I had thought that the mobs demonstrating during ‘days of rage’ on our streets were largely made up of Bolsheviks. No doubt many are. Together with the driven ideologues, are the touchingly naïve, who believe that everything can be free and that someone else will pay for it: ‘useful idiots’ as Lenin characterised them.
When I actually found myself caught up in one such demonstration, in effect –and however unwillingly- becoming part of it, the mob reminded me, not so much of the Bolsheviks of 1917, as the sans culottes of 1789, such was their venom and anger. I definitely heard shouts of ‘property is theft’ though I may have imagined the cries of ‘la guillotine’!

When the Greeks invented democracy they never intended that it should apply to everyone. For Aristotle, decision making needed to be reserved for the valentior pars –those with judgement.
This preoccupation has always been evident in our own slow progress towards universal suffrage. There were property qualifications and other provisions to ensure that the vote was restricted to those with a ‘stake’ in the future of the country.

Now that we do have universal suffrage, our preoccupation needs to be -not with the exclusion of those without a stake, but rather to ensure that they do have a stake.
In this respect our retreat from a property-owning democracy should alarm us. A growing proportion of our population are coming into that category described as the ‘just about managing’. Many cannot lay their hands to a spare fifty quid at the end of the month. Rather than savings, so many have mounting debts.

The danger to democracy, and which ancient Greece foresaw, is that those who have nothing, will be prepared to risk everything.
When some new political messiah comes on stage like a rock-star and promising the earth, including the ‘aspiration’ of writing off all your debts, why not take a punt on him, if you have nothing to lose?

The mobs demonstrating in Whitehall, purporting to speak for the survivors of Grenfell tower, the underpaid public sector workers, or whomsoever else, should serve as an warning to those of us who believe in free enterprise, that we need to put the issue of how we extend the benefits that flow from growth and free markets at the very top of our priorities. To too great an extent the description of ‘two nations’ still applies.

I think I’ve been dressing down, and I must raise my game.

I know that we have much bigger fish to fry, and that there are enormous issues facing the nation, but I confess to seething in silence, as the Speaker gave his ruling last week: That now one might as well be naked in the Commons chamber -certainly as far as the neck is concerned.

I know that standards of dress change. There was a time when members would have sat fully hatted and cloaked, which would inappropriate nowadays, and ties, after all, are a relatively recent invention.
As members are elected, and speak as representatives of their constituents, I suppose they must have that right to speak, irrespective of how they have dressed for the occasion.
I do wonder however, how many of these iconoclasts dressed in ‘scruff order’ when they were campaigning for the votes of their constituents.

Are they showing due respect to their constituents by seeking to represent them whilst dressed in a fashion that lowers the tone in our institutions, and the respect in which they are held?
I think that dress codes remain important. Maintaining standards says something important about us. The impression that is created does still count.

It was whilst reflecting on my anger at the Speaker’s ruling that I suddenly recognised my own offence: I have been going to church on Sunday casually dressed, relaxed at not wearing the suit and stiff collars I have had on all the rest of the week. I may have even, on occasion, been in short sleeves. Now, that might be fine in evangelical churches where the liturgy is itself informal, but I am C of E, or -to use the appropriate cricketing metaphor- ‘middle and leg Christianity’. The Chairman of the Parish Council attends and is very properly turned out as one would expect of an English country gentleman. The Choir and Clergy make a tremendous effort, swathed as they are in quantities of haberdashery.

I wonder how much offence have my slack standards given over recent years?
I am resolved to reform, and dress smartly in future, but perhaps not the stiff collar.

(First published 25th June)

Last week it was my privilege to open the ‘Art Dementia New Forest’ exhibition at Forest Arts. Art Dementia run three groups for people suffering from dementia. They meet fortnightly for a couple of hours in Ringwood, Milford on Sea and Lymington.

It was fascinating to meet the artists and discover how therapeutic they find the sessions. The quality of their work was technically impressive, and also beautiful.

Since our ancestors first began to sketch hunting scenes on the cave wall, people have wondered about their purpose in doing so. Was it just pure creativity and self-expression, or was there some other reason?
Throughout the history of art, artists have had differing motivations, from worship, to enlightenment, the desire to inspire, to educate, to make political statements, to shock, even to disgust. Some artists will have had no motive whatsoever, just to let the work of art speak for itself.

Picasso described his paintings as a form of diary: a way of washing the ‘dust of daily life’ from his soul, as he put it. For certain, artists can dip their brush into their own soul, and express what other forms of communication cannot.

If your immortal soul is being crushed by disease, or even just the pace and demands of daily life, art can be the reminder that you still do have one.

(The Ringwood Dementia Art Group meets at the Trinity Centre. Details can be had from Gilda 01425 473777 gildanewsham@aol.com )

I respect Tim Farron, who resigned as Leader of the Liberal Democrats because he could not reconcile that position with his Christian faith, though I am not sure that I fully understand him. In the UK we are accustomed to having political leaders with a Christian faith. Those that are not Christians have been the exception rather than the rule. Furthermore, we Christians tend to disagree just as much as those with no belief. On all the great questions of conscience in my time in Parliament, the Christians have pretty well divided themselves evenly between both the ‘aye’ and ‘no’ lobbies.

The row with which Farron was confronted was driven by the belief, common among journalists, that for Christians, ‘sin’ is principally all about what people get up to in bed. (It really isn’t.)
Mercifully, Farron and the gay sex row was only a footnote in the election. During that long campaign however, it occurred to me that there were much bigger and much more important moral questions. Here is just one of them.

I am profoundly concerned about just how corrupting our ‘transactional’ politics has become. By transaction I mean “vote for me and I’ll give you ‘whatever’.

Before the great Reform Act the transaction was at least open and above board. For example, “vote for me and I’ll pay you a guinea”. The voter having declared his vote in public at the ballot, could then expect the candidate to pay up. Corrupt, depressing, but essentially an honest and transparent transaction. The arrival of the secret ballot however, removed any certainty that the voters have fulfilled their part of the bargain. So instead, politicians still offer all sorts of inducements to voters, but now they are to be paid for with other people’s money.

The voter however, is so often told that whatever is on offer, will be ‘free’ and that others will foot the bill: that the rich will pay for it; or the corporations will pay for it. It has a whiff of the French Revolution about it, but we have become so inured to it that we are blind to the corrupting belief that we deserve to have something for nothing, and for which others ought to pay: At this election some voters were even told that their debts would be written off at the public expense, others were told that breakfast would be free.

When did we lose the sense that we all have responsibilities, and that everyone must make a contribution?
My heart sinks every time when I am on the doorsteps and the voter asks “what are you going to do for us”. Elections should be about the future of our country, not just what you can get.

Some 7 weeks ago in my last contribution to this column – though it seems an age away now – I likened MPs voting for an early election to turkeys voting for Christmas. I said however, that we would have to await the election result to know which MPs were the turkeys. Well, with the Tories having lost seats, and Labour having gained them, we now know the answer.

The Prime Minister’s campaign lacked a strategic object: She set out her aim in Downing Street when she announced the election, saying that it was to secure a position that would enable her to negotiate our departure from the EU from strength. She then published a manifesto however, which failed to sustain that stated aim. It contained 85 pages, offering a range of inducements from free school breakfasts (for which the costs had not been accurately calculated), to a major change to the agreed government policy on funding social care, which was quickly dubbed the ‘dementia tax’. The PM then had to trash her own brand of ‘strong and stable government’ when she carried out a U turn from that manifesto policy.

I was taught at Sandhurst that the first principle of war is the ‘selection of the aim’, and the second principle is the ‘maintenance of the aim’. Applying that to politics, the PM selected and set out her aim quite clearly in her Downing Street briefing at the outset. Her failure was in the maintenance of that aim: the disastrous manifesto distracted attention from her objective.

This was compounded when events intervened in the form of the terrorist outrages, and the PM was not particularly successful at articulating a defence of her policy and achievements on policing during her time as Home Secretary.

In addition to the failure to maintain the aim, the PM’s performances lacked charisma and authenticity. Altogether, it was a dreadful campaign. Yet, more people voted Conservative than have done so since 1992, and the PM secured the highest share of the vote since Mrs Thatcher in 1983.

The triumphalism of Labour needs to be tempered by the fact that, notwithstanding their gains, after 7 years of Conservative austerity and a shockingly bad Conservative election campaign, they are still some 60 seats behind the Conservatives: they didn’t even come close.

When I stated in this column last week that there is sometimes a danger of it being overtaken by events, I did not expect it to be confirmed quite so quickly.

Indeed, I went on to say that we would find that ‘next week things won’t have changed very much’. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

For months I have been telling anyone who would listen, including readers of this column, that there was no possibility of an early election, no matter how much the Prime Minister might need or want one.

I said that the Fixed Term Parliament Act introduced by the coalition government in 2010 (to prevent either of the coalition partners ‘pulling the plug’ on the coalition agreement just when it suited them) meant that the choice on an election date was no longer in the gift of the Prime Minister and could only be changed from the fixed five year term, if two thirds of MPs voted for it.

Given that the Government’s majority is only 17, I concluded that there was no prospect of the required two thirds being achievable. After all, what possible motive could opposition parties have in voting to accommodate the Prime Minister’s choice of early election date?

The rest is history. It begs the question however, if there remains any point in the Fixed Term Parliament Act, given that it has so easily been overcome, and we have in reverted to the status quo ante, where the Prime Minister effectively chooses the election date?

In any event, whatever the election result, a significant number of the 500 or so MPs who voted for the election on June 8th, will end up regretting that they did so. We can’t all have been right!

Parliament has been in recess for Easter so it has been a relatively quiet week for me in the constituency, whilst international events have swept the world from the brink of war over Syria to the brink of war over North Korea.

One of the dangers of writing a column at the beginning of the week for publication in the Forest Journal mid-week, is that occasionally one is overtaken by events. Nevertheless, I feel confident that we will all still be here next week and that things won’t have changed that much, notwithstanding some of the hyperbole in the news headlines suggesting that we at the most dangerous point in international relations since the Cuban missile crisis and that we are approaching the brink of thermo-nuclear Armageddon. I continually remind my constituents and correspondents of General William Slim’s dictum that nothing is ever as bad as it is reported.

Over the bank holiday weekend I’ve managed a bit of gardening and some routine maintenance on my Morris Minor. At no stage have I felt the random urge to go and do something I’ve always wanted to, on the grounds that it may be my last chance before the world ends.

None of this however, should be taken as in any way a denial of the dreadful state that much of the world is in, or as an attempt to trivialise it. North Korea is a ghastly place, much of it a vast prison camp for the half-starved rural population. The slighted evidence of lese-mageste towards the regime will prove fatal to the offenders, their families and any known associates. Profession of Christianity attracts the heaviest of penalties. As Kim Jong-un’s late brother discovered in Thailand recently, the regime’s murderous reach extends well beyond the hermit kingdom’s own borders.

As for Syria, our TV screens tell us all we need to know of the suffering there. I was surprised to hear however, a senior parliamentary colleague in an interview, state that President Assad could have no rational motive in launching a chemical attack at this stage in the war, attracting such international condemnation, when otherwise everything was going his way.

That Assad was indeed responsible, was proved beyond doubt, when he piped-up to insist that the whole incident had been completely faked (despite respected journalist witness accounts, and – even more surprisingly – contradicting the Russian carefully crafted cover story that it was the result of a rebel chemical weapons factory).

To suggest that Assad was without motive, is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of his regime. The Assads share a great deal in common with the Kim dynasty of North Korea: their purpose is the same; to terrorise their subjects into submission by demonstrating that they will stop at absolutely nothing.

To suggest, as I have, that next week we will still be here and the world won’t have changed very much, is not necessarily a good thing. We should always count our blessings that we can do normal stuff like mow the lawn and wash the car. For so many of our fellow citizens of the world, ordinary every-day life is very different – and we’ve only considered just two of the world’s grizzliest places.

Last week’s:

Gassing of Khan Sheikhoun
After the ghastly scenes from the deployment of sarin nerve agent by the Assad regime in rebel held Idlib, and before the USA response with 59 tomahawk cruise missiles, I received a flurry of emails from constituents demanding that ‘something be done’.

I reply by asking my correspondents to give me a clearer idea of what he or she thinks that ‘something’ ought to be.
We already apply sanctions, asset freezes, and we have withdrawn diplomatic relations. Is there really an appetite to get even more involved in another conflict in that deeply troubled region?
I hope so, but I have not yet detected it.

In my response to the emails I pointed out that the key moment of our failure came in August 2013 when Assad previously used chemical weapons, crossing President Obama’s declared ‘red line’. Instead of taking the threatened punitive action, neither the USA nor the UK did so. Indeed, in Parliament we voted down the Government’s request to take action: we chose explicitly to do nothing. Inaction can have dreadful consequences as the children and parents of Khan Sheikhoun have now discovered.

In 2013 Russia, though involved, had not deployed its own forces to any great extent, so our freedom to respond militarily would have been much greater than it is now, when the risk of a clash with Russia is so much greater. Of course I said that two days before President Trump did take the risk of responding militarily, it is far too soon to tell what the consequences will be.

To be fair, I think our biggest misjudgement came much earlier than August 2013. Our failure was at the very outset of the rebellion in 2011, through our refusal to arm the Free Syrian Army. We supported its objectives but we sent it only medical supplies and radios. The consequence was, as a fighting force, it was completely overtaken by the vastly better armed and financed Islamist militias.

Russia’s initial response to the US military action has to be to condemn it as an ‘act of aggression against a sovereign state contrary to international law’.
This doctrine that sovereign states can act with complete impunity within their own borders goes back to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia which ended the 30 years war in Europe. Russia may still adhere to it, but the rest of the civilised world has moved on: Chapter VII of the UN Charter allows action to be taken in the interests of international peace and security.

The carnage and suffering in Syria has now lasted longer than the Second World War, and with profound and destabilising consequences for Europe. Something has to be done to bring it to an end –but what?

After the ghastly scenes from the deployment of sarin nerve agent by the Assad regime in rebel held Idlib, and before the USA response with 59 tomahawk cruise missiles, I received a flurry of emails from constituents demanding that ‘something be done’.

I reply by asking my correspondents to give me a clearer idea of what he or she thinks that ‘something’ ought to be.
We already apply sanctions, asset freezes, and we have withdrawn diplomatic relations. Is there really an appetite to get even more involved in another conflict in that deeply troubled region?
I hope so, but I have not yet detected it.

In my response to the emails I pointed out that the key moment of our failure came in August 2013 when Assad previously used chemical weapons, crossing President Obama’s declared ‘red line’. Instead of taking the threatened punitive action, neither the USA nor the UK did so. Indeed, in Parliament we voted down the Government’s request to take action: we chose explicitly to do nothing. Inaction can have dreadful consequences as the children and parents of Khan Sheikhoun have now discovered.

In 2013 Russia, though involved, had not deployed its own forces to any great extent, so our freedom to respond militarily would have been much greater than it is now, when the risk of a clash with Russia is so much greater. Of course I said that two days before President Trump did take the risk of responding militarily, it is far too soon to tell what the consequences will be.

To be fair, I think our biggest misjudgement came much earlier than August 2013. Our failure was at the very outset of the rebellion in 2011, through our refusal to arm the Free Syrian Army. We supported its objectives but we sent it only medical supplies and radios. The consequence was, as a fighting force, it was completely overtaken by the vastly better armed and financed Islamist militias.

Russia’s initial response to the US military action has to be to condemn it as an ‘act of aggression against a sovereign state contrary to international law’.

This doctrine that sovereign states can act with complete impunity within their own borders goes back to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia which ended the 30 years war in Europe. Russia may still adhere to it, but the rest of the civilised world has moved on: Chapter VII of the UN Charter allows action to be taken in the interests of international peace and security.

The carnage and suffering in Syria has now lasted longer than the Second World War, and with profound and destabilising consequences for Europe. Something has to be done to bring it to an end – but what?

This address was given to the Lymington United Nations Association on 25th March 2017 and was followed by one and a half hours of questions.

This Dangerous World

What a doom laden title. It reminds me of one of my favourite books The Coffee Table Book of Doom. Here is a flavour from the advertising blurb:
“…with the apocalypse at hand, don’t fret about dying uninformed. The Coffee Table Book of Doom is a revelatory…superbly illustrated and erudite compendium of all the 27 doom-laden horsemen we need to worry about – personal doom, gender erosion, asteroid impact, pandemics, super storms, sexual ruin – and much more besides.”

Actually, the definitive ending of the world was supposed to have been in 2012 when the 5000 year old Mayan civilisation’s calendar ran out.

We can comfort ourselves with the thought that every generation thought that it would be the last. Even Our Lord predicted that ”these things will come to pass” within the lifetime of some of his listeners –Matthew 16.28 (he was right: the second temple was destroyed in 70 AD and the world as they had known it really did come to a dramatic and very violent end).

Let us start with a brief tour of some of the current threats to world stability and prosperity.
One of the falsehoods of the EU referendum campaign was the IMF analysis that stated that BREXIT would be the greatest current threat to the world Economy. It was nonsense, but there are major threats to the world economy:
The very sticky, if not completely fixed currency exchange rates, are preventing many countries from emerging from recession and to deal with their sovereign debt, or rebalancing trade surpluses and deficits;
The very low interest rates which have reduced incentives to save and invest, with consequent weak productivity growth;
The danger to the free trade and prosperity potentially posed by the new US administration’s protectionist rhetoric.

One symptom of all the world’s troubles is the tide of humanity on the move, in pursuit of safety and a livelihood. Although many are fleeing violence and persecution, the overwhelming motive is the need to find a secure future: in the end it is all about jobs. The world needs 600 million new jobs over the next decade if we are to avoid a growing army of young people who are under-employed, increasingly frustrated and angry. That itself is a threat to our future, and can only be addressed by investment in the growth of the world economy.

Climate change is a threat to our entire planet. The agreement in Paris in December 2015 signalled that, at last, 195 UN member states were taking it seriously enough to do something about it, but now this consensus has been undermined by the declared policy stance, and early actions of the US administration.

In the 21st century we have the obscenity of famine looming in South Sudan, Yemen and northern Nigeria. South Sudan, the world’s youngest country, is stricken by drought –an entirely predictable phenomenon for which relief can be planned in advance. What is really starving the people is a vicious civil war. Warfare is the cause of Starvation in northern Nigeria with Boko Haram, and in Yemen where the Houthi rebels – armed by Iran- have overthrown the legitimate government which is backed by a coalition of Gulf States.

Which brings me to the civil wars within Islam between the orthodox Sunni, Shi’ism, and Sunni Islamists. At the very least this religious conflict is a feature –if not the entire cause- of the conflicts in Iraq, Yemen, Libya and Syria. It threatens to destabilise Jordan, Lebanon, and the Sahel. It contributes to so much violence in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and indeed on the streets of the western nations. I think it is proper to refer to it as a civil war within Islam because, notwithstanding the attacks launched at minorities, Christians and secular governments, overwhelmingly the greater number of victims are themselves Muslims.

Looking elsewhere, there is no difficulty in identifying other dangers to peace and stability:
A resurgent Russia, a gangster state laundering its corrupt cash in the world’s financial system, has fostered war and violence in Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine. It has intervened in Syria, is shaping up to do so in Libya, and is suspected of having launched cyber attacks on the Baltic States;
China’s militarisation of the South China Sea threatens Taiwan, Vietnam, Japan, The Philippines, international navigable waters, and the supremacy of the USA in a worrying potential new area of conflict;
The hermit state of North Korea’s development of increasingly longer range missiles to deliver its nuclear capability adds perhaps the most unpredictable element to our brief tour.

We’ve hardly scratched the surface, but let’s return briefly to Palestine where we began.
Our Department for International Development employees in Jerusalem, who travel into the city daily on a tortuous commute from the areas around Bethlehem, are young people in their mid-20s to mid-30s. The only interaction that they ever have with an Israeli subject is when, during that journey, they are challenged to show their papers under the operation of what I would call the ‘pass laws’ that exist to ensure that people’s ability to live, stay and work in their own city is restricted.
I entirely understand how we got to that dreadful situation: because of the obscenity of suicide bombing. Israel could not possibly tolerate the wholesale slaughter of its innocent citizens. The key question for us is, having got to this dreadful situation, how we get back from it. It is one thing to demand, quite properly, face-to-face negotiations, but pursuing a policy in respect of illegal settlements makes those negotiations much more difficult, particularly when that policy is driven by an increasingly strident ideology.

In February when a Bill was passed in the Knesset retrospectively legalising 4,000 homes in illegal settlements, the Israeli Minister of Culture welcomed the result, saying that it was
“the first step towards complete…Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria.”
The words “Judea and Samaria” were chosen carefully.
When President Trump was elected, the Israeli Interior Minister, no less, welcomed it by saying that we are witnessing
“the birth pangs of the Messiah when everything has been flipped to the good of the Jewish people”.
it is absolutely clear that a significant proportion of the Israeli political establishment is in thrall to an increasingly strident settler movement that regards Palestine as a biblical theme park— Judea and Samaria.

The more strident and aggressive outriders of the settler movement are not people we would necessarily welcome as our neighbours. I particularly refer to what is now happening in Hebron. Setting aside some of the ruses that are used to acquire property, when the settlers move in, it is actually their Palestinian neighbours who have to erect grilles and meshes over their windows, and fences around their yards, to exclude projectiles and refuse. The reaction of the security forces to protect their newly resident citizens is to impose an exclusion zone, and to cordon off and sanitise the access and areas around those properties. So proceeding, Palestinians find that they are excluded from the heart of their city and, indeed, from the environs of their own homes. It has all the appearance of what we used to describe as petty apartheid.

Secretary Kerry explained at the turn of the year why the United States would no longer pursue its policy of exercising its veto in respect of UN Security Council resolution 2334. He said that if the two-state solution were abandoned, Israel could no longer be both a democracy and a Jewish state because, as a consequence of abandoning the policy, it would have to accommodate Palestinian citizens and all their civil and political rights within the state of Israel. My fear is that, on the contrary, there is an element within the Israeli establishment that believes that it can do exactly that. It can, while the world is distracted by more pressing conflicts elsewhere, proceed to annex the West Bank of the Jordan and to tell the Palestinians to seek their civil rights in Jordan, or in reserved ‘bantustans’.

So, what is to be our response to all the dangers and problems that confront us in the world?
I think it must be threefold:
First, we must keep faith with the rules based post WWII order. That means reforming and strengthening the United Nations system.
Second, we must hold fast to the principles of free trade, whatever may be the short term temptations of protectionism. Trade dwarfs aid, and the agenda for free trade, so important to our own prosperity, is of even greater significance to the developing world, and the least developed nations.
Third, we need to stick to the commitment we made over 40 years ago to spend 0.7% of our national income on development aid internationally. We are the only G7 nation, thus far, to have done so. It is important that we continue to give leadership to the world in this vital area. If we had met the commitment when we made it, and if all the other wealthy nations had done so too, we might now be dealing with a much more secure and stable world than we are now facing.

I heard an item on the wireless about the name that has been given to the Government’s ‘Great Repeal Bill’ which legislates for our exit from the European Union. The commentators claimed that no such bill had ever been so named before. I think they are wrong, and that they have ignored the statute of repeal passed by Parliament after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, and known as the ‘Great Repealer’.

They share a name but their intentions are complete opposites. The aim of the 1660 statute of was to wipe the slate clean, expunging all the laws passed under Cromwell’s Commonwealth. The modern statute, shortly to be introduced, will have the very different effect of incorporating all EU regulation into UK law.

For a Eurosceptic like myself, the thought of accepting all that ghastly EU regulation into our own law, just at the moment when we thought were about to escape from it, requires some explanation.

That explanation is twofold. First, after 42 years and thousands of items of complicated legislation, the task of unwinding it all in the two years available before we are out of the EU, is just far too time consuming and difficult, especially when all government effort is focussed on detailed negotiation of our exit terms. Much more sensible therefore, to incorporate all current EU regulation so that our exit is seamless, and leaving us the luxury of repealing or amending it at our leisure over coming years.

Second, by retaining – at least for the present – all EU regulation, we will begin our status as an independent trading nation with exactly the same rules and standards as the rest of the EU. This will make it much easier for us to trade with the EU, making our departure somewhat less economically disruptive.

Much has been made of the ‘Henry VIII powers’ that will be in the bill, and the synthetic indignation expressed about them by leading opposition politicians. The name suggests that the Government is seeking to rule by proclamation in the way that Henry VIII did (and link it by association, with Henry’s tyrannical rule – he may have executed as many as 72,000 people, a much larger total than that achieved by Bloody Mary his daughter).

I hate to spoil a good story with facts, but this is a load of nonsense. The so called Henry VIII powers are not uncommon in parliamentary bills. Often bills will grant ministers powers to make detailed regulations once the bill has become law. Somewhat less frequently, that power to regulate will extend to enabling the minister to amend other acts of Parliament. This power is narrowly defined in the statute, and is subject to detailed parliamentary scrutiny: any such regulation must be approved by Parliament in a statutory instrument by a vote in both Houses. Not quite Henry VIII’s style.

The reason for granting these powers to alter the law by ministerial regulation is to enable the huge volumes of legal changes that will need to be made, without tying up our legislative programme in Parliament for years to come.

We have other fish to fry.