.. Desmond Swayne – Page 39

Sir Desmond Swayne TD MP

Sir Desmond Swayne TD MP

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No-Fault Divorce

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Whilst the focus of political news has remained on the Conservative Leadership contest, and in particular its implications for BREXIT, largely unreported Parliament has continued to legislate on important matters, even if rather fewer MPs appear to be participating in this process.


Last week the House of Commons gave a second reading to a bill bringing in the most profound changes to our divorce law since the nineteen sixties. I am simplifying a complex measure, but basically the current law still requires ‘irretrievable breakdown’ to be proved through adultery, desertion or unreasonable conduct by one of the parties before divorce is granted. The Alternative is a separation of two years, but where one party opposes the divorce the other must wait fully five years to get one.


The reform approved by the commons last week will change this fundamentally: The long waits of two and five years are swept aside and the concept of ‘fault’ in divorce is removed.
Clearly, irretrievable breakdown on the basis of unreasonable behaviour means that at least one of the parties has behaved unreasonably and is at fault. The focus of the measure before Parliament is to grant ‘no fault divorce’: to simply accept that a relationship has broken down when either party applies for a divorce, rather than having to demonstrate it by attributing blame.


This is not uncontroversial. I have received a significant amount of correspondence opposing these reforms. Constituents have complained that they trivialise both marriage and divorce. Furthermore, that they fly in the face of the facts: there is fault in divorce, people do behave unreasonably, and surely the law should recognise this.
Some of our clergy have complained that the sanctity of marriage is undermined by making it so easy to end it.

I have a great deal of sympathy with these arguments, and I had to reflect for a long time before giving my assent to the bill.
The question of ‘sanctity’ in marriage is a religious one. Of course, a change in the law of marriage as a civil contract cannot change what the Church teaches about ‘Holy Matrimony’ and its indissolubility, or otherwise.
The key issue is the question of ‘fault’. I accept that there is fault in divorce, but in my experience it is the requirement to attribute that fault -to lay the blame- that can make divorce a so much more malicious affair.
So often divorced constituents have come to my surgeries seeking my assistance in a continuing warfare with their former spouse, where the children are being used as the weapons.

It was on the basis of lowering the temperature by removing the need for one party to blame the other when seeking a divorce, that I gave my consent to the bill.
I hope, with the assistance of like-minded MPs, to extract a commitment from the Government during the remaining stages of the bill, to greater support for struggling couples earlier in their marriage.

Please turn the TV off

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Against my better judgement, I watched the BBC debate between the Conservative leadership candidates last week.

The highly partisan questioners were the least of it. Frankly, such is the preponderance of a left-wing outlook among broadcast journalists in general, and the BBC in particular, that I have come to expect treatment of that sort as standard practice.

Rather, It is the format that is so biased in favour of the journalist and against the politicians participating -whatever their politics may be.
A ‘bun-fight’ fight is deliberately set up so that none of the participants can come out of it smelling of roses. The compere however, with prepared one-line put-downs, and giving little time for her targets to respond, comes out as the master, looking reasonable, clever and in command of misbehaving school-boys.

I am happy to be interviewed anytime, but for some-time now I have been refusing to do broadcast discussions, unless they are very strictly refereed -where one can only speak at the invitation of the referee. The moment participants are allowed to interrupt each other the whole thing goes the way that the broadcasters always intended: never content with reporting the news, rather they want to make it; by creating a spectacle.
As I have implied, all the participants lose out in this format by appearing pushy and unreasonable. Personally, I always come off worst in these arguments because I am just too polite: I was taught not to interrupt.

Of course, as an ordinary civilian, rather than in my persona as a politician, I interact in conversation just like anyone else. It doesn’t matter if I’m interrupted because I can wait, then proceed as soon the person who has interrupted has finished. In a radio or TV studio, you just don’t have that chance: you are at the mercy of their pressured schedules. It is that pressure to get one’s point across while there is still time -and before the compere or the other participants interrupt again, that makes the whole thing so frightful.

Formerly, as a member of the directing staff at the Army’s commissioning board I would put potential officers through any number of tests, one of which was to watch them engage with one another in conversations on controversial subjects. The objective, was to see that they could make an argument logically and communicate effectively, at the same time to see that they were not ‘hogging it’ and that they were properly mindful of the others. Indeed, extra merit might be earned by a candidate that turned to one more reticent candidates and afforded him or her an opportunity to participate.
Many large employers have adopted a similar format when recruiting graduates.
To work effectively however, it needs plenty of time, the one thing you don’t get in a TV discussion.

Putting five politicians on the spot and at the mercy of a compere with ‘reputation’ and only an hour to cover any number of subjects was bound to end the way it did: with none of the participants coming over well. As, I believe, was always the intention.
It was for that reason this I urged David Cameron not to challenge Gordon Brown to debates in the 2010 election. I failed. Three participants were bad enough, but in 2017 with six it was just excruciating.

TV seeks to entertain viewers with ever shorter attention spans. I regret having defended the licence fee in this column last week: Television is making morons of us. Please turn it off

Free TV ?

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I have received a great deal of correspondence about Free TV licences for the over those seventy-five years of age.

The Government is guaranteeing this concession, which costs £745 million per year, until 2020. Thereafter, the concession is the responsibility of the BBC. This was agreed at the last negotiation of the TV licence fee – which generates £3.85 billion annually for the BBC. In addition to which, the BBC makes another £1 billion or so, from its commercial activities, including selling programmes to other broadcasters.

When the agreement was reached with the Government that from 2020 the concession should be the BBC’s responsibility, the BBC’s Director General observed that the cost of the concession was more than matched by the funding settlement it had received.

The BBC has now decided to not to make the concession to all the over seventy-fives after 2020, but instead, to means-test it by confining the free licence only to pensioners receiving pension credit.

Frankly, given the settlement that the BBC got, and the agreement it made, I think that tax-payers are being short-changed.
I certainly don’t think that tax-payers should be expected to pick up the tab for this once again.
The BBC has ‘pulled a fast one’ and ought to reconsider.


Constituents have however, pressed me on the principle that TV licences should be free for the over seventy-fives. Here I have some difficulty – I don’t see why they should.
Every autumn, I get a dozen or so letters from pensioners embarrassed by receiving their winter fuel allowance. They complain that they do not need it and that it would be better spent by giving rather more to those in greater need. I agree with them. If the allowance were mean-tested we could afford to make a more generous payment to those who really need it.
I cannot see why the means-testing principle should not also apply to the TV licence too. Clearly there will be many who can well afford to pay for their own. A colour TV licence is £154.50 per year, that’s just over 40 pence per day.

My granny used to save-up for her TV licence. When I was a little boy, she would send me down the street to get her ‘messages’, by which she meant her shopping (and which, in those days, meant waiting to be served in a number of shops, rather than helping-yourself in a supermarket).
Often, this would involve a trip to the post-office to purchase her TV stamp: By collecting the weekly stamp, she spread the cost of purchasing her licence annually.
I am nervous about ‘moral hazard’ in the expectation that things should be free.

Pension Credit is currently under-claimed: Many pensioners who are entitled to it, are not claiming it. They will therefore, from 2020, also miss out on a free TV licence if they are over 75.
This should be a greater incentive to claim what they paid their national insurance contributions for, and live more comfortably as a consequence.

As for the rest of us, we should continue to pay for our own licences.

Housing for Commoners

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The landscape of the New Forest, like so much of the remarkable countryside in the kingdom, is largely ‘man made’ in that it is the product of farming practices over generations.
In the New Forest, it is the grazing by commoners’ stock that is responsible for so much of the beauty and diversity.
Maintaining this landscape therefore, relies on the survival of commoning, and in particular bringing on the next generation of commoners.

Commoning is more a ‘way of life’ than a way of making a living. Many commoners subsidise their commoning activities from other sources of income.

A critical part of the equation to sustain commoning for a new generation is the provision of properties with affordable rents. A local home together with a back-up bit of land is an essential ingredient for managing ponies and cattle on the Forest.
The problem is that there is an ever grater premium on Forest properties, and you just can’t manage your livestock commuting from an address miles and miles away.
The problem isn’t new. It was spotted some time ago.

There are 65 Crown properties which were built to meet the needs of the Forestry Commission’s staff, most of whom were themselves commoners. In 1992 the recommendation of the Illingworth report was accepted by the Government, namely that these properties should be let to commoners at a rent equal to 15% of their income.
This policy was re-stated to the House of Commons by the Secretary of State in 2006 who said:
“Two criteria underpin the retention of properties in the Forest. The First is to provide opportunities for affordable housing with associated back-up land for practising commoners and the second is to provide affordable accommodation for commission employees in key posts when there are operational reasons for staff to be based in the Forest.”


Forestry England now stands accused by the Commoners Defence Association of breaching the policy  was clearly stated in Parliament. First, it is accused of advertising the properties to all staff within the region and not just those in key posts requiring them to be based in the Forest.
Second, that the rents charged are now well beyond the reach of genuine commoners, with rents representing from 70% to in excess of 100% of commoners’ income.

This is clearly a change from the policy adopted arising from the Illingworth report. In 2017 the Minister assured me that any review of the Illingworth policy would be preceded by a consultation with all interested parties, and that any change of policy would require ministerial approval.
There hasn’t been a consultation, and there has been no ministerial approval of any policy change.


So what’s going on?
I await an answer from the Forestry Minister, David Rutley.
Of course, I can understand Forestry England’s desire to maximise the income from its assets. It does however, receive a substantial subsidy from taxpayers to pay for its special obligations to conservation of the New Forest. Equally, it cannot be allowed to unilaterally change policy without proper parliamentary accountability.

Choosing a PM

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A number of constituents have put questions to me about the constitutional propriety of the choice of the next prime minister being confined to the membership of one political party. Frankly, it is indeed questionable.


The constitutional position is that we are a parliamentary democracy and we do not elect the prime minister. Rather, we elect members of parliament, and the PM holds office because she enjoys the support of a majority of those members of parliament.


Until relatively recently political parties confined to their own members of parliament the choice of who would lead them.
The advantage of doing so is to ensure that the leader always has the confidence of his or her parliamentary party, and if that confidence is lost, then it can be swiftly remedied by a ballot confined to a small electorate.


The moment you extend the electorate beyond the parliamentary party you make the process more complex and lengthy, and more important, you run the risk of having a winner chosen by the wider membership who doesn’t actually enjoy the confidence and support of a majority within the parliamentary party.
This is exactly the position that the current Official Opposition is in. Jeremy Corbyn was elected by a very wide definition of Labour Party membership which included registered Labour supporters, all on the basis of reforms implemented under his predecessor Ed Miliband, which further diluted the influence of MPs. The result is that it takes a relatively long time to arrange such a contest, and it has delivered a party led by Mr Corbyn, to the dismay of a majority of the MPs who sit on the Labour benches behind him.
When those MPs voted that they had no confidence in him, it made no difference because they no longer had ownership of the office.

The Conservative Party came rather late to the concept of ‘democratising’ the party leadership. It was only under reforms implemented by William Hague that the ballot for leader was extended beyond MPs to the party membership. I opposed the reform for the simple reason that the Leader should have the confidence of the parliamentary party, and therefore should be the choice only of the parliamentary party.
The system that Hague designed ensured that parliamentary ballots would narrow the choice to two candidates, and that the final choice between them would be put to the membership in a postal ballot.
Only two leadership elections have been conducted under the system: when Ian Duncan-Smith triumphed in 2001; and David Cameron in 2005. In the  contests of 2004 and 2016, the parliamentary party engineered the exclusion of the wider party membership by ensuring that only one candidate emerged from, or survived for more than a weekend after, the parliamentary ballot.

How a political party selects its leader is only of constitutional significance when it is in government.
If it is in opposition, a general election stands between its newly elected leader and political power.
When the party is already the party of government however, the choice of leader is also the choice of prime minister. If that choice is confined to MPs then I believe that the demands of constitutional propriety in a parliamentary democracy are satisfied. The extension of that choice however, to unelected members of just one political party undermines the principle of parliamentary democracy.

There is only one precedent for this: when Gordon Brown replaced Tony Blair. The precedent doesn’t make it right.
We are now in the strange position where urgent and critical business faces the nation, whilst we take two-and-a half- month ‘breather’ to choose a party leader, who will become Prime Minister

…but for how long?

What Went Wrong?

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Surveying the wreckage of Theresa May’s premiership and the disastrous wipe-out of the Tory Party in the European Election it is difficult to underestimate the complete horlicks that has been made of BREXIT.

I don’t agree with most commentators however, that one of the PM’s biggest mistakes was to call an unnecessary election in 2017 in which she lost her parliamentary majority.
In my estimate her majority of only 15 was insufficient to negotiate terms with the EU from a position of strength; it was too small to guarantee getting Brexit legislation through the Commons; and she needed to overawe the huge Remain majority in the Lords.
Her mistake was not in calling the election, but in her handling of the election campaign, frankly I’d never experienced a worse one.

All her subsequent problems in the negotiations either stem from, or were exacerbated by, the weakness of her parliamentary position after the 2017 election.
Nevertheless, grave mistakes were made.
First, she began the negotiations under Article 50 of the EU Treaty before we were ready: she had not agreed with her cabinet what exactly it was that she was negotiating for (It wasn’t until the Autumn of 2018 that she secured their -somewhat reluctant- backing for a plan).
Consequently, the Government’s negotiations lacked coherence. The ministerial resignations from the Department of State for Exiting The EU are testimony to the fact that those ministers discovered that 10 Downing Street was negotiating quite separately and keeping them in the dark.


Second, She insisted that ‘no deal would be better than a bad deal’, but to sustain that position it would have been essential to have begun preparations for a no deal Brexit even before the Article 50 negotiations had started. Indeed, a proper analysis of all the necessary measures and the time it would take to implement them should have preceded the Article 50 process. Only then could the mantra ‘no deal better than a bad deal’ have been taken seriously by EU negotiators.


Third, and perhaps the biggest mistake, was to have accepted the EU’s demand for the sequencing of negotiations so that there could be no discussion of future trading arrangements until a financial settlement was agreed: never agree a price before you’ve seen the product.


Whether the Government can now recover the confidence of the nation under a new prime minister, it’s too soon to tell

Repeats

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I am aware that I repeat myself in this column, but then the main item on the nation’s the political agenda keeps repeating itself. We are shortly to debate and vote on the PM’s EU withdrawal agreement for the fourth time.
Furthermore, a significant number of my constituents repeat themselves persistently in the emails that they address to me, almost as if I hadn’t answered the point that they made in my last reply to them.
It’s happening again this week. A whole stack of people are emailing again to tell me to vote down Prime Minister’s “deal” so that we can leave the EU on World Trade Organisation terms.
So, I repeat: There is no ‘deal’: The PM has not negotiated one; the ‘deal’ doesn’t begin to be negotiated until we’ve actually left the EU.
What the PM has agreed (and now seeks parliament’s approval for the 4th time of asking) is the Withdrawal Agreement which merely covers the next 20 months or so after we’ve left the EU or until we have negotiated the real ‘deal’.
Whilst I have all sorts of reservations about the Withdrawal Agreement, it’s no good telling me it’s a rotten deal, because we haven’t got a deal yet. Who Knows, the deal, when we actually get it, might turn out to be mutually advantageous. Alternatively, be could end up being completely shafted. It’s a risk, but that negotiation lies ahead.
What my correspondents want is for us to avoid that risk by just leaving without any agreement and trading just on World Trade Organisation rules (of course, that involves a quite different set of risks).

Again, I repeat myself, I’ve said it to them before. On the balance of risks, I would indeed oblige my correspondents: voting down the agreement and leaving without an agreement if that choice was open to me, but it isn’t: The one thing that Parliament has found a majority for is that it will not approve leaving without an agreement. So I just cannot deliver what they are asking, no matter how much I might wish to.

I conclude that, on the balance of all the risks, the greatest is that we end up not leaving the EU at all. It is for that reason I will support the PM’s agreement with all its defects. Then, once outside the EU, we can join battle over the nature of the ‘deal’ that we then have to negotiate.

Contempt?

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Every Couple of weeks the Police contact me to see if I have any ‘security concerns’.
I haven’t yet. I get some pretty frightful emails but they’re rare. Overwhelmingly, my correspondents can disagree politely and sensibly, no matter how outraged they are at the pace and direction of Brexit.
I know parliamentary colleagues who have been threatened with violence, but I had no such encounters.
On the contrary, people tend to sympathetic and understanding, I think they feel sorry for me having to endlessly repeat the same debate.
I think it was in Joseph Conrad’s novel Victory that he observes that ‘pity’ is the supreme form of contempt!

Why the PM Must Leave

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I wonder if Gavin Williamson, sacked by the PM after accusations of leaking confidential discussions, ever reflects on what I told him in July 2016 when he came seeking my support for Mrs May’s leadership bid:  that he had taken leave of his senses and that, in my estimate, she’d be a disaster. (I had twice tried to persuade David Cameron to dispense with her services).
Once she became leader however, I began to re-appraise her. She was decisive, resolute, and said all the right things about BREXIT. It wasn’t until the general election campaign of 2017, that all my previous misgivings about her judgement and her style resurfaced.

It is true that she has been given the most difficult and controversial task of any post-war Prime Minister, and without a parliamentary majority with which to achieve it. She has shown extraordinary determination and resilience in the face of repeated setbacks.
Nevertheless, a complete horlicks has been made of the enterprise. The measure of it rubbed-in by last week’s screening of BBC’s BREXIT Behind Closed Doors.
The fact that we can even treat as credible the report that Olly Robbins, the PM’s trusted negotiator, asked Guy Verhofstadt -the BREXIT lead for the EU Parliament- if he could get a Belgian Passport after it’s all over, is a measure of our humiliation and the chaotic way in which the negotiations have been handled.

The PM assured Parliament over 100 times that we would leave the EU in March of this year. The failure to deliver that fundamental aim of policy must come with consequences.

Stay with me, this is complicated:
The principal difficulty with the PM’s withdrawal agreement is the ‘backstop’ which keeps in the UK in a form of limbo at the end of our transition period after leaving the EU, if a solution to the Irish border question has not been found.
Much work was done to identify such a solution in an exercise that came to be known as the ‘Malthouse Compromise’ and subsequently a parliamentary motion was passed known as the ‘Brady amendment’ which required the PM to return to the negotiations, re-open the withdrawal agreement and substitute the arrangements identified by the Malthouse compromise.
A great deal of effort was also put in to persuade the EU negotiators that the arrangements set out in the Malthouse Compromise were workable using existing procedures and technology. They must have been impressed because, when for a short while, it did appear that the UK might actually leave the EU in March without a deal, Mr Barnier announced that, even were that to happen, there wouldn’t be a hard border in Ireland because the EU would rely on ‘other arrangements’.

So what became of the parliamentary instruction that our negotiators re-open the agreement and substitute Malthouse for the backstop?
We discover from the EU Commission that the UK negotiators never even asked.

What Next?

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In June 2016 the British people voted to leave the EU, but in May 2017 they elected a parliament without a majority.

It was always going to be a very tall order for a hung parliament to accomplish the most controversial and complicated agenda in a generation. I am not surprised that, thus far, it has failed to do so.

After the drubbing that both the main parties have just taken in the local elections, It strikes me that there are three possibilities as to what happens next with Brexit:
First, nothing changes, and the parties take no notice of the evident frustration of the voters expressed in the results of last Thursdays polls, by continuing to reject every compromise, save only that they have voted to prevent departure from the EU without any agreement (which, perversely, appears to be the most popular option among voters -if my correspondence is any guide).

Second, that the EU loses patience and just throws us out at their next opportunity, Halloween.
I know that to many this is highly desirable, because it achieves the no-agreement outcome above, which Parliament has refused to deliver. In my estimate however, it is the most unlikely outcome: We are the EU’s second largest financial contributor, and all that money is surely worth the minor irritation of our continuing indecision.

Third, the Government, together with sufficient numbers of opposition MPs, encouraged by the sobering effect of the local election results, decide to unite around a compromise BREXIT.
This will involve a measure of re-alignment: some will brand it as ‘BREXIT in name only’ (BRINO) and peel off to join Farage’s BREXIT Party, whilst others, opposed to any departure without a further referendum,  will join the new Change Britain Party.

This third, and most likely of the possibilities, will involve leaving the EU politically whilst hanging on in there in some form economically. It is bound to mean some close accommodation with the EU customs union and internal market.
That isn’t what I want, or what I voted for, but in the hung parliament delivered by the voters in May 2017 it’s probably the best I can get.

The opportunity to leave the EU only comers round once every 46 years, I cannot allow it to be fumbled, and lost.
Could the British people live with it?
Some, like me, I would be disappointed, but I suspect they would shrug and continue with their busy lives and other priorities. After all, for years they used to say to me “we were hoodwinked in 1975, we were sold a ‘common market’ but it turned out to be a super- state”
Does that mean that, shorn of involvement in the super-state and its political institutions, they could live with the EU’s economics?