07/04/10 "I'm the only MP who has built a real green home "
It was the birth of my older children that originally propelled me to want to change the world from inside Parliament. Now it is the birth of my youngest that convinces me that change has to come from elsewhere.
28/03/10 - "House Magazine - Eco House"
I no longer know whether my attempt to turn a derelict shell into a house that generates 50% more energy than it consumes is a folly, a vision, an obsession…or all three. I may now more when it is finished in the summer.
This will be my last newspaper column as a Member of Parliament. It is without nostalgia that I want to look at the mess we’re in and how we get out of it. My parting speech in parliament’s debate on the Budget followed the same theme.....
16/03/10 - "The Meadows of hope and inspiration"
I no longer know whether my attempt to turn a derelict shell into a house that generates 50% more energy than it consumes is a folly, a vision, an obsession…or all three. I may now more when it is finished in the summer. To make sense of it may require a different....
Thank goodness Jeremy Leggett stepped in to correct some of the inaccuracies in George Monbiot’s ‘comment’ piece in Tuesday’s Guardian. The errors, however, are even more extensive than Jeremy highlighted.
26/02/10 - "Office without power"
Perhaps it wasn’t the most conciliatory way of winding up the parliamentary debate on limiting carbon emissions from UK power stations. Perhaps a different tone might have influenced enough MPs to have avoided the 8 vote defeat.
11/03/10 - "Food for thought"
Sometimes a couple of individuals, who are not in the national spotlight, can highlight political issues more effectively than exchanges taking place in parliament. So it is with John Hughes and Christine Shawcroft. Neither figure in television news coverage.
10/02/10 - "Who's Robbin Who?"
The current parliament staggers towards its own lamentable end. As it does, I have been trying to reflect on what the last eighteen years has meant to me, as the elected representative of ‘Robin Hood Land’ in Nottingham South.
Dear Gordon, A word of congratulations about the way you have brought the banks into public ownership. In the crisis they have dragged us into, no other lifeline was worth entertaining. Congratulations too in calling for an international conference to rewrite the...
Watching the exchanges between the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, I can’t help feeling that my mother would have sent them off to bed without an evening meal; two men, afraid to face the future, bickering about how much can be blamed on the past.
June 2009 "House magazine- Taking the poor into a low energy future"
During our time in office, the Labour Government has made some genuinely radical commitments on both the eradication of fuel poverty and our response to climate change. This makes it all the more frustrating to be confronted by two.......
At the moment, serious politics in Britain has imploded. The outrageous abuse, by some MPs, of the Parliamentary allowances system has lead to a general denunciation of everyone. Newspapers have discovered that they no longer need....
The Institute of Fiscal Studies cast a long shadow across Labour’s £1.3 trillion rescue plan for the British economy. Their judgment was that it will saddle every household in Britain with an annual bill of £2,840 for a decade, in debt and interest repayments.
Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South) (Lab): Given the perilous state of the world economy in which the Budget has had to be presented, I wondered whether the Chancellor would open his Budget statement with reference to words used by someone else.....
Forget the tabloid obsessions with sleaze, sex lives and spin. The period running between the G20 conference in London and the next General Election will come to define Labour’s relevance to 21st century politics.
The police ‘swoop’ on climate change protestors in Nottingham had an air of the surreal about it. Some 200 police officers, dozens of dogs and a cavalcade of police vans descended on a school site, in the dead of night, to conduct Britain’s largest pre-emptive....
The G20 summit in London, on April 2nd, looms ahead of the Government. As finance ministers from around the world trail in and out of the UK for ‘preparatory discussions’, the only clear consensus is that something needs to be done. Beyond this, countries....
Gaza is no longer the world’s biggest prison camp, it is a duck shoot. If you would prefer not to hide behind euphemisms, it is a death camp; where people who cannot leave face daily bombardment and where even ‘safe havens’.....
When a relationship breaks down there are two things you can say about it with a degree of certainty. The first is that the most ferocious arguments will take place around the most marginal issues; how someone eats their cornflakes, who gets the CDs.....
When the weather stops soaking the British public the energy companies will take over. Already during 2008 average energy charges have risen by 38%. Wages, benefits and pensions have not. By the end of the year 6 million British households will officially......
Delegates at the Labour Party conference in Manchester should be gentle with Gordon Brown. It will be his last as Labour leader and Prime Minister. Gordon is like a Damien Hirst sheep. Trapped in formaldehyde, he lacks the qualities needed for a bold.....
Gordon Brown’s declaration that he is about to review New Labour’s policies sent a flutter of excitement through the parliamentary press lobby. Was this to be the distinctive political lead everyone has been waiting for? Is it to be the genuine break with the Blairite.....
25/07/08 "The dead hand of Sir Humphrey"
Receiving a lifetime achievement award is certainly better than not receiving one. The only trouble is that it has an air of something posthumous about it. You can hear the whispers in your own head… “God bless him, guv’nor… ‘e did his best”.
The Secretary of State shall make regulations within one year of the passing of this Act with the purpose of requiring designated energy suppliers to introduce a renewable energy tariff for specified producers of renewable energy.
In these days of strange associations what is the connection between Brendan Barber, General Secretary of the TUC, pop star Lily Allen and Bianca Jagger? The answer is that all three have written to Labour MPs urging them to back my amendment......
Graham Allen and Alan Simpson have both committed themselves to the Climate Change Bill which will be introduced in the House of Commons. Graham Allen said 'Global Warming is the biggest problem being faced by mankind and this Bill starts the process of setting the British Government serious targets to help make a real impact on this threat.
05/03/08 - "Shock - New housing revelations"
On the 2nd March 2008, the Mail on Sunday ran a nonsense piece about Alan. They sent a journalist, Nick Pisa (sic) and a photographer out to get details of the family apartment in Italy. Having come back with the wrong photo and the wrong info, the Mail....
So, finally, Northern Rock has been brought into public ownership. Now the political fun begins. Recriminations are everywhere. I’m reminded of a ‘Peanuts’ cartoon in which Lucy offers consolation to a forlorn Charlie Brown.........
22/01/08 - Energy Bill
Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South) (Lab): The Secretary of State will know that the Prime Minister has committed the UK to meeting the EU target of obtaining 20 per cent. of our energy needs from renewable sources by 2020.....
I am really pleased to have the opportunity of contributing to the Committee’s enquiry into the role we can play, as individuals and local communities, in tackling climate change. I will try to do so within the sequence of headings set out by the Committee.
Sitting on the hill in front of the Ackermannbogen estate in Munich, it was easy to see how the City had been named
Germany’s ‘Energy Saving City’, only 18 months earlier. The hill wasn’t a hill at all. I was actually sitting on top of 6 million litres of water.
In every town and city across the UK the picture was the same. Queues of people snaked their way down the high street. Not since the Tories paid people to queue in their infamous ‘Labour isn’t working’ poster have we seen
anything like it.
25/07/07 - "Adrift in the deathly hollows"
After two months of torrential downpours, Britain seems mesmerised by the floods that have swept the country. As the final Harry Potter novel hits the streets at the same time the rivers do, it is as through Lord Voldemort himself had decided to create....
I am really pleased to have the opportunity of contributing to the Committee’s enquiry into the role we can play, as individuals and local communities, in tackling climate change. I will try to do so within the sequence of headings set out by the Committee.
Interregnums are strange events. You never quite know where you are. If they follow a death, people at least know that they are entitled to mourn. Handovers of political power bring no such certainties. Labour MP's hover in clusters, uncertain about which.....
08/06/07 - Aviation Growth
Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South) (Lab): May I wish the Prime Minister well in his attempts to make climate change the centrepiece of the G8 discussions? Will he take the opportunity to remind the leaders who fly in there that, despite all the....
08/06/07 - "Friends disunited"
Of course, it could have happened to anyone. You go out for a meeting with old friends. You do a bit of business, a bit of catching up, swap a few reminiscences. And then, out of nowhere, up pops Dubya. “Yo, bro, whaddya know. I got an
army and we’re ready to go”
25/04/07 - "More urgent than oil (liquid gold)"
For the last 20 years the free‐market Right have dominated the global political agenda to an extent where arrogance vastly outstripped intellect. They were able to do so partly because the Left failed to address the ways in which capital was seeking to disengage....
27/03/07 - Sustainable Communities
Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South) (Lab): One of the great attractions of such legislation is that it would give local authorities in the UK the same powers and entitlements that they have in other parts of Europe.....
21/03/07 - Green Budget Debate
Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South) (Lab): It is normal on these occasions for me to follow the Chancellor’s Budget statement and fill in the conventional gaps that I feel he has overlooked. I pay tribute to the Chancellor.....
13/03/07 - "Independent Article -Climate cheating"
Political leaders of all parties may not yet understand the urgency of responding to climate change, but at least they understand that at the next general election there will be
a race to turn carbon credits into electoral credits. Bless them.
12/03/07 - "Food for thought"
I'm bored with most of the arguments still going on about climate change. How much is down to man and how much to solar cycles is somewhat academic. The question is what are we going to do about the crises that are already in the pipeline?
13/03/07 - "Somewhere beyond soundbites"
My decision to leave parliament at the next election is driven by the same reasoning that took me into parliament 15 years ago. Then, as now, I had no particular interest in a career plan. All I wanted was to change the world. That is
still the plan.
11/03/07 - "Mail on Sunday article - Cheating on the planet"
For the last 20 years the free‐market Right have dominated the global political agenda to an extent where arrogance vastly outstripped intellect. They were able to do so partly because the Left failed to address the ways in which capital was seeking to disengage....
07/03/07 - Transport Questions
Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South) (Lab): Will the Minister ask for an audit of LIFT schemes in the Leicester area and elsewhere to assess the number of projects that have been able to incorporate energy‐generating systems, rainwater harvesting....
06/03/07 - Biofuel Question
Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South) (Lab): As a supporter of the
development of sustainable biofuels, I am sure that the Minister will be
as aware as I am of the “Dispatches” programme last night, which
pointed out that were the RTFO to be a success.....
22/02/07 - "Mail on Sunday article - In the land of the blind"
It was the birth of my older children that originally propelled me to want to change the world from inside parliament. Now it is the birth of my youngest that convinces me that
change has to come from elsewhere. I had no illusions about where I would fit.....
22/02/07 - "Picking up the bills for climate change"
I had intended to write this week’s column as a demolition job on carbon emissions trading, but it will have to wait a bit. The announcement of my decision not to stand again in the next general election probably demands the more
urgent explanation.
Our whole understanding of fuel poverty is being squeezed in 3 ways. Weather patterns are becoming increasingly erratic. We have to deal with health risks both from the cold in winter and heat in summer. Fuel poverty will become as much to do with staying......
There can’t be too many occasions ahead when Tony Blair presents himself before the Parliamentary Liaison Committee. These are parliament’s big hitters; the Chairs of all the major Select Committees. They are supposed to be the MPs who......
2007 "A Really Green Budget"
A) New Golden Rules
Henceforth HM government should ensure that in line with the Stern Report recommendations, the government will seek to direct a minimum of 1% of....
26/10/06 "Markets, myths, and the climate change muddle"
In the early part of next week a pillar of the establishment, Sir Nicholas Stern, is set to drop a bombshell into the corridors of the Treasury. Its implications are far more
devastating than anything al Qaida threatens. Stern, who was a former chief economist....
Don’t be too hard on David Miliband. The new Secretary of State for the Environment is a bright cookie, with a mind that is at least open to the big challenges we have to address on climate change. At Labour’s annual conference in Manchester he received....
As Al Gore’s film on climate change begins to fill cinema seats all round the country, the Labour Party is confronted with an inconvenient truth of its own. This does not revolve around Tony Blair, whose premiership is already dead in the water.
Hey, sucker. Try this on for size. Climate Change is good for
you. The world’s scientists may be screaming at us that never before has the way we live so threatened the prospects of life itself, but reassurance is at hand.
28/04/06 "Resurgence Article - The long & winding road"
I suppose I grew up with John, Paul, George, Ringo and ‘Resurgence’. It just took me a while to catch up with the seeds of exciting irreverence that Resurgence was to plant in my life. The magazine’s explorations turned conventional ideas......
22/03/06 - Budget Debate Speech 2006
Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South) (Lab): Budget debates are
often conducted within a strange sense of time. The short term is
about whether the Budget will survive the press headlines and analysis tomorrow.
01/01/06 "The China syndrome"
No one has a kind word to say about Tony Blair these days. The Chinese press have just slammed him for his latest lecture visit: less interesting than a local newspaper column;
more expensive than buying ownership of the whole paper.
25/04/07 - "More urgent than oil (liquid gold)"
For the last 20 years the free‐market Right have dominated the global political agenda to an extent where arrogance vastly outstripped intellect. They were able to do so partly because the Left failed to address the ways in which capital was seeking to disengage....
11/03/07 - "Mail on Sunday article - Cheating on the planet"
For the last 20 years the free‐market Right have dominated the global political agenda to an extent where arrogance vastly outstripped intellect. They were able to do so partly because the Left failed to address the ways in which capital was seeking to disengage....
2007 "A Really Green Budget"
A) New Golden Rules
Henceforth HM government should ensure that in line with the Stern Report recommendations, the government will seek to direct a minimum of 1% of....
21/07/2006 "Lebanon - The destruction of Democracy"
Those witnessing the hushed exchanges between Dubya and Son at the G8 summit must have thought they were watching a political spoof. “Hey pop, Canna do the Middle East roadshow before Conodoleeza gets there? Canna, canna, canna?......
17/05/06 - "Why nuclear is nonsense"
Ever heard the story of Chicken Licken? One day, whilst walking in the woods, an acorn fell on Chicken Licken’s head. “Oh no!” Cried Chicken Licken “the sky is falling in. We’re all doomed.” In a state of panic, Chicken‐Licken ran off to warn his friends.
09/12/05 - "When the chat show ends"
It would be easy to caricature the
change in Conservative Party
leadership in slapstick terms. The
arrival of David Cameron at the
Despatch Box was more of a love-in
than a clash of convictions it was
Punch and Judy being replaced by
Richard and Judy....
22/11/05 - Climate Change
Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South) (Lab): I join other Members who have expressed a preference for the House not to divide on these issues tonight. I feel that it would put us all in a strange position if we were asked to choose between voting.....
27/10/05 - The burning fuse of sustainability
It is very British that a revolution that will change our lives profoundly over the coming years actually began its course almost 200 years ago. This is a revolution in energy policy, and it will leave the nuclear debate looking like a discussion between sad......
16/09/05 - "When New Labour runs out of fuel"
The biggest legacy of the Blair‐Bush era is fear and insecurity. One hint of a trucker’s protest about fuel prices and the British public laid siege to petrol stations all around the country. True, it had none of the carnage of social collapse in New Orleans...
16/07/05 - Food & Energy Security: Local systems, global solidarity
It’s the strange nature of our times that’s defining a quite different politics. The defining difference now is between those who want to address, with a degree of urgency, the challenges of climate change and the way it is going to rewrite.....
When world leaders get together at the G8 summit no one will have a bad word to say about Jeffrey Sachs. The economics professor responsible for the UN’s anti‐poverty report, ‘Investing in Development’, has asked rich nations to.....
28/05/05 - "Eco House"
I no longer know whether my attempt to turn a derelict shell into a house that generates 50% more energy than it consumes is a folly, a vision, an obsession…or all three. I may now more when it is finished in the summer. To make sense of it may require a different....
With all the benefits that only hindsight from the Eurovision song contest can bring, we can now measure the full disappointment of the Queen’s Speech. What an opportunity
missed. I never expected much at the most serious and structural level.
25/03/05 - Future Energy Markets
Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South) (Lab): I am extremely grateful to you for choosing this subject for debate this afternoon, Mr. Deputy Speaker, particularly as it follows the Chancellor's announcements in his Budget speech about the
intention......
23/05/05 - "Microgeneration meeting invite"
Just a reminder about the reception we are sponsoring on microgeneration. As you will be aware micropower (the production of sustainable heat or power by individual or small groups of consumers) has many benefits.
11/05/05 - "St Anthony and the half blood project"
I was half way through the latest Harry Potter book when the press ran the story saying that, at the end of his premiership, Tony Blair planned to lead some sort of global, inter‐faith initiative. It was described as the ‘clean break’ option from politics.
11/05/05 - "Leading Labour"
I no longer know whether my attempt to turn a derelict shell into a house that generates 50% more energy than it consumes is a folly, a vision, an obsession…or all three. I may now more when it is finished in the summer. To make sense of it may require a different....
15/03/05 - Budget Debate 2005
Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South) (Lab): At the end of every Budget debate, Members stream out of the Chamber and are greeted by those in the press, who want to know whether or not we thought it a good Budget. Usually.....
10/03/05 - "Dangerous manouevers in the dark"
The abrupt withdrawal of 14,000 Syrian troops from the Lebanon fills me with mixed emotions. Press headlines celebrating the end of an era of foreign military occupation it uneasily against daily efforts to justify the 150,000 US
troops in current occupation of Iraq.
18/02/05 - Making the pledge
This is a time to explore some important contradictions. When I went off to Rome 's anti‐war rally on the anniversary of 9/11, the British press were obsessed with something else. Blair had just appointed Alan Milburn to a Cabinet.....
08/02/05 - Climate Change
Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South) (Lab): I shall try to be as brisk as possible, partly to allow other Members into the debate, but also because I want to make several points that I hope will upset the applecart in relation to the consensus of......
03/01/05 - "Evevning Post - MP calls for green battle"
Nottingham South MP Alan Simpson told Parliament he was fed up with the trivial subjects being discussed on the eve of the election expected this May. During a hard‐hitting speech, the Labour MP said each member of the public could take
his....
03/01/05 - "Letter to Post - Mark Glover"
An example for all MPs MP Alan Simpson is to be congratulated for truly putting his money where is mouth is and converting a derelict building into a house that is to be a
net producer of energy (Post, January 3). Climate change is not a theory, it is fact.
We are heading into the General Election campaign and already it needs to be rescued. There is no shortage of towering issues we could address – climate change, air pollution, secure pensions, the future of the NHS, transport needs of the 21 st century.......
26/11/04 - "Gordon and the Gekko fallacy"
There was a time when the Chancellor of the Exchequer was a firebrand of Labour radicalism. Gordon Brown, then, was unafraid to make the case for economic interventionism, universal entitlements, and an internationalism rooted....
08/11/04 - Carbon Emissions
Alan Simpson: We need to put the debate in the context of the best aspects of the Government's record. For the first time in history, the Labour Government gave a statutory undertaking to eradicate fuel poverty in this country by 2016.
29/10/04 - "Terra Madre - The mother of all movements"
In the modern world, democracy gets killed off more in parmesan shavings that para‐military coups. Little bits get sliced off the system of public accountability and, before you know it, social authoritarianism has replaced social
democracy; the democratic cheese has.....
This is a time to explore some important contradictions. When I went off to Rome 's anti‐war rally on the anniversary of 9/11, the British press were obsessed with something else. Blair had just appointed Alan Milburn to a Cabinet post that will take charge of Labour's next...
It is Tony Blair's anniversary. Ten years ago he took over as leader of the Labour Party. Shortly afterwards he and I set off on a round Britain tour. He was championing the case for modernising' the Labour Party by abandoning its‘
commitments to common ownership.
This is a difficult, turbulent period for ASLEF, but one it will come through with dignity. As with the Labour Party, the ask will be to re‐build around the strength and principles of
its membership. Central to this is trust, openness and accountability.
16/06/04 - "The politic of patronage"
Here is the irony. I've spent the best part of the last year arguing for taxes on saturated fats, sugar and salt, and I could barely get any part of the press to take an interest. Then, one weekend in Portugal and everyone in the press anted to talk about obesity.....
10/06/04 - "The day we all lost"
I am going to give today a miss. News coverage will no doubt be dominated by makeover explanations of the EU election results in Britain and the Reagan funeral in America . I can already feel the nausea of organised dishonesty beginning to
overwhelm me.
For once a national newspaper caught the issue perfectly. The right wing think tank “Civitas” were holding a conference on migrant workers in Britain . Reluctantly, they had conceded a case for highly skilled workers being recruited for jobs in the UK.....
17/03/04 - Budget Debate 2004
Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South): I am very pleased to be called to speak on the first day of the Budget debate, and I begin by paying a couple of tributes, the first of which is to the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr. Gibb) for.....
October 2003 - "Labour Party Conference"
It says a lot about the state of British politics that just when you get a Labour conference hungry for policy change, the
press become obsessed with leadership change. This is the politics of Pop Idol – adore the winner, abuse the rest....
Forget the tussle between the BBC and Downing Street over who was responsible for hounding David Kelly to his death. Forget the manoeuvring between Blair and Brown over who will lead Labour after the next general election. Consider, for one moment....
June 2003 "Labour Party reshuffle"
For a moment Ian Duncan Smith huffed and puffed about the Cabinet reshuffle and the planned demise of the Lord Chancellor's office as though he had found a real political issue. Some Labour members joined in the disquiet about not knowing where.....
Long after the street celebrations in Baghdad have ended a more awkward reality will dawn upon the international community. 'Victory' over Iraq will not bring an end to war. It will just move the conflict on to different terrain.
February 2003 "NEf peoples pensions"
Where does money come from? Who does it go to? And what does it do when it gets there? These are all key questions for new economics, both on the international stage and at home in Britain. In projects ranging from Jubilee Research’s....
The latest opinion polls show that British people oppose a war on Iraq by a ratio of 4:1. The government’s media campaigners have failed to make a case for war and Downing St’s ‘dossier on Saddam’ has been seen for what it as.....
"Soft spots and hard messages"
Ok, I have a soft spot for the Archbishop of Canterbury. Anyone who will stand up and describe this week’s G8 Summit, in Edinburgh as a meeting at which the leaders of the world’s richest and most powerful nations decide what they might do....
