Last Friday I went to the Grantham Youth Parliament, bringing together young people from all three sixth forms in Grantham – the College, the King’s School and K.G.G.S.

It was excellently organised by Bex Mezzo of the South Lincolnshire Community and Voluntary Service and held in the large and bright ‘Coffee Republic’ in the George Centre.

The object was to debate the future of Grantham. In the margins we spoke about most other subjects too.

There are always a few curmudgeonly people who complain about the younger generation (“selfish, irresponsible, undisciplined” etc). I wish they had been there. They would not have found more sensible, thoughtful, better mannered human beings.

Our Council house system has always been based on giving first call on housing to families with children, to the disabled and to old people. That is the order of priorities I have always supported, as I think most reasonable people do.

When I heard, two or three years ago, that the Government were proposing to extend priority rights to three new categories of people, alcoholics, drug abusers and released prisoners (all defined as “vulnerable people”) my first thought was that they had gone quite mad.

I remember asking Duncan Kerr, the Chief Executive of South Kesteven District Council (and a very considerable expert on housing, as on all other things connected with local government), “Do you mean that if I go out, get drunk, get a fix and punch you hard in the face you will have to give me a Council House?” The answer was more or less “yes”.

Campaigning against a decision of the bureaucracy is never easy. If it were of course, at least one of the purposes of having Members of Parliament would disappear.

But this week, the Post Office broke new ground among public bodies in demonstrating either complete internal confusion or deliberate public two-facedness.

I heard from a Post Office official by telephone on Monday 10 December that one of the three sub post offices which I had been campaigning to save, Stamford East (Ryhall Road), was indeed going to be reprieved – one of only two out of the total 77 under threat of closure in the East Midlands. Of course I was grateful for that. And there will now be a great deal of celebrating at that end of my constituency.

In twenty wonderful years as Bourne’s MP I have had many requests to take up personal cases, or causes in the interest of the town as a whole. I have always tried to be as helpful as I could.

In all this time no one has ever approached me to say that what the town needed was a base for gypsies or “travellers”.

My initial reaction when I heard that S.K.D.C. was proposing this was disbelief. There are so many useful things that public money might be spent on. And so strong a case for economy to keep the Council Tax down (a matter on which I think that our District Council – and let me be quite fair to a party of which I am no longer a member – has a very good and commendable record.) Why spend money on something for which there is no demand?

I made two commitments at the last Elections specifically to the electors of Grantham – to do everything possible to save the hospital, and to get an East-West bypass. Of course my crossing the floor in the House of Commons does not change by an iota my commitment to these two causes.

There seems to have been some doubt about the course of events on the by-pass, so let me use the column this week to set the record straight.

At the beginning of the last parliament – I think in 2002 or 2003 – at the behest of the County Council I lobbied John Prescott to try to get Government funding for a Grantham by-pass. After one or two conversations, it became quite clear to me that we didn’t have a cat in hell’s chance of getting such funding – the traffic flows (and indeed the accident rate! ) were simply nothing like high enough to meet the Department of Transport’s criteria. Another way forward had to be found, or the idea would have to be abandoned.

Leaving a political party and joining another is not an easy thing to do. But what do you do as an M.P. if you become convinced that your own party has gone irretrievably off the rails, and another one really does now stand for the things you have always believed in?

There are only three things you can do in those circumstances. Leave public life altogether. Just suppress your honest judgement, and pretend to everyone that you are perfectly happy – which means mouthing falsehoods every time you make a political comment. Or “cross the floor” of the House.

I excluded the first and the second. To leave public life because circumstances had proved difficult would be an abdication.

I made two decisions last week – having contemplated both of them for months. One was to leave the Conservative party. I set out many of my reasons for that decision in my letter to David Cameron. The other was to join Labour. That I have not so far had the opportunity fully to explain.

In a sense I agreed with New Labour since its inception. After all its two cardinal principles, a competitive enterprise–friendly economy combined with social justice, are what I have stood for all my life. But it took me a long time – many years – before I appreciated the reality and the seriousness of the changes in the Labour Party. Meantime of course all my instincts were to try to get my own Party onto the right course rather than to join another. That endeavour obviously failed.

02 May 2007

Grantham Journal article

Mostly I visit constituency-based organisations in my constituency and see my constituents there on Fridays or over the weekend. But sometimes – and I am always delighted – they come down to Westminster.

On Tuesday, the Grantham-based Woodland Trust gave a reception in the House of Commons for Parliamentarians. I was pleased and proud that colleagues at Westminster had a chance to hear from the Trust directly of the good work they do.

The Woodland Trust is a non-profit making organisation with 160,000 members and a budget of £21 million a year, most of which is spent on planting trees, managing woodlands, encouraging public access to wooded areas and providing information and education campaigns in support of the environment. Their operations are all over the country. Locally they have planted and manage 150 acres of woodland between Londonthorpe and Belton.

If we want to be taken seriously as an alternative government we should not do things in Opposition, or urge on the Government a line of action which no responsible government would dream of.

Why did I refuse to vote last night with the bulk of the Conservative Party ( I was not alone in abstaining) on our frontbench’s resolution to hold an inquiry into our involvement in Iraq? Not because I exclude an inquiry at some stage. Indeed I think one held after military operations are over, and in the perspective of how they ended would be a most useful way of learning lessons, military, political and other. But I was quite persuaded that the right time is not now – indeed that it would be utterly mistaken to hold such an inquiry now.

Mostly in the House of Commons, we debate things that are close to our constituents’ lives, the N.H.S., tax rates, crime prevention, education etc.

On Tuesday we debated something immensely important, but remote and certainly beyond our national control – Darfur.

The issue of principle is very simple in theory, but very difficult in practice. What are the limits to national sovereignty? Should governments be allowed to get away with massacring their own population as long as no-one outside their borders is threatened?

So far humanity has never answered that question. None of the great slaughters or genocides of the twentieth century – the Turks in Armenia, the Nazis, Stalin and the purges, Mao Tse Tung in China (who tops the bill with 60 million deaths) or the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (who probably killed a third of their own people) - ever brought on any international intervention.