Reports in the press suggest that representations have been made to the new Modernisation Committee, principally by newly elected MPs, for shorter and more family-friendly hours in the Commons. There is nothing new under the sun…(and change if usually for the worse).

When I was first elected in 1997 the Commons sat from half past two o’clock in the afternoon until half past ten o’clock (and not infrequently until much later) from Monday to Thursday, and from half past nine o’ clock in the morning until half past two o’clock in the afternoon on a Friday.
That didn’t mean we took the mornings off Monday through Thursday. On the contrary, the morning was precious for meetings with councillors, constituents, and experts. They were vital for briefings, telephone calls and correspondence.

Tony Blair’s newly elected government set up its own modernisation committee and the hours were changed. Monday was left unaltered – to allow for MPs from far flung parts to get to Westminster.
Tuesday and Wednesday sittings were changed to start at half past eleven o’clock and finish at half past seven o’clock. Thursday to begin at nine thirty o’clock and finish at five o’clock.
We were told that this would allow us evenings with families, or enjoying the theatre, or whatever. We were sold a pup.
Most MPs have their families in constituencies well beyond the reach of a finish at seven thirty in the evening. They would arrive home after their children had gone to bed, and they would be up the next morning to get to Westminster, before their children were awake.
Furthermore, a seven thirty finish is not quite what says on the tin: it simply means that the main business must conclude by seven, with an adjournment debate for half an hour thereafter. The main business will more often divide the House. So there will usually be at least one vote and sometimes several more before the adjournment debate. The notion that you might get to the theatre in time is utterly fanciful.
That is before you consider that, as happens so often, you get a message from the whips informing you that “the business may go beyond the moment of interruption”, in other words, its going to be a late one.

So, we gave up our mornings in which so much could be squeezed, for the illusion of a family friendly leisure time at the end of the day. When, in reality,  what had been done in the morning, now had to fill the evenings, but so much less efficiently, because the councillors, officials, experts or whomsoever that you wanted to interact with, are by then at home in front of the telly.
We found these changes so shocking that within eighteen months we had voted to restore the status quo ante on Tuesday, and we very nearly got a majority to get back our Wednesdays too.
Then a new Parliament, with more newer, younger and more gullible members, voted to recapture Tuesday for modernisation.

I fear it all going to start again, and the result will be even worse.

There is something a ‘bit off’ about getting into a new job and immediately agitating to reduce the working hours.

We are fortunate in Hampshire that our police force is led by a “copper’s copper” who would not have been out of place in Dock Green. Other parts of the country are not so well favoured, like Essex for example.
The very concept of Police investigating and recording ‘non-crime hate incidents’ infuriates me. We have enough crime to fully occupy every policeman that can be had. That they should find time to harass citizens for expressing opinions that fall short of any criminal intent under common or statute law, is outrageous.
We pride ourselves on being a tolerant nation that enjoys freedom of expression. Which, in turn, means none of us have any right not to be offended. It is ridiculous for police forces find the time to pursue those who have given offence, but who have not committed a crime in doing so. Equally, it is deeply worrying that our current Government is encouraging them to do so.
We are all subject to the law, subjects, the police and ministers. There is a clear danger however, that we are increasingly being subject to arbitrary government.

We’ve now had sight of the Assisted Dying Bill that we will debate on 29^th November. The lobbying has been under way for some time. Already I’ve had literally hundreds of letters and emails.
Now the meetings have started too, with invitations to discussions led by any number of eminent people. On Tuesday I went to one addressed by Liz Carr, the actress who is one of the stars in the BBC drama Silent Witness. She’s made a documentary entitled  Better off Dead. It is well worth watching, whatever angle you come at the subject from. You’ll find it on BBC i-Player.

The principal strength of the Bill is that it avoids, to some extent at least, the profound impact on the medical profession that authorising practitioners to kill their patients would have. The key point here is that patients will have to do the deed themselves, having first secured a terminal prognosis of death within six months, confirmed by two doctors and signed off by a judge. Only then can the prescription be had, which -I reiterate- must be administered by the patient.

The difficulty with this is that it is also the Bill’s weakest point too. Most of the reservations of those who oppose the bill are that it is the start of a slippery slope. That once the principle of assisted death is breached, then the permitted circumstances will be swiftly extended, as they have in so many other jurisdictions. This was certainly my own reservation when I blogged previously  Medically Assisted Death .
The problem is that the Bill’s method fails to address the aspirations of those who have been campaigning hardest for the service. Patients with progressive wasting conditions want to continue life as long as its quality is bearable. When it becomes unbearable, they want to die. The terrible dilemma they face is that, whilst they do not want to die early and before they are really ready, their condition may, at any time, rob them of the ability to take the potion themselves, making them them reliant on what remains the unlawful agency of someone else. They will have to die by their own hand early or run the risk of being unable to do the deed at all, so either facing exactly the sort of death that they feared or having to secure unlawful assistance.
This Bill will not help them. So, the self-administration requirement will be the focus of the first campaign to extend the Bill’s provisions and allow the doctor to administer the drugs.
Next, campaigners will question the cruelty of the requirement for a six-month terminal prognosis. If you are suffering unbearably and expected to live for a year, why should you have to endure another six months of agony before you qualify. Indeed, if you are in agony, or extreme misery, and are desperate for the relief of death, why should you need a terminal prognosis at all?
If the Netherlands can be so humane as to accommodate the death wishes of those who experience a much wider are extremity of circumstances, why shouldn’t we?

The cast iron guarantees of the Bill -death in six months; two doctors, a judge, and self-administration, are merely an aiming target for further reform. It is indeed a slippery slope.

On Thursday, at the Oxford Union, I debated the motion ‘this House would re-join the EU’.
What, so soon?
We gave our membership over 40 years before we decided to leave. We’ve not even been out of it 4 years yet. Those 4 years that have been dominated the economic impacts of war in Europe and a pandemic. We should give ourselves rather more ‘ordinary times’ in which to judge.

The premise in the motion ‘re-join’ implied that we would be going back to the way we were. We wouldn’t. The EU has changed dramatically; it’s engine, the Franco / German alliance, has collapsed; Schengen is in disarray; and the block is struggling to address the rise of the far-right.
Neither could we expect the same membership terms – Mr’s Thatcher’s rebate, and John Major’s opt-outs -including a treaty obligation to join the Euro.

The favoured statistic of the joiners is that, in years to come, our economy will be 4 to 6 % smaller than if we hadn’t left. The genesis of that statistic however, is the same Treasury forecast which predicted an immediate recession in 2016 following the referendum, with unemployment rising by 10,000 per month. In fact it fell by almost that much and we ended the year as the best performing developed economy.

Forecasting is always bedevilled by incomplete data and questionable assumptions. Typical of its sort, we’ve just had a new analysis from a prestigious business school. It begins by saying that we have seen only modest gains from our accession to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But that membership hasn’t even started yet -that’s not till 15^th December. The report goes on to note a catastrophic decline in aspects of export performance. The problem is that the boffins failed to spot that the export reporting codes have changed and they’ve simply missed the data.

That we have significant economic problems is not in dispute. Nevertheless, we are doing comparatively well: in the last quarter for which statistics are to be had, our GDP growth was twice that of the EU, (though EU growth is not a high bar).

Our future prosperity depends not being in or out of the EU, but rather on how hard we work, our risk appetite, the business-friendly nature of our tax and regulatory regime. In an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be agile and flexible.
That agility is bound to be enhanced by our ability to make decisions quickly in our own best interest rather than reliance on mechanisms that require a qualified majority negotiated between 27 member states.
In the EU Council of Ministers, we so often didn’t push our objections to a vote because we could see we hadn’t a chance. On the 72 occasions when we did force a vote – we lost every time.
We were increasingly governed by people we didn’t elect and couldn’t remove.
In this respect Brexit has already delivered: we are no longer required to implement damaging arrangements to which we were opposed.

The proposer blamed the Conservative Party for taking us out of the EU. When I pointed out that it was the people who made that choice, my opponent, Rachel Johnson, responded that it was the fault of the Conservatives for granting the people a referendum: proof that the contempt for democracy by the liberal elite, is unabated.

I have no difficulty with the Government compensating those who have been damaged by the British state in recent years. The Horizon scandal and the Tainted Blood scandal being two obvious examples.
I just don’t hold the same view when both victims and perpetrators have been dead for over a century.
Recently I was at a lecture by a clergyman who told us that we all needed to apologise and atone for slavery. I disagreed vociferously on the ground that I had nothing for which to apologise, as I haven’t ever enslaved anyone.
Now some Commonwealth nations are demanding mind-boggling sums from Britain as reparations for the slave trade. They badgered the Prime Minister into abandoning his original stance ‘this is not on the agenda’, to one of ‘opening a discussion’. Such discussions open the door to a slippery slope: The original  flat refusal to engage was the correct response and he should have stuck to it .
Many Britons were engaged in the ghastly slave trade and profited mightily from it from about 1650 to well into the 19^th Century. Africans and Arabs profited from it too.
Monstrous though slavery is, it had been a universal institution for millennia. Even the Maroons -the escaped slaves in Jamaica- kept their own slaves. Freed slaves in North Carolina owned slaves until the American Civil War in 1861.
Britain abolished the Slave trade in 1807 and slavery throughout the Empire in 1833. We used our naval power to impose our own abolition of the trade on the rest of the World: 13% of the Royal Navy’s manpower was assigned to the West Africa Anti-Slavery Command. Historians have called that endeavour “the most expensive example of moral action”
Whilst contemporary UK subjects can’t claim the credit for the action of our forbears in stamping out the trade. Neither should we be asked to pay compensation for being involved in it in the first place.
Some of the Caribbean nations that suffered under the enslaved plantation system have prospered  whilst others much less so. It is not the history of slavery that has blighted those that have not prospered, so much as other circumstances, not least weak and corrupt government.

We must not pay up

Around this time of year I get half a dozen emails demanding an end of the practice of turning the clocks back one hour to Greenwich Mean Time and promising all sorts of economic benefits from doing so.
Some of my correspondents have simply forgotten, a few others weren’t even born when we last tried exactly that experiment. We kept British Summer Time all year round, but we renamed it British Standard Time. I was twelve when the experiment started in 1968. It was dreadful living in Scotland going to school in the dark. I doubt that any economic benefits were delivered because by 1971 the nation had had enough: Parliament voted by 366 to 81 to end the misery and restore the status quo ante. I’m always amazed that some people want to try it out again.

As we approach the budget, full of apprehension, with both business and consumer confidence plummeting, the former having taken a further hit with this week’s second reading of the Employment Rights Bill -adding five billion pounds to business costs, I’ve been considering how Labour’s first few months have gone so spectacularly wrong.

I put it down to lack of focus on what ought to have been their  main effort.
 As officer Cadets, our training at Sandhurst drummed into us the that first principles (of war) were the selection and maintenance of the aim: you have to choose your overriding priority and then stick to it.
The Massai put it rather more elegantly: Huwezi kuwafukuza swala wawili which, paraphrasing from the Swahili, means ‘you just can’t chase two gazelles’.

Labour’s stated overriding objective was economic growth, summed up by the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, as ‘invest, invest, invest’. Yet the main effort of the first weeks after the election was clearly something quite different: The new administration was determined to frame a narrative in the public mind that it had been bequeathed a disastrous legacy by the wicked Tories who had pursued a ‘scorched earth policy’ leaving behind a wasteland, everything broken and a massive financial black hole; And that, as a consequence, things would have to get worse before they could get better, and the Government was going to have to do some very painful stuff by withdrawing Winter Fuel Allowance from some nine million pensioners, with much worse to follow in the Budget on October 30^th.

This political strategy has a long lineage: You get into Government and announce that you never realised things were really this bad. The Coalition Government did exactly that in 2010 when it inherited from Labour a financial deficit of fully 10% of the national income, which dwarfs the mere 4% (and already in steep decline) that the new Labour Government inherited this July.
Nevertheless, Labour’s pursuit of this same strategy was clearly at odds with their stated priority of securing growth through investment, which requires confidence and optimism, not the misery spouting from government commentary. Little wonder that business confidence, which had been soaring, plummeted.
The Government’s stated priority would have been much better served by rehearsing the positives that it had inherited Viz. the fastest growth and the second lowest debt in the G7, inflation firmly under control and interest rates falling, record low unemployment. All of which is now at risk as a consequence of the bucket of cold water that the Government has poured over them.

Add into this mix ‘wardrobe-gate’ and the mayhem in 10 Downing Street with the defenestration of the PM’s Chief of Staff, Sue Gray, and it makes nonsense the corporate stooges who wrote to The Times last week praising political stability.

This week party members will receive their ballots to vote in the Conservative leadership election.
There are two very strong candidates, but we have to choose between them. I’ve set out the reasons for my own choice below.

It starts with honesty. We need to be clear about why we lost the election. We lost because we were seen as incompetent and divided, and no-one knew what we stood for. This wasn’t entirely fair but it was true enough to turn off millions of voters who left us for Reform, the Lib Dems, Labour, or to stay at home and not vote at all.

To restore our reputation for competence, to unite the Party, and to rediscover what we stand for – we need leadership. 

Leadership isn’t about grabbing media attention, though we certainly need a good media performer. It’s about doing the hard work to identify the real causes for our national malaise – on productivity and growth, on defence and security, on social breakdown and the state of the public services – and putting in place a plan to fix them. 

It’s about setting a clear direction, with explicit policy commitments on the main issues the voters care about: immigration, the economy and the public services, especially the NHS. When the leader is clear on direction, the troops will unite and follow.

And it’s about being professional, diligent, decent and respectful towards all strands of conservatism (and indeed non-conservatives). We need courage and radicalism, but with the spirit of emollience and courtesy. You don’t win by hectoring people. You win by putting across a clear and persuasive message.

This combination – clarity on policy direction, and an inclusive and generous spirit – is what Robert Jenrick represents. He has set out a detailed analysis of what is wrong with our country, a clear set of Conservative principles to address them, and policies to get there. His pledge to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is a case in point.

  I like and greatly admire Kemi Badenoch. If Rob had been knocked out of the contest earlier, I would have backed her. Indeed, I backed her in the last leadership contest. I share her politics – pro-Brexit, pro-growth, anti-woke – and I recognise her strengths as a punchy debater and, of course, if Kemi wins this contest, I will gladly follow her. We have a great chance of winning back power from this plainly failing Labour government, and we will need unity to do that. But for the next week we have a choice and I see Robert Jenrick as the stronger of the two