The departure of David Laws from the Coalition Government certainly deprives the cabinet of a first class intellect and a minister with considerable potential.

 

I believe that Laws has made the correct and honourable decision to resign - anyway his friends and allies try to dress this situation up the man has been cheating on his expenses for a number of years.

 

It really does amaze me that a man of such intelligence and great personal wealth should have been so careless / naive / dishonest /stupid. (Delete adjective according to your own preference!)

 

However, the world moves on and perhaps we should consider a wider implication of Laws departure from Cabinet - the issue of the 5 "guaranteed" Lib Dem seats at the cabinet table.

 

Danny Alexander has been promoted into Laws former position as Chief Secretary and apparently somebody called Michael Moore will become Scottish Secretary.

 

Given that there are only 57 Lib Dem MP's and that about 9%* of them have to have a Cabinet job there doesn't have to be many further Lib Dem resignations before their talent pool will be "fished out".

 

This promotes the thought that, increasingly, able & talented Tory MP's will be overlooked for Cabinet jobs at the expenses of Lib Dems - simply because of the terms of the coalition agreement.

 

Trouble ahead for Cameron?

 

(*Compared to 16 Cabinet posts for the Conservatives from 307 MP- about 5%) 

 

I firmly believe that this sort of information should be in the public domain, along with details of allowance & expenses payments made to elected representatives.

 

When elected back in '08 Judi & I decided to publish details of our attendance records and allowance payments on this website.

 

There are perhaps a couple of improvements that The Mercury could have made to the attendance table it published:

 

(1) Show a full municipal years worth of information

 

(2) Show Councillor's attendance at all committee meetings, even if not a member of that committee. Councillors frequently attend as "substitutes" for colleagues unable to attend a meeting.  I feel this information should be included in any attendance records in order to give a more rounded picture.

Quite rightly there is lots in the news today about the Dunkirk evacuation (Operation Dynamo) that started 70 years ago today.

 

Wartime propaganda made a great deal of the "miracle of Dunkirk" and of course this has entered into the national consciousness.

 

It is often forgotten that the evacuation marked a terrible defeat for the British Army - one of the worse, if not the worse, in its history.

 

Although the army was (largely) evacuated along with many of our French allies almost all of their equipment was left in France.

 

The importance of Dunkirk was perhaps two fold: (1) That Britain still had an army that went on to fight in North Africa, Italy, France etc (2) The impact on wartime propaganda / morale.

 

This date is also marked by a significant British naval victory. Today in 1941 the Royal Navy sank Battleship Bismark at the culmination of a famous wartime chase.

 

The story of Bismark, its sinking of HMS Hood in the Battle of the Denmark Strait, and subsequent destruction by HMS Rodney, HMS King George V and various smaller ships is well known having been told many times.

 

Over 4000 British and German sailors were killed on Hood and Bismark - a sobering reminder that in naval warfare there is nowhere to hide and that it is hard for ships to take prisoners.

Excellent - I'm delighted to see that Charles Walker has been elected as one of the Vice-Chairmen of the Tory Party 1922 Committee.

 

Strong, independently minded backbench MP's of all political persuasions are essential if our parliamentary democracy is to recover from the recent problems and thrive into the future.

 

Charles certainly fits this bill and his involvement in the leadership of the 1922 has got to be a good thing.

 

 

 

Between 3rd March and 28th April Broxbourne Services carried out various "cleansing actions" on the stretch of the A10 that runs through our Borough and on the B198 Lt. Ellis Way.

 

In this fairly short period they cleared - wait for it - 2,269 bags of litter from the highway, verges & central reservations.

 

Apparently this is the equivalent of 13.3 tonnes!

 

The full report can be seen here (page 32 onwards).

 

Why on earth do people think that it is socially acceptable to throw their litter out of cars?

 

A way to take action against this kind of behaviour would be to prosecute - but, inevitably, there's a problem!

 

The current legislation means that an offender has to be positively identified - no easy task with a moving vehicle.

 

The Local Government Association would like to see a simple change in the law to make the registered keeper of a vehicle liable (rather like the situation with speeding tickets).

 

This seems a sensible suggestion to me - wonder if our new coalition government will take notice?