More assisted dying bill committee this week, which I won’t trouble you with. In other news I spoke for the opposition in a debate about the Waspi Women (1950s-born women caught out by poor government communications when the state pension age rose without them knowing it) - see here. And we had the monthly Oral Questions for the Department of Work and Pensions, which I shadow, so I poked the Government about their shameful betrayal of pensioners whose Winter Fuel Payment has been summarily withdrawn.
Every week every MP puts their name in the ballot to appear on the Order Paper (i.e. have an official slot to ask a question) for PMQs. This Wednesday my name popped out, and I asked the PM about his proposed benefit reforms. It’s plain we need a radical change in the system which will see the bill for sickness and disability benefits rise from around £60bn (already more than we spend on defence) to over £100bn in the next four years. I think it’s very bad that Labour came to power without even the beginnings of a plan for how to do this, and that they’re only making cuts now - and not properly consulting disabled people on the best way to do so - because of their economic mismanagement. Watch me make this point, and the PM’s rather (I thought) inadequate response, here.
Marlborough is booming; but Marlborough is struggling. This is the paradoxical truth of the local economy in a prosperous market town where the traffic is a nightmare, business rates clobber old-fashioned shops trying to compete with online warehouses, and now Labour are hiking national insurance and giving employees the right to keep their job from day one. Quick vid here.
Liddington’s a lovely place, nestled beneath a massive iron age hill fort with views over all Wiltshire and Oxfordshire. The pub - imaginatively called The Village Inn, near the street called The Street - is newly reopened and a proper hub. But the traffic is murderous, as the parish council told me. The M4 roars nearby, tracking the ancient Ridgeway, and when the motorway jams the ratrunners come.
All Saint’s, Liddington, is a Norman gem, much restored and improved by the Victorians and now lovingly looked after by churchwarden Gaynor Halls. In the churchyard is the stone base and stump of what must have been an ancient cross. The local intelligence is that was erected in the 8th century AD, hundreds of years before the church itself; when I took my seat I thought I was sitting on a relic which Alfred the Great, king hereabouts, would have venerated as old. But later I find Pevsner mentions it without dating it, and the laconic description at britishlistedbuildings.co.uk (‘Square base with spur chamfer corners. Short shaft with pyramidal stop chamfers’) has the disappointing note, ‘Probably late C15.’
