Comment of the Day – Assisted suicide: disabled campaigner in 11th hour court challenge by Christopher Hope

A disabled campaigner will launch an 11th hour challenge to plans to relax the laws on assisted suicide at the Supreme Court today.

Alison Davis claims that a legal ruling that forced the change was unsound, alleging the “apparent bias” of one of the judges, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, now the Supreme Court’s president, who later expressed strong personal views on the subject in an interview with The Daily Telegraph.

In July, Lord Phillips, with four other Law Lords, supported a call to clarify the law on assisted suicide from Debbie Purdy, a multiple sclerosis sufferer. The ruling forced the CPS to draw up new prosecution guidelines.

The deadline to challenge the Purdy ruling is today and in legal papers Miss Davis claims that Lord Phillips’ personal sympathy played a role in the Purdy ruling, on the basis of the interview he gave to The Daily Telegraph several weeks later.

As a result of the ruling, which overturned two earlier decisions by more junior courts, Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, is proposing a new “tick box” approach for prosecutors to decide whether to prosecute someone for assisted suicide. Read in full in the Telegraph.

Comment of the day – Chancellor Alistair Darling’s £40bn cut in public spending and latest poll gives the party a 13point lead by David Smith

Alistair Darling will this week tell government departments that the money has run out and they face a three-year cash freeze on spending.

The message, the toughest to be delivered by a chancellor since the last Labour government was bailed out by the International Monetary Fund in the 1970s, will mean public sector pay freezes and big job cuts. The cash freeze in Whitehall will mean a “real” cut of nearly £40 billion in spending over three years.

And…

The latest YouGov poll for The Sunday Times shows that the Conservative party is retaining a commanding 13-point lead, contradicting recent suggestions that Labour had narrowed the gap enough to make a “hung parliament” likely.

The Tory lead is fractionally down on last month’s gap of 14, but remains big enough to assure David Cameron of a comfortable majority. Read in full in the Sunday Times.

Bad Day – by Nadine Dorries MP

I’ve commented for Sam Coates, of the Times, regarding the interview given by the wife of the Speaker, Sally Bercow. 

The interview was given in the Speaker’s apartment in her role as the Speaker’s wife.

If Sally Bercow had been standing for an un-winnable Labour council seat in a safe Conservative ward and had been married to anyone else, no-one would have been remotely interested.

In one interview she has eroded any progress Parliament had made towards restoring its lost integrity and authority.

The Speaker, the man who holds Parliament and its Members to account, has displayed a serious lack of judgment in allowing his grace-and-favour apartment to be used for such an interview. His future tenure of the historic Chair must now, more than ever, be in question.

To have used the Speaker’s apartment in the Palace of Westminster to personally attack David Cameron, the man who may be the next Prime Minister, to criticise him for something he may or may not do in the future in terms of his children’s’ schooling, is also offensive and sheer hypocrisy. This is especially so when many Labour MPs are privately educated and privately educate their own children (something David Cameron doesn’t and may not do).

Her admission regarding her ‘ladette’ behaviour is something Parliament just didn’t need right now. A bad day for all of us.

Comment of the day 2 – The sheer hypocrisy of Gordon’s class war (and I’m speaking as a life-long member of the Labour Party) by Mark Seldon

“Life for us Labour supporters has not exactly been a bed of red roses over the past year, what with Gordon Brown’s ponderous Commons performances and his plummeting popularity among voters.

So it was immensely heartening to see him land a few solid punches on David Cameron at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, and to hear the cheers of the poor bloody infantry on Labour’s backbenches as the Opposition leader reeled under the assault.

But how depressing that in order to score his hits, Gordon Brown chose to re-open the ‘class war’.

He resorted to the old fallback of labelling the Tories as a party of toffs; he asserted that Cameron’s tax policies had been dreamt up with his colleagues on ‘the playing fields of Eton’; and he gave every indication that the ‘class war’ will be a central plank of Labour’s election campaign.

Now, I’m one of the first to criticise Cameron’s tax policies, and in particular the Tories’ plan to raise the threshold for inheritance tax to help the rich — which demonstrates to me just where their sense of priorities lies.

But I worry deeply that the Prime Minister’s cheap-and-easy tactic of bashing Old Etonians simply for being Etonians will backfire.

It’s not just that it could so easily be made to appear hypocritical. After all, there are a number Labour ministers who could equally be subject to the same accusations of benefiting from a private education — Ed Balls (Nottingham High School) and Harriet Harman (St Paul’s) come to mind.” Read in full in the Daily Mail.

Comment of the day – Police time on the beat tumbles to 13 per cent as red tape blitz fails by Rebecca Camber

I know that this issue has been widely covered by the all the national newspapers over the last 2 days, but I thought this article sums up the complete failure by Brown’s Government. Only in February the Government announced ambitious plans to cut red tape and increase the time policed officers spend on the beat. Not only have they failed but they have managed to decrease the time the police spend on the street and increase the time they spend on form filling.

“Efforts to get police out on the beat by slashing paperwork have failed, the Government’s own ‘red tape tsar’ warned yesterday.

Former Police Federation chairman Jan Berry said officers spend just 13 per cent of their day on patrol.

In an indictment of Labour’s failure to get police on to the streets, she said there had been no improvement on the amount of time police spend on frontline duties in the last two years – and in some areas it had got worse.

Miss Berry, who leads a task force looking at how to slash bureaucracy, said officers were still swamped with paperwork.

She blamed a fixation with targets, saying there was a culture of ‘what gets counted, gets done’, rather than what mattered to the public.” Read in full in the Daily Mail

Comment of the day – ‘Britain not Brussels must regulate the banks’ says the Daily Mail

The full extent of Britain’s catastrophic diplomatic defeat over the division of jobs in the EU became all too clear yesterday. 

A trio of new regulators, guided by a Frenchman eager to undermine the City of London, took aim at Anglo-Saxon capitalism in general and Britain’s financial services industry in particular. 

In one day, Brussels created a Banking Authority, an Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority and a Securities and Markets Authority. Read in full in the Daily Mail.

Edward Leigh MP welcomes government money for churches carrying out God’s work

In my role as Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee I recently chaired a hearing into the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s campaign aimed at Promoting Participation with the Historic Environment.

One of the hearings witnesses was the Chief Executive of English Heritage Dr Simon Thurley. With my final question I took the opportunity to enquire about his organisation’s decision to cut funding for our historic cathedrals. Aside from the potential damage caused by a lack of funding this has caused our cathedrals to charge more for entrance and therefore potentially cause a reduction in participation.

Dr Thurley replied that English heritage was in the process of conducting a survey entitled The English Heritage Cathedrals Fabric Condition Survey 2009 which had the remit of deciding which cathedrals had significant problems and therefore needed help. The results of this survey were to be published on December 1^st and he suggested, as I am a member of the Lincoln Cathedral Council, that I would not be disappointed.

Yesterday the results of the survey were announced. It concluded that despite our cathedrals having spent over £250m on repairs since 1991, it was still necessary to spend another £100m over the next ten years. Significantly Lincoln Cathedral was granted £250,000 for urgent work, and according to Dean of Lincoln, the Very Revd Philip Buckler, this money means “that the current works program can continue”.

I have spoken to the Dean and he has provided me with a breakdown of what the investment will be used for once it commences in the new fiscal year. It will be primarily used for work on the south side of the cathedral between the two transepts. Here the team of in-house craft and tradesmen will work on stone repair, refurbishment of the stained glass windows and roof and lead repair. They will also repair the damaged wood.

The announcement of the grant is encouraging and greatly welcomed. It is tangible recognition of the work which still needs to be done in order to maintain not only Lincoln, but the other sixty cathedrals in England for ourselves, and for future generations. After all, our cathedrals are our greatest architectural heritage. But they are still pathetically under-funded in comparison to some of our continental neighbours. For instance the French Government has just announced it is putting 100m Euros into its own Cathedrals. That said, English Heritage’s announcement is at least a step in the right direction.