The Government is planning to restrict the exposure of children to the advertising of unhealthy food.

When I asked the minister why children from the lowest income groups are disproportionately amongst the fattest, and suggested that it wasn’t because they watched more adverts, he replied that he thought it might be.

I do not dispute that advertising may have some impact at the very margin, but children have always been the target of advertising for confectionery. I recall the Milky Bar kid whose sales pitch was that the Milky Bars were on him, a statement that would be unlikely to get past modern advertising standards.
The real difference is that so many children do so much less exercise than we did in the past.

One in five children starts primary school already too fat, but we will have that child in full-time compulsory education for 13 years, for 35 weeks per year, for 7 hours per day:  the lack of productivity is staggering if we cannot organise their day so as to ensure that they come out thinner than they arrived.
If we lack the political will to make schools the engine of a healthier lifestyle, I doubt that advertising bans will ever make up for it.

Airbus was part of the original ‘project fear’ during the referendum campaign. Yesterday the orchestrated re-heating of these fears was designed to pressurise the Government into holding on to many of our EU membership obligations.
This is curious because the aerospace industry is not subject to tariffs under World Trade Organisation Rules. So Airbus won’t suffer in that way when we leave. As for non-tariff barriers, all the countries outside the EU have no difficulty in getting their products certificated.
I think they really gave the game away however, when the suggestion was made that production might be relocated to that well known EU member… China!

Yesterday we had another row in the Commons over a long running complaint.

The Government is accused for interfering in the order in which private members’ bills proceed:

The order is determined fairly by ballot.
After surviving a second reading debate however, in order to proceed further, they need a money resolution which only the Government can put to the House.
The allegation, is that the government is promoting some bills of which it approves, from further down the queue, by granting them money resolutions, and demoting the bills at the front, which it doesn’t like, by withholding the money resolutions.
Yesterday great outrage was expressed again.

The irony is that last Friday the Government sought to interfere again in the order by another means.
At the end of the day, the established precedent is that the whip on duty prevents any bill from proceeding which has not yet been debated.
Last week however, the government announced that it liked the bill that was number 7 in the order and that, despite only the first two being debated, it was going to let number 7 through but not 3,4,5, and 6.
Sir Christopher Chope spotted this ruse and entered his own objection when the duty whip remained silent.
Instead of receiving the thanks of the House, which claims to be outraged about Government interference in the order of private members’ bills, Sir Christopher has incurred the opprobrium of the entire nation.

As it happens, Sir Christopher’s action has forced the Government to do the right thing and bring forward its own up-skirting bill which will benefit from government time and the government whip, suffering none of the vagaries of the private member’s bill system, so it will be on the statute book much quicker.
I doubt however, that Sir Christopher will be given any credit.
It’s a funny old world.

 

As to the issue the importance of the bill itself, I initially expressed doubts on the grounds that there are common law and public order offences under which up-skirting can already be prosecuted.
I was partially right: prosecution under existing law is possible. The difficulty is that it will not be treated as a sexual offence and offenders cannot be placed on the register. A new statutory offence is therefore desirable.
Essentially, up-skirting is the reverse of ‘flashing’: it is another way in which a perverted individual attempts to exert sexual power over another.
The sooner the new bill becomes an act, the better

As an officer cadet I danced at the Edinburgh Military Tattoo in 1979. We were billeted at Redford Barracks, and we were in uniform all day. By tradition, we wore nothing under our kilts, and so we received instruction, including a demonstration, on how to sit down without giving offence.

Up-skirting is a measure of our current moral turpitude, but I find it hard to believe that there is not an existing common law provision under which it could be prosecuted.

As for Sir Christoher Chope, about whose actions on Friday I have received large correspondence, he takes the principled view that no measure should pass without being first debated.
When I was a government whip, that was also the government view, and when on duty on a Friday, it fell to me to object -whatever the merits of any particular bill- to all the bills on the list which had not been debated that day.

If I am wrong about common law, then the government can amend one of its own bills, or give its own time to debate the up-skirting bill.
I remain of the view that I expressed in this column on 24th February however, that private member’s bills are not an effective way of legislating.

The passage of Lords amendments to the Government’s EU Withdrawal Bill have fundamentally weakened our negotiating position to secure reasonable conditions upon which to leave the EU on 29 March next year.

As I have said before in this column: the strength of a negotiating hand is based on the ability to walk away without making a deal. If your counterparty knows that you really won’t be able to walk away, then he can increase his price accordingly.

 

The estimate that I made of the parliamentary proceedings over the last week was that, given the make-up of the Commons, there is very little likelihood of the House accepting our leaving the EU without EU agreement on the terms.

Unfortunately, the EU Commission will have been watching too and may have drawn the same conclusion

 

 

I wonder how the announcement of the relaxation on the skilled worker visa cap was greeted in those households where young people with very impressive A level results, nevertheless had their ambitions to be doctors dashed when they were unable to get a place in medical school.

For years and years we have been turning qualified and enthusiastic young people from medicine and nursing degrees.

 

The doctors from overseas are drawn disproportionately from developing countries where the number of clinicians per head of population is much lower, and their services are correspondingly in greater demand.

People sometimes complain to me that doctors trained here, who subsequently emigrate, ought to repay some of the costs of their training. My word, that would take some nerve as we denude poor countries of their trained doctors!

(We do, of course, need to ask ourselves why so many of our own doctors leave the NHS within just a few years of having completed their training, and address the issues that cause them to do so).

 

We have belatedly started to address our shortage of training places with the reforms to nurse training about which I wrote in this column on 12th May, and with the announcement earlier this year that 5 new medical schools are to be opened, increasing the number of places by 25%.

 

The recourse to doctors from abroad however, is a return to a bad old habit.

Exactly the same is true of the needs for skilled personnel in every other enterprise. For years we neglected the shortcomings in our education system whist employers relied on inviting both skilled and unskilled workers from overseas.

 

It is a nonsense to imagine that we can just continue to import the next generation of skilled workers.

I attach a great deal of importance to international development aid. After all, I was for two years the minister responsible for it, but I have never been uncritical of it. It is precisely because I attach such importance to it, that I am horrified when any of it is wasted.

When aid is wasted the damage is twofold: First in the ‘opportunity cost’ of the good use that it might otherwise have been put to; second because that waste, magnified by the press, undermines the whole case for such aid in the eyes of the public.

Last week I saw press coverage criticising the fact that some of our aid was being used to support the Chinese film industry. Without having to read further, I knew the culprit: the ‘Prosperity Fund’.

This fund was set up by George Osborne when he was Chancellor and was given £1.5 billion to be disbursed over a five year period. I was one of the joint chairmen of the fund along with Greg Hands, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and Lord Price the Trade Minister. Its purpose was to use development aid to open up markets, from which there might subsequently arise opportunities to be exploited by UK enterprises.
(The language had to be pretty tight because the expenditure remained governed by the International Development Act 2002 which requires that it be spent for the purpose of eradicating poverty.)

The other members of the board were ministers from spending departments across Whitehall. It was part of a strategy to reduce the proportion of development aid disbursed by the Department of International Development to only 75% of the total, and to divide the rest between Whitehall departments whose budgets were otherwise being severely cut.

Although I ‘read the riot act’ to the board, pointing out the narrow definition of what can count as official development aid, and that government policy was not to tie aid to trade, and that all expenditure must be in accordance with the very limited provisions of the 2002 Act, and that departments would bear full responsibility for any projects that they sponsored, nevertheless I knew that I was watching a car crash in slow motion.

It was obvious to me that the sorts of markets that were going to generate subsequent opportunities for trade, were not going to be in the world’s most fragile, disordered, misgoverned, and poorest states; the sort of states that are in desperate need of jobs; the states that generate waves of migrants; the states that breed terrorism and grievance. These are the states where we need to deploy our aid, in our own national interest, in order that we can prosper in a more stable and peaceful world.

Rather, the targets of the fund, given its objectives, were bound to be in countries, though still qualifying for aid under international rules, were no longer what we would consider ‘poor’. It was in the rapidly developing economies of China, India, and Brazil that the fund’s opportunities would be found. And so it has proved.

After years of denying to outraged constituents that we were giving aid to China, now apparently we are.
A spectacular own goal.

Ruth Davidson, leader of the Conservatives in Scotland, is just the latest politician to call for the abandonment of the Government’s immigration reduction target.

In the light of the recent experience of some members of the ‘Windrush generation’, where previously government policy sought to create a ‘hostile environment’ for illegal immigrants, the new Home Secretary has indicated that instead, he now prefers the term ‘compliant’ to ‘hostile’. Dianne Abbot, Labour’s immigration spokeswoman has, in effect, called for the abandonment of measures to identify and remove illegal immigrants, including the closure of the detention centres.

I hope that the distinction between ‘compliant’ and ‘hostile’ is just semantics. I regard it as vitally important to both have effective immigration controls and to enforce them rigorously. Not to do so, sends a very powerful signal to hundreds of thousands of other potential illegal immigrants that UK is a soft touch and that it is open house.

As for the suggestion that now is the time to abandon our legal immigration reduction target, it is folly.
Even though we have little experience of it in the New Forest, nevertheless, for years the level of immigration was the top concern in my postbag. Although that concern has abated somewhat, it has not gone away, and if mishandled by politicians it will undoubtedly return.

Ever since in the late 1970ies when Mrs Thatcher, then Leader of the Opposition, caused a furore when she referred to people feeling “swamped” by the volume of immigration, it became a subject to be treated with proper caution and sensitivity by mainstream politicians.
So many of my correspondents are clearly nervous about expressing their concerns and hedge their use of language fearful that by expressing their opinion they might be thought to be racially prejudiced.
If politicians, unwilling to provoke the opprobrium of a vociferous ‘liberal elite’, fail in their duty to address the issue, then they leave the field open to demagogues of a much less fastidious nature.

I see no good reason to relax immigration policy at this time.
We live in one of the most densely populated countries and we already have an acute housing shortage.
The evidence that immigration boosts economic growth and genuine economic welfare is, at best, mixed.
We already have significant problems arising from the failure to sufficiently assimilate existing immigrant populations.
Whilst London, our capital city, wears as a badge of honour and celebrates its ethnic diversity, and the revelation of the 2011 census that only a minority of its population (44%) is now ‘White British’, for many of our subjects this is something about which they are somewhat uneasy.

A sensible immigration policy needs to take that unease into account. There has to be a balance to deal effectively with short term skills shortages and economic opportunities, whilst reassuring people that immigration is very much under control.

Aside from the constitutional doctrine that proceedings in Parliament may not be questioned in any court, the police have plenty of real work to be getting on with, without their time being wasted on the carryings-on with Mr Speaker.
Apparently, somebody has complained to the police because Mr Speaker, John Bercow, was heard to mutter under his breath “stupid woman” after an acrimonious row with the Leader of the House of Commons, Andrea Leadsom.

The row was over the decision by a minister to make a statement on a ‘supply day’. Supply days are given to the Opposition to decide what is debated and, by convention, the Government does not intrude with its own business which would otherwise crowd-out the time available for the subject chosen by the Opposition. For a minister to take up the time with a statement is rather ‘bad form’, and the person responsible for scheduling the business of the House is the Leader.

Now, the Leader of the House has a dual function: as a cabinet minister she is clearly part of the Government, but equally, she is Leader of the whole House of Commons and therefore should be sensitive to the views of back-benchers on both sides of the chamber. Allowing a Government statement on an Opposition day, at the very least, shows a certain lack of sensitivity, which irritated Mr Speaker.

In the scale of crimes and insensitivities however, it doesn’t rank that highly, and it’s not as if it hasn’t happened before under governments of both colours.

The next day Mr Speaker explained -without apologising: He told us that his overheard remark ‘stupid’ referred only to his opinion about the decision to put on a Government statement on an Opposition day, and he stood by it.
The other word: ‘woman’ must have been lost in translation. Certainly, it didn’t refer to the Leader because everyone knows that she is both hard-working and very clever.

Well, who cares anyway?
How many times have any of us MPs muttered something much worse under our breath after receiving a duff reply from the minister at the despatch box. As Ken Clarke pointed out, if we are all to be referred to the police for such indiscretions then not a single member of Parliament would be left.
Frankly, we have more important fish to fry.

Referring the matter to the Police is more than stupid, it’s just plain bonkers.

*

The announcement of another stupid EU directive, this time requiring owners of ride-on mowers to get motor insurance for mowing their own lawns, reminded me of our wisdom in voting to leave this wretched interfering institution and, hopefully, managing it before the directive requires our compliance.
For my own part however, I dispensed with my ride-on a year or so ago, on the grounds that the discipline of having to push one instead, would be beneficial to my weight and consequently to my health.
It is depressing that we are all soon to be asked to pay higher taxes to fund the NHS when so much of its increasing costs are down to the unhealthy lifestyles of its patients, so many of whom don’t seem to realise that their joints and vital organs were never designed to carry the weight that they are placing on them.
Perhaps, as a stealth tax on sitting, the objective of EU directive isn’t so stupid after all?

The Brexit outcome that the EU fear’s most is our adherence to the principle set out and repeated by the Prime Minister that “no deal is better than a bad deal”, and consequently UK leaving the EU without one.

 

This would be the worst outcome for the EU because they have more to lose in terms of the tariffs that they would have to pay; and much more importantly they wouldn’t get the money (the £40 billion or so that has -rather shockingly- been accepted as our ‘divorce’ bill).

 

Why then has the intransigence of the EU negotiating position not reflected this?
Why are they making such a meal of Irish Border issue and refusing to even negotiate on the perfectly reasonable solutions that we have put forward, rather than rejecting them out of hand?

 

I think that they simply do not believe that we will reject a bad deal in preference for no deal.
So, why do I think that the EU doesn’t believe the PM means what she says and that, rather than walking away with no deal, we can be forced into accepting a bad deal, indeed any deal on offer however bad?

 

It is because the EU can see the weakness of the PM’s position in Parliament: They are presuming that she could never get leaving with no deal through Parliament.
Now, we haven’t definitively tested this yet with votes, but the EU is making reasonable suppositions given the absence of a majority in the Commons and the significance of the small number of Tory rebels colluding with the opposition parties.

 

So, how would I do it if I were in the PM’s shoes?
I would proceed on the publicly acknowledged presumption that we were expecting to leave without a deal and that we were making all necessary plans and preparations to do so.
The default position is that we will leave at the end of March next year anyway: If nothing changes then that happens automatically.  So, I’d make it clear that we will simply ‘park’ any legislative process in Parliament until the EU blinks first.
If they don’t blink however, well unfortunately then we will leave with a sub-optimal outcome but, hey, we’ll have £40 Billion to spend on the NHS before the next general election.

 

Of course this plan would provoke a furore in Parliament.
Remember however, Parliament handed the decision to the people in a referendum. The people took Parliament at its word and they voted to take back control of our borders, our laws and our money. If a principal obstacle to effecting that decision of the people is Parliament itself, then we will have to deal with that. Perhaps even proroguing it if necessary.
Clearly, we’re getting into King Charles the First territory here, but then my being in the PM’s shoes was an utterly fanciful notion to start with.
But by heck, there’d have been some changes!