Mel Stride MP: To provide a shot in the arm for small business, the Coalition should review parental leave benefits

Mel Stride is the Member of Parliament for Central Devon, founder of the Deep Blue group, and an entrepreneur.

Along with its headline grabbing decision to look into the practicalities of a General Strike over public sector pay and conditions, a key message from last week’s TUC conference is that the union movement is especially determined to confront the Government over labour market reform. Departing General Secretary, Brendan Barber, dismissed planned Government measures as nothing more than "making it easier for bad employers to get away with misconduct" and asserted that easing labour regulations "will not create a single new job". His views are shared widely across the trade union movement and the reform of employment legislation is likely to occupy a key area in the battleground between unions and government over the coming months.

The line adopted by the TUC on supply-side reform is to misunderstand both the severity of our current economic challenges and the importance of enterprise and business in helping us to come through them. To propel ourselves firmly out of recession it will be increasingly important to leverage enterprise and to continue to press ever harder in our support for business. The Government has already done a great deal. The Chancellor’s progressive step-down in corporation tax rates and the recently announced reforms to employment tribunals are welcome examples of bold and positive action. And John Hayes in particular leaves a legacy of real success through his boosting of high quality apprenticeships – an achievement that will in turn inject skills and growth into the veins of our economy for many years to come.

Mel Stride MP: Britain needs "something pretty dramatic to pull us out of the current economic mire"

Mel Stride is Member of Parliament for Central Devon. The PPS to John Hayes MP, Mel is also founder of the Deep Blue group of 2010 Conservative MPs. Here he presses the case for a radical new approach to growth.

The news that the UK economy has contracted for the third quarter in succession and by a jaw-dropping 0.7% is grim by any measure. We are now in the most protracted double-dip downturn since records began half a century ago and this latest news comes on top of the IMF’s downgrade of its UK growth forecast for the rest of this year – one that is harsher than for any other EU state with the exception of Spain. And bear in mind that the IMF is our preferred pundit when it comes to our economic prospects. It is true that the World economy is much troubled. It is true also that much business confidence and trade has now haemorrhaged as a result of the death from a thousand cuts that is the slow motion marital bust-up of the euro-crisis. But for all this, the latest deterioration in our economic position will undoubtedly get people thinking harder than ever before about whether our approach to the economy is right. It will provide added lead to the opposition’s calls of ‘too far, too fast’ and the neo-Keynesian arguments around rowing back on deficit reduction.

I hold fast to our position that any significant attempt to conjure growth through fiscal loosening risks spooking the markets, increasing our borrowing costs, jacking up interest rates for businesses and mortgage holders, increasing personal indebtedness and spiking up the cost of servicing our debt. George Osborne deserves far greater credit than he is currently receiving for sparing us this outcome. The political thump and grind of the last budget has been painful but largely irrelevant in the context of his enormous achievement in reducing our deficit by a quarter whilst keeping our economy well out of the bailout zone.

Mel Stride MP: Why I'm opposed to capital punishment

Mel Stride is the MP for Central Devon

In the Guardian last year there were two striking personal stories. One chronicled an attempt in Ohio to execute a prisoner by lethal injection. It made the news because of the execution team’s inability to raise a vein in the prisoner’s body sufficient to insert the needle. Considerable pathos was added by the prisoner’s attempts, over a period of two hours, to assist by moving position and flexing his muscles – an act that led the prison governor to commend him for the consideration with which he had treated those who had the task of killing him. The other article? I’ll come to that in a moment.
 
Hanging was discontinued in Britain in 1964. Elsewhere judicial execution is still practiced. Amnesty International recorded that in 2009 worldwide at least 2,390 people were executed and 8,864 were sentenced to death. I abhor every one of those sentences and every one of those deaths. I say that knowing that in many cases those condemned to die will have committed the most heinous acts including torture, murder and in some cases wholesale genocide. I say that also knowing that I have had a life in which none of my family has suffered from these kind of atrocities and that I am in that sense critically distant from those whose lives have been destroyed under less fortunate circumstances. I am also aware that on this issue my views are out of line with a significant section of public opinion and in particular with those held by many Conservative voters. Regardless of this, my conviction on this issue is absolute.