The Government defeat in the Commons last week on an amendment to a  Northern Ireland bill was unwelcome but it doesn’t change ‘the price of fish’.

The Northern Ireland bill is a short technical measure to prolong attempts to re-start the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont and avoid having to revert to direct rule in Ulster from Westminster.
The measure was ‘hijacked’ a fortnight ago to force abortion and same-sex marriage on to the reluctant province, and last week it was hijacked to try and stop a no-deal Brexit, on the assumption that the new Prime Minister would prorogue Parliament to prevent it from interfering.

The amended bill required the Government to give frequent updates to Parliament on progress in restarting the assembly, thus making it difficult to adhere to this requirement if Parliament were prorogued. The further amendment went another step by requiring that if the Government couldn’t meet that reporting obligation because of a prorogation, then a Royal Proclamation would require Parliament to meet the next day and for five subsequent days.

This perceived “Remainer triumph” is based on one quite false assumption, namely that there ever was a serious plan to prorogue Parliament in the first place. There wasn’t. It just isn’t serious politics. Regular readers of this column may recall that I addressed the issue several weeks ago and reminded them that when King Charles I prorogued the Long Parliament, it didn’t end well for him.

Of course, Dominic Raab and Boris Johnson refused to rule out the possibility of a prorogation, but refusing to rule something out is very different from having a plan to do it. The first rule of any serious negotiator is to keep all possibilities open.

The damage that the defeat has done, is not that it has removed a serious option, but that it sends a further signal to the EU -as if one were needed- indicating that Parliament will oppose a no-deal BREXIT, and therefore that the threat is a paper-tiger and that they need not engage seriously in negotiations to avoid it.
Once again Parliament has had the effect of acting like a fifth column in undermining the Government’s BREXIT negotiations.

How reliable is the signal that Parliament has sent?
The Government defeat was large, but does it really indicate that a majority in Parliament would vote to block a no-deal BREXIT?
I doubt it.
The actual vote was on the question of potentially side-lining Parliament at a key moment in our history, not something to be taken lightly in a modern parliamentary democracy that takes itself seriously.
Frankly, in such a circumstance it isn’t difficult to persuade democrats of any persuasion to resist the Government whip on such a question.

It is a quite different question however, to ask democrats representing constituencies that voted by 70% and upwards in favour of leaving the EU, instead to vote to change the law and prevent the UK leaving on All Souls Day.
The last time the Commons voted on the possibility of availing itself of such a power, it demurred and the proposal was defeated by 11 votes.
I conclude that no-deal remains on the table, and the EU better believe it.

A relatively small number of constituents have written to ask me why I voted against extending the equal marriage provisions of England and Wales to Northern Ireland earlier this week.
That correspondence pales into insignificance compared to the deluge of mail that I received over months and years from 2010 until the passing of the Equal Marriage Act in 2013.
I was a prominent supported of that legislation and sought to stiffen David Cameron’s resolve to persevere with it in the teeth of vociferous opposition.
I recall being assured by some constituents that it would destroy marriage, and by others that it would bring down the wrath of God upon our nation.
On that second point I was able to write to reassure them that the provisions applied only to civil marriage: a legal contract between two parties; and that the legislation had no effect on Holy Matrimony celebrated in churches and blessed by Almighty God.
On the first point I assured them that it wouldn’t have any effect on any marriage except where the couple specifically wanted it to: the provisions of the Act were voluntary and not compulsory; if same sex marriage doesn’t appeal to you, then you needn’t enter into one!
I told my correspondents that such same sex marriages would be occasions of joy and celebration to the participants, their friends and relations, and wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference to anyone else.
So it has proved: Marriage has not been destroyed, and the wrath of God has yet to be visited upon us.

So, why did I not support amendments to the Northern Ireland (Executive Formation) Bill last week, which were designed to extend the same marriage provisions to the province as are now enjoyed on the mainland?
The answer is simple. Our devolution settlement with Northern Ireland devolves decisions relating to marriage to the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont. In short, the decision is one to be made by Northern Ireland and for Northern Ireland, and not one to be imposed by Westminster.
It struck me a supreme irony that a bill designed to get the Assembly back up and running again, should be amended with provisions that usurped its proper jurisdiction.

Exactly the same principle determined my opposition to other amendments that were similarly tabled and which were designed to extend abortion in Northern Ireland.

I do not doubt the well-meaning intent of those who supported (and carried) these amendments.
I sit on the House of Commons Northern Ireland Select Committee however, and I am conscious of the sensitivities of people who want to take decisions democratically for themselves rather than having them imposed from the mainland. There remains a ‘fragility’ within the province of which we need to take proper account.

In Canada the euphemism they use is ‘maid’: medical assistance in dying (and I do mean euphemism rather than just acronym).
The last attempt in Parliament to introduce changes in our law to allow it was seen-off so decisively by the House of Commons in 2015, that I am surprised that this agenda has raised its head again so soon after its comprehensive defeat, and I am at a loss to identify anything significant that has happened to bring it back on to the political agenda. Nevertheless, it was debated in the Commons again last week (though no vote took place).

The one change that has taken place is that the Royal College of Physicians has moved from a stance of opposition to medical assistance in dying, to one of neutrality. This change was secured after a ballot of its members. Curiously, the rules for the ballot required a majority of 60% to maintain what was then the status quo (opposition to doctor assisted dying). At 43.4 % most physicians voted to keep the College’s opposition, 31.6% voted to have the College support it and Only 25% thought the college should be neutral. The College has therefore adopted the position taken by fewest of its voting members!
I wonder what consideration was given to how profoundly the proposal would change the nature of the medical profession. How will our attitude to doctors change when, in addition to healing, they also bring the instruments of death?

Suicide itself used to be against the law. Now some 5000 people commit suicide in the UK every year, of which it is estimated that about 400 do so because they have a terminal medical condition.
In the Netherlands by contrast, the annual number of doctor-assisted deaths is 21,000. Are we really ready for the scale of what is proposed?

I have every sympathy for those with a terminal condition but who do not have the means to visit the Dignitas Clinic in Switzerland, and who want to have the option of their doctor killing them when their condition becomes too painful and undignified to bear any longer.
The consequences of changing the law to accommodate them however, strike me a potentially much worse.
What begins as an ‘option’ may quickly become an ‘expectation’.
“After all, you wouldn’t want to become a burden, would you?”

A clinical director from Canada visited Parliament recently and made a presentation in the House of Lords at which I was present. One of the more worrying points that she made was her suggestion that palliative care budgets in Canada are being squeezed to fund the new medical assistance in dying service.
We are at our most expensive in terms of our consumption of healthcare in the last weeks of our lives. Think of the savings to be had for NHS budgets if only we could persuade more people to do the “decent thing”.
What a grotesque calculation!
Change the law however, and one day not so far off, we’ll end up making it.

Whilst the focus of political news has remained on the Conservative Leadership contest, and in particular its implications for BREXIT, largely unreported Parliament has continued to legislate on important matters, even if rather fewer MPs appear to be participating in this process.

Last week the House of Commons gave a second reading to a bill bringing in the most profound changes to our divorce law since the nineteen sixties. I am simplifying a complex measure, but basically the current law still requires ‘irretrievable breakdown’ to be proved through adultery, desertion or unreasonable conduct by one of the parties before divorce is granted. The Alternative is a separation of two years, but where one party opposes the divorce the other must wait fully five years to get one.

The reform approved by the commons last week will change this fundamentally: The long waits of two and five years are swept aside and the concept of ‘fault’ in divorce is removed.
Clearly, irretrievable breakdown on the basis of unreasonable behaviour means that at least one of the parties has behaved unreasonably and is at fault. The focus of the measure before Parliament is to grant ‘no fault divorce’: to simply accept that a relationship has broken down when either party applies for a divorce, rather than having to demonstrate it by attributing blame.

This is not uncontroversial. I have received a significant amount of correspondence opposing these reforms. Constituents have complained that they trivialise both marriage and divorce. Furthermore, that they fly in the face of the facts: there is fault in divorce, people do behave unreasonably, and surely the law should recognise this.
Some of our clergy have complained that the sanctity of marriage is undermined by making it so easy to end it.

I have a great deal of sympathy with these arguments, and I had to reflect for a long time before giving my assent to the bill.
The question of ‘sanctity’ in marriage is a religious one. Of course, a change in the law of marriage as a civil contract cannot change what the Church teaches about ‘Holy Matrimony’ and its indissolubility, or otherwise.
The key issue is the question of ‘fault’. I accept that there is fault in divorce, but in my experience it is the requirement to attribute that fault -to lay the blame- that can make divorce a so much more malicious affair.
So often divorced constituents have come to my surgeries seeking my assistance in a continuing warfare with their former spouse, where the children are being used as the weapons.

It was on the basis of lowering the temperature by removing the need for one party to blame the other when seeking a divorce, that I gave my consent to the bill.
I hope, with the assistance of like-minded MPs, to extract a commitment from the Government during the remaining stages of the bill, to greater support for struggling couples earlier in their marriage.

Against my better judgement, I watched the BBC debate between the Conservative leadership candidates last week.

The highly partisan questioners were the least of it. Frankly, such is the preponderance of a left-wing outlook among broadcast journalists in general, and the BBC in particular, that I have come to expect treatment of that sort as standard practice.

Rather, It is the format that is so biased in favour of the journalist and against the politicians participating -whatever their politics may be.
A ‘bun-fight’ fight is deliberately set up so that none of the participants can come out of it smelling of roses. The compere however, with prepared one-line put-downs, and giving little time for her targets to respond, comes out as the master, looking reasonable, clever and in command of misbehaving school-boys.

I am happy to be interviewed anytime, but for some-time now I have been refusing to do broadcast discussions, unless they are very strictly refereed -where one can only speak at the invitation of the referee. The moment participants are allowed to interrupt each other the whole thing goes the way that the broadcasters always intended: never content with reporting the news, rather they want to make it; by creating a spectacle.
As I have implied, all the participants lose out in this format by appearing pushy and unreasonable. Personally, I always come off worst in these arguments because I am just too polite: I was taught not to interrupt.

Of course, as an ordinary civilian, rather than in my persona as a politician, I interact in conversation just like anyone else. It doesn’t matter if I’m interrupted because I can wait, then proceed as soon the person who has interrupted has finished. In a radio or TV studio, you just don’t have that chance: you are at the mercy of their pressured schedules. It is that pressure to get one’s point across while there is still time -and before the compere or the other participants interrupt again, that makes the whole thing so frightful.

Formerly, as a member of the directing staff at the Army’s commissioning board I would put potential officers through any number of tests, one of which was to watch them engage with one another in conversations on controversial subjects. The objective, was to see that they could make an argument logically and communicate effectively, at the same time to see that they were not ‘hogging it’ and that they were properly mindful of the others. Indeed, extra merit might be earned by a candidate that turned to one more reticent candidates and afforded him or her an opportunity to participate.
Many large employers have adopted a similar format when recruiting graduates.
To work effectively however, it needs plenty of time, the one thing you don’t get in a TV discussion.

Putting five politicians on the spot and at the mercy of a compere with ‘reputation’ and only an hour to cover any number of subjects was bound to end the way it did: with none of the participants coming over well. As, I believe, was always the intention.
It was for that reason this I urged David Cameron not to challenge Gordon Brown to debates in the 2010 election. I failed. Three participants were bad enough, but in 2017 with six it was just excruciating.

TV seeks to entertain viewers with ever shorter attention spans. I regret having defended the licence fee in this column last week: Television is making morons of us. Please turn it off

I have received a great deal of correspondence about Free TV licences for the over those seventy-five years of age.

The Government is guaranteeing this concession, which costs £745 million per year, until 2020. Thereafter, the concession is the responsibility of the BBC. This was agreed at the last negotiation of the TV licence fee – which generates £3.85 billion annually for the BBC. In addition to which, the BBC makes another £1 billion or so, from its commercial activities, including selling programmes to other broadcasters.

When the agreement was reached with the Government that from 2020 the concession should be the BBC’s responsibility, the BBC’s Director General observed that the cost of the concession was more than matched by the funding settlement it had received.

The BBC has now decided to not to make the concession to all the over seventy-fives after 2020, but instead, to means-test it by confining the free licence only to pensioners receiving pension credit.

Frankly, given the settlement that the BBC got, and the agreement it made, I think that tax-payers are being short-changed.
I certainly don’t think that tax-payers should be expected to pick up the tab for this once again.
The BBC has ‘pulled a fast one’ and ought to reconsider.

Constituents have however, pressed me on the principle that TV licences should be free for the over seventy-fives. Here I have some difficulty – I don’t see why they should.
Every autumn, I get a dozen or so letters from pensioners embarrassed by receiving their winter fuel allowance. They complain that they do not need it and that it would be better spent by giving rather more to those in greater need. I agree with them. If the allowance were mean-tested we could afford to make a more generous payment to those who really need it.
I cannot see why the means-testing principle should not also apply to the TV licence too. Clearly there will be many who can well afford to pay for their own. A colour TV licence is £154.50 per year, that’s just over 40 pence per day.

My granny used to save-up for her TV licence. When I was a little boy, she would send me down the street to get her ‘messages’, by which she meant her shopping (and which, in those days, meant waiting to be served in a number of shops, rather than helping-yourself in a supermarket).
Often, this would involve a trip to the post-office to purchase her TV stamp: By collecting the weekly stamp, she spread the cost of purchasing her licence annually.
I am nervous about ‘moral hazard’ in the expectation that things should be free.

Pension Credit is currently under-claimed: Many pensioners who are entitled to it, are not claiming it. They will therefore, from 2020, also miss out on a free TV licence if they are over 75.
This should be a greater incentive to claim what they paid their national insurance contributions for, and live more comfortably as a consequence.

As for the rest of us, we should continue to pay for our own licences.

The landscape of the New Forest, like so much of the remarkable countryside in the kingdom, is largely ‘man made’ in that it is the product of farming practices over generations.
In the New Forest, it is the grazing by commoners’ stock that is responsible for so much of the beauty and diversity.
Maintaining this landscape therefore, relies on the survival of commoning, and in particular bringing on the next generation of commoners.

Commoning is more a ‘way of life’ than a way of making a living. Many commoners subsidise their commoning activities from other sources of income.

A critical part of the equation to sustain commoning for a new generation is the provision of properties with affordable rents. A local home together with a back-up bit of land is an essential ingredient for managing ponies and cattle on the Forest.
The problem is that there is an ever grater premium on Forest properties, and you just can’t manage your livestock commuting from an address miles and miles away.
The problem isn’t new. It was spotted some time ago.

There are 65 Crown properties which were built to meet the needs of the Forestry Commission’s staff, most of whom were themselves commoners. In 1992 the recommendation of the Illingworth report was accepted by the Government, namely that these properties should be let to commoners at a rent equal to 15% of their income.
This policy was re-stated to the House of Commons by the Secretary of State in 2006 who said:
“Two criteria underpin the retention of properties in the Forest. The First is to provide opportunities for affordable housing with associated back-up land for practising commoners and the second is to provide affordable accommodation for commission employees in key posts when there are operational reasons for staff to be based in the Forest.”

Forestry England now stands accused by the Commoners Defence Association of breaching the policy  was clearly stated in Parliament. First, it is accused of advertising the properties to all staff within the region and not just those in key posts requiring them to be based in the Forest.
Second, that the rents charged are now well beyond the reach of genuine commoners, with rents representing from 70% to in excess of 100% of commoners’ income.

This is clearly a change from the policy adopted arising from the Illingworth report. In 2017 the Minister assured me that any review of the Illingworth policy would be preceded by a consultation with all interested parties, and that any change of policy would require ministerial approval.
There hasn’t been a consultation, and there has been no ministerial approval of any policy change.

So what’s going on?
I await an answer from the Forestry Minister, David Rutley.
Of course, I can understand Forestry England’s desire to maximise the income from its assets. It does however, receive a substantial subsidy from taxpayers to pay for its special obligations to conservation of the New Forest. Equally, it cannot be allowed to unilaterally change policy without proper parliamentary accountability.

A number of constituents have put questions to me about the constitutional propriety of the choice of the next prime minister being confined to the membership of one political party. Frankly, it is indeed questionable.

The constitutional position is that we are a parliamentary democracy and we do not elect the prime minister. Rather, we elect members of parliament, and the PM holds office because she enjoys the support of a majority of those members of parliament.

Until relatively recently political parties confined to their own members of parliament the choice of who would lead them.
The advantage of doing so is to ensure that the leader always has the confidence of his or her parliamentary party, and if that confidence is lost, then it can be swiftly remedied by a ballot confined to a small electorate.

The moment you extend the electorate beyond the parliamentary party you make the process more complex and lengthy, and more important, you run the risk of having a winner chosen by the wider membership who doesn’t actually enjoy the confidence and support of a majority within the parliamentary party.
This is exactly the position that the current Official Opposition is in. Jeremy Corbyn was elected by a very wide definition of Labour Party membership which included registered Labour supporters, all on the basis of reforms implemented under his predecessor Ed Miliband, which further diluted the influence of MPs. The result is that it takes a relatively long time to arrange such a contest, and it has delivered a party led by Mr Corbyn, to the dismay of a majority of the MPs who sit on the Labour benches behind him.
When those MPs voted that they had no confidence in him, it made no difference because they no longer had ownership of the office.

The Conservative Party came rather late to the concept of ‘democratising’ the party leadership. It was only under reforms implemented by William Hague that the ballot for leader was extended beyond MPs to the party membership. I opposed the reform for the simple reason that the Leader should have the confidence of the parliamentary party, and therefore should be the choice only of the parliamentary party.
The system that Hague designed ensured that parliamentary ballots would narrow the choice to two candidates, and that the final choice between them would be put to the membership in a postal ballot.
Only two leadership elections have been conducted under the system: when Ian Duncan-Smith triumphed in 2001; and David Cameron in 2005. In the  contests of 2004 and 2016, the parliamentary party engineered the exclusion of the wider party membership by ensuring that only one candidate emerged from, or survived for more than a weekend after, the parliamentary ballot.

How a political party selects its leader is only of constitutional significance when it is in government.
If it is in opposition, a general election stands between its newly elected leader and political power.
When the party is already the party of government however, the choice of leader is also the choice of prime minister. If that choice is confined to MPs then I believe that the demands of constitutional propriety in a parliamentary democracy are satisfied. The extension of that choice however, to unelected members of just one political party undermines the principle of parliamentary democracy.

There is only one precedent for this: when Gordon Brown replaced Tony Blair. The precedent doesn’t make it right.
We are now in the strange position where urgent and critical business faces the nation, whilst we take two-and-a half- month ‘breather’ to choose a party leader, who will become Prime Minister

…but for how long?

Surveying the wreckage of Theresa May’s premiership and the disastrous wipe-out of the Tory Party in the European Election it is difficult to underestimate the complete horlicks that has been made of BREXIT.

I don’t agree with most commentators however, that one of the PM’s biggest mistakes was to call an unnecessary election in 2017 in which she lost her parliamentary majority.
In my estimate her majority of only 15 was insufficient to negotiate terms with the EU from a position of strength; it was too small to guarantee getting Brexit legislation through the Commons; and she needed to overawe the huge Remain majority in the Lords.
Her mistake was not in calling the election, but in her handling of the election campaign, frankly I’d never experienced a worse one.

All her subsequent problems in the negotiations either stem from, or were exacerbated by, the weakness of her parliamentary position after the 2017 election.
Nevertheless, grave mistakes were made.
First, she began the negotiations under Article 50 of the EU Treaty before we were ready: she had not agreed with her cabinet what exactly it was that she was negotiating for (It wasn’t until the Autumn of 2018 that she secured their -somewhat reluctant- backing for a plan).
Consequently, the Government’s negotiations lacked coherence. The ministerial resignations from the Department of State for Exiting The EU are testimony to the fact that those ministers discovered that 10 Downing Street was negotiating quite separately and keeping them in the dark.

Second, She insisted that ‘no deal would be better than a bad deal’, but to sustain that position it would have been essential to have begun preparations for a no deal Brexit even before the Article 50 negotiations had started. Indeed, a proper analysis of all the necessary measures and the time it would take to implement them should have preceded the Article 50 process. Only then could the mantra ‘no deal better than a bad deal’ have been taken seriously by EU negotiators.

Third, and perhaps the biggest mistake, was to have accepted the EU’s demand for the sequencing of negotiations so that there could be no discussion of future trading arrangements until a financial settlement was agreed: never agree a price before you’ve seen the product.

Whether the Government can now recover the confidence of the nation under a new prime minister, it’s too soon to tell

I am aware that I repeat myself in this column, but then the main item on the nation’s the political agenda keeps repeating itself. We are shortly to debate and vote on the PM’s EU withdrawal agreement for the fourth time.
Furthermore, a significant number of my constituents repeat themselves persistently in the emails that they address to me, almost as if I hadn’t answered the point that they made in my last reply to them.
It’s happening again this week. A whole stack of people are emailing again to tell me to vote down Prime Minister’s “deal” so that we can leave the EU on World Trade Organisation terms.
So, I repeat: There is no ‘deal’: The PM has not negotiated one; the ‘deal’ doesn’t begin to be negotiated until we’ve actually left the EU.
What the PM has agreed (and now seeks parliament’s approval for the 4th time of asking) is the Withdrawal Agreement which merely covers the next 20 months or so after we’ve left the EU or until we have negotiated the real ‘deal’.
Whilst I have all sorts of reservations about the Withdrawal Agreement, it’s no good telling me it’s a rotten deal, because we haven’t got a deal yet. Who Knows, the deal, when we actually get it, might turn out to be mutually advantageous. Alternatively, be could end up being completely shafted. It’s a risk, but that negotiation lies ahead.
What my correspondents want is for us to avoid that risk by just leaving without any agreement and trading just on World Trade Organisation rules (of course, that involves a quite different set of risks).

Again, I repeat myself, I’ve said it to them before. On the balance of risks, I would indeed oblige my correspondents: voting down the agreement and leaving without an agreement if that choice was open to me, but it isn’t: The one thing that Parliament has found a majority for is that it will not approve leaving without an agreement. So I just cannot deliver what they are asking, no matter how much I might wish to.

I conclude that, on the balance of all the risks, the greatest is that we end up not leaving the EU at all. It is for that reason I will support the PM’s agreement with all its defects. Then, once outside the EU, we can join battle over the nature of the ‘deal’ that we then have to negotiate.