Recognition of a Palestinian state, will not cerate one. It would be a gesture, but it would be an impottant one nevertheless

Constituents have emailed me over the last year or so, in pursuit of ‘uniting the right’ through a merger or pact between Reform and the Conservative Party, with the objective of avoiding perpetuating government by the Labour Party. Of course, the Runcorn by-election and the Local Elections on Thursday have created a greater urgency and accelerated this email correspondence over the last 48 hours.
The difficulty is that no such arrangement is on offer. On current performance, Reform is convinced that it can beat Labour without any pact with the Tories.
Equally, for the Tories, nothing ever turns out to be as bad as first reported. It will take time to see if the Conservative Party can recover its reputation for competence and with that, its electoral support. Tories will want to watch as Reform has to survive the much greater level of media scrutiny that will now accompany its electoral success. The life of this Parliament will be a marathon and not a sprint: it is far too soon to make predictions as to how things will progress and what will be he impact of, as yet unknown events.

Nevertheless, when the next general election is much closer, if the polling and the way that political landscape has developed suggests that minority support for a further term of Labour government is likely to prevail, then both Reform and the Conservatives may review the question of an electoral pact as the lesser of two evils.

A number of difficulties will arise for any such endeavour.
There can be no doubt that Nigel Farage has been one of the most influential politicians of my lifetime. He was once an enthusiastic Conservative, a devotee of Sir Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher. Yet he became convinced that the Conservatives would never be persuaded to leave the EU and for that reason would need to be destroyed and replaced. Inevitably, this history makes for a relatively difficult reconciliation.
Next, as Reform has advanced at the expense of Conservative support, it has increasingly turned its attention to the battle to win support from former Labour voters. As it has done so, its rhetoric and policy is becoming more remote from the free market economics that are core beliefs of ‘Thatcherite’ Conservatives, and which were once Farage’s original inspiration.
Third, Reform is determined to implement proportional representation which is anathema to Tories, who believe that it will perpetuate continental style coalition government.
Finally, Farage is someone that many Conservatives detest. He has been an apologist for both Putin and also for some of the most egregious behaviour of Donald Trump.

Detestation, however, is still negotiable and ultimately, expediency will prevail.
A view will be taken on the basis of an electoral calculation of the consequences of not negotiating a pact. Until that time, both Conservatives and Reform, will be each hoping that their fortunes and the turn of events will enable them to avoid having to consider it.

It is just far too soon to be led by an over-excited press, to be speculating about it.

I’ve rarely ever agreed with Ed Miliband. In contrast I usually agree with, Sammy Wilson, the Democratic Unionist MP for East Antrim. Strangely, I found the position completely reversed on Tuesday at Energy and Climate Change questions in the Commons.
Sammy questioned Ed regarding an issue on which I’d had a score of emails from constituents. I don’t know where they got the story from but I’ve been confidently replying that it is utter nonsense. Here is Tuesday’s exchange between Sammy & Ed:

Sammy Wilson
In the 1970s, global warmists wanted to put black dust on the Arctic to block the sun. Now the Minister wants to put black dust on clouds to block the sun again. Is his plan not bonkers? £50 million of taxpayer’s money has been spent, which will only put up energy prices even further.

Ed Milliband
Secretary of State, Energy & Climate Change
This is like conspiracy theories gone mad. I feel like we have entered a whacky world. Let us keep our eyes on the prize. As a country, we are vulnerable because of our exposure to fossil fuels. This Government has one mission alone: to get clean, home-grown power, so that we take back control.

I share Tony Blair’s doubts about the Government’s timetable for achieving net zero carbon emissions. We are in danger of crippling industry with uncompetitive energy costs in an expensive race to net zero.
That said, I do support the objective, if not the timetable. Achieving the objective will, in the long run, reduce our energy costs and rescue our planet.
 The important thing about net zero however, is understanding the meaning and importance of ‘net’.
No matter how hard we try, and how difficult we make life for ourselves in the medium term, we are still going to be reliant on hydrocarbons to generate power in a substantial number of processes and applications for many years yet. This will continue to generate carbon dioxide emissions that warm the climate. The requirement is to remove sufficient carbon from the atmosphere so that what we take out, balances what we continue to generate.
Carbon capture and storage can be achieved by enlightened agricultural policy but, in my estimate, technology will prove much more important.
The capability to sequester carbon dioxide from the air is a technology developed over a century ago. It does not involve diming the sun, or any other such nonsense. It is however, an energy hungry process which we need to improve before implementing on an industrial scale.

Technology ‘to the rescue’ will be politically much more tolerable than persuading people to give up meat, dairy products, private transport , and overseas holidays, or -for the conspiracy theorists- forgoing sunshine.

 

 

Previously I in this column  The Monstrous Regiment of Judges

Nevertheless, I have a high regard for Judges, I know several personally that are I consider to be excellent. I acknowledge that throughout history the judiciary have been a bulwark in the creation and defence of our liberty.

That said, on Tuesday, during questions to the Secretary of State for Justice, the Lord Chancellor took every opportunity to lecture MPs telling us not to compromise the independence of the judiciary. In my estimate however, criticising judges and their decisions does not compromise their independence. Members of Parliament have an absolute right to give voice to the exasperation of constituents about some judicial decisions. We would only compromise judicial independence if we sought to influence them beforehand or to take their decisions ourselves.
It is perfectly proper that judges, and the manner in which they are appointed, are scrutinised in Parliament.

Over recent weeks there have been a series of bizarre judgements at immigration tribunals, preventing the deportation of foreign offenders. It raises the question of how some of the judges at these tribunals ever came to be appointed.
Blatant political partiality should certainly disqualify any candidate. We do, after all, aspire to an ‘independent’ judiciary. Nevertheless, one such judge who determines asylum and deportation appeals, publicly supported Labour’s plans to scrap the Rwanda scheme and for illegal entry into the United Kingdom to be decriminalised. He has even said that the Conservative Party should be treated the same way as Nazis and cancer!
How on earth was he ever get past the most rudimentary scrutiny process?

The Judicial Appointments Commission is the body responsible for selecting judges. Its Chairman is Helen Pitcher KC, who resigned in January this year as chairman of the Criminal Cases Review Commission, having been rebuked for failing in her duties during one of the worst miscarriages of justice in recent memory (Andy Malkinson was imprisoned for 17 years for a rape he did not commit). Yet she is still in charge of judicial appointments.  
As Robert Jenrick complained in the Commons “Her commission has failed to conduct the most basic checks on potential judges, either out of sheer incompetence, or out of sympathy with their hard-left views on open borders. The commission is broken and is bringing the independence of the judiciary into disrepute. How much longer will it take for the Justice Secretary to act and remove the chair of this commission from her position and defend the independence and reputation of the judiciary?”

Strong Stuff. Nevertheless, it would be remiss of me, not to welcome the sanity of the Supreme Court judgement in their ruling that, in law, ‘woman’ means a biological woman (with the 23^rd  Pair of XY chromosomes  in each and every cell).
Actually, the judgement is very balanced and protective of the rights of those suffering from gender dysphoria.
In my experience, those that suffer from the condition, always felt that they were born in the wrong body, and they are not obsessed with participating in competitive female sports or which lavatories they use. They are misrepresented by the activists who seek to tell our children that there are 68 genders, or the grotesque wish of rapists  to be incarcerated in female prisons.

Some constituents have demanded to know why that decision was one for the Court and not Parliament. The role of the Court is to determine what the laws passed by Parliament actually mean in practice. Parliament remains supreme: if it doesn’t like the interpretation reached by the Court, it can legislate to change the law.

All democrats should protest, raising our voices against the imminent execution of five political prisoners who have suddenly been transferred from Evin Prison to Ghezelhesar Prison on April 16, 2025:

A group of political prisoners previously held in Tehran’s Evin Prison have been forcibly and violently transferred to Ghezelhesar Prison, raising alarm over the possibility of imminent execution. On April 16, 2025, Babak Alipour, Vahid Baniamerian, Pouya Ghobadi, Mohammad Taghavi, and Ali Akbar Daneshvarkar—who are all on death row—were moved under heavy security. According to sources, the prison ward was placed on lockdown to prevent protests against the transfer. In many previous cases, such transfers have preceded executions.

Relatives of the prisoners report that they have endured prolonged solitary confinement, torture, and consistent denial of legal representation. Some have been subjected to repeated mock executions and threatened with execution in the field—tactics known to inflict severe psychological trauma.

The Islamic Republic has a long history of executing political prisoners around international holidays, fueling concern that these men may be executed during the upcoming Easter holidays. Iran Human Rights has warned of the grave and immediate danger facing the prisoners and has called on the international community, particularly governments with diplomatic ties to Iran, to intervene urgently.

“We call on the people of Iran, civil society organizations, and the international community to pay close attention to the situation of political prisoners sentenced to death,” a relative stated. “The Islamic Republic has repeatedly used silence and media blackout to carry out executions.”

Executions in Iran have sharply increased following the end of Nowrouz and Ramadan.

The five men, along with Abolhassan Montazer—whose current status remains unknown—were sentenced to death on November 25, 2024, by Branch 26 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court, presided over by Judge Iman Afshari. They were convicted of “baghy” (armed rebellion) for alleged membership in the Mojahedin Khalgh Organization. Additionally, they received sentences of imprisonment and internal exile for charges including “assembly and collusion to disrupt national security” and “forming an illegal group.”

All six have long histories of political persecution and previous arrests spanning decades. They were detained between December 22, 2023, and February 23, 2024, and formally indicted on May 14, 2024. Until the recent transfer, they were held in Evin Prison in Tehran.

Read the full sytory at: 5 political prisoners on death row in Qezel Hesar Prison. – Communication and Education Centre

 

In this column last week,  I criticised President Trump’s trade policy, warning that it risked making US industry inefficient and uncompetitive (USA will increasingly mirror Russia in its economic decline and dishonest crony-capitalism.)
The attitude that underlies protectionist trade policy is all too common. It is the principle, after all, that underlies the EU’s customs union: a tariff wall to exclude or disadvantage trade with the outside world whilst promoting free trade amongst its own members. One might even go so far as to say that the EU provoked retaliatory tariffs from Trump, given the way that it penalised US manufactures and agricultural produce through its own tariffs and non-tariff barriers.
Worse still, for many years the EU subsidised its own agricultural produce through the Common Agricultural Policy, generating large surpluses, that were then dumped on world markets with devastating consequences for the earnings of less developed countries, whose only access to capital was dependent upon revenues from their own agricultural exports.

The ’exports=good and imports=bad’ approach to trade policy by ‘nationalist’ politicians’ is an ignorant throw-back to the Mercantilism of former centuries, which treated trade as almost a substitute for warfare, rather than a system of trade to mutual advantage.
A great economic power is not undermined by its reliance on imports. Even when Great Britain was the ‘workshop of the World’ following the Industrial Revolution, we ran a balance of trade deficit. The Cotton Industry, which was the engine of our economy, was reliant on a wholly imported raw product.  This was compensated for, not just manufacturing, but by ‘invisibles’ in the form of shipping and the export of capital -such as financing the US railroad expansion.

Both Trump and his Vice-President  are exercised over what they consider as the export of manufacturing jobs by US reliance on imports from overseas. But any calculation must recognise that it isn’t just about the jobs.
Obviously, if my climate doesn’t lend itself to growing desirable tropical fruit, I’m not sacrificing any domestic jobs by importing those fruits. However, Ricardo’s law of Comparative Advantage is rather more subtle: suppose I’m a highly skilled engineer and I employ a cleaner. Nevertheless, I reckon that I can clean more effectively and efficiently than my cleaner can. Should I stop exporting that jog to the cleaner and do my own cleaning?
Of course not, because, in the time that I give up to cleaning, I will have forgone the much higher earnings I could have earned using my engineering skills. The reality is that I don’t want the cleaner’s job even though I am better at it.
The same principle applies to an advanced economy: It should deploy its resources of land, labour and capital where it can do best and earn most -rather than incurring the opportunity cost of using some of them up to produce things of less value.

The UK doesn’t export a great deal of manufactured goods, but despite being a small Island our earnings from exporting manufactured goods are in the top ten internationally: our strength is at the high-tech end of precision manufacturing. So, the question is, given where our strength lies, should we be investing our very scarce capital and skilled resources into saving our steel making capacity, in a world where there is already a surplus, and where we haven’t made a success of it for decades?
Whatever the answer, its an important question to ask

When President trump announced his tariffs, describing it as ‘liberation day’, I told the Commons that, on the contrary, it was the very antithesis of liberation because tariffs always and everywhere reduce the choice available to customers. They are a conspiracy by producers and politicians against the interests of ordinary customers.
Nevertheless, tariffs have a long history even in our own great free-trading nation. Indeed, my own Tory Party split -and consequently was out of power for a generation- when Sir Robert Peel and the Duke of Wellington succeeded in repealing the Corn Laws in in 1846.  Thereafter, the burnt and bandaged hand wandered back towards the flame in the guise of a policy of ‘imperial preference’ before a policy of full-blown tariffs were once more disastrously imposed in the 1930ies.
Our post-war prosperity is largely a consequence of enlightened abandonment of tariffs, superintended by the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs signed initially by 23 nations in 1947, and which later became the World Trade Organisation.
The greatest US President of my political lifetime was Ronald Reagan. I recently came across his 1987 speech on tariffs. Here is an extract

“First, when someone says let’s impose tariffs on foreign imports it looks like they are doing the patriotic thing by protecting by American products and jobs, and sometimes, for a while, it works. But only for a short time. What eventually occurs is, first, home-grown industries start relying on government protection in the form of high tariffs: they stop competing and  stop making technological and management changes necessary to succeed in world markets.
And then, while all this is going on, something even worse occurs: High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars. The result is more and more tariffs, higher and higher trade barriers and less and less competition. So, because of prices made artificially high by the tariffs that subsidise inefficiency poor management, people stop buying.  Then the worst happens: markets shrink and collapse; industries shut down; and millions of people lose their jobs.
The memories of all this back in the 1930s made me determined that, when I came to Washington, I would spare the American people the protectionist legislation that destroys prosperity”

Regan was right and Trump is wrong. US businesses will quickly learn that their profits are increasingly dependent, not on innovation and efficiency, but on political favours in the form protectionist tariff barriers. Accordingly, their main effort will become lobbying the politicians for such favours rather than winning new markets. The USA will increasingly mirror Russia in its economic decline and dishonest crony-capitalism

On Tuesday we debated the second reading of the Product Regulation and Metrology Bill.
I’m not sure quite when we started calling weights and measures ‘metrology’, but my prejudice is that any recourse to newspeak is probably to cloak some Orwellian enterprise.
The Secretary of State insisted that it was a purely technical measure: That, as a consequence of Brexit, government needs new powers to regulate standards.
In order to reassure suspicious Euro-sceptics, he insisted that there was no hidden agenda to use the Bill’s provisions to establish alignment with European product regulations. On the contrary, he said that the Bill was a neutral measure, and that it could be used to establish new British standards which have so often in the past established the international standards.
Indeed he reassured us by saying that the last Conservative administration had been planning to bring forward just such a Bill.
We were not. Our Bill would have differed in a vitally important respect. Its aim would have been the same: to provide the architecture for establishing product standards given that we no longer rely on the European Commission to do that for us. But we would not, as the current bill does, handover the power to legislate entirely to ministers.

Parliament has done enormous damage to our constitution by delegating powers to independent law-making bodies, so much so, that when the public complain about some outrageous decision or situation, Parliament finds that it cannot put it right because it simply gave away the power to do so. We have had a classic example of this in the last few weeks when the woke-obsessed Sentencing Council sought to undermine a fundamental principle of justice, equal treatment before the law. When the Lord Chancellor and Parliament objected, we were told to get stuffed. We are now in the absurd position of having to introduce emergency legislation to put the Sentencing Council back in its box.

This Metrology Bill takes the proper power of Parliament to legislate and hands it unlimited to Ministers. Whilst, the aim of the bill may be about the better regulation of products; it also gives the Government the power to do what they like, when they like, for reasons they do not have to explain, and then impose it as they see fit. And all with the coercive and intrusive powers of search, confiscation and arrest, all of this without having to return and seek the consent of Parliament.

Democratic institutions, particularly when led by decent and principled people, need to take care to legislate against the worst case, such as government falling into less scrupulous hands. Power must always be limited, because -as Lord Acton observed- it corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Many of us will have watched President Zelensky being berated in the Whitehouse for showing insufficient gratitude, and for not having come to terms with his aggressor sooner, given that he had “no cards” and that “Russia has all the cards”.
We will have followed subsequent events with equal misgivings as the USA has developed an increasingly transactional approach to Ukraine: access to its mineral wealth, and even some of its infrastructure, as payment for past and continued support. Whilst US negotiations with Putin appear increasingly to be to Ukraine’s disadvantage.
The truce in the Black Sea, for example, will free the Russian fleet which Ukraine has successfully confined to port, when Ukraine has already secured its routes for grain exports. Equally, though any relief for Ukraine’s energy structure is welcome, nevertheless the agreement will neuter Ukraine’s most effective strategy which has been to decimate Russia’s oil processing capacity (as I pointed out in this column on 15^th Feb: Farage has tied his party’s fate to something over which he has no control )

On TV we have witnessed the appalling barbarity of Russian forces in Bakhmut, their ruthless targeting of civilians, the abduction of 700,000 children (the joint statement following  US / Russian talks this week made no mention of them, but USA has withdrawn from the international working group investigating  these Russian war crimes, and Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab, which was tracking 30,000 of the abductees have had their access to US intelligence systems withdrawn)

Despite our dislike and increasing horror at the way things appear to be turning out, isn’t  the US entitled to put its own interests ahead of those of an unimportant far-away country, irrespective of how aggressively Ukraine has been attacked?

In answering that question we need to examine the commitments that we in the UK made, together with Russia and the USA.
In 1994 Ukraine had the third largest stockpile of nuclear weapons – 1,900 intercontinental nuclear missiles. Enormous pressure was brought to bear in order to get Ukraine to sign up to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and divest itself of the weapons. Notwithstanding the resignation of government ministers in protest, Ukraine complied by signing the Bucharest Memorandum at the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe on Dec 5 1994.
In return for giving up its nuclear weapons it received assurances with respect to its independence and territorial integrity from Russia, USA and UK.
What are those assurances worth?

The Ukrainian translation of the memorandum describes them as ‘guarantees’ but the English version only as ‘assurances’. The distinction is that the US and UK did not consider themselves committed to going to war on behalf of Ukraine, as implicit in a ‘guarantee’. Rather, that our commitment was limited to diplomatic and materiel support.
Russia insists that it has not abrogated the agreement, stating that its undertaking was only not to attack Ukraine with nuclear weapons. This is a monstrous re-writing of the Treaty. In any event, Russia has indeed threatened the use of nuclear weapons.

I am confident that, thus far, the United Kingdom has honoured its commitment.
But, as we watch events unfolding, I believe that we are entitled to ask ‘what is an assurance by the USA now actually worth?’

I refer, of course, to the statement by Liz Kendall, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, to the Commons on Tuesday, which ministers and the Prime Minister had been trailing for weeks.
The Secretary of State told us that the facts speak for themselves: One in ten people of working age are now claiming a sickness or disability benefit. Almost 1 million young people are not in education, employment or training—that’s one in eight of all our young people. Some 2.8 million are out of work due to long-term sickness, and the number of people claiming personal independence payments is set to double this decade from 2 million to 4.3 million, with the growth in claims rising faster among young people and those with mental health conditions.

Taxpayers are paying billions more, with spending on working-age sickness and disability benefits up by £20 billion since the pandemic, and set to rise by a further £18 billion by the end of this Parliament, to £70 billion per year. In most other comparable countries spending on these benefits since the pandemic is either stable or falling, but ours continues to rise inexorably.

So, in response to problem which she had set out with such clarity, she announced savings of a mere £5 billion by 2029/30.

I put a simple question to her:
“because working is so good for mental health, will she require claimants to do socially useful work to retain their benefits.”
I got a one word answer: “No”

60 people were signed off onto sickness benefit in the time that Liz Kendal was on her feet telling us how little she was going to do about it.
I don’t disagree with any of the measures that she did announce, but they just are not going to be enough. She said that she would not proceed with any of the measures that were planned by the last government – and I didn’t believe they would be enough either.
There is a both a practical and moral case to require people in receipt of benefits, and who are able to work , to do socially useful work whilst they are out of paid employment.
As the number employment opportunities contracts due to the Chancellor’s disastrous jobs tax on employers, the need for an initiative of this sort will become more glaringly obvious.

Nothing will come of Nothing