Sometimes being in Government can be pretty miserable. Home Office ministers would have had a pretty ghastly couple of days with the public relations disaster, when a deportee on their one-in-one-out scheme with France returned on the first available dinghy.
Equally, the Secretary of State for Justice would have had a ghastly weekend with the mistaken release of Hadush Kebatu, the sex-offender from the controversial Epping asylum hotel, who was also due for deportation. Kebatu tried to return to the prison 5 times, but instead they sent him packing to the railway station.
I’ve never believed that ministers should take the blame for the incompetence of operatives. Ministers are responsible for policy, not for every operational matter.
I recall the occasion in 1997 when BBC’s Robert Paxman badgered Michael Howard, then the Home Secretary, after a mass escape from HMP Parkhurst. It was gripping television which saw a new departure in the treatment of politicians by interviewers, but it wasn’t fair.
Repeatedly Howard stressed his responsibility for policy and that operational matters were for Prison Governors.
So, I don’t believe that we should dwell on the discomfort of ministers over what was an operational blunder. Instead let’s confine ourselves to consideration of the Government’s policy.
On Wednesday the Sentencing Bill completed its Commons stages.
As ministers were saying how livid they were, and demanding maximum resources to recapture kebatu, they were, at the same time, pushing a bill through Parliament which will see hundreds of offenders just like kebatu, the dregs of society that wreck the lives of women and girls, avoid prison altogether. The Irony is that if Kebatu had committed his crime after this bill had passed into law, he wouldn’t have gone to prison in the first place.

The Government insists that the measure is forced on to it by a shortage of prison places.  In which case the Bill should contain a sunset clause to be invoked once sufficient new capacity, already in the pipeline, has been delivered.
At the same time, the Government prays-in-aid David Gauke’s sentencing review, which claimed that short sentences don’t work anyway; that they increase reoffending,  and that they should be replaced by community sentences.
I’m not convinced that they can have it both ways.

It ought to have occurred to Ministers that a remedy for the shortcomings of short sentences might be to make them longer.
To be fair, I do understand the issues that arise from short sentences: loss of employment, loss of accommodation, disruption to family, all rendering the offender without a support network on release from prison. Clearly there are offences and offenders who might be better suited to a community sentence. But sex offenders like Kebatu ought never to be among them

On Monday we debated the Government’s Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill. This is the measure that will enable the Government to cede sovereignty of these Islands to Mauritius and then lease them back for the next hundred years.
Only one government back-bencher spoke up in favour of the measure. Little wonder, given that we are being prepared for a tax raising budget, when this leasing arrangement on something that we own will cost us some £35 billion. It enables Mauritius to cut its taxes whilst we are raising ours.
The Bill is riven with what, in the jargon, we call Henry VIII clauses: powers conferred on ministers to subsequently change the law without parliamentary amendment or full scrutiny.
Parliament, should always be very wary about letting minsters have almost unrestricted powers.

One of the things left entirely unresolved, is what will the future hold for the important marine protection zone that surrounds the islands. It is one of the world’s largest and most pristine of such zones, a haven of rare biodiversity.
Illegal fishing is already rife across the Indian Ocean. Mauritius simply does not have the capability, experience or expertise to manage or enforce the zone. There is a real risk that the zone will be plundered by industrial scale illegal fishing, including by Chinese vessels.

The territory is more commonly known as the Chagos Archipelago. The Chagossians, who, should they want it, under the UN Charter, ought properly to have the right to self-determination. But they haven’t had their say. They are certainly very unhappy with the proposals which give them no right of return to the homeland from which they were evicted in 1968. They ought to have been given a referendum.
The reality is that it was for mere colonial administrative convenience that the Islands were administered from Mauritius, some 1,300 miles away. Handing sovereignty to Mauritius, where Chagossians complain they have been treated as second-class citizens, offends their sense of fairness.

 The military base on Diego Garcia, the principal island in the archipelago, is critical to our defence. We own it. We police and protect its waters. Why would give it away and lease it back from Mauritius which is increasingly in allegiance with Communist China. It doesn’t make sense.
Or does it?
Perhaps my neighbour, Sir Julian Lewis MP, had the answer, when he said in the debate
“On the face of it, this does not make sense, unless we look at it in one particular way. If the Government have made a decision that they wish to have a strategic economic partnership with communist China, this makes sense, the closing of the case with the China spies makes sense, and the willingness for China to have the biggest embassy of any country in Europe makes sense. None of it makes sense, or all of it makes sense, as long as the National Security Adviser wants us to suck up to communist, totalitarian China.”

Yesterday at Exeter University I debated the question  that activist judges threaten our constitution.

Judges, by their decisions and the precedents that they set, make law.  Some of those decisions are the basis of our liberty -long before anyone dreamt of the Human Rights Act.

But, at PMQs the Kemi Badenoch raised the absurdity of a Judicial decision granting a Palestinian family sanctuary in the UK under a scheme exclusively for Ukrainians.
The PM agreed, saying that the decision was wrong.
This earned an immediate rebuke from the Lady Chief Justice saying that the role of Parliament “is visibly to protect the independence of the judiciary” and that where it disagrees with judges, then the proper course is to appeal to a higher court. 

The independence of the judiciary was not being questioned, merely their judgement.
In a democracy elected politicians will inevitably give vent to the frustration of their constituents when judicial decisions depart from common sense
We are now at the stage, through judicial latitude, where our proper obligation to prevent torture has come to mean any service provision less eligible than is available in the UK.

Of course the Lady Chief Justice is right that it is open to the Crown to appeal, and so many absurd rulings, which have filled our newspapers, have been appealed and overturned.
 But, appeal is a restricted and uncertain option.
  Parliament can legislate instead . When the Supreme court ruled that Rwanda was not a safe destination, Parliament simply legislated to change that judge-made law.
Alas, we don’t take this route often enough.
When in 2019 the Supreme Court absurdly ruled that the prorogation of Parliament was not a proceeding in Parliament, and therefore not protected from judicial interference under the Bill of Rights 1689 –“proceedings in parliament may not be questioned in any court” – they made a new law setting out a list of requirements that must be satisfied before the prorogation of Parliament can proceed . In my estimate it is a constitutional outrage and Parliament ought to reverse it. I urged Boris to do so, I told him to ‘let bygones be…his top priority’. But he bottled it.

In 2020 the courts set aside the long established Carltona principle: that a statutory power granted to the Secretary of State can be exercised his subordinates.
This opened the door for terrorists to sue for compensation because their detention orders were signed by a minister of state, not a secretary of state.
Parliament immediately legislated to close that door by restoring Carltona in sections 46 &47 of the Northern Ireland Legacy Act.
The courts vented their frustration by issuing a Declaration of Incompatibility between the Legacy Act and the Human Rights Act. But, as Jack Straw said when he introduced the Human Rights Act in 1998, such a declaration has no force, it places no obligation or expectation on Parliament to do anything about it.
After the election however, the new government announced that it would use a remedial order to strike out sections 46 & 47, opening once again the prospect of compensation for terrorists. The Prime Minister called that prospect grotesque, so I asked him why was he doing it.  He said that he must, because the courts had struck down the law.
They can’t.
They have no such power
But if the Prime Minister, himself a senior lawyer, believes that the courts are entitled to strike down Acts of Parliament, then our constitution, in which the High Court of Parliament is Supreme, is in real danger.

[as an addendum. I’ve won the argument on Carltona and Sections 46 & 47 of the Northern Ireland Legacy Act. On Tuesday, the Secretary of State came to the Commons. He said that he had listened and he announced that his remedial order would keep sections 46 & 47 in place until new legislation was introduced, which would also preserve the Carltona principle.
Throughout the exchanges however, he still insisted that Parliament was bound to respond to the decision of the courts, which is plain wrong]

Usually, political policy announcements are trailed well in advance, there are few surprises. So, the announcement this week that a Conservative government would abolish Stamp Duty was an exception, and a most welcome surprise.
Stamp Duty Land Tax is paid when you purchase a property or land. First-time-buyers pay a zero rate on a home purchase up to £300,000. Everyone else would pay 2% up t £125,000, 5% between £125,000 and £925,000, 10% between £925,000 and £1.5 million and 12% on anything over £1.5 Million . Non-UK residents would pay 2% more.  Given the way that house prises have risen, the tax can amount to very substantial sums on relatively modest properties. Even at £250,000, if you weren’t a first-time-buyer, the purchase would set you back £2,500 in tax, adding to all your other costs of moving home.

Home ownership provides a stake in a stable society, but in the UK it has been in decline.  The average first-time home buyer is now 34 years-old, which is an increase of 10 years over generation.
Almost all economists agree that stamp duty distorts the housing market and prevents it working effectively. The institute for Fiscal Studies has dubbed it ‘the most damaging tax’.
Young people are often trapped in rental accommodation because the tax at the higher end of the market deters sales, discouraging older homeowners from downsizing from family homes that no longer suit them, whilst younger families can’t find larger properties that suit their growing needs. This inefficient market reduces labour mobility because the shortages are a deterrent to moving in pursuit of better employment prospects.

The abolition of the tax on a main residence will therefore improve productivity by addressing one of the principal impediments to an efficient and mobile labour market.
The abolition, however, will deny the Treasury some £9 billion annually if it were to be implemented at the beginning of the next Parliament. This sum will have to be had from elsewhere: there is no such thing as a free housing market, anymore than there is such a thing as a free lunch.
The Conservative Party has identified £47 billion from savings, almost half of which will be had from the benefits budget. Inevitably, there will be much scrutiny over the coming months about how deliverable these savings are. Nevertheless, they are essential – not just to fund the reform of Stamp Duty; they are vital for our economic survival in an increasingly competitive world. We just can’t go on spending and borrowing as we have been.

Hopefully, the announcement may also put some political pressure on the Chancellor regarding whatever shocks she may have been planning for Stamp Duty in next month’s budget.

       The chancellor has announced a new scheme to get the under-25-year-olds that are currently not in work, training or education, the so-called NEETS, offering a guaranteed job for those of them that have been out of work for 18 months or more, and a reduction in benefits for those who ‘unreasonably’ refuse a job offer.
First, I do not believe that this will offset the damage already done to young people’s employment prospects by the Chancellor’s imposition of a job’s tax on businesses through increased employers’ National Insurance contributions.
Second, the eighteen month threshold is far too late. By that time, the propensity to live on benefits will have become a habit. People will have got used to it and will have found ways of adapting in order to get by.
Third, What constitutes ‘unreasonably’ refusing a job offer?
The current cohort of under-twenty fives appear much less work-ready than their predecessors. This partly stems from the pandemic and the substantial school absenteeism that has followed it. Though my prejudice is that much of it also flows from the degenerative effects of social media and video games. In addition, many fewer young people now have had the experience of part-time jobs during school and university holidays than in previous generations.  All this means that the system will need to be rigorous. The availability of benefits is part of the problem: Life on benefit must absolutely be less eligible than full-time employment, otherwise, for many, it will be a favoured choice.
Fourth, the announcement does nothing to address the alarming growth amongst young people opting for Personal Independence payments (PIP) because they have mental health ‘issues’- be it stress, anxiety, or whatever.  Apparently, coaching now can be had from online ‘influencers’ for successful completion of the PIP application process (which, extraordinarily, is increasingly conducted over the telephone, rather than face to face).
Fifth, though in this column on 4th September I expressed my scepticism about the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the jobs market ( Artificial Intelligence ), nevertheless, if it is going to have an increasing impact on the work opportunities for young people, then the Chancellor’s scheme will need to rise to that challenge.
For all these reasons I believe that what has been proposed does not address the generational problem that we now face. We simply cannot afford to allow a generation to become addicted to a life on benefits.
We Must be bold and radical. The great non-event of last year’s election was the proposal for the re-introduction of National Service. I thought that it would dominate the campaign, but it became a damp squib buried by gambling allegations, the PM’s early departure from D Day celebrations, and the rest. But its time is now: we need National Service to give young people the opportunity of earned income, discipline & routine, skills, self-esteem and the confidence that so many of them are now lacking.

A liberal Democrat parliamentary colleague leaned over the gangway towards me on Monday, confiding that he had been listening to James Obrien’ s LBC news programme as he drove to Westminster: Danny Kruger’s defection from the Conservative Party to Reform was under discussion; Obrien asked for listeners to text him with their prediction of who would be the next turncoat.
Apparently, I was the most favoured choice!
Well, I suppose that I should be mildly flattered that the listeners even know my name.
I accept that I have been very critical of my own party when I thought that it properly deserved such criticism. Nevertheless, I remain a ‘Church and King’ Tory, even though I have also picked up much that was part of the Whig, and indeed, National Liberal traditions. Furthermore, I’m a former whip: A parliamentary political party is so much like a pack, where colleagues are bound together, not just in a common purpose, but also in friendship and loyalty. More often than not, it is the loners and semi-detached, that tend to peel off, being less encumbered by those bonds.

I do not underestimate Nigel Farage, he is a very clever politician who, in the estimate of Professor Vernon Bogdanor ‘makes the weather’. But I could never reconcile myself to his fondness for President Trump, his equivocation over Ukraine, and his stated admiration for Putin. To say nothing of some of the superficial and ill thought through policy positions he has recently taken.
Nevertheless, many constituents have urged me to support some form of electoral pact between Reform and the Conservative Party in order to prevent a right-of-centre split among voters, which would ensure another Labour victory at the next election. My answer is that no such arrangement is on offer: Farage believes that he can destroy and replace the Conservative Party and secure a majority in Parliament.
(I doubt it, and current polling doesn’t support such a conclusion).

Notwithstanding the Government’s current difficulties, the probability is that we are still three and a half years from the next general election. Anything can happen in that time.
 Political parties have come and gone in our modern history, but the Conservative Party has endured. Given the form of the parties over recent years, were I to take a bet on the one most likely to implode, it wouldn’t be mine.
Even if it  were it so, I’d prefer go down with the ship.

On the 5^th September I added a post Parent of parliaments? In which I expressed my surprise at one of the parliamentary lavatories being converted to a ‘gender neutral’ facility, by having the urinals boarded up, and leaving only the two WC cubicles that had previously been available. This represents a reduction of three fifths, in terms of service provision. Since when, I have had correspondence condemning my selfish approach by only measuring the reduction of provision for gentlemen, without considering an increased provision of two WCs now available to ladies.
My wife, however, assures me that Ladies use lavatories very differently, they often use them as safe spaces in which they can adjust their make-up etc. The last thing that would suit them would be to have some bloke intrude, whilst on his way to the remaining closets.
I conclude that, as far as lavatories are concerned, gender neutrality suits neither sex.

We often have to identify ourselves by providing our date of birth, for example when we collect a prescription at the chemist’s.
So, I am very surprised at the number of complaints I have received, demanding repeal of the Online Safety Act 2021, because of its recently implemented requirement that verification of age be provided before access to adult content can be had.
I doubt that this deluge of emails has been prompted alone, by the call from the Reform Party that the Act be repealed.
No doubt, the complaint is one of principle, entirely prompted by the infringement of liberty that requires one to give an account of oneself before proceeding with lawful business.
Were it just prompted by a reluctance to provide adult content websites with sufficient bona fides to identify oneself, then surely complainants would have been too embarrassed to bring the matter to my attention (just as, as a schoolboy,  I was embarrassed, when I sought to avoid disapproving looks, as I reached for the top shelf at the newsagent’s, for the latest edition of Health and Efficiency).

I voted for the age verification provisions in the Online Safety Act and I believe that they provide important protection for children. The Children’s Commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza, has expressed her dismay at the quantity and nature of pornography that has been circulating on social media amongst young children. The early sexualisation of children is deeply disturbing.
Of course, no system is fool proof, and those so determined, will find ways of getting around the identity requirement. Nevertheless, the provisions have already led to a very significant reduction in access to adult content and certainly prevent children stumbling across it by accident.

One of the ways that the age verification can be circumvented is through the purchase of virtual private network (VPN) software. There has been an exponential rise in the sale of this software since the identity requirement was implemented on 25^th July. VPN provider Proton has revealed a 1,800% increase in demand!
Well, as I said, if people are really determined, they will find a way to get access without having to identify themselves. In any event, I would be very reluctant to restrict access to VPNs because they are essential for exiles and political dissidents, in order to conceal their whereabouts from authoritarian regimes that are determined to silence them.

There are however, legitimate concerns about the Online Safety Act and the chilling effect it can potentially have on freedom of expression, to which I will return.

I Chaired a debate commemorating the Battle of Britain on Tuesday. Here is a gobbet from Sir Ian Duncan -Smith’s contribution:
“I was fortunate enough to sit next to Jock Colville, who was assistant private secretary to Churchill throughout the war. They were visiting Uxbridge on 15 September, when a huge armada gathered. Churchill was watching as, one by one, the lights went up, until everything was up. He said to the air officer commanding, “What are you going to do now? Where are your reserves?” The officer said, “We have no reserves, Prime Minister.” Churchill asked, “What will you do?” The officer said, “I don’t know about you, but I’m going to pray.” Jock Colville told me that, with that, Churchill stayed silent for three hours, something he never did, but that when he got into the car, he turned to him and said, “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.”