Jonathan Wallace

Labour MP for Tyne Bridge, Mr David Clelland, is not having a good year. There is open speculation in the North East press about his future following his interesting use of the expenses system to give his then partner Brenda an equity release of £45,000 from his taxpayer funded London home. (Shortly afterwards Brenda became Mrs Clelland.) To add to his troubles, it was revealed that Mr Clelland had bought a rather attractive "oriental rug" and tried to get the taxpayer to pick up the bill for it.

Mr Clelland has also been one of the leading critics of the government's policy on smoking. He led the unsuccessful attempt to have private members' clubs excluded from the ban on smoking in public places. More recently he has been trying to incinerate government plans to ban tobacco displays in shops. The Observer recently attacked him for not declaring an interest in the issue. It turns out his step-daughter is head of a pro-smoking lobby group that is financed by the tobacco industry to fight the retail display ban.

Now Mr Clelland's troubles are a bit closer to home. Gateshead Council's Labour group will tomorrow move and debate a motion at full council highlighting the deaths and ill health caused by smoking in Gateshead - pointing out that the smoking-related health situation in the borough is amongst the worst in the country.

Interestingly, the motion goes on to demand that the MPs of the borough support a ban on point of sale promotions of tobacco in shops. Most Labour councillors in Gateshead come from the new Gateshead constituency for which Mr Clelland was narrowly selected to fight the next general election. His Tyne Bridge constituency is being scrapped.

So on the big, high profile issue on which Mr Clelland is battling, his own troops appear not only to be failing to back him, they are demanding he abandons the line he is taking. Is this the opening shot is a Gateshead Labour plot to rid themselves of this MP? Are there ambitious people in the Labour group with their sights set on his seat? Is Mr Clelland about to be smoked out?

I was in Gateshead Civic Centre this morning to attend Cabinet and bumped into a senior member of the Gateshead Labour party. To spare him his blushes, I will not mention his name! He was talking about his villas in Spain. "How interesting it is to see a socialist engaging in the world of the multiple home owning democracy, even if the homes are abroad!" I joked.

"Former socialist," he corrected me!

I'm sure the company he keeps in the Labour Party is of like mind!

For the first time in nearly a decade (other than holidays and times when I worked from home) I am not spending a Monday morning on the train to London. Bliss! Not that it's very relaxing here. Okay, I didn't have to get up at 6.40am, but I have had to make a trip to the allotment and now I am back home, surrounded by papers I need to read for meetings tonight and tomorrow. Meanwhile an email has arrived asking me to facilitate a meeting next Monday in Cumbria of the county council group.

So I am rapidly back into the swing of things (not that I was ever really out of them.)

Yesterday I paid a visit to Newcastle North constituency, a key battleground in the North East. The news from there is that Little Big McHenderson, the Labour MP (and a definite vote winner - for the Lib Dems) has announced his retirement at the general election. Whether or not this is to spend more time with his burgers (he's on McDonald's payroll as an "adviser") is not clear.

I was also out collecting petition signatures against Labour's cuts to flower beds in Whickham (Labour call them "efficiency savings"). We got about 70 signatures.

I'm off to bake bread now!
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Another milestone in my bid to conquer the known universe - whilst I was on holiday my YouTube videos reached three quater of a million viewings. Sadly, for the rest of the world hoping desperately that I would get a life, I have over 2 hours of video shot in Paris, Norway, Faroe Islands, Iceland and the Orkney Islands over the past 3 weeks which will all be edited and uploaded to YouTube.

If anyone is short of something constructive to do, feel free to boost my viewing figures further at www.youtube.com/jonathanwallace

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It seems everything happened whilst I was away. Michael Jackson died (we had previously tried to get tickets for the O2 concerts when they were first announced but found they were sold out). Britain had a heatwave (we were getting worried as we sailed around the North Atlantic that all our crops would be frazzled by the time we got back - fortunately they are all doing well.). Cowley St suffered a flood on floor three right next to my old desk. (I always miss the exciting stuff!)

But the big news in my absence was that National Express decided to hand back the keys to the East Coast railway line. Seems as though National Excess couldn't afford the fare. Quite when they will hand over the service is not known but it is rather ironic that just as I stop using the service as a regular traveller, they decide they want to hand over the service to people who know how to run trains.

It is doubly ironic that I should find myself writing this post on the National Express train heading to Newcastle. At least however I am heading home.

I feel sorry for the staff running the rail service. Not only do they have to put up with passengers upset by management decisions to cancel trains, they are about to have their third employer in two years.

The question now is what happens to the franchise. I have seen suggestions that the government wants to offload it as quickly as possible. There are some who want it fully nationalised. There are times when putting a company into public ownership is the right thing to do. There are other times when public ownership is inappropriate or just plain damaging. I certainly don't support public ownership simply for the sake of it. I'll leave that to the Labour dinosaurs. The railways themselves did not do well under state ownership. Remember Beeching was a government appointee with a government remit to hack down large parts of the rail network. In effect British Rail was neglected as governments were not committed to investment and making it a success. There are plenty of faults with the current private franchising operation, but outside Network Rail, the private operators are at least committed to making running trains a success (even if like National Express they make a hash of it.)

I can't imagine for a moment that a Tory government would look on a publicly-owned rail system favourably despite their protestations of support, which we all know is drivel. A rail network fully owned by the public would not fare well under the Tories.

Perhaps what we need to do is work out what the final shape and purpose of a rail system should be and then decide the ownership on the basis of how best to deliver that vision.

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We arrived at Harwich at 8am today and we are now on the coach heading to Victoria. A very pleasant holiday and we are thinking of returning to Iceland to see the country in more detail. The trouble with doing a cruise is the rather fleeting glimpses gained of places visited. Iceland has too much interesting geology and history to do on three one day visits. We need much longer there. Whilst I think it unlikely we will get back to the Faroes, we are likely to return to Norway. It is, after all, only a ferry ride away from Tyneside.

I wouldn't mind returning to the Orkneys, though it would be as a stepping stone to visit the Shetlands. Incidentally, the amusing incident of the holiday was in the Orkneys. The local MP, Alisdair Carmichael, had picked up from Facebook that I had arrived in Kirkwall and sent me a message suggesting we meet up. Alas, we didn't have time to do so as we were only there for half a day. But we did speak on the phone. Facebook, internet, mobile phones. There's no escaping them!

Apparently there has been a heatwave in the UK whilst I was away. And the first thing that happens when we set foot again back here? - it rains. Welcome back! Mind you, I guess the allotment could do with a heavy downpour.

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We have just arrived in Kirkwall in the Orkney Islands, having spent a day and a half sailing across the North Atlantic from Iceland. So we've done volcanoes, whale watching, geysers and waterfalls. Today we go to Skara Brae and then it's back to Harwich for the end of this holiday.

Given the poor signal at sea, I turned on the blackberry as we arrived this morning in Kirkwall and got a bucketful of emails.
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Do you remember the Sedgefield by-election? I do! I went to do the photos and video for the Lib Dem campaign (and managed to write off one video camera in the process when I got caught in one of those massive downpours.)


I wasn't the only councillor from Gateshead to be involved with the by-election. Paul Foy, Labour councillor for Birtley and office assistant for Blaydon MP David Anderson, was there as well. The reason I knew that is down to Councillor Peter Mole, a Labour council cabinet member. At full council on 19th July 2007, on the same day as the by-election, he announced that Cllr Foy was down in Sedgefield helping Labour in the by-election. As is so often the case, Cllr Mole is a useful font of wisdom when it comes to what's happening in the local Labour party!

I was therefore intrigued by the following claim for "staff car travel" made by Mr Anderson on 28th July 2007, just 9 days after the by-election. The amount was for £214.80. That seems an awful lot for one month's car use by a member of staff and, unless I have missed it, I can find no other similar claim anywhere in Mr Anderson's accounts. In other words this claim seems to be a one off.


Now, we all know that an MP's office budget cannot be used for party political purposes. Paying staff expenses to help Labour in a by-election is certainly not a permitted use of taxpayer funded office allowances. Quite what the claim in Mr Anderson's allowance was for, and which member of staff it covered, are not clear from the published accounts. All but the actual amount has been covered up.

So, could Mr Anderson enlighten us with the details as to what the purpose of the "car travel" claim of his staff member was for?

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The GPRS signal is rather variable out here as we head around the north of Iceland so whether or not this post will get through immediately or wait in the queue for the signal is yet to be seen. Anyway, we did Norway last week, visiting Flam and Alesund. We were whale watching as we headed for the Faroe Islands on Saturday and we also experienced 24 hour daylight.

We've done one stop in Iceland this morning, to look at lava flows and go swimming in a hot lake. Very relaxing, except we had to get up at 6am to do it. We are now heading anti-clockwise around Iceland and should be in Reykjavik tomorrow.

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Before going on holiday, I found a bit of time to go through the claims and receipts of Labour MPs in Gateshead. And some very interesting reading they make. So here's the first in a series of interesting highlights.

Blaydon MP David Anderson paid a company from his taxpayer funded office allowance £2056.25 in March 2006 for "consultancy, constituency office support and development, staff development, casework management, media handling and parliamentary reports."

In December 2007 a payment of £4,459 was paid to the same company, this time in connection with Mr Anderson's annual report.

The company in question is Mapset Ltd. I can reveal that the director of this company is a Mr Gary Haley, a Gateshead Labour Councillor.

He had previously been Labour candidate in my ward but at his 3rd attempt at election his vote spectacularly collapsed. He then turned his attention to Dunston Hill and Whickham East ward, a very marginal Lib Dem held seat. During his two attempts to get elected there I am pleased to say that the Lib Dem majority increased substantially.

Mr Haley then jumped wards again in July 2007 to be Labour candidate in Dunston and Teams, a safe Labour ward, which resulted in his election as councillor (it was his 6th attempt.)

I found the following description of Mapset on the Journal website from 12 August 2003:

"Mapset has built up a reputation for high-quality book design for large-scale projects in environmental publicity.

"But it also works on projects including map-based corporate publicity."

Quite how all this fits in with running a constituency office, casework management, media handling and parliamentary reports is not clear.

£6500 of taxpayers' money paid to Mr Anderson's friend's business is a great deal of money. I am a great believer in ensuring as much support as possible goes to local businesses where they are able to supply good quality goods and services at a competitive rate.

So I can only hope that Mr Anderson wanted to ensure other local businesses got a fair chance to bid for the contract. After all, I'm sure Mr Anderson would not want to be seen favouring a business run by one of his Labour chums.

So perhaps he could enlighten us as to the tendering process he used and, without giving away any commercial confidentiality, indicate how many other offers for the same work resulted from the bidding process and therefore how much was saved by opting for Mr Haley's company.
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