Casino Politcs

Richard Caborn, the Sports Minister, is an engaging chap; it’s impossible to dislike him. However, I must say that I have huge misgivings about his latest project, which is to make Britain a “world leader” in online gambling.

At present, about 70 online sports betting sites are based in the UK, but there are currently no sites offering games such as blackjack, poker and roulette. These are mostly based in offshore tax havens, including Gibraltar, Antigua and Costa Rica.

The United States recently banned online gaming, leading to a collapse in the share prices of many gaming companies.

The Government clearly sees the US move as an opportunity to cash in, promoting the UK as a tight regulatory environment, offering a higher degree of player protection than is available in other jurisdictions.

Today, Caborn and his boss, Tessa Jowell, made it pretty clear that the Government would offer also tax advantages to online gaming companies to attract them to the UK.

“You can either tax them in, or tax them out," he said.

I am far from sure that the Government’s plans are, overall, for the good of the people of this country. Yes, they will bring some employment and additional tax revenue – possibly a lot of tax revenue to Britain. They will, however, almost certainly add to the growing problem of gambling addiction, which already causes such misery through debt and family breakdown.

The growth of the internet has brought huge benefits but also great evils. It is now possible to sit in the comfort of your own home and lose your life savings, very quickly and efficiently. I do not feel that we should strive to make this process any easier.

There was a time when this country had higher aspirations; now it seems that the pinnacle of our Government's ambitions is to turn the UK into the biggest casino in the world.

Just Like a Virgin

Talking of global warming, if the Government wants to achieve what it persists in calling "modal shift" (excruciating phrase - it sounds like the latest creation by Karl Lagerfeld) and get us to abandon our cars for public transport, it would do well to stop taxing us and start making buses and railways an attractive option.

Yesterday evening, I travelled by rail back to London from the constituency. Direct trains from North Wales to London on Sundays are a thing of the past, so I had to change at Crewe. The journey from there to Euston on the Virgin Pendolino was unbelievably dispiriting. It was grossly overcrowded, with passengers standing, sitting and lying in the corridors. I was lucky enough to find a seat, and at one point tried to visit the shop to buy a drink. I had to give up, because I couldn't get through the crush of bodies.

This is no way to run a public transport service. Car travel is too expensive and the motorways are usually choked anyway. I have no option but to use the trains, but if I could, I would gladly stop doing so at weekends. Richard Branson, please take note!

Too Much Hot Air

If autumn has arrived in the Vale of Clwyd, it is still very much summer in London. The hanging baskets in Victoria Street – that concrete and glass canyon of government offices – are flowering and the lime trees in Westminster Abbey churchyard are in full leaf. I cannot remember such a long, warm summer. It doesn’t feel natural.

In the circumstances, today’s report by Sir Nicholas Stern, the Government’s Chief Economist, on the potential economic effects of global warming, is timely. According to this morning’s Today programme, Sir Nicholas is likely to say that, if unaddressed, global warming will lead to a crisis on the scale of the 1930’s depression and will cost the world £3.6 trillion – a mind-bogglingly incomprehensible figure.

The Government is trailing its intention to address the problem by imposing “green” taxes. It will be interesting to see how this pans out. The problem with taxes on energy consumption is that they tend to be regressive, affecting those on lower incomes disproportionately more than the better-off. The Government must be careful to reassure the electorate, who will be paying the taxes, that this is not simply another revenue-raising exercise. Since they are serial offenders on stealth taxation, they have an uphill struggle.

Any green taxes should be fiscally neutral, or as neutral as possible. We are, after all, trying to change consumption habits, not to tax more without affecting that consumption. This should not be unachievable. Sir Nicholas tells us that if we address the problem quickly, we can avoid global catastrophe by spending the equivalent of 1% of GDP.

The Government should also resist the temptation to react to the report with grandstanding “initiatives”. This will be counter-intuitive to a Government that is obsessed with eye-catching headlines. It is is also, probably, a vain hope. According to today’s papers, Gordon Brown’s first action will be to appoint Al Gore, the former US Vice-President, as his special adviser on climate change.

It was Gore, of course, who recently produced and presented the well-received film on climate change, “An Inconvenient Truth”. He proved a surprisingly good communicator, markedly changed from the rather wooden Veep of the Clinton era. He is not, however, a scientifically trained climatologist. So why is Gordon appointing him? Not, surely, just to grab a headline in tomorrow's Sun?

Ruthin Surgery

Drove to Ruthin for a surgery. At last it seems that the Indian summer has ended. The leaves have started to change colour and the Clwydians are a blaze of purple. It’s at times such as this that I particularly value representing such a beautiful rural constituency.

The day is tinged with sadness, however. Iorrie Foulkes, councillor and town crier, has died suddenly. Ruthin won’t be the same without him.

Iorrie was the kindest man imaginable, always anxious to promote his beloved Ruthin. One particularly hot afternoon last summer, I was wandering around town in sunglasses, taking pictures for my website. A car pulled up and out jumped Iorrie. Before I could say a word, he launched into the history of Ruthin, commenting on details of the building I was photographing.

I took off my shades.

“Oh, sorry, I didn’t recognise you with those on,” he said. “Never mind, have these.”

He thrust into my hand a batch of picture postcards he had brought with him to give to any tourists he might bump into. I still have them.

Iorrie used to put my surgery posters up around town. He was part of the very fabric of the place and leaves an enormous gap. Everyone will miss him terribly.

A Wing and a Prayer

Bad news that Virgin Atlantic has postponed taking delivery of the Airbus A380 s until 2013 – six years after it was due to acquire the first of the six superjumbos it has on order.

It cannot be denied that Airbus is in trouble, only two years after the plane was hailed as a 747-beater. Wiring problems have put the project back by two years and a number of airlines are reassessing their commitment to buy it.

This is a crucial time for the UK Airbus operation. The company is by far the biggest manufacturing employer in North Wales, with over 6,000 workers at its Broughton plant and more than 20,000 additional jobs throughout Wales and the North West depending on it. Two weeks ago, BAe disposed of its 20 % stake in the company, leaving it with no British equity interest. There will, we are told, be a UK government-appointed director on the Airbus board, but his influence will be limited.

The next big product to come out of the company will be the wide-bodied longhaul jet, the A350XWB. This will be a revolutionary aircraft, constructed principally of lightweight composite material. It will be going head to head with a lightweight Boeing rival. It will probably be a make or break offering by Airbus.

The wings for the new plane will be made of carbon fibre, an entirely new technology. It is vital for the UK aircraft industry that they are made in Broughton. However, the Spanish arm of Airbus is making a strong bid to build them in Spain, which has an equity interest in the company and hence, it would appear, more influence within Airbus than Britain.

We cannot afford to let the A350 wings be built anywhere but Broughton – it is too crucial to the North Wales economy. The government has been in talks with Airbus for some time over the building of a new wing-making R&D facility in the UK. Airbus must be given total support for that project, but in return it must give guarantees of its commitment to Britain.

Off Target

An enormous stir has been created this week by the publication of HM Inspectorate of Constabulary’s report on the performance of North Wales Police. Generally, it was pretty good, and the force (or, as we now must apparently call it, “service”) was ranked equal fourth in England and Wales.

What most excited the journos, however, was a small paragraph hidden away in the bowels of the report, which read:

“In at least two of the operational divisions, officers were instructed not to put any more intelligence about drug dealing onto the system because they had achieved their annual target for arrests. More intelligence requires more pro-activity, which would lead to more arrests and the imposition of a more demanding target for the next performance year. This instruction has now been withdrawn, but reflects a worrying aspect of performance culture."

Now, this is absolutely barking. Officers were, in effect, being told by their seniors to soft pedal on drug crime, for fear of being told to detect more offences next year. Yes, they should feel the collars of drug dealers, but they should not go out of their way to do so.

This lunacy is the product – as the Inspectorate correctly diagnosed – of the target-driven “performance” culture that prevails throughout the public services. It is the product of a government that is obsessed with headlines above all else. Provided a service hits its target, that is good enough; it will show an x percent improvement on the previous year and that is all that matters.

But it’s not. Families are being destroyed by drug dealers in North Wales. We need to put every ounce of effort into detecting dealers and then banging them up. And if that means processing every scrap of intelligence and following up every single lead, then that is what should be done.

Targets are a crude method of gauging performance; everybody recognises that. If the government wants to use them, it should do so in the knowledge that everyone is pretty jaundiced about them. But if the use of targets means that one more teenager gets hooked on crack cocaine or another baby is born with heroin addiction, then they are more than window dressing. They are positively life-threatening and should be reassessed.

Or, even better, scrapped.

The Show Ain't Over...

Yesterday, Peter Hain appeared before the Welsh Affairs committee, to be grilled on the Wales Office’s annual report. The experience was unexpectedly diverting.

Peter was his usual combative self, crediting Labour with all having bestowed all manner of bounty on Wales and warning of the disastrous consequences for the Principality if the wicked Tories get control of the Welsh Assembly after next year’s elections. Not for him a statesmanlike aloofness; he is a street fighter, and all the more entertaining for it. I like him a lot.

He got himself into a bit of a knot, however, when asked about the Parliamentary procedure for giving the Assembly the power to make its own mini-laws, or “Assembly Measures”, under the new Government of Wales Act. Lord Elis-Thomas, the Assembly’s Presiding Officer, had recently said, in essence, that Parliament should simply nod the Orders in Council creating the powers through. Peter, however, said that every proposal for new legislation should be fully scrutinised, although he was a little woolly as to how that scrutiny should be conducted.

Amazingly, he then said that if a future Conservative administration in the Assembly were to come up with a “ridiculous” proposal (meaning, presumably, a proposal Peter disagreed with), he would be prepared to veto it. Or, rather, he said that “Parliament would take a dim view of it”, but, since the Secretary of State has the power under the Act to refuse to lay a draft Order in Council before Parliament, it will be in Peter’s hands to strangle an Assembly Measure before birth if he takes a dislike to it.

The Government of Wales Act did not, as Peter said it would, “settle the issue of devolution for a generation”. We already have Peter and Dafydd Elis-Thomas taking violently opposing views of how the Act should work. This squabbling will continue.

The position would have been so much clearer if Peter had taken the advice of the Conservatives and held a referendum on whether the people of Wales wanted the Assembly to have law-making powers. We could thereby have avoided the tricky-dicky constitutional wheeze of Assembly Measures and Wales would have either got a Parliament à la the Scottish model or continued with the current secondary legislative body.

But the people haven’t spoken and no doubt the spat between Peter and Dafydd will drone on.

That is no good for Wales; we must have a referendum.

Thinking outside the Postbox

Last Wednesday, Parliament was lobbied by over 1,000 postmasters and postmistresses from the length and breadth of Britain. They were drawing attention to a crisis that threatens to causes wholesale cuts in the number of post offices throughout the country.

Post offices have been suffering for some time, since the Government decided to stop the payment of pensions and benefits in cash. This was a severe blow to many small post offices, which relied upon pensioners spending their cash in their shops.

To soften the blow, the Government introduced the Post Office Card account. However, it has now announced that the account will be withdrawn with effect from 2010. Sub-postmasters and postmistresses believe that this could well sound the death knell of the small post office. Branches across the country also face threats from the cancellation of rural post office subsidy in 2008, DVLA moves to renew car tax online and the opening of new regional Passport Offices.

Over 4,000 post offices have closed since 1997, and the Chief Executive of Royal Mail recently announced that he wants to reduce the network by another 4,000.

This is a vitally important issue, particularly for rural communities, where the local post office is often the only shop and provides essential services to the elderly and others who find it difficult to travel. Most small post offices are private concerns run by sub-postmasters and postmistresses. They need a reasonable level of business to keep going. If that business disappears, they will be left with no option but to shut up shop, with devastating consequences for the communities they serve.

The Government’s response to the lobby was discouraging, with a minister quoted as saying that there are “too many offices”. However, the Government could do something to improve the viability of post offices, if it had sufficient will. It could, for example, reverse the decision to scrap the Post Office Card account; nobody ever suggested when it was introduced that it would have a limited lifespan.

It could also allow post offices to expand their markets, by allowing them to offer a broader range of services. Postmasters could also, after training, become local “information GPs”, offering advice on a range of matters, such as pension entitlements, the opening hours of local pharmacies, how to apply for a disabled parking badge, and the like.

The Government should start to think outside the box. If it doesn’t do so, and we lose our post offices, there will be nobody else to blame.

Eric Newby

I have just heard on Radio 4 News that Eric Newby died today. Although I never met him, I am immensely saddened.

Newby was one of the greatest travel writers of the twentieth century, and probably the funniest. My father introduced me to his work, which he himself only discovered in the last few months of his life. Dad served with the Indian Army on the North-West Frontier during the final years of World War II. In the last weeks of his cancer, when he knew he was dying, he read Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, a brilliant account of his trek through the mountains of Nuristan in the 1950s. Ill as he was, Dad enjoyed the book hugely, roaring with laughter as he read of the struggles of Newby and his companion, Hugh Carless, to set up camp, complete with air beds, in that most inhospitable of terrain. It reminded him of his Indian days, evoking not only the country, but also its people.

I read the book after my father’s death and went on to read most of Newby’s work. He was unfailingly entertaining, with an infectious sense of humour and the ability to communicate a boundless fascination with his fellow humans, wherever, whenever and in whatever circumstances he encountered them.

His death saddens me despite his good innings of 86 years, because I know I will never read anything newly written by him again. He was quite unique, and utterly irreplaceable.

Eastern Promise

In geological terms, it was something of a non-event, measuring only 3.6 on the Richter scale – hardly enough to rattle the teacups. In geo-political terms, however, its importance could hardly be overstated; the detonation by North Korea of a nuclear bomb stunned the world and its repercussions will rumble on, possibly for years.

The UN Security Council responded swiftly, by unanimously approving Resolution 718, imposing military and financial sanctions which were not, however, backed by the threat of military force.

The Korean issue has thrown into sharp focus the increasingly important role of the People’s Republic of China. China is North Korea’s only significant international ally. It supplies most of its food and energy. It has the capacity to keep Kim Jong-Il in power or to bring him down. China’s support for the resolution was therefore crucial.

With one fifth of the planet’s total population, China looks set to become the principal military and economic power of the twenty-first century. The Chinese economy is growing at an exponential rate, its rapid industrialisation consuming most of the world’s raw materials and a large proportion of its energy.

For most of the twentieth century, China was an enigma. The cultural revolution of the 1960s was succeeded by years of repression, followed by the slow emergence of a semi-capitalist economy. The economic boom of the last decade has been dramatic, but China remains a communist state, slow to liberalise its political institutions

Now, China appears to be on the brink of taking its full place on the international stage. Shanghai is the most economically vibrant city in the world and, in two years’ time, the Olympic Games will be held in Beijing.

It is impossible to exaggerate the importance to the world of encouraging the development of democratic institutions in the People’s Republic. The Chinese have had a taste of what an increasingly liberal economy, if not political system, can bring them. Soon, it is to be hoped, they will wish to enjoy the political liberties that we in the West take for granted.

The old guard of Chinese leaders will soon be passing and we must all fervently hope that they will be replaced by a new generation who will understand the need for a peaceful transition to democracy. If that happens, then the whole world can look forward to a more secure and prosperous twenty-first century. If not, the prospect of an economically dominant and militarily powerful China must surely be a cause for concern.

Getting the Needle

The proposal to site an automated needle exchange machine at the rear of Colwyn Bay police station has caused understandable controversy and met considerable local opposition.

Two weeks ago, I visited Police Headquarters and viewed the machine. It is a solidly-built piece of kit, constructed of very strong sheet steel. It is impossible to say if it is entirely tamper-proof, but it would certainly take an enormous effort to break into it. It dispenses packs of ten needles, with swabs and a condom, and operates with tokens which would be dispensed by drug agencies. It would, I was told, be subject to constant CCTV surveillance.

Despite the sturdiness of the machine and the precautions which would be taken against its misuse, I retain significant concerns. Firstly, it would be sited very close to an area regularly used by as a kick-about by children, who cheerfully ignore the signs reading “No Ball Games”. Secondly, there would be the danger of addicts losing tokens or, even worse, the growth of an illicit trade in them. There would also be the obvious danger of people coming into contact with discarded needles, although the machine does incorporate a sturdy locked bin for disposing of sharps.

My greatest concern, however, is the strong feeling that this is no way to treat people who are suffering from a serious medical condition. Colwyn Bay, like it or not, has a substantial population of drug addicts. If not given proper medical support, they will find it virtually impossible to rehabilitate themselves. If they use dirty needles, they will become a serious public health risk to the rest of the local population, through the spread of HIV and hepatitis.
We therefore do need a needle exchange in this town. It should, however, be professionally run and properly supervised, as part of a properly-constituted drugs rehabilitation programme. It should not be hidden away in a murky back alley.

We are told that the Welsh Assembly would pay for the machine. Far better for the Assembly to lay out sufficient funds to pay for a proper, professionally-supervised facility, where addicts can receive the treatment they need. That is the way to address the problem, not the cut-price gesture we are being offered.

The final decision on the machine will rest with Conwy Council’s Planning Committee. I expect the application to receive a rough ride and probably to be rejected. If it is, it will not be the end of the story. Colwyn Bay has an increasing drug problem. It must be addressed. For that, we need, and must demand, proper support from the Welsh Assembly.