The Government has abolished NHS England, the largest QANGO (quasi non-governmental organisation). Its function -managing the NHS in England- is now simply folded into Whitehall’s Department of Health (from whence it emerged under the Conservative /Lib Dem coalition government).
It was created to try and take the party politics out of the NHS. The theory being that this arms-length managerial body would be clinically led, with political responsibility -and controversy- being confined to the provision of funding. Alas, we cannot break our habit of blaming government for everything. Notwithstanding the eye-watering increases in funding, ministers continued to get the flack for the relatively poor performance of the NHS. Their frustration was that they had no levers left to pull with which to do anything about it, power having been handed over to NHS England. The Secretary of State became a bit like a spectator on the touch line at a soccer match, shouting advice to the players and being largely ignored.
Well, the current Secretary of State, Wes Streeting has had enough. I don’t blame him, but now he has no excuses, now he really is in charge. For all our sakes, I wish him luck.

Despite getting rid of this super-QANGO, the Government has created eight new ones for every week that has passed since the General election. Decisions that should be made by ministers accountable to Parliament, are continuing to be outsources to unelected officials.

One QANGO ripe for abolition is the Sentencing Council which has issued new sentencing guidelines for Judges, the effect of which will make a custodial sentence less likely for those “from an ethnic minority, cultural minority, and/or faith minority community”.
This is an outrageous double standard, a two -tier approach to sentencing.  It is an inversion of the rule of law to which we should all be equally subject.
The Secretary of State for Justice, Shabana Mahmood, is ‘incandescent’ (despite the fact that her Department supported the new two-tier guidance—her representative was at the meeting when it was approved on 24 January. Her officials were even given a walkthrough on 3rd March: a dummy’s guide to two-tier justice).
She then wrote the Sentencing Council expressing her dissatisfaction and asking for the guidance to be ditched.
The Council, under the chairmanship of Lord Justice William Davis has, in effect, told her to get stuffed (as the council is quite entitled to, Parliament having delegated those independent powers to it. But it is now high time we took them back again)
This is yet another example of the impertinence of the judiciary in the face of criticism from elected representatives. We’ll have to see how Shabana Mahmood responds in this latest display of the monstrous regiment judges.

On Tuesday I asked the Chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves, what level of ambition she had for finding savings in the welfare budget, given that servicing our debt is now costing twice what we are spending on defence (and which we urgently need to increase significantly).
This was her response:
“I agree that we need to get a grip of the welfare budget, which got out of control under the previous Conservative Government. Frankly, I am not going to take lectures from the Conservative party, which crashed the economy. Let me remind the House what the right hon. Gentleman said about the disastrous mini-Budget:
“I share entirely the free-market ideology that underpins the Chancellor’s statement…The Chancellor was right to be radical.”
He added:
“I rejoice at the two fingers the Chancellor has raised to socialist dogma and envy.”

I think that the financial markets and the British public have united in their view on the previous Government.”

 Lecture -Moi !
I didn’t give her a lecture, I merely asked a question. Nevertheless, I am quite flattered that, evidently, she studies this column. What she quoted so enthusiastically, but nevertheless, rather selectively, was word-for-word what I wrote here on 25^th September 2022 ( Two fingers to Socialist Dogma and Envy ).
It was my assessment of Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous mini budget. I don’t resile from anything that I said back then. I long for the implementation of all the measures that he announced. I just thought that to try them all at once, and at the same time as announcing a mind-numbingly expensive commitment to pay half of all our energy bills (and without first ‘rolling the pitch’ with the financial markets) was, to say the least, ‘high risk’.

Just weeks later I had to defend government policy in the annual no-confidence motion at the Oxford Union. I was half-way to Oxford on the train when breaking news came that Kwasi had been sacked. It wasn’t a good wicket on which to have to go out and bat. My speech is still available at
desmond swayne oxford union speech – – Video Search Results
I lost -heavily.

The upside is that the Chancellor is reading this column and I shall have to take that into account as I consider what to write about!

The Prime Minister was right to increase defence spending. We have neglected to properly fund our armed forces for far too long. It is a matter of deep regret that much of the worst damage occurred under the stewardship of my own political party.
I do not believe that the increase announced is sufficient, but it is an important start, and it is a realistic amount – given the current demands on the public finances.
The Prime Minister has chosen to fund the increase in defence expenditure by a pound for pound reduction in our overseas aid expenditure. As a minister once responsible for that expenditure, I know that this will be a popular choice. Indeed, this choice has been welcomed by my own party leader.
A popular choice does not however, make it the right choice. My preference is for the stance that the Prime Minister took when the then Conservative government under Boris Johnson reduced overseas aid expenditure from 0.7% of GDP to 0.5%. Starmer said then ”this is wrong because investing 0.7% in international aid is in Britain’s national interest…”

 Governing is about choices and the Prime Minister has made his choice. I believe it is the wrong choice. My own choice, had I been entitled to make it, would have been to raid the welfare budget. If we could only reduce our addiction to welfare benefits to pre-Covid levels, we would save £40 Billion, dwarfing the current proposals for increased defence. We have an army  – particularly of younger people-  who believe that their mental health is too fragile to allow them to go out to work. Yet, it is accepted medical wisdom that going out to work is good for your mental health.
We are currently awaiting the Government’s proposals on welfare reform. I hope that they turn out to be suitably ambitious, because the current bill is one that we can no longer afford to shoulder.

The cut in international development aid is even more dramatic than at first sight, because an additional £4 billion annually of that aid budget is being spent on housing asylum seekers in hotels. I know, as the minister once responsible, that one can support so many more displaced people in distress in their own region, than you can by resettling a lucky few here in the UK.

We entered into an agreement with the other rich nations back in the nineteen seventies to spend 0.7% of our national income on overseas development aid. It took us until 2011 to honour that pledge. In doing so, we were almost alone. Since when, we have stepped back again. Had all the nations that made the pledge honoured it -and done so immediately having made it, I believe that there would be far fewer seekers after asylum arriving on our shores from basket-case economies in poorer parts of the world.

I accept that there was too much wasteful aid expenditure. As the minister responsible it used to drive me into a state of apoplexy. I wanted to exclusively focus our aid on economic development to create jobs. For that is why the world’s poor seek to come here. They come here, not to live on benefits (even though we are ready enough to provide them). They come to seek work.
It is our own people who appear to be much more inclined to live on welfare benefits. That’s why we can’t afford to defend ourselves.

Were we to restore our commitment to spend 0.7% of our income on Aid, it would leave us with 99.3 % of our income for our own priorities. I think that is sufficient, even given our defence needs.

The PM and the Leader of the Opposition have been rebuked by Baroness Carr, the Lady Chief Justice, for an exchange that took place at Prime Minister’s Questions last week. Kemi Badenoch raised the absurdity of a judicial decision to allow the migration of a family of six from Gaza under the scheme exclusively designed for Ukrainians (this is just yet another in a long history of ridiculous immigration judgements) . The PM agreed, saying that the judgement was clearly ‘wrong’.
The Chief Justice has written to complain that it is the role of government “visibly to protect the independence of the judiciary” and that where it disagrees with judges, then the proper course it to appeal to a higher court. 
Well, strictly speaking she is correct, but she protests too much. The independence of the judiciary was not being questioned, politicians were merely remarking on the stupidity of their decisions not their independence.
Cleary the Lady Carr has ideas above her station if she thinks that the decisions of her judicial colleagues should be above the criticism of elected representatives, particularly when they so often offend against common sense.
I have long believed that Parliament should bring the judiciary to heel (see my blog of  25/09/19: Yes, it is a coup and my demand that Boris make ‘bygones’ his…top priority). Alas, that important agenda remains unaddressed.

Every now and again, someone will write to me demanding a written constitution for the UK. I never agree. We have far too many priorities for legislative time, to be able to set aside so much of it for the enormous task of finding an elusive consensus to establish what the constitution ought to be, what the powers -and the limits on powers- should be. It would require an enormous consultative undertaking and plebiscite. Properly done, it would take years.

Instead, we have no special category for constitutional laws, they can be amended or repealed just like any other law, so that no Parliament can be bound by its predecessor.
But now, I’ve come to the view (however disagreeable I find it), that we do already have a written constitution, and that it is the Human Rights Act 1998:  The Act requires that every government bill introduced to Parliament must be certified by a minister as being compliant with the Human Rights Act.
When courts subsequently rule that legislation is not compliant (irrespective of what ministers thought). Then Parliament meekly rushes to amend the offending statute.
It remains true in theory, that Parliament could simply ignore the court’s judgement, but in reality we inevitably surrender to rule by judges. Little wonder then that Lady Car has such an elevated conception of her status.

Parliament is currently, once again, meekly in the process of surrendering to the courts in the most egregious of cases. We are rushing through legislation to amend the Northern Ireland Legacy Act to enable Gerry Adams to resume his legal action seeking compensation for a conviction for escape from lawful custody during the conflict waged by the IRA in Northern Ireland, the Court having ruled that preventing the claim, as the Act set out to, is contrary to human rights.
 You couldn’t make it up.

 

 

Reform is ahead in the opinion polls for now, but there is a cloud on its horizon that is growing fast: Nigel Farage has tied Reform so closely to President Trump, and acts as his apologist and mouthpiece.
Over the coming months this may turn out to be an enormous liability.

I should caveat what I will say next about Trump, by stating first, that I agree with Vice President Vance’s analysis, that free speech and democracy have been endangered in Europe -and here in Britain- by our own political masters. Equally, that we Europeans have coasted under the US umbrella for years, enjoying a ‘peace dividend’ instead of meeting our proper financial share of the defence commitments. Little wonder that we are now being side-lined by the new US administration.

Nevertheless, Trump is making a monumental strategic mistake, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, by rewarding Putin, even before negotiations begin, offering up the key concessions of Ukrainian territory and a veto on its being admitted to NATO.

 Notwithstanding the stalemate on the battlefield, Putin had already lost the war. He anticipated eliminating Ukraine’s independence within days. He has wrought terrible destruction and terror there, but he has also suffered enormous Russian casualties and economic damage at home. He has reduced Russia to little more than a nuclear-armed petrol station.
And now they have a problem with the petrol: According to analysis from Reuters, Russian oil companies are preparing to start forced production cuts as they are unable to sell millions of barrels of oil. Volumes from Russia’s western ports in January were down 17% from a year ago, and the cost of transporting a cargo from Russia’s Pacific ports to China increased fivefold last month. Goldman Sachs estimates that Russia has stored 17 million barrels aboard ships since January 10^th. That figure could rise to 50 million barrels in the first half of this year. There is nowhere else where they can store it: there are virtually no large storage facilities in Russia, and the ones that do exist were damaged by Ukraine last month.  Ukraine’s drone attacks have also knocked out around 10% of Russian refining capacity.

Russia is reliant on the largesse of China, North Korea, Iran and Belarus – the world’s pariahs. This is exactly the moment to double down on sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and materiel support for Ukraine. Yet this is the moment that Trump has chosen to bring Putin in from the cold and back into the centre of world affairs. The Kremlin is cock-a-hoop.

As the ramifications sink in and events unfold, especially in Britain where we have been so united in our commitment to Ukraine, Reform’s nuptials with all things Trump may well begin to pall.
And Trump may just keep giving… with tariffs, climate vandalism, Gaza, and heaven knows whatever next.

 Farage has tied his party’s fate to something over which he has no control.

I last wrote about the Chagos Islands in this column on 5^th October last year( Chagos ).  Since when, the UK negotiating stance, plagued by our own ‘lefty’ lawyers, appears to have weakened dramatically.
To recap, the archipelago is a legacy of the Empire, as the British Indian Ocean Territories.
In the early nineteen seventies the native population were resettled to Crawley in England and to Mauritius off the coast of East Africa, so that the main Island, Diego Garcia,  could be leased to USA for a vital strategic air base.
Notwithstanding previous agreements and payments, Mauritius has claimed sovereignty and was backed by a UN non-binding judgement.
To see if a new agreement could be established, our last government opened negotiations. We ‘walked away’ however, when it became clear that the demands by Mauritius were excessive.
In July our newly elected government reopened negotiations and has now reached agreement.
Parliament was told the bones of the agreement are that UK will cede sovereignty to Mauritius and then lease back the Islands for 100 years, with an option to extend for a further 40 years.
What was withheld from Parliament was the price attached to the lease. Although, informed opinion suggested that it was £9 billion.
There was some urgency to complete the deal before the supportive Biden presidency ended. This was prevented by an election in Mauritius, which  resulted in a new government there, which thought that the deal negotiated by its predecessor was a sell-out. Negotiations were reopened and a revised deal concluded.
The Prime Minister of Mauritius told his Parliament that the price of the lease would be an index- linked £18 billion and that Mauritius would have a veto on any lease extension.
Our Foreign Office Minister told the Commons on Wednesday that the terms of the deal hadn’t changed. So, were they always that bad?

It is outrageous that we are contemplating paying billions to rent something that we already own, at a time when we are so strapped for cash that we have stripped pensioners of winter fuel payments the Treasury is even consulting on taxing death-in-service payments to the Armed Forces.

The Government’s defence is that our tenure of the Islands require certainty and that there is a danger that this would be thrown into doubt if a case was brought against us at the International Court of Justice. This is pure sophistry, the United Kingdom is not subject to the compulsory jurisdiction of the ICJ when it concerns disputes involving members or former members of the Commonwealth.

This dreadful deal is now on the desk of President Trump. We are at his mercy, hoping that he will save us from ourselves and the rotten deal that the Government has negotiated.

Now, to cap it all, we discover that the Government is about to open negotiations with Caribbean nations on the issue of reparations for the Slavery. They are asking for trillions, notwithstanding that we were the first to abolish slavery and then expended enormous sums using our naval power to stamp out the trade internationally.

So much of the effort against us on the question of the Chagos and of slavery reparations is driven by our own left-wing lawyers who hate Britain and are ashamed of our history.

Whenever brutal child murders fill the news, I receive several dozen emails demanding restoration of the death penalty. The trial of Axel Ruhakana has prompted many more such demands.

I have voted for the return of the death penalty on the three occasions that the opportunity has presented itself during my parliamentary career. Alas, I was always in the minority -and by a wide margin.

When I first became a parliamentary candidate in the New Forest, I expressed my view robustly. I was challenged at a church hustings, as to how I could reconcile this support with my professed Christian faith. I answered by quoting article 37 of the 39 Articles (which form the doctrinal foundation of the Church of England): “The laws of the Realm may punish Christian men with death, for heinous and grievous offences”.
When my questioner responded with the sixth commandment “ Thou shalt not Kill” , I pointed out that the original biblical languages suggest “thou shalt do no murder” is a closer translation, and that is a clean different thing.

The latest polling by More in Common reports that overall, 55% support restoration with 37% opposed. This is a 5% increase in support and a 5% reduction in opposition, since their last poll in 2023. In the generational breakdown, there is majority support across the age ranges with millennials (28- to 43-year-olds) leading the way, 58% of them are in favour, to only 27% against. Generation X (18- to 26-year-olds) was closest with 45% in favour and 42% against, even here however, there has been a 16% increase in support since the last poll.

Whatever the level of public support, the reality is that there is just no parliamentary majority for it.
Even if we did restore it, a significant minority would remain viscerally opposed and every death sentence would be the focus of public protests. It might also be more difficult to secure convictions for capital offences -as jurors contemplate the finality of a guilty verdict. Whatever the argument, one way or another, it certainly won’t happen in this Parliament.

The public demand for justice might be assuaged however, were a life sentence to mean what is says. Which is why the inability to sentence Ruhakana to a whole-life term was so frustrating. It is an affront to justice to see criminals who have been imprisoned for the most horrible offences being released (even though this is very unlikely in Ruhakana’s case).

We devalue human life by our refusal to punish those who take it, with death.

There are two issues that arise from the grotesque murder of children at a dance class in Southport. The first is how Axel Rudakubana, being well known to the authorities and thrice referred to the anti- terrorist ‘Prevent’ programme, avoided surveillance. The Home Secretary has made it clear that this is properly to be subject to an inquiry.
The second concerns whether the riots, which followed the murders, might have been prevented had the authorities been more candid with the public. The Home secretary avoided answering whether this too would be subject to the inquiry.

The riots were inexcusable and should not be blamed on anyone but the rioters. Nevertheless, it is not unreasonable to ask if they might have been prevented.

The Home Secretary’s statement on Tuesday was immediately preceded by that of the Parliamentary Under- Secretary for Communities entitled ‘a statement on community engagement principles and extremism’. I put it to him that “when a crime has the attributes of a terrorist outrage, but the police, in their engagement with the community, proactively announce that it is not initially being treated as such, is that not bound to give rise to public suspicion that the truth is being covered up?”
 The Minister replied “I do not know what in particular the right hon. Gentleman is referring to”, which is absurd given that his statement had been prompted by the Prime Minister’s words in Downing Street that morning on the Southport murders. The minister’s response is exactly the sort of obfuscation that may have been a contributory factor in the rioting that followed the murders.

The authorities were aware that Rudakubana had been referred to the Prevent programme. That he possessed an al-Qaeda manual and the poison Ricin (themselves offences under the Terrorism Act 2006).
These facts were not disclosed to the public in case a fair trial was subsequently prejudiced. But was it necessary for the public to have been told, as they were, that there was no evidence that the carnage was motivated by terrorism and that it was not being investigated as such?
It was into this void that suspicion of a cover-up and misinformation spilled online, some of it, apparently, originating from hostile states, and fuelling the riots.

Would being more open with the public have prevented riots?
I don’t know, but it is a fair question to ask.
Would being more open really have prejudiced Rudakubana’s trial?
I doubt it. After all, the authorities released this information in October before the trial began. If it wasn’t prejudicial in October, why would it have been prejudicial last August?

Jonathan Hall KC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, said this “The Government has to be aware…that if there is an information gap…then there are other voices, particularly in social media, who will try and fill it….If there is any information you can give, put it in the public domain, and be really careful that you don’t fall into the trap of saying ‘we can only say zilch, because there are criminal proceedings….Quite often, there’s a fair amount…that can be put into the public domain…. just saying ‘there’s a charge, we can’t say any more’, is not going to cut it these days.”

I think he’s right and the authorities got it wrong last August. The Inquiry should examine it.

I recall the mayhem, carnage and horror of the ‘troubles’ in Ulster, so much of it orchestrated by Gerry Adams, and so I recoil at the prospect of him receiving compensation along with hundreds of terrorists.

This grotesque possibility was ruled out by The Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023, which sought to draw a line under the conflict and move on with the peace process.
To be fair, the legislation was highly controversial and opposed by almost everyone except the Conservative Government. Drawing a line under a conflict can be like that: There are still scores to be settled and investigations unresolved, but after so many years there has to be an end to it all.
Equally, we had to stop the outrage of elderly former soldiers being hauled before the courts to answer charges that they overstepped the rules of engagement. When, at the same time,  the immunity of so many terrorists has been provided by indemnities in the form of ‘letters of comfort’ furnished to secure the peace agreement in the first place.

Labour opposed the Act and made it clear that it would be repealed after the election. But there was one part of the ACT that enjoyed unanimous support in both the Lords and the Commons: the part the which prevented compensation for Adams and others like him -sections 46 & 47.

It is complicated:
In the 1970ies, Adams, with so many others, was interned (imprisoned without trial on the orders of the government, not the courts). In 2020 Adams successfully appealed against convictions for escaping from his internment, because his internment was unlawful – having been ordered by a minister rather than the Secretary of State.
Section 46 and 47 restore the longstanding principle that powers conferred on the Secretary of State can properly be exercised by subordinate ministers, effectively reversing the Supreme Court ruling by statute.
In February last year Adams appealed again and the Northern Ireland High Court ruled that section 46 and 47 were incompatible with European Convention on Human Rights and issued a Declaration of Incompatibility with the Act.
But Parliament remains supreme. Such a declaration does not change the law or require Parliament to change it. Parliament can just decide to leave things as they are.
Sunak’s government chose, in the first instance, to appeal. There is now a body of expert legal opinion of the view that the government appeal would have been upheld and that the original Supreme Court ruling was flawed.
Nevertheless, in July the new Government withdrew the appeal and last month used its power under the Human Rights Act 1998 to issue a remedial order for Parliament to repeal sections 46 & 47 of the Legacy Act.
It is this unforced and chosen course of action, this remedial order, that now reopens the frightful possibility of thousands of pounds of taxpayer’s money  being paid in compensation to hundreds of murderous terrorists. The Prime Minister says he will find a way to prevent such payments. He’d better, because he has opened up the possibility, which the last Government had shut down.