I am delighted that Suella Braverman MP has been appointed Attorney-General. She is a first-class lawyer and a fierce opponent of judicial activism.

There used to be an understanding that our constitution had a lock that required 3 keys to be operated simultaneously: only when the Crown, the House of Peers and the Commons all agreed on a measure would it become law.
Over the last century or so the power of two of those keys has diminished dramatically: in effect the Crown has withdrawn entirely from decision-making in the legislative process and the Parliament acts of 1911 and 1949 have reduced the Peers to a revising chamber with limited delaying powers. The Commons is supreme.
Constitutional theorists fret about this largely unchecked concentration of legislative power in one body. It does have the virtue however, of being elected, so that it is periodically held to account by voters for its stewardship.

I have always been in receipt of letters demanding constitutional reform, to be fair it’s always been a minority taste amongst my correspondents, but it has been growing steadily albeit from a low base. Their principal demand is for the certainty of a written constitution.
This is the very opposite of what we currently enjoy, where there is no superior body of constitutional law that cannot be altered by statute (a new act of Parliament). Parliament can make new law and alter or repeal any previous laws unrestrained. Parliament is supreme and no court can strike out its statutes.
(Under the Human Rights Act 1998 a court can declare any Act of Parliament as being incompatible with the Human Rights Act, but that will be just a declaration: the offending Act remains in force; the court cannot strike it out. In any event, Parliament itself can repeal the Human Rights Act should it choose to.)

The reason we should shrink from a written constitution is that it would establish a superior body of law as supreme, and which Parliament could not alter, and by which it would have to abide.
The will of the people, expressed through their elected representatives would be constrained by this new body of law.

Now here’s the real rub: any decision with respect to whether a law infringed the constitution would be made by judges, who would indeed have gained the power to strike out laws democratically made by elected representatives.
We would have replaced the supremacy of an elected Parliament with the supremacy of unelected judges.

Given the rage with which so many constituents have written to me over the years to vent their frustration at judicial decisions that fly in the face of  common sense (most recently, for example, the decision to halt the deportation of a foreign rapist and a murderer), such a constitutional settlement would be very much for the worse.

(…but not all the judges are barking: Well done to Mr Justice Knowles for condemning the Orwellian actions by Humberside police who presumed to “check the thinking” of Harry Miller for expressing perfectly legitimate opinions about ‘transgender’ issues)

No sooner had I despatched last week’s column than it was overtaken by events at Streatham.
I had concentrated on the on provisions to end automatic early release of violent and sex offenders and merely hinted that further similar legislation was expected shortly with respect to terrorists.
Now the terrorist legislation is of much greater urgency.

The provisions for violent and sex offenders were made under an order making power granted to ministers in an earlier Act of Parliament. All the Government had to do was to lay the order before Parliament for the requisite number of sitting days and secure an affirmative resolution in both houses. The order was not amendable and did not need to go through the lengthy procedures associated with a bill.

The Change in the law to end automatic release on licence halfway through a sentence for terrorists however, is more complicated and will require the full legislative treatment of a parliamentary bill. This is because we are seeking to achieve something much more ambitious with terrorist offences.

The order that changed prison sentences for violent and sex offenders, about which I wrote in this column last week, does not apply retrospectively: it only applies to offenders sentenced from now on. Those offenders already in prison before the order was made will, alas, still be released halfway through their sentences.

With terrorists, we want the change to apply retrospectively to those already sentenced and in prison now. The halfway automatic release for dangerous terrorists is approaching and we urgently need to keep them inside for longer and make their release subject to a risk assessment by the Parole Board.
For this reason the law requires to be changed by primary legislation: an Act of Parliament and not just an order.

Will this offend against Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights ?
A heavier penalty may not be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time that the offence was committed.
Well, the Government will argue that it doesn’t, because it is not changing the penalty, merely the administration arrangements of the penalty. A 10 year sentence will remain a 10 year sentence even if the amount of time spent inside is longer, and the amount spent on licence is shorter.
This is bound to be challenged in court under the Human Rights Act 1998 and I rather suspect that the judges will give the Government another poke in the eye.
What happens then?
Well, actually nothing necessarily: A ruling that an Act of Parliament is incompatible with the Human Rights Act is merely declaratory: it doesn’t change or set aside the Act of Parliament; Parliament remains supreme…for the moment at least.
Only when the case finally gets to the European Convention Court in Strasbourg, as it inevitably would, and were the Government to lose there, it would be required to seek to change the law back again in Parliament (the Ministerial Code requires ministers to comply with international law and treaty obligations).

I should point that the Strasbourg Court has nothing to do with the EU which we’ve just left. It is the creature of a Treaty largely designed by the UK in 1950 with the objective of preventing Europe from slipping back into tyranny from which we had so recently fought to deliver it.
Were that Convention however, to become an obstacle in the way of our determination to maintain public safety in the face of the terrorist threat, I do hope we would conclude that it had outlived its usefulness, and make different international treaty arrangements.

I was a prison visitor for over a decade, first at The Scrubs, then at HMP Wandsworth

On Tuesday last week the Commons approved the Release of Prisoners (Alteration of Relevant Proportion of Sentence) Order 2019, which is a very welcome measure: it ends the present early release regime for violent and sexual offences. Currently those offenders are released on licence once they have served only half their sentence. Furthermore, that halfway release is automatic, it is not dependent on good behaviour or on any other assessment.

The order that we passed last week changes this in two very important respects: first, it extends the release point until they have served two thirds of their sentence. Second, that release will no longer be automatic, on the contrary, it will require a full evaluation of risk and readiness by the parole Board.

This is a step in the right direction, but I do not believe it goes far enough. I believe we should be honest in our sentencing: the sentence that the judge gives in court should be the one that the prisoner should serve. What happens in court at present is a fiction: the judge might announce that the prisoner will go down for five years, but only the ‘man in the street’ is fooled. Those who understand the system will quickly work out on the back of their fag packet that he’s only going down for 2 years and six months. We should be grateful that now it means he’ll be inside for at least three years and four months, maybe longer. It would be more honest, I suggest, if the judge said at the outset “I’m sending you down for three years and four months, after which you may -dependent upon your behaviour in prison- be either released on licence, or remain in prison for a further year and eight months.

There is a whole lot more to do. Further legislation is on the way shortly to extend similarly the prison sentences of terrorists. I’ve always thought it absurd that an enormous amount of our counter-terrorism resources are taken up with monitoring terrorists who have been released from prison. Clearly, if they are still a danger requiring monitoring, then it was madness to have released them.

We also need to extend these provisions to less serious crimes, such as burglary. A Police officer recently told me that he had a graph indicating ‘spikes’ in local break-ins, which he could map directly to the release dates of a known repeat offender.

When Michael Howard was Home Secretary he used to say “prison works”, what he meant was that communities are spared significant levels of crime so long as the habitual criminals are ‘inside’.
It follows that if we want lower levels of crime, then we need to keep criminals inside for longer. Frankly, we ought to keep them inside until they demonstrate that they are reformed.

Finally, after 48 years the 1972 European Communities Act will cease to have effect on Friday night. This was the Act of Parliament upon which our accession to what was then the European Economic Community, better known as the Common Market, was based. It gave primacy to law made by the European Community over any law made in our own Parliament: It was the original ‘surrender Act’.
It was, of course, given democratic sanction and legitimacy by a referendum in 1975 in which voters were asked if they wished to remain within the Common Market. I campaigned and voted in that referendum for a ‘no’ vote: a vote to leave. We were heavily defeated: the people voted to remain by a margin of almost two to one.
Those voters however, were assured throughout the campaign that this was a purely economic arrangement from which we would benefit from freer trade and that there would be ‘no essential loss of national sovereignty’. Nevertheless we were warned by a vigorous No campaign which demonstrated that we had handed over control of our fisheries, abandoned our economic partnership with friends in the Commonwealth like Australia and New Zealand; and we would discover that, in time, the Treaty of Rome, to which we had acceded, really did mean what it said about ‘ever closer union’. We heard both sides of the argument and we made our choice with our eyes open.

The pressure for another referendum grew over the decades entirely as a consequence of the way that the European Economic Community developed into the European Union on a trajectory to become a super state with its own constitution, government, parliament, supreme court, currency, flag and national anthem. It became ever clearer that with each successive European Treaty (The Single European Act, Maastricht, Amsterdam, Nice, Lisbon) that we were losing control of our laws, our money, and our borders; that increasingly we were being governed by people who we had not elected and whom we were unable to remove.
To be fair, European advocates of this endeavour never made any secret of their intent, they were open and honest about what they were seeking to achieve. It was our own UK politicians who kept on insisting that the treaties they were signing-up to really didn’t mean what they said.

In my estimate, David Cameron’s greatest legacy (-however he campaigned and voted in the 2016 referendum), is that he committed to having a referendum in his 2015 election manifesto and he implemented the promise when he won it. I was at the very centre of his regime and I well recall the evolution in his thinking: notwithstanding his support for remaining in the EU (though he certainly wanted fundamental reform of it), he recognised that remaining required renewed consent from the British people and he had reached this conclusion well before the electoral pressure from UKIP made it an imperative.

All that is history and we are leaving
We have good friends in the EU with whom we share many interests and objectives. We will continue to pursue those shared goals and to co-operate closely. We will however, no longer be joining them as they evolve into a United Stares of Europe. We will once again be governed by people whom we elect, and whom we can remove.

I’ve had scores of emails in the last week demanding that I vote for amendments to the EU Withdrawal Bill,  the effect if which -in the understanding of my correspondents, was to preserve the rights of refugee children overseas to be reunited with family members who have made it to the UK.
(Most of the emails arrived after the debates in the Commons had concluded and the Bill was already on its way to the Lords).

I support re-uniting child refugees with any family they have in the UK, it is Government Policy to do so and we have an excellent record: In the last 12 months, the UK granted protection to over 7,500 children, and since 2010 to 41,000 children. This makes us third in the EU in terms of the numbers that we have accommodated, accounting for 15% of all claims from unaccompanied children in the EU.
In the year ending September 2019, 6,035 family reunion visas were issued to children and partners of those granted humanitarian protection or refugee status in the UK.

There is no intention for this to change following the UK’s exit from the EU. The Prime Minister has made it clear that we intend to ensure that unaccompanied children who are seeking international protection in an EU Member State can continue to be reunited with family members who are here, as well as children here in the UK with family in the EU. This is a negotiating objective of the Government for our future relationship with the EU.

The purpose of the bill now in Parliament is to give parliamentary approval to the Withdrawal Agreement with the EU which we signed up to in October last year, not to determine the future relationship which is still to be negotiated and agreed.
The misery of the last Parliament was that, the absence a Government majority enabled MPs to use any bill as a ‘Christmas tree’ on which to hang any number of obligations that would tie the Government’s hands in future EU negotiations. The current bill reverses that: it simply approves the agreement we’ve already made, and lets the Government get on with negotiating our future relationship unfettered by any imposed parliamentary negotiating mandate.
It is for this reason that the amendments supported by my email correspondents were so inappropriate.

To say that MP’s voted against refugee children being reunited with relatives living in the UK is just utter nonsense. We didn’t. The UK will continue to be one of most generous and accommodating European nations in our acceptance of refugee children.

The Government in its recent election manifesto stated that
“A strong society needs strong families. We will improve the Troubled Families programme and champion Family Hubs to serve vulnerable families with the intensive, integrated support that they need to care for children…”

In this column last week, whilst discussing food banks, I quoted statistics on childhood obesity in which children from families with lower incomes were disproportionately overrepresented.
My source for this statistical analysis was the Nuffield Trust, based on data collected by the National Child Measurement Programme: One in five children in Year 6 (aged 10-11 years) were obese in 2017/18 (20.1%). Obesity in children aged 10-11 has increased by 2.6 percentage points since 2006/07. The proportion of children who were underweight has remained relatively stable over this time period.
There is a strong association between deprivation and obesity: In 2017/18, in Year 6 children obesity prevalence was over twice as high in the most deprived areas than the least deprived areas. Severe obesity prevalence was about four times as high in the most deprived areas than the least deprived areas.

In a rhetorical flourish I inferred that “the poorest are among the fattest”.
I’ve received a large number of emails agreeing with what I said. This puts me in the awkward position of having to disagree with my supporters, because I’ve reflected on it, and believe that referring to the ‘fattest’ was insensitive, so I apologise to anyone to whom I gave offence.
Furthermore, that statement is not a legitimate inference from the evidence I quoted: even when children from lower income backgrounds are overrepresented in the figures for obesity, it is equally possible for the richest to be amongst the fattest.

I believe that the conclusion that I drew however, remains valid, and I stand by it. We need to provide support and assistance to some low-income families which goes well beyond merely supplying them with increased benefits. Many need help that will enable them to shop more cost-effectively and healthily.

One of the places where such assistance could be located are Children Centres. They were a welcome innovation and I regret that so many were closed as a consequence of the squeeze on local authority budgets. That was an inevitable consequence of the financial situation that the coalition government inherited. Now, as the financial situation improves, it is essential that that Children Centres and Family Hubs feel the benefit. Accordingly, I hope that the manifesto commitment that I quoted is a statement of this intent, and I shall certainly campaign for it.

An issue that was raised at every one of our four hustings during the election campaign was that of food banks.
There was a measure of surprise when I stated my view that food banks were a proper and welcome response by voluntary organisations and individuals to a need that exists and which it is difficult for state agencies to address.
There never was a golden age when the need that food banks address did not exist. When families or individuals experience a crisis they make use of food banks because they need to, and because they are available. In times before food banks existed they would, in the first instance, rely on the wider family for help, and in desperation they might even have recourse to loan sharks. Food banks address a need, and we should thank those volunteers who give their time, money and substance.

We have a more generous welfare system than most comparable affluent economies. We also have a number of short term and emergency benefits including Discretionary Housing Payment. It is significant that government figures show that most food bank users have not applied for a Discretionary Housing Payment in the 6 months prior to their referral to a food bank.
The explanation may be that they were simply unaware of the benefit, or that the crisis that caused them to be referred to a food bank arose at such short notice.

Whatever the particular crisis that an individual may face, there will inevitably be a delay in the response of the welfare system whilst the bona fides of any applicant for benefits are established and checked, into that ‘space’ the existence of a food bank is an important contribution.

For longer term reliance on food banks we need to ask more profound questions as to why people find themselves in such a situation. Of course, this will include assessments of the adequacy of the level of benefit payments -particularly where housing costs are concerned. The easy answer however, is always to address the problem with more money, but I do believe that we need to get at more a fundamental understanding of how recipients of benefits actually spend the welfare payments that they receive.

The shocking statistic is that one in five of our children is obese by the time they leave primary school, and that this disproportionately affects those children in the lowest household incomes.
To put it bluntly (and in the terms that elicited shouts of protest at the hustings): the poorest are amongst the fattest.
The conclusion that I draw is that their families need, in addition to welfare payments, help with how to shop more cost effectively and healthily.

A number of my correspondents over the last few weeks have demanded to know why the Government did not lay before the voters detailed proposals to address the growing problems with social care.
Those proposals are overdue, they were promised earlier this year. My hunch is that the paralysis caused by the BREXIT impasse and stalemate in Parliament took its toll on a number of aspects of policy which in ordinary circumstances would have secured greater attention and urgency.

Even had the proposals been ready, it would have been foolish indeed to have sprung them on us during an election. As the polling guru Lynton Crosby says “you can’t fatten the pig on market day”. Measures to address the problems with social care are bound to be controversial and the level of analysis and rational discussion appropriate to them does not lend itself to electioneering.
Theresa May tried exactly that in the 2017 election with her own proposals for social care, and to her great cost. I was no fan of those proposals, but it was equally clear to me that many of those who were dismayed by them, had little understanding of what they actually were.

Like so many things, in the end the issue of social care comes down to two questions:
How much, and who pays?
When we are ill, we expect the NHS to treat us and for the taxpayer to settle the entire bill, (costing some £134 billion over the next year).
When we are ill and infirm to the extent that we need help everyday life however, we are expected to pay for it ourselves if we can afford to.
Do we want to ‘nationalise’ another aspect of our life by having taxpayers take responsibility by footing the bill for social care in entirety (with obvious consequences for taxation)?
Certainly, we cannot go on as we are now, spending too little on it and with the services available stretched beyond their limits.

My personal opinion is that the system ought to retain a balance between individuals and the state.
I was always taught to save for a ‘rainy day’. If you require social care, isn’t that a rainy day?

Over the years we have had a series of enquiries into the policy and Parliament broadly accepted the results of the commission led by the economist Andrew Dilnot in 2011. We legislated to implement Dilnot’s plan from 2021 onwards (giving more time for the public finances to recover because Dilnot’s proposals were expensive).

Basically the Dilnot deal was this: social care would remain means-tested with the expectation that, if you could afford it, you would be liable for the first £80,000 of your care costs, and thereafter the taxpayer would meet the bills. The advantage of this design is that would create an insurance market for those who want to protect themselves from that first £80,000 liability. Currently no market exists because the liability for insurers is unlimited, but by creating a cap to liability at £80,000 you give insurers an aiming point for which they can design financial products.

I never understood why Theresa May re-opened the issue in the 2017 election. We had the Dilnot plan and we should have stuck to it.

I’ve lost a few pounds consequent upon 5 weeks pounding the streets delivering and knocking doors in all weather.
Some people have letter boxes that could be categorised as offensive weapons, I don’t know how the postman copes but my fingers are still cut and sore. Then there is always an address that you just can’t find. There are streets that appear to have no logic whatever to the way the house numbers work.
So letter boxes display prohibition against the delivery of ‘Junk Mail’. Would anyone trouble themselves to deliver a message all the way to your door, if they really thought that it was junk?

When it comes to canvassing, I confess that it is not my favourite pastime. I know that some election volunteers love it, but I am not among them.
No matter what time you call, most people are out -or pretending to be.
There are some voters who are disappointed that the Tory didn’t call by, and I did get an email from one. I pointed out that with some 45,000 households in the constituency, even going full tilt with a dedicated team of volunteers you would barely make an impression. My own maximum during this election was 300 doors in one week.
What makes canvassing so daunting however, is the fact so many voters do not want you on their doorstep discussing politics -or anything else, and they make this abundantly clear by the little stickers they place on the door telling you to go away. Those who follow me on Twitter will have seen that I have been sharing examples as I encountered them. Perhaps the most common, and the daftest, is “No unwelcome callers”. I ask you, how on earth can you tell if you are unwelcome or not, unless you call?
One of my favourites was “No purveyors of religious or political wisdom of any kind”
Another said “No Cold Callers. We are too broke to buy anything. We know who we are voting for. We have already found Jesus. Seriously, unless you are distributing free cookies PLEASE GO AWAY”
Some signs just say “no cold callers”. Now does that really mean salesmen or does it apply to political canvassers too?
Well, it depends on the random caprice of the occupant. When I’ve gone ahead and knocked sometimes they’ve seemed quite agreeable, but at others they are clearly angry that their instruction has been defied.

When you knock, having first consulted the electoral register, you know the name of the person you are calling on. Often, for an address with only one registered voter, the door is opened by a person of the opposite sex to that specified on the register. My habit is to say “excuse me, I was hoping to speak to Mrs ‘x’, is she at home?”
Now here’s a question for our new age where gender is now regarded merely as an outdated social construct rather than a biological fact: could I be insulting the occupant by assuming that he or she is not the person on the register, on the basis of my own bourgeois expectation of what a person of a particular sex looks like?
I haven’t had a complaint yet, but I suppose it’s bound to happen sometime.

During the proceedings on the bill to hold a general election earlier this week, a number of amendments were tabled for debate in the committee stage of the bill. One of which was to give EU citizens, resident in the UK, the right to vote in our general election on 12th December. During their speeches at the second reading of the Bill, the leaders of Labour, SNP, and Liberal Democrats all announced their intention to vote for that amendment giving EU citizens the vote.
No other EU state affords that privilege (except that UK and the Republic of Ireland have a mutual arrangement that predates our EU membership).

It is an extra-ordinary measure of contempt for our own voters, who themselves voted to leave the EU, that these parties should seek to extend our general election franchise to EU voters. It is the equivalent of raising two fingers to UK voters.

Happily, the Deputy Speaker did not select the amendment, so it was never voted on, but the intention of the opposition parties, and the measure of their contempt was clear enough.