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...but these people are no rats but the representatives of over 1.3 million predominantly public sector workers. Next Tuesday, much of UNISON's membership will strike in protest at proposed changes to the Local Government Pensions Scheme. UNISON Labour Link is the part of the organisation that gives money to the Labour party and organises campaigns to UNISON members to persuade them to vote Labour. It's not full of trots or entryists, but the more loyal Labour followers (you have to opt into it).

So, whilst unions have said this sort of thing in the past, and have in the process bought time and u-turns from the government, I thought it significant that UNISON Labour Link have said:

"In the circumstances of the union taking national industrial action
against the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, named as Regulator and
decision maker regarding the LGPS, in is felt that it is not appropriate
or politically sensible to be organising, on one hand, for industrial
action by the union while sending out letters and leaflets to many of the
same members asking them to vote Labour.

The decision has been taken to suspend our election campaigning work for
Labour in the May elections while the industrial action is going on.

Labour Link will not be giving any further donations or support to the
campaign until we reach a solution to the present LGPS issue.

This is a decision that affects our work for Labour's election campaign in
May nationally and locally."

I'm just sitting listening to the Any Questions Lib Dem leadership contest special and I just heard Chris Huhne, in response to a question about whether they were more afraid of Gordon Brown or David Cameron, say that one thing that scares people about Gordon Brown is that he cannot keep his hands out of other departments' business.

How timely an answer, because it has just been announced today that Kate Barker, she of the housing market report that was commissioned a couple of years ago (and who said herself that she didn't know much about housing economics at the time!) has now been asked to do a review of the Land Use Planning system...by...The Treasury:

The terms of reference of the review are:

To consider how, in the context of globalisation, and building on the reforms already put in place in England, planning policy and procedures can better deliver economic growth and prosperity alongside other sustainable development goals.

In particular to assess:

• ways of further improving the efficiency and speed of the system;
• ways of increasing the flexibility, transparency and predictability that enterprise requires;
• the relationship between planning and productivity, and how the outcomes of the planning system can better deliver its sustainable economic objectives; and
• the relationship between economic and other sustainable development goals in the delivery of sustainable communities.

I wonder how much Ms Barker knows about planning. She's turning into the economist's version of Louise Casey methinks.

The Telegraph today highlights a poll claiming that up to 68% of the population want an English parliament. At least I think that's what the various, slightly confusing, figures say. It might mean that 68% of Scots want an English parliament for all I can work out.

No worries. Suffice it to say that I find myself, once again, in the minority. But not, I hasten to add, because of any particular devotion to Westminster, far from it. I loathe the place and all that it stands for personally. But because I do believe that supporting an English parliament is a substitute for real devolutionary democratic change. Yes, it may well be unfair that Scotland has one and that we are ruled by people who have their own parliament and whose decisions at Westminster do not affect what happens in some areas of life to their own constituents.

But think of this. I live in Oxford. I like to think, though I don't have one to call my own, that it is my home. I believe that Oxford has in its little valley setting, everything we need to be able to run our lives the way we want to.

Why would I want someone elected by the people of Leicester West deciding what to do with our hospitals? Is that any better than, say, someone elected by the people of Airdrie and Shotts, telling our Thames Valley police force what to do? Is it going to be any better that someone put there by the people of Bolton ties our councils up in knots than someone for Dunfermline holds the purse-strings?

Leviathan may have been a necessary evil in building up a strong post-war state in an era of relative scarcity and in negotiating economies of scale in order to get a social safety net functioning in the first place. But neither it, nor its little sibling, an English parliament is necessary now to get our cities, regions and services competing and growing in ways that the people who depend on them want.

I simply refuse to believe that the people who happen to have conned or cajoled the poor citizens of Sedgefield, or even of Witney into sending them to the High Trough of Parliament are any better, with ideas or managerial competence, than those the folk of Headington, Wolvercote, or even Hinksey Park have decided should run their home town. And the former, for all their globe trotting, power broking and international adventuring are making the world a more dangerous place to boot.

If we have to have an English parliament, let it be in a form David Hume would have suggested, which, with modern communications and travel is self-evidently more practical in the 21st century than ever it was in the 18th.

Surely there's some mistake here. Have a look at this snippet from MetCheck's short term forecast for today in OX3, Oxford. The earlier period from 10:00 to 13:00 has just passed so has dropped off the screen, but it was showing 1.8mm of rain in that period. It's been tipping buckets all morning. But the forecast seems to be saying that in the mid-evening this evening it will be 10.8mm (it was 11.7 earlier) in two hours as against 1.8mm in three hours this morning.

My flat is prone to a bit of rainwater flooding as the door is in a bit of a dip halfway down a hill peppered with springs and so the run off is huge. SO it will be interesting to see what this order of magnitude increase in the rain from this morning to this evening will be like!