Andrew Griffiths MP: To make amends for his company's Falklands video mistake, Sir Martin Sorrell should donate the fee to veterans' charities

Andrew Griffiths is the Member of Parliament for Burton and Uttoxeter. Follow Andrew on Twitter.

The tawdry video of an Argentinian sportsman training on the Falklands has understandably caused anger and outrage. This cheap political stunt was all the more offensive because the athlete was shown training on the steps of the First World War memorial.

Having visited the Falkland Islands and met servicemen and women and islanders, I appreciate the heightened importance of this and other war monuments. The islanders are free precisely because of the sacrifices made by the military, and to the local people these monuments demonstrate the gratitude they feel for the sacrifices made on their behalf.

The circumstances around the video and the fact that it was shot in secret do nothing to endear it. Sir Martin Sorrell has rightly condemned the video, which was produced by one of his companies, as “totally unacceptable”. Yet there is no doubt that the PR agency concerned would have been fully aware of the inflammatory nature of this film. The fact that they shot it in secret using an American film crew so as not to draw attention to themselves clearly demonstrates that they were fully aware of how controversial this would be.

I applaud Sir Martin for his strong words and quick condemnation. He is a magnificent businessman and his companies have flown the flag for the UK for many years. However, his business has profited as a result of this video. The Argentinian Government paid handsomely for the rights to screen it. Sir Martin’s strong words are not enough to make amends for the distress caused. I am not alone in thinking that any money the company earned should be donated to the Falklands Veterans’ charities in order to make amends.

I am sure that Sir Martin would agree that donating the many thousands of pounds to charities which look after service people who fought in the Falklands war would be a just use of this money. I hope Sir Martin will do the right thing and make amends for the mistake that his company made. In doing so, Sir Martin will go some way to restoring the damage done to his company’s reputation.

Andrew Griffiths MP: George Osborne should freeze beer duty tomorrow to save countless community pubs and thousands of jobs

Andrew Griffiths is Member of Parliament for Burton & Uttoxeter and Vice Chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Beer Group

If it’s possible to read anything into the drinks Chancellors have sipped while delivering the Budget over the years - water (Gordon Brown), whisky (Kenneth Clarke), gin and tonic (Geoffrey Howe), brandy and water (Benjamin Disraeli), sherry and beaten egg (Gladstone) and spritzer (Nigel Lawson) – then I hope tomorrow that George Osborne opts for beer, Britain’s favourite drink.

But more importantly, I hope the Chancellor heeds the increasingly urgent cross-party appeal for a fair deal for British beer.  More than 100 MPs have signed my Early Day Motion calling on the Chancellor to suspend the beer duty escalator planned for this month.

Everyone involved in the beer industry, including the brewers in my constituency of Burton, the home of Britain’s beer, are rightly worried about the impact that additional increases in beer duty will have on their businesses and community pubs round the country. Beer tax in the UK is already the second highest out of the 27 EU member states and since 2008 beer duty in the UK has gone up a further 26%. Coupled with January’s VAT increase this has pushed the average pub pint through the £3 barrier for the first time. This has hit our pubs hard - the latest figures show that last year, 25 pubs closed every week with the loss of an estimated 13,000 jobs around the country.  Every pub is a small business, employing on average ten people.

Despite these closures and job losses, brewers and pubs remain a significant contributor to the British economy and one with the potential for growth. The sector sustains almost 1 million jobs in towns and villages throughout UK; contributes £13.4 billion in wages and £21.4 billion Gross Value Added (GVA). Beer sales generate 50% more tax in revenues than spirits and its jobs are spread throughout a UK-based supply chain - around 600,000 jobs in pubs; 20,000 jobs in agriculture and 15,000 jobs in breweries and brewery companies. This compares with 45,000 jobs in total generated by that old favourite of the last Labour administration, the Scotch Whisky industry. In my constituency alone, 4,500 jobs depend on the beer and pub trade and around the country 85% of pubs are small, often family-run, businesses, injecting on average £80,000 into the local economy.

Andrew Griffiths MP: Making drugs legally available would be wrong, dangerous and reckless

Andrew Griffiths is MP for Burton and Secretary of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on the Misuse of Drugs and Alcohol.

Former drug minister Bob Ainsworth’s call for heroin and cocaine to be legally available for sale or by prescription at chemists is not just wrong, it is dangerous and reckless. 

We saw the consequences of sending out mixed messages about drugs to our young people when Tony Blair’s government downgraded cannabis only for it to be upgraded again a few years later when the impact of their mistake became apparent.

Mr Ainsworth may have failed as a drugs Minister and raised the white flag in the war on drugs but this Government has not, and I hope Ed Miliband and Ed Balls will condemn his foolish comments today.

Just last week the Home Office announced a radical change to our nation’s drug policy which refuses to accept that more and more drug use is inevitable.  Mr Ainsworth is right when he says the previous approach failed but that does not mean to say we should give up.

Last year the NHS spent £235 million prescribing methadone to heroin addicts.  That equates to £500 a minute or the equivalent of 11,000 NHS nurses.  More than 95,000 people last year were on state induced methadone dependency and the fact that more than a quarter of all users were still hooked four years later proves what a failure harm minimisation and methadone prescribing has been, particularly because the vast majority of methadone users use other drugs on top.

The answer is not as Mr Ainsworth suggests, to legalise all drugs, but instead to continue to tackle the supply and vastly improve how we treat drug users.  The Coalition Government’s commitment to abstinence based recovery programmes, as championed by Iain Duncan Smith, offers a huge chance to tackle long term addiction and get people drug free for good.

I doubt whether Mr Ainsworth has spoken to drug users recently, but I have.  This morning I rang Jamie, a constituent of mine, who after years as a prolific heroin addict, has been drug free for three years thanks to the support of the Burton Addiction Centre.  “What do you think of calls to legalise drugs?” I asked.  “It’s very simple,” said Jamie.  “On the day you legalise it, can you send round the police car to slap on the handcuffs and take me to prison, because if you don’t I know I’ll be dead in six months.”

I know whose views I think make most sense in this debate.   And those are Jamie’s.