My reading of British history taught me three big lessons.

1. The UK has fought far too many continental wars, costing us a huge price in lives and treasure. It was often a bad idea to get involved in struggles that did not affect our core interests as an island with global reach.
2. When we had to fight as against Nazi Germany we were on our own for crucial months and needed to have the military capacity for self protection and survival. Being able to make our own weapons and feed our own population were crucial.
3. The main threats to us in previous centuries always came from Europe with successful  invasions by Vikings, the French, and the Dutch, and unsuccessful by the Spanish, French and Germans in more recent times.

Recently  Ukraine has been invaded. That country wishes to become an EU state. Other small states to the east face possible Russian interference if they look to the EU and NATO. The EU and its leading member states with substantial militaries needs to decide on what relationship it plans with Russia and whether it is willing to give Ukraine sufficient financial and military support to give Ukraine a good chance of defeating the Russian invasion.

NATO remains an important pillar of our defence. Led by the dominant contribution of the US we can only rely on NATO for those purposes which the US will endorse. Under Presidents Biden and Trump it is clear the US does not regard NATO as the alliance to intervene against Russia to support Ukraine. As the UK cannot change this view it needs to respect it and base policies on the consequences. We do need the US to continue its offer of protection to NATO members, and therefore need to respond to the US direction .We and the other NATO members also need to do more to defend ourselves.

The UK needs to greatly bolster our own defences. Defence commitments need to be increased, starting with a more comprehensive anti missile and drone defence for our home islands. Our airforce and navy need expansion both for home defence and for possible overseas tasks in conjunction with the two aircraft carriers. The main interests the UK has abroad is to keep open the sealanes and air routes for international  trade and to protect UK overseas territories.  As a Security Council member of the UN we need to be able to commit to overseas interventions against terrorists, rogue states and threats to allied democracies and trade. As a NATO member we need to work to ensure the continued effectiveness of the NATO guarantee to its members, the continued presence of the US in NATO  and to ensure we can help the US defend NATO states.

The UK needs to invest much more in securing our own food and essential supplies at home, and in rebuilding our defence industrial capacity. We can only defend ourselves in an uncertain world if we can grow enough food, and make enough weapons here at home.

The USA regards oil and gas as central to its lifestyle and to its economic and military strength. China seeks to dominate the battery car and renewable energy markets but is busy buying up cheaper Russian gas and increasing its use of coal. It doubtless regards the EU and UK as stupid to be buying its green products made using fossil fuels to shift the use of the fuels from their economies to China’s. China has avoided firm targets to get its own CO 2 down and has spent the first decade since the Paris Treaty to cut CO 2 putting its own up.

Russia pays for its war of expansion by selling oil and gas discounted to countries willing to ignore western sanctions. India plans to grow fast buying more oil, gas and coal from any good value source. OPEC still earn a good living from fossil fuels.

Western consumers including Europeans remain wedded to gas and solid fuel heating given the high costs of electricity and in most countries  battery cars are a minority  taste.  Most  forecasters expect the  world to be needing 100 m barrels of oil a day in ten years time alongside at least as much gas as is burned today.

Europe and the UK government do not wish to accept this reality. As a result they are becoming more dependent on expensive renewables, needing back up ways of providing power for all the times when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine. There was a good reason the Uk grew richer by dumping windmills and changing to coal based steam power.

Europe and the UK by backing extreme net zero policies and over regulating digital business are putting themselves into the slow lane whilst the US and China leap ahead. Worse still the EU approach will increase world CO 2 whilst damaging themselves by denying themselves cheaper fossil  fuel energy. The US grasps the need for both more electricity and more fossil fuel as the digital cloud needs huge quantities of power for its revolution.

When I was the UK’s Single Market Minister I was appalled by the excessive and bad laws and regulations the Commission drafted and tried to force through. I had to waste my time seeking to build qualified minority vote blocks to delay measures  or to try to get revisions or dilutions to the  harm the drafts would do.

The procedures were designed to concentrate power in the hands  of the Commission. As a participating Minister I could not move my own amendment to a law but had to get the Commission to adopt the change behind the scenes if they accepted I could mobilise a blocking minority against their bad proposal.

I kept the UK Parliament informed of the main proposals but Parliament had no official role. It just had to rubber stamp anything the Council of Ministers accepted from the Commission. Thousands of bad laws got through over our long years in the Single Market. Parliament had to watch and submit.

The EU Council legislates in private to avoid scrutiny by press and public. Ministers from various states could be persuaded to back something whatever their stated views on the issue safe in the knowledge they could not  be seen and heard shifting position away from  a national interest.There was an irrational wish to find a compromise to legislate when it would often have  been better not to  do so. There was no appetite for repeal of bad past measures that were  doing obvious harm,

The Commission just wanted to occupy as many areas of life and government activity as possible. To do so it usually asked leading French and German companies and their governments how they did things and then make that the only legal way to do things in their laws . It rarely thought of  the needs of small business, innovators and challengers.

It was also anti US. Wherever the US was pulling ahead through new ideas the EU sought to regulate and fine the US success stories.

The left pointing parties in the UK claim to be upholders of international law. Whenever the UN, an international Court or the EU expresses an opinion or passes a resolution hostile to UK interests they side with the international lawyers.

This leads to absurd contradictions and self harm. They decide to give away the Chagos islands and loads of money based on some UN advisory statement. They ignore the rights of the Chagos islanders a previous Labour government threw off the islands. They  waste our money on a court case to suppress the islanders assertion of their rights and their wish to keep the islands British.

It is surely illegal to smuggle drugs into the US, to rig an election, to so harm people that millions flee a country to seek refuge elsewhere, to deal in illegal weapons, so how can these international laws be enforced? Why do the left not complain about all this damaging lawlessness?

It is illegal to travel by unlicensed dangerous boat. It is illegal to put a child’s life at risk in an unlicensed boat . It is illegal to seek entry to the UK without documents and a basis to claim a right to enter. Why not improve enforcement of these international laws?

Why do these international law lovers regard the human rights of an illegal migrant as more important than the human rights of a legally settled UK citizen who does not want large scale illegal migration?

Democratic societies need a rule of law that is fair and fairly enforced. Too many today see the government and left wing parties selecting parts of international  law that  harm the UK whilst failing to enforce laws against violent crime, sexual assault, illegal migration and drug trading.

I usually am excluded from any discussion of the impact of Brexit on the BBC. I was given a rare interview on Friday on Radio 5. It did not of course turn out to be the promised interview to put the case for Brexit. It  began with questions about whether I had lost friends over my views on Brexit, not something put to the Remain interviewees about their views. It went on by asking me to say what I thought was good about Remain. As soon as I started to correct  the many egregious Remain   errors about the post Brexit performance of the UK economy and trade I faced a tirade of the usual misleading and wrong Remain arguments from one of their more articulate performers put  up to interrupt me.

The BBC cannot claim balance by giving so little time to well informed  Brexit commentators and then treating us in such an absurd partisan way. Why do they want to suppress  the official figures about our growth rate, faster than Germany’, Italy and France, and the increase in our trade since Brexit? Why do they refuse to examine why the EU has fallen to just half the US level of GDP per head and has only grown half as fast as the US over the entire  last  25 years?

Why do they not use the ONS and EU official figures which show the UK has grown faster than Germany, France and Italy since 2016 and since our exit, showing no negative Brexit effect? Why do they ignore the huge success of our service exports, 56% of our total exports, especially to non EU places?

I would be happy to receive comments on the events  in Venezuela. I am not planning to make any early statement myself on these issues, and will study the US and Venezuelan  responses as they develop. It seems likely this will lead to some rebuilding of the badly run down Venezuelan oil industry which will drive oil prices  down easing inflationary pressures.

In my last full year as an MP (2023-4)  I claimed £103,266 in office costs and staff expenses. 2 people helped me do my job. I claimed no travel , no one off expenses . I  supplied  my own car and diesel for the task. My two staff members concentrated on following up and handling the detail of constituency cases which I discussed with them. I was grateful for the efficient, well informed and caring way they dealt with a wide range of sensitive issues for people.  I did not have any staff to write speeches, research problems, monitor political agendas and highlight issues that needed government attention. I regarded all that as my job as the MP. I wrote my own blog seven days a week to keep constituents informed and paid for it myself. We replied to all incoming emails and letters from constituents by the next working day following receipt.

The Lib Dem replacement in Wokingham, Mr Clive Jones,  claimed £178,207 in staff and office costs for the part year 2024-5 he has served as MP, or an annualised rate of £237,000. So he has landed Wokingham and national taxpayers with a 130% increase in the bill for his office. The main reason is large parts of the job of being an MP which I did myself he expects others to do for him.  His staff list runs to nine staff employed for part of the year 2024-5. IPSA lists  a Chief of Staff,  a Communications Officer, a Senior Parliamentary Assistant, a Constituency Support Officer, a Senior Casework Team Leader and  4 caseworkers during the first year.

It is difficult to see why he cannot handle his own communications with the public and media, or why he needs a Parliamentary Assistant when an MP has full access to Commons papers and can go into the Chamber to find out what is going on.He should  not need someone on the  state payroll to design and advise on campaigns.

On top of his claims for his large office he claimed £20,995 for accommodation in his first nine months, and £2579 for travel including some for dependants. This is an expensive MP. No wonder our taxes have to go up with public servants like him undermining  public sector productivity, unwilling or unable to do the job they are paid to do without people to do most of it for them.

There has been much debate about Britishness and who is British. Some say only someone born in the UK to British parents is truly British. This would rule out may good Brits who have UK passports and are legally settled here. In  practice anyone is British who was born here or who successfully applies for British citizenship. So why is there an issue?

Wish for change, or worries about how to define Britishness is a product of rapid high volume migration into the UK in recent years. It led Parliament to put in a test for applicants to become citizens to show some knowledge of UK history and customs. It has led the public to demand much lower rates of citizenship grants and inward migration.

Many of us have an idea of what being British is, but not all our ideas agree with one another. We do not say to someone born of UK parents in the UK they are not British because they want to abolish the monarchy or give the country away to the EU or spend their time condemning our history. We disagree with them revelling in  the democratic freedoms of our country to disagree about such fundamental issues. A criminal does not lose his citizenship though he may lose rights to liberty and to vote.

We can say to people seeking to come here and applying to be UK citizens that if their intent is  to come to be criminals or terrorists we do not want them. If they despise or hate our country they would be best advised to go elsewhere. We can say to people on low and no incomes thinking they might be more prosperous in the UK they can only come and settle if they get a job and pay their own bills and show they will make a contribution. We can have benefit and housing  rules that favour settled UK citizens over new arrivals, taking the view many take that charity begins at home.

If someone gains the privilege of becoming a UK citizen they have won one of life’s bigger lotteries. Free health care, heavily subsidised social housing, a wide range of benefits for any of life’s hazards, good free education for children are all available for UK citizens meeting the criteria. The UK has been too free with its grants of citizenship, adding to strains on the NHS. housing and the benefits bill.

Being British is also about the shared history, the culture, the English language, the traditions we enjoy together. These will be different for individuals free to make their own choices from a rich palette of choices. If too many people are admitted who have not been brought up in these surroundings with that common culture it gets more difficult to define what being British is, and unsettles more who have been born and brought up here.

If 2026 is to offer us the change we want UK  government needs to do less and do it better.

It needs to delay the idea it can bribe and force  us to buy heat pumps  and battery cars. The UK does not have the  power stations to supply all the power this would need, and the grid is far too small. Save the money on the subsidies.

It needs to smash the gangs in the ways often proposed here, to save all the money on housing illegal migrants.

It needs to stop its ill placed generosity to the EU and foreign  countries. We should not be giving away our fish and so much money to the EU nor the money and Chagos islands to Mauritius.

It needs to repeal some of the many EU originated laws that impede and delay  building homes and infrastructure. Bats are treated better than people when planning.

It needs to tell the Bank of England to stop selling bonds at big losses and sending taxpayers the bill.