During the last Parliament I used, snobbishly, to boast that there was no McDonald’s in the whole of my constituency. The worst you could do, if you wanted delicious unwholesome food, was Domino’s in Devizes. But the boundary commission swiped away Devizes and gave me Amesbury and - crucially - Solstice Park retail and industrial estate on the A303. Now I represent not just any McDonald’s but the busiest McDonald’s in the South West of England; also a rare drive-through Greggs; and a range of other destination restaurants not designed to gladden the hearts of the Labour MPs speaking in the debate on obesity last Monday.
I recognise we have a chronic problem here. As a nation we are sick and fat, tired and mentally ill, and a good part of the reason is diet. I don’t think we can tax and regulate our way back to health - let alone prescribe our way there, with miracle pills to make you thin. Ultimately the answer to obesity is people putting less sugary and fatty food into their mouths. But we are programmed to crave food that gives us a kick but is bad for us, and the worse our lives feel the more we crave it. As ever, we need a stronger society, more fulfilling work, more stable families, purposeful activities, supportive communities. This will also help with the opposite, related problem, which I also addressed this week in a meeting with eating disorder charities.
I met with the Defence Minister on Wednesday to discuss the relocation of Afghan soldiers and interpreters from the British Army, to whom we have offered a home so they can escape the Taleban in their own country. Note these are not asylum seekers, nor illegal immigrants (as a Reform UK leaflet falsely states). But there are a lot of them here: Wiltshire takes a large proportion of the Afghans because we have military accommodation which serves as transitional housing until they can be permanently settled in their own homes.
The process has not been easy and I firmly believe that existing communities have a right to complain about the pressure and impact on local schools, on housing, and on the atmosphere and culture of our area.
I was pleased to hear there will be a rationalisation of the multiple schemes currently in place to bring these men and their families to the UK. But most of all I was pleased to hear the Minister confirm that local authorities will not be expected to arrange permanent accommodation for them, and that they are not expected to stay in the area where they are temporarily housed. Indeed we know that most of the Afghans, very understandably, wish to live in cities, not in rural Wiltshire.
The Minister promised that the use of the defence estate for temporary accommodation for Afghan families will reduce this year; and I will hold him to this promise.
The committee examining the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill met for the first time this week, somewhat acrimoniously as some of us feel the process of selecting committee members and expert witnesses has not been fair to those who have concerns about the safety of the Bill. Most of the meeting was used up in an argument about whether we should sit in private to discuss the witnesses - I thought we should not; perhaps a small matter, but I think important. You can watch my speech, involving a fair few interruptions from the Bill’s sponsor Kim Leadbeater, here.
I had a tour of Solstice Park on Friday. Most of it isn’t food outlets but massive distribution operations, including Muller Dairy and Home Bargains (whose lorries are the scourge of our country roads, which I am due to take up in a meeting with the company soon). I had a particular look at the fields (in a hollow, please note, out of view of anywhere) where the developers want to expand the park. I want to see more business sites in Wiltshire, to create space for the high-tech innovative companies and the jobs we need to attract and keep young families in the area. I hope - whether here or elsewhere (for council planners, not me, decide these things) - we can make Wiltshire hum with industry, with minimum extra unsightliness and traffic of course.
This is an artificial landscape. As the brilliant exhibitions at the Amesbury History Centre (do go) show, people have been moving earth around the A303 since 4000 BC. Rachel Reeves has cancelled the Stonehenge tunnel, not out of respect for the landscape and its buried inhabitants but, eccentrically, because she doesn’t think the economy of southern England needs new infrastructure. Nevertheless, we can still make minor adjustments to the folds of the land without, I hope, invoking the wrath of our ancestors, or Tom Holland.