my next blockbuster video. Watch out for "Harrogate Conference" (rated PG). A definite oscar winner (not).

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The details of Royal Mail plan - not so good after all

I have had a chance to look at some of the details of the Royal Mail plans of the government. I am on record as being a supporter of bringing private finance into RM but the details of what is proposed are nowhere near as attractive as was first claimed.

The basic case for a change in ownership of RM is the freedom it gives to the company to raise the badly needed capital required to modernise what is an antiquated set up. Without that investment, the company will be unable to compete with the new arrivals in the market place. The government is currently the only shareholder in the company and therefore is the only body that can agree to new investment. This has not been forthcoming either under the Conservatives or Labour. Both governments have been prepared to take out the dividend, but not put in the investment. In effect, Royal Mail has been used as a cashcow but is now overmilked and underfed. Had this been a real cow, the owner would be in court for neglect and cruelty. No wonder RM is in such a mess

My hope was that the new ownership model proposed by Mandelson following the Hooper review would change all that. Sadly, having considered the details, it does nothing of the sort. Two crucial areas will leave the company hamstrung. Firstly, it will not be able to go to the financial markets to borrow or raise new share capital. The company will therefore still be dependent on the government for additional investment. Okay, so the new minority private sector shareholder will be putting in the region of £800 million into the company in the form of new share capital. But that money only goes so far and assuming it modernises the business, where then for RM. It needs to be dynamic and look to grow into new areas. But the model as proposed by Labour will leave the company to stagnate yet again once the initial investment has been completed. In effect, after the initial investment, RM will be left with the disadvantages of state ownership without any of the advantages.

The second worrying point is the Royal Mail will be restricted to business activities in the UK. This is all the more ironic given that the new investors in RM are foreign mail providers who do have the option to branch out into foreign markets and earn valuable profits to send back home. Royal Mail won't be allowed to branch out abroad and earn euros and dollars.

The Lib Dems have a proposal on the table for a shared ownership scheme which gives the companies the freedoms it needs to be a success. Okay, I am biased. I was very closely involved with writng the policy. Our model would have created a Royal Mail that was free to borrow and raise capital, had a significant minority stake for the state and another significant minority stake for the staff which would have been held in trust for their benefit. As with the John Lewis model, staff would have been partners in the business. The shareholding of he staff and the state together would have been just over 50%, the rest would have been sold.

A further significant difference is that under our model, Post Office Ltd would have been split off from RM and remain wholly in the public sector. This would free branches to develop new business, especially with other parcel amd mail delivery companies. At the moment they are barred from doing that. Under Labour's proposal, Post Office Ltd remains a full part of RM. And that means in effect Labour are part privatising the Post Office but not giving the branches the freedom they need to develop new business income.

So, having given some consideration to the proposals, I have come to the conclusion that they are timid step that fails to address the long term issues and leaves the company without the freedoms it needs to be a successful national and international competitor.

And let me just correct anyone who thinks I'm jumping into bed with all those rotten Old Labour dinosaurs on this issue. I'm not. I think they are even worse than their own government. At least ministers have proposed a way forward, even though it is very far from perfect. The dinosaurs on the other had have made a few Jurrasic roars about how dreadful they think it all is, but they have not put forward a single, workable alternative suggestion. It seems they are happy to leave RM as it is and let it whither on the vine and eventually die. That is certainly not something I would support.

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Round up

This is my first round up for a while so here goes. I have to keep it short as well. My blackberry is just about of juice! Sunday I came down to London. Rest of week I've been sorting conference photos. Anyone at the photo ops should now have their pics. Today I met my new big boss. And I've nearly finished the North East Democrat. So there we go, keeping it short. Off out for dinner now. Probably the Yak and Yeti again.
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Photos from the rally at Harrogate

Just a few photos from the rally held on Saturday evening at the Harrogate Lib Dem conference.

Leaving Harrogate on a very small train

A successful conference. I have spoken to lots of people who read my blog, taken bucket loads of photos and ran 5 photo ops though this time I took the photos at only 2 of them.

The most surreal moment for me over the weekend was at dinner last night. I was out with a group of about 12 and the person sitting next to me, Stephen from Scotland, who I hadn't met before, had the same interests as me in terms of home grown food and world travel.. So, whilst everyone else around us was discussing how to save the world, we were swapping stories about growing courgettes, picking blackberries and going on cruises on the Medditerranean!

We are now on the train heading to Leeds. I'm not heading home, but instead I'm heading down to London. This is a 2 carriage train. Fortunately I was able to get a seat when I insisted that someone remove a bag from it so I could sit down. Most others on this train are standing, sardine style.

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Leaving behind the wheelbarrow puncture repairs to go to Harrogate

I am on the traiin heading south to York where I change for the local service to Harrogate. Surprisingly, given the time of day, the service is packed out. The overhead racks are full and I have half my luggage, and my homemade sandwiches on my lap. I would have tried to read the self-sufficiency handbook I brought along for the journey but frankly, I'm going to have a battle to retrieve it from my bag.

Meanwhile, I've left David at home with a puncture repair kit, mending the tyres on both our wheelbarrows! (Yes we are a 2 wheelbarrow household!) And as this is a conference weekend, I will be missing my time on the allotment. Still, I paid it a brief visit yesterday after council and looked lovingly on my new greenhouse and fruitcage.

Meanwhile, stashed away in my luggage are some rhubarb plants which are surplus to requirements in Sunniside and will be planted instead in our garden in London. I wonder if they will go with the green custard which was showered on Peter Mandelson this morning.

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Throwing custard is not the way to make your case

There are far better ways to make a case for your beliefs than assaulting cabinet members. Throwing green custard over Peter Mandelson may bring a degree of amusement to some, but whatever your cause, this sort of activity is completely unacceptable. I don't say this just because I have a degree of respect for Peter Mandelson (a point that probably does not endear me to many Labour members!) I say it because so-called direct action damages democracy and often puts back the cause in question.

The self-righteous twit who perpetrated this morning's custard throwing spectacle (she postures as an environmentalist but uses a highly processed and unsustainable food source!) claimed she was doing so because democracy had failed. Peter Mandelson, she claimed, was not elected. Quite who elected her is not clear. She claimed that direct action had worked in the past. She gave the miners' strike and suffragettes as examples. Given that the miners' strike was an unmitigated disaster, was led by donkeys posing as lions and actually accelerated pit closures, this seems to be an odd comparison. And with my historian's hat on, there is an historical argument that says that the campaign of violent damage to property actually delayed female suffrage. Having read private papers and cabinet documents of the late Edwardian and pre First World War period, there was great frustration with the more extreme "direct action" wing amongst those cabinet members who supported equalising the franchise. They did not want to appear to buckle to undemocratic forces of violence.

I am all for peaceful demonstration. The right to protest is a fundamental part of democracy and Labour's attacks on that right have been unforgivable. But there are some attention seekers who go too far. I suggest today's culprit does something practical to support the green cause such as living a genuinely greener lifestyle and showing others how to do it, rather than bringing the cause she claims to support into disrepute.

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Harriet Harman, fingernails and blackboards

My ears are still recovering from Deputy Leader's Question Time. The more the Lady Harriet got wound up, the more shrill was her tone. There were times when I thought she was simply going to explode and MPs were going to get showered by her aristocratic blue blood. Alas, it was bad news for the Labour Party - she survived to live another day, and, of course, mount a leadership bid if Labour loses the election. Nevertheless, having sounded like Margaret Thatcher in best hectoring and shrill mode, she did manage to mount a minor comeback part way through PMQs. Perhaps we should call it a Harriet Bounce.

Listening to her screaching away left like listening to someone scratching fingernails down a blackboard. Let's just hope she wins any leadership bid. She really would scare the horses!

I'm on the train heading back home now to Gateshead, having spent the day making photo op props. We had an extra volunteer in the office today so I made full use of the extra labour. I have 5 photo ops this weekend at Lib Dem conference with Nick Clegg, Lorely Burt, Vince Cable,Chris Huhne and David Laws.

Tomorrow we have full council (last week's meeting was for setting the budget.) And on Friday I'm off to Harrogate for the conference. So no chance for me to hide away down on the allotment.
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Whose idea was the weather - and other round up stories

I have just left Cowley St in the rain and gale and discovered that my shoes are leaking. My toes are paddling in their very own pool of water at the moment. I need to make a trip to the cobblers! Mind you, the last time I did that, it was almost as cheap to buy new shoes. Anyway the weather is vile. I don't want to dwell too long on Britain's favourite item of polite conversation, but it is just plain awful. And I hear other parts of the country are getting snow.

Quite a contrast to Sunday when I was down on the allotment in the sun. Anyway, a brief roundup from the last few days.

Firstly, for all you Parliamentary Candidates out there, I have written and produced the pre-conference edition of Parliamentary Campaigner. It should be in your inboxes shortly. The final revision to it was done this evening.

Secondly, having built the fruitcage last week down on the allotment, I had a merry time on Friday planting raspberries. Cowley St is expecting a big increase to the jam supply this summer. The jam addicts need their fix! And just to set the pulse of the new communications media racing, I have posted onto YouTube the video of building our greenhouse and fruitcage. But just as you thought it was safe to come out, I'm working on my next allotment oscar winning blockbuster, "Winter on the allotment". Watch out for the shocking scenes of the arrival of 5 tonnes of manure! I made the mistake of letting a colleague have a photo of me shovelling the stuff. He said he wanted to use it in a training session on how to take good photos. I suspect it will be used in other ways, probably with interesting captions added!

And finally, I have been creating police officers (cardboard ones)! It's for a photo op at conference this weekend with Chris Huhne. I needed to come up with an idea for the event and it had to have a crime and policing angle to it. So watch this space. Tomorrow I have to create a giant cheque, a poster about increased spending on schools and a giant version of the small business survey, all for the other photo ops I am running. Should be fun!
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The Monday morning blog: the politics of pensions

The sight of Labour's aspiring potential Leader of the Opposition, the Lady Harriet, beating the drum for the confiscation of Fred The Shred's pension, is one of those classic moments of political spin. And whilst the unbelievably generous arrangements for this particular pension are staggering in the degree to whichthey have rewarded failure, the reality is that Labour are culpable in the arrangements.

Lord Myners, the City minister, has admitted he knew of the arrangement last October when Fred the Shred took early retirement from RBS. Myners defended himself by claiming he was not made aware that the decision was a discretionary one for the board of the company. This claim sits uncomfortably alongside Myners's previous role as a city financier. He is one of Labour's friends in the City, the sort of rich financier to whom Labour have sucked up for over a decade. If anyone knows how city boardrooms operate, Myners is the person.

Back to the Lady Harriet. As a leading member of the government, she shares responsibility for the pensions fiasco that includes making the benefit system vastly complicated with the result that too many pensioners do not claim their entitlement; taking away benefits from those who have saved and spinning that they are going to restore the state pension link to the increase in earnings whilst never actually introducing the reforms.

The reality of the situation is that Labour approved the pension deal for Fred the Shred and are now trying to wriggle free now that there has been a storm of public indignation about the arrangement. And the people making the loudest noise, such as Harriet Harman, will be the beneficiary of the most generous state pension going, the one set up for MPs and ministers. All this raises the interesting prospect of stripping failed ministers of their pensions. After all, we wouldn't want to reward failure, would we?

Equally nauseating is the babbling of George Pipsqueak Osborne. Having spent years defending financiers' rewards, and having seen his own leader last September, on the eve of the RBS pension decision, backing executive pay and conditions, we are now all expected to believe that the Conservatives want an end to such excesses.

Anyway, I'm off to London for two days. No National Express cancellations. Talking of failure, I wonder what their executive pension arrangements are liike.

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Just as one job is finished, the avalanche of others drops on me

I finished February Campaign Ammo this evening and anyone on our circulation list will get it overnight. It is slightly revamped so hopefully our troops will find it even more useful in the political ground war. I then went straight into doing a desktop publishing job for those nice people at the Policy and Research Unit who sweet talked me into doing it. And with that finished at 8.15pm, I had a few minutes spare to start editing one of my videos. The trouble was, I also agreed to go out to dinner tonight, which meant I couldn't stay late getting the video finished. I'll try to get it done tomorrow.

However, don't hold your breath - I have the next Parliamentary Campaigner to do by the weekend and I haven't even started writing it! And I also agreed to write a short policy paper for Gateshead Lib Dems by Friday. No doubt there will be more about that soon. Anyway, I looked at my list of things to do before I left the office this evening. It ran to a mere 8 pages!

One of the jobs on the list was to complete and send out the Whickham efocus, our email newsletter for constituents. Hopefully it will be in people's inboxes shortly.

Meanwhile I am on a bit of a slow train. Looks as though I will be late for dinner.

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The Monday Morning Blog - the shadow Labour Leadership begins

News of what happens in Cabinet reaches the public by one of two routes: it's leaked by ministers or the 30 year rule means it is released automatically. Given that we are now aware of recent Cabinet conversations about who said what on bankers' bonuses, clearly the former is the route used recently to keep the public informed.

Cabinet conversations get leaked normally for a reason. In this instance, the apparent benificiary is The Lady Harriet. Her posturing as the class enemy of rich bankers no doubt appeals to many Labour MPs, and it certainly stands in sharp contrast to her super-privileged, aristocratic, expensively-privately-education background. The public is not told who leaked the details of the Cabinet discussions but I can't believe that it was not someone close to The Lady H herself.

What was interesting was the response of other Labour chiefs. Suddenly, there was talk of a "stop Harman" candidate in the form of Yvette Cooper. It suggests a degree of desperation within Labour's ranks that a complete unknown (in the public's mind) should be suggested as possible leadership contender.

There is of course no actual leadership campaign at the moment. Instead, there is a Labour "beauty" contest (though beauty is not a word I normally associate with Labour) underway as the ambitious wanabees begin to line up to take on the leadership of Labour once Brown has gone. Labour are seeing the writing on the wall: Brown, they believe, will lead them to election defeat, possibly a bad defeat. The Labour vultures are therefore circling. Brown is seen as a dead cert for disposal after the 2010 election. The next 14 months leading to the election will, for some Labour individuals, be dominated not by the general elction, but by the shadow leadership election.

And at the moment, The Lady Harriet seems to be the only real contender in the race. But expect others to join it soon.

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Bitten on the arse!

This will bring a smile to the faces of opponents! I have just finished delivering my Focus leaflet in Marley Hill village in my ward. Three quarters of the way round I got bitten by a cocker spaniel. The clue as to which part of my anatomy was the recipient of these canine fangs is in the title. Fortunately, my jeans took most of the force. Maybe the owner is not a Lib Dem supporter! Fangs a lot!

I have now retired to the office to print more focus leaflets! Seems as though I can't get enough of an opportunity to get out and meet man's best friend. Well, I suppose I need something to get my teeth into! I will be going home soon to have a bite to eat.

I think that's enough of that!

On other matters, I am pleased to announce that we finished building the greenhouse this afternoon. And we spent the morning happily wandering around a garden centre at Hexham, taking Dad with us, to stock up on seed potatos, onion sets etc. It was the sort of garden centre that caters for the allotment holder. Amazing the sort of thing that now gets us excited!

After that we went to the farmers' market at Gibside. Dad seemed to think he was in the local supermarket and stocked up for the next few weeks.

Anyway, print run is about to come to an end......

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Heading home

I am currently on the train heading back to Newcastle and I am taking a few moments away from the book I am reading (about wiild foods) to do an update about the coming weekend.

First, news from the family. Esther, my sister who was rushed into hospital whilst on holiday in Jamaica in now back home. Seems as though she is in good shape and was able to catch her scheduled flight. I also suppose it gives an new meaning to the term "health tourism"!

Meanwhile, I have the inevitable round of Focus production and delivery to perform this weekend. We are busy consulting in my village of Sunniside about the plans for traffic lights that we have fought for years to get. So we have to deliver the consultation forms with the Sunniside Focus and I know there are two patches waiting for me to do when I get back.

The saga of our greenhouse continues to run and run. We hope to finish building it this weekend. You'll get to see the photos and inevitable video soon! We are also off to Hexham to go to the garden centre there and also visit Gibside to go to the farmers' market. Should be fun.

Anyway, we are just pulling out of Newark Station on my National Express train, with its flashy new timetable which takes much longer to get to Newcastle. Amazing to think just a few weeks ago that National Excess were announcing an exciting new timetable with quicker journey times. Perhaps we have differing understandings of the word "quicker".

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Anti-nationalising MacDonalds financed Labour MP backs nationalised bank

Doug Henderson, who is a big knob adviser to burger giant MacDonalds, and in his spare time is Labour MP for Newcastle North, said in the Journal on 18th February that, “Nationalisation has sorted out [Northern Rock]. It is now on a road where it has got some future stability.”

Comments from the occasional invisible man of Tyneside politics are not always particularly interesting. This one was. The reason why? Because he set himself up as the arch critic of nationalisation of Northern Rock when it was first proposed by the Liberal Democrats.

On 12th December 2007, Big MacHenderson told the Commons that the nationalisation of Northern Rock “would be a disastrous policy to adopt”! There would be doom and gloom and the end of civilisation and all life as we know it in the North East (okay so I slightly exaggerate) were the bank to be taken into public ownership.

This MP is, it would appear, about as useful to the world of economic prediction as double cheeseburgers are to calorie controlled diets.

Labour get screwed after imitating the BNP

This was just going to be a round up of yesterday's by-election results and just as I was about to start writing, Labour's leaflets from the Downham by-election in Lewisham yesterday hit my desk. For those who are not clad in by-election anoraks, the background was that 2 Lib Dem cllrs retired from the Council last month, both representing the same ward. So the by-election was a double header. Lewisham itself was one of the councils where Labour went into meltdown in the last elections in 2006. They went from having a large majority to having 29 out of 60 councillors. This was rather academic however given there is an elected mayor, Labour's Sir Steve Bullock, the thinking man's cure for insomnia.

Though Downham is a Lib Dem held ward, it does have a Labour history. And Labour had high hopes of taking the 2 seats and winning back a majority on the council. In the end they nearly came third. Looking at their appalling literature, they deserved to come last. Labour seemed to think there was a BNP threat in the ward. The actual threat could hadly be described as anything other than weak. The BNP only had one candidate. They hadn't stood in the ward last time. And BNP resources were clearly going to another by-election, in Sevenoaks, which they won from Labour.

So why Labour should campaign in the ward in the style of the BNP is an as yet unanswered question. It seems that much of their message was the desperate need to have the Union Jack flying above the town hall. They had a petition on it, in an attempt to persuade the mayor to see sense and fly the flag. (Interesting that they felt the need to run a petition to persuade themselves to change something they were doing!) Anyway, Labour's campaign of waving the flag was an outstanding success as the Labour mayor had a rethink and decided to have the Union Jack fluttering from the municipal flagpole on "at least 14 special occasions such as Trafalgar Day and the Queen's birthday." (It was noticeable that Nuuuuuu Labour don't mention May Day as a special day, though that may have something to do with Labour's successful approach to reducing the number of workers.)

Personally, I think flying the nation's flag on special occasions is a great idea. But it should be done as a matter of course, not something adopted as a tactic in a political battle. The flag belongs to the nation as a whole, not to one political party. Politicising the Union Jack is a tactic of the far right and Labour should be ashamed of themselves for posing in such a manner. If you want to beat the BNP, you do so by giving a different and better vision, not posing as a pale version of the far right.

And couldn't Labour find something closer to people's needs on which to campaign? Whilst Labour may be keen to have the flag flying above their head, the rest of us are more concerned about having a roof above our head.

But Labour's stupidity does not end there. Though they posed as flag waving nationalists, one of their campaign messages was that the battle was a 2 horse race between Labour and Conservatives. And whilst Labour drools with indignation everytime they see a bar chart in a Lib Dem Focus leaflet, Lewisham Labour stuffed their leaflets full of graphs suggesting that it was only Labour or Tories who could win there.

So I can imagine the surprise and confusion of voters therefore on polling day when they received a Labour leaflet claiming "The BNP winning in Downham - it's more important than ever before to vote Labour today."

And the next day, of course, people woke up to the news of a Lib Dem election victory!

So, posing as watered down right wingers, ignoring bread and butter issues, talking up both the Tories and BNP - even that must be a record for Labour. Still, though they fly the union jack "on special occasions", at least we will be guaranteed that Labour certainly won't be flying the red flag in Lewisham.

Is this a trend I see before me? (Another National Express story)

It seems the level of service provided by National Express on the East Coast Line has caught the attention of a number of Parliamentarians. Lib Dem peers Bill Bradshaw and Angie Harris were reported recently in The Journal as being decidedly unhappy with the quality of rail services provide by my not-favourite company.

And then last week, Blaydon MP Dave Anderson expressed his unhappiness with the company as well. He asked Geoff Hoon, the Transport Secretary, to speak to the company and ask for improvements. Mr Hoon sidestepped that part of the question. May be some good will come of this. Here's hoping!

Nevertheless, is a trend of making vocal complaints about National Excess being set?

One interesting National Express wheeze I want to share with you is about the 9pm service out of London being resheduled to take about half an hour longer to do the same route and stations. I discovered this on a journey north recently. There was no explanation as to why the extra half hour had been added on. The train arrived at a number of stations early and sat waiting, in one instance for 20 minutes, so that it could catch up on its elongated timetable.

But that wasn't the end of it. National Excess schedules half an hour on the timetable to get from Durham to Newcastle. The actual journey time is 12 minutes. Under the old timetable, it normally arrived 20 minutes early into Newcastle. No doubt this helped the company tick a few boxes on train punctuality.

But on the elongated timetable, the train got in half an hour early. The reality was that it got in half an hour after it used to do, but because of the madly extended timetable, the train guard was ever so proud to tell passengers that National Express was bringing us in a staggering 30 minutes early. Who are they trying to kid? Hardly surprising they can claim to be doing so well on their punctuality targets!
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My latest on National Express and the weekend round up

National Excess appear to pour most of their publicity budget into promoting their ultra cheap fares. Go to London for £14 - that sort of thing (the return fare not included!) "Minature prices" they call them. More like minature victory if you manage to lay your hands on them. When I tried to get cheap, or even modestly prices tickets for last Friday to get out of London and today, to go back there, they were as common as good news economy stories in the press. I ended up getting a ticket home on Thursday and took Friday off.

Getting a ticket for this morning was equally tortuous. The cheapest I could get for a single to London was first class advanced costing £69.50. And it leaves at 9.30am, much later than I normally pick up the train. I decided to get the bus in rather than get David to do his chauffeur routine. And since he is chairing the magistrates bench this morning, I don't want to make him late for all those criminals!

So on arrival at Central Station, with over half an hour to spare, I headed for the waiting room and spotted the first class lounge. "That will do nicely," I thought to myself. Errr, actually it didn't. My first class tick didn't let me into the first class facilities. Apparently, as I only paid an arm and a leg for my ticket, I clearly have not provided sufficient body parts to let me through the door! So I headed for standard class waiting room instead!

Anyway, rant over and so to my weekend activities. Mine focused on the long running saga of building the greenhouse. We are only partly further on. And oh, how I so hate the sound of breaking glass, especially when specially cut panes of glass are dropped in the kitchen. So another weekend goes by in which we set ourselves the target of completing the building job the following weekend. The video I am making about it for my allotment blog just keeps getting longer.

Good news: I was contacted over the weekend by an American looking for photos taken inside the ex-Soviet, formerly top secret nuclear submarine base in Balaklava, the Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula in the Black Sea. He runs a website promoting holidays to the Crimea but had no photos of the inside of the base. The video I shot in the base has been viewed over 100,000 times on YouTube and has appeared on various websites but no one has, up til now, asked me for photos. Fortunately, I took over 150 when I was inside the base, just over 2 years ago, shortly after it was first opened to visitors. Needless to say, the Russian navy has long sinced stopped using the site. The photos will have to be sorted but some will be heading over to America by email shortly.

I guess that had this been 20 years ago, the CIA would have been asking for the photos as well!

And so to the bad news. 2 family members have been taken ill, one of whom has been rushed into hospital in Jamaica of all places for an emergency operation. The other is in hospital in North Wales.

And we are concerned about Freda, our cat in Sunniside. She is 20 years old so for a puss, she is seriously old. Last night she fell off my lap, having some kind of fit. She had another 4 during the next couple of hours. She has been booked to go to the vet tonight.

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Sorry seems to be the hardest word

The bankers have laid the apologies on thick this week, even though it was difficult to see this as anything other than an insincere attempt to put some heat under the iceberg of anger that threatens to sink them forever. What is lacking however is the apology from Brown and Labour. No doubt Gordon Brown would choke if he ever said the word "sorry".

Labour find it politically useful to see the bankers making grovelling apologies. Brown hopes this will deflect attention for his own responsibility. And reading sites such as Labourlist (which has rapidly degenerated into a craven mouthpiece for the government) you can see how desperate Labour are to pin all the blame for the entire mess on the bankers.

The reality was that the entire culture of greed and irresponsibility in the banks not only went unchallenged by Labour, they were happy to encourage it. They fed it with a light touch regulatory machine and a tax system that encouraged top bankers to behave irresponsibly. That culture sucked in both Labour and the banks and both were happy to perpetuate it. One side has apologised. Labour hasn't done so yet. I doubt they ever will.

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Councillor Maureen Chaplin RIP

I was phoned this morning by my colleague Cllr Chris Ord who gave me the news that the Mayor of Gateshead, Maureen Chaplin, had passed away. I had a great deal of time for Maureen and I know she will be missed. Our thoughts are with her family.

Weekend round up - pheasants, photos and greenhouses

The weekend was split between securing my future food supply and taking photos for the Lib Dems! Saturday morning was the Lib Dem training session at Gateshead Civic Centre and I went down to Gateshead Quays with our three Euro candidates to take photos. My other Lib Dem bits over the weekend included work on a Focus and the next Parliamentary Campaigner (due out today, Monday).

We also built a greenhouse. The bits were assembled in the front room on Saturday afternoon. We then simply carried them over to the allotment and with Dad's help assembled the whole thing, minus the glass. Glazing is next week's job.

In between all this, we found time to pluck and gut a couple of pheasants. We were also given 2 woodock. This was a new food source for us so we plumbed the depths of the internet, and our collection of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall books to find out what to do with them. Apparently, you do not remove the head or guts and you eat them on toast. We've decided to give that a go next weekend! If we live to tell the tale, I'll make sure you are the first to hear it!

Meanwhile, another food experiment was conducted. In the autumn I made acorn flour. All very experimental but all part of our move towards food self-sufficiency. Last night I made 3 loaves of bread using the flour, 2 of which are coming down to London with me. Cowley St colleagues will be used to test this bread. I tried some this morning and was rather pleased with the result.

I'm now on the train heading to London. The person sitting in front of me is having a loud phone conversation. I think she is practising her entry for the "let's squeeze into a phone conversation the entire family history including all the embarrassing bits that other people on the train really don't want to hear" competition. Sounds like a winning entry.

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The Monday morning blog: burning coal does not make you green

There is a belief amongst many Labour MPs that burning coal is somehow a green activity - in other words damage to the environment and carbon emissions can be avoided by burning coal. Labour's claim however is deeply flawed.

Basically, Labour MPs simply add the word "clean" to the words "coal technology" whenever they possibly can presumably in the hope that people will think burning coal is some kind of environment saving measure. Their claim however is not well founded. The term "clean coal" started some years ago when it was realised that coal burning was adding significantly to levels of acid rain. Nitrous and sulphurous oxides released by burning coal had to be scrubbed from emissions to stop their forming airborne acids when they dissolved in water droplets which then fell as rain. Carbon emissions were never reduced. Indeed, if anything, carbon emissions went up in net terms because resources had to be put into cutting acidic emissions.

What Labour MPs are hoping for is the technology of carbon capture will developed quickly to the point where it actually makes a significant impact on carbon emissions and is not prohibitively expensive. At the moment neither of these conditions is being met. At this point in time, industrial carbon capture has not even reached an embryonic stage as a solution to our emission problems. And furthermore, use of industrial carbon capture will significantly reduce the net output of energy from a given quantity of coal. As with removing acidic emissions, a large amount of energy will be required to remove the carbon emissions of coal burning. The end result is that even more coal will have to be burnt just to get the same energy output.

That said, carbon capture is something that should be pursued but, it should only be used as a short to medium term solution to our emission problems. Our ultimate goal has to be to ween ourselves off fossil fuels and nuclear as both leave a lasting and damaging environmental legacy. Both give us a short term boost in terms of the energy provided for us, but both leave subsequent generations and the planet generally with the problem of how to deal with the waste.

The solutions to our energy problems must start with energy efficiency. As an industrialised society we are enormously wasteful with the energy we have. We need to cut the waste by using energy more efficiently. Secondly, we need some lifestyle changes. These cannot be forced on people but we all need to understand the consequences of our actions and lifestyle choices. So, when replacing your car, do you really need that 4 litre gas guzzling 4 wheel drive or are you just buying it as a status symbol to show off to everyone when you take the kids to school or do the shopping at Tescos? (No doubt the 4 wheel drive comes in very useful to drive up the rugged peaks of Tesco car parks!)

The more effort we put into renewable energy, the less we need to put into carbon capture. This should be the next strand of energy policy. Nevertheless, as I mentioned previously, we will need some degree of carbon capture for some time to come as for some decades we will continue to be dependent of fossil fuels. We also need carbon capture to reduce the levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide to more natural levels, after centuries of deforrestation and industrialisation.

There is of course one natural form of carbon capture that does not need a major industrial complex to make sure it happens. Indeed, it is something I do myself. Growing trees captures and locks up atmospheric carbon. I have 40 sycamore saplings growing at the moment and I am about to plant 20 acorns. Yet even growing trees cannot address all out carbon emission problems. Firstly it is a slow process. It takes years for a tree to soak up one persons carbon emissions. Secondly, we will not have sufficient land to grow the trees to soak up the required amount of carbon. Whilst it is a reasonable response to the problem, it is not the total solution and it does not reduce the problem. Ultimately, we have to cut the amount of fossil carbon we emit.

So my message to Labour MPs in particular who claim that coal is a green fuel is, think again. Burning coal adds to the problem, and the solution to reducing emissions from coal is not yet available. Focus instead on energy efficiency and and renewables. Give up your coal addiction.

Meanwhile, over to David Anderson, Labour MP for Blaydon who wisely spends some of his time reading my blog! A pat on the back from JW. I like the EDM you have sponsored calling for much more effort to be put into using waste cooking oil as a fuel. This is all about making maximum use of the resources we have. But that said Dave, you need to kick the coal habit.

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What's coming up this weekend

Ideally I could have done without it but tomorrow morning I am going to Gateshead to train one constituency on doing email newsletters and to take photos. Otherwise I would have spent the time on the allotment. We have a greenhouse and a fruit cage to build. I guess I will get down there on Saturday afternoon, assuming there is no further snowfall.

I do however, have to finish the next Parliamentary Campaigner. I have pencilled in Saturday evening for that as we are publishing on Sunday. I expect to be back down on the allotment on Sunday as well. Building that greenhouse is going to take more than one afternoon!

Meanwhile, I appear yet again to have missed the snow actually falling. When it came down heavy in London, I was in Gateshead. When I was in London this week, it came down in Gateshead. And now I am on the Newcastle train from London and I have just had a text from Richard in London telling me it's snowing there!

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Brown's government in administration and likely to be wound up

The Brown bounce that arrived so unexpectedly in the autumn has gone. The partial recovery in the polls has turned again into a slump. Brown's standing is falling faster than the share value of a bank. Were Brown a financial services company, hedge funds would be selling him short.

Labour MPs however are not selling up. They are sticking with Brown, and will continue to do so until after the general election. Assuming Labour goes down to defeat (and much can happen in the space of a few weeks in politics, never mind the 15 months or so to the likely date of the general election) Labour will dump Brown faster than they can blink. And then comes the decision as to who will take over. Looking at the likely options, I can understand why Labour are in no rush to pack Brown off to his retirement home. They could have The Lady Harriet, but since a fair chunk of the Labour party wants to put the boot in on Tory toffs, they won't be able to do it without blushing if she we at the helm. Then there is Ed Balls, but he would really scare the horses. Then there is Milliband The Younger (The Older blew it last year) but no one outside Parliament knows who he is (which admittedly could be an advantage.) Alan Johnson is a credible candidate but lacks the suport (and probably the ambition).

So despite the collapsing share value of Brown, Labour will stick with him. The guy may be unsuited to the task of Prime Minister, he may never answer a question and he may be addicted to spin, but he is not an ogre or a buffoon. Assuming Labour are defeated in the general election, he will have the misfortune of being seen by history as the failure who followed the much more successful Blair.

Brown as Chancellor claimed to have delivered the successful ecomony which was the foundation of the Blair years. He must be feeling a certain degree of bitterness that almost as soon as he switched from Chancellor to Prime Minister, that apparent economic success evaporated. I guess the Downing St air must have been thick with expletives yesterday therefore when Brown lost out to Blair for the highly coveted position as the first major European politician to meet Obama.

Meanwhile, Brown's claims that he has saved the world and is showing Johnnie Foreigner how to save their economies took a bit of a roasting from the French today. President Sarkozy laid into the VAT cut though the Germans had beaten him to it. They went for the jugular on the economy a few weeks ago.

There is a feeling that the government has gone into administration and few believe it can be saved from bankruptcy. It is not a going concern. The millions who lent Labour their vote over the past decade or so, are feeling their investment hasn't paid off and may well be looking to have this Labour government wound up.

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Tiger tiger burning bright

Wendy, a friend of mine, has just returned from India, taking photos of tigers. Looks as though she had a great time. And here are some of her tiger photos.

The slow train back

When I got the train down from Newcastle yesterday, we were an hour late into Kings Cross. The delay had nothing to do with the snow and everything to do with the train that broken down ahead of us and the electrical failure just north of Kings Cross. Westminster itself was like a winter scene from an edition of Survivors. Barely a sole in sight. And the journey from work to the flat last night was like something from Mission Impossible. Amazingly I made it.

Today has been a marginal improvement. I got to the station this morning and had to dash to catch the train which was packed out. And this evening, having left Cowley St late (working on a Focus leaflet) I found most trains at Victoria cancelled. It seems the last one is the 10.07 and thankfully it goes via Crystal Palace. I am on it down. I think it would have been quicker to walk!

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The Cowley St Abominal Snowmen

I snapped this as I was walking into Cowley St yesterday.

The Monday morning blog: when posturing like the BNP comes back to haunt you

There is something odd in the recent wildcat and illegal strikes at oil terminals (and now Sellafield). British jobs for British workers? Actually, these are French jobs for British workers, for it is British workers working for a French company who are striking in opposition to other, non British workers being employed.

Foreign businesses such as Total, and, for us in the North East, Nissan have invested heavily in the UK economy in recent years. Without them, there would be far fewer jobs for British workers. We start picking apart that for short term political gain at our peril. And that is precisely what Gordon Brown did back in 2007 at his first conference speech as Labour leader (just before he drove a wrecking ball through the Labour party with his fiasco over the election that never was).

Brown is a politician who is more driven by spin that even New Labour in overdrive. Blair had a big spin operation as well but there is something different about Brown's. He treats people as if they are stupid and in the process creates far more false claims that come back to haunt him (though admittedly Blair's claims on Iraq were a disaster that never went away.) So with Brown we have the "end of boom and bust", the claim that Britain is best placed to come through the recession and, of course, "British jobs for British workers."

The Ghost of Conference Speeches Past is certainly back to haunt him. Not only was Brown stupid to have lifted a line from the BNP, he was offering something that was illegal, is contrary to the whole direction in which the economy had been moving for generations and is impossible to deliver. Could you imagine the incandescent rage from Brown if President Sarkozy had beaten him to it and called for French jobs for French workers and demanding that British companies with sites in France should be forced to remove any British workers and replace them with French?

Brown is an intelligent guy but that has not given him common sense. His British jobs for British workers demand (note that it was never follwed up by any action to ensure it happened) has come back to haunt him big style and give him an almightly kick up his well spun rear end. And frankly, he deserves every bit of it.

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Caught in the snow

We are currently stuck in slow moving traffic heading towards Newcastle. The tailback of traffic was almost up to Sunniside. I'm not sure if this can be blamed on the snow but nevertheless, snow is what we have. And for once, we seem to be less affected than other parts of the country, especially London and the South East, which is where I am heading to. I got text messages from London last night telling me how bad the snow was. At that time we had barely had a sprinkling up here in the North East. And the media this morning is stuffed full of snow stories, no doubt inspired by journalists and editors who had to travel through the stuff to get to work.

Hopefully, the trains to London are not too disrupted. But I'll believe that when I see it.

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Opencast meeting

I am on the bus now, leaving Newcastle to head home to Sunniside. I have just spoken at the meeting on opencast mining. It looks like a region wide group will be set up to fight the ever growing number of opencast coal applications. I said that any such group will need to have an alternative vision for energy that is not based on coal but is based on renewables, devolved power production and better energy efficiency instead. This was certainly taken on board.

The bus has had to take a detour. There appears to have been an accident in the Teams. Police cars and fire engines are charging all over the place.
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Speaking on opencast mining

I was recently invited to speak at an environment conference in Newcastle. The event is tomorrow and I have agreed to attend. I am speaking in the afternoon and have been given 10 minutes to speak and then answer questions. I have been specifically asked to speak about opencast mining.

Nearly 4 years ago I led a campaign against an opencast scheme in my ward. The proposal was to mine 400,000 tonnes of coal and fireclay from a site right next to a couple of villages and with a route for lorries right through the centre of a number of villages. The campaign resulted in a petition of 18,000 signatures being handed in to Gateshead Council, the largest ever in Gateshead. I also managed to run a strong media campaign and as a result of that, I continue to do media interviews. It has also resulted in the invite for tomorrow.

I will be speaking on how the campaign was run and how to get a positive result - in this instance the rejection of the application and the eventual abandonment of the appeal by the applicant. I do of course, have to write the speech now. Fortunately I am on the train heading to Newcastle so I have some time to use up.

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50th councillor elected in Newcastle after gain from Labour

Having blogged that we won last night in Fenham in Newcastle, taking Labour's last seat in the ward, I can now give you the vote:

Lib Dem 1049.
Labour 1025
BNP 836
Con 186

That means we have 50 councillors in the city. Not bad after 5 years of control and a majority substantially increased on the authority from when the Lib Dems first won it (back in 2004 we had 44 seats).

A bad result for Labour who opted for a 4 month campaign in the hope of appearing as the underdogs trying to claw back the Lib Dem lead. Had they gone for a shorter campaign, they would have gone to the polls at a time when Labour were doing better in the polls and were basking in the rather short lived glow of their victory in the Glenrothes by-election. Their tactical error raises further doubts about their group leader in the city.

As for the BNP I'm not sure whether they will be elated or devastated by the result. No doubt BNP readers of this blog will make their views clear. I guess it depends on which starting point you take. The rise in their vote from the last election will make them happy. If the starting point was their expectation as they went into the final stretch of the campaign, they will be disappointed - not that I would expect them to admit it. Nevertheless, there is a warning in the result for all parties.

And finally, the Tories. Yet again they have failed to register on the radar screen. Whilst a Tory recovery may appear to be taking place throughout the country, the reality on the ground in places like Newcastle and many other metropolitan areas is that the Tories are the distant 4th party. Remember, Fenham was a ward they held in the Thatcher period.

Back to lessons, at least for the Lib Dems. We were in the slightly unusual position of being the dominant party that is in control of the council. Strategies for defending records are different from going on the attack in areas where other parties are in control. Picking up the seat in the more difficult circumstances of not having the luxury of being in opposition is all the more remarkable even with such a small majority in the actual result. Nevertheless, we need to look closely at what worked, what didn't and what needs to be done to counteract opponents. And no doubt opponents will have views on that as well.

So well done Newcastle. And let's have more gains in the future!
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Gain from Labour in Newcastle

Result just through from Newcastle Fenham byelection. A Lib Dem gain from Labour by a slender 24 votes, or there abouts. But the BNP were only about 200 behind. Tight result but a gain nonetheless. Well done to Newcastle who now have their 50th councillor. Newcastle before the elections were the biggest Lib Dem group in the country and are now the even biggest group.

Labour's glittering new and otherwise useless group leader in Newcastle, Nick Forbes, must be feeling the heat. Time for Labour there to get their 4th leader in 4 years!
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Beware of BNP by-election result

There is a by-election in Fenham ward in Newcastle today. Labour are defending the seat though it is a ward with a colourful political history.

Until the 80s it was a strong Tory ward but they lost to Labour and have since collapsed, as they have across the whole of Newcastle and Gateshead. Labour held the ward comfortably for 20 years and it returned 3 Labour councillors in 2004 despite their meltdown elsewhere in the city.

Then in 2006 Labour lost a seat to the Lib Dems. In 2007 they held on though only by a slender 4 votes and a similar number of recounts. And in 2008, Labour lost again to the Lib Dems. It is the Labour seat in the ward that is being fought over in this byelection, sparked by the death of the Labour councillor. Labour opted for the long campaign. The seat became vacant in September so the battle has lasted 4 months. Presumably Labour thought of themselves as the underdog and wanted more time to claw back what they regarded as the Lib Dem lead.

Into this battlefield rode the BNP. From what I had heard, they have thrown everything into the contest, or so it seems. I have seen concerns about the rise in the BNP vote on one Labour blog and I know what our own people are telling me. With just this one seat to focus on, their vote is going up. Watch out for a possible upset tonight.

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French Google Earth and other stories

There is a barely known island in the Indian Ocean called Mayotte. It is a French dependency and I visited it in December 2007 and shot a few videos there which made their way onto my Youtube channel. In the past few days, I have spotted an interesting increase in the number of viewings they are getting. So I checked out what was happening and discovered that they are featured on the French version of Google Earth. If you go to the satellite image of Mayotte, you can see the island peppered with images of my videos! Let's just hope all those French speaking people who are viewing them can speak English. I'm not sure if my O'level French is up to doing a translation!

Talking of electronic communications, I went to the Parliamentary Party meeting this evening at the end of which, one MP amusingly feigned surprise that I wasn't on the allotment or preserving food. Seems as though people on Facebook at least are following our attempts to become self-sufficient.

And talking of that, we have bought or are in the process of buying equipment to help us achieve our aim of providing most of our own food. One of the purchases was a new, large food processor which came with an eye watering array of attachments. I tried it out last night though it took me most of the evening to assemble it and get it working. Fun times ahead however. On learning of the acquisition of the new equipment, expectations of an increased supply of home made food have gone up in Cowley St.

Back to electronic communications. I finished the next edition of North East Democrat on Monday. This is the email newsletter I produce for Lib Dems in the region. I always send it to in addition to people on my media list. As a result, I discovered that journalists do pass it on to each other. One Chronicle journalist emailed me to ask to go on the circulation list. She'll end up getting my eFocuses as well!

Anyway, my train journey is about to end and I am heading off for the pub quiz. We haven't won so far this year. Hopefully tonight will see an improvement.

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The Monday morning blog - time to reform the Lords

The Sunday Times entrapment of 4 Labour peers has again highlighted the need for Lords reform. Whether or not the 4 people in question are guilty (and if there is a case, we should let the legal system deal with them, rather than have trial by media) the fact is that a chamber that consists of unelected and unpaid life members (okay so they got a comfortable allowance) breeds a situation in which cash changing hands to change legislation is more likely to happen.

Attempts to reform the Lords have gone on for a century. The Parliament Act of 1911, which curtailed the powers of the Lords to reject legislation agreed by the Commons (and took away financial powers) was the started of botched attempts to change the real nature of the upper house. A century later and though the Commons has voted for substantial reform, nothing has been done. To borrow a phrase from Labour, they are a do-nothing government on this issue. Let's hope that changes.

Anyway, I am on the train to London now, just crossing the Tyne as we leave Newcastle. It's a slightly later train than normal. Should be in London in 3 and a half hours.
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Small business survey launched

We launched the North East Liberal Democrats' survey of small businesses yesterday in Gateshead. The aim is to survey 5,000 businesses. As usual, I was on hand to do the photos and interview the participants for the regional video newsletter I do.

You can see the photos on my Flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonathanwallace/sets/72157608340329359/

You can also see the video: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=sPUpGbGOPrg

The photos is of me, Fiona Hall MEP and my ward colleague John McClurey in whose shop we launched the survey.

Video gaffe - always switch off the phone before you start filming

I always tell people to switch off phones when I interview them on video. Trust me to forget on Saturday when we were shooting the video for the launch of the small business survey in the North East. Here's the offending clip.

Launching the small business survey

We are launching a survey of small businesses across the region tomorrow, Saturday. It is part of a survey that is being carried out across the country by Liberal Democrats, under the direction of the Parliamentary Business and Enterprise Team. (Guess who wrote the original!?)

The launch will be taking place in a small business in Gateshead: a shop owned by my ward colleague, Cllr John McClurey. Leading the survey in the North East will be Fiona Hall MEP and she will be supported at the launch tomorrow by Carol Woods, our candidate for Durham City, and Cllr John Shipley, Leader of Newcastle City Council.

I'm doing the photos and video. Watch this space......

My latest on National Express

As I am sitting here on a National Express train, heading home after 10 days in London, I thought I would have a post about one of my favourite subjects: National Express! The Journal reported recently that the company is considering introducing a £1 charge for seat reservations to discourage people from booking seats who subsequently don't occupy them. They allege this is something of a problem.

Quite how it is a problem is not explained. If someone books a seat on a train from Newcastle to London and then decides to get a different service, that seat does not stay vacant all the way to London. Someone else very rapidly claims it. In fact, on a busy service, if you have no seat and all unrserved seats are filled, all you have to do is wait for the train to leave the station and find a vacant reserved seat which was supposed to be filled by a passenger from the station at which you have just boarded yourself.

I get the impression however that the proposal is just a wheeze to rake in more cash from passengers. Fares have just gone up well above inflation. Now other charges are being introduced. Let's hope they don't start charging for taking luggage or breathing the on board air!

I notice that Tyne Bridge MP Dave Clelland has backed the seat reservation proposal.
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On the other side of the camera with Nick Clegg

On Saturday I took photos of members with Nick Clegg (if you have your photo taken it will be on the Lib Dem Flickr site soon). But at the end I ended up being on the other side of the camera for a change. This is the picture.

At the LSE conference

I am at the LSE to do photos with Nick Clegg and members. The session is now finished. Format was the usual one we use for conference photo ops. There was an invasion of staff at the end of the session to have pics taken and I suspect there will be plenty of them appearing on Facebook soon.

But forget politics for a moment. Seems as though some people here are far more interested in my food growing and making exploits! Talking of which, I've just had a message from David who is working hard on the allotment, shovelling more of that manure! And here I am stuck in London!

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Yak and Yeti

Normally at this point I would be on a train heading home to Gateshead but not tonight. I am in London over the weekend to do photos with Nick Clegg at a one day conference at the LSE. So I am in Crystal Palace now, instead of being on a train.

So to fill in the evening, I am out for dinner in a new restaurant in the Crystal Palace Triangle called the Yak and Yeti. Well worth going to. The only drawback was that I was eventually defeated by the vegetable jalfrezi. It was super hot. I hate food waste but I had to leave a small bit or otherwise I would have spontaneously combusted!

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Let the train take the strain

Despite my regular outbursts against National Express, I continue to be a great fan of rail travel. Indeed, some of my anoyance with National Express and their service cancellations is the concern that poor service simply encourages people to switch to using the car instead.

We have as a nation become accustomed to using the car. And whilst some rail passengers may switch to other modes of travel if problems arise on the trains, too often motorists accept all the drawbacks of driving, especially congestion, rather than switch to other means. In other words, it takes a great deal to encourage people to leave the car at home and take public transport instead. And this was brought home to me earlier this week by an article in The Journal, our regional morning newspaper in the North East.

There are major roadworks now taking place on the A184, a major road linking the A1 to central Newcastle and Gateshead. The Journal interviewed a driver who said she normally takes an hour to drive from Durham to Newcastle. Now, due to the roadworks, she was having to add another 30 minutes to her journey.

This struck me as odd as the journey from Durham to Newcastle by train is only 12 minutes. And there is no hassle at Newcastle in trying to find a parking space, no problem with getting stuck in congestion, no burning up expensive fuel stuck in the traffic, and far less pollution. 12 minutes by train compared to 90 minutes by car. I know which I prefer.

And for your information, I am writing this on the train!



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Now Gordon is going to save the world from cancer

Gordon Brown, Saviour of the World, is on a new mission to protect the population of the planet Earth from impending disaster. Having cured the banks of imminent death and destruction, Flush Gordon wants to turn his hand to stamping out cancer, so claims The Sun in one of the most sycophantic and stomach churning articles I have read in a newspaper.

Speaking about the impending presidency of Obama, Flush Gordon said, “There has never been a time that cooperation between the two countries and the rest of the world is more necessary.” (How about during the First and Second World Wars?)

Flush proudly proclaims that he and Obama, working together, could “find ways of wiping out deadly global diseases, such as cancer.” Presumably this will be done by the two of them sitting in a room and talking.

If you have a strong constitution and feel the need to see what Brown had to say about how he is going to show Obama how to end death and disease from the cabinet war room, you can read it here.

John Reid MP – from Leninist activist to private security industry consultant

There is something deeply uncomfortable about the way Labour government members retire from the Cabinet to the backbenches and then take on a well paid position as consultants to the industry which came under the control of the ministry they recently led.

The latest to make the move is John Reid. The former Defence Secretary has just picked up a plum job as a consultant to G4S Security Services, with a credit crunch busting payslip of £50,000. Last year G4S bought out private security company ArmorGroup, which was involved in mine clearance, convoy protection and ‘kidnap and extortion insurance’ in Iraq.

Dr Reid has certainly made an interesting transformation from Leninist PhD student to New Labour businessman, specialising in Iraqi security. Presumably there is a big need for the services of these private security companies in Iraq, following the illegal invasion which turned into the biggest foreign policy disaster since Munich.

I wonder, however, what Labour MPs think of Dr Reid’s profiting from the security industry. Perhaps the following early day motion initially proposed in January last year, gives an indication:

This House is concerned by the exponential growth of private military and security companies (PMSCs) since the invasion of Iraq; is disturbed by the substantial rise of reported incidents of civilian killings and human rights abuses by PMSC guards in Iraq who remain unregulated and unaccountable; further notes that problems posed by proliferation of PMSCs were highlighted in a Green Paper in February 2002 that originated in a request from the Foreign Affairs Committee but that, six years later, there is still no United Kingdom legislation regulating PMSCs; believes that self-regulation by the industry is not appropriate in this instance; and urges the Government to bring forward legislative proposals for the control of the PMSC sector as an urgent priority.

Proposer of the motion is none other than David Anderson, MP for Blaydon constituency where I happen to live. It was signed by 92 MPs in total, 53 of whom were Labour.

You can read more about Dr Reid’s consultancy on: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1111702/John-shot-fired-Reids-50-000-Iraq-security-job.html.

Up to my neck in the brown stuff

This got quite a flurry of interest and amusing comments when on Saturday I announced on Facebook that a large tonnage of manure had been delivered for use on our allotment. So we have spent a large part of the weekend shovelling the stuff into wheelbarrows and spreading it on the land. We had originally estimated 3 tonnes of the stuff had turned up. We now think it is about 5 tonnes.

Since we are aiming to be as self-sufficient in food as possible, having a well fertilised stretch of land is important. Nevertheless, the shelves of Sainsburys as a source of food did have a certain amount of appeal when we were in the middle of shovelling all that brown stuff. And there's still plenty of work to do to get it all onto the land. But that is for another weekend.
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The Monday morning blog: National Express starting the year as they intend carrying on

I would have been hopping mad had I been booked on the 7.40am train from Newcastle to London today. This is the fast service to London and the one National Express loves to cancel. And today, yet again rather than bother themselves with putting on the scheduled service, National Excess has cancelled the service they regard as optional. The train arrived as scheduled from Edinburgh and at that point was withdrawn from service, complete with all the passengers on board, and then converted to the slow service leaving at 7.52am (the service on which I am booked). The seat reservations for the 7.52am have been cancelled which means it's a free-for-all as passengers race to get what seats are available.

In December, on the first anniversary of National Excess getting the franchise, they claimed in the Journal that everything was improving and going well. Frankly, National Excess couldn't run a Hornby trainset, never mind a real one. It seems however that they are starting the year as they intend carrying on.


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Heading home at last

At last, at last, I am heading home. Having been away since Xmas Eve, it will be good to get back to Gateshead. I am on the train just leaving Kings Cross now. No National Express screw ups tonight. And unusually, I am on the early train.

I am hoping to spend the weekend sorting photos and video and tidying my office at home, though I suspect we will need to do some work on the allotment as well. But tomorrow starts with a photo shoot with some of our councillors in Whickham. 9.15am. The timing wasn't my idea!

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I've made it into the pages of an international travel guide!

Well sort of. Schmap is an on-line travel guide. They have a page on Newcastle and asked if they could use one of my photos of the City's St Nicholas Cathedral which is on my Flickr site. If you have nothing better to do, follow the link: http://www.schmap.com/newcastleupontyne/sights_greystreet/#r=none&mapview=Map&tab=Places&p=105505&topleft=54.98978,-1.62344&bottomright=54.95347,-1.59933&i=105505_7.jpg

Brown bypasses North East on the day Nissan announces 1200 job losses

Gordon Brown will not be coming to the North East as part of his current tour of the nation in which he looks at the problems of the recession. The region is not sure whether they should feel relieved or insulted. I suspect it is a mixture of both.

However, the Brown tour to other parts of the country goes ahead on the day one of the most successful private sector employers in the North East, Nissan, announces 1200 job losses. A further 300 jobs are going in a regional business that provides parts to Nissan.

This is a serious blow to the region. Many of my constituents work at the car plant. Northern Rock has already shed a huge number of jobs over the past year. Small businesses are feeling the pinch, and as with the rest of the country, all our Woolies stores have closed.

And yesterday, I took delivery of the jobseeker allowance figures for Gateshead, showing the claimant count went up in all 22 wards in November.

This is going to be a difficult recession. My fear is that we are only at the start of it.

Does Newcastle City Council have a Conservative councillor after all?

It seems a daft question to ask as no Conservative has been elected to Newcastle City Council since 1992. However, listening to Labour Group Opposition Leader Councillor Nick Forbes, I can be forgiven for thinking his briefings come straight from Conservative Central Office.

In early January, Lib Dem run Newcastle announced plans for a council tax rise of 2.9% which would pay towards helping residents and businesses of the city through the recession. The Council will take advantage of loans at low interest rates to invest in homes and businesses.

But Cllr Forbes has attacked the plans, claiming, people are "in a better position than the council when it comes to deciding how to spend their money."

So this begs the question, what does Cllr Forbes think of his own beloved government’s decision to borrow to invest in projects that aim to create jobs and get Britain through the recession?

Judging by what Cllr Forbes has said about Newcastle, I can only assume he is joining with the Tories to attack his own government’s investment plans.

But no, Cllr Forbes is certainly not that consistent! Whilst he takes the view that it is terrible that the Lib Dem run Council should be borrowing to invest, late last year he sang the praises of the government from the rooftops for allowing £400 million of taxpayers' money to be invested in the Tyne and Wear Metro. He claims that "the additional investment in public transport is a boost for the region’s economy and jobs at a difficult time."

In February last year, Cllr Forbes laid into the Lib Dem council, claiming there was not enough council housing. Given that much of the new Council investment is to go into housing, his attack on the investment plans don’t quite square with his previous posturing.

Not very consistent, are you Nick?

Happy New Year from National Express

I received a promotional email from National Express today, offering me 20% off some types of advance purchase tickets. All I had to do was put in a special code when I booked on line. Given the large amount of my income I hand over to this company each year, I decided that I should take advantage of the offer.

Pity therefore when I went onto the site, all I got was the following message: "Sorry, we can't connect to the National Reservation System. Currently, we can only sell flexible tickets and not discounted Advance Purchase tickets. We are also unable to make any seat reservations." After numerous attempts, I gave up.

Happy New Year from National Express.

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Nearly the wrong trousers

It is a rare event but it has just happened. I left Cowley St in the early evening. The reason - to get my trousers back! I got a new suit a few days ago but the trousers were too long. So they went to a tailors yesterday and were ready at 5pm today. The problem was that at first they couldn't find them and kept offering me the wrong trousers. Eventually they turned up. Problem solved. I am now heading back to the flat.

It's bad news at Marks and Spencer. Store closures and redundancies. I worked as a trainee manager with M&S in the early 90s. They used to make big profits then though I very much doubt that that had anything to do with me! They went through a major revamp a few years ago after profits slipped badly. Seems as though they may have to do the same again.

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Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to work we go

Well, I am heading off to work for the first time this year. No, I'm not on a National Express train coming down from Newcastle. I have been in London over the weekend so I am currently on the local service going into Victoria. The train is largely deserted. Seems as though the xmas break is longer for a great many people.

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My first video with 100,000 viewings

Start the new year with a bang, well sort of. I have just checked YouTube and found that I have blasted my way past another YouTube milestone. The video I shot in a former Soviet secret nuclear submarine base in the Crimea in the Ukraine two years ago has now had 100,000 viewings.

If you really want to, you can see the video on the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ylag1L_p48I