He was dazzled by the fluid visionary quality of his oratory but the

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Published: July 27, 2010

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He was “dazzled by the fluid visionary quality of his oratory, but the actual proposals did not rise above the municipal,” he said.Mr Lawson said that he was unimpressed by proposals for “kidnapping people’s stereos – imagine if that had been the centrepiece of Wilson’s programme in 1963″.. There has been an exaggerated emphasis on Bills of Rights in the past.”It received a more sarcastic welcome from Eric Pickles, Conservative Party vice-chairman, who said he could have written most of it himself. “The substantive difference would be that I would have believed in it,” he told BBC Radio’s The World at One programme.Mr Blair was also condemned from within his own party. Alan Simpson (Lab, Nottingham South), secretary of the left-wing Campaign Group, said that Mr Blair should have told his well-heeled audience: “When we look around for the first people to draw [education] resources from, you are the ones who will have to pay more in tax.”Privately, one Labour frontbench spokesman asked: “Is it practical? If you take action against parents you tend to get them chucking the child out.”Dominic Lawson, editor of the Spectator, was reluctant to criticise Mr Blair’s speech, for which he had provided the platform. Mr Blair is right to raise the issue, but it is a great deal more difficult than he understands.”But Mr Blair’s Spectator lecture was enthusiastically supported by most Labour MPs, who took issue with reports that it was aimed at “Middle England”, with the implication that the language of responsibility was for the middle class.”It was about the real concerns on the council estates, where young people are terrorising old people, throwing stones at windows – we get these every week in our surgeries, the police just can’t deal with it,” Judith Church (Lab, Dagenham), said.The lecture was welcomed across the political spectrum, with David Alton (Lib Dem, Liverpool Mossley Hill) saying: “I’m very pleased to hear what Tony Blair is saying about rights and duties. As Mr Blair insisted that “the notion of respect for other people is an essentially Labour notion”, Nigel de Gruchy, general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers, accused him of “playing to the gallery” by urging councils to take parents to court if their children miss school, a practice they called “a waste of time”.
David Hart, leader of the National Association of Head Teachers, said: “You have to be tough on the causes of truancy as well as on truancy itself.

Tony Blair yesterday denied “stealing Tory clothes” in his speech on Wednesday in which he stressed the duties of citizens and urged tougher action on truancy and noisy neighbours. But his approach was attacked as simplistic by teaching unions. The main elements are the costs of reorganisation, redundancies and extra grant to the six passenger transport executives and Strathclyde for the increased costs of access charges. The department accepts its costs, including consultancies, will be £64m by 1996/7 but says that so far only £35m has been spent.On redundancies, which have been costed at £377m for 19,200 staff, ministers argue that these would have happened anyway.Franchise stampede, page 32.

“It is a fraction of the costs of the industry and a very small price to pay for a modern railway serving the nation in the way we wish to see it served,” he said.Labour bases its calculation of the costs of privatisation on answers to a series of parliamentary questions. He said: “We will stick to the terms of contracts”, but reiterated that Labour would stop the privatisation.Mr Blair’s claims on the costs of privatisation elicited a furious response when he repeated the figures at Prime Minister’s Question Time. John Major called Mr Blair’s calculations “fantasy figures” and said the real cost would be much lower. Attempts to sell freight companies and the Red Star service had failed, he said, leaving a ballast quarry as the only successful sale.Mr Blair appeared to contradict his transport spokesman, Michael Meacher, who last week said that Labour would not necessarily be bound by the terms of any contracts given to companies taking over train services. It is argued the state should not subsidise low-paying employers through the social security system.. BY CHRISTIAN WOLMAR

Transport Correspondent
Tony Blair, the Labour leader, yesterday said that rail privatisation would cost £1.25bn and had resulted so far only in the sale of a quarry in Devon.Launching Labour’s campaign against “The Great Train Robbery”, Mr Blair said he was confident his party would stop the privatisation process even though legislation went through Parliament in 1993.Pointing out that Labour had halted Post Office privatisation and the second rise of VAT on gas and electricity, he said this was “a campaign in which Labour will speak up for the mainstream majority in Britain who oppose this absurd plan and want rail privatisation stopped in its tracks”.

Ironically, in view of Sir Christopher’s involvement, Conservative interest in the issue was stilled by John Major in the wake of well-publicised complaints by Lord Hanson.Other members of the commission are expected to include the economists Professor John Kay, Professor Richard Layard, and a senior member of Anderson Consulting, the leading management consultancy group.The bold decision to set up the commission, which is expected to produce a report co-inciding with the party conference, could put to the test some of Labour’s most cherished policies including a training levy and the national minimum wage.Although the former could well be the subject of a compromise, the minimum wage idea – though not necessarily a fixed cash target – is unlikely to be ditched, however. The CBI is understood to have promised to make a written submission to the commission, which could pave the way for policies agreed with business in areas such as training, and manufacturing investment.One criticial issue likely to be considered is how to curb the “short- termism” which can channel investment into unproductive speculation or property, instead of manufacturing. The issue was highlighted in an important economic speech by Mr Blair during his Labour leadership campaign last year.Possible fiscal measures including capital gains tax breaks for people who make long-term investments in productive enterprise were considered by Stephen Dorrell when he was Financial Secretary to the Treasury. in which the enterprise of the market and rigour of competition are joined with the forces of partnership to produce the wealth the nation needs.”Although the IPPR is technically in an “arms length” relationship with the Labour Party, the setting up of the commission follows discussions between Jack Cunningham, Labour’s Trade and Industry spokesman, and the Confederation of British Industry. The services include chiropody, infection control, ophthalmology, speech therapy and radiology.Mrs Beckett wrote to Mrs Bottomley: “I am writing regarding the article in the Independent to seek urgent clarification of your privatisation plans for the NHS. For the first and only time in their lives before this court they start out as total equals before they gave their evidence because we are all equal before the law.”His message was reinforced by Judge Gerald Butler as he began his summing- up at the end of the second day of the trial, which had regained its calm following the high drama of the appearance the previous day by Miss Hurley, who has returned to America by Concorde.The judge told the jury: “Unless you live on another planet the celebrity status of Miss Hurley will be known to all, but in this court that is irrelevant. Among the businessmen on the commission is Sir Christopher Harding, for more than 20 years a director of Hanson, a consistent donor to Conservative Party funds.
Chaired by Sir George Bain, Principal of the London Business School, the commission is the most concrete evidence yet of the new Clause IV’s pledge to create a “dynamic economy …

The left-of-centre think tank, the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR), which is closely linked with the Labour leadership, has joined a number of leading businessmen and academics to set up the unprecedented commission. The seriousness of Labour’s commitment to wealth creation will be underlined next month by the establishment of a new “Commission on Public Policy and British Business”, including senior industrialists. Mr Haskins said the job cuts were caused by last year’s privatisation of the milk supply.
The cuts are among the biggest recent job-loss announcements and follow 1,250 redundancies announced by Northern Foods last month.The cuts will be spread across the company’s 30,000 workforce, but the 6,000 workers in the dairy side of the operation are likely to bear the brunt.Northern, which handlesabout one-quarter of Britain’s milk deliveries, said the job losses would occur over the next two years. They had been dealing with the co-ordination and presentation of government policy for as long as he could remember.. The last time Reggie was allowed out of prison was in 1983 with Ronnie for the funeral of their mother, Violet His wife, Frances, is also buried there. The main purpose of the Bill was to cut public spending, he said. “This Bill, ironically called the Jobseekers Bill, doesn’t create a single job but instead inflicts further hardship on those people without a job.”DAVID Hunt, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, later defended the use of civil servants to back up the Cabinet committee for “co-ordination and presentation of policy” – better known as a “gaffe committee” after the ministerial embarrassments which spawned it.Kevin McNamara, Labour’s Civil Service spokesman, pressed, during a Commons debate, for an undertaking that no civil servants would be employed in any form of political work for the new committee “appointed to look for banana skins and look forward to the next general election”.Peter Mandelson, MP for Hartlepool and Labour’s former communications director [chief spin doctor] asked if it was really a proper function for civil servants to spend their time “cleaning up” after Jeremy Hanley, the Tory party chairman.But Mr Hunt insisted Mr Hanley was on the committee in his capacity as a minister without portfolio.


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