ConservativeHome's Platform

Nadine Dorries MP: Why 20 and not 22 weeks?

Nadine Dorries is MP for Mid Bedfordshire and is author of a popular blog.  She writes today about her cross-party campaign to reduce the upper limit for abortion from 24 weeks to 20 weeks.

I have 20 reasons why I think the abortion limit should be reduced to 20 weeks.  Viability - the age at which a foetus can survive outside of the womb - is only one of them.

The Trent study that has been in the headlines recently and appears to advocate 22 weeks is flawed. To begin with, some of Trent's data is twelve years old. There is only one lesson to be learnt from the Trent study and that is if you are about to go into premature labour, don’t do it in Trent!

The reason 22 weekers are not always surviving in the UK has everything to do with the fact that each neo natal unit had to close its doors an average 52 times over the last year (National Audit Office, Caring for Vulnerable Babies, The Reorganisation Of Neo Natal Services In England, 19th December 2007, pg 24 Para. 3.3). The units are understaffed, and as Bliss say, if we had dedicated neo natal transfer ambulances and well-staffed units - as they do in Sweden and other countries - we would begin to see a much healthier picture.

It's about the service the NHS provides to 22 weekers which prevents them from living, not their ability with the right treatment to make it through.

Mark Wadsworth: A case for legalising cannabis

Mark Wadsworth is a Chartered Tax Advisor.  He blogs here.

Having spent a couple of hours reading and understanding the ACMD's report, it surprises me that cannabis was made illegal in the first place.

The public's concerns about cannabis are “real” in that they exist (see section 11) but the question must be, are those concerns justified? Or are they merely fuelled by misleading headlines such as 'Cannabis use linked to 40% rise in risk of schizophrenia'?

Mental health

The report confirms that the risk of 'psychotic outcomes' appears to be 41% higher in those who have used cannabis (8.7.1), even though... there are very considerable difficulties in establishing a 'cause and effect' relationship between the use of cannabis and the subsequent development of a psychotic illness.' (8.3).

Even assuming that the risk of a 'psychotic outcome' is doubled for frequent users (8.7.2), what are the overall risks? '€œSchizophrenia is a serious mental illness affecting about 0.5% of the UK population over the course of their lives.'€ (8.1.2). So, frequent use increases the risk from a negligible 1-in-200 to a still negligible 1-in-100.

Matthew Elliott: Twice in eight months, the tax burden has been centre stage in British politics

Matthew Elliott is Chief Executive of The TaxPayers' Alliance.

Alistair Darling’s statement on the abolition of the 10p rate of income tax yesterday afternoon was a fascinating development in the ongoing tax debate. Having taken a battering for Gordon Brown’s decision to raise taxes on some of Britain’s poorest workers, the Government has finally been forced into at least partial retreat.

The Chancellor’s proposals are not perfect, and certainly don’t correct all the damage – raising the threshold by £600 will return 80% of those adversely affected by the abolition back to the financial situation they faced in March, whilst partially mitigating the losses suffered by the remaining 1.1million people. They do, though, mark an improvement on Brown’s original Budget. In essence, things for those on low incomes are better than they were yesterday but slightly worse than they were a month ago.

We shouldn’t let this moment pass, however, without noting the positives from this development, as it shows the growing power of the public’s opposition to the tax burden. Particularly good news is that it has brought the power of raising the threshold to the public’s attention. For years, the Government have sought to keep up the pretence that the poor can only be helped by direct intervention – an Emperor’s Clothes-like charade of insisting that more tax credits, benefits and public servants are the only answer to poverty. That is not the case, and today’s statement shows it.

Charles Tannock MEP: In defence of PR for European elections

Last week Daniel Kawczynski MP wrote for these pages about the "fundamental flaws" of proportional representation.  The 47th and final comment on Daniel's article was from Charles Tannock MEP, defending PR for European elections.  We thought it deserved wider notice and have republished it below.  It was a comment and is not, therefore, as polished as Mr Tannock would probably have produced if it had been formally submitted as an article... but his arguments are clear enough and worthy of consideration.

I can see the logic of FPTP for Westminster where you want clear majorities and stable government but I don't agree with Daniel that its equally desirable or applicable for Euro elections. Granted in 1999 I probably wouldnt have been elected in London on a single member Constituency so some might argue I will say the following for personal interest reasons.

I can now after 9 years in office see the advantages of the multimember regional list for the European Parliament. Not only does it allow an elector to write to his or her MEP of party choice but also a degree of choice in finding an MEP who sits on the relevant committee with specialist knowledge of the matter in question. In the EP most legislation is highly technical and doesn't always divide on party lines but on national ie UK plc lines and in the area of supranational legislation we have to build consensus across parliament so a spread of political views are necessary to gage public opinion. I very much doubt with the reducing number of total UK MEPs even if we had our own FPTP Constituency (with 10 Westminster constituencies within it) that we could ever be known personally to the million or so population this would entail. Furthermore when we were at our most unpopular the MEPs were a useful backup for local party structures in the large swathes of the country with no elected Tory representation at all.

I do not seek personal recognition in my Regional constituency and am happy to leave that glory to my Westminster colleagues and am keen instead to get on with the job in hand. Furthermore if I did have personal recognition with London's 5 million electors I might be deluged with correspondence without the resources to cope with it - which has anyway increased exponentially in the last decade as a result of the internet in which in "write to them" you plug in a postcode and all elected representives get sent the same email irrespective of whether its in our jurisdiction or not (I get housing, immigration, health etc enquiries better handled by the local councillor, MP or AM) but still have to issue a polite reply as they are all my Constituents (well there is some debate if those who aren't on the electoral register are Constituents but that's another debate).

Ben Rogers: We have a “responsibility” to “protect” in Burma

Benedict Rogers is a human rights activist specialising in South Asia. He works for the human rights organisation Christian Solidarity Worldwide and serves as Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission. He has visited Burma and its border areas more than 20 times, and is the author of A Land Without Evil: Stopping the Genocide of Burma’s Karen People (Monarch, 2004). He was Conservative Parliamentary Candidate for the City of Durham in the 2005 General Election.  He also blogs at CentreRight.com.

Bob Dylan asked the right questions. And following the tragic destruction caused by Cyclone Nargis in Burma nine days ago, the words of his song Blowing in the Wind are eerily appropriate:

“How many times must a man look up before he can see the sky?
Yes, 'n' how many ears must one man have before he can hear people cry?
Yes, 'n' how many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died?
How many years can a mountain exist before it's washed to the sea?
Yes, 'n' how many years can some people exist before they're allowed to be free?
Yes, 'n' how many times can a man turn his head, pretending he just doesn't see?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind, the answer is blowin' in the wind.”

The death toll in Burma is in the hundreds of thousands, and rising. The cyclone itself killed several thousand – but the regime is responsible for even more deaths. India provided 41 warnings to the regime before the cyclone struck, but the regime did nothing to prepare the people. During the cyclone, when 36 prisoners in Insein Jail tried to get out of their cells to avoid being crushed, they were shot dead. Then, following the devastation, the regime initially refused all offers of international aid. Subsequently, it accepted aid – but continues to refuse access to aid workers. This past weekend, as the bodies piled up, the regime shut up shop for a three day public holiday.

David Eyles: Is food security incompatible with a free a market?

This is the first part of a feature looking at food security by David Eyles, a Dorset livestock farmer.

Food security can be defined as:

“The ability of a nation to produce sufficient of its own food requirements such as to ensure the proper nutritional, economic, strategic, psychological and spiritual needs of its population. Where imports of food are necessary, they should not be so great that in the event of an alteration in political, economic or environmental conditions elsewhere in the world, that nation cannot feed or support itself properly.” 

This is my definition and is subject to discussion, but will do for a start.

For most of Britain’s history, we have been self sufficient and/or exporters of food and food based products. The considerable wealth of medieval England was accumulated by the export of wool. This continued until the late 18th century, when we started to import food to support a burgeoning population. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, we imported an increasing proportion of our food, until by 1940 we imported about 60% of our needs. This came mostly from the Empire, the USA and other countries like Argentina. A largely unhindered free market was in operation.

Oberon Houston: A vision for Britain

The Abolition of the 10p tax band may have been a disaster for Brown. He may have confused even his own backbenchers, when he accused the Tories of being for it, and then against it. Presumably he was for it when he introduced it, and is now so against it he is abolishing it. Confused? I was. However in the ensuing debating frenzy, we have been constantly challenged as to whether we would re-instate it or not, to which the rather feeble response is that we cannot say. A couple of weeks ago on The Marr Show, David Cameron was being pressed on exactly this, "So if you won't re-instate it, what will you do?" said Marr. 

What happened next, I regard as a defining moment in the debate on this issue. Cameron retorted angrily:

"What I can promise is this; I will never single-out the poorest workers in this country for a tax increase."

This is the stuff people want and need to hear. To react to specific fiscal policies such as the 10p rate abolition, as many involved in the debate rather vacuously wish us to do, isn't responsible. A budget needs to be integrated, balanced, correct for the time it’s presented, and above all, consistent with every policy. Further, government policies need to complement each other; most are in some way connected and have a cause and effect relationship. Together they form the government's ‘vision for Britain’. To debate the specifics of one party’s specific, detailed policy in isolation does little to the quality of the debate. So if the ‘vision for Britain’ is the way to go, how to the two main parties compare?

Neil Reddin: Shifting the centre rightwards

Neil Reddin, a Councillor in the London Borough of Bromley, looks ahead to the election after next.

We no doubt benefited from protest votes last Thursday, only some of whom may be likely to turn voting Conservative into a habit come the General Election. Even so there are also those who, as Boris Johnson identified, had their pencils hovering for a moment before voting for us. Come 2010, the hoverers could well make the difference between us winning and losing - or, being optimistic, between a wafer thin or a stonking majority. It will be the likes of the NUT member who admitted to voting Conservative, on a radio phone-in show last Friday, who could make that difference.

The bigger challenge in our first four years in government will be to crystallise those pencil wavers into habitual Conservative voters. Part of that process, of winning the 2014 General Election, must begin now.

The best way to sustain the new Conservative revival, in the long term, is not so much to keep the party closer to the centre of the political spectrum (though that is invariably where elections are won from), but to shift that centre point rightwards. We have a window of opportunity in the next few years, a period when people are no longer shy of admitting voting Conservative, a period when we have the ear of the media at last.

Daniel Kawczynski MP: Elections demonstrated PR's flaws

Daniel Kawczynski, MP for Shrewsbury & Atcham, says the Conservatives should abolish Proportional Representation for GLA and EU elections.

As a founder of the All Party First Past the Post Group I have spent the last few days analysing the recent mayoral and Greater London Assembly election results, mindful of the different voting systems used.

Having voted on the 1st May you will have seen the confusion at the ballot box as voters were faced with three ballot papers, each offering a separate voting system. We saw the problems a similarly confusing system brought at the elections in Scotland last May. The recommendations made from the Gould Report made it clear that we need to be careful, especially when conducting a number of elections at the same time.

The first past the post vote for the local GLA candidate was the most straightforward, with people voting for a known, and more importantly, accountable, figure. The public, through the campaigning literature, were able to see what local candidates thought of local issues. It is significant that hard working Conservative candidates did well in this vote. Where the GLA loses much of its credibility is in the so called ‘top-up’ seats which rob us of our deserved majority on the Assembly.

Dominic Grieve QC MP: Is "Britishness" useful or redundant?

Dominic Grieve QC MP, Shadow Attorney General, explores the concept of Britishness, This is an abridged version of a speech he gave as the 10th Wilberforce Address for the Conservative Christian Fellowship this week.

That there is now confusion about Britishness is without doubt.  Part of the confusion comes from muddling different concepts.  The Government is equating State citizenship with Britishness.  But people cannot be told to be British, Britishness is identity which people have to feel while British Citizenship is increasingly seen as a portal to the consumption of State services with no little requirement to subscribe to a common identity at all. These two ideas have clashed.

There has been for a long time a consistent pattern of those on the Left attacking national symbols and culture for anti establishment reasons – arguing that it reinforced traditional values and hierarchy and was thus inimical to socialist progress in creating a new society. They have sought to deconstruct it. And as social revolution has been resisted by the innate conservatism of the population the preferred weapon has been the imperative need to adapt Britishness to diversity and multiculturalism.

The ex Mayor of London Mr Livingstone, has been a supreme champion of multiculturalism. He devoted a large budget to encouraging compartmentalised self expression in each ethnic or religious grouping under his patronage. The justification is that each has been a victim of discrimination and requires support to assert itself.

Nicholas Bennett: It was Bromley wot won it

Nicholas Bennett, a Bromley councillor, Chairman of Beckenham Conservative Association and former MP and Minister, explains how the mayoral vote was got out in Bexley & Bromley.

"It was ‘Bromley that did for us" said a Minister, according to the Guardian so it must be true.

The Bexley and Bromley result was a superb tribute to the work done by the six and half constituencies which make up the GLA constituency. James Cleverly, our first rate candidate, was elected with a 75000 majority and took over half the votes cast. In the Mayoral poll Boris received 120000 votes to Livingstone’s 40000. The 80000 lead represents 58% of Boris’ majority.

The new Beckenham Constituency will be London’s safest Tory seat. Normally we specialise in mutual aid. At the last General Election we helped John Horam in his fantastic achievement to end the last vestige of Liberal taint in Orpington and at the next election we will be helping Gareth Johnson in Dartford, so to be a receiver of mutual aid was a new experience for us.   

Dan Hannan MEP: Four pro-EU "Charities" got £34,597,219.16 last year

Dan Hannan is an MEP for the South East and blogs for The Telegraph.

Is there anyone out there who just happens to support deeper European integration? Without being paid to say so, I mean?

I ask the question perfectly seriously. When he introduced the Bill to ratify the Lisbon Treaty, the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, made a song and dance about the fact that it wasn’t just Labour politicians who backed the wretched thing. A whole range of NGOs, he told MPs, had also come out in favour.

“The NSPCC pledged its support, as have One World Action, Action Aid and Oxfam,” he said, looking typically pleased with himself. “Environmental organisations support the treaty provisions on sustainable development and even the commission of bishops supports the treaty. This is a coalition, not of ideology, but integrity”.

Integrity, eh? Within a few hours, Eurosceptic blogs were pointing out that every single organisation he had cited received money from the EU (hat-tip EUReferendum.blogspot.com).

Most of them, it turned out, also got bungs from the British government. Hardly surprising, then, that they should dutifully endorse a treaty supported by their paymasters.

What is surprising is the extent of their financial dependency. When Miliband sat down, I fired off a written question asking the European Commission how much money it had paid these organisations. I have just had the answer. In 2007, ActionAid, the NSPCC, One World Action and Oxfam received, among them, €43,051,542.95. (I’ll come to the bishops in a moment.

Paul Goodman MP: Boris Johnson defeated Islamic extremists as well as Ken Livingstone

Paul Goodman, MP for Wycombe and a Shadow DCLG Minister, welcomes Boris Johnson's victory as good news for community cohesion.

This result isn’t just a wonderful victory for Boris and the termination of Livingstone.  It’s also a defeat for the campaign – an exceptionally dirty one, at that - waged against Boris by a small band of separatists claiming to act in the name of all London’s Muslims. The effects of Boris’ win will be felt not only in the capital, but nationwide – and they’re worth probing in detail.

This campaign’s aim was to attack Boris as an Islamophobe; swing Muslim voters unanimously behind Livingstone; deliver the election for him; emerge, thereby, as a leading force in British Islam, and thus send an uncompromising message to the main political parties – follow our line, or there’ll be electoral consequences.

Its first shots were fired in January, when it was claimed that over fifty Islamic organisations in London had written to the Guardian endorsing Livingstone.  (It later emerged that some of the letter’s signatories had written only in a “personal capacity”.)  Its final salvo was the desperate advert, placed recently in the London Bengali paper “Janomot”, implying that Boris, as Mayor, would ban the Koran.

Greg Clark MP: Right to roam

Greg Clark MP explains the reasoning behind a Bill he has launched this week urging mobile phone companies to share masts and to allow users to 'roam'.

Think back to your last holiday overseas. The chances are that you took your mobile phone with you. Can you remember the number of times you went out of range of coverage? In fact, you probably never went out of range at all – but instead were seamlessly transferred from one network to another, depending on which had the strongest signal. A process everyone knows is called ‘roaming’.

Think back to your last journey around Britain. How many times during a train or car journey outside London did a conversation you tried to have on a mobile phone get cut off because the signal failed? Last Friday in the course of travelling the 15 miles between Tunbridge Wells and the county town of Maidstone – both within 40 miles of London – I passed through 5 separate areas of no network coverage.

The reason? Mobile phone companies do not allow roaming within the UK and do not share their masts with each other. What is automatic for people on holiday is blocked when they’re at home.

Andrea Leadsom: We must dispense with Labour's proposal to take medicines away from GPs

Andrea Leadsom, parliamentary candidate for South Northamptonshire, says the Government's proposed changes to the dispensing of medicines would create more work for GPs whilst cutting the income of their practices.

What more punishment does Labour have in store for us? I would have thought Gordon Brown would leave the family doctor well alone. The one professional in the UK that people trust is the local GP – those of us with young children have got to know our GP pretty well through many years of blood pressure tests, smears, inoculations, kids with chicken pox and sore throats.

Well, Labour has come up with a new plan that will pull the rug from under your local doctor. Their White Paper deviously entitled Pharmacy in England in fact proposes dramatic and far reaching changes to the way GP services are currently run in England.

The plan, put simply, is to stop GPs dispensing medicines from their surgeries. This will force pharmacies to assume control over dispensing medicines, in return for which the Government wants them to start offering a wider range of services, including diagnosing minor ailments and managing chronic illnesses such as diabetes and asthma.

Jeremy Wright MP: The challenge of treating dementia

Jeremy Wright, MP for Rugby and Kenilworth and Chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Dementia, looks at the use of anti-psychotic drugs in care homes.

I suspect that dementia is an issue that many readers will be familiar with - 1 in 3 older people will end their lives with a form of dementia, an estimated 700,000 people in the UK have a form of dementia, and this is expected to rise to a million in less than 20 years.

On Monday, in partnership with the Alzheimer’s Society, we launched A Last Resort which is a report into the use of anti-psychotic drugs in care homes. Two thirds of care home residents have a form of dementia. The report highlights expert findings that suggest that 105,000 people with dementia are given anti-psychotic drugs inappropriately. This equates to 70% of all prescriptions.

Jonathan Caine: The Price of Peace

Jonathan Caine, a former adviser on Northern Ireland to the Conservative Party in both government and opposition and now a Director at Bell Pottinger Public Affairs, reviews David Trimble: the Price of Peace by Frank Millar.

For many years, when asked by politicians I have advised on Northern Ireland, ‘what should I read?’ top of the list would have been Peter Utley’s 1975 classic Lessons of Ulster.  Since 2004 I have had no hesitation in placing alongside it David Trimble: The Price of Peace by the award winning London Editor of The Irish Times, Frank Millar. It is quite outstanding – a must for anybody interested in the politics of that wonderful but much misunderstood part of our country.

When the book first appeared the DUP had already become the majority unionist party at the previous year’s Assembly elections but the 2005 General Election rout which ended Trimble’s leadership of the UUP had yet to take place.  Now, to mark the tenth anniversary of the Belfast Agreement – and by coincidence the departure of Ian Paisley from frontline politics – Millar has brought out a second, revised edition with a new introduction and an additional conclusion to bring the story up to date.

Here I should declare two interests.  First, Millar is a longstanding friend from whose wisdom I have benefited enormously over the years.  I was honoured in 2004 when he asked me to be one of the five people to read and comment on the original typescript.  It was so gripping I could hardly put it down.  Re-reading it last week was a similar experience.

Ryan Shorthouse: It's time for mixed-age classrooms

Ryan Shorthouse, a Conservative policy advisor, Deputy Editor of CrossBow Magazine and qualified Tennis Coach, looks at the potential benefits of mixed-age classes and clubs.

On the national junior tennis circuit, three types of matches would provoke intense nerves: playing someone with a lower rating than you, playing someone you train with in your regular squad, and - more crucially - playing someone younger than you. Agassi-style aggressive baseline play, practised again and again in gruelling coaching sessions, would be replaced by tentative "hacking" - just hitting down the middle of the court with no pace, fearful of missing.

If you were twelve, losing to a nine-year old was a cardinal sin. Your reputation on the tour would temporarily be in tatters: a no-show at the end-of-tournament BBQ would be a certainty. For some, the pressure was too much: 5-2 down in the first set against a player three years younger meant sunglasses had to be worn - even in the middle of winter - to hide the tears that inevitably ensued.

Graeme Archer: Only Connect

Look at your hand a minute (then come back to this!). Think of all the carbon atoms in it, formed at the same time as our solar system. So much of the very matter which gives us our form, and therefore our function, is common to all of us, so very, very much. Ancient and fundamental. We are all made of stars, in the words of the song.

Of course we’re not all the “same”. There are visible differences between human beings. Most of these differences, though, are accidental: unplanned outcomes of evolutionary bifurcations, and in the scheme of things they are tiny. Even the most visible biological human variation, that between men and women, is of little material weight, if you think about it, if you calculate that biological difference as a percentage of the biological total of “male” compared to “female”. For a relatively small proportion of our lives, that difference manifests itself in an important way (in terms of biology, not psychology): but I think it’s a category error to believe that men and women are hugely dissimilar. Psychology is a man-made construct we use to describe our “intentions” as phenotypes of the human species: but the biology came first. I think this applies a fortiori to other manifestations of human groupings.

Mark Prisk MP: Reflections from the Valley

Over the last week Mark Prisk MP, Shadow Minister for Business & Enterprise, has been in Silicon Valley CA, supporting a collaborative business mission for twenty UK web 2.0 entrepreneurs. Web Mission was organised by social entrepreneur Oli Barrett, and consultants Polecat and TechCrunch. Here Mark offers his reflections on some of the policy issues which have arisen from his trip.

The conventional view from Britain of the US economy is universally gloomy. So I am pleased to spread a little happiness from here in Silicon Valley.

Seen from here, there are good reasons to be cheerful. For whilst no-one doubts the troubles in housing and finance - have you seen the sub-prime numbers in California? – I’ve also heard some good, countervailing arguments for thinking positive.

First, technological innovation offers the prospect of real savings for companies, large and small. That means more business for the tech sector and key players like Oracle.

Second, the soaring price of fuel means that investment in, and the development of, environmental technologies will accelerate. At least two of the venture capitalists I have met this week spoke glowingly about recent ventures, which they fully admit they would never have touched just two years ago. Watch this space for a soon to be announced battery-powered car to take on the motor giants in Detroit.