One of the greatest falsehoods presented to us during the referendum campaign last summer, was the International Monetary Fund’s pronouncement (no doubt prompted at our own government’s suggestion) that an exit by UK from EU presented the principal threat to the health of the world economy.

That is not to say however, that there aren’t very substantial threats to both the world economy and to our own: There are; but they have little to do with our decision to leave the EU, even if they are presented as such.

Consumer confidence has taken a big hit with rising inflation – at 2.3% in February. Given that consumer spending drives almost two thirds of our economic activity, denting that confidence can have a severe impact. It is most certainly responsible for the very thin time that our high streets have been experiencing recently, with retail sales actually falling. The same depressing trend is evident in figures for recent mortgage approvals. These figures will be seized upon as vindication by those who predicted the Brexit ‘economic shock’.

Consumers are taking a hit because prices are rising; and prices are rising because of the devaluation of the pound which will, of course, be presented as a consequence of Brexit. It isn’t. Rather it is a consequence of the huge and growing trade deficit that we have been running over recent years – at almost 10% of our national product. What is more, we desperately needed this devaluation to correct the imbalance in our economy. It will move us back towards a trade equilibrium by making our exports more competitive whilst choking off some of our seemingly insatiable demand for imports.
Whilst the higher prices hurt consumers in the short term, they are nevertheless a necessary correction for the long term health of our economy.

The world economy is in desperate need of the flexibility we have recently achieved, because currency exchange rates have become increasingly sticky – almost fixed. There are countries – not least in parts of Europe – desperate for a devaluation similar to one that we have seen, in order to rescue themselves from becoming more and more uncompetitive. If Brexit could be blamed for Sterling’s devaluation, it would be a boon to the world economy and not a threat.

We will become accustomed to every economic development being presented in the worst possible light – and blamed on Brexit.

For so many of my friends in Scotland the announcement by their government that they are to have a second independence referendum, was greeted with dismay. They regarded the last one as so divisive and unpleasant that they have no enthusiasm to repeat the process, particularly given that they were assured that the last one was to be a once in a generation experience.
I expect we’d feel the same if were told we had re-run the EU referendum.

What generated substantial correspondence from my constituents the last time that Scotland had an independence referendum, was the question of the franchise: There are a surprisingly large number of people living in the New Forest, who regard themselves as Scottish and believe that they should have a right to vote on the future status of what they see as their own country.

The difficulty is that we are all British subjects and there is no legal means of distinguishing between us as citizens of our kingdom’s constituent parts. The right to vote in Scotland, like voting in any other part of Great Britain, is dependent only upon having a residential address there (assuming you are old enough, a UK subject or a citizen of the Republic of Ireland for general elections, or of any other EU country for local elections).

If the residents of Scotland are to have a second independence referendum, and were they, this time, to vote to leave the UK, one of the principal difficulties would be in defining our separate nationalities. How would we go about it?
Would it be decided simply on where you are living on the determining date?
How else could we proceed, given the extent to which we are inter-married?
How would people claiming a heritage in one part of the Kingdom, but living in another, have their nationality resolved?
An independent Scotland might well set about this task quite differently from the remainder of the UK, leaving some people potentially stateless.
At the very least it would be a very distressing and dismal process.

The Union of England and Scotland over 400 years ago was sought by the Scottish Parliament for financial reasons, after a currency crisis. Since then however, we have effectively become one country and one people to such an extent that unwinding the union will make our leaving the EU a piece of cake by comparison. I can quite understand the lack of enthusiasm about putting the question a second time.

I have received half a dozen of emails from self-employed people complaining about the budget proposals to change the way that they are taxed.

The problem, as I see it, is not the policy itself, but David Cameron’s pledge when he said “as long as I am Prime Minister we will not put up national insurance contributions”. This became a manifesto pledge at the last election.

Trying to get round this by saying this was only meant to apply to class 4 national insurance contributions looks distinctly shifty. It would have been much better, though still controversial, to have said that pledge was made by David Cameron and he is no longer in office, and that our dramatically changed situation demands that the policy be changed too.

As to the substance of the Chancellor’s policy, I believe it to be fair. Self-employment enjoys advantages over being an employee when it comes to tax, and because self-employment is growing fast we are losing £billions annually because of this more generous tax treatment.

Changes in public policy, principally the fact that the self-employed will now have the same rights as employees to the state pension, have substantially removed the reasons for the more generous tax treatment of the self-employed. In fairness therefore, it follows that the tax treatment should be made more equal – which is what the Chancellor proposed.

My email correspondents complain that this is unfair because they don’t get entitlement to sick pay. True, but then their costs are lower because they are not paying employers’ national insurance contributions either.

They complain that they do not get maternity or paternity benefits, but I distinctly heard the Chancellor say that this would be changed to include them.

They complain that they do not get holiday pay. This is a complete red herring: tax and national insurance doesn’t cover holiday pay for any commercial enterprise. It is just part of the cost of labour that companies of any kind need to factor into their overall cost of doing business.

Whilst I believe that the policy of more equal treatment is fair, the question arises as to whether it will discourage entrepreneurs and risk-takers from making a go of it in self-employment, which is vital for the prosperity and growth of our economy. I certainly believe that we need to develop a tax system that more generously rewards these entrepreneurs with a risk appetite. Our current difficulty however, is that there is no way of distinguishing them from any other service provider who has simply chosen to be self-employed for the tax advantage of doing so. Equally, and for the same reason, it suits many undertakings to avoid having employees and to pay them instead as contractors.

I’m glad that the Prime Minister has delayed the legislation while we look at all these things in the round.
As for the present media storm, might its intensity have anything to do with the fact that so many of our broadcasters and journalists are being paid, not as employees, but as limited companies, or am I being just too cynical?

Bizarrely, last Thursday evening, over 9 months after the decisive referendum result in favour of leaving the EU, I was at the Cannon Street offices of CMS, the city law firm, debating the question that ‘The UK is leaving the EU’ together with my Colleague Sir Henry Bellingham MP. Against us, and arguing that we won’t leave, were Lord Butler, a former cabinet secretary, and Lord Lester, our most eminent human rights lawyer.

After 15 public debates across the south of England in the run up to the referendum last June, and two of them in the New Forest – head to head with Sir Vince Cable, am I surprised that here I am, still debating whether the decision of the voters will be implemented?

No, I am not. European elites have ‘form’ when it comes to overturning the decisions of voters. The Irish twice voted in referendums not to accede to European treaties, only to be told to repeat the process until they came up with the right answer – which they obligingly did. French and Dutch referendums both decisively rejected the EU Constitutional Treaty (the Dutch by the impressive margin of 68% to 32%). Yet, in all its essentials, that constitution became the Treaty of Lisbon without risking running it past French and Dutch voters again.

In very brief summary of our debate: Their Lordships thought it inevitable that the deal negotiated by the Government under Article 50 will be a poor one. They were equally certain that Parliament will have a ‘meaningful vote’ on the outcome (even if that vote is a vote of no confidence in the Government), and that Parliament will overturn it, and we’d give up on leaving.

My case is that the very suggestion of a ‘meaningful parliamentary vote’ (let alone a second referendum) is a standing invitation to the EU to overturn our decision by punishing us with such dreadful terms that we are bound to refuse.

The only way remove the temptation for them to adopt such a strategy is to maintain the certainty that we are already walking away, that the decision has been made, and that there is no going back.
Only then will it be absolutely clear to them, that their best strategy is to negotiate the optimum deal for themselves, which – given our shared identity of mutual interests, will also approximate to the best deal for ourselves.
The question isn’t ‘are we leaving the EU?’
We are.
Rather, the real question is ‘where are we going?’
Few of us went into the polling booth on 23rd of June entirely of one mind. Whilst I was convinced that voting to leave was for the best, nevertheless I was thoroughly aware that there would be costs, disadvantages and risks. It is now the duty of the Government, individuals, and every enterprise in the Kingdom to seize the opportunities that are opening up to us, whilst working to minimise the costs and risks.

This should be the joint endeavour of the whole nation following the decision that voters have made. Unfortunately, a minority continue to put their effort into contriving circumstances in which the decision by voters can be thwarted.

I visited my alma mater St Andrews University last week to deliver a seminar and a lecture, and have an obligatory swim in the North Sea. I hadn’t been back in over thirty years. It all looked very much the same but the changes were very significant.

First, the students were much more focussed on their studies than my generation were. This is hardly surprising given the students are now paying very substantial fees which my generation did not. Little wonder then that we treated our time at university more like a luxury consumer good, where the current generation treats it more like an investment from which they need to secure a return.

Second, the university has doubled in size. The income from tuition fees has enabled so many more places to be made available. In my day only a very much smaller proportion of sixth formers could expect to get a place at university (and because there were many fewer of us, the absence of fees was affordable). It was clear to me many more students were evidently enjoying the opportunity of a university education consequent upon the decision to charge fees.

Third, St Andrews is, of course, a Scottish university and the Scottish government does not believe that Scottish students should have to pay tuition fees – so here is a salutary lesson: the numbers of Scottish students studying at the University is capped at 20% of the total student body. The reason for this is simple; because Scottish students don’t pay fees, the university cannot afford to take so many of them. The ‘privilege’ afforded to Scottish students of not having to pay fees is actually denying many of them the opportunity to study at one of the best universities in their own land.

Whenever sixth formers visit Westminster I always try and encourage them not to be daunted at the prospect of incurring a very significant debt in order to pay for a university education. They won’t have to start repaying the loan until they are earning over £21,000 per year, and even then the repayment schedule is affordable with very modest monthly repayments. The key issue, as anyone with a mortgage will know, is not how many thousands of pounds you still have outstanding, but can you make the monthly repayments, and the student loan scheme is designed to ensure that they can. As for the outstanding capital sum, if they haven’t repaid it all after 30 years it is written off anyway, which is a much more advantageous system than a graduate tax, which is the alternative, and which they would end up paying for the rest of their working lives.

There is a form of African post-colonial democracy where presidents, even if originally elected, nevertheless rule for life. Call it ‘one person: one vote; -Once’!

Of course, we reject this as any kind of democracy at all. Voters a right to change their minds. That is why Tony Blair has every right to argue that voters got it all wrong on the 23rd of June last year and that it is his mission to persuade us to change our minds.

I campaigned to leave the Common Market in 1975 and, whilst I accepted the referendum result, I never changed my mind and I always took every opportunity to argue that the wrong decision had been made.

I had hoped that following last June’s result, the political agenda would move to on to focus on so many of the other complicated and pressing questions facing us. Unfortunately however, every day I still receive a trickle of email correspondence from constituents demanding that I set aside the referendum result and use my votes in Parliament to prevent us from leaving the EU. Mr Blair’s intervention will, no doubt, inspire further such attempts to persuade me. What I thought was very significant about both his speech and also the correspondence that I receive, is that there is no new argument being made. Rather, it is merely the re-statement of arguments that were thoroughly rehearsed in the referendum campaign last year.

So, given that the case hasn’t changed, and that even Mr Blair acknowledged that there is currently no public appetite to reconsider, what then is their strategy?
It is to delay as long as possible until ‘something turns up’ and the public changes its mind. It is a strategy of clutching at any straw that happens to come to hand.

Their Lordships and the Opposition in the Commons will take every opportunity to delay. The Article 50 bill has, so far, proved something of a disappointment to them in this respect, but they are salivating at the prospect of the Government’s statute of repeal shortly to begin its long and tortuous progress.

The longer they can delay, the longer there is for the public to tire and to lose interest. The longer there is for cold winds to blow from elsewhere, for events to intervene, after all, we live in an increasingly unpredictable world.

The parliamentary opponents hide behind the need for ‘proper’ scrutiny, but their strategy is really one of delay and desperation. Democracy demands that they retain their freedom to continue to argue and that the voters made a mistake, but to delay the implementation of the properly made decision of the voters is a denial of democracy. In effect it is an attempt to apply the ‘one person: one vote; – but only once’ rule to the plebiscite we had in 1975.

As a minister who had responsibility for our efforts to provide relief to refugees from the conflict in Syria, I was properly vigilant about getting value for money. That money goes much further and helps many more refugees in the region than it does if it is spent in Europe.

Offering resettlement in Europe costs more, meaning that we can help fewer families; even worse, it encourages a disgusting trafficking trade masterminded by gangsters; and it attracts migrants from well beyond Syria, inducing them too to undertake an all too often fatal journey.

Never the less, we have implemented resettlement schemes for the most vulnerable refugees selected direct from camps in the region (in order not hold out any incentive that encourages the flow across the Mediterranean and Aegean seas) and we will resettle 20,000 Syrians over the course of this parliament through the Syrian Vulnerable Persons Resettlement scheme. Of the 4,400 already settled under this scheme so far, half are children.

UK will also resettle 3,000 children and their families from the wider region. In the last year the Government has granted asylum, or another form of leave to remain, to over 8,000 children.

This week the Government announced that, in accordance with section 67 of the Immigration Act (the so-called Dubs amendment), that it will admit 350 children who have already made it to Europe. This number includes over 200 children already transferred from France, and a further 150 over the coming months.

The Government was obliged by the Immigration Act to put a specific number on how many children Britain would take based on consultations with local authorities about their capacity to make provision for them. 350 wasn’t just arbitrarily plucked from the air, it was reached after months of consultations with the local authorities about what they can absorb. Finding suitable homes for these children is actually quite difficult and adds to the pressure that already exists, arising from the 3,000 or so unaccompanied asylum-seeking children arrive in Britain every year.

Currently many children are camping out in Eastern Europe, in dangerous and frightful conditions, eschewing the shelter and official assistance that is available (and to which we are contributing financially) because they believe that their chances of making it to the UK are better.

The bishops and others who demand that we take in more children, need to recognize the hard facts: they are encouraging the flow of children undertaking the risks, and that money will go so much further in providing relief to many more children when spent in the region, rather than drawing them to seek refuge in Western Europe.

The largest item in my mailbag remains the shortage of affordable housing. New Forest District Council has the very difficult and unenviable task of allocating the scarce supply of social housing between the pressing needs of families in various states of distress, many of whom have been waiting for years. Often they write to me in the quite mistaken belief that I have some power to ‘intervene’ and get them further ahead in the queue.

For years we have not built sufficient houses to afford people born and brought up in the area any prospect of being able to find somewhere to buy or rent. The District Council’s plan for the next couple of decades makes a bold attempt to address this. Given the sensitivity of our rural environment, that plan is bound to be controversial.

Building land is essential, but it is not enough. The problem is that the demand for housing has outstripped the supply, driving the price beyond the reach of much of the market. We need a sufficient increase in supply as to drive prices down again so that they are once more affordable. I am persuaded however, that builders will not deliver that increase to the extent necessary: high prices suit them very well, particularly given their preference for addressing the more profitable higher end of the market. For this reason, despite my long held preference for free enterprise, I am looking for the Housing White Paper, which is to be published this week, to give the green light to much greater involvement by the public sector: councils need to build more.

I have had a stream of emails demanding that the invitation to the President of the USA to make a state visit to the UK, be withdrawn.

As the PM said, she is running a government not a protest movement.
The hint is in the name ‘state visit’. This is not the visit of an individual and does not express any support for the individual’s policies. It is an expression of the importance of the relationship between our two states. This is why comparisons with other US presidents who made their state visits to the UK much later in their presidencies are so wide of the mark. The situation then was radically different.

We are about to begin negotiations to leave the EU and profoundly change our place in the world. We have a significant agenda to cement with the nation that is our largest individual trading partner and our most important strategic ally. At the same time, its new president had signalled radical departures in respect of policy towards free trade and enduring alliances.

Whatever our reservations, it is both vital and urgent that we exercise the greatest influence that we can in our national interests. The state visit is an important part of that process.

We are the first G7 country to meet the jointly agreed commitment to spend 0.7% of our income on overseas aid. In doing so, we have established an expertise and leadership in the field. It has given us enhanced credibility at the UN and the ability to speak with real authority in the world. Along with our defence and diplomatic effort, it is a key part of the way we project our power and influence.

People think we are spending too much. I once tried asking constituents in Ringwood how much of our income it is. The answers ranged from 10% to 30%, so I was able to tell them we had cut it to less than one percent!

Think of it the other way around: we are keeping 99.3% of our income for ourselves. Do you know anyone who does that, indeed would you want to know them – would they have any friends?
The Daily Mail’s campaign against our overseas aid budget has run for over a year now. In recent months it has been joined by The Times. The stories about our aid being given to corrupt and profligate regimes, wasted on trivial projects like Ethiopian girl pop groups, or lavished on the salaries of consultants drives my correspondents into a state of apoplexy.

On detailed examination these stories turn out to be very different from what has been reported.
Of course, we do spend in the poorest and most unstable places in the world, and it is no co-incidence that these tend to be the most corrupt and misgoverned countries, but we do not ‘give’ money to them. We pay by results for projects in health, education and economic development, and because we do not have an army of civil servants, we pay contractors from professional and experienced organisations to run those projects. The Daily Mail calls them ‘consultants’.

Our international aid effort is undermined by waste and the perception of waste. I met the new Secretary of State last week to re-enforce the message that she needs to root out those things that might give rise to that perception. Before she got the job of running the International Development department, she was on record as wanting to abolish it and replace it with a trade department.

Well, she is quite right in her priority: Trade dwarfs aid. If we can only get poor countries better access to the world’s trading system then they will earn vastly more. That is why our international aid programme spends about £1 billion per year facilitating and improving trade.

At the last election UKIP proposed we cut the budget from the current £12 billion to £4 billion and concentrate just on humanitarian relief and the inoculation effort to prevent disease. These are important, but we would lose the much more important work in economic development that is so vital to our national interest. Millions are on the move in pursuit of better lives and livelihoods. Over the next decade the world needs 600 million new jobs if we are to avoid a growing army of under-employed, frustrated, desperate and angry young people. It is therefore vital that we invest in economic development and prosperity in their countries. In the end, it is all about jobs. This has to be our main effort, because if we do not, we know where all the consequent problems are going to end up being exported to.

In the modern world you cannot – like an ostrich with its head in the sand – isolate yourself from global reality.

Development aid is not charity. We spend it in our national interest so we can trade and prosper in a stable and safer world.