The Big Picture

I wonder how many of you have flown off for your well-deserved holidays to sun-drenched beaches and tropical paradises where democracy is only a dream? The Maldives, perhaps, or Dubai? Then there are the countries where British forces are fighting under UN mandates to uphold Governments that have been duly elected by their people – in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Against a global background, how odd it is that back here in South Wiltshire, we’ll be lucky if one third of those entitled to vote bother to do so on Thursday May 3rd. Please be sure to use your vote in the District Council Elections.

Up at Westminster, we are also contemplating a new Prime Minister – and whether it will be an election or a coronation. Whoever he is (and there are no female contenders so far) he will not need to ask The Queen to dissolve Parliament for a General Election until 2010!

Where has all the money gone?
At least as important as who will be our next PM, is who will be the next Chancellor of the Exchequer – and what will relations be between the occupants of Numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street.

As we learned last month, it is not the Budget Speech that tells us what is happening to our economy, but the documents, tables and departmental press releases that come after it. Then the financial journalists have a field day and tell us something more approximating to reality.

What is clear to us all is that Britain is overtaxed, over-regulated and under-performing. Gordon Brown has pushed our economy down from fourth to fifth place in the world league. The pips are squeaking not just for the rich, but for pensioners and hard-working people on modest incomes and from public-sector employees to the typical small family businesses we rely on in our rural economy.

The Green Agenda
The debate about green taxes is important for two reasons. First because we need to reach some sort of consensus on how much we should modify our personal and collective behaviour when it comes to carbon emissions as a contributing factor in climate change.

Secondly, because we will need to agree just how we use tax to achieve lower carbon emissions. Smoking kills – so most of us accept penal taxes on tobacco which deter its use and help finance the NHS. We all gain. Alcohol tax deters over-indulgence, thus cutting consequences of drunken behaviour – or we thought it did until our community started to suffer from binge-drinking and its very unpleasant consequences. Now we have been warned by the medical profession that alcohol tax should take a big and early hike – or else.

Both those taxes seek to change public behaviour as well as raise revenue. That is how it should be with green taxes. But I’d like to go further. I don’t like tax for its own sake. I think that as a nation the Government is already spending too much of our money. So any green taxes imposed should be offset by tax reductions elsewhere. That way tax encourages us to change our ways, but the Chancellor takes his hand out of our pocket.

In defence of freedom
Whichever way we look at it, our whole way of life depends upon the freedom we take for granted to go about our daily business. I mind very much that too much of our personal freedom has been eroded as security and the law takes its toll of that liberty in the name of the war on terrorism.

Ultimately, the security of western civilisation depends on collective action. That is what the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation is all about. Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has evolved into a new partnership and it has had to come to terms, like it or not, with European Security and Defence arrangements. The Commons Defence Committee, on which I serve, is undertaking an Inquiry into the future of NATO. Personally, I think we are right to play our part in collective European defence operations – but I am deeply sceptical of the need to duplicate NATO by paying for a separate European Defence Operational HQ.

In Paris recently I met the President’s Defence Advisers at the Elysee Palace as well as politicians and the military. It is clear that France recognises that she, too, ultimately depends on NATO in spite of her attachment to EU institutions. As one distinguished defence strategist put it to me, ‘The French will always talk the talk, but never walk the walk’!

Later, in Copenhagen, we listened to Ministers, MPs and think-tanks. The Danes, who are solid NATO partners, are regretting their Maastricht opt-out of European defence co-operation. They may be small in numbers but their armed forces are very professional and stand shoulder to shoulder with British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are fed up with having to leave the room every time an EU military operation is discussed.

Brave new world?
We learnt a thousand years ago never to underestimate the Danes. Their time may soon come again to strut the world stage! Global warming is melting the Greenland ice sheet – and Greenland belongs to Denmark. There are good prospects for finding huge reserves of oil, hitherto inaccessible, which could lead to substantial economic migration of people to Greenland.

Denmark also says it owns a strategic island that is the subject of a territorial dispute with Canada. If the Danes are right, within a decade a new North-West Passage could open up a new shipping route between China and Europe – and the Danes will control it. What was that about Danegeld?

Robert Key MP
27th March 2007