Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South) (Lab): I came into the House 18 years ago frustrated by a Government who had sold the pass on manufacturing in favour of a dangerous flirtation with speculative and deregulated finance. So, a lot has changed in those 18 years. taken
26/02/10 - "Office without power"
Perhaps it wasn’t the most conciliatory way of winding up the parliamentary debate on limiting carbon emissions from UK power stations. Perhaps a different tone might have influenced enough MPs to have avoided the 8 vote defeat.
10/02/10 - "Who's Robbin Who?"
The current parliament staggers towards its own lamentable end. As it does, I have been trying to reflect on what the last eighteen years has meant to me, as the elected representative of ‘Robin Hood Land’ in Nottingham South.
Dear Gordon, A word of congratulations about the way you have brought the banks into public ownership. In the crisis they have dragged us into, no other lifeline was worth entertaining. Congratulations too in calling for an international conference to rewrite the...
Watching the exchanges between the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, I can’t help feeling that my mother would have sent them off to bed without an evening meal; two men, afraid to face the future, bickering about how much can be blamed on the past.
Forget the tabloid obsessions with sleaze, sex lives and spin. The period running between the G20 conference in London and the next General Election will come to define Labour’s relevance to 21st century politics.
The G20 summit in London, on April 2nd, looms ahead of the Government. As finance ministers from around the world trail in and out of the UK for ‘preparatory discussions’, the only clear consensus is that something needs to be done. Beyond this, countries....
So, finally, Northern Rock has been brought into public ownership. Now the political fun begins. Recriminations are everywhere. I’m reminded of a ‘Peanuts’ cartoon in which Lucy offers consolation to a forlorn Charlie Brown.........
So, finally, Northern Rock has been brought into public ownership. Now the political fun begins. Recriminations are everywhere. I’m reminded of a ‘Peanuts’ cartoon in which Lucy offers consolation to a forlorn Charlie Brown.........
I am really pleased to have the opportunity of contributing to the Committee’s enquiry into the role we can play, as individuals and local communities, in tackling climate change. I will try to do so within the sequence of headings set out by the Committee.
08/06/07 - Aviation Growth
Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South) (Lab): May I wish the Prime Minister well in his attempts to make climate change the centrepiece of the G8 discussions? Will he take the opportunity to remind the leaders who fly in there that, despite all the....
25/04/07 - "More urgent than oil (liquid gold)"
For the last 20 years the free‐market Right have dominated the global political agenda to an extent where arrogance vastly outstripped intellect. They were able to do so partly because the Left failed to address the ways in which capital was seeking to disengage....
21/03/07 - Green Budget Debate
Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South) (Lab): It is normal on these occasions for me to follow the Chancellor’s Budget statement and fill in the conventional gaps that I feel he has overlooked. I pay tribute to the Chancellor.....
Gaza is no longer the world’s biggest prison camp, it is a duck shoot. If you would prefer not to hide behind euphemisms, it is a death camp; where people who cannot leave face daily bombardment and where even ‘safe havens’.....
Delegates at the Labour Party conference in Manchester should be gentle with Gordon Brown. It will be his last as Labour leader and Prime Minister. Gordon is like a Damien Hirst sheep. Trapped in formaldehyde, he lacks the qualities needed for a bold.....
08/06/07 - "Friends disunited"
Of course, it could have happened to anyone. You go out for a meeting with old friends. You do a bit of business, a bit of catching up, swap a few reminiscences. And then, out of nowhere, up pops Dubya. “Yo, bro, whaddya know. I got an
army and we’re ready to go”
Last weekend Gordon Brown’s office were furiously briefing the press that the new Brown, post Blair, era would be a ‘listening’ Labour government; one committed to winning hearts and minds rather than playing fast and loose with the democratic process.
26/01/07 "The other day upon the stair…’ – Blair’s leadership on Iraq"
Parliament’s first Iraq debate in three years, in government time, began in a fraud and ended as farce. As such, it was probably a fair summary of UK policy on the war and the occupation. The debate itself was dominated by three people who weren’t there.....
21/11/2006 "Bush, Blair, and the end of an Empire"
As George W Bush looks down at the ruins of his presidency he must be wondering if there is anything more he could have screwed up. The answer is ‘yes’. And, reassuringly for most of us, he will almost certainly go on to do so........
26/10/06 "Markets, myths, and the climate change muddle"
In the early part of next week a pillar of the establishment, Sir Nicholas Stern, is set to drop a bombshell into the corridors of the Treasury. Its implications are far more
devastating than anything al Qaida threatens. Stern, who was a former chief economist.... read more | back to top
18/09/06 "Another inconvenient truth"
As Al Gore’s film on climate change begins to fill cinema seats all round the country, the Labour Party is confronted with an inconvenient truth of its own. This does not revolve around Tony Blair, whose premiership is already dead in the water.
Hey, sucker. Try this on for size. Climate Change is good for
you. The world’s scientists may be screaming at us that never before has the way we live so threatened the prospects of life itself, but reassurance is at hand.
21/07/2006 "Lebanon - The destruction of Democracy"
Those witnessing the hushed exchanges between Dubya and Son at the G8 summit must have thought they were watching a political spoof. “Hey pop, Canna do the Middle East roadshow before Conodoleeza gets there? Canna, canna, canna?......
I suppose I grew up with John, Paul, George, Ringo and ‘Resurgence’. It just took me a while to catch up with the seeds of exciting irreverence that Resurgence was to plant in my life. The magazine’s explorations turned conventional ideas......
01/01/06 "The China syndrome"
No one has a kind word to say about Tony Blair these days. The Chinese press have just slammed him for his latest lecture visit: less interesting than a local newspaper column;
more expensive than buying ownership of the whole paper.
It comes as something when it fell to Israel’s chief justice to remind Britain that it is the duty of the justice system to “protect democracy both from terrorism and from the means the state wants to use to fight terrorism.”
23/09/05 - "Goodbye Mr Blair"
Be nice to him. This will be Tony Blair's last Labour.
Conference as undisputed Leader. It will be full of bluff and bravado: grandiose claims about an unfinished agenda of New Labour reforms; resolute statements about work still to be done.....
16/09/05 - "When New Labour runs out of fuel"
The biggest legacy of the Blair‐Bush era is fear and insecurity. One hint of a trucker’s protest about fuel prices and the British public laid siege to petrol stations all around the country. True, it had none of the carnage of social collapse in New Orleans...
Jean Charles de Menezes. The name lived in relative obscurity and will slip away, in similar terms, over the coming weeks. It does, however, sum up the futility of much
that comes to be symbolised by 'the war on terror'
16/07/05 - Food & Energy Security: Local systems, global solidarity
It’s the strange nature of our times that’s defining a quite different politics. The defining difference now is between those who want to address, with a degree of urgency, the challenges of climate change and the way it is going to rewrite.....
11/05/05 - "Leading Labour"
I no longer know whether my attempt to turn a derelict shell into a house that generates 50% more energy than it consumes is a folly, a vision, an obsession…or all three. I may now more when it is finished in the summer. To make sense of it may require a different....
15/03/05 - Budget Debate 2005
Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South) (Lab): At the end of every Budget debate, Members stream out of the Chamber and are greeted by those in the press, who want to know whether or not we thought it a good Budget. Usually.....
10/03/05 - "Dangerous manouevers in the dark"
The abrupt withdrawal of 14,000 Syrian troops from the Lebanon fills me with mixed emotions. Press headlines celebrating the end of an era of foreign military occupation it uneasily against daily efforts to justify the 150,000 US
troops in current occupation of Iraq.
08/02/05 - Climate Change
Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South) (Lab): I shall try to be as brisk as possible, partly to allow other Members into the debate, but also because I want to make several points that I hope will upset the applecart in relation to the consensus of......
We are heading into the General Election campaign and already it needs to be rescued. There is no shortage of towering issues we could address – climate change, air pollution, secure pensions, the future of the NHS, transport needs of the 21 st century.......
26/11/04 - "Gordon and the Gekko fallacy"
There was a time when the Chancellor of the Exchequer was a firebrand of Labour radicalism. Gordon Brown, then, was unafraid to make the case for economic interventionism, universal entitlements, and an internationalism rooted....
In the modern world, democracy gets killed off more in parmesan shavings that para‐military coups. Little bits get sliced off the system of public accountability and, before you know it, social authoritarianism has replaced social
democracy; the democratic cheese has.....
29/10/04 - "Terra Madre - The mother of all movements"
In the modern world, democracy gets killed off more in parmesan shavings that para‐military coups. Little bits get sliced off the system of public accountability and, before you know it, social authoritarianism has replaced social
democracy; the democratic cheese has.....
Ogden Nash's poem wasn't written about the Parliamentary Labour Party's meeting that I had just come out of, but the words kept
running through my head. In what came over as an infantile gesture, MP's who raised the issue of Iraq.....
We should not kid ourselves about Iraq. In has an army of occupation, in charge of transitional administration. Military t seek to deliver pacification but not peace. We should
not kid ourselves about Iraq......
This is a time to explore some important contradictions. When I went off to Rome 's anti‐war rally on the anniversary of 9/11, the British press were obsessed with something else. Blair had just appointed Alan Milburn to a Cabinet post that will take charge of Labour's next...
Parliament has grown tired of the war on Iraq . Downing St is desperate to move on elsewhere. America lurches from one panic to another at the mere mention of a possible terrorist attack. When the ‘evidence' used to throw the USA.....
Much of the recent ‘paper talk' about Tony Blair's leadership of the Labour Party has lurched between the surreal and the silly. Would he survive the Loch Fyne conspiracy? Is he more vulnerable to a flour attack from Fathers for Justice.
By the day, the situation in the Middle East slides down a spiral of despair. Iraq is a mess. The Sharon Administration turns Israel into a rogue state. President Bush begins the trials of foot soldiers involved in photographing or conducting the torture and humiliation.....
10/06/04 - "The day we all lost"
I am going to give today a miss. News coverage will no doubt be dominated by makeover explanations of the EU election results in Britain and the Reagan funeral in America . I can already feel the nausea of organised dishonesty beginning to
overwhelm me.
June 2003 "Labour Party reshuffle"
For a moment Ian Duncan Smith huffed and puffed about the Cabinet reshuffle and the planned demise of the Lord Chancellor's office as though he had found a real political issue. Some Labour members joined in the disquiet about not knowing where.....
May 2003 "The Emporers no clothes"
Behind the scenes, something of enormous importance is happening. ‘The Project' is dying. The Third Way is falling apart. And in it's death throws of credibility, Downing Street is lurching towards ever more reckless commitments to
corporate greed.
Long after the street celebrations in Baghdad have ended a more awkward reality will dawn upon the international community. 'Victory' over Iraq will not bring an end to war. It will just move the conflict on to different terrain.
09/04/03 "The Emporers no clothes"
Rumours have been running around parliament and the press that there will be a move to suspend George Galloway from the PLP. You don't have to be a signed member of George's fan club to know that displacing him over opposition to the war in Iraq.....
Of course it was important that over half of backbench Labour MP's voted against a war on Iraq. It means that the government only has half a mandate to go in to Iraq, and no plan at all about how to get out. This is of critical importance.......
It was, and still is, the most powerful rallying call of the post‐war generation. “We, the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind…
So, fed up with waiting, angry at being unable to bully or bribe the UN into supporting a second resolution, George Bush has launched a war on Iraq. He intended to do so all along. Forget that the Weapons Inspectors offered to deliver.....
Parliament’s debate on Iraq will be caught between two cynical extremes. Saddam Hussain will do whatever it takes to avoid a war. George Bush is no less determined to do
whatever it takes to avoid a peace.
The latest opinion polls show that British people oppose a war on Iraq by a ratio of 4:1. The government’s media campaigners have failed to make a case for war and Downing St’s ‘dossier on Saddam’ has been seen for what it as.....
'The time for military action has not yet arisen. However, there is no doubt at all that the development of weapons of mass destruction by Saddam Hussein poses a severe threat not just to the region, but to the wider world…After 11 September......
January 2002 - "Silence Isn't Peace"
The Afghan war is over, unless you happen to live in Afghanistan. Day 100 of the war brought with it another round of bombings that the villagers of Zhawar have become accustomed to.
America's biggest, non‐nuclear bombs are now being dropped on Afghanistan. These so‐called 'daisy cutters' have s little to do with gardening as they do with understating of terrorism.
Whatever the press briefings have been saying, Britain has not yet declared war on Afghanistan, nor should we do so. Every day that I wake to the news that no bombing has taken place is a celebration of the restraining role Tony Blair as played with the US....
We are repeatedly told there is overwhelming public support for the war in Afghanistan. After the first weeks of bombing, opinion polls suggested only 16% of people
opposed it. But what does this mean?
September 2001 - "Tribune article - Bomb & We Loose"
Whatever George W. Bush may say,
this is not the first war of the 21st
Century. To describe the awesome
destruction in New York and Washington as 'war' is to
misunderstand both what happened,
and how we must confront it.
"Soft spots and hard messages"
Ok, I have a soft spot for the Archbishop of Canterbury. Anyone who will stand up and describe this week’s G8 Summit, in Edinburgh as a meeting at which the leaders of the world’s richest and most powerful nations decide what they might do....
