Mr Clegg bombed badly in the debate last night. He majored on the lie that 3 million jobs would be  at risk if we left the EU, an argument often debunked on this website. Let’s hope after another airing of the main reasons why this is untrue we can put that canard to bed once and for all. Germany sell us more cars than we sell them, so why would they want to damage that trade? No sensible Eurosceptic wants to damage our trade, nor do our European partners who make so much money out of us. The German government has told us it would want good trade arrangements with us if we left the EU. It is only the Europhiles who have such a low view of our partners in  the EU that they think they would spite themselves to do us damage!

                     The public adjudged Mr Clegg the loser. They warmed to Mr Clegg when he said thanks to the EU we can get criminals back here to stand trial, despite the obvious counter that we would have extradition arrangements with the EU countries if we did not form part of the criminal justice measures of the current EU.

               A recent good piece of research from Business for Britain shows how the UK has opposed just 55 new EU laws since 1996. Labour lived through whole years (e.g. 2006,2008) without opposing a single EU measure, so worried were they about having a disagreement with the Commission. Despite this every one of those 55 measures are now good EU law and therefore apply to the country which opposed them. No sign then of the EU coming our way or the UK having lots of influence.

             The UK has just 3.6% of the EU Commission, 8.2% of the votes in the Council of Ministers and 9.5% of the MEPs, as Business for Britain has recently reminded us.  No wonder we rarely influence policy and rarely stop laws we do not like. The Pro EU case suffered a bad blow last night as it revealed its dependence on a falsehood about jobs. We were told we would lose lots of those jobs if we did not join the Euro, a prediction which turned out to be false. The pro EU forces  need to change the record if they are win back lost support in the country.

George Osborne has twice said or done something very popular which has changed the national mood.

His Conservative Manifesto promise to take most people out of paying Inheritance Tax was very popular when he first proposed a new £1m threshold before having to pay. Labour gave up any idea of an early election on the back of it. They then increased the tax free allowances for IHT to show they had understood the public mood, taking it up to £650,000 for a married couple. The Lib Dems did not allow the full increase in threshold the Conservatives had offered in 2010 when joining the Coalition.

Last week his decision to let people with defined contribution pension schemes enjoy the freedom to decide when to take their money out in retirement was another one of those opinion changing moments. Ever since the announcement the Conservatives have gone up in the polls, the Chancellor has become more popular and Labour after early misgivings have decided to back the policy.

We should ask why is it that these two things amidst the thousands of decisions that governemnts make should be the ones that attract so much attention and favourable comment?

The first point to grasp is it shows people are  not primarily motivated by jealousy. Few people will benefit from the pension changes – around 400,000 immediately out of an electorate of more than 40 million. Most people are in defined benefit schemes or do not have an employer pension fund.  A minority have significant sums in a defined contribution scheme which will ultimately  benefit.

Similarly, when Mr Osborne proposed a major increase in the Inheritance Tax threshold most people were not in the bracket where they were facing any IHT bill at all.

What both reactions have in common is the view that the state does not have a right to confiscate your money after a lifetime of hard work and prudence, nor does it have the right to tell you how and when you might spend it. Many people who do not stand to inherit a decent sum from their parents do not want to stand in the way of those who do. Others think that given time maybe they will stand to inherit, and do not fancy the idea of a large tax charge on their parents’ effots. Similarly people may not have much or any pension savings yet, but do not rule out one day having some and then wish to be free to use them as they see fit.

It has been good to see the instant reaction against the nanny state when some dared to argue that people should not be free to draw down their savings in retirement when they wish. The public mood thinks government interferes too much and charges us too much for what it does and what it can offer. The two popular statements by Mr Osborne show there are lots of people in our country who want the state to know that many of us wish to be responsible with our money and want the state to interfere less.

In 1866 the annexation of Venice by Italy was endorsed by a referendum of the Venetian people. A remarkable result was achieved, with just 0.01% voting against. Subsequent historians have suggested the referendum was conducted under the watchful presence of the Italian military. They argue it was just a formal endorsement of an occupation that had already taken place and was arranged by the annexing power. The annexation was possible following  the victory of Prussia over Austria, as Prussia was the newly united  Italy’s powerful ally. Others say that swapping Austrian rule for Italian rule may have been the lesser of the evils  at the time, but Italian rule turned out to be no more enjoyable for Venetian nationalists than Austrian control.

So why isn’t the EU welcoming the decision by many in  Venice to hold its own recent  referendum  to see if people would like an independent Venice instead of staying with Italy? Why are they ignoring the substantial majority that has voted for an independent Venice in the unofficial referendum that has just been conducted, owing to the refusal of the Italian state to allow a legal referendum under Italian law? What will they and the Italian state do if Venice now follows the results of this v0te up by not forwarding tax revenues in future to the Italian state or takes other action to flex its muscles?

It appears once again that the EU picks and chooses which referenda to allow, and as we know is also often quite choosy about the results of any popular vote. Clearly independence for the Veneto is no more permitted than for the Crimea, though it is apparently allowed for Scotland where the existing mother country is more democratic and broad minded about these matters and has agreed to a vote. Even here the EU has intervened in the referendum campaign to make it clear it wants a No vote to independence.  Many countries in the EU have been allowed referenda on EU matters, though they are usually asked to vote again if the EU does not agree with the result.

If current energy prices are not high enough to shock people into wanting us to find more home based gas to use, the weak position of European countries  vis a vis Russia should be sufficient spur to find and extract UK gas.

Some in the government are keen – the Chancellor and the Minister of State for Energy. How keen is the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change?

It is true he is working  towards a large new Licensing round to prospect for onshore oil and gas. The 14th Round is due soon, and will grant licenses in many parts of the country to those willing to spend to find. However, the whole process is currently out to consultation. The consultation, which closes on 28th March, is mainly preoccupied with ensuring compliance with the EU’s Strategic Environmental Assessment Directive 2001 and the EU Habitat regulations.

The DECC website reminds us just how highly regulated all this is going to be. Now I entirely agree the interests of landowners and local communities need to be fully protected. Of course they need assurances that drilling will be safe and controlled and  will not take place close to residential areas. Of course if gas is found communities and individuals should participate in the good news, and should be protected against damage to their properties or their water supply. If any gas is found in my area I will want to help the local community get the sensible guarantees and a participation  they will expect, but I will not want to block the development in suitable locations.

Anyone wanting to look for gas will have to obtain landowner consent, DECC permission, planning permission from the local Council, Environment Agency consent, and Health and Safety approval. It might be a good idea if the government also offered some encouragement to this process. The oilfield at Poole in Dorset shows that it is possible to extract oil close to a beautiful landscape and a prosperous town without it being intrusive or a constant cause of conflict with the neighbours.  The drilling for that occurred years ago before all this latest regulation.  If we are to tackle fuel poverty and fuel a decent industrial revival we need to get on with finding and using the gas that probably lies beneath our feet.

Foreign policy is ultimately about war and peace. Countries which pursue strong foreign policies need armies and navies to defend them. The politicians who decide and pursue the foreign policy need to carry their whole country with them if their policy entails taking up arms. Sending our military personnel into conflict requires the loyalty and consent of the public in a democracy.

That is why I do not want the EU to have a foreign policy. I am pleased to say that Baroness Ashton cannot yet  command armies and navies. The EU’s foreign policy only has force behind it if the main military powers in the EU are prepared to commit their forces. The danger in the current situation is that the EU will become more and more assertive in foreign policy until the point is reached where member states will be expected to commit forces to support their policy or correct their mistakes. Who then will want to fight for a cause which unelected officials in Brussels have pursued, loosely organised by member states who may have disagreed about the policy at the time?

Let us take the case of EU policy towards the Ukraine. Many people in the UK and doubtless elsewhere in the EU think the EU overreached itself by supporting the uprising against an unpleasant elected President. The EU  pushed for a wide ranging Association Agreement between the Ukraine and the EU in a way which was bound to provoke Russia. The result of the EU’s rash action was entirely predictable. Russia had the force, the EU had none in the area, so the Crimea was taken over easily by Russia. Many people in the Crimea were willing supporters of this move, as they had been alarmed by the pro EU Ukrainian interim government’s stated wish to ban Russian as an official language in the Ukraine, before that idea was withdrawn. The EU now complains about how it was done after the event. Why wasn’t it able to foresee the likely outcome before it blundered in?

Maintaining support for our armed forces and committing them  where there is agreement about the national interest in so doing is a crucial role for a democracy. The UK has shown in recent years that where consent breaks down, as it began to with the war in Iraq, our forces are placed in a difficult position and our democracy strains to adjust. How much more difficult if in future our forces could be expected to pick up  the pieces from some crass foreign policy error made by the EU when many UK voters disagreed both with the policy and with the body undertaking it.

I do not detect much willingness to fight for the EU amongst most of my electors. Having a Foreign Policy Supremo and an EU foreign policy is many bridges too far for me. I am afraid that the EU will end up drawing its member states into ill thought through conflicts where there is insufficient loyalty and support for the policy.

Some  people as they reach retirement come to see their pension savings as a con. At the top end they saved when they were on low incomes, receiving modest tax reliefs, only to find in later years they will have to pay higher tax rates to get their money out. Some very successful people will find they have saved too much and now get caned by the new tax system above the lifetime limit.  Some on lower incomes will find their pension savings have not bought them much extra pension. At current annuity rates you need around £20,000 of savings to get an extra £1,000 pension a year. All will find that current low interest rates and  past costs of running the pension scheme leave them worse off than they hoped.

I warmly welcome the Chancellor’s proposal to give people more freedom to decide what to do with their pensions savings where they have defined contribution funds. It is far from satisfactory that people are made to buy an annuity  when rates are low and returns poor. The state seems to be saying that it regards people’s savings as in some way the state’s money, to be controlled for people.

In recent days numerous regulators and socialists have emerged from the woodwork to tell us what they really think of us. Apparently they do think left to our own devices we will behave irresponsibly, blowing our money on fast cars and cruises, instead of drawing down our pension savings over the years of retirement in an orderly way. Some even say that as we have received tax relief on pension savings the state has every right to decide how we can spend them. They clearly do not understand that the tax relief on pensions is largely a tax deferral, not a tax break.

I make this prediction. There will be very few people if any  buying a Lamborghini from  their pension pot. Most will have insufficient money, and the overwhelming majority will be far more sensible with their money.

I also say this. By what right does someone rule out any way that a person might end up spending the money they have saved? If someone was told that they had  only a few months to live, and they had saved substantial sums over their lives, who would begrudge them buying the car of their dreams or the holiday of their lifetime before death? People are usually better judges of how to spend their money than is the state.

The ending of the compulsory annuity purchase was one of the best things in a budget for many years. I will be pleased to vote for it, and to defend it. Those who think the state should control our savings belong to that school of thought which thinks that we are all on pocket money from the government. What a ghastly world to live in if we got to that position. Why then would people try harder or work longer hours, if the government decides what you earn and how you spend it? The old communist jibe was “the government pretends to pay us, and we pretend to work”. That’s what kept them in poverty for so long.

Yesterday I debate the motion

“Excessive and unnecessary environmental legislation and regulation is seriously damaging the UK’s economic gr0wth”

before an audience of environmental lawyers and others at Simmons and Simmons. I will put up a video of the exchanges when it arrives with me.

Crimea is now part of Russia. The EU and the USA should understand this simple fact.  Russia has acted illegally and in ways which offend the West, but Mr Putin now has the Crimea under his control.

Imposing some sanctions retrospectively in a fit of pique makes the West look weak and is a kind of self harm. It looks like someone trying to play cricket in a glasshouse. The sanctions are not going to get Crimea back in the fold of the Ukraine.

The West should believe in democracy. That means we should have worked with the Ukraine for a new election to find a President of the Ukraine who could speak for all and hold it together. That means we should have helped the Ukraine organise a legal referendum on the future of the Crimea so they can settle their own future. Instead the West allowed or encouraged the overthrow of an elected President without an early election to replace him, and condemned the referendum in the Crimea as illegal without having a positive way of letting the Crimea have its say.

In the UK defenders of the Union in the Union Parliament have given Scotland the right to a voice on their future, showing the EU how these things should be handled. Identity and loyalty are important emotions in politics. Unfortunately elsewhere in the EU there is a determined attempt to stifle popular opinion and distort or change loyalties. The EU and the Spanish state are against Catalonia having a vote on its future. The EU and the Italian state are against Venice and the Veneto  having a vote on its future, though an unofficial one is currently underway. The EU and the Ukraine have been against the Crimea having a vote on its future, and partly as a result they have lost the Crimea thanks to Russian actions which the West  condemns but cannot stop.

If the West thinks Mr Putin might be emboldened to do the same again elsewhere, then the West needs to make clear in advance their disapproval and take the diplomatic and defence actions necessary so next time they have some control over events. The rest is just huffing and puffing. The best defence against the splitting of nations is good democratic government in each state that can command the loyalty and agreement of its peoples. Seeking to suppress or deny the existence of demands for self government cannot be the right way ahead.

There is a big gap between what the experts say and what is going on. The experts say we are cutting the deficit primarily by cutting public spending. When people hear that 80% of the task of deficit reduction comes from spending cuts, they think that means public spending is actually declining in cash terms.

Starting with an inherited deficit of £160bn people would think that meant cutting £128bn off public spending to remove the deficit, with the remaining £32 bn coming from tax rises. Of course nothing like that is happening, as all elected politicians agreee you cannot cut that sort of money out of the budgets given the importance of many public services.

Instead public spending will go up every year in cash terms during the period of deficit reduction. They used to say that it would be cut in real terms, though the figures for the first three years of the programme of deficit reduction show there has in practice been small real increases in current spending each year.  Far from causing low growth or no growth as the opponents of austerity have argued,  public spending has made a positive impact to total output and incomes since 2010. Within the spending totals welfare, debt interest, overseas aid and health take a rising proportion, so some other programmes are experiencing cash cuts.

So how is the deficit being brought down? It is coming down for one simple reason – tax revenues are rising. The idea of the gradual programme is to make the task  easier, by allowing more tax revenue to arise naturally through the growth of the economy. Where the government has tried higher tax rates on income and capital gains it has actually damaged the revenues, not increased them. If any government tried to reduce the deficit quickly through a series of tax rate rises, considerable damage would be done to the economy and tax revenues might fall.

Growth has always been the main requirement to help correct the large imbalances in the economy without pushing it into a deep recession. Growth results from change to the economy, with more successful and more helpful activities increasing. We need more exports, more homes, more domestically produced goods to replace imports. The budget seeks to help bring that about.

               There is some good news in the budget. The increase in the ISA allowance for savers to £15,000 and the ending of the disticntion between cash Isas and the rest is a welcome simplification with more generous tax relief. The forthcoming Pensioner bonds from National Savings may well offer a reasonable and secure income.  The offer of much greater flexibility of what to do with your pension saving is also welcome, though the details still need to be worked out in some cases.

              Total public spending at 42.5% of our national output  next year  is still too high a proportion of the total economy, but is down from the excessive 47.5% of 2009-10. The aim is to get it down to 38% by 2018-19.  Total spending  rose this year in real terms.  As expected, the Tax threshold was raised to £10,500 for next year.  There was also a small increase in the 40% tax threshold.

               The Chancellor recognised the need to do something to cut energy prices. He himself highlighted the dangers of UK energy prices twice the US level, and has extended and improved a scheme to subsidise high energy using industries for their energy costs. The better answer must be to find and produce much larger quantities of cheap gas for ourselves. The Chancellor is offering tax assistance to North Sea oil and gas developments, and states that he supports shale gas extraction. The Uk still remains way behind the US in finding and using this new hydrocarbon source.

             The Red Book warns that “Energy intensive Industries pay almost  50% more for their electricity than they do in France, and the cost to business of policies to deliver low carbon energy infrastructure  is set to increase by about 300% by 2020.” This is a massive threat ahead, and should persuade the government to demand changes to EU energy policies so that the UK can opt for cheaper energy which could help power an industrial revival. The goverbnment is offering £500 m in subsidies a year to energy intensive industries from 2015-16 to compensate them for dear green energy, subject to EU approval.

               The long term reforms to achieve a low rate of Corporation Tax now give the UK a competitive advantage with a 21% tax rate. The Chancellor added to that a £500,000 investment tax allowance for business.

                 The main figures in the Budget are little changed from the December Statement. Growth is forecast to be a little higher, unused capacity a bit lower. The Budget concentrates on trying to assist industry to invest, savers to save, and individuals to enjoy some real growth in income.