My Parliamentary week consisted of two all-day seminars with senior people recently retired from our Intelligence and defence communities discussing counter-terrorism measures, and measures to re-strengthen our much-cut armed services which an incoming Conservative Government might consider; the (non-pulling) captaincy of the House of Commons Tug of War Team against the Lords, which raised £130,000 for Macmillan; constituents’ visits to Question Time; a 2 hour interview with MORI on every subject under the sun; discussions with Wiltshireman, Lord (Peter) Brooke, about the pending reform of the House of Lords; and a speech in the all-day defence debate in the House on Thursday. Incidentally, I used my speech, amongst other things, to question the ridiculous and cynical remarks by Gordon Brown the previous evening that he would support a replacement for Trident – a matter on which I have not yet made up my mind. How odd it was to hear the following day his disclaimer that he was merely reiterating the Labour Party Manifesto, while his spin doctors were simultaneously touring the studios to brief that he really was promising the £15 billion investment required. More about forthcoming Labour Party internal political wranglings than the better defence of our Realm, methinks.

In amongst all of that, my excellent office, both in London and Chippenham, dealt with hundreds of telephone, email and postal enquiries, and I signed and despatched something in the order of 500 letters to constituents during the week.

What a relief, after that intellectually testing and physically demanding week in London, to return to Wiltshire for an array of highly enjoyable events packed into one weekend. A meeting with National Trust Chief Exec, Fiona Reynolds, to discuss housing matters in Lacock; a reception in Corsham, amongst other things to meet charismatic new Chippenham candidate, Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones; a Supper Club in Lea to discuss Local Government finance and reorganisation; an evening of madrigals and supper in Slaughterford; a speech to school leavers in Calne Church, lunch with Head, and then handing out the prizes to 500 girls at St Mary’s Calne; followed by drinks in Brokenborough and dinner with Tory grandee, Lord Hodgson, in Crudwell; then a day’s gardening, and the Taize service in Slaughterford. All conducted in blazing mid-summer weather. Who could ask for anything more as a straight antidote to midsummer smog and stress in the Capital?

The big debate in the May plenary took place on the subject of the admission of Bulgaria and Romania to the EU. The Commissioner responsible for enlargement, Mr Olli Rehn, told MEPs that the two countries should still be able to join the EU on 1 January 2007 as originally planned but that they could not be given a definitive green light because they still need to tackle a number of outstanding problems. The Commission will therefore make a new report in October on whether the target date can be met.

This means some fast work on a short time scale. In Bulgaria the Commission is worried about the lack of results in the fight against corruption and organised crime and is particularly concerned about money laundering and what will happen to EU funds when they start to flow. There is for example no digital photographic mapping of Bulgarian farm land - an essential tool for the management of direct farm payments. (I met a Bulgarian MP who spoke longingly of her country’s need for an Environment Agency on the British model.) For Romania, the gaps are in rather more technical areas and the Commission admits that the Romanian government has recently put in place a crackdown on corruption and serious crime.

Of course we still wait to see whether our own government will allow completely free entry to Bulgarian and Romanian passport holders who wish to work here from day 1 – or whether it will delay such entry, as Germany has done in the case of citizens of the 10 newest member states. One wonders how many more bright young waiters, care assistants etc we can absorb from Eastern Europe and also to what extent their availability acts as a disincentive to our youngsters to enter the service industries. If a recent encounter in Cornwall is anything to go by we are failing to produce and train people to run services in the way Eastern Europeans are good at. I entered a small café near Penzance. The following dialogue took place:

CJ “I would like a cup of tea and a pasty  please”

Gormless local girl: “Ain’t got no pasties left”

CJ “Well, what do you have?

GLG: “I dunno really”

Bring on the Bulgarians, I thought: they can’t be worse than this.

The same session of Parliament was addressed by Mr Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, and by Bolivian President Evo Morales, who called for EU support in fighting poverty in his country.  He explained that his government’s nationalisation of the energy sector, involving many EU firms, was “not a matter of expropriation or expulsion” but part of a Bolivian desire to control their own resources. In his first 100 days, 2,000 people had been taught to read. If we continue to allow our schools to churn out illiterates perhaps we should adopt some similar yardstick of progress for the next government.

This month we reached agreement on a directive dealing with health claims on food and drink. The new law introduces clear definitions for claims such as “low energy” and “low fat”. The ratios of salt, sugar and fat most appropriate for human health in any given product will be laid down by the Commission in consultation with the food industry and consumer bodies. A producer will be able to make a claim concerning one of the three key ingredients (fat, sugar and salt) if the other two ingredients comply with the law or if it is clearly stated that the product has a “high content” of these ingredients. I imagine that this kind of thing is aimed at products such as those claiming to be “low fat” while actually being stuffed with sugars.

Another EU measure adopted this month was the services directive. Although it is somewhat watered down, it still tells Member States to give service providers from another Member State free access and allow them to exercise their business freely. Such companies will no longer need to open an office in another Member State or have a local representative there. “One stop shops” for service providers will be set up to help with the paper work. The idea, which I always thought was doomed, that service providers could work in another Member State according to the rules of their home country has been dropped.

Just for the record: it is 6 months on from David Cameron’s election to the party leadership and he has still made no attempt to meet the Conservative MEPs, in London or Brussels.

Eric would have been quick to point out the cant nature of Mr Blair’s defence of the action in Iraq during his trip to Washington this week. For while he was mouthing platitudes about freedom and tolerance in the US, and while our troops are risking their lives in its pursuit in Iraq and Afganistan, a vignette portraying the reality of new Labour’s intolerance was being played out in Parliament Square in London.

I was heading into my office early on Wednesday, and was horrified to see the 100 or so police, some of them in combat equipment, deployed to remove Brian Haw whose anti-war protest has disfigured the Square for five years now. There he sits, day in day out, in all weathers, an eccentric figure covered in badges, and surrounded by the messiest collection of banners and placards you could imagine. Squalid, and aesthetically pretty unattractive. And those of us with offices on the Parliament Square side of the building have been deeply unappreciative of the way in which he has loudhailer bombarded us with calls to pull out of Iraq for the last five years.

But seeing a hundred of the Metropolitan Police’s finest deployed to rid us of the environmental menace which Brian Haw undoubtedly was, was reminiscent of the worst aspects of Communist Eastern Europe, of Tiananmen Square. To do it, Labour passed a new law preventing protest anywhere within a mile of Parliament, which resulted in the arrest of a peaceful old woman recently for no worse a crime than standing beside the Cenotaph in Whitehall to read out the names of those servicemen who had so far died in Iraq. No longer would the long-standing protest by Winnie the Pig, who lived in Parliament Square for six months to protest against the crisis in the bacon industry be allowed, nor the many highly enjoyable protests by the Countryside Alliance. Gone will be the anti-war protests, the sit-down strikes by the disabled, those campaigning to save their hospitals, and the rest.

Parliament Square will be a prettier place as a result, better for the tourists perhaps. But what a desperately retrograde step for our democracy. Surely a tatty old eccentric squatting outside Parliament is in the highest traditions of Britishness. Of tolerance, Of freedom. Of the right of free speech. After all, which would you prefer- that people like Mr Haw were using up their energies protesting, or sitting at home making bombs, as they do in other dictatorships.

Eric Forth would not have approved of the demise of Brian Haw. Of the eviction of the harmless hecklers from the Labour Party Conference, of ID cards, 90 day detention without trial nor many of the other excessive measures in the name of preventing terrorism. This is one of the least Libertarian of all Governments. They hate being disagreed with, most of all laughed at. They hate eccentricity, people being different from their North London wine bar normalcy. They have an arrogant self-regard, and I for one applaud people like Brian Haw and Eric Forth who lost no opportunity to hold them to account over it.