Bernard Jenkin MP

Member of Parliament for Harwich & North Essex. Promoted by Bernard Jenkin of Unit C2, East Gores Farm, Salmons Ln, Colchester CO6 1RZ

[Bernard Jenkin MP @bernardjenkin]

First Substack post on the failing state https://t.co/OSMtPhAEIv

[Bernard Jenkin MP @bernardjenkin]

This is why @theHSSIB is such an essential part of the patient safety management regime in healthcare; there is no other body investigating health incidents which is unconflicted and can provide a “safe space” for people to speak freely.

[Bernard Jenkin MP @bernardjenkin]

“NHS dismissed mothers' concerns in ten-year baby deaths cover-up.” This article says: “While Ockenden spoke to more than 800 staff at
the trust, it is understood [30] senior executives/directors refused to answer questions abt their role in the scandal.” https://t.co/kvL8BTrcM7

[Bernard Jenkin MP @bernardjenkin]

The arguments made by Remainers about what small percentage of economic growth may have been adversely affected by leaving the EU pales before the reality. And all the freedoms outside the EU are still largely unused. https://t.co/ENwHHsjAPG

[Bernard Jenkin MP @bernardjenkin]

As @KemiBadenoch says: “That is why I have changed the Conservative Party.
No more Left-wing policies, drift or timid managerialism. We are ditching mad Net Zero policies, leaving the ECHR so we can deport those who don't belong here and planning an economic revolution that will deliver prosperity to our country.” So what need @reformparty_uk ? @Conservatives

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

The argument sounded clever: Conservatives have never won in Makerfield. Do a deal with Reform. Stand down and they’ll do the same in Aberdeen “Unite the Right”.

I decided it was more important to Unite the Country. That’s why we won in Aberdeen.

My piece in Daily Mail below 👇

[Bernard Jenkin MP @bernardjenkin]

Striking how the @Conservatives are now on the right side of history on this one! Sad that it took nearly 40 years.

[Julian Jessop @julianHjessop]

ICYMI, here is the attendance at the National Rejoin March @MarchForRejoin #RejoinEU, as claimed by the organisers (if any of these numbers are wrong I'd be happy to correct!) 🤔

2022 “50,000”
2023 “over 20,000”
2024 “about 15,000”
2025 “thousands”
2026 ? (nothing public yet)

[Helen Whately MP @Helen_Whately]

We can't go on like this.

Instead of having a growing economy to pay a shrinking welfare bill, we’ll have a shrinking economy trying to pay a growing welfare bill.

@KemiBadenoch is right – we risk becoming a welfare state with an economy attached. That's why we'll start again on sickness benefits.

[Conservatives @Conservatives]

Another U-Turn!

Conservatives have forced the government to drop their deranged plan to slaughter the Dartmoor ponies.

[YouGov @YouGov]

79% of Britons now see the Labour Party as divided, relative to a mere 4% seeing the party as united

United: 4% (-10 from 18-20 Apr)
Divided: 79% (+19)

[YouGov @YouGov]

Britons are now more likely to see the Conservatives as united than divided for the first time in six years

United: 33% (+5 from 18-20 Apr)
Divided: 28% (-6)

[Helen Whately MP @Helen_Whately]

Sickness benefit claims have doubled since the pandemic - but we’re not twice as sick.

Time to rethink our sickness benefit system.

That’s why I’m launching a root and branch review.

[Helen Whately MP @Helen_Whately]

We can't go on like this.

Instead of having a growing economy to pay a shrinking welfare bill, we’ll have a shrinking economy trying to pay a growing welfare bill.

Kemi is right – we risk becoming a welfare state with an economy attached. That's why we'll start again on sickness benefits.

[Helen Whately MP @Helen_Whately]

Over 4 million people are now claiming PIP. That’s doubled since the pandemic.

Our current system gets the incentives wrong – handing out cash to stay home, whilst failing to give disabled people the help they need.

Conservatives will change this and get Britain working again.

[Bernard Jenkin MP @bernardjenkin]

This is brave and necessary. Looking toward to this. @Helen_Whately MP @Conservatives

[Helen Whately MP @Helen_Whately]

Tomorrow I'll unveil the @Conservatives' plan to rip up the current sickness benefits system and start again.

We'll fix the broken incentives and welfare traps at the heart of our benefits system, as part of our plan to get Britain working again.

@restate_thinks

[Bernard Jenkin MP @bernardjenkin]

This is heavy duty policy development. Well done @Helen_Whately MP! @Conservatives

[Helen Whately MP @Helen_Whately]

Calling for welfare cuts is becoming mainstream - but saying something should happen doesn't mean it will happen: you need a plan.

I have one. Read it in my Substack 👇

[Julia Lopez MP @JuliaLopezMP]

Overnight, major US AI company, Anthropic, has been ordered by the Trump administration to deny foreigners access to its latest AI models. This is the kind of tech that Labour has spent all week telling British companies to make themselves dependent on via its AI Adoption Summit.

Let me set out why this is yet another example of how Labour’s TOTAL lack of preparedness for government has left the UK exposed (something I touched on with Matt Chorley on 5Live earlier this week)…

There is a whole dance going on right now in the States among and between these AI companies and the US government - that’s for separate comment on AI regulation, the sustainability of their underpinning commercial models and more. But amidst this, Labour’s combination of political naivety and economic failure has created a dependency problem that DSIT’s belated, frenetic barrage of announcements at London Tech Week is unlikely to solve any time soon.

Advances in tech were already making it more important for the UK economy to have high quality digital infrastructure - ultra fast internet, telecoms and cloud, reliable supply chains and so on.

The pandemic accelerated the trend. AI put it on speed.

It means that politicians need to be looking more seriously at who owns and controls the software, hardware and government systems on which Britain relies, what leverage our country can build in critical technologies and how we access or develop the best AI models.

Instead Labour spent its first year in office making all our economic fundamentals worse. Higher taxes, higher employment costs, higher regulation, higher energy costs, a total screw up on defence procurement where dual-use tech is vital to modern warfare, and the same old government contracting that sees players with massive lobbying operations favoured. All of this has weakened home grown enterprise and made us less attractive to international companies despite us having some of the best talent and most innovative start-ups in science, tech and security in the world.

It meant that by the time the US-UK tech summit rolled around a year later to puff out President Trump’s State visit, Labour Ministers were totally dazzled by big tech and its promise to provide positive investment headlines. (Remember this was the time when Deputy PM, Angela Rayner, and US Ambassador, Peter Mandelson, were both resigning from scandal and the Chinese spy case was collapsing.) Crazy investment pledges were being bandied around, many of which were repackaged existing deals or promises which received very little scrutiny despite Labour building policies like AI growth zones around them. Lo and behold some of the biggest deals have now been junked because UK energy costs are nuts and because some of these companies are struggling to make their own numbers work.

In the wider economy, companies were told ‘adopt, adopt, adopt’ when it comes to AI to stay up with any AI-enabled competitors. The promised ‘benefit’ would be a reduction in a ballooning payroll bill. Despite this, a lot of companies have struggled to get the productivity gains that have been billed from AI adoption. Many were told that was because they need to totally rewire their systems to maximise the benefits. But that rewiring makes them dependent on the kinds of AI models that President Trump has just restricted foreigners’ access to and whose token prices were already being jacked up (humans not so inefficient and expensive after all…).

This is not to deny the transformative potential of AI or its disruptive effect on the workforce and wider society. But as the initial AI mania begins to fade, the risks of Labour's approach are becoming clearer. Rather than using the strength of the wider economy to preserve choice and resilience, Labour doubled down on dependence on a small number of companies whose technologies are now becoming more expensive, more restricted and harder to access.

The penny half-dropped with some of their Ministers a few months ago. They started playing into the Mark Carney ‘middle powers’ speech, talking of British-first procurement and making noisy headlines against Musk and the like after realising that that the government had reduced its own own leverage on issues like social media regulation and more. A delayed launch came of a Sovereign AI Fund. A litany of announcements on chips and sovereignty flowed from London Tech Week. But this all risks being small beer when it comes to the scale of what is required, especially when the UK government stubbornly refuses to confront the fact that it has moved all the economic fundamentals in the wrong direction.

This is why the first priority of any incoming leader or government has to be on getting those fundamentals right. Kemi and the Shadow Cabinet have been relentlessly focused on policies to give our companies the tools to win - cheap energy, less red tape, lower taxes, an education pipeline that produces the talent we need, a Sovereign Defence Fund for dual-use technologies, pensions reform so that we see more money going into UK equities. It’s why I spent London Tech Week talking to the people and companies that understand the nature of the challenge, including techy details like the need for open architecture.

Is there a messiah coming this week from Makerfield in the form of Andy Burnham who understands the nature of the challenge? Forget it - the papers are today being briefed that Ed Miliband is his front runner to be Chancellor. There are more rounds of this chaos to go before this UK gets a government that recognises that without a strong economy, all else fails. Being ready for that moment is the project to which the Conservatives under Kemi are dedicated.

[Andrew Griffith MP @griffitha]

This is a disaster for Britain.

Falling embarrassingly behind whilst our socialist government pitifully recreate a 1970’s fantasy of state-owned trains and steel making.

We need an intense focus on sovereign capabilities in advanced manufacturing, drones, space and AI.

[Bernard Jenkin MP @bernardjenkin]

The APPG on Patient Safety is planning to block the abolition of @theHSSIB and we have the lead letter in @thetimes today, signed by a cross-party group of MPs. I thought you would be interested in this story from The Times:
Healthcare safety and guarding patients' data. https://t.co/ez75hXyGZ5

[Bernard Jenkin MP @bernardjenkin]

This shows that the govt’s EU Reset is a political quagmire for @UKLabour @LibDems . And an opportunity for the @Conservatives. And the extra “access” to the EU internal market is of very little value to the U.K. economy as a whole, given that total U.K. exports of goods to the EU = <8pct of U.K. GDP

[Britain Unbound @BritainUnbound]

Our polling conducted by YouGov really is very clear - the British people do not want to sacrifice control over UK laws, in order to gain greater access to the EU Single Market. This holds true whether you look North, South, East or West.

https://t.co/39i9l85V1S

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

The news about Sir Alex Younger has hit really hard. I met him just once. In February this year, he was the keynote speaker at our parliamentary away day.

He was superb.

I wished he had been in government when I was in cabinet. Even in retirement he was studiously apolitical. Yet the depth of knowledge, expertise and his sheer love of the United Kingdom and deep commitment to her defence and safety shone through with his remarks and answers to even the most knotty questions.

He gave candid advice on how to use our time in opposition to get ready for defence and national security in this new geopolitical era.

So much of the recent policy work and research we have started and announced was based on his recommendations. There is so much to do and so little time.

It was a real privilege to have a long lunch with him that day. I am grateful for the time he spent with me and deeply sad to know our agreement to have further conversations will now not happen.

It is odd to feel such a loss for someone I only met once but his death is a loss not only of a remarkable man, but of the wisdom, insight and clarity he still had to offer.

He was a great man who loved, fought for and defended our country in ways we will never know.

May he rest in peace.

[Bernard Jenkin MP @bernardjenkin]

Look at this. The upward @KemiBadenoch trend continues. @Conservatives

[Luke Tryl @LukeTryl]

Badenoch moves to her highest approval of her time as LOTO on -4 with the biggest gap between her and other leaders. Davey is at -12, Farage -13, Polanski -25 and Keir Starmer is up this week though still far at the bottom of the pack on -44.