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YouTube - "Children Of The Corn Syrup" Lecture By Dr. Stephen W. Ponder

Dr. Stephen W. Ponder , MD, FAAP, CDE is the director of the Childrens Diabetes and Endocrine Center of South Texas at Driscoll Children’s Hospital. Dr. Ponder delivered his presentation on childre…

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Is Stephen Byers off his rocker?

Traditionally, Labour governments are “thrown off course” by unelected capitalists. Until October last year, the Blair government seemed an exception to this rule. So eager were New Labour ministers to prostrate themselves in front of capitalists that any clash between the elected government and the forces that humbled its predecessors seemed unlikely. Then came Stephen Byers and his decision not to pour any more public money into a clapped-out capitalist fiasco called Railtrack.

From the outset, new Labour ministers had decided that the best solution to what they now call the “botched Tory privatisation” of the railways was to leave the industry exclusively in the hands of the botchers. Years of disaster followed, while Railtrack shareholders demanded more and more taxpayers’ money to bail them out. Then Byers called a halt. He shut off the flow of public subsidy, and Railtrack was bust.

For a brief moment Labour backbenchers rejoiced. They jeered as the Tories’ transport spokeswoman, Teresa May, a Thatcher without the charm, bawled about the inalienable right of wealthy gentlemen in the City to make money out of lame ducks subsidised by the taxpayer.

Rather half-heartedly, I joined in the applause. I even managed a faint cheer when Byers told the House of Commons (on October 15 last year): “The government are not here to fund the shareholders of private companies,” and when he wrote in the Financial Times: “I can say for certain that there will be no taxpayers’ money made available to support shareholders.” I was impressed, too, when Byers’s line was eloquently endorsed by the prime minister.

I should perhaps have been warned by the phrase “for certain”. That should have stirred up memories of Harold Wilson’s famous assurance (over a historic Labour commitment on housing): “This is not a lightly given pledge. It is a promise.” The promise was duly broken.

And so it has turned out this time. In a statement to the Commons last week, Byers announced that when he promised “for certain” that “no taxpayers’ money” would be “made available to Railtrack shareholders”, he meant that £300m of taxpayers’ money would be made available to Railtrack shareholders.

“The government,” he declared, “have said that every single penny of taxpayers’ money must be used to improve the rail network. That is exactly what the £300m will do.” When I read that, I assumed there had been a misprint in Hansard, and that Byers had really said: “That is exactly what the £300m will not do.” But no. He really said that £300m of our money shovelled into the pockets of Railtrack shareholders would be used to improve the rail network.

Is Byers off his rocker? Is he determined to commit political suicide? I doubt it. I suspect instead that his sudden decision to do what he promised not to do was the result of pressure from the most powerful minister in the government, the chancellor of the exchequer. “Red” Gordon Brown gets his nickname from his socialist youth. He edited the Red Paper on Scotland (1975), in which he advocated “the public control of the industries whose monopolistic position threatens the ability of society to plan its own future”.

Somewhere in the early 1990s something happened to turn Red Gordon into Blue Gordon, a chancellor driven by an almost obsessive desire to comfort the City slickers he once sought to expropriate – and to make sure all other ministers, including the prime minister, fall into line.

· Unlike Red Gordon, who has forsaken his radical youth, another Scottish Labour MP, Tam Dalyell, constantly rediscovers it. Most Scots seem to have accepted the grotesque conviction and 20-year prison sentence of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi for the biggest murder in British history, the bombing of an airliner over Lockerbie in 1988.

In an adjournment debate in the Commons last week, Tam called Megrahi “an innocent man”. He quoted from a statement by former police constable Mary Boylan. She took part in the police trawl of Lockerbie after the bombing, and, some years later, as the Lockerbie trial loomed, asked for her notebook so she could refresh her memory of what had occurred. She remembered finding part of a suitcase, in which, she was told, the bomb had been planted, and which belonged to a CIA officer. Her notebook, she was told, had been destroyed, no one knows why.

Boylan’s experience is further evidence that the official reaction to the bombing of the plane at Lockerbie was dominated by intelligence spooks, most of whom knew that neither Megrahi nor Libya had anything to do with it. Tam’s questions about Boylan and her notebook were answered by the parliamentary secretary to the privy council, Stephen Twigg – so there was no answer.

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