Readers of the local newspaper have often commented on the number of boarded up shops in the town centre as the lack of local demand has resulted in many high street retailers voting with their feet.

From last November to this November Gloucester’s claimant rate for Job Seeker’s Allowance has risen by nearly 20%. The Coalition’s harsh cuts are hitting Gloucester disproportionately because, like many areas of need, it received major investment in its public sector during the Labour years. Local schools, the police force and the hospital were crying out for investment after all.

Currently nearly 900 people under the age of 24 in Gloucester are looking for work, that’s a 38% rise in twelve months.

Instead of campaigning to boost the lack of local demand in to our struggling economy – which is now hurting retailers in the Quays almost as badly as those in the high street – coalition politicians have watched idly as the government saps demand further by proposing to put 710,000 public sector workers out of a job (compared to their initial estimate of 400,000). So retailers will be hit by the drying up of even more consumer demand.

What Gloucester desperately needs is a cut in tax, such as VAT to get people spending again and the reintroduction of the Future Jobs Fund to get young people back in to work. The Future Jobs Fund was helping over 130 young people in to work before it was cut by the government, only to be replaced by hollow words about apprenticeships.

Thus far there has been no local plan to get us out of this mess. When politicians stop listening to local people and start thinking about their own survival, you end up with knee-jerk decisions with bad repercussions. The Railway Triangle plan is one such example of this. The views of local people and the need to create high skilled jobs for the long-term have been ignored.

For young people in Gloucester the prospects of getting a good job are receding each month – the EMA has been scrapped and ordinary working families are left wondering whether £9,000 per year of debt to fund a university place is a price worth paying.

The government’s policies have resulted in an increase of national debt to the tune of £158 billion. YetGloucester is on the verge of spiralling in to economic decline. In Gloucester, the coalition’s harsh cuts are hurting, there’s no sign of them working.

Parmjit Dhanda

This couldn’t be further from the truth. This government has decided to cut the funding of higher education by 80%. Some institutions are set to lose 97% of their funding. To fill this chasm in funding the government has decided to shift the funding burden from the state directly on to the student. No overall increase for universities and not an extra penny for deficit reduction.

When you throw in accommodation costs it won’t be uncommon for students to end their courses with a £40,000 debt around their necks and by the time working class and middle class parents have tried to navigate their way around the complex system of grants, fee remission and variable fees – you’ll find many young people from places like the one I used to represent just won’t enter higher education anymore.

Yes, Labour introduced tuition fees. Personally, I accept that those that those who benefit from a university education should contribute something towards it. But Labour only introduced the system in order to grow and invest in the university sector – not to cut it by 80%. At present students contribute on average about 10% of the costs of their degree. That burden is about to be shifted massively away from the state and towards the student by this government.

To really rub the noses of aspiring families in it, the Con Dems will be taking thousands of pounds away from middle class families in child benefit – many of whom put this money away with a view to helping their children through university.

Labour should oppose any increase in tuition fees next week, and I’m sure they will. The Lib Dems are showing breath-taking hypocrisy on this issue – the Lib Dem candidate who stood against me at the general election sums it up when he shrugs his shoulders and fulsomely now supports a system that he was trashing when he signed the NUS pledge a few months ago. Instead, the Lib Dems now talk about the benefits of raising the salary to £21,000 before repayments begin (from £15,000) and they can’t understand why people don’t thank them for this.

The simple truth is this. Whatever the salary level you set repayment at, the vast majority of us are not prepared to see our children saddled with such a monstrous level of debt. Part of the reason the Liberals are facing such vilification across the country is because they could never come close to winning in places like Gloucester, but by telling outright lies about what they would do if ever they were in power, they were able to steel enough Labour votes to let Tories sneak in to our constituencies. But we mustn’t forget, regardless of their hue or political background, and largely due to a huge groundswell of student anger, every single MP will have to face up to their local constituents and explain why draconian cuts to universities should be funded through student debt.

I don’t think the government will be defeated in the vote next week, but they will lose the argument. This will be such a high profile vote that it will cost many a MP their career at the next election.

Parmjit Dhanda is a Matson resident in Gloucester.
He was Member of Parliament for Gloucester from June 2001 –  May 2010

Everything we worked for in Gloucester over the past decade, like massive reductions in unemployment, more doctors, nurses, teachers, police – better schools, hospitals and hundreds of millions in regeneration, is in danger of being undone.

In less than 6 months in office the new coalition government has set about reducing the country’s deficit in a hasty and dangerous way that jeopardises 600,000 jobs in the public sector and a further 700,000 in the private sector. The deficit does need to be tackled, but the reckless way that local politicians are setting about cutting £120 million from council services alone is set to wreck over a decade of hard work which restored our City from being Cheltenham’s poor relation to being considered one of the country’s top ten cities in an influential national report just two years ago.

Councillors Mark Hawthorne (Conservative), Jeremy Hilton (Lib Dem) and Richard Graham MP (Conservative) must stop attacking a public sector which provides the private sector with 37 pence of every pound through procurement. If you take £120m out of the local economy through cuts, you will cause shockwaves that will take us back to the 1980s, possibly even the 1920s.

These are dangerous times – just days ago Richard Graham voted for a Bill which will cut the compensation to public sector workers who lose their jobs. I don’t recall seeing any manifesto saying that a party would cut redundancy payments and then tell those same workers that they’d be removed from their jobs in their hundreds of thousands – yet that is what Mr Graham is now supporting.

By cancelling £20m of investment in the Academy at Central Technology College the coalition have not just affected the life chances of local children, they have wielded a hammer to the recovery of the private sector construction companies who were set to benefit. Thousands more jobs depended on the Building Schools for the Future Programme that would have rebuilt Gloucester’s schools from the year 2014. That’s now been shelved by this government. Whilst roaming the City and shaking hands Mr Graham likes to tell us “we’re all in this together.” But we’re not. If he had chosen the state sector for his children instead of Eton he would understand the strain he is imposing on local people. The cuts mooted by the Schools Forum in Gloucester for our local state sector are breathtakingly savage. He should be fighting those cuts.

Hospital wards are closing, there will be cuts to police numbers on our streets, the elderly and the disabled are losing home help, and benefits will be cut to those who have just been made redundant by this government’s over zealous deficit reduction plan. Surely these are measures we elect our politicians to oppose? Hilton, Hawthorne and Graham, I fear, are not doing this out of a belief that this ‘medicine’ will help Gloucester but instead are doing it because this has always been the ambition of Conservative zealots. They want to reduce the state, but they are naïve if they think the private sector – which will take the brunt of the job losses – will be in a position to take up the strain. But by using the Liberal Democrats as their cover, Tories feel liberated to go further and faster than they ever dreamed they could get away with – rolling back the state forever.

The danger is, when Hilton, Hawthorne and Graham are gone, Gloucester won’t need politicians to repair the damage – they will need miracle workers.

As someone who lives here and loves this City I feel deeply saddened and concerned at what is being done in the name of deficit reduction by this government and its local pact of Lib Dems and Tories. My fear is that when Hilton, Hawthorne and Graham understand the consequences of the decisions they are taking, our economy will be nose-diving and a decade of good work in Gloucester will have been dismantled.

Question from:  Parmjit Dhanda (Gloucester – LAB)

Minister answering:  Rt Hon Rosie Winterton

Question

To ask the Minister of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, when he expects to conclude his deliberations on the Gloucester Linkages Project 293964

Answer

The Department has now approved the additional funding of £7.7m being sought for the Gloucester Economic Linkages Project.  I have today written to the South West Regional Development Agency informing them of this decision.

The Prime Minister’s speech at conference reminded us it was only a Labour government that had the foresight and determination to introduce the policies that have transformed our country in the last twelve years.  The minimum wage, paid maternity leave, the Climate Change Bill, Civil Partnerships, reduced waiting lists and record school results could only have been delivered under a Labour government.

It was a Labour government that realised that markets alone were not enough and that the state needed to intervene to lead us through the recession towards recovery.

I believe voters understand this.  But they also need to know that Labour will be on their side in the future, that we still understand their needs and concerns and that we have fresh ideas that can make a positive, tangible impact on their every day lives. 

I think these measures were the highlights of the PM’s conference speech:

• Tough new regulations on the banking system: tackling bonuses which encourage reckless gambling and ensuring that in Britain markets will have morals.
• Post Offices up and down the land will be given a new role to help encourage community banking.  I look forward to seeing the details on this.
• A guarantee by law that Britain will give 0.7% of our GDP in foreign aid each year.  What could possibly be a better demonstration of Labour values?
• A referendum on changing our voting system at the start of the next Parliament if we win the General Election.  A debate on the more proportional Alternative Vote system has got to be welcome.
• New Family Intervention Projects – these will intervene early where families have the most complex needs and in doing so could save millions as we help prevent people ever committing crime or becoming dependent on benefits.

There were many other policy announcements, but I think these were particularly eye catching in the Hall in Brighton.  I hope they’ll be popular out in the country too.

It’ll be part of a sporting decade that sees London host the Olympic Games, The Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, the Rugby League World Cup and the Cricket World Cup in England and, who knows – perhaps the football World Cup too in 2018.

In the year 1991 I was a student at Nottingham University and can clearly recall the Rugby World Cup which saw England ultimately finish runners up to Australia at Twickenham. And just how much change will a visitor to Gloucester for the 1991 group game between New Zealand and the USA see if they return to visit us again when Kingholm hosts another World Cup match in 2015? By then Kingsholm is likely to hold 18,000 spectators.

Well, back in 1991 they would not have had the choice of hotels in Gloucester that we have developed and are continuing to develop. They wouldn’t have been able to travel in through the South West by-pass, they wouldn’t have been able to shop at the Quays, see new life in the Docks and then wander through the town to admire the new stand at Kingsholm.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot more to do for our visitors and our own residents, which is part of the reason I’ve spent so much time trying to help sort out the multi-millions in funding required for the ‘linkages’ work between the Docks and the Town Centre, but look, as a City we are now a world of progress beyond where we were in the investment starved days of 1991.

The fact that alongside great stadia of world renown, like Wembley, Anfield, Twickenham and the Emirates stadium will be the our own City’s sporting cathedral of Kingholm is not just a big boost, I think its also an acknowledgement of how far the City has progressed.

We’re the best in the world at running ourselves down, but this week’s decision is real reason to be proud – of Gloucester Rugby and our City.

I’d also like to say a big thank you to the many kind comments I had about my speech on Twitter. I may not have won the contest in Parliament, but I’m told I won it on Twitter! So I need to start twittering myself which I mean to do asap.

Also, there was a nice post on the FT’s website after the speeches I thought I’d share with you…

http://blogs.ft.com/westminster/2009/06/speakers-speeches-a-brief-summary/

This is a unique time and opportunity to reform Parliament. To do so the next Speaker of the House will need to be someone who will work to clinically shift power away from the Executive and from Parliament and place it firmly back in the hands of the people. Only then can we begin to put behind us the on-going destruction of public confidence over MPs’ allowances. It’s too late for evolution and time for us to be brave. I believe that if we firmly shift the pendulum of power back to the public they are more likely to put their trust in us again. To put these changes in place we will need a Speaker who is comfortable in, and able to communicate with modern Britain.

I think he or she will need to do 3 key things. Firstly, take Parliament out of Westminster. We need to give ownership of Parliament to the people. Hence Ministers, Shadow Ministers and whips will need to relinquish their control of the Parliamentary Agenda. Through new technology like internet polling the public should choose the issues for ‘topical debate’. And instead of poorly attended debates lacking atmosphere in Westminster Hall, Parliament should relocate Ministers and the entire apparatus for these debates to Town Halls around the country. A day of adjournment debates on local issues in the regions would be top billing in regional media and give us the chance to draw crowds to Parliamentary proceedings.

Secondly, we need to change our personnel to reflect modern Britain. The next Speaker needs to do much more than preside over committees and Parliamentary proceedings in the Chamber. In a more public way than ever, the Speaker will be the interface between Parliament and modern Britain, championing the role of MPs and encouraging greater participation amongst the public. But to truly change the settlement in favour of the public, the personnel who represent our Parliament will have to change too. At the current rate of progress Parliament will not be representative of its racial, gender or class mix at any time in the next 100 years. The Speaker must actively encourage political parties to make changes, through law, to catalyse these changes over one or two terms, not 100 years.

Just one example of Parliament’s abject failure to move with the times is the fact the Palace of Westminster still does not have even rudimentary crèche facilities to allow MPs access to child care. And then we leave MPs to face the music when they take it upon themselves to use their archaic allowances system to come up with alternative child care provision. Parliament not only stitches them up at the outset, it then hangs them out to dry afterwards. That’s not a defence of those that abuse the system, but an acceptance of how far removed from reality the system has become. Surely the Speaker’s job is to make Parliament more representative of society and to actively articulate how it will be done.

Finally, Mr or Madam Speaker needs to change the balance – to create a more relaxed executive, a stronger Parliament. As politicians we need to accept that we are living in changing times. It’s time for us to be more deferential towards the public. The British public want to see the executive loosen its grip. At present party whips don’t just influence membership and chairs of our committees; they even decide which MPs deserve a nice office. Parliament should elect its chairs, and all of the administrative matters (like allowances and accommodation) should be entirely independent of politicians.

In the current set up it is inevitable that there will be a large element of ‘buggins turn’ and a closed shop mentality, partly because our upper chamber is still full of political appointments and hereditary peers. Parliament is in danger of being left behind while the world moves on, so the next Speaker needs to be brave and play a leadership role in championing reform of the House of Lords.

I hope whichever candidate comes forward with a radical agenda encompassing these principles of reform will prevail on June 22nd. Just as importantly such an agenda will have the support of the public.