I debated against motion  “The Climate Crisis Cannot Be Effectively Tackled Without Transforming Capitalism” at Durham University last night: 

 

The Proof of any pudding is in the eating:

The boffins at Yale, mapping their Environmental Index on to the international indices that measure the ‘capitalism of economies’ -the World Bank’s Ease of Doing business index and the International Chamber of Commerce’s Open Market Index  -reveal that the freer the economy the better environmental record.
Furthermore that there is a critical point in the economic development of free economies when additional economic growth leads greater environmental benefit
This is the reverse of what groups like Extinction Rebellion tell us

Why?
Well., there are several reasons, but I’ll fix on just one
Capitalist driven economic growth affords citizens the opportunity to care more about the environment. We aren’t consumed with worry about disease, slums, and malnutrition, so instead have resources to care about the environment and to demand political action from our democratic systems to address it.

For Example:  Notwithstanding that our coasts and rivers are cleaner than they have been for years, every time a storm overflow discharges into the river Avon I get scores of emails demanding action, and that sort of political pressure drives the eye-watering £60 Billion investment now planned.
Equally London was often ground to a halt by smog and fog  so thick they were called ‘pea soupers’ it led to political action and the Clean Air Act.
Where is the campaign for clean air in Beijing?

 People who are worried about where their next meal is coming from, or about dying from malaria, are not in a position to be concerned about the extinction of endangered species or potentially rising water levels driven by climate change. And even if they were, they don’t enjoy the political freedoms and property rights that capitalism promotes, in order to demand a remedy

Some comparisons: In the 198ies Total Green House Gas emissions in the USSR, with an economy a fraction of the USA generated, at the most conservative estimate, at least one and a half times as much pollution as the USA per unit of GNP.
East Germany provides an example as a socialist-capitalist contrast with West Germany. Before it folded, CO2 emissions in the German Democratic Republic were almost twice the West German level, in per capita terms – astonishing when compared to how much richer the German Federal Republic was.
When the Soviet system collapsed, the enormity of environmental degradation became apparent including the  disappearance of the Aral Sea, perhaps one of the worst environmental disasters, and directly attributable to socialist planning.

I do not contend that Capitalism is an environmentalist’s paradise. Of course there are plenty of examples of capitalist excess that we need to address through regulation, as Adam Smith sets out in Book 5 of The wealth of Nations. This is why property rights, contract, rule of law, a free press, and democratic oversight are essential components of Capitalism.

But the present danger is this:
A New puritanism is out to rob you of your liberty. To coerce you into giving up meat, to confine you to 15 minute cities, to take away the convenience and liberation of your own car, restrict you to public transport, stop you enjoying international travel.
But let’s be clear. We account for about 1% of Co2 emissions. Were we to stop at once, it would make no difference to climate change. The future of emissions will be determined in Latin America, India and China. Currently they have other priorities,
Remember Alok Sharma in tears closing COP 26 when he thought he had unanimous agreement to abandon coal – but they pulled the plug on him at the last moment
 Why?
 Because their people are, per capita, much poorer, so they attach a much greater priority to increasing consumption. If you were poor your priorities would be exactly the same.

As Bill Gates points out in How to avoid a Climate Disaster, the solution lies in the technologies that enable us to enjoy increasing prosperity whilst repairing the damage to the planet’s climate.
Where socialist planning has sought to catch-up by investing in industrial espionage and the theft of intellectual property. It is the initiative and enterprise of capitalist economies that are the essential engines of innovation and technological advance,
This is Capitalism’s greatest strength, and frankly, without it we have no chance!

On the contrary, Capitalism -far from being the problem – it is the solution.

 

 

[In the student debate Capitalism won – by a very comfortable margin]

As we approach Remembrance Sunday, we are reminded daily of the horrors of war by the newscasts on our television screens, they are shocking and dreadful to watch.
In World war II the scenes that would have accompanied civilian distress throughout Europe would have been as equally horrible and shocking had instant close-up television coverage been available.
Perhaps the absence of mass demonstrations demanding a ceasefire back then, can be put down to the unavailability of that television coverage.
Alternatively, we might put it down to a clearer national consciousness that our Kingdom, for all its faults and short-comings, was in an existential struggle for survival against an ideology that would extinguish our liberties, our values and our way of life. Therefore, in those circumstances, whatever the misery and the innocent civilian casualties, there was no prospect for ceasefire, for compromise, we just had to prevail at whatever cost, or face oblivion.

Constituents email me daily drawing my attention to the horrors on their TV screens, demanding my support for a ceasefire. There is no ceasefire to be had. Israel, whatever its faults and shortcomings, is locked into an existential conflict with Hamas, whose aim it to obliterate it and replace it with an Islamic republic of the most repressive sort. There is no compromise that can be had. A ceasefire merely provides the opportunity to rearm and resume
We must do all we can to provide humanitarian relief but the horror, unless a leopard can change its spots, will continue

When the pressure is on to answer awkward questions at a time when there are many other pressing concerns to be dealt with, the temptation for a hard-pressed Prime Minister is to take the pressure off by putting the whole issue into a box which can be opened at leisure later -by announcing an official independent inquiry.
But it is, more often than not, a dreadful mistake. The short-term relief is bought at the expense of a prolonged nightmare. The government loses any control of the agenda as the inquiry meanders wherever it chooses, clocking-up ever greater expense.
The Covid Enquiry is doing exactly that. So far it has cost £100 million. The lawyers are laughing all the way to the bank. The rest of us can enjoy mild titillation, or despair, depending on our predisposition, as we are treated to what often appears as an episode of In The Thick of It, revealing who despised whom, and the fruity language they used to express it.

None of this addresses the they key issue that is of interest: why did the Government abandon the pandemic plan, previously war-gamed and rehearsed, and instead follow the herd of other nations  by locking-down the entire country both socially and economically?
The Inquiry would, ideally, come up with a cost/benefit analysis and conclude that either the Government got it right or that it imposed a cure that was, in its unforeseen consequences, worse than the disease.

The Inquiry has already revealed a prejudice in favour of lock-downs and I doubt that anything of value is now going to emerge from its further deliberations. And it’s going to cost a bomb. Its time to pull the plug and close down this farrago nonsense with immediate effect.

I’ve received a large number of representations demanding a ceasefire in Gaza. Or, to be more precise, demanding that the UK Government join international calls for a ceasefire.
I do not see that there is any possibility of a ceasefire in the foreseeable future, so I can’t see the point in calling for one.
What I do believe is a possibility, and for which we must work strenuously is a ‘pause’ for the purpose of delivering humanitarian aid to civilians. Even this will be difficult because Israel is acutely aware that Hamas has a history of appropriating humanitarian aid for its own purposes. Screening the aid and ensuring that it is not stolen will be a complex operation.
Equally, using civilians as a ‘human shield’ is central to the standard operating procedure of Hamas.

I do not believe that either side sees a ceasefire as being in their interests.
The ferocity and ‘in your face’ barbarity of the Hamas attack on Israeli settlements was clearly designed to provoke an overwhelming response from Israel. Hamas has been building its network of underground tunnels and arsenal for years. It has chosen its moment to draw Israel into a very costly urban warfare for which Hamas is well prepared. It is not in the interests of Hamas to hold a ceasefire now, when it is on the brink of achieving the very objective which its attack was designed to provoke.

Israel, on the other hand, has been attacked by an organisation whose only purpose is to completely obliterate it and replace it with an Islamic state. There is no settlement that can be negotiated with such an adversary. One side can only prevail by annihilating the other.
To survive this existential threat Israel must take this opportunity to destroy Hamas, or face prolonging the bloodshed of further attacks by Hamas in the future. I see no reason why Israel would accommodate a ceasefire now.

We have to confine ourselves to what is possible, namely pauses in which relief can be delivered and as many lives saved as possible.

But the nightly vision of Hell will continue to unfold on out TV screens.

 

I’m uneasy with the outcry over demonstrations and the chanting of ‘jihad’.
I believe in the right to demonstrate -however strongly I might actually disagree with the cause about which the demonstrators are protesting.
The line that I draw is when a protest prevents everyone else going about their lawful business: I’d sooner someone was arrested for blocking a road than chanting ‘jihad’.

Of Course, some chanting could contravene the laws that we have passed to prevent incitement to violence and hatred and, no doubt, that threshold has been reached on occasion in recent days.
But does chanting ‘jihad’ reach that threshold?
 The difficulty in any court will be the question whether ‘jihad’, beyond any reasonable doubt, constitutes incitement or a ‘hate crime’. Surely the defence would simply plead that the proper and true meaning of ‘jihad’ is purity and spiritual renewal, rather than violent holy war.

The statement the Lord Chancellor to Parliament last Monday clearly indicated that he believed that sentences were too lenient or inappropriate.
He indicated that space for the longer prison sentences for more serious offences will be made available by no longer imprisoning minor offenders for short sentences.
I am not opposed to reform and I acknowledge the fact that short sentences have proved unsuccessful, and often make for a higher rate of reoffending.   I hope however,  that when more space is delivered by our largest prison building programme since Victorian times, he will consider that part of the answer to the problem of short sentences is to make them longer.
Because prison works – do not underestimate the relief to a whole neighbourhood had by removing persistent minor offenders can have.

They say fish Rots from the head down, so let’s start with the head – the capital crime: murder. The law shows its contempt for the sanctity of life by the leniency with which it treats those who take life.
On three occasions in Parliament I’ve taken the opportunity to vote for the restoration of the death penalty. My demand for justice would have been assuaged however, if the mandatory life sentence meant life -or at least some greater approximation to it- but of over 7000 murderers currently in prison, less than 1% have a whole life tariff. Typically, they only serve between only 11 and 16 years.

Moving on to Rape, the requirement that rapists serve at least two thirds of their sentences was reduced to only a half in 2003 – needless to say, I voted against the measure. Of the tiny proportion of reported rapes that finally make it through to a conviction, in 2022 twenty rapists received sentences of less than 5 years, some less than 2 years.
The scandal is that nearly a fifth of all sex offenders reoffend within one year of their release.

We are living through an epidemic of Knife Crime, and despite bill after bill in Parliament giving the courts greater sentencing powers, repeat offenders for possession continue to avoid custodial sentences. Taking violent crime as a whole, in the year to 2021 sentences fell by a quarter – down by 19 months.

Moving on to burglary, unbelievably the average Burglar will have been convicted for up to 27 offences before being jailed.
And when any custodial sentence actually is handed down, however rare, we go through the charade of the judge specifying a  term, and everyone else in court calculating on the back of a fag packet how long it will actually be, because they all know that most prisoners serve less than half their term.

So Let’s jump down to the tail, to  those crimes that make the lives of neighbours and neighbourhoods a misery: the anti-social louts, the vandals, the shop-lifters, the benefits cheats, the fly-tippers, the fraudsters: none of whom will see the inside of a prison cell, for them it’s ‘community punishments’
The Lord Chancellor said that he was going to ensure public confidence with a robust regime for community punishments. Well he would need to, because last year I asked in Parliament

“It is reported that community punishments can be discharged by working from home. Please tell me that isn’t true. “

The policing minister replied that although they would reduce the proportion of sentences that could be worked from home, they would retain them for ‘those unable to manage a brush and shovel’.

Leniency is measured by the public frustration that justice is not being seen to be done.
Let’s bring back penal servitude with hard labour!

Until July 2016 I was the minister with responsibility for UK’s assistance to the Palestinians, much of which was channelled through United Nations agencies, some in collaboration with the EU, and some directly by our Department for International Development’s operations based in Jerusalem .
I regarded myself as a critical friend of Israel, but I kept that criticism between myself, our diplomats and the Israeli ministers and politicians with which I interacted.
At one meeting with the Israeli Deputy Prime Minister, who was also their chief negotiator with the Palestinian Authority, my criticism was sufficiently forceful to cause him to storm out in rage.
I had made a number of complaints: illegal settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank of the Jordan; the unfair treatment of Palestinians; and the bulldozing of schools by the Israeli occupying authorities -built with funding from UK taxpayers.
My concern was that the proposal for a ‘two state’ solution to the conflict, with a Palestinian State co-existing peacefully alongside Israel (which was -and which remains- UK Government’s policy), was becoming increasingly untenable given the rate at which  Israeli settlements were expanding into the occupied Palestinian territory,  making it very difficult to include in any viable and geographically contiguous future Palestinian state.

When I no longer enjoyed that ministerial responsibility, I went public with my criticism for the first time: I led a debate in Parliament on the illegal Israeli settlements in February 2017
Occupied Palestinian Territories: Israeli Settlements – Hansard – UK Parliament
Following the debate I was invited  to meetings with any number of Palestinian representatives. Basic ‘due diligence’ revealed that many of them were on the record with all sorts of blood-curdling statements about the destruction of Israel, and they had associations with terrorist organisations.
In this light it is important to see the conflict from the Israeli point of view: it is impossible to negotiate a settlement with opponents whose aim remains the obliteration of Israel. The horrific attack by Hamas from the Gaza strip which they control and govern is just the latest and worst in a long history of terrorism. The curtailment of civil rights in Israeli occupied Palestinian territories, of which I previously complained, is itself very largely a consequence of the security measures that have had to be taken to protect Israeli citizens from the terrorist threat.
Israel has endured, bombings and killings for so many years. This latest atrocity is the last straw. The Government of Israel must destroy the terrorist organisation that is Hamas, in order to prevent it from continuing its own quest to destroy Israel and all Israelis.

The action against Hamas now presents huge dangers to Israel itself, to the occupants of the Gaza strip , and to the stability of the whole region. Nevertheless, what other course is open to Israel?
It must protect itself from continued attacks
Equally, no peace process can proceed whilst armed terrorists are determined that there should be no peace until Israel is wiped from the map.

I won’t be voting to raise the age at which it is lawful to purchase tobacco.
I don’t subscribe to the view that it is proper for the state to direct us to do things that are good for us, or to abstain from things that are bad for us. Providing warnings or encouragement is one thing, but giving us orders is quite another.

A number of journalists have demanded to know how I can continue to support the Prime Minister as leader of my party when such a profound philosophical difference has emerged between us.
Well, first, the PM made it clear that any vote on this question would not be whipped, so the pressure is off; it is purely a matter of conscience.
Second, democracy is messy: There will always be substantial disagreements on matters of principle within our political parties, and more so in the UK. Our voting system ensures that, to have any chance of success, a party must have a broad base of support. Proportional voting systems on the continent however, enable their parties to maintain much narrower ideological purity and still secure representation. The consequence is that multiple parties have to forge a coalition after an election and negotiate a programme for government that was never put to the voters. The virtue of the UK system is that we make our coalitions before any election, in that each political party is itself a coalition which puts its manifesto to the judgement of the voters. Inevitably, our ‘broad church’ polity means that, though united on most issues, our political parties will have significant disagreement on others.

So, back to tobacco.
I don’t doubt that had we known the dangers of tobacco when Sir Walter Raleigh first introduced it to England in 1582 it might well have been banned, but it’s too late now.
The experience in USA of the Prohibition era from 1920 to 1933, where attempting to ban a widely consumed product, in that case alcohol, gave rise to a crime wave, violent gangsterism and widespread flouting of the law, is a warning of how this might play out.
It is one thing to demand that youngsters prove their age, but as the age threshold rises year by year, are we really going to ask the retailer to distinguish between one old man who is entitled to purchase a packet of cigarettes, and another old man, albeit one year younger, who isn’t?
Are we really going to make sure that someone, now aged fourteen, is prohibited thought-out his life from enjoying the luxury of a cigar on New Year’s Eve?
Is this really the business of government?

Aside from rescuing us from ourselves, the principal argument for prohibition is the scale of cost that falls upon the NHS through treatments for smoking-related disease.
I accept that there is a logic to this. We have developed a system of socialised medicine where we share the cost of any individual ill-health among all tax-payers. It follows that anyone who recklessly endangers their health is a burden upon all the rest of us. Does it follow therefore, that we have the right to prevent them?
It may be logical, but it is the thin end of a very thick wedge. Its logic would soon extend to an absolute ban on smoking, and, so proceeding, to alcohol, and to any number of other products that food fascists have on their agendas

A constituent wrote to complain that he couldn’t find my blog on HS2. That’s because I’ve never written one…yet.

The reality is that most MPs are generalists. Of course, some bring particular, knowledge, expertise and experience from a profession or previous walk of life that they’ve been involved in. Others will master a brief and become expert in an aspect of policy in which they’re particularly interested, or if they’ve been appointed to a specific bill’s standing committee or elected to serve on a select committee.
Not many of us are polymaths, so we are reliant on advice of experts and to temper that advice with our own prejudices and the weight of opinion of constituents, and most important of all, participating in the debate in Parliament -which is, after all, what we were elected to do.

I’ve always had a healthy scepticism for large public sector infrastructure projects. The great age of the railway, though enabled by parliamentary legislation, was financed by private enterprise which carried both the risks and the rewards.
Nevertheless, HS2 with its huge implications for taxpayers, was given thorough parliamentary scrutiny. The Act that enabled it broke precedent by spanning two different parliaments (the members of the special standing committee, to ensure continuity, had to be from ‘safe’ seats which were unlikely to change hands in the election dividing the parliaments).
The Bill was subject to the hybrid procedure because it disproportionately affected so many different private interests. That procedure places a very significant additional burden on the MPs sitting on the committee, giving them a quasi-judicial role.  Various interest groups, represented by parliamentary counsel (specialist barristers) present evidence from witnesses and cross examine the witnesses of other interest groups. The MPs sit as both judge and jury, they can intervene to cross-examine witnesses themselves, as a trial judge might.
The snag is that, like a juror, an MP nominated to such a committee has to present for every session of what, in the case of HS2, was a marathon.

Though I had my doubts, I was never a partisan. I was prepared to accept the judgement of the standing committee that had examined all the evidence in such detail. Those MPs who were most vehement in their opposition clearly had a particular axe to grind: they were disproportionately those colleagues whose constituencies in the Chilterns, and elsewhere, were going to be dug up.
I was to some extent reassured by the pedigree of the protagonists. Philip Hammond, formerly the MP for Runnymede and Weighbridge, was the Secretary of State for Transport who gave the green light to the project, he also became one of our most conservative and parsimonious of chancellors of the Exchequer.

I always thought that halving journey times was a complete red herring. The case was always, in my estimate, built on the huge shortage of rail capacity on the routes north of London, where no new railway had been built for over 100 years. The question was one of ‘if we are going to build the new rail capacity that is needed, would we build an ‘old one’ or one using the latest cutting-edge technology?

We went for the latest technology, and that is largely responsible for the exponential rise in costs.
We have a duty to review the decisions we made in the light of the detrimental impact that these costs have on other important national priorities. It is always difficult to admit a mistake, particularly such a costly one, but it may be better than compounding the mistake by ploughing on.
I will await the outcome of the PM’s review before deliberating further.

I read that during a Department of Trade seminar, organised by its ‘LGTBQ+ Network’ sixty participating civil servants were asked to describe their weekend but were told avoid mentioning the gender of anyone, or pronouns that would give it away. An example given was not to say “I went home to visit Mum and Dad” because some people may have two mothers or two fathers.

I don’t have any statistics, but I suspect that families with two fathers or two mothers are still relatively rare. In all probability, many more families may be less fortunate in only having one parent, be it a father or a mother.

I cannot imagine how someone with a widow for a mother would be offended by any mention that I visited my father over a weekend. No more so, can I imagine that a fellow with two mothers at home would be upset by such a reference to my father.
It is, of course, complete nonsense. Irrespective of our sex and sexual preferences, we are all quite capable and broad-minded enough to chat about what we did at the weekend without our colleagues being upset by references to our mothers and fathers, whether they possess such parents themselves or not.

What this is really about is given away by the earlier part of the instruction namely, to avoid mentioning anyone’s gender. What they seek is the abolition of the concept of fatherhood and motherhood in entirety, replacing it instead with a gender-free concept of parenthood.

Now, I’ve previously made clear in this column that I consider this concept of separating sex and gender as pretty nutty. Nevertheless, given my preference for freedom of expression, if people want to espouse this nonsense, that is entirely a matter for them. In my opinion they are entitled to believe that there are any number of genders. Just as I am entitled to recognise only two, male and female (whist keeping an open mind about hermaphrodites).

What is increasingly sinister however, is the attempt to bully those of us who reject this new ideology which suggests that life is not unlike a supermarket where you can choose your gender much as you choose a breakfast cereal.
Telling us we will upset others by using gender specific nouns like mother and father, is clearly an attempt to coerce us into abandoning them. Effectively it is telling us that polite and decent people don’t use those offensive words.

I’m not normally a conspiracy theorist, but I’ve begun to wonder if there is one.
Why is it that this new gender ideology is trying to purge us of everything that we have considered familiar, even normal?
I don’t know, but I’m working on it.