On Wednesday the Prime Minister almost pleaded with the Leader of the Opposition to withdraw her wrecking amendment to the Schools and Children’s Wellbeing Bill. I can’t imagine why. Given the size of his parliamentary majority, there was no prospect of the Government being defeated and the Bill being lost.
The occasion was the second Reading of the Bill. The opportunities to improve a bill by amendment come at committee and report stages. To be orderly at second reading, an amendment cannot seek to improve the bill, on the contrary, it must be fatal to the bill e.g. “That this House declines to give a second reading to the xxx Bill because…”. Hence the term ‘wrecking amendment’.
The PM’s concern was that the Opposition were using their amendment merely as a ruse to secure a vote on a public inquiry into sexual grooming gangs just to achieve the political objective of embarrassing the Government with a vote that it didn’t want, and in which ministers would have to whip their members to vote contrary to both popular will and the advice of Andy Burnham, their most successful regional mayor.
The PM appeared to be horrified that the Tories would be so destructive as to vote against a perfectly good bill just because it didn’t contain provision for an inquiry, notwithstanding that it contained so many other desirable measures. When, in any event, the Tories could have supported the bill as it stood, then moved amendments at latter stages to include the inquiry.

Of course, it was -partly- a political ruse: It was important to secure a vote on a matter which had hit the headlines in a big way, even though the Government didn’t want the embarrassment of the issue getting a further airing.
For my own part, I am not an enthusiast for public inquiries. They are very expensive and time- consuming. On this occasion however, I think that Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, who himself commissioned one of the earlier enquiries, was right in his assertion that there is proper scope for a limited national inquiry to pull together the threads from the local inquiries and explore the question of why the establishment failed comprehensively. Such an inquiry would not impede proceeding swiftly the recommendations made on the basis of the earlier findings.

The PM’s concern about the Opposition’s naked political expediency by voting against a sensible measure just to embarrass the Government is however, quite misplaced. We would have voted against this frightful Bill in any event.
Though the Bill does include some measures to improve child protection, nevertheless it undermines the long-standing combination of school freedom and accountability that has been the foundation of the dramatic improvement in England’s educational standards. These were first introduced by Tony Blair with the enthusiastic support of the Conservative Opposition. These successful policies were then extended under the following Tory years. This Bill now seeks to abolish academy freedoms which have been at the heart of that success. It ends freedom over teacher pay and conditions, making it harder to attract and retain good teachers. It ends freedom on Qualified Teacher Status, making teacher recruitment harder. It removes school freedoms over the curriculum, leading to less innovation. It repeals the requirements for failing schools to become academies and for all new schools to be academies and it will undermine school improvement and remove the competition which has led to rising standards. The Bill will make it harder for good schools to expand, reducing parental choice and access to a good education.
It is just dreadful.

I spent the best part of 5 years in the last Parliament serving on the Work & Pensions Select Committee. The experience reinforced my prejudice that the principal problem that we face is a culture of welfare dependency.
Our out-of-work benefits are not particularly generous by European standards and those who are dependent upon them are not, by any stretch, enjoying a ‘cushy’ lifestyle. Nevertheless, recipients grow accustomed to the life and learn to ‘get by’, particularly so, when they are relieved of the inconvenience of going out to work for a living.
The trends are particularly worrying amongst the young
More women are now out of the workforce due to sickness than those who don’t work because they are raising children. Whilst the number of young men off work due to sickness has trebled in the last decade and three quarters of them indicate that they have no interest in finding a job.
The economically inactive population of working age now stands at a record 10 million.
The bill for sickness benefits is currently running at £65 billion annually, and is predicted to rise to £100 billion by 2030.
This has to be set against a background of several years with vacancies at record, or near-record, levels and enormous pressure from employers on government to ease immigration control in order to enable them to recruit from overseas.
Some 40% of those claiming sickness benefits state that mental health issues are their reason for doing so. Yet nothing could be better for mental health than the stimulation of work, with a consequent improvement in self-esteem.
Ministers have undertaken to bring forward reforms to the welfare system this year with the intention of encouraging recipients back into the workforce. We will have to wait and see what they propose. I did however, try and steer the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in the direction of the work of Jeremy Bentham and his utilitarian principle of ‘the greater good for the greatest number’. I do not believe that society can, or should, carry a growing cost of an increasing proportion of its members who are not working.
The most effective way to achieve this would be a return to Bentham’s policy of ‘less eligibility’:  that life on benefits must be less eligible than the meanest form of independent existence, so as to discourage anyone from choosing to live on benefits.
How could we implement such a policy without cruelty and a return to the Victorian workhouse?
I think we need to ensure that, as far a possible, welfare rights have to be balanced with responsibilities. We need a system of ‘workfare’ where benefits are paid in return for socially useful work. This would be good for the self-esteem of many claimants with mental health problems and encourage them to take a further step towards paid employment.

The future of the Western Solent has been under discussion for the last few years. The question has been the extent to try and ‘hold the line’ through engineering works in the face of rising sea levels and climate change, or whether we try and manage the retreat as the coastline realigns.

There is a consultation underway: the detailed proposals can be found at https://www.hurstspit2lymington.co.uk/  and representations must be submitted by email HurstSpit2Lymington@environment-agency.gov.uk by 11^th January

I find the proposals for ‘managed retreat’ pretty alarming. They include discontinuing the maintenance of the Hurst Spit shingle bank and abandoning the existing sea wall between Keyhaven and Lymington Yacht Haven.

Walking along the popular sea wall footpath from Lymington to Keyhaven will no longer be possible.

Once Hurst spit has been breached through discontinued maintenance, all of the salt marshes inside of Keyhaven river, all along the existing sea wall to Harpers post will ultimately be lost. This managed realignment will accelerate the loss of the intertidal habitat outside the sea wall and make the Lymington outer harbour area much more exposed.
I understand that the Lymington River will almost certainly silt up, it will be subjected to huge wave action and become no longer navigable.

Hurst Castle will be cut off permanently from the shore and Lymington Harbour as a whole will be at risk. All of the features in that area will be given up to allow the tidal waters to penetrate inland and create new intertidal habitats for the birds further inland.

The cost of raising the existing sea wall to “Hold the Line” is in the order of £100 million, whilst the “Managed Retreat” option is closer to £280 million. The more expensive option of managed retreat is now the preferred option of the environment Agency because it unlocks central government funding for the proposed creation of the new intertidal bird habitat. However, I do not believe that enough weight has been given to local marine-related employment, or sufficient recognition given to the needs of businesses in the town of Lymington which depend of a thriving harbour, or the local amenity of sailing, motor boating, sea fishing, or simply walking your dog along the sea wall between Lymington and Keyhaven.

The annual budget for maintaining the shingle bank at Hurst of £40,000 is per annum, but there has been no maintenance this year. Given the new policy of “do nothing”, it remains to be seen if there will be any future maintenance of Hurst Spit between Milford and Hurst Castle, or whether this has already been abandoned to “Managed Retreat”. Given the relatively moderate cost of maintaining this structure in a normal year, this should not be allowed to lapse.

These proposals will change forever the shape of the coastline with profound impact on amenity and businesses. We need to consider very carefully before we give them up.

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.