The motion before the Commons on Thursday 14^th February was

‘That this House welcomes the Prime Minister’s statement of 12 February 2019; reiterates its support for the approach to leaving the EU expressed by this House on 29 January 2019 and notes that discussions between the UK and the EU on the Northern Ireland backstop are ongoing.’

Many of my euro-sceptic colleagues abstained, ensuring that the motion was defeated. I was not one of them. They refused to back it because they believed that it implied ruling-out the possibility of a no deal exit from the EU, but in her statement of 12 February when the PM undertook to go back and renegotiate with the EU as demanded by Parliament, she made it clear that no deal had to remain an option. Furthermore, ministers made it plain as day during the debate on 14th Feb the outcome must involve the possibility of not reaching an agreement and so leaving on March 29^th without one (because that is what the Withdrawal Act 2018 requires).

The PM is not strengthened in her negotiations by having to return to Europe with another parliamentary defeat under her belt.
Failing to support the motion was an act of folly.

Readers of last week’s column will recall the furore over Sir Christopher Chope blocking progress to a private member’s bill because it had not been debated (notwithstanding that it was a highly desirable measure which would have afforded greater protection ton girls considered to be in danger of genital mutilation).
In the row that followed, some of the criticism fell on Sir Christopher’s judgement, and some on the Government itself for leaving such an important measure to the vagaries of a private member’s bill.
The Government has now responded by undertaking to pass the bill in Government time and with the support of the Government whip. Consequently, it will become law much quicker than it otherwise would have done.  So it turns out that Sir Christopher has done us a favour, as he did in exactly the same way last year over the issue up-skirting.

What did worry me however, was the number of colleagues sounding-off about Sir Christopher’s actions when it was clear that they had little understanding of procedure, or experience of handling private members’ bills on Fridays.
They were arguing that a member’s right to object and block progress on an un-debated bill should be removed. Essentially therefore, they are arguing that legislation can proceed without being examined or voted on, which is completely absurd. 
The word ‘parliament’ derives from the French ‘Parler’, meaning ‘to speak’, which is exactly what we are supposed to do before legislating.

I ‘ve had a stack of emails complaining about my neighbouring MP, Sir Christopher Chope, who objected to a bill last Friday, which would have afforded greater protection to girls at risk of genital mutilation.
Readers of this column might recall that in June of last year there was a not dissimilar row when he objected to a bill to create a specific sexual offence of ‘up-skirting’.
The short answer to any email is that Sir Christopher is not accountable to me, he is accountable to the voters of Christchurch, of whom he is the elected representative.

On each parliamentary sitting Friday a number of bills are listed for debate (with the order determined by ballot). In the time available it is rare for more than two bills to have been debated. At the end of the sitting however, those bills listed, but not reached on that day can be given a second reading (the first stage in the legislative process before they proceed to detailed scrutiny by a parliamentary committee) ‘on the nod’ unless an MP shouts “object”.
When I was a member of the Government whips office it was the responsibility of the whip on duty to make that objection to every bill listed, on the basic principle that, whatever the merits of any particular bill, no bill should proceed without having been debated.
I am not privy to why the whips have discontinued this function, leaving it instead to Sir Christopher.

Sir Christopher turned out have done us all a favour on up-skirting last year: Such was the furore surrounding his cry of ‘object’, that the Government adopted the provisions of the bill as an amendment to one of its own bills. With the result that up-skirting became a criminal sexual offence much sooner that it would have done had it remained a private member’s bill.

The lesson here is simple: important measures should form part of the Government’s legislative programme, benefiting from the Government’s whip and its parliamentary time, rather than being left to the vagaries of private members legislation on a very few thinly attended Fridays.
It will be interesting to see if the Government now similarly adopts and expedites the provisions of the FGM bill.

As to any question of a shortage of parliamentary time: there is no such thing; rather, there is a shortage of the will to make that time available. 
When I was first elected, Parliament had a 5 day week: we sat most Fridays, on some there would be government business and on others private members bills.
Now, in effect, we have a three day week: overwhelmingly Thursdays are given over to worthy but thinly attended back-bench debates, and there are only 13 sitting Fridays per year.
Many members return to their constituencies on a Wednesday evening.
One thing that can certainly be said of Sir Christopher is that he attends assiduously, including Fridays

Notwithstanding 80% of voters casting their ballots at the last general election for parties explicitly committed to leaving the EU customs union, there is a growing demand in Parliament for us to remain within it, as a means of breaking the current impasse.
We need to be clear what this means.
It would mean that we could trade as we do now with the EU without tariffs but this comes at a cost:
We would not have any flexibility to negotiate better trade relationships with non-EU third countries; but we would have no voice or vote in the conduct of EU trade policy; our trade would remain subject to the jurisdiction of the EU court; the EU could negotiate favourable trade access to UK markets for third countries outside the EU, whilst affording us no reciprocal access to their markets.

It’s not a tempting prospect, and it doesn’t even solve the problem anyway. It will neither address the problem of the Irish border nor deliver a continuation of frictionless trade at any border.
Unless the UK remains within the EU Internal market (continuing with free movement, paying our annual subscription, and being subject to EU laws –but without any voice in the making of them), we will have to comply with checks to ensure that exports from the UK are compliant with EU standards.

I do not doubt that the advocates of remaining in the customs union realise all this. Theirs is a war of attrition, an incremental battle, once acceptance of a customs union is achieved, they will add the demand for the EU internal market too.
If they get their way, we will leave the EU in name only.

From the very outset the Government’s negotiations with the EU have been undermined by the presence of a vociferous element in Parliament sending the clear signal that, in effect, the UK would have to accept whatever terms Brussels offered, and that ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’ was merely a ‘paper tiger’ slogan.

The very worst outcome for the EU is a no deal BREXIT: it denies them the substantial financial settlement and their businesses will be saddled with the vast bulk of tariff payments –they, after all, have the £100 billion trade surplus.
This fact should have afforded us great negotiating leverage with the mere threat of no deal. Alas, rightly they assessed that the PM had no parliamentary majority to make that threat credible.

Last week Parliament voted for two things: first to send the PM back to re-negotiate the deal; Second, it resolved that we should not leave without a deal.
These are mutually exclusive objectives.
Why should the EU blink first?
They know Parliament won’t walk away. So they know that they won’t have make any concessions.

Infuriating, isn’t it?

A minority of my many correspondents continue to demand a second referendum.

I would only countenance that as a last resort to prevent our ‘REMAIN’ Parliament from preventing us leaving the EU altogether.
The motive of my correspondents however, is different: they want a new referendum purely to overturn the decision reached in the last one.

First, they say people didn’t know what they were voting for. I have heard the same argument in Parliament from MP’s representing seats with Leave majorities that dwarfed ours here in the New Forest. They say their constituents voted LEAVE because they are poor, their towns lack investment, they’ve been ‘left behind’.
I think they just wanted their country back.
They say people never realised how dreadful it was going to be. Well, I reject that premise: I think it’s going to be fine, but even if you don’t agree, REMAIN painted the bleakest, hardest BREXIT imaginable, so nobody could claim that we weren’t warned of all possibilities.
They claim we were misled, specifically they refer to the money that LEAVE said could be redeployed from the EU to the NHS. Well, we haven’t even left yet and the Government has already redeemed that promise in its 10 year NHS plan.

I do however, have some sympathy with the argument that we were misled: I recall being told that economic Armageddon would dawn on 24 June 2016 if we voted leave on 23 June. We were threatened with an immediate emergency budget to raise taxes. Nothing of the sort happened. On the contrary, employment continued to grow to an all-time record and foreign investment in UK outstripped that in all the other EU countries combined. Now the forecasters are saying UK growth next year will be the highest in the EU… and all despite Brexit.

We have certainly been misled, but we’ve been misled for years:
We were told, before we joined, that there’d be “no essential loss of National Sovereignty”
We were told that Maastricht was the ‘high tide’ of EU Integration
We were told that we faced disaster if we didn’t join the exchange rate mechanism, then we were told it’d be a catastrophe if we left it
Were told we’d suffer grievous economic harm if we didn’t join the Euro
We were promised a referendum on the EU Constitutional Treaty
We were told that the Treaty of Lisbon was a mere ‘tidying-up’
Yes, from the very start we’ve been misled, as our political class have assured us that the treaties they signed on our behalf didn’t really mean what they said

The greatest lie however, would be if it turned out that we were lied to about the 2016 referendum, when we were assured that this was to be the people’s one chance to settle the question for a generation.
The one thing that REMAIN and LEAVE agreed on was the importance of that vote in determining the outcome.

I think people knew exactly what they were voting for in June 2016.
What they didn’t know, was what they were actually voting for in the 2017 election, they can be forgiven because 80% of them voted for parties pledged to deliver the 2016 referendum result, and specifically pledging to leave the EU customs union and single market. 
Yet now they discover that Parliament is against the people, that it is seeking to usurp power and stop us leaving.

Certainly, very few of us thought we were voting for that.

Every Parliamentary day begins with prayers, and in particular the following prayer

“Lord, the God of righteousness and truth, grant to our Queen and her government, to Members of Parliament and all in positions of responsibility, the guidance of your Spirit. May they never lead the nation wrongly through love of power, desire to please, or unworthy ideals but laying aside all private interests and prejudices keep in mind their responsibility to seek to improve the condition of all mankind; so may your kingdom come and your name be hallowed.”

These sentiments seem to me entirely proper given that the most common complaint levelled against MPs is that they are self-interested, or put party before country. Reciting these words in the presence of the Almighty should ensure that they at least start each parliamentary sitting in the right frame of mind.

Prayers are not compulsory, members are quite entitled to wait and come into the chamber after prayers are over. 
For some, the voluntary nature of praying is not sufficient: the National Secular Society now demands that formal parliamentary prayers be abandoned altogether.

Just a few years ago a parish councillor took his council to court to stop them praying before meetings –unbelievable, the lengths some people will go to!
Anyway, the courts decided that he was right and that formal prayers could not be part of the agenda. Fortuitously however, within 48 hours the Secretary of State used his own statutory powers to grant councils the authority to pray at meetings, which the courts said that they hadn’t until then had.

I pray that the attempts to ban parliamentary prayers will prove as unsuccessful as was the battle to stop councils praying. We are a Christian nation with an established Church with the Queen at its head at the heart of our constitution.

Given the strife over BREXIT I cannot imagine a less propitious time to abandon prayers. In fact several constituents have written to me to reassure me that they are praying for MPs, and in particular for wisdom at this time. My response to them: Please Keep Praying!

Set out below is the speech I made in the Commons on Monday Night during the EU Debate. Given how critical I have hitherto been of the Withdrawal Agreement, it surprised colleagues and commentators,. My criticism has not abated, but my estimate of the alternatives courses has.

Two events in the Commons last week confirm my belief that we are in a REMAIN dominated Parliament.
First, initiative was seized from the Government when -defying all precedent- an un-amendable motion was amended. I believe that changes to our procedures of this sort will now be driven forward granting the Commons legislative initiative -formerly exclusively in the hands of the Government- and that this is a clear danger to the Withdrawal Act which guarantees our departure from the EU on 30th March.
Second, the Government was soundly defeated in an amendment to the Finance Bill, which demonstrated that there is a clear and determined majority that will actively prevent a No-Deal exit from the EU.

It is clear therefore, that in the current Parliament a ‘No-Deal’ BREXIT as an alternative to the PM’s deal is no longer an option. The looming possibility of no BREXIT at all, has changed the facts on the ground. If the facts change, then I change. I have no doubt that the PM’s Withdrawal agreement, for all its faults, is preferable to NO BREXIT and to-night I voted accordingly.

Hansard Volume 652
Column 902
European Union (Withdrawal) Act
14 January 2019  
9.00 PM
Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)
The hundreds of constituents who have written to me demanding that I vote down this deal divide into two kinds: those who urge me to reject it so that we can leave the European Union without a deal—their preferred option—and those who urge me to reject it so that we can stay in the EU. They both cannot be right. There will have to be some management of expectations.

I have made my own dislike of this deal plain, and it is based largely on the fact that we do not know what we will be getting. The political declaration might deliver anything from Canada-minus to Chequers-plus, and where in that spectrum we might land depends upon the negotiations that will follow. There will be no end to the uncertainty for some time.

We have delivered ourselves into the weakest possible position during those negotiations, first by making the financial settlement up front, and secondly by abandoning one of the most important principles to any negotiating position—the ability to walk away—because we have agreed that we will agree and that we will stay in a state of limbo until that agreement is reached. Such is the toxic nature of that limbo that I fear we would probably agree to anything in order to avoid getting there in the first place.

I disagree passionately with my correspondents who say that this deal is worse than staying in the European Union. I have campaigned to leave since the referendum of 1975, and I am not prepared to see that opportunity lost. This deal is better than staying in the European Union. We will be out of the common fisheries policy, out of the common agricultural policy and out of the relentless momentum for political integration. I am very much aware that the events and votes of last week pose a present danger to Brexit, and I will have to consider carefully over the next 24 hours whether I want to share a Division Lobby with those who are there because their strategy is to prevent Brexit.

The Crown in Parliament is sovereign because consent is secured through the election of representatives of the people. The sole qualification for participating in the proceedings of the House of Commons being election by the voters.
Parliament has been careless with that sovereignty in the past by passing power to others so that we increasingly came to be governed by people that we do not elect and whom we cannot remove, and we gave that sovereignty away without ever seeking the explicit consent of voters, indeed the political class denied that it was happening and sought to conceal it from them.

The referendum result of June 2016 can be seen as a revolt by the electorate in protest at that process and a demand that their sovereignty be re-possessed.
It is still unclear this week as to how, or indeed whether, Parliament is going to carry out that instruction.

Old habits die hard however, and in a little noticed 35 minute debate on Monday night –with no dissenting voice being heard – The Commons was at it again: We passed what I consider to be an enormous constitutional innovation; hitherto the sole qualification for participating in the proceedings of the House of Commons has been through election, but on Monday we gave that right to 7 members of the public who will not be elected by anyone, but who will have the right to vote in the proceedings of a parliamentary committee, and that their votes will carry equal weight with the 7 MPs on that committee of the House of Commons.

I think that this is the thin end of an enormous wedge. It sets a most unwelcome precedent.
If you don’t like the way your MP votes in Parliament, you can use your own vote at the next election to have him or her replaced: Your MP is accountable to you at the ballot box.
In what way will the 7 members of the public be accountable?

It matters not that the committee in question is the Standards & Privileges Committee which examines the conduct of fellow MPs. The argument is that MPs should not be able to ‘mark their own homework’, well of course they shouldn’t, but then they don’t -and they can’t. It is for that very reason that the committee exists.
Anyway I’ve heard that specious argument before. It was used when MPs used to vote on the terms of their own remuneration, counterintuitively the pay and remuneration was much lower then.
When we handed that responsibility away to an independent and unaccountable body, that body imposed a 10% increase at a time when anyone else was lucky to get 1% and we had the ridiculous situation with the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and the Lib Dem leader all begging the independent body to change its mind –which, of course, it didn’t.
I would have wagered that MPs, who have to look their constituents in the eye, would have been rather more sensitive about awarding themselves a pay increase in those circumstances.

When the people traffickers opened the route to into southern Europe from Libya and the grizzly count of those drowned in the attempted crossing began to rise, the response of European powers was to support a rescue mission with their own naval vessels and those chartered by charities and others.
Perversely, the consequence was more drownings rather than fewer: the increased chance of rescue, led to an exponential rise in the demand to make the crossing, and a corresponding response from the traffickers by providing even more unseaworthy craft and with insufficient fuel, in the expectation of rescue just beyond Libyan territorial waters.
Of course, there were many more rescues, but many more drownings too, such was the increased traffic.

I see no reason to believe that experience in the English Channel will be any different from the Mediterranean. Indeed the Home Secretary initially urged caution in the face of demands for more patrol vessels, because they would be likely to encourage many more attempted crossings. It is not clear to me why he appears to have changed his mind and redeployed the available patrol vessels so that they too can now patrol the channel.

I do not underestimate the enormity of the expense and the hardship that refugees endure in making their journeys to Europe and then across it, nor should we underestimate the misery and poverty from which they initially fled.
When I was the minister responsible for our humanitarian response it was clear to me that we could afford to feed, accommodate and educate ten refugees in their own region for the cost of assisting just one back in Britain. Furthermore, the ones that made it to Britain were not the most vulnerable, but the most resourceful.

Everyone has a right to flee to safety in the face of violence and persecution. The moment you travel beyond the first place of safety in pursuit of a more attractive destination however, you have become, not so much a refugee, as an economic migrant.
Now, nobody should be condemned for being an economic migrant: which one of us, in similar circumstances, would not see it as our duty to seek better prospects for our families by struggling to get to Britain? 
Equally, it is clear that there is a limit to what Britain can accommodate.

In economics there is a concept of ‘equilibrium’ which , I believe, is applicable: migrants will continue to be drawn to Europe until an equilibrium is established where life is no better here than it is in the places from which they were coming.
Our proper response to the refugee crisis, therefore, is our massive investment in international development assistance to provide order, economic opportunity, education and healthcare in the places from which people are seeking to escape.

To those constituents who demand cuts in this assistance so that we can spend it on ourselves instead, the answer is simple: expect many, many, many more channel crossings until an equilibrium is established.