Money galore?

£billions found

Great! Piles of cash can always be found for bad causes. £billions were  there for unexpected wars in Iraq and Helmand. More was discovered to rescue banks from the consequences of their own incompetence.

Today's £2.7 billion was found lurking un-noticed in a Treasury drawer for a good cause. OK so we are borrowing it. We usually fight wars with contingency funds. The compensation for the robbed low earners is very similar to that suggested by David Taylor last week. Although David's solution seemed to be better value as it cost £650 million and did not reward anyone who had not lost out.  The other solutions were fiendishly complicated and would have excessively rewarded those who had gained from the tax changes.

This is probablythe best practical way of correcting this hideous error. As always it is not perfect and 1.1 million  will not be fully compensated immediately. A mechanism must be found for this. This is not the end. Millions were incorrectly wound up by Tory propaganda and the tabloids to believe they had lost out when they had not. Watch for a second wave of resentment when the compensation for which they are not entitled does not arrive.

It would have been useful if today's statement had been made before last week's slaughter of the undeserving in the local elections.

Shameless

If things were not bad enough Labour is under assault from competitive memoiring.' There are no excuses. The only explanation is vengeance and greed.

At a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party three weeks ago John Prescott gave a rousing speech on the need to back Gordon Brown. Had he forgotten that he was about to add to his woes?

Last week Gordon Prentice and I beat up some former ministers because of their headlong rush to get their snouts into second-job trough. Today we tabled an Early Day Motion on the epidemic of memoirs. The criticism is similar.

Those who have benefited from the power and wealth of ministerial office are immediately capitalising on the privilege by selling their access or their gossip. As a Select Committee, we jumped on an  ex-Ambassador for revealing intimate details of his dealings with John Major and Tony Blair in order to spice his tedious memoirs.

The least that can be expected of them is that they wait until the Government they serve is out of office before putting the boot in. That would cost them money because gossip has diminishing allure. The ghostwriter must be rapidly recruited while the victims of the character assaults are still in office and vulnerable to career destruction.

If money from memoirs becomes part of the anticipated pension entitlements for ministers and civil servants,will any trust exist between ministers and ministers or ministers and civil servants? Will they be concentrating on their vital jobs, or spending  their working lives ferreting for gossip to sex up their memoirs?

We can all pray for small sales for these tedious volumes – especially after all the best bits have been reported in newspapers serialisations. That is where the serious money is. A friend of mine wrote a book with a news worthy bit of gossip about Princess Margaret in one of the many books he wrote about the Royal Family. A newspaper paid £250,000 for the serial rights. There was little else in the book and the publishers decided it was not worthwhile publishing it.

The salt in the Labour Party's wound that is being rubbed in now is that former beneficiaries of the party’s loyalty are eager to sell to the highest bidder. That’s is usually the Mail or the Telegraph - sworn enemies and daily tormentors of the Labour Party. Do those pause for a second to wonder whether this is the correct thing to do. Or are we completely adrift from our moral compass?

The EDM reads

EDM 1542

CONDUCT OF THE RIGHT HON. MEMBER FOR KINGSTON UPON HULL EAST AND OTHERS

12.05.2008

Prentice, Gordon

That this House regrets the actions of the right hon. Member for Kingston Upon Hull East and other senior and influential figures within the Labour Government or close to it, now retired from the front line, who have recently published memoirs which will bring them rich rewards in cash and anticipates that others are writing their version of events to put the record straight, as they see it; recalls the evidence of Professor Peter Hennessy who appeared before the Public Administration Select Committee on 17th November 2005 during its inquiry into Political Memoirs who forecast, with great prescience, that the publication of the Alistair Campbell diaries would be the 'opening salvo of the most ghastly mobilisation of the most wonderful exchanges of competitive memoiring'; and believes that all profits from such publications should be donated to the Labour Party or to a charity.

Trough-free

Alert Bethan Rhys Roberts on Good Morning Wales this morning challenged me about my own books. She asked whether I revealed things in Dragon led by Poodles. A fair question.

There are key differences. The book had a political imperative. I vainly hoped that detailing the catastrophe that followed Tony Blair's failure to support Rhodri Morgan in Wales would deter him from repeating the error in London. Sadly it did not. Alun Michael chalked up the worst result for Labour in Wales for a 100 years. Frank Dobson amassed a miserable 13% of the vote against Ken Livingstone.

As for money. Dragon led by Poodles was published first on the Internet to get the story into the public domain as quickly as possible. It is still available FREE on the archive section of this website.

Comments

[valleylad]

I'm waiting for the dust to settle as far as the tax changes are concerned. Unless I've missed something, any single person earning less than 10k is better off, those between 10k and 19k are still worse off than before the budget. If there are low income losers this is not a labour govt!

I've little if any time for Prescott, but his behaviour still has a degree of integrity that is totally lacking in the snouts in the trough mentality of others (e.g. Blunkett)

[Anon]

Thanks to you and your colleagues for sticking with it on the 10p tax. EXCELLENT!!!

[paulflynn]

The 10p tax changes are not complete, Valleylad. Work is still going on and the pressure must be maintained. But it is a vast improvement

Blunkett is more worthy of blame. I have spent more time with Prescott in the past six months than in the past 21 years. My opinion of him has improved. He is a complex character