Shortly, I am heading into Parliament to support Julian Brazier’s bill to allow consumers to appeal against video classifications and other measures to curb some of the excesses of the industry that Julian outlines below.

I am someone who is normally very suspicious of new regulation. In fact, most of the Private Member’s Bills that come before us on Friday sittings like this are proposing new regulation. Many when scrutinised closely are shown to be either unnecessary or impractical. I am not sufficiently expert on games classifications to know whether Julian’s proposals, if passed into law, will be the last word on the matter, but they are worthy of our support.

Sometimes, Private Members Bills perform a wider function of bringing an issue to a wider audience. Julian’s bill has done just that, as I have received a number of constituent letters in support of it, and I think the Government is starting to give the problem some focus. David Cameron has been very supportive of Julian’s efforts.

The only time in my life that I ever supported anything promoted by Hillary Clinton was when Keith Vaz MP and I jointly sponsored a Parliamentary EDM against one of the nastier games. This caused some controversy in my constituency, as many of the games manufacturers (or, more often, the UK subsidiaries of foreign companies) are based in Hammersmith.

Last year, I visited one of the companies to present it with an award for Corporate Social Responsibility (or CSR), to record the fact that it was one of the most generous companies in Britain when it came to organising charitable payroll giving. I quietly took them to task about some of the excesses of the industry, and suggested that they might take their CSR a little bit further by taking a look both at addictive games and at those that encouraged violence. Next time I am there, I might not be so quiet!

Let’s hope that Julian’s Bill gets its second reading this morning.

I have blogged elsewhere (e..g. http://conservativehome.blogs.com/centreright/2008/02/the-luck-of-the.html) about Northern Rock’s desperate search for savers in the last year, and its offer of inflated interest rates to depositors in Denmark and Ireland. This has been a story running all this week in newspapers in Denmark and the UK, who question why a state-owned bank is offering above-market rates to savers in other countries.

The reason Northern Rock was foraging abroad is that the UK has both the worst savings rate in the EU, and the highest level of personal debt. There simply weren’t enough savers in the UK to provide the funds for our fellow-citizens’ voracious appetite for taking on more debt. In fact, the average UK household has £50,000 of personal debt, as well as supporting £70,000 Government debt on top.

Fortunately, there is a growing realisation that something needs to be done. Citizens Advise Bureaus are swamped with people with personal debt problems. I am a patron of a new charity called “Debt Doctors”, based in Hammersmith (http://www.ddukonline.org/), which tours our local primary schools giving lessons in financial education. It also offers an online facility for those seeking advice and counselling. DDUK has only just started, but I expect they will grow quite quickly.

Our local churches are also playing a role. St Paul’s Hammersmith (http://www.sph.org/ ), which has been influential in IDS’s Centre for Social Justice, runs a debt counselling surgery every Monday evening. SPH sees it as a key part of their community outreach role, and its services have a terrific reputation.

One of the key challenges that will face David Cameron after the next election will be reducing the debt burden. Debt is closely linked to family breakdown and to addiction, and we need to be supporting voluntary sector efforts like those outlined above if we are going to tackle it.

On Friday I have a private members bill to shake up the system of film and video classification. Official crime figures suggest that rape has increased tenfold in the past 25 years.  David Cameron has commented:

“…the companies which make music videos, films and computer games have a social responsibility not to promote casual violence, the gang culture and the degradation of women.”

The Ministry of Justice published a paper last September, based on 124 independent studies from around the world, which concluded that viewing hard core porn led to:

… “…belief that women enjoy or desire rape and a lack of empathy with rape victims and

… rape myth acceptance, pro rape attitudes and self-reported likelihood to use force …”

I have done some digging and found lots of concrete examples of horrifying copy cat behaviour. One example is the horrendous murder of little James Bulger by ten year old boys.  The trial judge, Justice Moreland, commented on the ‘striking resemblance’ the murder bore to one of the whole library of violent videos found in the household of one of the child murderers. Another is an episode of the TV drama Casualty which contained a storyline about a paracetamol overdose. Research showed that self-poisoning increased by 17% in the week following the broadcast. One in five of those patients said that it had influenced their decision to attempt suicide.

Yet the BBFC, who are responsible for films, video, DVDs and video games, are passing more and more violent material like. SS experiment camp.  This is a film whose own promotional material makes its content pretty clear.  I quote:

“Female political prisoners are brought to von Kleiben’s secret camp to have sex with Wehrmacht troops as part of a breeding study – at least the compliant, beautiful ones, that is.  The plain Janes and the uncooperative experience a course of cruel experiments by von Klieben’s lesbian assistant.”

The film “Irreversible” includes a rape scene, which runs for nine consecutive minutes. If you type “irreversible rape” into Google, five of the top ten links are to clips of the rape scene alone. The actress in question is by any standards good-looking. If this is not glamorising rape then it is difficult to imagine what would be.

My bill aims to make the British Board of Film Classification accountable to Parliament. It would give a Parliamentary committee the power to review and veto key appointments and the guidelines the BBFC works to. It would also introduce a new Parliamentary appeal against videos – at the moment the only appeals allowed are by the industry in favour of them. In Australia anyone can appeal.

Of course pretty soon it will only be the internet which matters but – by suggesting ways of setting boundaries – my bill aims to start to role back our growing culture of violence and rape.

For once, the LibDems have the chance to make a difference, but they have blown it. That was the verdict in Westminster yesterday after their petulant storming out of the Government’s ongoing debate on the Lisbon Treaty, a.k.a. European Constitution, after the Speaker ruled that they will have to debate whether there is a referendum on the Treaty, and not a referendum on whether we are in or out of the E.U.

The Speaker had already made the same ruling during the debate on the Second Reading in January. Normally, there aren’t more than a couple of LibDems in the Commons Chamber, but yesterday, suddenly, there were 40 of them, simply for the purpose of storming out.

They are becoming like a football team which insists on showing up for the big match with a rugby ball.

I have previously blogged about the inexplicable LibDem policy on a referendum (http://conservativehome.blogs.com/centreright/2008/01/bizarre-new-lib.html) . They say they want a vote on Britain’s EU membership. At the same time, they say they don’t want a vote on the Treaty, as this would effectively become a vote on “in or out” – which is the referendum they say they wanted in the first place. Many LibDem activists are blogging that the policy makes no sense.

There are two very odd things about this. First, opposition parties shouldn’t get themselves tied up like this, most of all the LibDems who never have any realistic prospect of having to put their policies into action in Government. Second, this is actually the one time where thanks to all the other opposition parties (including the SNP and the DUP) and to a large number of Labour rebels, the Government could actually be defeated on having a referendum on the Treaty.

Today is the national lobby of Parliament by the I Want a Referendum (IWAR) campaign, where I am delighted to be on their advisory group. It is hard to say whether the LibDems will show up to this, or maybe orchestrate a walk-out, as if we were back at the Student Union. Either way, I wish IWAR well in their lobby today.

Northern Rock was nationalised at 00.01 on Friday, and already the troubled bank has disappeared from the news agenda, replaced by yet more rows on MPs’ expenses and peripheral issues.

Yet now is the time for all of us to be taking an interest in the new £110 billion business we all own. The size of this business is three times our defence budget and twelve times the budget for the 2012 Olympics.

But today there was not a single media mention of Northern Rock, not even in the Financial Times.

The Government has made some outrageous claims in the last week over our new company. In the House of Commons, Yvette Cooper claimed it was a good time to nationalise a £50 billion plus mortgage portfolio, as it was “the bottom of the market” for house prices. I am a former trader, and woe betide anyone who calls the bottom (or top) of the market, let alone a minister with no business or financial experience, who has been in the job a matter of a couple of weeks. These words will likely come back to haunt her.

Meanwhile, just what horrors are to be found in this business we now own? Yesterday, I believe for the first time, I highlighted on the CentreRight blog the reckless activities of Northern Rock’s Danish subsidiary (http://conservativehome.blogs.com/centreright/2008/02/business-as-usu.html ), paying very generous interest rates to more than 10,000 savers in Denmark – all guaranteed and subsidised by the UK taxpayer. I will be taking a look at the Bank’s Guernsey offshore banking outfit shortly.

The initial signs are not good. The Government has proclaimed “business as usual” at Northern Rock, at the same time as saying that the Rock had a unique and flawed business model. This is a model that so far at least, has been inherited unchanged by the taxpayer.

The Government’s attitude has been to nationalise first, ask questions later. I hope they are at least going to ask the right questions. At the moment, the signs aren’t good.

Reading from the Gospel at a carol service in my constituency two months ago, I was reminded that for more than 2,000 years Governments have felt a need to accurately count their populations.

This Government in particular has shown a fascination with gathering demographic data, especially when it is linked to equalities issues.

Nevertheless, there is a growing debate on what should be a very simple question – how many people live here?

The Office of National Statistics (ONS – http://www.statistics.gov.uk/ ) records that in mid-2006, the UK’s population stood at a rather precise sounding 60,587,000, with growth accelerating slightly to 0.5% per annum.

The reality is this: nobody really knows. Slough Borough Council recently did their own count, and their estimate was between 3,000 and 7,000 more than the ONS said. The ONS itself uprated its forward projection for 2024 for my Borough by some 30,100 in just one year – remarkable, when the population is currently around 180,000 (although nobody can be sure of that figure either).

Many observers think the UK’s population is much bigger. A leading figure at Tesco recently told one of my parliamentary colleagues that they estimate the population of the UK to be closer to 80 million, based on the volume of certain staples they sell. Tesco are probably a world leader in understanding their consumer market, so it would be foolish to disregard their opinion.

In my London Borough, for the most recent year available, 2006-07, 9,310 foreign nationals registered for a National Insurance number. That’s 5.2% of the total population of the Borough. Actually, that was only the 5th highest figure in the UK. 9,310 people in one year – that’s more than the total employed by the Borough’s largest employer, the BBC!

Recently, the Bank of England called into question the ONS’s figures (http://neweconomist.blogs.com/new_economist/2006/01/politics_and_uk.html ), and the Treasury Select Committee is currently enquiring into how Britain’s population is counted (http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmtreasy.htm).

If Tesco’s unofficial figure proves to be correct, a political storm is sure to erupt – just who are these extra 20 million people?

As I said on Monday, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) is a sort of ‘Grand Inquisition’ that interrogates senior civil servants to ensure the Government is giving taxpayers value for money. Founded by Gladstone a century and a half ago, it is chaired always by an opposition MP – since 2001 this has been me.

It is essential that the PAC maintain its non-partisan character, so that the objectivity of its investigations is not compromised. As a result, we don’t go into policy. I must also be very careful to adhere to this impartiality when speaking as its Chairman.

Sitting on it are sixteen MPs from the three main parties, reflecting in number the current makeup of the House of Commons, at the moment: 9 Labour, 5 Conservative, 2 Lib Dems.  

Nonetheless, like me, all are expected to suspend their party allegiance when acting as members of the PAC. In line with this expectation, there has not been a vote put to the PAC in living memory.

Appearing before it is certainly not an experience relished by civil servants; indeed a video of me grilling one such hapless individual is used as part of a civil service training video to warn aspirant Sir Humphreys of the fate that awaits them if they fail to cut the mustard! After all, to have a group of professional debaters fire hostile questions at you and to be obliged to answer them, before a public audience, with a stenographer recording your replies, every ‘um’ and ‘er’ of which are also recorded and filmed for possible broadcast on radio, television and webcast (on the Parliament Live TV channel, and some on the BBC parliament channel), cannot be enormously enjoyable.  

If your answers don’t satisfy the committee, it will press relentlessly for satisfactory explanations, and, although it has no actual power to sack you, it may even call for you to resign. I have on occasion asked people to consider their position. They usually go, as after such a call from the PAC they are damaged goods.

So there is often a strong element of public humiliation in the hearings. But the knowledge that the threat of such hangs over them is, I hope, a spur to its potential victims to try that little bit harder; after all, it is taxpayers’ money that both pays their wages and provides the funding for all the projects they oversee.

Just occasionally, the effect of a PAC hearing can lead to the resignation of a cabinet minister. This happened in 2006, when an investigation led by my indefatigable colleague and committee member Richard Bacon into the Government’s failure to deport significant numbers of foreign prisoners, some of whom had seriously re-offended, caused Charles Clarke to quit as Home Secretary.

As for yesterday’s session, it was the turn of the cumbersomely-named ‘Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform’ (formerly known as the Department of Trade and Industry) to be examined.

The hearing was trying to get to the bottom of how well they had implemented something called the ‘Administrative Burdens Reduction Programme’ – the Government’s latest wheeze for freeing business from red tape.

Opinion was divided as to the success of the Government’s initiative. Although it was acknowledged that there had been some improvement, some members felt that there was still much further to go, particularly when it came to helping small businesses;  others that it is in the nature of businessmen to endlessly whinge about the slightest burden.

Just over a year ago, the Government had set a target of saving £16 billion, or 25% of GDP by 2010. In spite of its differences about the efficacy of the programme, the committee was united in thinking this figure somewhat arbitrary. According to a report by the National Audit Office (NAO) (whose research is the basis for almost all PAC hearings), the figure was based on a similar initiative by the Dutch and the Danes – it was apparently a purely political decision: 25% as a target looks good in the newspapers.

So the witnesses (Sir Brian Bender, the Permanent Secretary at the Department, and William Sargent, the Executive Chairman of a body called the Better Regulation Executive) were unable to satisfy us that their target had a sound financial basis. I pointed out that so far, from a budget of £35 million to complete the project, they had spent £17 million on consultants – nearly half the total budget, for what seemed to me and some other members little measurable improvement. And they couldn’t give an accurate figure for any of their other costs. This did not smack of efficiency or value for money.

So that is the sort of thing the committee does, on behalf of the taxpayers of the nation. It has taught me a great deal about the machinery of government and the operation of the civil service, and I certainly regard it as a privilege and an honour to be able to chair its hearings, all of which, by the way, are open to the public.

For further information on the PAC, see its website www.parliament.uk/pac