The political survival of the Lib Dems can surely be achieved without impinging on the real survival

During the next week, we are told, the Government will decide on the future of the National Health Service reforms. On that decision may also depend the future of the architect of those reforms, Andrew Lansley, the Secretary of State for Health.

Lansley was cheered to the rafters when he addressed the 1922 Committee, but he is an unlikely poster boy for the Tory Party. Indeed, in some ways he is an unlikely politician. He is far better at policy than at politics – and it is to his credit that he would take that as a compliment.

Having had responsibility for the health brief for seven years, he is obviously committed to the NHS, but also clear-eyed about its strengths and weaknesses. He knows it has two priorities: to save the lives of those threatened by mortal illness or injury; and to improve the quality of life of those afflicted by the other injuries and illnesses that will dog most of us at some point.

From seeing Lansley in action I suspect he quite rightly views these priorities as far more important than appeasing the many vested interests in the NHS or the understandable yet misguided demands of the Lib Dems. Of course, protecting those priorities against such interests may prove easier said than done.

Harold Macmillan once said: ‘No Government in its senses will pick a fight with the Brigade of Guards, the Catholic Church, or the National Union of Mineworkers.’ We might add ‘or anyone with a white coat and a stethoscope’. It has always been difficult to win a political battle with the medical profession, as is understood by many past Health Secretaries, not least Ken Clarke.

When he tried to reform the NHS he was pilloried by the medical establishment. Remember the poster? ‘What do you call someone who doesn’t take medical advice? Ken Clarke.’ But his opponents still had on their side the myth of the NHS as the ‘envy of the world’. That illusion is no longer supportable.

Most of the British public are massive supporters of the NHS. So am I. Neither I nor any of my family has ever used anything other than the NHS, except when abroad. Yet in recent decades we have all become acutely aware of some very serious shortcomings after a series of scandals, from the needless infant deaths at Bristol

Royal Infirmary to the horrific failure at Mid Staffs which cost up to 1,200 lives.
Despite a doubling in NHS expenditure in a decade, survival rates for certain respiratory diseases and strokes are the worst in the developed world.

MRSA infection, worse than the European average, took too many years to get under control.

Survival rates for breast, bowel, lung or ovarian cancer are among the worst in the West. Those rates are even worse for the elderly, who are often denied the treatments that would be offered to younger patients.

Yes, the NHS has had successes, especially with heart attacks, mental health and some cancers. But other countries show only too clearly that it could be so much better.

That is what Lansley was trying to achieve: world-class care to match the dramatic increase in NHS funding this past decade. He was trying to do it using greater accountability to patients, greater professional empowerment by giving GPs control of funds, and via competition between providers.

I am quite sure that not all the detail of his policy is perfect. In political terms it self-evidently was not. But the thrust is correct, and dealing with the problem is undoubtedly urgent. For every year that passes without reform means thousands of people die unnecessarily.

And as Britain grows older, the number dependent on the NHS grows geometrically, and so too the cost of treatments they require. It means demand for care is rising at four per cent per year: we need to save up to an unprecedented £20 billion just to keep up. This is impossible without reform.

Some doctors (and Lib Dems) have taken against the idea of competition. The shout of ‘privatisation’ has gone up, ever the Left-of-centre shibboleth in healthcare. This was an astonishingly ignorant attack. It ignored completely that there is already a small but significant amount of private sector competition in the NHS, largely introduced in the 2006 reforms. An independent study recently showed that those reforms have saved both money and lives.

Of course, this has to be done carefully. I was the first Tory MP to criticise the misuse of PFI (private finance initiative) in the NHS. It was a grotesque misuse of public money.

But that should not stop us seeing that the countries which do best at healthcare delivery most often use a competitive mix of suppliers, and let patients choose their preferred carer. Germany has one third of its healthcare provided by each of the public, charitable and private sectors, with brilliant results.

In the Spanish province of Valencia, patients choose whole systems of care from the public or private sector. It is free at the point of delivery; providers cannot cherry-pick but must take all patients; the private sector has to deliver their service at 20 per cent less than the public sector. This popular system gives very good healthcare, and the government that created it is popular too.

Such measures are not precisely the same as Lansley’s plans, but they demonstrate why what he is trying to do is likely to work. It will save lives and money, and set our NHS on a path that will guarantee a better future.

Which brings us back to the politics. This is the most important test of the Coalition yet. Healthcare reform is the life-and-death issue that will affect most of us.

The pressures on the Prime Minister are pretty severe at the moment. He quite reasonably wants to bolster the position of the Dep¬uty Prime Minister and, perhaps unusually for a backbench Tory, I wholeheartedly support that wish.

But there are other ways to do that. Giving up competition in healthcare is not the sacrifice to make. The political survival of the Lib Dems can be achieved without impinging on the real survival of thousands of Britons – which is, after all, what this is about.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2002634/Tories-furious-Clegg-humiliates-Andrew-Lansley-NHS-victory-roll.html#ixzz1P8sCdGwI

The maxim ‘Justice must not just be done; it must be seen to be done' is a fundamental tenet of English law, but it is one which some of our senior judges seem to have lost sight of last week, despite their protestations to the contrary.

They did, to be fair, admit that the courts had issued too many injunctions and super-injunctions in recent years.

They accepted that there was a danger of a form of ‘permanent secret justice' developing, but claimed that since 2010 the problem had been resolved.

The Lord Chief Justice then went on to attack MPs using parliamentary privilege to expose secrets imposed by the courts.

As an exercise in complacency it would be hard to better.

Firstly, let us be clear about the seriousness and consequences of this failure in British law. We are not simply talking about the goings-on of a bunch of footballers and ‘glamour models' here.

The issues affected by the secrecy of our courts range from massive pollution by a company that ended up paying out millions in compensation and fines, through to serious miscarriages of justice in our family courts.

Take the case of Trafigura, the oil company that dumped waste on the Ivory Coast. It had to pay the Ivorian government £100 million to clean up the waste, then £30 million compensation to 30,000 Ivorian citizens who needed medical treatment, and then last year it was fined a further million euros by a Dutch court.

It would be hard to think of a case that had a more pressing claim on the public interest.

This was the case that a British court was willing to put behind such a wall of secrecy that it was illegal to even mention that the case existed.

It was this case that the MP Paul Farrelly ‘outed' by raising the issue in Parliament in late 2009, and it was only after he had done this that the courts started to be a little more circumspect about allowing super-injunctions.

So for the senior judges to blithely say that the situation has improved since 2010, and then attack MPs for highlighting the problem in the first place, is disingenuous in the extreme.

The Lord Chief Justice, of all people, should understand that in a democracy Parliament is supreme. He must know that it would be astonishingly unconstitutional for the courts to attempt to curb free speech in either House of Parliament, in particular where they are commenting on the operation of the law.

It would be just as unconstitutional to prevent reporting of Parliament on these matters, and I expect the Speakers of both Commons and Lords to make that clear in the most robust terms. It is also pretty disingenuous to pretend that this is not ‘judge-made' law.

Of course the judges are correct to say that it arises from the Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights upon which it is based.

They are wrong to claim that this is what Parliament intended. I opposed the Human Rights Act, but even those who supported it would be astonished if you had told them that it was going to be used to throw a cloak of secrecy over the operations of the courts.

The problem is that the margin of discretion the Act gave the judges is enormous, and some judges have used that to create a European-style privacy law without the approval of Parliament or, indeed, the British people.

There is, of course, a lot of hypocrisy spouted about the balance of privacy and free speech, and a lot of self-serving argument.

I would have had more sympathy with those who argue for their own privacy, however, if those rights were equally available to the weaker and poorer members of society. Of course they are not.

They are largely reserved for rich individuals and wealthy corporations that can afford the legal firepower of the legal firms Carter-Ruck or Schillings.

In particular, it is odd to hear the complaints of those that make their living - and often a decent fortune - from the celebrity culture.

Subject to the limits of truth and absence of malice, however, I am afraid that if you make your living from being in the public eye, you must allow for the public gaze being unblinking and sometimes severe.

Often this is as it should be. Sponsorships and other contracts are usually dependent on public image, and the public who buy products on the basis of the company's public representatives can reasonably expect that image to be honest.

Look at what happened to Tiger Woods when that turned out not to be so. Even more importantly, this applies to people who hold major public or private office. While this self-evidently includes politicians, it also includes people such as the Sir Fred Goodwin, formerly of Royal Bank of Scotland.

The risk of withholding information from the public eye with such people is that you also inadvertently withhold it from the relevant agencies with an interest - the Financial Services Authority in Sir Fred's case, the police and safety agencies in other cases that I have been told about.

In some cases that my colleague, the Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming, has dealt with, judges have even instructed people not to talk to their MP.

This is an astonishing act for a judge to undertake. Even convicted murderers have a right to talk to their MP, but the courts have sometimes put absolute confidentiality ahead of that fundamental right.

Much of this growing judicial culture of secrecy is no doubt well-intentioned.

Judges hope to protect innocent family members in libel cases, or children's welfare in family law cases, or even national security in some governmental cases.

Regrettably, it often has the opposite effect to that intended. It protects dishonesty and incompetence, and sometimes facilitates serial miscarriages of justice.

It can put the public at risk, or protect from punishment people and corporations who have put the public at risk.

It is also in defiance of modern realities. This judge-made law has a little in common with the foolish action of the European Court of Human Rights on prisoner votes.

In the case of prisoner votes, a set of foreign judges had no grip on our historic traditions; in this case British judges clearly have little grip on future realities.

Much modern media, such as Twitter, has its commercial base in the US, a country that has admirable traditions of free speech and whose courts will almost certainly see off any attempt to interfere in that.

So are British judges going to be engaged in hunting down thousands of people who gossip on Twitter? I think not.

Or are they going to press on with an approach which will amount to one law for the print media and another for the e-sphere?

This cannot stand. Parliament needs to put it right.

It will not be easy. A free Press is often pretty uncomfortable, particularly for politicians.

But in the words of the US politician Adlai Stephenson: ‘The free Press is the mother of all our liberties and of our progress under liberty.'

I am confident that in the coming weeks, Parliament will remind the judges of that fact.

David Davis MP: Today's vote on prisoners' rights is an historic opportunity to draw a line in the sand on European power

‘Control orders lite’ will not make us any safer

Unless we sweep away this authoritarian policy, the radicalisation of Muslims will continue

Theresa May, the Home Secretary, will announce to Parliament tomorrow the conclusion to six months’ deliberation by the Government on its counter-terrorism policy. “Deliberation” is probably too calm a word.

They have had a fierce struggle in Whitehall to defend a series of policies that were denounced by both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in opposition because they were ineffective, authoritarian and, in some cases, a stain on our national honour.

To her credit, Mrs May has swept away some of the most obviously unwise policies. She has abolished ID cards, curbed the grotesque misuse of “counter-terrorist” stop-and-search and indicated the end of 28 days’ detention without charge.

But the most shameful policy, control orders, has been the most fought over and most fiercely defended. It was created when the courts stopped the government of the day imprisoning suspected foreign terrorists who could not be deported. That was the reason given to Parliament. After a long battle, Parliament grudgingly accepted this but I suspect that it would have been rejected out of hand had it been clear that the policy would be used principally to detain British citizens and British residents. Today all the “controlees” are British.

Why are control orders so terrible? They are a series of measures, many of which — house arrest, internal exile, restrictions on movement and communication — we associate with regimes such as the Soviet Union and South Africa under apartheid. Worst of all, they are imposed after a secret trial process in which the “suspect” is told neither the specific allegation nor the evidence. It would be hard to imagine a procedure that was more of an affront to our judicial traditions.

Out of fewer than fifty “controlees”, seven have escaped. One was reported to have been killed recently in Pakistan. Another turned up at a Liberty AGM and got within close range of the Justice Minister, the future Attorney-General and the head of counter terrorism at Scotland Yard. Had he really been a suicide bomber it would have been the highest-profile hit on government since the Brighton bomb. The public should not believe that just because people are under a control order that they are in any sense under control.

But even beyond the incompetence and illegality of the policy is a hideous Catch 22. Year after year whoever is head of MI5 tells us of the alarming rise in “people of interest”: those sufficiently radicalised to become potential terrorists. The number started at 1,600; they stopped giving a number when it passed 4,000. This growth in the threat, by an astonishing 25per cent a year, is a symptom of a flawed strategy. One reason that radicalisation of Muslims is running so high in Britain is disaffection with policies that appear to victimise them. This is not a minor issue. US Intelligence views radicalised British Muslims as one of the main global terrorist threats.

Heavy-handed measures such as control orders feed recruitment by our enemies and suppress recruitment of friends — as intelligence officers, agents or informers. That makes it difficult to carry out the sort of conventional intelligence gathering that we did in Northern Ireland.

The only way to deal with this is very visibly to sweep away its primary causes, including control orders. A halfway house, or “control order lite”, will not do it. Regrettably that seems to be exactly what we are going to get.

These policies are symptomatic of an attitude among counter-terrorism experts more prevalent here than almost anywhere in the democratic world: a preference for disruption over prosecution. In the US, for example, it is a requirement of federal law that all domestic terrorist cases are pursued to prosecution. In Britain this does not seem to be the case, although we have a 92 per cent success rate when we do take terrorist suspects to court. This would be easier if, like everyone else, we used intercept evidence in court, another policy we appear to balk at.

The greatest single problem with control orders is that they have become a substitute for the judicial process, whose primary aim is to prosecute and put terrorists in prison.

Many of these problems would vanish if control orders were brought within the normal judicial process, as a form of police bail. It is not unusual in criminal proceedings, while the police are collecting evidence, for courts to allow various restraints on suspects — for them to be restricted from associating with other criminals, or to have to stay in the country. This is justifiable as part of prosecuting a crime and because it is part of an open, rather than a shadowy process. We should implement such a procedure for terrorism cases as a replacement for control orders. If we did, nobody could accuse us of dropping our commitment to the rule of law.

I understand that this was rejected in the Counter Terrorism Review. Instead we are likely to see a range of modifications to the policy that, while they are worthwhile, will not resolve the problem. Doing away with house arrest and internal exile, allowing the use of computers and mobile phones, are all valuable improvements, but they will not cut the Gordian knot of our current tangled policy. They will neither return us to the rule of law, nor will they cut the radicalisation of young British Muslims that is the greatest single threat to our safety today.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/article2886690.ece

Reagan's Clarity, 30 Years Later

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the inauguration of U.S. President Ronald Reagan. One wonders how the man who, by sheer force of belief, ended the Cold War without a shot being fired would have responded to 9/11 and to the global financial crisis.

Born in a rented apartment in Tampico, Illinois, few could have predicted that the son of a shoe salesman would become one of the most revered political figures of his generation. His first career was as an actor with Warner Bros., spending many years featuring in B-movies, where, he joked, "the producers didn't want them good, they wanted them Thursday."

When the 69-year-old Reagan became president, he encountered a barrage of intellectual snobbery from the European and East Coast establishments. The then British ambassador to the U.S., Sir Nicholas Henderson, opined that "Reagan believes there are simple answers to complex problems. The main worry is not just age, but whether he possesses the mental vitality and political vision necessary."

But Reagan proved them all wrong. He became the first Cold War president to serve two terms without becoming involved in a major armed conflict, despite it being an extraordinarily unstable and volatile period in world history.

Just over a year before Reagan took office, Soviet forces had invaded Afghanistan. Beyond Afghanistan, the escalation of proxy regional conflicts in Nicaragua, Angola and Ethiopia further strained the U.S.-Soviet relationship. Relations deteriorated further in 1983 when Moscow terminated arms-control negotiations, raising the prospect of a nuclear-arms race.

Many in the West supported a return to détente with the Soviet Union. However, Reagan abandoned this policy and, together with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, he spoke up for freedom, criticizing the oppression within the Soviet Union. He described the U.S.S.R. as an "evil empire" and predicted that "freedom and democracy will leave Marxism and Leninism on the ash heap of history."

Reagan's tough rhetoric appalled critics, who accused him of warmongering and urged a return to peaceful co-existence with the US.S.R. Reagan, though, believed in the inevitable triumph of democratic values over dictatorships. He would not settle for mere détente. Nor did Reagan confine his attacks on the Soviet system to his speeches. He backed up his rhetoric with hard-headed action, such as providing financial support to anti-Communist groups across the world.

The Soviet Union was the most serious threat to the U.S. during Reagan's presidency, but it was not the only threat. Terrorist attacks on U.S. targets were a common occurrence. In 1986, a bomb planted by Libyan agents exploded in a West German discothèque, killing two American servicemen and wounding 200 civilians. Reagan took decisive action, launching air strikes against Libya, again to the horror of many European governments.

Far from entrenching longstanding Cold War hostilities, it was Reagan's courageous decision to tackle communist ideology head-on that made the transformation of U.S.-Soviet relations possible.

Historians point to the close personal relationship between Reagan and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev as a major factor in the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War. But this relationship was not always an easy one. Reagan used all his diplomatic skills to create mutual trust. In 2004, reflecting on his cordial relationship with Reagan, Mr. Gorbachev commented: "Look at how it began. When I was first asked what I thought of Reagan, I called him a dinosaur. He called me a Bonehead Bolshevik."

Reagan was prepared to take a firm stand in the domestic arena too. In the first year of his presidency, U.S. air traffic controllers broke federal law by going on strike. Reagan responded by giving the strikers 48 hours to return to work or face the consequences, sacking the 11,000 who refused to comply.

He also tackled the U.S. economic malaise, reversing years of rising inflation and unemployment. While many favoured a financial stimulus to increase the money supply, Reagan cut taxes, reduced regulation, and abandoned Nixon's wage and price controls. The result was a sustained period of economic expansion during which the U.S. economy grew by more than a third. Every income group became wealthier, and consumer confidence soared.

So how would Reagan have responded to the major threats of the 21st century? No doubt, in response to Islamic terrorism, he would have flown the flag of freedom. He would have asserted the importance of Western, democratic values, rather than undermining them through the use of torture, control orders and the erosion of traditional freedoms in the name of national security.

In response to the financial crisis, Reagan would have emphasized that the roots of economic recovery lie not in financial stimulus packages, but in a return to the principles of free enterprise, lower taxation and deregulation. Above all, Reagan would have used his communication skills to convince people that these values and principles are strengths, not weaknesses to be given away.

In contrast to Sir Nicholas Henderson's view that Reagan was too simple to be up to the job, it was precisely Reagan's simplicity of language and clarity of views that made his insights and policies so powerful.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703954004576089491048979316.html?KEYWORDS=DAVID+DAVIS

Why we must outlaw these cynical strikes

To read the headlines, you would not believe that strikes have fallen from 29 million days lost to little over half a million days. 

Rail union leader Bob Crow behaves like a character from ‘I’m All Right Jack’, disrupts the lives of millions of Londoners, and costs the country many millions of pounds. It all seems very 1970s, but even his behaviour pales by comparison with the Fire Brigades’ Union. 

The right to strike is an important one for workers in most of the civilised world.
Justice demands a reasonable parity of power between the workforce and the employer, to ensure decent and fair treatment for the employees.

But decent treatment should not be at the price of risking the lives of the public.

The threat of strikes by firefighters was wholly irresponsible and deliberately designed to put the public at risk. It makes even someone like me, who supports the right to strike, think twice about the way it is being used.

When the Trades Disputes Act 1906 effectively legitimised strikes, it was correcting a real imbalance between capital and labour. Back then, however, the risks in a strike were largely faced by business owners and workers. 

The bosses faced loss of profits and customers and, potentially, long-term damage to the business. Equally, the workers faced loss of wages, and possible loss of their jobs if the company went bankrupt. Most of the time, the customers were not much harmed.

And as the risks were confined largely to those involved in the dispute, there was a strong incentive for both sides to reach a deal.

However, all that changed after the 1950s with the creation of huge nationalised industries and the growth of an enormous State sector. Large sections of the economy became State-funded monopolies.

When workers in a public monopoly go on strike, the only victims are the customers and the taxpayer. Indeed, making the customer suffer has become the primary tactic of the modern strike leader.

That is why airport workers target bank holiday weekends, and postal workers target Christmas. And on the railways, especially the London underground, union tactics are clearly designed to disrupt the maximum number of innocent citizens who have no say in the outcome.

What’s more, they have no alternative service so they suffer more and when the strike is over they must generally return as customers.

The taxpayers fund the losses. There is little threat to the long-term existence of the company, and thus no threat to jobs. The disincentives to strike are much less than in the private sector.

Worse, in many cases they provide vital public services that it can be dangerous to withhold.
That is why we do not allow soldiers or policemen to strike. It is why many countries restrict the right to strike across a whole range of tasks, the interruption of which would endanger the life, personal safety, health, or normal living condition of their people. 

So can we find a better way to resolve industrial disputes that does not involve making economic hostages of the public? Can we do this without undermining the rights of responsible trade unions? 

It is undoubtedly possible for a government to remove the right to strike from a limited number of areas where irresponsible action would unfairly oppress or put the public at risk. It is more difficult to do it in a way that respects the rights of employees and encourages sensible negotiating practice and good industrial relations. But it is not impossible.

At first sight, compulsory arbitration seems the obvious answer. Unfortunately, since most ­arbitrators ‘split the ­difference’ between the two sides, it encourages both sides to make ­outrageous claims.

The best approach is that employed by several states in the U.S.. They do not allow some categories of public service workers to strike, but instead disputes are resolved by what is known as ‘pendulum arbitration’.

The arbitrator has to choose one of the final offers made. If one side offers 2 per cent, and the other demands 6 per cent, he has to choose 2 or 6 – he is not allowed to split the difference. The more reasonable of the two offers wins. It creates an incentive to be reasonable and creative in improving productivity in exchange for higher wages.
Most of all, it protects the customer from being taken hostage by an irresponsible union leadership.

Some will say ‘Europe won’t allow it’. This is nonsense. A fair and decent arbitration system, with a proper role for unions, will meet the requirement of Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

We have had 20 years’ respite from the irresponsible militancy of the 1970s. Today, however, we are seeing the results of a clear decision to resurrect that militancy, and the public misery it engenders, as a political weapon. It is time we replaced that weapon with something that better serves the public interest and the interests of the trade unions’ members rather than their over-political leadership.

This article appeared in the Daily Mail on Friday 5th November 2010.

The Right Way to Cut Defence Spending

"Hurry up—and wait," is the description of the typical officer's command as given by many a long-suffering infantryman. That complaint characterizes the paradoxical demands of warfare, rather like the cliché that describes most people's experience of combat: "Long periods of boredom interrupted by brief moments of terror."

There is an even fiercer paradox facing the British military this week: How to square Britain's need to rebalance its books and cut its defense budget, while retaining its ability to meet a range of threats that we are struggling to deal with even now. Budget cuts are a challenge facing all government departments, but if the Ministry of Defense gets it wrong, people die and our nation is threatened.

In the next few days, the National Security Council will receive a pivotal briefing on the U.K.'s Strategic Defense review, and face up to how it will deal with the massive shortfall between Britain's strategic ambitions and what we can afford to spend on our armed forces. Part of this will be deciding whether we can continue Tony Blair's strategy of being a "mini-superpower"—itself an oxymoron—but also whether there exists any radical reconfiguration that can deliver more for less.

One of the problems is that the Ministry of Defense and its predecessors have always gotten Britain's strategic threats wrong. We prepare to fight the French, and end up fighting the Germans. We prepare to fight the Russians, and end up fighting the Argentines. We prepare to fight on the central European plains, and end up fighting in the deserts of the Middle East and Central Asia. We prepare for high-intensity armored warfare, and end up mounting counterinsurgency operations.

So the most dangerous route the government could take would be to try and guess what comes next, and construct a narrow military solution tailored to the predicted threat. Yet that will be their temptation, given their otherwise sensible goals of efficiency and cost-effectiveness. The intelligent route would be to design a military option that is not only cost-effective, but also flexible enough to respond to a wide range of threats. That argues strongly for a reserve-based solution.

Many in the military do not take Britain's reserve and Territorial forces seriously. They forget that the reserves were the backbone of our armed forces in both the first and second World Wars. In those conflicts, Territorial units won disproportionate numbers of Victoria Crosses and other gallantry medals. In the Battle of Britain, the Auxiliary Air Force and the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserves provided a huge number of pilots to fight off German raids.

These traditions continue, despite the massive (and foolish) reductions in the Territorial Army in the last few decades. The 21st Special Air Service Regiment, a unit of reservists, won three Military Crosses when a single squadron was deployed to Afghanistan for six months. Other units have done enormously worthwhile, if less dramatic, work in the Afghan theater.

In other countries this is the norm, not the exception. The U.S., the greatest military power in the world, makes massive use of its reserve forces, and has always done so. In the second World War, reservists won 44 of the U.S. Marine Corp's 77 Medals of Honor. In the first Gulf War, it was a U.S. Marine reservist unit—Bravo Company of the 4th Tank Battalion—that knocked out 34 Iraqi tanks, a record unequalled in the war. More recently, reservists made up 40% of the Joint Special Operations command that, under Gen. Stanley McChrystal, pretty much knocked al Qaeda out of Iraq.

Other countries rely even more heavily on reservists. Israel is the most obvious, with reserve infantry, tank, and air force units. Even the highly sophisticated Patriot systems that protect Israel from missile attacks are manned by reservists.

So the reserve forces of other countries are capable of doing the most challenging, most technical, and most hazardous tasks. Almost as importantly, they are able to do it at a tiny fraction of the cost of regular forces. Until they are actually mobilized, reservists cost roughly one-fifth what regular units do. Salaries, residential costs, pensions, all the other overhead of the standing army go down by 80% for reservists.

The British military is facing an inevitable reduction in the size of its armed forces. An expected 25% or even 33% cut in regular manpower could, however, be offset by doubling or tripling the size of the reserve forces, which would use only a tiny fraction of the savings made on regular forces. Crucially, such a recalibration in the number of reserve versus regular forces would enhance our abilities to respond to a wide range of threats.

Undoubtedly many regular generals would recoil in horror at this idea, uncomfortable with the implications for the careers of their officer corps. They also worry about the military's ability to recruit reserve and Territorial units up to strength—a real issue, but solvable if we organize to cope with it.

The truth is, our generals, admirals and air marshalls—and indeed our politicians—will have to swallow even more radical changes if they are to cope with the Scylla and Charybdis of financial austerity and an unstable world. They will have to countenance downsizing the air force, and far more widespread use of unmanned aircraft. They will have to completely change the role and design of the new "aircraft carriers" on order, possibly so that they won't actually carry any aircraft at all. They will probably have to rethink the planned upgrade to the Trident nuclear deterrent system. All this will mean not so much thinking "outside the box," but thinking without any bounds at all.

In this brave new world, a reserve-based military will bring many advantages. It will very likely be better educated than most of today's armed forces. It will bring skills and experience that our young soldiers have not had a chance to obtain. It will almost certainly draw from a wider range of backgrounds than our regular army. It will possess a wider range of skills, from understanding cyber threats to speaking Pashtun. It will be cost effective, but incredibly adaptable to a changing world. Finally, it will be built upon a tradition of courageous and capable citizen-soldiers that stretches from the poppy fields of Flanders to the passes of Afghanistan.

This article appeared in the Wall Street Journal on 16th September 2010.

David writes about the ease at which the identities of ordinary citizens can be stolen.

Astonishing, perhaps, but we are not far from the point at which anybody could repeat the trick, about almost anybody else, with a few clicks on the internet. It gets easier every day but it has been made simple by websites that aggregate data from public sources for commercial purposes.

Websites like 192.com integrate information from electoral rolls, telephone directories and public government records, and sell it on for as little as 35p a record.

Recently a computer magazine decided to have a look at how much it could glean about someone using the information from 192.com and a few other public domain websites. Its target was Alastair Crawford, chief executive of 192.com. Its conclusion was alarming: "So after not much more than 10 minutes, we've managed to discover Mr and Mrs Crawford's age, home and work addresses, telephone numbers, photos of his home and holidays, details of friends, his school, and much more besides. And we're bumbling amateurs, not professional identity thieves."

Quite. The truth is, identity theft has never been easier. Just think through those questions that banks and other big corporations ask when you phone.

"Just a few security questions, Mr Davis. Mother's maiden name?" Easy.

"Date of birth?" Simple. "Name of eldest child?" not a problem. You could read them all off the screen if you spent a short time preparing.

Before we get to full-scale identity theft, this public information can be used for a wholly legal but nevertheless infuriating intrusion of privacy. There has recently been a sharp rise in complaints about telephone cold calls. There are now 1.5 billion such calls every year in Britain.

For every unwanted call, there are dozens of items of junk mail. That is irritating and intrusive enough. It can be worse.

When Alastair Crawford was receiving his web once over, one of the facts thrown up (by Google's Street View) was that he had a Sky dish and therefore a Sky contract.

That sort of fact is very useful to all sorts of marginal operators.

I had experience of this myself. One week after I had bought a Sky Plus box, I was called and asked whether I needed insurance for the box. The caller knew my name, my address, had found out I had Sky. He had enough knowledge about me to hook me into a conversation. It was a scam, one I avoided but which fleeced many innocent people. It was nothing to do with Sky. Most of the information necessary to hook a punter was on the internet. Some of my very elderly constituents have faced mail-based scams to frighten them into buying things they do not need or want. These would be even more effective in a telephone cold call by someone who knew a lot about them. Even mundane information, such as your age, or the fact that you live alone, can be used but there is much more data around than is realised.

Now I know most of this public domain information has always been available but before a decade or so ago, it required an effort to get it. If you wanted to consult the electoral roll, you had to go to the library or council offices. If you wanted my house value, you had to write to the Land Registry.

That effort protected most of us, and our privacy, from everything except the most determined investigator. Now it is available at the touch of a button. As the speed and convenience came in one door, our privacy went out the other.

In a modern world, you may say, there is nothing we can do about this. But there is no need to make it easy, either for the aggressive but legal direct marketeer, or for the illegal identity thief. However, through naivety, or thoughtlessness, the authorities are doing just that. By selling electoral roll data they are handing over information that may be inconvenient for us and at the same time making the criminal's job easier.

If you wanted to carry out an ID theft on David Davis, you would start out with a search on the name. That, however, will generate vast quantities of junk! To properly clone my identity, you need a tighter fix, exactly what is given by electoral roll data. Apart from where I live, it will tell you who lives with me, who my neighbours are, perhaps who my children are.

From all that flows telephone numbers, marriage dates, friends, dates of birth, house values, the lot. Work hard enough and you will likely get enough data to get a copy of my birth certificate and marriage certificate. From that you can set up bank accounts and sign contracts.

ALL OF this starts from information that I am required to give to the council, by law, and which it is required, by law, to sell to any commercial concern that wants it. This is one of many examples of the State assuming that it owns my identity. It does not; we each own our own identity.

Each breach of this principle appears trivial but collectively they add up to a huge potential intrusion on privacy. Yes, I can tick a box to protect my privacy when I fill in the electoral registration form. This is good in theory but I cannot remember even seeing that box, let alone ticking it. Can you? The presumption is that our private data should be put in the public domain. That is wrong.

For years the Local Government Association has been asking the Government to change the law so that it no longer has to sell the electoral roll. It is time the Government conceded this request.

It used to be said that an Englishman’s home is his castle. If we do not stop this trend, it will be less castle, more glass house, without even the benefit of net curtains. 'By selling data from the electoral roll the authorities are just making the criminal's job easier'

                
This article appeared in the Express on Sunday on 15th August 2010.

Let's defend our way of life, not just our lives.
Total safety is incompatible with an open society. That's why I can't support 28-day detention

If anything is the centrepiece of the coalition Government, it is the focus on defending the liberty of the individual and the integrity of our judicial system. It has come not a moment too soon. The past couple of years have seen the crumbling of the authoritarian extralegal apparatus that the previous Government set up as the foundation of its counter-terrorism strategy. Every element of it has come under pressure.

For example, the secret courts that issue control orders have been overruled many times, sometimes because the control orders have been too draconian, sometimes because the Appeal Court thought there was plenty of evidence to prosecute suspects in open court. Even in practical terms, the control-order regime has failed, managing to lose seven terrorist suspects, probably the most dangerous ones.

Similarly, the serial abuse of stopand-search powers by the police has been checked. After hundreds of thousands of British citizens were subjected to these "counter-terrorist" actions, the European Court ruled their use excessive, and last week the Government had to restrict them.

On a more gruesome note, the co-operation and/or complicity of British Intelligence agencies with foreign governments who use torture has come in for excoriating criticism in the courts. Again, David Cameron had little choice but to announce an investigation into this assault on our national honour.

The previous Government's heavy-handed, authoritarian strategy was taking us in the opposite direction to most of our allies. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the issue of detention without charge, which is being debated in the House of Commons today. Even after the defeat of Labour attempts to impose detention without charge for 90 days, then 42 days, we still have, at 28 days, the longest detention time in the civilised world. Canada gets by with one day, America with two.

The longest detention period in a country with a similar legal system to ours is 12 days, in Australia. That country was scarred by the Bali bombing, has the biggest Muslim state in the world as a neighbour, and is tough-minded about terrorism. Yet it is currently reducing its maximum detention without charge to eight days. The only real debate is whether even that is too long. But today our Government will seek to extend the 28-day rule for another six months, a decision I shall vote against.

To be fair, Theresa May, the Home Secretary, has stated clearly that she is using the six months to review many aspects of counter-terrorism policy, including control orders and detention without charge. She has made it clear that she views 28 days as temporary. Nevertheless, there is a fear that this is simply a rearguard action being fought by those in the Home Office and parts of the police force who do not want to give up their powers. That fear is grounded in the fact that we do not need six months to prove this policy a failure. It is already evidently a counter-productive disaster.

When John Reid was Home Secretary he tried to persuade me that he needed a longer detention time to deal with the crisis that would arise if our agencies were overwhelmed by multiple attack of multiple targets, and multiple suspects. Well, as luck would have it, we had a rehearsal of just such an occurrence within a few months. The Heathrow bomb plot of 2006 targeted ten airliners, had very large numbers of suspects in several places, and was triggered by events outside the control of the authorities.

The consequence of this operation was that five suspects were held for 27-28 days. Three were judged to be innocent and were released. Two were charged, but the evidence on which they were charged was in both cases available well within the old 14-day limit. Even so, after a further 18 months of trying to find evidence, the case of one was dismissed by the judge, and the other was found not guilty by a unanimous jury verdict. Five people, 28 days, and no convictions.

The only effect of this heavy-handed law was to create resentment and suspicion within the communities from which the five came. Our biggest problem in dealing with terrorism today is the increase in radicalisation of young Muslims and the lack of intelligence co-operation from the Muslim community. A 28-day detention makes both much worse.

Extended detention without charge is the most prominent example of the State forgetting that it is not just our lives that it is defending, but our way of life. The cost of attempting to achieve absolute security is not just many more billions of pounds that we cannot afford, but the sacrifice of liberty which diminishes our civilisation. The understandable intention to prevent loss of life should be tempered with an appreciation that total safety is impossible in an open society.

The coalition has promised that its counter-terrorism strategy will be principled, effective and based on the rule of law. By cutting down the unnecessary 28-day detention without charge, it will signal its intent to keep that promise.

This article appeared in The Times on 14 July 2010.

Rt Hon David Davis (Conservative), Simon Wright MP (Liberal Democrat) and Fiona Mactaggart MP (Labour) have won the ‘Bupa Fitbug Parliamentary Challenge’ on behalf of their parties. Members of Parliament were challenged to walk the most steps over two weeks in the hope of winning a £1,000 Bupa donation to a local charity of their choice. 

Thirty seven Members of Parliament from the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties signed up to take part in the competition, which ran between 21 June and 4 July. The three winners walked a combined total of 379,335 steps.  Bupa devised the competition to raise awareness of the benefits that taking regular exercise such as walking can have in ensuring a healthy heart and reduced body fat as well as helping people to feel better about themselves.

Rt Hon David Davis, Conservative MP for Haltemprice and Howden, said: “I already enjoy walking, but Bupa’s Fitbug Parliamentary Challenge gave me that small extra spurt necessary to catch one fewer buses and walk that one extra mile. I am delighted to have won the challenge and doubly pleased that the £1,000 will go to MacMillan Cancer Support which does so much to help those suffering with cancer in my constituency and across the country.”

Simon Wright, Liberal Democrat MP for Norwich South, said: "I enjoyed taking part in Bupa’s challenge and making an effort to walk further than I normally would. Walking is a really good way of keeping active. It's easy to do and it gives you an opportunity to take in the world around you. It's not only good for the body, it's good for the mind too. Taking a few minutes out for a short walk during a busy day can be reinvigorating."

Fiona Mactaggart, Labour MP for Slough, said: “I wanted to take up Bupa’s challenge because Slough has such a high incidence of diabetes and I thought I could help my constituents reduce their risk of developing it.  My victory was secured when I led a team of volunteers to deliver cards to homes in the Foxborough area of Slough, which used to be in Windsor constituency, to tell my new constituents how to get hold of me.  On a lovely sunny day we walked 18,000 steps.”

The Fitbug, which was worn by all the candidates, is an ‘intelligent pedometer’ that monitors the amount of steps a person takes every day.  When connected to a computer, users can add in extra details such as what they ate for lunch to calculate total energy intake and output. The programme then generates a health and fitness plan tailored to the individual.

Fergus Kee, managing director, Bupa’s UK and North America division, said: “It’s great that Members of Parliament are setting a positive example by taking part in the Bupa Fitbug Parliamentary Challenge and I’d like to congratulate all three winners on their success.”

Evidence shows that regular exercise, including walking, can:

- halve the risk of getting type 2 diabetes

- halve the risk of developing coronary heart disease
- increase levels of HDL ('good' cholesterol)
- reduce high blood pressure

- have beneficial effects if you have arthritis and lower back pain
- reduce overall risk of cancer, prevent bowel cancer and reduce the risk of breast cancer in women after the menopause

- help to maintain a healthy weight in combination with a balanced diet

- reduce the risk of depression and dementia in later life

- reduce stress and improve sleep

The Future of Banking Commission, chaired by David Davis, has published its final report. The cross-party Commission was established because the public’s voice has not yet been sufficiently heard in the ongoing debate about the future of banking.

Read the full report here. For more information about the Commission visit the Which? website.

The Government has announced the national identity card scheme is to be axed. Read the Home Secretary Theresa May's speech here.

Just as in business, no deal in politics is ever perfect. Real life is like that.

So it’s no surprise that parts of the new Lib-Con coalition agreement have proved controversial.

Those of us who want the deal to succeed, and view the alternative with horror, accept that reality — and accept the occasional discomfort that goes with it.

But this does not mean that we should not try to improve on it — particularly when that improvement would meet the aims and principles of both parties.

Take the most controversial part of the coalition deal for traditional Tories: the agreement to increase Capital Gains Tax.

The aim of this is to enable the coalition government to fund a reduction of taxes for the least well-off by raising the threshold for income tax to £10,000.

Yet there are legitimate questions that should be asked before we rush ahead with the planned increase in Capital Gains Tax.

Will it deliver enough money? Will it work, as the Lib Dems intend, by taxing the rich?

Will it support other policy aims shared by the coalition, such as social mobility, and encouraging work and thrift?

If not, can we amend it to make it do what both parties want? First, how much will it raise?

If we carried through the whole £10,000 income tax cut, the cost to the Treasury is estimated to be £17billion a year.

But the truth is that, in total, Capital Gains Tax raised £7.6billion in 2007-08 and will never provide anywhere near the necessary sum to pay for the whole tax cut.

In fact, research published recently based on data from the U.S., Britain and Australia, shows that every time a country cuts the Capital Gains Tax rate, the revenue goes up.

And every time the rate has been raised, the revenue has actually gone down.

Paradoxically, the research implies that the way to increase the tax take is to cut the rate rather than increase it — possibly down to 12.5 per cent.

When the U.S. cut their rate to 15 per cent in 2003, the tax take doubled in the subsequent two years.

So a stark increase from 18 per cent to 40 or 50 per cent will almost certainly reduce the amount of money raised.

Why does this happen? Essentially, it’s because, for the really rich, Capital Gains Tax is a voluntary tax.

Those with large estates can afford the expensive accountants who minimise their taxes.

Even those on middle incomes can often wait before selling their shares or second homes. So when rates go up, people pay less.

There is one category of people, however, for whom this is not true — and it highlights a stark unfairness in this tax.

You're the man: U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner with George Osbourne outside No11 today before their talks on the Euro crisis

The largest group of people who cannot choose whether or not to pay the tax are the elderly.

Over the past decade or so, their attempts to provide for their old age and to pass something on to their children, have been savagely handicapped by Gordon Brown.

First it was the raid on the pension funds and the effective destruction of the final salary pension schemes that followed.

Then it was the government’s inability to deal with serious business failures such as Equitable Life, the insurance company which was unable to pay out to its investors.

More recently, it has been the reduction of interest rates to near zero, meaning their savings lost value in low-risk accounts.

It is no surprise, therefore, that these people — the hardworking, responsible and self-reliant middle and working classes who want to get on — have looked to invest their savings outside the normal pension funds, and under their own control.

What they did — save to provide for their old age, unexpected adversity and their children — was laudable.

It is explicitly what Conservatives approve of.

And it is these people, not the rich, who will pay the lion’s share of the increased Capital Gains Tax.

When they reach retirement age, they will not be able to defer selling their share portfolio, holiday cottage or buy-to-let flat. They will need the money.

So if we are not very careful we will be punishing the virtuous. We will also be destroying aspiration.

Both the Lib Dem and the Conservative Party believe in social mobility.

An important element of social mobility is breaking through the tendency of whole families to suffer cycles of decline down the generations.

One way to break out of this is to encourage parents to save to help their own children.

In this way, savings and inheritance act as a social ratchet — lifting each generation one step at a time.

So unless it is very carefully designed, the plan to increase Capital Gains Tax will not only fail to raise the money needed, it will cost money.

It will penalise hard work and saving. Far from taxing the rich, it will simply tax the elderly at their point of maximum vulnerability — when they enter retirement.

And it will damage long-run social mobility. It will also damage long-run savings rates and economic growth. Is this avoidable, while still staying within the agreement?

The answer is yes, but it will require George Osborne to be extremely skilful.

There were encouraging signs in the Queen’s Speech that the government is listening to concerns about the impact of a swingeing, blanket charge.

One sensible argument for increasing Capital Gains Tax is to prevent people switching income to capital gains to avoid high income tax rates.

Research shows that this is less of a problem than it might seem, but it is a reasonable argument.

The way to square this circle is to use a plan that is actually already sitting in Chancellor George Osborne’s filing cabinet.

About five years ago, George asked the Tories’ former Secretary of State for Scotland Michael Forsyth to lead a Tax Reform Commission.

At the time, this eminent commission recommended, among other things, the elimination of taxes under £10,000 — just as the Lib-Con coalition is now proposing.

The commission also drafted a proposal to simplify Capital Gains Tax and Inheritance Tax.

The idea was to create a short-term Capital Gains Tax which would start at a headline rate of, say, 40 or 50 per cent, and would taper down to zero — falling year by year, over a period of five years.

This would prevent the problem of switching income to capital for tax avoidance purposes, would encourage long-term saving and investment, would avoid distorting investment decisions, would make us internationally competitive and would raise extra revenue.

Furthermore, it is an idea that attracted cross-party support and, in particular, was praised by Lord Oakeshott, the Liberal Treasury spokesman in the Lords.

This idea would sidestep every single problem I have outlined and would resolve the issue of inheritance tax.

And it would meet the aims and aspirations of both the Lib Dem and Conservative Parties. It is an idea for which the time has come. 

This article was published in the Daily Mail on 27 May 2010.

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has unveiled the Government's programme to roll back the state and restore freedoms and civil liberties.

Read the speech here. For further details on the Great Repeal Bill click here.

When David Cameron announced the outline terms of the agreement with the Liberal Democrats to a meeting of the Conservative Parliamentary Party, I applauded as loudly as anybody. “At last,” I thought, “an end to this dreadful Labour government, a government that has stayed long beyond its useful life.”

Although I had reservations about some aspects of the described agreement, I viewed most of it as an inspired amalgam of the best of our respective parties' manifesto commitments. I particularly liked the commitment to cut taxes for the low paid, and of course the great repeal Bill to remove the most illiberal of the last government’s legislation was music to my ears. I also liked the pupil premium, aimed as it is at enhancing social mobility.

Then I obtained a copy of the agreement and read it in detail.

To introduce such a measure in this way is simply wrong.

Consider what the reaction would have been if, say, the Lib-Lab coalition of the 70’s had introduced such a measure. It would have caused public uproar, and rightly so. Such a change would have allowed the failing Callaghan government to stay in office despite losing the confidence vote in 1979. Or imagine if a failing Gordon Brown government had started to lose its majority, and had changed the ground rules in this way. Under those circumstances it would have been quite obviously a serious breach of our constitutional traditions.

I expect the current government to have a healthy majority throughout the next five years. But we are not legislating for one Parliament. Imagine a future government that loses its absolute majority. Under these rules it could lose decisions in the House time after time by as much as 60 votes, and still stay in office. We quite rightly criticised Gordon Brown for clinging to power for a few days. This opens up the possibility for a future government to cling to office without a majority for months or even years.

I am sure that this was not the intention. I assume that under the pressures of rapid negotiation this idea was conflated with the idea of introducing a fixed term Parliament. If so it was a misunderstanding of the constitutional implications of two completely different reforms.

It is entirely proper for us to introduce a fixed term Parliament. It is after all simply a constraint on the traditional power of a Prime Minister to set the date of a General Election. In theory the Prime Minister could do that by simple decision at the beginning of the Parliament, for his own term at least. It does not alter the powers of Parliament to hold the government to account in any way.

By contrast, altering the circumstances under which a Parliament can dismiss a failing government is a massive constitutional change, and strikes at the heart of Parliament's ability to hold the Executive to account. It is not something that should be introduced without major consultation, prior manifesto commitment, and ideally opposition party acquiescence. After all, if this is not the case, what is to stop a future government with a small and unstable majority from changing the rules again, to a higher threshold? Or to extending such new rules to its "essential business" like the Budget? What about manifesto commitments? Do the losing opposition parties have the right to block them?

Once we had implemented the 55% rule we would have absolutely no moral authority to challenge such a set of proposals.

Imagine that the coalition parties had announced in the General Election campaign that once they had won they were going to change the rules to make it more difficult to remove a government. The reaction would have been extremely adverse, and likely to have denied both parties many seats.

Cavalier changes to our constitutional traditions to favour the Executive were one of the hallmarks of the worst aspects of the Blair government. This proposal will be seen as an extension of that unfortunate tradition. It would be the worst possible start to the "New Politics”. Indeed it is completely contrary to the Conservative Party’s stated intention to reinforce the powers and standing of Parliament.

This proposal could even compromise the position of the monarchy. One of the most important roles of the monarch is to dissolve Parliament in the event that the government can no longer command sufficient votes in Parliament to govern effectively. This is why a vote of confidence is set at 50% plus one. If you cannot command that number of votes you cannot deliver either your legislative programme or your budget.

If this proposal goes through we could have a situation where the government could not effectively govern the country, but it could command 45% of the vote. What would the Palace do if the Prime Minister refused to ask for a dissolution? If the monarch dissolved Parliament, there would be a constitutional crisis. If she did not, a broken government could stagger on, perhaps with a failed economic policy, perhaps pursuing an unpopular war, perhaps simply paralysed but unwilling to relinquish power.

Although unlikely, it is even theoretically possible that it could happen in this Parliament if the Lib Dems abandoned government in four years, leaving a paralysed Tory administration locked in place.

Some have argued that what the country needs is “stability”. Actually what it needs is decisive and effective government. Such government is naturally stable. What it does not need is a system that might at some point in the future lock in place a government that is incompetent, ineffective, but unwilling to go.

Many have said that this is necessary to bind the coalition together. There are many ways to do that: compromise over the key policies, or allocate the junior partner a disproportionate number of places in government. We have done both. Perhaps the two leaders should sign and publish a binding concordat.

What we should not do is hastily amend a fundamental and longstanding element of our constitution to favour a government coalition for a single parliament. We certainly should not whip MPs through the lobbies on a major constitutional reform that we have not put before the people. To do so would taint irreversibly what we had all hoped would be the era of “New Politics”.

This article was published in the Telegraph on 18 May 2010.

David Davis has been returned as the Member of Parliament for Haltemprice and Howden with 24,486 votes.

David said, 'I’d like to thank my party and the other candidates, who fought with dignity and intelligence.

'I'd like to thank my constituents who put their trust in me for the seventh time. I will continue to endeavour to live up to that confidence that they have shown in me.'

This article appeared in The Guardian on 17th March 2010.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/mar/17/lehmans-bank-repo-105-accountants

Lehman Brothers: Accounting to Us All

Last month, two weeks before he died, Sir Brian Pitman, a chief executive and then chairman of Lloyds for 18 years and one of the wisest commentators on today's banking crisis, appeared before the Future of Banking Commission. He said "One of the great differences between banking, financial services generally, and other activities, is that you can increase the profits of the outfit simply by changing the risk profile … And [you] will wind up short term with very big profits, and if you gear up the remuneration system appropriately, become rich quite quickly."

What he described was exactly what Lehman Brothers was up to in 2008, before its collapse. Not only did Lehman gear up its leverage with just $25bn of capital to support $700bn of assets and liabilities, but it also failed to disclose $50bn of off-balance sheet assets by using an accounting gimmick internally nicknamed Repo 105.

According to last week's US bankruptcy proceedings report, "Lehman's auditors, Ernst & Young, were aware of but did not question Lehman's use and nondisclosure of the Repo 105 accounting transactions". This despite a whistleblower bringing it to their attention. They claim they did nothing wrong.

The accountants were correct, in a narrowly defined sense. The Repo 105 scam and its near relative, Repo 108, were technically legal but certainly morally repugnant. Bank balance sheets are supposed to inform, not deceive, and accountants are supposed to ensure that they do so accurately and precisely.

Lehman's bankruptcy was, of course, the trigger for the global financial collapse – but more important, the practice of deliberate deceit and opacity exemplified by it was one of the systemic causes of the crunch. At the end of the boom, some parts of the financial services industry looked like the insatiable in pursuit of the incomprehensible.

The Lehman accounting gimmick is of course just an extreme version of a whole suite of techniques designed to maximise leverage without degrading the credit rating of the bank or company using it. Too often, however, a method supposedly designed to reduce risk merely concealed risk, and very often the effect was to increase system risks to phenomenal levels.

It was in large part the willingness of the accountancy profession to accept the opacity of banks' accounts, and the instruments they invested in, that blinded the regulators to the risks, and that deceived the investors into believing that high returns could be had.

There is nothing new in the idea that markets suffer from herd instincts, and that the sum of individual benefit can lead to collective harm. That is why we have rule systems and laws. The real keepers of these rule systems are the central banks, the competition authorities, the regulators, the credit rating agencies, and the accountants. If one part of this system fails, it all fails.

That's why the accounting problem with banks is fundamental. When accountants signed off a set of accounts, they used to attest that it represented a "true and fair view" of the company's activities. Today the accounting firms avoid such useful assessments. Instead, they simply state that it meets one of the two international accounting standards. That is not good enough. When they sift through the records of a bank, they are acting as the agents of the wider public. It is time they recognised this.

It may be that we need to impose a direct responsibility to the regulator on the auditors. Maybe we need to ensure that bank audit committees are entirely independent of the bank's executives. Whatever, there is no doubt that we need this profession to shine far more light on the darker recesses of the financial services industry if we are not to face a repeat of our problems.

This article appeared in The Express on 17th March 2010.

http://express.co.uk/posts/view/163406/Libel-laws-Dangerous-enemies-of-free-speech

Libel Laws: Dangerous Enemies of Free Speech

FREEDOM of speech has long been a vital component of our society. When it is threatened, we have fought fiercely to protect it – as we did, successfully, in recent proposed religious hatred laws. Yet a creeping erosion has begun to take place, a blurring of definition between proof of fact and valid opinion.

Our libel law appears to have become mangled in the interplay of defamation law, the Human Rights Act, and no-win no-fee agreements with libel lawyers.

The consequence has been famous legal cases arming celebrities against what many would see as fair reporting. The paradox is that people who live by media coverage, and make money from it, can claim a selective protection from it.
 
The most famous was Naomi Campbell whose previous drug problem was reported in a newspaper. She won the case (for breach of confidence). It went all the way to the Lords and cost the paper £1million in legal fees. This sort of arbitrary protection of celebrities, was certainly not the intention of the law makers who crafted these pieces of legislation.

Article 8 of the Convention of Human Rights was designed to stop the state intervening in our private lives, not to gag newspapers. So what, you may say. These powerful media moguls and massively rich celebrities, with teams of expensive lawyers, deserve each other. But when arguments of defamation hit science and politics, libel law becomes less about titillation and more about essential freedom of speech.

Science writer Simon Singh is fighting the British Chiropractic Association’s attempts to stifle his opinions. He described the claims of chiropractic benefit as “bogus” and based on insufficient evidence. The court ruled that his wording implied the BCA was dishonest. Mr Singh denied any such implication and is appealing the decision. Though absolute freedom of speech is a necessity for progress in medicine and science, writers are being intimidated out of reasonable comment.

The we have the new invention of the “superinjunction”. This stops reporting, not just of the supposed libel, but even of the existence of the court case. In one case, brought by the oil company Trafigura, it briefly stopped reporting of proceedings in Parliament, a breach of hundreds of years of democratic rights.

England is the worst place in the world for this, so we get “libel tourists”, foreigners who bring cases in English courts against other foreigners, on the grounds that their  reputation has been damaged in England even if the publications are in other, less libel- friendly jurisdictions.

For example in 2004 Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz launched a libel action against Rachel Ehrenfeld, author of Funding evil: How Terrorism Is Financed And How To Stop it. The book claimed Mahfouz financed Al Qaeda. It was not published here but was available online, so a court agreed to hear the case and awarded Mahfouz substantial damages.

As a result New York law was changed to prevent British judgments applying in the US. Our libel laws chill free speech in science, academia and politics, cover up corporate misbehaviour, and bring our law into international disrepute. But they don’t protect the most vulnerable victims of libel. With British libel suits costing over a hundred times more than in Europe, most claimants simply cannot afford to act, particularly when the odds of winning are slim and any damages awarded unlikely to begin to cover costs.

We are creating a law designed to benefit the Naomi Campbells and not the man in the street. So we need to change our libel laws to reinstate free speech and at the same time make proper protection available to ordinary people who cannot afford the expensive legal predators that flourish in our libel courts. It is time to give the law back to those it is meant to protect rather than allow it to be appropriated by those with the resources to misuse it.

That’s why I am backing the Libel Reform Campaign, led by three charities, English Pen, Index On Censorship and Sense About Science, which aims to reform our libel laws. Over half of all eligible MPs have signed a parliamentary motion and 40,000 people from all walks of life have signed a petition calling for libel reform. I would ask all Daily Express readers to do the same: www.libelreform.org/sign.

David has spoken in the House of Commons about control orders.  His opening contribution was as follows:

Rt Hon David Davis:  My right hon. Friend has talked about the problems of high principle with this issue and he is now discussing the legal problems, but I should like to draw his attention to one simple practical point. We were led to believe that thousands of people would be subject to these control orders when the legislation went through the House in 2005, but that has not turned out to be the case. Some 45 people have been subject to such orders and of those 45, seven have absconded. One would think that the seriously dangerous al-Qaeda terrorists would be the ones who would abscond, which indicates that this regime is not just flawed, but totally useless.

The debate can be read in full here:

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmhansrd/cm100301/debtext/100301-0013.htm#10030158000001

This article appeared in the Wall Street Journal and can be found online here - http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704188104575083492418736822.html

The Politics of Personality in Britain

As a rule I hate personality politics. It is almost always nasty, and invariably leaves a sour taste. But there is no doubt the character of the various political leaders will form a large part of the judgment exercised by the British people in the general election. The revelations of the last week about Gordon Brown's character have made this even worse.

There is a good reason for the British instincts in this. The personality of our prime minister is more important to the country than any other Western head of government. Constitutionally, the prime minister has enormous power. But through a quirk of British history, this power is exercised through machinery that is positively rickety.

The prime minister's support staff can be crammed into the small townhouse that is 10 Downing Street. The "powerhouse" that runs our government largely consists of a small crowd of civil servants sitting at desks crammed into two offices that adjoin the cabinet room.

As a result of this almost amateurish setup, the authority and personality of the prime minister is the single most important influence on the effectiveness of the government. So, under Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, Whitehall worked well. We may not like what it delivered, but at least it did deliver. Prime ministers whose authority becomes damaged lose their grip. It happened to John Major, and it is happening to Gordon Brown.

So I suspect the battle of the next few months will be nominally about policy, but actually about character. Now, l do not believe that one personality is intrinsically better than another. There is much to admire in both David Cameron and Gordon Brown. Indeed I remember how I felt for each of them, and admired their dignity and courage, when they both lost children in the full glare of public scrutiny. Nor do I blame Mr. Brown for talking about his loss. Regrettably that is inevitable in today's intrusive media world. The question is not about some innate virtue. It is about who is best fitted to fill the most important office in the land.

Nor was even this narrow question always obvious. When Brown took over, I was in the Shadow Cabinet. I thought at that time that there was an appetite among the British people after a decade of Blairite spin, for a leadership with high policy, high gravitas, and low spin, and I feared that Brown might present himself in that light, which would have made him a formidable PM. Indeed, for three months it looked like exactly that was happening.

Then, as we all know, normal service was resumed. What has happened since to expose Gordon Brown's character will determine the outcome of the next election. More than the slump, more than the 13 wasted years, the character of the prime minister will determine how people vote.

Now, I suspect that the accusations of bullying are overblown. The demands of No. 10 are ferocious on all who work there. The consequences of error are enormous for the country as a whole. So perfectionism is a job requirement.

Equally necessary is the need to work calmly under enormous pressure, as is the confidence to delegate effectively, and the ability to withdraw from the details and focus on the bigger picture. This is where the recent revelations show the most worrying weakness. So while the allegations of bullying are probably wrong, the suspicions of inadequacy are not.

We should remember that we do not make these judgments alone. Our international allies make them, and decide whether they can rely on us as a result. This has a direct impact on our national interest. For example, a recent book about Gordon Brown told us how he lost his temper at an official banquet over seating arrangements. That a prime minister should sulk through such an event and stalk out early over such a triviality is scarcely believable. It cannot have impressed our American allies, a view that would have been reinforced by his behavior demanding meetings with the U.S. president at a recent Washington conference.

It is also a necessary quality of a prime minister that he be a leader, a man whom people will follow through adversity and trouble. This means he has to be able to inspire loyalty. That means he has to reciprocate loyalty, and deal fairly with his supporters. He certainly cannot rely on "fear of the Brown machine," which many Labour MPs tell us has been a characteristic of the last decade.

The book "Inside Out" tells how Mr. Brown was willing to sacrifice its author, Peter Watt, to possible prosecution over "donorgate." This appears to have been a concerted character assassination designed purely to save the prime minister's own skin, and for the government to save face. This cowardly treatment is hardly a characteristic that people would look for in a leader.

The fact that any number of people have been willing to write or brief against him reinforces that view. Even one of Brown's closest allies in the house, Douglas Alexander, has said he doesn't actually like him and feared that "the longer the British public had to get to know him, the less they would like him as well." The ferocious rages, the sullen sulks, the disorganization, the inability to hold the loyalty of his staff, all tell us what Alistair Campbell meant when he called him "psychologically flawed."

When political parties are fighting over the center ground, as they will be in this election, the ideological distinctions between them become blurred in the public eye. That inevitably leads the electorate to make their judgment on personality more than policy. They also know we face tough times, a period of crisis, pressure, and vital decisions. They will be looking for courage, conviction, and character.

In many walks of life, Gordon Brown would be a towering figure. In the role of prime minister he is simply inadequate, and what I am hearing on the streets of Britain tells me the British people know it.

This article appeared in 'The Times' on Monday 15th February 2010.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article7028220.ece

"Our Courts Must Stand

Up to the Bullies"

If you listen to government ministers and their supporters, you might be forgiven for thinking that the behaviour of the British courts in the Binyam Mohamed case was unusually aggressive, unique even. You might be led to believe that our courts were alone among the judiciary of America’s allies in their challenge to torture and rendition.

You would be wrong. Indeed, by comparison with Canada, Germany and Italy our courts have been courteous to the point of deference to the Foreign Secretary and, through him, the US authorities.

Courts in Canada, Germany and Italy have been vigorous in upholding the rights of suspects not to be abducted and tortured, and in making public information about the actions of their own and the US intelligence services, where appropriate. I have been unable to find any threats by America to withhold intelligence co-operation from these allies. Nor have I been able to find allegations by their governments that their courts are dupes of al-Qaeda, the line peddled by Whitehall last week.

The Canadian courts have gone so far as to release video footage of an alleged terrorist, Omar Khadr, being interviewed by Canadian intelligence officers in Guantánamo, showing him breaking down in tears. This was against the wishes of the Canadian and US governments.

More dramatic still was the case of Maher Arar. A dual-nationality Canadian of Syrian origin, he was stopped while passing through New York, on information provided by the Canadian Secret Intelligence Service. He was not sent to the Canadian border, but to Syria. The Syrians tortured him for ten months before returning him to Canada.

The Canadian Government instituted a judicial inquiry, which found that Mr Arar had been tortured and cleared him of terrorism. The Government apologised and the Commissioner of the RCMP, the Canadian police, resigned.

The sensitivity of the Americans to this case led them to invoke a secrecy clause known as State Secrets Privilege against Arar in a US court case. This is something they did not do in the US case involving Binyam Mohamed.

But the Canadians are as nothing compared with the German courts in the case of Khalid el Masri. This Kuwaiti-born German citizen was picked up in Macedonia by a CIA snatch team and spirited away to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan. Here, he claims, he was beaten and abused. It seems likely that the CIA decided that they had got the wrong man, as they dumped him, penniless, on a road in Albania. Again the Americans used State Secrets Privilege to prevent the release of information in a case brought in the US courts by Mr el Masri.

On January 31, 2007, the Munich prosecutor issued arrest warrants for 13 CIA agents on information provided by the authorities in Spain, where the rendition flight is said to have originated. Those cases have not been pursued. However, in November last year, the Italian courts found 23 CIA agents guilty of abducting a suspect in Milan and taking him to Egypt for torture.

I, for one, prefer our own courts’ more measured approach. But consider how The New York Times compared the Italian decision with their own courts’ refusal to deal with the Maher Arar case: “The Italian court got it right,” it said. “The American court got it miserably wrong.”

So where does this leave the British courts? First we should understand that British courts recognise that in a democracy secretaries of state are appointed to exercise their judgment. You can see this in the almost excruciating lengths to which last week’s judgment went to give the Foreign Secretary the benefit of the doubt. It put the kindest interpretation on everything.

Second, it demonstrates how implausible is the threat to withhold intelligence co-operation. Will the Americans really cut off co-operation with Britain, Canada, Germany and Italy, just because their courts uphold standards we are all supposed to believe in?

Third, it demonstrates quite how disgraceful the Whitehall-inspired attack on our judges last week was. Far from being irresponsible, the judges were being the model of calm judicial reasonableness.

Of course, stories of rendition and torture are a propaganda gift to our enemies. But the authors of that gift, are the members of Western intelligence agencies who precipitated those barbarous actions, and all who acquiesced in their doing so.

It is categorically not the responsibility of those — be they judges, lawyers, campaigners, journalists or politicians — who seek to expose and correct these errors. Indeed, it would be a further propaganda gift if we compounded one departure from civilised standards on torture with another from our standards of impartial justice and open democracy.

Today the Appeal Court begins considering fresh submissions on whether to publish the paragraph expressing its critical judgment of the intelligence agencies. I hope it decides to do so, not because I wish to see that criticism, but because it will demonstrate the independence of our courts from political bullying.

Whatever it does, it will not close this issue. The only thing that will do that will be a full judicial inquiry. This is not an issue that should be resolved by grinding through large numbers of civil court actions. That will paralyse the agencies. An inquiry, with instructions to be as transparent as possible within the limitations of protecting national security, will be quicker and more effective in ensuring that justice is done and that the West never makes this terrible mistake again.

This article appeared in 'The Evening Standard' on Thursday 4th February.

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/markets/article-23802275-eurozone-mess-shows-uk-was-right-not-to-join.do


"Eurozone Mess Shows


UK Was Right Not To


Join"


The government tells us that we are out of recession - but only by one tenth of one percent growth. Any smaller and it would have vanished all together. After the brutal negatives of the last year, our economy could not get any more fragile. Or could it?

What if we had been a member of the Eurozone? Had we been in the euro these last few years, our economic state would not be a disaster, it would be a catastrophe. Our already damaged economy would have been crippled by a fixed exchange rate set by the so-called "successes" of the financial sector.

Instead, when our financial sector collapsed, the pound fell.

Outside the euro, sterling has been trading at a competitive level in global currency markets. British exports remained at attractive prices while euro-denominated goods raced to all-time highs against the pound and the dollar in 2009. This is the main reason we had a record manufacturing upturn in January, and without the beginnings of that upturn we would have still been in recession. In Greece, Ireland and Spain, all in the eurozone, manufacturing is struggling. The biggest of these, Spain, is unlikely to see an economic recovery this year.

So managing our own currency is critical to our ability to compete. Giving up our currency would also have meant giving up to the European Central Bank our ability to control interest rates. The ECB has kept interest rates significantly higher than rates in the UK.

The Bank of England has kept our rates low and pumped money into the economy, allowing companies to absorb the shock of recession and start to recover. None of this would have been possible had we joined the euro.

Those countries in the eurozone whose governments have, like Gordon Brown, behaved in a profligate manner, are now paying a fearsome price.

As well as the higher ECB base rate, they are being punished by the bond traders who are charging them for the riskiness of their national balance sheets. Greece, for example, is facing some of the highest interest rates for a decade, and is finding it hard to compete for funds with other eurozone countries.

What is worse, before the current crisis, membership of the eurozone lulled Greece into a false sense of security. Leading up to the budget problems in Greece, their government bond yields barely indicated the growing risk of Greek debt. The market was distorted, failing to convey information about the state of finances in Greece.

Even worse, the rest of the eurozone has been subsidising the bloated spending programmes of the Greek government, offering them no incentive to restrain extravagant and sumptuous behaviour.

This may well be why the Greeks were the first European nation to have their credit rating downgraded. Had we been a member of the euro, we would have suffered a similar fate. To add insult to injury, like Greece, had we been in a similar fix, we would have been denied balance-of-payments aid.

We have our own house to put in order, and that is not something we should entrust to a system controlled by foreign states who, quite reasonably and properly, have interests other than our own.

The UK currently ranks 126th out of 133 countries analysed for the soundness of their banks, according to the World Economic Forum. Our banks are amongst the most likely in the world to become insolvent and require a government bailout. Our national finances are in a parlous state.

Yet unlike the Eurozone countries of Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain, our national credit rating has not been downgraded.

Do we want to find our banks, not to mention the families and businesses they serve, in the same position as these governments, trusting their livelihood to Eurocrats, when the financial markets themselves do not trust them?

About 15 years ago, I was one of a team determined to keep us out of the euro. We were influenced by a hard-headed consideration of all the previous attempts to bind the currencies of disparate economies together. Most had crashed and burned at the first stress on the system.

The euro is facing its first stress-test since its adoption in 1999, with the looming financial problems of Greece, and now Ireland, Portugal and Spain, all testing the euro's ability to absorb shocks during a recession. We have yet to see the conclusion of this continent-wide experiment.

For ourselves, the pound has served our country well over the past ten years, in the good times and in the bad. Sterling is helping pull us out of the recession. This is no time to abandon a steadfast friend.

This article appeared in 'The Wall Street Journal' on Thursday 4th February.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704259304575042963927541630.html?KEYWORDS=david+davis

"Gordon Brown's Cynical

Election Ploy"

Sometimes it seems that Gordon Brown has no sense of shame. This week, in the name of re-establishing the trust of the public in democracy, he proposed the most shamelessly cynical and undemocratic ploy that I have seen for some time. That the proposal was about tactics not principle was demonstrated by one of his own cabinet ministers who told a journalist that it was intended to "f*** up the Tories."

The idea—to have a referendum on introducing an alternative voting system for general elections—masquerades as a form of proportional representation. With it he hopes to seduce the Liberal Democratic Party onto his side, either now or perhaps in a hung Parliament after a referendum. His main problem is that his own party hates proportional representation.

The proposal, Alternative Voting (AV), is a system whereby constituents rank the parliamentary candidates and the losers are eliminated, and the votes redistributed until one contender achieves more than 50%. It is not proportional representation. Indeed Roy Jenkins, when asked by Tony Blair to devise a PR system for the U.K., dismissed AV as offering "little prospect of a move toward greater proportionality and in certain circumstances it has even less proportionality than first past the post."

Labour Party members like AV because they see it as an anti-Tory voting system, in which they believe Liberal Democrat voters are more likely to vote Labour than Tory, because both are essentially left-wing parties.

Nevertheless, many Labour MPs are suspicious of this proposal because they think it is likely to be a stepping stone to full-blooded proportional representation. They are right to worry.

PR is, generally speaking, not particularly representative, not particularly democratic, not at all transparent, and neither necessarily stable nor decisive.

It invariably leads to coalition governments, formed by deals in smoke-filled rooms out of sight of the public and beyond the control of the electorate. The result may bear little resemblance to the manifestos that people cast their vote on. The ensuing Government is almost always a compromise, and is therefore rarely decisive (as in most European countries), or it may be unstable (as sometimes happens in Israel). No coalition government, no system of proportional representation, would have delivered a Margaret Thatcher to resolve the problems of a failing country—indeed of a failing political class. Only a first-past-the-post system could have done that.

Even more important, the first-past-the-post system creates a strong link between the MP and their constituency. This is good for democracy, and it is also good for the independence of the MP. In all PR systems, the political party chooses, ranks, and thereby controls the MP. The sorts of mavericks and independent spirits that lead to great political innovations are generally removed from the system by the party machine. In a first past the post system the constituency link gives the MP authority independent of the party to which he belongs.

I am acutely conscious of this. When I forced a by-election 18 months ago to fight against the government's authoritarian policies, I did not need to seek the approval of my party—although it was supportive. I was able to fight the seat with money, workers, and publicity engendered by the cause, not the party. That in turn gave great authority to the battle of ideas over the liberty agenda, and the government has folded on virtually every count as a result. None of this would have been possible under most PR systems.

This level of individualism is also deterred under the AV system. People occasionally say it would stop extremist parties. True, but first past the post does that. But what about the Greens, the Scottish and Welsh nationalists, the individual single-issue candidates? All of these are perfectly legitimate causes, and all, early on, would have been crushed by the coalition of establishment parties under AV.

What about fairness, some may say? Of course the first past the post system is unfair occasionally, as are all systems. Its principal unfairness however is against my party, the Conservatives. It was this unfairness that allowed the Labour Party to form a comfortable majority government with 35.3% of the vote in the last election. I must say that I have not noticed Mr. Brown rushing to correct this weakness in the system.

The sheer scale of this imbalance is breathtaking. It is caused by differences in sizes of constituencies and distribution of votes. To understand it, imagine the major parties having, respectively 40% and 30% of the vote, with the Liberals at 18%. If the Tories have the 40% share, they have a majority of 8. If Labour has the 40% share, they have a majority of 128—an astonishing advantage of 120 seats.

It would be remarkably easy to put right, by recalibrating the size of the constituencies. So my constituency, Haltemprice and Howden, is just over 70,000 votes. Labour's Sheffield Brightside, the constituency of my old Home Office opposite number David Blunkett, is just over 50,000. There is no conceivable justification for this, and I would expect a new Conservative government to correct it when they cut the number of MPs by 10%, as they have pledged to do. While this would not eliminate the disparity, it would reduce it dramatically.

Even with his current 8-10% advantage, Mr. Brown is expecting to lose next time. This is why he is indulging in this grubby ruse, trying to set up the conditions to hang on to power in a hung parliament. It will not work. The reason it will not work is because this latest episode is just one more example of why the British people want rid of him. He is a man who will put tactics before principle, political advantage before national interest, at every turn. And in May 2010 the electorate will decide, enough is enough.

During a debate in the House of Commons, Secretary of State for The Foreign Office David Milliband made the following statement:

“With permission, Mr. Speaker, I would like to make a statement to the House on the case of Mr. Binyam Mohamed following the judgment handed down this morning in the Court of Appeal.

The Court of Appeal has ruled that, in the light of disclosures by a United States court in December 2009, which I shall describe below, the seven paragraphs that have been redacted from the original judgment of the divisional court in this country of 21 August 2008 should be published. The seven paragraphs contain summaries of American intelligence relating to Mr. Mohamed's case held in UK files. I accept the Court's ruling, which concludes a very complex, and in various ways apparently unique, case, and I have made the relevant paragraphs available this morning on the Foreign Office website. The judgment is significant not just in respect of the seven paragraphs but for important principles that are at the very heart of both our national security and our democracy.

The facts are as follows. Mr. Mohamed, an Ethiopian national formerly resident in the UK, was detained in Pakistan in 2002. In 2004, he was transferred to Guantanamo Bay. In August 2007, the then Home Secretary and I wrote to the US Secretary of State to seek Mr. Mohamed's release from Guantanamo Bay and his return to the United Kingdom, along with four other UK residents. Mr. Mohamed was released from Guantanamo a year and a half later, in February last year.

In May 2008, Mr. Mohamed brought proceedings against the British Government in an effort to secure disclosure to his legal counsel of any material held by the British Government that might assist in the defence of his case before a US military commission. The question at issue in our appeal against the judgment of the divisional court was not this disclosure, which we supported and secured. It was instead whether intelligence provided, on a confidential basis, by one state to another, in absolute trust that it would be kept secure, should be disclosed into the public domain in the interests of open justice; or whether the breach of trust would be so grave as to endanger intelligence-sharing relationships and therefore affect national security. As I have said in this House on a number of occasions, in this case it was US intelligence and an English court, but it could just as easily be British intelligence in a foreign court. As I have also said to the House, often, at issue in this case was not the content of the seven paragraphs, but the principle of their disclosure by an English court against US wishes.

I am grateful for the consideration that the Court of Appeal gave to the control principle. This principle, which states that intelligence belonging to another country should not be released without its agreement, underpins the flow of intelligence between the US and UK. This unique intelligence-sharing relationship is vital to national security in both our countries. Crucially, the Court has today upheld the control principle. The judgment describes that principle as integral to intelligence sharing. It specifically vindicates the careful assessment that releasing the seven paragraphs without the consent of the United States would have damaged the public interest. It also specifically makes clear that"“this litigation has endorsed the application of public interest immunity and the maintenance of confidentiality over secret information.”"

This is important for the future of intelligence-sharing with the US and others.

However, on 17 December last year, we received notice of a US court ruling in the case of another Guantanamo detainee, Farhi Saaed Bin Mohammed, which made a finding of fact in respect of Binyam Mohamed's allegations of mistreatment. That judgment does not set out the content of the seven paragraphs per se, but it does include references to the treatment of Mr. Mohamed covered in the seven paragraphs. We brought this to the attention of the Court of Appeal and Mr Mohamed's counsel immediately. The Court of Appeal today ordered the publication of the seven paragraphs because, in its view, their contents were placed into the public domain by a United States district court. Without that disclosure, it is clear that the Court of Appeal would have upheld our appeal and overturned the fifth judgment of the divisional court. The Court of Appeal was also clear that the judiciary should overturn the view of the Executive on matters of national security only in the most exceptional circumstances. It states that"“it is integral to intelligence sharing that intelligence material provided by one country to another remains confidential to the country which provided it and that it will never be disclosed, directly or indirectly by the receiving country, without the permission of the provider of the information. This understanding is rigidly applied to the relationship between the UK and USA.”"

I spoke last night to Secretary Clinton about this case, which has been followed carefully at the highest levels in the US system with a great deal of concern. Recent events have shown the importance of the US-UK intelligence relationship in the fight against terrorism; equally, the determination of the US authorities to protect the confidentiality of their intelligence has been absolute throughout this case. We will work carefully with the US in the weeks ahead to discuss the judgment and its implications in the light of our shared goals and commitments.

Mistreatment of prisoners, not to say torture, violates the most basic principles of this country, never mind our national and international legal obligations. There is a fundamental commitment on the part of myself, responsible for the Secret Intelligence Service, my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary, responsible for the Security Service, and the heads and staff of those agencies, to uphold the highest standards of conduct not just for ourselves but with the countries with which we co-operate.

A wide range of allegations have been made during the course of this case. Today some of the facts can be publicised, in some cases for the first time. First, the paragraphs released today describe information received by our intelligence agencies concerning the conditions of Mr. Mohamed's detention by the United States in Pakistan in April 2002. They note specifically that he was subject to sleep deprivation, threats and inducements, that he was held shackled, and that the treatment, were it conducted by the United Kingdom, would be contrary to undertakings first given to this House in 1972. I repeat that it was not conducted by the UK.

Secondly, now that they are in the public domain, it will be evident that the paragraphs do not contain information on Mr. Mohamed's most serious claims of mistreatment, notably in respect of alleged genital mutilation, during his detention until his release from Guantanamo last year. We, the United Kingdom, have no information to corroborate those allegations. Those matters have quite properly been raised by Mr. Mohamed in his civil claim for damages and will be addressed there.

Thirdly, during the course of these proceedings, allegations of possible criminal wrongdoing by a British official were made. The Home Secretary referred them to the Attorney-General for her consideration, and they are now the subject of a police investigation.

The most basic values of this country are at issue in the debate that will follow the Court's decision today. Our position is clear: the UK firmly opposes torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment. This is not just about legal obligations, it is also about our values as a nation and what we do, not just what we say. We have taken a leading role in eradicating torture internationally, both through organisations such as the United Nations and by assisting other countries. Where possible wrongdoing is found, it is fully investigated.

I also want to place on record the fact that we are lucky to have the best intelligence agencies in the world. Their staff are second to none in their commitment and public service. They are respected across the world, and the work that they do to keep Britain safe deserves all our admiration and gratitude.

There is a fundamental myth that needs to be addressed, which is that the security services operate without independent oversight. Ministers and agency heads have the first responsibility for the conduct of their organisations. The Intelligence and Security Committee provides parliamentary scrutiny of agency activities, and independent judicial oversight is provided by the commissioners, who by law must be given access to whatever documents and information they need. Both report annually to the Prime Minister and to Parliament. Then there are the courts, whose role is to protect the rights of individuals and provide recourse to justice when they believe they have been infringed. That they have done, and continue to do, in this case.

Today's judgment is not evidence that the system is broken. Rather, it is evidence that the system is working and that the full force of the law is available when citizens believe that they have just cause. The six judgments in this case, plus a closed judgment, show a seriousness of purpose in our legal system that is a vital part of our system of accountability. We have fought this case and brought the appeal to defend a principle that we believe is fundamental to our national security—that intelligence shared with us will be protected by us. No one likes to lose a case, but the force of the judgment is that it firmly recognises that principle. In doing so, the Court is fulfilling its vital constitutional role, protecting this country and upholding the law.”

David was amongst the members who responded, saying;

“May I thank the Foreign Secretary for making this statement, because it is good that he did so? Just before he stood up earlier, The Guardian published on its website a copy of a letter from Jonathan Sumption QC, his lawyer, raising the matter that the Government are still seeking a redaction—it would appear—from the judges' rulings. I shall read the Foreign Secretary the following short extract from that long letter:"“The Master of the Rolls's observations…are likely to receive more public attention than any other part of the judgments. They will be read as statements by the Court (i) that the Security Service does not in fact operate a culture that respects human rights…(iii) that officials of the Service deliberately misled the Intelligence and Security Committee on this point (iv) that this reflects a culture of suppression in its dealings with the Committee, the Foreign Secretary and indirectly the Court, which penetrates the service to such a degree as to undermine any UK government assurances based on the Service's information and advice; and (v) that the Service has an interest in suppressing information which is shared…by the Foreign Office for which he is responsible.

Will the Foreign Secretary comment on that?”

To which Mr. Milliband replied:

“I will comment on it, but it is very important that the facts are on the record, not the allegations, and I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will allow me to go through this. First, it is not correct to say that the Government or, more specifically, the counsel for the Government, sought redactions of the judgment. A redaction suggests that we wanted an item deleted that we accepted was true. Once our counsel had been provided with a copy of the judgment in draft, as is normal practice, he had a real concern that one paragraph set out conclusions that went beyond the evidence presented and raised prejudice in respect of the ongoing case involving witness B. He took the view that that should be brought to the attention of the judges in the case. The three judges examined that letter and decided to amend the paragraph so that it took the final form that it did; the court concluded that the concern was well founded, so it revised its paragraph in the light of it.

It is very important that we also remember that in open court today the counsel for Mr. Mohamed apologised unreservedly for releasing this private legal document—it is a normal part of legal practice that such correspondence should take place. It is also important that no suggestion is made anywhere to impugn the integrity of the judiciary in making their own judgments. What the judiciary say in a draft judgment or in a final judgment is their business, and their independence is at the heart of their final words. The words that appear today in public are those of the justices in the case, and it is their decision to release them on that basis.”

This article appeared in 'The Observer' on Sunday 24th January.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/24/marriage-tories-tax-breaks

"Marriage Just Wasn't a

Choice For My Mother..."

When I was conceived, in the late 1940s, my mother faced a dreadful set of choices. Her lover was a married man and to all intents and purposes abandoned her. The stigma on single mothers in those days was so fierce that for many young women, maybe most, the next step was the dangerous one to an illegal, backstreet abortionist. For those who could not bring themselves to take that awful course, the standard alternative was to have the baby and give it away for adoption immediately after the birth.

One of the reasons I have always admired my mother is that she had the courage to resist those ferocious social pressures and keep me. The battle between social stigma and a mother's love for her child must have been agonising. Nobody I know of in the Tory party wants to go back to those days. Or if they do, they keep quiet about it around me.

But none of that gainsays a single, overwhelming set of facts. Children do well when they are brought up by two parents in a long-term stable relationship. On average – and only on average – married couples stay together for longer than unmarried ones. So, on average, children do better when their parents are married. There are plenty of exceptions, of which more in a moment, but that is the average.

The job of government is to improve the average outcome for everyone, without visiting injustice on anyone. In this area of policy, that is clearly difficult. It is made more so by the fact that there are a vast variety of different family circumstances.

Take the category of single mothers alone. The common assumption is that they are mostly young teenagers who are careless or who even deliberately get pregnant as a step to a council flat and a benefit cheque. Of course there are young women who do that – and some who follow it up by having other children by other fathers. The prospects for their children are often dire. These are all too often the children who fill the care homes or end up being abused by the peripatetic fathers. At the extreme end of this spectrum we find the Baby Peters and the Victoria Climbiés.

But that is not the typical single mother by a long chalk. Single mothers come in a wide variety of categories. There are married mothers who are separated or divorced from their husbands. There are single mothers who decide to have a baby, but who are capable of providing for that child, both financially and emotionally. Then there are widows.

The fact that the policy area is difficult is not an excuse for avoiding it. As it stands, from a social policy perspective, our tax and welfare system is at best chaotic and at worst perverse. The tax credit system clearly penalises couples over single parents. This leads many couples to pretend to live apart – the notorious "living apart together" scam. I have heard estimates that 200,000 people are in this category. This puts a tax not just on marriage, but on having any stable relationship. In fact, it criminalises relationships by leading people to lie about their status.

This nonsense has to go. Similarly, I want to see the tax system recognise and reinforce marriage. This is not, for me, an issue of morality. People's moral choices are nothing to do with the state. It is simply an issue of reinforcing what works best for most children in most circumstances.

In the party political spat over marriage and tax in the last two weeks, David Cameron volunteered that he had "messed up." While this was a gracious thing to say, I am not sure that I agree. Tactically, he may have created a problem, but strategically I think the Conservative party is in the right place.

Few people are more pro-marriage than me. I want the Tories to implement policies that favour marriage, both symbolically and practically. In my mind, to be pro-marriage is to be pro-children. But a tax break is no use if you do not have a job. So the need to balance the books must take priority over social aims. Recessions do not help marriages. In my grandmother's words: "When money troubles come in the door, love goes out of the window."

So it may take time to deliver a pro-marriage tax and welfare policy. So what? In my view, that is a good thing. This is a policy whose social impact will take more than a decade to pay off and it is vital that we get it right. So a year or two does not matter.

When he became chancellor, Gordon Brown was warned that the tax credit policy was prone to fraud, error and waste. He ignored the many warnings and rushed ahead. For more than a decade, poor families have had reason to regret that haste.

To illustrate how difficult this is, take my favoured policy, a transferable marriage allowance. Imagine, for example, a young woman married to a soldier who goes off to fight in Afghanistan. He is killed in the service of his country. Does she lose the allowance? Presumably she does, so when we introduce the allowance we must alter the widow's pension to make up for this.

That is just one example of the many complexities we will have to address. Take another. It is almost certainly the case that the financial circumstances of the nation will require us to introduce any sort of allowance in stages. I would start by introducing an allowance for families with young children. I am influenced by watching my daughter struggle to balance career, school runs and finding good childminders. But what about others with competing claims? What about families with disabled children? There are many deserving categories.

It is clear the Conservatives favour reinforcing marriage. It should be clear that we do not intend to do so in a way that compounds the misfortune of the widow, the divorcee, the abandoned mother. It is obvious, for these reasons, and because of the dire financial state of the nation, that we will need to proceed cautiously. If that is the Tory promise, then for I one am happy with it.

David makes a statement during a debate in the House of Commons regarding the Government’s retention of people’s DNA data on central databases:

“The Home Secretary knows that nobody disputes the value of DNA in solving cold cases as well as current crimes, but there is one figure that I would like him to confirm or deny. It relates to the holding of the DNA of innocent people—people who have not been found guilty and were released after arrest. Just over a year ago, the Prime Minister attributed the clearing up of 114 murders to such DNA. In other words, as a result of holding the DNA of previously innocent people, the police cleared up 114 murders. Is that correct, and if so, will the Home Secretary provide a list of them?”

To which the Home Secretary responded:

“The right hon. Gentleman says—this is the third time that I have heard it—that no one is disputing the advantage of DNA. I am stuck at this part of my speech because so many people have disputed it. We hear from a sedentary position that the numbers are coming down. The combination of the right hon. Gentleman's question and that of my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) means that I should provide some statistics to the House, because the statistics are interesting. I do not happen to have in my speech the one for which the right hon. Gentleman asked, but I have some others that he will find of interest.

I mentioned Paul Hutchinson. We can also take the case of Matthew Fagan. In 2006, he was sacked from a London company. In January 2007, he returned to the offices at the weekend to steal computers and was disturbed by a former colleague, Cathy Marlow, whom he brutally murdered. A significant factor in Matthew Fagan's conviction was that DNA retrieved from under Cathy Marlow's fingernails matched his profile, which was on the database because he had previously been arrested but not convicted for a disorder offence.

There was also the case of Abdirahman Ali Gudaal, arrested in July 2006 for robbery, but not convicted. His DNA was sampled and his record retained. In June this year, he was found guilty of the brutal rape and kidnap of a woman in Coventry, his DNA having matched samples found at the crime scene. Those are two examples of people who had been arrested but not convicted, and who subsequently committed brutal crimes, who would not have been brought to book without the DNA database.

In a recent debate, the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne), who speaks for the Liberal Democrats on this issue, described such cases, including the tragic case of Sally Anne Bowman, as "anecdotal". They are, of course, the personal tragedies that make this legislation necessary, and the response of the hon. Gentleman's party is woefully inadequate.

In developing this framework, we have sought to balance several important issues: first, human rights considerations. The House will be aware of the judgment by the European Court of Human Rights.”

David Davis: “I am afraid that the Home Secretary did not answer my question. Of course the individual cases that he mentions are incredibly important; indeed, I shall refer to some of them if I am lucky enough to catch your eye later, Mr. Speaker, and deal with them—[Interruption.] I shall do so despite the heckling from the Home Secretary's colleague. The simple fact is that the Home Secretary has not answered my question about the Prime Minister's assertion that 114 murders were solved as a result of previously innocent people's DNA being checked. Is that figure right or wrong? If it is right, may we have a list of those cases?”

The Home Secretary Alan Johnson: “I told the right hon. Gentleman that I would provide the House with statistics, and I have given two examples. Actually, even if there were only one example of a vicious murderer or rapist being brought to book in this way, I know that many Conservative Members would believe that this was worth doing—[Interruption.] Hon. Members are asking me to give names. I will provide the information that the right hon. Gentleman wants, but I have already given the House two very dramatic cases that would not have been solved under the policy being put forward by the Liberal Democrats, which we now know means that no one who is innocent and not convicted could remain on the DNA database.

The position of the Conservatives, as set out in the amendment that you quite rightly did not select, Mr. Speaker, is:""That this House declines to give a Second Reading to the Crime and Security Bill because the retention of the DNA of innocent citizens, which is the centrepiece of the Bill, is unacceptable.""

Yet their policy is to retain the DNA of innocent people. At least the Lib Dems, whose policy on this was overturned at their conference, say that we should not keep anyone's records. At least their policy is clear. The Conservatives' policy is actually contrary to their own amendment. They think that people who have been arrested for, but not convicted of, less serious charges should not remain on the DNA database, but that those who have been arrested for, but not convicted of, serious offences should remain on it. The most recent research shows that there is no difference between the two in regard to what is known as the hazard curve, and to the propensity of those people to be arrested again.”

Later in the debate, David has the Home Secretary give way again:

“And anything further I can take up on the train later, no doubt. The right hon. Gentleman is generous in giving way and I have two points for him. First, the policy he is mocking is, of course, the policy introduced by the Labour Government in Scotland at the time, so he should take that up with them. Secondly, I would not want him to mislead the House, inadvertently or otherwise, so will he return to his earlier point about the hazard curve, which he says is effectively flat? He says that there is no difference in respect of the likelihood of committing a crime in the future between someone who is innocent of any crime and someone who has committed a crime, yet the Home Office itself has published paper after paper after paper showing that that is not true.”

The Home Secretary Alan Johnson: “I accept that there is not a great wealth of research in this area, but it will grow in all parts of the world. The latest research we have is being independently peer-reviewed as we speak. It suggests that the Jill Dando Institute research on which we based our original proposals—which showed a difference in the hazard curve, or the propensity to be re-arrested, between those arrested but not convicted for serious offences and those arrested but not convicted for less serious offences—is wrong. In fact, the Jill Dando Institute itself said—unfortunately, nine months after it produced the research—that it was flawed. The latest research shows that there is absolutely no difference between the two, which is a very important factor. As to the Scottish scheme, I shall come on to that in a few moments.

Let me return to what I was saying about human rights considerations. This House is, of course, aware of the judgment handed down by the European Court of Human Rights on 8 December 2008, which ruled that although holding DNA records of those who had no conviction could well be proportionate in some cases, it was unlawful to hold those records indefinitely. This Bill responds to that judgment.

Secondly, we must consider what the most recent evidence in this developing field of research tells us. The research we published, along with our proposals in November 2009, shows that there is a link between previous arrests and future arrests. It also shows that, as time passes, that link diminishes so that after six years—not two, three or four, but six—the probability of re-arrest is no higher than for the rest of the population.

Thirdly, we must consider concerns about privacy. Many people find the idea of someone retaining their genetic material disturbing, which is why, although not required to do so by the European Court judgment, this Bill will require all DNA samples—namely, the actual genetic material—to be destroyed after six months. What is retained by the database is the unique 20-digit code that forms the DNA profile.

Fourthly, we must be mindful of the public's very reasonable expectation that the police will harness this enormous scientific advance to protect them from the most horrific crimes, and ensure justice for victims and their families. Under the framework proposed by the Bill, the DNA profiles of all those convicted of crimes, and all juveniles convicted of serious offences, will be held indefinitely, and the police will be given the powers to take DNA samples from people who were convicted of serious violent and sexual offences in the past, before DNA was routinely taken, and from those who have committed such offences and are returning from overseas. The DNA profiles of those who are arrested but not convicted will be retained for six years, in line with the findings of the best available research. I will talk more about that soon.

There is one important exception to the six-year rule. As national security investigations, including counter-terrorism cases, can go on for many years, setting a six-year time frame would potentially be damaging in these circumstances. We therefore propose to allow the retention of DNA profiles beyond the six-year point in these exceptional cases, which have been known to be live for as long as 25 years.

Under the framework set out in the Bill, the records of under-18s convicted of serious crimes will be held indefinitely. However, for those convicted of minor offences, if it is a first conviction, the record will be kept for five years, and only if it is a second conviction will that record be held indefinitely. We make this distinction because it is right that the criminal justice system distinguish between adults and children. For under-18s who are arrested for, but not convicted of, both serious crimes and minor offences, their records will be retained for three years. The records of 16 to 17-year-olds—those entering the peak offending years—will, however, be retained for six years where they have been arrested for, but not convicted of, a serious offence.”

This article appeared in 'The Independent' on Wednesday 30th December.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/david-davis-its-time-to-let-the-public-hold-banks-to-account-1852973.html

"It's Time To Let Public

Hold Banks to Account"

Since the onset of the financial crisis, there has been much talk about how it came about and how we can change our banking system so that it doesn't happen again.

We have had any number of different commissions and reports looking into the failures that have occurred. They were all insightful and useful, but they all focused on trying to fix the broken financial machine, rather than creating a reformed banking system which is fit for purpose.

The reason that banks have the privileges they do, up to and including being underwritten by a de facto taxpayer guarantee, is that they provide a vital service, to individual members of the public, businesses, and the economy as a whole.

Many have expressed concerns about whether banks and the City of London have provided the best possible service to the wider economy and the public in general. In the recent crisis Lord Turner described some of the banks' activities as "socially useless". Although he stirred up a controversy he had a point.

These concerns are not new. The crisis in which we find ourselves is the culmination of numerous regulatory and industry failings going back many years. Some were highlighted as far back as 2000 in Don Cruickshank's report Competition in UK Banking, and yet we've still got ourselves in a mess.

Many people and organisations have had their say on the crisis and its causes. But the general public has been conspicuous by its absence from the debate. Ordinary people have been hit hardest by the recession and have been asked to bail out the crippled banks with their taxes, but they haven't been asked how they think banks can change for the better.

This commission will give them a voice in the debate about how the banking system should be reformed. That way, not only can we avoid a repeat of the financial crisis, but banks will be encouraged to operate in the wider interests of society.

We will be seeking evidence from a cross-section of interest groups including the banking industry, academics, the Bank of England, the Financial Services Authority, trades unions and other consumer groups.

The commission will be looking to answer questions concerning the social function of banking, the impact on the public of the financial crisis, how to align the interests of consumers, banks, investors and other stakeholders, and how to ensure greater competition in retail banking, among others.

It is past time that we had a proper analysis of banking from the perspective of the people they serve, the savers, borrowers and businesses that make the economy work. I hope this commission will deliver that.

This article appeared in 'The Sunday Times' on Sunday December 20th.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article6962820.ece

"Think Tank: Teachers Are

Enfeebled By Pupils'

Slurs"

Some years ago a supply teacher in an inner-city school in my constituency was accused by a young girl in his class of putting his hand on her breast.

The story looked like a concoction from the start. The girl was a known troublemaker; her only “witness” was one of her pals; the offence was supposed to have been carried out in a crowded classroom, yet no one else saw it. Indeed, another adult who was in the room said that it had not happened.

Nevertheless, the man was suspended without pay, the council’s children’s services department became involved and the case was passed to the police. It was a year before it came to court and, in that time, he was unpaid and unable to work.

I spoke to the case officer in the children’s services department. The conversation was shocking. She clearly considered that my constituent was guilty and was not interested in the contrary evidence.

In court, the jury took only 20 minutes to decide. The judge dismissed the evidence in pretty scathing terms.

But my constituent’s life was destroyed. He could not bear to return to teaching, even if he could get a job in this suspicion-prone age. Even if you are exonerated, your record often still carries the unwarranted stain on your character. He was turned down as a special constable because of the shadow of the case, even though he had been completely cleared. The judge in the case summed it up pretty accurately: “Teachers live in an excessively power-to-the-pupil environment. The government and members of the public need to be made aware of this growing problem in schools, where one day there will be no more teachers because the word of every child is valued over and beyond that of everyone else.”

I was angry but there was nothing I could do. The cowardice and incompetence of the relevant authorities had done permanent harm, but I could not reverse it. I wrote it off to experience.

Then, recently, another man, a teaching assistant, was put through a similar ordeal. A former Commonwealth champion kickboxer was accused of assaulting an unruly pupil. He was exonerated after eight months of hell, during which he was even banned from seeing his own children for two weeks.

Curiously, it was the same local council department, the same local Crown Prosecution Service and the same police force that had brought the case against my constituent.

In truth this is a nationwide problem. The Association of Teachers and Lecturers recently surveyed its members and found that almost 30% had been the victims of false allegations.

In the past 20 years the balance of power in our classrooms has moved away from the teachers to the children. The consequences for the teachers have often been agonising, even tragic, but the real victims have been the children.

Nobody can learn in an unruly class. When teachers are paralysed by disruptive children, they fail to impart any knowledge to the obedient youngsters. Worse, in some ways, they effectively teach all the children that breaking the rules works.

So we need to change the balance of power in the classroom and return decent standards to many of our schools. That may mean a change in the law. So be it.

We need to return to believing the responsible adult before believing the irresponsible child. We need to punish children who make false allegations and return honest standards to our schools.

So far, so bad. Then, this summer, we had the uproar over the new Independent Safeguarding Authority proposing to check every visitor to a school against the criminal records database. Last week the government conceded that 2m people who visit schools less than once a week will be exempted from the vetting and barring procedure. But that still leaves 9m subject to it.

Surely this is a good thing? After the Soham murders, do we not want to avoid any risk at all of exposing children to the likes of Ian Huntley? True, but the method we have chosen surreptitiously destroys the lives of many who are victims of slanders. The legislation requires the authority to bar anyone from dealing with children or vulnerable adults unless there is “no known reason why an individual should not work with these client groups”.

The decision to ban someone is entirely confined to the authority. Appeals and objections are dealt with inside the organisation. This cannot be right. When it is revised, as Ed Balls, the schools secretary, has promised it will be, a proper judicial check should be inserted so that victims of vicious calumny can rescue their reputations by appeal to a judicial tribunal at a standard of proof beyond reasonable suspicion. We must remove this culture of suspicion from our schools and institutions. British justice demands no less.

David Davis: Why this ferocious desire to impose hair-shirt policies?

As the dignitaries gather for the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, dark clouds are gathering over environmental policies. Copenhagen itself has been presaged by troubling signals that it will be harder than usual to get agreement. These will probably be resolved, but it is debatable whether that will make any real difference. In Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the international community promised cuts by 2000. In Kyoto in 1997, they promised even greater cuts by 2010. Neither happened.

The row about whether global warming exists gets even more virulent. The case is not helped by the fact that the planet appears to have been cooling, not warming, in the last decade. Last week, the row was fuelled after a hacker revealed emails between the world's leading climate scientists that seemed to show them conspiring to rig the figures to support their theories. So it is unsurprising that more than half the public no longer believe in global warming.

Today, the economic climate makes people question whether we can afford the expense of these policies. The UK's environmental policy has a long-term price tag of about £55bn, before taking into account the impact on economic growth.

The fixation of the green movement with setting ever tougher targets is a policy destined to collapse. The ferocious determination to impose hair-shirt policies on the public – taxes on holiday flights, or covering our beautiful countryside with wind turbines that look like props from War of the Worlds – would cause a reaction in any democratic country.

This adverse reaction will be reinforced if, as predicted, we suffer power shortages in the next decade. Lights going out around Britain could be an electoral off-switch for environmental policy. This will happen at the same time as fuel bills rise by 30 per cent.

Paradoxically, the Government's strategy is going to have a number of deleterious consequences for the environment. Biomass fuels will increase atmospheric pollution in the countryside, with harmful effects on health. The Government's own estimate of this policy-led pollution says it could cost as many as 1,750,000 man-years in lost or shortened lives.

Similarly, the wind strategy is encouraging the building of large clusters of enormous wind turbines in the countryside that will scar the landscape, and whose noise levels could ruin people's lives. The planning blight alone will afflict hundreds of thousands of families and damage the value of many homes – and all with enormous taxpayer subsidies.

We often worry, properly, about the potential effects of global warming on the poorer parts of the world. We should also worry that cutting the world's growth will condemn millions of people to continuing poverty in the decades to come.

So what do we do about it? Much environmental policy is beneficial to the public. It is intelligent to conserve resources, to insulate homes, to encourage lean-burn engines and efficient power generation. Along with the sensible use of renewables, this is worthwhile in its own right. It will have the important side-effect of reducing our dependence on energy sources in unstable parts of the globe.

There is also a pressing need to protect elements of the natural world under immediate threat.

So is there a middle way in environmental policy? Can we devise a mixed policy that has realistic prospects of success in cutting carbon dioxide production at less-than-crippling cost, and also acts to accommodate the effects that we cannot prevent? Is there a smart green alternative?

Just to pick one example, micro-generation is a technology which is often overlooked. Micro-combined heat and power systems just about to enter the market would provide the same heat as a regular boiler, produce most of the electricity needs of the property, and cut carbon emissions by anything up to 50 per cent.

This sort of local power generation has a number of benefits. It avoids the waste associated with transmitting from central power stations; it would keep running through any blackouts; and it could make a major contribution to domestic reductions in carbon emissions in the long term.

Like it or not, a major increase in nuclear power must also be central to any sustainable future energy policy. It will be costly in the short term, but it will be a reliable ongoing source of power, and is a true zero-carbon option with enormous benefits for climate change.

But the single biggest change in mindset that is necessary is to give more prominence to a policy of adaptation. This should range from basic lo-tech ideas such as reversing the policy of abandoning sea defences, to very hi-tech developments, such as maximising cloud reflectivity – the technology for which is still some way off, but should not be dismissed.

Many of the people signed up to the green movement instinctively believe in statist, regulatory, dirigiste regimes. They forget these approaches have failed many times before – or perhaps believe the sheer importance of the cause will carry them through policy weaknesses. But the importance of the issue should make us doubly careful to get the policies right.

To date, too many discussions on this matter have degenerated into infantile mud-slinging and virulent name-calling. It is simply unacceptable for one side to describe the other as deniers, with its deliberate holocaust connotations, and the other side to essentially call their opponents liars. This issue is too important for the argument to be reduced to the level of an adolescent political spat, and it is time we engaged in this debate on a properly adult level.

·        David Davis: Crunch time for a botched mission

It is not uncommon in British history for the early stages of counter-insurgency campaigns to be littered with mistakes and false starts. Few, however, can have been pursued with the uncomprehending incompetence of this Government in its actions in Afghanistan.

We had barely established our base of operations when we effectively abandoned the strategy for winning these conflicts, a strategy that had been hammered out over the decades, from the successful conclusion of the "Malayan Emergency" on.

The original "ink-blot" strategy, based on the Malayan success, envisaged commanding and dominating areas of land and population. Within those areas the rule of law would apply, and the ordinary citizens would be able to go about their business, farming, trading, and supporting their families unmolested by the insurgents. Like ink-blots, these areas would expand until they joined up.

The concept depended on guaranteeing security and normality to the population inside the inkblots, so that they would be better off than those in the insurgent areas. Instead, within months, and under pressure from President Karzai, this was abandoned in favour of defending a number of far-flung outposts, in locations where our authority did not extend more than a rifle-shot beyond the walls of the compound. This strategy quickly became known as the "tethered goat" strategy, since it turned our soldiers into immobile targets.

Now the generals are talking about retreating from the most far-flung of the outposts, to husband their limited resources in an attempt to dominate the key population centres of Helmand. Four years in, it is simply a return to the strategy that we should have followed from the beginning.

It is hardly surprising that popular support for the war is slipping away in Britain. When we add in the corruption of the Karzai government, the disgraceful travesty of an election, and the betrayal and killing of our soldiers by an Afghan "ally", it would be astonishing if we witnessed anything but a collapse in support.

It will not be helped by both Brown's and Obama's reluctance to put in enough troops, which has had the effect of increasing the risk to those that were in theatre. This is compounded by Gordon Brown's decision to pre-announce a decision to leave Afghanistan, without having any serious plan as to how to do so.

To win back support Gordon Brown must stop the patronisingly simplistic justifications for what we are doing.

He attempts to portray this war as directly protecting the streets of Britain. Well, maybe. There are not many Taliban in our cities. What he is clumsily alluding to is the idea of denying space to al-Qa'ida. This is a fine aim, but to make it effective we would also have to deny them space in every lawless Muslim state in the world – Somalia, Yemen and any number of others. That is not realistically in prospect.

What we have to recognise is that this war has many aims. They include creating a stable state, preferably a democracy, but not necessarily one that looks much like ours. They include curbing the poppy trade, partly to cut drugs on our streets, but mostly to shut off funds for terrorism, crime, and insurrection. Perhaps most important is the prevention of the complete destabilisation of Pakistan, the world's most fragile nuclear power.

Finally, since we have become involved, a further purpose has come to the fore. If we fail in Afghanistan, the whole credibility of the Western Alliance will collapse. We have to do everything possible to win. Unfortunately, having wasted so much time, we only have about a year left to turn this battle around.

Next November there will be the US congressional mid-term elections. If we have not seen signs of progress by then, the pressure on President Obama to reduce the commitment, or even pull out altogether, will become enormous. He is already haunted by the history of LBJ's presidency, whose New Society domestic agenda was overshadowed by the ignominious end to the Vietnam War. If he believes he is not winning, it will look like the smart option to pull out well before his own election campaign.

Which gives us just one year to make it work. Fortunately, General McChrystal understands that, and we should start by strongly supporting his call for 40,000 more troops, and sooner rather than later.

For our own part, we should stop dribbling in resources piecemeal. That is a formula for maximising casualties. We should decide what is the maximum number of troops on the ground we can sustain for the next few years, and commit to it without hesitation.

This military "surge" needs to be backed up with a much simpler civil strategy. Schools and hospitals are important, but Afghan needs are even more basic than this. They need to be able to work, farm, and trade in safety. They need to be able to feed their families and heat their homes. We are failing even at this level.

The urgency of this situation cannot be overstated. We must grip it now.

There is one further consideration that is understandably worrying the Shadow Foreign Secretary, William Hague. Afghanistan will be an issue in the General Election, as Iraq was in the last one. Indeed, with its daily death toll, it may be even more salient than Iraq was. I would be unsurprised if by May the Liberals had moved their position to one favouring rapid withdrawal.

This will put an incoming Conservative government in a hideous position. Virtually all the decisions that affect the outcome by November will have been made by May, entirely outside the Conservatives' control. If we are not witnessing a change in our military fortunes by November, decisions in Washington may leave the new government with no choice but British withdrawal from the Helmand mission as almost its first act on the international stage.

In all the grim inheritance that he leaves us, this will be Gordon Brown's bitterest legacy of all.

Sinister threat to open justice

Today, Remembrance Day, we commemorate the sacrifice of the lives of millions of Commonwealth citizens - a sacrifice made to defend our system of liberty and justice.

It is a tragic irony that on this of all days, the House of Lords is debating a government proposal which undermines those noble principles through the creation of secret inquests. 

For centuries, the whole point of an inquest has been independence and openness. It is there to tell the bereaved and the public exactly why someone died. And this is never more important than when the State is implicated in the death. The very openness of the process gives power to the people and provides a check on the State.

Yet the Government has repeatedly tried to subvert this time-honoured principle through the creation of secret inquests, heedless to the damage such a measure would do to the very standing of democracy.

It all started when Des Browne, the then Labour Defence Secretary, went to court to try to gag comments made by coroners at inquests held into the deaths of British service personnel. That was after a string of cases in which the verdicts savagely criticised the government when soldiers had died because of inadequate or missing equipment.

It also followed a dreadful 'friendly fire' incident when an American aircraft shot Lance Corporal Matty Hull, and the American government tried to withhold the evidence.

Despite the surrounding furore, the Government has since made repeated attempts to give itself the ability to have completely secret inquests, claiming, for example, that it was an issue of 'national security'. Many suspected that this was about avoiding political embarrassment rather than protecting the nation.

Yet still Labour ministers persisted - and yesterday a clause was finally voted through in the Coroners and Justice Bill which will allow for open inquests to be replaced with 'secret inquiries', to be held at the behest of the Government in certain sensitive cases.

The minister will set the terms of reference, the minister will choose the judge, the minister or the judge can restrict attendance at the hearings, a minister or the judge can restrict the disclosure or publication of evidence or documents, and the minister can censor the inquiry conclusions on the grounds that it is in their own interpretation of the public interest to do so.

In other words, secret inquiries will not be independent or provide public scrutiny, and they will not give the next of kin proper involvement, understanding or closure.

Even if an open inquest is held after the inquiry is over, the jury is not allowed to make a contradictory finding to the inquiry even if that is where the facts take it.

So the secret inquiry will not only deny the facts to the families and public, it will also cripple the inquest and prevent it doing its proper job. This is simply intolerable and a gross insult to the relatives of the fallen.

Moreover, if these new powers were put into practice the implications would be incredibly widespread. Secret inquiries could, in theory, be used in the interests of national security; in the interests of a relationship with another country; in the interests of preventing or detecting a crime; in order to protect the safety of a witness or another person; and in order to prevent harm to the public interest. In practice, of course, they will be triggered whenever the government faces embarrassment.

For who would take Labour at their word when they say they will not use the new inquiries often?

This would not be the first time the Government has granted itself new powers on the promise of exercising them in exceptional cases, only to use them more widely.

In the name of political expedience, Labour wants to fracture one of the very foundations of our justice system. And we can be sure that, like every other piece of excessive ' security' legislation, it will be misused.

 A referendum Mr Cameron COULD give the people

David Cameron has an unenviable task. Europe has been a toxic topic for the Tory party for two decades now. It has destroyed two of its leaders, and crippled its ability to do anything else for much of that time. Mr Cameron could be forgiven for wanting to avoid the subject altogether.

But that is not possible. The British people have been promised a referendum by all the major parties. The treaty itself is undoubtedly a massive constitutional transformation. It has been ratified by an unelected prime minister without a mandate.

All these are arguments for a referendum, almost irrefutable ones. But on what? Any incoming government will be faced with the ultimate fait accompli, a binding treaty which it cannot revoke.

So a referendum on the treaty would be pointless. Nevertheless William Hague has said: 'We will not let it rest there.' So what can we do?

What we should do is, in my view, clear. We should have a referendum, not on the treaty, but on the negotiating mandate that the British Government takes to the European Union.

This has many virtues. It allows the British people to express their view on the future of their nation. Most of all, it gives the Government a formidable negotiating weapon.

Referendums terrify the European Commission and the political elites who run Europe. They are clear statements of the popular will. They force issues to be stated in clear and unambiguous terms. They are impossible to ignore.

That is why the European reaction to referendums is to make concessions. Look at the history. After Ireland's first rejection of the Lisbon Treaty, the European Council conceded legally binding protocols pledging to keep the treaty out of taxation policy, family and social issues (such as the right to life, abortion and euthanasia), and Ireland's traditional military neutrality.

Denmark has obtained similar opt-outs after a referendum, and the defeat in the French and Dutch referendums led to the rewrite of the original European Constitution.

So referendums are incredibly powerful weapons. What is more, they are necessary if a single nation is going to achieve any material change.

The Europeans are past masters at the permanent negotiation that makes up the federal project. They know all the tricks of isolation, pressure, delay, coalition, vague language, and institutional and judicial expansion.

They are entirely capable of repackaging rejected ideas over and over until they get them accepted. Lisbon is a good example of this. Indeed they are capable of retabling a rejected proposal five or ten years later, after the relevant national governments have changed.

So if we are to be able to manage our relationship with the European Union, let alone change it, we need to have a powerful weapon like a referendum.

But what should be the question in such a referendum? It should be a question that would result in a solid majority, because that would give the maximum reinforcement to our negotiating position.

The question should contain four or five specific strategic aims which clearly summarise our objectives.

The sort of things we might include are: recovering control over our criminal justice, asylum and immigration policies; a robust opt-out of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights; serious exemptions to the seemingly endless flood of European regulations which cost the UK economy billions of pounds each year; a recovery of our rights to negotiate on trade; exemption from European interference into trade in services and foreign direct investment rules; and an exemption from any restrictions on our foreign policy.

The referendum should be the first piece of legislation in the new parliament, and should be held within three months of the election.

Some fear this would become an 'in or out' referendum, a decision on whether to continue our membership of the European Union. It would be nothing of the sort. Killing this tired old canard is one of the reasons the referendum question has to be absolutely clear in language and intent.

If our opponents keep trying to make this argument, it will give us an opportunity to highlight the fallacy that there are only two options in Europe: either capitulate to the Franco- German federalist model, or leave. It is clear that this notion of such a vote being an 'in or out' referendum is both craven and wrong.

After winning such a referendum, the position of our negotiating team in Brussels would be the strongest in British history. In effect they would be the advocates of the popular will ranked against the defenders of the current establishment.

That will not be comfortable for the European Commission at all.

Of course it is possible that we will not achieve every change we want.

If that is the outcome, we should give the British people the right to accept or reject it in a further referendum. This is, in effect, using the European Commission's own trick against it. They are notorious, when a referendum delivers what they think is the 'wrong' answer, for asking the question again until they get the 'right' answer.

This 'double referendum' strategy may seem a very tough way of playing these negotiations. It is. But it is hard to see any less robust strategy delivering any significant change.

We should not forget that what we are arguing about is the democratic right of the British people to decide large and important sections of our national policy. It is time that we achieved a stable, reasonable, and civilised settlement of these matters, based firmly on the popular will.

As Jack Straw spoke, this suspected terrorist stood just feet away…proof of the complete folly of Labour’s ‘control orders

Control orders, the system of secret courts and house arrests introduced by the Government in 2005, are there to protect us from dangerous terrorists.

That is what the Government tells us. Yet this supposedly vital system is undergoing a legal and practical collapse.

In the past few weeks the Home Office has decided to release two of these ‘dangerous terrorists’ on to the streets of Britain, rather than explain in court the case against them.

This is in addition to the four others whose orders have been revoked. It is also in addition to the seven more resourceful, and presumably therefore more dangerous, suspects who simply escaped.

So, clearly, this dark corner of our justice system is not providing much protection, with 18 suspects under control and about 11 walking the streets.

But we do not receive much protection even from those who are supposedly ‘under control’.

On June 6 this year, Jack Straw – Justice Secretary, Foreign Secretary during the Iraq War and Home Secretary before that, and presumably therefore a valuable terrorist target – was addressing a meeting in London staged by Liberty, the human rights group.

Only a matter of feet away from him, well within range of a suicide bomb or pistol, was Mahmoud Abu Rideh, a stateless Palestinian terrorist suspect who had spent much of the previous few years in Belmarsh prison, Broadmoor prison or wearing an electronic tag, and who was still under a control order.

Mr Abu Rideh heckled another speaker at the meeting, the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg. The organisers were horrified – there was not a policeman or security minder in sight.

Mr Abu Rideh was also seen unaccompanied at an anti-war demonstration in Trafalgar Square. He has since left the country. But if we cannot protect senior political figures, what chance the ordinary man in the street?

The trouble is the control-order regime is hopelessly ineffective against real terrorists, but viciously cruel to any innocent entangled in its web.

Sometimes the treatment seems silly or even vindictive, such as the apparently unnecessary forced separations of families, or the pointless confiscation
of a Nintendo Wii, a PlayStation and a PSP from the children of one suspect.

This is the shadowy world that the House of Lords described as the ‘stuff of nightmares’.

Control orders are the product of secret courts, in which the alleged terrorist does not know the evidence, or even the detailed accusation, against him.

This means he is unable properly to deny the charge, or even explain his actions and put up evidence in his own defence. None of the normal principles of British justice applies.

Our system of justice is not a luxury. It is there to prevent mistakes and people being wrongly convicted. Without the proper judicial processes, terrible errors can be, and are, made.

Under the secret control-order system, we only catch these mistakes by accident. On one occasion, MI5 put up opposing evidence in two separate but related cases.

Fortunately, a security-cleared lawyer working on both cases spotted the impossibility of MI5’s evidence and the second case was thrown out.

On another occasion, a UN committee designated a British resident as an Al Qaeda suspect.

 Without knowing the evidence against him, he was put under crippling financial restraints that left him unable even to buy food or clothing, until eventually even the Foreign Office decided that the UN’s evidence did not stand up.

But these were lucky exceptions in a system that has led to some of the special security-cleared lawyers resigning in disgust.

The outcome of all this is that even the Government is beginning to recognise what an utter failure the control-order system is. Like so many of Labour’s ill-conceived attempts to twist our judicial system to deal with terrorism, it is proving a disastrous and counter-productive failure.

It creates potential injustices on the one hand while failing to cut terrorism on the other.

It allows our enemies abroad to portray us as hypocrites, and very probably helps the extremist recruiters in our inner cities.

At the end of all this, it seems highly likely that the Government will drop the cases against most, if not all, of the last 18 control-order subjects.

So it will release on to our streets people it describes as ‘dangerous’ and posing ‘serious threats to our national security’.

The terrible truth is that in some cases the Government is probably right. So now we have the worst of all worlds – injustice that has done nothing to mitigate the future threat.

So what is the way out of this tangled mess? How can we enhance our judicial system so that it delivers real terrorists to justice, protects the innocent and, most of all, protects the public?

As luck would have it, we have just had a perfect demonstration of the way out of our dilemma.

In the Heathrow ‘liquid bomb’ case, some of the plotters nearly got off scot-free because, pretty much alone in the Western world, British courts are not allowed to hear intercept evidence from British intelligence agencies.

Our old-fashioned laws render our most powerful evidence useless. Fortunately, in the retrial, critical email communications between the plotters were revealed in court, permissible because they came from a foreign source – the records at Yahoo in America.

So by using foreign-based intercept evidence, we were able to prosecute and convict two dangerous terrorists.

Two years ago, under sustained pressure from the Opposition, and I suspect under advice from the Crown Prosecution Service and Attorney General, the Government set up the Chilcot review into allowing British courts to use intercept evidence.

It concluded that it was a good idea, but recommended that the intercepting agencies should control whether the evidence may be used in court.

Since then the Home Office has been trying to devise a practical way of implementing this. Its hierarchy and GCHQ have always been nervous of the proposal.

Someone who is both expert in the area and who has been exposed to the process told me last week: ‘They got a bunch of lawyers and told them to think up as many problems as they could.’

Whatever the reality, progress has been disastrously slow, and in recent weeks there has been a lot of briefing that it is all too difficult.

Frankly, that is not good enough. When the various agencies briefed me (as Shadow Home Secretary) on this issue, their arguments were facile.

They seemed to assume that terrorists did not watch television, look at the internet or follow the trials of their fellow travellers abroad – that somehow British use of intercept in court would put in the public domain secrets that are not regularly exposed in American, Australian, Canadian and European courts.

They tried to argue that somehow our intercept technique was more sophisticated than that of our allies. Given that the American agencies are bigger and better resourced, that is unlikely to be true.

Those were the overt arguments. The covert ones were even less persuasive. The truth is that our counter-terrorism strategy is at a point of crisis.

Control orders are about to collapse. If we do not give ourselves the weapons to prosecute terrorists using some, but not all, intelligence-based material, we
are going to be putting some dangerous people on our streets – more than we have done already.

To avoid that, we must stop bleating about how difficult it all is and create a mechanism to allow intercept material to be used in court. 

As a past Australian Director of Public Prosecutions put it succinctly: ‘In dealing with terrorism, if you don’t use intercept, you aren’t being serious.’

There’s just one cut that can save us: Only a reduction in tax on business will revive the economy

In the debate on our economic strategy, one thing should be more obvious than it appears to be. The sheer, uniquely awful scale of the United Kingdom’s problem means that no single solution offers any hope of success.

Public expenditure control alone will not do it. The public sector deficit amounts to about a quarter of total public spending. Not even the most draconian cost-cutter pretends they can achieve that. One of the most successful governments at cutting public expenditure, in Canada, managed less than half that in four years, and it had advantages we do not enjoy.

What do we need to do beyond cost control? The majority of the fiscal deficit, some £90 billion a year, is caused by the crash in the growth rate of the economy. Falling tax yields and soaring welfare costs are the inevitable consequence of a slump in the economy, and this is doubly true in Britain, both because of our tax and welfare structure, and because of the sheer magnitude of our crash.

What this implies is that one of the principal policies for fiscal recovery must be a strategy for growth in the private sector. In order of magnitude terms, every increase in the growth rate of 1% improves the recurrent fiscal balance by between £10 billion and £20 billion.

This growth strategy cannot simply be an exercise in Keynesian demand management. This is what the government is relying on and, as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development showed, it is so ineffective that the UK is at the bottom of the growth league table. Neither will short-term demand management correct the worst decline in business investment since records began. What is necessary is a strategy that attracts investment, encourages innovation, enhances productivity, and thereby improves both competitiveness and job creation.

Such an effective growth strategy would inevitably depend on cuts in taxes and regulations, both apparently contrary to the spirit of the age. Tax increases, rather than cuts, are in fashion. Some tax increases are going to be necessary, but some are harmful and counterproductive. By the economic equivalent of Murphy’s law, the politically easy tax increases are the most harmful, and the most economically advantageous tax cuts are the most politically unpopular.

Take the 50p top rate of income tax on people earning more than £150,000. This is the most politically motivated and economically illiterate tax of modern times. The least deleterious consequence will be a sharp rise in expenditure on accountants hired to find avoidance methods. Expect to see a sharp increase in income being arbitraged into tax-free pensions and capital gains.

Worse, we will see people leaving the country to friendlier tax regimes, of which there are now many. So instead of increasing the tax take from a particularly talented and well-paid individual, we will lose the entire tax revenue — and with it all the benefits of having that talent in the UK. Once our most productive talent has fled these shores, they will not come back for a mere return to 40p. Moving house, moving schools, moving office is too irksome to do twice. The 50p top rate is only one of the economic barnacles slowing down our ship of state. Corporation tax is another.

Over the years the level of corporate tax that maximises tax yields has declined, as countries adjusted their own rates downwards. For the vast majority of those countries, corporate tax revenues increased after a short lag.

The gain is not confined to corporate tax revenues. One study of a prospective halving of Britain’s rate showed significant increases in employment, wages, savings, GDP and fixed investment over a decade. Increases in corporation tax, income tax and Vat receipts would lead to a nearly £30 billion improvement by 2021.

These gains arise from increasing entrepreneurship, greater inward investment and reduced tax avoidance. The benefits are not just about balancing the books; they are about creating more opportunity and more wealth.

We should be planning a future reduction in corporate taxes as an explicit growth strategy. Investment planning is by definition forward-looking, so if a British government announced a significant reduction two years in advance, we would be likely to avoid the short-term shortfall, and benefit from immediate investment growth. The more clearly we committed to this as a central economic strategy, the more beneficial the impact would be.

Finally we should cancel the pending increase in employers’ National Insurance contributions, and start to cut it. This contribution is an explicit tax on jobs. Once we have attracted business to the UK and encouraged its growth, we should encourage it to employ people. “British jobs for British workers” was just irresponsible rhetoric; but “real jobs for British residents” is an achievable reality.

Why University fails the poor

You would have to have had a heart of stone these past few days not to have shared the joy in the eyes and voices of all those young men and women celebrating their GCSE and A-level results. It was a proper reaction to the success engendered by their years of hard work and their optimism about a bright future.

Yet behind the celebration of the glittering prizes, there is a darker story to be told. This story is that of an education system designed to create opportunity for all which, in fact, reinforces the class divide in our society.

The symptoms are all there for anyone with eyes to see. One in six of our young people is not in school, college or work. Many of them are from poor homes, often with an unemployed head of the household. 

Schools in poorer areas are dropping tough subjects - physics, mathematics, history and geography - in favour of the 'softer' subjects such as information and communication technology (ICT) or media studies, in the hope that weaker candidates will do better in these easier topics and prop up the school's position in the league tables.

If this were not bad enough, there are signs that this serial failure by our education system to help kids from poor backgrounds extends into the university sector.

About 20 years ago, in a fit of misguided egalitarianism, the then Conservative government abolished distinctions in higher education between universities and polytechnics. Of course, no stroke of the pen could abolish distinctions in performance between them. Indeed, there is some evidence that this action turned some first-class polytechnics into second-class universities.

This distinction in quality of education still exists but it is now hidden by the names. Indeed, it is likely that Labour's massive expansion in higher education has made the poor performance of the weakest colleges worse, not better.

Does it matter? Surely a degree is a degree, and any degree is a stepping stone to a professional career. Well, that is certainly true up to a point. Too many professions today brag about being 'graduate only', as if excluding the bright youngsters who could not afford university was some sort of virtue. But there is a harder truth hidden here. Going to university is no longer free.

When I went to university at Warwick, most of my contemporaries had grants, which were supplemented by parental contributions. And, in an era of full employment, there was part-time work and holiday work to be had. Many of my friends got their first experience of real-life earning money on building sites or delivering Christmas mail or working behind a bar. We generally had no debt when we qualified. None of this is true today.

One report out last week predicted that students would leave university with an average debt of £24,000. Poorer students, without wealthy parents to subsidise them, will probably have even bigger loans. Even that underestimates the real cost of university. If you add in all the costs, from tuition fees to the foregone income students would have had in a job for those three years, the real cost of a degree is £45,000.

For most students, it is still a good deal. They earn enough in their career to make up for the costs and lost income. But this is not true for all graduates. For graduates of Oxford, Cambridge, the London School of Economics and other top universities, their starting salaries will average between £23,000 and £27,000. Their take-home pay will be up to £9,000 more than that of the average 21-year-old.

This means that for those graduates, typically middle class and mostly the products of independent schools and grammars, their investment in university could deliver them a benefit of up to £100,000 in their career.

At the other end of the scale, you will find universities whose typical graduate earns about £17,500. After tax, this is less than £2,000 more than the average 21-year-old earns.

On any normal financial return, that never pays off the costs and earnings lost as a result of three years at college.

My university degree guaranteed a job that would pay well enough to justify the three-year investment. No such guarantee applies today.

This summer, I surveyed many universities from the top to the bottom of the academic scale. About 20 were willing to give me information including graduate salaries for 2007-08. Of those, about five showed financial returns that were marginal at best and two showed graduate earnings as low as £17,500 a year.

Part of the reason for these poor average salaries was graduates going into 'non-graduate' jobs. Last year, the national average taking this path was more than 30 per cent. For poorer-performing universities, more than four out of ten graduates end up doing jobs they are overqualified for.

All this is without counting those graduates who do not get jobs at all. One in ten graduates of the low-performing universities simply joined the ranks of the unemployed. It also ignores those students who start their degree course, incurring many of the costs, but never finish.

Again, the poorer-quality universities do much worse here. One in 11 students do not complete their course at the weaker universities, against only one in 50 at Oxford, and less than one in 100 at Cambridge.

In general, those universities that generate the lowest salaries also generate the highest unemployment figures and the highest drop-out rates. For students attending these institutions, the risks are high, the rewards are low and the costs are no less.

For most young people going to university this year, the experience will be life-enhancing in every way. It will broaden minds, elevate aspirations and open up opportunities that they never had before.

But for that significant minority it will be a financial cul-de-sac and they'll spend their 20s enmeshed in debt, unable to get on the housing ladder and struggling to create a career.

We owe these young people a rather more honest perspective of their opportunities than we are giving them now. The Government should publish immediately a league table showing every university's graduate salaries, employment and drop-out rates, and proportions of graduates in non-graduate jobs. Then, at least, we can be sure that, in the struggle for scarce places that will take place during the next few weeks, school-leavers will not be disappointed because they make their most important career choice on what may turn out to be a false prospectus.

Afghanistan: The wasted years and lives

When British troops went into Afghanistan in 2006 it was seen by many as the “good” war, in contrast to Iraq. I was not so sure. It was not just that we did not appear to know how to achieve victory. We did not even know how we would recognise a victory.

What would winning look like? Underpinning Afghan democracy? Stabilising the Karzai regime? Providing education and healthcare to the Afghan population, both male and female? Delivering law and order? Eradicating corruption? Creating a working economy? Crushing the drug trade? Protecting Pakistan from instability? Or simply defeating the Taliban and creating a stable state?

The truth is on the day of its second “democratic” election, after yeans of pain and more than 200 British deaths, we are no closer to any of these objectives. Throughout that period, our resources have been inadequate, our strategy has been flawed, and many young lives have been spent to little or no effect.

From the point of view of the Afghan, the perception of the Allied forces has gone from the liberators of 2002, to an army of occupation in 2009. Although comparisons with Vietnam are trite and generally wrong, there is one grim similarity. We are seen by the population as propping up a corrupt and largely useless government, one that cannot even deliver basic security and justice to its own people — let alone the more ambitious aspects of government such as education and healthcare. The only beneficiaries of the past several years appear to be the 20 or so corrupt families who have become multimillionaires under Karzai — families that are all associated with him or his warlords.

Corruption is so rife that in the southern provinces the ordinary population are as likely to go to the Taliban for justice as to the government. In Kabul, if your cousin is kidnapped, the last people you go to are the police.

We have only ourselves to blame. The current tension over how long the war will last — from 40 years according to one general, to five from another, to some optimistic lesser time from the Secretary of State, demonstrate how schizophrenic our policy-makers are. This schizophrenia afflicts every aspect of our strategy, be it political, economic, social, judicial or diplomatic.

Take our policy on the poppy trade. Before we went into Afghanistan, Tony Blair accepted responsibility from the G6 for eradicating the Afghan opium trade. We did so little that the American government was publicly fulminating about our incompetence. Then when our forces went into Helmand, the epicentre of opium production, we decided that poppy eradication was contrary to our “hearts and minds” policy.

After a couple more years it dawned on the Government that the poppy was the primary funder of Taliban operations, so we had better eradicate it after all. Then it arose that it was illegal for ISAF (Nato) troops to police “civilian” drugs operations. We had the farce of British police counter-narcotics officers sent to Helmand who were not allowed to leave the base in Lash Kar Gar. Today there is still no co-ordinated eradication and replacement policy.

We will eventually get it right but we have wasted six years and many lives because of our shallow initial understanding of the problem. Similar indecision has affected our military strategy, with the infamous “Platoon House strategy” forced on us by the Karzai government, making Taliban targets of our brave young soldiers and crippling our ability to control the ground.

The question remains, what now? What is necessary is a level of effort and commitment as intense as that which turned around the Iraq conflict, but on a broader and more complex front, and sustained over a longer period.

Afghanistan is a bigger and more difficult country than Iraq. It has complex tribal, linguistic and political divisions. It is grindingly poor. It has no tradition of strong central government. Indeed, it has a 30-year tradition of civil war. Its most problematic areas have a massive economic dependency on the poppy.

But it also has a more direct impact on British and wider Western interests. While there is no direct link between the Taliban and terrorism on the streets of Britain, it could collapse back into a chaotic state that provided a bolt-hole for terrorists. It is undoubtedly the greatest source of heroin on UK streets. Finally, it also has potentially devastating effects on Pakistan — a nuclear power and major keystone in the region's stability.

So even if we put to one side the sacrifices of our brave young soldiers, and the suffering of the ordinary Afghans, this war deserves more resources, more political effort and imagination, and a clearer focus than we are giving it.

We need a military surge which involves a massive increase in force, to both decapitate the Taliban and deny them control of the countryside. We need a security policy that allows ordinary Afghans to get their goods to market without paying levies to the Taliban, common bandits and corrupt policemen, levies that make it pointless growing any cash crop other than poppy.

We need to have a blitz on corruption at the national and provincial level, and an imaginative use of the tribal system to deliver justice at the local level. We need to start implementing our aid policy seriously, rather than the dilettantish dabbling we are currently undertaking. It should focus hard on the economic infrastructure, roads and irrigation, since poverty is the big enemy.

Most of all we need a massive increase in the size of the Afghan National Army. The American counter-insurgency field manual implies that Afghanistan should have about 600,000 indigenous soldiers, about the size of the security forces in Iraq. That number is probably a minimum. It is much greater than the current plans.

This is important for several reasons. It is the only way we will be able to take and hold the countryside. It will put real power into a coherent Afghan State. And it will answer the question in every Afghan mind, namely what happens when the Westerners leave? At the moment the answer is the return of the Taliban. That would not be so with a proper Afghan Army, and as a result the ordinary Afghan would, for the first time, have good reason to support us. This may cost money but it is money the West should be willing to subsidise.

Whoever wins the presidential election, they must understand some things have to happen and progress must now be made. There is a price on the commitment of our troops. The British public are impatient for success and will not tolerate indefinitely our soldiers' involvement in an open-ended conflict.

If we carry through this strategy, we will have a decent chance of creating a stable Afghan state, and of bringing this operation to a conclusion with honour and dignity. If we do not do it then our strategic indecision will throw away all the tactical victories that our brave young soldiers buy with their lives. That would be both a political and a moral failure, indeed it would be a disgrace. If we believe this war was worth starting, we should believe it is worth winning.

I wouldn’t trust Google with my personal info: My party would be mad to give control of sensitive records to an internet giant notorious for ignoring privacy concerns

When I read in the pages of this newspaper this month that the Conservative Party was planning to transfer people’s health data to Google, my heart sank. The policy described was so naive I could only hope that it was an unapproved kite-flying exercise by a young researcher in Conservative HQ. If not, what was proposed was both dangerous in its own right, and hazardous to the public acceptability of necessary reforms to the state’s handling of our private information.

There are powerful arguments for people owning their own information and having rights to control it. There are massive weaknesses in the NHS’s bloated central database and there are benefits from using the private sector. But there are also enormous risks, so we are still a long step from being able to give personal data to any company, let alone Google.

Google is the last company I would trust with data belonging to me. In the words of human rights watchdog Privacy International, Google has “a history of ignoring privacy concerns. Every corporate announcement has some new practice involving surveillance”. It gave Google the lowest possible assessment rating: “hostile to privacy”. It was the only company of the 20 assessed to get this rating. It also said Google was leading a “race to the bottom” among internet firms, many of which did little to protect their users.

This highlights how careful we must be in using private companies to handle personal data. Actual and potential misuse of such data will be a recurrent public concern of the next several decades. This is because of the huge commercial value of a near-monopoly internet presence, combined with legally unfettered use of personal data. This is what gives Google a market capitalisation of $130 billion (£79 billion). It represents the value of exploiting its customers’ private data for commercial ends.

There is little the state can do about this. It cannot cut back Google’s monopoly, because it arises properly from the fact that Google provides a service people want. The state should impose some limits on how personal data is managed, anonymised and used, but that is a slow, technically difficult and international process. We should not disapprove of the profitability of Google, but we should recognise that the size of its profits have a dramatic effect on corporate behaviour.

It was the prospect of huge profits that pushed Google into its amoral deal with China and drove its high- handed approach to the intrusion on people’s privacy with Streetview. These profits also explain its cavalier approach to European legislation (which it claims does not apply to it). This means we have to be rigorous about how we allow any private- sector operator to manage state-originated personal data.

A Conservative spokesman was quoted last week as saying: “We fully expect that there will be multiple providers that will almost certainly be free to users.” If so, the question arises of how the providers will pay for it. It should not be possible to make money out of holding health data. Health information has to be secure, and should not be available to be used for commercial purposes. That means it should not be sold on, it should not be data mined for commercial insights, and it should not be used for targeted advertising.

Furthermore, any companies allowed to hold this data must be required to do so on computers within the UK, with no possibility of transfer. This is the only way we can enforce UK privacy standards and laws. Paradoxically, such a contract might be of no interest to Google, because it denies the opportunity to profit from data exploitation. If a new government is not careful about these so-called “post-bureaucratic” policies, data-loss and data-misuse scandals will kill public confidence in it. This would be a tragedy.

There is value in letting people nominate where their personal data is to be kept. Ownership, control, and “property rights” in the trail of online information that makes up our virtual identities should rest with each individual. That is the only way we can navigate the world of opportunity and risk that the web offers. It is also a good idea to have competitive private sector companies, holding your secure data. Indeed, it is sensible to have many companies, since financial data is better kept in a separate place to medical data.

Commercial companies are not perfect, but they have a greater incentive to protect your data. One successful class-action suit for losing or abusing data could bankrupt a company. The reputational damage could certainly cripple it. So they will try harder than any government to avoid disastrous failures like HMRC’s loss of 25 million personal records.

So private companies are better than the state, but they are not saints. Accordingly, before any government privatises personal data management, we should be clear about the rules and the structure. The protection of the individual’s right to control his or her own data must be plain and strong. An individual is unlikely to mount, let alone win, a legal challenge against a large corporation unless that is so.

That is so even for their personal “commercial” data, such as shopping patterns. When it comes to more private information such as health records or tax-and-benefit history, we should go one step further and learn from the financial crash of the past two years. The financial “masters of the universe” were allowed to be too big to challenge, and too big to fail. Only three years ago, they were “cool”. Now they cripple our economy with their incompetence.

It is a similar situation with the companies we eventually entrust with our personal data. They have to be subject to personal, judicial, and national influence. They should not be beyond control. So when we are handing out these state contracts, being a multinational mega- corporation is for once a competitive disadvantage. Google need not apply.

We Tories will make your eyes water

Conventional wisdom advises opposition politicians not to talk about spending plans. This has been doubly true since John Smith’s disastrous shadow budget before the 1992 general election.

It is, of course, rubbish. Despite Gordon Brown’s attempts to represent the division between the parties as between Labour investment and Tory cuts, the vast majority of the public knows that whoever wins the election will cut spending. The issue is not who will cut spending; it is who will tell the truth. We are in one of those rare times in politics when the public vote will reward courage over caution.

The old excuses will not work. “We have to wait to see the books” will properly be dismissed as a lame excuse. We all know the state we are in. Even Brown’s decade of creative accounting cannot conceal the depth of the hole.

First, there are political, practical and principled arguments for eyewatering honesty about our economic prospects. It is an inescapable fact that the next government will have to carry through some unpalatable changes. That means the next government will not just need a majority; it will need a mandate. That means the public will need to know precisely what it is voting for.

Second, credibility matters with the markets at least as much as with the public. The government’s credit rating is on probation. The credit default swap rates for UK government bonds have climbed significantly higher than their German, French and US equivalents. An overt and credible fiscal strategy will minimise the economic wreckage that a new government will have to deal with.

Finally, there is a moral argument for the public being involved in this process. This is not just about counting the pennies. The size of the problem means a new government will have to undertake a radical recasting of some aspects of the public sector. The decisions forced on us by Brown’s incompetence will change the shape of government.

At the next election the public will be making a fundamental choice about the sort of state it wants. It will be making a serious judgment about the nation’s priorities. It is democratically essential that the public is engaged in the debate about those priorities. Anything else is paternalism gone mad.

How do we deliver a viable plan that the public understands and accepts?

We are set to borrow more than £600 billion in the next four years. That amounts to about £25,000 per household per year. There is no way we could cover that cost in increased taxes. Other countries have been in similar quandaries before, if not on quite such a scale. The fashionable example is Canada, but Sweden in the 1990s did a pretty good job, too. There are lessons to learn.

The first is that simple belt-tightening will not do it. While the government’s spectacular incompetence in public spending should, in theory, create great scope for savings, in practice it is tough. Much of the cost increase has been in wages, which are hard to reverse. The Canadian experience tells us that uniform cuts across the board, pay freezes and spending caps do not deliver the necessary savings.

Second, for them to work, the spending decisions have to be decentralised to those who devise and administer the policies. It is strongly in the public interest that shadow ministers should start that process with senior civil servants now. This process binds the principal actors to the project and recognises that policies have cost implications. One such area is the enormous welfare budget, traditionally a minefield. Tory policies are tougher than Labour’s: they will have to be tougher still to deliver the savings necessary.

Third, the Conservatives have to challenge everything. Is this policy or programme necessary? If so, must the government provide it? If it must, can it be contracted out? If the state must do it, can it do so more efficiently? In doing this, the Conservatives must understand there are no sacred cows. Whole programmes, such as the Trident upgrade, can and should go. Similarly, middle-class welfare, such as child benefits and winter fuel payments for the well-off, should be cut. Politics is the language of priorities and this is never more true than in decisions on spending.

This should be a transparent, almost public, process. Even those areas that are ring-fenced, such as the National Health Service and international development, should go through it. This would be a unique process, but we are in a unique situation.

Because it is less than a year from an election, we can expect access to the appropriate civil servants. Because there is likely to be a change of government, we can expect this financial and policy planning process to be taken seriously.

The Canadian government eradicated its deficit in three years. Our deficit is bigger, so the task is greater and will take a whole parliament, which is all the more reason to start the debate now.

Trident can live to deter another day

The current pressure on national spending plans mean we have to challenge every government spending decision from fundamental principles. This is particularly true of the big programmes, no matter how politically difficult. One of the obvious, but controversial, big programmes is the proposed Trident upgrade, estimated to cost about £20bn ($33bn, €23bn).

Do we need a nuclear deterrent? There is no denying that the world's political climate has changed in the half century since we became a nuclear power. Our threats are no longer principally from rival large-scale nuclear powers, but from rogue states. They may even be from terrorist groups, against whom retaliation would be an irrelevance.

In January, Field Marshal Lord Bramall, former chief of the defence staff, General Lord Ramsbotham and General Sir Hugh Beach described it as "virtually irrelevant" and argued for the funds behind it to be used to provide the army "with what they need to meet the commitments actually laid upon them".

I do not agree with this argument. It seems to me perverse that we have a nuclear deterrent when we face one or two hostile nuclear powers, both with stable (albeit unpleasant) governments, but abandon it when we have a proliferation of relatively unstable nuclear antagonists.

But that does not mean we should squander money on an upgrade. The reason we decommissioned the cheaper air-dropped WE177 nuclear bombs in the 1990s and kept Trident was because the Trident system was designed to survive an all-out Soviet attack with sufficient power to retaliate. That threat is much reduced, and the bigger threat is of one or two probably inaccurate nuclear weapons from a rogue state.

On that basis what we have now is more than enough and certainly does not require an upgrade. We simply have to consider how to keep what we have viable. In its 2006 white paper, the government announced plans to buy into the US scheme to extend the life of the Trident missiles until 2042, and continue co-operation with a new design of missile. On the face of it, this is the most economically viable choice.

A more pressing problem is the renewal of the four Vanguard-class submarines. In the white paper, the government was adamant that because the Vanguards were only designed to last 25 years, essential components, including parts of the nuclear propulsion systems, could only be renovated to last a further five years, and that at disproportionate cost.

This is nonsense. Richard Garwin, former chair of the US government's science advisory committee, told our defence select committee that inexpensive engine repairs could easily extend the life of the Vanguards for 15 years, and save the government making what he described as a "premature and wasteful decision".

The US Ohio-class submarines were designed at the same time as the Vanguards with the same life expectancy. Now they have had their lives extended to 40 years. Do we build poorer submarines? Or is it just the Ministry of Defence's procurement executive doing its trick of putting service politics before the truth?

It should be an obvious choice to extend the Vanguards' life, at least to coincide with that of the D5 missiles. Although cabinet ministers now appear to be dithering over plans to design and build a new generation of submarines, the official public stance is still to press ahead with a Vanguard replacement. This project faces a glaring problem: what if the new missiles, to be introduced less than halfway through its lifespan, don't fit? The MoD claims to have US assurances that any new missile will be compatible, but the public accounts committee has rightly noted that "there is no guarantee it will".

Another considerably less-expensive option would be to convert an existing Astute-class hunter-killer submarine. While this carries the same non-compatibility risks as a whole new submarine design, it would waste considerably less money if the worst-case scenario occurred.

In this era of tight budgets it is evident that we should save the £20bn on an upgrade and make the Trident system last. The debate should be not about that, but about whether in this era of diffuse, lower-grade threat, we should save billions more by having three, not four, boats.

Afghanistan - the right war fought in the wrong way

It has been fashionable these last few years to view Afghanistan as the "good" war and Iraq as the "bad" war. This judgement is probably correct, but Afghanistan has been the right war fought in the wrong way, pursuing the wrong strategy, at the wrong time. What we now see as phase one of the Afghan war, the overthrow of the government in 2002, was brilliantly executed. From then, everything has gone wrong.

Firstly, we were distracted by the Iraq war, and largely left the new Afghan "democracy" under Hamid Karzai to its own devices. We turned a blind eye to the massive corruption – more than 20 families have become multi-millionaires from it in seven years. We ignored the monstrous growth of the Afghan poppy crop, with its legacy of heroin addiction and crime on western streets.

We did nothing to prevent the entrenchment of major and minor warlords running governmental baronies in pursuit of criminal gains, at the very real cost of ordinary Afghans. Finally, when we did intervene it was in a poorly planned, badly executed and under-resourced manner, calculated only to stir up resentment with little beneficial outcome.

We started with confused aims. We wanted to defeat the Taliban, although did not know which Taliban – the foreign radicals, the religious extremists, the criminals, the out-of-favour warlords or those with a real (and often justifiable) grudge against the government. Today, we are in principle willing to negotiate with all but the first of these.

In military terms, we massively underestimated what resources were needed to bring Helmand province under control, and we are still doing so. Inadequate numbers of soldiers have been exacerbated by deficiencies in equipment, from body armour to helicopters. We should not kid ourselves; equipment will not stop the inexorable count of lost and damaged lives. However, every life lost will be wasted if we do not have a clear view of what we want as a final outcome, and how to achieve it.

Our primary aim is to deny would-be terrorists a place in which they can organise and train, and from which they can strike out at our citizens. To do that, we have to have a strong and stable Afghan government, and to do that we need a people who are comfortable with their regime. That does not demand a Jeffersonian democracy, with all the appurtenances of the liberal state, from universal education and healthcare through to strong civic standards and gender equality, much as we would all like that. All it needs to deliver is justice and security to ordinary Afghans. If it can do that, the rest will come in due course.

This may sound more reminiscent of government in the Roman Empire rather than the 21st century. Regrettably, at the moment, we cannot even deliver that. In the Commons this week, Gordon Brown said we need to deliver justice on the ground. Quite right. He went on: "Not the medieval brutality of the Taliban, but the rule of law." This, I am afraid, shows he does not know what is going on.

Last October, I was in Afghanistan and I talked at length with people from Helmand province. What they told me was horrifying. Put to one side the incessant tales of theft, drug running, kidnap, extortion, rape and even murder by the Afghan National Police themselves. What they also told me was that the ordinary Afghan citizens seeking justice had two options. One was to bribe the national justice system to get a trial in perhaps a year, then eventually bribe the judge to get the outcome they want. Alternatively, they would walk five or ten miles to a Taliban village, get a hearing in a day and a fair ruling in a week.

As for security, our government does not appear to have any concept of what is needed to build a secure state. The current plans envisage about 134,000 Afghan soldiers and about 90,000 police. Iraq is a smaller country than Afghanistan, is less complex, either geographically or tribally, and has a history of stable central government. It has over 600,000 security forces, nearly three times those planned for Afghanistan.

So, it is time our political leaders got a grip. Our brave young soldiers will go on winning every battle, but the cost in lives will be tragically wasted if the political classes throw away the war. We need more coalition soldiers on the ground, of course. We need more equipment, no doubt. But most of all we need an achievable model of a stable, secure and decent Afghan state, and an idea of how to achieve it – and today we do not have that at all.

Bec Grammar gave this kid with scuffed shoes chances he had never dreamed of. That's why we must bring back these inspiring schools

It is almost 50 years since I won admission to grammar school, yet I remember it as though it were yesterday. It was a day that changed my life massively, for the better. Bec Grammar School in Tooting, South London, took this young kid from the wrong side of the tracks, with scuffed shoes, tousled hair, shirt hanging out of his trousers, and gave him chances he had never dared to dream of.

And they did the same for hundreds of thousands of children from poor homes, council estates and broken homes, through the post-war years. The simple truth is that grammar schools were the greatest instrument for social mobility ever invented.

It was not always so. I was by no means the only working-class youngster, or son of a single mother, in my grammar school. Many of my classmates were very tough. It was a community with few angels and no saints.

In the year I left Bec Grammar, as it was known, a controversial film called Up The Junction was released. It was about an upper-class girl who went to live in a lower-class community: a typical British gritty social drama set in crowded terraced streets and run-down council estates.

And where was this film shot? Bang in the middle of the catchment area of my grammar school. And yet my school has produced William Armstrong, Cabinet Secretary during Edward Heath's administration, Seventies English rugby captain Bob Hiller, and a host of people who reached the upper levels of the professional, academic and managerial classes.

Working-class grammar schools were incredibly successful at taking spirited and sometimes disorderly youngsters and turning them into disciplined and productive citizens.

They did that with an ethos that inspired respect, success, effort and ambition, whether in the classroom or on the sports field.

You only have to look at their results to see that grammar schools were great escalators to opportunity for poorer children. A child from a poor home who scored eight B grades at GCSE in a comprehensive would score eight As at a grammar school.

This is why social mobility improved markedly in Britain immediately after the war. Until about 1958, of every 100 born into the poorest quarter of society, only 31 would remain there. The rest would improve their lot before they got to the age of 30.

When next measured, with those born around 1970, the number stuck at the bottom had risen by almost a quarter, to 38 per cent.

Detailed study of the numbers shows that for those born after 1970, poorer children began to do less well in the education system, and rich kids did better. The arrival of the comprehensive system meant a return to the neighbourhood school - described dismissively by Tony Blair's spin doctor Alastair Campbell as 'bog-standard comprehensives' - in the poor areas.

Ironically, in a system designed to be more egalitarian, some of the poshest schools in the country are now smart comprehensives in wealthy areas. They are very good schools, but poor kids cannot get in because their parents cannot afford the premium on the price of homes in the catchment area.

The demise of the grammars, and the growth of the socially selective comprehensive, have left Britain at the bottom of the international social mobility league.

This need not be so. Look at Northern Ireland, which kept grammar schools. There, 42 per cent of university entrants come from poorer backgrounds. The defenders of our current system try to say 'it's different' - as if poverty, sectarian divides, and a recent civil war make educational success somehow easier.

Schools Secretary Ed Balls will this week announce yet more tinkering with State education. None of it would be necessary if Mr Balls had the courage to admit the stark truth. His own party's wanton destruction of grammars did more damage to the prospects of their own working-class supporters than any other political decision in the past 50 years.

Mr Balls should know better. His parents did not send him to a comprehensive but to fee-paying Nottingham High School - also, by the way, the alma mater of his erstwhile Cabinet colleague Geoff Hoon. As a child, Mr Balls even lived briefly at Eton College, while his father taught there for a term.

Instead of constantly meddling with a failed system, Mr Balls should study the success of grammars in the post-war years to maximise every child's potential, not in the private sector from which he and a privileged few benefited, but in the state sector.

Of course, grammars were not perfect. The 11-plus exam led to mistakes and friends who went to neglected secondary modern schools often felt abandoned. The technical schools planned after the war were never built.

It could have been so much better, but there was no need to wreck grammars. The 11-plus could be redesigned to reflect aptitude, not just learned skills. It could be taken at 11, 12 and 13, to give children three chances.

We need to raise the standard of all secondary schools. It can be done - look at Northern Ireland again, where seven in ten children get five good GCSEs. Since only a quarter go to grammar school, most get them in other parts of the secondary system.

Some people say middle-class parents do not like selection if their own children fail. With an improved system that would not be so. It certainly is not the case in Northern Ireland, where many are resisting Sinn Fein's attempt to destroy the system.

But my main concern is with the poor. If we carry on as we are, we are throwing away the opportunities and life chances of about 15,000 boys and girls from poorer households every year.

The terrible irony is that the main consequence of the egalitarian drive to destroy grammar schools is to massively boost public schools and their pupils.

As things stand, the products of the independent sector are increasingly dominating our society. Jeremy Paxman and David Dimbleby did not just both go to public school, they went to the same public school, Charterhouse.

The top ranks of the media, big business, the law - indeed the past four Chief Justices - are drawn from public schools.

I have no problem with this. I favour allowing parents to do the best possible for their children, including sending them to fee-paying schools. But we should also give the best possible chance to those who cannot afford that, and the best way to do this is to bring back grammar schools.

There were no halcyon days in our past. But for those kids, with the capability but not the cash, the aptitude but not the opportunity, with all the talent but none of the chances, there is little doubt - grammar schools were best.

The Mail on Sunday

Key Dates

Only the Speaker can restore faith in Parliament. That is why Mr Martin must go

The Mail on Sunday

David Davis: Brown's policy in Afghanistan is never going to work

 Friday, 1 May 2009

On Wednesday Gordon Brown outlined his latest strategy for Afghanistan, by announcing a temporary increase in troops, additional funding to tackle poverty and promote education, and an increased emphasis on training the Afghan army and police force. The greatest weakness in this new approach is that it does not plausibly answer the first question that enters the mind of any Afghan when he sees foreigners in uniform.

How can Jacqui Smith escape responsibility for this outrage?


WHEN HENRY II bellowed "Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?" and four of his knights journeyed to Kent to murder Thomas a Becket, he famously showed abject contrition by walking to Canterbury in sackcloth and ashes.

When Jacqui Smith's petty tantrums at leaks from the Home office set in chain a series of events that ended in a posse of Counter Terrorism officers journeying to Kent to arrest Damian Green, we saw no such contrition. Her responses went from "I didn't know," to "It's not my responsibility," to "It would have been irresponsible not to have done it." That last claim was based on the assertion that national security was at risk.

Let us put to one side the Home Secretary's inability to distinguish the nation's security from her own political insecurity, and consider the facts from a man who is both independent and has all the facts, the Director of Public Prosecutions. He said,

"I have concluded that the information leaked was not secret information or information affecting national security.

"It did not relate to military, policing or intelligence matters. It did not expose anyone to a risk of injury or death. Nor, in many respects, was it highly confidential. Much of it was known to others outside the civil service, for example, in the security industry or the Labour Party or Parliament. Moreover, some of the information leaked undoubtedly touched on matters of legitimate public interest, which were reported in the press."

Throughout this case Ministers have tried to imply that there was some hidden sinister aspect to this case. Indeed, the letter to the police from the Cabinet Office said in terms that there was a threat to national security. We now know that this was untrue, that it was either a lie or a piece of remarkable incompetence.

So how did it happen?

What the combination of the Damian McBride affair and the Damian Green affair tells us is that a culture of vindictiveness has grown up, in Whitehall in general and the Cabinet Office in particular. It is a culture that can only have originated from ministers and special advisers, since it is so at odds with the traditions of our Civil Service.

Indeed, the increasingly habitual use of the full power of the state to attack opponents of the government, be they whistleblowers or political rivals, is inimical to our entire liberal democratic tradition.

There are a number of questions left unresolved. Firstly we have not established whether Ministers were knowledgeable about these decisions and actions; and if they were not, why not? Police operational independence does not absolve Ministers from accountability. Are we seriously to believe that in the six month gestation of this case, no minister was consulted at any time?

Former Home Secretaries of both parties have said to me they are astonished that Jacqui Smith didn't know what was happening. She should have done. We also still have the unresolved question of Parliamentary privilege, which was undoubtedly breached in pursuit of this case.

It is the responsibility of Parliament and a free press to hold Government to account. When Governments lie or conceal information, as this one has done systematically, it is necessary to publish information from whistleblowers. They will not be possible if the police can seize parliamentary files whenever they feel like it.

Parliament also needs to consider the question of when criminal law can be used to protect confidential government information. If an employee leaks confidential information when working for a private company or individual - a celebrity's nanny, for example - they get the sack. They do not get arrested.

Government is only different in very limited circumstances, essentially involving national security. Those limited circumstances do not extend to protecting Labour politicians from embarrassment and exposure of their failures.

That is why the Damian Green affair is the second major case attempting to use "misconduct in public office" to gag whistleblowers to collapse in twelve months.

This law is antiquated, anachronistic, and has become a discretionary power for the Executive rather than a reliable protection for the people. It is time it was revoked or rewritten. After all, if we took the law literally, namely "misconduct in public office", this week we might end up arresting the Home Secretary.

The Independent

We did things differently in my day, Mr Miliband

The sunlight was streaming through the windows of MI6 headquarters as I sipped my Earl Grey tea from a bone china cup and gently teased the head of the Secret Intelligence Service. "You chaps are hardly James Bond these days, are you?" I said. "Why, you don't even kill people any more."

Sir Colin McColl smiled. "Well, that's because you don't ask us to, minister."

As the famed C, he was head of the organisation that ran Britain's spies and provided the backdrop for the stories crafted by Ian Fleming and John le Carré. He was a formidably intelligent and civilised man, as he had to be, providing as he did one of our major defences against the then Soviet threat. He no doubt viewed with quizzical amusement the impertinent badinage of the junior minister from the Cabinet Office, as I then was.

There was, however, a serious point. Sir Colin was an enthusiastic advocate of bringing his organisation out of the shadows and putting it on a legal footing. Until then, the British government had formally denied the existence of the Secret Intelligence Service. Now we were about to pass an act of parliament recognising its existence and creating the legal rules for its operation.

This created a real problem, however. Spies break the law. Burglary, bribery and blackmail are what they do. It is how they get the secrets that other countries are fighting to protect. While they existed in the shadows, this did not present a legal problem, but now they were going to be recognised as crown servants. It is a peculiarity of British law that civil servants and servants of the crown generally are bound by British law when working abroad, irrespective of where they are. So we had to create a way round this or see our espionage services crippled.

This led to the creation of what is known as the "James Bond opt-out". This allows our spies to break the law if, and only if, they get a warrant from the secretary of state, normally the foreign secretary. Before a warrant can be granted, the law requires the action to be absolutely necessary and proportionate to the eventual benefit to the nation. The warrant is specific and runs out after six months or sometimes sooner. The purpose of requiring explicit ministerial approval was to ensure that the "opt-out" from the law was never misused or, if it was, somebody would be held accountable. It was never remotely countenanced as covering killing or torture.

Last week, the attorney general referred the case of Binyam Mohamed to the police. This confirms what many of us already knew or suspected, that there is a prima facie case to answer that government agents colluded in the torture of one or several of the detainees picked up in Pakistan. It is important to understand what is meant by "colluded" in this case. It does not mean that British agents wielded the instruments of torture or were present when the pain was being inflicted. But neither does it simply mean negligence, as was suggested by one ill-informed, so-called security specialist on the BBC.

What has happened is that British agents have co-operated with foreign powers when they had good reason to believe that they were torturing British citizens or residents, providing information and questions to these foreign governments. This often involved getting the foreign agencies to put questions A, B and C under torture, so that once they had the answers, British agents could turn up and put the same questions without torture.

Pakistani intelligence service agents have told researchers that this procedure was followed with several different subjects and several different British agents. This is not about one "rogue agent". It is systemic. When the "James Bond opt-out" clause was created, it was done with advice from the legal advisers to MI5 and MI6. It is inconceivable that the requirement for a foreign secretary's warrant was not included in the standard operating procedure of the agencies involved. Given the severity of the laws against torture, both British and international, it is also inconceivable that it was not clear that the law was being broken.

So one of two things has happened. Either a foreign secretary has approved complicity in torture, in which case that foreign secretary should be on a criminal charge, or the system has suffered a massive breakdown, in which case heads should roll at the agency. But it is going to be difficult for the police, even with access to all the papers and all the British officers, to get to the core of the breakdown. Indeed, that is not their job. They will be looking, quite properly, to bring a criminal case against an individual.

What should happen is that a full inquiry should investigate all the cases and identify all the failures all the way to the top, including ministers. What should not happen is that some low-ranking official be made a scapegoat. The inquiry should also address the extent to which the government has been knowingly involved in a cover-up of this matter. The attorney general has made a reference to the police on the basis of 42 documents from the Binyam Mohamed trial. These are the documents that the foreign secretary asked the court to withhold from the public domain, initially on the spurious grounds that the Americans had threatened to cut off intelligence co-operation.

To stop the court releasing the documents, he issued three public interest immunity certificates. Before issuing such certificates, it was his duty to satisfy himself that the documents were a threat to national security. Not to read them would be irresponsible in the extreme. They total some 140 pages, which would take about two hours or so to read. But these are the documents that form the prima facie case of complicity in torture.

So the government has spent more than six months trying to keep out of the public domain documents that are critical in what is likely to end in a criminal case. In that time, both David Miliband and the home secretary have denied to the House of Commons that the government was complicit in any way in torture. If they were not telling the whole truth, that would be fatal to their ministerial careers. Yet it is difficult to see how it could be the whole truth, when they had both read the 42 documents that are now the basis of a criminal investigation.

We need a judicially led inquiry, with full access to the evidence and a broad remit to get to the bottom of what has gone wrong. We need that inquiry now and we need it to be held where possible in public, because it is time that people are told what has happened, if only so that our nation never allows such a moral failure to happen again.

To read David's article in full, please click here.

David made a speech in a Commons Debate on the economy held on the 18th March in which he developed the points he first made in an article published in the Sunday Telegraph on 1st March.

To read what David had to say, please follow the link below to see the full Hansard transcript of his speech:

http://pubs1.tso.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmhansrd/cm090318/debtext/90318-0016.htm 

His Sunday Telegraph article, 'Captain Mainwairing and Co. can save ourr banks' can be found by following this link to the Telegraph website:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/4424056/Capt-Mainwaring-and-Co-can-save-our-banks.html

David spoke in the Commons today in a debate on the renewal of Control Order powers.

He raised several issues of concern with the legislation, concluding that "this is an unnecessary piece of law, and a bad piece of law. It does huge damage to the Government’s “prevent strategy”, and I suspect that, if anything, it makes the threat from terrorism worse."

For a full transcript of David's speech and to read the debate in full, please follow the link below to the Hansard Official Report.

http://pubs1.tso.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmhansrd/cm090303/debtext/90303-0009.htm 

David has written an article on the issue of British collusion in torture for the Mail on Sunday newspaper.

To read the article please follow the following link to the Mail on Sunday website:

http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/debate/article-1158171/DAVID-DAVIS-Torture-moral-black-hole-diminishing-civilisation.html 

David has written an article on the problems currently facing NATO for the Guardian.

To read David's thoughts, please follow the link below to the Guardian website:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/12/david-davis-nato-defence 

Tony Blair is truly astonishing. He is summoned to the Chilcot inquiry to answer questions, and instead he poses his own: "What if I had not invaded Iraq? Where would we be then?"

Put to one side the astonishing insensitivity of saying such a thing in a room in which at least 20 people could have replied: "My son would still be alive today." Let us answer his question.

And let us not be too prissy about it. He will not have been the first war leader to use secrecy and subterfuge to attain his ends. But he will be the first that I know of who bullied his attorney general, ignored his legal advisers, deluded his cabinet and dissembled to the House of Commons and the public to get his way.

Even if we accept that he felt he was acting in the public interest, these acts alone did enormous harm to that interest. He believes that weapons of mass destruction and state-sponsored terrorism are threats to modern society. So they are. Now consider how likely parliament or public are to believe any future prime minister if he says: "I have compelling intelligence of an imminent threat to this country."

So, by his excessive reaction to a non-existent threat, he has crippled the capability of future democratic governments to respond robustly to a real threat. He told the Chilcot inquiry that his perception and assessment of the risks posed by Iraq changed after 9/11. But that assessment was naive, ignorant, careless and inconsistent.

It was naive because there was no prior indication of links between Saddam and al-Qaida. Indeed there was evidence of hostility between them. It was ignorant because it ignored the known fact that there were a number of alternative bolt holes for al-Qaida in the many failed and dysfunctional states in the region, so shutting down one would not handicap them at all. It was careless because it took no account of the cause célèbre that invasion handed to Islamist fundamentalists the world over, and the recruiting sergeant for terrorism that it created in this country. It was inconsistent because he did few of the other things that this new threat demanded. In particular, he did not materially increase the size of our security services until 2004, nearly three years later, and too late to stop the 7/7 bombings. Unfortunately, the naivety did not stop there.

I suspect that, when they presented the "dodgy dossier", he and his advisers believed it. They appeared to have no grasp of the will-o'-the-wisp nature of much intelligence data. When I was the non-proliferation minister in the previous government, I saw weekly intelligence assessments of Iraq's capabilities and intentions. It was always clear that this intelligence was patchy and incomplete, like most intelligence on hostile nations.

Indeed, when Blair assured the House of Commons of the existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), I assumed that we had acquired access to live data from a human source in place. Nothing else explained his confidence. It now transpires that his access was no greater than ours four years earlier. Possibly less.

Similarly naive was Blair's approach to warfare as an arm of state policy. When Margaret Thatcher was considering military action to retake the Falklands, the people who were most cautions were the Whitelaws, Carringtons and Pyms, who had seen warfare first hand. They had witnessed young men being burned and shattered by the weapons of modern warfare. They had no illusions about the hideous human cost.

Blair's concept of war seems pure Hollywood. He seems to forget the vast numbers of innocent casualties; the collateral damage and destruction; the pain, hunger and disease that are the fellow travellers of military action.

How else do we explain the cavalier carelessness with which he treated the follow-through to military action? He was told by the Ministry of Defence that there was no "phase four", the reconstruction and rebuilding of the nation that should have followed the invasion if there was to be any moral justification for "regime change".

Of all the people in the world, Blair was the one best placed to insist to George W Bush that the Americans take this seriously. At the very least, it should have been the price of our co-operation. Yet there is no evidence that he lifted a finger.

The result? One hundred thousand civilian casualties in Iraq. Even if we accept Blair's aims – and I did – there is no excuse for a British government to behave in this simplistic, careless, almost blinkered way.

Sometimes it is necessary for governments to spend lives, but when they do they should take very special care over both their aims and their methods. They should never spend any lives unnecessarily, and never spend one life more than necessary.

The final price of this war is not yet settled. It has not destroyed the morale of al-Qaida; if anything, it has given it a new moral cause. It distracted us from Afghanistan – the necessary war – and has rendered it a thousand times more difficult to resolve. And it has taken the west from a position of moral superiority to moral failure.

Where would we be without your war, Tony Blair? Even by your own criteria, in a rather better position than we are now, I fear.

David has written an article for the Telegraph Newspaper on the recent arrest of Damain Green MP and the search of his offices in the House of Commons and his constituency.

To read David's views on this, and his thoughts on how to avoid a similar incident occuring in the future, please follow the link below to the Telegraph website.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/3659610/David-Davis-Damian-Green-affair-must-never-be-repeated.html 

David has written an article on the ruling handing by the European Court of Human Rights on the retention of the DNA profile of innocent people on the NAtional DNA Database.

The ruling is seen as a crushing condemnation of the GOvernments policy on DNA retention.

To read David's thoughts in full, please follow the link below to the Independent's website:

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/david-davis-a-condemnation-of-a-policy-that-does-not-add-up-1052526.html 

David has written an article for the Mail on Sunday on the arrest of Damian Green.

To read David's thoughts, please follow the link below to  the Mail on Sunday website:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1090534/David-Davis-So-let-charge-Damian-jury-subpoena-damn-lot-them.html 

David has written an article for Index on Censorship on the dangers of introducing further restrictions on the reporting of securuty issues in the UK.

To read David's article in full, please follow the link below to the Index on Censorship website:

http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2008/11/10/unnecessary-secrets/#more-769

		By David Davis Published: Thursday, 25 September 08 - 06:11 PM (GMT) Last Updated: Thursday, 25 September 08 - 06:16 PM (GMT)

David will be speaking on Monday at two fringe events at Conservative Party Conference- "An Audience with Rt. Hon. David Davis MP", and at a Liberty fringe event, “Human Rights, Common Values: Discussing the future challenges for rights protection in the UK”.

Details of both of these events and where to attend are in the events section.

		By David Davis Published: Friday, 11 July 08 - 10:16 AM (GMT)

David Davis Acceptance Speech, 11 July

CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY
First, may I thank the returning officer, his officials ad the police.
I would also like to take the opportunity to commend the other parties that contested this election.
One of the freedoms I defend is the right of anybody to stand in a democratic election.
By and large this has been a courteous and entertaining campaign.
I thank everyone for taking part.
…
Four weeks ago, I resigned my position as Shadow Home Secretary, and Member of Parliament.
Not for personal gain.
Not for political advantage.
But to defend a principle.


The doubters said it couldn’t be done.
You can’t win a by-election campaigning for freedom.
You can’t shift public support for 42 days.
You can’t spark a national debate, they said… people just don’t care about British liberty.
And yet, 3 weeks on, we’ve sent a shot across the bows of Gordon Brown’s arrogant, arbitrary and authoritarian government.
We’ve galvanised a new consensus … across the political spectrum … beyond the world of politics.
A new resolve.
A new spirit of freedom.
A fresh sense of purpose.


Today, the people of Haltemprice and Howden have delivered a stunning message to the government…as our campaign has reverberated across the country.
Four weeks ago as Gordon Brown stooped into the gutter to rig the vote on 42 days, Ministers crowed that 69% of people supported 42 days.
Today just 36% support it.
Four weeks ago, the government touted public support for a range of other draconian measures.
Today, 71% support my stand against the attacks on British liberty.
And in the House of Lords, the last Head of MI5 savaged the government’s 42 day proposal.
It now lies in tatters, robbed of any remaining credibility. Along with this government.
And that’s after just 3 weeks.

But today is not the end of this campaign.
It’s the beginning.
On Monday I return to the House of Commons, to take up my seat in those hallowed chambers.
I do so with a clear mandate to fight Gordon Brown’s vision of ‘Big Brother Britain’ tooth and nail.
To stop 42 days dead in its tracks.
To prevent the disaster of ID cards before it happens.
To protect our personal privacy from being ransacked by the ever-intrusive state.

But most of all for the thousands upon thousands who have written to me…
Supported me
…and voted for me….
I return to fight for those fundamental freedoms that define our way of life.
The freedoms that millions died defending.
The freedoms that make Britain Great.
Thank you.

		By David Davis Published: Friday, 04 July 08 - 06:48 PM (GMT) Last Updated: Saturday, 05 July 08 - 11:24 AM (GMT)

The recent Observer Comment is Free debate featuring David Davis in a panel including former Labour Minister Denis MacShane, Times columnist David Aaronovitch and pro-civil liberties Observer journalist Henry Porter is now online to listen to and download from the following link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/audio/2008/jul/04/liberty.in.peril?gusrc=rss&feed=politics

		By David Davis Published: Friday, 04 July 08 - 05:21 PM (GMT) Last Updated: Friday, 04 July 08 - 06:47 PM (GMT)

Check against delivery

This is not a normal by-election but it is extraordinary. The people of this area are being asked to consider not the merits or otherwise of the government or opposition, much less the competing policies of the different parties. Not even the beauty parade of  eager candidates, who looking at David and the motley assemblage of other candidates, once again reminds me of that great truth that politics is merely showbusiness for ugly people.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/audio/2008/jul/04/liberty.in.peril?gusrc=rss&feed=politics

		By David Davis Published: Friday, 04 July 08 - 11:01 AM (GMT) Last Updated: Friday, 04 July 08 - 11:05 AM (GMT)

BOB Geldof is backing Tory David Davis in his by-election campaign against erosion of civil liberties. He will speak at a rally in Hull as the former Shadow Home Secretary, who quit over holding terror suspects without charge, fights to regain his Haltemprice and Howden seat. Geldof said last night: "What is the point of Britain without its freedoms? What terrorises the terrorists is our civilisation." Mr Davis said: "I am delighted Bob Geldof is supporting our campaign, which is vital to the freedom of our country."

Published in The Mirror (Star Edition) July 4th 2008

		By David Davis Published: Friday, 04 July 08 - 11:00 AM (GMT) Last Updated: Friday, 04 July 08 - 11:03 AM (GMT)

Bob Geldof is to endorse David Davis's protest against the Government's erosion of civil liberties. Geldof is a close ally of Gordon Brown on tackling poverty and repression in Africa, but he will join the former Tory frontbencher on the campaign trail in the Haltemprice and Howden by- election. He said: "What is the point of Britain without its freedoms? What terrorises the terrorists is our civilisation." 

Published in The Independent Friday July 4th 2008

		By David Davis Published: Friday, 04 July 08 - 10:58 AM (GMT)

Bob Geldof is to endorse former Tory frontbencher David Davis' protest against the Government's erosion of civil liberties, it was revealed last night.
The rock star - a close ally of Gordon Brown on tackling poverty and repression in Africa - will join Mr Davis on the campaign trail.
He said: "What is the point of Britain without its freedoms? What terrorises the terrorists is our civilisation. I am delighted to support this campaign and I will be speaking on it in Hull tomorrow."
The backing, from someone he so regularly shares a platform with on development issues, could prove embarrassing for the Prime Minister.
Mr Davis quit as MP for Haltemprice and Howden last month so he could fight a by-election on the issue, accusing the Government of "trampling" on essential freedoms.
However, Labour has refused to field a candidate, and ministers have been doing their best to ignore the contest, which culminates on July 10.

Published in Birmingham Post Friday July 4th 2008

		By David Davis Published: Friday, 04 July 08 - 09:39 AM (GMT) Last Updated: Friday, 04 July 08 - 10:23 AM (GMT)

THE exigencies of the war on terror seem a long way from Haltemprice and Howden, one of the more bucolic parliamentary constituencies. There are few obvious targets to strike in this collection of Yorkshire villages, nor much scope for a clash of cultures (the non-white population is under 2%). Islamist recruiters hoping to exploit deprivation should also look elsewhere: five years ago the private-wealth division of Barclays, a bank, rated it the tenth-richest place in the country, once living costs were taken into account.

Yet thanks to its MP, David Davis, the seat has become a forum for the vexed debate on the trade-off between liberty and security that has gripped Westminster. On June 12th, the day after Parliament voted to extend maximum detention without charge for terrorist suspects from 28 to 42 days, Mr Davis resigned as the Conservative home-affairs spokesman and announced that he would quit his seat. He said he would campaign in the resulting by-election, which takes place on July 10th, on the issue of defending civil liberties from 42 days, identity cards, CCTV cameras, DNA databases and other incursions.

It was a quixotic gesture—for Mr Davis’s party had backed his desire to oppose 42 days, after all—but those hoping for his campaign to flop completely are being disappointed. True, neither Labour nor the Liberal Democrats have put up candidates, so Mr Davis (whose rivals include a member of the Church of the Militant Elvis Party) cannot claim much of a mandate for civil libertarianism if, as expected, he wins. But his resignation has prompted a response from the government: Gordon Brown, the prime minister, gave a speech on liberty and security five days afterwards, and has more recently exchanged tetchy letters with Mr Davis.

As for the Tories, some senior figures deplored Mr Davis’s “self indulgence” and fretted that the loss of one of their big-hitters would create the party’s first bad-news story for months. The party has suffered no dip in the polls, however. Others speculate that Mr Davis is trying to undermine David Cameron (who defeated him for the Tory leadership in 2005), and could be a thorn in his side from the backbenches. But the candidate has ruled out ever leading his party; Mr Cameron campaigned for him on July 2nd and may yet bring him back into the shadow cabinet.

There is, however, a criticism that is harder for Mr Davis to rebut—that he would have served the liberal cause better by sticking around to be home secretary in the next Tory government. Repealing 42 days, to which the Tories (with a caveat or two) are committed, would be an obvious early move. He insists graciously that this could be done just as well by Dominic Grieve, his replacement, but some doubt that. Civil liberties is a tricky issue for the Conservatives, who have both a libertarian wing and an authoritarian one. On the “Nixon in China” principle, Mr Davis’s background (he grew up on a council estate and is no bleeding heart on crime) gives him the cover to take an enlightened line on civil liberties; Mr Grieve, a privately-schooled QC, lacks this advantage.

Instead, Mr Davis envisages his role after the by-election as that of one-man pressure group. Public opinion can seem an insurmountable barrier for civil libertarians (there was a clear majority in favour of 42 days). But Mr Davis notes that popular support for ID cards has slipped as voters have been made aware of their drawbacks. “Maybe something similar can be achieved on detention without charge,” he says, brandishing letters of support from the likes of Tim Collins, once an army colonel, and Terry Waite, a former hostage.

If Mr Davis sounds as if he is in this for the long haul, it is because he fears that the threat to Britain’s liberties comes from gradual erosion over time rather than a frenzied assault by a particular government. “Drop a frog into boiling water and it will jump straight out,” says Mr Davis. “Put it into lukewarm water, slowly turn up the heat, and it will die.”

Article from The Economist

		By David Davis Published: Thursday, 03 July 08 - 08:26 PM (GMT)

Leading anti-poverty campaigner and former Boomtown Rat Sir Bob Geldof will join David Davis in Hull on Friday, 4th July.  Sir Bob will back David's stance on civil liberties.

Speaking in support of David, Sir Bob said: "What is the point of Britain without its freedoms?  What terrorises the terrorists is our civilisation?  I am delighted to support this campaign and I will be speaking on it in Hull tomorrow".

David responded: "I am delighted that Bob Geldof is supporting our campaign, which stretches across all parties and is vital to the freedom of our country".

		By David Davis Published: Sunday, 29 June 08 - 10:13 PM (GMT)

You’ll be running against the monster raving loonies and a fruit seller. Hasn’t the gamble failed?
Liz Cromfield, Sheffield
 
It speaks volumes that Gordon Brown will not defend his record by contesting this election. But my aim is to launch a national debate on the defence of British liberty - and that is bigger than any one politician. I will spend the next three weeks making the case against ID cards, 42 days and the increasingly intrusive surveillance society -and for habeas corpus, free speech and the right to trial by jury. I am willing debate anyone, any time, anywhere. There is wide cross-party support for what I am trying to achieve - not to mention overwhelming support from outside the world of politics. Mr Brown has gagged all Ministers from participating in any televised debates. He's terrified of the electorate and he's terrified of the debate. He is right, at least, on that.
 

Isn’t it laughable that you are framing yourself as a fighter for liberty when you are an impassioned supporter of the death penalty?
Sanj Taylor, Leeds
 
I do not campaign to restore the death penalty. ( Actually I have never even made a speech on the subject, but it seems to fascinate interviewers.)

But it is my personal, moral, opinion that in the most serious multiple murder cases, where the evidence is overwhelming (not just beyond reasonable doubt), it is justifiable. I think there ought to be room for different views on ethical questions like that.
 


Why is a personal vanity crusade was more important than constructive team playing inside the Conservative Party?
John Frizell, by email
 
I don't agree that standing up for the principles I believe in is vanity. And the Conservatives have jumped 2 points in the polls since I resigned, so it is not damaging the Party.

Tell us the truth – did you have a blazing row with David Cameron?
Carlos T, Manchester
 
No. The papers just made that up. We are still friends and he is coming up to campaign for me in the next few weeks.


Isn't this all just driven by your monstrous ego and jealousy that David Cameron stuffed you in the leadership contest?
Bernard Morris, by email
 
I've dealt with the vanity point, and ruled out standing as leader. It is a rather sad sign of the times that there is such shock that anyone in politics would give up their job for what they believe in.

Mr Davis, you’ve restored my faith in politics. When are you running for leader?
Sue Enderle, Dagenham, London
 
Thank you for the moral support - but I have ruled out ever standing for the leadership again.

Have you at any moment regretted your decision since it happened?
Carl Thompson, Brighton
 
Not even for a second.   I have never felt more sure of a principle in my life.

How did you feel about all those toffs taking over the Conservative Party again?
Paul Thompson, Manchester
 
I could not care less about things like that. I dislike inverse snobbery as much as the conventional kind.  Anyway I have a toff on my campaign, Tony Benn (see below).

Did you ever imagine you’d see the day when you were battling on the same side as Tony Benn?
Dan Harrison, Exeter
 
Yes, I have always had friends from across the political divides. Tony Benn and I are old friends. I admire his courage, even if we disagree on many things.

Were you offended by Andy Burnham’s comments about you and Shami Chakrabarti?
David Fletch, by email
 
I think it is pretty pathetic that Mr Burnham will not take up my challenge for a debate on the government's record, but is all too willing to issue personal smears. He is gutless on both counts.

How come you style yourself as a defender of freedom when you supported homophobic legislation?
Ken McEwen, by email
 
I may have voted against certain legislation, but that does not make me homophobic. For example, I am in favour of allowing Christian adoption agencies to be exempt from discrimination laws, because they do a great job and - out of religious conviction - believe children should have a mother and a father. People with different views ought to be able to freely debate this kind of controversial moral issue without being accused of bigotry.  And see Iain Dale’s blog for a brief  account of my defence of gay people on many occasions.

You supported 28 days detention but opposed 42 days. So how many days’ detention should we have (and please don't duck the question)?
Frances Butler, Stourbridge
 
We should only be keeping someone in jail without telling them what they are charged with for as shorter period as is necessary, bearing in mind the need to protect the public. Detention without charge is a necessary evil - it must be strictly limited.  The current evidence from police and prosecutors experience in conducting investigations shows that 21 days has proved necessary in practice. A 28 day limit was agreed in 2005 for the most exceptional situations and I think it is still justifiable, but not a day more.
 
We certainly must resist the political pressure to keep on increasing the maximum period. Remember, the maximum detention period quadrupled between 2003 and 2005 - from 7 to 28 days. It is tempting for the government to play the numbers game - asking for 42, 56, 70, 90 days - because it is a way of talking tough on terror. But that is something we must check, or we will continue to see our freedoms salami-sliced away.

Finally, we can equip the police with greater tools to get better investigative use out of the current 28 day limit, which would ease the time pressures they face. For years, I have been calling for the use of post-charge questioning and intercept evidence in terrorism cases. These are not silver bullet solutions, but they would significantly boost our law enforcement capability and take some pressure off the police. Once we have introduced intercept evidence and post-charge questioning, and developed the use of plea-bargaining, it may be possible to reduce the limit below 28 days, without any risk to our security. That will depend on the evidence available from our law enforcement agencies - but it is something we should strive for.

Isn’t this just a stunt to raise your profile?
Neil Frei, by email
 
That is what Ministers say. But I don't think this government can accuse me of stunts, after the farce of its rigged vote on 42 days. And the public don't see it as a stunt – 69% think I am taking a principled stand.

What's wrong with CCTV cameras, unless you're committing crimes? They've made my estate safer.
Paul Moore, Clapham
 
CCTV has its place. But the current approach is the worst of all worlds – intrusive, ineffective and enormously expensive.  The government spent half a billion pounds on CCTV – more cameras than any other country, one for every fourteen citizens.  But police say 80% of CCTV footage is of poor quality, particularly for identifying criminals. CCTV is also prone to abuse. In one case, a camera was pointed at a young woman undressing and displayed by operators on a plasma screen at the control centre.  We need a focused use of CCTV that works and better controls and sanctions to protect individual privacy. There are cases where CCTV has helped, but many where it has failed. For example, after the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in July 2005, there was no usable footage from any of the CCTV cameras - on the bus, tube or at Stockwell station.

I am enormously impressed by your actions, But what do you propose to do after your campaign in Haltemprice & Howden to address the shortcomings in Parliamentary procedure?
Seb Thirlway, by email

I will continue to campaign to defend our fundamental freedoms. The best way to reinvigorate our democracy would be a change in government at the ballot box – and I will be working whole-heartedly towards that goal!

Ever think about joining the Lib Dems?
Lucy Flint, Barnet

Never.

What did you do when you were in the TAs?
Tom Manley, Kent

I am not sure that I can tell you anything interesting, but let me squash a few common misconceptions.   Firstly I was a soldier not an officer, contrary to what many papers report.   Secondly, although it had its moments, it was much more brutally hard work and much less glamorous adventure than I suspect many people think.

Do you wish we had more referendums in this country?
Michelle Owana, by email

I think there is a case for referendums on big constitutional issues that affect the fundamental direction of the country. The EU Constitutional Treaty is the most obvious recent example.
 
Who is your political hero?
Lauren Edwards, by email

I have huge admiration for William Wilberforce. He held my seat in Parliament and was one of the great champions of freedom during the nineteenth century, leading the campaign to abolish the slave trade. He never gave up, no matter what the odds or the personal costs.   

Apart from sharing the same constituency, do you and Alan B'stard share any similarities?
Dave Duncan, by email

A mischievous sense of humour.

Originally posted on the Independent

		By David Davis Published: Sunday, 29 June 08 - 07:55 PM (GMT)

Dear Sir

You suggest (‘Mary Poppins and the Magna Carta’, 21 June) that the public support liberty in abstract, but that their ‘resolve wilts …. when specific security gains are promised’.

In fact, it depends on what you ask. Your poll assumes that ‘CCTV cameras help to deter criminal behaviour’ – overlooking police reports showing that 80% of CCTV footage cannot be used. You say that ‘police are relying ever more heavily on DNA to solve crimes’, yet the percentage of crimes detected using DNA has remained below 0.4% - despite 1million innocent citizens being swabbed since 2002. And your suggestion that ID cards will make ‘keeping track of terrorists …  easier’ overlooks the fact that ID cards did not stop the 9/11 bombers based in Germany, or the terrorist attacks on Madrid and Istanbul.

It is claimed that 42 days is popular, yet another YouGov poll found that 70% would prefer to keep the 28 day limit, if police were allowed to use post-charge questioning.

The government presents these issues as Faustian trade-offs between security and liberty. The reality is that draconian measures rarely make us safer, and often jeopardise security. That is not a trade-off. It is a con, which is why we need an informed national debate that goes to the heart of our liberal democracy.

Yours

David Davis

		By David Davis Published: Sunday, 29 June 08 - 07:51 PM (GMT) Last Updated: Sunday, 29 June 08 - 07:54 PM (GMT)

David's article in the Evening Standard

Last week Gordon Brown bribed and bullied MPs into voting to extend the power to imprison people without charge from 28 to 42 days. He failed to provide a shred of evidence that it was necessary to fight terrorism, and brushed aside security warnings that it may prove counter-productive.

For now, the tactic has worked. But he paid a heavy price. His Parliamentary authority is in tatters, having failed to hold together a Labour majority. And his moral authority is in the gutter after the shabby deals it took to get the vote through.

I resigned on principle and I am delighted that, as well as support from David Cameron (despite what you might read in some of the papers), Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs have also come out in support of my stance. I am standing against the accumulation - and abuse - of power by the state, at the expense of the fundamental freedoms of the citizen.

Nothing, however, prepared me for the scale of the response from the public. It has been truly humbling, a world apart from the some of the carping around the Westminster village. I have been inundated with thousands of messages of support. A survey in my constituency defied the pollsters, who say the public don't care about liberty and privacy - with 69 per cent supporting my decision.

Many of those who contacted me say they are traditional Labour supporters, disillusioned that Mr Brown - and his government - have presided over the relentless erosion of our freedoms. This week I am setting up a website to kickstart a popular debate on these important issues.

Government ministers have dismissed my campaign as a stunt. That is a bit rich, given the farcical vote on 42 days. Kelvin MacKenzie claims the by-election is a waste of taxpayers' money. But he overlooks the Big Brother state's expensive tastes - like the £19billion wasted on ID cards. The bloated state has abused its power, but also burnt a hole in the taxpayer's pocket. A national debate is long overdue.

"One of the great values of being a British citizen," Baroness Kennedy wrote at the weekend, "is the strong sense that we are not here at the behest of the state; the state is here at our behest." I could not agree more. But under this government, that equation has been reversed.

As citizens, we have become subject to ever greater monitoring, surveillance and intrusion. Yesterday Andy Burnham, the Culture Secretary, said he was "staggered" by my criticisms of CCTV, claiming it is vital for fighting crime and counter-terrorism. I am not against all CCTV. But the current approach is just daft. This Government has spent about half a billion pounds on CCTV - we have more cameras than any other country in the world, one for every 14 citizens. Yet the police say 80 per cent of CCTV footage is of poor quality, particularly for identifying criminals. Mr Burnham mentioned the role of CCTV in identifying the 21/7 bombers. But after the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes there was no usable footage from any of the CCTV cameras on the bus, Tube or at Stockwell station.

If Mr Burnham really wants to defend his Government's record in creating a surveillance society, I challenge him to come to Yorkshire and debate it before the voters. But I won't hold my breath. It is easier to snipe from the sidelines.

Mr Brown has barred the local candidate from running - not least because he agrees with my position on 42 days, along with many Labour MPs. The truth is that Mr Brown is a bottler who fears the will of the people.

He bottled the General Election when it looked like he could not beat David Cameron. He bottled a referendum on the EU constitution, because he feared he would not win it. Now he is bottling this by-election in Haltemprice and Howden - one place you certainly cannot buy off the voters.

No matter. It is clear from the support I have received from across the political spectrum, and more importantly the country at large, that this is a national debate we can - and must - have.

		By David Davis Published: Sunday, 29 June 08 - 07:46 PM (GMT)

David's article in the telegraph

Yesterday, I announced my intention to resign from the House of Commons, which I have served as an MP for 21 years, and also as shadow home secretary, a position I have held for almost five years, in order to fight a by-election in my constituency of Haltemprice and Howden. Why?

On Wednesday, we witnessed a severe blow to liberal democracy in this country. On the one hand, Gordon Brown extended the maximum period of pre-charge detention to 42 days, sacrificing one of the most fundamental freedoms of every British citizen - the right not to be held in prolonged police detention without being told the charges against you. He sacrificed a fundamental liberty without a shred of evidence that it was necessary. And he did so against the advice of many security experts who warned that it may fuel the very extremism we are trying to defeat.