Reading West MP Martin Salter made his final Commons speech on Wednesday 7th April 2010, the day before Parliament was prorogued for the 6th May General Election. Mr Salter thanked Reading and District Labour Party for choosing him as a candidate on no fewer than seven occasions for both the Parliamentary and Reading Borough Council seats. He was successful in six of the seven contests and leaves a notional Labour majority of nearly 5,000 in his constituency.

There have been many casualties of last year’s MPs’ expenses scandal, from those who employed family members in non-jobs, to those who aspired to palatial living quarters for their mallards and hankered after a new wide-screen TV on the taxpayer.

Perhaps it’s because I’m neither a candidate nor an organiser for the first time in over 20 years that this seems to me to be the bleakest and most uninspiring contest yet. Public disenchantment with the two main parties is at a record high, and both sides are offering a prospectus of massive cuts to tackle the budget deficit leaving themselves very little wriggle room to paint the picture of the glad, confident, yes-we-can, morning of hope and promise to woo the voters to their cause.

How quickly things change in this game. A mere six months ago, the Tories were riding high in the polls, couldn’t set a foot wrong with the press and had won the endorsement of the overlord of News International and his various puppet news and broadcast channels.

Some of the top names in Angling and Shooting turned out this week to thank Labour’s Parliamentary spokesman Martin Salter for his work on behalf of both sports. The British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC), the Angling Trust, and the Salmon and Trout Association jointly organised a dinner in the House of Commons in honour of Mr Salter. The guests included wildlife film maker Hugh Miles, angling author and Times columnists Brian Clarke, Fisheries Minister Huw Irranca-Davies and his Conservative Shadow and Newbury MP Richard Benyon and Charles Walker MP (vice chair of the APPG on Angling).

Martin Salter, Labour MP for Reading West, has welcomed the payment of a £1.5 million capital grant in order to help the children’s hospice Naomi House. The charity was badly affected by the Icelandic banking crisis. Last year, Mr Salter led a delegation of south east MPs to meet with Kevin Brennan MP, the Minister of State for the Third Sector, in order to highlight the invaluable service provided by Naomi House to local people, and to reiterate the need to release the £5.7 million of deposits that were effectively frozen by the government following the economic turmoil affecting Iceland.

Once again I was surprised to be the only Berkshire MP who bothered to turn up on Saturday to support the excellent Magistrates Court Mock Trial Competition featuring schools from across the county. It’s a shame my colleagues don’t show more interest in this fantastic event which, in a very real practical sense, teaches young people how the courts operate and helps them develop their reasoning and communication skills. The Magistrates give freely of their time and judge the teams, not on the verdicts but on the way they conduct both their defence and their prosecution cases. Obviously I was mainly rooting for Little Heath from Tilehurst (and a bit for Kendrick) but I’m sure Bulmershe School in Woodley and St Crispins in Wokingham would have liked to have seen their local MPs as well.

Fishing clubs, fishery managers and anglers from across the region have been invited to a special workshop organised by Reading West MP and Parliamentary Angling Spokesman, Martin Salter, to take “a long hard look” at the problems of the River Kennet as a fishery. The workshop which will be chaired by Mr Salter will receive presentations from the Environment Agency and Natural England covering the latest results from the Environment Agency’s most recent survey of fish populations on the Kennet.

The dark joke doing the rounds at Westminster is that the ex-Ministers lobbygate sting so successfully carried out by the Sunday Times and Channel Four’s Dispatches programme has given new meaning to the term, “available only to the highest Byers.” But there’s nothing funny about either the pathetic boasting of the now whipless and soon to be former MP nor the totally useless regime of self-regulation that is supposed to control the activities of UK lobbyists.

Labour MP for Reading West, Martin Salter, will be launching the ABC to Read sponsored walk of Pangbourne Meadows on Sunday 28th March 2010. The walk from Pangbourne to Caversham will raise much needed funds to allow the charity to continue recruiting school based mentors to help develop the reading and writing skills of primary school children across Berkshire.