Westminster Views | rogergale

Westminster View

April 2025

All Fools` Day seems a light-year away. The World, surely, was a better place on the first of April. Putin`s illegal wat in Ukraine continues unabated of course, the attrition in the Middle East persists and the tide of humanity crossing the English Channel from France to Britain flows on remorselessly as men, women and children flee from persecution in Sudan, Syria, Afghanistan, and further East. But Trump had still to launch his assault on world trade, Pope Francis was still alive, the earthquake in Myanmar had yet to send shockwaves through that country and through Thailand and the local government election campaign was just getting into top gear.

What a difference thirty days can make.

While the Parliamentary by-election, Mayoral elections and County Council elections were of course actually held on May Day with most of the results not announced until May 2nd it is impossible to ignore, in this column, the impact upon the body politic of the United Kingdom that these events have already had with, I fear, worse to come.

It was hard, a year ago, to lose so many colleagues in the General Election and it was no easier, recently, to see good, public-spirited and hard-working Conservative County Councillors wiped out in a political tsunami the like of which most people going to the polls will not have seen before.

Less than a year since the last General Election it is not surprising that an electorate that had so roundly rejected the performance of Johnson and Truss at the polls should not have been yet ready to turn to us again. Kemi Badenoch, as the Leader of the Opposition, has made it clear that rebuilding will be a process over four years requiring careful thought and hard work. The timing of the County Elections was, from a Conservative viewpoint, far too soon.

It is also clear that those who placed their trust in Starmer’s Labour Party have swiftly become disillusioned; with a direction of travel that is harming our economy while hitting hardest some of the least well-off in the Country.

The cut to Winter Fuel Allowance for hundreds of thousands of pensioners at the bottom end of the income scale was a crass first initiative on the part of Chancellor `Rachel from Accounts’ Reeves that beggars belief for political ineptitude; while the Family Farm Tax has sent shockwaves way beyond farmers in the rural communities. And the increase in employers’ National Insurance charges has placed a job-destroying additional burden of cost on hard-pressed businesses - large and small.

Little wonder, then, that the electorate should turn elsewhere to cast votes in protest at a political system that they regard as failing them. It is also clear, though, from the many calls that I have made in person and by telephone, that this was a vote against the established political parties and not a vote for, as he would like to claim, Farage and his rather strange band of candidates. Time and again when I asked prospective Reform voters who their candidate was the answer came back “Don’t know” - and when pressed on policies could not name a single one other than “Well he says he’s going to stop immigration”.

Farage’s expressed intent to “return boat migrants to France” is, as he well knows, not legally possible as we surrendered that right, negotiated by Michael Howard as The Dublin Agreement when Home Secretary, when we left the Europeam Union. The only other `policy’ that I have been able to discern is Farage’s expressed intent to replace the National Health Service with an American-style system of private health insurance. Alright if you can afford it. Terrible if you are poor.

Where the disgruntled voter once turned to the Liberals or to the Social Democrats – if you can remember them - they have now turned in droves to Reform to express their discontent. But a cult whose natural bedfellows would appears to be ‘Alternatif fur Deutschland’ in Germany; Viktor Orban’s party in Hungary; Georgia Maloni’s government in Italy - and Marine Le Pen`s Opposition in France (with unattractive links to Trump`s administration in the United States), cannot be desirable to run a chip shop - never mind either County Councils or Central Government in a democratic United Kingdom.

Both the Labour Party and the Conservative Opposition have to learn from these election results, but the answer is not for either to try to become `Reform-like’; however tempting it may be for Farage to bask in the sunshine of success in the polls, he would do well to remember that his hand is a very long way from the doorhandle of Number 10. Hitherto Reform has been cavalier about candidate selection and only adept at populist sniping from the sidelines. Now they have to withstand in-depth scrutiny and deliver on promises made on flights of fancy.

Back at te beginning of the month The Tramp fulfilled his promise to impose 'beautiful tariffs' scattering these charges liberally and across the world and shattering at a stroke, the global economic order upon which stability depends. The perverse effect of this Presidential tantrum was to wipe billions off share values in the United States and to consolidate the Liberal caretaker, Mark Carney, as the front runner in the race for the Canadian Premiership. The combined effect of Trump’s threat to annex Canada as an American State and the trade war between Canada, of which Commonwealth Country King Charles is the Head of State and the USA , transformed a healthy Conservative lead for Pierre Poilieure into a comfortable win for the former Governor of the Bank of England. Nice one, ‘Mr Transaction'!

Throughout this Trumpian exercise in fiscal bullying Starmer has tried, with some possible success, to hang onto the vestiges of the accord reached in the White House before the Zelensky stitch-up. As a result, UK car sales and exports of Scotch whisky to America might not be hit as hard as some others. There will come a time in the not too-distant future though, when Starmer’s desire to unpick some of the worst commercial effects of Brexit; to recognise that the EU is still one of our largest trading partners; will collide with our `special relationship’ with the USA. At that point we shall see, remembering also AUKAS, whether Starmer really can ride two horses in a three-ringed circus.

It was mid-day on the 11th April , in the middle of the Easter Parliamentary Recess, when we learned that Mr Speaker Hoyle had consented that the House should be recalled to sit on Saturday 12th April to `consider legislative proposals to ensure that the continuation of British Steel blast furnaces is safeguarded’.

Saturday sittings are rare but not unheard of. Under the Succession to the Crown Act 1707 the House must sit , even if adjourned or prorogued , upon the death of a Monarch and so, when Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second died on the eighth of September 2022 the House sat (but was not `recalled`) on Saturday 10th September.

Prior to that the House was recalled during recess to sit on Saturday 18th August 2021 to debate the sudden withdrawal from Afghanistan and also sat, without recall, on Saturday 19th October to consider the withdrawal from the EU. Prior to my own election to parliament the House sat on 3rd April 1982 to debate the UK`s response to the invasion of the Falkland Islands and there have been several other such Saturday sittings since 1948.

All that said, and understanding that once blast furnaces are switched off it is well-nigh if not totally impossible to fire them up again, it beggars my own belief that the Government had not seen this coming and had not taken urgent action to protect the facility and the 2000 or so jobs at risk without having to resort to an emergency recall of parliament.

Unless we are to be dependent upon and potentially held to ransom by other countries for the virgin steel that we will need - to build all manner of necessities including warships - then it is of course necessary that we maintain our capacity to home-produced supplies. It is not just about the jobs, important though they are. It is about our national security.

Which leads me to another industry: North Sea oil and gas.

I am a member of, and supporter of the Conservative Environment Network. I am passionate about the future of the planet for the most self-interested of reasons. I want my grandchildren to be able to enjoy at least some of natural beauties and treasures that I have been privileged to enjoy, both at home and overseas, myself. And I want the species and the habitat in and upon which they live to be preserved and enhanced. I do not, however, want British businesses to be disadvantaged by inordinately high energy costs while other much larger countries and economies are busy polluting this planet at our expense.

We need to maintain the Net Zero objective, certainly, but not at any price. It grieves me to have to say it but Mr Miliband`s rush to targets in 2030 and 2050 are pie in the sky. By continuing on this fools’ errand we are not only damaging our native businesses - but we are also damaging - in the Gadarene rush to build a vast network of pylons and converter stations, the very environment that we are pretending to try to protect!

There is small point in refusing to permit the exploitation of our North Sea Oil and Gas reserves, upon which many thousands of jobs do also depend - if we are simply going to have to import carbon fuels from around the globe - at far greater cost in terms of price and carbon emissions.

The time is long past when we should have acknowledged that for the foreseeable future, this country is going to have to depend upon carbon fuels and allowed the expansion of our North Sea oil and gas reserves. This is essential to bridge the gap while in tandem, we stimulate the development and production of Small Nuclear Reactors, that will give us the green power that we will need for the future. Mr. Miliband`s policy is deeply flawed and it has to change.

I have raised in the House, on a number of occasions, the taxpayers’ subsidy afforded to the Drax Power organisation. I was right to do so and I shall continue to pursue this opposition to an operation that I now believe to be not only envirionmentally destructive, but corrupt.

Dr Krystal Martin and Katherine Egland both hail from Mississippi. I met them in the House of Commons shortly before I participated in a debate on Forestry prompted by my fried Barry Gardiner (Labour, Brent). Dr Martin and Mrs Egland told me of their first-hand experiences of the impacts of the subsidised UK bioenergy industry upon the health, welfare and environment of their communities, adjacent to where Drax is engaged in a major tree-felling operation - as they are also in Louisiana and Alamaa and Canada - as well as Mississippi.

In a pre-debate briefing note prepared by Drax, the company says that “In the US South we take the pulpwood from thinnings which helps to open up the forest canopy and get light onto the forest floor, which in turn supports habitats for insects. wildflowers and species”. Very romantic and what Mr. Gerald Ratner might have described as “crap”.

The last Government and your current government are paying your taxpayers’ money to support a company and an operation, that is using power to cut down carbon-liquidating trees; is using power to turn these trees into pellets; is using power to transport those pellets to the coast; is using power to transport those pellets by sea across the Atlantic, and is using power to transport those pellets from the West Coast port to the Drax power station in Yorkshire.

But the Drax `environmental clock’ only starts ticking at the gates of the power station – so all of the hideous CO2 costs accrued in the previous process are effectively, for UK CO2 accountancy purposes, written off. And that, my friends, is one big corporare scam condoned by the Government of the United Kingdom.

We might be forgiven for suggesting that Trunp’s claim that he would end the war in Ukraine “in a day” - puts a whole new perspective in the understanding of “The Longest Day” - but happily we now have clarification from a White House spokesman who tells us that this election pledge was `A joke’. I doubt that my Ukrainian friends, whether fighting on the front line or living as refugees from war in the UK, will fall about laughing at this little `jest’ but at least His Holiness Pope Francis had the opportunity to give a piece of his mind to Trump’s Spokesman on Earth, the second-rate Mr Vance, before the Pontiff shuffled off this mortal coil.

On a happier note, was it not wonderful that the Good Lord granted Pope Francis the strength and fortitude to deliver his Easter message and celebrate mass with the assembled faithful in St Peter’s Square before recalling him to Head Office, What a way to go. As an Anglican, I join my Catholic friends, and particularly the Sisters from Minster Abbey who I am privileged to represent, in saying may Pope Francis rest in the peace that he so richly deserves.