Military spending
I had my first - who knows, maybe my last - outing at the dispatch box this week, in my capacity as shadow defence minister. The Government has refused to commit to a timetable for their promise to raise defence spending, which means the commitment means nothing; and without this new money, not just future but current programmes are put at risk. I asked the minister to at least promise to preserve research and development spending, the vital ingredient to ensure our capabilities remain viable in the fast-changing world of warfare. He refused. See our exchange here. (My colleague James Cartlidge also hammered home the injustice of taxing the education of military personnel’s children - see here.)
The next morning I was on my feet again, this time in a ‘Delegated Legislation’ committee, which is when the Commons devolves a decision to a small group of MPs sitting in a committee room upstairs. It was a formality as the Opposition (represented by me) supported the Government on this occasion - but a very important one, for the legislation we were approving was The Armed Forces Act 2006 (Continuation) Order 2024. Since the Glorious Revolution of 1688 Parliament has insisted on its right to approve the existence of a standing army; without this little annual formality we could have no national defence. You can watch my short speech here.
Hereditary peers
Did you know about the Statute of Marlborough? Thanks to Lucinda Hall for telling me about it. It is the term for a little group of laws, passed here in Marlborough where the peripatetic Parliament was sitting, in 1267, in the reign of Henry III. They remain the oldest laws still in force in England. They consist of two Acts.
The Distress Act ensures - consistent with Magna Carta, bullied out of Henry’s father King John fifty years before - that it was illegal to obtain damages (‘distresses’) from someone except through the courts. As Wikipedia says, the Act ‘in many ways marks the end of feudalism’ in England. It was a marked example of the barons passing a law to protect their own privileges from a tyrannical King, and in doing so protecting the rights of everyone.
This week the House of Commons voted to kick the remaining hereditary peers out of the House of Lords. Of course - well, ‘I guess’ might be better - the hereditaries have to go. But I wish Labour was scrapping them as part of a larger reform package that reduced the influence of the Prime Minister over the Lords. The vote this week will simply increase to nearly 100% the proportion of peers who owe their place to No 10. Our constitution is anomalous, but if we are not careful, removing the anomalies simply takes us back to the days of an over-mighty executive, before the Parliament of Marlborough.
Solar
The other remaining part of the Statute of Marlborough is the Waste Act. This punished tenants for ‘making waste’ to the land they rented.
Yesterday I drove up the escarpment of Salisbury Plain to the site of a proposed solar farm, on land leased from the owners to a shadowy foreign company. This glorious stretch of prime agricultural land will not only be lost to our national food supply but a solar array would despoil - ‘make waste’ - one of the country’s most beautiful valleys, the Pewsey Vale. I made a short film with some local residents (see here) and pledged to fight the policy that allows these hideous, unnecessary, and almost certainly soon-obsolete, eyesores in our green fields. If necessary I will invoke the Statute of Marlborough.
