This year’s budget passed almost without notice, and not just because of the war in Iraq. It was the logical outcome of an accelerating trend. Major spending decisions are now annouced in the autumn and there is scepticism about the idea that government can manage the economy at all.
But this is Westminster. So even though budget day isn’t what it was, there has to be a debate. For several days. On one of them the minister opening the debate was Charles Clarke, the secretary of state for education and skills.
Clarke began in David Brent mode: "It is the skills and talents of our people that are our greatest strength." But he was soon speaking in the impenetrable jargon used for most education debates.
He talked about “the establishment and development of sector skills councils, which will bring together major employers and educators for each major sector of the economy”. Or said things like “We also need to attack level 2 plus” and “we are revitalising the culture of the relationship between employment and education”.
If anyone could thicken this fog it was Geraint Davies, the hyperloyal Labour MP for Croydon Central. He is always popping up to ask what he imagines are helpful questions, but he still looks like the sort of uncle who can waggle his ears to entertain the children.
This time he invited Clarke to visit Croydon (surely he wasn't that bad?) where “the education action zone has pioneered excellent work on seconding people into the workplace on time-based projects”.
As far as you could tell, the central message from Charles Clarke (Highgate and King’s College, Cambridge) was that academics should come down from their ivory towers and that vocational education should not be seen as second best.
“We reject the idea that some people in the education system appeared to have in the past that vocational work is for the less academically gifted,” he said.
But when you see how New Labour ministers educate their own children, you see what they really believe. To a great extent they use church schools, grammar schools and even private schools.
In other words, schools which emphasise academic excellence and are sceptical of the jargon that Clarke’s government imposes upon the rest of the education system.
There is a new Leader of the House. Robin Cook will be missed, though even as Foreign Secretary he was never the intellectual force he had promised to be. Remember the importance we used to attach to the “Cook-Maclennan Agreement”? His habit of mislaying wives at the airport ultimately rendered him a marginal and slightly ridiculous figure.
For a short time we had Ben Bradshaw, and now we have a permanent replacement: John Reid, the ultimate Scottish machine politician.
One story about Reid stands out. At the 1983 Labour Conference he got into an argument in the bar – probably with a bearded man. Reid maintained that the party was split between Tony Benn’s Leninists and soft-left “Luxemburgers” led by Neil Kinnock. Those who overheard him were so impressed that Reid was taken to the Labour leader to repeat his remarks. Kinnock shook his hand: “Thank Christ someone else knows what is going on in the party.”
Rosa Luxemburg was a German revolutionary who scorned all thought of reform by parliamentary means. This tells you all you need know about Neil Kinnock and the bizarre mind-set of the Labour Party in the 1980s. It is almost enough to make you warm to Tony Blair.
Reid’s Marxist days are long behind him, but he is not the only former comrade in New Labour’s inner circles. Deeply ingrained habits of loyalty to the party line and intolerance of dissent commend you to any leader.
His promotion now suggests the prime minister does is not feeling of magnanimous. It is hard to imagine Reid taking up Robin Cook’s attempt to complete the reform of the Lords and he is no supporter of proportional representation.
He has become that great political cliché: “a safe pair of hands”. In short order he has served as secretary of state for Scotland and then Northern Ireland, and Chairman of the Labour Party. For a captain to move his best fielder that often almost looks like panic.
Reid’s first government post was as a junior defence minister. One source suggests he came to love the technicalities of the subject and was fond of taking the salute at parades.
If you don’t make it to Red Square, New Labour is the next best thing.
At times like this House Points looks to the countryside for consolation. The lush Welland Valley, the grandure of the Cuillins, the eerie Stiperstones. Last Thursday's questions on the environment, food and rural affairs almost cured us of this habit.
John Thurso was worried about EU proposals on sheep identification. (“Isn’t that Shawn?” “Yes, and that's Woolly Linda.”) He feared for the future of the industry in Scotland.
Others worried about regulations on the disposal of fallen stock – dead farm animals to you and me. Sandra Gidley championed something called 'biodigestion', which sounds green and also rather disgusting.
But the nastiest thing in the woodshed was bovine TB. MPs said it was spreading insidiously in Cheshire, rapidly in Wiltshire and showing a worrying increase in Staffordshire. What makes the disease really controversial is the government's proposed remedy: a cull of badgers.
Several people managed to ask about this, even urge a wider cull, without saying so plainly. Headlines like “Kill more fluffy badgers, says local MP”make politicians nervous. Look at the outcry over the North Uist hedgehogs.
Now, if you know your Beatrix Potter, Tommy Brock is no Mrs Tiggywinkle. He drugs old Mr Bouncer with a cabbage leaf cigar and steals the Flopsy Bunnies. When Benjamin Bunny and Peter Rabbit... You’ll have to read it for yourself.
Despite this, there are many who think the case for culling has not been made. They call for research on vaccination instead. Not just for cows: they want a BCG for badgers too. John Hayes from South Holland and the Deepings (he plays the bass) wanted it for “the whole wildlife reservoir population”.
Imagine the scene. Nervous vet: Just a little prick with a needle. Weasel (coldly): Yes, aren't you?
Some campaigners say bovine TB flourishes in the same conditions as human TB: poor housing, poor diets, too much stress. Maybe that's being anthropomorphic.
But since 1945 we have lost 97 per cent of our flower-rich meadows. The populations of birds like the lapwing, the song thrush and the skylark have more than halved. The adonis blue and the marsh fritillary butterflies have disappeared.
All have been sacrificed to a hugely subsidised agriculture. We must make sure badgers do not go the same way.
Forget Iraq for a while. Last Friday the Commons tackled something almost as controversial. Hedges. In the words of Laurence Robertson the Tory MP for Tewkesbury: “The nightmare of high hedges has gone on for some years.”
This is not a subject to tackle lightly. There is a lot of expertise around. Last Friday’s second reading of the High Hedges (No. 2) Bill heard reference to Baroness Gardner of Parkes, the all-party group on gardening and horticulture and Charles Mynors classic volume The Law of Trees, Forests and Hedgerows.
And John Prescott’s department has issued a document called Over the Garden Hedge. Then again, it may have been The Over Harden Gedge.
Nevertheless, we are almost certain Robertson is wrong. We can recall seeing hedges as far back as, ooh, the late 1970s. Maybe everyone was drunk with the novelty of the things, but we do not recall them being thought of as a nightmare. And the Commons did not feel it necessary to debate them.
The other week, when the House debated fireworks, House Points observed that the libertarian ideas you read in Liberal Democrat publications are not always reflected when our MPs speak. It was equally true of the hedges debate.
There is a Peel Group and a Beveridge Group. The MPs who care above all for public safety should form the You’ll Have Someone’s Eye Out With That Group.
Don Foster, who would probably be its first chair, reported that Ludlow’s Matthew Green is worried that even a two-metre height limit for hedges may be too generous. When A. E. Housman wrote “On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble,” he didn’t know the half of it.
We did enjoy Richard Younger-Ross’s authoritative intervention on clay heave, though.
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There is a little time before the next programme, so here is an amusing story.
In 1948 a Washington radio station asked foreign ambassadors what each would most like for Christmas. The French Ambassador wanted peace throughout the world, the Soviet Ambassador freedom for all people enslaved by imperialism.
Britain’s Sir Oliver Franks misunderstood the request: “It's very kind of you to ask. I'd quite like a box of crystallised fruits.”