Earlier this week the New Secretary of State for Defence, Dan Jarvis, was summoned to the Commons to answer a question about the Defence Investment Plan.
Of course, the devastating critique by his predecessor, John Healey, given in his resignation letter, undoubtedly put the New Secretary of State and his junior ministers in a very awkward spot.
Nevertheless, convention demands that when Mr Speaker grants the Leader of the Opposition an urgent question, then the Secretary of State comes to answer it. Instead, he sent a junior minister. The excuse being that Dan Jarvis was meeting the King. I’m confident that the King would have understood, had he been advised, that this was to be the first appearance of the new Secretary of State in Parament.
Well, whatever, the Junior Minister appeared at the dispatch box to answer Kemi Badenoch. He prefaced his remarks by saying that “It is no secret that I worked in lockstep with the former Defence Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Rawmarsh and Conisbrough (John Healey). He is a friend and mentor. I was his deputy and I am still standing at the Dispatch Box because he asked me to stay ….”
I couldn’t help responding with” The Minister told us that the former Secretary of State had asked him to stay. Had he not been so asked, would he have resigned too? How much persuasion did it take?” 
Despite the laughter there was an awkward moment for the minister: The Key question that any defence minister now faces is whether John Healey and Al Carns, the Armed forces Minister who also resigned, were right in stating that the Government is failing the nation by underfunding Defence. 
 
But there is more. In his own personal statement, explaining his resignation, Al Carns, who spent 24 years as a serving officer, added
“I left because I could no longer ignore the continued failure to address the treatment of our veterans in Northern Ireland.  Whatever people’s view of the troubles, a country owes a duty to those it sent into harm’s way under lawful orders, and that duty does not end when the uniform comes off”
He was referring to the Government’s Northern Ireland Bill, which removes the immunities afforded to our veterans, provided for in the last government’s Northern Ireland legacy Act.
Regular readers of this column may recall that I have fulminated about the damage that the Government’s bill is bound to do.
It is a sop to the IRA, enabling it to try and rewrite history by putting our veterans in the dock, notwithstanding the immunities granted to terrorists in order to advance the peace process.
Although there will be court cases, inquests, trials, reviews and challenges, the prospect of conviction now is vanishingly small. The number of answers that victims will get will be minimal. All the while, veterans will be hauled before the courts, investigated for years and subjected to all the pain and ignominy that that will bring. That process alone has become a betrayal and a punishment.
The Legacy Act’s offer of immunity for information, based on the South African experience post-Apartheid, offered a much clearer path to truth for victims of ‘The Troubles’. Al Carns was right to resign over his Government’s plans.

When David Cameron was Prime Minister and I was Parliamentary Private Secretary, he used to say that we spent half our time trying to find out what the Government was doing a and the other half trying to stop it.
The machine of government steers on and it takes a positive and determined effort to alter course. One of the essential purposes of weekly Prime Minister’s Questions is that, because the Prime Minister can be asked anything for which he has responsibility, he has to have the time and discipline to be thoroughly briefed on every aspect of government.
Now and again, inevitably, something will slip through under the radar, and there will be a last minute scramble to unwind some daft decision.

This week the His Majesty’s Customs and Revenue has started to levy VAT at 20% on medicines given freely, without charge, for the purpose of clinical trials or or compassionately as the last hope for some very sick patients, under the Compassionate Use Medicines Scheme.

Was this decision just bonkers, or was it mean spirited?
Was it an example of the machine ploughing onwards because the Prime Minister at the wheel, or whoever else it might have been, hadn’t been briefed?
Or was it an example of what Pat McFadden, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, in his WhatsApp message to Peter Mandelson, described as Labour determined to find anyone to tax in order to pay benefits to somebody else?

Whichever it was, the consequences are disastrous. People in extremis, dying with rare cancers, will be denied a last hope. More damaging still, Drug companies will withdraw clinical trials from the UK and pursue them in a more tax friendly environment.

My charitable nature prompts me to suggest that this is a cock-up rather than mean spirited conspiracy. The problem, however, is that the Opposition had repeatedly warned ministers over the last few months that HMRC was planning to do this. Now they’ve done it: Nobody thought to grab the rudder and avoid the iceberg.

When the Minister was summoned to the Commons this week to explain. She complained that no new rules had been introduced and that the last government could have changed the rules if it had wished to do so. Implying that had the last Conservative government changed the rules, then this decision to impose VAT could not have been taken!
What a ridiculous position to take. The rules of the scheme have been set for the last 30 years. The plain fact is that previous governments chose not to impose VAT even though they could have done so. Imposing VAT is a choice that this government has made.

I smell another U turn coming. And that will be welcome.

I came first in the new parliamentary session’s ballot for private member’s bills. Accordingly, I have received a very large correspondence urging me to promote a bill on behalf of any number of worthy causes. I will take my time to consider the best way to proceed: I have until the 16^th June to submit the title of the bill to the Commons clerks. These are the principles that constrain my choice.
First, the bill will have to be of limited scope. The principal enemy of a private member’s bill is the limited parliamentary time available to it. Clearly, the wider the scope of the bill, the more time will be demanded to scrutinise it properly and the danger will be, not that it is voted down, but that it is simply ‘talked out’.
Second, It must enjoy the Government’s support, or at the very least, its neutrality. Otherwise, the Government will use its majority to vote in down, talk it out, or neuter it by amending it in the committee and report stages of its progress.
Third, It must involve almost no cost to taxpayers, otherwise it is unlikely to have the Government’s support.
Fourth, it must be almost completely uncontroversial. If it were not so, then it would attract opposition. There has always existed a small number of devotees who turn out to oppose any private member’s bill that offends against the constraints that I have listed. They do not have to trouble themselves to vote against the bill, they merely need to speak at length until the bill runs out of time.
There is a remedy against this danger available to the bill’s sponsor, which is to move a closure motion and divide the house. The problem is that if you do so you have to be pretty sure that the House is quorate. If the result of the division reveals that there are fewer than 40 members present (including Mr Speaker) then the business falls, and the bill with it. Getting 40 members to turn out on a Friday is a non-trivial undertaking. Members of Parliament use Fridays to pursue all sorts of important concerns and meetings in their constituencies. It would take substantial enthusiasm to persuade them to return to Westminster to be ready to support a closure motion and protect a private member’s bill from being talked out.
The alternative is to have a bill that is so utterly controversial that everyone has an opinion, one way or the other, which they will feel they need to register in response to a very large correspondence that the issue has raised amongst their constituents. This was the case in the last parliamentary session with the Assisted Dying Bill. It was protected in the Commons by the possibility of closure by reason of the fact that almost all of us felt the need to be there.
The procedures in the House of Lords are quite different however, and that’s where the Assisted Dying Bill ran out of time.
Complex, expensive and controversial bills need to have the benefit of the Government whip and be debated in Government parliamentary time.
Does that mean, of necessity, my bill will have to be ‘motherhood and apple pie’ ?
Well, there are worthy things that need to be legislated for, and which might be categorised as such.
But then, exceptionally, a controversial bill will slip through and surprise us all. The Act that switched organ donation from opt-n to opt-out was one such. 
We’ll see.

In this column on 9^th May ( 200,000…and counting ) I observed that migrants who arrive unlawfully in UK and claim asylum are accommodated at the expense of our overseas development budget, consuming very substantial funds which would otherwise be deployed helping many thousands more people in desperate need elsewhere.
 As a former minister who once had responsibility for that budget, I can vouch for the fact that the money goes very much further in the regions from which the migrants are coming. Resettlement in the UK is the least cost-effective way of deploying our resources when it comes to helping large numbers of people in greatest need.

In 1970 a UN agreement was reached for wealthy countries to commit to spending 0.7% of their national income on foreign aid to the world’s poorest countries.
The UK was the first, and only G7 nation to deliver that commitment, but it took us until 2013 to do so. The cost that year was some £14 Billion.
Such a large sum, spent abroad, was always bound to be controversial when there were constraints on government spending priorities at home.
In 2021 the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, reduced the amount to 0.5% of national income, and last year the Labour Government announced plans to cut it to 0.3% with the intention that savings of £6 billion would be transferred to expenditure on Defence.

Now, however, ex-defence chiefs have co-signed a letter to the Prime Minister warning that a choice should not be made between Defence and Foreign aid, and that such a policy is a false economy. The signatories are led by Field Marshal Lord Richards, a former Chief of the Defence Staff.
 I first came across the Field Marshal in 2023 when he was a general, and I a mere major. He commissioned me to give a lecture to the Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Michael Jackson’s, Army Board, in which I was to draw lessons from my deployment in Iraq. He told me that what I said would be a matter entirely for me, but that it would be helpful if….I took the hint!
The current letter is more than a hint. On the contrary, it states explicitly that “well-targeted international aid prevents extremism and displacement that military force subsequently has to confront, and at much greater cost.”

I would go further. I believe that our International aid budget at 0.7% made us the World’s second largest donor, giving us a soft power and influence well beyond the fact that we have the World’s fourth largest Defence budget.
I accept that much of our aid effort was not as well targeted as it could have been.  My prejudice was that, aside from the importance of exceptional disaster emergency relief, our main effort should have always focussed on economic development, with the objective of opening up markets and creating jobs. I believed that political stability, healthcare, and education would all follow on naturally as consequence of the greater prosperity generated by our investment. And that success would leverage-in much greater private sector investment.
Furthermore, that our investment would generate a return, so overcoming the public prejudice that our money was wasted and would be better spent at home.

If we do not invest in creating livelihoods in poor and conflicted parts of the world, we know where the waves of migration created by the lack of jobs and stability will be heading.
If all the rich countries had honoured their commitment to 0.7 % back in the 1970, and stuck with it. We might be facing a very different and more stable world now.

Cutting aid is definitely a false economy!

The King’s Speech setting out the Government’s legislative programme for the new parliamentary session is debated over five days beginning last Wednesday and finishing next Tuesday (19^th May). That’s quite an investment of time considering that we are often told that a number of matters cannot be debated because of the ‘shortage of parliamentary time’.
I acknowledge that the debate is an important one, and in normal circumstances deserves the time allocated to it.
But these are not normal times. As the Labour Party abandons what used to be its unique selling point: Stability’, after the instability brought about by six changes of Prime Minister in eight years (2016-24). Now we are in the extraordinary situation of debating a programme for government which, in very short order, may no longer turn out to be this government’s programme any longer!
The potential candidates, declared and, as yet, undeclared are on record as having expressed very different priorities to those that have been set out by the Prime Minister and which were put before voters in the 2024 manifesto.
The Prime Minister was quite right in his warning to his party last week, that setting off a leadership election would cause chaos and damage. It is already doing so: the markets which fund our gargantuan, and ever-growing borrowing requirement, have indicated their alarm at the prospect of our being governed by any of the potential prime ministers so far identified. Consequently, they are us charging premium risk rates, more so than the Truss premiership, which Labour constantly prays in aid for having ‘trashed the economy’, more so even than the risk premium demanded of Greece.
I  am no fan of the Prime Minister but I urge the members of the Labour Party and the good people of Makerfield – who will have a disproportionate impact on the future of this King’s speech- to heed the warning in Belloc’s Cautionary Verses,  (when poor Jim ran away from his nurse and was eaten by a lion)
“…Always keep a hold of Nurse for fear of finding something worse.”

The King told us “My Ministers will introduce legislation to take advantage of new trading opportunities, including a Bill to strengthen ties with the European Union.”
What precisely does that mean?
The Prime Minister’s red lines were ‘no return to the single market or freedom of movement’. Is that still the case given the PM’s own speech last Monday, let alone the vaunted European ambition of those who now want his job?
The Labour Manifesto commitment was to “make Brexit work”. But now they blame Brexit for the lack-lustre performance of the economy. Ministers have been involved in a serious game of ‘cakeism’: on the one hand claiming to have stabilised the economy, delivering interest rate reductions, and the fastest growth in the G7, whist at the same time inferring that the EU is doing so much better.
It Isn’t.
What is certainly true is that we would be doing so much had it not been for the contents of the preceding King’s speech which has placed so many new burdens on enterprise and new taxes on employment.

The best King’s Speech would have been the shortest: containing but one measure: A statute of repeal, to restore the status quo ante July 2024..

The numbers of migrants crossing the channel in small boats has now exceeded 200,000.
Rather than diminishing with every new initiative –‘smashing the gangs’; the one-in/ one-out agreement with France;  and now a further £600 million investment to pay for French riot police on the beaches- on the contrary, the numbers are accelerating again.

I’ve said it all before, but I believe it is worth repeating, there is no silver bullet. Rather a whole series of initiatives are needed including those already listed. More important however, are agreements with countries of origin for the return of their citizens. And most important of all, a third country where migrants can be sent when they simply cannot be returned to where they originated from.
The reality is that, without this essential probability of removal to a third country, migrants will make repeated attempts to cross the channel with the near certainty, that once they get here, the possibility of being removed is very remote indeed.
That third country in which British taxpayers invested £700 million was to be Rwanda. The current government wrote off that investment and abandoned the scheme before it could be implemented, since when they’ve been casting around for another without success.
There is another essential element that would have been necessary to make Rwanda, or any other third country workable: Legal certainty. So long as our own courts or the ECHR in Strasbourg can intervene to prevent the deportation of illegal migrants to a third country, then that enterprise is doomed, and with it the whole possibility of stopping the boats.
The essential piece of the jigsaw therefore, is to withdraw from the treaties and human rights laws that afford the courts the power to intervene.

Hitherto, It is from this last essential requirement that politicians shrink. There is a moral hazard in not doing so. The migrants who cross the channel in small boats will have paid very substantial sums to criminals in order to do so. Having arrived here they will be accommodated at great expense funded from our overseas development budget which would otherwise be deployed helping many thousands more people in desperate need elsewhere. As a former minister who had responsibility for that budget, I can vouch for the fact that the money goes very much further in the regions from which the migrants are coming. Resettlement in the UK is the least cost-effective way of deploying our resources when it comes to helping people in greatest need.

The Renter’s Rights Act has come into force. It will be some time before we can assess its consequences.
Certainly there will have been many ‘no fault evictions’ as landlords exited the market, selling their properties before the new legal provisions came into force. It is reported that such sales have been running at some 700 per day over much of the last year.
This could have a very significant impact on the availability of properties to rent. It will depend on how many of the sales were to other professional landlords. It is too soon to tell.

As a Member of Parliament, housing has been the largest element in my mailbag and ‘surgery casework’ throughout the last 29 years. I have seen the consequences for families subjected to a no-fault eviction. It means disruption to schooling and employment. It can often mean a long spell temporary B&B accommodation.
Huge anxiety is caused by the advice from local councils that tenants must wait until a court order to leave is issued to them, otherwise they will be judged to have made themselves homeless voluntarily, in which case the council will be under no obligation to assist them in finding alternative accommodation.

On the other hand, as a landlord myself, I know that there are often two sides to a story. The Section 21 ‘no fault eviction’ was a convenient way of securing possession of the property without the difficulty and expense of going to court with the evidence of non-payment of rent, anti-social behaviour, or some other breach of the rental agreement, which were often the real reason for the eviction.
For my own part, I have sometimes offered to reduce the rent to hold on to a good tenant.
I’ve had some excellent tenants over the years. But changing tenants is expensive in time and money, with redecoration and legal costs in order to re-let a property. And then there is always the possibility that a new tenant turns out to be a thorough nuisance, or even a complete nightmare. I’ve had tenants like that too.
The worst was a housing association. The advantage of letting to them was that all the administration for the sub-tenants was handled by the housing association, albeit for a lower rent.
When the association no longer required the property, I went to take it back. I was horrified by the state of the place, only to be told by the housing association representative that she considered it in pretty good nick, considering the way some of their clients left properties.

The change in the law that is of most concern is the abolition of fixed term tenancies that previously provided landlords with a predictable term. From now on tenants can vacate on giving two months’ notice. This uncertainty will have a disproportionate impact of the availability of student lets.

A member of my family who lets a property and who also holds elected office, is a member of the Green Party. I wonder if he even realises that his party’s Maoist policy is to abolish ‘landlordism’ altogether. I’ll let him discover the hard way.

My deep suspicion of Olly Robbins stems from his being our chief BREXIT negotiator under the disastrous stewardship of Theresa May. Nevertheless, by all accounts he was doing a magnificent job cutting costs at the Foreign Office, however, what has really sent his reputation soaring in my estimation, was the way he began his evidence to the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee. He told them there were only two things he could recite by heart, first was his departmental code of conduct, and the second was the Book of Common Prayer. Magnificent! I recite it by heart too, every Sunday. The Church of England has largely abandoned it to the poverty of modern liturgies. No wonder congregations are dwindling, after its memorable phrases gave so much comfort to countless generations.
But, back to Olly’s evidence: whilst much of what he told the Committee was deeply damaging to the Prime Minister, in particular the demand that an ambassadorship be found for Kier Starmer’s -surplus to requirement- Director of Communications (subsequently elevated to the Peerage only to be suspended from the Labour Party after campaigning for a paedophile). Nevertheless, Olly’s evidence cleared the PM of the principal charge, namely that he misled Parliament by denying that he had known that Peter Mandelson had failed his developed vetting.
Two members were rightly forced to leave the Commons Chamber on Wednesday last week for accusing the PM of having lied. As do so many of us, the PM obfuscates, he conceals, but he does not lie.
I tried to nail him down. I asked why, when he was asked by Kemi Badenoch on 4^th February “did the official security vetting that he received mention Mandelson’s ongoing relationship with… Jeffrey Epstein?”
The Prime Minister replied, “Yes, it did.”
So how could he deny having ever received the official vetting report?
The answer is that he had simply confused the terminology of the different reports. He was referring to the Due Diligence Report, which he had received, not the Vetting Report, which he hadn’t. Confusing two different reports in quick-fire during Prime Ministers Questions, isn’t lying. He’s off that hook.

Readers will appreciate that I am not an impartial observer, on the contrary, I am a committed partisan. Notwithstanding that I was often a severe critic of the last Tory government -despite having been part of it, I believe that this Labour government is infinitely worse on almost every front.
 Of course, the Official Opposition is right to go after the PM for his failures, but do we really want his scalp?
Be careful what you wish for: ‘Hang on to Nurse, for fear of Something worse’. The candidates lining up to replace Kier Starmer should terrify middle England.
There is talk of a vote to refer the Prime Minister to the Privileges Committee. Forget it! I wouldn’t vote to refer anyone to that kangaroo court, not after the travesty of their proceedings against Owen Paterson. The notion of politicians sitting in judgement on anyone, should fill us all with horror.

My blog post of 12^th April 1956! attracted a rather wider audience than my posts are usually accustomed to reaching. As a consequence, I’ve had quite a large email correspondence on the back of it. Most controversial is the figure I quoted stating that the average person born in 1956 will have consumed some £300,000 more in benefits that they will have paid in taxes.
I’ve had many emails from that age cohort complaining that they’ve ‘never taken a penny’ and demanding to know how the figure is calculated.

The calculation appeared in a paper produced by the Resolution Foundation:  An intergenerational audit for the UK (2023):
In Annex 1 – “Analysis of net lifetime benefits from the welfare state” , (Chart) 6 –“Net lifetime benefits from the welfare state, by year of birth” They gave an estimate of between £290,000 and £310,000. As stated in their notes below the chart, they included the following net lifetime benefits: State pension; NHS spending; Education spending; other public service consumption; and cash benefits.
Minus taxes paid: Income tax; National Insurance; VAT and other indirect taxes.
All the figures are discounted to present value and expressed in 2023 prices and, averaged across the entire 1956 birth cohort.

Such a mathematical illustration will invariably include a spread with many well above, and also well below the mean.
What I thought was healthy about the response was that people clearly did not want be seen as being part of a cohort that was not self-reliant, and which consumed more benefits from the state than they paid for in taxation. I take this to mean we are a bit embarrassed about being dependent, that there is still a residual pride about not living ‘on the parish’.
Halleluiah! I had begun to fear that we had become shameless, seeing state benefits as an entitlement, and that we were inured to dependency.
If there remains at least some a concept of a ‘moral peril’ with regard to welfare dependency, then we have a prospect of recovery from it.

Bizarrely, a Government Treasury minister passed me in the lobby and complimented me on the blog. I was surprised (and flattered) that a Minister, with a Red Box of vital state papers to deal with daily, would take time to read a blog of mine. No doubt, an official spotted it and flagged it up to him. Perhaps, the Government has started to think about the future of the Triple Lock on pensions…before the deteriorating state of the public finances causes the IMF to force it to do so.