The Independent contacted me for comment because I was, they assured me, on the ‘defection watch list’!
I referred them to my earlier blog when Danny Kruger defected: Kruger . My mind hasn’t changed,. And will not change

I believe that screen based, or phone based childhood is no childhood at all. We are in danger of abolishing childhood altogether.

              So, I am rather pleased to have had my inbox inundated with hundreds of emails following Kemi Badenoch’s announcement that, if elected, she would follow Australia’s lead by banning under-sixteens from social media. The Prime Minister too, has jumped on the bandwagon, not by making a firm commitment, but by saying that ‘nothing is off the table’ .
Of the hundreds of emails that I have received, one hundred to one are in favour of the proposal.
The principal objection of those few that disagree is that this ought to properly be a matter reserved for parents to decide, and that parental responsibility should not be usurped by the state control. It is a fair point, but my judgement is that it is outweighed by the harm that unrestricted access can have. After all, we do not allow parental discretion to extend to allowing their children to purchase alcohol, go to X-rated movies, or drive the family car.
Children are now spending record amounts of time online, exposed to violence, pornography and extremist content, with experts warning this is contributing to deteriorating mental health, poor sleep, isolation, and knock-on effects for learning and behaviour.
The introduction of a legal ban will help parents to enforce boundaries. One might say that, rather that replacing parental authority, on the contrary, it will assist parents.
The other objection is of a different order: it’s that the proposal doesn’t go far enough because it will exclude WhatsApp and other limited communication tools. I think making this exception is fair. WhatsApp does not use algorithms to feed users with content in the way that so many other applications do. In fact, many families, including my own, use WhatsApp as a means of keeping tabs on their children.

One cannot but admire the sheer efficiency, capability and prowess exhibited by US forces in capturing President Maduro of Venezuela. Their might is truly awesome.
As for concerns about the ‘rule of law’, when did that concept ever trouble the Maduro regime?
To be frank, Maduro had it coming.
It says something about the regime’s trust in the loyalty of its own forces, that Maduro’s security detail was provided by Cuba.
Some of my colleagues have asked what message the US intervention sends to Russia regarding Its war on Ukraine, or to China regarding its threat to Taiwan. Forgive me, but Russia’s five years of brutal warfare in Ukraine, with its deliberate toll on civilian life, with the kidnapping of thousands of Children, will not be informed by, nor should be compared with, the US surgical operation in Venezuela.
As for Taiwan, China’s actions will be determined by the strength and readiness of Taiwan’s own military capability, and China’s assessment of the strategic ambiguity surrounding potential American involvement.
Much of the European reaction to the events in Venezuela, and comments about the future of Greenland are a product of our own impotence and lack of military capability. The fault is our own. We took a ‘peace dividend’ by cutting defence expenditure drastically after the Cold War when, in reality, there was no peace.
Incidentally, though I would seldom find myself in agreement with Lord Mandelson, he is right about Greenland: there isn’t the remotest chance of US military action.
European Governments need to wind in their necks and start being serious about defence expenditure.

Brigitte Bardot’s Funeral this week prompted fond memories. I am of a generation of men who, when asked about beautiful women, immediately call to mind the likes of Brigitte Bardot and Raquel Welch -the great film stars of our youth.
Though I admired her, and her concern for animal welfare, I thought her politics were ‘wired to the Moon’.
Actually, I once performed as Brigitte Bardot in a class play at school. It would have probably been nineteen sixty-eight. The play was written by our French master, Mr Speight, who we affectionally referred to behind his back as ‘Spidget’. I can’t remember much about it except that Brigitte had been the victim of a robbery. The only line that I recall was yelling “o mes bijoux, mes beaux bijoux”.
Mr Speight died a year ago. And next week I will be attending the funeral of yet another of my former teachers. I often reflect on the profound impression that they made upon me, and of the humanity and passion with which they taught.
In addition to being a brilliant linguist and remarkable teacher, Spidget ran the model railway club and his jacket pockets were always bulging with jars of jam and pickles. He would often take a lucky half-dozen of us out for a ride on a Sunday afternoon in his 1965 Citroen DS, with its hydro-pneumatic suspension.

Oh, that these days might come again.

At this time of year I’ve often used this column to reflect on doom-laden prophesies about what to expect in the year ahead. After all, It’s that magnificent time when we can wallow in the short dark days and add to the gloom with blood-curdling predictions of disasters.

For those of us who do wallow in predictions of the dreadful prospects that the future holds, I recommend my favourite book of all time: The Coffee Table Book of Doom, which was published a few years ago by Art Lester and Steven Appleby. 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, brilliantly funny, 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.”

Anyway, a new ‘horseman’ has arisen in the form of Artificial Intelligence.
I previously opined on AI in this column last July: Artificial Intelligence
Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights of, which I am a member, (‘joint’ because it is comprised of both MPs and peers) is currently conducting an investigation into the human rights implications of the technology.
The principal near term threat is to employment opportunities. Technology has always changed the nature of employment, replacing all kinds of labour, but presenting the possibility new and better opportunities elsewhere. The jury is still out, as to whether AI will replace most of us, or create sufficient new employment to keep us satisfied. The need to do useful work is part of our basic psychology.  We learn in the Bible that even Almighty God worked on the creation before, seeing that it was good, and rested.

Nevertheless, a new and much more dreadful prospect has arisen: that AI will develop into a ‘general intelligence’ and threaten our very existence. I ‘ve just stated reading The New York Times instant bestseller If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsk. The blurb states that “the scramble to create superhuman AI has put us on the path to extinction-but it’s not too late to change course, as two of the field’s earliest researchers explain in this clarion call for humanity, may prove to be the most important book of our time.”
I’m only one chapter into it, but my understanding is that the basic thesis is that we don’t understand how AI works and therefore will not be able to control it.

In our last evidence session in the Human Rights Committee, I asked one of the world’s leading experts how scared, on a scale of one to ten, should we of the technology. His answer was eleven.
I’ll read the rest of the book, and reflect.

Yesterday, the Commons started progress on the Finance Bill, the bill that puts last month’s budget into law. That budget has brought about the highest tax burden ever in our history,
 What will the Government do with all the Tax that it is raising?
 They will not pay down the national debt—it is going up. They will not employ more teachers; their numbers are falling. They will not employ more police officers either; their numbers are falling too.
 Instead, they will turn hard-working taxpayers’ money into handouts: the money is for Benefits Street.

To-day the Chancellor has hailed the Bank of England’s decision to cut interest rates as a measure of her own successful stewardship. On the contrary, the Bank has made it abundantly clear that, despite inflation above target, it cut the interest rate because it is increasingly concerned about the risk “from weaker demand” due to rising unemployment and low growth: Not an auspicious background to begin the committee stage of the Finance Bill.

I have written in this column previously about the economically disastrous policy of our Government on the future of the British Indian Ocean Territories:  Though we are saddled with debt -just shy of 100% of our annual national income- we are giving away sovereign British territory, only to lease it back for £35 billion. (  They are ashamed of our history and they hate Britain )
Little wonder, that we now shoulder the highest tax burden in our history. Whilst Mauritius, the beneficiary of our bounty, is enjoying tax cuts.

The Bill to ratify the treaty with Mauritius is currently in the House of Lords, having shamefully passed unamended in the Commons.
Now, however, The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has waded in to the debate, demanding that the Treaty be abandoned because of its shabby treatment of the Chagossian islanders.
Future decisions on access to, and resettlement on most of the archipelago, the ancestral home of Chagossians, are now left in the hands of Mauritius, a foreign Government.
British Chagossians, those who resettled here after being removed from the archipelago,  will need to become Mauritian citizens to have any hope of being eligible resettlement under any future resettlement programme to return them to the archipelago.
The reason that so many Chagossians came to Britain after leaving the archipelago, was because they felt that they were treated as second Class citizens in Mauritius. Indeed, it was a criminal offence in Mauritius even to question its sovereignty over the archipelago.
In recent weeks we’ve seen a further influx of Chagossians arriving in UK, having fled Mauritius.
The Chagossians now plan to set up their own government-in-exile in London.

Our Government have also given Mauritius an additional £40 million to set up a trust fund for the welfare of Chagossians. Yet, despite this being UK taxpayers’ money, Britain will have no representation on the board and no control over how the funds are spent. There will be just one UK-based Chagossian representative on the board, chosen not by the British Chagossian community, but by the Prime Minister of Mauritius.

With a government of so many lawyers, and so in awe of Human Rights law, how embarrassing to have their treaty challenged by the UN for the denial of Human Rights

In 2017 David Lammy, now Secretary of State for Justice and Deputy Prime Minister conducted a review of prejudice in the Criminal Justice system and he concluded that Juries “act as a filter against prejudice”. In 2020 he went further, saying “Criminal trials without juries are a bad idea. You don’t fix the backlog with trials that are widely perceived as unfair.”
He was right.
Now however, he is pushing ahead with an agenda to restrict trial by jury to only the most serious crimes of murder or rape. When challenged with the ancient right of subjects to be tried by their fellows, as set out in 1215 in Magna Carta, arguably our most important constitutional document, his answer was that Magna Carta also required that justice be swift.
So, faced with a growing backlog of cases giving rise to long delays, sometimes years before alleged offenders can actually face trial, he has prioritised the speed with which offences can come to court, over the right to trial by Jury. Accordingly, he will introduce legislation to empower a judge to sit alone, or with magistrates, to determine guilt or innocence in our crown courts.

That there is a backlog of hundreds of thousands of cases awaiting trial, is not in dispute. It arises from a number of inefficiencies, and it certainly wasn’t helped by closing the courts down for a year during Covid. There is a shortage of criminal barristers, -it is better remunerated to practice civil and commercial law. Equally, courts sit empty because governments have not funded the Department of Justice with a budget sufficient to staff them.

One of the statistics that Lammy preyed in aid, was that because of the current delays, 60% of rape victims withdraw rather than face the trauma of a long wait before trial. He is now in a spat with senior barristers who accuse him of a cynical attempt to justify his proposals on the basis of misinformation, because the majority of accusations are withdrawn before charges are brought, with only 8 percent being withdrawn post- charges and awaiting trial.
As I pointed out to the Minister of State, when she stressed the rights of victims for swift justice, governing is about choices: the Government could have funded more sitting days in the courts, instead, the Chancellor’s budget prioritised benefits recipients over victims.

If the purpose of this measure is to clear the backlog, then the legislation should contain a ‘sunset clause’ to return the status quo ante once the backlog is cleared. Last week, when the Parliamentary Under-secretary was before the Joint Human Rights Committee, I pressed him on exactly that point, but I could extract no such concession. So, I conclude this is an ideological agenda (Just as the last Labour government also tried to restrict jury trials) rather than just an expedient to deal with a backlog of cases.

To-day, the Minister of State returned to the Commons to answer a further urgent question.
Last week Lammy had told us that only 3% of prosecutions end up actually going before a jury. So, I asked her to publish the modelling so we could see how reducing the small number of such trials even further could save much time, given that there are already so few.
Others, piled in after me to see if we could get any clarity on the work that the Government has already done to quantify the benefit of this assault on liberty. She avoided answering. All she would say is that an impact assessment will be published when the legislation id brought to the Commons.
I can’t wait!

I serve on the Joint Human Rights Committee (JHRC), to which I was appointed at beginning of the current parliamentary session. ‘Joint’ because the membership is composed from both the Lords and Commons. Unlike Commons Select Committees, to which members are elected by their fellows, the JHRC is appointed. Presumably the Opposition Chief Whip asked me to do it in order to make a nuisance of myself, or to bring some common sense to it, depending on your point of view.
The principal purpose of the Committee is to scrutinise policy and bills in order to ensure that they are compliant with the Human Rights Act 1998. Given that I voted against the Human Rights Act, and I believe we ought to repeal it, I come to the business of the Committee with a significantly different perspective than some of its more enthusiastic members.
On Wednesday we had Jake Richards MP, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice, before us, his brief includes international issues.
I was keen to get a feel for whether there was a sense of urgency with respect to the proposals to address asylum, recently announced by the Home Secretary (who was herself, the Secretary of State for Justice until quite recently). It was she who told the Commons that, whilst we won’t send anyone back to be tortured, nevertheless the interpretation of Article 3 (the European Human Rights Convention protection against degrading treatment and torture) has “expanded into the realm of the ridiculous”.   She is, of course, quite right.
Changing things, however, presents a difficulty. The European Convention on Human Rights works on the basis of unanimous agreement between all 46 member states.
I asked the Minister “who is the enemy”, and who did he think his allies would be. I pressed him on how long it would take and how long did he think he had.
What I got in response was an affirmation that the Government had an “ambition to look at it” and  a  vague reference to “like-minded democratic governments” that, whilst they shared the “highest regard for the independence of the Court”, nevertheless wanted “a mature dialogue on a live issue that we are approaching and discussing”.
Well, with that sort of laser-like focus, I think we can conclude that this is an agenda that is going nowhere.
The last time a change in the Convention was negotiated, it took 9 years.
Perhaps, readers will now understand why Kemi Badenoch has concluded that we just have to leave.

 The economy is still reeling from the impact of the Chancellor’s previous budget.
 Business confidence collapsed even months before that when, during preceding summer, we were warned that things were bound to get worse before they got better. Then, when the budget eventually came, it was even, even worse than expectations, with its wholesale assault on enterprise, investors, family farms and family businesses, as well as employers of every kind.

After that budget last year the Chancellor insisted that she had ‘stabilised’ the economy and that, from then onwards, its stewardship was entirely down to her, and that she would not be back for any more tax increases. Throughout the last year the Government has trumpeted that it had achieved the fastest growth rate among the G7 nations– but that is what it inherited, and as the year passed, that growth became ever more anaemic: last month the economy actually shrank.

The Chancellor made exactly the same mistake of collapsing business confidence prior to this budget, in the way that she did before her last one: She spent the summer breeding uncertainty by flying all sorts of kites as to what sort of tax-hikes might be in the budget.
This behaviour is hugely unhelpful, it affects employer hiring and investment plans; it moves some markets whilst freezing others; and it increases the cost of servicing our debt.
That’s why we used to have pre-budget ‘purdah’.

And against that background, throughout the year, there has been the ever-present chilling effect of the huge extension of trade union power set out in the Employment Right’s Bill which is currently going through Parliament.
No surprise therefore, that unemployment has risen every month since the last budget and now stands at 5%, with vacancies sharply down.

This anti-growth agenda is only half the story. The other half is that the government is over-spending, even its bloated plans overshot by over 4%.
Prime Minister’s very modest proposals, only to slow down the accelerating growth of the benefits bill, ended in a disastrous climb-down..
Now the total benefits bill stands at £300 billion annually, £212 billion of which is for inactivity due to sickness. 4.3 million people are on benefit and under no obligation to seek work, and that figure is growing by 130,000 per month, – adding one and a half million more people to ‘benefits street’ every year.
The Chancellor’s response yesterday; was to announce even greater bounty: Billions more on benefits.

To pay for it, the Chancellor’s  Smorgasburg measures increasingly single out the minority who are already contributing the most: the entrepreneurs and the investors who can take their vision, their skills and their wealth elsewhere to places where there is a more business-friendly climate: And they are doing exactly that, they a leaving in droves, even the Secretary of State for Business has admitted it.
The Chancellor is killing the Goose. We are going to be left with the unsustainable position of more people claiming benefits than are paying for them.

The choice she made was to increase benefits at the expense of even higher taxes, we now have the highest tax burden in our history

The great danger of the inexorable growth of the state, now accounting for 45% of our economy, has turned out not to be the totalitarian fist raised in anger, not so much Hayek’s  Road to Serfdom, rather, it’s turned out to be an open hand dishing out largess, it’s more of a Road To Penury.