Lobbied by the Control Arms campaigning wing of Oxfam ahead of the review taking place into the Export Control Act.

In May the Government will begin its review of the first years operation of this act. This is important as there are holes in the system which mean that arms end up quite easily in countries where war wages, feeding the violence. With Oxfam were three local constituents come to tell me their reason for taking action on this issue.

The key things they want are to introduce include full controls on those who traffic in arms and broker arms deals, regardless of where the deals are done (so that people can’t sidestep the rules by stepping outside the UK briefly) and proper monitoring of what any arms exports actually end up getting used for.

It is clear that arms exports which end up going into feeding and exacerbating existing conflicts leave numerous tragedies in their wake – and make all the worthy things the Government tries to achieve through its international development policies much, much harder.

The evening is taken with the Mayor of Haringey’s charity ball at the Cypriot Centre in Wood Green. It is really well attended and a great success. I leave relatively early as I have a somewhat bizarre engagement next – tonight!

As I sit here, it’s nearly one o’clock in the morning, and I am trying to keep myself awake as my last call of the day (or actually first call of the morning) is to Bounds Green tube station to see the improvements being worked on there. I said I would like to go when Tube Lines came to see me at Parliament recently – but to be frank – I hadn’t at that point worked out that it would have to be at quite such an hour! So…