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.

I will support the measures that the new Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has announced, which are designed to regain control of our borders, but I don’t believe they will deliver the result that she wants.

Returning the grant of asylum to a temporary measure, until it is safe to return, rather than long term resettlement, which is what it has become, is entirely right and, to be honest, long overdue.
The problem is that, the opposition to the measures that she announced this week, came principally from her own back-benches. Many of her proposals, and even her language, just do not chime with Labour’s DNA.  You have to remember that we are dealing with so many politicians that campaigned against every flight deporting violent criminals back to the Caribbean.
The measures are far reaching and will require primary legislation. We have already seen the Government abandon its very modest proposals to cut welfare bills in the face of a back-bench rebellion. We will have to see how Mahmood’s determination and stamina lasts over what will be a gruelling campaign.

Irrespective of the importance of the proposals she has made, they are undermined, and rendered impotent by two vital omissions.
First, she is relying on A) telling our judges how to interpret our commitments under the European Convention on Human Rights and, B) negotiating changes in the Convention itself.
A) won’t work because our courts import case law and jurisprudence from the court in Strasbourg. And B) won’t work because it will require unanimity by all signatories to the treaty, which is simply not currently to be had, nor any time soon. The only realistic course is to withdraw from the Convention, which she won’t.
Second, You have to have somewhere safe to send people to when you cannot send them back to their own countries, either because you can’t get the agreement of those countries, or because sending them there really would amount to torture or death.
The last Government had a solution: the agreement with Rwanda, at a cost of £700 million – a ‘snip’ compared with the current costs of our asylum system. It would have been worth waiting to see what the impact of the first flights to Rwanda would have been, but the election intervened and the incoming government wrote-off the investment by closing the scheme before it had got underway.
Mahmood is now looking for somewhere else they can be sent to. I wish her the best of luck.

 

There used to be a convention of ‘pre-budget purdah’ whereby, for several months before the budget, the lips of ministers and their officials would be sealed with respect to even the slightest speculation of what might be in the budget.
But in the last few weeks we have witnessed the Chancellor calling a press conference to ignite speculation that income tax would be increased, notwithstanding her earlier promise not to do so, then days later to issue a clear signal that, on further reflection, she won’t after all.
If this were just all political noise, it wouldn’t matter, but these speculations affect markets with real economic impact. Over the summer all the kite-flying from the Treasury has slowed up investment decisions and frozen the housing market. They have also increased the cost of servicing government debt, as are creditors have taken fright at some of the speculation.
On Monday I challenged Janes Murray, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, with this question
“Given the blatant breach of pre-Budget purdah, will the Chancellor follow the proper example set by Hugh Dalton?”
He replied “I fear that my history is not good enough to know exactly what that question means. I am embarrassed to admit it. I am not entirely clear, but I suspect that I do not agree with the right hon. Member, whatever it was. I will leave it at that.”
Now, I would not expect any casual reader of this column to know about Hugh Dalton, but a Labour politician, indeed a Treasury minister, ought to know that Hugh Dalton was the Labour Chancellor who resigned because he inadvertently he let slip a sentence from his budget speech just minutes before he delivered it.
Standards were higher then. I can understand why they wouldn’t want to remember.

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to address a Trafalgar Day dinner in Penzance.
Inevitably, as a great fan of Winston Graham’s Poldark novels, I reflected on the piracy associated with the coastline and the town: Piracy with the objective of tax evasion.
That same objective is also associated with our own heritage in the New Forest, just look at the place names on an Ordnance Survey map; ‘Picket Post’ just north east of Ringwood, to name but one.
The tax that piracy sought to evade was effectively the only tax that had to be paid: the Excise. Our forefathers would never have tolerated the extensive taxation that we now endure, especially the state intrusion into our private lives that is implicit in our income tax.
Of course, the other side of the coin, was that the state provided very little in the way of public services. Effectively, all that government provided for was the maintenance of order and the defence of the realm.
Government touched few aspects of life, which in turn had an impact on politics.
Frankly, it was of little consequence as to who represented you in Parliament, and political ideologies with which we are familiar to-day were unknown. So, if you were fortunate to have the franchise, you may as well sell your vote to the highest bidder. Inevitably ‘treating’ by the candidates was common. Of course, the fact that you would vote by public declaration at the ballot, sustained such transactional politics.
I am surprised that, notwithstanding generations of electoral reform, transactional politics remains implicit, and sometimes explicit, in a number of my encounters with voters. I’m often told that somebody will vote for me if I do such and such. Or, more often, that they won’t vote for me unless I don’t do such and such. The difficulty of entering into any such transaction however, is that -given the secrecy of the ballot- I will never know if they fulfilled their part of the bargain.
Instead, the transactional nature of politics is now sustained by the ‘offer’ that political parties make to voters in their election manifestoes, which increasingly involve large amounts of expenditure on all sorts of desirable initiatives. But now it is the voters themselves that will have to pay for the goodies that the candidates have offered.
Consequently, we are now in a cycle of ever higher public expenditure to afford all that the voters  were offered, and ever higher taxes to pay for it.
Within this cycle a particularly damaging phenomenon emerges: in an attempt to diminish the unpopular consequences of ever higher taxes on the majority, the temptation is to levy them on minorities. This results in ever greater distortions in markets. It punishes enterprise and drives entrepreneurs elsewhere. Ultimately, it will kill the goose that lays the golden egg, a goose that  is already paying the lions’ share of our taxes.
As we approach expenditure of £100 billion on benefits, and politicians are touting their willingness to be even more generous with our money, we have reached the position where more people are living on these benefits, than there are of us paying into the system to sustain them.
If we cannot break this cycle, and break it soon, we face economic oblivion, and we’ll all be reduced to piracy.

James Orr, Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge University’s Faculty of Divinity, was last month named as an advisor to Nigel Farage (US Vice-President, J D Vance regards Orr as his “British sherpa”).
This follows the defection to Reform by Danny Kruger, perhaps Parliament’s most committed Christian thinker .
Christian nationalism, Christian faith with national identity and national purpose, appears to be creeping ever so slightly into Britain. These ideas are almost all imported from the USA, where Christianity is used widely as the source and justification for much of the current political agenda. The worry, or hope, depending on your point of view, is that similar developments will follow here too.

I disagree with this Christian nationalist approach -I’m not sure one can call it a philosophy.
I consider JD Vance’s endorsement of Ordo Amoris – the concept of ordered love which justifies putting self, family and friends before others, -to be incompatible with biblical teaching (the good Samaritan immediately comes to mind). This ‘ordering’ justifies the America First foreign policy, which has seen severe aid cuts to some of the world’s most vulnerable, and threats of abandonment to some of America’s closest democratic allies.

That said, I’m not too concerned: Religion no longer has the same political resonance in Britain as it retains in the USA. I just don’t see it catching-on here.
In my experience voters are simply not swayed by political offerings presented as Christian and are not attracted to parties or candidates who make their explicit Christianity central to their campaigns. When Ram Gidoomal ran for Mayor of London for the Christian People’s Alliance in 2000, he achieved a share of just 2.4% of the total votes cast. The party’s share only decreased further in the two subsequent London mayoral elections, before they ceased standing.

 Christian politicians would need to be united to be able to affect change in any way, but I’d be hard-pressed to recall a division in the Commons on moral issues, let alone on legislation more broadly, where Christian members of Parliament haven’t divided almost equally on either side.

 My advice to Christians who are interested in entering politics has always been to join the party which best matches their outlook, and to use their Christian influence within it.
I meet for a weekly Bible study with parliamentary colleagues, irrespective of party, and we get along just fine. Were religion to have a more prominent role in defining our politics, I doubt that such meetings would remain so good tempered. There is something very unpleasant and divisive about politics currently in the USA.

The Labour Party owes much more to Methodism than it does to Marxism, and I consider myself a ‘Church and King Tory’: If a Christian nationalist movement did rear its head in the UK, it won’t encompass a majority of Christians, and I am not convinced that it would really be Christian at all.