Welcome to my diary spot on Southport.gb.com where I have provided regular updates on life as your Member of Parliament for Southport. I hope this gives you an insight into the working life of an M.P.  Please keep checking back for further regular updates, especially during the General Election campaign where I will be fighting to continue representing you as your Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament. If you would like to help me in my campaign please visit www.southportlibdems.com or www.johnpugh.org.uk for ways to help.

2005
20th March 2005 - Sleepless in SW1

6th February 2005 - Fall from Grace

24th January 2005 - Autism, Elections, Plugs and Imposters

For year 2004 and earlier entries - Please click here
 

20th March 2005 - SLEEPLESS IN SW1

I awoke last Sunday morning thinking it must be Saturday. I went round on Friday wondering why I hadn't got the football results. I was showing all the symptoms of the seriously deprived of sleep. Yes it was the week of the great Terror Laws debate when the House of Commons sat without break for around 36 hours when M.P.s dossed down in their offices, Peers debated our civil liberties at 5 am and the only sleep many MP's got was between the 3 am and 8 am sittings .Officially though since Friday was not a sitting day it was still a very long Thursday in parliamentary time.

In all a strange experience graced by some marvelous speeches and a certain amount of real tension. Old stagers lamented the grumbling and lack of stamina of younger members. "You should have been here during the great debate of …………………….. ", they would say referring back to a time when men were men and half our legislation was framed by people suffering from the sort of chronic tiredness only usually encouraged in KGB interview rooms. Could this be why every MP'.s room has a rather comfortable sofa or chair- a recognition that survival and mental health in our strange world depends on a capacity to catnap? That by itself would not be so bad but consider this. The House of Commons adjourned at 7 on Thursday to resume at 11 that evening. Could you hazard a guess of where and how some members might have filled in time waiting for the house to convene ? I have to observe that some honourable members judging by the raucous atmosphere when the house resumed at 11 were not just tired, but as they say 'tired and emotional' . 

Back home the perennial hubub on parking issues has re-appeared as a result of some asine blue sky thinking out loud by Sefton officers. I am reminded nostalgically how often this particular political chestnut crops up prior to elections and how similar the debate is every time. When I was a council group leader I opposed the extension of pay and display beyond Bootle and Southport town centre but it was regularly rumoured that pay and display would be extended to everywhere you could find a shop. Every year sensible people said that there was no majority on the council for it and therefore it wasn’t going to happen. Every year some political opportunist wanting to stir things up said
"They're only saying that before the election- Watch what happens afterwards !". 
After a run of the usual dire prophecies on parking from the usual political sources in 1994 I offered publicly before the local elections to eat five years of full council agendas if the prophets of doom were correct and it all happened after the elections. Frankly we needed to establish who was telling the truth. I enclose the picture. Ten years later the agendas are still in mint condition- not even chewed around the edges. I wish I could say the same about myself.

General Election campaigns are now in all but name well underway and as a someone who was human being before they were a politician and have kept my membership going, I have much sympathy with the electorate. Although it’s the time when they -the electors have the power ; its also the time when they feel most got at. Gone are the days when at public hustings candidates made their pitch, voters listened, questioned and then voted.

Now all those bright ideas that clever salesmen employ are taken up by political parties and used to effect. Not because it’s the best way to do things and satisfies the intelligence of both voter and 'voted for' but because they believe it works. Around the parties now sit phalanxes of political consultants, ad men, pollsters etc.-a long way from Gladstone speaking on the balcony of the Dukes Hotel.

Image replaces substance. The Conservatives ,I believe, have machine into which they can feed you shoe size, credit history, the kind of cat food you buy etc and will enable them to profile you. Thus if you get a letter prefaced " Dear Yachstman and Father of Six I know you have a lifelong interest in lupins" well you'll know what is going on. I am of course being somewhat arch and ironic here but I hope making my point which is a rhetorical one "Is there a future for a more direct mature dialogue at elections and how is that future to be advanced ?"

Wednesday was budget day and the air was thick with the sound of Tory foxes being shot - (well they do support the pursuit ) but also an occasion for a number of charities to lobby MP's. Chief among these was the Alzheimer's Society - lovely people. We had a deputation from Southport and we talked of the chances of getting care for Alzheimer's treated as nursing care. It’s a very important issue effecting more and more families and a very good case. I do think the government will have to respond constructively. 

It followed a meeting I had with a lady from Sheffield University who was interviewing me about mental health- not happily my own ! I was late for our rendezvous and my office paged me and as often when paged messages get sent over the phone and then typed and sent on ,you get some strange results. The lady's surname was 'Dyath'. My pager went. I picked it up and looked at it . The printed message said ominously "Dr Death is waiting for you in the Central Lobby". I thought twice before going !

The Alzheimer's Delegation 

6th February 2005 - Fall from Grace

Anyway I re-read my old assembly in the same spirit one reads letters one has written long ago. I never kept any script I used regarding them as ephemera- so it was truly like meeting some bygone self. I could pick up the arch and ironic tone I intended in the script but to me it was like a jolt - like discovering a fall from grace.

To be honest it was refreshingly different in tone and expression to the carefully monitored and policed utterances you come out with in the media glare of politics where any misplaced word can be pounced upon, 
wrenched out of context and used against you. I sensed the freedom I still feel even now when I talk to school groups and children but which as a politician you indulge in at your peril.

Anyway see what you think. Imagine it is 8.50 Monday morning in a large school hall full of boys 11-18 - your colleagues standing round the sides. You walk in. The entire room stands up. You go up on the stage- you ask them to sit .They fall silent. Only your voice for good or ill will fill the next ten minutes. You've decided to speak about 'eccentrics' and you hope for the reassurance of a smile, a laugh- a response from the sea of faces.

Does it sound to you like a politician ? Would it be good if politicians sounded like this ? All I know is that I'd sooner you read this than many a political speech -even ones made by me!

A Plea for Eccentrics

I do not know if you have ever thought what an odd situation we‘re in now. Here are you still half asleep, having come from the organised chaos of your different homes. Most of us emerged from that deeply puzzling condition we call sleep an hour or so ago, pushed aside our Thomas the Tank Engine duvet, looked around for our clothing, tuned in our radio and while cleaning our teeth tried hard to focus on the day ahead. Your thoughts turned to your projects for the day: what you hoped, what you feared.

And here you sit now plonked in assembly next to other strange, in the proper sense, alien, beings whose point of view you can only guess at, whose experiences you can never have, whose history can never be yours, who you will only share a fraction of your life with. Of course exactly how alien and  strange they are may depend partly on who exactly you are sitting next to.

These ought to be very exciting thoughts. I am looking down in front of me at a range of assorted first years, none of whom have any experience of being twelve before. All round you stand staff, many of whom equally and implausibly claim to have never been thirty before. We are all travellers through time on a voyage as unpredictable as any made by Columbus, where even those old salts in the bows of the ship, who have to get off first, have only the vaguest notions. No-one can remember signing up for the voyage and no-one has any clear idea of where were going. In the immortal words of Alexei Sayle " Its a funny old world".

This belief in the fundamental oddity of life, the utter weirdness of it all, is not shared by everyone. It afflicts me, and may at times afflict you, but some people are not afflicted by it at all. They zip confidently round life equipped with a definite plan they seemingly formulated in the cradle, working to some eerie timetable laid down for them. They progress through life from infancy on invisible tracks, unswerving, without pause for reflection or self-doubt.

You know the sort of thing:

Get born
Acquire bladder control
Learn to read
Get to Merchant‘s
Pass GCSEs
Do appropriate A-levels
Go to university
Acquire a good income
Get a house with a patio
Produce 2 children,  and call one Ben
Buy a very shiny car
Start jogging to prevent middle-age spread
Go grey
Retire
Lose bladder control
Die.

1 marvel at such well-organised, motivated people. It‘s as if someone unfairly has slipped them the rules and they‘re up and running in some strange competition which I don‘t understand but they seem to. They get 
on all right. If they were born molluscs they‘d have the best slime trails. If they were born dung beetles they‘d roll excellent dung balls, but some of us would wonder why they lived like that or even if they lived at all.

I want to condemn these people who know — because they don‘t. I want in contrast to praise people who admit they haven‘t got it all sussed out and are prepared to experiment to find out what‘s worthwhile in 
life — who are prepared to do the unconventional — who cheerfully and courageously leap into the unknown.

I was telling the second year the other day about St Simeon Stylites - a man who in the third century built himself a pillar in the Syrian desert about the size of the school clock tower and lived on it for an incredible 32 years until his death. He became a legend in his own lifetime and was visited by people from as far away as Britain. Now I can think of lots of reasons why you might not wish to imitate Simeon and head for a desert pillar: the loneliness, the possible boredom and the somewhat problematic arrangements for personal hygiene. But one obviously poor reason for not doing it is that one simply must get on, there is something obvious one ought to instead:

Go to university
Acquire a good income
Get a house with a patio
Buy a very shiny car
Produce 2 children and call one Ben...  etc

This is not necessarily or automatically a more sensible reaction to our very strange and exciting situation than becoming a hermit — and those who think it must be have lost a feeling for the sheer oddity of life and are sadly doomed to be dull. Why should one not consider the hermit option? The pay‘s rotten but the hours I‘m told are good. Why not as an alternative dedicate your life to saving the rain forest, or lovingly restoring beautiful old machinery, writing poetry or finding a cure for senility?

Shouldn‘t we all really celebrate eccentrics as the explorers of existence? Is the man who cycles up and down the bypass with a bicycle full of old newspapers and cardboard on a one-man campaign to stop smoking any madder than the man who drives down the bypass with burning leaves in his mouth? So let us be slow to judge those who do seemingly mad and futile things — who practice Yoga, buy season tickets for Burnley, take up Morris Dancing, enlist as school inspectors, or make their own soap. For the world is probably very much odder than we think.

24th January 2005 - Autism, Elections, Plugs and Imposters

My sensitivity to that misuse of language has been accentuated by a few visits I have been making to teaching centres for autism- Autism Initiatives in Crosby, the unit at Our Lady of Lourdes and Peterhouse. People with Autism and Aspergers syndrome often are very literal in their interpretation of speech so that when asked which road do you live in will reply ."I dont live in the road ". They are described as 'literal thinkers' which is a major problem with the English language being so full of metaphors.

What this has meant in the Commons is we are all debating laws with eyes on the clock. It will be a race to get legislation through and there will be casualties if bills hit problems in the Lords. Rushing through the process of scrutiny though just leads to bad laws which we end up trying to live with or good laws with unexpected consequences.

This will be especially the case if many of the minds in parliament are thinking of the election and not the process of law making. Of course key to any successful election is a 'good slogan' or so the politicians believe and spend much time crafting them.

In the history of Southport there have been some good examples and some dreadful ones. In recent memory Ronnie Fearn won in 1987 with his poster saying "He lives here " plastered on hundreds of houses (More problems for literal thinkers there!) . On the leaflets though we used the potent "Stand Up for Southport" which I personally claim the patent for as I persuaded Ronnie to use it.

Back in the 1910s Southport M.P. Major Dalrymple-Wright (Conservative) campaigned on the slogan "England for the English " . That's what his poster said . 'English' note -bad news for all those of Scottish, Welsh or Irish origin. Those excluded must now include a fair section of the Southport population. His opponent at that time had Jewish ancestry.

I was impressed with the Koronet in Coronation Walk with its smart decor and Frank Sinatra like bar stools. It just seemed so chilled compared with other places. Other clubs taking note and going for sophistication might be no bad thing.

Second plug must go to All-White Taxis who from time to time bear the brunt of some nightlife excess. They were very helpful in briefing me on their perspective and with me in the belief that improvements need to be made. I did tell them though that I would see they got mentioned in dispatches so you'll not be surprised to see a rather big telephone number in the background. Is it coincidence that I and the owner are photographed in front of it ? I think not.

It was good fun talking frankly to them. They knew very few names of politicians but I cant blame them altogether for that. I got a nice letter from a Tory shadow minister the other day telling me he was coming to Southport. He was sorry for the late notice but he had suddenly been handed an invitation at the last minute. Sad to say even I hadn't a clue who he was! Well hands up who has heard of James Arbuthnot?

There are so many shadow ministers and ministers around now that it wouldn't surprise me if a complete imposter could turn up thumping the dispatch box in the Commons and get away with it. Some say that happens all the time.