The furore about the burka prompted by Reform’s new bi-election victor, Sarah Pochin, at Prime Minister’s questions, took almost everyone by surprise, especially her party chairman who promptly resigned. Though, having patched-up differences, he is now back again.

The issue had gone completely off the radar since Boris Johnson’s quip about women looking like letter boxes in 2018
(see my blog Somewhat Belated Burka Commentary )
 Prior to that, I hadn’t commented on the issue for a couple of years
(see The Burkinis of Barton-On-Sea)
It is a subject, though very much alive in France, but which had certainly gone off the boil in the UK.
My recollection is that It was Jack Straw, as Foreign Secretary in 2006,  who initiated the debate when he spoke of his discomfort when a fully veiled female attended one of his advice surgeries.

Of course, one would only really see a burka in Afghanistan. It is the billowing covering of the whole body, from head to foot, with only a tight mesh through which the wearer might view the world. What commentators and Ms Pochin are really referring to, is the niqab, a face covering which leaves the eyes exposed.  (Given, that the purpose of the garment is to promote female modesty I have often been amazed by the creativity of many wearers who really can make the most of their eyes!)

So, would I ban the burka or the niqab?
As a libertarian I am not disposed to ban anything that does not harm anyone else.
It certainly gives offence to many people, but in a society with freedom of expression, none of us has a right NOT to be offended
.
But, does it oppress women?
Is it a symbol of female subservience?
How many wearers do so really by free choice, or are they coerced by family and social pressure?
(On the other hand, I do recall one former female MP who went to Iran and found wearing the abaya a ‘liberating experience’)

These are legitimate questions, but a ban might well make the lives of wearers even less eligible: they might, instead, be encouraged not to go out at all. Equally, a ban may be perceived as an assault on Islamic tradition and, consequently,  lead to more wearers as acts of defiance or community solidarity.

In any event, how on earth would we enforce it?

My inclination is to live and let live: fashions change.
In my youth women always wore hats in Church, last Sunday I didn’t see a single one.
My wife still possesses a mantilla, a souvenir of her convent upbringing. Mercifully, she never wears it.

There is a perverse pleasure to be had by Watching the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, try to maintain her composure -her ‘move along, nothing to see her’ attitude- when questioned about illegal immigration.
It is such a contrast to the anger and venom she exhibited when questioning Conservative ministers about it from the Opposition side of the Commons.
She would rant about how Labour would work much more closely with France to ‘smash the gangs’ and to co-operate over returns, so that there would be no need for implementing the Rwanda scheme.
Now having repealed the Rwanda legislation (writing-off the investment before it even got started), she is scrabbling to find an alternative venue. The PM was humiliated in public when Albania announced it wouldn’t be there. Now, apparently, we are trying for Kosovo.
As for co-operation, performance by the French stopping a proportion of the boats has fallen sharply. Their police (for whom we are paying) just stand and watch.
The reality is that since Yvette Cooper took on the Job, all previous records have been broken by the number of boats and migrants now coming ashore.

If we are to solve this problem, illegal migrants must know that there is a probability that they will end up somewhere else. Labour has removed the possibility of that deterrent.
We need to restore a scheme to send them elsewhere, but we also need the certainty that we will not be stopped from doing so by the courts, in defence of their human rights. Last weekend, the hapless Lord Hermer, the Attorney General, announced that we are not even going to try

then prepare for War

The Defence Review was akin to a wish list sent to Santa, albeit a very sensible and worthy list, but a wish list nonetheless: No money was allocated, merely an ‘ambition’ .
Ambitions are rarely achieved. To be reassured, we need to see the hard cash.

What was reassuring however, was the almost universal commitment to nuclear deterrence. The Government was robust (notwithstanding that both the Deputy Prime Minister, and the Foreign Secretary voted against Trident renewal in the past -as did the Liberal Democrats, and it’s welcome that even they have now changed their minds). The only party entirely absent from the feast was Reform, perhaps  further indication of Farage’s admiration for Putin.

 The one country to disarm itself of nuclear weapons is Ukraine, which has not turned out well.
The purpose of nuclear weapons is to persuade a potential opponent not even to consider an attack. That opponent needs to know, not only that we will retaliate in any escalation to a nuclear exchange, but also that we have is no hesitation to make first use of them.
Alas, the government appears to be wobbling on this critically important point:

Hansard 2nd June Column 46
Sir Desmond Swayne
In pursuit of deterrence, will the Minister recommit to first use when either the strategic or tactical situation demands it?
Luke Pollard, Minister for the Armed Forces
If I read out our nuclear playbook at the Dispatch Box, the right hon. Gentleman would be one of the first people to raise concerns, so I decline that polite invitation to detail our nuclear strategy. That ambiguity is absolutely certain, but we do not have a first-strike policy, as he will know. As the only European NATO member to dedicate our nuclear deterrent in the defence of all NATO member states, we maintain that capacity not only in support of the United Kingdom. That is an important part of our collective deterrence.

The Enemy needs to be certain, ambiguity  just won’t do.

In Kipling’s poem he observed “the burnt fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire”.
I wonder that anyone who has witnessed political events for the last fifteen years could fall for the fantasy economics of Nigel Farage’s Reform programme announced only a few days ago.

Of course, I find myself often addressing students or sixth formers who weren’t politically aware when important events occurred. Also, many of my constituents have busy lives, balancing demanding jobs with any number of family commitments. Who can blame them if they barely catch a few headlines on the early evening news, when more pressing concerns crowd their consciousness?

But these are the facts as I recall them.
In 2010 the Conservative-led coalition government inherited the worst recession since the 1930ies. Included in this inheritance was a record government overspend funded by unsustainable borrowing. Cutting expenditure was vital to restore financial credibility. Together with the Liberal Democrats, setting aside party differences in the national interest, the coalition set about reducing the deficit. This policy was condemned as ‘austerity’. It was painful, but it worked.
Had we not undertaken those deep cuts we could never have had the credibility in the financial markets to borrow the billions necessary to sustain the economy through the Covid pandemic. Or, to cushion the effects of the huge increase in energy prices when Russia invaded Ukraine.
Clearly, these were two examples of times when Governments have to borrow in the face of emergencies, but their ability to do so depends on the financial credibility established in ordinary times by matching expenditure to tax revenue and paying down debt.
Our national debt, at some 100% of our income, together with the increasing  interest payments to service it, is largely the cost of having survived Covid and the energy crisis with the economy intact. But it is essential that the highest priority is attached to reducing the debt and eliminating the deficit in current finances.
In this context any offer of tax cuts has to be accompanied by a credible explanation of how they are to be paid for. The lesson of the disastrous Truss premiership was the promise of tax cuts, accompanied not by matched restraint in expenditure but, on the contrary, further borrowing and spending.

Despite this bitter experience and the lessons that it ought to have taught us, we find that Reform has moved sharply to the left in a bidding war with the Labour Party to outspend them on welfare by ending the two-child limit.
In addition, Reform has promised £80 billion of tax cuts, to be paid for by reducing waste, ‘wokery’, and scrapping  Net Zero.
The savings will be paltry and It is not entirely clear how much might be spared by cancelling Net Zero, given that most of it is to be driven by private sector investment.
In any event the Net Zero policy is, I believe, vital for our future security and prosperity. The difficulty with it is not one of principle, but of the nature and speed of its implementation.

In the end it comes down to this. Given our recent experience, are we really going to be taken-in by a politician offering us eye-watering tax cuts without the most detailed and credible explanation of how they are to be afforded?

…Britain loses

So, following the Government’s negotiations we have now agreed to give up our sovereignty of over the British Indian Ocean Territories, which are vital to national security, handing them to Mauritius, a country with strengthening ties to China and Russia, and then to lease them back for £9 billion. What sort of Madness is this?

Also announced this week is the Prime Minister’s ‘reset’ agreement with the European Union. This was the scheduled 5-year review of the terms on which we left the EU. It ought to have presented an opportunity for UK and Europe to benefit from amended terms to mutual benefit.

We started with a huge advantage: our fish.
For whatever reason, access to UK fishing waters has always been a top priority for the EU. Even when we were negotiating to join the Common Market back in 1970-71, when they had no common fisheries policy, they cobbled it together, at the last minute, making it the price of our joining.
Knowing, that fishing in UK waters was so important to them, we should have made it the first item to be agreed, and as such, the price of everything else that we were seeking. Instead, the Government repeated the earlier mistake of seeking agreements on other items first, only to be threatened at the, last minute. with complete collapse, unless their demand for fishing concessions be met.

The Prime Minister told the Commons that, having reached agreement, he rushed straight to Lidl, to be told by staff that they were ‘delighted’.
I have no idea what he told Lidl that they would be getting, because there is no detail in the agreement at all. Indeed, it is a set of agreements, rather than being an agreement. And these agreements are merely to meet again and thrash out exactly what it is that we are agreeing to.
The PM could give no implementation date, precisely because all the details are still to be negotiated.
What we do know is that we have agreed to give EU boats continued rights to fish in our waters for the next 12 years. So, with all the details yet to be hammered out, we have already conceded our principal bargaining chip.
Indeed, its worse, from this year forward, there was to have been an annual negotiation of the extent of EU access to our waters: Every year we would have had negotiating leverage to secure desirable concessions. Instead, we’ve forgone 12 years of bargaining power.

All that we do know is that we will be subject to rules made elsewhere, that we will have to pay, but we don’t know how much.

What a rip-off

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Previously I in this column  The Monstrous Regiment of Judges

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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