A Very Merry Christmas One And All

Christmas is a magical time and I can think of nowhere better to celebrate it than right here in East Renfrewshire.



I have hugely fond memories over my years at Carolside Primary, at Williamwood High, with the 128 Boys Brigade, at Giffnock Tennis Club and with family and friends across the district.

Today my wife, Elaine, and I celebrate our first Christmas as parents. Myles is too young to really understand what is happening, although he seemed very excited to meet Santa for the first time earlier this week. While family and friends will undoubtedly spoil him rotten I want more than that for Myles. I am determined to ensure 2010 becomes the year that East Renfrewshire plays its part in sorting out the economic disaster we face as a result of Labour's recession.

Unless we act now our children and grandchildren will be the ones left to pay for the mistakes of today. Every child now owes £23,000 thanks to Labour's debt crisis, and that simply isn't fair on future generations or in the best interests of our country. We owe it to each other to choose a path of stability and responsibility in government and we will get our chance to help make this change at the polls in the coming year, by voting for David Cameron and the Conservatives.

I know just how difficult things are for so many people in these difficult economic times, particularly as unemployment has rocketed across East Renfrewshire over the past year. On behalf of my family and all at East Renfrewshire Conservatives can I wish you a very Happy Christmas and best wishes for 2010.

Happy New Year - But Only An Election Can Bring Hope to East Renfrewshire

2008 was a year of dramatic highs and lows. We witnessed great success for Team GB at the Olympic and Para-Olympics Games in Beijing but our economy took a very dramatic downturn and we enter 2009 facing a very deep recession and the prospect of a rapid increase in unemployment.

The problems we face are of course of our own and our Labour governments making. Individuals reliance on credit is borne partly out of our own greed but more significantly as a result of government policy. For years government statistics have pointed to our combined individual and state national debt rocketing to unsafe levels and yet government continued to encourage institutions and banks to lend lend lend. That the state now proposes to borrow massive sums to try and get us out of a recession caused by debt is truly staggering.

Here in East Renfrewshire we face a year in which our Labour led Council propose to invest massive sums of Council Tax money into pet political projects for which no real case can be made. Facing the loss of more than £1million in a high risk investment with a failed Icelandic Bank they now propose to spend more than £12.5million building a college in Barrhead despite their own figures showing the number of people attending adult eduction in Barrhead falling by more than 40% in recent years.

For me the answer to both local and national problems lies in political leadership. For years we have had local politicians who are seen at everything but ask yourself one simple question: what have they actually done for you or your family to make life better in East Renfrewshire? We need political leadership that will deliver spending on better roads and pavements, more police on local streets and a cleaner environment. These are the priorities of the people of East Renfrewshire and they are my priorities too!

East Renfrewshire, Scotland and the UK all need one thing to make them better - a General Election that delivers a new government. My mother always tells me the best things come to those who wait, but for me our country can't wait any longer for a new government and I hope 2009 brings us all the General Election we so richly deserve.

Helping Zimbabwe To A Prosperous Future

With Zimbabwe's Presidential election run-off scheduled for 27th June, Robert Mugabe is literally murdering people to stop them voting in order that he can cling on to power.

The UK has let the people of Zimbabwe down before and I believe we are letting them down again, right now. If Gordon Brown and his government won't intervene, it is surely time the people of Great Britain took matters into their own hands and did something proactive to help the people of Zimbabwe to enjoy freedom and prosperity through their democracy!

Even though this election is so vital to the Zimbabwean people, and the Southern African region, only 200 SADC election observers are approved to monitor proceedings and with most not even in the country to monitor events, latest reports put the number of people dead at more than 65, with hundreds missing, thousands injured and tens of thousands dispossessed. Inflation is around 1,000,000%, more than 85% of the population is unemployed and food production in what was once the bread basket of Africa is almost non-existent.

I cannot sit back and let Mugabe's murderous regime survive because my government did nothing. That is why I am making a donation to "Friends of Zimbabwe", so that they can invest resource into trying to ensure this election follows SADC guidelines and reports a result that is accurate and truly reflective of the will of the Zimbabwean people!

Please visit: www.friendsofzim.com if you would like to find out more or to make a donation!

Relative Poverty - Disappointment Or Disgrace?

I have always found the concept that poverty is "relative" difficult to grasp. Today's announcement that the number of children living in poverty has risen for the second year in a row is deeply depressing, even if it isn't surprising.

For our Labour government, who set themselves the goal of halving child poverty over a generation, to be presiding over such a steady increase in the number of young people growing up in poverty, leaving so many of them living in a Britain without hope, is not "disappointing", as the government described it today, it is a "disgrace"!

The Member of Parliament for East Renfrewshire, one Mr Jim Murphy, shoulders a great deal of responsibility for today's figures having served as Minister of State for Employment and Welfare Reform at the Department of Work & Pensions at the very time when the number of young people living in poverty increased so startlingly.

I am not a statistician, so I look to professionals like Professor John Hills, the head of the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics, to guide me as to whether government policy will work. As he describes the latest figures as "disappointing if unsurprising" it appears to me there is little prospect of any improvement in the number of people living in poverty as long as we pursue policies that lack vision for our future.

Possibly most telling is the increase over the past year in the number of pensioners living in poverty. Despite all Labour's interference in our tax and benefits system since 1997, at 2.5 million there has essentially been no reduction in the number of pensioners living in poverty in the UK over the past 11 years.

So our Prime Minister should be hanging his head today in more than "relative" shame. It was his stewardship of the UK economy as Chancellor that delivered the unfair British society in which so many young people and pensioners grow up in poverty despite the highest level of taxation in generations and it is on his watch as Prime Minister that even more people seem destined to live in poverty in the future.

The day of reckoning for Labour, Mr Brown and Mr Murphy will come at the next General Election. Those living in poverty, and those of us living with the privilege of living above its "relative" measure, all want to see a fairer more inclusive society and it will be at the ballot box that we get our chance to hold them to account!

Happy 1st Birthday Jamie

When you spend your morning at a Conservative Party meeting, and follow this up with a street canvass, the last thing you think you want to attend is a friends child's first birthday party.

Anyway, enough about logic! The think about children is that they have an infectious ability to draw seemingly sensible adults into enjoyment of the atmosphere they create at a most basic of levels. While my friend's son, Jamie, simply enjoyed all that went on around him the children attending his party, (ranging from ages one to five), had a ball in Jamie's garden - running around, throwing things and acting with just a little mischief.

The innocence of youth!

As the day drew on, those of us who prefer to think of ourselves as nearer childhood than any age of responsibility gradually found ourselves joining in with the children's fun and frolics and yet, as I watched this happy group of children play, I could not help feeling very contrasting mixed emotions of wanting desperately to be hopeful for their futures while looking at all they have to face in today's Britain with great concern.

My fear for Jamie, and his young friends, is that our Labour governments current social and economic policies will not afford them the happy eighteenth birthdays they will so richly deserve. So, if anything, today has made me even more determined to pursue my passion for politics and to ensure East Renfrewshire's children have the bright future I believe they are entitled to. Perhaps one day I will look back on today and conclude that it was for Jamie and his generation that the country called time on Labour and asked the Conservatives to map out a positive future from which they will prosper!