Chris Skidmore MP, Kwasi Kwarteng MP, Dominic Raab MP, and Priti Patel MP: Britain’s best days are not behind us

By Chris Skidmore MP, Kwasi Kwarteng MP, Dominic Raab MP, and Priti Patel MP.

Our new rivals in the world economy are working harder than us, taking their studies more seriously, keeping their debt low, and taking more risks. If Britain is to remain competitive, we must learn from their example. Britannia Unchained is a rallying cry for the 21^st Century.

Britannia Unchained backs the current government’s deficit reduction strategy as a vital first step to restoring economic growth. Here our model should be that of Canada in the 1990s. Between 1992 and 2000, Canada converted an annual deficit of 9% of GDP to a surplus of 3%, cutting federal spending by around 20% between 1992 and 1997. In contrast, British public spending has continued to grow since 2007, and the deficit has been reduced by a quarter.

On education, we should be looking eastwards for positive role models, to arrest our decline in the PISA world rankings - we have fallen as low as 28^th in maths. Britain has the lowest proportion of students studying maths post-16 of any developed country, at 15%. By contrast, in Japan, 85% of students achieve the equivalent of maths A-level, and Indian students study maths and science for twice as long each week at high school as their British counterparts.

On innovation, Britain can emulate the success of Israel, in supporting high tech entrepreneurship, and the USA, in accepting the benefits of risk-taking and losing our fear of failure. The difference between Silicon Valley and Britain is astonishing. In 2005, 3,867 patents were awarded to businesses and individuals in San Jose, a city of fewer than a million people. The total number of patents awarded in Britain the following year was only 2,978.

Priti Patel: Union members must have opt-in choice for party donations - and political fund levies to end abuse

Priti Patel is MP for Witham.

Just imagine if you paid for a service from an accountant, a lawyer or a plumber and they placed an additional charge onto your bill without informing you. It does not feature on your invoice despite the charge apparently being optional so you never know it’s been taken from your wallet. Or if you took out a gym membership or social club membership and they added a levy onto your subscription fee but gave you no information about it. It was your choice whether to pay it or not but greed or incompetence denied you the chance to decide. I am sure that most people would not be too pleased and may even report the culprits to trading standards.

But this is what could be happening to millions of trade union members each year as trade union membership forms fail to notify members of the political levy added to their membership fees. They are having money taken from their pockets which is handed over to the Labour Party and put into political funds without them even knowing. The underhand ways unions are adding to their political funds are quite shocking and demonstrate how they and the Labour Party are prepared to treat union members as cash cows.

Large public sector trade unions the GMB and PCS fail to advertise on their membership forms that subscription fees include an optional levy let alone giving them the right to opt-in or opt-out of paying. I pointed this out in the recent report I produced on trade unions and the Kelly report into Party funding was also critical of the fact that members do not make a positive decision to opt-in to paying the affiliation fees to Labour and the political levy. Even the Unite Union’s Parliamentary branch for MPs’ staff does not inform members, which may include Conservative and Lib Dem staffers that they are contributing to Labour Party coffers.

Charlie Elphicke MP and Priti Patel MP: We need a £50,000 cap on political donations now

Charlie Elphicke is MP for Dover and Deal.  Priti Patel is MP for Witham.  Both are members of the Public Administration Select Committee.

There is nothing more corrosive to public life than the perception that our politics can be bought. All parties have had problems – from the Conservative ex-Treasurer, through the Lib Dem conman donor Michael Brown to the outright purchase of the Labour leadership by the trades unions. Small wonder then that there is such widespread public disgust with the whole business.

There needs to be a limit on donations. Much talked about, yet never implemented. That limit should be £50,000 or less. It should apply to any individual or any organisation – be it a company or trades union. Only with a limit can people have faith that no one person or organisation has the influence to buy our politics or subvert our public life. Moreover, all donor access should be transparent and published so that the public will have more assurance that the system has been changed.

Priti Patel MP: Legislation should be introduced to give more rights to victims of crime through a new enforceable Code of Practice

Priti Patel is the Member of Parliament for Witham.

Today I have a 10 Minute Rule Bill on the Rights of Victims of Crime. The Bill is seeking to introducing legislation to give more rights to victims of crime and their families through a new enforceable Code of Practice. The Bill would enable a number of gaps in the provision of support services available to victims to be closed and for the criminal justice system to be rebalanced to give victims more rights. With figures from the British Crime Survey showing that twice as many people believe the criminal justice system is fair to those accused of committing a crime (80%) than meets the needs of a victim of crime (36%), there is a clear need to ensure the rights of victims are protected.

Delays burying bodies of murder victims – 78% of bereaved families wait more than 28 days to bury loved ones and 6% wait more than 6 months. The Code will implement the recommendation by the Victims’ Commissioner to give families the right to bury body within 28 days (which would enshrine guidance into law).

Priti Patel MP: The support trade union leaders have from the people they claim to stand up for is at an all time low

Priti Patel is the Member of Parliament for Witham.

All of the dogmatic rhetoric from fat cat trade union leaders on six-figure salaries and the money they are spending on anti-cuts campaigns cannot disguise the fact that trade unions are becoming less relevant to the British workforce. Trade union membership levels have been in decline over the last 30 years and are now at their lowest levels since the outbreak of the Second World War.

Britain has just six-and-a-half million trade union members, which represents barely one-quarter of the nation’s workforce. This is also half the number when membership peaked at over 13 million in the late 1970s as the public suffered the winter of discontent. Almost half of all public sector workers are not union members while just one-in-seven workers in the private sector have joined a trade union. So as they prepare to inflict havoc to businesses and families on Wednesday, it is worth remembering that the support trade union leaders have from the very people they are claiming to stand up for is at an all time low.

Further evidence of how out of touch today’s champagne sipping union barons are with ordinary workers can be seen in the results of strike action ballots. Between them the biggest public sector unions could not even manage to muster a third of their total membership being balloted to turn out to vote, let alone support strike action. The two biggest, Unison and Unite, had turnouts of 28% and 31%, while the GMB managed 34% and the PCS union, whose ballot was held in advance of the 30 June strikes, managed just 30%. This demonstrates that most workers in the public sector do not want to lose a day’s pay by striking but are being forced to do so by a minority in their union who have been wound up by the militant and ideologically-driven desires of union barons.

Priti Patel MP: State funding of political parties cannot be morally justified to the public and to party members

Priti Patel is Conservative MP for Witham.

Sir Christopher Kelly's report into political party funding makes an interesting read and an important contribution to the debates on party funding. But increasing the amount of taxpayers' cash handed over to political parties by £23 million a year cannot be morally justified, especially in the current economic climate when the public are feeling the squeeze and facing some cuts. Sir Christopher says that this “is the equivalent of only about 50p per elector per year – little more than the current cost of a first class stamp.” But it is unacceptable to expect the public to dig into their pockets to bankroll political parties.

The public will see this as another example of politicians attempting to line their own pockets at the expense of the public purse. It would also damage the attempts being made to rebuild trust with the electorate after the expenses scandal which plagued the final year of the last Parliament. Moreover, we rightly pour scorn on the EU when we read budget proposals for increases of 20% or more for the funding of political parties in the European Parliament and should not allow ourselves to go down that route.

But while supporters of state funding believe it to be a panacea to end big donations, reduce the risk of corruption and support smaller parties, the fact that state funding is being given serious consideration actually demonstrates how political parties have not done enough to broaden their memberships and attract voluntary support from the public.

Priti Patel MP: Why Parliament must debate ECHR reforms

Priti Patel is MP for Witham.
 
Next month Britain has a once in a generation opportunity to spearhead reform of the European Court of Human Rights, the European Convention on Human Rights and their related institutions when it assumes the chairmanship of the Council of Europe. As the chairmanship rotates between the Council of Europe’s 47 members every six months, it will be a quarter of a century until Britain is in this position again so it is an opportunity that cannot be missed.

These Strasbourg-based European institutions have grown in power and the European human rights system the have created has resulted in the powers of our Parliament being eroded. The laws they create have crippled our immigration system, placing huge and often insurmountable barriers in the way of the authorities when they want to throw a foreign murderer, rapist or violent offender out of our country. They give criminals gold-plated rights, such as allowing prisoners access to IVF treatment. And, as we've seen with their desire to force Britain to grant all prisoners the right to vote, they have no respect for British democracy. Worryingly, these institutions are attempting to go even further and are issuing diktats ordering countries to have soft border controls, grant immigrants more rights and criticising cutbacks to public spending.

It is time to hold them to account and in advance of Britain's chairmanship, Parliament and backbench MPs need to have an opportunity to question ministers over their plans. MPs are aware of the frustration and concern their constituents feel when they see human rights allowing prisoners to have IVF treatment or foreign criminals free to walk our streets by claiming that they have a right to a family life. Our constituents expect action and change. Now that the British Government has an opportunity to deliver that change it would be a beneficial use of Parliamentary time for the Backbench Business Committee to grant time for MPs to debate these matters.

Priti Patel MP: Taxpayers shouldn't be paying the salaries of union activists

Priti Patel is MP for Witham.

In his Conference speech, Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude reflected the growing anger over taxpayer subsidies for trade unions by highlighting the scale of facility time in the civil service. He has informed us that Whitehall departments are spending some £30 million on paying the salaries of officials while they are working for their trade union rather than the public. And the 150 full-time representatives he identified are complemented by thousands more who spend varying degrees of the time that taxpayers are paying their salaries supporting the activities of their unions.

But what we need to see is strong and robust action being taken now and not just the promise to consult on reforming this unacceptable practice. I have already tabled parliamentary questions to ask more details about the timescale of the planned consultation, however, there is nothing to stop the Government acting now to shine the light of transparency over facility time.

An immediate step that the Government should take is to require full, detailed and comprehensive records to be kept of what work civil servants are undertaking while they are on facility time. Just as a school governor, local councillor or magistrate would need to give details to their employer of when they need to take reasonable time off to fulfil their public duties, trade union representatives should have to do the same.

Priti Patel MP: Why, as a Conservative, I support NO to AV - a response to Mohammed Amin

Priti Patel is Conservative MP for Witham and responds here to the article posted yesterday by Mohammed Amin in support of adopting AV.

Unfortunately Mohammed Amin has bought into the Yes campaign’s misleading claims about the Alternative Vote.

While the Yes side like to claim that AV will end tactical voting – a claim that many people would love to believe – this is factually wrong. AV forces voters to vote even more tactically to decide who is in the final round. In a close three-way race, for example, a tactical Labour supporter may be more confident that their candidate can beat the Liberal Democrat than the Conservative candidate, and therefore vote for the Liberal Democrat to ensure he or she makes it into the final round.

So far from ending tactical voting, AV just makes it more complicated. That’s why Dr. Roger Mortimore from Ipsos MORI has said: ‘Under AV there is a real incentive for tactical voting, because the order in which candidates are eliminated affects the result’.

In fact, sometimes AV can even make staying at home tactically better than turning out to vote at all – the ‘no-show paradox.’ In the US, for example, Republicans in Burlington, Vermont would have been better off had some of them stayed home during the last mayoral election that they ran under AV (of course, they’ve since ditched it and returned to First Past the Post). Had some Republicans not voted for their candidate, the centrist Democrat – for whom most Republicans cast their second preferences – would have made it to the second round and beat the left-wing Progressive, who went on to win despite coming second in the first round.

Mohammed refers to the recent by-election in Oldham East – but the result there is a perfect illustration of the way that AV gives the supporters of fringe parties extra chances to have their vote counted, whilst the supporters of mainstream candidates only get their vote counted once.