Martin Tod

I was very encouraged to see today’s Hampshire Chronicle report on how Winchester’s local hospital is making progress in the battle against MRSA.

Back in January, following an invitation, I accompanied the RHCH Medical Director, Dr Kevin Stewart, on one of the daily ward rounds by the executive team to inspect the hospital environment and see that action is taken on areas that need work.

We spent two hours visiting the hospital - mainly in Florence Portal House - seeing the improvements that are being made and discussing the infection control programme.

I’ve been particularly interested in infection control for several years.  Earlier in my career, I was involved in setting up public hygiene programmes in developing countries - teaching mothers and children basic handwashing habits can have a dramatic effect on infant health and mortality -  and have previously met with experts in infection control to learn more about it.

It was very encouraging to see how totally committed the hospital’s management team and staff are to improving infection control and creating a culture of cleanliness within the hospital - and how hard the staff are working to improve things.  It was clear that their top priority is to get the essentials right: regular hand-washing and hand-sanitising - reducing unnecessary use of antibiotics - making the hospital easy to clean and keeping it clean.  I was amazed how many hospitals didn’t mention handwashing or sinks in the recent Panorama survey the BBC published alongside their ‘How clean Is your hospital’ programme (although RHCH did).  Hand sanitiser (essentially alcohol with bit of glycerin and perfume thrown in) is good as far as it goes, but, if there is any dirt on the hands, it is not as good as soap and water.

We also talked about their programme of ‘prescribing’ the insertion of cannulae. It’s been getting great results and it’s very good to see RHCH taking a national lead on finding innovative ways to go beyond the basics.

Most of the time, the best thing that politicians can do about the NHS is stay out of the way of local health professionals. The one area where they can need more support is in ensuring they have enough funding to pay for the right number of beds for the number of patients they have and to modernise the wards to make it easier to isolate people who get an infection.

I know Mark Oaten and I are committed to doing everything we can to make sure that the hospital has the funding and support it needs to do this.  As recently reported on Panorama, if beds are used too intensively, it can increase the risk of infection - even if everything else is done right.  It’s essential that the hospital gets the support it needs to keep reducing bed occupancy rates and to continue driving down infection rates.

While reading the davidthedesigner blog for my latest typography fix, I spotted this article about QR-codes. They’re a sort of square bar-code that can be read by mobile phones. You can generate your own here and get the software here.

Are these ever likely to take off? Should we start printing them on posters or business cards? I doubt it - but here’s a test image with a hidden message which you can use to send me your views.

We’re all stunned by the great results of the elections last Thursday:

• More votes and more seats in the Winchester District and the new Winchester constituency than the Tories
• Highest Lib Dem share of the vote in Winchester district or county elections since 1998 
• Swing from the Conservatives to the Liberal Democrats for the second year running

We knew that our campaign for a greener, fairer and safer Winchester was getting a strong response - and that people were reacting well to the strong record of our candidates - but getting the highest vote for 10 years was more than we expected!

The picture in the new Winchester Constituency was even better: 49% of the vote, vs only 43% for the Conservatives, and 12 out of 17 seats.  Unfortunately we missed winning Hiltingbury West by only 20 votes or it would have been 13 out of 17 seats.

Even if you include the latest results from the wards which weren’t up this year (which are all Conservative), we still beat the Tories by 48% to 44%.

Overall, a very encouraging night.  And a big thank you owed to all the people who worked so incredibly hard and, most of all, to all the people who voted for us on Thursday.

Post-note: I’ve just checked the County Results.  Our results outperformed those as well - so I’ve updated the post accordingly.

Conversations at various WinACC meetings, while out campaigning with Winchester Friends of the Earth for aircraft emissions to be included in the climate change bill (see above) and in Green’s after the monthly Winchester Friends of the Earth meeting have thrown up several interesting local environmental websites.

First off, there’s Dave Walker-Nix’s ‘One World’ website at http://www.wwn-oneworld.co.uk. Dave organised the Friends of the Earth aviation demonstration in the town centre (that’s him on the left wearing the mask).  His site has a collection of fascinating inventions for tackling climate change. Very thought provoking and well worth a read.

David Morgan turned up to his first WinACC open meeting last Saturday.  He has an environmental blog at http://www.reallifenews.com/environment/ as part of his real life news website with a local and personal take on living a greener lifestyle.

The Greening Oliver’s Battery team has set up a website at http://www.greening-ob.org.uk/.  It’s great to see Terena Plowright’s inspirational Greening Campaign starting to roll out across the area.

I served on the Liberal Democrats’ Federal Executive with Donnachadh McCarthy at the time of the Iraq War.  He’s now left party politics and is a full-time eco-auditor. He recently came to speak to WinACC about his work and to give advice on a greener lifestyle.  You can find out more at his website http://www.cix.co.uk/~dmccarthy/

The final site isn’t strictly an environmental site, but WinACC wouldn’t be what it is without the brilliant facilitation of James Martin-Jones. WinACC open meetings are fun, constructive, inclusive, positive and action-focused - and also run exactly to time (always 90 minutes!).  The next one is on June 7th.  Several people I spoke to after the last one commented on how much better they are than ‘normal meetings’.  This wouldn’t happen without James; you can find out more at http://jamesmartinjones.com/.

That’s it for now.  As I find more, I’ll post them up and add them to my links.

(Needless to say, none of these links imply that any of the sites, organisations or people mentioned endorse me or anyone else - they’re just sites I hope you find interesting)…

One piece of good news today.  The Government has made it clear that Micheldever Station is not going to be one of its new eco-towns.

I’m really pleased.  This was an eco-town proposal that wasn’t eco.  It was going to have an appalling effect on traffic congestion and emissions.  It was going to concrete over the countryside - rather than using brown field land as per the original specification.

In essence, it was a half-baked greenwash of a bad idea that had previously been repeatedly rejected.

Most of the credit for this belongs with the Dever Society and particularly their very impressive vice-chair, Tessa Robertson, who got a big round of applause today at the celebration meeting (or, more accurately, celebration walk across some fields that were threatened with being concreted over).

There was also huge public opposition.  The online petition against the proposed Micheldever Station eco-town got more support than any of the other petitions around the country opposing local eco-towns.

The Dever Society is intending to continue campaigning until Zurich Insurance and Eagle Star give up on their plans.  I certainly intend to keep doing what I can to support them. They need members and support: the more the better.  If you’d like to join, the membership form is here.

Winchester had a wonderfully gentle atmosphere on Friday evening.

Around 10,000 people (according to the Echo) were in the centre for the Winchester Passion.

The evening started at Oram’s Arbour and then moved to the Great Hall, followed by the Law Courts, then the High Street and Butter Cross, and finally the west end of the Cathedral.

David Spender has some great photographs of the event - and has set up a Flickr group for the Passion to pull together everyone else’s as well.

The following video (shot on a digital camera at quite some distance) is not great quality, but it does give a sense of the atmosphere outside the cathedral during the crucifixion scene.

Winchester Passion 2008

As promised elsewhere, I will answer any questions received on this blog in public (unless the questioner specifically asks for a private answer).

Question:

The Winchester Whisperer asks:

What about the LD abstention on the vote last night. If you’d been the MP for Winchester would you have abstained?

Answer:

No. I would have voted for a referendum.

I was a parliamentary candidate at the last election and this is what our manifesto promised:

MAKE EUROPE MORE EFFECTIVE AND DEMOCRATIC
Membership of the EU has been hugely important for British jobs, environmental protection, equality rights, and Britain’s place in the world. But with enlargement to twenty-five member states, the EU needs reform to become more efficient and more accountable. The new constitution helps to achieve this by improving EU coherence, strengthening the powers of the elected European Parliament compared with the Council of Ministers, allowing proper oversight of the unelected Commission, and enhancing the role of national parliaments. It also more clearly defines and limits the powers of the EU, reflecting diversity and preventing overcentralisation. We are therefore clear in our support for the constitution, which we believe is in Britain’s interest – but ratification must be subject to a referendum of the British people.

In response to the change from the Constitutional Treaty to the Lisbon Treaty, I personally see three possible lines of argument:

• It’s not the same as the Constitutional Treaty.  It’s a smaller revising treaty. So I’m not bound by my promise at the last election.
  
  • Although several people have argued that Lisbon has a different role and works a different way, see Quaequam Blog for an example, in the end, I’m not convinced - I think we need to compare the overall effect of the two treaties, not the way they work.  While I admit the two treaties are not identical, I don’t believe the end-point is different enough to justify a different response. If the start point is the same and the end point is nearly the same, then I don’t believe the intermediate step should be treated differently.
• I’ve changed my mind. I was wrong to propose a referendum on the EU Constitution - since I now think referenda are wrong for issues of this complexity.
  • There are definite issues with this particular referendum because it’s a complex treaty and there are many people and publishers who would be keen to turn the referendum into a ‘do you like what you’ve heard about the EU?’ vote. It would have been a major challenge to ensure the substance of the treaty was addressed.
  • However, in practice, the EU Constitution was, if anything, more complex than Lisbon, not less - the same problems would have applied - and I made a public commitment to supporting a referendum on that.  I’m also committed to a referendum on EU membership - so, while convenient, I also don’t think this argument stacks up (unless I’d genuinely had a Damascene conversion on referenda and also opposed the one on EU membership - and I haven’t and don’t).  I’ve also previously stated publicly my liking for the clause in the Swiss constitution permitting a ‘delete all and replace’ referendum if 100,000 people propose a new national constitution: a generic ‘anti all referendums’ line would not be true to my previously stated beliefs.
• We promised a referendum on a treaty on Maastricht, and on a treaty that takes us to almost the same point as Lisbon, so we should stick to our guns and vote for a referendum.
  • As I understand it, all the elements of the Constitutional Treaty we praised at the last election are still in the Lisbon Treaty. (I’m open to be corrected on this).
  • At least for me personally, the duck test therefore applies*. We need to treat the Lisbon Treaty in the same way we committed to treat the Constitutional Treaty. 

So, what would I have done in the Commons on Thursday night?

• I’d have voted for an in/out referendum
• I’d have voted for a Lisbon referendum

If they had passed, I’d then have campaigned for the UK to stay in the EU and for us to ratify the Lisbon treaty.

Is Lisbon enough?  No.  The EU still needs further reform to be more open, more accountable and more easy to understand for the peoples of Europe.

I once found a quote that summarised my feelings about the EU (and many other institutions) I think from Mill:

My love for an institution is in proportion to my desire to reform it.

There’s a lot to do to make Europe work better for British people: more open, more accountable, less fraud and waste, with stronger action on climate change and reform of the Common Agricultural Policy and Common Fisheries Policy.

But those are matters for a separate blog post.

* A strict user of the ‘duck test’ could argue that while Lisbon has a very similar end point to the constitutional treaty (’quacks like a duck’) it doesn’t look the same as the constitutional treaty (much shorter etc, not ‘delete all and replace’) - so it doesn’t actually ‘look like a duck’ and so the duck test doesn’t apply - but there’s been enough sophistry in this debate already.

A good article in Saturday’s Guardian by Tristram Hunt on the ‘un-eco eco-towns’:

All too predictably, Britain’s leading developers are using the eco-town template to dust off long-rejected proposals and re-submit shoddy housing schemes.

The potential loss of countryside around Micheldever is not the only problem with the proposed Eagle Star development. Despite the railway station, a large new eco-town equidistant between Andover, Winchester and Basingstoke will also be very bad for traffic.  There’s a good briefing from the Dever Society on the issue here.

My fears about Housing Minister Caroline Flint’s forthcoming decision on Micheldever are not just driven by concerns about the Government’s desire to be seen taking some symbolic ‘green’ action.  What worries me most is the combination of this desire to appear green with Labour’s love of large top-down solutions to any problem (in this case housing) and their strangely obsessive desire for approval by big business (in this case a company that has just appointed Tony Blair as an advisor on climate change).

Very pleased that Winchester City Council Planning Committee backed the campaign to save the Stanmore this morning.

All credit to the councillors of both parties (and none) who spoke and voted in favour of keeping the Stanmore as a community pub.

I’d built a website to help the campaign and the response it got showed how strongly people feel locally about keeping the Stanmore at the heart of the local community. After the officers recommended closure, a lot of people were telling us we didn’t have a chance. Sitting in the pub last night, preparing for today’s meeting, it felt like a last charge. Everyone, especially Glenn Sumner who spoke at the planning meeting on behalf of the Save The Stanmore campaign, was determined to give it their best shot.

Following through a link in Jonathan Calder’s Liberal England blog to an article about Greg Mulholland in the Bradford Telegraph and Argus, it turns out that we did it in CAMRA’s Community Pubs Week!

The CAMRA Community Pubs week website has a list of things to do to support the week, but I couldn’t find a reference to ’saving the pub from closure’!

The campaign isn’t over. It’s still possible that there could be an appeal - and so we’re still asking people to sign the petition in case we need their help again. But that doesn’t stop today being a very satisfying day indeed.

Just back from speaking at the Cabinet (Traffic and Parking) Committee at the City Council - and there’s good news.

George Beckett and the Council have listened to local people and local businesses on the proposed parking changes and decided not to press ahead with ‘Pay and Display’ instead of ‘Pay on Foot’. All credit to them.

At the meeting, I took them through a survey we recently completed on parking: 94% of car park users that returned our survey were opposed to changing the system.

People like the current system.  It means they don’t have the same pressure to rush back to the car and it gives them more chance to stay longer in Winchester. And that, in turn, is good for local businesses.

It was clear from the survey that the problems with pay on foot have also been overstated.  Although a majority of people in the survey have had a problem at some point or another, it happens to most people very infrequently. And when things do go wrong, they told us that Winchester’s parking attendants do an excellent, prompt and effective job in sorting out problems in the overwhelming majority of cases.