In this column last week I set out my analysis of the EU withdrawal agreement. I did not however, say how I intended to vote, notwithstanding the very critical assessment that I had given. Since when, a number of constituents have enquired about my voting intention, and I have read in two national newspapers that I intend to vote against the agreement, those reports didn’t come from me.

I refrain from declaring my voting intentions because, as I write, the parliamentary debate hasn’t started, let alone concluded. I regard it as my duty, as the representative of all my constituents, to do them the courtesy of listening to, and reflecting on, the whole of the parliamentary debate.
Despite hundreds of emails (many of them multiple correspondence from the same senders) I estimate that less than 1% of my constituents have expressed their opinion to me. I also represent the 99% who haven’t, and I owe it to them to hear all the debate before deciding.

Of course, I do not begin as a blank sheet, I bring to the debate my opinions and my prejudice.
Constituents can clearly see that from what I have published and in my written responses to them, but to announce now how I will vote, would be to close my mind to information, arguments and events that may yet follow.

Last week I was highly critical of the proposed withdrawal agreement, and that hasn’t changed.
I do have to consider however, if there might be even worse outcomes, and to assess their likelihood.
I need to consider the probability of leaving the EU on 29 March without an agreement, and to weigh-up the costs and benefits of such an outcome.
Equally I need to consider the risk of our not leaving the EU at all.

There are 5 days of parliamentary days set aside to debate the withdrawal agreement and there will be plenty for us to consider and argue about. To decide and announce my decision now, would be to write- off five days of parliamentary time. Indeed, there is no point in having parliamentary debate at all, if we simply declare our decisions beforehand.

Here is my assessment of the Withdrawal Agreement. I leave aside its accompanying Political Declaration which is still incomplete, and in any event is just a wish list with no greater legal status than my letter to Santa.

We will leave on 29 March and nothing will change whatsoever, we will remain subject to all EU law and jurisdiction, save that we will no longer have any role in the framing of the law and regulation by which we must abide. This will be for a two-year ‘transition’.
Having waited over 40 years to leave the EU, I can live with a couple more, even at risk of temporary new burdensome laws over which we have no control.

From the outset, the Agreement binds us into a financial payment over years costing some £40 Billion, the exact sum being determined by processes ultimately under EU control.
Set against annual payments  in perpetuity, were we to remain members, this is a bargain.

So far, so good?
Well, at least tolerable?

It is during the 2-year ‘transition’ that our future trading relationship will be negotiated. The difficulty is that even before the negotiation opens we have played our strongest card by already binding ourselves into the financial settlement.

Historically, EU trade negotiations have taken a long time. These ones have a further complicating factor: they must deliver a solution that obviates the need for a ‘hard’ border between Eire and Northern Ireland.
If that solution has not been agreed before the end of the transition then one of two things must occur:
Either the transition must be extended indefinitely with all its costs, restrictions and obligations.
Or, the UK must remain in the EU customs union, and additionally Northern Ireland will effectively remain within the EU internal market. In this scenario, the only way we could preserve the integrity of the UK and avoid border checks on goods going from the mainland to Northern Ireland, would be for ourselves to abide by the EU internal market regulations.

These arrangements might continue forever, because the withdrawal agreement hands a veto over ending them to the EU. It is extraordinary that we should place our future in the hands of the EU in such a binding way, with no other way out.
We are reliant entirely on their good faith, but they will have us exactly where they want us: unable to implement international trade agreements elsewhere; unable to develop competitive advantage; they will have free access to our markets; continuing to benefit from our financial contributions; and they will have us under their jurisdiction without any of our tiresome objections to new regulation, harmonisation  and integration.
What possible incentive will they have to release us from this trap into which we will have so willingly walked?
The terms of any future relationship would have to be so heavily one-sided in order to give them any inducement to do so.
We will have bound ourselves by international treaty law without escape.

 

 

Of the two great questions to-day, I am resolved on one and undecided on the other. I’ll take them in reverse order.

First on the proposed withdrawal agreement, I’ve had well over 200 emails in the last 24 hours, about half of them demanding that I reject it so that we can leave the EU with no agreement, and the other half demanding that I reject it so that we can remain in the EU.
It doesn’t take a genius to work out that the same course of action will not deliver both outcomes.

My prejudice is with those who would leave without an agreement. Frankly, I’d prefer an agreement but I don’t much care for this one: It surrenders our chief bargaining card (money) before the key negotiations on our future relationship even begin; it leaves us in a potentially indeterminate transition beyond our control; and it treats Northern Ireland differently.

I have to weigh-up my dislike for this proposal however, against two risks identified by the PM: leaving the EU without agreement, or not leaving the EU at all.
On no agreement, before I can come to an assessment I will need to be much clearer as to the state of our preparations, and I will need to scrutinise in detail the position papers that the Government has released.
On the risk of no BREXIT, I asked the PM to-day how that might come about, her answer didn’t give me much to work with. The law and parliamentary procedure are clear: we leave on 29 March-whatever. We would nevertheless be in uncharted political territory with the Government, having lost its flagship measure, proceeding towards a no-deal Brexit, perhaps opposed by a determined majority in Parliament. Who knows what might happen next.

I am certain of one thing: this deal, however bad, is much better than staying in the EU. Whilst it constrains our economic autonomy it nevertheless gets us out of the super-state, freed from ‘ever closer union’, freed from common fisheries and common agriculture, and released from unrestricted freedom of movement.

I’ve read all 185 pages, before I come to a decision I need to read some of them more carefully, digest them, reflect on them, discuss them, and I won’t be hurried.

Now, to the other question of the day: will I be writing a letter the Chairman of the 1922 Committee asking for a no-confidence ballot?
No I won’t. My assessment is that the PM would win such a ballot, in the meantime it would add another uncertainty and distraction to our politics at a critical time.
If my assessment is wrong, and were such a ballot triggered, and the PM were to lose it, it would potentially add an even greater distraction and uncertainty, and I doubt that it would deliver us a different proposed deal to deliberate upon at this late stage.

I’d prefer to concentrate on resolving the first question, and that would also be assisted if I were to receive fewer emails, well –if you don’t ask…

The volume of email -and emotive nature of those emails- increases exponentially by the day and Jo Johnson hasn’t helped.
Gadzooks, I’ve even started getting piles of letters again, and all about BREXIT.
They fall into two categories: those outraged that we are leaving the EU and want to stop it, and those outraged that we haven’t already left yet and fearing a great betrayal.

I thought most people had busy lives: jobs, children to collect, feed and entertain, friends and relatives to visit and look after, Morris Minors to restore, or whatever; where on earth do they get the time to write so many letters & emails, or go to meetings and marches?
I have to -but then that’s part of my job.

How can we maintain a proper sense of proportion?
As the political temperature reaches boiling point here’s a coping strategy. It’s the one I use myself.
Go out into the garden and look directly overhead into the night sky (it helps if you’re in the New Forest unpolluted by street lights) and contemplate the Milky Way, our own galaxy, where our sun is just one of its 250 billion stars (and to get some perspective on what a billion actually is, consider that a billion minutes ago Jesus was still preaching in Galilee).
Just a week or so ago we discovered the oldest known star in a corner of the Milky Way, 13.5 billion years old, just a few hundred million years younger than the Creation itself. It is composed only of hydrogen, helium and traces of lithium:  The heavier elements didn’t appear until later –their manufacture required the enormous pressures created in the lives and deaths of generations of massive stars.
At the beginning of this month we discovered that the Milky Way had consumed another Galaxy some 10 billion years ago, so millions of stars are in our galaxy that weren’t even born here.
…and another thing, a year ago we discovered thin strings of gas between galaxies, doubling at a stroke the ordinary matter in the Universe. From our observations and calculations we always knew that it was there, but now we’ve found it. Which, still leaves the question however, of what has become of the other 85% of the Creation?
The Milky Way and other galaxies are not rotating in the way that we expect, and the only explanation is that there is an awful lot more stuff and energy out there that we just can’t see.

Contemplating all this might suggest our own complete insignificance in the scale of the Creation.
On the contrary, our bodies -composed of large molecules made from stardust that has taken generations of stars to create, are a measure of our importance to the Creator and his purpose.
Consider Ecclesiasticus 43:32:
“There are yet hid greater things than these be, for we have seen but a few of his works”

In any event, it puts BREXIT in perspective.

My email correspondents are ever more anxious and argumentative about the precise nature of the trade deal that they believe that the PM is negotiating with the EU, often characterised as ‘Chequers versus Canada ++’.
I believe their energy is entirely misplaced: I am prepared to wager that what will be presented with will be the blandest of statements which could accommodate any number of future trading arrangements including both Canada and Chequers.
Agreement to such a statement merely puts off the arguing about which of them it is actually to be until later, -when we’ve already played our strongest hand by paying the money up front.

This will run and run, we all need to develop strategic patience, and to ‘live in the moment

 

On Saturday we consecrated the restored Lantern that hangs above the Gateway offices to Ringwood Town Council. Fittingly it is in good time for Remembrance Sunday when we mark the 100^th anniversary of the armistice that ended The Great War.
I say ‘we’ consecrated it, but as Abraham Lincoln would have undoubtedly observed, rather it is consecrated by the brave souls who struggled and died far above our power to do so that afternoon.

When I was learning about World War One at school in the early nineteen seventies, we were taught that it was all a terrible mistake, an accident even: that through the complex set of alliances, a political assassination in an obscure city in the Balkans led almost automatically to war between the great powers; that a machine was in motion that couldn’t be stopped.
Consequently, as no great principle was at stake, the slaughter of so many was ultimately just a senseless waste.

There is, of course, no control experiment in history, no way of knowing how things would have turned out had they been done differently.  I now reject utterly however, the history I was taught at School.
The Kaiser’s Germany was a fast expanding power run by a militarist elite that derided the values of emerging liberal democracy. It was rapidly developing ever more sophisticated armaments and offensive capability. A swift victory in war with France had been the basis of German military planning and preparation for a generation.
If post Great War history has taught us anything, it is the lethal danger of appeasing aggressive militarist regimes.
Who knows how much darker the modern history of our continent would have been had we not come to the aid of Belgium and France in 1914.

It was a just, noble and honourable cause

 

I listened carefully to the statements in Parliament last week by the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State, questioning them both. I have studied documents supplied to the House of Commons Procedure Committee and evidence given to the Constitution and Public Administration Committee by the Clerks. It’s complicated!

 

When and if the Government makes a withdrawal agreement it will present it for approval to the Commons, where the Government’s motion can be carried, rejected, or amended.
The Government needs clearly expressed approval to proceed to ratify the agreement with the EU, so any amendment framed in terms which clouds that issue will have the effect of preventing that ratification, which means leaving with no deal.

If amendments seek to change parts of the agreement, they will be merely expressions of opinion, because they will not themselves change the agreement that has been made.
Equally, were the amendment to order the Government to, say, go back to the EU and seek an extension to the Article 50 negotiations, or to introduce legislation to give effect to that, or to arrange a further referendum, then again, these would merely be expressions of opinion: because in terms of law and procedure the Commons does not have the power to force the Government to do any of these things.

Of course, in the past the success of such amendments against the expressed wish of the PM would have amounted to a vote of no confidence in the Government and would have meant a general election. The Fixed Term Parliament Act 2011 has however, changed all that: defeating the Government on an EU withdrawal agreement motion would not now amount to a vote of no confidence.

The Withdrawal Act 2018 is already law, and that law says that we leave the EU on 29 March 2019.
So the much trumpeted ‘meaningful vote’ on the agreement does in the end come down to this:
Either the Commons accepts the deal negotiated, or we leave with no deal.

Inevitably there will be a temptation for BREXIT true-believers to reject the compromises that any negotiation involves, and save the £39 Billion, by voting down the Government’s withdrawal agreement- if it gets one, safe the knowledge that BREXIT is secure because we are leaving on 29^th March whatever.

 

All this is based on law and procedure, but it doesn’t take into account the politics, and politics is entirely unpredictable. What would really happen if the Commons threw out the PM’s negotiated agreement?
Could she really survive?
Would the Government really simply plough on to a no-agreement exit on 29 March in the face of Parliamentary and public opposition?
I recall David Cameron insisting that his administration would continue irrespective of the referendum result in 2016, but look how that ended.

Notwithstanding the law and parliamentary procedure, voting down a withdrawal agreement could still set in train a set of uncontrollable and unpredictable events, and that is something I and my BREXIT-supporting colleagues will have to consider very carefully when we scrutinise whatever deal it is that the PM has been able to make. In the end it will be down to our assessment of all the risks.

 

…but hey, there is still the possibility of an all-singing, all-dancing deal

I have resisted the temptation to return to the subject of BREXIT in this column for quite a few weeks. It has taken some degree of will power. I receive a large number of emails about it daily. Some constituents have taken to emailing several times a day with their reaction to every twist in the latest news bulletins. I hope they are not too dissatisfied with a simple “thanks, your views are noted” because there is just not enough time in the day to provide a running commentary on the latest news.

As I write, the latest thing to generate email outrage, was the PM’s suggestion on Wednesday that we might remain in a transition phase for a further year in order to enable the enduring trade deal with the EU to be fully negotiated and implemented, and to give more time for to the Northern Ireland border problem to be resolved.

Many people believe that time is of the essence: Another year means another year of fully paying our dues; It will take us into the next EU budget period where we will have no input to the budget setting process, nor enjoy our existing rebate, so the price of that year will be correspondingly much higher.
By the time that that additional year is over it will be over 5 years since the referendum, and three years living under rules that we have given up our power to influence.

Having waited 43 years to leave the EU already, adding one more to the two already suggested in the proposed transition agreement, is not the deal-breaker for me personally.
What is my deal-breaker, is signing up even to just the two year transition, when our exit from it relies on a solution –acceptable to the EU- of the Northern Ireland border

Signing-up to such an agreement is a recipe for a permanent state of limbo, a vassal to the EU: making the payments, but without influence.
The only solution to the Northern Ireland border is available now, and the EU has rejected it. There is no new different solution that will suddenly emerge in the next three years. Especially so, because now is the time when our negotiating leverage is at its strongest: we haven’t given them the money. Once the transition agreement is signed and ratified however, the £39 billion will be committed and they will have us where they want us, they will be under no pressure whatsoever to agree to end the transition.

Unless the EU negotiation position changes dramatically and soon, I believe that the only sensible way to proceed is to announce that we will leave on 29^th March on World Trade Organisation rules, and seek a number of minor technical agreements to ease that process, recognising that both UK and EU are bound by the provisions of the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement.

As for to-day’s rally for a second referendum, all I can say is that I haven’t heard a single argument in the last 2 years that wasn’t thoroughly debated before the 2016 referendum.
There was only one thing that both sides agreed on, namely that the voting in that referendum was vital because it would settle the question for a generation. Accordingly, it’s settled.

Overwhelmingly constituents email me to complain about four things; first because they cannot afford to rent in the private sector, indeed that they are often excluded out-of-hand because such is the pressure of demand that many landlords can refuse to even consider tenants who are in receipt of benefits.
Second, that there is insufficient local authority or housing association provision to accommodate them adequately, or at all.
Third, people of my generation with children in their late twenties to mid-thirties, write to complain that those children have no prospect of being able to afford to buy because prices have so outstripped earnings. (Consequently, we have tumbled from the top of the European league table of countries where most people own their own homes, down almost to the bottom. Economists insist that there is nothing particularly wrong with this, after all, look to Germany, where a majority are content to rent throughout their lives, but I am a politician not an economist and we are not Germans. My alarm bell rings because most of us still aspire to own our own homes, and it just won’t do if we can’t.)

Clearly, the economics all this requires such an increase in housing supply as to bring about a reduction in house prices and rents.

The forth most frequent thing that constituents write to me about however, is that whenever there is a housing development proposal, they complain that they don’t want it built anywhere them.

So, how to square this circle?

There is nothing new under the sun: Go back a hundred years and you will find that politicians were wrestling even then over how to solve the housing problem.
Over the years all sorts of things have been tried, some with modest success, and some with consequences the very reverse of what was intended: perhaps the best example of this being the introduction of rent controls which led to a drastic reduction in accommodation available, and a significant deterioration in the quality of that which remained.

Last year 217,000 houses were built, which is better than in any of the previous 18 years, but there is a big backlog of under-building to address.
There is no silver bullet.
At the Conservative Party conference there was a proposal to give incentives to landlords to sell to their tenants. It’s a helpful initiative, but it changes only the tenure not the total supply.
Here are some other suggestions.

First, the evolution of the new local planning process may, over time, lead to a reduction in the level of protest over proposed housing developments. Local politicians, instead of having housing targets imposed upon them, will assess the genuine local housing need and -knowing their own ‘patch’- designate the places where building can be more sympathetically accommodated. That process will be strengthened when they can also specify the type and even the style of development.
At present so much of this discretion is in the hands of the developers rather than the community.

Second, we need a much better quality of dwelling. I am inundated with complaints about poor quality of newly built houses, and the fact that the individual purchasers are at a disadvantage when it comes to dealing with large developers when things have to be put right. There needs to be a better balance in these disputes. I am glad that a minister already working on what can be done.

Third, to address that part of the market where private sector developers have little incentive and interest, we just have to get councils building again. The very recent lifting of the cap -which had been placed on the ability of councils to borrow against the security of the flow of future rental revenue, in order to fund development, ought now to get things moving.
Social housing however, should be for need, not for life. It is unreasonable for people to be allocated social housing on the basis of need, yet to remain in it so many years later when their income and family circumstances have changed dramatically.

Perhaps most controversially, we should consider the price of land. The extortionate value of building land encourages development suitable to the most expensive end of the market and drastically reduces the scope for building something affordable for the first-time buyer.
It encourages ‘land-banking’ –the hogging of land by speculators in the expectation that when planning permission is granted their land will be worth many multiples of what they paid.
Their capital gain will be taxed, of course, but notwithstanding the historic right to dispose of property at the best price that the market will bear, ought we to artificially put a cap on it?

Finally, I offer my sympathy, but no apology to the many buy-to-let landlords who have written to complain to me about the phased withdrawal of tax relief on their principal cost of doing business, namely on their mortgage interest payments.
The simple fact is that this relief put them at an advantage against every first time buyer in the market, it meant they could afford to offer more to secure a purchase: it just wasn’t fair.

I was dismayed to read in the national press that a member of staff had resigned from a secondary school in my constituency after a conviction for striking a pupil, in what seemed to me a rather trivial incident.
Of course, we must all abide by the laws made by Parliament. All I can say is that I never voted for that one.

I am of that generation that took a thrashing at school as an occupational hazard. I remain of the view that it didn’t do me any harm and, on the contrary, may have done me some good. In some cases the sharp painful rebuke made you see the error of your ways, and to abandon a path leading to nowhere. On other occasions a swift caning spared you the misery of a prolonged tedious punishment, and spared the teacher from having to supervise it too.
When we complained to our parents about the injustice, they tended to the sensible view that ‘the little blighter had it coming’.

Years later I enjoyed a short career as a teacher myself in a school where we not too infrequently used the cane. I recall that it was particularly effective at nipping bullying in the bud. After all, bullies tend to be the biggest cowards.

Of course, there have always been excellent and well-disciplined schools that thrived without any corporal punishment. It does however, take a lot of hard work and teachers do have an enormous amount on their plates. No doubt, there are extraordinary teachers who can quell disorder with just a stern look, but that ability is rare.
If punishing a pupil will involve a delayed and time-consuming administrative process, there may be a temptation to ignore the offence, perhaps to choose not to have heard a profanity, or answering-back muttered under the breath by a pupil, and so standards slip.

Yes, there are plenty of good schools, but ask yourself this question:
Overall, have our classrooms become better ordered and disciplined, and has society at large become more polite and less violent in the years since we outlawed corporal punishment?