Published: Thursday, 17th September, 2009 8:00am

Rob Wilson's Westminster Diary, September 17, 2009

by Rob Wilson MP

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POLITICS is starting anew after the summer with the Party Conference season already underway, but there's nothing fresh coming from our Prime Minister.

For more than a year everyone has known the Government is going to make spending cuts but the Prime Minister continued his bizarre mantra of Labour investment versus Tory cuts.

Unfortunately for him it just looked silly because the Treasury's own Red Book showed it simply wasn't true! Even the Chancellor told him it wasn't a sustainable argument, so it had to be changed.

But they will be good public spending cuts not bad public spending cuts; nice Labour cuts not nasty Tory cuts.

They will be about efficiency savings and stopping "unnecessary" spending.

One could ask, why have you been spending our money on unnecessary things in the first place?

Only an out of touch Prime Minister desperately trying to hang on to his job could attempt to treat people as fools.

Once again the whole thrust of Government policy has been decided on the basis of trying to dig Gordon Brown out of the enormous hole he dug himself. It's never about what is best for the country, never about looking beyond his own narrow political advantage. People know a dud when they see one and our current Prime Minister is certainly a dud.

Meanwhile, my Reading East constituency played host to the South East Regional Grand Committee at the Town Hall.

It's an uncomfortable spot for Labour MPs because it's one of the only committees with a built-in Conservative majority. Of the 82 MPs allowed to attend, 57 are Conservative. Hence it is yet another talking shop with no decision-making allowed. If we don't like the motion being put forward, we can't even amend it. Labour has bought into the EU desire to divide the country into regions so it can be easily governed from Brussels and, under this Government, it has found Britain particularly cooperative!

I asked the Minister for the South East why his Government is concealing the true extent of unemployment.

We actually have an inactive workforce of around six million, with nearly 20% of people in my constituency not working. I find that truly shocking, even scandalous, and it is causing huge social problems. But the Prime Minister, like his cuts mantra, would rather hide it because he's only interested in saving his own skin.