A couple of weeks ago, in Parliament’s debate following the overthrow of the elected government of Afghanistan, I put the question of what we might do were it to happen here: would we join the Resistance or would we flee?
To say that the question was not well received would be an understatement. Nevertheless, I believe it is an important question: do we believe that our liberty, democracy and values are worth fighting and dying for?
We enjoy these freedoms because so many of our forebears fought and died for them.  It is a difficult question for us to face with a measure of humility as we watch events unfold from our comfort and security. Yet in our own generation and in Afghanistan 457 of our men and women fought and died for those very values and many more suffered horrific injuries.
Also, as we consider the reasons behind complete collapse of the trained and well-armed Afghan forces in the face of a numerically much inferior enemy, we must also remember that over the last few years no less than 70,000 members of the Afghan security forces bravely fought and died for these values too.

The resistance continues in the Panjshir Valley where elements of the Afghan Army, together with the Vice President have pledged to fight on under the leadership of the Sandhurst-trained Ahmad Masoud, the son of the mujahedeen leader ‘The Lion of Panjshir’ who was assassinated on the orders on Bin-Laden in 2001.
Are we going to leave them to it, or will we assist in the way that we supported Ahmad’s father in his resistance to the Taliban?

Realpolitik demands answers to certain questions. First, what are their realistic prospects?
The Taliban are already claiming victory in the Panjshir but this is fiercely denied by the resistance. I hope we have much better military intelligence as to what exactly is happening than we had earlier this summer.
Second, what would the consequences of western support for resistance in the Panjshir be?
Currently the Taliban have ‘hostages’ in the form of all those that we failed to evacuate in the last weeks. We want them granted safe passage out of Afghanistan. Notwithstanding announcements of amnesty, there are many reports of summary reprisals against Afghans who assisted NATO and the Government of Afghanistan. I do not doubt that western assistance to the resistance in the Panjshir will make the predicament of those Afghans now in fear and hiding very much worse.
On the other hand, I doubt that the Taliban have much appetite for our good opinion so the only leverage we really have is financial. To put it bluntly we will need to ‘incentivise’ the provision of safe passage out of Afghanistan. So, in the end it comes down to danegeld, but as the English discovered with the Vikings, payment doesn’t always lead to compliance with the obligations for which the payment was made.

If the prospects of resistance are realistic then an assessment needs to be made on the basis of risk to those Afghans who are -in effect- now hostages, as against the potential benefits to Afghanistan as a whole of an effective and successful resistance.
I do not know the answers to these questions, but I believe it is important to ask them. Just as it is important for us to examine ourselves and ask, what would we have done had it happened to us.

You should never underestimate your adversaries. I recall that in the ‘Cameron camp’ during our years of frustration as the Official Opposition, we never underestimated the skills of Tony Blair as the consummate political performer. We even used to refer to him as ‘The Master’. Clearly, you cannot win 3 general elections in a row with majorities to dream of, without an immense ability to manage your political party and to reach out beyond your committed and faithful supporters. I always saw Tony Blair as a political ‘star’ of similar calibre to Bill Clinton in the USA. All this, without sharing his political outlook or his policies… that is until now:
When Blair spoke out last week about the ‘imbecilic’ decision to leave Afghanistan in the way that the US Biden administration did, I do not think I could have come up with a better way of describing it. A monumental strategic error has been made.

After a twenty-year commitment, expensive in both lives and money, I entirely understand the urge to withdraw. But to do so without first establishing the capabilities of Afghan forces, and to do so in a way that so undermined their morale, and to have done it during the Taliban’s fighting season instead of waiting till winter until they return to their tribal fastness, and to have done it with so little planning for the detailed logistics of withdrawal, all of this amounts to an enormous blunder with incalculable consequences.
A Regime that assassinated female judges, female TV presenters, bombed girl schools, markets and weddings has been handed control. It remains intimately connected with Al Qaeda; it has released 500 of the world’s most dangerous terrorists which we left imprisoned at Bagram -when so much sacrifice went into their capture. And now we discover that we have left them with the pick of $85 billion’s worth of the most modern weapons. Frankly, it is just incredible that such an act of self-harm could have been allowed to happen.

So, were the billions of pounds that we spent and the British lives that we sacrificed, in vain?
I certainly don’t believe so: Hundreds of terrorist outrages were prevented by the work of our troops in Afghanistan.
It was a righteous cause and the years of education and healthcare that improved so many lives were certainly of enormous benefit to millions.

The one bright spot of the last few days has been the magnificent performance of our Armed Forces in the most difficult and stressful of circumstances, evacuating 15,000 souls in the last fortnight, retaining their professionalism and efficiency in the face of such extremes of human misery. They really are The Best.

*

…and Gazing at the photograph of our paratroopers crammed aboard the military aircraft bringing them home, there isn’t a Covid mask to be seen. Hallelujah!

To my mind there is a clear distinction between sanctuary and resettlement.
There are many brave Afghan men and women who are currently in grave danger and it is right that we offer them sanctuary, if they can get to us or if we can rescue them. Given their bravery and commitment to their native land, I would expect such sanctuary to last as long as the danger itself. Once the opportunity arises (if it does, but it may never) I anticipate that they would want to return to help rebuild their country.

There are very many more Afghan men and women who are not in grave danger, nevertheless they have lived difficult lives in a war-torn country, they are about to lose what rights they have and their life chances and opportunities are about to get very much worse. There have been demands in Parliament that we resettle permanently as many of them that wish to come to our shores and are able to escape.
With the best will in the world, though we regret their desperate situation, we are in no position to make that unlimited offer.
Angela Merkel made such an offer in 2015 and the result was one million takers.
 We ought to help as many as we can, but it does come down to a question of numbers. In the circumstances, our offer to accommodate 20,000 Afghans -especially the most vulnerable women and girls, is proportionate. Particularly so, when our support to other nations in the region which take refugees is taken into account.

There are countless places in the world where life is so much less eligible than here in Britain: Countries where there is ghastly oppression, injustice, poverty, warfare, famine and disease. The people of those countries would dearly wish to come to Britain for a better life -and many try to. It is to our credit that we wish we could be more generous in our welcome. I believe that our contribution is better made in development aid deployed to the places from which they seek to escape (that is why I was dismayed by our decision to cut our aid budget, though we remain the world’s second largest donor).

Some go further and argue that not only should we have a much more generous resettlement scheme, but that -because of our involvement in Afghanistan over 20 years – we are obliged to do so. I do not agree and I revert to the distinction that I have drawn: We do have an obligation to provide sanctuary to those who, by assisting us or by the roles they have played, have put themselves in particular danger. For the wider population, beyond our offer of 20,000 places, our obligation has been met in blood and treasure over 20 years as we sought to bring a measure of security, education, healthcare and economic development to their country.
I wish that we had completed the job and that we had avoided the huge strategic error of withdrawal. I pray that we will learn the right lessons.

My contribution to this column last week was quickly overtaken by events. The Chief of the Defence staff, Sir Nicholas Carter’s analysis that the Afghan security forces were pursuing a sensible strategy of consolidating in the cities, turns out to have been quite detached from actual events on the ground.
Equally, my own suggestion that we might be being too hasty in our determination to expedite evacuations, turns out to have been ill-informed. Nevertheless, the concern about providing asylum for translators has been a long running saga over recent years and is likely to have had an impact on the morale of those who had no alternative but to continue taking the fight to the Taliban.
In 2016 I had a meeting with President Ghani where one item on my agenda was to get a more constructive approach from his government regarding facilitating the return to Afghanistan of failed Afghan asylum seekers from the Britain. His response was that he was a ‘war president’ and his first concern must be the men and women who were fighting the battle, rather than taking up any of his time with arrangements to accommodate those who had chosen to run away. It was a fair point.
My own view was that our proper contribution to Afghanistan was not in providing asylum, but rather in the hundreds of lives sacrificed by our armed forces and the billions of pounds that we spent on education, healthcare, humanitarian aid and economic development. The humiliating defeat of this enterprise inevitably means we will face what we sought to avoid, namely enormous new demands on our ability to provide sanctuary and asylum. 

There is no hiding the magnitude of the disaster. An enormous unforced strategic error has been made by the decision to withdraw before the Afghan armed forces were capable of defeating the Taliban.
Our enemies will be celebrating the humiliating defeat of western democracy and a huge morale boost will be given to Islamist terrorists the world over.
It is pure wishful thinking to believe that the Taliban will not return to their former policy of harbouring foreign terrorists and promoting the violent assault on our values. The disaster in Afghanistan is unlikely to be confined there.

Almost as an afterthought, Afghan students who had been successful in the highly competitive Chevening Scholarship scheme, which enables them to study for a master’s degree in the UK, have been told that there is now no time to arrange their visas. But, hey, don’t worry: they can defer their scholarships until next year.
As if the Taliban regime will be going to facilitate such an endeavour. 

I visited Afghanistan twice as a minister with responsibility for driving forward the economic development effort that we were making there. In fact, I had spent some time in the country on a number of visits in the mid-nineteen- seventies when it was a very different country. I recall hiring a horse for a couple of days and riding out on my own to the stunning lake at Band-e-Amir and to the standing Buddhas at Bamiyan (- subsequently destroyed by the Taliban).

Given the blood and treasure that we have sacrificed over the last twenty years, I believe that NATO’s withdrawal is a profoundly mistaken policy. It is some years since NATO troops were actually involved in the fighting: with the exception of US air attack missions, NATO’s contribution has been largely confined to training and mentoring the Afghan security forces, whom we are now abandoning.

The advance of the Taliban is a catastrophe for women, girls and religious minorities, as well as to the ordinary liberties of everyone in that country. The prospects for educated women, many of whom have taken leading roles in the Parliament, media and the professions, are particularly bleak.
We can expect another even greater wave of refugees seeking to arrive on our shores.

The Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Nick Carter has said that we shouldn’t write-off the Republic yet: that there are signs that the population is showing the sort of defiance needed to win this battle; that they are rallying in support of the security forces which are pursuing a sensible and realistic strategy of consolidation to  fight the Taliban to a stalemate. He says we must help them stay firm and force the Taliban to the negotiating table. He concludes that much depends on who wins the “battle of the narratives”
He’s right: winning the ‘battle of the narrative’ is vital for morale, the maintenance of which, is a most important principle of war and essential to success.
Our policy however, appears designed to do the exact opposite. We do seem to be ‘writing-off’ the Republic. Our proper concern for the safety of Afghan interpreters who served our armed forces is laudable and indeed, our sacred duty. Our haste however, in securing their evacuation,  sends a clear signal to those who are still fighting, that we believe there is no hope. Now a similar commitment is being given to evacuate Afghan journalists.

I pray that the Afghan warriors, so many of whom have been trained by UK forces at our ‘Sandhurst in the Sand’, will prove the defeatists wrong.

Several constituents have written to me, outraged at the prospect of ‘Covid passports’ and quoting Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the USA, who said
“those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety”
Franklin couldn’t have been writing in more different circumstances: his concern was the liberty of the Pennsylvania legislature, for the purpose of  meeting military expenditure, to insist on its right to levy taxes on the State’s  founding family, rather than to be bought off with a lump sum in return for an acceptance by the assembly that they had no right to tax them.
However impressive the quote may sound (and I’ve used it myself) it is a bit of a tight fit when it comes to shoe-horning it into the debate on compulsory vaccination.
My retort to the constituents who quoted Franklin to me is that, on the contrary, I have secured both my safety and my liberty by freely choosing to be vaccinated: a course that I recommended to them, and which I recommend to everyone else.

Nevertheless, regular readers of this column will know that I am deeply concerned about the creeping encroachment on liberty. I’ve twice used this column to set out my opposition to Covid passports and to the decision to make Covid vaccination compulsory for anyone working in residential care homes.
I do not want to live in a society where we would routinely have to produce our bona fides in order to secure access to venues and enjoy our full civil rights. I’m confident that were such a system introduced -and we are not there yet, with the parliamentary battle still ahead of us – it would be very difficult to subsequently dismantle it and it could be the fore-runner of a system of identity cards.

I understand the Government’s preoccupation that, whilst we have had enormous success with the vaccination programme, progress with the youngest age cohorts has been less impressive. From the outset I believed that the vaccination roll-out for younger people should have been incentivised on the basis of ‘carrots and not sticks’.

Frankly we have made a poor job of trumpeting the effectiveness of the vaccines: We have thoroughly undermined them by maintaining restrictions even after the vulnerable groups had been vaccinated and by insisting on isolation and quarantine conditions notwithstanding fully vaccinated status. This sends completely the wrong message to younger and less vulnerable people. Which is possibly why the Government is now having to raise the prospect of making their lives less convenient and agreeable should they choose not to bother.

As for those who write to me about the Government’s malign and hidden agenda to deprive us of liberty. I reject it utterly. Though I disagree with their policy, I know these ministers personally, they are among my friends, they have the best of motives, even if they are mistaken.  But I do accept that the threat to our personal freedoms are growing in intensity and we have to decide whether we insist on holding on to them, or we are going to allow the growing power of the state to take them from us  whenever it chooses.

As the trickle of migrants crossing the Channel in overcrowded and unsafe inflatable boats has started to become a flood, so the correspondence in my email inbox has increased by the same proportions.
Though some correspondence is informed and sensitive, for the most part that is not the case: correspondents simply demand that it be stopped and that arrivals be sent back.
It reminds me of King Canute ordering the incoming tide to turn.
Sending the arrivals back does require the agreement of the jurisdiction to which we are going to send them: what reason would France have for agreeing to that?
We are already paying France a small fortune for the policing their beaches to prevent boats from launching, which has had some modest success.
Once launched however, France interprets international maritime law  as preventing them from interfering unless the boats ask to be rescued. France sees its role as safely shepherding the migrants into UK waters where we will intercept them. A senior member of the Commons Home Affairs Committee has announced that France’s interpretation of maritime law is perverse and they must change it -so, we are back to King Canute: we hold no power over France to make them change (unless, of course, we can think of a sanction to make the French miserable, whose effects won’t rebound equally upon us).

Now that crossing the Channel in small boats has been established as a successful means of illegal entry to UK, the numbers attempting a crossing are bound to increase until migrants assess that it is not worth undertaking the expense or encountering the danger because the probability is that they will be expelled, or that they will be held in conditions less eligible than their current circumstances.
We’ve already encountered the difficulty of finding somewhere to expel them to, so we are left with the ‘ Australian’ approach of deterring them on the principle of less eligibility. The Australians send them to detention centres in Papua New Guinea. This is controversial even in Australia and I rather suspect that the British public would not have the stomach for it.
Nevertheless, the Borders Bill currently going through Parliament specifies a 4 year prison term for illegal entry and empowers ministers to implement detention centres for the processing of asylum claims overseas.
I seriously doubt that we will fill our -already bursting- prisons with tens of thousands of migrants, including the prospect of separating families.
Equally, it is not clear what sort of inducement would be required to persuade another country to house our ‘processing centres’ and whether they would turn out to be as grizzly and embarrassing as Australia’s.

That we need to identify a workable solution, I do not doubt. Clearly, our generous resettlement schemes are being overtaken by unlawful migrants who, no matter what they may have endured and from what horrors they have fled, have had sufficient sums to purchase the services of criminal gangs to deliver them to our shores.

Of course, we could reduce the attraction of the crossings, just making them so much more dangerous by withdrawing our cutters and patrols altogether. I’m confident that this would not be the answer. I wonder how many constituents would be emailing me then, when the bodies of children start washing up on the beach.

When I first entered the Commons, the Father of The House (its longest serving member) was Ted Heath, who was followed by Tam Dalyell, one of the most independent minded and effective members. I remember him once rising after a particularly long and vapid ministerial answer and simply saying “why?” leaving the minister floundering. Tam was one of the few Scottish members opposed to devolving powers to a Scottish parliament. It was he who framed what became known as the “West Lothian Question” (he was the Member for West Lothian when he framed it though he was subsequently the Member of Linlithgow).
Basically, at issue in the question was, if having once devolved Scottish educational matters to a parliament in Edinburgh, the fairness of the Member for Linlithgow voting in Westminster on educational matters in England which would have no effect in his own constituency.
The matter came to a head in the election campaign of 2015 because of the collapse of Labour support in its former Scottish Heartlands: Labour’s only prospect of getting into Government was believed to be, on the basis of polling, by relying on the support the Scottish nationalist MPs. Under such a scenario, England representing 80 of UK would have been governed at the will of Scottish MPs voting on matters whose own laws were devolved to an exclusively Scottish Parliament.
To the surprise of many it didn’t happen: a majority Conservative government was elected. One of its manifesto pledges however, was to address the issue with ‘English Votes for English Laws’ (EVAL). So, we changed the Standing Orders of the House of Commons (the nearest thing to a written constitution that we have) to exclude Scottish MPs from detailed stages of legislation not affecting Scotland and for the House to sit as an English Grand Committee in which Scottish MPs would not vote. The procedure was clumsy but effective.
Out of the blue last week the Government introduced a motion to remove the procedure and to return to the status quo ante. I am at a loss as to its motive. The Covid-secure Westminster was empty and utterly ineffective. There were a handful of us there to vote against the measure, but to divide the House you need to supply two tellers, one for the ‘Aye’ Lobby and one for the ‘No’ lobby. Alas, so many of us have been persuaded not to act as ‘supper-spreaders’ by crowding the lobbies and instead to accept the innovation of voting by proxy. But if you are voting by proxy you cannot be a teller. So, when it came to the vote we couldn’t find anyone amongst us to be our second teller: Accordingly, English Votes for English Laws was ditched without a single recorded dissenting vote.
Democracy?

I am an enthusiast for vaccinations but I never dreamt we’d make them compulsory. In my blog of 3/12/20 Vaccination Passports (desmondswaynemp.com) I said it was unthinkable. Nevertheless, compulsory vaccination for anyone working in a care home will be introduced later this year, that includes any tradesman entering the premises to do repairs, or whatever.
We haven’t had compulsory vaccination since 1853 – which was soon reversed because it swiftly led to a collapse in the number of people willing to be vaccinated for smallpox, such was their suspicion of the new law.
Of course, many clinicians have to have hepatitis vaccinations in order to practice, but they go into the profession knowing that. It is very different thing to turn round to a care worker mid-career and say ‘take the jab or lose your job’. This is no way to treat dedicated staff, who could well go elsewhere and do less demanding work for higher pay.
I have received desperate representations from a number of care homes who are already under-staffed and fear that they will have to reduce their number of beds or even close.
This extraordinary departure from accepted norms was dealt with in our Covid Potemkin Parliament in a mere 90 minutes on a motion that was  designed to obscure its purpose. The Statutory Instrument was almost double-Dutch and referred merely to a ‘medical procedure’.
The Government’s Impact Assessment of the measure was withheld from us and the minister either wouldn’t or couldn’t tell us what was in it.
Democracy is under attack from within, ably assisted by Covid-19

I recall watching the early evening TV news in Jonesboro, Arkansas back in the mid-nineteen eighties and seeing footage of myself descending aircraft steps to the commentary “economist and professor, Mr Desmond Swayne flew into town to-day”. Well, it must have been a very thin day for news and they do use the term ‘professor’ very much more loosely than we do in the UK. Nevertheless, I was on a lecture tour of US universities, corporations and business organisations and the  following morning I addressed a business breakfast at 7 AM, where most of the attendees had come from work, having already started an hour earlier -that’s productivity.
It is some now time since I passed myself off as an economist, but the facts of economic life are blindingly obvious. I am a member of the House of Commons Work and Pensions Select Committee and we recently produced a report, the Future of Work.  Select Committees are encouraged to reach their conclusions by consensus from the evidence presented to them during an inquiry. I’ve never been persuaded that consensus is a virtue: It is often the lowest common denominator and gives rise to some rather bland conclusions. On this occasion however, we couldn’t reach a consensus and voted on party lines not to include a recommendation on UBI within the report.
No matter how slight your acquaintance with the science of economics, UBI -the provision of a universal basic income, has got to be amongst the daftest of ideas. That it has attractions, I have no doubt: I’ve spoken to lots of furloughed employees who, despite having only 80% of their income (compensated somewhat by no longer having commuting costs) have rather enjoyed being paid to stay at home without having to work at all.
Even Lenin insisted that “He who does not work shall not eat”.  Who on earth would work if they were provided with an income that enabled them not to have to?
The argument advanced in favour of UBI is that it would not stop us from working but would provide a level of security against the possibility of a reduction in our earned income. But that is exactly what Universal Credit is there for. The difference is that UBI is to be paid to absolutely everyone where Universal Credit is only paid to those in need. It shouldn’t take an economics professor to spot that paying an income to absolutely everyone irrespective of their need, will mean you will have very much less available to concentrate on those who really are in need. Either that, or you tax everyone into to penury.  .
They’d have understood this at breakfast in Jonesboro, even if they don’t in some parts of the Houser of Commons.