Andrew Tettenborn

In febrile times, politicians tend to have a touching belief in their ability to pass laws and make men good. The well-meaning, but actually slightly sinister, Protection from Sex-based Harassment in Public Bill, which went through its committee stage yesterday with full support from Labour and no dissenting voices, is a case in point. The proposed legislation is a private member’s Bill brought by Greg Clark, Conservative MP for Tunbridge Wells, but it is broadly supported by the government. At first sight it does very little. It has long been a crime under the Public Order Act to intentionally cause someone harassment, alarm or distress by saying or doing anything threatening, abusive or insulting. This can clearly stretch to covering sexual harassment.

The last year has not been good for the European Union’s image. The Qatargate scandal rumbles on. So far, apart from various functionaries and hangers-on, three MEPs, including a vice president of the European parliament, and one ex-MEP have been implicated in the scandal. Last week, however, yet another festering sleaze scandal broke, this time over the EU’s purchase of Covid vaccines from Pfizer. The scandal is less serious in that no one suggests it involves actual bribery. But it is nevertheless rather more embarrassing because it embraces Commission president Ursula von der Leyen herself.  At issue is the billions paid by the bloc to Pfizer for the vaccines. In 2020 Pfizer had delivered a first batch at the stiffish price of €15.50 a pop.

Say it quietly, especially when there’s a Green listening: but there’s one certainty about Net Zero 2050. It won’t happen. As any honest MP will admit in private, it is stymied not only by the need to keep the lights on following the Ukraine energy shortage, but also for another reason: because no democratic majority will tolerate the cutbacks in their quality of life necessary to maintain the headlong dash to carbon neutrality in 27 years’ time. Unfortunately there is also another certainty about Net Zero. While it remains official policy, however quixotic, corporate capital is being handed a heaven-sent opportunity at the expense of you, me and the country we live in. If you don’t believe this, ask anyone who lives in rural East Anglia, between Newmarket and Soham.

Rishi Sunak senses, rightly, that tough talk on the Channel migrant issue will go down well in both middle England and the Red Wall. One can see why. No small country with overstressed social provision should tolerate an annual influx of irregular migrants sufficient to populate a medium-sized town landing openly on its beaches. That they are from countries where they are in no appreciable danger, can mouth the word ‘asylum’ and then either disappear or use every intricacy of the law to stymie attempts to deport them feels intolerable to many.  Last week Rishi floated an idea to stop this. It would subject those who arrived irregularly on our shores to automatic detention and deportation, and prevent them claiming asylum at all until they were out of the country.

Sadiq Khan has an inveterate desire to show Londoners who is boss: the mayor’s latest wheeze is an expansion of London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez). Khan is seeking to roll out Ulez to all of London’s boroughs from August – along the leafy lanes of Surrey, Kent, Essex and Hertfordshire.  Aside from ostentatious green zealotry, it’s difficult to see any convincing argument in favour of doing so. These areas already have sparser public transport than the rest of London. Charging hard-pressed residents who are unable to afford a fancy car £12.50 a day for the privilege of driving to the station to catch a sustainable train is a slap in the face. It could also backfire by encouraging them to do the whole run by car.

Just as Brexit began with a few harmless-looking chips at what looked like an impregnable concrete wall, something similar may be happening with Britain’s attachment to the European Convention on Human Rights.  The latest episode was yesterday’s ten-minute rule bill from the Tory MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, Jonathan Gullis. His Asylum Seekers (Removal to Safe Countries) Bill was nothing if not direct. Put bluntly, his plan would seek to avoid a repeat of the Rwanda debacle earlier this year by allowing asylum seekers to be flown to Africa, despite any orders from Strasbourg to the contrary. Like nearly all other ten-minute rule bills, everyone accepted this one was entirely quixotic.

There is nothing like abortion to make feelings run high. Termination of pregnancy has been lawful in Northern Ireland since 2020: this year, however, the Legislative Assembly in Belfast turned the screw and passed a further, remarkably authoritarian, Bill. This makes it illegal – anywhere within 100 metres of an abortion clinic – not only to impede access to it, but to do any act ’with the intent of, or reckless as to whether it has the effect of, influencing’ any visitor. In effect, this is the creation of large public zones where, on pain of a £500 fine, no-one is allowed to talk about abortion, hand out leaflets, or even silently pray.

To anyone looking in from the outside, the ongoing argument between Budapest and Brussels over EU subsidies, which flared up again this week, looks both drearily legalistic and eye-glazingly boring. However, as often happens with the EU and its member states in eastern Europe, there is a good deal more to all this than meets the eye. At issue is a tad over €13 billion: €7.5 billion in ‘cohesion funds’ (i.e. regular subsidies to help out poorer states) and €5.8 billion in Covid recovery funds. Both would normally have gone to Hungary without serious question. However, these are not normal times.

The government’s Online Safety Bill is coming to look more and more like some ghastly juridical juggernaut: a vessel grimly unstoppable, even if no-one quite knows where it is heading or where they want it to go. The latest changes to the Bill, announced this week, look very much like an attempt to make the best of a bad job. They leave untouched the provisions of the legislation aimed at safeguarding the young, but slightly relax it as regards others. The aim is the awkward one of placating three disparate constituencies: child protection activists, those desperate to be seen to be doing their bit to bridle Big Tech, and those who value free speech online. And they are a mixed bag. The good news first.

If you are still trying to come to grips with our Supreme Court’s delicate relation with the politics of Scottish independence, spare a thought for the people of New Zealand. Their courts have just dived headfirst into the political pool with no such hesitation as affects our justices. The result is not encouraging. Three years ago, numerous schoolchildren in New Zealand took part in a series of Greta Thunberg-inspired school strikes. Shortly after that, a youth organisation called Make it 16 was formed to agitate for a voting age of 16 rather than 18. Its argument was that if youngsters are likely to be affected by such matters as climate change, they should get a formal say in dealing with them.

If you’re after a lesson in how to lose friends and alienate people, look no further than the government’s cack-handed approach to improving transport in the Red Wall. Last week Grant Shapps announced insouciantly to any northerner who was listening that there was not ‘much point’ (his words) in an important part of the Northern Powerhouse rail project, namely a section of brand-new track covering much of the route between Manchester and Leeds. Although this would have slashed journey times between the west and east coasts at Liverpool and Hull, given the region a source of pride and put Bradford firmly on the rail map, he thought it simpler to put in some improvements on the existing, but already fairly congested, tracks between Leeds and Manchester.

If you think British politics is cracked, spare a thought for Europe. A spat between Germany and Poland is rapidly developing into a full-scale row involving not only those countries but the EU as a whole. Just a couple of weeks ago, Polish foreign minister Zbigniew Rau of the ruling PiS (Law and Justice) party handed an explosive diplomatic note to his German equivalent, Annalena Baerbock, on a visit to Warsaw to discuss security. In it was a formal legal demand that Berlin pay a cool €1.3 trillion in reparations for damage done to the Polish state during world war two. Ms Baerbock instantly made it clear that in the view of the German government the issue of reparations for events 80 years ago was long closed and it did not owe a cent. How will all this end?

Liz Truss's government has taken a deserved pasting in the polls for its slapdash economics, but all is not lost for the Tories: the party is doing a good job of holding the line on some of its more enlightened social policies – not least on ensuring freedom of speech. Justice Secretary Brandon Lewis's appearance at a fringe event yesterday was understandably overshadowed by other events. But his comments are too important to go unnoticed. Lewis told a Policy Exchange meeting he intended to fashion free speech laws to make clear there was a right to say what one thought, even if it offended others.

Brussels appeared to be finally getting serious with a rogue member state this week. A couple of days ago it announced that it would use its power – which it obtained last year – to withhold €7.5 billion (approximately £6.4 billion) from Hungary unless Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz government cleaned up its act on corruption. The EU, it is fair to say, has a point. Like a number of other eastern European countries, Hungary is not known for the trustworthiness of its officials, or for its scrupulous avoidance of nepotism and favouritism in awarding state contracts. Nevertheless, as is often the case with EU affairs, outward appearances can be misleading. The reality is a good deal murkier. But it is also rather more interesting.

A vital part of gamesmanship, according to the British author Stephen Potter, is to disconcert your opponent before they have joined the game. True to form, gamesmanship has already begun in earnest on one matter likely to be high up in Liz Truss’s pending in-tray: the Northern Ireland Protocol negotiations. It comes both from the EU and from Irish nationalists. The Protocol is that part of the EU withdrawal arrangement aimed at preserving the integrity of the EU single market, despite the existence of open borders between the UK and Ulster and Ulster and the Republic.

Opinion polls these days don’t normally raise more then passing interest. But there are always exceptions worth a second look. One such was a YouGov survey out on Wednesday on what people thought about university finance. The big question was whether they believed nearly £30,000 for three years at college was good value for money. Among graduates, many of whom will have paid these fees, the answer (by a margin of well over two to one) was clear. They didn’t. For good measure, nearly half of the graduates polled thought most degrees actually left them worse off overall, against just over a third who thought they led to financial benefits. Many, no doubt, will draw a predictable conclusion.