This week a group of mainly Conservative MPs tabled an amendment to the Queen’s Speech. The amendment states, in Queen’s speech style language,

               “This House respectfully regrets that an EU referendum Bill is not included in the Gracious speech”.

           Some of you would want a full bloodied motion, but I can assure you this did the job in Parliament. Everyone deciding how to vote on this amendment knows what it means on the main point. If you vote for the Amendment you want legislation in this session to hold a referendum. If you vote against it you clearly do not want a referendum. It would be most unusual for an amendment critical of a Queen’s speech to pass. Previous governments of a single party have united behind their Queen’s speech programme and voted down criticisms.

            The Motion does not tell us when the referendum should be held, or even what the referendum should ask in detail. The reason for that was simple. Mr Baron wished to maximise support for his motion. This motion allows an MP who wants to legislate soon  for a referendum in 2017 to vote Yes, as well as a person who wants an immediate In/Out referendum and an MP who wants a Mandate referendum now.

               Those of you who want an In/Out referendum now will probably complain. The truth is that amongst MPs  even on the side of a referendum on the EU there are split views on how and when. It would be a pity to lose this motion by being too specific and putting off MPs from supporting it because they do not like the detail.

               It appeared yesterday  the motion has already attracted the support of a very important MP, Mr Cameron. He was reported to  say Conservative Ministers can vote for it, a necessary condition for the motion to have a better  chance of passing. This morning we read that Conservative Ministers can merely abstain whilst backbenchers can vote for it.

            Now the question is what will Mr Miliband do? If he asks Labour to vote for the motion,  it would pass with or without the Conservative Ministers. I read he is not going to support it.  If he  merely ask them to abstain from voting, the motion will now pass thanks to the majority of Conservative MPs voting for it, with many Ministers abstaining. I assume the Lib Dems, Green  and most Nationalists will vote against the referendum. There will be quite enough Conservative backbenchers for the amendment  to carry it  if Labour abstains en masse.  Conservative Ministers abstaining will swell the majority.

               If Parliament approves this amendment, then the next step will be to present a Bill, where the questions of when and what referendum have to be addressed. There is substantial debate within Parliament on these issues, which I  will talk about more tomorrow. Parliament needs to get closer to a common view to be able to legislate.

              If Parliament passes the amendment it will not be good enough for the government to say that there will still be no Bill for a referendum. The will of Parliament will have come into line with the wishes of ther people to get on with sorting out our relationship with the EU by involving the voters in this overriding issue.

 

            On Monday at 5 pm I am debating austerity and growth policies at the Sheldonian Theatre , Oxford under the chairmanship of the Warden of St Antony’s College. The other main  participants are Martin Wolf of the FT, Robert Skidelsky and Meghnad Desai.

            The topic is “Austerity in the UK and the  Eurozone: kill or cure?” Anyone interested in hearing is welcome to attend this public debate, at no cost to them.

            My Parliamentary duties allow me to do this, as Parliament is having another day’s debate on the Queen’s speech. I have already made my speech in this debate and am not allowed to speak again in the main debate. There will be no vote on Monday.

 

           In a way I was one of  the first modern Tory modernisers. In 1995 I said “No change, no chance”, and called for new policies and new approaches to Conservative politics. The party opted for no change, and went down a very large defeat.

            In opposition a group of people developed a modernising agenda. Some of it made a lot of sense. They said the party has to be comfortable in modern Britain, and not think it can put the social clock back to the 1950s. They were happy to have a liberal economic agenda as I favour, as long as there was a more liberal social agenda too.  In political terms the aim was to reach out to new voters and to  voters for parties of the centre left, to build a Conservative majority. Subject to careful choice of socially liberal measures and how far that went, this could have worked as an election winning strategy. A well judged reduction in political correctness, leaving people freer to run their own lives, would be welcome and popular.

           Unfortunately the strategy developed harsh edges, at a time when the aim was stated to be make the Conservatives more cuddly and likeable. Some exponents decided that the traditional Conservatives had nowhere else to go, so they could briefed against, left out in the cold or otherwise badly treated. Some of the positive measures of the modernising strategy, like the emphasis on climate change theory and the more recent approach to single sex marriage, caused adverse reactions amongst many  Conservatives , making the party look split rather than modern.

          The strategy also rested on highlighting issues that have been  traditional  strong suits of the left, and ignoring or playing down issues like the EU, law and order and tax cuts where Conservatives have fared better in the past. The Conservatives failed to break through in 2001, and failed to win an outright victory in 2010 despite substantial modernising steps. Some say Consevatives  lost because the party modernised too much in the wrong way, others say the party did not win because it still had not modernised enough.

              In the last three years there has been a great opportunity for the modernisers to show their strategy working, as around half the voters who voted for the Lib Dems in 2010 are currently  no longer prepared to vote for their old party for a variety of reasons. The government modernising agenda of green energy, same sex marriage, increased overseas aid, the concentration  on issues like health and schools rather than tax cuts, the EU and law and order should have been able to attract some of those departing Lib Dems, yet most of them have gone elsewhere. Meanwhile that same agenda has clearly driven numerous voters in the most recent Coucnil elections to vote UKIP instead of Conservative.

          Conservative opinion ratings have gone up when the PM has vetoed the Fiscal treaty, cut the EU budget , set a cap on total welfare payments to each family and made other commitments to welfare reform. In the days ahead I will look at how the Conservative party could come up with an agenda that suits many traditional Conservatives, whilst also showing that the party can reach out to people who have not voted for it for many years, and to younger people who have never voted for it.

Lord Lawson was right to say in the Times on Monday that the Euro means an ever closer union in the EU, with ever more government from Brussels. He is right that the UK does not want that and cannot accept that. Some of us thought the EU bossed us around too much before the Euro. The Euro has clearly made it a lot worse.

The EU Trade Commissioner decided that made it a good day to launch an attack on Europsceptic MPs in the UK for not understanding the EU. I suspect our problem from his point of view is we read too much and understand too much, not the other way round. There is no point in Commissioners trying to threaten the UK with the tired old lie that we will lose 3.5 million jobs dependent on EU trade if we pull out. As they well know, the rest of theEU, especially Germany, sells us much more than we sell them. They will need to carry on with that trade, so they will be asking the UK for arrangements that allow that to happen.

If the EU was indeed a friendly partner and supporter of the UK , it would now be asking us what we need to allow us to trade and be friends with them. It would not be lecturing us, but would be listening sympathetically to what it is about the EU that we do not like. The fact that they do not do this, shows  some of them  do not think it is our club as well, and shows they have little wish for us to improve its performance and alter its masively over intrusive rules.

The big problem for business with all the single market rules, is they apply to everything we do at home and everything we sell to non EU countries, as well as applying to our exports to the EU. If we were a free country again, the EU rules would only apply to things we sold to them, making it easier for us to compete in the rest of the world’s growing markets.

I was asked to make my own position clearer. I cannot see how I can make it clearer. I have repeatedly said that I voted against continued membership in 1975, and that if we had a referendum today on In/Out on current terms I would vote for Out. I also want us to negotiate a relationship based on trade and political co-operation. Many of you tell me that cannot be achieved, in which case I would vote for Out on any referendum that followed such a negotiation. Those who just wish to leave need to accept there has to be a negotiation over which common rules will still apply so ferries can run, planes can fly etc. I have always thought the costs and legal impositions of membership were too high, and that it was always a political union in the making which we did not wish to join. That is why I voted against Rome in 1975, and opposed all subsequent treaties one way or another, as being incompatible with UK democracy and sovereignty. The whole Conservative party rightly voted against Nice, Amsterdam and Lisbon, which is why we cannot accept the current arrangements.

 

The last time a government had to control the excess spending and borrowing inherited from its Labour predecessor was 1979.

I have been reading Mr Moore’s new official biography of Margaret Thatcher. He guides us through the received wisdom and the well known press cuttings and literature. In the case of her private life he does shine new light with access to the fascinating family letters, especially to her sister.

When it comes to the first couple of years fighting the deficit and excess spending he is less sure of foot. The fascinating thing was that despite all the preparation in opposition to come in and control spending from Day one, the first two years saw a huge increase in public spending. This “fiscal stimulus” did not rush us out of recession, nor did it make the government popular.

I had been one of the two external advisers to the extensive Policy Group work done on public spending under Keith Joseph’s chairmanship in opposition. We had been through the published “books” with a fine toothcomb, and knew how the incoming  government should get to grips with runaway spending. Margaret had taken a strong personal interest in our work, as we  were regularly told. Our papers were often called in for pulping, as she was understandably afraid  that the detailed plans woud leak, even though they were in line with the regular public statements about the need to curb spending.

Yet in the first year the government took cash spending up from £75 bn (General Government expenditure) to  £90 bn, an increase of 20%, and in the second year up to £108.6bn, a further increase of  20.6%. The total increase over the two years was 44.8%   (Red Book p 120  1997-8 ). Public sector inflation was rapid, and a  lot of the increase went on higher wages. It was nonetheless a  real increase of 5.2% as scored in an understated way by the Treasury at a time of stories of massive public sector cuts. Actual inflation was 29.8%, so public spending went up by 15% more than the GDP deflator measure of inflation.(Red Book p 120).

So why did this happen? I think the main  reason was the official civil service presented eveything to Ministers in so called real terms. These figures concealed the huge cash increases in spending going on. I called John Hoskyns (Policy Adviser) at No 10 as soon as I saw some cash figures that revealed what was really going on. When I showed them to him he expressed surprise at the scale of the increases, as all the government debate was couched in terms of cuts and how many cuts the system could take. It was only  when Ministers and their advisers started to demand and to use  cash figures that the true scope of the spending control problem became clear to them.

The Coalition has put up spending by much less than the Thatcher government did in its first two years. They too, however, have tended to look at so called real figures instead of cash figures.  Where the Thatcher government increased spending by 44%, the Coalition increased current public spending  by just 7.8% in cash terms, and continued with most of Labour’s capital cuts. The Coalition has said it is cutting spending in real terms, yet overall current spending rose a little according to official figures. The rest of us have to budget in  cash. Our pay does not go up to allow for full inflation. The best way to budget in government if you want to bring the deficit down its to ask how many twenty pound notes each item costs.

 

        Parliament legislates too much. I am not looking for another long list of Bills regulating too many things. Indeed, top of my list are the Bills I do not want to see get the light of day.

        I do not want a Bill to enshrine levels of overseas aid in law. These should be settled each year in the Budget like other spending. I want us to get the deficit down before committing more cash to this cause.

      I do not want a Communications Bill offering government surveillance over our use of the internet. The authorities should snoop under warrant on those who may threaten our society, not on everyone else.

     I do not want a Bill to impose a minimum alcohol price. Whilst too many  getting drunk does cause problems for our society, a minimum price only stops the poor and honest from getting drunk, not the rest.

     I do not want a Bill to regulate cigarette packets.

     I do not want a Bill to undertake the next stage of HS2. I want this delayed until the structural  budget deficit has been removed.

        I would like a Referendum Bill, a Repeal  Bill to remove needless and costly regulations, and a Bill to free us to have an energy policy based on cheaper energy.

       Government needs to spend more time sorting out public sector management, standards, quality and extent of its functions rather than adding more laws to the Statute book. It needs to redouble its efforts to curb spending to get the deficit down.

          What would you like? And Yes, you can say repeal of the 1972 European Communities Act.

 

Reports I am getting from business and individuals in my constituency and from the wider country tell me that banks are reluctant to lend, require huge amounts of paperwork, and impose very high charges if they do decide they will provide some finance. Recent figures show there is still a lending problem in our economy. A new generation of potential homeowners cannot get mortgages, and many businesses struggle for loans to help them grow.

Anti Money laundering is  an absurd paperchase. Most banks still seem to think that having an authenticated copy of your passport and a utility bill will mean the money they are receiving is not laundered. It is completely ridiculous. Money launderers have passports and homes with utility bills. If they do not, they would happily forge or steal the necessary documents, as one more offence would not make a great deal of difference to their criminal record  should they get caught. The whole thing has become like the sale of indulgences against sin, with the victim having to pay for a lawyer to countersign the documents to prove who he or she  is, even though the Bank should know exactly who  he or she  is.

The Money Laundering Regulations 2007 do indeed ask the business to “verify the customers identity on the basis of documents, data or information obtained from a reliable and independent source”. Many businsses do this to death, requiring expensive signed copies of documents from people they know well. It also requires business to “obtain information on the purpose and intended nature of the business relationship”, which few seem to bother about and which does  not lead to all sorts of standardised box tickings,.

Banks used to regard property as a good asset for security. Now they seem to dislike property, saying they have too many loans against it already. If they do go ahead, the new system of property transfer has been made cumbersome and much more expensive, with endless enquiries concerning energy efficiency, appliances in the property, past conformity with planning and Building Regulations, Stamp Duty rules and the rest.

Anyone seeking to gain permission for property improvement or alteration now faces a much longer and more expensive process than a few years ago. Bat, newt and other surveys can delay works by more than a year.

It is no wonder it is difficult getting growth back again in our economy. There is so much regulation that is either of dubious value, or over the top in the way it is implemented, that it is easier just to say when faced with the idea of a new project “I cannot be bothered”. So many public bodies, and some advisers in the private sector, now see any glimmer of enterprise as an opportunity to demand more fees and charges before allowing people to go ahead.

 

 

          The BBC/Labour strategy up to this point has been to create UKIP as a new SDP. The left now thinks they were out of power in the 1980s and most of the 1990s owing to the split in Labour and the emergence of Labour light. Mr Smith and Mr Blair eventually got them back into power by moving Labour more towards the SDP to make it electable. What better, they think, than to help stimulate a massive split in the Eurosceptic forces, so they can have Lib/Lab  governments busily allowing the EU to complete its take-over of our country.

           This week’s Council results should give them pause to think again about this strategy. It has worked in the sense that giving more airtime and support to UKIP as a political force has helped them speak up for many voters who do not like the current situation. It has set Eurosceptic Conservative against Eurosceptic UKIP brilliantly. However, it now turns out that UKIP has been able to garner more of the popular vote in the seats they contested than is comfortable for either Labour or the Lib Dems. UKIP has shown an ability to take some votes from the left, and to persuade former non voters to vote, in a way which has also damaged the two parties of the pro EU  left as well as the Conservatives. Mr Miliband would be ill advised to deny the British public a referendum now, as he scrambles to get up to just 30% of the popular vote.

          From here there is all to play for for all the main parties and viewpoints. The Eurosceptics have shown that if you add the UKIP vote and the Conservative vote they have the majority. Can they find a way at last of translating that into power, to  change the EU relationship as we wish? Or can the left ensure the splits in Eurosceptic opinion get more bitter , so the Conservatives end up  by winning fewer seats, leaving the  field open for Labour? Could Labour succeed in  winning a General Election  whilst polling less than 30% of the popular vote? It would be rash to rely on that. Labour has to think about how it can change on issues like migration, dear energy, extradition and the underlying problem of the EU.

          As someone  motivated to seek a better life for UK people I want to get the UK out of the centralising bossy ill directed government of the EU that currently damages us.  I am not sure whether to cheer or to weep at the last results. The optimist in me says at last people have spoken in greater numbers, to tell all the political parties they want a say on the EU and they deeply resent EU policies on borders, crime,energy and welfare, to name but a few. Surely now we Eurosceptics can weld this mood into a political force for change?  The pessimist warns me that UKIP and the Conservatives may continue to attack one another to the point where they let Labour in, as some on the left anticipate.

         If Eurosceptics are to seize the opportunity in these latest figures, two things need to happen. The Conservative leadership has to start rectifying the problem now, despite the Coalition. They have plenty of backbench MPs keen to do so. They need to act, not just to talk about acting. UKIP for its part has to use more moderate and friendly language about Eurosceptic Conservatives, seeing us as part of the solution, not wrongly defining us as the problem. We do have votes in the Commons, which is where we need them to change the UK’s relationship with the EU. UKIP still has none.

The Ancien regime of the EU is far from popular. Today we see the full extent of the UK electors protest over the EU’s actions. Voters are fed up with the UK having too little control over its own borders, annoyed that we have to pay benefits according to the whims of the European Court, angry that we cannot extradite whom we wish, livid at the EU’s dear energy policy and frustrated at the ever growing burden of regulation that hits motorists, small business people, savers and many others.

It follows large votes for non mainstream parties in Euroland, where the damage being done by the EU is considerably greater. There high and rising unemployment and endless tax rises and austerity packages courtesy of the EU are adding to the misery.

Some in the mainstream media and parties take comfort from phrases like “it is a protest vote”, it “wasn’t mainly about Europe”, “it’s what you expect mid term”. They would be wise to think again. It is a sign that European government now has too many tentacles. More voters now wish to express anger at just how much power was transferred from UK democracy to EU bureaucracy by the Nice, Amsterdam and Lisbon Treaties without a referendum, as they see the results of the UK not even being able to control its own borders, welfare and criminal justice system. That is why all the mainstream parties are suffering.

Labour lost votes to UKIP in South Shields, and the Lib Dems lost votes everywhere, as well as the Conservatives suffering substantial defections of their voters to UKIP. The first mainstream party to grasp the significance of this mood and to offer a solution to the complex web of issues that have upset so many people will do the nation a service and make itself more likely to win the 2015 General Election.

Mr Cameron has so far come the closest to understanding it, when he made his excellent Bloomberg speech. For the first time a UK Prime Minister has made it UK policy to negotiate a new relationship with the EU. For the first time since 1975 a PM has said we will need a referendum giving people the chance to vote to leave the EU if the new relationship secured is not to their liking. Welcome though this is, it does not however go far enough. The voters have passed their judgement on it and other matters and said they want more, faster.

So what can he do, given the constraints of Coalition? One thing UKIP supporters refuse to accept is that the UK voters chose an EU federalist inclined Parliament in 2010. It may well be the case that such thought was not uppermost in their mind when they voted, but that was the result of all the combined choices. It certainly means that in 2010 voters were not primarily concerned to change our relationship with the EU. It is only more recently that the extent of the EU’s powers and the damage of its policies has come to preoccupy more voters minds. It is because neither Labour nor the Lib Dems will vote for a referendum or for a renegotiation at the moment that Mr Cameron has had to promise to do all this if he wins the next General Election.

Today there is a new mood which will affect Labour as well as the Conservatives. Sensible Labour representatives have already said UKIP voting is an issue for them as well. I think in this new climate Parliament could approve an immediate referendum on the issue of whether the government should go to Brussels and negotiate a new much looser relationship where we are not governed by Europe. I would support a Bill which allowed us to ask the public “Do you want the UK government to negotiate a new relationship with the EU based on free trade and political co-operation?”

It may be that the Lib Dems, a principled pro EU party, would wish to oppose even this. So be it. The Conservatives could launch it from the backbenches, as long as Conservative Ministers could vote for it, and vote for the time it needs to pass it. In this climate I would be amazed if the Labour party wished to oppose it, given the mood of the country and the urgency of the issues involved.

Some say, why do we need to do this? Isn’t it clear that the UK public want the government to do this. The answer is sadly “No”, it is not clear enough to politicians. That is why they have not done this so far. More importantly, assuming it is the will of the big majority of the UK voters that we need a different relationship with the EU, our Prime Minister armed with such a mandate would be taken much more seriously in Brussels when demanding change.

UKIP will doubtless complain that this is not the same as an IN/Out referendum now. They will say this is delay or obfuscation. On the contrary. It is a necessary process the country has to go on. In or out of the current EU, we need trade arrangements, pipeline agreements, interconnector deals, transport permissions, extradition treaties and the rest. It all takes negotiation.

They will also say that the EU will not negotiate a new deal for the UK. I say if the Prime Minister had the backing of the UK people for such a task, they would have to. If by any chance UKIP were right and they still would not negotiate, then it would presumably result in the UK voters voting to leave the EU in the subsequent referendum on the non deal negotiated.

This will not appeal to the purists in UKIP who just think Parliament should vote to leave the EU immediately. I have to tell them we are still a very long way off that day. After all, the bottom line in South Shields was another federalist MP was returned to this federalist Parliament. We need to settle the matter of Europe now, for the sake of our liberty and prosperity. The Mandate referendum harnesses the energy and anger of the UK electors positively to that task.

 

Published in conjunction with a shorter version of this piece in  The Sunday Times 3 Thomas More Square

 

        Before the election I predicted that UKIP would not win any Councils, and would not win more Council seats than the Conservatives, or Liberals, or Labour. The final results show the Conservatives won 1124 seats, Labour 560, Lib Dems 371, Independents 165 and UKIP 147. The Conservatives won 18 Councils, Labour won 3 Councils and 13 are now in no overall control. Despite doing much better  in the popular vote where they did stand, UKIP got very little representation.

      The curious thing is the BBC published adjusted figures for vote share designed to adjust for  the fact that some parties did not fight all the seats, and adjusted to allow for different voting patterns in parts of the country not facing elections. All this requires difficult judgements based on past voting, at a time when there are big changes in voting behaviour where there are elections. Did they adjust enough and in the right directions?

        I would like to see the unadjusted date, so we can know what share of the actual votes cast each party recorded on Thursday.  This information is normally easily available, but for some reason is not this time. It would be useful to compare this with the adjusted figures.