THE pre-Christmas Register of MPs’ Interests shows our representatives have been pretty busy with moonlighting, side hustles and freebies.

Birmingham Labour MP Liam Byrne is a controversial figure. He was a Treasury minister before Labour lost the 2010 election. 

Byrne left a note for his Tory-Lib Dem coalition replacement apologising to them because “I’m afraid there is no money” in the Treasury — it was a cack-handed joke that backfired badly, helping the Tory-led coalition justify punishing austerity measures. 

Byrne has a habit of putting his foot in it: his 2008 leaked memo instructing his minions on “Working with Liam Byrne” had many absurd diva-managerial commands to his underlings — “Never put anything to me unless you understand it and can explain it to me in 60 seconds” or  “If I see things that are not of acceptable quality, I will blame you.” Or the need to present “a cappuccino when I come in” the office. 

Despite his uncertain public persona, Byrne was Labour’s candidate for the strategic West Midlands mayoral contest in 2021 — a contest which he lost to the Tories.

So it’s nice to report some good news for him: in the latest Register of MPs’ Interests Byrne reports he got money and benefits worth £2,010 for a lecture at the Institute of Travel and Tourism’s next conference. 

Further inspection shows Byrne will actually be giving this lecture next June at a glamorous five-star Hilton Hotel in Istanbul, where the conference takes place. 

The conference is billed as “the travel industry’s blue riband event” which will be “an ideal blend of conference sessions, social activities and networking opportunities,” with speeches “flanked by a party followed by a late bar on all three evenings, and plenty of free time for delegates to network and explore the local area during the afternoons.”

So it will be a good chance for Liam to forget the times that things went wrong.

Sometimes you get a freebie even without having to sing for your supper with a lecture. Leyton MP John Cryer joined the ranks of Labour MPs who like to take cash from the gambling industry. 

According to the latest Register of MPs’ Interests, the Betting and Gaming Council — lobbyists for the gambling industry — gave Cryer “two tickets with hospitality” for the Autumn Nations rugby match on November 20 — South Africa v England at Twickenham — worth £2,517.50. 

England won, and by the price I think there was plenty of “hospitality” for Cryer to celebrate.

Sometimes what looks like a freebie might be more than just a bit of complimentary travel. Liam Fox records he had £5,403 worth of flights and accommodation over November 15-19 to go to New York and Washington to “speak at various political events,” with the cash coming from Conservative Friends of America.  

Fox, a former defence and trade secretary, is firmly on the “neoconservative” wing of the Tories, and has a strong interest in US Republican policies, so him going to the US on a political jolly is not unusual. 

But the dates Fox was in the US covers the same period that Home Secretary Priti Patel made an official visit: Patel met the US homeland security secretary and addressed the right-wing Heritage Foundation think tank. 

According to their Twitter accounts, Fox and Patel also met up at the British embassy in Washington — both Patel and Fox have previously been in trouble for running their own “independent” foreign policy, so I have to say the simultaneous Fox/Patel visits to the US do look like the minister and the former minister are joining up to try and unofficially build up the “neocon” side of Tory foreign policy again.

Labour and water – renationalisation policy down the drain

AT THE start of December I used this column to predict that Labour was about to drop its commitment to taking water in England back into public ownership. This is despite the fact that the argument for public ownership has got even stronger. 

As the Financial Times pointed out the formerly publicly owned water firms, which were sold off with no debt and handed £1.5bn when they were privatised 30 years ago, have since borrowed £53bn, the equivalent of around £2,000 per household. 

Much of that has been used not for new investment but to pay £72bn in dividends. Preferring to pay their big shareholders big dividends rather than invest in infrastructure means they are now involved in frequent, and frequently illegal, pollution, pouring filth into the rivers and sea.

However, the current Labour leadership wants to prove to the City and the CBI and the Tory press that they are not very much of a danger, hoping this will mean that they will get less fierce press. 

It might mean they have less enthusiastic members or voters — water renationalisation is popular, notably with the “traditional” blue-collar voters the party claims it wants to win back — but maybe being meek means the party could squeak through an election, relying mostly on discontent with Boris Johnson rather than enthusiasm for Labour.

It turns out I was right, as Rachel Reeves announced on Boxing Day that Labour would not renationalise water. 

However, I wrongly thought Labour would try and put the case for some alternative — for worker and customer representation on the board, or “golden shares” or some other structural change short of renationalisation. 

But instead Reeves just blurted out the new policy in a Guardian interview, claiming: “I actually don’t think you need to nationalise to stop the sewage from going into the sea. You just need much tighter regulation.”

When Tony Blair dropped renationalisation back in 1997, he did at least offer a (much) lesser alternative, imposing a big “windfall tax” on water and other privatised utilities. 

Blair was trying to create a compromise between his new, market-oriented centrism and “traditional” Labour. 

But politicians like Reeves only know “New Labour” and the brief interregnum of the Corbyn years. They don’t intend to compromise with the revived socialist arguments of the Corbyn years — they intend to ignore them, so in effect they end up to the right even of Blair.