Henley-Twyford railway line
Well done to my House of Commons office staff. Did you know:
- all the mail from far and wide has been replied to (email and land mail)
- the next batch of letters will also receive individual responses – every single one
That is about 500 extra letters over and above my heavy mail bag. Olly, Maggie, Fiona and Melissa will need a good Christmas and New Year break soon, when I hope the mail bag will shrivel up in size. Ann, on the diary front, and Wayne, in the constituency, have also been working overtime.
Here is my latest press release:
PRESS RELEASE
Following the recent publication of the Future of Rail White Paper, Alistair Darling MP, Secretary of State for Transport, has today announced the launch of the Government’s Community Rail Development Strategy. Fifty six lines have been proposed for Community Rail designation by the Strategic Rail Authority, the aim being to involve local authorities, users and community groups more and to double originating fare income from Community Rail services over a five-year period and to reduce subsidy per passenger by a half.
Commenting on this, Boris Johnson MP said:
“To designate the Henley-Twyford line a community railway is utter lunacy. I fully support involving local communities in the management of local railways and I believe that we must place these railways on a sustainable basis for the future. However, I fail to see how the Government can possibly relate the rhetoric of sustainability to the reality of funding cuts. This is an excuse to marginalise, downgrade and under-invest in important parts of the network.
Queen’s Speech and State Opening of Parliament
Parliament was prorogued today, eagerly awaiting the Queen’s Speech in the House tomorrow, where we will all be interested to hear of the Government’s plans for future legislation.
Boris should enjoy the proceedings away from the pressures of Shadow High Office – no doubt he will make some points during debates and questions in the Chamber and/or in his column this week.
A reason to smile this week: Weblog’s own Tom Watson MP [in transit to a new host] was one of the first amongst quite a clutch of MPs to send consolatory letters to our office!
Cheers fellow blogger! what a great club
Google Scholar
As you know an MP’s day-to-day working involves a great deal of research to keep up to date with latest policy ideas and Bills running through Parliament.
Now Google have come up with a cracking first-rate search engine http://scholar.google.com/ looking up scholarly literature including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. This should greatly enhance our research capability. Released yesterday for beta testing, it looks promising and you may like to try it out as well.
Labour will always decide what’s best (Smoking in public)
And I tell you this, gentlemen, I said, and 100 golfers in black tie boggled drunkenly and hung on my words… You know what this Labour Government wants to ban? I yipped.
What? they chorused, red-faced with anticipatory wrath. They want to stop you – smoking! I said. No more smoking in the workplace, or pubs, or restaurants; no more pint’n'Castella in the 19th hole, and in so far as the putting green is a public place, you will probably be forbidden even from having a crafty fag as you steady your nerves!
Outrageous, they said, and for a while the surf of indignation thundered around me, until a man just to my right piped up in level tones: “Well, you know, I am all in favour of a ban, actually.”
What? I said, amazed, but before I could get to the bottom of his dissent, two or three others around the room were putting their hands up and demanding a ban on any kind of smoking in public. But hang on, I said, and I explained the statistics about passive smoking: that you have only to charcoal-grill frankfurters for half an hour on your barbie, and you will inhale the same quantity of carcinogens as you could expect to absorb in two weeks of passive smoking.
Yes, yes, said my friends at the golf club dinner; we know all that, but the honest truth, they said, was that they used to be smokers themselves, and it was a filthy habit, and they thought the new law would help them to resist any temptation to take it up again.
What? I said, still incredulous. Next thing, I said, you’ll be wanting to ban drink in order to remove any temptation to get drunk, or ban cars, to avoid ever being tempted to drive too fast… But then I thought some more about their position, and I could see a kind of attraction in it. Of course it is ignoble to invoke the nanny state in order to correct your own personal weakness, but at least my friends’ motives were somehow honest, and based on intimate knowledge of the people they knew best – themselves.
My black-tied chums weren’t actuated by a desire to impose some superior code of behaviour on others; their motivation was purely selfish, and I can live with the selfishness. It’s the dogooders I can’t stand, and this Labour Government is riddled with people who long to stop other people doing things of which they disapprove. In so far as there may or may not be a case for banning smoking in public, it should be no business of central government – or at least not while smoking is legal.
Boris column in the DT
Tomorrow’s column in the Daily Telegraph – inspired by an evening followed by speech at HENLEY GOLF CLUB DINNER, HARPSDEN, HENLEY ON THAMES – at the end of last week.
Points made include: Government plans to ban any kind of smoking in public, banning hunting and the destruction in Iraq.
Brilliant column following quite a week….. how does he do it?!
Post with full text tomorrow as early a.m. as possible.
