Hard times
Tuesday 11th May 2004
Hindsight
The local elections may be a month later this year but the campaigning, and the backbiting, has got off to an unusually bitter start. The appalling events in Iraq and President Bush’s crass endorsement of the Israeli Prime Minister’s plan to only withdraw from selected settlements on the West Bank, have raised the temperature and shortened tempers at Westminster.
They have also fuelled media speculation. I have lost count of the number of calls I have had from reporters asking me if I knew what I know now, would I still have voted for the war last March? The answer is yes. Not because I condone the hype about weapons of mass destruction or the torture of prisoners. But because I believe that Saddam Hussein had to be stopped.
UNICEF estimates that, under his regime, 5 000 Iraqi children died every month from lack of food and basic medical care. Even with sanctions these deaths were preventable. The UN’s Oil for Food Programme was designed to avert just such suffering. But Saddam Hussein used its funds to fill his own coffers.
No one has even tried to estimate how many adults were dying in Iraq’s jails every month. All we do know is that thousands of people are still missing and thousands of others have been found in mass graves throughout the country.
Twelve years of sanctions and diplomatic intervention had failed. The UN’s authority was being undermined and the region was becoming even more dangerously unstable than usual.
Sadly, the situation in the Middle East remains dangerously unstable but we have got rid of a brutal regime and we are in the process of handing power back to the Iraqi people under the aegis of the United Nations. This is progress and, despite the despicable behaviour of a few troops, most of them are doing a good job under extraordinarily difficult circumstances.
Getting over it
The only nice thing about my recent fall has been the letters, cards and flowers I have received from well-wishers. Politicians are far more used to getting brickbats. Perhaps that is why I have been so touched by them.
They are still coming in and I am beginning to feel a bit of a fraud. My burst lip and cracked wrist are mending nicely. Most of the stitches have been taken out of my upper lip, the splint has been removed from my left arm and I can drive again.
Thanks to the application of generous amounts of make up in the affected area you would have to look closely to see any damage at all. But I cannot not fool the eagle-eyed security policemen at the House of Commons. Trained to look at the shape of our features and faces they notice immediately. One of them remarked uncharitably, but accurately, that I looked as though I had had a collagen job that had gone wrong.
This is not something that has ever attracted me. But, after the two injections I had to have in my lip before it was stitched I am at a loss to know why anyone would voluntarily put themself through such pain.
Adjusting the Green Belt
Interfering with Mother Nature is not something that anyone, least of all politicians, should do lightly. That is why the public inquiry into the proposed development to the West of Stevenage is a necessity, albeit an expensive one. Any incursion into the Green Belt must be considered very carefully indeed. It was a very sensible piece of pre-war environmentalism designed to prevent the loss of green spaces between towns.
However, its boundaries are not sacred. The present Green Belt was designed for another century and will, obviously, have to occasionally be adjusted. But this does not mean that green spaces have to be lost or towns merged. It just means that they have to be moved. That is what will happen if the development to the West of Stevenage is given the go ahead. Every acre of land removed from the Green Belt will be replaced and there will be no net loss. In fact, as far as I can gather, there will be a net gain.
I value the green spaces of Hertfordshire. It is, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful counties in England. But I also value its people and their quality of life. If we build carefully and considerately we can preserve both.
Barbara Follett MP
