LibDems leaders follow the Tory line again on Syria.

I wrote to all the Highland Media this week, calling Danny Alexander to account for his support for the Government motion which would have taken us down to road to a full scale war in Syria.  Events since have shown how wise the House of Commons was to reject the motion, with the real prospect now of a negotiated outcome.  Here is the text of my letter.

Dear Sirs

Danny Alexander’s decision to actively support the government motion on Syria as described in the media this week (Inverness Courier, 3^rd September 2013), shows the full extent of his political transformation since first being elected by the voters of Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey.

At the 2005 General Election, Mr Alexander owed much of his success in being elected to replace David Stewart, to a campaign based on the Liberal Democrat Party’s opposition to the war in Iraq.

Now Danny Alexander is “disappointed” that he - along with Clegg, Cameron and Osborne - could not persuade the House of Commons to start down the same road again in Syria. 

Readers of your paper will recall the vote in Parliament in March 2003 - opposed by every single Lib Dem MP - which gave approval to go to war in Iraq.  Many of the arguments made then by Tony Blair as are being made again now by David Cameron and echoed by Danny Alexander.  The UK entered into a disastrous and bloody war from which we have only recently emerged.  To this day, there is no clear benefit to the people of the country we were supposed to be trying to help with hundreds of thousands of people killed and injured in the resulting civil war.

In 2010, when I stood against him as the Labour candidate, I was constantly attacked as representing the party which had taken the UK into an illegal war in the middle-east.  This despite my well known public opposition to the decision to invade Iraq in 2003, alongside my then MP, Gavin Strang.

The Government motion defeated at Westminster last week risked embroiling the UK in a complex middle-east conflict in support of an American-led action with no clear aims or out-comes and with dubious legal justification without clear United Nations backing.

How Danny Alexander can justify his support for the Government now, when he opposed just such a decision ten year ago and at both elections since is beyond me.   

Labour’s amendment recognised the atrocity of the use of chemical weapons but would have put in place a process which ensured backing for any action under international law.  The Government chose not to support this and press on with its case for immediate action.  Labour was right to vote against the Coalition motion when the amendment was rejected and I am proud of my party and its principled leader for doing so.

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LIbDem Sell-off of Royal Mail will damage Highland Communities

Come the 2015 elections, the Highlands will remember it was a LibDem minister who sold off the Royal Mail. 

The Highlands already suffer from poor quality broadband compared to many other parts of the country.  Despite the Coalition’s promises, the programme to deliver high speed broadband to rural communities – a programme reliant on a privatised BT – is well behind schedule.

Now the LibDems will put at threat a basic service that’s served us well for generations.

We are assured that a privatised Royal Mail will be obliged to honour the universal delivery obligation to deliver mail to any household in the UK.  There are no such guarantees about the timeliness and cost of such deliveries.  We have already seen how the privatised energy and train companies can raise tariffs and fares pretty much as they like, maximising profits instead of service standards.  

How long will it be before a privatised Royal Mail cuts the frequency or range of delivery in rural areas?  Pick up your mail from the “local” service point anyone?  And only on Tuesdays and Fridays, of course……..

Despite all the fine words about “freeing up management to seek sources of private capital to invest” this is a policy driven by right wing, free market, political ideology.  To make the sale attractive to its friends in the City, the Coalition has taken on the Royal Mail’s £200m pension debt, clearing the decks for big business to squeeze more cash out of an already profitable operation.  

Nationalise the debt, privatise the profit.

The Highland LibDem MPs had no mandate to support a wholesale privatisation of Royal Mail in their 2010 manifesto.  But it’s a LibDem minister, Vince Cable, who is driving through this legislation, with the enthusiastic support of Inverness MP Danny Alexander at the Treasury.

We can of course look forward to seeing CWU and other trade union members who stand up against this sell-off to protect their jobs and our mail services being lambasted by the media as “left wing luddites”.   They deserve pubic support and I, for one, will be proud to stand alongside them.

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Letter to the Courier...

Published in Inverness Courier, 3rd April 2012

Dear Sir

Coalition plans to break up national pay bargaining arrangements must surely mean that there will soon be pressure to cut public sector workers wages in the highland as in other areas deemed “lower cost than London”, however spuriously.

In his leaflets and speeches during the Westminster election campaign Danny Alexander promised to put the Highlands first. As the Labour candidate, I was accused of representing a party that had let the Highlands down with plans to put up VAT, raise student tuition fees and had “taken money from hard working families, pensioners and carers in the Highlands and given it to millionaires”.

In government, what is Mr Alexander’s actual record on standing up for the Highlands? Local military bases are under threat or closing, VAT is up and working tax credits down (both hitting low earners hardest) whilst mainland fuel costs continue to rise for most, despite all the promises about a rural fuel discount.

But this latest coalition plan to cut public sector wages - at the same time as cutting the 50p tax rate for the well off - goes too far. Does Mr Alexander have any principles left? Or is power at the heart of the government a price worth paying to inflict his coalition cuts on the Highlands?

And where are our local LibDem councillors on this? Will they speak out before the Highland Council elections in May to condemn what their MPs are doing in their name or will they just bow their heads and go along with them?

Yours sincerely

etc

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When Fairness Equals Savage Cuts

Every LibDem candidate across the country campaigned on “fairness” during the Election.

Every letter and leaflet promised that the LibDems were the only party who would restore economic and social fairness. Locally, Danny Alexander promised fair taxes, a fairer economy – with investment in the Highlands in green energy , broadband and affordable house building - and a fair fuel deal for rural motorists.

Labour’s warning about LibDem plans for savage cuts in public spending were dismissed as scare mongering.

Two months on and the LibDems need to answer some questions.

How is it fair to raise the income tax threshold, then take it all away again for low income families by raising VAT and slashing tax credits?

Why is it now fair for public sector workers to take the pain, instead of the bankers and financiers you lambasted in all your election literature?

What’s happened to all the promises of reducing rural fuel costs? The VAT increase next January will put rural fuel prices up not down and a pilot scheme to reduce rural fuel prices seems to have been kicked into the coalition long grass. See Peter Peacock’s latest comments here.

Why is Danny Alexander leading the charge to cut not just 25% but as much as 40% from government budgets? The Barnet Formulae will bring that home to Scotland next year. If times are already tough for Highland Council he is about to make it a whole load worse.

Labour would have had to make some tough decisions about public spending, but our approach was to get the balance right between reducing spending and raising income from economic growth as we came steadily out of recession. We would have reduced the deficit by 50% by 2014 without any of the ideologically driven pain now driven by the Tories and signed up to by the LibDems.

How is all this “Standing up for the Highlands”, Danny?

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A Bridge too far, Danny?

When I said to comrades in Inverness last week that the real test of the new Coalition would come when it faced its first crisis, I didn't expect it to be upon us quite so quickly.

David Law, I think, has done the right thing but the elevation of Danny Alexander to be the new Chief Secretary to the Treasury must be a concern.

I don't know Danny personally, but I got to know him a little during the election campaign.  I liked him as a person and he is obviously a capable politician, as his election result shows.  Party politics aside, he did a good job during what must have been hugely tense and complex negotiations with the Tories to agree how they would share power.  But I worry for him now.

Senior government responsibility is much like football management. Mostly, you need to put in the learning in the lower divisions in order to to be able to lead and deal with the pressure at the top.  We now have the two most senior politicians in charge of shaping the economic destiny of this country both under 40 and with next to no real business or ministerial experience.  Whilst I don't agree with their politics, David Law had years of experience in the City behind him and the Tories' Phillip Hammond a successful business career as well as shadowing the role for a long period.  Was Vince Cable even asked, or did he not want to go there?

I notice also that none of the senior and experienced LibDems in Scotland seem to have been considered as the new Scottish Secretary.  Or were they not interested?

I wonder whether the Tories are working to a very smart strategy which is to have a coalition partner in place, willing to make cuts in return for power and who can be an expendable target for the blame when the masses get difficult.

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Rural Fuel Prices

There is a real issue with the price of fuel – petrol and diesel - in the Highlands. The combination of distance and lack of public transport alternatives means many people in rural areas have no choice but to travel by car. In principle, I support the raising of fuel duty as one way of discouraging unnecessary car journeys but many people in rural and remote areas have little alternative but to continue to use their cars. Combined with lower average incomes, this creates an issue similar to fuel poverty for domestic heating bills.

A government committed to fairness for all needs to tackle this issue. The question is how.

Fuel prices in rural areas vary widely, from around the national average to more than 10p per litre above. Despite what the oil industry says, this variation does not seem to be about extra transport costs; it seems to be about local market practice and trading volumes (Scottish Exec Report, 2001)

Small rural garages do not have the volume, so they need to charge a higher margin per litre to cover their fixed costs. Large retailers (mainly the supermarkets like Tescos and Morrisons) exploit this to charge as high a premium as their local market will bear, hence the variation between supermarket pump prices in different part of the highlands, despite their economies of scale and ability to share costs around their national networks.

The LibDems make much of their proposals to tackle these issues through a Rural Fuel Duty Reduction which would seek to reduce pump prices in defined areas by up to 3p per litre. It would require the UK government to seek a derogation under EU law. This has indeed been done by the governments of France, Greece and Portugal but ONLY for island communities (Corsica, the Peleponese and the Azores respectively).

In practice, however, for other than clearly defined island communities, the practicalities of working out what constitutes a “remote” community for the purpose of such changes in fuel duty seem impossibly complex in most parts of the UK.

The Scottish Government does use an 8-point “urban-rural” classification system that could form the basis for this. The problem is the when you map out the areas that would be defined as the most remote/rural there is little correlation with the most extreme differences in fuel prices. For example, the borders of one "very remote" region pass within 5 miles of Fort William, where current prices are only 1.1p a litre above the UK average, and within 5 miles of Oban, where current prices are only 2.1p a litre above the average.

A fuel duty reduction could lead to unpredicted market consequences (Tesco setting up over the “border” of a rural area but which is still close to a major centre like Fort William or Inverness). It could also give rise to perceived unfairness in UK tax regime between different parts of the country (should holiday home owners in rural Cornwall, for example, also benefit from such a regime?). Without very strict regulation, there may be little actual change in pump prices at rural filing stations as reduced costs are absorbed into margin or used to cover additional administration costs

So if a Rural Fuel Duty Reduction is not the answer, what is?

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Voodoonomics!

Fed up with yet another LibDem party political broadcast masquerading as Danny Alexander's regular "Our Man in Westminster" column in the Courier, I've sent in this letter to the editor. We'll see tomorrow if they print it!

Dear Sir

Having allowed Danny Alexander MP to use his “Our Man in Westminster” column in last Tuesday’s Courier (9 March) to put his case for Liberal Democrat tax policy, I hope you will give me the opportunity to respond through your letters column.

As always, the LibDems come up with ideas which sound great but fall apart when you look at the details. They are the ideas of a party which does not have to worry about the serious business of government and how it impacts on the lives of ordinary people.

Mr Alexander describes the LibDem’s “fair” tax proposals. The highlight of this is raising the income tax threshold to £10,000. Whilst this does indeed give back £700 a year to many people on low incomes, he makes no mention of Labour’s Working Tax Credits (WTC), which already does more than this for low income families. The LibDem’s have said they want to limit WTC because it helps families earning as much as £50,000. Shame that their new income tax threshold will benefit families earning up to £100,000!

The LibDems estimate that raising the income tax threshold to £10,000 will cost £16.5bn. They claim this can be paid for – at the same time as making “savage cuts” to public spending – through higher taxes on the well off. When you read their proposals in detail, however, it’s clear that this is made up of a ragbag mix of tax avoidance savings, new taxes on air travel and cutting various capital gains tax reliefs. Putting to one side the impact of the capital gains tax changes on our pension funds, this seems to depend an awful lot on closing the same tax loopholes which every government has struggled with. These feel like SNP promises in the making to me.

In the detail of LibDem policy, £400m is to be raised from a new “green” tax on UK domestic flights.

Now I am all for encouraging people to use trains and other forms of public transport but perhaps Mr Alexander would like to explain how this new tax will affect the price of flights from hard-pressed Inverness airport to the Islands, Edinburgh and the south-east?

Labour will continue to develop a tax regime which is fair to individuals and businesses and which uses tax credits and other reliefs to support those that really need it most.

In closing, I see that pillar of the Thatcher establishment, Norman Tebbit, has praised the LibDem tax proposals (www.libdemvoice.org on 13 Jan 2010). That says everything about which side of the political divide the LibDems now stand on, and who they may be likely to support in a hung parliament.

Yours etc.

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INBS Labour Party determined to Win

Much media talk over the weekend about the lack of determination to win in the Labour Party. Well anyone who doubts that we are ready and willing for the "fight of our lives" at next year's election should have been on Inverness High Street on Saturday afternoon when a team of enthusisatic Labour activists handed out hundreds of leaflets highlighting Danny Alexander and the LibDem's plans for "savage cuts".

Its been a Labour government that intervened to help people through the recession. Not just because it was the right thing to do but because it is in our instincts to do so. The Conservatives took the decision to do nothing - to let the recession take its course. And today they would use the financial crisis as an excuse to cut support for jobs and families, because that is in their instinct too. Seems it is a LibDem instinct as well!

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LibDems plan Savage Cuts in Public Expenditure

We are used to finding it hard to pin down LibDem policy on most issues. Now, on public expenditure, we finally know exactly where they stand. In Nick Clegg’s own words “"I have said there will need to be cuts, cuts that are savage and bold.” Even the Tories have not gone this far (yet).

The Highland economy is already facing a tough public expenditure regime - the Council is looking to trim its budget by £60m over the next 3 years - as we start to pay the price of the SNP's political programme. The impact of further "savage" cuts will be severe.

Danny Alexander is right at the heart of such plans. As Nick Clegg’s Chief of Staff, he has responsibility for drafting the LibDem manifesto for the election. In Danny's own words (Inverness Courier, 30th June) "spending cuts will hit the poor hardest". For years, the LibDems have been lining up to demand new services and programmes and criticising Labour when we have had to make difficult decision on spending priorities. Now we know exactly what they are planning to do if they get into power - or into coalition with the Tories - "savage" cuts!

Danny Alexander is carrying Cleggs’ knife in the Highlands. We must get organised to stop him.

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Liberal Tax Cuts don't Add Up

I listened to Danny Alexander on Radio 4's Question Time last Friday and had to admit that we both seem to share some pretty similar political values. Having read his regular column in the Courier last week, however, I find myself concerned.

In his comment on Labour's budget, his main argument was that we should be reducing income tax for low and middle income households in order to offset the worst effects of the recession. This echoed the Lib Dem proposal during this year's Scottish Parliament Budget discussions to cut income tax by 2p.

What he totally fails to say, however, is where the inevitable cuts in government spending that would result will need to be in order to fund such tax cuts.

Labour has made a deliberate choice to invest in jobs and services as the way of driving ourselves out of the recession. Just as President Roosevelt did with the New Deal in the US in the 1930s. It worked then and I believe it will work for us now. You can't deliver such investment - least of all during a during a recession - and make broad tax cuts (Labour increased marginal tax rates on those earning more than £150k).

Are the Liberals just saying what they think people want to hear (who does not want a tax cut) rather than being serious about investing our way out of this crisis? Or are they really planning for cuts in services?

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