This is my speech on the government’s bill to increase the number of Ministers who can be paid a salary. I have taken the Hansard record of my remarks and  have added to the speech, as I was kept to a short time limit.

 

This Bill is an opportunity for the Government to think more widely about how the tasks of Ministers can be made a bit easier, how the chances of success can be enhanced and how the public can feel that they are getting more out of their Ministers who are  being paid for the jobs that they are doing. There is plenty of scope to improve the clarity about what the Ministers are meant to be doing, how well they are doing it and how they are mentored and supported in their jobs.

When I was the executive chairman of a large quoted company, it would never have occurred to me that it would be good practice to go into the office one day, without having alerted any of my senior colleagues, and tell them that I had decided to swap them all around just for the sake of it. I did propose  that I was going to make the sales director the finance director and the engineering director the sales director, and that I was going to sack somebody else, all on the same day. I would not think that that would have a happy result. Even more obviously  I would not  have sent out the newly appointed senior executives to talk to the press and customers about what they were going to do in their new jobs before I had talked to them at length  about the changes that were needed, and before they had talked to their new staff and got on top of the issues.

 

Successive Prime Ministers have been quite wrong to have these big clear-out days as some assertion of power, Those whom they sack will never like them again and quite a lot of those whom they appoint are given jobs that they do not want or understand, so they also harbour a grudge about the experience of the reshuffle. We need something better than that. The newly appointed are expected by Parliament and the media to be instant experts in their new roles.,

We need senior Ministers mentoring and looking, in private, at the performance of more junior Ministers. Leading Cabinet members should be mentored and their performance reviewed by the Prime Minister and other Cabinet members perhaps by the Deputy Prime Minister. All other Ministers should be mentored by their departmental ministerial heads.

Aims should be few in n umber, challenging to achieve, and linked to the main goals of the government. The Home Secretary for example should be expected to smash the gangs, and have as one of her targets big reductions in numbers of illegals entering the country. The Health Secretary should have targets to boost NHS numbers of  treatments and consultations and get waiting lists down.

I wonder if it is not time to be a little bolder and change the language. Why do we call most of our Ministers junior Ministers? People think it a privilege, necessity or requirement to see a Minister, so we do not need negative language  to undermine the Minister’s authority before the meeting begins. Surely each is either a Minister or a Cabinet Minister. A Cabinet Minister is a super-Minister with strategic obligations and ultimate responsibility for the departments in which the other Ministers are working. That could be extremely helpful from the point of view of working out the structure.

I think that we need only two main types of Minister: heads of department or Cabinet Ministers paid a higher salary; and other Ministers paid the Minister of State salary. I think the Parliamentary Secretary salary is still quite low given the magnitude of many of these jobs and the responsibilities that they entail. Some Parliamentary Secretary jobs do not amount to much and can be absorbed b y the Minister of State  supervising or working with them.  Each Ministerial job needs to  be a defined area of powers, duties and expertise, with clear targets to assess achievement. The way to decide how many Ministers are needed is to map the powers and duties  the government wishes to exercise first, to see what is the right number of Ministerial commands.

I would strongly recommend that we consider some kind of performance review system. One of the things that made reshuffles so particularly difficult for many of my ministerial colleagues when we were undergoing them was that they had absolutely no idea whether the Prime Minister and the Whips thought they were doing well or badly and whether they were going to be promoted, demoted or shuffled sideways. Sometimes, they were sitting there with their phone for a day or so while the reshuffle agonisingly went on and were not even rung up and told that they were just going to stay put—which might have been good news, a relief or a disappointment. On performance, therefore, we need a system where they are mentored, assessed and allowed to say that they need better resources or more support.

As a general rule, it would be much better if we did not change Ministers so often. Looking at the Governments of the last 25 years—Labour, Coalition or Conservative—there has been an in-and-out far too frequently. I would have thought the norm should be that you appoint somebody for a four to five-year Parliament as a Minister. If they then do very well and you want to promote them, that is a bonus; if you have to manage them out because they are so dreadful, you do so only after giving them  chances to improve and trying to help them do a better job, and then you do it in an orderly and sensible way. There would be a bit of movement but you would not have these blow-up days when everybody is put at risk. Knowing a Minister’s past, wishes and expertise would enable more suitable appointments to be made, to reduce the unacceptably high loss rate most governments have experienced through loss of  Ministers for past or recent conduct.

This might start to work rather better. It takes four years for a Minister to read their way in, get used to working with their officials, and put in place the laws and the budget programmes they want to and then see the results of their labour—whereas most of us were never allowed to see the results of our labour because we were moved on to some other crisis point or difficulty before we had seen the whole thing through. You would not normally do that in a business.

I make these modest suggestions to the Leader. I hope she will pass them on to the Prime Minister, because I think government would be much better if Ministers were looked after and mentored but also expected to perform, and if we had a more orderly process for appointing and removing. It does seem that, with the current system, in all too many government cases, too many people are still selected who have bad histories that come to revisit  them in an unfortunate way as soon as they become Ministers. It would be much better if more time were given to the selection, once you had set up an initial Government, and there were more conversations with people to find out what they were good at and wanted to do, and a bit about their background, to avoid embarrassment.

I have always found it crucial to success in a organisation to appoint people to posts they want to do, where they already have the expertise or where they will give freely of their energy and time to acquire the skills they need. The parties in my experience have often not done a good job at getting to know the people they have as MPs so they have failed to put  more round pegs into round slots. Being a Minister is demanding and not a regular job. You are on call 7 x 24 every week, you work weekends and evenings as needed, you have to go the extra distance to get things done and to ensure the public’s wishes  and interests are upheld. In response  Ministers should not be prey to instant dismissal for no good reason, should  not be left in the dark about what they  is meant to achieve, and  not be ignorant of how well or badly they are doing or are thought to be doing.

The government proved to be so bad at international law when it came to the Chagos give away. They seemed unaware that the ICJ could not make a binding judgement to make us give the islands to Mauritius  given the Treaty limitations we imposed on their power when we joined. They seemed unaware of the binding Treaty with the US to set up the joint Diego Garcia base which prevents us from giving the islands away.

Worse still, they got into a complete pickle over human rights and colonial matters. Normally keen to hound the UK for past alleged misdemeanours as a colonial power, they have ridden roughshod over the rights of the people  who were living in our colony of the British Indian Ocean Territory before a Labour government in 1966 forced them out. They treated them badly then, had to grant UK citizenship to many and now are treating them atrociously despite their UK citizenship.

6 Chagossians decided they wanted to go back to live in the islands they were forced out of. Choosing one many miles away from the sensitive base at Diego Garcia, they have been told to leave by an angry and aggressive UK government. The government lost a court case over the issue of whether they could return to their homelands but still harries them and the people and boats that wish to keep them supplied whilst they establish new homes.

A government which is unable or unwilling to interdict any illegal migrant  boat or shadow fleet tanker in UK home  waters has boarded a small supply boat seeking to help the Chagossians, and has sought to prevent them receiving some of the supplies they need for their settlement. Why are they so hostile and so unhelpful? Why do they  not accept the judgement that people thrown out of their homeland by a colonial power have rights to resettle when the islands apart from the military base are empty and have been allowed to return to nature? Why are they blocking the delivery of a fast small boat to them so the people there could get to medical facilities in a hurry if needed? The NHS pays big bills to provide boats for our small home islands where people might need to be rushed to a hospital. The government has a duty of care towards the Chagossians which it is not fulfilling.

Why bother to get elected as the governing party if all you want to do is to give the task of governing away to Brussels?

Why get into office, tax some small farms out of business, spend subsidies on getting farmers to stop growing food and then say your big idea is to export more food we do not grow to an EU that does not want it? Are they aware of our massive trade deficit in food with the EU and how the EU will want rules that boost their exports to us?

Why get into office, double up on net zero policies that lead to a big acceleration in the rate of closure of high energy using businesses, and why ban all new oil and gas developments at home? Why be so keen to sign up to even higher levels of carbon taxation and carbon tariffs on non EU imports, to put up the cost of living and and ensure the UK closes down more industry? Why is imported CO 2 OK but domestically produced less voluminous CO 2 not OK?

Why get into office by promising to smash the gangs that bring in so many illegal migrants, only to want to sign up to a Youth Scheme which will mean many more EU migrants coming to the UK to study at our expense under Erasmus or to seek homes and work here? Why pretend this is not a partial restoration of freedom of movement under EU approved rules?

Why say aligning us with EU laws – which means making us accept any EU law they care to impose – will increase our growth rate? It did  not do so when we joined the EEC, nor when the single market was “completed” in 1992. More laws, more taxes and more Danegeld sent to the EU will not make us richer or generate more well paid jobs here.

I  have read plenty of badly informed articles, with some saying pensioners must keep the triple lock on the state retirement pension as the pension is still low, and from those saying the best test of a government’s serious intent to control the benefit bill is to ask them to remove the triple lock. They mainly assume the state pension  is just a universal benefit and see it as  a contest between the generous and the mean, between the high spenders and the controlled spenders. In practice is not that easy, as the pension is  a contributory benefit or an entitlement earned by making NI contributions over a lifetime. People get different levels of pension based on their contributions, and  the NI fund has to balance the tax in with the costs of the contributory benefits paid.

The reformers often have no idea what they are reforming. If for example a government said it would remove the option of a 2.5% increase in a year of low inflation and low wage growth, it would make little difference to the long term costs given the UK tendency to higher inflation. If it removed the wages link there would be savings so pensioners would be worse off, but it would also break the promise of what is a contributory scheme.  If someone does not pay in for enough years they get a lower pension. If someone was paying in for a private pension they paid lower NI and get a lower state pension.

The National Insurance Act 1946 and National Assistance Act 1948  as amended by the Social Security Act 1992 and 1999 is the governing law. These lay out that all the National Insurance Contributions are paid into a fund. Under the 1992 Act Ministers have to set contribution rates of NI in relation to “the general level of earnings, the balance on the Fund and payments expected to be made from it in future.” The Government Actuary has to report on the impact of upratings on the fund. This government decided in its first budget to make a large increase in NI presumably taking into account the upratings it awarded.

The last accounts for the Fund to March 2025 show that the fund received £130.9 bn in NI contributions that year with other income of £7.3bn, primarily interest on investments. It paid out £143 bn  leaving an annual deficit of £7bn. That left it with a balance for future payments of £79bn. It needs to keep a cash reserve to make payments on a continuous basis.  The main contributory benefit paid out was the pension, at £136.9bn. There was a £5bn payment for contributory ESA and £200m for contributory JSA. The Fund  also covered the modest  costs of the Pensioner Christmas bonus. The next report may show the extra NI paid has created a surplus.

Of course a government  with a majority could repeal all the legislation and say that NI is now simply a general tax not giving people any right to a State pension. They could then legislate to make the State pension a normal benefit, with  means testing  or still available to all regardless of income. It could become a universal benefit which you got whether you had worked and paid NI or not. Means testing it would be robbing people of the pension they have paid in for  over any years of paying NI under the Contributory system.

The best way to control the costs of the pension without having to tear up the contributory principle, abolish the Fund and upset many pensioners is to increase the age at which you can draw the pension. Each year of increase in the age saves roughly 7% of the cost. The current pension age is 66. It will rise to 67 by 2028. Legislation says it will rise to 68 by 2046, but governments have announced their wish to bring this forward to 2039. It would make sense to legislate to get to 68 by say 2035 and to 69 by 2045 to increase the savings. People who still want to retire earlier than these later ages should have an option to pay additional NI contributions into the Fund in their later years in employment to buy themselves a full State pension at an earlier retirement age. Alternatively they could retire earlier with a lower State pension where they had private pension or savings so they did not need to claim top up benefits.

In my youth there was general optimism that things year by year would get better, thanks to technology and progress. The luxuries of the few became the norm for the many as free enterprise companies made affordable cars, fridges, tvs, washing machines, gas central heating and other domestic comforts. By the early 1970s the technical frontiers had been pushed to allow supersonic jet travel slashing the time to get from London to New York and men were walking and driving on the surface of the moon. In the 1980s came the mobile phone and in the early years of the 21 st century the internet arrived to transform so much.

Today we seem to be going backwards. Supersonic travel has been phased out with no plans to resume. Men no longer walk on the moon as the US and China seek to get back there at huge cost with different rockets and capsules to the successful 1970s ones. We have decided to go back to wind power which was ditched for coal then oil and gas as they are more reliable. Power boats go faster and carry heavier loads than sailing vessels. Gas fired power stations work all the time whilst solar and wind power is intermittent. Wind power is bound to be dearer as you need back up for windless days, storage and extra grid capacity. The government tries to make gas powered electricity dearer by burdening it with high carbon taxes and only allowing it to produce when there is no wind which means the capital cost is higher per unit of electricity actually allowed and sold. The whole UK energy policy is self harm on a huge scale, burdening consumers with big bills and de industrialising the economy at a terrifying pace.

Householders are told they need to buy much dearer domestic heating systems and dearer electric cars, undermining the living standards and aspirations of people on modest incomes. This is the opposite of the post war consumer led growth that brought increased prosperity for the many. Now many do own cars government pillories motorists and invents ever more taxes and charges to deter use.

In Ireland there are big protests against greedy government using higher oil and gas prices as an opportunity to raise yet more tax from people needing fuel for their homes and jobs. In the UK people are angry about the way government cashes in,  over taxing these necessities.

Sloppy legal advice coupled with a wish to punish  the UK for imagined sins of colonialism led to the ridiculous idea of giving away the Chagos islands. The advocates wrongly thought the International Court of Justice could make us surrender them, when our sign up to that court exempted Commonwealth and defence matters. They failed to see that the UK is bound in international law by the US/UK Diego Treaty to keep the freehold of the islands all the time the US has a base there. They wanted to give the Chagos to Mauritius, 1200 miles away and never the owner of the islands. This would have made Chagossians colonists of another  foreign country.  The so called champions of de colonisation ended up ordering  the Chagossians to keep away from their islands that a previous Labour government had evicted them from!

I pay tribute to those who helped fight and win this battle to keep Chagos and to support the Chagossians. Adam Holloway and leading Chagossians were brave and determined, going there and re re establishing settlement on the islands. A group raised money and fought a court case in the UK courts on their behalf, and forced the government to delay and to think again. The Lords produced a spirited opposition to the legislation and pointed out that the government could not advance its Mauritius sell out  Treaty before it had amended or cancelled the US Treaty.

The right answer would be to let the Chagossians who wish return to suitable islands away from Diego Garcia to do so, and to help them. The US should be reassured that we will keep the freehold of our joint base, and continue to keep the seas near it free of fishing vessels and spies. The marine environment should continue to be fully protected. We would save the £35 bn this government was foolishly planning to give away to retain use of the base over the years ahead.

Our times have been changed by the digital and the  Green revolutions.

The digital revolution is bottom up, driven by strong popular demand for everything from on line retail to downloaded entertainment, and from  social media to business computing. The US has swept all before it with its seven digital giant companies dominating the space in the advanced  and non aligned world. China has developed  its own powerful parallel systems for itself and its alliance of autocracies.

The Green revolution has been largely top down, pushed onto a reluctant consumer by subsidies, bans, taxes and rules. It has been mainly a feature of the EU and UK.  They have been willing to sacrifice large swathes of their high energy burning and fossil fuel based industries, whilst turning to Chinese imports for many of the net zero replacements. China has adopted it to exploit the market opportunity it sees in selling batteries, electric cars, solar panels and wind  turbines  to the West, whilst itself continuing to increase its use of coal and gas, increasing its own CO2 output. The US has shifted from being a believer to going for massive growth in its fossil fuel sector. The US sees cheap reliable fossil fuel energy as the way to rebuild its industrial power.

We  have witnessed the emergence of China as the rival and competitor to the USA for world power and influence, the decline of Europe and the rise of India, Brazil, Indonesia and other populous countries as they they grow faster.  China can usually rely on Russia, North Korea, Cuba, and Iran. The US has worked with NATO, the EU, the leading members of OPEC, South Korea, Japan and the Philippines.

US power rests on many foundations. There is the superior force and technology of the large US military, with its capacity to intervene anywhere in the world through a carrier task force or long range warplanes. There is the leading role of the dollar and US commercial banks in world, trade and finance. There is the leadership the US usually gives to NATO as its majority donor. There is the grip US technology companies have over every family and business throughout the free world by supplying the software, communications, data storage and the rest that allow people to live their lives and businesses to pick up and process orders. There is the influence of US film and media  entertaining and informing many in the world.

Today this power is under the microscope. Has the US won the war in Iran as they claim, when the Straits are still not open and the Revolutionary Guards still control the Iranian people? Is the yuan and an alternative trade and banking system growing faster as China and Russia seek alternatives to US directed activity? Will the US break up NATO in anger over the refusal of European countries to offer more help against Iran? Will there be more challenges to the US story? Or will the US with its growing control over oil and gas worldwide come to exert more power in a world which may think green but acts fossil fuel?

Low tax rates, plenty of cheap energy, and a welcome for innovation and technology are three essentials for fast growth, high productivity and high per capita incomes.  The present UK government in going for higher taxes, dearer energy and EU levels of restriction on business innovation has turned its back on growth and success.

The top group in the world GDP per head league comprises Luxembourg ($145,000) , Switzerland ($116,000), Ireland ($110,000) , Singapore ($97,000), Iceland ($94,000), US ($92,000) and Norway ($90,000) . Two of these are EU members, Luxembourg and Ireland, who have got away with very low corporate tax rates attracting plenty of international financial and technology business to book profits with them. Switzerland and Singapore have also made themselves attractive business, investment and financial centres. Norway has used oil, gas and hydro energy to build a national wealth fund out of the revenues. The US has combined cheap fossil fuel energy  leapfrogging to be the world’s largest oil and gas producer, with dominance in the digital revolution creating the nine largest quoted corporations worldwide.

The Europeans along with Japan and South Korea create a middle grouping. The EU’s GDP per head is now less than half the US, with Korea about to overtake it, and with Japan around the same level. Germany ($60,000) and the UK ($56,000) lead this group with Greece as low as $26,000 . Spain ($38,000) ,  Italy ($43,000)  , France ($51,000) share the group’s slow growth characteristics. The EU members and the UK are held back by dear energy, over regulation, and a failure to create conditions where home grown technology businesses can flourish and grow into world scale companies.  This group of countries is falling further and further behind the US, with a  few Asian exceptions like Taiwan and South Korea.

China and Russia on $15,000 hover just above the world average of $14,000.  Mexico ($14,000), Brazil ($11,000), South Africa ($7,000) and India ($3,000) help keep the world average low. China is now growing at around 5% per annum and India faster. Over this century to date the US has grown twice as fast as the EU. The UK seeking closer ties with the EU is linking itself eveer more firmly to a proven slow growth or ,no growth model. EU economies are digital colonies of the great US corporations. They are de industrialising rapidly as their penal self harming n et zero policies destroy once great engineering, vehicle, steel, glass, ceramics, textile, petrochemical  and other industries.

I have had cause before to point out that this PM guided by  international law is particularly bad at understanding international law. He was unaware the ICJ cannot make binding judgements over Chagos. He was unaware of the need to amend the US/UK Treaty on Diego Garcia before even  thinking of giving the island away as the US has a Treaty veto over the UK surrendering the freehold to protect their investment in the base .  He has been opining on international law in the US/Iran war without calling out Iran’s breaking of international law by imposing charges on ships using the seas for navigation which are banned  under the Law of the Sea.  A country can only charge for use of a man made canal, not for waters close to its shore. The UK is not allowed to charge people for using the English Channel, a similarly narrow waterway to the Straits of Hormuz.

So let us look at his silly interpretation of the law of war. He said the UK and US could use bases to defend themselves but not to attack an enemy. If that was international law and all obeyed it there would never be a war. The laws of war allow a country to attack for military necessity to get an enemy to submit. They need to avoid civilian casualties, and ensure only proportionate civilian deaths where civilians are enmeshed with legitimate military targets. There are rules against torture, deception using symbols like the Red Cross and against certain particularly savage types of weapon.

What Starmer is saying is impossible for our armed forces. He is saying that our bases cannot send out force to attack an enemy about to attack us. They have to wait and then try their best to shoot down the incoming missiles, drones  and shells. In person to person  combat it would  imply a soldier needs to wait until he has been shot at before returning fire which would then only be possible if the enemy had missed the first time. It is this doctrine which can lead  to many past soldiers being investigated for alleged war crimes when they were acting under orders to take pre emptive action against defined enemy combatants.

All this war so far he has made out that the UK is not at war with Iran. It is true most of us  did not  want to go to war with Iran and Parliament and PM never declared war on Iran. It is also true Iran treats us as a combatant because it sees our bases , personnel and weapons as part of a US led system in the Middle East. It has been shooting at our people and facilities. Our personnel and weapons have been used to shoot down Iranian missiles and drones. The PM lives in a parallel universe, seeing the polls say the war is a bad idea. He then conjures up press events saying he is working to de escalate the conflict, yet he fails to talk to Iran or the US or Israel who are the powers that could de escalate if they wanted to.

Yesterday he went to the Middle East to thank UK military personnel in the conflict. What did he do whilst there to engage the combatants? What is his plan to create a lasting peace? Will he at last condemn the Iranian idea that they should levy a toll on ships and decide who can use the freedom of the seas off their coasts under threat of being blown up if they fail to comply? Is HMS Dragon still the only destroyer or frigate we have that can do anything? When will it be fully ready?

Pakistan managed to delay the threatened intensification of the US/Israel/Iran war. A very worried and angry President Trump accepted the ten point plan as part of another negotiation. That ten point plan is said to include Iran controlling and charging for use of the Straits, US withdrawal from Middle Eastern bases and US promises against future military intervention. It is unclear what the US gets in return without seeing language on the nuclear issue which began the conflict. Presumably the US will still argue for its rather different fifteen point plan. The US can claim it has destroyed a lot of Iran’s military capacity to do more harm.

If a final deal does indeed deliver control of the Straits to Iran and allow them to levy a tax or charge on shipping, that is an important win for Iran. It is also another cost and risk to business in the Middle East.  It is clearly a big improvement on the current defacto  position of no western cargo getting through and major disruption of Asian supplies. The US presumably rejects the Iranian demand to pay them reparations but high levies on trade is a form of doing that.

What do you think Trump should do now? Can both sides credibly claim a win as they wish to do?