The Prime Minister has put a change in the voting system to some form of proportional representation, squarely on the political agenda.
 This may be down to a principled support for electoral reform, or it may be just an early bid for the support of the Lib Dems, nationalists and the Green Party in the next ‘hung’ Parliament, where current polling indicates that Labour will be without a majority. Either way, this will be a divisive debate within the Labour Party where a significant number of MPs are viscerally opposed to change, not least the Chancellor of The Exchequer.

All voting systems have advantages and disadvantages. Our Ango-Saxon voting system (I call it that because, overwhelmingly, it is the system used in the English-speaking nations) has served us well. Delivering, for the most part, majority governments for the last century.
The demand for reform is a matter of great importance, but to a very small number of people.
When we last tested the matter in a referendum in 2011, the result was 70% for keeping the current system, as against only 30% for changing it.
Critics complain that this result was secured on a relatively low turnout of only 42% of the electorate. This reenforces my point: it just isn’t a matter of importance to most voters in their busy lives.
The second criticism is that we weren’t really offered a ‘proper’ PR alternative in the 2011 referendum. We were only given the choice of sticking with the current system or adopting the Australian variant, where you register a second choice, which will only be counted if the winning candidate when first preferences are counted, secures less than 50% of the votes cast.
The problem is that there is any number of PR systems of mind-boggling complexity. The joy our Anglo-Saxon system is that everyone understands it: the candidate who got the most votes, wins.
 In proportional systems the votes go into a ‘sausage machine’ to be crunched by the d’Hondt formula (and that is the simplest of the schemes) and out comes a result which nobody quite understands.
The notion that we might have an informed debate in which voters might choose a new system, defies  credulity.

The principal criticism of our Anglo-Saxon voting system is that it disproportionately rewards the winning party, at the expense of losing parties, particularly the smaller ones. The converse is that proportional systems do the exact opposite: The winning party finds itself short of a majority and has to negotiate coalitions with the smaller ones. That support comes at the price of policy concessions to the smaller parties, for which few votes were had. A typical example of this is Israel, where a largely secular electorate is governed by an administration that always contains ministers from the extreme religious parties, because they are always necessary for the winning party to secure coalition partners in order to command a parliamentary majority.
The process of forming a coalition after an election can take months. And when the policy programme of the new administration has been negotiated and published, it isn’t a manifesto on which any of the voters cast their ballot.

My advice is stick with what you know.

Last week in this column I referenced the US Vice-President, J D Vance’s speculation, that the Anti-Christ, foretold in the Bible’s final book Revelations, may already be walking the Earth amongst us. I suggested that get his Boss, President Trump to look in the mirror.
There are, of course, several other candidates.

There has been much speculation that President Putin will use his thumping victory in the Russian elections, in which his party triumphed in the Duma, will prompt another mobilisation of conscripts in the war against Ukraine and an intensification of sabotage, cyber-attacks, and misinformation campaigns against NATO member states which have assisted Ukraine.

It is estimated that Russia has already suffered 1.5 million battlefield casualties in Ukraine, some 500,000 of which have been fatalities. Fortunately for them, Patriarch Kirill of Mosco, head of the Russian Orthodox Church has decreed that anyone killed in battle fighting Ukraine will go straight to Heaven, avoiding any further due diligence checks by St Peter at the Pearly Gates.

The enthusiasm for warfare by the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate is very worrying. Kirill has stated that the attack on Ukraine is a Holy War against evil; That Putin’s rule is a miracle from God; His priests have been reprimanded for praying for peace; Earlier this year Kirill went to the closed nuclear city of Sarov to bless nuclear warheads as a sign of God’s Grace and Mercy.  He has also pronounced similar sentiments at the Monastery of Saint Seraphim, close by. The Seraphim are traditionally angels closely associated with ‘Holy Fire’ to purge the Earth.

Gadzooks!
So, Putin is seeking to escalate conflict with NATO, whilst his chief spiritual advisor, Patriarch Kirill, seem unconcerned that God’s plan might involve the World ending in nuclear conflict.

To what extent does Putin share the Patriarch’s view of contemporary history?
Is his embrace of Orthodoxy a cynical strategy to recruit the Church as the moral component of his war against Ukraine (as Napoleon observed, the moral component of warfare is to the physical component “as three is to one”)
Surely, Putin, the hardened KGB officer, servant of a Communist state that was deeply hostile to religion wouldn’t be genuine this embrace.
Well, some think otherwise. Putin was secretly baptised as a child and continues to wear an icon that his mother gave him. Perhaps he does believe, in his distorted view of Christianity, that his is a war against the evil influence of western decadence.
Religious fervour combined with overwhelming military capability is a terrifying prospect.

Parliament’s Joint Human Rights Committee can be a bit of a backwater. Its routine fare is examining if Government policy and legislation to satisfy that it is consistent with our obligations under the European Convention on human Rights (ECHR).
Committees strive to make their reports unanimous on the basis that a consensus will be more persuasive. Unfortunately, as regular readers of this column will have observed, I am not a devotee of the ECHR: The committee’s chairman did ruefully observe that they had never had a report that was not unanimous until I joined it.

Anyway, This week Committee hit the headlines: On Monday, I awoke to the early morning news and the lead item was our report on Artificial Intelligence (AI) which we had been working on for the last few months, and which was one on which we were indeed unanimous.
Our timing was fortunate because publication was preceded by a string of leaders of the industry issuing warnings that we need to slow down development of AI, and that we need international agreement and regulation, otherwise there is a significant danger of the extinction of the mankind within the next decade.

There are huge benefits arising from AI which increase our productivity across industry and in healthcare.
The difficulty is that way that AI systems generate output which is not determined in advance by programming. There is now an unpredictable relationship between input and output. AI can be so mathematically complex that the output, and how it has been arrived at, is opaque, even to the experts. To be blunt, it’s mastery of data, vastly exceeding our own, and its speed of calculation, means that we cannot keep up.
We have never seen technology before with an ability to play a convincing role as a human, even though it has no human component.
AI systems are already displaying disturbing behaviour including sycophantly, deception, scheming, even blackmail.
We are in danger of having created an intelligence greater than our own, which we do not understand and which will not be able to control.
The Committee’s report rings an alarm bell and demands proper legislative and regulatory safeguards.

Two new commentators have also entered the debate this week. First, Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, has added his voice to the need for international agreement on regulation and oversight. Gates has, hitherto, been a technology optimist. His report this week demands an inspection regime similar to the that which governs international nuclear facilities.
The other new entrant is President Trump who says the dangers of AI are just another hoax, just like Climate Change, and the threat posed by Putin’s Russia; That the only regulation necessary to oversee AI is the IQ of the President himself; That the US is lucky that he is so smart; The USA is in a AI race with China and that “WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS”

JD Vance, Trump’s Vice President, has been musing recently that the Anti-Christ, foretold in the Bible’s book of Revelation, may already be walking amongst us. Perhaps, he might get the President to look in the mirror.
It would be unfair, however, not to observe that there are several other candidates for the role.

There is nothing wrong with being rich, but being poor is not an attractive option.
The trouble is, that we are making ourselves poorer by the penalties that we impose on the rich.

In 2024, as taxes increased and rumours of further tax increased too, 7,500 millionaires took their money and their business overseas to more welcoming and wealth-friendly jurisdictions.
In 2025 that number more than doubled to 16,500. Who knows what the number will have increased to this year.

By millionaires I mean ‘liquid’ millionaires: those with money not just property. The good fortune of many of us living in the New Forest, means that we might count ourselves millionaires just on the basis of what our houses are now worth, although across the country we ‘property millionaires’ have shrunk to our lowest number in two decades, as house prices have fallen.
Alas, we may shrink further as mortgage rates rise and if rumours of new property taxes materialise in the October budget.

But back to the ‘liquid millionaires’, the ones with the ready cash that enables them to just get up and go, taking their wealth with them. The reason this matters is because the large amounts of tax that they were paying, will go away with them too. Putting more pressure on the rest of us to make up the shortfall. Replacing the revenue lost from just one departing millionaire requires an additional 50 average taxpayers.
This week Chris Rokos, Britain’s Third biggest taxpayer announced that he was leaving for Greece. Last year he paid £330 million in tax (and donated £190 million to his alma mater, Cambridge University). It will take an additional 38,000 taxpayers to make up the tax revenue that the Exchequer will lose on his departure.

This week I went to a lecture by Professor Laffer, -of the famous ‘Laffer Curve’ -which is often alleged to show that the higher taxes go, the lower the tax revenue that will be raised. Left-wing economists lampoon this by concluding that zero taxes will give rise to massive revenue.
The Laffer Curve shows nothing of the Sort!
The Professor began his lecture rather provocatively by telling the audience that he wasn’t interested in our opinions, any more than we should be interested in his opinion!
He explained that he was only interested in facts, as we too should only be interested in facts.
He then took us through the facts, case by case, where high marginal rates of taxation were reduced dramatically, leading to increased economic activity and very substantially increased tax revenue. The reality is that, though the curve has wider tax implications (low tax economies grow faster and prosper), it describes the relationship best between tax cuts and increased tax revenue at the top end of the scale. Higher taxes on those with high incomes incentivises them to employ specialist lawyers and accountants -because they can afford to- in order to minimise their exposure, or -because they have the freedom, to go elsewhere.
If loopholes and shelter schemes are removed, and their taxes cut, that effect is reversed.

The top 1% of earners in UK, earn 13% of our income but pay 28% of our income tax. We cannot afford to lose them.
In a world where capital moves freely, we are in a competitive market to attract high taxpayers.
Our competitors are laughing at our determination to export ours, to them.
We are killing the Goose that lays the golden egg.

The Prime Minister’s appearances in Parliament last week confirmed two things: First, his belief that low economic growth is a consequence of Brexit and, second, his belief that our economic problems stem from abandonment of the way things were properly done in the 1970’s until the Thatcher government that was elected in 1979, and whose policy legacy has endured until the present.
With respect to the first statement, in almost the same breath the PM also boasted that UK was enjoying the fastest growth amongst the G7 wealthy developed nations. Can both simultaneously be true?
-That we are doing better than the rest of the pack with the fastest economic growth, yet we are saddled with a decade of low growth because of Brexit.
Clearly there is a contradiction, unless he is suggesting that notwithstanding that we are doing better than the pack, we would have been doing even better, romping ahead with Chinese growth rates, had it not been for Brexit.
The reality is that the fastest growth in the G7, which the Labour Government inherited from its Conservative predecessor, is not itself a very high bar. It is better than the pack, but it is nevertheless pretty miserable, just less miserable than the rest are experiencing. That misery has nothing to do with Brexit. It is a consequence of the two great shocks to our economies from which we are still reeling. Namely, the profound long-term impact of the Covid pandemic, and then the chilling effect and dislocation caused by Russia’s war on Ukraine.
That UK is doing marginally better than the rest of the G7, would suggest, on the contrary, that it has proved to be an advantage, rather than a disadvantage.

Now, coming to the 1970’s, to which the Prime Minister would return us, I remember them well:
They were really dreadful. The economy performed intermittently due to strike action. In 1972/3, as a consequence of strikes, we even had a three-day week because there was insufficient electrical generating power for commercial and industrial activity over a full week.
The level of inflation averaged 6.8% and at one time rose as high as 25%.
In 1976 Denis Healey, Chancellor of the Exchequer, had to go cap in hand, to the International Monetary Fund, for a loan to bail out the UK economy. The terms of that loan-imposed swinging cuts in public expenditure: Including the only time, ever in the history of the NHS that its overall budget was reduced, arising as a consequence of that IMF loan.
Andy Burnham was born in 1970, which is why he may have a rose-tinted memory of the decade. Many of us however, remember them rather too well. I’ve no desire to go back to the policies that ensured that we were viewed from overseas as the ‘sick man of Europe’.

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?