Given perpetual political controversy, people are often surprised to discover that
The Palace of Westminster can be quite a spiritual place: The design of the building is profoundly influenced by Pugin, our most prolific church architect of the 19^th century Oxford Movement; The Lord’s Prayer is carved into the external stonework right around the building; The iconic clock face on the Elizabeth Tower, which houses Big Ben, is surrounded with words from Psalm 37 “All through this hour Lord, be my guide”; Central Lobby, at the epicentre of the Palace, resembles an Orthodox cathedral, overlooked by icons of all the patron saints of our United Kingdom. Its central floor tiling design
displays words from Psalm 127 “Unless the Lord Build the House, those that labour, labour in vain”;
The hammer beam ceiling of Westminster Hall, the only surviving part of the original palace dating back 900 years, is held aloft by 26 carved angels.
The first official daily business in Parliament is prayers: in the Commons read by Mr Speaker’s Chaplain, and in the Lords by one its 26 Bishops.

Of Course, as with the rest of the nation, we have long abandoned the notion that the season of Advent, like Lent, was supposed to be a fast in preparation for the subsequent feast.
Nevertheless, the nature of the building, lit with Christmas lights, in the dark mornings and early evenings, makes it much easier to ‘plug into’ the proper spirit of Advent: Hope.
And don’t we need such hope when our TV screens are filled with the intolerable suffering of children in so many ravaged and war-torn places.

Advent carol services, of which there have been four in the last week at Westminster, begin with Isaiah’s prophesy of Christ’s Birth 700 years before the event. Isaiah’s was a time of hope when Israel had returned from 70 years exile in Babylon, to rebuild Jerusalem.
Advent is about Hope In darkest of times; Hope in the promise of a New Heaven and a New Earth.

Karl Marx regarded such hope as an ‘opiate’ to make the miserable lives of the proletariat tolerable by placing their hopes in the joys of a future life; An opiate propagated by the bourgeoisie to prevent the proles from rising and taking revolutionary action to change the terms of their miserable existence.
Arguably, religious belief in a future life may dull the disappointments of this one. Nevertheless, if we have religious hope, it in no way constitutes any disproof of what it is that we hope for. In the same way, during a night of anxiety we might hope for the dawn. Just because we desire and need the dawn to come, doesn’t mean that it won’t.
Marxism poses no threat to the Hope which characterises Advent. The real threat to it, is our own self-satisfied inability to recognise our need for redemption in the New Heaven and the New Earth.

In this column on 16^th October Rwanda – facing down the judges (desmondswaynemp.com) I said that I was not persuaded that abandoning our obligations under the European Human Rights Convention would jeopardise our ability to negotiate returns agreements for illegal entrants to UK.
  I think that what I said is still broadly true with respect to our near continental neighbours, all of whom are toughening their stance towards asylum seekers, and a few of whom are already showing a disregard for their obligations under the Convention. And several of them are now showing an interest in the arrangements we have been negotiating with Rwanda.
 I was wrong  however, with respect to the most important partner in this business: Rwanda has now made it clear that, were we abrogate our commitments under the Convention, then the deal will be off, and they won’t receive any of the illegal entrants that we are hoping top send their way.
This effectively closes off the route that I and many of my colleagues favoured, namely leaving the Convention altogether. Unfortunate, but we have to live with political reality.
 Instead, we must now capitalise on the increasing frustration of our continental neighbours, in order to collaborate collectively to drive reform of the Convention itself -which we all signed up to three generations ago, and which was made for a different world and a completely different set of circumstances than now prevail.
 Alas, this will not be deliverable in the short to medium term.

In the meantime, the Government has framed new legislation that delivers all the objectives that I set out in my blog of 16^th October.
I entirely understand the frustration of Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick. They urged the Government to adopt this course much earlier and to prepare for a defeat in the Supreme Court when, instead, the Government was banking on winning.
Nevertheless, we need to deal with the situation as it is, not as we would wish it to be. Howling at the moon and insisting on what me might have done differently won’t get us anywhere.
 It is no good complaining that the new bill does not go far enough, if it went any further, Rwanda would cancel the whole endeavour: End of story.

The Bill before the Commons next week uses parliamentary sovereignty to establish, beyond the jurisdiction of any UK court, that Rwanda is a safe destination.
What it doesn’t do, is to stop is individual appeals against deportation. We can live with that for the time being. After all, we have already legislated to establish that such appeals can be conducted remotely, once they are already in Rwanda.
Let’s get on with it.

We forget that we are not alone, all of Europe is experiencing the same problem -but worse than we are.
Whilst our Channel crossings are down by a third, Europe’s crossings are increasing exponentially. Were we to enter a pan-European deal, as the Opposition proposes, the EU has made it clear that this will be based on a ‘fair’ share-out of the entrants: we’d end up with even more of the illegal migrants than we’re getting now!

In this column on 16^th November https://www.desmondswaynemp.com/ds-blog/rwanda-facing-down-the-judges/ I pointed out that despite the beached Rwanda policy being an important part of the deterrent to Channel crossings, we have seen a reduction this year of one third.

The net migration figure however, is going in the opposite direction: In the year to June 2023 675,000 represents disastrous failure for those of us who have campaigned in election after election for a reduction in immigration.

Nevertheless, nothing is ever as bad as first reported.
About half the numbers are accounted for by students and their dependants. The reality is that tertiary education is one of our major export industries which is worth about £20 billion to the UK economy. It also allows own students to study at university at substantially lower fees, in effect subsidised by foreign students.
Those foreign students return to their native countries with a British education and goodwill towards us, which will have a beneficial impact on developments, commercial and diplomatic, for years ahead.
It is right however, that we have clamped down on short and ‘low value’ courses which attract migrants who really aren’t interested in study but just want to find a way of getting into Britain.
We need however, to cut the 150,000 dependants that postgraduate students have been bringing with them. So, beginning with courses starting in January, students on taught postgraduate courses will no longer have the ability to bring dependants; only students on designated postgraduate research programmes will have that entitlement.
All this begs the question of why we include students, here temporarily, in our migration statistics at all, when most other jurisdictions don’t. The answer is simple: we always have; So, any government that chose to exclude them would be accused of ‘fiddling the figures’.

Which leaves us with the other half of the net migration figure: those on work visas.
As I’ve said before in this column, there isn’t an enterprise that I have visited that isn’t having  difficulty recruiting staff.  We have a million vacancies, yet 21% of our working age population, nearly 9 million people (including 3 million ‘on the sick’) are economically inactive.
Little wonder then, that businesses and public services sponsor so many visas for overseas workers, making a mockery of the ’points-based immigration system’ which was modelled on Australia’s.
The argument is made that -were we to abolish the list of critically short occupations allowable and to raise the salary threshold, the consequent fall in the number qualifying migrants would fuel inflation and cause some sectors to grind to a halt.
I am sceptical. The counter argument is that, whilst migration is generating greater national income, the income per head of population is not growing in proportion. Genuine economic welfare may actually be falling as a result of the pressures on housing and public services arising from the growing migrant populations.
Furthermore, despite the numbers arriving, the shortages persist: 70,000 people were recruited from abroad for care roles in the year to June, while the number of vacancies in the sector dropped by only 11,000.

Foreign workers cost employers 20% less than UK employees: this incentive to recruit from abroad should certainly be removed.
But the strain on our society, economic an social, of immigration well beyond what we can safely absorb, will not be assuaged until we can curb our appetite for foreign labour and address economic inactivity amongst our own working age population.

I am at a loss to understand the surprise that so many people express when told that the tax burden is higher than it has ever previously been. It is also the case that public expenditure is higher than it has ever previously been. The two are not unconnected.
There seems to be an insatiable desire for the state to do more and more for us, inevitable placing a greater burden on taxpayers.

Rarely, do constituents come to me with suggestions for cuts in public services.
Those of us who believe that both society and our economy will benefit from lower taxes, need to come up with a coherent plan to restrain the apparently insatiable demand for more public expenditure

Over the last couple of years I’ve had my ear bent by so many local enterprises about the difficulty they are having in recruiting staff. It is a national problem: we have a million vacancies. With that in mind, I am now lending my support to  Starting Fresh – a campaign being run by Sodexo, one of our principal recruitment specialists, which aims to encourage businesses to employ more people with criminal convictions. The campaign is designed to help remove the barriers associated with the employment of ex-offenders.

 

Apart from the benefit to businesses in finding employees in a tight labour market, getting ex-offenders into work is an important part of making sure that they successfully reintegrate into their local communities.
Too often misconceptions and prejudice prevent businesses from tapping into this underutilised resource. Concerns about hiring people with criminal convictions can often be attributed to a failure to appreciate the quality of education which now takes place in prison. Many of the 50,000, or so, offenders who leave prison every year do so with formal qualifications they didn’t have before they were sentenced.

 

Businesses can access the Starting Fresh online hub, where they can find advice about how to make use of this underutilised resource and provide support in the workplace.

Sodexo also runs prisons on behalf of the Ministry of Justice and is, in addition,  using this campaign to let employers know they are welcome to visit their prisons if they are interested in offering job opportunities to prisoners when they are released. Organisations with multiple job opportunities can even run employer days in the prisons.

More information on the campaign can be had from https://uk.sodexo.com/startingfresh.hmtl

Some of my parliamentary colleagues, particularly those who are lawyers, get frightfully upset when I criticise judicial decisions. They believe that the separation of powers -political from judicial- is so sacrosanct that no politician should intrude by criticising the judgements of the courts.
I disagree. As an elected politician it is quite proper for me to give voice to the frustration that so many constituents express to me about judicial decisions, whether it is the leniency of sentences or ‘high politics’, where courts have frustrated the will of Government -which should properly be a matter for Parliament.

There is enormous anger about leniency in sentencing. More than half our most prolific offenders -with at least 45 previous convictions- are never sent to prison. This is the reason that Parliament has increasingly been intervening with new laws to set mandatory minimum sentences to bind the judges, as we will again on 28^th November with the second reading of the Criminal Justice Bill.

Greater still is the frustration with Judicial intervention in the most contentious political issues of the day. I expressed my robust rejection of the authority of the Supreme Court in this column in my blog about the prorogation of Parliament back in September 2019:
 Yes, it is a coup (desmondswaynemp.com)
Now we have  had the judgement that the Government’s scheme to deport asylum claimants to Rwanda is unlawful, with which I profoundly disagree.

Nevertheless, I’d be the first to acknowledge that throughout history Judges have played a key role in preserving our liberty. And that an independent judiciary is an essential part of a functioning liberal democracy. In any event, we already have a solution where we believe judicial activism has gone too far.
In their decisions judges make law. If we don’t like the laws that they make, then we have the remedy in Parliament, just as we have with lenient sentencing: Statute law made in Parliament trumps law made by judges in the courts.
The problem is that it will take time, and time is running out. A bill to make the Rwanda scheme lawful would pass at speed in the Commons but would be held up by the delaying power of the Lords, where the Government has no majority. We could prorogue, and re-present the bill in the new parliamentary session, forcing it through under the Parliament Act. it would be controversial and messy, it might not be quick but it would work.

That leaves us only having to deal with the international judges whose power derives from the treaty obligations to which we voluntarily acceded. They will not be overawed by Parliament. If they intervened, we’d have to withdraw from those obligations. The PM has indicated that, if necessary, he will do so.

The Rwanda deal, as a deterrent to illegal migrants, is an essential element to successfully stopping the boats, but it is only one element. Of greater importance are bi-lateral agreements to return the migrants to their countries of origin. Our agreement with Albania, from which the greatest number were coming, has cut those numbers by 90%.
The argument is made that, were we to withdraw from the international conventions, then it would be so much more difficult to sustain and extend bi-lateral return arrangements, that we’d be a pariah and that nobody would deal with us.
I think this is nonsense. Other European countries are experiencing very much greater numbers of illegal migrants and are already following where we have led. There is a common view now that the historic conventions on refugees are completely unfit for the current reality. I’m confident that  where we continue to lead, other developed nations will continue to follow.