After ten years in power, after a plethora of Home Secretaries, endless initiatives,  and massive press manipulation and spinning; after all of that we still have the absurd situation that apparently they have no note of British citizens who have committed offences abroad, thereby entirely devaluing the Criminal Records Board designed to protect children and the vulnerable from some of the worst imaginable criminals; we have no control at all over our borders, foreign criminals are released onto our streets with no record of their whereabouts being kept, some of them, apparently then securing jobs as security officers in the Home office itself! Then we hear that the statistics of crime reduction themselves are wrong, the situation much worse than the Government had bragged; and now we have the Association of Chief Police Officers saying that unless the Government increase their financial settlement for this year, they will have to cut police officers. The whole system is a complete and utter shambles, and the Government should be ashamed of itself for failing to achieve one of the most basic of any Government’s responsibilities – protecting the security of our citizens.

“Ah well,” you may say, “But at least John Reid has now admitted that his department is ‘not fit for purpose’ and is taking urgent steps to put it right.” Well, quite leaving aside the fact that it is now ten years since they came to power, I have very real doubts about whether they have the intellectual crispness, or the determination to put it right. Mr Reid is an expert with the media, a pastmaster at sounding as if he’s in charge. But his record is thin to say the least. Just look at what he is proposing:- the establishment of a new computerised database to try to keep track of overseas convicted British citizens; another database to keep all Government records of all citizens in one central place ; ID cards at huge expense which all but we honest citizens will doubtless ignore or forge; no doubt a website, a helpline, counselling services and the rest. Initiatives galore. Bullshit by the barrowload.

What we need; what we demand as our most basic right is tight control over our borders both inbound and outbound. Bad people must not be allowed to come here, and criminals from overseas must be sent back to wherever it was they came from. We demand tough prisons sentences and sufficient investment in our prisons to make sure that we keep these people off our streets for the whole of their sentences; tough probation services to ensure that we know where they go after release; a strengthened police force. A general determination to be “tough on crime”, to punish the bad guys and protect the rest of us. That is the toughness of mind, the robustness of approach which we need. I for one do not believe that this Government has it.

2007 promises to be an exiting year. Locally I hope that we’ll find some solution to the crisis in the leisure centres, we may hear some news about the future of RAF Lyneham which is so important to so many people and I hope that farming, which plays such an important part in our local environment, will fare better than in recent years and that the over burgeoning ambitions of some planners and developers to turn North Wiltshire into a mini-Swindon may be curbed. Nationally, the tired and by almost any standards discredited Mr Blair will be replaced by Mr brown whose honeymoon period may well be short lived. There seems to me to be so much wrong with so many areas of our national life that it is hard to imagine how a change at the head of the labour party will make a blind bit of difference.

Internationally, the ghastly photographs of Saddam Hussein’s execution cannot result in the situation in Iraq getting any better and may well be a trigger for its further deterioration. Afghanistan, the Palestinian question and instability in both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia together with the international terrorism which is spawned by it, seems likely to make the world an increasingly unsafe place and neither Mr Bush nor Mr Blair seem to me qualified to change that.

But for all of us our personal lives take precedent and I hope that all of you can look forward to a happy, contented and fulfilling 2007. For me I have a worrying month while I persuade members of the North Wiltshire Conservative Association that the 26,000 people who elected me last year together with the association who unanimously reselected me last year in February are more important than a small cabal of disaffected people who are trying to remove me as your MP.

After the end of January, I look forward to working hard for all of the people of North Wiltshire, both locally and in parliament, irrespective of the outcome of that ballot of Conservative members.

In the meantime I wish you all a very happy New Year.