On Tuesday we debated the second reading of the Product Regulation and Metrology Bill.
I’m not sure quite when we started calling weights and measures ‘metrology’, but my prejudice is that any recourse to newspeak is probably to cloak some Orwellian enterprise.
The Secretary of State insisted that it was a purely technical measure: That, as a consequence of Brexit, government needs new powers to regulate standards.
In order to reassure suspicious Euro-sceptics, he insisted that there was no hidden agenda to use the Bill’s provisions to establish alignment with European product regulations. On the contrary, he said that the Bill was a neutral measure, and that it could be used to establish new British standards which have so often in the past established the international standards.
Indeed he reassured us by saying that the last Conservative administration had been planning to bring forward just such a Bill.
We were not. Our Bill would have differed in a vitally important respect. Its aim would have been the same: to provide the architecture for establishing product standards given that we no longer rely on the European Commission to do that for us. But we would not, as the current bill does, handover the power to legislate entirely to ministers.

Parliament has done enormous damage to our constitution by delegating powers to independent law-making bodies, so much so, that when the public complain about some outrageous decision or situation, Parliament finds that it cannot put it right because it simply gave away the power to do so. We have had a classic example of this in the last few weeks when the woke-obsessed Sentencing Council sought to undermine a fundamental principle of justice, equal treatment before the law. When the Lord Chancellor and Parliament objected, we were told to get stuffed. We are now in the absurd position of having to introduce emergency legislation to put the Sentencing Council back in its box.

This Metrology Bill takes the proper power of Parliament to legislate and hands it unlimited to Ministers. Whilst, the aim of the bill may be about the better regulation of products; it also gives the Government the power to do what they like, when they like, for reasons they do not have to explain, and then impose it as they see fit. And all with the coercive and intrusive powers of search, confiscation and arrest, all of this without having to return and seek the consent of Parliament.

Democratic institutions, particularly when led by decent and principled people, need to take care to legislate against the worst case, such as government falling into less scrupulous hands. Power must always be limited, because -as Lord Acton observed- it corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Many of us will have watched President Zelensky being berated in the Whitehouse for showing insufficient gratitude, and for not having come to terms with his aggressor sooner, given that he had “no cards” and that “Russia has all the cards”.
We will have followed subsequent events with equal misgivings as the USA has developed an increasingly transactional approach to Ukraine: access to its mineral wealth, and even some of its infrastructure, as payment for past and continued support. Whilst US negotiations with Putin appear increasingly to be to Ukraine’s disadvantage.
The truce in the Black Sea, for example, will free the Russian fleet which Ukraine has successfully confined to port, when Ukraine has already secured its routes for grain exports. Equally, though any relief for Ukraine’s energy structure is welcome, nevertheless the agreement will neuter Ukraine’s most effective strategy which has been to decimate Russia’s oil processing capacity (as I pointed out in this column on 15^th Feb: Farage has tied his party’s fate to something over which he has no control )

On TV we have witnessed the appalling barbarity of Russian forces in Bakhmut, their ruthless targeting of civilians, the abduction of 700,000 children (the joint statement following  US / Russian talks this week made no mention of them, but USA has withdrawn from the international working group investigating  these Russian war crimes, and Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab, which was tracking 30,000 of the abductees have had their access to US intelligence systems withdrawn)

Despite our dislike and increasing horror at the way things appear to be turning out, isn’t  the US entitled to put its own interests ahead of those of an unimportant far-away country, irrespective of how aggressively Ukraine has been attacked?

In answering that question we need to examine the commitments that we in the UK made, together with Russia and the USA.
In 1994 Ukraine had the third largest stockpile of nuclear weapons – 1,900 intercontinental nuclear missiles. Enormous pressure was brought to bear in order to get Ukraine to sign up to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and divest itself of the weapons. Notwithstanding the resignation of government ministers in protest, Ukraine complied by signing the Bucharest Memorandum at the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe on Dec 5 1994.
In return for giving up its nuclear weapons it received assurances with respect to its independence and territorial integrity from Russia, USA and UK.
What are those assurances worth?

The Ukrainian translation of the memorandum describes them as ‘guarantees’ but the English version only as ‘assurances’. The distinction is that the US and UK did not consider themselves committed to going to war on behalf of Ukraine, as implicit in a ‘guarantee’. Rather, that our commitment was limited to diplomatic and materiel support.
Russia insists that it has not abrogated the agreement, stating that its undertaking was only not to attack Ukraine with nuclear weapons. This is a monstrous re-writing of the Treaty. In any event, Russia has indeed threatened the use of nuclear weapons.

I am confident that, thus far, the United Kingdom has honoured its commitment.
But, as we watch events unfolding, I believe that we are entitled to ask ‘what is an assurance by the USA now actually worth?’

I refer, of course, to the statement by Liz Kendall, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, to the Commons on Tuesday, which ministers and the Prime Minister had been trailing for weeks.
The Secretary of State told us that the facts speak for themselves: One in ten people of working age are now claiming a sickness or disability benefit. Almost 1 million young people are not in education, employment or training—that’s one in eight of all our young people. Some 2.8 million are out of work due to long-term sickness, and the number of people claiming personal independence payments is set to double this decade from 2 million to 4.3 million, with the growth in claims rising faster among young people and those with mental health conditions.

Taxpayers are paying billions more, with spending on working-age sickness and disability benefits up by £20 billion since the pandemic, and set to rise by a further £18 billion by the end of this Parliament, to £70 billion per year. In most other comparable countries spending on these benefits since the pandemic is either stable or falling, but ours continues to rise inexorably.

So, in response to problem which she had set out with such clarity, she announced savings of a mere £5 billion by 2029/30.

I put a simple question to her:
“because working is so good for mental health, will she require claimants to do socially useful work to retain their benefits.”
I got a one word answer: “No”

60 people were signed off onto sickness benefit in the time that Liz Kendal was on her feet telling us how little she was going to do about it.
I don’t disagree with any of the measures that she did announce, but they just are not going to be enough. She said that she would not proceed with any of the measures that were planned by the last government – and I didn’t believe they would be enough either.
There is a both a practical and moral case to require people in receipt of benefits, and who are able to work , to do socially useful work whilst they are out of paid employment.
As the number employment opportunities contracts due to the Chancellor’s disastrous jobs tax on employers, the need for an initiative of this sort will become more glaringly obvious.

Nothing will come of Nothing

The Government has abolished NHS England, the largest QANGO (quasi non-governmental organisation). Its function -managing the NHS in England- is now simply folded into Whitehall’s Department of Health (from whence it emerged under the Conservative /Lib Dem coalition government).
It was created to try and take the party politics out of the NHS. The theory being that this arms-length managerial body would be clinically led, with political responsibility -and controversy- being confined to the provision of funding. Alas, we cannot break our habit of blaming government for everything. Notwithstanding the eye-watering increases in funding, ministers continued to get the flack for the relatively poor performance of the NHS. Their frustration was that they had no levers left to pull with which to do anything about it, power having been handed over to NHS England. The Secretary of State became a bit like a spectator on the touch line at a soccer match, shouting advice to the players and being largely ignored.
Well, the current Secretary of State, Wes Streeting has had enough. I don’t blame him, but now he has no excuses, now he really is in charge. For all our sakes, I wish him luck.

Despite getting rid of this super-QANGO, the Government has created eight new ones for every week that has passed since the General election. Decisions that should be made by ministers accountable to Parliament, are continuing to be outsources to unelected officials.

One QANGO ripe for abolition is the Sentencing Council which has issued new sentencing guidelines for Judges, the effect of which will make a custodial sentence less likely for those “from an ethnic minority, cultural minority, and/or faith minority community”.
This is an outrageous double standard, a two -tier approach to sentencing.  It is an inversion of the rule of law to which we should all be equally subject.
The Secretary of State for Justice, Shabana Mahmood, is ‘incandescent’ (despite the fact that her Department supported the new two-tier guidance—her representative was at the meeting when it was approved on 24 January. Her officials were even given a walkthrough on 3rd March: a dummy’s guide to two-tier justice).
She then wrote the Sentencing Council expressing her dissatisfaction and asking for the guidance to be ditched.
The Council, under the chairmanship of Lord Justice William Davis has, in effect, told her to get stuffed (as the council is quite entitled to, Parliament having delegated those independent powers to it. But it is now high time we took them back again)
This is yet another example of the impertinence of the judiciary in the face of criticism from elected representatives. We’ll have to see how Shabana Mahmood responds in this latest display of the monstrous regiment judges.

On Tuesday I asked the Chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves, what level of ambition she had for finding savings in the welfare budget, given that servicing our debt is now costing twice what we are spending on defence (and which we urgently need to increase significantly).
This was her response:
“I agree that we need to get a grip of the welfare budget, which got out of control under the previous Conservative Government. Frankly, I am not going to take lectures from the Conservative party, which crashed the economy. Let me remind the House what the right hon. Gentleman said about the disastrous mini-Budget:
“I share entirely the free-market ideology that underpins the Chancellor’s statement…The Chancellor was right to be radical.”
He added:
“I rejoice at the two fingers the Chancellor has raised to socialist dogma and envy.”

I think that the financial markets and the British public have united in their view on the previous Government.”

 Lecture -Moi !
I didn’t give her a lecture, I merely asked a question. Nevertheless, I am quite flattered that, evidently, she studies this column. What she quoted so enthusiastically, but nevertheless, rather selectively, was word-for-word what I wrote here on 25^th September 2022 ( Two fingers to Socialist Dogma and Envy ).
It was my assessment of Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous mini budget. I don’t resile from anything that I said back then. I long for the implementation of all the measures that he announced. I just thought that to try them all at once, and at the same time as announcing a mind-numbingly expensive commitment to pay half of all our energy bills (and without first ‘rolling the pitch’ with the financial markets) was, to say the least, ‘high risk’.

Just weeks later I had to defend government policy in the annual no-confidence motion at the Oxford Union. I was half-way to Oxford on the train when breaking news came that Kwasi had been sacked. It wasn’t a good wicket on which to have to go out and bat. My speech is still available at
desmond swayne oxford union speech – – Video Search Results
I lost -heavily.

The upside is that the Chancellor is reading this column and I shall have to take that into account as I consider what to write about!

The Prime Minister was right to increase defence spending. We have neglected to properly fund our armed forces for far too long. It is a matter of deep regret that much of the worst damage occurred under the stewardship of my own political party.
I do not believe that the increase announced is sufficient, but it is an important start, and it is a realistic amount – given the current demands on the public finances.
The Prime Minister has chosen to fund the increase in defence expenditure by a pound for pound reduction in our overseas aid expenditure. As a minister once responsible for that expenditure, I know that this will be a popular choice. Indeed, this choice has been welcomed by my own party leader.
A popular choice does not however, make it the right choice. My preference is for the stance that the Prime Minister took when the then Conservative government under Boris Johnson reduced overseas aid expenditure from 0.7% of GDP to 0.5%. Starmer said then ”this is wrong because investing 0.7% in international aid is in Britain’s national interest…”

 Governing is about choices and the Prime Minister has made his choice. I believe it is the wrong choice. My own choice, had I been entitled to make it, would have been to raid the welfare budget. If we could only reduce our addiction to welfare benefits to pre-Covid levels, we would save £40 Billion, dwarfing the current proposals for increased defence. We have an army  – particularly of younger people-  who believe that their mental health is too fragile to allow them to go out to work. Yet, it is accepted medical wisdom that going out to work is good for your mental health.
We are currently awaiting the Government’s proposals on welfare reform. I hope that they turn out to be suitably ambitious, because the current bill is one that we can no longer afford to shoulder.

The cut in international development aid is even more dramatic than at first sight, because an additional £4 billion annually of that aid budget is being spent on housing asylum seekers in hotels. I know, as the minister once responsible, that one can support so many more displaced people in distress in their own region, than you can by resettling a lucky few here in the UK.

We entered into an agreement with the other rich nations back in the nineteen seventies to spend 0.7% of our national income on overseas development aid. It took us until 2011 to honour that pledge. In doing so, we were almost alone. Since when, we have stepped back again. Had all the nations that made the pledge honoured it -and done so immediately having made it, I believe that there would be far fewer seekers after asylum arriving on our shores from basket-case economies in poorer parts of the world.

I accept that there was too much wasteful aid expenditure. As the minister responsible it used to drive me into a state of apoplexy. I wanted to exclusively focus our aid on economic development to create jobs. For that is why the world’s poor seek to come here. They come here, not to live on benefits (even though we are ready enough to provide them). They come to seek work.
It is our own people who appear to be much more inclined to live on welfare benefits. That’s why we can’t afford to defend ourselves.

Were we to restore our commitment to spend 0.7% of our income on Aid, it would leave us with 99.3 % of our income for our own priorities. I think that is sufficient, even given our defence needs.

The PM and the Leader of the Opposition have been rebuked by Baroness Carr, the Lady Chief Justice, for an exchange that took place at Prime Minister’s Questions last week. Kemi Badenoch raised the absurdity of a judicial decision to allow the migration of a family of six from Gaza under the scheme exclusively designed for Ukrainians (this is just yet another in a long history of ridiculous immigration judgements) . The PM agreed, saying that the judgement was clearly ‘wrong’.
The Chief Justice has written to complain that it is the role of government “visibly to protect the independence of the judiciary” and that where it disagrees with judges, then the proper course it to appeal to a higher court. 
Well, strictly speaking she is correct, but she protests too much. The independence of the judiciary was not being questioned, politicians were merely remarking on the stupidity of their decisions not their independence.
Cleary the Lady Carr has ideas above her station if she thinks that the decisions of her judicial colleagues should be above the criticism of elected representatives, particularly when they so often offend against common sense.
I have long believed that Parliament should bring the judiciary to heel (see my blog of  25/09/19: Yes, it is a coup and my demand that Boris make ‘bygones’ his…top priority). Alas, that important agenda remains unaddressed.

Every now and again, someone will write to me demanding a written constitution for the UK. I never agree. We have far too many priorities for legislative time, to be able to set aside so much of it for the enormous task of finding an elusive consensus to establish what the constitution ought to be, what the powers -and the limits on powers- should be. It would require an enormous consultative undertaking and plebiscite. Properly done, it would take years.

Instead, we have no special category for constitutional laws, they can be amended or repealed just like any other law, so that no Parliament can be bound by its predecessor.
But now, I’ve come to the view (however disagreeable I find it), that we do already have a written constitution, and that it is the Human Rights Act 1998:  The Act requires that every government bill introduced to Parliament must be certified by a minister as being compliant with the Human Rights Act.
When courts subsequently rule that legislation is not compliant (irrespective of what ministers thought). Then Parliament meekly rushes to amend the offending statute.
It remains true in theory, that Parliament could simply ignore the court’s judgement, but in reality we inevitably surrender to rule by judges. Little wonder then that Lady Car has such an elevated conception of her status.

Parliament is currently, once again, meekly in the process of surrendering to the courts in the most egregious of cases. We are rushing through legislation to amend the Northern Ireland Legacy Act to enable Gerry Adams to resume his legal action seeking compensation for a conviction for escape from lawful custody during the conflict waged by the IRA in Northern Ireland, the Court having ruled that preventing the claim, as the Act set out to, is contrary to human rights.
 You couldn’t make it up.

 

 

Reform is ahead in the opinion polls for now, but there is a cloud on its horizon that is growing fast: Nigel Farage has tied Reform so closely to President Trump, and acts as his apologist and mouthpiece.
Over the coming months this may turn out to be an enormous liability.

I should caveat what I will say next about Trump, by stating first, that I agree with Vice President Vance’s analysis, that free speech and democracy have been endangered in Europe -and here in Britain- by our own political masters. Equally, that we Europeans have coasted under the US umbrella for years, enjoying a ‘peace dividend’ instead of meeting our proper financial share of the defence commitments. Little wonder that we are now being side-lined by the new US administration.

Nevertheless, Trump is making a monumental strategic mistake, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, by rewarding Putin, even before negotiations begin, offering up the key concessions of Ukrainian territory and a veto on its being admitted to NATO.

 Notwithstanding the stalemate on the battlefield, Putin had already lost the war. He anticipated eliminating Ukraine’s independence within days. He has wrought terrible destruction and terror there, but he has also suffered enormous Russian casualties and economic damage at home. He has reduced Russia to little more than a nuclear-armed petrol station.
And now they have a problem with the petrol: According to analysis from Reuters, Russian oil companies are preparing to start forced production cuts as they are unable to sell millions of barrels of oil. Volumes from Russia’s western ports in January were down 17% from a year ago, and the cost of transporting a cargo from Russia’s Pacific ports to China increased fivefold last month. Goldman Sachs estimates that Russia has stored 17 million barrels aboard ships since January 10^th. That figure could rise to 50 million barrels in the first half of this year. There is nowhere else where they can store it: there are virtually no large storage facilities in Russia, and the ones that do exist were damaged by Ukraine last month.  Ukraine’s drone attacks have also knocked out around 10% of Russian refining capacity.

Russia is reliant on the largesse of China, North Korea, Iran and Belarus – the world’s pariahs. This is exactly the moment to double down on sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and materiel support for Ukraine. Yet this is the moment that Trump has chosen to bring Putin in from the cold and back into the centre of world affairs. The Kremlin is cock-a-hoop.

As the ramifications sink in and events unfold, especially in Britain where we have been so united in our commitment to Ukraine, Reform’s nuptials with all things Trump may well begin to pall.
And Trump may just keep giving… with tariffs, climate vandalism, Gaza, and heaven knows whatever next.

 Farage has tied his party’s fate to something over which he has no control.

I last wrote about the Chagos Islands in this column on 5^th October last year( Chagos ).  Since when, the UK negotiating stance, plagued by our own ‘lefty’ lawyers, appears to have weakened dramatically.
To recap, the archipelago is a legacy of the Empire, as the British Indian Ocean Territories.
In the early nineteen seventies the native population were resettled to Crawley in England and to Mauritius off the coast of East Africa, so that the main Island, Diego Garcia,  could be leased to USA for a vital strategic air base.
Notwithstanding previous agreements and payments, Mauritius has claimed sovereignty and was backed by a UN non-binding judgement.
To see if a new agreement could be established, our last government opened negotiations. We ‘walked away’ however, when it became clear that the demands by Mauritius were excessive.
In July our newly elected government reopened negotiations and has now reached agreement.
Parliament was told the bones of the agreement are that UK will cede sovereignty to Mauritius and then lease back the Islands for 100 years, with an option to extend for a further 40 years.
What was withheld from Parliament was the price attached to the lease. Although, informed opinion suggested that it was £9 billion.
There was some urgency to complete the deal before the supportive Biden presidency ended. This was prevented by an election in Mauritius, which  resulted in a new government there, which thought that the deal negotiated by its predecessor was a sell-out. Negotiations were reopened and a revised deal concluded.
The Prime Minister of Mauritius told his Parliament that the price of the lease would be an index- linked £18 billion and that Mauritius would have a veto on any lease extension.
Our Foreign Office Minister told the Commons on Wednesday that the terms of the deal hadn’t changed. So, were they always that bad?

It is outrageous that we are contemplating paying billions to rent something that we already own, at a time when we are so strapped for cash that we have stripped pensioners of winter fuel payments the Treasury is even consulting on taxing death-in-service payments to the Armed Forces.

The Government’s defence is that our tenure of the Islands require certainty and that there is a danger that this would be thrown into doubt if a case was brought against us at the International Court of Justice. This is pure sophistry, the United Kingdom is not subject to the compulsory jurisdiction of the ICJ when it concerns disputes involving members or former members of the Commonwealth.

This dreadful deal is now on the desk of President Trump. We are at his mercy, hoping that he will save us from ourselves and the rotten deal that the Government has negotiated.

Now, to cap it all, we discover that the Government is about to open negotiations with Caribbean nations on the issue of reparations for the Slavery. They are asking for trillions, notwithstanding that we were the first to abolish slavery and then expended enormous sums using our naval power to stamp out the trade internationally.

So much of the effort against us on the question of the Chagos and of slavery reparations is driven by our own left-wing lawyers who hate Britain and are ashamed of our history.