George Freeman

Last year I voted to give Kim Leadbeater’s Assisted Dying Bill a second reading in the House of Commons. I had many concerns but thought it was right for Parliament to debate this issue and for the Bill to be able to begin its journey through Parliament. As is often the case, the Bill met stiff opposition under scrutiny in the House of Lords and ran out of time. Today I voted against the same Bill as it was reintroduced. Why? My position on assisted dying hasn’t changed: I support a change to the law to allow doctors to provide patients facing a painful, demeaning and humiliating death in the final stages of a terminal disease to die with dignity.

Last week’s budget has transformed the political landscape. The welfare cap, new savings and pensions freedoms and ‘NISA’s, have all been much commented on. So too other micro measures, like the very welcome continued investment in science and innovation for the innovation economy, and support for exports. But I think the events of Wednesday went far beyond entrenching the defining key fiscal reforms of ‘Osbornomics’. It laid down the dividing lines on which we will fight, and can win, the next election. And as we saw in the Chamber on Budget day it has brilliantly exposed the growing tensions between Ed Balls and Milliband, who couldn’t agree how to respond. This is a slow-fuse torpedo Budget which has holed Labour amidships.

What does a Tory eurosceptic look like? Loud chalk-stripe, a flash of red braces and the faintest whiff of a lunch-time gander at the Members’ wine list. Right? Wrong. The economic trauma of the crash of 2008 is demanding that just as Conservative modernisation needs to be rebooted to suit the new Age of Austerity – with a focus on bold economic reformism to tackle welfare traps, worklessness and failing schools instead of the cultural gesturism of early modernisation – so too the crisis demands a rebooted euroscepticism.  The Tory Party in Parliament has been transformed by the arrival of the Cameron generation: more entrepreneurial, impatient, ambitious and global in our outlook.

You know you’ve been in politics too long when you're onto your tenth 'Red Tape Challenge'. I remember Neil Hamilton as Deregulation Minister in the Major Government in ’92 promising to slash the jungle of red tape. Every time I cheered. Every time the flood of Regulations and Directives kept pouring out of the Whitehall and Brussels machine. But hardened Red Tape Analysts of all stripes will notice something a bit different about yesterday’s news of the Prime Minister's commitment to implement the deregulatory proposals of the Business Task Force. He has explicitly linked it to the historic Renegotiation and Referendum strategy launched in his Bloomberg speech. So this time we'll actually have a chance not just to stem the flood of regs, but to turn off the stopcock.