The banks - local and national issues

A whole range of issues concerning the banks and financial institutions have been a major focus of my activity here in Westminster over the last few days.
(1) The takeover of Standard Life Bank by Barclays, announced this week, although not unexpected, will affect almost 300 jobs in Edinburgh. There doesn't seem to be any suggeston of job losses - indeed, the tie-up with Barclays might lead to more work for Edinburgh - but I want to know more about the company's plans for the future, and I'm talking with Barclays Head of UK Retail Operations about that later today.
(2) The dispute which has arisen between Lloyds TSB Foundation for Scotland, and the Lloyds bank which funds it, is deeply worrying to the many charities who receieve funding from the foundation. There's an obvious UK dimension, because of the big government shareholding in the bank - so I've asked the Treasury to intervene, and also raised the issue directly with Chancellor Alistair Darling earlier this week.
(3) Complaints have come in about the Bank of Scotland's changes to its overdraft charges, which could lead to people who overdraw by even just a few pounds, even an authorised one, having to pay £31 a month in charges. BoS of course is now owed by Lloyds TSB, so again there is a government interest, and a lot of MPs have raised this issue with the government as well;
(4) Lastly, but by no means least, there is a growing debate about the future structure of UK banking now that they appear to be coming out of the crisis. A current hot topic is whether banks should be broken up, and linked to that is the immediate future of Northern Rock. I have strongly supported the idea that Northern Rock should be brought back into the 'mutual' sector, to provide a real alternative for the consumer, and I'll be pushing for that today if I get a chance to do so.

On a different issue, I also see that the 'Kelly' report on MPs expenses and allowances has been widely leaked today. My view is clear - given all that has been revealed over the last few months, MPs should accept Kelly's recommendations in their entirety, and put them into effect as soon as possible. I'll probably comment in more detail once the actual report is published (which was meant to be next week, but as they have been leaked so widely, I think it would be best if the report was published now).

After Question Time..

The decision by the BBC to invite the BNP leader Nick Griffin on to Question Time has been pretty big in the news over the last week, of course. I was one of those who felt that he shouldn't have been invited on the programme - the BNP have a perfect right to free speech, but that doesn't also give them an automatic right to appear on a particular TV programme. Like many others who have commented on the programme, I felt that Griffin performed poorly - but I still feel that the very act of inviting him gave him and his views a credibility which they didn't previously have. It's also a wake-up call to the mainstream political parties - address the issues which lead people to vote for the BNP, or they will gain support - and that I am sure applies just as just as much in Scotland as in the rest of theU.

The right to free expression..

Sometimes you get a reminder, close to home, of how dangerous political activity can be in some countries. At my surgery last week, a woman from Leith came along desperate for action to help her brother who she told me had been seized by the security services in Morocco. He is a human rights activist from the Western Sahara community, and he and six of his colleagues were returning from a human right conference when they were taken. My constituent is very worried about their well-being; she has been told they may even face the death penalty. I had a brief word with UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband in the Commons chamber last night, and raised it in a question at Foreign Office questions today. I've also raised it with some of the media. Hopefully this will help to publicise the case, and put pressure on the Moroccan authorities to release those they have detained.

From Berlin to Leith - the same issues!

It's less than two months until the big UN conference in Copenhagen which will seek to get a new international agreement on climate change. The UK government has been at the forefront of efforts to try and get an agreement on the big reductions in emissions which is needed if we are going to avoid catastrophic climate change, and Ministers like Ed Miliband and his deputy Joan Ruddock have been working hard to win support from other countries. I've been doing my bit to help through the work I've done on 'carbon trading', where I published a report at the end of July (the link is here, but briefly the argument is carbon trading, IF caps on emissions are toughened, can play an important part in cutting emissions, but is only part of the solution). The report has been sent to governments round the world, and its recommendations have been broadly accepted by the UK government as one of its objectives for Copenhagen. I haven't been travelling round the world myself, though! - apart from visits in London, my only visit overseas has been this week to Germany where I was promoting the report as the main speaker at a conference in Berlin.

I was pleased to say there was a considerable degree of consensus, not just about the type of ideas in my report, but also on the need for a tough new international agreement. It made me think there is a much higher chance of an agreement at Copenhagen than some people think, although a lot of course will depend on the final US position, where many in Congress do not support the position taken by the Obama administration.

And what my short visit to Berlin also highlighted for me was the way that some of the difficulties to tackling climate change in a practical way are not financial, but bureaucratic and organisational e.g. the planning difficulties many people face when they try and instal energy efficiency measures in older houses. This was brought home to me when, having come back overnight from London on the sleeper, I went to a 'meet the public' event in the Redbraes area in my constituency. It was mainly about housing and park maintenance issues, but there was a short presentation at the meeting from the excellent community based Greener Leith organisation, who are working on the idea of bringing water power back to the Water of Leith, with one of the sites at Redbraes. They've just got cash for a feasibility study, but it's more than 5 years since an expert report for the Council highlighted the possibilities for this. Anyhow, hopefully it will now move forward under the leadership of Greener Leith - from which I draw the conclusion that locally based community energy initiatives may be more likely to get somewhere than ideas which depend on support from traditional bureaucracies. (Redbraes, not Berlin, above - along with Malcolm Chisholm and Angela Blacklock!).

Legg over....

It's been a difficult few months for MPs with the enquiry into MP 'second home' expenses. Like many MPs, I had checked all my expenses claims - I thought I was ok, but there was always the nightmare that maybe I had overlooked something. So I was delighted when the inquiry led by Sir Thomas Legg confirmed my 'second home' Parliamentary expenses were 100% OK. It was good to have this confirmation, particularly as Legg's team had gone into MP expenses with a fine toothcomb and scrutinised us all in great detail - as is only right and proper given the exposures about what some MPs had been up to.

I have to say, though, the way that the publication of the 'Legg findings' were dealt with was far from satisfactory. First of all, material has been all over the papers over the last few days, but back bench MPs, at least, had no idea what was going on. Then today we were told we would get letters about 9 am - then 12 noon - then later - and it was only at 7 pm that the letters were handed out. Many MPs not surprisingly were getting very distressed at the delay - I was on the train from Edinburgh, so I didn't have the same problem - but it was certainly not handled well. Anyhow, hopefully we can now move forward and begin to restore the trust in Parliament which this whole expenses episode has severely undermined.

No reason to run from debate

I see that there's been quite a bit of media coverage today and over the last few days about the issue of whether or not Alex Salmond should be given equal billing as the three other main party leaders in the leadership debates which are likely to be held in the run up to the UK General Election.

To me, the issue is pretty clear cut. Like it or not (and I don't!), the SNP is a major party in Scotland and there really is no sustainable excuse for leaving their leader out of any leadership 'head-to-head'. I think that to try and do so might indeed lead to a successful legal challenge - and also encourage the SNP in its 'victimhood' complex.

On this at least, I tend to agree with Alan Cochrane in the Daily Telegraph (!); the SNP can't reasonably be kept out of at least the Scottish debates - and let them in there so their arguments can be met head on.