Was the budget really this week?

Usually the Sunday paters would be full of commentary unpacking it.
It has been crowded-out by Covid19, but when the pandemic is over, the budget’s implications may be profound.

Budget day is misery for the Opposition. I know- I spent 13 years of it. The Government has the initiative, all the popular announcements, and the ability to disguise any bad news.
Last week the Opposition’s misery was compounded by their belief that it was their own manifesto’s large expenditure proposals that the Chancellor was stealing.

To be fair, there was a little nervousness on the Government side as some of us felt that people had not necessarily voted Conservative in December in the expectation that the Tories would bring in a Labour budget.
In reality, the budget wasn’t quite like that. Whilst there was more money for the NHS, it was by no means John McDonnell’s drive for increased day to day expenditure across the board, paid for by taxing business and the better off.

The Budget’s emphasis -aside from vital help to deal with Covid19, was on investment to address Britain’s low productivity and to ‘level-up’ those areas that have been in long-term relative decline.

This incentive to borrow in order to invest is hard to resist: currently the Government can take a ten-year loan in the markets with a zero, and even negative rate of interest.
Nevertheless, I do have reservations.

I believe in a smaller state and lower taxes, and that in our mixed economy we need more of the private sector and less of the government sector in the mix. This budget took as a step in the other direction.
Large scale investments will be undertaken by the Government, in the past government investment performance has been patchy. I have never had confidence in government’s ability to ‘pick winners’.
The distinction between what is ‘investment’ -generating future returns, and what is day to day current expenditure has often been an elastic one. Fiscal rules are not immune to bending.
That is why it is always prudent to keep the total government borrowing requirement in check and to see that the stock of government debt is on a downward trend as a proportion of national income (it still is -just).

I recall a Conservative election poster in 2010 with the image of a new-born baby and the slogan ‘ she has her mother’s eyes, her father’s hair…and Gordon Brown’s debt’.
Tories must continue to  heed their own advice about borrowing: never  to borrow now in the expectation that future generations will repay.

Addendum
What a difference a couple of days make:
What I wrote on Sunday for this column was completely overtaken by events on Tuesday.
Having expressed some concern about an expansionary budget of £30 billion, how do I react to the announcement this week of a further £330 billion.
Counterintuitively, I approve wholeheartedly.
We are now in an economic existential crisis pf a greater order than 2008. We responded then with an even larger package to prevent the collapse of the financial sector. It was tough but it paid off.
It is essential that we respond to the new circumstance to prevent economic oblivion.

 

I have had the benefit many emails offering a great deal of advice on how to deal with the latest conovirus Covid19, in the expectation that I will pass it on to ministers. The one thing that government ministers are not short of at the moment, is advice. Indeed, they have access to the best medical and crisis management advice that can be had.

One email correspondent, responding to the false news -published in Times last week- that Parliament was to go into recess for 5 months, told me that he was glad that I was being sent home to my constituency to get ill along with everyone else.
I responded by pointing out that the danger from the covid19 is not so much to our health as to our wealth (as demonstrated by the collapse of Flybe and the consequences for Southampton Airport that will follow from it).

Some 17,000 of our fellow citizens die of flu in our country every year but we don’t hide ourselves indoors to try and avoid it. Covid19 is unlikely to kill many more than flu does and most sufferers will experience only mild symptoms, some won’t even realise that they’ve had it.
The difficulty is that Covid19 is much more ‘catching’ than flu, with the prospect that one in five of us may be off-work at when it peaks, and for those who do get severe reactions, hospitals will be overwhelmed.
It is for this reason that we need to delay the progress of the contagion, pushing its peak as far into the summer as we can. First, this will relieve the NHS of other winter pressures, including flu, so that it is better able to cope with the numbers that will have to be hospitalised. Second, there may be a seasonal decline with covid19, just as there is with flu.

The key issue is what to do to slow the progress without wrecking the economy. Clearly, we want to take measures that are effective in retarding the spread but don’t have a downside. That’s why washing your hands frequently is so helpful: it is very effective and has no economic downside whatsoever. Once you start banning large gatherings like sporting events, or even closing schools you will cause major economic dislocation for what might be only a marginal impact on the spread of the disease.

If you already have a damaged immune system or are weakened by other health or age-related conditions, I can understand the need to take precautions and to isolate yourself from the risk of exposure to Covid19 as far as you can. The rest of us however, should take advantage of the opportunities to be had, carry on going shopping, going out, and eating out. There are bargains now to be had from the holiday industry, I see no reason why they should be passed-up.

Don’t waste your money on expensive gels and masks when soap and water will do well enough.
And why people would imagine that they need to hoard loo paper -God only knows.

I recall that, when standards in education were falling so precipitously in the second half of the nineteen seventies, the Prime Minister-  Jim Callaghan- launched a ‘great national debate’ to try and get to the bottom of it.
Many blamed large class sizes, but rather perversely the statistics didn’t bear them out: with the results for children in larger classes tending to outperform the rest.
Clearly, politicians couldn’t just stand by as literacy and numeracy declined. Consequently, over the decades we imposed a national curriculum instructing teachers what and how to teach, when to teach it and, in order to ensure that they had done so, we imposed a testing regime and school league tables.
There is always the danger that the curriculum becomes a straight-jacket, and that schools ‘teach to the test’ to the detriment of a wider education. Nevertheless, results have improved very significantly. Indeed, primary schools have become one of the great success stories of recent years. This has resulted in pressure on a number of preparatory schools in the private sector which have experienced falling rolls because parents have discovered that a good education can be had at their local primary school -without parting with fees.

I have a particular concern about the other end of the age range at school and college: sixth form education; we fund post sixteen education significantly less generously per pupil, where arguably we should spend more.
When I was studying for my A levels, I had a full timetable -including classes on Saturday mornings. That was still the case when I taught A levels in the mid nineteen eighties. Currently however, we only fund post sixteen-year-olds to the tune with 15 hours per week of teacher contact time. With three, and sometimes four A levels, is that enough?
Of course, the pupils are required to spend time reading and working on assignments in addition, but I am not convinced that, without sufficient supervision, they are getting a fair deal.
I spoke to a head-teacher recently who was very concerned that so little time is available that teachers have to stick rigorously to the syllabus and exclude wider discussions.
Consider how demotivating it would be -for both the pupil and for the teacher- were the subject matter in class to spark your interest and prompt you to ask a question rather wide of the examined syllabus, only to be told “you don’t need to know about that”.
My recollection was that the best and most interesting lessons were when the teacher went off at a tangent and gave us an insight into a subject about which he or she was both knowledgeable and passionate.
I fear that the current generation are in danger of missing out.

For those of us who love to sit by a log fire in a pub or at home, the announcement of a ban on sales of ‘wet wood’ (moisture content higher than 20%) from February next year, appears to have been most unwelcome and I have been inundated with complaints from constituents denouncing this latest surrender to climate activism.
I think they are wrong on two counts.
First, anyone who has wasted their time trying to burn wet wood will know what a miserable source of heat that it is. Anyway, on my reading of the proposal, enjoyment of my the log fire will not diminish: Moderately sized deliveries of logs (not less than 2 cubic meters) for storage and seasoning at home before burning will be permitted, as will the sale of kiln-dried wood.
Second, the measure is not driven by climate change activism so much as clean air / health activism. The PM25 particles that are targeted by the ban are among the most damaging because they are the smallest and therefore, penetrate further into our lungs. The presence of these micro particles has been in very steep decline for 40 years but there has been a slight rise since 2017, perhaps reflecting the growing popularity of wood-burning stoves.

Having raised the issue of climate activism however, there are other privations which will no doubt be demanded of us.
There has been Citizen’s Assembly taking place over 4 weekends , where a random selection of our fellow citizens have been deliberating, with the help of ‘experts’ , to consider what changes in lifestyle we will be prepared to tolerate in order to reduce our carbon footprint.
My own view is that the only legitimate and accountable citizen’s assembly is Parliament.
The legitimacy of this climate assembly rests on the fact that it was commissioned by the select committees on The House of Commons -before the election.
Well, we will see what they come up with…but no Parliament can bind its successor.

As we scramble to cut our emissions by all sorts of sacrifices however, aren’t we missing something rather obvious?
Last week BP announced plans to eliminate its carbon footprint by 2050. Shell, which made a $15 billion profit last year, responded by saying that it will examine BP’s proposals to understand exactly how they are calculated and set up, but the chief executive added “once we understand them we’ll think about them but, at the moment, I don’t think we need to get into an arms race of CO2 targets”.
On the contrary, a CO2 reduction arms race is exactly what we need to get the oil companies into: they represent 10% of the world economy and their product is by far the greatest source of emissions worldwide. If we require them to become carbon neutral our problem will be largely solved.

I am delighted that Suella Braverman MP has been appointed Attorney-General. She is a first-class lawyer and a fierce opponent of judicial activism.

There used to be an understanding that our constitution had a lock that required 3 keys to be operated simultaneously: only when the Crown, the House of Peers and the Commons all agreed on a measure would it become law.
Over the last century or so the power of two of those keys has diminished dramatically: in effect the Crown has withdrawn entirely from decision-making in the legislative process and the Parliament acts of 1911 and 1949 have reduced the Peers to a revising chamber with limited delaying powers. The Commons is supreme.
Constitutional theorists fret about this largely unchecked concentration of legislative power in one body. It does have the virtue however, of being elected, so that it is periodically held to account by voters for its stewardship.

I have always been in receipt of letters demanding constitutional reform, to be fair it’s always been a minority taste amongst my correspondents, but it has been growing steadily albeit from a low base. Their principal demand is for the certainty of a written constitution.
This is the very opposite of what we currently enjoy, where there is no superior body of constitutional law that cannot be altered by statute (a new act of Parliament). Parliament can make new law and alter or repeal any previous laws unrestrained. Parliament is supreme and no court can strike out its statutes.
(Under the Human Rights Act 1998 a court can declare any Act of Parliament as being incompatible with the Human Rights Act, but that will be just a declaration: the offending Act remains in force; the court cannot strike it out. In any event, Parliament itself can repeal the Human Rights Act should it choose to.)

The reason we should shrink from a written constitution is that it would establish a superior body of law as supreme, and which Parliament could not alter, and by which it would have to abide.
The will of the people, expressed through their elected representatives would be constrained by this new body of law.

Now here’s the real rub: any decision with respect to whether a law infringed the constitution would be made by judges, who would indeed have gained the power to strike out laws democratically made by elected representatives.
We would have replaced the supremacy of an elected Parliament with the supremacy of unelected judges.

Given the rage with which so many constituents have written to me over the years to vent their frustration at judicial decisions that fly in the face of  common sense (most recently, for example, the decision to halt the deportation of a foreign rapist and a murderer), such a constitutional settlement would be very much for the worse.

(…but not all the judges are barking: Well done to Mr Justice Knowles for condemning the Orwellian actions by Humberside police who presumed to “check the thinking” of Harry Miller for expressing perfectly legitimate opinions about ‘transgender’ issues)

No sooner had I despatched last week’s column than it was overtaken by events at Streatham.
I had concentrated on the on provisions to end automatic early release of violent and sex offenders and merely hinted that further similar legislation was expected shortly with respect to terrorists.
Now the terrorist legislation is of much greater urgency.

The provisions for violent and sex offenders were made under an order making power granted to ministers in an earlier Act of Parliament. All the Government had to do was to lay the order before Parliament for the requisite number of sitting days and secure an affirmative resolution in both houses. The order was not amendable and did not need to go through the lengthy procedures associated with a bill.

The Change in the law to end automatic release on licence halfway through a sentence for terrorists however, is more complicated and will require the full legislative treatment of a parliamentary bill. This is because we are seeking to achieve something much more ambitious with terrorist offences.

The order that changed prison sentences for violent and sex offenders, about which I wrote in this column last week, does not apply retrospectively: it only applies to offenders sentenced from now on. Those offenders already in prison before the order was made will, alas, still be released halfway through their sentences.

With terrorists, we want the change to apply retrospectively to those already sentenced and in prison now. The halfway automatic release for dangerous terrorists is approaching and we urgently need to keep them inside for longer and make their release subject to a risk assessment by the Parole Board.
For this reason the law requires to be changed by primary legislation: an Act of Parliament and not just an order.

Will this offend against Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights ?
A heavier penalty may not be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time that the offence was committed.
Well, the Government will argue that it doesn’t, because it is not changing the penalty, merely the administration arrangements of the penalty. A 10 year sentence will remain a 10 year sentence even if the amount of time spent inside is longer, and the amount spent on licence is shorter.
This is bound to be challenged in court under the Human Rights Act 1998 and I rather suspect that the judges will give the Government another poke in the eye.
What happens then?
Well, actually nothing necessarily: A ruling that an Act of Parliament is incompatible with the Human Rights Act is merely declaratory: it doesn’t change or set aside the Act of Parliament; Parliament remains supreme…for the moment at least.
Only when the case finally gets to the European Convention Court in Strasbourg, as it inevitably would, and were the Government to lose there, it would be required to seek to change the law back again in Parliament (the Ministerial Code requires ministers to comply with international law and treaty obligations).

I should point that the Strasbourg Court has nothing to do with the EU which we’ve just left. It is the creature of a Treaty largely designed by the UK in 1950 with the objective of preventing Europe from slipping back into tyranny from which we had so recently fought to deliver it.
Were that Convention however, to become an obstacle in the way of our determination to maintain public safety in the face of the terrorist threat, I do hope we would conclude that it had outlived its usefulness, and make different international treaty arrangements.

I was a prison visitor for over a decade, first at The Scrubs, then at HMP Wandsworth

On Tuesday last week the Commons approved the Release of Prisoners (Alteration of Relevant Proportion of Sentence) Order 2019, which is a very welcome measure: it ends the present early release regime for violent and sexual offences. Currently those offenders are released on licence once they have served only half their sentence. Furthermore, that halfway release is automatic, it is not dependent on good behaviour or on any other assessment.

The order that we passed last week changes this in two very important respects: first, it extends the release point until they have served two thirds of their sentence. Second, that release will no longer be automatic, on the contrary, it will require a full evaluation of risk and readiness by the parole Board.

This is a step in the right direction, but I do not believe it goes far enough. I believe we should be honest in our sentencing: the sentence that the judge gives in court should be the one that the prisoner should serve. What happens in court at present is a fiction: the judge might announce that the prisoner will go down for five years, but only the ‘man in the street’ is fooled. Those who understand the system will quickly work out on the back of their fag packet that he’s only going down for 2 years and six months. We should be grateful that now it means he’ll be inside for at least three years and four months, maybe longer. It would be more honest, I suggest, if the judge said at the outset “I’m sending you down for three years and four months, after which you may -dependent upon your behaviour in prison- be either released on licence, or remain in prison for a further year and eight months.

There is a whole lot more to do. Further legislation is on the way shortly to extend similarly the prison sentences of terrorists. I’ve always thought it absurd that an enormous amount of our counter-terrorism resources are taken up with monitoring terrorists who have been released from prison. Clearly, if they are still a danger requiring monitoring, then it was madness to have released them.

We also need to extend these provisions to less serious crimes, such as burglary. A Police officer recently told me that he had a graph indicating ‘spikes’ in local break-ins, which he could map directly to the release dates of a known repeat offender.

When Michael Howard was Home Secretary he used to say “prison works”, what he meant was that communities are spared significant levels of crime so long as the habitual criminals are ‘inside’.
It follows that if we want lower levels of crime, then we need to keep criminals inside for longer. Frankly, we ought to keep them inside until they demonstrate that they are reformed.

Finally, after 48 years the 1972 European Communities Act will cease to have effect on Friday night. This was the Act of Parliament upon which our accession to what was then the European Economic Community, better known as the Common Market, was based. It gave primacy to law made by the European Community over any law made in our own Parliament: It was the original ‘surrender Act’.
It was, of course, given democratic sanction and legitimacy by a referendum in 1975 in which voters were asked if they wished to remain within the Common Market. I campaigned and voted in that referendum for a ‘no’ vote: a vote to leave. We were heavily defeated: the people voted to remain by a margin of almost two to one.
Those voters however, were assured throughout the campaign that this was a purely economic arrangement from which we would benefit from freer trade and that there would be ‘no essential loss of national sovereignty’. Nevertheless we were warned by a vigorous No campaign which demonstrated that we had handed over control of our fisheries, abandoned our economic partnership with friends in the Commonwealth like Australia and New Zealand; and we would discover that, in time, the Treaty of Rome, to which we had acceded, really did mean what it said about ‘ever closer union’. We heard both sides of the argument and we made our choice with our eyes open.

The pressure for another referendum grew over the decades entirely as a consequence of the way that the European Economic Community developed into the European Union on a trajectory to become a super state with its own constitution, government, parliament, supreme court, currency, flag and national anthem. It became ever clearer that with each successive European Treaty (The Single European Act, Maastricht, Amsterdam, Nice, Lisbon) that we were losing control of our laws, our money, and our borders; that increasingly we were being governed by people who we had not elected and whom we were unable to remove.
To be fair, European advocates of this endeavour never made any secret of their intent, they were open and honest about what they were seeking to achieve. It was our own UK politicians who kept on insisting that the treaties they were signing-up to really didn’t mean what they said.

In my estimate, David Cameron’s greatest legacy (-however he campaigned and voted in the 2016 referendum), is that he committed to having a referendum in his 2015 election manifesto and he implemented the promise when he won it. I was at the very centre of his regime and I well recall the evolution in his thinking: notwithstanding his support for remaining in the EU (though he certainly wanted fundamental reform of it), he recognised that remaining required renewed consent from the British people and he had reached this conclusion well before the electoral pressure from UKIP made it an imperative.

All that is history and we are leaving
We have good friends in the EU with whom we share many interests and objectives. We will continue to pursue those shared goals and to co-operate closely. We will however, no longer be joining them as they evolve into a United Stares of Europe. We will once again be governed by people whom we elect, and whom we can remove.

I’ve had scores of emails in the last week demanding that I vote for amendments to the EU Withdrawal Bill,  the effect if which -in the understanding of my correspondents, was to preserve the rights of refugee children overseas to be reunited with family members who have made it to the UK.
(Most of the emails arrived after the debates in the Commons had concluded and the Bill was already on its way to the Lords).

I support re-uniting child refugees with any family they have in the UK, it is Government Policy to do so and we have an excellent record: In the last 12 months, the UK granted protection to over 7,500 children, and since 2010 to 41,000 children. This makes us third in the EU in terms of the numbers that we have accommodated, accounting for 15% of all claims from unaccompanied children in the EU.
In the year ending September 2019, 6,035 family reunion visas were issued to children and partners of those granted humanitarian protection or refugee status in the UK.

There is no intention for this to change following the UK’s exit from the EU. The Prime Minister has made it clear that we intend to ensure that unaccompanied children who are seeking international protection in an EU Member State can continue to be reunited with family members who are here, as well as children here in the UK with family in the EU. This is a negotiating objective of the Government for our future relationship with the EU.

The purpose of the bill now in Parliament is to give parliamentary approval to the Withdrawal Agreement with the EU which we signed up to in October last year, not to determine the future relationship which is still to be negotiated and agreed.
The misery of the last Parliament was that, the absence a Government majority enabled MPs to use any bill as a ‘Christmas tree’ on which to hang any number of obligations that would tie the Government’s hands in future EU negotiations. The current bill reverses that: it simply approves the agreement we’ve already made, and lets the Government get on with negotiating our future relationship unfettered by any imposed parliamentary negotiating mandate.
It is for this reason that the amendments supported by my email correspondents were so inappropriate.

To say that MP’s voted against refugee children being reunited with relatives living in the UK is just utter nonsense. We didn’t. The UK will continue to be one of most generous and accommodating European nations in our acceptance of refugee children.

The Government in its recent election manifesto stated that
“A strong society needs strong families. We will improve the Troubled Families programme and champion Family Hubs to serve vulnerable families with the intensive, integrated support that they need to care for children…”

In this column last week, whilst discussing food banks, I quoted statistics on childhood obesity in which children from families with lower incomes were disproportionately overrepresented.
My source for this statistical analysis was the Nuffield Trust, based on data collected by the National Child Measurement Programme: One in five children in Year 6 (aged 10-11 years) were obese in 2017/18 (20.1%). Obesity in children aged 10-11 has increased by 2.6 percentage points since 2006/07. The proportion of children who were underweight has remained relatively stable over this time period.
There is a strong association between deprivation and obesity: In 2017/18, in Year 6 children obesity prevalence was over twice as high in the most deprived areas than the least deprived areas. Severe obesity prevalence was about four times as high in the most deprived areas than the least deprived areas.

In a rhetorical flourish I inferred that “the poorest are among the fattest”.
I’ve received a large number of emails agreeing with what I said. This puts me in the awkward position of having to disagree with my supporters, because I’ve reflected on it, and believe that referring to the ‘fattest’ was insensitive, so I apologise to anyone to whom I gave offence.
Furthermore, that statement is not a legitimate inference from the evidence I quoted: even when children from lower income backgrounds are overrepresented in the figures for obesity, it is equally possible for the richest to be amongst the fattest.

I believe that the conclusion that I drew however, remains valid, and I stand by it. We need to provide support and assistance to some low-income families which goes well beyond merely supplying them with increased benefits. Many need help that will enable them to shop more cost-effectively and healthily.

One of the places where such assistance could be located are Children Centres. They were a welcome innovation and I regret that so many were closed as a consequence of the squeeze on local authority budgets. That was an inevitable consequence of the financial situation that the coalition government inherited. Now, as the financial situation improves, it is essential that that Children Centres and Family Hubs feel the benefit. Accordingly, I hope that the manifesto commitment that I quoted is a statement of this intent, and I shall certainly campaign for it.