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.

I came first in the new parliamentary session’s ballot for private member’s bills. Accordingly, I have received a very large correspondence urging me to promote a bill on behalf of any number of worthy causes. I will take my time to consider the best way to proceed: I have until the 16^th June to submit the title of the bill to the Commons clerks. These are the principles that constrain my choice.
First, the bill will have to be of limited scope. The principal enemy of a private member’s bill is the limited parliamentary time available to it. Clearly, the wider the scope of the bill, the more time will be demanded to scrutinise it properly and the danger will be, not that it is voted down, but that it is simply ‘talked out’.
Second, It must enjoy the Government’s support, or at the very least, its neutrality. Otherwise, the Government will use its majority to vote in down, talk it out, or neuter it by amending it in the committee and report stages of its progress.
Third, It must involve almost no cost to taxpayers, otherwise it is unlikely to have the Government’s support.
Fourth, it must be almost completely uncontroversial. If it were not so, then it would attract opposition. There has always existed a small number of devotees who turn out to oppose any private member’s bill that offends against the constraints that I have listed. They do not have to trouble themselves to vote against the bill, they merely need to speak at length until the bill runs out of time.
There is a remedy against this danger available to the bill’s sponsor, which is to move a closure motion and divide the house. The problem is that if you do so you have to be pretty sure that the House is quorate. If the result of the division reveals that there are fewer than 40 members present (including Mr Speaker) then the business falls, and the bill with it. Getting 40 members to turn out on a Friday is a non-trivial undertaking. Members of Parliament use Fridays to pursue all sorts of important concerns and meetings in their constituencies. It would take substantial enthusiasm to persuade them to return to Westminster to be ready to support a closure motion and protect a private member’s bill from being talked out.
The alternative is to have a bill that is so utterly controversial that everyone has an opinion, one way or the other, which they will feel they need to register in response to a very large correspondence that the issue has raised amongst their constituents. This was the case in the last parliamentary session with the Assisted Dying Bill. It was protected in the Commons by the possibility of closure by reason of the fact that almost all of us felt the need to be there.
The procedures in the House of Lords are quite different however, and that’s where the Assisted Dying Bill ran out of time.
Complex, expensive and controversial bills need to have the benefit of the Government whip and be debated in Government parliamentary time.
Does that mean, of necessity, my bill will have to be ‘motherhood and apple pie’ ?
Well, there are worthy things that need to be legislated for, and which might be categorised as such.
But then, exceptionally, a controversial bill will slip through and surprise us all. The Act that switched organ donation from opt-n to opt-out was one such. 
We’ll see.

In this column on 9^th May ( 200,000…and counting ) I observed that migrants who arrive unlawfully in UK and claim asylum are accommodated at the expense of our overseas development budget, consuming very substantial funds which would otherwise be deployed helping many thousands more people in desperate need elsewhere.
 As a former minister who once had responsibility for that budget, I can vouch for the fact that the money goes very much further in the regions from which the migrants are coming. Resettlement in the UK is the least cost-effective way of deploying our resources when it comes to helping large numbers of people in greatest need.

In 1970 a UN agreement was reached for wealthy countries to commit to spending 0.7% of their national income on foreign aid to the world’s poorest countries.
The UK was the first, and only G7 nation to deliver that commitment, but it took us until 2013 to do so. The cost that year was some £14 Billion.
Such a large sum, spent abroad, was always bound to be controversial when there were constraints on government spending priorities at home.
In 2021 the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, reduced the amount to 0.5% of national income, and last year the Labour Government announced plans to cut it to 0.3% with the intention that savings of £6 billion would be transferred to expenditure on Defence.

Now, however, ex-defence chiefs have co-signed a letter to the Prime Minister warning that a choice should not be made between Defence and Foreign aid, and that such a policy is a false economy. The signatories are led by Field Marshal Lord Richards, a former Chief of the Defence Staff.
 I first came across the Field Marshal in 2023 when he was a general, and I a mere major. He commissioned me to give a lecture to the Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Michael Jackson’s, Army Board, in which I was to draw lessons from my deployment in Iraq. He told me that what I said would be a matter entirely for me, but that it would be helpful if….I took the hint!
The current letter is more than a hint. On the contrary, it states explicitly that “well-targeted international aid prevents extremism and displacement that military force subsequently has to confront, and at much greater cost.”

I would go further. I believe that our International aid budget at 0.7% made us the World’s second largest donor, giving us a soft power and influence well beyond the fact that we have the World’s fourth largest Defence budget.
I accept that much of our aid effort was not as well targeted as it could have been.  My prejudice was that, aside from the importance of exceptional disaster emergency relief, our main effort should have always focussed on economic development, with the objective of opening up markets and creating jobs. I believed that political stability, healthcare, and education would all follow on naturally as consequence of the greater prosperity generated by our investment. And that success would leverage-in much greater private sector investment.
Furthermore, that our investment would generate a return, so overcoming the public prejudice that our money was wasted and would be better spent at home.

If we do not invest in creating livelihoods in poor and conflicted parts of the world, we know where the waves of migration created by the lack of jobs and stability will be heading.
If all the rich countries had honoured their commitment to 0.7 % back in the 1970, and stuck with it. We might be facing a very different and more stable world now.

Cutting aid is definitely a false economy!

The King’s Speech setting out the Government’s legislative programme for the new parliamentary session is debated over five days beginning last Wednesday and finishing next Tuesday (19^th May). That’s quite an investment of time considering that we are often told that a number of matters cannot be debated because of the ‘shortage of parliamentary time’.
I acknowledge that the debate is an important one, and in normal circumstances deserves the time allocated to it.
But these are not normal times. As the Labour Party abandons what used to be its unique selling point: Stability’, after the instability brought about by six changes of Prime Minister in eight years (2016-24). Now we are in the extraordinary situation of debating a programme for government which, in very short order, may no longer turn out to be this government’s programme any longer!
The potential candidates, declared and, as yet, undeclared are on record as having expressed very different priorities to those that have been set out by the Prime Minister and which were put before voters in the 2024 manifesto.
The Prime Minister was quite right in his warning to his party last week, that setting off a leadership election would cause chaos and damage. It is already doing so: the markets which fund our gargantuan, and ever-growing borrowing requirement, have indicated their alarm at the prospect of our being governed by any of the potential prime ministers so far identified. Consequently, they are us charging premium risk rates, more so than the Truss premiership, which Labour constantly prays in aid for having ‘trashed the economy’, more so even than the risk premium demanded of Greece.
I  am no fan of the Prime Minister but I urge the members of the Labour Party and the good people of Makerfield – who will have a disproportionate impact on the future of this King’s speech- to heed the warning in Belloc’s Cautionary Verses,  (when poor Jim ran away from his nurse and was eaten by a lion)
“…Always keep a hold of Nurse for fear of finding something worse.”

The King told us “My Ministers will introduce legislation to take advantage of new trading opportunities, including a Bill to strengthen ties with the European Union.”
What precisely does that mean?
The Prime Minister’s red lines were ‘no return to the single market or freedom of movement’. Is that still the case given the PM’s own speech last Monday, let alone the vaunted European ambition of those who now want his job?
The Labour Manifesto commitment was to “make Brexit work”. But now they blame Brexit for the lack-lustre performance of the economy. Ministers have been involved in a serious game of ‘cakeism’: on the one hand claiming to have stabilised the economy, delivering interest rate reductions, and the fastest growth in the G7, whist at the same time inferring that the EU is doing so much better.
It Isn’t.
What is certainly true is that we would be doing so much had it not been for the contents of the preceding King’s speech which has placed so many new burdens on enterprise and new taxes on employment.

The best King’s Speech would have been the shortest: containing but one measure: A statute of repeal, to restore the status quo ante July 2024..