Author: johnredwood

The more laws and bigger government brigade will be out in force this week to rubbish the Queen’s speech programme for the last year of the current Parliament. They will claim there are too few new laws. This, they say, means government has run out of ideas.

The UK does not suffer from a shortage of laws. Whatever else you might criticise about MPs in recent Parliaments, failing to pass enough laws would be an unfair complaint. We need to remember that the next session of Parliament will be considerably less than a year, running from June to March 2015 only.

Parliament has many other roles besides passing new laws. It is there to supervise the spending of large sums of public money, approving budgets, probing on value for money and priorities. It is there to cross examine Ministers on how they are using the many powers past laws have given them. It is there to debate foreign policy and our relations with overseas countries. It is there to handle our all pervasive relationship with the EU, and to seek to guide or assist Ministers in how they respond to the endless stream of new laws and initiatives coming out of Brussels. There is plenty to do without having to pass lots of new laws.

I for one think the UK and the EU between them have passed far too many laws in recent years. A period of reflection and consolidation would be welcome. Some more repeals would also help, where there are simply too many regulations in areas where individuals and businesses could be left to themselves to decide, with choice driving what people do and buy. One of the problems of our current membership of the EU is we have two governments for the price of three, with both the EU and the UK legislating on the same topic, and with the EU driving us to more legislation than we would choose for ourselves. As more and more areas come to be covered by EU law you would expect the UK need for national legislation to reduce.

Owning your own home is in some ways one of the most liberating experiences you can undertake. When you move from your parent’s home, or from a rented property, into your first home that you own, you have a range of important new freedoms. You can choose the paint and the wallpaper, have a cat or dog of your own, drill holes in the wall if you need to install items, or take a hammer to the non structural parts of the home and remodel them. You can invite who you like.

Government is always there to take some of the joy out of the experience. They want their pound of flesh before you move in, with their Stamp Duty demand, a tax on home ownership. They demand an annual levy or Council tax for you living in your own home. They require full plans and fees if you wish to make significant changes to the building. They may even have views on hedges, trees and fences around your garden.

A freedom manifesto would try to reduce the nagging and taxing demands government makes on homeowners, and would try to help more into home ownership. The present government has rightly made it easier to buy a home from the public sector where a tenant wishes to change to an owner. It has also launched its Help to buy scheme to enable more buyers to afford the deposit for a home of their own.

A freedom manifesto might include lower Stamp duties on lower priced parties, perhaps by making the thresholds points at which the marginal extra cost of the home is charged at the higher rate, not charged at the higher rate on the full amount. Local and national policies to keep Council taxes down are an important part of the drive to raise living standards by controlling domestic costs.

More planning flexibility for the homeowner, more access to finance for purchase, and less tax would be a good combination.

Now that the local and European elections are behind us I am going to become tougher over what I allow people  to post on this site. In the long run up to the General Election on May 7th 2015 I wish this site to continue to be independent. I pay for it out of my own income. It is not an official Conservative party site, nor is it an MP’s website funded by the taxpayer. I will not post any item which is blatantly party political and has in it a exhortation to vote for a particular party, or which rubbishes people from other parties in the hope of gaining party advantage. There are plenty of other sites that do this, and the best place to promote your own party is on one of its own approved websites. I will no longer edit pieces to protect their authors from possible libel or retaliation for remarks hurtful to particular groups, religions and institutions – I will instead simply delete the whole comment as it takes too much of my time to check it out or amend it.

The underlying principle of the main public services which is popular is the principle that the service is supplied free to the user, and paid for by taxpayers. This is true of most healthcare, of most school education, and many social services. No political party with serious aspirations to govern either locally or nationally will challenge this popular base to much public service provision.

This does not mean that users of these services are all happy with what they get, or against improvement. It does not mean that because they are free to the user they have to be monopolies delivered by public officials. The Conservatives, the Coalition and Labour in government have made some moves to allowing charities and private sector companies to provide some of these services. There have also been limited moves to give users some choice.

In education Labour developed an Academy programme which has been taken further by the current government. They have added free schools. Parents and older schoolchildren value having some choice of school. The complaints I get as an MP are where a popular school has too few places, forcing some to go their second or third choice school. I rarely get complaints about the possibility of choice. The issue for the next election is how much further should we go in offering more choice? What other types of school should we permit? How can popular schools expand to provide the desired places?

In the NHS Labour let some contracts to private health suppliers to carry out certain operations and procedures where waiting lists were too long. Patients still received a free service, but at a with profit provider paid for by the NHS. This was broadly popular with patients, and did help reduce waiting lists in the areas targeted. How much  more of this should we do? Should patients have more choice of GP, Consultant and hospital when they need treatment. How much should they be told about success rates and availability when sorting out their diagnosis and  treatment? Was the big idea behind Choose and book a good one?

In social care Councils vary in their approaches, but many do understand the need to tailor care packages to individual needs, and to help people live for longer in their own homes with assistance before having to consider  moving into a home. Is there enough choice and flexibility?

More choice should mean better value for money as well as a service tailored to individual needs and preferences. Having a variety of providers will help deliver value and drive innovation, two things monopolies are usually poor at achieving.

For most in the EU it will be business as usual. In large countries like Germany and Italy the mainstream parties won the Euro elections. Overall federalist parties of the centre left and centre right which belong to the main groupings won 70% of the seats. They will claim a mandate and continue to pursue their integrationist strategy. The so called socialists and the so called centre right in the EU will grow more and more together, becoming a united federalist team, exploiting all the manifold divisions in the anti and less EU parties in the rest of the Parliament.

In France where the NF came first with just one quarter of the vote the Socialist and pro EU President will try to gain concessions about growth and budgets but hope the rest of the problem goes away. The President’s main right of centre opposition remains damaged and weak.

In the UK UKIP’s first place on 27% of the vote gave them 24 seats to Labour’s 20 and Conservative’s 19 is a rare case of a country where voters have by a majority preferred two parties (UKIP and Conservatives) that do not belong to either of the two main federalist groupings. The vote will reaffirm the Conservatives decision to offer a negotiation and a referendum on the result of any negotiation in the next election. UKIP say they would simply withdraw from the EU, but they could only do that if their party held at least 326 seats in Westminster and if they thought they could do it without any referendum to ask people if they agreed. The idea of trying a renegotiation first makes it more likely the Out side will win a referendum if critics of the strategy are right and the EU offers little or nothing to the UK. If instead the EU offers us a good deal then people will have the chance to decide if it is good enough to warrant the continuing surrender of various rights and powers of self government which will still be needed as a sacrifice under any likely deal.

As Conservative MEPs and UKIP do not belong to a federalist grouping, so the UK offers the biggest block of anti federalist votes in the Parliament. UKIP does not wish to work with the National front in France. It will be interesting to see if UKIP does work with AFD in Germany. UKIP will presumably offer immediate pull out from the EU again in the General Election, whilst Labour is still wedded to putting up with all the current EU powers and measures, and remains against a referendum. Labour hopes UKIP will do more damage to the Conservatives than to them and will allow them to win on a small share of the total vote. This would cement the federalist position and rule out a referendum.

In future posts I will examine more issues surrounding the role of the new MEPs, the best way for Eurosceptics to unite their forces from here instead of fighting each other to a standstill, and the ways in which the UK could start to wrestle powers back in crucial areas before we have the chance to settle the matter at the 2015 General Election.

The UK is producing a new wave of entrepreneurs. Self employment is rising swiftly. Many more people now have more than one job, splitting their time between differing paying activities. THis is making our economy more flexible, giving more choice and better service in many areas. What more can be done to encourage others to tread this helpful path?

Most entrepreneurs will not make a fortune, and many will do it for a bit of their lives before moving into an employer based job or retiring. It needs to be relatively easy to do this. This means reviewing the paperwork and compliance involved, especially by the VAT and Income Tax authorities.Someone who is good at gardening or plumbing and provides a good service is unlikely to be a tax expert or to have money to spend on an accountant. Simplification of the demands on them for financial information would help.

Many entrepreneurs aspire to financial success. They do not want to feel that if they are successful too much of their hard earned gains will go in Capital Gains Tax or higher levels of Income Tax. Taking down the rates of both Income Tax and CGT could raise more revenue, partly by encouraging more to venture. At the moment a new business is an asymetric bet. If you lose the taxpayer does not help with yous losses, but if you win, the taxman expects a large share.

One of the most difficult things to do is to hire your first employee. Most businesses remain as one man or one woman bands, fearing the amount of work they would have to do to take on, pay and look after an employee. I am all in favour of good pay and conditions for employees.However, the very bureaucratic requirements which larger companies can handle are difficult for small businesses. The govermentn needs to review whether there can be more flexible rules for one person businesses making that first step.

The present government got rid of the most offensive parts of Labour’s attack on civil liberties when it reduced the time people can be held without charge or trial, and ditched the Identity card scheme. More can be done to restore lost civil liberties, which used to define an Englishman’s rights – and came to include an Englishwoman’s rights too as the twentieth century rightly enfranchised women.

Civil liberty would be strengthened by fewer but better laws. Our freedom rests in part on supporting an independent police force and prosecution service, where politicians cannot interfere in individual cases, and on a supreme Parliament which can police the independence of the law and change the Statutes as required.  This system is under threat from the European Convention on Human Rights, which has been extended from a sensible set of general proposals to encourage freedom loving states, into an alternative system of law which judges our own Parliamentary process and our own freely chosen laws. Reform of this system is needed to restore UK Parliamentary authority over what the law is, and to restore the independence of our courts over how the law is applied and interpreted.

A democratic state should not take powers to remove money from people’s bank accounts if the taxman thinks they owe some. It should avoid further drift towards  the pocket money society of some Labour imaginings, where government regards all income in the state as its to distribute, leaving what it thinks appropriate for the individuals who earned it.

The government is rightly looking at how it can reduce the use of stop and search powers. These are necessary but should be used where there is reasonable suspicion that someone may be about commit an offence or is committing one.

The fundamentals of our system are good, and need restoring. Everyone is innocent until proved guilty. No-one should be detained for a long period without charge and the prospect of an early trial.The presence of a few nasty potential terrorists in our midst should never be used as an excuse to remove the ancient liberties of the English.

As we run up to the manifesto launches for the 2015 election , who will adopt a manifesto for motorists? The last couple of decades have seen motorists in the dock,  blamed almost solely for wrecking the planet with their CO2 emissions, and held to account for any problem on our inadequate road system. Despite all this, 86% of our journeys are by car or van, and we need road transport to supply us with food and other necessities, to get people to school and hospital and to get many to work.

A freedom manifesto for motorists could begin with the decriminalisation of parking offences within car parks and designated parking areas on highways which the government is pursuing. If someone overruns at the shops or gets detained on the way back to the car they should have to pay for the extra parking time, but not end committing an offence and having to pay a fine. Parking charges should be like the BBC Licence fee – a debt you owe a public body, not a tax you have to pay. Parking in places which blocks the road or causes danger to others is another matter where you should still be charged with an offence if you have broken the rules.

It could go on to incorporate common sense over road works. When will a party take up the idea that utility pipes and wires should in future be  buried in easily accessible conduits under the verge or pavement, with access points, so we do not have to dig up the main road every time a pipe or wire needs mending or improving? New construction should include these friendlier arrangements as a matter of course, and when pipes and wires need renewing the issue should be raised to see if they can buried somewhere more accessible than under the middle of a main road. The government and local authorities should improve their work with the utility businesses over hours of working, length of contract  and arrangements to allow maximum use of the highway when works are being undertaken.

It needs to offer motorists some respite from ever higher taxes and charges. Cutting the planned increases in fuel duty has been a popular action by the current government. Motorists still pay a disproportionate amount of the tax in the country, and further reductions would be welcome as the public finances improve.

Transport capital budgets need to be better balanced to allow more improvements on the highways. Improvements are particularly needed at busy junctions, where more segregation of different types of user of the junction allied to more capacity can make these crossing points safer for all and speedier. There should be more bridges to get over railway lines and rivers in busy towns and cities.