Jesse Norman

Governments must step up to the mark and clean up our rivers

At a time when political debate is dominated by public concern over pollution and other threats to the environment, few things are more important than the protection of our rivers and the ecosystems, livelihoods and businesses they support.

 

That is the argument I will be making today, in a debate on water quality in the House of Commons.

 

The River Wye, which flows from the middle of Wales through my constituency and on towards the Severn, is a case in point.

 

The Wye is one of the glories of our country, a priceless national asset celebrated for its beauty since the 18th century, when it inspired the first domestic tourism and the aesthetic movement known as the picturesque.

 

Yet the Wye is at grievous risk from phosphate pollution, which destroys river life and natural habitats. It is the victim of what a recent Commons report identified as a “chemical cocktail” of sewage, slurry and plastic in our rivers, only 14 per cent of which meet good ecological standards.

 

The problem is complex, but the path to a solution is well understood and likely to be relatively inexpensive. But bureaucratic delays and inertia have impeded the way forward.

 

Much recent public attention has focused on the effect of sewage discharges, but the much bigger issue is the leaching of phosphate and other chemicals that have built up in the soil over many years of intensive agriculture on both sides of the border.

 

This has been exacerbated by the rapid development of chicken sheds in England and Wales. Chicken litter is a particularly potent source of phosphate, and discharges upstream are naturally carried all the way down the river.

 

Three agencies are crucial to the clean-up: the Environment Agency, Natural England and Natural Resources Wales. All are needed, together with Ofwat, which regulates the water companies, and with guiding support from the Welsh and UK governments.

 

The solution is evident, as I have argued for more than two years. It is for these organisations to develop a single team and a joint long-term cross-agency strategy covering the river from source to mouth. It will require testing, monitoring and enforcement. But once the team and strategy are in place, we will have the framework needed to secure the necessary funding.

 

And it is nothing new. A very similar issue was addressed in relation to the River Tweed, which straddles the border between England and Scotland, as long ago as 1807, and the Tweed is still regulated by its own commissioners. So the precedent is there.

 

It was that pioneering environmentalist Margaret Thatcher who said in 1988, “It’s we Conservatives who are not merely friends of the Earth — we are its guardians and trustees for generations to come.

 

“The core of Tory philosophy and the case for protecting the environment are the same. No generation has a freehold on this Earth. All we have is a life tenancy — with a full repairing lease. This government intends to meet the terms of that lease in full.”

 

She was right, and that obligation remains today. Now the agencies, the regulator and the Welsh and UK governments need to step up to the mark.

 

Published in The Times

Slow Politics Episode 5: Any ideas?

Who’s got all the good ideas in politics these days? Lara Spirit and Matt d’Ancona are joined by Jesse Norman MP, author of biographies of Edmund Burke and Adam Smith.

Click here to listen

My Letter of No Confidence in Boris Johnson

Dear Boris 

 

As you know, I have supported you throughout your career in politics: for Mayor of London in 2007- 8 and 2012, and for Leader in 2016 and 2019.

 

As Prime Minister, you have been dealt a very difficult hand with Covid and Ukraine, and you deserve great credit for much of the way in which the Government has handled these twin crises. Your recent visit to Kyiv was a conspicuous act of leadership.

 

When I stepped down from the Treasury last September, you raised the topic of the next reshuffle, and we discussed the potential for me to run a department of state. 

 

I have always been deeply committed to public service. But recent events have served to clarify the position this country is in under your leadership, beyond any doubt; and I am afraid I can see no circumstances in which I could serve in a government led by you. 

 

First, as Sue Gray’s report underlines, you have presided over a culture of casual law-breaking at 10 Downing Street in relation to Covid. To describe yourself as “vindicated” by the report is grotesque. 

 

Secondly, both in the Queen’s Speech and elsewhere, your current policy priorities are deeply questionable. Breach of the Northern Irish Protocol would be economically very damaging, politically foolhardy and almost certainly illegal. 

 

You are the leader of the Conservative and Unionist party, yet you are putting the Union itself gravely at risk. 

 

The Rwanda policy is ugly, likely to be counterproductive and of doubtful legality. Privatisation of Channel 4 is an unnecessary and provocative attempt to address a political non-issue during a time of crisis, at significant cost to the independent UK film and TV industry. 

 

No genuinely Conservative government should have supported the recent ban on noisy protest – least of all when basic human freedoms are facing the threat of extinction in Ukraine. 

 

Thirdly, under you the Government seems to lack a sense of mission. It has a large majority, but no long-term plan. There is no sign, for example, that it has even begun to get to grips with the need for greater security and resilience in a range of policy areas. 

 

Rather, you are simply seeking to campaign, to keep changing the subject and to create political and cultural dividing lines mainly for your advantage, at a time when the economy is struggling, inflation is soaring and growth is anaemic at best. 

 

Sensible planning has been replaced by empty rhetoric. As a former Energy Minister I can tell you that there is, for example, zero chance that this or any government will be able to build a nuclear power station a year at any point in the next decade. 

 

Worse still: you are apparently trying to import elements of a presidential system of government that is entirely foreign to our constitution and law. 

 

But you are not a president, and you have no mandate other than as an MP, and from the confidence of your colleagues. Attempts to centralise power in 10 Downing Street are not merely yet another ill advised political distraction, but almost certain to compound and accelerate the problems listed above. 

 

In my judgement, all these things are at odds with a decent, proper conservatism: with effective teamwork, careful reform, a sense of integrity, respect for the rule of law and a long-term focus on the public good. 

 

Little could please me less than to have to write in these terms. But someone needs to say it, now. With Brexit and Covid behind us, we are at an inflection point. People are crying out for good government and for warm, engaged, unifying and constructive leadership, in the service of a vision all can believe in. 

 

Neither the Conservative party nor this country can afford to squander the next two years adrift and distracted by endless debate about you and your leadership. 

 

For you to prolong this charade by remaining in office not only insults the electorate, and the tens of thousands of people who support, volunteer, represent and campaign for our party; it makes a decisive change of government at the next election much more likely. That is potentially catastrophic for this country. 

 

For these reasons, and with great sadness, I am withdrawing my support for you as leader, and I have notified this to the Chairman of the 1922 Committee. 

 

I leave it to our colleagues to decide where they stand in relation to these concerns. For the avoidance of doubt, however, this is not a leadership bid. 

 

As ever, Jesse Norman 

 

Member of Parliament Hereford and South Herefordshire

Sterile debates over university expansion miss the point

In many ways, UK higher education has been a great success over the past two decades. But our public debate remains trapped in a sterile tussle about whether more university students is a good or bad idea. We need to move on and ask more fundamental questions about the deeper function, effectiveness and purpose of much of UK HE. 

Bright Blue: Centre Write Interview

Phoebe Arslanagic-Wakefield and Joseph Silke speak with the Financial Secretary to the Treasury about COVID-19 and what it means to be a conservative in modern Britain.

Who are the people who have most influenced your political philosophy?
I’d have to choose Michael Oakeshott, Edmund Burke and Adam Smith, since I have written so much about them, but that is by no means an exhaustive list. The joy of political philosophy is that it continues to be a very lively area of debate and thought. I’ve just written a piece for Prospect Magazine on John Rawls and his book A Theory of Justice, which presents a remarkably useful and prescient set of philosophical tools for thinking about where we are now with COVID-19.

The Spectator: My Clash with Cameron -- The true story behind the Lords reform rebellion

MPs have a standard approach to political biographies, which falls into three phases:  first, preliminary gossip about what will or won’t (always a lot more interesting) be in it; second, mildly salacious enjoyment of the usually tepid leaks and excerpts in the press beforehand; and, once the book comes out, the inevitable furtive rummaging through the index to see if they get any mentions.

Stage three is hardly restricted to MPs, of course:  William F. Buckley famously sent Norman Mailer a book with “Hi Norman” inscribed in the index, knowing Mailer would look there first.

But I hadn’t got anywhere stage three with David Cameron’s autobiography when my indefatigable assistant sent me a couple of spontaneous screen shots that made clear that David had badly misremembered one small but significant episode:  the 2012 rebellion over the Government’s attempt to abolish the House of Lords.

Gentle reader, I led that revolting band of Conservative brothers and sisters -- naturally, we called ourselves the Sensibles -- and hitherto I have rebuffed numerous invitations to spill the beans as to what actually happened.

My view has been that this was a most unfortunate, indeed unConservative, incident best left to posterity.  But now that the sanctity of the lobby has been violated, the true story can be told; including a close encounter of the third kind between myself and the then Prime Minister.

Spectator readers are an educated bunch and, I have no doubt, stern and unbending upholders of the British constitution.  They have browsed the works of Bagehot, cosseted Coke and delved into Dicey. But the same was not true of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government of 2010.

The Prime Minister had made his big, open offer, and had decided that the Liberal Democrat demand for a national referendum on the Alternative Vote was a small price to pay for a stable government with a large majority at a moment of national economic crisis.

The deal was clear and well known.  Conservative MPs would support the AV legislation in return for Liberal Democrat support on boundary reform, the historic neglect of which amounted to anti-democratic gerrymandering.

In May 2011, however, the AV proposal was rightly trounced by voters at the ballot box, by 68%-32%.  Immediately afterwards the Government published a draft House of Lords reform Bill, and set up a Joint Committee under the Labour peer Lord Richard to examine the proposals.

Over the following twelve months, several things became clear.  The first was that the Bill’s title was a misnomer.  Few if any doubted that the Lords needed, indeed still needs, reform; but the Bill effectively proposed its abolition, by turning it over time into an almost entirely elected chamber.

The second was that the Joint Committee was a shambles.  Far from being an impartial chair, Lord Richard was known to favour an elected Lords.  The membership was packed to support the Bill.

Not only did the Committee fail to reach a unanimous conclusion on most of the key issues—destroying any authority it might have possessed—but a group of its members, including six Privy Councillors, took the almost unprecedented step of issuing a minority report.  None of this mattered, though, because the Committee made two majority recommendations, and the Government ignored them both.

The third was that there was serious concern about the Bill from Conservative backbenchers.  This had started early:  with colleagues, I had presented a private letter signed by over 40 Conservative backbenchers to the then Chief Whip on 18 July 2011, a full year before the Bill got to the Commons.  This argued for constructive reform, but unequivocally rejected an elected upper house.  It was a very clear statement of intent, but unfortunately it too was ignored.

I had never voted against the Government before.  As for the other signatories, the vast majority were also not serial rebels but loyal backbenchers—including seven future Cabinet ministers—who wanted to nip a potential constitutional crisis in the bud.

They knew that although our Parliament looks like a bicameral institution, in reality it is not:  it is basically unicameral, with a single deciding chamber, the House of Commons, and a secondary advisory chamber in the Lords, whose function is to examine and give sober second thought to legislation which is often rushed and under-scrutinised in the Commons.

The Lords is thus not in the full sense a legislative chamber. Nothing can become law unless the Commons wishes it so, the Lords never even sees Money Bills, and if absolutely necessary the Commons can pass legislation by itself, irrespective of the Lords.  The Commons has the core legitimacy of election, the Lords the lesser legitimacy of established practice, expertise and effective process. Both are fundamental to our constitution.

But despite its limited powers, the Lords has often proven highly effective.  With its enormous majorities, the Blair government was defeated just four times in the House of Commons over a ten-year period.  Over the same period, it was defeated 460 times in the House of Lords.  Which chamber did the better job of checking executive power?

Turn the Lords into an elected Senate, however, and mark what follows. The new Senate would start to act as a second House of Commons.  It would inevitably become more party-political and less expert.  The quality of legislation would fall.  The new Senate’s emphasis would be on competing with the Commons, not on scrutinizing and amending legislation.

But this is just the start of the problem. The point of elections is to confer power.  Over time the new Senate would argue that it had greater legitimacy than the Commons, since its members had electorates vastly larger than the 70,000-odd voters normal for MPs.

Senators would feel they had a positive obligation to stand up to the Commons, just as MEPs started to throw their weight around after the European Parliament switched from being appointed to being elected in 1979.

Today, when people elect their MPs they elect the government.  That would no longer be true.  Over time Parliament would become more like the US Congress, marked by gridlock between the chambers, greater partisanship and poorer legislation driven by interest-group politics. The flexibility and balance of the British constitution, fragile but intact today and widely admired around the world for over three hundred years, would be destroyed.

The Lords Bill finally came to the Commons in July 2012. Opening the debate, Nick Clegg made clear that if the Bill was opposed in the House of Lords, the Government would use the Parliament Act to drive it through.

The Labour party supported the Bill in principle, but opposed the shortened timetable which the Government had laid out in a so-called Programme Motion.  Securing the Programme Motion was therefore crucial; otherwise the Bill could be filibustered, creating endless delay and preventing the passage of other legislation.

All thus hinged on the votes of Sensible Conservative backbenchers. These had been subjected to huge pressure, including the argument that if the Liberal Democrats did not get their way on the Lords Bill they would kill the boundary reforms, a manifest breach of the agreement between the parties.  (The Conservatives won the 2015 General Election even so.)

Over the weekend the press speculated that a rebellion of 30-40 Tories would be enough to defeat the Bill.  So when on the first day of the debate I published a letter against the Bill signed by 57 Conservative MPs, with more than a dozen further names withheld, the result was mayhem.

The temperature went up another notch later that day with the release of a devastating comment by Lord Pannick QC — famous now from his
exploits in the Supreme Court — which stated in terms that “The Bill does not adequately address the central issue of constitutional concern.”

Faced with this twin political and legal challenge, on the following morning the Government withdrew the Programme Motion, signalling the effective defeat of the Bill.  On the substantive vote itself, 91 Conservative MPs voted against the Government.  It was the largest rebellion by Government MPs on the Second Reading of any Bill since the Second World War.

But for me the previous evening had included personal drama as well. As the vote was called, our rebel whipping operation had swung into action and I had moved in front of the No voting lobby so as to encourage MPs towards it.

David Cameron was clearly very angry about the scale of the defeat, his temper not helped by an email I had sent in good faith to wavering colleagues a few minutes before the vote, which argued that the largest possible rebellion would actually help the PM by killing the legislation outright.

Directly after voting, he strode up and tore a strip off me, jabbing me in the chest with his finger, while I stood there gaping at this unexpected development.  Little in my previous experience had prepared me for a sudden bout of energetic pectoral massage by the Prime Minister of the day.

This modest assault then immediately generated its own mythology, energetically spread by journalists ignorant of what had happened. These myths included the suggestion that my clash with the PM was cooked up between us, to prove to the LibDems that Cameron was serious about the Bill, and that I had been "escorted off the estate" by the Whips.  None of this was true.  In fact, I had a drink on the Terrace with one or two others, and went home.

Perhaps understandably, in his book David passes over the whole episode in silence.  What is more telling, perhaps, is his insouciance then and now about the constitutional issues involved.

That insouciance is widely shared.  One of the more striking ironies of the Brexit debate has been the number of well-known politicians — Nick Clegg, Andrew Adonis and many others — who denounced the House of Lords as an undemocratic monstrosity in 2012, only to sing its praises after 2016 as a sober and expert chamber immune to the winds of populism, when they thought it could be used to delay or prevent the UK’s exit from the EU.  Wisely, the Lords has declined to do so.

The British Constitution is not perfect.  But as this episode and the recent shenanigans over Brexit and the Fixed Term Parliament Act of 2011 remind us, it possesses a deep inherited wisdom which — and this is not a fashionable thought — outstrips individual human comprehension.  It has evolved over hundreds of years as a means not merely to constrain democratic power but to defend it; from monarch and people alike.  You meddle with it at your peril.

The British Constitution has an enviable record of correcting individual foolishness.  Perhaps we all need to spend a little more time with Bagehot, Coke and Dicey.  We might avoid a few blunders, and — who knows? — maybe even engineer some lasting and effective Lords reform as well.

A shortened version of this piece originally appeared on 11 January 2020.

UnHerd: The Tories should have listened to Jesse Norman

James Kirkup, published 30th December 2019

“Without realising it the free-market West, most notably the US and the UK, has sleepwalked into a species of financial crony capitalism that has disguised economic reality, shielded underperformance, cosseted poor management and leached away value.”

In 2011, a junior Conservative MP published a pamphlet, The Case for Real Capitalism, which anatomised the failures that led to the global financial crisis and — by implication — the policy responses that followed. Jesse Norman had been elected for the first time the previous year, and no one took much notice of his work; but looking back, he may well be considered a prophet whose foresight ought to have been perceived by his own party.

https://unherd.com/2019/12/the-tories-should-have-listened-to-jesse-norman/

Sunday Times op-ed: Beyond Brexit, the chance to be One Nation again

A striking thing about this Conservative leadership election is just how unconservative it is. In days gone by one might have expected the candidates to extol the importance of fiscal rectitude, keeping taxes low, deregulation and public spending restraint. But there has been very little of this.

The fact becomes more surprising still when one thinks that the UK is now in its ninth year of economic growth. Inflation and interest rates are low, employment is at an all-time high. The UK’s public finances are at last under control. This is, many would say, the moment to be storing away the grain against the proverbial and inevitable “rainy day”.

Telegraph: No Deal would be bad, but its possibility will get the EU to engage

How should the next Conservative leader and PM deal with Brexit? Only by facing the facts and then acting with energy and decisiveness.

First, we need to acknowledge the mistakes of the past few years. It was a mistake to agree a short Brexit timetable without a clear understanding of how that timetable could be achieved; not to recognise that the narrow but decisive Referendum vote could and should form the basis within Parliament for an agreed withdrawal deal; to allow the EU to dissociate the financial settlement from the overall deal; and above all not to prepare from the outset for No Deal.

Twitter thread: Conservatism, the party leadership, and the future of our country

In recent days I’ve been asked a lot if I would stand for Leader of the Conservative Party. It’s already a crowded field, and my reply has been that the views of my constituents, party members and colleagues should shape that decision, and I will carefully consult among them.

As a campaigner, over the past fifteen years and more, through books and articles, in interviews and speeches, as candidate, MP, Select Committee Chairman and Minister, I have tried to make the case from first principles for a proper, classic conservatism of public service.  That conservatism ties thought and action together, and I have argued for it in politics since 2006:  in Compassionate Conservatism, Compassionate Economics, The Big Society and my books on the ideas and impact of Edmund Burke and Adam Smith. 

Why Burke and Smith? Because they wrote the Operating System for representative government and open markets, for politics and political economy. Their ideas underlie my conservatism. And they have taught me a vast amount about Ireland, Scotland and the Union. 

The same core belief in public service has always inspired me:  in 1989, when I gave up a job on Wall Street to run a charitable project giving away medical textbooks to doctors behind the Iron Curtain, helping build free institutions in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia; it inspired me in 1997, when I left Barclays to do an MPhil and PhD in philosophy and teach at University College London; and over 20 years in working with astonishing organisations such as The Roundhouse in London which my father created, the Hay Festival, and many others in Herefordshire.