What a Balls up – by Edward Leigh MP

So Ed Balls is going to force kids to have sex education whatever their parents think. When will these centralisers ever learn. I am not going to get into the merits or otherwise of sex education. I don’t need to. Because the truth is that you can’t and shouldn’t seek to impose your ideas from the centre. Every head teacher should have the power to run his. School as his professinal judgement dictates. And if parents want to give their own sex education or not that is their fundemental human right.

We have lost the battle on the Lisbon Treaty, but we have not lost the war – by Edward Leigh MP

So France’s Europe Minister Pierre Lellouche thinks that British Conservatives have “castrated themselves” and that William Hague’s European policy published yesterday is “autistic”.

I am a great Francophile. Both my parents were brought up in France. All my children went to the French Lycée in London for part of their education, as did I. I speak French. I have a picture of General Charles de Gaulle hanging in my office.

When de Gaulle arrived in Bordeaux in June 1940 the other politicians and soldiers were walking around like scared rabbits. He didn’t say it’s all over, we can’t resist history, the Germans have won. He said, “La France a perdu une bataille, mais la France n’a pas perdu la guerre.” “France has lost a battle, but France has not lost the war.”

The truth is that British Conservatives are not isolated from Europe. We have many friends and our vision of a de Gaulle “Europe des Patries” is gaining ground.

One day and not too long in the future, after we have repatriated powers, we will lead a referendum to give our people the choice and buttress our vision of a deregulated Europe of nation states trading freely with each other. Our time will come.

Bully boy Sugar betrays small businesses – by Brian Binley MP

What a really compassionate, understanding and humane man Alan Sugar must be.

How courageous that he should blast small firms adding: “that most small businesses didn’t need more money, they need insolvency practitioners”. What a way to encourage entrepreneurs to start up new businesses and provide the jobs growth the country so desperately needs.

I have been fortunate enough to found two small businesses which now collectively employee some 230 people, but I well remember the long sleepless nights when I wondered where the next order was coming from or whether a dodgy debt would be paid.

I remember, during the last recession, when age debt was stretched almost to breaking point and my house was on the line.

I remember the worry, the fear but also the determination to succeed and I believe my experience of people who run small businesses is much closer to the truth than the well known business bully boy, Alan Sugar.

The truth is that the Government he joined to grab instant aristocracy had no understanding of the culture of small business and it seems neither does the very un-noble Lord Sugar.

Gordon Brown let the economy rip for his own reasons and was the prime architect of the problems the SME sector now faces. He told the FSA to go easy on casino banking and as a result small and medium sized businesses are now paying the price.

Only yesterday, in the BIS Select Committee, leading figures from the aerospace industry told us they were deeply worried at the pressures being placed on SME’s in their supply chains and were especially concerned by the seeming unwillingness of banks to lend for growth and development.

As every M.P. knows, small businesses up and down the country are facing lengthening aged debt and unpaid invoices and are going to their banks pleading for help with working capital. They are being screwed into the ground by high interest rates, personal guarantees and overdraft renegotiation fees- and they are just the successful ones.

What a fitting person Lord Sugar is to be appointed the Governments Enterprise Champion.

In Government- he should be incarcerated! Enterprise Champion- he should be fired!

The Right must continue to make the case for real reform – by Edward Leigh MP

In all the furore over Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time, the voice of the moderate right has had little chance to express itself.

The first truth is that the Labour government itself has given a tremendous boost to the BNP with its immigration policies. The careful controls such as the Primary Purpose Rule which had controlled immigration under successive Conservative Governments were torn up. There has in the last twelve years been an unprecedented wave in immigration of over 2 million people. One report I read this week suggests that in the not too distant future our population will reach 77 million.

A cap is needed now on immigration.

In case anyone thinks there is something racist in this I would argue that the uncontrolled eastern European has long been a problem, much as I love Poles and their work ethos.

Even the Conservative asylum policies, designed to admit small numbers of political refugees, were a problem. Within the last twelve years these rules have been abused.

The second boost to far-right parties has been a general sense of hopelessness engendered by our increasingly rule based, regulation driven, politically correct society. We should remember that Britishness is primarily about freedom from the state. We are the only country in Europe never to have been a police state or had one imposed on us. Again a new Conservative government must have the sort of bonfire of controls that the Conservative government of 1951 initiated.

The third boost to the extremist policies has been the moral relativism of mainstream liberal thinking. Politicians are frightened of proclaiming an ideal because it may not be attainable by everybody or because they themselves fall short of it. An obvious example is marriage. It may be difficult for people to commit themselves to each other for life, to bring up children, but that does not mean it is wrong or that in acknowledging the fact we are attacking alternative lifestyles.

The fourth boost for the far-right, and most difficult to talk about, has been the squeamishness of mainstream politicians in dealing with Muslim extremism, not just the terrorist but the cultural variety. I make no secret of my admiration for Britain’s Jewish community. Muslims should learn from their example. Jewish people here have kept their religion, (if they want, of the liberal or orthodox variety) they have kept their identity, but they have chosen to integrate. They have become more British than the British; they have contributed enormously to Britain’s cultural, intellectual and business strength.

I admire Islam, its spirituality and its values. But Muslims who choose to settle here, and they are most welcome, must see themselves primarily as loyal Britons, not just in the sense of citizenship but cultural sense as well.

The last boost for extremist parties has been the lack of radical intellectual vigour in the mainstream ones. There are too few back-benchers on the opposition party and too little encouragement given to radical ideas which appeal to the party loyalist. I recently attended a Conservative county wide dinner. I was the only Conservative MP there. This doesn’t matter much, but what the party should be worried about is that there were only 40 people there. There were 2,000 journalists at the party conference but only 1,500 delegates. To break through you need ideas coming up from below. You must inspire your activists.

Back-bench MPs and MEPs who come up with new ideas should be encouraged. I am not saying that the leadership should adopt all there policies, just that we need a debate about them.

Let me give a few examples. First, localism. If we really believe in this should local authorities not be given the tax licensing powers, for instance through local sales tax being set free from central government.

In the education world we must trust the professionals. Schools really should be set free. Heads should be entirely free to set the curriculum, hire and fire staff and select and expel pupils as they wish, as happens so successfully in the private sector. Parents should be able to able to buy into the private education sector with a discount equivalent to the cost of state education. I say this by the way as a parent of a child in a comprehensive school.

The NHS is not a religion. People who have contributed all their lives as tax-payers should be able to top-up NHS care with private care or private medicines if the NHS can’t provide them with what they need. Pensioners should be allowed to claim tax relief for private health insurance (the policy of previous Conservative governments) and this should be extended as circumstances permit. I say all this as someone who has to rely exclusively for himself and his family on the NHS. At present I can afford nothing else.

We must continue to be explicit about the state of the public finances, acknowledge the need for cuts in the public sector and unveil efficiency programmes. Much progress has been made in this respect. For a long time people like me, who argued for breaking free of Labours spending plans, were called dangerous extremists who would cost us the next election; who says that now?

And of course when we take power we need a referendum on our relationship with Europe and ensuring our national sovereignty.

And so the list goes on. We need radical ideas from the grass roots. We need of course to capture the middle ground but politics needs to be fun as well!

WHAT DON’T THEY GET? – by Brian Binley MP

So the city is furious at George Osborne’s “bonus war” on bankers. Yet these are the self some people who created casino banking which almost bought the country to its knees.

Don’t they get the fact that the majority of people regard massive bonuses as unacceptable?

Don’t they understand that bonuses for top people of close on a million pounds simply dismays small and medium sized business managers who cant get working capital to keep their companies going.

Don’t they realise that city workers are not rated highly in the esteem league table at present and big bonuses just add to the contempt in which they are held.

If SME employees, public sector workers and politicians are not expecting pay rises then city workers should have the decency to show similar restraint. However, their howls of anguish convince us that they don’t recognise the reality of the situation.

If that is the case then the Conservative Opposition must act and George Osborne is right to call for a clampdown.

Labour have let down the nation’s young – by John Hayes MP

This Government promised to extend opportunity and to ensure that 50 per cent. of young people attended university. That promise was made by the former Prime Minister Mr. Blair in a speech 10 years ago, and it was repeated in the 2001 Labour party manifesto, yet today’s debate has been all about broken promises and false claims. The scar of disappointment cuts deep—in some cases to despair.

Even though the figures have been recalibrated and recalculated, by last year the Government had achieved just 43 per cent. participation in higher education. Success for women masked failure for men, for whom the rate stood at 38 per cent.—just one percentage point higher than a decade ago. Under a consistent measure, the proportion of university entrants from both sexes increased hardly at all over the whole decade.

Even though the Government are spending £2 billion a year on widening participation, the participation rate for working-class students has hardly improved since 1995. If that were not bad enough, the improvement rate has actually declined. In the previous decade, participation by working-class students grew at a faster rate. Although I acknowledge the genuine determination across the House to try to widen participation, the truth is that the Government have failed by any measure. It is clear that there are Labour Members, such as the hon. Member for North-East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel), who care about these matters. It was especially distressing to hear how her ambitions, and the ambitions of the whole country, have been frustrated down by Ministers—not through lack of concern, but through their inability to deliver results. The experience at the beginning of the current academic year has demonstrated beyond all doubt that the Government have no hope—and, worse, no intention—of meeting their 50 per cent target.

Even though applications increased by a predictable measure this year, the result has been chaos. While the Government blew up expectations, parents and students have been let down, the dream of a generation has been exploded, with universities left to pick up the pieces. There are 140,000 potential students who cannot find a place in higher education, and only 22,000 places were available through clearing; that is down by 50 per cent from the year before.

That so many young people should lose their chance to learn can hardly come as a surprise to Ministers. Universities received roughly 60,000 additional applications this year. The Minister for Higher Education and Intellectual Property broadly confirmed that, yet the Government simply did not allocate sufficient places to meet that extra demand. Every previous recession has brought an increase in the number of applications for university places, so the Government must have known that that would happen. The issue should have been anticipated and dealt with, and a solution should have been found.

The Government are still nowhere near their target, and yet the system of student finance that they established has not been able to cope with the pressure, as was generously acknowledged by the hon. Member for Stockton, South (Ms Taylor). She said that the situation was not good enough, and challenged those in her own party, on the Treasury Bench, to recognise the problem. I must be fair to the Minister of State: he did acknowledge it. His words were damning of his own record and that of his hon. Friends. He said that the situation was not good enough; that it was not effective; that it had not been sensibly anticipated; that the technology had failed; and that systems had let students down. But who is to blame? I am afraid that the buck stops on the Government Front Bench. The Minister knows that, and should have acknowledged that, too. After all, it is the Government who shifted responsibility for processing loans from local authorities to Student Finance England.

Announcing the new system in 2006, the then Education Minister, the hon. Member for Harlow (Bill Rammell), said: “As well as clearer information, faster decisions, timely payments and accurate repayments” would be assured. It is no wonder that after doing so little for HE, and FA for FE, he was sent to the FO. He left a legacy for the Minister for Higher Education and Intellectual Property; I know that the situation was not of the latter’s making, but it is still his responsibility. How stark is the contrast between past soft-soap rhetoric and the granite-hard reality of the problems facing students and their families this year!

Some 175,000 students started this term without loans. Worst hit are first-year students. At the end of last week, 28 per cent of first-year applications had yet to be dealt with, and universities are being obliged to make emergency pay-outs.

The problems could have been anticipated. Indeed, they were; minutes from the board meetings of the Student Loans Company reveal that in July 2008—a full year before the problems became public—the company forecast that 40 per cent of telephone calls would go unanswered. At the same meeting, a policy of avoidable contact was adopted. That, by the way, is Labour-speak for not answering the phone. The Student Loans Company is using an 0845 number, against official Ofcom advice, so callers must pay for a 10p-a-minute call, and some of the revenue can be “shared” with the Student Loans Company. I call that adding insult to injury, and adding impertinence to both.

To add to the chaos, the future of the student loan book is now unclear. At the beginning of the week, the Government announced a fire sale of Government-owned assets. Back in 2007, the comprehensive spending review committed the Government to raising £6 billion over the next three years from student loan sales, yet no sale has yet been made. When the Minister winds up the debate, will he tell us whether the £3 billion is in addition to the £6 billion in the CSR? Can he tell us when he expects the first tranche of loan sales to be made, and if no sale is expected to be made by the end of the financial year, can he say how the Government intend to make up the £6 billion shortfall?

In the past year, there has been a succession of crises in HE, further education and skills. First, there was the crisis over FE capital funding; then the crisis of the Train to Gain overspend and the problems with apprenticeships; and now there is the crisis in student finance. Is it any wonder, when responsibility for this vital area of policy has been shifted from one Department to the next, like a macabre game of pass the parcel—first DFES, then DIUS and now BIS? But this is not a game. The Government are playing with people’s lives—the hopes, dreams and potential of a generation. In Labour’s end, to paraphrase Eliot, is its beginning—a 13-year journey back to where it started.

As the Minister for Higher Education and Intellectual Property knows, I admire his progress from disadvantage in Tottenham to high office. I know that in his heart he must be ashamed that as a result of his Government, few others so disadvantaged will follow in his footsteps. For he must also know in his heart that if we want to reinvigorate higher education, if we want to reignite social mobility, if we want to deliver social justice, we need a Government who genuinely believe in education: change driving hope, a fresh start—a new Conservative Government for a new Britain, because Britain deserves better.

David Cameron and his team have shown they are fit to govern – by Edward Leigh MP

The Party Conference season has come and gone and for many of you it will have provided an opportunity to assess the state of the parties in these last few months before the General Election.

Without wanting to be too political all I would say is that my own Conservative Party showed themselves well aware of the magnitude of the financial mountain to be climbed and set out a clear path towards restoring our financial health.

It was a message that, to some extent, we don’t wish to hear but I am a firm believer that the public must be made aware of how serious a position we are in. The current deficit is projected to be between £175 and £200 billion next year. This is totally unsustainable.

Unless you have hours of spare time and the inclination to watch the BBC Parliament channel all you will see of the Conference will be glimpses of the main speaker winding up each session. But to get a real feel for the mood of the Party and the debates that quite rightly go on within any party you need to be there in the bars, restaurants and most of all in the fringe meetings.

The Fringe provides an opportunity for pressure groups, think tanks and the media to arrange debates and ‘Question Time’ style events. Some feature the front bench spokesmen, others outside speakers and backbenchers pushing their particular concerns. All in all it’s a rich mix.

The Cornerstone Group of MPs, of which I am the co-chairman, held a meeting that was addressed by the Bishop of Liverpool, the Rt. Rev’d. James Jones.

It’s always refreshing to hear an address that links politics and morality. Without a moral foundation our politics is much the poorer.

The Fringe includes meetings that are aimed at highlighting some of the many problems governments must grapple with. There are disability groups, animal welfare organisations, trade associations and so many more.

But now parliament has returned and it’s back to the serious business of holding the Government to account.