Richard Spring MP
Member of Parliament for West Suffolk

What a juxtaposition of contradictions that the colossal fall in the Shanghai share index proved to be. It happened on the very day that the Chinese Prime Minister promised socialism for 100 years. I wonder what Karl Marx would make of yesterday’s events. It also coincided with the beginning of the Year of the Golden Pig, very auspicious, and an event occurring only once a century.

Markets have done very well – not only shares linked to commerce and industry, but also mining and commodity shares. Almost all over the world house prices have soared, on the back of low interest rates and low inflation. The profits outlook for 2007 is good.

However this golden scenario of ever rising asset prices will not continue for ever, that is the only certainty. Perversely, the chances of this extraordinary bull run continuing for longer is greater today than two days ago. Much froth will have evaporated.

As President Kennedy’s hugely successful father Joe once observed about the performance of stock markets – “leave the last 10% to the other guy”.

What it also tells us is the huge global economic importance of China. It used to be that if General Motors sneezed the US economy caught a cold. Eventually one day, we shall undoubtedly suffer from Asian flu – the moment of greatest danger will be when such an eventuality is universally regarded as inconceivable. 

When the National Lottery was established in Britain in 1995, its underlying principle was that money from the sale of tickets would be given to good causes. When people bought a ticket, they not only had a chance to become a millionaire, but, if they didn’t win, could take comfort that they were also helping causes which were inevitably at the back of the Government’s spending queue.

Since then the original aims and aspirations have become distorted under this Government.

Last year, when the National Lottery Bill was being debated in the House of Commons, the National Council of Voluntary Organisations again highlighted their concerns about maintaining a clear dividing line between lottery expenditure and core Government expenditure. It must not be  abused as a substitute for general taxation. Sadly the lines have become blurred in recent years.

I recently attended a meeting in Stanton in my constituency to discuss the plans for redeveloping the village hall. Village halls play such an important role in rural life, bringing communities together, with a wide range of clubs, events and activities. The plans for modernisation are very impressive, but are dependent on securing funding for the project. I shall be supporting the village hall in their application to the National Lottery through the Big Lottery Community Building Fund. They richly deserve this financial assistance.

However, due to the mishandling of the London Olympics project by Gordon Brown and Tessa Jowell, we could eventually see costs quadruple to an eye-watering £9billion by 2009—and perhaps even more. It does not need a huge leap of the imagination to see that the National Lottery pot may be raided yet again to try to cover these spiralling costs, crowding out worthy local projects such as Stanton Village Hall. This would go against the very ethos of what the National Lottery is supposedly all about. 

Last week a hugely amusing and enjoyable 50^th birthday party took place for Keith Vaz MP, so well known in particular in the Asian community, and latterly new best friend of Shilpa Shetty. The Lord Chancellor Charlie Falconer teased Keith (known sometimes as Vazeline) for being on the campaign teams of all seven candidates for the deputy leadership of the Labour party.

Perhaps it is now eight, since the Labour Chairman Hazel Blears announced her candidature. She has had to go on television repeatedly of late to explain the latest Government fiasco and to her credit she has looked cheerful and enthusiastic, no mean feat.

However, I have a certain experience to report. When the Government sought so obsessively to regionalise the police forces there was uproar in Suffolk as elsewhere. A group of MPs from Suffolk went to see her and all we heard about was Manchester and Salford. She had dragged in some toadying Chief Constable who told us how desirable it would be. The meeting showed she had no clue about life outside the big cities. But my biggest regret was not being able to tell the Uncle Tom policeman what I thought of him and the oleaginous drivel he spouted. Happily, the idea which Hazel and the Chief Constable were so eagerly promoting was dropped, and thank goodness for that. 

One of my regrets is only becoming a Member of Parliament after Margaret Thatcher had left the House of Commons. She may have excited controversy but she was one of the most formidable politicians of our age.

When the Falklands War took place, and the lead up to the first Iraq war, the preparation and detailed thought were comprehensive to a degree. Listening to Tony Blair at last being interviewed on Radio 4 yesterday, what a contrast. Going to war is not about being some moralising Sir Galahad. Of course there has to be a moral base to foreign policy, but Blair has fallen into the trap of identifying countries in black and white and apocalyptic terms. His powerful and dramatic description of problems in speeches all too rarely translate into properly thought out actions. The sheer functional incompetence in all government departments is breathtaking.

Would Margaret Thatcher have gone to war in Iraq without demanding (and getting) the closest involvement in deciding critical issues like post-invasion security, control and governance? Of course not.

Tony Blair has liked to suggest he is something of an heir to Thatcher. However his legacy, by comparison, will be a woefully anaemic one. 

Being in the USA last week, it was even in Florida quite cold. The most appalling weather had gripped wide swathes of the country, with people stuck at airports, and with massive disruption of travellers’ plans.

Yes, it was rather more centimetres of snow that paralyses this country, but the biggest casualty was a low cost airline called jetBlue, whose organisation fell apart. Passengers dressed for visits to the Caribbean sat shivering in aeroplanes for hours on frozen runways, their communications to aircrews failed too.

Here we range from laughter to fury at excuses like leaves on the line, but I have never seen such chaos. It was good to return, even if cancelled flights meant it was a day late. 

Having just been in the United States, the universal anger and disappointment directed towards President Bush is just astonishing. The savagery of the criticism of his conduct of the war, either privately or in the media, is so much greater than criticism of Tony Blair here. The drawdown of British troops from Basra will be greeted, however dressed up, with horror in parts of the Administration, as the US bolsters its own troop numbers.

Republicans are currently very pessimistic. All the current candidates like Giuliani, Romney and McCain are seen by many to have their drawbacks: most seem to think that the Democrats will win irrespective of whether it is Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. A number of Republican commentators now even look back on Bill Clinton’s presidency with greater regard.

As Harold Wilson observed,however, a week is along time in politics……….

When Manuel de Araujo MP spent the weekend in my constituency, he was on the telephone several times, or texting Mozambique.

The reason is that there are appalling floods there, not least in his constituency as a result of very heavy rains in Zambia and Zimbabwe, so that the enormous Cabora Bassa Dam is overflowing. So far 68,000 have been displaced and 27,000 are now in accommodation centres along the Zambezi River. The head of Mozambique’s national relief agency estimates that the total number of displaced people may rise to 280,000. Manuel is flying back this week. He told me that the inevitable end product of such flooding, on top of all the death and destruction, is a chronic outbreak of malaria. In 2000 and 2001 flooding killed over 700 people.

This sort of tragedy puts everything in our country in context.

Meanwhile, I am personally off to the United States for a few days, so blogging is suspended until next week.

Consciousness of Africa and its problems has probably never been so high. Many British people try to buy fair trade goods or give money to good causes in the developing world.

In 1992, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Westminster Foundation for Democracy was founded to assist the fledgling democracies of Eastern Europe. Since then it has tried to assist in democracy building in Africa and elsewhere. It is funded by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

In the past two years, as a WFD governor, I have done political development work in Uganda, Tanzania and Mozambique. Last summer in Mozambique, I spent time in the central Zambezia constituency of Manuel de Araujo MP. There are huge problems there, all expressed very clearly by the many people we talked to. Mozambique’s economy is doing well, but there are massive difficulties flowing from malaria, HIV/AIDS, on top of poor education and health care facilities.

Manuel is now doing a Ph.D. at the University of East Anglia but this weekend will be in my constituency meeting school pupils and many others. It will be illuminating to hear at first hand what the role is of a politician whose constituents have in many instances such limited opportunities in life, and how he tries to represent their interests.

One of the aspects of our national life which bemuses foreign visitors is the inability of our transport system to cope with snowfalls. Yesterday we had headlines forecasting the travel chaos which inevitably attends a snow fall.

Four years ago, one Thursday evening I set off as per normal to my constituency. I heard that there were some snow showers about, but thought nothing of it. Suddenly, half way there, near to Stansted Airport I found myself in a gridlock traffic jam, unable to move, as the snow fell. I was stuck for thirteen hours. Fortunately I had had a big lunch and so had some food in the car, some water, and in the boot, a couple of blankets and some gumboots. Others around me were less fortunate. The condition of the M11 was so glacial that anybody with leather soles slipped badly and quickly. It was like a scene from a horror movie – children trapped in cars, elderly people the same, and commuters only wearing their office clothes. You can read the full story by following this link: http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2003050857,00.html

Next morning, bright and sunny, police helicopters irritatingly hovered overhead.

Firstly there were no warning signs about the gridlock, no radio messages, no effort by the emergency services to drive down the closed but traffic-free other side of the motorway, to see if anybody needed emergency help. What had happened is that the Highways Agency had neglected to grit the road surface, despite the earlier warnings: allegedly because of windy conditions. You couldn’t make it up.

I look forward to tonight’s journey to Suffolk with some trepidation.

When Tony Blair became Prime Minister he proudly proclaimed that his number one priority was “education, education, education”. It is true that giving every child the best possible education for the future not only allows them to maximise their own potential but provides the country with a skilled and dynamic workforce to help us compete with countries such as the United States, China and India.

Unsurprisingly, if we probe behind Blair’s soundbite, we begin to see what this means in practice. The education funding figures for pupils in England and Wales for 2007/08 were published recently. Naturally I looked to see how much pupils in my constituency would receive from this Government. Scanning further and further down the list, I found Suffolk in the bottom 10% of the whole country for education funding. It was 134^th out of 149 Local Education Authorities with £3,591 per pupil. This is below the national average of £3,888 and the East of England average of £3,721.

Sadly this is true across the board when it comes to public services. Rural areas are discriminated against by this metropolitan, urban-obsessed Government which primarily distributes public money to where its political support is strongest. I have consistently highlighted that Suffolk does not receive a fair deal when it comes to NHS funding. It is below the national average, and well below the Prime Minister’s constituency which will annually receive £420 more per person than people living in my constituency. If you look at transport funding or police numbers, the story is always the same.

I believe in the principles of One Nation where all parts of the country should be given a fair slice of the national cake. Under this Government, rural regions like Suffolk are simply not treated fairly. The degree to which this is happening is a new and cynical departure in British politics.