HearFromYourMP

Comments

• Posted by Justin Kilcullen-Nichols, 19:35, Tue 17 November 2009: (Is this post abusive?) #

  Several areas that need to be focused on. 1) Tax evasion - Labour has pulled off 'smoke and mirrors' polocy with regards to chasing down corporate tax dodgers. The fact that people like Murdoch are able to get away with paying minimal tax while at the same time taking money out of our country needs to stop.

  2) The return of civil rights previously eroded by the terrorism act. The reduction in risk of death by terrorist attack is not large enough to warrant the injustices done by this act.

  3) Trimming down quangos and other non-jobs paid for by the taxpayer.

  4) Peer reviewed scientific evidence to be listened to over personal feelings in Parliment.

  5) An increase in a) The qualifications needed to train as a teacher b) An increase in the salary of a classroom teacher...if we are to regain our status of providing a world class education then we need to lure world class professionals from other, better paid areas instead of depending on second best. (see PISA rankings in reading, maths and science)

• Posted by Darren Lines, 10:04, Wed 18 November 2009: (Is this post abusive?) #

  I feel that there are quite a few problems with this country and a lot of measures that the government put in are to mask them and not fix them.

  A new law that I strongly believe must be introduced is that the people MUST elect THEIR Prime Minister. In the case that a Prime Minister steps down or retires, then it should be up to the people, not the party in power, to elect the successor.

  My next point is with VAT. I would hope that as the financial situation with the country has not improved, that the budget offers to extend the lower VAT period for one more year.

  I also believe that the government need to reduce their taxation of fuel. Once again the price per gallon is over £1 per litre, and at least 65p of that is going straight to the government. No one else is taxed so highly for fuel. The fact that they say they make it high for environmental purposes is quite frankly disgusting. I am not saying that we should care about the environment, far from it, however simply hiking taxes for non-green things is not doing anything to help. Soon, the price of fuel will cripple the country as a lot of people will not be able to afford to travel to work, so will all go on job seekers allowance as it is more profitable for them. It was only about 10 or so months ago that fuel was at £0.85 per litre. The government should aim to get the price of fuel back down to that region again.

  While on the subject of the roads, I feel that the government are going about road safety the wrong way. All they seem to be doing is reducing the speeds of roads and fitting more and more speed cameras. These measures are only in place as an excuse for incompetent drivers, and drivers who do not fully understand the rules of the road. Rather than penalise good drivers, new drivers should be educated to a higher level, and theory refreshers should be introduced every 10 years. There would be a lot less incidents on the road if people indicated and looked more, and had better lane discipline.

  Also, I think that it’s time to introduce a better system for people visiting or moving to this country. Most countries have a screening system so only people who can benefit the country can move there, whereas we seem to let anyone in. That may sound rude or racist, but I am not meaning to be any of those things. I even believe that the different cultures in the country will only make it better. However, we are an island with limited space, jobs, money, and resources, and we are over populated. The government needs to put a scheme in place to limit the number of people coming into the country.

  There are many more areas that I feel need to be addressed, and I will note these when I've had the opportunity to note them down. I must say that I feel like the government is doing things for their own greed rather than for the people of this country.

• Posted by Mike Hancock, 14:23, Wed 18 November 2009: (Is this post abusive?) #

  Thanks for these posts.

  On Justin’s point on tax avoidance, recent research by the TUC showed that tax avoidance by companies was costing the country £25 billion – over a quarter of the total cost of the NHS. Avoidance is legal (as compared to evasion) but I would like to see a general anti-tax avoidance measure which other countries have successfully introduced to get some of this money back. And it is not fair to individuals or smaller businesses who can’t afford expensive tax lawyers or accountants to exploit the loopholes. I have always said that the terrorists will have won if we sacrifice too many of our hard-won democratic freedoms in fighting terrorism and the Lib Dems have been at the forefront of, for example, fighting the extension on the length someone can be detained without being charged. On the issue of Government scientists, their independence should be established in law and they shouldn’t be able to be sacked just for saying something a Government minister disagrees with. But the independence of Government scientists and statisticians is crucially important.

  On fuel duty, I think the tax should help to a degree stabilize the price – so it decreases a bit when fuel prices go up. Businesses in particular need stability as much as possible in the price to plan ahead. Fuel Duty has been a “stealth tax” in recent months as it went up to compensate for the VAT decrease, and I think as gone up a further two times this year. I would like to see a move away from fuel duty to vehicle exercise duty to encourage people to buy more environmentally cars in the first place.

• Posted by Darren Lines, 08:21, Thu 19 November 2009: (Is this post abusive?) #

  I would agree with you, however there are really no viable alternatives for the average motorist in the UK that are truly environmentally better cars. Duty could be raised in large 4x4s and MPVs, but lowering duty on electric cars and hybrids is a nonsense. Electric cars and the hybrids that are available are nothing more than a placebo. Both electrics and hybrids require batteries, the production of which has a huge carbon footprint, so much so that my 15 year old car is more environmentally friendly than any hybrid that's been sold, and will be for a long while to come. It has been documented that it would take a hybrid car an average of 25 years until it starts becoming more environmentally friendly than an equivalent sized internal combustion engine car. I am sure that the figure would be similar, if not a little lower for electric cars too.

  Perhaps this increase in excise duty could be put towards researching sustainable energy sources. There is a lot of work to be done in that area, and maybe instead of spending money on adverts to say we need to be more energy conscious, which I'm sure that most decent people living understands, the money should be redirected to finding the solutions, as there is a long way to go.

  For example, everyone knows to use energy saver bulbs instead of incandescent bulbs as they use around 70-90% less energy and last around 5 times longer in most situations. However, what people don't know is that in around 9 year’s time, these bulbs will seem as wasteful as incandescent bulbs do now, due to LED lighting being available for household use. The technology already exists. Osram produce a single LED that is brighter than a 50 watt halogen light, producing over 1000 lumens of light, yet uses a fraction of its power. The reason why they are not yet in everyone’s homes is because to buy a replacement bulb would cost around £2, compared to the £1 price of energy saver bulbs. The reason for this is the cost of producing the LED its self; however, companies are very close to finding a solution, which it why when I read the article, they were estimating that the LEDs could be mass produced cheap enough to go in every home in around 10 years.

  This is just a light bulb. I'm sure there are thousands of other projects out there trying to help the environment and every living creature on the earth, which could do with funding to give us solutions, not just tell us that there is a problem.

• Posted by Mike Hancock, 13:33, Thu 19 November 2009: (Is this post abusive?) #

  These are good points.

  And there are valid arguments to be had over what is environmentally friendly/better or not. If you are getting a new car anyway, it is better to get a more environmentally friendly one – not necessarily a hybrid but one that uses less petrol and generates less CO2 per mile. Just getting a new car, the benefits of improving CO2 emissions per mile compared to your old one has to be balanced against the costs of manufacturing the cars in terms of CO2 emissions which is large. The same sort of arguments apply to light bulbs.

  There are arguments also over lifestyle changes to reduce CO2 emissions. I think, frankly the challenge to reduce CO2 emissions is large and now urgent and it will take a combination of people reducing their individual carbon footprints and also generating energy – particularly electricity with less CO2 emissions and we know how to do that – essentially through renewable sources – wind, solar and wave.

• Posted by Justin Kilcullen-Nichols, 04:05, Fri 20 November 2009: (Is this post abusive?) #

  As lovely as the utopia dream of generating electricity through renewable sources is, we need to be realistic in terms of what is achievable, and what is affordable. Currently the only technology that seems viable is nuclear power, but unfortunately (and ironically) environmental groups have a strict anti-nuclear stance as well as nuclear energy having bad press due to scare words such as "radiation! Chernobyl and meltdown!". More irony can be found in the fact that nuclear power causes less release of radiation to the environment than coal burners, which are also responsible for the release of other nasties such as mercury, which has ended up in the sea, and therefore our food chain (see FSA guidelines on eating fish). Nuclear *could* also solve the car problem by using that energy to generate hydrogen from water provided fuel cell technology, and hydrogen storage methods are advanced.

• Posted by Mike Hancock, 13:39, Mon 23 November 2009: (Is this post abusive?) #

  Wikipedia discusses the amount of electricity generated by renewables in EU countries at

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_European_Union

  You can see from that Germany is currently generating 23,903 MW from wind a year against our 3,241 MW. And I am not sure that Germany is much windier than the UK! Spain has a comparable population at around 45 million to the UK at around 61 million but is already generating over a third of its electricity through renewables against under 10% for us and Scandinavian countries are above 40%. There is also great potential for (very) small scale solar and wind generation as a very large amount of electricity is wasted in transmission.

  On nuclear: There starts with major problem on timescale and cost. The Government have said that the first of the new nuclear power stations would be completed in 2018. I will though believe that when I see it! And each station is projected to cost £5 billion. Again I suspect it will be more. Decommissioning costs at the end of their lives are also likely to be a lot. I am less sanguine than you on the issue of radioactivity – especially dealing with decommissioned stations at the end of the lives. Why leave that for future generations? But leaving aside the issue of radioactivity, firstly I think like other countries we can generate a lot of electricity from renewables but more importantly it is quicker and probably less expensive than nuclear.

• Posted by Justin Kilcullen-Nichols, 13:19, Tue 24 November 2009: (Is this post abusive?) #

  I would presume from your comments that you have not read the energy white paper found at http://stats.berr.gov.uk/ewp/. I would suggest setting aside a couple of hours and using that time to have a read through this document and educate yourself on the energy needs of this country instead of falling for the 'green vote' option (see what I said before about evidence based policy). Seeing you mention the projected cost of each station as a negative shows you are unaware that 65% of the total lifespan costs for a nuclear station are found in the initial construction. To compare the large initial investment of nuclear with the cheaper initial investment of renewables is misleading and unfair. Look at the total cost over a plants lifespan, and more importantly examine the cost to the taxpayer.

  I honestly would like to know how you came to the conclusion that renewables are likely to be less expensive than nuclear when everything points towards the opposite.

  Yours concerned.

  P.S. fun little calculator on costs http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/uk/06/electricity_calc/html/1.stm

  read the paper for something a little more reliable.

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