I  have read plenty of badly informed articles, with some saying pensioners must keep the triple lock on the state retirement pension as the pension is still low, and from those saying the best test of a government’s serious intent to control the benefit bill is to ask them to remove the triple lock. They mainly assume the state pension  is just a universal benefit and see it as  a contest between the generous and the mean, between the high spenders and the controlled spenders. In practice is not that easy, as the pension is  a contributory benefit or an entitlement earned by making NI contributions over a lifetime. People get different levels of pension based on their contributions, and  the NI fund has to balance the tax in with the costs of the contributory benefits paid.

The reformers often have no idea what they are reforming. If for example a government said it would remove the option of a 2.5% increase in a year of low inflation and low wage growth, it would make little difference to the long term costs given the UK tendency to higher inflation. If it removed the wages link there would be savings so pensioners would be worse off, but it would also break the promise of what is a contributory scheme.  If someone does not pay in for enough years they get a lower pension. If someone was paying in for a private pension they paid lower NI and get a lower state pension.

The National Insurance Act 1946 and National Assistance Act 1948  as amended by the Social Security Act 1992 and 1999 is the governing law. These lay out that all the National Insurance Contributions are paid into a fund. Under the 1992 Act Ministers have to set contribution rates of NI in relation to “the general level of earnings, the balance on the Fund and payments expected to be made from it in future.” The Government Actuary has to report on the impact of upratings on the fund. This government decided in its first budget to make a large increase in NI presumably taking into account the upratings it awarded.

The last accounts for the Fund to March 2025 show that the fund received £130.9 bn in NI contributions that year with other income of £7.3bn, primarily interest on investments. It paid out £143 bn  leaving an annual deficit of £7bn. That left it with a balance for future payments of £79bn. It needs to keep a cash reserve to make payments on a continuous basis.  The main contributory benefit paid out was the pension, at £136.9bn. There was a £5bn payment for contributory ESA and £200m for contributory JSA. The Fund  also covered the modest  costs of the Pensioner Christmas bonus. The next report may show the extra NI paid has created a surplus.

Of course a government  with a majority could repeal all the legislation and say that NI is now simply a general tax not giving people any right to a State pension. They could then legislate to make the State pension a normal benefit, with  means testing  or still available to all regardless of income. It could become a universal benefit which you got whether you had worked and paid NI or not. Means testing it would be robbing people of the pension they have paid in for  over any years of paying NI under the Contributory system.

The best way to control the costs of the pension without having to tear up the contributory principle, abolish the Fund and upset many pensioners is to increase the age at which you can draw the pension. Each year of increase in the age saves roughly 7% of the cost. The current pension age is 66. It will rise to 67 by 2028. Legislation says it will rise to 68 by 2046, but governments have announced their wish to bring this forward to 2039. It would make sense to legislate to get to 68 by say 2035 and to 69 by 2045 to increase the savings. People who still want to retire earlier than these later ages should have an option to pay additional NI contributions into the Fund in their later years in employment to buy themselves a full State pension at an earlier retirement age. Alternatively they could retire earlier with a lower State pension where they had private pension or savings so they did not need to claim top up benefits.

In my youth there was general optimism that things year by year would get better, thanks to technology and progress. The luxuries of the few became the norm for the many as free enterprise companies made affordable cars, fridges, tvs, washing machines, gas central heating and other domestic comforts. By the early 1970s the technical frontiers had been pushed to allow supersonic jet travel slashing the time to get from London to New York and men were walking and driving on the surface of the moon. In the 1980s came the mobile phone and in the early years of the 21 st century the internet arrived to transform so much.

Today we seem to be going backwards. Supersonic travel has been phased out with no plans to resume. Men no longer walk on the moon as the US and China seek to get back there at huge cost with different rockets and capsules to the successful 1970s ones. We have decided to go back to wind power which was ditched for coal then oil and gas as they are more reliable. Power boats go faster and carry heavier loads than sailing vessels. Gas fired power stations work all the time whilst solar and wind power is intermittent. Wind power is bound to be dearer as you need back up for windless days, storage and extra grid capacity. The government tries to make gas powered electricity dearer by burdening it with high carbon taxes and only allowing it to produce when there is no wind which means the capital cost is higher per unit of electricity actually allowed and sold. The whole UK energy policy is self harm on a huge scale, burdening consumers with big bills and de industrialising the economy at a terrifying pace.

Householders are told they need to buy much dearer domestic heating systems and dearer electric cars, undermining the living standards and aspirations of people on modest incomes. This is the opposite of the post war consumer led growth that brought increased prosperity for the many. Now many do own cars government pillories motorists and invents ever more taxes and charges to deter use.

In Ireland there are big protests against greedy government using higher oil and gas prices as an opportunity to raise yet more tax from people needing fuel for their homes and jobs. In the UK people are angry about the way government cashes in,  over taxing these necessities.

Sloppy legal advice coupled with a wish to punish  the UK for imagined sins of colonialism led to the ridiculous idea of giving away the Chagos islands. The advocates wrongly thought the International Court of Justice could make us surrender them, when our sign up to that court exempted Commonwealth and defence matters. They failed to see that the UK is bound in international law by the US/UK Diego Treaty to keep the freehold of the islands all the time the US has a base there. They wanted to give the Chagos to Mauritius, 1200 miles away and never the owner of the islands. This would have made Chagossians colonists of another  foreign country.  The so called champions of de colonisation ended up ordering  the Chagossians to keep away from their islands that a previous Labour government had evicted them from!

I pay tribute to those who helped fight and win this battle to keep Chagos and to support the Chagossians. Adam Holloway and leading Chagossians were brave and determined, going there and re re establishing settlement on the islands. A group raised money and fought a court case in the UK courts on their behalf, and forced the government to delay and to think again. The Lords produced a spirited opposition to the legislation and pointed out that the government could not advance its Mauritius sell out  Treaty before it had amended or cancelled the US Treaty.

The right answer would be to let the Chagossians who wish return to suitable islands away from Diego Garcia to do so, and to help them. The US should be reassured that we will keep the freehold of our joint base, and continue to keep the seas near it free of fishing vessels and spies. The marine environment should continue to be fully protected. We would save the £35 bn this government was foolishly planning to give away to retain use of the base over the years ahead.

Our times have been changed by the digital and the  Green revolutions.

The digital revolution is bottom up, driven by strong popular demand for everything from on line retail to downloaded entertainment, and from  social media to business computing. The US has swept all before it with its seven digital giant companies dominating the space in the advanced  and non aligned world. China has developed  its own powerful parallel systems for itself and its alliance of autocracies.

The Green revolution has been largely top down, pushed onto a reluctant consumer by subsidies, bans, taxes and rules. It has been mainly a feature of the EU and UK.  They have been willing to sacrifice large swathes of their high energy burning and fossil fuel based industries, whilst turning to Chinese imports for many of the net zero replacements. China has adopted it to exploit the market opportunity it sees in selling batteries, electric cars, solar panels and wind  turbines  to the West, whilst itself continuing to increase its use of coal and gas, increasing its own CO2 output. The US has shifted from being a believer to going for massive growth in its fossil fuel sector. The US sees cheap reliable fossil fuel energy as the way to rebuild its industrial power.

We  have witnessed the emergence of China as the rival and competitor to the USA for world power and influence, the decline of Europe and the rise of India, Brazil, Indonesia and other populous countries as they they grow faster.  China can usually rely on Russia, North Korea, Cuba, and Iran. The US has worked with NATO, the EU, the leading members of OPEC, South Korea, Japan and the Philippines.

US power rests on many foundations. There is the superior force and technology of the large US military, with its capacity to intervene anywhere in the world through a carrier task force or long range warplanes. There is the leading role of the dollar and US commercial banks in world, trade and finance. There is the leadership the US usually gives to NATO as its majority donor. There is the grip US technology companies have over every family and business throughout the free world by supplying the software, communications, data storage and the rest that allow people to live their lives and businesses to pick up and process orders. There is the influence of US film and media  entertaining and informing many in the world.

Today this power is under the microscope. Has the US won the war in Iran as they claim, when the Straits are still not open and the Revolutionary Guards still control the Iranian people? Is the yuan and an alternative trade and banking system growing faster as China and Russia seek alternatives to US directed activity? Will the US break up NATO in anger over the refusal of European countries to offer more help against Iran? Will there be more challenges to the US story? Or will the US with its growing control over oil and gas worldwide come to exert more power in a world which may think green but acts fossil fuel?

Low tax rates, plenty of cheap energy, and a welcome for innovation and technology are three essentials for fast growth, high productivity and high per capita incomes.  The present UK government in going for higher taxes, dearer energy and EU levels of restriction on business innovation has turned its back on growth and success.

The top group in the world GDP per head league comprises Luxembourg ($145,000) , Switzerland ($116,000), Ireland ($110,000) , Singapore ($97,000), Iceland ($94,000), US ($92,000) and Norway ($90,000) . Two of these are EU members, Luxembourg and Ireland, who have got away with very low corporate tax rates attracting plenty of international financial and technology business to book profits with them. Switzerland and Singapore have also made themselves attractive business, investment and financial centres. Norway has used oil, gas and hydro energy to build a national wealth fund out of the revenues. The US has combined cheap fossil fuel energy  leapfrogging to be the world’s largest oil and gas producer, with dominance in the digital revolution creating the nine largest quoted corporations worldwide.

The Europeans along with Japan and South Korea create a middle grouping. The EU’s GDP per head is now less than half the US, with Korea about to overtake it, and with Japan around the same level. Germany ($60,000) and the UK ($56,000) lead this group with Greece as low as $26,000 . Spain ($38,000) ,  Italy ($43,000)  , France ($51,000) share the group’s slow growth characteristics. The EU members and the UK are held back by dear energy, over regulation, and a failure to create conditions where home grown technology businesses can flourish and grow into world scale companies.  This group of countries is falling further and further behind the US, with a  few Asian exceptions like Taiwan and South Korea.

China and Russia on $15,000 hover just above the world average of $14,000.  Mexico ($14,000), Brazil ($11,000), South Africa ($7,000) and India ($3,000) help keep the world average low. China is now growing at around 5% per annum and India faster. Over this century to date the US has grown twice as fast as the EU. The UK seeking closer ties with the EU is linking itself eveer more firmly to a proven slow growth or ,no growth model. EU economies are digital colonies of the great US corporations. They are de industrialising rapidly as their penal self harming n et zero policies destroy once great engineering, vehicle, steel, glass, ceramics, textile, petrochemical  and other industries.

I have had cause before to point out that this PM guided by  international law is particularly bad at understanding international law. He was unaware the ICJ cannot make binding judgements over Chagos. He was unaware of the need to amend the US/UK Treaty on Diego Garcia before even  thinking of giving the island away as the US has a Treaty veto over the UK surrendering the freehold to protect their investment in the base .  He has been opining on international law in the US/Iran war without calling out Iran’s breaking of international law by imposing charges on ships using the seas for navigation which are banned  under the Law of the Sea.  A country can only charge for use of a man made canal, not for waters close to its shore. The UK is not allowed to charge people for using the English Channel, a similarly narrow waterway to the Straits of Hormuz.

So let us look at his silly interpretation of the law of war. He said the UK and US could use bases to defend themselves but not to attack an enemy. If that was international law and all obeyed it there would never be a war. The laws of war allow a country to attack for military necessity to get an enemy to submit. They need to avoid civilian casualties, and ensure only proportionate civilian deaths where civilians are enmeshed with legitimate military targets. There are rules against torture, deception using symbols like the Red Cross and against certain particularly savage types of weapon.

What Starmer is saying is impossible for our armed forces. He is saying that our bases cannot send out force to attack an enemy about to attack us. They have to wait and then try their best to shoot down the incoming missiles, drones  and shells. In person to person  combat it would  imply a soldier needs to wait until he has been shot at before returning fire which would then only be possible if the enemy had missed the first time. It is this doctrine which can lead  to many past soldiers being investigated for alleged war crimes when they were acting under orders to take pre emptive action against defined enemy combatants.

All this war so far he has made out that the UK is not at war with Iran. It is true most of us  did not  want to go to war with Iran and Parliament and PM never declared war on Iran. It is also true Iran treats us as a combatant because it sees our bases , personnel and weapons as part of a US led system in the Middle East. It has been shooting at our people and facilities. Our personnel and weapons have been used to shoot down Iranian missiles and drones. The PM lives in a parallel universe, seeing the polls say the war is a bad idea. He then conjures up press events saying he is working to de escalate the conflict, yet he fails to talk to Iran or the US or Israel who are the powers that could de escalate if they wanted to.

Yesterday he went to the Middle East to thank UK military personnel in the conflict. What did he do whilst there to engage the combatants? What is his plan to create a lasting peace? Will he at last condemn the Iranian idea that they should levy a toll on ships and decide who can use the freedom of the seas off their coasts under threat of being blown up if they fail to comply? Is HMS Dragon still the only destroyer or frigate we have that can do anything? When will it be fully ready?

Pakistan managed to delay the threatened intensification of the US/Israel/Iran war. A very worried and angry President Trump accepted the ten point plan as part of another negotiation. That ten point plan is said to include Iran controlling and charging for use of the Straits, US withdrawal from Middle Eastern bases and US promises against future military intervention. It is unclear what the US gets in return without seeing language on the nuclear issue which began the conflict. Presumably the US will still argue for its rather different fifteen point plan. The US can claim it has destroyed a lot of Iran’s military capacity to do more harm.

If a final deal does indeed deliver control of the Straits to Iran and allow them to levy a tax or charge on shipping, that is an important win for Iran. It is also another cost and risk to business in the Middle East.  It is clearly a big improvement on the current defacto  position of no western cargo getting through and major disruption of Asian supplies. The US presumably rejects the Iranian demand to pay them reparations but high levies on trade is a form of doing that.

What do you think Trump should do now? Can both sides credibly claim a win as they wish to do?

The EU re set is an ill conceived danger to UK growth and prospects. The government pretends the negotiations are not underway when they are well advanced. They pretend they are  not making big sacrifices of money and powers, but they are.

It is all based on lies about what has happened since our half hearted Brexit departure. ONS figures say our trade has risen, yet the re set case is based on the damage they say was done to our trade by leaving. They forget we paid a big price to secure a tariff free trade deal anyway.

Our GDP followed a very similar course to the EU countries that stayed in, well ahead of Germany and a little ahead of France and Italy in growth. That was not surprising as the UK  governments stayed fixed to so many laws, rules and taxes from our EU membership, and we continued to pay sums to the EU as some kind of guilt penance. We are  now largely free of sending them money which means we now are saving the sums promised on the bus. It’s a good job we are given this government’s propensity to run up huge extra bills and to max out the borrowing.

I have set out here and in the Lords how in the past our joining the EEC slashed our growth rate, and joining the restrictive and costly single market slowed our growth rate further. Why does the government perversely think adopting more EU rules and sending them more tribute money will increase growth? It is bound to be another negative.

MPs who want this re set need to be asked to explain themselves. They also need to be asked

1. How much extra money will the UK be expected to send to Brussels when the full re set agreements are revealed? How will this extra cost be raised from taxpayers?
2. Joining the EU carbon trading and carbon tariff system will mean dearer energy and dearer imports. How many job losses  and closures will this bring?
3. Will the UK need to pull out of its trade deals with TPP, India, US, Australia etc as the rules of the single market it will have to adopt makes these Treaties  illegal in EU law?
4. Why is it acceptable that in important areas the UK will  have to adopt whatever laws the EU demands of us with  no right to influence, vote on them or reject them?

My experiences as Single Market Minister confirmed my analysis of my earlier years. I had to spend most of my time trying to stave off laws and regulations we did not want, seeking to dilute, delay or derail. It meant constructing qualified minorities of states sufficient to force change to a badly drafted power grab, or to secure delay.

As I reported to the Lords I discovered the promised Emergency brake to stop them imposing very bad laws on us was never going to be used and in due course lapsed through never being applied. As single market Minister I saw just how far the EU had got with its power grab, how powerless the UK was unless we could muster some support from other countries. The proposals were usually carved up by the Commission with German and French backing, and too many of the smaller states just went along with everything for fear of getting a bad reputation as trouble makers.

Press and public were excluded from our debates about all these new laws. The press usually declined to publish my read out of what had happened as they feared the EU Commission would cut them off from their briefings if they dared report what had actually happened in a Ministerial meeting. Apparently other Ministers often said different things in the meetings compared to what they reported back home. I had no problem with the press knowing what I said and what I was doing in the meetings as it was the same as the account I gave to Parliament and press back home.

I was moved on from the job at the time the EU decided on a major push to get every country to sign up to the Euro. This was a massive power grab which would change everything. I began my fight inside the UK government against it, and with others persuaded the PM to negotiate and secure an opt out from joining. When the PM refused to promise to use the opt out to ensure we would  never to go in  to the Euro I took up his challenge when he resigned the leadership and made the case against the Euro and for other changes of policy.

The leadership election did secure the  promise from the PM that he would hold a referendum before entering the Euro. More importantly this extracted from Mr Blair the same promise. I knew then the pound was saved, as polls showed the UK public were so much wiser than many of their MPs with big majorities against the Euro.  They also showed a Labour government was inevitable. John Major had badly crippled the UK economy by his EU zealotry putting us into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, which predictably gave us both boom and bust, ending badly for many businesses and homeowners and destroying the Conservatives as an election winning party for more than a decade.I had failed with Nicholas Ridley to stop ERM membership despite writing a report before joining the government forecasting boom or bust from ERM participation.

In the Shadow Cabinet and on the backbenches in the Opposition years I was one of the voices that persuaded the party to oppose each of the centralising power grabbing Treaties Labour signed up to.  We wanted the incoming Conservative government in 2010 to renegotiate, pointing out that we did not agree with the big Treaty changes and many of the extra EU laws of the 1997-2010 era. Having Liberal democrats in the coalition 2010-15 prevented anything serious being done about the EU.

I and my friends ran campaigns and organised votes from the backbenches to secure a referendum on continued membership, as we had by then decided the EU was so changed from the EEC on the UK prospectus in 1975 that the people should be allowed to cast their judgement on our membership of this Federal governmental body. It was when I and a few friends at a meeting with the PM explained we were close to half the Conservative MPs being willing to defy a 3 line whip to vote for a referendum that the PM agreed to include one in our next Manifesto. It was the most important change I had ever helped  secure. I always assumed the public would vote to leave as it was such a crippling deal being in the emerging superstate.

Christians rejoice for the resurrection of Christ. Most of the nation enjoys easter eggs and a special Easter lunch as families get together to enjoy a four day break. The Easter stories celebrate the triumph of life over death, good over evil, Christian values over the heavy handed Roman colonial government that crucified Jesus,  and the rites of spring. There is something for every UK citizen in this end of winter holiday.