As a minister who had responsibility for our efforts to provide relief to refugees from the conflict in Syria, I was properly vigilant about getting value for money. That money goes much further and helps many more refugees in the region than it does if it is spent in Europe.

Offering resettlement in Europe costs more, meaning that we can help fewer families; even worse, it encourages a disgusting trafficking trade masterminded by gangsters; and it attracts migrants from well beyond Syria, inducing them too to undertake an all too often fatal journey.

Never the less, we have implemented resettlement schemes for the most vulnerable refugees selected direct from camps in the region (in order not hold out any incentive that encourages the flow across the Mediterranean and Aegean seas) and we will resettle 20,000 Syrians over the course of this parliament through the Syrian Vulnerable Persons Resettlement scheme. Of the 4,400 already settled under this scheme so far, half are children.

UK will also resettle 3,000 children and their families from the wider region. In the last year the Government has granted asylum, or another form of leave to remain, to over 8,000 children.

This week the Government announced that, in accordance with section 67 of the Immigration Act (the so-called Dubs amendment), that it will admit 350 children who have already made it to Europe. This number includes over 200 children already transferred from France, and a further 150 over the coming months.

The Government was obliged by the Immigration Act to put a specific number on how many children Britain would take based on consultations with local authorities about their capacity to make provision for them. 350 wasn’t just arbitrarily plucked from the air, it was reached after months of consultations with the local authorities about what they can absorb. Finding suitable homes for these children is actually quite difficult and adds to the pressure that already exists, arising from the 3,000 or so unaccompanied asylum-seeking children arrive in Britain every year.

Currently many children are camping out in Eastern Europe, in dangerous and frightful conditions, eschewing the shelter and official assistance that is available (and to which we are contributing financially) because they believe that their chances of making it to the UK are better.

The bishops and others who demand that we take in more children, need to recognize the hard facts: they are encouraging the flow of children undertaking the risks, and that money will go so much further in providing relief to many more children when spent in the region, rather than drawing them to seek refuge in Western Europe.

The largest item in my mailbag remains the shortage of affordable housing. New Forest District Council has the very difficult and unenviable task of allocating the scarce supply of social housing between the pressing needs of families in various states of distress, many of whom have been waiting for years. Often they write to me in the quite mistaken belief that I have some power to ‘intervene’ and get them further ahead in the queue.

For years we have not built sufficient houses to afford people born and brought up in the area any prospect of being able to find somewhere to buy or rent. The District Council’s plan for the next couple of decades makes a bold attempt to address this. Given the sensitivity of our rural environment, that plan is bound to be controversial.

Building land is essential, but it is not enough. The problem is that the demand for housing has outstripped the supply, driving the price beyond the reach of much of the market. We need a sufficient increase in supply as to drive prices down again so that they are once more affordable. I am persuaded however, that builders will not deliver that increase to the extent necessary: high prices suit them very well, particularly given their preference for addressing the more profitable higher end of the market. For this reason, despite my long held preference for free enterprise, I am looking for the Housing White Paper, which is to be published this week, to give the green light to much greater involvement by the public sector: councils need to build more.

I have had a stream of emails demanding that the invitation to the President of the USA to make a state visit to the UK, be withdrawn.

As the PM said, she is running a government not a protest movement.
The hint is in the name ‘state visit’. This is not the visit of an individual and does not express any support for the individual’s policies. It is an expression of the importance of the relationship between our two states. This is why comparisons with other US presidents who made their state visits to the UK much later in their presidencies are so wide of the mark. The situation then was radically different.

We are about to begin negotiations to leave the EU and profoundly change our place in the world. We have a significant agenda to cement with the nation that is our largest individual trading partner and our most important strategic ally. At the same time, its new president had signalled radical departures in respect of policy towards free trade and enduring alliances.

Whatever our reservations, it is both vital and urgent that we exercise the greatest influence that we can in our national interests. The state visit is an important part of that process.

We are the first G7 country to meet the jointly agreed commitment to spend 0.7% of our income on overseas aid. In doing so, we have established an expertise and leadership in the field. It has given us enhanced credibility at the UN and the ability to speak with real authority in the world. Along with our defence and diplomatic effort, it is a key part of the way we project our power and influence.

People think we are spending too much. I once tried asking constituents in Ringwood how much of our income it is. The answers ranged from 10% to 30%, so I was able to tell them we had cut it to less than one percent!

Think of it the other way around: we are keeping 99.3% of our income for ourselves. Do you know anyone who does that, indeed would you want to know them – would they have any friends?
The Daily Mail’s campaign against our overseas aid budget has run for over a year now. In recent months it has been joined by The Times. The stories about our aid being given to corrupt and profligate regimes, wasted on trivial projects like Ethiopian girl pop groups, or lavished on the salaries of consultants drives my correspondents into a state of apoplexy.

On detailed examination these stories turn out to be very different from what has been reported.
Of course, we do spend in the poorest and most unstable places in the world, and it is no co-incidence that these tend to be the most corrupt and misgoverned countries, but we do not ‘give’ money to them. We pay by results for projects in health, education and economic development, and because we do not have an army of civil servants, we pay contractors from professional and experienced organisations to run those projects. The Daily Mail calls them ‘consultants’.

Our international aid effort is undermined by waste and the perception of waste. I met the new Secretary of State last week to re-enforce the message that she needs to root out those things that might give rise to that perception. Before she got the job of running the International Development department, she was on record as wanting to abolish it and replace it with a trade department.

Well, she is quite right in her priority: Trade dwarfs aid. If we can only get poor countries better access to the world’s trading system then they will earn vastly more. That is why our international aid programme spends about £1 billion per year facilitating and improving trade.

At the last election UKIP proposed we cut the budget from the current £12 billion to £4 billion and concentrate just on humanitarian relief and the inoculation effort to prevent disease. These are important, but we would lose the much more important work in economic development that is so vital to our national interest. Millions are on the move in pursuit of better lives and livelihoods. Over the next decade the world needs 600 million new jobs if we are to avoid a growing army of under-employed, frustrated, desperate and angry young people. It is therefore vital that we invest in economic development and prosperity in their countries. In the end, it is all about jobs. This has to be our main effort, because if we do not, we know where all the consequent problems are going to end up being exported to.

In the modern world you cannot – like an ostrich with its head in the sand – isolate yourself from global reality.

Development aid is not charity. We spend it in our national interest so we can trade and prosper in a stable and safer world.

Rather bizarrely, given a busy news agenda, last week I was inundated with letters and emails demanding that the proposal for an ‘equality oath’ should be abandoned.
I am confident that most people will never have heard of it, and I confess that it rather took me by surprise.

The genesis of this proposal is the review on community cohesion published by Dame Louise Casey last year. This reported that ethnic segregation is increasing and that we need to do more to ensure that immigrants integrate fully into British society.

The review identified a need to establish a set of values around which people from all different backgrounds can unite. To this end, it suggested the introduction of an integration oath on arrival for immigrants intending to settle in Britain, but the review also identified a need to increase standards of leadership and integrity in public office, suggesting that this could be done by developing a new oath for holders of public office.

The lobby against the proposal is promoted by evangelical Christians concerned that the oath may be used as a means of excluding from public office anyone who has religious reservations about the validity of same sex marriage.

I think this is somewhat implausible given our fundamental commitment to freedom of religion. To be fair to their suspicions however, oaths have certainly been used to exclude religious dissenters in the past.

The Test Act of 1673 required an oath not just from office holders, but also from entrants to professions and universities. It was in response to Charles II’s willingness to move on from the lingering divisions of the civil war and the years of Cromwell’s Commonwealth. In 1672 he used his prerogative powers in the Declaration of Indulgence to remove disadvantages and restrictions placed on non-conformists and Catholics. Parliament’s response a year later proved that there was still no mood for forgiveness and that bygones were to remain top priority. The Act required that applicants give ‘assent and consent to all and everything contained in, and proscribed by the Book of Common Prayer’. Clearly, the only shared value around which Parliament believed the country should unite, was to be full membership of the Church of England.

This had profound social consequences. The exclusion of non-conformists from public office, professions and universities led them to concentrate on commerce and industry, with their own schools to nurture them. It is for this reason that so many of our historic successful companies were founded in the non-conformist tradition, for example Barclays, Wilkinsons, Courtaulds, and Cadburys.

The Government will respond to Dame Louise’s recommendations in the spring. Notwithstanding the importance of equal treatment under the law as a constitutional principle, I would prefer the oath to have a rather wider compass. My preference would be a simple oath of allegiance to the reigning monarch who, after all, sums up all our national values. MPs and members of the armed forces swear such an oath, so I can’t see why every other holder of public office shouldn’t do so too, and I doubt that evangelicals will object to that.

I cannot remember a time when there wasn’t political row of some sort over the NHS, or a time when there wasn’t talk of a ‘winter crisis’.

We have to set the hyperbole of media reports and the ridiculous comparisons of some commentators, such as the director of the Red Cross and his talk of an humanitarian crisis, against the realities experienced by the people that we know. Patient satisfaction with the NHS is at a record high, with patients saying they have never been treated more safely and with more dignity and more respect. The number of complaints that I receive has diminished dramatically, and the number writing to commend the care that they have received has increased correspondingly. In the last couple of weeks two people close to me have received first class care: one walked into casualty with a broken foot, and the other was taken by ambulance in an emergency with a stroke.

There are now 11,000 more nurses and 11,000 more doctors working in the NHS. On cancer, we are starting treatment for 130 more people every single day, and have achieved record cancer survival rates; we have 1,400 more people getting mental health treatment every day and some of the highest dementia diagnosis rates in the world; we are doing 5,000 more operations every day and that, despite those 5,000 more operations every day, MRSA rates have halved.

We are spending more on the NHS than ever before, with plans to increase that expenditure year on year.
There are, of course, very significant problems for which we are going to have to find solutions.
People who would ordinarily have died from a heart attack in their fifties or sixties, were saved by modern medicine over recent decades, and are now presenting in their eighties with multiple and complex nursing needs. Add to this mix the demands of a rapidly rising elderly population, and a deterioration in the health of many younger people consequent upon an obesity epidemic, and it is clear that pressure on the NHS will continue to build. Notwithstanding, that medical advances are continuing to deliver new, and expensive treatments.

The current furore has centred upon the 4 hour target within which to treat anyone who is admitted, or who walks into an hospital accident and emergency department. In recent weeks this measure has fallen from a percentage in the high nineties to the mid-eighties. The irony is however, that in terms of the raw numbers, more people are actually being treated within the target every day, because so many more are presenting – it’s winter again.

A word of caution when praying for the peace of Jerusalem.

Further to my remarks in this column last week, I thought I’d risk giving even greater offence. All religions are a bit ‘wacky’ and stretch the credulity of their adherents. That is certainly my own experience as a Christian. Perhaps Mormonism has got to be the wackiest of all beliefs. I can say that because Mormons are gentle people who do not easily take offence, unlike other religions where ‘blasphemy’ is perceived almost everywhere, and is punishable by death, with – or without – the necessity of any proper judicial process.

Yesterday’s ghastly assassination of Israeli soldiers in Jerusalem by Daesh marks a further unwelcome and worrying ‘religious’ aspect to the conflict in Palestine. The West Bank of the Jordan has hitherto remained a predominantly secular place where women can go about their business freely, unaccompanied and uncovered. Much less so in Gaza where the Hamas and other sinister Islamist thugs hold sway.

The growing religious sensitivities on the other side of the conflict are all too apparent as a muscular Israeli settler movement increasingly treats Palestine as its biblical theme park. The Israeli interior minister (equivalent to Amber Rudd as Home Secretary) has stated that with the election of Donald Trump we are witnessing “the birth pangs of the Messiah when everything has been flipped to the good of the Jewish people”.

Alas, if you really believe that God promised you the land, there isn’t much scope for negotiation.

What I always find odd however, is the support for this position to be found amongst evangelical Christians. Later this month Parliament will be visited by ‘Christian Friends of Israel’ and I will be lobbied by a number of constituents, some of whom are convinced that the ancient borders of Israel have to be fully re-established according to God’s promise to the patriarchs, before Christ’s second coming and the messianic age can begin.

This wacky eschatology is, at least, not mainstream Christianity: Christ’s first coming was God’s final and complete revelation to mankind. All the promises of the Old Testament and the New are already fulfilled in him. There is nothing left outstanding and still to be delivered; Through Christ all humanity become the ‘children of Israel’, including the Palestinians.

So, when I ask for people to pray for the peace of Jerusalem, I ask them to do so, at least in one respect, with the intention of keeping God out of it.

Groundless accusations are water off a duck’s back. What really hurts is when you know that there is truth in them.

The vitriolic response to the UN resolution on illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine, and to John Kerry’s very measured speech explaining why the USA refused to exercise its veto, show that Israel is just a touch sensitive on the issue.

The reality is clear to anyone who looks at the pattern of settlement building on a map: it is removing the possibility of a viable Palestinian state that could co-exist peacefully with Israel.

Israel has persisted with settlement expansion on Palestinian land whilst the focus of world attention in the region has been understandably elsewhere, and it has, until now, enjoyed the assurance of support in the USA.

My own attitude was one of instinctive support for Israel. It is a democracy and an ally. My generation saw the Arab / Israeli wars through the lens of a David against Goliath. My attitudes were hardened by our experience of international terrorism by the PLO and our horror at what happened at the Munich Olympics. In more recent years we were disgusted by the senseless and indiscriminate suicide bombings of innocents in Israel.

We do no service to our friend and ally however, if we are silent and ignore its folly at scuppering the possibility of a two state solution, which we regard as the only prospect for its own long term peace and security.

John Kerry said that, if the endeavour to create two state solution is abandoned, Israel cannot be both a democracy and Jewish: for if the Palestinians are not to have their own state, then they will have to have all their civil rights accommodated in the state of Israel.

My fear is that a significant part of the Israeli establishment reject this logic. Rather, they believe that they can continue to occupy Palestinian land and tell the Palestinians that they must seek their political expression and representation in Jordan, or in sub-state ‘bantustans’.

The Obama administration’s pressure on Israel has come far too late, and President Trump will renew robust, perhaps unquestioning, support for Israel. So, the prospects for a two state solution, which has been the focus of US and European endeavour for so long, looks bleak indeed.
If the opportunity is lost, Israel will not be alone in bearing the consequences: we will all feel the fallout from continuing violent instability in the region.

It’s that magnificent time of year when we can wallow in the short dark days and add to the gloom with blood-curdling predictions of disasters, and all the things that will go spectacularly wrong next year. Of course, this year we’ve been able to indulge ourselves in this favourite pastime since the bright long days of the summer, when we were warned that the world would all but end for us if we voted to leave the European Union. Those predictions have now been deferred until next year. We should comfort ourselves with the reassurance that every generation in human history has thought that it would be the last one.

Actually, the definitive ending of the world was supposed to have been in 2012 when the 5000 year old Mayan civilisation’s calendar ran out. A year earlier my favourite book of all time The Coffee Table Book of Doom was published by Art Lester and Steven Appleby. Here is a flavour from the advertising blurb:
“…with the apocalypse at hand, don’t fret about dying uninformed. The Coffee Table Book of Doom is a revelatory, brilliantly funny, superbly illustrated and erudite compendium of all the 27 doom-laden horsemen we need to worry about – personal doom, gender erosion, asteroid impact, pandemics, super storms, sexual ruin – and much more besides.”

I can’t speak for all 27 doom laden horsemen but at least the prospect of being vaporised in a nanosecond by an asteroid is now less likely than the book suggested because a more recent NASA study has downgraded the threat: apparently there are only half as many threatening asteroids than was previously thought.

There is still plenty to worry about. Only the other day I heard that there is a volcano under a lake near Naples rumbling away and if it blows it will make Vesuvius look like a camp fire. The lava lake under Yellowstone Park could go at any moment, taking most of the USA with it. Unfortunately ‘remoaners’ would not be able to blame either on Brexit.

With elections in France and Germany next year, and every possibility that Greece or even Italy might still crash out of the Euro, there is plenty that could destabilise one of our major export markets beyond anything that Brexit might be blamed for.

Personally, and on the contrary, even on these dark mornings I still wake up – as I have done every morning since the 24rd of June – and my first thought is “we are going to be free again, WE ARE GOING TO BE FREE!”

Last week I was deluged with emails demanding that we do something – almost anything – to relieve the desperate situation of Syrians besieged and trapped in eastern Aleppo.
George Osborne was right when, in the emergency debate held in Parliament, he pointed out that whilst intervention can have unintended and severe consequences, so too does choosing not to intervene.

I was a government whip in late August 2013 when the Government sought parliamentary authority to take punitive military action against the Assad regime after it had crossed the ‘red line’ defined by President Obama, and used chemical weapons against its own civilian population.

The difficulty we faced in the whips office was not that the situation in Syria did not demand it, rather that colleagues were fearful of what happened a decade earlier with our military intervention in Iraq.

In 2013 the emails, which now demand that we intervene, were – notwithstanding the obscene chemical attacks – demanding that we stand aside. They won the day and we have watched the slaughter from the side lines ever since. As a consequence of the decision to do nothing, hundreds of thousands have died, our allies in the region have been destabilised by the presence of 4 million refugees, and a million refugees have fled to Europe; the dreadful regimes in Iran and Russia are in the ascendant.

Even before that fateful vote at the end of August 2013, much of the damage had already been done. From the very outset of the rebellion we supported the objectives of Assad’s moderate opponents – the Free Syrian Army, but we refused to arm them. Consequently the opposition to Assad’s murderous regime became increasingly dominated by the better armed Islamist militias.

Now it is too late. Assad, his Russian and Iranian allies are triumphant. The prospects for Syria and the entire region are frightful. This is a mistake we have made before. After the first Gulf war, when Saddam’s Shia subjects in southern Iraq rose in rebellion, we stood aside while he massacred them, with consequences that lasted a generation, and continue.

The consequences of what we have now allowed to happen in Syria will also reverberate for a generation, that’s if we are lucky.