Category: Uncategorized

Conservative policy has changed a lot towards the EU in recent years. The biggest change came with the Prime Minister’s decision to require a renegotiation of our relationship with the EU and to then let voters decide with an In/Out referendum. Supporting decisions have included the veto on the Fiscal Treaty, keeping the UK out of it, the demands for a lower EU budget, and the extrication of the UK from further financial support for Euro area countries and banks in trouble.

The mood in the Conservative Parliamentary party is supportive of all these initiatives, and understanding of the limits on immediate action imposed by the Lib Dems and the lack of a Conservative majority. This has not prevented us from thinking of other ways of trying to accelerate the change to the relationship we want, despite the present Parliamentary constraints.

There are two immediate opportunities that require decision this Parliament. The government was rightly persuaded to opt the UK out of all the Criminal Justice measures of the Union, using a right Labour put into our version of the Lisbon Treaty as reassurance at the time but would not itself have used. The Lib Dems and Labour wish to opt back in to many of the central measures. If we do so then these powers pass from the UK to the EU in perpetuity or until we leave the Union. Many of us are urging the government to come to separate extradition arrangements with the EU similar to those we enjoy with other non EU countries, to avoid this area falling under EU and ECJ control.

The second is the government needs to respond to a wide ranging and important unanimous report from the European Affairs Committee. This Report recommends that the UK government amends the 1972 European Communities Act to reassert Parliamentary sovereignty. We could for example reinforce our version of the Lisbon Treaty which expressly opted the UK out of any move to include the European Convention on Human Rights in European Union law. A recent ECJ Court case appears to have done just this despite the Treaty, so the Committee recommends asserting Parliamentary sovereignty in this respect. It would be an important precedent, and would mean the UK Parliament resisting erosion of our right to self government in an important area.

These are matters which we have been working on for many months. They are nothing to do with UKIP or the political response to UKIP. The serious business of the UK Parliament struggling to combat excessive EU power and legislation continues daily as it has done for many years, against a background of too many Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs who vote for any extension of EU power.

There is a new round of speculation over what additional powers will be granted to the Scottish Parliament assuming a victory for the Union in the forthcoming referendum. Some wish to see much more extensive revenue raising powers resting with the Scottish Parliament. They point out that at the moment the Scottish Parliament has the pleasure of spending the money and the Westminster Parliament the pain of raising it. All the main Westminster parties seem to be moving towards some version or other of devo max, probably what Mr Salmond wanted all along.

If this is true, it is time to think of England. The present system is unacceptable. Underemployed Scottish members of the Westminster Parliament come to debate the Union matters, but cannot contribute to health, education, local government or criminal justice in their country. They retain their vote and their voice over these matters in England. This lop sided devolution cannot survive a further major increase in powers of the Scottish Parliament.

The immediate need is for a rule which says Scottish MPs do not speak and vote on issues and in debates which the Speaker has identified as non Union matters. In purely English matters the same ruling should apply to Northern Ireland and Welsh MPs. If Parliament grants Scotland revenue raising powers, then Scottish MPs should be excluded from consideration of the devolved taxes being imposed or altered for England or the rest of the UK by the UK Parliament.

Many English nationalists want a separate English Parliament to mirror the Scottish one. I see the English Parliament as being at Westminster. Westminster is the sacred plot of English democracy, predating the Union Parliament. Westminster Hall is the scene of many important dramas in English as well as in Union history. The English Parliament should remain or be refashioned at Westminster. We do not need expensive new buildings with no traditions and history in the walls.

I also think a single person can do the job of representing their voters on English issues when we meet as the English parliament, and representing their voters also on Union matters when we meet as the Union Parliament. The last thing I think we need is more politicians and another very expensive Parliament. Let’s use what we have got more intelligently. Above all let’s make sure we now speak for England, as more devolved power goes to Scotland.

I made a speech yesterday about this in the Commons which I will post later today.

It takes something to get Mr Clegg to say the EU should stop lecturing the UK on growth, yet that is exactly what he said yesterday about the EU’s predictable intervention in our economic policy. The EU, whose policies in Euroland produced a long and deep recession in most parts of the zone, with a late and feeble recovery so far, has presumed to tell the UK how to grow more quickly. Apparently higher taxes are part of the answer!

I write about it not because I am surprised or even shocked, but because others have suddenly woken up to a phenomenon which has been around for several years. Labour gave the EU the power to demand details of our economic policies, and for the Commission to mark our homework with a report telling us what we should be doing. Successive governments have dutifully filed copious pages of information with the EU each year, Parliament has debated these figures, and the EU has pronounced. The only conession to the UK as a non Euro member is we are not subject to EU fines for failing to comply with EU Commission recommendations and requirements on deficits and other matters in the way Euro states are. I am glad that at last others are unhappy about this needless development.

The UK government has indicated that it does not want to see Mr Juncker as the next President of the Commission. He is seen as an establishment EU candidate who will want to make further progress to full political, monetary and banking union. His supporters say the centre right federalist party grouping “won” the EU elections, and should therefore have the right to impose their candidate as President. They say for the Heads of government to come up with an alternative would be undemocratic.

This is far from the truth. The centre right grouping is the largest grouping, but it is still a minority. It has no right or ability to impose its candidate on the Parliament. Under the Treaties the power to chose rests with the Heads of government meeting as the Council of Ministers. These people are all elected, usually on much larger turnouts than the EU Parliament. The UK and others are well within their rights to try to find a different candidate if they wish.

The squabble over this post illustrates just how difficult it will be to find a consensus between so many different interests around the Council table and in the Parliament. It also underlines how difficult for the EU it is when a major country like the UK has an electorate who vote by a majority for non federalist parties who not join the main groups. EU lovers want the EU to settle down to tweedledee and tweedledum demcocracy, alternating power between centre left and centre right on an EU wide scale, when much of the power rests with the Commission and Court, and when policies show considerable continuity between the two blocs. 30% of those voting on May 22nd across the EU do not agree. Managing that minority is going to be quite a task.

The European Parliament has a right of veto on the proposed appointment by the Council of Ministers. If the two federalist groups combined to agree a candidate then they could of course continue to veto any other proposal from the Council.

Talk of a cost of living crisis often degenerates into an attack on the businesses which supply us with energy or other basics. It rarely looks at the architect of many of the high prices, government itself. Nor does the debate regularly include the evidence which shows the worst falls in real incomes occurred at the end of the last decade during the Great Recession.

Take the case of energy. Almost two thirds of the price of petrol and diesel is tax. The last government had a policy of increasing this regularly. The Coalition cancelled the escalators but left in place the high levels of tax already reached as it needed all that revenue from motorists and businesses delivering our food and other needs.

One of the main reasons our domestic fuel bills have been going up is the EU and Labour government policies to shift electricity output from cheaper coal and gas fired plant to very expensive renewables. Delay and opposition to extracting domestic gas and oil has also impeded the arrival of cheaper energy, such that we now pay so much more than the US for fuel to power our factories and warm our homes.

When it comes to the cost of housing, this government has increased Stamp duties. The previous government presided over large rises in Council tax, which have been abated by the present government’s policy of financial help to Councils who freeze their bills. They remain frozen at the much higher levels achieved under Labour.

Extra government borrowing is simply deferred taxation. Those of us who want to complete the job of deficit reduction, and want to see more progress in improving the cost effectiveness of public services do so because we realise that the UK has been suffering from a cost of government crisis. This lies behind the fall in living standards.

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.