There are a number of highly politically partisan websites that pass themselves off as objective sources of news.
So, when I was informed that I had voted to pump raw sewage into our rivers, it was certainly news to me. On the contrary, I voted through six pages of measures to stop raw sewage going into our watercourses.
As a regular swimmer throughout the year in rivers and off our beaches, I have every incentive to end the pollution of our waters.

The Government has already made the water companies spend £3 billion to reduce their discharges. Now, with the Environment Bill and the Government’s strategic policy statement which, for the very first time by any Government, directs the regulator to ensure that water companies tackle sewage discharges.

I will consider any new amendment to the Environment Bill that will expedite the removal of  sewage from our waters and I await with interest whatever the Lords are now about to send back to the Commons.
Nevertheless, I stand by what I said after last week’s debate:
I believe that the Environment Bill demonstrates an absolute commitment by the Government to tackling sewage discharges. It introduces an entire new chapter to the Water Industry Act 1991, which places a statutory requirement on the Government to produce a plan to reduce the discharges from storm overflows before 1 September 2022, and commits it to taking action and reporting on progress to Parliament. The Government will also be required to produce a report on the actions that would be needed to eliminate discharges from storm overflows completely  in England, and their costs and benefits, before 1 September 2022.

The difficulty with the previous Lord’s amendment, which I voted against in the Commons, is that it put the cart before the horse: we don’t yet have a clear idea of the costs, or a plan yet for ending discharges, but the amendment wanted to outlaw the discharges before we know how to do it.

We rely on  Victorian designed sewers that combine, in one system, all the water from our lavatories together with the water that runs off out streets when it rains. As the population has grown exponentially we’ve had to invest in expanding the capacity to treat the waste from so many more lavatories. Equally, we’ve paved over so much more of our land surfaces so that more rain enters the sewers rather than being absorbed by the ground. More importantly however, whilst we get pretty well the same amount of rain as before, the changing climate is delivering it in much more intensive bursts with which the system has not the capacity to cope, resulting in the untreated emergency discharges into our rivers

Currently the Storm Overflows Task Force is charged with finding out the extent of what needs to be done. Estimates of the costs vary widely by £ hundreds of billions. Before we fix a date and outlaw the discharges we need to know the scope of the work, the amount that will need to be invested and the impact it will have on our bills (the polluter pays!).
 Were we to outlaw storm discharges before can realistically be delivered, we’ll have rain water and sewage backing up in the system to flood our lavatories, streets and gardens.

For some months  I have been anticipating how analyses of the way that the Government handled the Covid-19 pandemic would focus on the common prejudice that, if only we had locked-down the country sooner and harder so many lives would have been saved.  Without giving sufficient weight to the huge lasting economic and social damage that lock-downs cause.
I was not surprised therefore, when accounts in the media trumpeted the findings of the joint report by the Commons Health and Science & Technology committees and their criticism of exactly that failure to lock down swiftly enough.
Well, nothing is ever quite as bad as first reported. I have now read the report for myself and it is much more nuanced than was evident in the news broadcasts.
It is clear from the report that the policy of choice ought to have been not to lock-down at all, but instead, to follow the example of those jurisdictions that avoided lock-downs because, having earlier experience of the SARS infection, they had developed sophisticated and efficient systems to trace all the contacts of infected persons and isolate them.
The parliamentary committee’s criticism is more focussed on our failure over the longer term to have developed such systems because we really only ever planned for a severe flu epidemic.
When it comes to the analysis of the position last autumn, when there were also demands for swifter and more extensive lock-downs, the report actually supports the Government having resisted those demands.

The usual suspects are now demanding, once again, that the life and livelihood of the nation be restricted to accommodate the needs of the NHS. I find this surprising because Covid-19 hospital occupancy is lower now than it was a month ago.  We are told to be alarmed at the current  50,000 infections per day, -when following the removal of restrictions in July- we were told to expect 100,000 cases per day and still hold our nerve.
In any event, in most cohorts the figures are relatively flat, the growth is largely accounted for by five to twelve-year-olds, who are the most able to shake it off like a common cold.

A principal cause of the pressure that the NHS is under is the rise in what used to be common respiratory and viral infections which are of now increased severity precisely because we have lost so much of our natural immunity by restricting social interaction. The more we see social and economic restrictions as the answer to reducing Covid-19 infections, the more we will generate problems from the loss of our ability to resist other common viruses that put elderly and vulnerable people into hospital, let alone the growing problems for mental health.

Living with the Covid-19 virus means treating it in the way that we treat other endemic diseases. We live with flu which, on a typical winter’s day will carry off 250 souls, but we don’t obsess about it and publish daily statistics.

Over the last 18 months the Lock-down policy has enjoyed high levels of public support, indeed pollsters were telling us that the public would welcome even severer restrictions. Now however, the situation has changed significantly and the public are much more alive to the long-term damaging costs of restricting economic and social life. Hopefully this may act as a constraint on the willingness of ministers to submit to the noisy lobby demanding a return to restrictions.

Sir David Amiss was a friend  and a devoted servant of the public. He embraced so many campaigns -supporting families; poverty; animal cruelty- with enormous enthusiasm and lasting stamina.
Above all, he was most generous with that most precious of commodities -his time: he was always prepared to give you his time and help you out if you had a problem. His brutal murder came as a great shock.

In responding to such shocking events there is always a danger of over-reacting. In the commentaries that have followed Sir David’s murder there have been, in my estimate, a number of such over-reactions.
In several analyses the deaths of Sir David, Jo Cox, Ian Gow and Sir Anthony Berry have been classified together. I think this is quite mistaken: Ian Gow and Sir Anthony were murdered by the IRA as part of an organised territorial campaign to remove Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom. Sir David and Jo Cox were murdered by ‘lone wolves’ with quite different, though equally despicable motives.
A number of commentaries have drawn attention to the way that our public and political discourse has become so charged with unpleasantness and abuse, some on which is attributed to social media.
Whilst, this observable fact and horrid, I doubt that it accounts in any way for the ideological derangement that leads someone to kill Members of Parliament.

I am very fortunate in never having been threatened, or having felt threatened in the 23 years since I was elected. I have every sympathy with those colleagues who are constantly being threatened. Clearly, appropriate precautions need to be taken to protect them. Demands for police protection for all MPs are however, quite misplaced. There are many calls on police time. After all, many more ordinary members of the public have been killed by terrorist outrages in recent years. It would be a denial of democracy if politicians were to be protected from the public who elect them.

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Sir David Amess was renowned in public life for his Christian faith, but I was rather taken by surprise by Katie Martin on Radio Solent when she asked me where God was when Sir David was murdered. I didn’t answer very well. The proper answer is that God was there. The Christian truth is that in the life of Christ God shared our suffering.  We do not understand God’s purposes but it’s no good complaining that the Universe is imperfect, full of suffering and not the one that we would made. It is the Universe in which we have to live and either we have faith in its ultimate purpose even though we have no understanding, or we accept that ultimately there is no purpose, that there is no justice and that in the end suffering is un-remedied.
Professor Richard Dawkins would argue that faith in God’s purpose is based on our wish for it to be true and that we just cannot face the reality that we are in a purposeless universe (in essence Karl Marx made the same critique). Dawkins may well be right in that we do want it to be true, but since when did the desire for something constitute a disproof of its existence?
 After a sleepless night of anxiety and pain you wish for the dawn; that you desire the dawn, doesn’t mean that it won’t come.

The last time that ‘assisted dying’ was debated in the commons was 2015 when the proposal to lift the prohibition on assisted suicide was decisively defeated by 330 votes to 118.
A new private members bill with the same objective has been introduced in the House of Lords. My expectation is that it will complete its progress in the Lords and arrive in the Commons early next year.
I have used this column previously to describe the pitfalls facing private member’s bills in the Commons. To be successful they really need to be of very limited scope and wholly uncontroversial. The principal enemy of such legislation is time: A vote on the scale that defeated the 2015 bill is rare because opponents of any private member’s bills don’t have to trouble themselves to vote against the measures: They just need to take up time available debating it until that allotted time runs out.
 The only hope for a controversial private member’s bill is for it to be rescued by the Government by being granted government time. Given, the pressure that the Government is under to find time for its own legislative priorities, this is unlikely.
The signals that are currently leaking out of the Government are that no such assistance will be made available to an assisted suicide bill in this parliamentary session.
So, that looks like the end of that. The question is however, why would the Government pass up the opportunity of supporting such a measure, because opinion polls have for many years shown consistent popular support for legalising assisted suicide?
Pollsters ask for an instant opinion on complex issues which might rarely, if ever, have occupied the minds of members of the public who have their own busy lives to take up their time. The whole point of representative democracy is that the elected representatives are required to look in detail at the implications of any proposal, to listen to the arguments, before taking the time to decide -time that members of the public ordinarily just do not have.
My estimate is that in 2015 when assisted suicide was so decisively defeated, many MPs actually came to the Commons sharing the public prejudice in favour of it. After all, few of us relish voting against something that we know our electors support. When they heard the debate examining the consequences of changing the law however, they changed their minds about it

Suicide is contagious, our own figures -without allowing the possibility of assistance- are quite worrying enough. The experience in those jurisdictions where assistance is permitted show  even more alarming trends.
My principal concerns are first, the profound way that our perception of the medical profession will change when the doctor comes not always with the intention of curing, but of killing.
Second, nobody wants to feel that they are a burden to others, so the frail, sick and elderly will come under ever so subtle pressure to avoid being a burden to the rest of us; to eschew expensive care and to follow the ‘selfless’ examples of others by accepting medical assistance to end their lives.
 For an already overburdened healthcare system just imagine the savings to be had. It is a short distance from assisted dying to euthanasia.

Rather than contemplating legalising assisted suicide we should, on the contrary, be investing in giving patients dignity in dying by providing much better palliative care, so that nobody feels the need to end their lives prematurely either for fear of an agonising death subsequently, or because they have been made to feel a burden to the rest of us.

Last Tuesday evening, in an effort to conserve fuel. I decided to cycle to a meeting in Bransgore despite the filthy weather. On my return journey, having cycled up the long hill between Bransgore and Burley, I changed to high ration to make the most of the downhill sprint. Alas, a vehicle coming up the hill in the opposite direction, failed to dip its headlights and momentarily dazzled me: so that I slipped into the rough edge of the road; went head over heels; gashed my leg through waterproofs and trousers, and ended so heavily bruised I’ve been limping ever since. So, ended my contribution to easing the current fuel crisis.

I have received a number of representations from frustrated constituents still awaiting HGV tests that were suspended during the lockdown. Apparently, there are 40,000 tests in the queue.
In addition I’ve had quite a correspondence from former HGV drivers explaining why they gave it up and what it would take to persuade them to return. They tell a similar tale: they say that the terms and conditions deteriorated to such an extent over the last decade or so, that it was no longer sufficient compensation for the long and anti-social hours that they put up with. They tell me that the hourly rate of pay has halved. They put this down to the influx of foreign drivers who were prepared to do the work for less money and with poorer conditions.
Many of those foreign drivers returned home during the lockdown and there is no pressure for them to return, given that there is plenty of work for them in Europe which is itself short of some 400,000 HGV drivers.
Notwithstanding, the demand of the employers is that visa restrictions be lifted to encourage the return of the foreign drivers. This cannot be the answer because it was the influx of foreign drivers that drove down wages and conditions in the first place, causing our own HGV drivers to retire or look for more rewarding work elsewhere.

In a free market a shortage of a particular skill will drive up the wage paid for it, and that higher wage will attract workers prepared to acquire the particular skill so much in demand, therefore addressing the shortage. To be fair, this is what has been happening recently. There are many reports of significantly higher wages being offered and even substantial ‘golden hellos’ being paid to newly recruited drivers. Over time this will address the shortage…but we don’t have time, the crisis is now…so bring back foreigners immediately!

As it happens the shortage of HGV drivers has been a minor irritant for months. Many of us will have noticed the odd fuel pump out of commission more often than usual. It was no more than an inconvenience, and one that we could certainly have lived with. What made it intolerable was our own behaviour rushing to the pumps to fill up unnecessarily.
So, was the scare of severe shortage deliberately engineered, in order to create the panic buying, as a way of forcing the Government to lift visa restrictions on foreign HGV drivers which employers had unsuccessfully been demanding for months?

Whilst there were many more damaging aspects to lockdown restrictions, I found masks one of the most irritating. The removal of all the restrictions in July was a great liberation, but the potential for a return -set out in the Government’s plan B, with mandatory masking included- is most unwelcome.

As an Army officer training for chemical warfare, I was instructed that once I had ordered troops to mask-up, I then had to look for the first opportunity to un-mask, because masking led to physical deterioration in effectiveness and psychological disorientation -a growing sense of isolation. Of course, the military respirator we used was much worse than the Covid face coverings, yet people do tell me that they feel that sense of isolation and anxiety, that they find it sinister seeing so many people masked, as social beings facial expression is one of the subtle ways we communicate.

 

In Parliament there is definitely something political about masks: In a crowded House of Commons at Prime Minister’s Questions there won’t be an unmasked face on the Labour benches, whereas on the Conservative side there will be only be half-a-dozen masked faces at most.

 

Had it not actually happened, I would never have believed that a Conservative government would order us to wear masks and introduce fines for those who disobeyed: how very un-British.
That extraordinary intrusion into our personal choices took place when the lockdown was over; we had survived the first wave without the NHS being overwhelmed; all the shops were open again; then -out of the blue- came this order to mask-up without any prior parliamentary debate or vote.
For years the World Health Organisation assessment was that masks were ineffective at preventing the spread of disease. Then that advice conveniently changed overnight just when governments were looking for new tools to change normal social behaviour, as enforced lockdowns were coming to an end.

 

When our government announced its new masking rules, that very evening at the daily televised briefing, the Deputy Chief Medical officer gave the game away: She was asked for the scientific evidence to support the new policy on masks; her reply was that it was not a matter of evidence but of providing ‘reassurance’. 
So, having so successfully terrified us with the dangers of the virus, they then had to find something make us feel safe enough to go back out into the everyday world but at the same time to provide an  ‘in-your-face’ reminder not to indulge in too much ordinary social intercourse.
It these respects masks do work: There is no doubt many people are reassured by wearing them and by finding others wearing them. Equally, they do provide a highly visible and constant reminder to behave differently to normal: They are a means of social control.

 

I doubt however, that masks prevent the spread of disease. This is not question for medical expertise: Just think of it from an engineering point of view; the mesh that makes up the material with which you cover your face contains microscopic holes that are 5000 times larger than the virus which can pass through them. They can only have the most marginal effect. I suppose that ‘every little helps’ , but then consider the habit people have of constantly fiddling with them – completely undermining the original advice we were given to wash our hands and keep them away from our faces. Add to this mix the fact that so many of us wear the same mask again and again.

 

In the end it is a matter of opinion, and everyone is entitled to their own. Personally, I disliked having to appear as if I were about to rob a bank

I have received a very large number of emails asking for my support against a cut of £20 per week in Universal Credit. I think it quite disingenuous to describe the ending what was always a temporary increase in Universal Credit as a ‘cut’.
At the outset of the first lock-down in March last year,  the temporary increase was made in order to address the needs of a surge in the number of newly unemployed people who had no previous experience of having to navigate living on benefits: It was an emergency measure.
If however, you had the odd £6 billion to spare and you wanted to address the needs of our most vulnerable people, you would not spend it by giving every recipient of Universal Credit an extra £20 per week, irrespective of their particular circumstances, including whether they had any children or not. There are much better targeted ways of relieving want amongst the most needy. The action that was taken in that particular way was purely because it was an emergency and that it was a temporary.
The circumstances in which the increase was made have now changed profoundly: Currently we have one million vacancies; Every employer that I meet vents his or her frustration that they just cannot recruit the staff that they need. It would be irresponsible to prolong the increase in Universal Credit when we need to raise the sights of claimants to take the opportunity to work longer hours or get a more demanding and better paid job.

Nevertheless, as a member of the House of Commons Select Committee on Work and Pensions, I am not tin-eared to the evidence that we have taken over recent weeks. I accept that we need to address the aspects of benefits that prevent people from taking a job or increasing their hours. First, childcare costs – the cap on the amount claimable has not been increased for 18 years. Second, the ‘taper’ (the amount of benefit you lose for every additional £1 that you gain from working) was always originally designed to be more generous in order to always ‘make work pay’. Unfortunately, George Osborne raided the budget when the state of the public finances demanded. As soon as it is affordable, we need to put that right.

In this column on 28^th June I expressed my hope that the issue of the reform of system of social care would be expedited by the appointment of Sajid Javid as the new Secretary of State for Health and Social Care.
I also questioned one of the principal motives for reform: what politicians often refer to as the ‘scandal’ whereby people have to sell their homes to pay for their residential care.
I have always taken the view that the main way that people save in the UK is by acquiring a home, and that paying for your residential care was a proper demand on your savings, which in so many cases means your home.
Of course, there are many other things we might have preferred to spend our savings on, including passing them on to our families, but if we need residential care, why should we expect the community to pick up the bill if we have a property that we could sell to meet the expense?
Any sense of unfairness arises, not from the assumption that we ought to pay for our care, but from the fact that we might have to but that others won’t. This is the same perception of unfairness that arises from any means-tested welfare system: the belief that you are penalised for having been prudent, but that the impecunious, profligate, or just less fortunate, get a free ride.

The Government’s proposals, announced last week, with a cap on care costs of £86,000 -after which taxpayers will meet any further costs, are designed to address the sense of unfairness.
Government’s critics however, appear to be attempting to ride two different horses at the same time: first they argue that it is immoral for taxpayers to be expected protect the inheritance of the relatively wealthy by preventing them from having to sell their homes to meet their care bills. Yet at the same time they argue that so many of them will have to sell their homes anyway, because relatively few will have the £86,000 readily to hand to pay for their bills before the taxpayer comes to the rescue.

The critics have fundamentally misunderstood one of the main purposes of the reform.
Consider our main motive saving: whist it may be prudent to save up against the possibility of lean times ahead; most of us save up for something positive that we want to get or to do, including passing such savings on to our children.  I certainly couldn’t be motivated to save up for care costs, because my hope and expectation would be to never to have to be cared for.
On the other hand, rather than save up to meet unwelcome possibilities, we insure against them: We insure our homes against burglary, fire and flood. Equally, it would be sensible to insure against care costs in order to avoid having to sell our homes. The difficulty is that such insurance is not readily available because of the potential unlimited liability that might arise from many years in residential care. The purpose of the £86,000 cap is to quantify and fix that liability so that the insurance market can bring forward affordable schemes -should you wish to purchase one- to protect you from the first £86,000, and prevent you from needing to sell your home if you don’t have £86,000 to hand.
I hope it works.