Mark Reckless MP: Are you saying, Home Secretary, that Strasbourg is now supreme?

Mark Reckless is the Member of Parliament for Rochester and Strood and serves on the Home Affairs Select Committee. Follow Mark on Twitter.

Yesterday I suggested to the Home Secretary that she might ask the Supreme Court if it, or the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, has the final word on interpreting the European Convention on Human Rights. She concluded her reply by saying:

“I fully understand the frustration felt by my hon. Friend and others who share his views, but our options involve operating within the law, and I believe that we should operate within the law or change the law. Dare I describe urging the Government to break the law as a rather reckless step?”

I am well used to puns on my name – if not to apparent jokes from the Home Secretary – and I probably have it easy compared to family who are doctors, particularly my father who went to medical school with a Dr Butcher, a Dr Carver, a Dr Coffin and a Dr De’Ath.

However, as a lawyer I have never urged the government, or anyone else, to break the law.
What makes me angry is that we appear to be accepting, without even testing the matter in court, that it is Strasbourg, and not our Supreme Court, which is supreme in human rights matters.

Mark Reckless MP: Crunch Time for Theresa May

Mark Reckless is the Member of Parliament for Rochester and Strood and serves on the Home Affairs Select Committee. Follow Mark on Twitter.

"Are we conceding that our own Supreme Court is not supreme? I believe we are."

So said Theresa May in her keynote speech to Saturday’s ConservativeHome speech. To which the answer should be:

“Well Home Secretary, don’t concede it then.”

This week gave two perfect opportunities. The first was Monday’s latest Abu Qatada appeal. The second is today’s Dominic Raab vote on Article 8.

Abu Qatada

On Monday I attended the latest instalment of the Abu Qatada legal proceedings, which have been going on for ten years yet are still running.

Unfortunately I saw another craven Home Office surrender to Strasbourg. This was encapsulated by the Home Secretary’s QC summarising the case as being “Did SIAC [the Special Immigration Appeals Tribunal] do the right thing, i.e. apply Strasbourg properly?”

It did not seem a good sign for the Home Office when even the Master of the Rolls appeared to be confused by the case they were putting forward, seeking to show a series of six Strasbourg-inspired principles being met. Cue much speculation as to the meaning of recent developments in the Jordanian justice system and reference to disputes among experts concerning Jordan’s internal affairs.

Just before lunch Theresa May’s QC threw in the towel saying that, if the Court of Appeal could not overturn the decision, then perhaps it could remit the case to SIAC to start all over again. He did though receive a positive response to his submissions when he noted a tendency for Strasbourg just to list facts and “assert a single mantra ... without the degree of supporting analysis you would expect here my Lords”, with the Master of the Rolls replying “Or indeed any”.

Mark Reckless MP: The Energy Bill is a sad retreat for Conservatives

Mark Reckless is the Member of Parliament for Rochester and Strood and serves on the Home Affairs Select Committee. Follow Mark on Twitter.

Today marks a retreat from a triumph of the Thatcher era.  The Energy Bill we consider today will rip up the world-leading competitive energy market bequeathed by Lady Thatcher and Lords Parkinson and Spicer, her ministers who privatised electricity.

Instead we will institute a rigged market where the government will pick technologies by allocating varying levels of subsidy on the say-so of civil servants. In the main, rather than hand out taxpayer funds directly, the government will authorise others to load charges on to electricity bills. For EDF, the French state-owned company many see as the only credible supplier of new nuclear plants, this could mean adding many tens of £billions over the odds to our electricity bills, for decades to come, nodded through with next to no further parliamentary scrutiny under the terms of this Bill.

Mark Reckless MP: Police and Crime Commissioners are one of the great reforms of this Conservative-led government

Mark Reckless is the Member of Parliament for Rochester and Strood and serves on the Home Affairs Select Committee. Follow Mark on Twitter.

It is ten years since I joined the Conservative Party Policy Unit and helped develop our policy for direct election of those who oversee our police. It was therefore a particular pleasure for me to spend Saturday at the Conservative Selection Council to decide our final shortlist for Kent's first Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC).

Tim Montgomerie described the withdrawal of Colonel Tim Collins in Kent as a 'blow', but it is one we barely noticed given the strength of the rest of our field. The three who made it through were:

• Finance whizz and ex-UKIP Leader Craig Mackinlay, who came over to the Conservatives in 2005, gave perhaps the most powerful speech, showing a no-nonsense approach to budgeting, cutting crime and policing our borders;
• Foreign Office man, Francois Gordon, who comes from a long civil service career and worked as an EU desk officer before taking on ambassadorial roles, and is now "European Strategy Adviser" to Kent Police; and
• Jan Berry, an ex-police officer who for several years ran the Police Federation, the police equivalent of a trade union, and was persuaded by the wording of the PCC oath to stand as Conservative and not Independent.

Councillors Brian Sweetland, Jo Gideon and Mike O'Brien performed well, but with Craig Mackinlay, an ex-ambassador, and an ex-head of the Police Federation winning through against them, in what was a very tight contest, the Kent PCC contest should remain one of the highest profile.

Mark Reckless MP: Prime Minister - Yes, you can legally deport Qatada

Mark Reckless is the MP for Rochester and Stroud. Follow Mark on Twitter.

At lunchtime today the Home Affairs Select Committee will question Theresa May about Abu Qatada. We can clarify issues through detailed and sustained questioning in a way which is not possible in the more partisan Chamber where each member is limited to one question.

We will in particular challenge her claim that the government would be “breaking the law” were it to deport Qatada. How can this be true when Parliament has incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) into domestic law under the Human Rights Act 1998, and the highest UK court ruled it allows Qatada to be deported?

Theresa May says that “The proper processes must be followed and the rule of law must take precedence”. However, the reality is that the government is ignoring the judgment of our highest court based on the law as passed by Parliament, and incorporating the ECHR international law by which the government sets such store.

Mark Reckless MP: We can cut Britain's uncompetitive income tax rates if we tax high end properties

Mark Reckless is MP for Rochester and Strood and was previously UK Economist for Warburgs. Follow him on Twitter.

Raising the tax threshold up to £10,000 to take the poor out of tax is something which Conservatives support just as much as LibDems. Meanwhile, we want to cut the top rate of tax, not because we want to help the rich, but because we want the economy to grow.

On the Today programme yesterday morning I argued that we should accelerate tax cuts for the least well off and pay for it by taking more tax from the very wealthy. The way to do this is to cut high income tax rates, which are internationally uncompetitive, but raise tax on high-end UK property, which we tax less than property almost anywhere else in the world. I propose three urgent reforms.

1. Make the rich pay stamp duty

Labour pretended to make the rich pay more stamp duty by raising it to 5% for properties over £1million. However, the globally wealthy avoid it by putting properties into shell companies, so that only the 0.5% stamp duty on shares is paid on sale. For instance, all but two of the eighty or so flats costing an average of £15m at One Hyde Park were sold to offshore companies, while Roman Abramovich may just have saved £4m in stamp duty by buying his new £90m house in a company wrapper.

Mark Reckless MP: It was Labour’s failure to deal with the backlog of asylum seekers that has resulted in an amnesty

Mark Reckless is MP for Rochester and Strood and a member of the Home Affairs Select Committee, whcih this morning published its report into the Work of the UK Border Agency.

This morning the Home Affairs Select Committee, which is now elected, said what it failed to say for years when Labour whips appointed a Labour majority to the committee. The backlog of nearly half a million asylum claims, which built up over Labour’s years of at best incompetent administration and at worst wilful neglect, has been cleared by in effect issuing an amnesty.

It is understandable that Damian Green, the current immigration minister who like me is a Kent MP, does not want to use that word, or advertise that position, but the Home Affairs Committee, in a unanimous report, has no doubt that an amnesty is in effect what we have seen. What else can we call the instructions issued by Labour ministers to nod through asylum seekers just because they had failed to deal with them for six years or more? 

Of 403,500 backlog cases ‘concluded’ up to 2 March 2011, only 38,000 asylum seekers were removed, while 161,000 were granted asylum and right to remain and an extraordinary 205,500 cases were classified as ‘other’ (NB to mathematically-minded readers – officials told our committee that the 1,000 difference between the total and  sum of the categories is a rounding error).

Mark Reckless: Parliament should decide if we pay for Euro bail-outs

Mark Reckless is the Conservative MP for Rochester and Strood and previously UK Economist for Warburgs.

The coalition government made a total of £6.2 billion of savings domestically in its first year. Parliament should not reverse that by accepting commitments twice as big to bail out a currency we did not join.

MPs agreed in December to use around half of those savings to make a £3.2 billion loan to Ireland – subject to it being repaid in sterling under terms that provide for Ireland to leave the Euro.

Tomorrow MPs will decide whether we should accept further liabilities as proposed by the EU and the French-led IMF. These would take our Euro bail-out commitments to £12.5 billion, double the savings we have so far made domestically.

I do not believe that is something which we can justify to our constituents. Even the £12.5 billion sum, itself around £500 per household, is only for Greece, Ireland and Portugal, with potentially billions more to come for other countries in the Euro. 

Mark Reckless MP: At last, democracy is coming to policing

Mark Reckless is MP for Rochester and Strood, a member of the Home Affairs Select Committee and a member of the Kent Police Authority.

Today and tomorrow the House of Commons will put its finishing touches to the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill.  It is a long title for one key reform, putting a directly elected individual “in charge” – as the Home Secretary put it on Monday – of each police force. That reform will have huge ramifications as power in policing shifts from the Chief Constable to the elected Commissioner.

Unsurprisingly, the Chief Constables don’t much like that. However, unlike police authorities, which have spent public money fighting their own abolition, most Chief Constables, if not necessarily their Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), accept very professionally that it is for elected politicians to set policy under which they operate.

Police authorities are generally considered to have been the weakest of the ‘tripartite’ pillars of police governance, the others being the Home Office and the Chief Constable.  Our plan to deal with that, which I passed to Douglas Carswell to develop further when he replaced me at the Conservative Policy Unit in 2004, was to transfer the police authority powers to people who are elected, so as to reinforce those powers with a democratic mandate.

David Cameron wrote that plan into our manifesto in 2005 and has evangelised it ever since, so much so that he appointed the hugely impressive Nick Herbert as Police Minister, having seen him make the case for democratic control of policing when leading the thknk-tank Reform. The Prime Minister then promised in July 2006 that “We will enshrine operational independence in legislation”. 

Mark Reckless: Government borrowing is preventing private lending

Mark Reckless is PPC for Rochester and Strood and was previously a top three rated city economist.

Does ‘radical monetary action’ mean more than guaranteeing certain bank loans if the European Commission allows and suggesting the Bank of England cuts interest rates? What will we do to make monetary policy work and the economy recover?

We should start by recognising how the government and its Debt Management Office (DMO) have disabled monetary policy. They are flooding the market with short-dated government debt, doubling the outstanding stock of treasury bills from £16 billion to £32 billion and increasing short-dated gilt issuance from the £25 billion planned to £63 billion. The DMO is even ‘overfunding’, i.e. selling more gilts than needed even to fund Labour’s current borrowing, a policy last used by us to slow the money supply between 1980 and 1985 and one which is utterly perverse in current economic conditions.

Given this flood of gilt-edged debt, risk-averse investors, particularly banks, lend to the government rather than to the private sector. They buy up the surging supply of short-dated government debt, instead of holding short-term private debt such as commercial paper or bank certificates of deposit. Surely it would be better to tackle this problem by cutting supply of the former rather than setting up an EU-backed bureaucracy to guarantee favoured categories of the latter?

Investors, including banks, are clearly scared to lend, so whether or not they do so will depend crucially on the riskiness of the alternatives. Historically in the UK there has been very limited supply of the lowest risk assets, i.e. debt that is government guaranteed, liquid and short-term. Banking problems in the past have not been exacerbated by the supply of huge amounts of low risk government paper to serve as an alternative to private lending.

Mark Reckless: Time to correct investors’ mistake

Mark Reckless PPC for Rochester and Strood was previously a top three rated city economist.  On the day that markets continue to crash he presents his alternative to a taxpayer-funded bailout; one led by creditors.

The banking crisis arose because banks became too leveraged. Their assets (mortgages etc.) were funded by too much borrowing (deposits, bonds, interbank loans etc.) and too little shareholder equity.

When it became clear that bank assets were not worth what was thought, creditors asked banks to repay some of their over-borrowing. Banks can’t sell their assets quickly at anywhere near to their book value and they don’t have enough equity to carry on covering creditors who refuse to renew loans.

Therefore banks will fail unless they recapitalise, i.e. increase their equity relative to their borrowing

They tried to do that through rights issues but now the replacement equity is worth less then shareholders paid in for it only months ago. Few shareholders want to throw good money after bad when they are not sure that the equity will be worth anything.

Unless someone else is made to buy new equity then banks will go bust. We are being told that there is no alternative to the taxpayer buying that new equity. But there is – the creditors.

It is the creditors (excluding depositors with <£50,000 who are insured) who lent the banks money who stand to lose most in a lengthy liquidation if banks go bust and armies of lawyers and accountants are left to pore over the mess.

Mark Reckless: Criminal justice should be localised and democratised

Mark Reckless of the Kent Police Authority and formerly the Conservative Party Policy Unit, looks at the Policing Green Paper and the benefits of having an elected official overseeing local police policy.

Only a single directly elected individual, unlike what is suggested in the Green Paper, is likely to be able to give the political lead to make the police do what the public want. However, merely transferring Police Authority powers to such a person is unlikely to be sufficient to ensure that police chief officers implement a democratic mandate.

Unfortunately "political" is a dirty word in policing, generally used by chief officers as a reason not to do something. There is a danger that the "political" objection will be deployed more frequently against a directly elected individual than it is against an only partly indirectly elected police authority. We should also guard against assuming that the main problem with the Tripartite Structure is that the Police Authority leg is too weak compared to the Home Office leg and that the problem can thus be solved merely by endowing the former with greater democratic legitimacy. The more significant problem is that Constabulary operational independence leg has been colonised and nationalised by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO).

Whilst its representative role for chief officers has ostensibly been hived off, ACPO acts as an overbearing and unaccountable club of chief officers which tends to subjugate its members' individual and local judgement. Its Committees and Cabinet (!) promulgate ACPO policy (sorry, ACPO operational guidance) on almost every conceivable policing matter to supposedly independent Constabularies which too often then implement it with little or no reference to either Home Office or Police Authorities.