It is in a very real sense the triumph of dullness But you can't be expected to take a baby with you on every trip, can you? And now you need never do so again, with our Plastic Passenger Baby! Lifelike and lifesize, it comes in three attitudes: Feet in the Air, Peering out of Side Window, and Doing V-sign out of Back Window Ideal gift for new parents. There has been a spate of stories in recent weeks about the rise of outsourcing to China and India, and quite rightly there is concern about this. Were private-sector employment to start to fall sharply, then the Government should worry. But in the short-term the reverse looks more likely, particularly since demand in Europe is at last picking up a bit.That leads to the third big issue, the ghost at the feast. It is an over-simplification, but big businesses tend to shed jobs while small ones create them. Small and medium-sized businesses are more usually represented by the Institute of Directors, or simply don't bother to sign up to these organisations at all. The big companies get the headlines, the small ones create the clusters of future growth.This principle of looking at what businesses do, rather than what they say, would certainly suggest that there are grounds for concern. For example there are parts of the country, such as the North-east, where new business creation lags badly. There is some sort of productivity gap with other developed countries - a particular concern of the Chancellor - though the productivity numbers for services are notoriously difficult to read.The central point here is that business may be feeling a bit bad-tempered but it is not in general doing at all badly. It is, in a very real sense, the triumph of dullness.But where's the Tory vitality? Where's the research? Where's the inside information? Where are the glorious leaks that swamp the Government's fragile case? Where's the deadliness? For goodness sake, Tories, do buck up.I went in to do some Sexual Offences but they'd been done so I stayed for the few moments available for Criminal Justice.
So where were they? We need muscle, we need knuckle, we need cunning and suppleness! The new shadow minister for transport was so torpid he might not have been awake in any scientific sense.His two questions noted that trains were twice as late as they had been, that passenger targets had been abandoned, services had been cut and congestion had increased - and Alistair Darling reacted as he always does with an air of stifled boredom.Unpleasant as it is to admit such a thing, Mr Darling has doused the fire in the transport debate by suffocating it With carbon dioxide (his own). There is an argument to be won here: there are statistics and facts and comparisons and quoted authorities and a great deal of scornful mockery to be applied to the botched nationalisation of the railways. Conservative Central Office, beaten in all EU hygiene criteria by the Augean stables, has been cleaned out But is it working?Transport questions offer no great hope. It is very much later than they think. Mr Blair has constructed himself a little statistical refuge in which to hide from the appalling NHS productivity figures (spending has gone up 20 per cent but hospital activity has gone up only 2 per cent).Does Mr Howard have the resources - the manpower, the brainpower, the research power, the power to react quickly - to squash Mr Blair's new defensive system? It's the task of today, at PMQs.If Mr Howard allows the new argument to be aired without an annihilating response, then cocky Conservative heads will start to droop again No, the omens aren't good. Tony Blair's speech to the CBI (the one explaining why things are actually much better in the health service than anyone knows) provides us with the first practical test of Michael Howard's organisational ability "Oh, it's early days," they say. What could be a fairer test of that influence than whether before President Bush takes off on Friday we have secured agreement on an agenda in which progress is as much in the interest of the US as Britain?. It is in the interest of US consumers and business that we do not become locked in an escalating trade war. It is in the interests of US troops that they are not asked to pursue tactics that strengthen support for the terrorists. I have deliberately omitted goals which may be desirable but would represent a bridge too far with the present US administration.For instance, they are so saturated in the influence of the Texan oil industry that there is little point at any course between canap?nd coffee in rebuking them for their sabotage of the Kyoto protocol. At some future point there will be a US administration that puts the rights of future generations not to casserole as a result of global warming ahead of a positive return on the next quarterly statement of Halliburton, but this is not that administration.Before the invasion of Iraq we were told that, by taking part in the war, we would acquire influence over Washington. He should do so because peace in the Middle East would do more to enhance the security of the US than any other foreign policy goal, by removing the greatest grievance of the Arab world against the West.I have included no topic on this checklist where British advice would not be totally compatible with US interests. |
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