Rupert Matthews

My views on the economy are simple. Government should be there to ensure fair play, then let everyone just get on with it.
I run a small business and know that the best thing that a government can do is leave people alone to run their own affairs. We need a judicial system to enforce contracts and a government to ensure a sound money supply, but otherwise workers and managers should be free to do as they see fit. Red tape and regulation is strangling British business and destroying jobs.
The reason I joined the Conservative Party in the first place was because I wanted to help Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit set British business free from the trades unions, from nationalisation and from state control. I saw proud, profitable companies being laid low by union bullies and stifled by government control. There had to be a better way, and there was.
That was back in 1984. We have won those battles, but new dangers have arisen. Those who once sought to control the economy through nationalisation now seek to do so through regulation. One of the reasons that I don’t employ any permanent staff is because of the hideous load of paperwork and regulation that would be involved. Instead I hire freelancers on a project-by-project basis. I am happy as I get skilled staff for the job, they are happy as they are paid a fair sum for the work involved. I am lucky to be in publishing where flexible working is widespread. Not everyone is so lucky. Many small businesses struggle because of the regulations and red tape with which they are forced to comply - and the penalties for ignoring even the smallest edict can be eye-watering. No wonder our economy is slowing.
What is needed is a government that actually understands how business ticks. What it is that workers want, what it is that managers want - not what it is that bureaucrats want.
Yes, Labour’s taxes are too high. Yes, pensioners get a rough deal from Labour. And yes, the dependency culture should be tackled.
But what we really need is sound money, sound justice and parliamentarians who have not spent their entire working lives as bureaucrats or politicos.

2) Crime

The job of the police is to catch criminals, not act as a branch of Labour’s social engineering project.

Everyone knows that disorder, crime and threatening behaviour are getting out of hand. Most people know what to do about it. But Labour and the do-gooding establishment prefer to indulge their own pet theories and priorities rather than knuckle down and actually get the job done.
You don’t need me to tell you that the levels of crime that we all experience is on the up. Nor do I need to rehearse all the facts and figures that show that criminals are more likely to get away with their crimes now than at any time in living memory. Nor that drugs lie behind much of the petty crime that blights our communities.
What I will tell you is what I think lies at the heart of the problem and what we should do about it.
There is in any society a minority of nasty, evil people. There is a slightly larger minority of people who will behave badly if the opportunity presents itself to do so without any apparent penalty. Young men are particularly prone to get into fights, especially if they have been drinking, or to engage in burglary, theft or mugging.
For the first category there is not much that can be done except to catch them and lock them up so that they cannot commit any more crimes. For the second and larger category there is much that can be done. Sadly this Labour government is not doing it and - if truth were told - past Conservative governments haven’t done as much as they should either. The trouble is that the police and courts have been largely taken over by a group of criminologists who have rather more interest in proving their theories to be correct than they have in keeping order on the streets.
But what is needed is not rocket science. It is commonsense. Put simply, people will do unpleasant things if they think they can get away with it. But if they think they will be caught and punished they will not do it. Nor do the punishments need to be particularly severe, they need only to be certain.
The police need to stop messing about with gender equality awareness courses and get down to the business of catching criminals and convicting them. What worries most people is the high level of disorder on the streets. Having police on the streets will stop that. And they need to take all crimes seriously. How many burglary victims know that the police have merely logged the crime, then ignored it? And how many burglars know that this is what the police do?
To my mind the answer is relatively simple. Instead of the police being accountable to a Justice Ministry staffed by theorists who live in nice houses in safe neighbourhoods, they need to be accountable to the people whose communities they police. The best way to do this is to make the Chief Constable an elected office. It may sound radical, but something radical needs to be done.

3) Defence

My father’s family has a long and proud military tradition gong back almost two centuries. I know that our servicemen and women are brave and patriotic people who put their lives at risk on a daily basis. They should never be sent to war unless it is to protect Britain’s vital interests and they must never be asked to do a job for which they are not equipped.

My father volunteered on 4 September 1939, the day after war was declared. He joined RAF Bomber Command’s No.105 squadron and served throughout the war in the RAF. His father was in the Royal Artillery, seeing service in the Boer War, while his brothers all served in the trenches of the First World War – great uncle George was a pre-war professional who fought through the Retreat from Mons in 1914, the Somme in 1916 and Ypres in 1917 to survive the war astonishingly without a scratch. One of my ancestors was with the 17th Lancers at Balaclava for the Charge of the Light Brigade.
When I was growing up I heard many stories about those past conflicts. Not all the stories were pleasant and few of them heroic. I heard about injury, sickness and death as much as I did about victories or triumphs.
What I learned is that war is a grim business. What was never in doubt, however, was that it was a necessary task. Nobody thought for a moment that men were being sent to fight and die for some political convenience. Nor was there any doubt that the equipment they used was the very best available. My father told me about an Italian soldier captured in North Africa that he had met. My father asked why his entire Italian regiment had surrendered so promptly. “Oh,” came the reply. “Because we know our equipment is faulty. The men at the war ministry take bribes to hand out contracts, then most of the money is pocketed. We are not going to die so that some fat bureaucrat in Rome can line his pockets.” My father was appaled. It would never happen in Britain.
But is that true any longer? From what we hear the Labour government is buying inferior equipment from European manufacturers instead of state-of-the-art technology from the USA. This is done so that our ministers can assure their EU counterparts that Britain’s armed forces are ready to join the EU Rapid Reaction Force. Meanwhile, our men in Afghanistan and Iraq face the enemy with inadequate equipment. It may not be as corrupt as the Italians in the Second World War, but it is still shameful and wrong.
Britain’s armed forces deserve the best. They should get it.

4) Rural Affairs

England is the countryside. It is there that the soul of England is to be found.
When I was a boy growing up in the Surrey suburbs my favourite holidays were when we went to see old Great Aunt Hilda in Buckinghamshire. There I learnt to plant vegetables, pick blackberries and feast on the seasonal plenty of an English smallholding. Like so many I work in an office, but I escape to the country whenever I can.
My mother’s family came from one of the old farming families of Buckinghamshire. I grew up on stories of rural life as it was lived before the war. How my grandmother escaped by inches when a bull ran amok in Aylesbury high street on market day. How my great uncle Tom used to go scrumping. How to kill a chicken and get it ready for the oven. How townies - I think they meant my father - did not really understand the countryside and rural lives.
Well, now we have a government that is made up entirely of townies. Never has the rural part of England suffered so much from neglect and contempt. Whether it is the incompetence of failing to make farm payments or the brutal disinterest shown in foot and mouth or blue tongue, our Labour government has shown that it is uninterested in our rural communities. The EU is no better. The Common Agricultural Policy was designed as a way to siphon funds from richer countries and channel it to keep unproductive and inefficient French peasant farmers on the land. Its time passed decades ago and it is only the naked self-interest of continental politicians that keeps it going.
Now, I don’t pretend to be a country boy myself. But I know enough to realise that our rural communities need support and understanding. I don’t go hunting myself - I never have and probably never will - but I would not dream of banning everyone else from doing so.

5) England

I am English and proud of it.
I love England. It has been my home since I was born. There is no other country on earth that can offer so much by way of natural beauty, human culture or home comforts. Going abroad is all very well for holidays or business, but I wouldn’t want to live there. As a professional historian I have developed a deep understanding of our nation’s past, its character and its future.
I am fortunate that my job takes me out and about so much. Whether it is conducting research, supervising photo shots or visiting contacts I am lucky enough to spend a good deal of my time travelling around England. Not long ago I went to the battlefield of Lydenforde (now Lydford) to view the memorial there. In 997 the local English militia gave an invading Viking army a sound thrashing.
Just recently, sadly, England has not been getting a good deal. The EU has been steadily stripping away power from our Parliament to Brussels and quashing our ideals of freedom and justice. They take our tax money readily enough, but treat us with contempt when we ask for openness or democracy in return.
Nor has the recent devolution of the UK been much better for England. While Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their Parliaments and Executives, England has been given nothing. Worse than that, in fact. Labour’s initial plan was to carve England up into regions each with its own mini-assembly. As if a great people like the English could be so treated. That plan was voted down, but Labour pushed on with devolving powers to the unelected regions. You can still hear Gordon Brown and co talking about “The nations and regions of the UK”. By” nations” they don’t mean England, but by “regions” they do.
It is time that England got a fair deal. The unbalanced Barnett Formula gives far more taxpayer’s cash to Scotland and Wales than to England. And something needs to be done urgently about the way Scots MPs can vote on English-only matters.
England is a great nation. It is time she was treated as one.

6) Europe

Yes, we need to block the EU Constitution / Lisbon Treaty. And yes, our MEPs are better off out of the EPP, but the problems go deeper than that. My work takes me around Europe a fair deal - doing research or meeting with publishers - while my wife lived and worked in Germany for a number of years before we married and is fluent in the language. Everywhere I go I see vibrant and dynamic cultures and peoples being slowly stifled by the dead hand of the corrupt, bureaucratic and anti-democratic European Union. It is time to confront the EU for the good of Britain and for the good of Europe.

For far too long the British people have been misled about the true nature and purpose of the EU. It is something of a cliché to say that Britain joined a free trade organisation only to find itself trapped in a superstate, but it is no less true for that.

For too many years, politicians of all parties have been pretending that “Britain is winning the arguments in Europe” or that “our key red lines have been protected”. But having worked alongside Chris Heaton-Harris since he was first elected to the European Parliament in 1999, I know that none of this is true. There is a fundamental and deep rift between Britain and the rest of the EU. Unless that is acknowledged and confronted we will get nowhere.

There is a deep-seated mindset that has dominated the EU and its institutions ever since the EEC (as it then was) was first founded. Those who established the EEC had lived through two devastating world wars. They firmly believed that it was the institution of the nation state that had caused those wars. They also believed that Hitler, Mussolini and other dictators had come to power because the uneducated mass of the population had been given power through democracy. Their answer was to establish an international institution that would override the nation states and to organise it in such a fashion that it would not be democratically accountable, but would be run by a self-selecting oligarchy of well-educated bureaucrats.

This way of thinking seems very strange to us in Britain. Our experience of the nation state has been wholly positive. It is the nation state that has allowed us to develop economically, politically and socially. We see it as a good thing. Likewise we think democracy is a good thing. We believe that only by holding the state to account through the ballot box will we ensure that the government generally does the right thing untainted by corruption or injustice. Things are not perfect, but on the whole we see a democratic nation state as the best arrangement.

Not so those who set up the EEC, the EU as it has become. Of course they realised that to achieve their aim for the good of the people, those same people must be misled. They knew that the uneducated - to their minds - masses would not give up democratic power. So the EU elite embarked on their programme of what is called the Acquis Communitaire. Bit by bit powers have been removed from national governments and pulled to the centre in Brussels. Very often the powers are exercised through national governments, but they can do only what they are instructed to do by the EU centre. The nation states still exist in name, but not in any meaningful reality.

We have now reached the point where the EU is on the brink of becoming a true superstate along the lines of the USA or the old USSR. That, of course, is what the EU Constitutional Treaty is all about.

The EU institutions that govern this incipient superstate are deliberately anti-democratic. The EU Commission is, in effect, the EU government. The various commissioners hold positions broadly similar to cabinet ministers in our Westminster system. It meets in secret, conducts its business in secret and keeps all its workings secret. Hardly surprisingly it has become bloated, proverbially generous with taxpayer’s money and, in some well known cases, corrupt.

The EU Council acts as a sort of senate. It is made up of all the prime ministers of the member states. When discussing individual policies it is often the relevant cabinet ministers who meet. In theory the Council holds the Commission to account on behalf of the peoples of Europe. But like the Commission it meets in secret and never issues any minutes of what it has done. Again power is kept within the self-selecting elite.

The EU Parliament is presented by the EU as being the democratic forum for the people of Europe. Sadly it is no such thing. For a start it does not have anything like the powers needed by a Parliament. It is more like a toothless revising chamber. Imagine the House of Lords without any power and you get the idea. In theory the EU Parliament has some impressive powers, and these are set to increase under the new Constitution, but in practice business is managed by the elites so that it never has the chance to exercise them. That is one reason why it is essential that the Conservative MEPs leave the EPP grouping which restricts their actions so severely.

This might be all well and good for those European countries willing to go along with it. Many have been through revolutions and upheavals beyond imagining in the past century, making the stability offered by the EU welcome. But Britain is different.

Here in Britain we do not want to be run by Europe. We are happy to run our own country. What we do want are the economic links that we thought we were voting for back in the 1975 referendum.

What is needed is for a British government to recognise the facts and act upon them. We need a government that will face up to the EU institutions, tell them what we want and what we don’t want and then set about getting them. Crucial to the success of this would be the fact that those running the EU must be convinced that if Britain does not get its way, then Britain will withdraw from the EU.

Such a policy can only be implemented by a Conservative government. And that government is going to need a team of Conservative MEPs ready and eager to back them up, to fight for Britain at every turn even if that makes them deeply unpopular in the EU Parliament. We need MEPs who are most definitely on our side.

7) Parliamentary Reform

The recent furore over MPs’ expenses has highlighted problems with the way Parliament is run.

With regard to expenses, David Cameron made a good start by stressing individual responsibility and the need to be careful, not casual, with public money. The introduction of an independent body to scrutinise claims should ensure that no further problems come from that source.

However, there are other issues. The Labour government has shown contempt for Parliament and for the democratically elected representatives of the people it contains. However soem MPs have behaved, Parliament remains the only forum in which democratically elected representatives can hold the government to account. We need to ensure that Parliament has the tools it needs to do that job properly - even if we get a Conservative governmetn at the next election. The Committees need to have extra powers, and the role of the whips in selecting thier membership and chairmen reduced.

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