In anticipation of the forthcoming Afghanistan Pledging Conference, I attended a seminar in which the desperate plight of the situation in Afghanistan was brought home to us: the economy has collapsed and people are starving. The obscenity is that food is available but there is no cash to buy it. The plea, which was made by western charities, was for more Aid and for a solution to the liquidity problem by unfreezing assets held by the Afghan Central Bank overseas and committed to Afghanistan before Taliban takeover.
The presenters insisted that there is now an opportunity to influence the Taliban by the generosity of our response, and that were we not to do so, that influence would instead be acquired by China and Russia with their rather less delicate sensitivities.
 I ventured that it was my prejudice that the response of the West would be conditioned by the willingness of the Taliban to demonstrate their commitment to the undertakings they have given on Women’s Rights and to no reprisals against servants of the former regime. Alas, the day after that seminar, the Taliban cancelled the return of girls to secondary schools.

Another question on which we might reflect, given our 20 year commitment to Afghanistan in blood and treasure, is this: As we look at the example of Ukrainians fighting to the death for their country, why was it that such a will to resist on the part of the whole of civil society was not so evident in Afghanistan?

A number of arm-chair experts have sent me their criticisms of the Homes for Ukraine scheme that the Government has launched. This scheme hasn’t just been plucked out of the air, rather it is modelled on a successful scheme that was developed and implemented in Canada for Syrian refugees. We hope it will be equally successful here but there is an element of ‘suck it and see’.
Hosts have to commit to 6 months, some won’t manage to stick it out, some will extend their hospitality well beyond and some won’t. Undoubtedly other hosts will come forward to take up the slack, but in the event of there not being sufficient, then the burden will fall on local authorities to find accommodation. In that eventuality it is worth remembering that there are still 12,000 Afghans accommodated in hotels since last August to find homes for.

A windfall tax on oil companies, demanded by the opposition parties, would deliver a short-term gain for the exchequer – which could be passed on to hard pressed tax-payers and consumers.
It would however, be an irresponsible expedient at the expense of the long-term interests of the very same tax-payers and consumers.
We live and work in an international economy where we compete for investment to generate jobs, productivity and -so proceeding- greater prosperity. The key to this competitive process is to present ourselves as a stable, predictable and business-friendly jurisdiction. Few things could be more damaging to that reputation than arbitrary taxes imposed on enterprises because the markets have delivered them unexpectedly high profits.
The proper course for a country that wants to become and to remain prosperous, is to design a tax system that incentivises the reinvestment of profits in to  more productive enterprises.
Advocates of a windfall, often pray in aid the windfall tax imposed on the Banks in the early years of Lady Thatcher’s government. Though I’ve worshipped at her shrine too, she wasn’t perfect and that tax was one of her mistakes.

The welcome for the return of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was universal. Nothing should dampen the joy of seeing her family reunited. I visited her husband Richard twice during his hunger vigils -once outside the Iranian Embassy and, more recently outside the Foreign Office. He has proved a magnificent and brave campaigner, matching his wife’s courage and endurance at Evin prison in Iran.

The reality we cannot escape from however, is that Iran took Nazanin as a hostage and we have paid a ransom for her return.
The historical £400 million debt that we owed to Iran was indeed legitimate: In the nineteen seventies the Shah of Iran ordered and paid for UK tanks for his army. They were never delivered because the Iranian Revolution brought to power a regime that we could not possibly of have justified arming. That regime, in breach of all international standards and law, took 52 US diplomats hostage. Since when, international financial sanctions, in one form or another, have prevented the settlement of the debt we owed to Iran.

The secret terms of the treaty we signed, we are assured, prevent the £400 million being spent on any of Iran’s current military adventures in Syria, support for the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon or any of its other sponsorship of terrorism. On the contrary, it must be spent on humanitarian objectives.  This fig leaf, the exact terms of which we are prevented from knowing, is our comfort blanket, reassuring us that we really didn’t pay a ransom after all; No,  we just settled an historic debt that we genuinely owed and that we’ve done the just and honourable thing.

Notwithstanding my joy for the return of Nazanin, I cannot be alone in believing that Iran has secured what it set out to achieve when it took her hostage in the first place.
A precedent has been set and the world is a more dangerous place as a consequence.
Anyone who travels to jurisdictions beyond the ‘rule-of-law’ -as we understand that term  in western liberal democracy, places themselves at huge risk.

From the very start the UK has been out in front of the pack on Ukraine: We trained 22,000 of their troops over the last few years and armed them with anti-tank weapons: We made public the classified intelligence spelling out exactly what Russia was planning. Some of our allies were sceptical, but our ministers travelled relentlessly to European capitals to repeat the warnings.
When it came to the crunch we froze more Russian Assets than the USA and very much more than the EU.
Our humanitarian assistance to countries bordering Ukraine taking the refugee crisis, has been
faultless.
 I have been inundated however, with complaints about our dilatory response on the issue of Ukrainian refugees. 
Security is important: bona fides do need checking; there will be Russian agents and migrants from other countries masquerading as Ukrainians: we cannot just open the door without checking.
I have no difficulty with the two schemes that have been announced which strike me as fair and proportionate. I anticipate that family sponsored refugees will mostly dwell with their families that sponsored them. Equally individual and community sponsored refugees will reside in the housing that their sponsors have identified. This is an important consideration. Shortage of housing is easily the biggest headache in my inbox; and we still have 12,000 Afghan refugees in hotels to find homes for.
What has driven me, my correspondents and my parliamentary colleagues into a state of rage is the lamentable implementation of these schemes.
When many thought we were ‘crying wolf’, ministers really believed our own intelligence sources that an invasion was coming with all its predictable consequences – so we had weeks to plan and deploy forward processing centres in countries bordering Ukraine, well in advance of the arrival of refugees. It is deeply regrettable that this week we were still acquiring premises and defining the details on the schemes.

I’ve received a considerable correspondence characterised by bitterness and unpleasantness, Happily, it isn’t from my own constituents. Strangely, most of it appears to come from Scotland. I think stems from an account in the Glasgow Herald about a question I asked in the Commons a full a week before their article.
The gist of the correspondence is that I am a fool (and that is putting it rather more charitably than the emails do) for having voted for Brexit, only now to complain about bureaucracy at the borders.
I’m afraid they’ve got quite the wrong end of the stick. My complaint was one about our own lack of urgency in implementing time-saving digital systems to replace paper. After all, we have -as part of our international development effort- implemented those systems in Africa to promote seamless trade within that continent.
We can get our own house in order, then we’d be in a position to challenge Europe’s level of ambition.
For the avoidance of any doubt, my support for Brexit is undiminished.

Several correspondents have written to demand the imposition of a ‘no-fly zone’ over Ukraine as we did to prevent Saddam terrorizing the Kurds in Iraq.
The difference is simple: Saddam did not have Putin’s capability to press the nuclear button and vaporise us in nanoseconds.
A NATO no-fly zone over Ukraine would require us to shoot down Russian aircraft that violated it: we would be at war with Russia, with all the consequences that Putin has indicated will follow.

One of the military mysteries of the Russian invasion, thus far at least, has been the very limited use they have made of their huge superiority of their air force in both numbers and technical sophistication. Suggestions to explain this range from a shortage of precision weapons (after a prolonged campaign in Syria), to lack of training in the complex field of mounting a large-scale operation co-ordinated with ground forces. In this respect operations in Syria have been confined to single aircraft or pairs of them, which is how they are being deployed in Ukraine. They have yet to mount operations to take and maintain control of the skies.

Similarly, the use of their superior numbers in tanks and other ‘state-of-the- art’ armoured vehicles has also been unimpressive. They have been snarled-up in huge traffic jams on roads, bogged down in mud when off-road, breaking down and running out of fuel. It is tempting to conclude that they just aren’t particularly good.
In the nineteen seventies our intelligence was that we faced the USSR’s highly trained and motivated military machine and that we had no hope of halting their advance -that’s why NATO would not subscribe to the undertaking of ‘no first use’ of nuclear weapons: We believed that our only chance of holding the advance was to use our battlefield nuclear capability.
When the USSR disintegrated internally, the shortcomings of our intelligence was exposed: their military was nothing like as formidable as we had been led to believe.
Perhaps that is still true of the Russian Bear. 

I have received quite a correspondence condemning the 2.7 % pay rise for MPs.
My reply is simple: “Not me Guv”; For over a decade MP’s pay has been set by an independent body using a formula linking it to the level of pay in the public sector. 
Is the independent body making a reasonable fist of it, or is it being too generous?
Well, if you average out the pay increases they have awarded us over the last decade it works out at 2.9% per year, which may be generous but not excessive. The important thing is that it is significantly below the rate of inflation. Hopefully, this will give a lead in pay negotiations: it is essential not to build inflationary expectations if we are to bring inflation under control. 

As an aside, given the column inches given to the MP pay award in the newspapers, when David Cameron’s Coalition Government came to power in 2010, with very stretched public finances, it immediately cut all ministerial pay by 5% and then froze it for 5 years. This received no press coverage at all -funny that.