My colleagues were wonderful today.

 

Normally, during PMQs, MPs rise up and down between questions hoping to ‘catch the Speaker's eye’.

The Speaker takes free hits from either side of the house, in rotation.

 

Today, in order to guarantee that I was called, none of my colleagues rose, and all forfeited their chance of asking a question of the PM. The Speaker had no option but to call my name.

 

The Speaker certainly wasn’t happy to have been ambushed in this way; however, there was really nothing he could do.

 

I asked for an apology FOR smeargate, not about, which is what he said before. I got as good as I am ever going to get.

 

The budget was shocking. No wonder we have had diversionary headlines over the last few days.

 

£550 million is to be spent investing in off-shore renewable energy.

 

Well, the wind is in Scotland, as is the off-shore expertise. So that’s a £550 million present to Scotland from the Scottish Chancellor and the Scottish PM.

 

Nothing to do with shoring up the Scottish vote of course.

 

More on the budget later.

And there was me just thinking you 'got lucky' with Mr Speaker. Instead it was a set-up. Brilliant. Very predictable response from the Dear Leader, though.

Million not billion thank goodness!

Yes, I agree it's dreadfully cynical of the Chancellor to invest £550 million in creating jobs in technologies that will be with us well into the next millenium, and help to provide cheap energy for the 4 million people in the UK currently living in fuel poverty. I guess Tories might call supporting the vulnerable crass electioneering because they don't like doing it, but the rest of us would call it the purpose of government.

Sky deion of the budget: The Darling Buds Of Dismay

Anonymous - On the basis that, due to its intermittent nature, wind power will not solve the country's energy problems, I'm inclined to believe that this timely investment is more about electioneering than a concern for those in fuel poverty. It is, after all, entirely characteristic of this government's normal behaviour. Wind power is low in carbon emissions but very expensive and, unless some new way of storing energy can be found, it won't provide anything but a top-up for power generated by other means. Yes, let's explore alternative means of power generation, but let's not pretend that £550 million is going to make any real difference. It's a shame the government couldn't more quickly accept that, in the short to medium term, we will be reliant on nuclear power. The landscape may change if/when the physicists and engineers crack the problems of nuclear fission, but that's a long way in the future.

Did that mean that none of your colleagues were then called to speak? It's my understanding that they have to stand at the start in order to be called, otherwise the Speaker can pass over them and just call MPs from the other parties. Such loyaty and devotion! You must be really flattered.

I've watched many PMQs and I have never known Brown to give a straight honest answer to any question asked. Tom Harris is trying to denounce your tactic on his blog but few of his commentors agree with him.

Anonymous: You have obviously not understood the windmill scam. It's not about "farming the wind" it's about farming the subsidies, and many companies, mostly foreign, are confiscating our money for this trickery. Over last winter (winter is the coldest part of the year, by the way) our 2,400 windmills produced one-tenth of one percent of the demand. The whole scheme is madness and I expect someone to say, not too far into the future, "Why did we do that?"

I had the rare treat today of the Parliament TV cameras pointing at you, Julia Golsdworthy and Claire Ward all in the same session. Brilliant! The way DC referred to Smeargate was excellent, as good as William Hague has ever produced at PMQs, and he is the best at it. I'm a Blairite, but but possibly vote Con at the election. Depends on my candidate.

CORRECTION:- In my earlier comment (the last sentence) I, of course, meant 'fusion' when my errant fingers typed 'fission'. Aaaaagggghhhh! The two couldn't be more different... ;-)

Lol Mike! And of course, one requires a magnetic vacuum and according to the experts, is always only eighteen months away!

This budget has to be the end for Labour. it must go down as the worst ever.

Benefits were upgraded on 06 April 2009 by 5%, reflecting the RPI increase in September 2008. Today, Move Over Darling announced that next April the upgrading would be 2.5%. He made it sound that he was being generous. The State Pension is governed by the same rules. Or am I mistaken?

Yeah, fusion is hard to achieve in a controlled reaction. Who keeps saying it's only 18-months away! That sounds like Labour spin. I doubt there are any physicists and engineers working on the problems who think that a productive fusion reactor is 18-months away. Yes, there are several different designs of experimental reactor that will produce a fusion reaction, but only for a very short time and at the cost of many times more power input than they actually produce. It's the future, though....

It’s the reason I support nuclear. An interim measure in order to give the scientists enough time to a) produce a commercially viable vacuum and b) find a way to ‘tap’ the energy produced. You are absolutely right though, it’s the future. I am going to ask my committee chair if we can produce a report into fusion power. If we do and you would like to come to any of the evidence sessions, just let me know.

how lucky for Labour. Able to bury the budget story on a day when big news broke, ie Roy Keane being appointed manager at Ipswich Town!

Well done to you and your colleagues for ambushing Brown at PMQ yesterday. Excellent ! Can you please clarify one question for me:- Which 'AD' delivered the Budget Speech yesterday, was it Alastair Darling of Arthur Daley ?

The £550 million comes from an increase in electricity prices that we will all have to pay. Once again the goverment is using our money to play politics and it is the low earners who will be hit hardest by the increase in electricity prices to pay for it. As to Scotland gaining because we have the wind I would rather we didn't. The dammed things are ruining the countryside and more than half the time they aren't turning because there is either no wind or there is too much wind (which happens a lot in Scotland). Build nukes (fission) if we want CO2 free energy generation. As to the waste there are now possibilities available for 'burning' that material in reactors and reducing the long half life material to elements which will deacy in decades. it also means that the waste material sitting at Sellafield and various reactors is a very valuable commodity. As to fusion, it's not the vacuum that is the problem but creating, compressing then containing the plasma stream. Once past that you then have to prove a viable method of extracting the energy generated.

Perhaps you're being deliberately obtuse but you come across in this article as ignorant and bigoted. I dislike Labour and the budget was fanciful and full of tokenism. But I notice you make no mention of the budget boost for the English car industry and the duty rise on whisky (which is well known as being particularly damaging on that industry, more so than other alcohols). Both Darling and Brown are de-Scotched -- making the worst kind of Englishmen. Labour as a whole is using a burnt-earth policy in the UK and have been in Scotland since they lost power in Holyrood. It's clear they want Scotland to fail so they can point the finger at the SNP. Get over yourself Nadine.

Disappointingly anti Scottish sentiments from you Nadine. As a Scot I yield to no-one in my loathing of Gordon Brown and his North British New Labour munchkins but anyone who thinks they favour Scotland knows squat about Scottish politics. Still well done fro ambushing the fruitbat.

you should have just butted the slimeball

Actually Mike H and Mike Spilligan, the European Supergrid of offshore and windfarms, which is what some of the government's new investment will help to develop, can create a continuous supply of low cost renewable energy because of the corresponding areas of high and low pressure which are a phenomenon of the Northern European coastline. This literally means that the wind is always blowing somewhere, and by linking farms with under-sea AC cables we can power Northern europe with cheap, reliable energy. And employ lots of people to do it.

Anonymous, do you mean this:- http://www.airtricity.com/ireland/wind_farms/supergrid/ Maybe you're right. Who knows? But I can't help feeling that it all reads like a marketing bid for massive amounts of cash from the EU. Forgive my cynicism - it's borne of today's political environment. There's a claim that the supergrid, as a whole, will achieve a capacity utilisation rate of 70%, compared to 40% for dedicated (i.e. non-interconnected) windfarms. How does that work? I can understand that interconnected windfarms in different regions will stand a better chance of producing *some* power most of the time, but I don't understand how the capacity utilisation is improved. The output of the whole grid is only the sum (less transmission losses) of the individual farm outputs where the wind happens to be blowing. I don't dispute the need to explore other means of power generation and, through conservation measures, to reduce power waste. But in the short to medium term we need to ensure that there's sufficient generation capacity to keeps the lights on. Assuming that climate change is man-made with CO2 being the main culprit, we have to reduce carbon output - and maybe windfarms have a part to play in that. But if the lights start to go out over the next 20-30 years, the effect on society will be almost catastrophic. Given the long lead-times for introducing new generation capacity, I'd rather see our baseline power requirements coming from proven nuclear technology. Yes, it has its problems, but so does a lack of electricity.

Sad racist bigotted comments in this blog. I expect more from UK MPs.

Another Scotophobic Tory ... and you wonder why you guys only have one seat north of the border, good luck with defending that single seat. Our oil wont be subsidising the whinging English for much longer. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Peter said - "The way DC referred to Smeargate was excellent, as good as William Hague has ever produced at PMQs," Who do you think writes hios questions and tells him how to think. I am a Conservatives voter but will vote Lib Dem this time as I have no intention of voting a puppet in as PM