Harold Wilson asserted that the Labour party was a moral crusade or it was nothing. The McBride affair has left Labour members looking at nothing. That is the reality check that McBride has wrought on the party.

The whole of the government’s energy should be spent on governing now and building a programme from which, within and year, we will be seeking permission to rule for another five years.

Far from helping sketch out a new roadmap, the McBride activities shine a searchlight on the paucity of the government’s programme.

Week after week MPs have been turning up but with almost no serious work to do. There is the odd bill to be sure. But there is no legislative programme to speak of. Even the debates that are put on to fill in time are ones that deny MPs a vote. The whole exercise is vacuous.

Labour MPs are left staring into the abyss – that nothingness of Harold Wilson’s statement. There is a wish amongst all sections of the PLP for the government to start governing. We wouldn’t care too much whether the ideas were Blairite or non-Blairite, as long as we could give the impression of supporting a government that was using the next year to mark out why we should stay in office.

We have lived through an age of record public expenditure provision, but are now entering one of increasing cuts. There have been some beneficial results from this huge tax-payer largesse, but they in no way match up to what radicals predicted would be the outcome.

Have we been on the wrong track, and if so, what should now be our approach? Or is the task to look much more carefully how each pound of tax-payers’ money is spent so we get a much bigger bang for our buck? Instead of this debate, we see the energy at the heart of Number 10 going into trying to smear the opposition.

It is this contrast between how we should be behaving, and what has been exposed, that is the real killer. A necessary government information machine has been corrupted by a spin that seeks not to inform but control and, if needs be destroy. And it has been in existence for over a decade.

McBride sat on the Prime Minister’s political War Cabinet. If this is the war the Prime Minister thinks the country wants he is in for a very rude awakening. In the meantime, Labour supporters are left bewildered and wondering what happened to the moral crusading side of our mission.

Poor old Labour party.

A good Lent reminds us that we’re at another stage in the year, and another stage in our life. One of the failures of a society that has, in a sense, walked away from, or banished God, is that it does not have these regular points in the year where it is reminded about its own existence: the need to take stock, the need to make new beginnings. So, for example, if you think about baptism, in the First World War, most people being sent to the front were baptised. That was not only a sacrament, it was also a way in which society said, ‘You are being welcomed into a larger family than your immediate family.’ One of our failures in modern Britain is that we somehow thought we could not only lose God, but that we could lose all that wisdom of giving life a rhythm that religion gave us. So for example, I think we should reinvent baptism as an initiation service that, as you sign on for child benefit, there should be a little celebration of the family saying ‘Well here we are, we’re presenting a new child,’ and society saying ‘Welcome. Now this is what we want you to do for this child and these are the resources to make sure that you do a really successful job.’

So Lent for me is not just the ‘sackcloth and ashes’. It’s this wonderful dividing up both the year and one’s life to reflect on the purpose of our being. I’m always struck by those who claim that they don’t believe in God, how moral they are. The first time I really noticed this was when a friend of mine, Barbara Wootton, who was one of the cleverest people of the last century, said that she realised the point at which she did not believe in God. The next move she had to make was to decide how to draw a set of beliefs by which she would live a moral life? What she had done was largely take what she thought the best of Christian morality and lived her life accordingly. It was a life one of service. It was a life about exploring how you ennoble individuals and ensure individuals can lift themselves up. I do think that we’ve got out of the habit as a society of doing that.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, when doubt was springing up and devouring people, the cleverest of individuals thought, ‘How can we have Christian morality without Christian dogma?’ They realised you could not live your life in a vacuum; you could not do it without guidance. The miracle of their success in inventing what in fact became a public ideology, the agreement we all subscribed to without even thinking about it, was that it lasted for so long. Partly by sheer accident, the Christian morality was secularised by a group of individuals known as the English Idealists. They wouldn’t have said that that was what they were doing, but, I think looking back, most people would say that’s what they did. They took the stumbling blocks away from Christianity, particularly that you had to believe in the miracles, they reinvented worship as service, and they also taught us that God was present in all of us, but that the Creation was never complete – neither in God nor ourselves. That part of this journey was to achieve our best selves, or ourselves as moral beings.
We fell in love with that way to approach life, and this approach was shown and reinforced by an extraordinary period of the care that we gave to the nurturing of children. The English have always been a pretty brutal race. Then all of a sudden, we changed dramatically. Our natures didn’t change. We changed because we decided we should live as a community. That was the success of this secularised Christianity. So whether you were a teacher, whether you were a policeman, whether you were a magistrate, whether you were a Sunday School teacher, everybody knew what the purpose, what the train journey was about, why we were on that train, and where that train was heading. The late Victorians and the Edwardians that put so much effort into this failed teach us one critical thing, however, and that was that we have to keep remaking ourselves. We did not change our DNA – but we hit on a marvellous way of people voluntarily choosing this kind of freedom or self-governance.

One of the big events that happened in my lifetime – and I’m a war baby – is that we ceased doing the work on nurturing children and raising citizens in the way that our immediate past did. The effects of that are to be seen all around us, where young lads in Birkenhead reply with with ‘Why?’, when I say ‘I don’t think you should be doing that.’ You realise that you can’t run a society where everybody thinks they can say ‘Why?’ to every suggestion that’s ever made to them. We have to have a ‘Highway Code’ that we all are happy to use to navigate life by. We fell out of love with nurturing our children. Of course lots of people still do this job brilliantly, but increasingly, parents do not.

The reasons why we fell out of love with living in this way are complex. It’s far too easy to say ‘Oh it was the ‘60s, where everybody let everything hang out.’

The effort of winning that war, the Second World War, the surrender of freedoms, the commitment to the common good was so enormous that, I think afterwards, people wanted break from the personal cost of that. One also had living standards beginning to rise very substantially, and therefore there were choices, or ‘temptations’, which were there for the first time. The fruit of the tree was to be tasted – and why not? That’s what human nature is about. I also think that we became too confident that somehow we’d cracked the way that we raised children. That somehow that this was in the air that we breathed and hadn’t realised just how recent it was that English society moved from being pretty vicious to being a peaceable kingdom.

The case that I make is not that somehow we’ve always been very civilised; but rather we had an extraordinary interlude. We see how sharp the present change is if we take any parliamentary seat like mine. During the last year for which data are available, there are more violent crimes against the person in my seat, and in every other seat like it than was in the whole country fifty or sixty years ago. And I use that not to suggest there’s anything very peculiar or awful about Birkenhead – far from it. It is that those restraints have gone, have collapsed, which we somehow thought we could take for granted. The problem is how do we draw back and begin to remake our characters again?

That is why I’d like to see a secular Lent to run alongside the Christian one, because I do think we, as a society, need these different festivals and, and seasons of the year, to help us take stock in building our best selves. If you look back a hundred or so years, we had lots and lots of collective services, but they were not run by the State at the centre. We’d run our own local hospitals, or we would have charitable foundations doing that. There were many more independent or church schools then, with their own governing bodies. The Victorians fell in love with the Greeks, and their ideal of citizenship was what they tried to reproduce in England’s green and pleasant land.

The vote was conceded in this country because people like Mr Gladstone saw that, in fact, the working class were running their own welfare states, their friendly societies, their mutual aid societies, their hospitals, their trade unions. How could you say that this group didn’t deserve the vote? By their very nature, the way they behaved, the sort of people they were, they showed they had actually earned the right of full citizenship, which included the vote. We as a nation somehow felt this was a once and for all operation, and was not something that was continuous. That not only had we to renew it daily amongst ourselves, but we had to do it through the generations. And I think that, with rising living standards, wanting the freedom after the efforts of the Second World War, led to us becoming very careless about who we were, how we should gain respect and what we think is worthwhile and In the end, what we really thought about our own country, because our country’s only us writ large.

I’m anxious that we look across the various religions in this country and examine how much of their teaching on how we should live our lives as individuals, in families and communities, is common to all of them. From that basis we could establish our social ‘Highway Code.’ This self-governing, peaceable kingdom is another way of talking about a land where order is not imposed, not run by law, not centrally directed in the way we are now and one that is natural to us. But we need the guidance to do that.

Finally, this social ‘Highway Code’ needs to be backed up by contracts. We have contracts in employment, if I buy a house, I have a contract buying the house. And I think we need contracts – to establish what we should expect? What are the different parties going to bring to our education system, including the pupils themselves? The biggest Government budget is welfare. It is absurd to think that we can change people’s behaviour on smoking, but we cannot change their behaviour through the way welfare is paid. So there needs to be contracts in that area as well. They’re not once and for all – we’re not coming down Mount Sinai with them. They’re ones which somebody has got to start and say ‘Here’s my first effort. But, as time goes on, we will improve them.

On one occasion, while I was listening to the Archbishop speak about children, Peter Bottomley made the most wonderful suggestion that we should have a guide to ‘5-star parents’ so that you could know you were a ‘5-star parent.’ I said ‘Peter, for what are the stars to be awarded?’ He replied ‘Well the first one is that you get your children up in time and they have something to eat and they are at school in time.’ Then I asked what the other four might be. This year we were both at the Advent service in Westminster Abbey. He began scribbling on the service sheet, and he passed me down the other four stars, which he put on his website.* That is a start. The aim of him putting it on the website was for people to improve on it.

So, if you haven’t had a wonderful Mum and Dad, and you feel cast adrift, you can easily catch up on the ground rules. We need to give people the confidence to do what their gut tells them is right, and to do so even if they might look silly. This whole exercise in making good citizens has to become once again a passion of the whole of society. Here is the theme for a secular Lent; by which we stir up a passion again about becoming – all of us – first class citizens. That great adventure will simply get nowhere unless all parents begin the wonderful task of nurturing their young.

*Peter Bottomley’s “Five Star Parent Guide” – one star awarded for each of the following
1. Get each child to school each day on time, fed and in the right clothes.
2. Have a planned event in the child’s diary on one day next week.
3. Have a meal together with another family at least once a fortnight.
4. Be on the best terms possible with the other parent.
5. If in doubt, the child’s best interests come first, but usually there should not be any doubt.

(This post was originally broadcast by BBC Radio 4 as a part of their Lent Talks Series.)

The Prime Minister deserves full marks for the sheer effort he put into the G20 summit. But . . .

The summit has not agreed anything concrete on the central danger facing the world economy. The slump into which we have now been thrown is unique. Its origin lies in the banking system which has ricocheted into what some people like to call the real economy.

Britain, let alone anywhere else, has yet to deal effectively with the toxic assets which are paralysing the banking system’s willingness to lend to businesses.

There are warm words in the communiqué, but they simply mask the lack of any new concrete actions. Until this central issue is grasped, the world’s economies lie in mortal danger.

We only have to go back to last weekend in this country, with the collapse of the Dumbarton building society, to realise how frail the banking system remains, despite having huge sums of tax-payers’ money thrown at it.

The sense of unease is increased over a central plank of the communiqué which focuses on the new monies for the IMF. Here, unfortunately, the Prime Minister, comes with a track record.

If the last twelve years have taught us anything, it is the Prime Minster has a near-pathological weakness in recycling and recycling again monies already committed and then to present them as new initiatives.

I would expect a careful analysis of whether the “new sums” going to the IMF will show that much is already committed, or worse, they are sums that will never be paid.

Of course it is helpful to strengthen the IMF and the role it might play in protecting the prospects for developing economies. But while making sure the ambulance is more fully-equipped for a crisis has some advantages, the IMF efforts might best be seen as yet more diversionary tactics.

The summit was silent on the timetable and the agenda for the next round of trade negotiations.

Surprising, really. For making world trade easier is crucial for the developing countries.

And while it is of less interest to the US, which has a much more contained economy, it is equally vital for Germany, the great exporting power, and to a lesser extent ourselves.

Despite the hype, the G20 summit not surprisingly fails to provide any new international economic architecture.

If the world is to prosper it won’t come from such high-falutin talk, but from months of hard slog negotiating that next trade round.

The Clatterbridge Oncology Centre is under threat. That is the view of the local members of parliament. What is the threat and what are we doing about it?

Sometime last year, the local members of parliament learned that the Merseyside Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) had initiated a study on cancer services in our area. Nothing wrong with that. Indeed, I applaud bodies that are proactive.

But local MPs were not involved and, as it were, found out by accident. No marks there.

The plan, as described to me, had an unbelievable degree of unreality about it. A new centre was to be built the other side of the Mersey costing £150 million.

That proposal has now been vetoed, but anybody who is part of Merseyside politics knows that some of these big blue-sky thinking type projects have a habit of returning.

So the review is now concerned with access to radiotherapy treatment. National guidelines stipulate that no patient should have to spend more than 45 minutes travelling to reach their treatment. I assume they mean by private transport. Given the state of public transport, and despite huge subsidies to the bus companies, a 45 minute time limit would make for a very limited catchment area. It is worth noting that over 90% of patients attending at Clatterbridge travel by private transport, taxi or ambulance.

So the local MP Ben Chapman, who has been leading the campaign, is asking for a detailed breakdown of the 45 minute catchment area. He wants to know how many people north of the river seeking treatment are outside a 45 minute journey to Clatterbridge.

The most advanced technology currently available in the UK to deliver radiotherapy comes in the form of the Linear Accelerator machine (LINAC). A radiotherapy base is to be built at Aintree hospital, and a second centre is apparently to be built merely five miles away at the new Royal Hospital in Liverpool.

Will these developments downgrade the position at Clatterbridge? That is what so concerns Wirral MPs. Will some of the LINAC machines at Clatterbridge be moved or mothballed? If that happened then it is quite clear that the centre of excellence at Clatterbridge hospital will be downgraded – no matter what the experts say now.

And what might that in the longer term mean for the provision of the very best cancer services in Merseyside and Cheshire?

I’ve been around long enough to have seen huge sums of public money, partly wasted, in rebuilding the Royal Hospital. It is now down for rebuilding yet again, and while the absurd grandiose schemes have been trimmed back, history seems to have a habit of repeating itself.

Under a then new Chief Executive, the Royal boasted it was going to become the cancer centre in our area. It now claims no such objective, but one cannot help wondering.

So, if the plans go ahead unamended, we will have three centres in the inner area of Merseyside providing advanced radiotherapy. But the possibility of building up Clatterbridge to become centre of excellence to counterbalance the wonderful centre at the Christie Hospital in Manchester will be lost.

Here my main worry comes into play. Advanced cancer treatments are amongst the most expensive offered by the National Health Service. In an age of public expenditure cuts, any Government will be looking for today’s centres of excellence to provide the new cutting edges to develop new cancer services. The restricted budget of future Health Secretaries will demand this approach.

And where will Merseyside stand in this new scramble for new funds? Will we have one centre of excellence that can become a country leader in providing cancer services? Or will we have a near broken-back service in Merseyside spread over three sites?

So the campaign that Ben Chapman is leading is not merely an old fashioned turf war dispute. It is about how our cancer services should develop in Merseyside and Cheshire and whether the political decisions involved should include elected political representatives, like MPs, or should such a decision be left to the PCTs, who have a statutory duty here in developing certain services, but who, through no fault of their own, are not elected.

What Governments do and say can affect the course of an economic crisis. Their actions and statements can affect the all-important expectations of the rest of us. But once a crisis is underway Governments are powerless to rewind the film.

On this score the Government has proved clumsy. The delay, allowing the Northern Rock crisis to fester over that long weekend where depositors queued to take their savings, left the Government well behind the curve.

Likewise with its so-called stimulus package. Why so much of our limited room to manoeuvre was wasted on a VAT cut still awaits a sensible explanation. I thought the move ill-judged and I was the only MP on the Government side to vote against it.

Similarly with the G20 summit. For over a month the event has been talked up way beyond what could reasonably be expected from a short day meeting, even if that meeting has been backed up with some careful work beforehand, as it obviously has been.

The danger here is that the all important financial markets will take away a message of division and lost opportunity, and act accordingly in becoming even more cautious about the world economy.

Victory can still be snatched from the jaws of defeat. For this to happen four key moves need to be made.

First, the G20 would be well-advised to drop all talk about further reflationary measures. Britain certainly has no room in its collapsing national budget to find such money anyway.

But the reflationary sums being spoken of are puny compared with the deficits Governments are already running up.

Over the next two years the British Government will be borrowing probably in excess of £380 billion. Imagine the impact on demand if these sums were not forthcoming. Now put that sum against the Government’s £20 billion reflationary package.

All the G20 Governments are into big borrowing. This, surely, is the mega fiscal stimulus that is hopefully going to prevent major economies collapsing. The message that should go out from the G20 meeting is to emphasise on the size the reflationary borrowing to which all Governments are committed.

This leads to the second important announcement. Let’s remain cheerful and assume that these record sums are out there somewhere to be borrowed. A key task of Governments is to coordinate their issuing of debt and to do so in an ordered and staged manner.

Such an approach will lessen any turbulence that might be felt if the debt demands are not spread out evenly throughout the next few years.

Third, while it sounds good to pontificate on the need for new worldwide financial controls, such a distant goal is of less importance now than bringing to book some of those whose actions have brought us to this sorry pass. When will we take action, for example, against the main players who have brought near financial ruin to all of us?

We do not need to wait for any new regulation. What is most urgently required is to throw the existing regulatory rule book at offenders.

The FSA’s rulebook lays down eleven principles rather like the ten commandments which must guide the actions of our country’s main financial players. These are:

1. A firm must conduct its business with integrity.
2. A first must conduct its business with due skill, care and diligence.
3. A firm must take reasonable care to organise and control its affairs responsibly and effectively, with adequate risk-managements systems.
4. A firm must maintain adequate financial resources.
5. A firm must observe proper standards of market conduct.
6. A firm must pay due regard to the interests of its customers and treat them fairly.
7. A firm must pay due regard to the information needs of its clients, and communicate information to them in a way which is clear, fair and not misleading.
8. A firm must manage conflicts of interest fairly, both between itself and its customers and between a customer and another client.
9. A firm must take reasonable care to ensure the suitability of its advice and discretionary decisions for any customer who is entitled to rely upon its judgment.
10. A firm must arrange adequate protection for clients’ assets when it is responsible for them.
11. A firm must deal with its regulators in an open and cooperative way, and must disclose to the FSA appropriately anything relating to the firm of which the FSA would reasonably expect notice.

It would not be that difficult to start handing out sentences for the breech of any one, let alone all these principles.

When is the FSA going to give up its absurd quest to create the most complicated and rigourous form of new regulation and start, instead, implementing the existing measures? The G20 countries should agree to instruct their regulatory authorities to begin legal action now against the main culprits.

Fourthly, a beguilingly simple, but important reform could be agreed that leads to re-establishing the split between retail and merchant banking. There clearly will be pressure against such a change. President Obama’s chief economic advisor, Larry Summers, was largely responsible for its destruction in America. And I do not need to mention who was responsible for an equally dangerous move here.

This reform will begin to build and effective firewall between the deposits we as ordinary members of the public make into our banking system, and with it the expectation conservative banking policy, and those of us who want to invest their savings in more risky ventures in what was once known as the merchant banking system.

Such a reform would be an important insurance against a return of the economic devastation that we are beginning to experience as a result of the whole of our banking system believing it could make big bucks on the cheap. It would also restore individual confidence in at least one part of our financial institutions.

And nobody could talk down a summit which agreed these four proposals as being anything but a success.

Is the failure yesterday to sell the next modest tranche of Government debt due to the Governor of the Bank of England’s call against further reflation? Or something much more serious at work? It will be sensible to plan for the latter scenario.

The magnitude and force of this financial and economic crisis is throwing the public accounts into even greater disarray. Governments of all parties have never found ways of taxing us beyond 38 per cent of GDP. Yet we as voters like governments to spend up to 50 per cent of GDP on public services. This growing gap between expectations and tax revenues was apparent before the banking implosion, and these two forces alone put at risk our entire economy.

For it is on to these fast disintegrating public accounts that the Government is set to borrow at an unprecedented peace-time level. The Government’s early estimates of this borrowing spree always looked unrealistic at 7 to 8 per cent of GDP.

Ernst and Young’s item club group now forecasts borrowing at 12 per cent of GDP by 2009-10, but I wonder what odds one would get for the Government exceeding even this level. The country is well and truly in uncharted territory with worse news coming with practically every new batch of statistics.

Tax receipts have plummeted by 9 per cent over last year, and last month’s figures show a 10 per cent decline. Contrast this with the Chancellor’s prediction of only a 2.6 per cent fall in revenues.

Expenditure is up. Last week’s claimant count when revised will show that the unemployment level for February surpassed the level the PBR predicted for the end of the year, i.e. it was ten months ahead of planned expenditure levels. The failure to sell all the gilts on offer yesterday is probably a judgment on how fast the public accounts are disintegrating.

If that wasn’t bad enough the Government remains hampered in grappling with an unprecedented crisis by its failure to deal effectively with the banking crisis. Much of the poison of those wretched toxic assets remains in our banking system. With bankers deeply distrustful of other bankers, believing them to have larger stocks of these poisonous assets than they have publicly admitted, inter bank lending remains stalled and the hope of getting working capital to viable businesses remains blunted.

Into this economic and financial maelstrom the Government has added the new dangerous ingredient of printing of money. No-one knows what the longer-term consequences will be of such a strategy.

Yet cheers went up when the first venture of using this new cash to buy back government debt was five times over subscribed. That institutions and countries are quitting holding what is supposed to be this country’s safest of assets, is surely grounds for alarm and not congratulation.

Now wind the clock forward. Soon the Government will be trying to offload what many expect to be at least £180bn of debt in each year, for as long as it dares to predict.

Yet we are not the only government set on this course. The Americans, to take the largest example, will be attempting to sell over $1,750bn of government debt this year and for many a year to come.

Even if the credit is out there, we cannot assume that Britain necessarily ranks high on the list of safe destinations. And it certainly won’t be if the failure to get a grip on the widening imbalance in the public accounts leads to the loss of our AAA credit rating. The results of yesterday’s efforts in the gilts market suggests that there may well be growing difficulties in selling government debt as each new tranche is issued.

Our currency has too often in the past been our Achilles’ heel. And this weakness may not necessarily the time around be countered by a floating exchange rate. What will happen to the price of sterling if the debt management office reports that it is unable again to sell all the next tranche of government debt, or only if long-term interest rates rise?

These are treacherous days for the Government and they make the delayed Budget perhaps the most important one in living memory.

Will the Government be able to float new debt on its projected scale without convincing the market that it is dealing now, and not after the next election, with the huge structural imbalance in the national accounts? I doubt whether the international money market will wait for ‘resolute’ action for another year.

Here is the test for both Gordon Brown and David Cameron. The test of the Government will come in April’s Budget which needs to contain announcements of immediate tax increases for this financial year, over and above those already set out in the PBR for after the next election. If we are to have any hope in the shorter run of raising the debt we need to have an agreed timetable within which to balance the accounts. Similarly, and as a first move, the public expenditure budget has to be cash limited.

David Cameron will soon have to declare his hand that the appalling state of Government finances makes the introduction of tax cuts in the next Parliament, or the one after that, an unrealisable possibility.

British politics is being transformed. For well over one hundred years a central belief has been that social progress comes from expanding government expenditure.

Government expenditure will be cut in real terms, not just now, but over the next two Parliaments. So the drive must be to get better results for less money. That is the least that taxpayers are going to demand as their tax bills soar.

A progressive centre left will insist that any tax increases go onto those with the broadest shoulders. A cool additional £6bn revenue would result from allowing pension tax subsidies at the standard rate only. Surely this must be just one of the measures to increase tax revenue in the next Budget.

Likewise, we need to take seriously Aneurin Bevan’s assertion that Socialism is the language of priorities. While events already unfolding look like testing this belief to the point of destruction, its sentiment still offers the best prospect there is of protecting the poor from the economic gales now besetting us.

Jeff Green, the Tory leader in Wirral, has launched what some people may want to see as an attack on establishing new academies in Birkenhead. There are a number of people with vested interests who, it seems to me, are prepared to defend the indefensible even to the point of metaphorically being taken to the stake.

The facts are pretty plain. Is it unreasonable to expect that, after twelve years of tax-payers’ investment, at least 95% of our young people should leave secondary school with minimum leaving requirements? I do not think so.

Now compare that eminently reasonable objective with the facts. Despite heroic efforts by teachers, and the heroic support of some parents, no state school in Birkenhead achieves half that target.

Indeed, all too many pupils leave hardly able to read and write.

Clearly there is something wrong with the education we offer many young people in Birkenhead – and elsewhere.

All our schools have a national syllabus that mimics an academic grammar school education. That is not a suitable education for perhaps the majority of young people.

The advent of the academies will allow some schools to offer what we have failed to do since the 1944 Education Act promised a tripartite system – a pukka technical education. All academies will be able to adapt the national curriculum to local needs.

Now take the actual results of Birkenhead schools and transfer the results to imaginary hospitals. Here we would have a success rate for operations of 23%, 26%, 37% and 44%.

What would the response be for, say, hospitals where 80% of patients were maimed or died during an operation? We would demand that they were closed that day.

So why have we accepted an education system which has a similar maiming rate for our young people? We clearly need to bring back to the drawing board our idea of schooling.

That is what the new academies will offer us in Birkenhead.

So back to Jeff Green. My guess is that his policy is now to oppose anything the ruling Labour coalition proposes up until next year’s local elections. His strategy is nothing to do with me.

But I make a plea to him not to play those party politics with the future of young people in Birkenhead and beyond. Every political strategy is worth an exception. And we will get our minimum success rates up towards that 95% mark all the more quickly if everybody puts their shoulder to the wheel. And Mr. Green is too important a person not to help in this great endeavour.

A month ago the experts were predicting an era of deflation once the retail price index was published. I cast doubt then and do so now on this analysis. The danger for the British economy is inflation not deflation.

This morning’s press was again full of the experts predicting a negative rate for the RPI. The guesstimates were for a fall of between 0.5 and 0.8 per cent. (It is the oldest and most comprehensive index. It excludes only some atypical households)

For the second month running the experts are wrong. The RPI registers this month an overall nil increase in prices.

Examine the inflation target set for the Bank of England. The bank is to aim for a 2 per cent rise in the Consumer Price Index. Last month it was 50% above this level but it still did not stop the commentators shouting about deflation. This month it has risen up to 3.2 per cent. It will be interesting what the Governor says in the letter he now has to write to the Chancellor.

Look at the other indices as well at the Consumer Price Increase. The All-Items RPI, excluding mortgage interest payments, rose from 2.4 to 2.5 per cent.

The core inflation rate – excluding energy, food, alcoholic and tobacco – rose for the third consecutive month up from 1.1 to 1.3 and now stand at 1.6 per cent.

The British economy is in a big enough mess without policy makers fighting the deflation dragon which shows not much sign of yet appearing on the scene. The 30 per cent collapse in sterling has still to be fully registered as an upward movement in these measurements. And the Government has embarked on a printing money policy which can only lead to ginourmous inflationary pressures.

It is inflation not deflation that is still the public enemy.

Another day and yet another scandal over an MPs’ expenses. A setup where a senior member of the Government lodges with their sister, or has their parents living in their constituency house, is clearly unacceptable. There is something wrong with the rules if such payments are in order.

Public anger is currently concentrated on the allowance MPs have for a home in their constituency or, if that is where their main home is, a home in London. But only a few months ago it was employing members of an MPs family who were not all good examples of the Protestant work-ethic.

Most voters accept that MPs need to run an office so they can do their job properly. I have argued since I first came here that MPs should be able to choose their staff but the staff should be on the House of Commons establishment. This would mean that outside advisors would judge that the successful candidate for a post has the skills to carry that out properly. Such a reform would also guarantee that MPs did not direct any of the money themselves.

I cannot now see any alternative other than for the House of Commons to own these second homes and to service them. I know where the next media attack will be, on the bureaucracy in the House of Commons needing to run such a system. But I do believe that the current system is so damaging to the political process that the most drastic reform is now necessary.

In this way, MPs would not be open to big capital gains or losses on their second homes. The cost of running a second home would be met directly from the House of Commons not by the MPs claiming back expenses.

We have had long enough trying to put our own house in order and we have failed. We are now into a period when taxes will need to go up and public expenditure cut. There is no way that our allowance system can survive the new politics that are being ushered in by the current mega financial and economic crisis.

How does our Balanced Migration campaign run outside Parliament? Yesterday, Nicholas Soames and I met up with Roger Godsiff in Birmingham. If we could get a proper hearing here, without our political motives being unfairly questioned, we would have established a bridgehead that would encourage further work.

Our first port of call was with the editors of the Birmingham Mail, Post and Sunday Mercury. In the minefield of immigration politics, could we persuade our hearers that our single and only aim was to try and persuade the political elite to join where the overwhelming majority of the electorate is on this issue?

That events turned out positively owes most to Roger Godsiff.

It is strange how events can show one’s colleague in such new light. I had never questioned Roger’s integrity. I had watched him debate too much on the immigration question to have any doubts on this score.

It was Roger, after all, who exposed the unbelievable fraud in local government postal voting. He did so in a city where very shortly white voters will be in a minority. His success was in asserting that what might be acceptable electoral practices, say on the Indian subcontinent, are not acceptable in this country. That postal voting arrangements are being overhauled owes everything to him.

As Roger spoke I could not help letting my mind go back to my first ten years in Birkenhead when the Trotskyites were by simple thuggery trying to take over the Labour Party. The campaign was so awful that I decided not to make my main home in Birkenhead. So while it was my duty to fight the corner and never to surrender an inch if that was at all possible I had another life outside of Birkenhead to argue my case.

But Roger’s home is in Birmingham and those few of us who are prepared to raise the question of the levels of immigration in Parliament do not get an easy run – although it is getting easier. Roger did not only rely on integrity. We had arguments and facts as well. If present levels of immigration continue we will need to build the equivalent of seven new Birminghams. The arrow of our argument landed a local bullseye.

We also developed the argument that despite all the razzamatazz about the use of class politics, immigration was essentially a class issue. Both long established citizens, as well as more recently established citizens, believe the government is wrong in its open borders policy. Our initial poll to launch Balanced Migration showed there was no statistical difference in the proportion of Black or White citizens, or older established or newly established citizens, in their wish to see the number of new arrivals drastically reduced.

Studies in the East End of London have shown how the complaints of the White working-class fifty years ago that the Bangladeshis were putting pressure on the housing and schools, are now identically voiced by well established Bangladeshi families equally concerned about how new arrivals are affecting their families’ chances for better housing and better schools.

The other lesson of the day was the contrast between power of leaders in the print industry to respond to political campaigns compared with the BBC’s chain of command.

The three-MP delegation to Birmingham had an equally constructive meeting with the BBC regional political staff. But it was quite clear from our conversations that, in order to, in a sense, preserve a BBC line, the command chain in the BBC is lengthy.

I could not help think, while sitting in the meeting, that one of the reforms the BBC must think about is how does it pass real editorial power down into its regional offices, so that it can let the regions begin to change how the Corporation approaches emerging political topics.

In a 24-hour news medium, is it appropriate for a line to be held until a decision is made and so the whole Corporation jumps to a new position? Wouldn’t a better approach be to let those areas where a political issue is more important – say the levels of immigration into the West Midlands – respond appropriately, knowing that this may begin to set the new line which the whole Corporation would in time adopt?

Our next trip to the regions will be to Liverpool and Manchester. After Birmingham we have a yard stick against which to measure our attempts to get the regional media reporting seriously on the immigration we have.