Ignoring the fact that Vince Cable flip-flops more than casual beach footwear, it is now time to put the LibDems under scrutiny because they cannot and should not be allowed to hoodwink the British electorate. (I apologise for the length in advance – this could have gone on for pages.)

Getting Labour back for another 5 years would be disastrous for this country, however, having Nick Clegg as kingmaker, or God-forbid as PM, would be simply frightening. So here’s 10 reasons why they think they should hold power – and why they absolutely shouldn’t:

1. The LibDems think that they’re a credible opposition party
   LibDem 2010 Budget Response: “The increase in National Insurance Contributions is a damaging tax on jobs and unfair to employees; however with a structural deficit of almost £70bn no party can credibly say they are going to reverse it.”

   LibDem 2010 manifesto (p97): “We would seek to reverse it.”

2. Lib Dems believe in British jobs for foreign workers
   Nick Clegg’s interview with Jeremy Paxman (25m40s):
   

   Paxman: Anywhere in England need more immigrants?

   Clegg: Well, I think if you speak to some farmers, for instance, in parts of Lincolnshire – we know there’s already a shortage of immigrant labour in fruit-picking and vegetable-picking.

   Things that Nick Clegg apparently doesn’t know #1: There is 20% youth unemployment in the UK. Might Nick not want to encourage people already in the UK to do these jobs?

3. The LibDems think that the UK as big as Australia
   It’s not just immigrants that Nick Clegg wants to corral into regions of the UK “like Australia”, it’s a “rural fuel discount scheme” (Manifesto p80). In rural areas they want to keep fuel duty lower than in urban areas, er… a bit like Australia.

   Things that Nick Clegg doesn’t know #2: Australia is a tad bigger than the UK. You could fit Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland into Australia 31 times and still have a bit left over. It takes 2 hours alone to drive from the Western Sydney city limits to the Harbour Bridge. In the UK, is there any city that you can’t reach in under 2 hours (Highlands, islands & traffic jams excepting)?

   To give certain places in the UK a fuel discount scheme would mean limiting the programme to petrol stations in extreme rural areas, and there aren’t that many. Wouldn’t it be better to plan for something like, I don’t know, how about a Fair Fuel Stabiliser? (Conservative manifesto p24)

4. Nick Clegg has a secret database (allegedly)
   Nick Clegg apparently has a secret database of illegal immigrants as he wants to give an amnesty to all those who have been here for over 10 years (keep watching Paxman interview above).

   Things that Nick Clegg doesn’t know #3: Because they’re illegal immigrants, we actually don’t have a record of when they entered the country. So what’s to stop people who have been here 6 months saying they’ve lived here for 10 years?

5. LibDems are cancelling Eurofighter – they’re just not sure which bit
   LibDem Manifesto (p16) cost savings – “Cancelling Eurofighter Tranche 3b”.

   In the Ask the Chancellors debate (9m10s), Vince Cable said that he wanted to scrap “Eurofighters in the short run”. I didn’t know what he meant by this but apparently he meant tranche 2. This was picked up by the Shadow Treasury Minister, Philip Hammond the next day in the budget debate – and Vince Cable didn’t disagree (Hansard 30 Mar 2010: Column 682):

   Mr. Philip Hammond (Conservative): The hon. Gentleman talks about the credibility of plans to cut spending and he has announced his £15 billion plan. Will he confirm something that he said last night during the television debate-that the £15 billion includes scrapping tranche 2 of the Eurofighter project? Perhaps he has seen a different contract from the one I have seen, but my understanding is that the cancellation charge for tranche 2 exceeds the cost of taking delivery of tranche 2. Can he explain to the House how he would make a saving there?

   Dr. Cable: That is not the information that we have received. We have repeatedly checked our understanding of the charges involved in such a decision. There are two different components to the end of the Eurofighter contract, as the hon. Gentleman knows. We believe on the basis of what we have been told – of course, we are not told everything, because some of this is supposedly commercially confidential – and on the basis of our information that some savings could be made.

   (“Some savings” is apparently £1.5bn – manifesto p103.) Actually, the rest of the Hansard page is well worth a read as Vince Cable was clearing up a whole load that evening. But then Vince Cable seems to “mispronounce” and give the “wrong impression” quite a lot for someone who is supposed to be an economic guru.

   You can only come to one of two conclusions here: Either 2 weeks before the LibDem manifesto is launched, the LibDems were still planning on cancelling tranche 2 but after this was shown to be economic drivel, they suddenly swap over to tranche 3b in their manifesto; or Vince Cable “mispronounced” something else, to add to his lengthening list.

   If it was the first, then it shows a deplorable lack of planning and research by the LibDems; if the second, then all I can say is that markets have gone down because of speculation and rumour – what you don’t need is someone continuously “mispronouncing” things or “giving the wrong impression” when it comes to international financial markets.

   What they haven’t mentioned is how many thousands of jobs in the UK will be lost because of cancellation; whether cancelling 3b has any associated compensation fees; and how many 3b Eurofighters might be sold to the Middle East, just like Oman is buying up a load of our tranche 3a fighters.

6. They’re also cancelling Trident to make their sums look better
   On page 17 of the LibDem manifesto, it states that Trident “could” cost £100 billion, however, on p65 it suddenly changes to a definitive “at a cost of £100 billion”. Assumption to fact in 48 pages. Worrying.

   The LibDems want to cancel Trident then have a “full defence review” (by the acclaimed nuclear defence strategist, Ming Campbell – I kid you not).

   So what happens if the review concludes that our best defence is to have the US, off-the-shelf solution that is Trident – and we’ve cancelled it and spent the money? Frightening.

   No-one knows what the state of the world will be in a year, 10 years or 30 years from now. There are LibDems that argue that having nuclear weapons didn’t stop the Falklands War or 7/7, which is possibly the most ridiculous argument ever.

   I’d prefer to have nuclear weapon free world but I’m also a realist. I do think the amount of warheads we have is ridiculous though (how many times can you blow up the world?) but dismissing Trident out of hand is even more dangerous.

7. Vince Cable believes that crossing your fingers is a good way to raise money
   When the manifesto talks about job creation, he says that the UK Infrastructure Bank seed funding “could” be raised from the sell-off of the student loan book or the Tote (p25), and that further seed funding “could” be secured against or raised from government-owned assets such as the Dartford Crossing (p25).

   Why doesn’t Vince Cable also see whether the sale of the Post Office “could” raise even more money – assuming of course someone actually wants to buy all of this right now. Yes, they all “could” get sold – but be realistic.

   I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you though.

8. Vice Cable knows more than HMRC
   Revenue from “Anti-avoidance measures” in the manifesto (p101) include £2.4bn saved from Income Tax and NIC contributions, £1.46bn from Corporation Tax and £750m from Stamp Duty, totalling £4.63bn.This is a major part of the LibDems cost savings.

   Small problem is that those lovely people at Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs estimate that NI, income tax and capital gains tax avoidance is only between £0.8n and £1.6bn.

9. Vince Cable thinks his budget is costed
   Without the delayed spending review, it’s impossible for any “credible” party to specifically say where cuts will be made or exactly where money will be saved.

   Credible means getting the real data first – not pulling figures out of thin air and passing it off as costed.

10. The LibDems love Europe.. (well some of them do)
    Both this year and in 2008, there has been revolt on the LibDem benches over European referendums. In 2008, Nick Clegg was humiliated when 13 LidDem MPs voted with the Conservatives for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, when Nick had ordered them to sit on the fence abstain.

    In January of this year, they were split again with LibDems going against Nick Clegg to vote with the Conservatives on an amendment to block any further powers going to Europe without a referendum.

    Only problem is that Nick Clegg proposed a motion at their 2005 conference to block any further powers going to Europe without a referendum.

    (h/t Jon Craig)

    And the Euro? “We believe that it is in Britain’s long-term interest to be part of the Euro” (LibDem Manifesto p67).

    ‘Nuff said.

The Liberal Democrats really don’t stand up to any scrutiny and I’ve only scratched the surface here – I haven’t started on the magical VAT figure they plan to put on new homes – without saying how much it would be (would it add £10,000 or £20,000 to a new home?) So maybe the last word should go to the Channel 4 Fact Check website on the Liberal Democrat manifesto, which has dug out a few more:

“Their oft-repeated mantra on the poorest fifth paying proportionally more tax fails to offset it against benefits; and their statistics on a reoffending pilot scheme are very impressive until you realise that these “petty criminals” are not worthy of a police caution.”

Australia is a country of contradictions: It has both the cuddliest and deadliest animals in the world; it can be 40C one day and 15C the next; and while the rest of the world think of the average Aussie as a healthy, outdoor-living type, they are up there with the worst offending carbon polluters (per capita) in the world.

While most of the developed nations worry about dwindling energy supplies leading to blackouts in the next decade, Australia is sitting on enough brown coal to last them 300 years. Brown coal is bad – much worse than black coal for spewing carbon into the atmosphere – and although energy prices have risen in Oz, they are still relatively cheap compared to the exorbitant prices that residents pay in the UK.

Even their petrol is around half the price of the UK, so there’s no incentive to get people onto public transport. And why would they? As the saying goes, “Australia is a bloody big country” and unless you live in a city suburb with a tram or train stop within walking distance, you have to use a car.

Australia isn’t just a country, it’s all but a continent, made up of people who don’t want to live anywhere else and are generally very happy with their lives. They want to protect their status quo and they don’t want America or Europe telling them they’ve got to change, so I’m not surprised that the country is dissolving into a political and social battle that revolves entirely around climate change.

I was in Sydney last week while COP15 was on and for the snail pace drive back to the airport which took an hour (usually 15 minutes), my taxi driver gave me an impromptu lecture on his theories surrounding the treaty that was never to be. Ask a London cabbie about Copenhagen and he’ll probably be able to tell you that it’s in Denmark – I doubt he’ll be able to give you an opinion on the summit, let alone a lecture.

I don’t know whether it’s scaremongering; media reporting; or the haste at which Tony Abbott (the new Liberal leader who has described climate change as crap) has risen up the political ranks, but many Australians – and not just my taxi driver – feel that a binding treaty would have made them relinquish sovereignty while taxing them to the point of bankruptcy. Ask them how both these would come about and they don’t really know – “I heard it somewhere” (probably from my taxi driver).

Kevin Rudd (the Labor PM) wants to introduce the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) – which is being dubbed the “giant new tax” by Abbott… Introduce the words giant, new and tax into the public psyche and Rudd will have a tough fight come election time – he may even be forced to call it sooner that planned just to draw a line under this rather hot potato.

Abbott only won the leadership election by a single vote and was close to pulling out of the race days before. But rather than a new leader fixing the cracks, his election has horrified moderate Liberals and has split the party more than it was already.

There will be an Australian election in 2010 before the next climate summit and it’s already being dubbed the Climate Change Election. It goes against all my political principles to want a Labor victory but an Abbott victory (rather than a Liberal one) would not be the best option for this planet. I may not agree politically with much of what Rudd believes in but unlike Gordon Brown, Rudd didn’t fly into Copenhagen with a self-mandate to save the world – he went there to make it work and you can see the utter disappointment in his eyes, once you get past the dark shadows giving away the lack of sleep.

It’s great that climate change will be discussed over the turkey or barbied snags this Friday but Australia has to be careful that it doesn’t go the for Abbott easy option and just ignore it. I don’t think they will and when the election comes around, I think Rudd will still come out the winner. It’ll be an election worth watching though.

I thought I understood how the European Parliament worked – but apparently not. So for anyone out there that doesn’t know their Commission from their Council of Ministers, here’s a brief introduction after a patient explanation from Caroline Healy (a Conservative committee advisor), with comparisons to the UK parliament – I hope I get it right!

Overshadowing everything is the Commission, which is a body of 27 appointed commissioners – one from every EU member state. Think Peter Mandelson or our current EU Commissioner, Baroness Ashton. They are unelected and the new European Council President (Herman van Rompuy) and Lady Ashton (EU High Representative) are chosen from the Commissioners.

Think of the Commission as the UK Civil Service. However, before the Lisbon Treaty came into force on the 1-Dec-09, it was only the Commission that could initiate directives, now the European Parliament can also do this. The commission does the initial research into how a Directive would affect each of the 27 member states and produces a Motion for Resolution to parliament.

The European Parliament is made up of 736 MEPs (only about a 100 more than MPs in the comparable House of Commons). Each party that has an MEP from a country joins a group, even if it’s the Non-attached Group. These are:

• EPP – European People’s Party (Christian Democrats – we left the EPP)
• S&D – Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats in Europe (centre-left – Labour is a member of this group)
• ALDE – Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (liberal – where the LibDems are)
• GUE/NGL – European United Left-Nordic Green Left (left-wing)
• Greens/EFA – Greens/European Free Alliance (Greens and regionalists/nationalists)
• ECR – European Conservatives and Reformists Group (the new group that the Conservative party formed after we left the EPP)
• EFD – Europe of Freedom and Democracy (Eurosceptic – incl UKIP)
• NA – Non-attached (MEPs not part of any group with no group rights – includes BNP)

The work of the parliament at Brussels is comparable to the UK committee stages of legislation. Each committee is far more powerful than the UK equivalent, as the group’s representatives will direct all the other members of the group how to vote on the legislation and amendments when the Directive comes to the final plenary vote. Some committees can add amendments, some only opinions – but they are all important.

The votes to enter Directives into European law happen at the plenary sessions, which are held at Strasbourg. Twelve times a year, MEPs pack up and go to Strasboug for 4 days to vote on Directives. This is an anomaly, which comes from some superb French and German negotiation. It’s one of their biggest bargaining tools but using it against them allowed John Major to negotiate veto powers to the UK in the 1990s.

Last year the roof nearly collapsed at Strasbourg, so the plenary sessions were held in Brussels. It’s embarrassing to the Parliament how well it all worked in Brussels, and maybe the death knell for Strasbourg. Don’t count on France and Germany letting it go too soon though.

After a successful vote, the Directive goes to the Council of Ministers for final sign off. The Council of Ministers is made up of the Prime Minister or comparable Head of State of each Member Country. This process is similar to our Royal Assent, as they shouldn’t ever say no, however, it does require that all 27 member states sign the legislation before it becomes European law: This is where the Lisbon Treaty nearly fell over. If one country doesn’t sign, then the legislation fails. The only exception to this is when a country has a veto over certain powers, as this won’t affect the final legislation passing into law (for example the UK veto on border controls).

Finally, the Directives returns to the Commission (Civil Service) for implementation into law across all member states.

Unlike the UK, there is no Upper House. Without these checks and balances on the parliament itself, the majority of the power is with the committees and the group representatives on them.

So there you have it – the European Parliament in a nutshell.

I didn’t want to tag this onto another post as the CWO is so grateful to so many people for their trip to Brussels.

Huge thanks are due to Marina Yannakoudakis for inviting us to visit and giving us so much of her extremely precious time; to Timothy Kirkhope MEP (the leader of the Conservative MEPs in Europe), Vicky Ford MEP and all the other MEPs we met and talked to. An honour too to have sat down with Eva Svensson, the Chair of the FEMM Committee.

Special thanks must go to Mark Walker, Marina’s Head of Office, and to Caroline Healy (the Conservative FEMM Committee Advisor) for their help in guiding us around and patiently explaining how everything worked. We would literally have been lost without Mark and still quite ignorant with Caroline!

A two-year campaign to give a voice to voiceless women forced into prostitution ended victoriously earlier this week. Late on Tuesday night members of the House of Lords voted in favour of a clause designed to protect people forced into prostitution. Clause 14 passed through the Report Stage of the Policing and Crime bill un-amended.

The clause, which is supported by over 60 charities and organisations, shifts the focus of the law onto those who create the demand for prostitution by making it an offence to pay for sex with someone who is subjected to force, deception or threats.

This is good. There would be no need for forced prostitution if there were not so many men out there looking to buy sex. I’ve heard a lot of the pro and anti /legalise and not legalise prostitution, but I always come back to the point of why do so many men buy sex? They can’t all be misunderstood. Part of it is ‘because they can’ – and they are not taught otherwise.

I cannot help but recall a conversation with women at the UN Commission for Women who were all mainly from the USA. I asked if they talked to their sons about paying for sex, and the plight of some prostitutes. They said ‘its not men like our sons’.

Yes it is ladies. It’s always someones son, brother, husband, lover. They need to be told its not acceptable. This is a great step forward. Stopping the market would be another.

After John Prescott warned Harriet Harman to keep quiet about women’s rights yesterday, I tuned in to see what the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party would say.

Admittedly I only caught the end of her speech, but what I did catch was incredulous, even for a Government on its last legs. I don’t think my anger levels will survive watching the whole thing.

I caught the speech as she was talking about prostitution (which she obviously has never fully researched) but then went onto rambling about Labour’s Diversity Evening:

“If the Tories had a Diversity Evening at their conference…Theresa May wouldn’t be allowed to be there, because she’s a woman. But she could serve the drinks.”

I don’t even know where to begin to understand why Harman said what she did.

Thankfully, the 10 people that have stayed for the last day of the conference didn’t give Harman the reaction she must have been after. Other than one raucous laugh (probably from her speech writer), the rest of the delegates gave it a very quiet, embarrassed laugh.

May I remind Ms Harman that no Conservative Shadow Cabinet member has ever resigned from office telling their leader that they “have been treated … as little more than female window dressing”!!

If the Conservatives achieve a majority of just one at the next election, then we will have 55+ women MPs in the next parliament. This will only have come about because of the hard work of the CWO and because of David Cameron’s determination to increase the number of women MPs on the Conservative benches – and all without the NuLabour sexist, all-women shortlists.

Conservative women do well because they’re damned good and will NEVER describe themselves as window dressing.

The vast majority of CWO members have been out canvassing, delivering leaflets, telling and knocking-up for the past weeks and months. Certainly in the County Council elections it was all worth the sore feet, slammed doors in faces, close escapes from dogs and scraped knuckles from unfriendly letterboxes.

Taking Devon and Somerset from the Lib Dems and the outstanding results in the North showed how successful Conservatives are at local level and just how much the population wants a change in Government.

It was all going so well – until Sunday evening – when the results came in from the North West and Yorkshire.

I don’t know anybody in this country who wouldn’t have had a lump in their throat watching the wonderful WWII veterans tell their stories at the D-Day celebrations. I just wish the elections had happened the day after the 65th anniversary – it might have stopped people believing that voting for the odious BNP was in some way a protest vote.

For Griffin to even align himself with Churchill and the heroes of the two world wars is sickening. In some twisted re-writing of history, the BNP believe that these same veterans fought to protect Britain for the British.

Every man and woman who defended Britain – be it on the front, working in factories, digging in the fields, or keeping the home fires burning – were all heroes and they worked, fought and died to defend our freedom from Fascism – from people like Nick Griffin.

If there was ever a reason for the electorate to participate in democracy – that most precious commodity saved by those heroes – then the shame of having two BNP MEPs is that reason.

For the 26 million of you who did not vote in the European elections because of political mistrust, boredom, couldn’t be bothered or because parliament is going through much-needed reform, then you only have yourself to blame when you wake up this morning and are disgusted by the news. Remember that feeling at the next election and go and vote.

You might not like mainstream politicians at the moment but giving the BNP a foothold in British politics would be a far worse disaster than the times we are living through now.

Enough is enough. For every day that new revelations are dripped out to the media and electorate, I can see another 500 votes for UKIP (or worse) in the June elections.

The day this broke, I wrote to the Telegraph to tell them that they had done a disservice to democracy by releasing this information before the June elections. My letter, unsurprisingly, didn’t get published.

County Council and European candidates are getting thrown to the wolves. I forget the number of times I’ve had to remind voters on the doorstep that these are local and European elections and not parliamentary.  

Not voting goes against everything I believe in a democracy but for once I’d prefer people not to vote than give a protest vote to a party whose MEPs are embroiled in their own scandals, or to the loathsome BNP.

The Telegraph have had this information for weeks and possibly months. They would have had to, given the time it would have taken them to go through the million or so receipts.

Publish the rest in one go then publish another 10 editions highlighting the vast majority of our MPs who work hard and don’t have any “accounting errors that were within the rules”.

It is not the fault of all the County Council and Euro candidates that parliament has got itself into this mess – so why does a national newspaper believe that it has the right to interfere with democracy at such a basic level? I’m not saying they shouldn’t have published the information – only that they should have started it after the 4th June.

Some 26 years ago I had the fortune to marry a young man who was destined to be an MP. As it happens, just 6 weeks after our wedding he was an MP, and decisions for my callow 23 year self had to be made. Stay in my job (administrator in the racing industry) or follow my hobby into work – 8 years service as a volunteer in the Conservative Party had me well bitten by the bug, so heading after my man to become his PA seemed reasonable, sensible, and a good way to not blow this fresh young marriage. We worked hard, we rented a small flat on the allowances, and we lived sensibly. In that respect nothing has changed. 26 years on; we rent a small flat, we live sensibly, we only claim what is appropriate.

To say we were stunned by some of the revelations this week is an understatement. I wrote in a recent article that I believed 99% of MPs were doing it correctly and it would be ‘the few’ that muddied the waters. I was wrong.

So what do we do? David Cameron has shown true grit and leadership today. Clean up or get out is his message, and that is one all must follow.

What I really hope is that for the prospective young things out there who have been bitten by the bug will not be put off. The honour of representing people cannot be underestimated, and is worth fighting for.

After the stunning new YouGov poll figures that put Labour on 23% and the Conservatives on 49%, Gordon Brown must be wondering where all that support has gone. Why are all these people complaining about being better off? After all, over 40 million people gained by reducing the basic rate from 22p to 20p.

Well, Gordy, here’s the thing. No matter how much you tell us that we’re better off, Jo Public has shown that selflessness is still alive and well, after many of us thought that it had been eradicated.

I can’t count the number of people who have said to me in so many words: “Yes I’m better off but I don’t want it to be at the expense of people less well off.”

For the first time in a very long time, I’m proud to be British again.