OFGEM’s increase in the minimum price for energy has prompted demands for the Government to step in and subsidise our energy bills once again.
With our national debt at 100% of our national income, and another substantial overshoot in government borrowing during July, the Government is in no position to oblige.
Those demanding that the Government intervene appear to have forgotten the disaster that befell the Liz Truss premiership: Kwasi’s financial statement that included a raft of the most sensible measures to stimulate growth, was entirely undone by the simultaneous announcement that government would borrow in order to pay more than half of our energy bills. Such wanton generosity completely spooked the financial markets. The rest is history.

When Russia invaded Ukraine and energy prices spiked, I tried to persuade the Prime Minister that he should announce that, given that there was a war on, part of our national effort would be to bear the pain by reducing consumption.
The appropriate response to rising energy prices is for households to economise.
In the nineteen sixties, before anyone had heard of global warming (on the contrary, scientists were predicting a new ice age), I spend a lot of time with my grandparents in Scotland. They had no central heating. There were two fireplaces, one lit in the morning in the scullery, the other lit in the evening in the sitting room. They didn’t have a fridge, because they just didn’t need one. Perishables were stored in a cupboard in the ‘front room’ where a fire was only ever lit to celebrate Hogmanay.
The answer: they dressed appropriately, wearing layers of heavier and warmer clothes. I still possess a couple of my grandfather’s suits; they are so much heavier than modern ones.

*

…And another thing, correspondents have asked me to revise my opinions set out in this column on 22^nd July People’s Emergency Briefing given the ferocity of the wildfires we have experienced this summer.
On the contrary, substantial climate change has already occurred and it can’t be undone. Therefore, the first call on our resources must be to make ourselves more resilient by investing in our infrastructure to mitigate the climate impact. We need railways that don’t buckle, we need more firemen, we need better flood defences, ad infinitum.
The enormous costs of decarbonising our economy, especially our electricity grid, in a race to net zero, is something we simply cannot afford at present. We already lead the developed world in the extent to which we have cut our carbon emissions.
 Given that we account for less than 1% of global emissions, further progress will have the most marginal impact on the climate.
 In fact, it will make things marginally worse: Our current policy has driven up electricity prices to the extent that power-hungry enterprises cannot compete with overseas producers. Accordingly, they are closing and moving elsewhere. But we still need those products, be it cement, pharmaceuticals, steel, refined hydrocarbons and other manufactures, so we have to import them. In effect, we have exported our jobs along with higher emissions.
  In the same way our government’s determination not to exploit the full potential of the North Sea means that we are importing oil and gas with higher emissions than domestic production. It’s madness.

I do believe that we need to reach net zero carbon emissions, but the current race to do so by 2050 is just the wrong priority.

In Parliament ‘ginger’ groups exist to promote specific subjects in which MPs and peers might take a particular interest. They are known as All Party Parliamentary Groups, or APPGs. They follow rules set down by the Commissioner for Parliamentary Standards and these are enforced by the Ways and Means Office under the stewardship of the Deputy Speaker.
The rules concern the number of members of both houses required for a meeting to be quorate, and financial reporting for funds received to promote the objectives of the group.
Much of the that financial reporting concerns ‘benefits in kind’ because many APPGs are supported by a ‘secretariat’ in the form of a charity with objectives that overlap with that of the APPG.

Clearly, when meetings are organised by an APPG with an interesting speaker or round-table,
members of the group will want to extend the opportunity to other peers and MPs. Equally, the secretariat will send out invitations. Often, the secretariat will email their supporters throughout the country enclosing a link which, if activated, will send their MP a standard letter asking them to attend the meeting.
When Parliament is sitting, I will receive some twenty such invitations per day, sometimes many more.
As I write, Parliament is in recess until September, and it is a Saturday, and I have received three invites to APPG meetings for the first couple of days that we get back in September. All three are from groups that promote the interests of sufferers of a different disease.
I’ve not counted, but my prejudice is that there are more disease related APPGs than any other kind. Whilst there is a cancer APPG, there are also APPGs for almost all specific forms of cancer. It’s almost as if there is an APPG for every medical condition known to man, perhaps with the exception of rigor mortis.  
I might be invited to ‘drop-in’ to a committee room for just a few minutes to collect some briefing material , including an estimate of the number of sufferers in my constituency’; then sign the collective letter to the minister, have a photo for social media in front of a banner, whilst holding a board carrying a slogan. And then quickly on to my next assignment.
Alternatively, I might be asked to the Terrace Pavilion to quaff champagne and canapes whilst listening to speeches, all with a rather greater investment of time.

Why do I so rarely go?
The simple fact is that there are just so many other demands on my time. Equally, what is the benefit for me as a legislator, going along to hear about the latest treatment for a particular disease and to sign an open letter to the minister demanding that more resources be deployed for the new treatment?
To be blunt, I believe that there are better ways to distribute NHS resources and to determine clinical priorities than to badger MPs, so that they can, in turn, badger ministers about it.

I will be travelling overseas for the next fortnight. So, this column will not reappear until September.

I have received a number of invitations to join public screenings of a film called the People’s Emergency Briefing.
Having watched it in Ringwood, I can decline further such invitations.

The Film is about the dire consequences for Great Britain arising from climate change.
It is presented by Chris Packham. The format follows that of a conference which took place earlier this year in Westminster Central Hall, where a number of eminent experts gave their views of the catastrophic impact climate change will have on our way of life, nature and economy. There was a clip of each expert’s lecture, followed by a brief sofa discussion between Chris Packham and ordinary members of the public, gauging  their reactions to terrible things they had just been told.

 The purpose of the film is to build support for a government-backed televised emergency briefing to the nation on the climate and nature crisis.
Viewers are urged to follow up the screening by hosting further screenings in their community or workplace. They are also encouraged to fill out a questionnaire for the University of Bath on their response to the film. They are to encourage their MP to support a national televised briefing.

I’ve already started to receive email requests urging my support for the national TV prime-time briefing.
The problem with any briefing remotely like that shown to us in Ringwood, is that national TV broadcasters are under an obligation to demonstrate ‘balance’.
Chris Packham is not an objective observer, he is a long-standing and partisan campaigner.
The film clips from the lectures by experts were just accepted as fact. There was no challenge by dissenting voices. The ‘science’ was presented as if there were overwhelming consensus, when in fact much of what we were told is highly controversial. For example, we were warned that Britain would become uninhabitable and that no food would be able to be produced here.
The solutions were presented as obvious, merely technical, relatively easy, almost cost-free. When, in reality, these decisions require charged political action and very substantial trade-offs.
 It would have been more realistic had at least some of the sofa guests expressed some scepticism at what had been served up. As an aside, I found the swift descent to profanity by Jennifer Saunders, who was one of the sofa guests, quite unnecessary.

Interestingly, the demand for a national televised briefing, was accompanied by a short clip from one of the Number 10 daily Covid briefings and we saw the Chief Meical Officer about to address the nation. The comparison is instructive. It was during those briefings that the science was presented as unchallenged and that we must stay at home and obey. On the contrary, the scientific voices which insisted that our chosen response was an act of monumental self-harm with devastating lasting economic and societal consequences, were simply ignored.
I would not want to repeat those mistakes in response to climate change.

Notwithstanding, that I am deeply concerned about climate change and that I support our commitment to net-zero, we still need a sensible debate about our options and a proper sense of proportion. I  will not support a national emergency briefing remotely like the one that I have so recently witnessed.

There was quite a row in the Commons to-day. It was occasioned by an unexpected business statement by the Leader of The House, Alan Campbell.

The background to this is that the Government had granted to-morrow as an Opposition Day.
One of a number of such days allocated to the official Opposition in which it gets to determine the motions for debate.
The convention is that, once allocated, the Government will not change the business that day unless there is an overwhelmingly important reason for doing so. Equally, that it will not put on any Government statements that would take up the Opposition’s debating time.

Ordinarily, The Opposition would have until the rising of the House to-night to table its motions for debate to-morrow. It did however, notify earlier to-day that, without giving the exact wording of the motion, the principal subject would be whether the House, which is due to go into Summer Recess on Thursday evening, should instead, come back to sit on Monday, in order to enable the new Prime Minister to come and make a statement setting out his government’s plans and priorities.

This would be a most welcome opportunity for MPs to find out what the new PM really plans to do. Thus far, all we have is press speculation and rumours. There has been no scrutiny by elected representatives, not even a leadership contest within the Labour Party. He has simply been crowned without having to put a manifesto before us.
If we are not to hear from him on Monday, the day when he becomes Prime Minister, we will have to wait until September.
MPs, on behalf of their constituents in the South want to know what are the implications of all the hype about ‘Number 10 in the North’ for the South East and South West.
Our businesses want to know what the new regime will mean for their taxes.
We need to know how he plans to fund defence. We want to know if he is going to persevere with the mad plan to give away Chagos to a regime friendly to China and Iran.

This desire for information is not confined to Opposition MPs. I asked a Labour MP, elected in 2025, if she had been one of the 80% of her colleagues who had rushed to nominate Andy Burnham. She replied that she had not,  – a potentially career limiting omission. I asked why not. She replied that she had never met him and didn’t know what he stands for. Well, there it is.

As soon as the subject for debate to-morrow reached the Government Whips Office, all hell let loose. The Leader of the House came with his emergency business statement, withdrawing to-morrow’s Opposition day and substituting a general debate (without a motion to on which to divide) on the conflict in the middle East.
The Leader was uncharacteristically rattled, I suspect that he was very unhappy with what he had been sent out to announce. He maintained that the debate on the middle east was of vital importance and that, in any event, the Government did not even know what the Opposition motion was going to be. This is disingenuous: it is true that the exact wording had not been tabled, but the subject was well known.

You can always tell when something goes horribly wrong for the Government: the Labour benches cleared and those that remained sat in stony silence looking at their feet, while the Opposition expressed its outrage. 

Why are they so coy, so determined to keep the new PM in hiding?

The leader of the Rochdale paedophile grooming gang, who was imprisoned in 2012, is due for release. The last time the parole board met to discuss his case, it determined that he remained a danger, and it was not safe to release him.
Such serious foreign criminals must, on release, be deported. However, a loophole in the 1971 immigration Act prevents him, as a Commonwealth Citizen who arrived here before 1773, from being deported to Pakistan.
The Home Secretary has announced emergency legislation to close the loophole in the 1971 Act. Alas, it won’t work: Parliament can change our law, but it can’t change Pakistan’s law. Pakistan don’t want him back and they have removed his citizenship. Even, were we to secure agreement with Pakistan to return him by some triumph of diplomacy, no doubt appeals to the courts on grounds of human rights would set back any attempt to remove him indefinitely.
This is a measure of the ridiculous situation that early release schemes have got us into.

But there is worse. A whole contingent of new automatic early releases is coming our way in September under the provisions of the Sentencing Act 2026. When Parliament was considering that legislation, I voted for an amendment, together with my colleagues, which would have excluded sex offenders from the scheme. Alas, the Government defeated the amendment. This week we voted again on an Opposition Day motion, asking the Government to introduce emergency legislation to exclude sex offenders by amending the 2026 Act.
This time the Government whips simply gave up. They did not require their MPs to vote against it. The motion passed unopposed.  The reason for this volteface is that, apparently, the ‘King over the water’ -our next Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, has expressed his support for excluding the sex offenders.
We’ll just have to wait and see what happens next, and if the Government acts. The passing of the motion is just an expression of parliamentary opinion. It doesn’t require the Government to do anything.
I suggest however, that in what parliamentary time remains before our summer recess, the Home Secretary introduces the necessary emergency legislation.

To be fair, the last government used early release schemes too, in order manage the burgeoning prison population. We only added 500 more places to the prison estate despite launching the biggest prison building programme since the Victorian era. The problem is that Prisons take so long to build because of the delays in the planning system: nobody welcomes a new prison nearby, and building them remotely makes them increasingly difficult to staff.
Inevitably, until sufficient places are added, we have to actively manage early releases. But that needs to be done with discretion rather than blanket application to all offences. The Government ought to have accepted our amendment to exclude sex offenders. Now they should act with emergency measures to remedy their omission.

The tenth anniversary of the Brexit referendum prompted a series of emails from the unreconciled, asking me to recant and admit that it was all a terrible mistake.
They quote statistics purporting to establish that our economy would be six to eight percent larger had we remained in the EU. This is complete nonsense. We have enjoyed the fastest rates of growth among the developed nations, not a high bar, but certainly better than the EU. Adding another eight percent would put us in the league with China.

Those that lament our lack-lustre performance, which equally besets the EU, neglect the fact that all our economies have been subjected to enormous shocks, first from Covid, then from the Russian war on Ukraine.

In any event, my correspondents tell me that foreign investment has collapsed. On the contrary, UK remains one of its top destinations.
The City of London and financial services have forged ahead with reforms, and to return to EU regulatory control as ‘rule-takers’ would be fiercely resisted. Even the Government’s determination to ‘reset’ our EU relationship has clocked this one, so their agenda excludes the City and financial services altogether.
The Office for Budget Responsibility’s assumption that our export of goods and services would reduce by fifteen percent, is simply not borne out by the data. Our trade is holding up well.

Where undoubtedly non-tariff barriers imposed by the EU, in the form of bureaucratic procedures, has had a real impact, is that many small producers have stopped exporting to Europe altogether. The Food and Drink Federation reports a significant percentage reduction in exports. Nevertheless, their analysis is flawed: Given that the amounts were modest in the first place, a percentage reduction does not amount to much in absolute terms.
It ignores the significantly higher self-imposed UK energy costs which make our products uncompetitive.
Realignment with EU rules would reduce friction in EU trade but would impose EU bureaucratic costs once again across all our economic sectors.
The Life Sciences sector is a case in point. It has raced ahead since Brexit through the ability to use gene editing, which is banned in the EU. We must resist the urge to abandon our advantage and return to the EU slow lane, giving up flexibility for uniformity.

The CBI, that champion of the remainers, now acknowledges that Business rejects calls to rejoin the EU.
Popular opinion in favour of re-joining, quickly disappears when informed of the costs and obligations, which would in include much higher fees than previously, and giving up Sterling for the Euro.

None of the doom scenarios that we were warned that Brexit would usher in have come to pass.
Neither has our influence nor standing in the World been diminished.

I spotted a notice in Cologne Airport advertising a UK duty-free limit for UK travellers of 42 litres of German beer, that’s 74 pints. That’s got be a Brexit benefit, but how carrying them?

There was to have been a mass lobby of Parliament to-day in support of Trans Rights. It has been cancelled due to the hot weather. I confess that I was not looking forward to it.
Some of the advocates have been amongst the nosiest and most unpleasant activists who seek to deny a hearing for anyone who disagrees with them.

Coincidentally, on Tuesday the Commons debated the Government’s proposals for a clinical trial of the effect puberty blockers on children, the Pathways trial.
I believe that children need to be protected from adults who might do them harm, be they clinicians, politicians or whomsoever.

The trial will take 226 children, some as young as eleven,  who are physically healthy and inject them with powerful drugs to delay puberty in a way that may weaken their bones, affect their ability to think, damage their sexual function -perhaps even denying them sexual pleasure for life, and leave them unable to have children of their own.

The purpose of this trial is to assess the blockers as an effective treatment for ‘gender incongruence’ (defined as “a marked and persistent incongruence between an individual’s experienced gender and the assigned sex, which often leads to a desire to ‘transition’”).
The condition is ‘subjective’ in that it depends on a child telling us how he or she feels. There are no tests to confirm a diagnosis. We know from the Cass review that the vast majority of children with gender incongruence will get better on their own.
It is not possible for clinicians to determine which children with gender incongruence will persist with trans identity into adulthood, and which will not. So, clinicians cannot possibly know if they are injecting potentially harmful drugs into children who would have got better without them.

The reality is that the trial is unnecessary because the NHS already has the case histories of Children treated with puberty blockers at the (now closed) Tavistock Clinic. That data should be analysed before any assessment of the need for further trials is considered.

How can a child of 11 understand what it means to lose sexual function, to be unable to have children when they are older? This expectation is quite at variance with the recent government decision to restrict children’s access to social media under the age of 14

Before the trial commences, participating children will be asked “In the last year have you had oral sex with another person? (This is when they put their mouth or tongue on your penis/vagina or you put your mouth or tongue on their penis/vagina)”.
This, of course, would be against the law at that age!~
We are dealing with vulnerable children. In all conscience, can we really expect them to make informed consent to participate in this clinical trial.
For them, childhood is being abolished.
It is a cruelty, and a madness.
 I expect that future taxpayers will pick up the bill when the children harmed by the trial sue for compensation on the ground that it was unreasonable to have expected them to have given their ‘informed’ consent.

Earlier this week the New Secretary of State for Defence, Dan Jarvis, was summoned to the Commons to answer a question about the Defence Investment Plan.
Of course, the devastating critique by his predecessor, John Healey, given in his resignation letter, undoubtedly put the New Secretary of State and his junior ministers in a very awkward spot.
Nevertheless, convention demands that when Mr Speaker grants the Leader of the Opposition an urgent question, then the Secretary of State comes to answer it. Instead, he sent a junior minister. The excuse being that Dan Jarvis was meeting the King. I’m confident that the King would have understood, had he been advised, that this was to be the first appearance of the new Secretary of State in Parament.
Well, whatever, the Junior Minister appeared at the dispatch box to answer Kemi Badenoch. He prefaced his remarks by saying that “It is no secret that I worked in lockstep with the former Defence Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Rawmarsh and Conisbrough (John Healey). He is a friend and mentor. I was his deputy and I am still standing at the Dispatch Box because he asked me to stay ….”
I couldn’t help responding with” The Minister told us that the former Secretary of State had asked him to stay. Had he not been so asked, would he have resigned too? How much persuasion did it take?” 
Despite the laughter there was an awkward moment for the minister: The Key question that any defence minister now faces is whether John Healey and Al Carns, the Armed forces Minister who also resigned, were right in stating that the Government is failing the nation by underfunding Defence. 
 
But there is more. In his own personal statement, explaining his resignation, Al Carns, who spent 24 years as a serving officer, added
“I left because I could no longer ignore the continued failure to address the treatment of our veterans in Northern Ireland.  Whatever people’s view of the troubles, a country owes a duty to those it sent into harm’s way under lawful orders, and that duty does not end when the uniform comes off”
He was referring to the Government’s Northern Ireland Bill, which removes the immunities afforded to our veterans, provided for in the last government’s Northern Ireland legacy Act.
Regular readers of this column may recall that I have fulminated about the damage that the Government’s bill is bound to do.
It is a sop to the IRA, enabling it to try and rewrite history by putting our veterans in the dock, notwithstanding the immunities granted to terrorists in order to advance the peace process.
Although there will be court cases, inquests, trials, reviews and challenges, the prospect of conviction now is vanishingly small. The number of answers that victims will get will be minimal. All the while, veterans will be hauled before the courts, investigated for years and subjected to all the pain and ignominy that that will bring. That process alone has become a betrayal and a punishment.
The Legacy Act’s offer of immunity for information, based on the South African experience post-Apartheid, offered a much clearer path to truth for victims of ‘The Troubles’. Al Carns was right to resign over his Government’s plans.

When David Cameron was Prime Minister and I was Parliamentary Private Secretary, he used to say that we spent half our time trying to find out what the Government was doing a and the other half trying to stop it.
The machine of government steers on and it takes a positive and determined effort to alter course. One of the essential purposes of weekly Prime Minister’s Questions is that, because the Prime Minister can be asked anything for which he has responsibility, he has to have the time and discipline to be thoroughly briefed on every aspect of government.
Now and again, inevitably, something will slip through under the radar, and there will be a last minute scramble to unwind some daft decision.

This week the His Majesty’s Customs and Revenue has started to levy VAT at 20% on medicines given freely, without charge, for the purpose of clinical trials or or compassionately as the last hope for some very sick patients, under the Compassionate Use Medicines Scheme.

Was this decision just bonkers, or was it mean spirited?
Was it an example of the machine ploughing onwards because the Prime Minister at the wheel, or whoever else it might have been, hadn’t been briefed?
Or was it an example of what Pat McFadden, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, in his WhatsApp message to Peter Mandelson, described as Labour determined to find anyone to tax in order to pay benefits to somebody else?

Whichever it was, the consequences are disastrous. People in extremis, dying with rare cancers, will be denied a last hope. More damaging still, Drug companies will withdraw clinical trials from the UK and pursue them in a more tax friendly environment.

My charitable nature prompts me to suggest that this is a cock-up rather than mean spirited conspiracy. The problem, however, is that the Opposition had repeatedly warned ministers over the last few months that HMRC was planning to do this. Now they’ve done it: Nobody thought to grab the rudder and avoid the iceberg.

When the Minister was summoned to the Commons this week to explain. She complained that no new rules had been introduced and that the last government could have changed the rules if it had wished to do so. Implying that had the last Conservative government changed the rules, then this decision to impose VAT could not have been taken!
What a ridiculous position to take. The rules of the scheme have been set for the last 30 years. The plain fact is that previous governments chose not to impose VAT even though they could have done so. Imposing VAT is a choice that this government has made.

I smell another U turn coming. And that will be welcome.