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.

In this column last week, referring to Matt Hancock’s affair, I made a passing reference to ‘the Tempter’. A surprising number of email correspondents have asked me to have the courage name and shame the individual in question! I’m afraid that they have got quite the wrong end of the stick. Indeed, I’m shocked that anyone would not be certain as to what I was referring to . Have we become so forgetful of scripture?
“Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the Devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about seeking whom he may devour. Whom resist, steadfast in the faith”
1 Peter 5: 8 

That’s who I meant.

Sarah Vine wrote sensitively in a national newspaper about the difficulties faced by political marriages following the coverage of Matt Hancock’s affair, only for the announcement of the end of her own marriage to Michael Gove to follow shortly thereafter.
All the true circumstances that lead to divorce will only ever be known by the couples involved, and it is always dangerous to draw general conclusions. I am not sure that the marriages of politicians are more prone to end in divorce than they are in any other profession. Clearly however, physical separation doesn’t help. If you have to be in Westminster and order your affairs so that your spouse is at a distance in your constituency home, then an additional stress has been placed on the relationship, and additional opportunities for the Tempter.
When I was selected to be the Conservative Candidate to fight New Forest West before the 1997 election, a member of the selection committee told me that they had chosen my wife too: We were considered to be a team (such processes are now considered beyond the pale and candidates cannot even say if they have spouses, let alone be accompanied by them to interviews and selection hustings).
Equally, when I arrived at Westminster I was advised by professional staff at the Commons to employ my wife as a member of my staff as such an arrangement would ensure that she was involved in my work as part of the team, so acting as a powerful corrective to any sense of isolation, and even possibly temptation.
After the expenses scandal of 2009 the newly created Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority announced that it was minded to end the practice of allowing MPs to employ their wives. Following a public consultation they changed course and accepted that the practice had significant advantages. Unfortunately, they changed their mind again a few years later, since when new Members have been unable employ their spouses.

Some 15 years ago I recall the telephone ringing one Friday evening as I was rushing to get out in time to attend a voluntary organisation’s Summer barbeque in Ringwood. On the line was a well-known journalist from a Sunday newspaper telephoning to warn me that they were going to publish a story about an affair I’d been having and that– when I’d sought to end it- my lover, in an act of vengeance, had leaked embarrassing emails.
It was with some relief that I was able to say that whilst I had on a number of occasions met the woman that he had named, also that I was confident that I had always done so accompanied by a member of my staff (my wife!).
The story never appeared. Alas, the emails however, filled many column inches. Though embarrassing, mercifully they were of a political, rather than a sexual nature.
As to how the emails had leaked, it wasn’t a jilted lover: I had left myself logged into a computer in the library, then I had gone out to take a phone call without logging-off.
I think they call it ‘user error’. 

One of the pressing issues that will face Sajid Javid as the new Secretary of State for Health is how to reform social care.
Bluntly, the problem is that there is insufficient provision because we don’t spend enough on it.  That much is generally agreed. The key question on which a consensus has yet to be reached is how are we going to pay for the much greater sums that we will need to spend. 

I sat on the legislative standing committee which introduced the distinction between healthcare, provided free at the point of use by the NHS, and social care which is means-tested. This distinction is not always sustainable, especially where patients with dementia together with a number of complex medical conditions are concerned. The assessment procedures to deal with these cases and to provide ‘Continuing NHS Care’ -where all the cost are met by the NHS- leave much to be desired, they are applied differently giving rise to a postcode lottery and to a perception of unfairness.

That sense of unfairness however, is much wider:  People who have been lucky, wise, hard-working and successful in building up their savings will find that have to pay the full cost of their care. Whilst, those who have been impecunious or just much less fortunate, will have their social care paid for at the expense of taxpayers.
That perception of unfairness is an inevitable consequence of any system reliant on means-testing. We just live with it across other aspects of our welfare state; Where, for example, access to Universal Credit is denied to those who have significant savings, even though they have lost their income.
The only way to avoid this perception of unfairness is to remove any individual responsibly entirely by making free provision universal.

Universal benefits, irrespective of income and assets, come at an enormous cost to taxpayers, with all the consequences that higher taxation has for reduced incentives, investment and productivity.
It comes down to this simple question in the end: do we want to nationalise another aspect of our collective life by simply expecting the state to provide it? 

Politicians often refer to the ‘scandal’ of elderly patients having to sell their homes to meet the costs of residential care. Of course, we’d all much prefer to leave our assets to the next generation, but equally, I was always taught to save up for a ‘rainy day’. Well, when you need social care, isn’t that the rainy day?

I do not believe that we need to commission another great review of the options. The last such review developed a workable solution (and which Parliament legislated to implement): Sir Andrew Dilnot proposed a cap on the amount that anyone would be required to spend on social care if they had the means to do so. Beyond that cap the taxpayer would meet the costs. He suggested a cap of £75,000. Clearly, the lower the cap the greater the burden that will be borne by taxpayers.
The advantage of a cap however, is that it gives the insurance industry the certainty of a maximum liability which will enable the development of affordable financial products to protect those customers who want to safeguard their assets and savings for the next generation.

The Dilnot proposal is a means of getting more funding into social care on the basis of a ‘mixed economy’, whilst going some way to addressing the unfairness of a means tested system. But we must not hide from the reality that it comes at a greater cost to the public purse which  inevitably will require either higher taxes or less expenditure on other aspects of government provision, and we need to be open and honest about recognising that.

Months ago, in this column I pointed out that the successful virus variants become more transmissible by being less virulent. Clearly, by sending your hosts to bed, to hospital, or even to their deaths, there will be fewer opportunities to spread than if you keep them up and about mixing with others.
Despite the alarming graphs and charts, presented -as ever- without proper context, the success of the delta or Indian variant has become our dominant variant based on exactly this strategy.
According to the NHS’s own data hospital cases have risen significantly since 27 May, but comparatively very few of these  patients are actually occupying hospital beds. So, the rest probably pitched up at A&E -presumably because they couldn’t get an appointment with their GP – before being sent home.
For days however, establishment voices have been demanding an extension of restrictions to prevent even the smallest increase in hospital admissions so that the NHS can get on, uninterrupted, dealing with all the backlogs of other illnesses and conditions that have built up over the last 18 months. So it has come to this: enterprises are to be restricted, to remain closed, basic freedoms and social interactions remain banned, all as a means of managing NHS waiting lists.
Is England just an NHS served by a nation, rather than a nation served by an NHS?
By this logic there is no chance of the restrictions being lifted as we approach the flu season this autumn. Indeed, a number of the Government’s Scientific advisors have been sounding-off that we will have to abide by their dystopian distancing and masking regulations forever!
By rolling over and implementing their latest advice, the Government has transformed the victory of the vaccination campaign in to the defeat of their road map to the lifting of the restrictions.

But if you thought you were ok because your wedding can now go ahead with more than 30 guests…  before you celebrate, read the small print; only where the venue can accommodate higher numbers including the full distancing requirements. How cruel to raise hopes, only to dash them.

I never believed that the Government’s response to the epidemic was proportionate: it had no right to the freedoms it took from us; now it continues to withhold them despite the emergency having passed, accordingly it has set the most disastrous precedent for the future of liberty in England.