From second homes to second jobs: MPs earnings revealed

David Taylor, the widely respected Labour MP who was struck down by a heart attack on Boxing Day, was intending to resign at the coming general election. He cited ‘the scale of the modern MP’s workload as one reason’ (Guardian 28 Dec). Such a growing workload must mean that MPs these days are full-time with precious little time for other pursuits. Or does it?

Much has been written about MP’s second homes and the dubious, dodgy and frivolous claims made in pursuit of maximising their allowances. The media is, however, considerably more coy about MP’s second jobs. In July 2009 the rules about disclosing MPs financial interests were (in principle) tightened up.

From that date they were supposed to register ‘the precise amount of each individual payment … the nature of the work carried out … the number of hours worked… and … the name and address of the person, organisation or company making the payment’ (Register of Members’ Financial Interests). Furthermore, payments should be registered within four weeks of receipt.

Unfortunately, MPs are not sticking rigidly to these rules and, as is often the case in the parliamentary club, there is considerable room for the proverbial coach and horses to squeeze through. For example, Labour’s Frank Field, expert on poverty, provides no total of hours worked for the £3,090 he picked up in the three months after July for his directorship with Medicash Health Benefits, or the £1,735 he earned from his writing.

The majority of MPs provide no date for the receipt of their income. Therefore, there is no way of knowing whether they are declaring within four weeks or not. Similarly, it is unclear whether this is gross or net income. As they’re all in the upper tax bracket this makes a considerable difference. Sometimes, it’s clearly net from the context. Thus Sir Michael Spicer (Tory) declared an income of £4,500 in this quarter from a directorship. But his total income the previous year from the same source was from £55,000 to £60,000, which strongly suggests he was declaring net not gross income.

Others who declared large though vague incomes under the old rules have been suspiciously reticent since July. Take Alan Milburn, creepy Blairite Labour MP for Darlington. Milburn has set up his own company for his media and consultancy work, is a director of Diaverum Healthcare and advises a number of companies. His income from all this looks to be at least £75,000 a year, based on last year’s declaration. Yet, as he is paid annually for all this work, nothing has appeared in the Register since July and he is therefore not included in my figures below. These relate to declarations for payments made in the three months from August to October this year.

The publicly available disclosure of second job income should therefore be regarded as the minimum level of MP’s extra-curricular earnings. But even these data suggest that many of David Taylor’s former colleagues still find time to supplement their measly MP’s salary. During the 13 weeks after July 42 MPs spent more than a week in total working on activities not related to their parliamentary job.

This might not sound too many out of 645 MPs. However, their jobs are rather well paid, so a lot can be made from relatively little effort. Virtually all MPs earn well over £100 an hour for the onerous tasks of chairing board meetings, taking conference calls, giving advice to investment banks and property developers and the like. Indeed, some must have exceptional skills obviously in great demand as they earn a lot more than this.

The highest hourly earnings in this period were enjoyed by three MPs, all Tories, though one now sits as an Independent. William Hague received £25,000 for just 13 hours work, an hourly rate of £1,929. Tony Baldry was paid £1,055 an hour to give advice to oil and insurance companies and for being a barrister. Andrew Pelling received £1,040 an hour for his work for Tokai Tokyo Securities Ltd. Even those MPs relying on media and journalism rather than directorships appear to earn well over £100 an hour for churning out brain-taxing articles for readers of the Daily Mail and the rest of the Tory press.

Nice work if you can get it. But the most lucrative plums are company directorships, deep in the land of fat-cat pay culture. John Gummer’s directorship at French-owned Veolia Water netted him £10,686 in these three months. For this he had to endure a taxing five hours work, which must have left him utterly exhausted. Gummer spent rather more time - more than a working week - at Sancroft International - providing ‘strategic global advice on corporate social responsibility’. For this Gummer was paid £13,750, a mere £321 an hour. Did someone mention ‘ethics’?

This pales into insignificance compared to the £14,662 ‘earned’ by William Hague for two hours work giving a speech to the Denplan national conference. Denplan makes its money out of dental payment plans, a market created by the destruction of NHS dentistry. And that began with the Tory government of the 1980s and early 1990s. Millions might be suffering from poor dentistry but it’s good to know that Tory grandees are doing well for themselves.

But the award for the highest hourly rate for an MP’s second job goes to a Labour MP. Jim Hood, MP for Lanark and Hamilton East, is parliamentary advisor to Scottish Coal. As all the coal mines in Scotland are now history it’s unclear what’s left to advise on. Whatever it is, it doesn’t take up a great deal of Jim’s time. He was paid £1,875 for a grand total of zero hours work, which by my calculations is an hourly rate of infinity.

Of course, not all MPs enjoy these astronomic levels of extra income. In fact in these three months, 95 MPs (14.7%) topped up their £64,766 parliamentary salaries (plus the current £15,000+ personal additional accommodation allowance for MPs outside London) by more than £1,000. Of these more than a half were Tories. In fact, almost one in three Tory MPs reported incomes of more than £1,000 from second jobs in this quarter. This was far higher than Lib Dems (8%) or Labour MPs (6%)

Turning to the really big earners, we find that 31 MPs earned more than £10,000 in these three months. Fully 21 of these were Tories and seven Labour. So who were the biggest earners? Here they are ….

1. Patricia Hewitt (Labour) - £66,300, with lucrative directorships with BT and Boots.
2. Nicholas Soames (Con) - £52,700 (private equity and defence companies)
3. Michael Howard (Con) - £49,300 (from four directorships plus advice to investment managers)
4. John Gummer (Con) - £48,800
5. Tony Baldry (Con) - £45,300
6. Malcolm Rifkind (Con) - £43,200 (various companies involved with oil, asset management and overseas consultation and investment)
7. David Blunkett (Labour) - £39,200 (from advice on business development and journalism – paid over £12K from the Sun in this period)
8. Tim Yeo (Con) - £38,600 (director of green capitalist companies)
9. John Redwood (Con) - £36,300 (mainly from investment advice)
10. Michael Gove (Con) - £34,200 (amazingly, people actually pay for his journalism and speeches)

And remember, this is just for three months. And some (most?) of this may be after tax is paid. The average full time pre-tax annual earnings in Cornwall in 2009 are £21,247. And the hourly rate is £10.29 (not even twice the minimum wage) compared with the £321-£677 an hour of the characters on the above list (excluding Baldry’s £1,055). Is their time really worth 30-70 times that of a Cornish nurse or teacher?

Why does this matter? With so many MPs coining it like this is it any surprise that we don’t have a properly progressive taxation system that places the heaviest burden on those most able to pay it? Does this explain why parliamentarians have so feebly failed to control the bonus culture of the bankers and gamblers in the City? And what should we expect when Cameron’s cronies take over, given the way Tory MPs are attracted to obscenely high directors’ salaries like flies to manure?

What about our local MPs? They’re small beer. Only Colin Breed made more than £1,000 in his period (£2,170) from 56 hours work as an associate member of the General Medical Council. Matthew Taylor made £750 from articles for Cornwall Today and chairs for the National Housing Federation but declared no income from that in this period.

Protecting the right to make profits: Chiverton Cross - a roundabout too far

During 2008 worried heads were being scratched at County Hall. Horrors above - the grand plan to suburbanise west Cornwall was being endangered by growing congestion at the Chiverton Cross roundabout at the end of the Camborne-Redruth by-pass. Congestion is apparently getting so bad that the Government are on the brink of using their powers under Article 14 of the Town and Country Planning Order of 1995 to direct the planning authority ‘not to grant planning permission for economic and housing development in mid and west Cornwall’. According to the Cornwall Council report presented at the Cabinet meeting of September 16th this would ‘stifle plans for the delivery of economic regeneration and residential development.’

Shocked by the thought that plans to build another 11,100 houses in Camborne-Redruth and 6,100 in Truro before 2026 were being put in peril, the then Lib Dem controlled Cornwall County Council submitted an ‘expression of interest’ to the Government’s weasel named ‘Community Infrastructure Fund’ for an ‘improvement’ at Chiverton Cross. In March 2009 this was accepted.

Under the offer the Government coughs up £3.85 million towards a £4.1 million scheme to widen access roads and add yet another circulatory lane. This is set to produce four lanes of traffic merrily wheeling around Cornwall’s own Hyde Park Corner. According to the Council, this will ‘allow continued economic development of the CPR Area [incidentally exactly when was the decision taken to rename Camborne and Redruth?] and Truro’, seen as ‘important elements to achieving continued economic growth in Cornwall’. Not just west Cornwall note. All of Cornwall.

After June this Lib Dem baby was adopted by the Tory-Independent ruling coalition at Truro. On September 16th the Cabinet agreed to accept the Government’s financial offer. This was despite the ‘very high risk’ that the work won’t be completed within the funding deadline of 31 March 2011. If that happens Cornwall Council foots the bill for any extra spending. So, even with ‘savage cuts’ in local government budgets looming, the right of developers, estate agents and house builders to make profits and of migrants to come and live in Cornwall remains sacrosanct.

This raises a couple of interesting questions. First, the Tory-Independent Cabinet seems to be accepting the proposed target housing figures contained in the discredited Regional Spatial Strategy. But isn’t this very likely to be binned with the coming demise of its patrons at the SWRDA? At least that’s what the Tories were promising. Doesn’t the Conservative Cabinet believe its own party leaders?

Second, why does Cornwall Council accept a clearly flawed report? With an unblushing lack of any empirical evidence, this disingenuously transforms funding specifically designed ‘to enable the acceleration of housing development’ into a wildly over-generalised warning that if this road building doesn’t go ahead then the ‘continued economic growth of Cornwall’ will be threatened and ‘economic regeneration’ put in jeopardy.

So do Councillors Hicks and Kazcmarek, who proposed and seconded this short-sighted scheme, really believe ‘economic regeneration’ is dependent on building huge numbers of unaffordable homes and squeezing even more migrants into an already congested Cornwall? In their Kerrier DC days they were regarded as pro-Cornish councillors. But, sadly, in reality they don’t seem much different from the others.

Our council appears perfectly happy to risk future income in a very uncertain funding climate for the sake of a mere eight years of frenetic in-migration (the extra lane only staves off the congestion problem until 2018). And yet there was an alternative. Wasn’t this just the right time – less than six months before an election – for Cornwall Council to reject this scheme and put forward a robust sustainability case against building so many houses in mid and west Cornwall?

Wasn’t this the perfect opportunity to critique the Alice in Wonderland housing economics that insists we have to build five unaffordable houses for in-migrants for every ‘affordable’ home for a local resident? Wouldn’t a gridlocked Chiverton Cross be a wonderfully convenient argument for not giving planning permission for so many houses in Camborne-Redruth and Truro?

Clearly, the possibility of this approach never even percolated the collective Tory/Independent/Lib Dem mentality at (ex-)County Hall. Instead, the four lane juggernaut is actually justified on the grounds that it will promote ongoing destruction of greenfield sites, continued environmental degradation and unsustainable suburbanisation.

How many times do they have to be reminded that this will lead to a near doubling of the Cornish population to over a million anguished souls sometime before 2071 at current rates of growth? Messrs Hicks, Kazcmarek and the rest of the Cabinet are obviously totally relaxed about this scenario. What is even more depressing is that, according to the laconic report of the ‘debate’ at the Cabinet, opposition was only on the grounds that ‘full improvement works’ of £200 million were ‘ideally’ required. Does no Cornwall Councillor possess the guts to oppose this insanity?

Strange memory loss hits Liberal Democrat Cornwall

According to blogger A Lanson Boy, Lib Dem Cornwall Councillor Alex Folkes, “The old County administration actually did most things right but got the crucial bit about communicating that work horribly wrong.”

We can perhaps forgive this young councillor his tribal enthusiasm for the cause. Political energy is a rare commodity these days and councillors (of any complexion) who are genuinely working for their communities should be welcomed with open arms rather than criticised by bitter and warped cynics such as myself.

Yet anyone might be also be excused if they were to shake their wise old heads sadly and wonder aloud about the way the collective Lib Dem memory has undergone such a tragic truncation. In the Lib Dem version of Cornish reality everything more than six months old seems to be suffused with a golden nostalgic glow.

Ah, those were the days. When the Lib Dems ruled the Cornish roost and people walked around with a permanent smile on their lips. Newspaper editors from Falmouth to Flexbury were unanimous in ceaselessly singing the praises of the glorious Lib Dem administration. And then in June disaster fell. The poor, benighted, deluded electorate carelessly cast their votes, due, it now transpires, solely to 'poor communications'.

The reformed Lib Dems lambast the climate criminals in charge of the of the asylum for refusing to sign up to the 10:10 pledge. Strange. I’m plainly mistaken in believing it was actually the Lib Dems who poured public money into Newquay airport to allow the better off to fly to and from their second homes, giving the green light to burn carbon as if there were no tomorrow. It must be a figment of my febrile imagination when I seem to recollect this unsustainable and costly mistake was typical of the hubris of arrogant Lib Dem councillors. Why do images persistently recur of Lib Dem cabinet members running roughshod over public opinion and then being justly punished by an electorate that exercised a commendable degree of selectivity in June.

And clearly it couldn’t have been the Lib Dems who saddled us with disastrous PFI projects for Cornish schools and waste management. And I must be dreaming about the dismal oversight that led to Cornwall’s child care and day care services for the elderly being hauled over the coals in the UK media. In contrast, before last June they were among the finest examples of local government anywhere in the world until the evil Robertson and his incompetent clique took over the reins of power and rapidly brought the bright and glittering legacy of the Lib Dems to the point of utter destruction.

Clearly, too many episodes of catatonic inebriation have burnt out large areas of my brain including all reference to those occasions when Lib Dem councillors fearlessly stood up to argue vehemently against the imposition of the Bristol-based RDA. And why can I no longer remember that public campaign they led against the insane hyper-development blighting our land, selling our heritage in order to prop up the profits of assorted developers and estate agents and accommodate around 125,000 newcomers over the next 20 years alone.

This is becoming worrying. Try as I might I'm completely unable to recall those heady times when the Lib Dem controlled County Council threw its weight behind the campaign for a Cornish Assembly, backing to the hilt their own party MP, Andrew George. Oddly I seem to draw a complete blank when I search for my memories of the forthright and outspoken Lib Dem support for campaigns for a Cornish census tick box or for Cornish human rights to be recognised.

I must be completely mistaken when for some obscure reason I keep thinking that belated support for a Cornish tick-box or an Assembly coincidentally emerged only after the unitary election. It’s clearly idiotic to imagine such a thing of a principled ethical party such as the Lib Dems, a shining example to the rest of Cornish politics.

It gets worse. I keep having this horrible and obviously ridiculous nightmare. This involves the delusion that it was the Lib Dems who cynically colluded with the Labour Government’s plans to emasculate democracy even further in Britain and abolish a whole tier of democratically elected local government. It couldn’t possibly have been the Lib Dems who centralised power on Truro like that, surely. There’s no way they would have promised huge savings (because we all know democracy is only valued if it can be cheap) and then not deliver them.

An organisation as pure as the driven snow such as the Lib Dems would never have set about recruiting an executive team from far away, paying them up to £200,000+ a year and allowing the CE to commute to and from York at the public expense for up to a year (or even longer for all I know). Would they? My memory is so awful these days that I can’t tell truth from fairy tales. Just like Lib Dem bloggers.

London parties impose closed shop

The BBC (and presumably ITV and Sky) are tonight drooling with barely suppressed excitement at the prospect of three live debates between the party leaders in the run-up to next year’s election. TV journalists just love the idea of a televised head to head encounter between Brown and Cameron (oh yes, and someone called Clegg.) Although this isn’t actually about ‘debate’ at all. Instead, it’s all about the relentless Americanisation and dumbing down of politics in Britain.

It’s a further step in the transformation of British politics into personality politics. Why engage in the boring task of deciding between policies, principles and values when we can choose between personalities? It’s not really about what they say any more. It’s about whether we trust them. Have they got an honest face? Fine, I’ll buy my policies from them.

TV isn’t able to grasp the basic fact that British politics isn’t American politics. Or if they do, they want it to become like American politics. And as quickly as possible. It’s an embarrassing truth for example that we don’t have Presidents or Presidential elections in the UK. In the States they vote (almost) directly for their Presidents. So head to head debates have at least some point (although they also act there to exclude non-‘mainstream’ opinion). Here they have no such logic. Quaintly, we’ll be voting for our local representative, not the PM, come spring or early summer

I grant that, unlike the rest of Europe, we share with the Americans an outdated voting system designed for a Victorian two party system. Yet, while the US still has a Victorian two party system, the inconvenient fact is that we now have a multiparty system in the UK. But there are other more pressing reasons to initiate televised debates this time around. Restricting political debate to the three biggest parliamentary parties like this comes at a very opportune time for them. Earlier this year they were reeling from the revelations that all three had colluded in maintaining a corrupt payment system that rewarded sheer greed and hid criminal proclivities. They can now shove that issue neatly under the carpet in these cosy ‘debates’.

Restricting ‘debate’ to the centre-right consensus parties like this also restricts its potential parameters. It makes it even more difficult to escape the narrow limits of what passes for politics in Britain. It excludes radical proposals (of both left and right). It embeds shared assumptions about growth at all costs, public spending cuts, low income tax, the ‘war on terror’ and the like and fails to subject these to crucial examination.

What this is actually about is stitching up the ‘others’ in a context where the Con-Lab-Lib stranglehold on politics was finally being prised loose. For it deals neatly with a second inconvenience for the political elite. In addition to a multiparty system we have different national party systems. If these party debates are broadcast to Scotland and Wales they will inevitably discriminate against the SNP and Plaid, ignoring their status as second/third parties in those countries. Even though there will apparently be extra debates for those countries this gives unfair airtime to the London parties.

In Cornwall the Labour Party has not a single Cornwall councillor and polled fewer votes in the unitary elections then MK or UKIP and fewer in the European elections than UKIP, the Greens and MK. Now Cornwall’s sixth party – a minor, fringe party - will receive extra and unwarranted coverage. MK in particular are right to feel aggrieved, having already had to cough up £5,000 in a lost deposit for the Euro-elections despite winning more than two and a half times the number of votes that English parties needed to save their deposits. Our electoral system is already deeply unfair and biased heavily in favour of the anodyne centre. This makes it even more so.

Expenses racket 2

Let’s now turn to the three eastern Lib Dem MPs. Of all the Cornish MPs Colin Breed on the surface appears to be the least costly from the taxpayers’ point of view. He’s the only one of the five to claim below the average for his Additional Cost Allowance in all years save 2004/05. Part of the explanation is simple - he has a less expensive mortgage than his colleagues.

Colin Breed’s second home is a Band E rated property in salubrious Southwark. This means it was valued between £88,000 and £120,000 way back in 1991. House price inflation in London must now equate to a value nearer £300,000. Meanwhile, both Andrew George and Julia Goldsworthy have more expensive Band F properties (in Southwark and Lambeth respectively). Matthew Taylor also has a Band F second home south of the river in Lambeth, while Dan Rogerson slums it in a Band E home in Tower Hamlets.

But what he saved in claims for mortgage payments in 2008/09 Colin Breed to some extent made up in food bills, claiming the maximum £400 monthly allowance in six months. The taxpayer in that year subsidised his grocery spending to the tune of £3,300. Although avoiding the silly claims of his counterpart at the other end of Cornwall, Breed pays out £500 a year (or rather we pay it for him) for a Virgin Media TV package. According to the Western Morning News, this included a family pack and a sports pack. Both are presumably viewed by the fees office as expenditure ‘wholly, exclusively and necessarily incurred … for the purpose of performing parliamentary duties’ as the regulations stated.

Dan Rogerson, in his four years in the (dodgy) Mother of Parliaments, has managed to claim almost (but not quite) the maximum allowance in each year. A large mortgage ate up the majority of his claim in 2008/09, together with council tax payments, utilities bills, a modest £250 TV and the TV licence to make it legal, plus £1,865 on food. A central heating problem in his east London gaff set us back £265, but Rogerson’s expenditure contains nothing beyond the fairly mundane, as long as we accept this bizarre method of paying our MPs a salary. (Although both Rogerson and Breed also employ their wives as part-time secretaries).

If your central heating packs up then you have to get it fixed. Before July of this year this was allowable under ‘maintenance’ - ‘necessary repairs to make good dilapidations’. The biggest non-mortgage element in Matthew Taylor’s claims in 2008/09 and the first two months of 2009/10 was £6,900 for repairs to his Lambeth second home. This didn’t leave too much for items like food, although hoover bags worth £6.99 were conscientiously claimed for in May 2008.

Matthew Taylor had clearly been having problems with his London property, paying for the treatment of a mice infestation in November 2008. Things got worse in January 2009 when he reported to the fees office that the roof was leaking and one of the window arches collapsing. Repairs were duly claimed and agreed.

Now, mending cracks and repointing the walls, replacing a rotten sash window and repainting the exterior all seem to be covered by the ‘necessary repairs to make good dilapidations’ rule in force at the time. But, according to the builders’ bill, they also installed more cupboards in the house, re-sited electrical points and put an aerial into the main bedroom. The regulations at the time went on to state that ‘repairs which go beyond making good dilapidations and enhance the property’ would not be allowed. But these were, which indicates a fairly generous definition of ‘making good dilapidations’ on the part of the fees office.

Matthew Taylor, who has claimed the maximum possible for his second home in every year since 2004, is retiring from the Commons at the next general Election.

Copenhagen – Capitalism wins out over climate

So that’s it then. One thousand five hundred politicians and bureaucrats plus assorted thousands of lobbyists and protestors gather for two weeks in Copenhagen to chart a way to avoid the catastrophic climate change associated with steadily increasing carbon in the atmosphere. The core attenders (not including the hangers-on) produced another 41,000 tonnes of carbon during this fortnight – equivalent to the fortnightly carbon production of around 133,000 people in Cornwall or well over a million Africans.

And for what? Nothing. If more proof were needed that a global political class is in hock to the energy corporations and unsustainable growth policies and is incapable of averting a Venus scenario then this is presumably it. The eventual non-binding accord patched up by the biggest carbon criminals – the US and China - is feeble political elastoplast designed to cover up the utter failure of Copenhagen and permit business as usual to roar on to its inevitable demise. Instead of preventing consumer capitalism driving us blindly and inexorably up to and beyond the brink this actively encourages it.

However, even had hard targets been decided on, and even had they been of the magnitude that the scientific consensus argues is necessary to keep temperature rises to within 2 degrees centigrade, it would not have been enough. Because a fundamental flaw lay at the rotting core of Copenhagen 2009.

This was the assumption that somehow we can reduce carbon emissions yet retain our lifestyles absolutely untouched. This myth has been consistently peddled by the likes of Tony Blair who, flying aimlessly around the globe adding to his already large pile of cash, emptily pontificates that of course it’s impossible to stop people (like him) flying or driving their cars. Completely impratical. Not remotely feasible. Which lets the rest of us neatly off the hook.

This ostrich-like denial is reinforced daily by a political and media class desperate to do anything and everything possible to cling on to their superficial globetrotting lifestyle. No price is too high. Especially if it’s going to be paid first by the poor in the global South. And hypocrisy drips from them faster than a melting glacier. Take the insufferable David Shukman of the BBC, who pops up regularly on the TV News.

One moment he’s in Greenland shedding crocodile tears on behalf of polar bears; the next night he’s watching the water supply dry up in the high Andes. A few days later he’s in the Orkneys, and within hours there he is at Copenhagen. Next week he’ll be reporting on flooding in Bangladesh, only to rush hotfoot to the South Pole to monitor the shrinking ice cap. Are his employers at the BBC incapable of making any connection between global warming and this frenzied and pointless jetting around the world in order to tell us the bleeding obvious? This moron must be among the biggest climate criminals on the planet.

But the really sad thing is not that the publicly funded BBC subsidise irresponsible activities designed to add to climate change. It’s that no-one apparently cares. The great British public’s sense of priorities were clearly visible the weekend of the Copenhagen flop. The BBC’s online coverage of the climate talks failure wasn’t even in the top ten most read stories on their website. Top was the X-factor and what would be Christmas Number One.

Among the other popular stories was the snow chaos. Snow chaos? Wozzon? I thought the globe was supposed to be getting warmer. But it’s been freezing in the Home Counties. Thousands of climate scientists must therefore be wrong. Or in the pay of the crypto-communist conspiracy to replace free enterprise by a world government run by the UN and the EU. Nigel Lawson, the Daily Express, UKIP and the BNP must be right after all.

Expenses racket 1: all the low-down on the Cornish Lib Dem MPs

It’s only seven months since the scandal of MP’s expenses engulfed the political establishment. For years, most MPs of all parties quietly colluded in using their additional cost allowance (ACA), supposedly to cover their expenses while away from home, as a ruse to bump up their salary by the equivalent of at least £40,000 a year gross, thus bringing their pay up to six figures. The unedifying spectacle of a whole parliamentary class with its collective snouts in the public trough further undermined any lingering respect for the democratic process. This had already been fatally compromised first by the wholesale abdication in the 1980s to market economics and then in the 1990s by the onset of value-free spin doctoring.

For a short period in the early summer the air was thick with heady talk of democratic renewal, constitutional reform and replacing the backward and archaic Victorian electoral system of an insular off-shore state living on the ‘glories’ of its imperial past. But nothing happened. The winds of change blew for a few weeks but failed to turn into the cleansing storm that could sweep away a rotting politics.

With the twin crises of the economy and the environment available to take minds off things, the parliamentary parties closed ranks and changed the subject as soon as was decently possible. But this month the details of MPs expenses in 2008-09 and the first two months of 2009-10 were published. And fascinating reading they make too.

In May 2008 the House of Commons failed to prevent the Freedom of Information Act being applied to their own fiddling. So one might expect that 2008-09 would see an easing back on the obscene gluttony that had characterised most MPs behaviour before then. However, either through stupidity, arrogance or sheer inability to let go of the golden calf, having milked it for so long, there’s not much evidence of growing prudence in these latest expense claims.

As all our MPs in Cornwall are Lib Dems the spotlight inevitably turns on a party that to a large extent avoided the worst fall-out of the first round of expenses scandals triggered by the Telegraph’s revelations back in May. Admittedly, the Lib Dems offer none of the spectacular home flipping and capital gains tax avoidance that Labour Cabinet Ministers such as Hazel Blears was indulging in. (And the continued presence of MPs like Blears in the Commons is a standing insult to the British electorate.)

Similarly, our local Lib Dems are hardly in the same bracket as the Tory toffs, millionaires or about to become millionaires like Cameron and ‘we’re all in it together’ Osborne who nonetheless feel it necessary to extort a shed-load of cash for their second homes courtesy of the taxpayer. And our Lib Dem ‘team’ do all genuinely need accommodation in London, unlike those Tory and Labour MPs who seem to require a taxpayer-supplied second home even though they live within the sound of Bow bells, or at least an hour of Westminster.

Nevertheless, our Lib Dems have not been backward in coming forward to claim their handouts. And I can’t find evidence of any of them trying to blow the whistle on the expenses system over the life of the last two parliaments. Furthermore, they’re not exactly the cheapest among our representatives. Four of the five (Colin Breed being the exception) have made higher than average ACA claims over the past two parliaments. Julia Goldsworthy, Dan Rogerson and Matthew Taylor have been consistently above the average in every year, while Andrew George claimed more than the average in five of the seven years from 2001 to 2008.

The two most westerly MPs received the most negative coverage back in the early summer for their claims in the year up to March 2007. Andrew George was accused of allowing his daughter to use his £308,000 flat in Rotherhithe and of claiming for various up-market furnishings to kit it out. Julia Goldsworthy was revealed to have expensive tastes. A £999 television, £1,200 leather rocking chair and a £1,111 sofa bed appeared among the articles for which costs were claimed.

But what about the period since March 2008? We find that both continued to claim large amounts under the ACA. If Andrew George’s claim forms and receipts are anything to go by, he has a chaotic (or more likely non-existent) filing system. Often forgetting to make monthly claims, there are a couple lumping together two and three months. Various items were rejected by the fees office as Andrew failed to present invoices or those he did present were out of date. A string of red letters from the utility companies pop up in the files. At one point he blames an over-zealous though anonymous ‘tidier’ for destroying his carefully garnered collection of invoices.

Andrew is clearly seeking to help the west Cornish economy, buying various stuff, including a £212 vacuum cleaner, in Cornwall and then carting them to his London flat. Indeed, in the autumn of 2008 he claimed £317.25 for the removal costs of (yet another) bed to his flat. However, this job creation scheme for the Cornish retail sector didn’t extend to the £511 sideboard bought at Habitat in London and claimed in January 2009. Apparently, according to the Western Morning News, this was later repaid as it was ‘inadvertently claimed’. Presumably the claim for a £9.99 hairdryer in July 2008 (this one rejected by the men at the fees office) was also ‘inadvertent’. The kitchen scales, toaster and ‘roaster’ (?) of September/October 2008 were clearly essential. As was the £20 alarm clock in November.

Let’s remind ourselves. Under the rules of the then current Green Book, the Bible of Parliamentary expenses, the ACA was to be used to provide ‘reasonable additional costs while you are away from home’. This was to cover expenses ‘wholly, exclusively and necessarily incurred … for the purpose of performing Parliamentary duties’. The rules were changed in July 2009 and household items are now not allowed.

Moreover, it now also caps mortgage interest payments at £1,250 a month. This must be bad news for Julia Goldsworthy who claimed the then maximum £2,000 a month to cover her mortgage from August 2008 to April 2009. That MPs look on the ACA merely as a salary supplement is obvious from the way that, before July 2008, when Julia moved into her new flat, she was claiming her utilities bills, council tax, buildings and household contents insurance and from £300 to £400 a month for food. After July these presumably had to be paid out of her basic salary.

In May of this year when the mortgage hand-out was capped at £1,250 a month she began claiming for council tax and utility bills again. One might have thought that the energy bill for a pied-à-terre in London used mainly as a convenient place to sleep while out ‘performing Parliamentary duties’ all day wouldn’t be too high. Yet Julia’s gas bill for three months last winter (at 5,297 kWh) ran out almost identical to that for our family home while our electricity consumption looks to be pretty similar too. London must be a lot colder place than Cornwall.

Andrew George’s ACA cost the taxpayer £21,236.04 in 2008-09. This is on top of the £138,821 of expenses in the seven years from 2001 to 2008, in four of which he claimed the absolute maximum. Julia Goldsworthy cost us even more - £22,406.45 in 2008-09 – adding to the £65,113 ACA expenses payments made into her account from 2005 to 2008.

The details of Matthew Taylor, Dan Rogerson and Colin Breed’s expenses claims for the last year will be revealed next time.

Missed opportunities and sealed lips: business as usual in the political establishment

My profound and sincere apologies are due to Charlotte Mackenzie for missing her comment on Chancellor Darling’s pre-election statement the other day. What a chump I am for not reading the Truro Falmouth Labour News. Am I the only person in Cornwall unaware of this exciting and prestigious publication?

For those who can’t be bothered reading it Charlotte claims there that ‘The pre-budget report will help businesses in Cornwall in three ways. Firstly, by continuing the direct support to businesses and measures such as empty property rates relief.’

In 2007 there were 6,280 empty homes in Cornwall. 5,911 (or 94%) were owned by private landlords. 2,910 (46%) had been empty for more than six months.

Empty homes are a ‘major national scandal’ (Frank Allaun, Labour MP, 1975). How times change.

Charlotte continues. ‘Secondly, by confirming that unlike the Tories Labour will not freeze public sector pay - spending by public sector workers is important for Cornwall’s retail and tourist industries and housing market.’

Public sector pay is being capped at 1% from 2011. As inflation will no doubt be higher by then this is a real pay cut. As 30% of the Cornish workforce are in the public sector compared with 27% in Britain we will be hit worse by this pay cut.

‘Thirdly, real investment in digital and low carbon businesses will provide an additional boost to sectors which are also being backed for development through convergence funding’ (our Charlotte)

‘Nor was there much evidence that the foundations were being laid for a new low-carbon economy … £120 million to boost green industry is a fraction of what will be needed. A Green New Deal it wasn’t.’ ((Larry Elliott, Guardian economics editor, 10 Dec)

‘New investment to match the government’s rhetoric on climate change amounts to a tiny fraction of 1% of the public support given to the finance sector. Such lack of ambition is counter-productive and a missed opportunity if Alastair Darling wants to pay down the public debt.’ (Andrew Simms, Policy Director, New Economics Foundation)

The projected drop in GDP this year of 4.75% can in fact be seen as good news in that it results in a drop in carbon emissions. Here’s the perfect opportunity therefore to switch towards a green taxation policy that encourages lower carbon emissions. But again, like the opportunity presented to Labour by the expenses scandal to initiate some real constitutional and democratic reform, it’s been spurned.

And those eager to know where the promised spending axe will fall will find that even the Truro Falmouth Labour News remains tight-lipped on this subject. But then, so do Tory and Lib Dem parliamentary candidates. Would someone, anyone, in the London parties like to break this conspiracy of silence and inform us which public services are going to disappear after 2010. Will it be our libraries? Parks? Will all public conveniences be closed? What about care homes? Free parking a thing of the past? Social workers on the dole queue? Will social housing finally disappear? Home helps under threat? Or do we have no right to know?

Cuts and con-tricks: the dismal science ignored in Cornwall

Local Tory parliamentary wannabes in Cornwall (and their Lib Dem friends come to that) remain strangely silent tonight about Chancellor Darling’s pre-election Budget statement. As both parties are committed to ‘savage cuts’ then we might be entitled to ask them what exactly they support savagely cutting. If, as Labour and Tories seem to agree, the NHS, schools and the police are protected then what other areas of public spending face cuts of up to 15% over the next few years to pay for the latest crisis of capitalism? Will it be local government? Are they going to pull out of Afghanistan, scrap Trident, pull the pug on the Olympics?

Odd therefore that on this issue there is only an eerie silence. Even Labour’s voluble Charlotte Mackenzie, bravely struggling to save her deposit in Truro and Falmouth, who is so quick to subject us in the West Briton to her tedious views on every subject under the sun, plays dumb on the cuts. Come on Charlotte, you have an opinion, albeit depressingly anodyne, on everything else. Why not this?

Particularly weird however that the Tories are so quiet when their media appear so certain about this pre-Budget statement. According to the Telegraph ‘Darling hits middle classes’. Meanwhile the Mail trumpets ‘Every family in Britain to pay an extra £2,400 to cover Chancellor’s Budget Con’. Well, not exactly. The £2,400 turns out to be the hypothetical equivalent of the cash amount needed to close the projected deficit over the next eight years. Or a mere £300 a year. Doesn’t sound quite so bad put that way.

Not that this stops the Mail foaming about middle earners being ‘hammered by tax rises’. The equally nutty Express echoes this by talk of a ‘deluge of tax rises on middle income earners’ while the Mails’ local mouthpiece the Western Morning News dutifully sees ‘painful new tax hikes’ and a ‘tax on the middle classes’. Moreover, the projected National Insurance rises will ‘hammer anyone earning more than £20,000’. Even the Guardian headline read ‘Darling soaks the rich … and the rest of us too.’

This is all sheer nonsense and media hype. Darling might be accused of fiddling while Rome, or in this case the City of London, burns. But hardly of swingeing tax hikes on the ‘middle classes’. These exist solely in the imaginations of febrile middle class journalists. The 'rest of us' are hardly being ‘soaked’. The ‘middle classes’ are not being ‘hammered’. This coming year no-one earning less than £120,000 will be any worse off. In fact increases in family tax credits mean that anyone earning less than £25,000 will be better off, at least for a year. Even the National Insurance hike, conveniently postponed until 2011 and after the election, will mean that anyone earning the Cornish average wage, which is around £25,000, faces an effective drop in income of £200. A year!

Voxpop interviews on BBC News last night gave the impression that people felt even this rise, even postponed until 2011, would be disastrous, plunging their family finances into the red and raining down ruin and destruction on them and all around them. Did they deliberately choose the thickest people to interview? Or has the public reached a state of total critical faculty meltdown when confronted by the mass of disinformation purveyed by the media? Or perhaps we’re all in collective denial. Pampered by our weekly fix of oil, drugged by the incessant need to consume, manipulated by the marketing industry, we’ve lost all sense of proportion. This culture of denial does not bode well for the real reforms that are urgently needed, both on the economic and environmental fronts, if we are to hand this planet over to our children in any fit condition.

Bonkers bankers bully Darling

Did I imagine it or did I hear not one but two apologists for the bankers’ bonuses on Radio 4’s ‘The World at One’ this lunchtime? One rather uninspiring and evasive government minister did little either to restore balance or help the digestion of my pasty.

After the charismatic Mr Darling’s announcement of a possible one year windfall tax on bankers’ bonuses, today we have the disagreeable spectacle of bankers and business spokespersons popping up all over the media. Threats of the dire consequences of tax increases on the rich fall as heavily as the incessant rain.

Call me naïve but I don’t recall acres of newsprint being given over to defenders of the low paid when Brown disastrously scrapped the 10p tax band a few years back. Wasn’t that regarded widely in the media as a jolly clever idea?

Cruise the online newspapers and the BBC and we find a shameless display of gobsmacking greed. In the Independent the bankers are ‘angry’ over the windfall tax. The British Bankers Association pleads for the Chancellor to ‘bear in mind the strategic importance of the City’. Chris Roebuck, honorary visiting Professor of ‘transformational leadership’ at the Cass Business School, conveniently sited just yards from the City of London, warns sagely that a windfall tax will tempt bankers to relocate and an annual tax would ‘court disaster’.

Move over the BBC and we find more angry ‘banking chiefs’. Angela Knight, Tory MP from 1992 to 1997, now the spokesperson for the indefensible, called a windfall tax ‘populist, political and penal’. So? It sends the ‘wrong message’. The right message, according to Knight, is that ‘consumers are getting an incredibly good result from our banks’, massive bonuses for fortunate gamblers and Old Etonian barrow boys are dandy, and £40 fees for getting overdrawn is defended on the grounds that unauthorized borrowing is akin to a ‘criminal offence’ (Independent 24 February 2007).

This is the same arrogant woman who claimed a couple of months back in the Guardian that ‘other countries want what we have got’. It’s those nasty Europeans again, falling over themselves to pinch our talented bankers. While they’re at it, would they also like the biggest public sector borrowing deficit in Europe or the prospect of ‘savage cuts’ as a gormless political class makes the rest of us pay for a bloated and bullying financial sector that seems incapable of financing small businesses efficiently?

In the Times we find Angela Knight again moaning about the populism of the windfall tax. But didn’t her ideological stablemate George Osborne promise us that we were all in it together? Is populism not just fairness, expecting those who reaped the rewards in the good times to take the brunt in the bad times? Knight’s view of populism’ is no doubt coloured by the perspective from her home located somewhere between Ascot and Maidenhead.

In the Times she questions the ‘practicality’ of a windfall tax, as does the insufferably grating Robert Peston of the BBC who points out that a windfall tax won’t make that much money. But instead of drawing the conclusion that we should find other and more effective ways to tax the rich he concludes that it ‘would not be great for the economic prospects of the UK if wealth-creating bankers and financial institutions emigrated to rival financial centres’.

The Times goes even further, citing ‘several leading [but anonymous] accountants’ as saying a windfall tax ‘could breach human rights’. Accountants are not exactly renowned for their support of Amnesty International or their defence of human rights. But they’re now manning the barricades. Taxing the rich is an attack on their human right to make as much money as possible while refusing to display an ounce of social responsibility. ‘Business groups’ in the Telegraph were more concerned about the prospects for generally increased taxes in the Chancellor’s upcoming pre-Budget statement. ‘Hefty’ tax rises would be ‘hugely harmful’ they squealed and hit ‘the very people we need in this country to create wealth’, i.e. themselves.

The ‘hugely harmful’ tax is merely the planned 50p tax rate on earnings over £150,000. All this whinging and special pleading is plainly designed to bully the Government into not extending the proposed 50p tax rate to earnings over £100,000. This is hardly a catastrophic level when we remember the marginal tax rates of over 80p before the 1980s.

After Wednesday the ferries will be full of anguished and distraught bankers and city financiers fleeing Labour’s expropriation. The streets of the City will be blocked by the pile of mangled bodies of investment managers who have jumped out of their high rise towers of Mammon in suicidal despair at the Leninist comrade Darling.

In the meantime for real lunacy just turn to the Mail and Express. The Mail leads with the story of the 2.5 million families who enjoy household incomes of ‘nearly £100,000’ but don’t consider themselves rich. In fact this top 10% of families earn around £95,000 on average gross but the net is nearer £70,000. The next story is about Britain’s middle classes who face the ‘biggest fall in living standards for decades’. The ‘richest’ are apparently looking forward to a 9% cut in living standards which the Mail helpfully informs us amounts to about £5,000 a year.

Hold on though. So the ‘richest’ now includes anyone with an income of over £50,000. But those with incomes between £50,000 and £150,000 won’t actually be contributing to Labour’s new grab tax. As the Mail’s lower middle class readership shiver in anticipation it transpires that this projected cut in living standards is not mainly about taxes at all.

The Mail’s story is identical to one in the Independent, under the by-line of Sean O’Grady, Economic editor. O’Grady writes that Price Waterhouse Coopers commissioned a survey ‘for the Independent’. The fall in living standards is mainly due to an assumed increase in interest rates of 2% and thus mortgage payments over the next couple of years and the continuing hike in petrol prices.

The details of the story are there in the Mail, just a bit more ambiguous than the Independent. This didn’t stop the inevitable crazed comments from apoplectic Mail readers:

‘I’ve HAD ENOUGH!!!!!.
I’m voting UKIP. The only party who will stand up for the honest, hardworking British people’

Meanwhile, over in the Express, one of those honest, hardworking British people, the ‘senior Tory Lord Forsyth’ is calling for taxes to be slashed, the 50p tax rate abolished, along with stamp duty on share sales. In fact basically any taxes on the rich must be buried. For the Mail and the Express the axe has to fall not on the City or the well-heeled who are suffering ‘agony’ but on ‘our bloated public sector’.

Look forward to the next Tory government and be very, very afraid.

The Cornish parliamentary lobby.

The depressing thing about the parliamentary vote to reject a Cornish tick box in the 2011 census was the fact that only two Labour MPs were willing to break the party line and vote for the tick box. Meanwhile, not one Tory dared to be seen in the ayes lobby, the Conservatives leaving it to Labour to quash Dan Rogerson’s amendment.

So who were the brave brace of Labour MPs who joined the 45 Lib Dems (18 Liberal Democrats including Colin Breed of South East Cornwall were absent) and vote for a Cornish tick box? One was Jeremy Corbyn of Islington, one of Labour’s most consistent rebels and an honourable opponent of the Iraq war. The other was Andrew MacKinlay, MP for Thurrock and an Old Labour trade unionist. MacKinlay is quitting the Commons next year, giving as his reason its inability to hold ministers to account and specifically the failure of the government to stand up to the Americans and stop the extradition of computer hacker Gary McKinnon.

Meanwhile, a couple of independent mavericks, both ex-Tories who have lost the Conservative whip, voted for a Cornish tick box. One was Andrew Pelling, suspended by squeaky clean family man Cameron for his arrest on suspicion of assaulting his wife, an accusation that ultimately didn’t land him in court. The other was even odder. This was Bob Spink, self-made millionaire and self-confessed member of the Christian right. Spink was chucked out of the Tories after unseemly rows with his own constituency party in Essex. He then became UKIP’s first claimed MP, but is now denying ever joining the anti-European fanatics in the first place. The reason for his sympathy for the Cornish remains a mystery.

Lib Dems dominated the vote for a Cornish tick box in the census, backing up the Cornish team in what a cynic might see as a sudden pre-General election and post-Unitary election panic as they rush to shore up their Cornish credentials. But let’s be more charitable and hope that this time at last the Lib Dems stick to their pro-Cornish guns.

But there have been other chances to make a pro-Cornish statement in this Parliament. At least five pro-Cornish early day motions (EDMs) have been tabled by the Cornish Lib Dems (four proposed by Dan Rogerson and one by Julia Goldsworthy and all seconded by Andrew George). Two of these (in October 2006 and March 2009) called for a measure of devolution to Cornwall. The other three (in March 2007, February 2008 and March 2009) called for St Pirans Day to be made into a national holiday. Early day motions are opportunities for MPs to sign up and show their support for an issue. However, the support for these EDMs was underwhelming to say the least, ranging from 14 to 21 signatories (around 3% of the total number of MPs).

If we exclude the Cornish Lib Dem MPs then just over half of the signatories have been other Lib Dems. This equates to around 11% of the possibles - hardly a resounding expression of support for their Cornish colleagues. The Cornish Lib Dems actually won proportionally more support from Plaid Cymru (25% of possibles) and the SNP (21%). Meanwhile, less than 1% of Labour MPs took the opportunity to show their sympathy with the Cornish case and a virtually invisible 0.3% of Tories.

So who were these pro-Cornish MPs? Eight Lib Dems have signed at least two of the five EDMs. They are Mike Hancock, John Hemming, Simon Hughes, Mark Hunter, John Leech, Willie Rennie, Mark Williams and Stephen Williams. But support for Cornish EDMs is not restricted to Lib Dems.

Jeremy Corbyn and Andrew MacKinlay were again among five Labour MPs who also supported at least two of these EDMs. They were joined by John McDonnell, the leftist Labour MP for Hayes and Harlington and putative leadership contender. The second pro-Cornish Labour MP is Lynne Jones, another left Labour MP who is giving up her Birmingham seat because of the timidity of the Labour Government’s socialist principles [sic], its reckless support of the Iraq war and its undermining of the NHS. Finally, we have Graham Stringer, MP for a safe seat in Manchester, who made headlines by claiming that dyslexia was a ‘fiction’ invented by teachers to cover up their poor teaching.

The sole Tory to support two Cornish EDMs has been Peter Bottomley, MP for Worthing West and husband of Virginia Bottomley. It was Bottomley who reported Carter Ruck, the solicitors, for trying to inhibit parliamentary reporting when they sought (and got) an injunction earlier this year to stop the Guardian reporting the Trafigura toxic dumping scandal.

Outside the Lib Dems therefore the Cornish case seems to be supported by prominent left Labour critics of the government, various oddballs on the right freed from the party whip, Plaid and SNP MPs (though not all of them by any means) and one or two principled supporters of constitutional reform and transparency in government. There is clearly a lot of work to be done in order to persuade the mass of parliamentary voting fodder to support the case for the Cornish to be respected on a par with Scots or Welsh.

The real climategate

Sixty five global leaders converge on Copenhagen over the next fortnight to join thousands of representatives from 192 states. (The carbon cost of which is what exactly?) Meanwhile, in the dear old West Briton, one man gets a whole page to extol the virtues of increasing carbon emissions, while 3,000 who want the opposite get half a page.

The one man is Andrew Skipp, chairman of the Newquay airport board. Skipp brazenly asserts that ‘if you want success in your economy, you have to have an airport’. Really? However, no evidence is offered for this particular myth. Skipp was managing director of Bristol Airport which, the headline informs us, is going to be the ‘model’ for Newquay. At Bristol passenger numbers went up 12 times in 18 years. So if this is the ‘model’ for Newquay are we to expect a tripling of the current planned increase in passenger numbers by 2030, equating to a twelve-fold increase in its carbon emissions or nearly 20% of the projected carbon emissions for the whole of Cornwall by 2030? This does not compute.

While the well-paid Mr Skipp (who at 47 was able to take two years off for the mandatory round the world trip with his family) uses his page not to mention catastrophic climate change at all, the 3,000 people in Cornwall who signed a petition backing tougher measures to combat it receive half a page of coverage.

As our ‘leaders’ struggle in Denmark towards the inevitable fudge of vague targets, to be met by carbon markets that allow polluters to make money, off-setting schemes that transfer the costs to the poor and avoid the need for us to change things, and blind faith in utopian and unproven technological fixes, there is little sign that the political classes grasp the extent of the problem.

The problem is not the climate change deniers – the Saudi sheiks who provide us our regular oil-fix, the American neo-con Republicans with a hotline to God, the hacks in the pay of the energy corporations who deny what is happening in front of their own eyes. Nor is it Conservative climate change deniers such as Nigel Lawson, David Davis MP or Roger Helmer MEP, or the BNP and UKIP, both of which beleive climate change is a communist conspiracy. Neither is it the gullible, ignorant and naïve media, too busy churning out their trivia for the masses to cast a critical eye over the climate deniers.

Instead, the problem lies with those who accept the scientific consensus and admit that the consequences of climate change will be disastrous for future generations and the rest of life on this earth. But the same people then refuse first to challenge in any way the business-as-usual that created this catastrophic mess in the first place and second, refuse to admit that solutions have to involve both lifestyle change and government action.

Who among the mainstream parties is daring to talk about a wholesale transition to carbon taxes, or carbon entitlement schemes, or bans on internal flights in small countries such as the UK, or a stable state economy? Who among the pampered middle classes is prepared to forgo some of their lifestyle and set an example? Who in the global elite of ‘opinion-formers’ makes the link between aspirations and action?

Take next summer’s football World Cup. This is forecast to become the biggest carbon emitter in the history of sport, chucking a massive 2.5 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Most of this will be produced by international flights to and from South Africa and the internal flights from match to match once there. But why go? Isn’t that why colour television was invented? Why not stop fans travelling by air and subsidise the ticket prices so that Africans can afford to attend the games. The rest of us can watch it on TV, and in the process add to the profits of our friendly local alcohol-vendors.

Or let’s return to Newquay airport. As Betty Levene of Friends of the Earth is quoted as saying ‘Planning to vastly expand air travel to and from Cornwall while claiming that we’re aiming to achieve a low-carbon economy is a particularly absurd example of this sort of refusal to deal with reality’. As is spending millions on dualling the A30 on Bodmin Moor. Or encouraging the building of thousands of energy inefficient houses in Cornwall. Or granting planning permission to out of town stores to encourage people to make even more shopping trips than they already do.

Is there any glimmer of evidence that Cornwall Councillors or MPs are aware of the contradictions inherent in their own policies? Or do they believe the bizarre rhetoric about ‘green peninsulas’ while swooning with joy at the prospect of more ‘eco-towns’ in Cornwall?

The state of the Cornish economy

Odd that we seem to know more about the state of the 19th century Cornish economy than that of the present day. Economists may be the witch doctors of contemporary capitalism, but there seems to be a dearth of them in Cornwall to guide us through the economic entrails.

More the pity as, after half a century of helter-skelter expansion, and ten years of massive European funding (take note Tories/UKIP), we need to know what’s going on in the economy. Without accurate information simply put how can the Cornish people make informed democratic decisions about future strategy? Let’s rephrase that. How can we demand that informed decisions be made about future strategy?

The Cornish economy is as prone to myth and legend as any other feature of Cornish society. Magic phrases are used to liberally season policy documents. ‘Sustainability, ‘distinctiveness’, ‘green peninsula’ are hauled out and thrown in with abandon. But where’s the beef? What’s the evidence? Is European funding turning the economy around? Or is excessive population growth choking off higher incomes? What exactly do the data tell us?

First, measured by the number of jobs it creates, the Cornish economy has been relatively successful. From 1998 to 2007, an extra 26,900 full-time and 15,200 part-time jobs were created. Both full and part-time job creation ran at faster rates than the British average. And, despite what might be expected, a decennial population rise of near 10% (back to the levels of the 1980s) has not swallowed up all these jobs.

The economic activity rate for men was in 2008 nearly 83% compared with 78% in 1999 and now almost matches the British level. Meanwhile, male unemployment in 1999 was running at a higher rate than the British average. But now it’s lower. So far so good. Although the female economic activity rate seems to be stagnating, increasing from 71% to just 73% in the same period, at a rate very similar to the British economy.

So where have all these new jobs come from? Three sectors account for three quarters of the growth. These are public administration, health and education, tourism, and banking, finance and insurance – in that order. However, all three are hardly in the peak of health at present and the prognosis looks gloomy. Cornwall – with 29.7% of its workforce in the public sector – is more dependent on levels of state spending than many other regions (the average in Britain in 26.9%). We are therefore likely to suffer more from the mainstream political obsession with ‘savage cuts’ to pay for the greed of the bankers and the failure of Labour’s neo-liberal economic policies.

Tourism employment is notoriously dependent on external factors: disposable income and tax levels, changing fashions, exchange rate movements and the like. The proportion employed in tourism in Cornwall actually fell from 1997 to the early 2000s but has grown again since then. Finally, banking and the financial sector is unlikely to be the growth sector in the next decade that it was in the last. Unless we have completely failed to learn the lessons of the recession that is and revert to business as usual. Surely not!

Even Cornwall Council’s much maligned Green Paper on the Economy concludes that the growth of the past decade has been ‘fragile, focused on particular areas’.

So what’s happened to earnings and income? Overall claimant rates in Cornwall remain slightly below the British average – 97.8% of the latter in May 2008 compared with 98.6% in May 2001 – a very slight improvement. Median earnings of full time workers have also shown an improvement - from 75% of the British average in 1998 to 80% in 2008.

Break open the champagne then. But there are two big caveats. First, this is a recovery from the historically low figures of the late 90s and early 00s. If we take a longer perspective it’s nothing much to celebrate about. In the 1970s the mean male earnings (the median is not available for this time scale) were around 84-85% of the British average and female earnings 88-89%. In the 1980s and 90s both slipped inexorably downwards to their relative nadir around 2000 – of 72.4% for men and 80.2% for women. Since than there has been a small recovery, to 74.8% for men and 82.2% for women. However, this remains considerably worse than the situation in the pre-Thatcherite 1970s.

The second caveat is that there appears to be growing divisions within Cornwall. For years planners from the English south east grumbled that there was no large central place in Cornwall. Their wish now seems to be granted as Truro increasingly fills that role. Growth in jobs has been fastest in Carrick and second fastest in Kerrier, from whence many commute eastwards to Truro. Claimant rates in Carrick are also lower than in the rest of Cornwall.

But the biggest change has been in full time earnings. In 1998 the Cornish districts were similar, with Penwith lagging at 65% of the British average. Since then earnings in Carrick have shot up to 91% of the British level, a far higher rise than anywhere else. East Cornwall has seen a smaller rise in line with the Cornish average. Restormel has experienced a fall in relative earnings and Kerrier and Penwith have had no change. Indeed, full-time workers in Penwith are still paid 65% of the British rate for their labour.

Truro seems to be the hotspot for earnings growth, helped by Falmouth and Penryn, which have seen the creation of well paid jobs centred on the university campus. It is no coincidence that in Carrick more people work in the public sector (38%) than the rest of Cornwall and fewer in badly paid tourist jobs (11%) – although here even fewer are dependent on tourism in Kerrier.

Of course, all this ignores the pressing issue of creating a truly sustainable low carbon economy. For it comes with growing levels of commuting and travel to Truro, a population growth rate that is steadily being ratcheted upwards, building rates at historically unseen levels, and a lack of local democratic control over the economic levers. The real question must be ‘Is this a price worth paying for the relatively modest economic gains we’re seeing?’

(All stats from NOMIS)