Tom Richmond: Why opposing the cuts isn't good enough

It is why there was so much to admire about the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, choosing to express his concerns while expanding his web service, Acts 435, that enables parishioners to help the poor.

It is why the proactive approach of business leaders, in seeking to form a successor body to Yorkshire Forward that fights for jobs and investment, is paramount – it is forcing the Government, and councils, to think through their approach to the regions.

And it is why Pat McFadden, Labour's business spokesman, was right when he implored the party to come up with its own distinctive policy agenda rather than simply oppose Ministers for the sake of opposing.

He's right – the row over the planned VAT increase has moved on now that it has been backed by a majority of MPs and Labour's opposition was fatally undermined by Peter Mandelson's timely disclosures that his party had been planning just such an increase.

That is why those who oppose the Government, whether it be Tory backbenchers fighting to safeguard those schools in their constituencies scuppered by the scaling back of the Building Schools for the Future programme, or Labour MPs hostile to the VAT rise, should be forced to explain how they would fund their wishlist.

You simply cannot allow a situation to develop over the next five years where Labour's shadow ministers demand the implementation plans of their pet projects, such as Glenys Kinnock's call for the BBC World Service to be exempted from the cuts.

Having precipitated this financial mess, Labour, too, has a duty to

provide constructive opposition – and come up with some proposals of its own to reduce the deficit while, at the same time, protecting regions like Yorkshire where the recovery remains fragile at best.

And so, too, do those people who continue to accuse Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader and Sheffield Hallam MP, of "selling out" to the Tories by forming a coalition Government. Once again, I put it to Clegg's critics: What is the alternative?

HULL'S dismal education record – it regularly props up the national GCSE league tables – is even more pronounced when one considers a recent Parliamentary exchange on funding.

Education select committee chairman Graham Stuart pointed out that children from the poorer areas of Hull have rightly had additional funds come to their local authority to help with their education.

However, when those children travelled across the border to be educated in East Riding – where he happens to be a MP – the money that was given to support their education in Hull did not follow them.

Stuart believes the pupil premium, with money following the child, is the answer. So does Sarah Teather, the Lib Dem Schools Minister, who went on to highlight the "widely varying levels of deprivation funding from one area to another".

This needs to be simplified – but where will reduced funding leave those pupils who continue to undertake their secondary education in Hull?

Nowhere – until Ministers recognise that raising standards at primary school level, in particular the tuition of the basic skills, is the key to raising standards across the board.

EVEN though some Whitehall departments have been asked to prepare for a 40 per cent budget cut, the NHS still remains exempt from the age of austerity.

It should not be. It remains a byword for inefficiency – and, from my experience, some hospital departments are overstaffed and sadly devoid of leadership.

Now a report, published in Scotland, reveals that the extra 9,000 NHS staff funded by the SNP government at Holyrood has failed to significantly increase the number of operations and treatments carried out.

Indeed, hospitals have said that they will have no problem shedding 4,000 health posts in the year ahead – further undermining the SNP's "spend, spend, spend" mantra and making a mockery of David Cameron's reluctance to take a scalpel to the NHS budget.

INTERESTING feedback has emerged from the otherwise interminable Labour leadership contest which has only reached the halfway point, and won't be settled until September.

Former Foreign Secretary David Miliband remains the frontrunner but he could still be pipped, under the complicated electoral college rules, by his younger brother Ed, the Doncaster MP and his party's energy spokesman.

Yet, while Miliband junior evidently has no qualms about serving under his older and more experienced brother, I am told that the brotherly affection is not mutual.

Indeed, don't rule out the possibility, if Ed Miliband becomes leader, of his brother quitting politics altogether.

PERHAPS there's merit in supermarkets setting up their banks, given how they monopolise most other traditional high street services.

John Redwood, the former Cabinet minister and Tory economic competitiveness guru, certainly thinks it is a good idea from his own experience.

"I often think that the supermarket I use seems to know more about me and use that information more intelligently than the bank I use," he explained this week.

"Yet the bank actually knows more about me because everything goes through the books."