Nick Bourne AM

I have just read an interview with Alan Johnson, the Health Secretary in England.He comes across for the most part  as a model of reasonableness.

 He believes in making proper use of the private sector in delivering health care within the NHS.  So do I if it means better patient care and an improved NHS and all the signs are that it does. He is unwilling to dogmatically rule out the use of the private sector ;quite the reverse. Would that were the case in Wales.My fear being realised is that health care in England will continue to outstrip the performance of the NHS in Wales because of the naive closed-minded approach of the administration in Cardiff Bay.

I know that devolution enables us to do things differently in different parts of the UK but here we have a fundamental philosophical divergence of approach  between Labour at Westminster and Labour in Wales. I would not mind were it not for the fact that Wales will lose out.

Originally when it was disclosed that Peter Hain had failed to declare a donation to his deputy leadership campaign, in common with most people I thought that here is a human error ( we all make them) and I thought he would move swiftly to put matters right.

That has not happened and today’s Guardian on its front page declares that he has failed to disclose £100,000 of donations.This is scarcely credible–why has he failed to do so? This goes beyond human oversight and the long and continuing delay to make a clean breast of it seems curious in the extreme.

It is true that this is a large campaign sum (the largest by far and at around £200,000 dwarfing the £4,000 of Hilary Benn), but as my colleague Cheryl Gillan has said this is scarcely rocket science and the longer the continuing delay the more there will be speculation as to why.

The rules were put there for a purpose and Peter owes it to us all to obey those rules and disclose the full true picture now

I spoke last night  at the New Year dinner of Aberystwyth Rotary Club in  the Marine Hotel.

The President, Eifion Lewis, used to work for  the Royal Mail in Aber and he and I have stood shoulder to shoulder in  many epic struggles to preserve that marvellous institution.Eifion has been unwell but is now happily very much back to 100%  condition.

I had been asked to speak on the year ahead and to make some predictions about what lies in store.With more prescience than I really realised I said that predictions in politics are notoriously difficult ( this was, of course ,before the New Hampshire Primary  result which I then proceeded to call  wrongly on the Democrat side of the equation–in common with just about everybody else! )

I told my audience that I don’t like ‘ What ifs ? ‘ and recalled the no doubt apocryphal story that Sir Alec Douglas Home was asked in what way the world would have been different if Kruschev and not Kennedy had been killed in November 1963. He mused for some time and then said it was difficult to say but he didn’t think that Aristotle Onassis would have married Mrs. Kruschev!

 Rotary Clubs do valuable community service and provide for co-operation between clubs on a national and international basis.

I spent a couple of weeks in Singapore and Malaysia over the Christmas and New Year season.

 
Though obviously I flew out (to Singapore), to try to minimise my carbon footprint I do take the train from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur rather than the hourly shuttle.  The train, in fact, takes nearly eight hours and so is quite an epic journey but it gives me a chance to catch up on quite a bit of reading as well as checking my emails on my Blackberry - very good reception in Singapore but it disappears halfway through Malaysia. 

 
I read while, over in the Far East, ‘From Third World to First’ by Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore’s first PM), which is the Singapore story from 1965 to 2000.  It is a very good read.  Lee Kuan Yew, as a Cambridge qualified Lawyer, is very pro-British.  He had a very good relationship with Margaret Thatcher, and in fact they retired from office at about the same time.  Margaret Thatcher made many efforts to get Lee Kuan Yew to speak at the Conservative Conference, but without success because of the historic ties between Lee Kuan Yew and the Labour Party.  I don’t think the Labour Party would go along with much of what Lee Kuan Yew stood for in Singapore.  It has been a conspicuous success story, however, and although, along with many others, I think I would draw the line closer to individual freedom than law and order in Singapore, it is very difficult to argue with the massive success story that has been Singapore.

 
I also manage to read a couple of Ruth Rendell’s while away, always enjoyable – ‘The Bridesmaid’ and ‘To Fear a Painted Devil’, and Arundhati Roy’s ‘The God of Small Things’ which is set in the 1980’s in Kerala  in South India and is a very moving, poignant story about the contradictions that existed in India and, indeed, still do.  I also read Sandy Toksvig’s ‘Melted into Air’, a light hearted story set in Italy.

 
The joy of Christmas and my Birthday coming together at this times means that I have got a pile of books as presents to read including: Pompeii – The Day A City Died, Michael Palin’s - New Europe, Martin Bell’s - The Truth That Sticks, Duncan McClaren’s – Looking For Enid, Anne Enright’s – The Gathering, Paul Torday’s – Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, and William K Parke’s - A Fermanagh Childhood.

 
I also saw Will Smith in ‘I Am Legend’ over the festive season. In principle I always feel I am not going to enjoy these doomsday, apocalyptic films, but in practice nearly always do and this was no exception and I thought it was excellent.

 
Christmas in the sun is always, for somebody brought up in Britain, going to be incongruous.  In the shopping malls of Singapore and Kuala Lumpur – ‘I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas’ and ‘Winter Wonderland’ are playing, and there are giant plastic snowmen and snow scenes all over the place and fake snow in many of the shopping centres.

 
Outside it is 31 degrees.  I manage some longish walks and some swimming.  Churches are packed on Christmas Day and I don’t think I have ever sat through such a long sermon as the one delivered at the Church that I attend – somewhat self indulgent really on the part of the Pastor, given the number of youngish children in the congregation, although the content was good. 

The most hopeful event of  the start of 2008 for me is Barack Obama’s win in the Iowa caucuses. I have long thought that the message of hope that he is putting across for the world’s only superpower is a powerful one and it seems that the people of the US are responding. A break from the mistakes of the past with a candidate, really the only candidate, who is not a Washington insider could well be what the people of the US want and what the people of the world need. The early analysis of the figures in Iowa suggests that new voters were attracted to the message of Obama.

Clearly there is a long way to go but a win in New Hampshire could provide an unstoppable momentum.

 I hope so.

 The Western Mail today highlights the problems of mobile reception in some parts of Wales. They are not wrong; as somebody with a vast rural constituency I can attest to this. On many roads I can warn interlocutors that I will lose them in 27 seconds or 2 minutes or whatever the case may be(hands free phone by the way )

Reception can be patchy, when I speak to William Graham on his  mobile  phone he reminds me that his mobile does not work in ALL parts of his house ( smooth line  William!– up there with a colleague who began a chapter in his legal textbook   ‘ In Trinidad where this chapter is being written….. ‘ !!)

 This is a concern, the poor reception in parts of Wales that is, not the variations in parts of William’s house, but surely we should be much more concerned about the patchy nature of the availability of some drugs on the NHS in different parts of Wales or of wild variations in educational achievement than the patchy nature of mobile reception.

The poor mobile  reception was certainly one ground on which I contested ( largely successfully) the withdrawal of many BT phone boxes in rural Wales when BT  was proposing cut backs in provision. Another very valid ground was the ‘Childline’ argument that complaints by victims of child abuse tend to be made from land lines.

Political parties and by extension politicians should only exist to improve the lives of the people they are serving. I don’t doubt that that is the aim of the vast majority of mainstream politicians and it is only at the factional extremes that parties and some politicians seek to further the interests of a particular race or indeed class.

I cannot help but feel, however, that the Labour party, certainly in Wales and probably more widely, is losing its way.  The denial of the opportunity to council tenants no matter how limited a denial is a kick in the teeth to totally reasonable aspirations of people in Wales to own their own homes. In fact the provision of the “right to buy” in Britain was the biggest single shift of wealth to working people that
there has ever been in our country, all the more extraordinary that the Labour party should want to limit that right. The restriction of the choice of services in the NHS once again runs counter to the rise in the aspirations that exist in society today.
 The same is true in education. The lack of choice for parents is not sensible. Take the situation as argued by the Labour party that free school breakfasts is a sensible use of public money ( I do not accept that position but for the sake of argument let us accept it )  and yet a parent in say Newport or Merthyr may be denied that option for their kids because their designated school doesn’t offer the breakfast scheme and Labour don’t believe that they should be able to exercise choice..

The Labour party’s monochrome view of society is rooted in the post war world of Attlee and indeed I often feel the First .Minister hankers after those certainties of ration book Britain and. the simpler life of those days with the more rigid class structures of the times.
The Labour party in Wales is uncomfortable with the idea of people exercising choice and perhaps cannot comprehend that people will not accept their view of what is best for them. The denial of choice and the exclusion of the private sector’s involvement in the provision of public services is seen by Labour as likely to raise the quality of public services just as it has in socialist nirvanas like Cuba and North Korea no doubt! Sadly for Wales Plaid Cymru seem to accept this dangerous analysis (if I may dignify it as such).

The evidence is to the contrary. Monopoly provision with no mechanism of choice is stultifying and will not improve the standards of schools or of hospital care. Even Labour at Westminster seems to recognise that Sadly Labour in Wales has a lot of catching up to do.

It is impossible not to feel pity for Bilawal Bhutto. So soon after the cowardly cruel assassination of his mother to become putative leader of the Pakistan opposition while still a teenager and undergraduate in the circumstances that prevail in that part of the sub continent and given the history of the treatment of the Bhutto family is daunting to say the least.
 
Some elements in the West seem keen to decry the dynastic nature of politics in the sub continent and Asia generally.. India with the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty’s domination is also cited as if it were some tribal archaic practice.

The Lee family dominate in Singapore too and their effect in the island state has been benign.

True the North Korean example of leaders beloved by official decree is not so compellingly successful (to say the least!!!) but here there has never been anything remotely approaching democratic endorsement.  A look at the experience in the West also demonstrates we should hold back from giving lectures.

In the US there has been a Bush, Clinton, or Dole on the ticket for more Presidential elections than is healthy. Tony Benn renounced his peerage honourably but yet the (Wedgwood Benn) dynasty lives on and I see that David Prescott hopes to carry on the croquet playing traditions in Hull East.
This in short is not an uniquely eastern phenomenon and in countries from Argentina to the Philippines and from France and the UK to the US the appeal of the familiar means that dynasties have a hold on the political system - also, of course, the passing on of political vision and skills whether by nature or nurture is not to be discounted.