Author Archives: Mark Pack

The title from Jonathan Wallace’s blog piece about Labour MP Sharon Hodgson pretty much sums it up.

1. You are concerned about a planning application in your road.
2. You decide to send an email to the Chair and Vice Chair of the Planning Committee, outlining your objections.
3. You turn on delivery and read receipts on your email so you can be sure your objections have got through.
4. You send the email.
5. You get an automated response back from one of them saying, “Your message was deleted without being read”.

Oh dear. That was the recent experience of former Barnet councillor Jonathan Davies (Lib Dem). Both the councillors he emailed are Conservative.

Most Democrats have been pushing quite hard for some time now to get US troops out of Iraq. They have just won an important new convert to their point of view – Republican Senator John Warner, a former chairman of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee:

He has recommended that Bush announce the beginning of a U.S. withdrawal in mid-September, after a report is released from the top U.S. officials in Iraq, and that those troops should be back in the U.S. by Christmas … Warner is one of the most respected voices in the Senate on military and national security

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That’s the bad news from a new report released today:

Our forecasts show that the government is set to miss not only its 20 percent carbon reduction goal by 2010, but also its declared target of obtaining 10 percent of UK electricity supply from renewable sources … by 2010 and 15 percent by 2015.

Instead it will get just five percent from renewables by 2010, rising to 12.5 percent by 2015, the report said.

You may recall the fuss over attempts by Conservative and Labour MPs to exempt MPs from the Freedom of Information Act. This would have allowed all sorts of things to be kept secret in future, but the supporters of the move claimed it was necessary to protect correspondence with constituents.

Now, one of the arguments (rightly) used against this was that the Data Protection Act protects constituents’ correspondence, so there was no need to exempt MPs from the Freedom of Information rules.

So, over to the Conservative Party, August 2007 policy proposals vintage. Their latest policy review group proposes scrapping the Data …

Well, see what the job description for their London Organiser post says:

To work with all relevant candidates, MPs, AMs, MSPs and MEPs in the motivation and organisation of Party members in preparation for all election campaigns.

So they mention MSPs, but not London Mayor. Oops. Perhaps next time someone should remember to change the standard wording 🙂

a. More hospital shambles. This time they’ve apologised for listing one hospital, then changed their mind and apologised for wrongly apologising. Do keep up at the back.

b. James Gray (North Wiltshire MP) is facing another attempt to deselect him.

First there was the little matter of David Cameron campaigning to save health services in Altrincham that, er…, didn’t actually exist.

And now one of his MPs has apologised for another blunder over another hospital. It turns out that whilst Cameron was saying it was at risk, it, er…, wasn’t really:

Henry Bellingham, the Tory MP for North-West Norfolk, made a public apology on behalf of the Tories, saying the Queen Elizabeth hospital in King’s Lynn should not have been on the “hit list”.

More in The Telegraph.

It almost makes you pine for the days when David Cameron just spent his time …

Welcome to another story of slick organisation courtesy of David Cameron and co:

1. You launch an NHS campaign.
2. You promise to save Altrincham General Hospital’s A+E ward and maternity unit.
3. Someone points out that, er…, the hospital doesn’t actually have either.
4. You withdraw your promise and issue a new one, this time saying you are only going to save the maternity unit.
5. Someone points out that, er…., it really doesn’t have a maternity unit for you to save.
6. The information for the second (also wrong) promise is sourced in a document you send to the media as “Info from local MP”.
7. You are David Cameron and the

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It goes from bad to worse for John Redwood and the Conservatives on data protection. As if it wasn’t bad enough that their recently published policy proposals document manages to flip flop between four different data protection policies between start and end of the document, it’s now turned out that their cost figures are ten years out of date and exaggerated forty-fold.

I think you can see the rest of this story coming …

Monsanto, one of the world’s leading producers of GM foods, would, I think, be pretty near the top of most people’s list of “firms least likely to switch to GM-free food”.

And yes, you can guess the next bit … more details here.

UPDATE: As you can see from the link, this story was published this year. It appears though that this wasn’t the first year in which it was published 🙁

I have been intrigued by the talk from John Redwood and the Conservative policy process about scrapping the Data Protection Act and associated legislation.

This sounds like it could be a very explosive proposal, because, although “data protection” is wrongly invoked to justify all sorts of bureaucratic silliness, just think of some of the many good things the data protection regime lets you do at the moment:

• Want to stop a company from selling on personal data you’ve given it?
• Want to stop a firm using details you’ve given them to keep on trying to contact you to sell more goods?
• Want to find out what records a government department has on you?
• Want to force someone to correct wrong records about you?

For all these – and many other examples – you could invoke the data protection regime at the moment. So what is it that the Conservatives are proposing?

Well, here’s the puzzle – their own policy review document keeps on changing its mind from page to page.

As The Telegraph reports, the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) recently asked various people to produce a postcard-sized piece of original work epitomising the countryside for a fundraising auction. The Archbishop of York, for example, painted a scene of green fields, nuts and berries.

As for David Cameron? Well, for his submission he cut out a Conservative Party (tree) logo and stuck it on a postcard.

One might say, and indeed the Telegraph does, that this is a “a rather baffling, and even embarrassing, short-cut.”

Though I liked the reaction of their art critic best:

Perhaps it’s a Duchampian gesture of a rejection

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Oh dear, the Conservatives in the South West seem to be in a bit of a mess. Not only do they have one Parliamentary candidate campaigning for a bypass that another of their Parliamentary candidates is opposing, but they are also telling different stories about what David Cameron’s position is.

The bypass in question is the proposed Kingskerswell bypass for the A380.

In the Torbay corner, Marcus Wood, who says on his blog:

The Bypass is an absolute essential plank in South Devons economic plans and simply has to be built.

and he says on his site that David Cameron is fully …

The Government’s plans to put everyone’s health records into a new single electronic system have come under fire in the British Medical Journal:

It is envisaged that the system will be used to select and book hospital appointments, store and chart health indicators such as blood pressure readings, generate e-mail reminders about calendar appointments and include a database of NHS contacts…

But Dr Pagliari, a senior lecturer in primary care, told the BMJ that challenges still existed over security and standardising different systems.

“Electronic personal health records may improve the quality, safety and efficiency of care and empower patients, but further research is

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A row has broken out following Scotland’s first council by-election since the introduction of STV after the Returning Officer decided four votes was not a small enough margin to warrant a recount.

The Aberdeen City Council seat was won by the SNP, but at one stage there were only four votes separating the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives and analysis of the ballot papers shows that had the Liberal Democrats overtaken the Conservatives (rather than being eliminated) they would have gone on to win the seat.

“The Liberal Democrats were four votes away from a sensational by-election gain. We will be raising …

Dominic Asquith, the British Ambassador to Iraq, has increased the pressure on the Government to grant asylum to people who have worked for the British armed forces in Iraq by stating that Britain has a “duty of care” to them.

He made his comments, which are reported in The Times, as he prepares to leave his job in Baghdad.

The Liberal Democrat campaign website on this issue is at ourcampaign.org.uk/interpreters and there’s a good round up of people who are supporting the petition on the Number 10 website over on Tim Ireland’s blog.

Labour councillor Rofique Ahmed recently faced this decision at a meeting. What did he decide? To sit there saying nothing. Only one slight problem. It was a key planning meeting which had to decide whether or not to grant outline planning permission for the Olympics. And he was the only councillor from Tower Hamlets sitting on the body.

Actually, I exaggerate slightly. He did talk once – to be excused to go to the toilet.

The East London Advertiser has more.

Two new surveys on student debt levels point towards top-up fees increasing student debts:

Another survey of 2,000 for Push.co.uk predicts those who began courses last year will owe nearly £17,500 by the time they graduate, up 24% on 2006.

It says this year’s freshers will owe up to £21,500 when they graduate, with some of them struggling financially.

Editor of the Push.co.uk survey Johnny Rich said: “This is the first time we have had genuine figures about what top-up fees have meant.”

He claimed the figures meant the government’s financial support for students paying variable fees was not working.

“This increase is not just

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From a Philip Webster story on The Times website:

It has also emerged that Mr Brown has spent £39 billion in his first seven weeks at No 10.

Sadly, this sentence was hit by a printing error and some text was lost from it. But I can reveal now what The Times really meant to publish was:

The Guardian has done the research and showed that Mr Brown has spent £39 billion in his first even weeks at No 10 but, you know, we just can’t bring outselves to mention that the story was put together by another newspaper or give any credit to that

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