Every time there are reports of a brutal child murder, I receive a dozen or so demands for restoration of the death penalty. And so it was last week after the trial of Kyle Bevan for the murder of his girlfriend’s 2-year-old daughter, Lola James.
I have voted for the return of the death penalty on three occasions in Parliament but alas, the majorities against restoration were overwhelming.
I recall an election meeting in a church where I was challenged on the ground’s that as a Christian I ought to oppose the death penalty. I responded by quoting from article 37 of the 39 Articles which form the doctrinal foundation of the Church of England:
“The laws of the Realm may punish Christian men with death, for heinous and grievous offences”.

I suspect that there would be majority support for restoration, but that a significant minority would remain viscerally opposed. Every death sentence would be the focus of public protests. It might also be more difficult to secure convictions for capital offences as jurors contemplate the finality of a guilty verdict. In any event, whatever the pros and cons, there just is no parliamentary majority to be had for it.

The public demand for justice might be assuaged however, were a life sentence to mean what is says. There is nothing more frustrating than to see people who have been imprisoned for the most horrible offences being released to present a danger to the public once again.
This undermines our whole concept of justice, and it extends from wicked and violent crimes down to more minor offences.
When a judge hands down a sentence in court it bears little relation to the time that will actually be served in prison. Indeed, it requires multiple convictions of burglary before the offender sees the inside of a prison at all.

There was a time when a politician (in those days the Home Secretary) was able to determine the ‘tariff’ -the actual minimum time of any sentence that a convict would serve. But this was considered to breach the constitutional principle of the ‘separation of powers’ between government and judiciary. So, that power was removed from the hands of elected politicians.
Now the only lever that ministers can pull is the right of appeal that the Attorney General has, where it is considered that a sentence has been unduly lenient.

Which brings me to Labour’s recent advertisement insisting that the Prime Minister doesn’t want child sex offenders imprisoned. On the contrary, I rather suspect that the PM shares my prejudice that they should be locked-up and the key thrown away. I don’t know if he would go as far as I would and make it a capital offence, were in in my power to do so.

It is very frustrating but the reality is -and Labour knows it, neither the PM nor any other politician, can determine the penalty that the trial judge imposes.
What we can do however, is increase the penalties available to the courts. When we’ve introduced measures to do exactly that, Labour has voted against them.

Given a few moments to think about it, I’m sure we could all come up with a daft law to add to some that are already on the statute book.
I’ve always been of the view that the fewer laws we have, the better governed we shall be; that, within reason, you should be able to do pretty well whatever you want so long as it doesn’t adversely affect the enjoyment of others. This has broadly been the status of our legal framework: we are permitted to do anything that isn’t against the law. There are many jurisdictions where the reverse is the case: you may only do what the law specifically permits you to do.

Many of my constituents have an appetite for much greater regulation of our lives. They write to me proposing new laws to address any number of real or imagined problems. They have ‘happy thoughts’ about “how much better organised life would be in only we had a law to make us do…” whatever the bee in their bonnet may be.
Putting their happy thought in an email to me does no harm. Alas, parliamentary colleagues have the opportunity, afforded the annual private members’ bill ballot, to put their happy thoughts into law.
There are 13 sitting Fridays per year on which the Commons deals with the private members’ bills that were successful in the ballot. It is a minority taste: Most MPs clear off to their constituencies where they have more pressing demands on their time like visiting schools, councils, enterprises, police, NHS and many more.

When, constituents write to me to ask me to be in Westminster on a Friday to support a particular bill, I reply telling them that, even were I in favour of the bill, the best thing I can do to support it is to stay away. The greatest enemy of any private members’ bill is the limited time available to it. Opponents need not trouble to muster numbers to vote against it. All they need do is speak at length about it. If you did support it, then it would be foolish to come along and help the opponents by taking up some of that time yourself.

Such is the potential damage and cost of the proposals in so many private members’ bills, sensible and public-spirited MPs will organise small teams of colleagues dedicated to ‘talking-out’ the offending bills. It is essential too that the Government Whips have some oversight of this process. It is also vital that the whip on duty at close of business shouts “object” at the right moment to prevent any undebated bill going through ‘on the nod’.
Given all this, the message gets through to most colleagues that, if they want their bill to proceed, then it must be of narrow scope and almost wholly uncontroversial.

Alas, every now and again the system malfunctions. Perhaps the dedicated team didn’t show on a particular Friday, or the whips were asleep at the wheel, or even -extraordinarily- the minister at the despatch box indicated support for the intentions of the bill. Whatever it was, the result can be a disastrous piece of legislation. Here is one such: we now have the prospect of employees being entitled to sue their employer for damages if a customer upsets them.
We all know how difficult it is to keep a small business going, why would we throw another burden on them by making them responsible for the speech and opinions of their customers?
How daft is that?

I always find that it is best to reserve one’s thoughts on the budget until the Commons has finished debating it, and that was only on Tuesday evening – although there will be another thrash when the Finance Bill begins its parliamentary proceedings.

Normally votes on the budget resolutions keep us till late into the night. This time however, there were only two divisions: Labour voted against the reductions in pension taxation and the Scottish Nationalists voted against the freeze in alcohol duty (what were they thinking!).

Personally, I much preferred the short-lived proposals in Kwasi’s Autumn statement. His mistake was to announce his intention to implement them all at once, and at the same time as a very generous scheme to subsidise all our gas and electricity bills.
By contrast, the tax increases in this budget will hurt, particularly the increase in corporation tax for businesses and the freezing of personal allowances for the rest of us. Nevertheless, our addiction to public expenditure and the expectation that the state will take ever greater responsibility for ‘looking after us’ has to be paid for somehow.
 And we must kick the habit of borrowing: I am alarmed that the government debt that our pension funds and other institutions have acquired may now be crowding-out productive investment opportunities.

There were two ‘give-aways’. First the abolition of the lifetime-limit on pension savings. This is a very sensible measure to remove the incentive to retire early for so many professionals, especially highly skilled doctors.
Labour, by opposing the measure, because they say it is only of benefit to ‘the rich’ have, first got their sums wrong, and second, they’ve lost all sense of proportion. 27% of those who will benefit are doctors, 5% are teachers, 13% will other public sector employees such as senior police officers and many will be skilled technicians, scientists and entrepreneurs. It is in all our interests to encourage them to continue working and earning.
In any event, for all labour’s confected rage, I recall that, as Treasury Lord Commissioner, I signed into law ‘The Pensions Increase (Pension Scheme for Kier Starmer QC) Regulations 2013’. I believe the advantages extended to Sir Keir should also be available -for all our sakes- to keep skilled operators in the workforce when we are so desperately short of them.

The second big announcement was the extension of free childcare provision. I understand the rationale – clearly the affordability of childcare is one of the major restrictions that prevent parents from working. However, I do have reservations. First, there is a structural problem: The providers are in the private sector but the price is determined, not by the market, but by government. The problem hitherto has been that the price government has set is insufficient for the providers and, consequently, supply has diminished; It’s no good having a right to hours of free childcare if you can’t find people who will provide it.
Whether the extended childcare that the Government is offering can be delivered, will depend entirely upon the price that it sets.
As we have the highest childcare costs in Europe we should attach a higher priority to reducing some of the bureaucratic impositions that bind the providers.
Also, there has to be a amelioration of the very substantial tax disadvantages experienced by single-income families when one parent looks after the children full-time. It just isn’t fair.
And finally, nothing is free. The Government’s hands will be in our pockets to pay for it one way or another.

I rather regret having written to the BBC asking them to properly enforce their own rules when dealing with their highest paid presenter, Gary Lineker.
My inbox so quickly filled with emails denouncing his ‘tweets’ and supporting the policy that he had criticised, that I soon realised how effective he was at marshalling support for the Government’s policy. So, long may he continue to ‘tweet unrestrained’. 

On the policy itself, I entirely support it. But we fool ourselves if we think we can stop the boats without the enthusiastic co-operation of France. Currently, French intervention stops about a third of crossings. If, by increasing our financial contribution, we can get them to significantly raise their game, then we will have got ourselves a bargain compared to the ever-increasing costs of dealing with those who make it to our shores.
We need to keep in mind that this is an international problem to which international solutions have to be found. France is having as much difficulty at its own border with Italy as we are having with the Channel.  Already this year 20,000 migrants have arrived in boats on the Italian mainland.
Of course, Europe has to find ways of protecting its borders and I am confident that they will increasingly start to embrace the policies that the UK is now adopting. Ultimately however, we must tackle the problem at source: the conditions that are driving mass migrations in the first place.

When I was the Minister for International Development, I recall visiting the largest refugee camp in the world. The UNHCR had provided housing well above the standard available in so many settlements in developing middle-income countries. The world Food Programme provided clean water and enough to eat. UNICEF was educating the Children. The host country’s police and army ensured a level of order and security uncommon elsewhere.
On balance, the refugees were getting a level of support that would be difficult to match in much of the world.
Nevertheless, there was a significant flow of refugees leaving and risking all that they had to pay gangsters to traffic them elsewhere, in pursuit of the one thing that that refugee camp could not provide: a livelihood.
If we are to have a prospect of solving migration we need to invest in providing the opportunity of earning a living in those parts of the world where that prospect is remote. As I kept saying to anyone who would listen, “it’s all about jobs”.

50 years ago, the rich nations pledged to invest 0.7 % of their national incomes in the poorer developing world. Most have never honoured that pledge at all. It took us the UK until 2011 to reach that pledge, but it only lasted until 2019. If all the wealthy nations had honoured their pledge when they made it, then perhaps we would not be having to cope with the current levels of migration that are overwhelming us.  

I recall my headmaster taking the opportunity of the last scripture lesson of the year to teach the ‘facts of life’ to those of us who were 13 and would be leaving. It was all over in half an hour. And that was it, until a couple of years later, we got a slightly more detail in the Biology O Level syllabus.
It may seem surprising, but we managed to marry and raise families.
Of Course, in those days, we didn’t have easy access to pornography: there were no mobile phones, laptops or internet; hence no internet pornography. Even video was some years off. The best one could manage -if you had the courage – was to reach up to the top shelf for the latest edition of Health and Efficiency, and then avoid the shopkeeper’s disapproving stare as he placed it in a paper bag. Life was a great deal simpler.

Last week I wrote to the Prime Minister together with Miriam Cates MP and other like-minded colleagues, to remind him of a pledge that he made during his leadership campaign: to end inappropriate sex education in our schools.
We enclosed a evidence that many children are being subjected to sex education that is wholly inappropriate. Children are being taught about extreme and dangerous sex acts, encouraged to share intimate details about sexual desires with classmates and teachers, and even primary school children are being indoctrinated with radical ideologies about sex and gender. Many of the resources used would make adults deeply uncomfortable, especially if they were expected to view them in their place of work. It is unconscionable that our children are being forced to engage with such disturbing materials in school.
Many of the resources are produced by external agencies, some of which take extreme and political positions on these issues, including campaigning to end the rights of parents to withdraw their children from sex education. Surprisingly, a number of schools refuse to allow parents to view lesson materials in advance.

 It is, of course, important that children are taught about tolerance and discrimination and are expected to treat others with dignity and respect. But exposing children to explicit materials and radical ideologies amounts to the abolition of childhood.

At Prime Minister’s Questions this week, Miriam followed up our letter with this:
“Graphic lessons on oral sex, how to choke your partner safely, 72 genders—this is what passes for relationships and sex education in British schools. Across the country, children are being subjected to lessons that are age-inappropriate, extreme, sexualising and inaccurate, often using resources from unregulated organisations that are actively campaigning to undermine parents. This is not a victory for equality; it is a catastrophe for childhood. Will my right hon. Friend honour his commitment to end inappropriate sex education by commissioning an independent inquiry into the nature and extent of this safeguarding scandal”
The PM replied saying that he shared our concern and that he had tasked the Department for Education to ensure that schools are not teaching inappropriate or contested content in relationships, sex and health education. He said “our priority should always be the safety and wellbeing of children. Schools should also make curriculum content and materials available to parents. As a result of all this, we are bringing forward a review of RSHE statutory guidance and will start our consultation as soon as possible.”

Good, but not before time!
That we have reached this current pass raises the  question, have some of  teachers entirely taken leave of their senses?

Kate Forbes is, in my estimate, the best candidate to be leader of the Scottish National Party -and by a country mile. The difficulty for a member of a rival political party, like myself, is that you don’t necessarily want the best and most effective candidate to win. The interests of my own party and, I sincerely believe, of the nation too, are best served if they instead choose a complete dud.
Nevertheless, Kate Forbes has been treated most shamefully by the public media whose focus has been almost exclusively on her Christian beliefs which are, more often than not, at odds with current fashionable social mores. What she would actually do in the Edinburgh government, and the direction in which she would take her party, has been almost entirely crowded-out by discussion of her Christian beliefs -including that marriage is exclusively between one man and one woman.
I remember when Tim Farron became leader of the Liberal Democrats and was treated in a similar fashion for exactly the same reason.
What is rather odd, even somewhat sinister, is that politicians who adherents of other religions which, nevertheless share the same traditional approach to marriage and sexuality, are never exposed to similar criticism. The treatment of Hamza Yusef, another rival for the SNP leadership, would be an obvious case in point.
It is as if our liberal intelligentsia has decided that Christianity, uniquely among religions, must be hounded from the public sphere and confined to ‘safe spaces’ out of sight in churches.

As the Government Whip who was responsible for shepherding the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 through all its Commons stages, I have some ‘skin in the game’.
I was clear in my own mind that the legislation properly distinguished between marriage as a legal status which the state has every right to define, and Holy Matrimony which is a religious matter instituted for quite different purposes.
Notwithstanding that distinction, Christian MPs divided almost equally in support and opposition to the measure (as indeed they have on almost every ‘conscience’ vote in my experience since I’ve been in the Commons).  The implications of biblical accounts of what Jesus actually taught are not always straightforward  -especially if you’ve read the New Testament in its original Greek.
Enoch Powell ( himself a former professor of Greek) in his discussion of John ch8:  the woman taken in adultery, leaves me struggling with what Jesus could possibly have meant when he told her ‘neither do I condemn thee’ before issuing what he knew to be the impossible command ‘go and sin no more’.

As a Christian, I don’t share the positions taken by Kate Forbes or some of her beliefs, but she has every right to a hearing in the front line of our national politics.

Sir Keir Starmer made every effort throughout the 2017-19 in Parliament to prevent UK leaving the EU. He has made clear however, that Labour is now reconciled to BREXIT and will not seek to reverse it. But this is rather undermined by Labour’s current actions in Parliament.  At every opportunity, when a problem occurs, They put it down to our having left the EU. This week, for example, they blamed the shelves emptied of salads in our supermarkets on the decision by the British people to vote to leave the EU. As I pointed out in the Commons in response to this nonsense, perhaps we ought to have been told -before we voted – that a vote to leave was going to result in the frosts in Morocco.
The reality is that most of our salads, at this time of year, come from southern Spain and Morocco both of which had an exceptionally warm December followed by an exceptionally cold January. Consequently, the crop has been particularly disappointing. Our own domestic supplies of these commodities won’t arrive until summer because the cost of heating greenhouses is prohibitively uncompetitive.
Seeking supplies from elsewhere has had the additional complication of striking French ferry workers.
None of this, of course, has a blind thing to do with BREXIT 

Perhaps even more indicative of Labour’s continuing hostility to BREXIT is its determination to thwart the Retained EU Law Bill.  This Bill completes most of the Brexit agenda. There are some 4,000 pieces of EU legislation which remain on the statute book because we incorporated them into our own law as there simply wasn’t long enough to consider them individually in the time available while we were negotiating our exit. Then there was the Covid-19 pandemic, causing a legislative backlog; then the war in Ukraine seized the political agenda. Only now therefore, are we wrestling with the EU retained Law Bill. Basically, the bill empowers the Government to go through all the EU laws and, those that it does not specifically decide to keep, will automatically lapse according to the timetable set out in the Bill.

Labour and the Liberal Democrats are now sponsoring amendments in the House of Lords that will require that each of these individual legislative measures be separately debated in Parliament. It is, in effect, a wrecking amendment. It would clog-up all available parliamentary time for years.
The motive behind such an agenda seems rather obvious to me: its supporters don’t want us to differ from the EU’s regulatory regime, because to do so, would make it harder for us to re-join -which is their real objective. 

When the Elections Bill was in Parliament, which included the requirement that voters produce photo ID at polling stations for the first time on the mainland, I received few letters of objection, and I still do.
Voter fraud in the form of ‘personation’ has not been a problem in The New Forest but there are districts in some of our cities where the there has been real concern about the integrity of the ballot.
In any event, it is no use reheating the arguments that were rehearsed in Parliament during the Bill’s passage. It is now The Elections Act 2022.  So, as from May this year individuals who wish to vote in person, including those acting as a proxy on behalf of another individual, will be required to produce an accepted form of photographic ID at the polling station in order to vote. They have had to do so for years in Northern Ireland, and it was also successfully piloted in a number of districts on the mainland too: We know that it works.

We have District and Parish Council elections in the New Forest on 4th May, so get ready: When you go to your polling station you will need to take with you one of the following documents. It doesn’t matter if they have expired so long as the photo is still a good likeness.

A Passport issued by UK, any of the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man, British Overseas Territories
Or

• A Passport issued by an EEA State
• A Passport issued by a Commonwealth Country
• Photographic driver’s licence (full or provisional) issued by the UK, Channel Islands, the Isle of Man, or an EEA state
• EEA photographic ID card
• UK Biometric Residence Permit
• An identity card bearing the Proof of Age Standards Scheme hologram (PASS card)
• A blue badge
• Oyster 60+ card
• A concessionary travel pass funded by HM Government or local authority, such as a Hampshire County Council Bus pass, disabled persons bus pass or Welsh or Northern Ireland travel card.

You must take the original document with you to the polling station:  A scanned, electronic version or a copy will not be accepted. 
(Beware, University and College Student Union cards are NOT included).

If you do not have any of these then you can apply to New Forest District Council to get a free Voter Authority Certificate. This is a document containing the voter’s name and photograph, specifically for the purposes of voting and will be accepted at the polling station. The deadline to apply for a Voter Authority Certificate will be 5pm on Tuesday 25 April.  But don’t wait, do it while it is in your mind, like the right now!
The application form can be downloaded from https://newforest.gov.uk/VoterID and emailed to electoralservices@nfdc.gov.uk 

Recently I showed a guest around Parliament who was incredulous to find Bishops in the House of Lords, that the daily proceedings in both Houses began with prayers, and that much of the architecture, both internal and external, resembles that of a church.
 “What about the ‘secular state?’ She asked.
I had to tell her that we don’t have one. One the contrary, and as anyone can see on every coin, the Monarch reigns by the Grace of God (D.G) and is ‘Defender of the Faith’ (F.D).
The coronation oath requires the Monarch, as ‘Supreme Governor’ of the Church of England to defend the ‘Protestant Reformed Religion, by law established’.

Only in the Last hundred years has Parliament delegated powers to the Church of England to alter its liturgy and doctrine. Even that delegation isn’t absolute: any proposed changes to Church canon law have first to be ratified by Parliament’s Ecclesiastical Committee.
An MP is appointed as a Church Commissioner and answers questions every month in the Commons on behalf of the Church.

Recently tensions have arisen between the Church and Parliament over the issue of Gay Marriage.
Parliament passed the Equal Marriage Act in 2013, but it specifically excluded the Church of England from its provisions.  Were same-sex marriages to take place in the Church of England, Parliament would need first to amend the 2013 Act. Recently, some parliamentarians have threatened the Archbishop of Canterbury with exactly that prospect, given their frustration at what they consider to be the slow progress of the Church on this question. After all, it was only last week the Synod considered merely providing prayers for same-sex couples in church. These prayers will ask for God’s blessing on the individuals, not their union. The Church’s doctrine of marriage will remain unaltered, namely that it can only take place between one man and one woman.

The problem for the Church is that in its legislating Synod there are two irreconcilable blocks, neither of which has a majority. About 45% are traditionalist and resist change to doctrine and practice, whilst another 45% are liberal progressives that promote the very changes that the traditionalists resist.
The Progressives want same-sex marriage, whilst the traditionalists want no change. Blessings for same-sex couples is a compromise or ‘fudge’ that satisfies neither side.

It is difficult to see how this can end well. The Bishops will now go away and come back with proposals for the prayers to be used in these blessings, but they will need to be accepted by a two-thirds majority in the Synod. Currently, that majority just does not appear to exist, or anything like it.

My personal prejudice is that Christianity has always spent too much time worrying about sex and sexuality, and there are much more important issues to address.
Nevertheless, a way out needs to be found in order to prevent collateral damage to the international Anglican Communion and to the integrity of the relationship between the Established Church and the State.

The Church of England is comprised of two provinces: Canterbury and York. That division is purely one of Geography. Perhaps we could instead make the division doctrinal: traditional parishes could opt for, say, Canterbury, and liberal progressive parishes for York. Schism and disestablishment could be avoided.

It might just work.

I’ve had quite a correspondence from a number of regular remailers, carping about the Brexit anniversary and citing the gloomy forecast from the IMF.

Let’s take the IMF first. Like most forecasts, they are rarely accurate. The IMF has consistently underestimated UK economic performance. Sometimes they have been spectacularly wrong, not least when they warned George Osborne that his policy would deliver mass unemployment, when on the contrary, we delivered record levels of employment.
When it comes to dealing with a forecast like the IMF, it is always worth reading all of it, rather than relying on a few nuggets that  headline writers have extracted to suit their own purposes.
On the morning of the forecast’s publication, the newscasts made it sound like the UK was facing oblivion. But  what the report actually reveals, together with its accompanying commentary, is that the IMF thinks that the UK is “on the right track’”; that we had done well in the last year, with growth revised upwards to 4.1%, which is one of the highest growth rates in Europe for 2022.

As for the depression about the Brexit anniversary, since the European Union referendum, the UK economy has grown at about the same rate as Germany, and our cumulative growth over the 2022 to 2024 period is predicted to be higher than that of both Germany and Japan, at a similar rate to that of the United States of America.
We are not immune to the inflationary and supply-side consequences of the war in Ukraine but the Governor of the Bank of England has said that any UK recession this year is likely to be shallower than previously predicted: Comparatively, we are weathering the storm pretty well.

The Economic benefits of Brexit were all bound to have their impact in the long run. They are the consequence of regulatory freedom that allows us to suit ourselves and play to our comparative advantages, rather than be bound to the collective interests of the EU. But making use of the regulatory freedom to change our way of doing things requires the dedication and courage of the Government to implement that change, only then, and after time to bed them in, will we see the results. Alas, we lost two years to the overwhelming agenda of addressing Covid-19. Now however, when the Government does have the will to proceed and has introduced its Regulatory Freedoms Bill, I find that I’m inundated with an email campaign not to proceed with the Bill.

You can’t have it both ways. Complaining on the one hand, that we haven’t seen the economic benefits of Brexit. Whilst, on the other hand, demanding that we desist from implementing the changes that will deliver those benefits.
The reality is that they don’t want us to move out of the EU’s regulatory orbit, because ultimately, they want us to re-join it.

We already have the best benefit of Brexit is: we are no longer told what to do by people that we did not elect, and whom are unable to remove.