My email correspondents are ever more anxious and argumentative about the precise nature of the trade deal that they believe that the PM is negotiating with the EU, often characterised as ‘Chequers versus Canada ++’.
I believe their energy is entirely misplaced: I am prepared to wager that what will be presented with will be the blandest of statements which could accommodate any number of future trading arrangements including both Canada and Chequers.
Agreement to such a statement merely puts off the arguing about which of them it is actually to be until later, -when we’ve already played our strongest hand by paying the money up front.

This will run and run, we all need to develop strategic patience, and to ‘live in the moment

 

On Saturday we consecrated the restored Lantern that hangs above the Gateway offices to Ringwood Town Council. Fittingly it is in good time for Remembrance Sunday when we mark the 100^th anniversary of the armistice that ended The Great War.
I say ‘we’ consecrated it, but as Abraham Lincoln would have undoubtedly observed, rather it is consecrated by the brave souls who struggled and died far above our power to do so that afternoon.

When I was learning about World War One at school in the early nineteen seventies, we were taught that it was all a terrible mistake, an accident even: that through the complex set of alliances, a political assassination in an obscure city in the Balkans led almost automatically to war between the great powers; that a machine was in motion that couldn’t be stopped.
Consequently, as no great principle was at stake, the slaughter of so many was ultimately just a senseless waste.

There is, of course, no control experiment in history, no way of knowing how things would have turned out had they been done differently.  I now reject utterly however, the history I was taught at School.
The Kaiser’s Germany was a fast expanding power run by a militarist elite that derided the values of emerging liberal democracy. It was rapidly developing ever more sophisticated armaments and offensive capability. A swift victory in war with France had been the basis of German military planning and preparation for a generation.
If post Great War history has taught us anything, it is the lethal danger of appeasing aggressive militarist regimes.
Who knows how much darker the modern history of our continent would have been had we not come to the aid of Belgium and France in 1914.

It was a just, noble and honourable cause

 

I listened carefully to the statements in Parliament last week by the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State, questioning them both. I have studied documents supplied to the House of Commons Procedure Committee and evidence given to the Constitution and Public Administration Committee by the Clerks. It’s complicated!

 

When and if the Government makes a withdrawal agreement it will present it for approval to the Commons, where the Government’s motion can be carried, rejected, or amended.
The Government needs clearly expressed approval to proceed to ratify the agreement with the EU, so any amendment framed in terms which clouds that issue will have the effect of preventing that ratification, which means leaving with no deal.

If amendments seek to change parts of the agreement, they will be merely expressions of opinion, because they will not themselves change the agreement that has been made.
Equally, were the amendment to order the Government to, say, go back to the EU and seek an extension to the Article 50 negotiations, or to introduce legislation to give effect to that, or to arrange a further referendum, then again, these would merely be expressions of opinion: because in terms of law and procedure the Commons does not have the power to force the Government to do any of these things.

Of course, in the past the success of such amendments against the expressed wish of the PM would have amounted to a vote of no confidence in the Government and would have meant a general election. The Fixed Term Parliament Act 2011 has however, changed all that: defeating the Government on an EU withdrawal agreement motion would not now amount to a vote of no confidence.

The Withdrawal Act 2018 is already law, and that law says that we leave the EU on 29 March 2019.
So the much trumpeted ‘meaningful vote’ on the agreement does in the end come down to this:
Either the Commons accepts the deal negotiated, or we leave with no deal.

Inevitably there will be a temptation for BREXIT true-believers to reject the compromises that any negotiation involves, and save the £39 Billion, by voting down the Government’s withdrawal agreement- if it gets one, safe the knowledge that BREXIT is secure because we are leaving on 29^th March whatever.

 

All this is based on law and procedure, but it doesn’t take into account the politics, and politics is entirely unpredictable. What would really happen if the Commons threw out the PM’s negotiated agreement?
Could she really survive?
Would the Government really simply plough on to a no-agreement exit on 29 March in the face of Parliamentary and public opposition?
I recall David Cameron insisting that his administration would continue irrespective of the referendum result in 2016, but look how that ended.

Notwithstanding the law and parliamentary procedure, voting down a withdrawal agreement could still set in train a set of uncontrollable and unpredictable events, and that is something I and my BREXIT-supporting colleagues will have to consider very carefully when we scrutinise whatever deal it is that the PM has been able to make. In the end it will be down to our assessment of all the risks.

 

…but hey, there is still the possibility of an all-singing, all-dancing deal

I have resisted the temptation to return to the subject of BREXIT in this column for quite a few weeks. It has taken some degree of will power. I receive a large number of emails about it daily. Some constituents have taken to emailing several times a day with their reaction to every twist in the latest news bulletins. I hope they are not too dissatisfied with a simple “thanks, your views are noted” because there is just not enough time in the day to provide a running commentary on the latest news.

As I write, the latest thing to generate email outrage, was the PM’s suggestion on Wednesday that we might remain in a transition phase for a further year in order to enable the enduring trade deal with the EU to be fully negotiated and implemented, and to give more time for to the Northern Ireland border problem to be resolved.

Many people believe that time is of the essence: Another year means another year of fully paying our dues; It will take us into the next EU budget period where we will have no input to the budget setting process, nor enjoy our existing rebate, so the price of that year will be correspondingly much higher.
By the time that that additional year is over it will be over 5 years since the referendum, and three years living under rules that we have given up our power to influence.

Having waited 43 years to leave the EU already, adding one more to the two already suggested in the proposed transition agreement, is not the deal-breaker for me personally.
What is my deal-breaker, is signing up even to just the two year transition, when our exit from it relies on a solution –acceptable to the EU- of the Northern Ireland border

Signing-up to such an agreement is a recipe for a permanent state of limbo, a vassal to the EU: making the payments, but without influence.
The only solution to the Northern Ireland border is available now, and the EU has rejected it. There is no new different solution that will suddenly emerge in the next three years. Especially so, because now is the time when our negotiating leverage is at its strongest: we haven’t given them the money. Once the transition agreement is signed and ratified however, the £39 billion will be committed and they will have us where they want us, they will be under no pressure whatsoever to agree to end the transition.

Unless the EU negotiation position changes dramatically and soon, I believe that the only sensible way to proceed is to announce that we will leave on 29^th March on World Trade Organisation rules, and seek a number of minor technical agreements to ease that process, recognising that both UK and EU are bound by the provisions of the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement.

As for to-day’s rally for a second referendum, all I can say is that I haven’t heard a single argument in the last 2 years that wasn’t thoroughly debated before the 2016 referendum.
There was only one thing that both sides agreed on, namely that the voting in that referendum was vital because it would settle the question for a generation. Accordingly, it’s settled.

Overwhelmingly constituents email me to complain about four things; first because they cannot afford to rent in the private sector, indeed that they are often excluded out-of-hand because such is the pressure of demand that many landlords can refuse to even consider tenants who are in receipt of benefits.
Second, that there is insufficient local authority or housing association provision to accommodate them adequately, or at all.
Third, people of my generation with children in their late twenties to mid-thirties, write to complain that those children have no prospect of being able to afford to buy because prices have so outstripped earnings. (Consequently, we have tumbled from the top of the European league table of countries where most people own their own homes, down almost to the bottom. Economists insist that there is nothing particularly wrong with this, after all, look to Germany, where a majority are content to rent throughout their lives, but I am a politician not an economist and we are not Germans. My alarm bell rings because most of us still aspire to own our own homes, and it just won’t do if we can’t.)

Clearly, the economics all this requires such an increase in housing supply as to bring about a reduction in house prices and rents.

The forth most frequent thing that constituents write to me about however, is that whenever there is a housing development proposal, they complain that they don’t want it built anywhere them.

So, how to square this circle?

There is nothing new under the sun: Go back a hundred years and you will find that politicians were wrestling even then over how to solve the housing problem.
Over the years all sorts of things have been tried, some with modest success, and some with consequences the very reverse of what was intended: perhaps the best example of this being the introduction of rent controls which led to a drastic reduction in accommodation available, and a significant deterioration in the quality of that which remained.

Last year 217,000 houses were built, which is better than in any of the previous 18 years, but there is a big backlog of under-building to address.
There is no silver bullet.
At the Conservative Party conference there was a proposal to give incentives to landlords to sell to their tenants. It’s a helpful initiative, but it changes only the tenure not the total supply.
Here are some other suggestions.

First, the evolution of the new local planning process may, over time, lead to a reduction in the level of protest over proposed housing developments. Local politicians, instead of having housing targets imposed upon them, will assess the genuine local housing need and -knowing their own ‘patch’- designate the places where building can be more sympathetically accommodated. That process will be strengthened when they can also specify the type and even the style of development.
At present so much of this discretion is in the hands of the developers rather than the community.

Second, we need a much better quality of dwelling. I am inundated with complaints about poor quality of newly built houses, and the fact that the individual purchasers are at a disadvantage when it comes to dealing with large developers when things have to be put right. There needs to be a better balance in these disputes. I am glad that a minister already working on what can be done.

Third, to address that part of the market where private sector developers have little incentive and interest, we just have to get councils building again. The very recent lifting of the cap -which had been placed on the ability of councils to borrow against the security of the flow of future rental revenue, in order to fund development, ought now to get things moving.
Social housing however, should be for need, not for life. It is unreasonable for people to be allocated social housing on the basis of need, yet to remain in it so many years later when their income and family circumstances have changed dramatically.

Perhaps most controversially, we should consider the price of land. The extortionate value of building land encourages development suitable to the most expensive end of the market and drastically reduces the scope for building something affordable for the first-time buyer.
It encourages ‘land-banking’ –the hogging of land by speculators in the expectation that when planning permission is granted their land will be worth many multiples of what they paid.
Their capital gain will be taxed, of course, but notwithstanding the historic right to dispose of property at the best price that the market will bear, ought we to artificially put a cap on it?

Finally, I offer my sympathy, but no apology to the many buy-to-let landlords who have written to complain to me about the phased withdrawal of tax relief on their principal cost of doing business, namely on their mortgage interest payments.
The simple fact is that this relief put them at an advantage against every first time buyer in the market, it meant they could afford to offer more to secure a purchase: it just wasn’t fair.

I was dismayed to read in the national press that a member of staff had resigned from a secondary school in my constituency after a conviction for striking a pupil, in what seemed to me a rather trivial incident.
Of course, we must all abide by the laws made by Parliament. All I can say is that I never voted for that one.

I am of that generation that took a thrashing at school as an occupational hazard. I remain of the view that it didn’t do me any harm and, on the contrary, may have done me some good. In some cases the sharp painful rebuke made you see the error of your ways, and to abandon a path leading to nowhere. On other occasions a swift caning spared you the misery of a prolonged tedious punishment, and spared the teacher from having to supervise it too.
When we complained to our parents about the injustice, they tended to the sensible view that ‘the little blighter had it coming’.

Years later I enjoyed a short career as a teacher myself in a school where we not too infrequently used the cane. I recall that it was particularly effective at nipping bullying in the bud. After all, bullies tend to be the biggest cowards.

Of course, there have always been excellent and well-disciplined schools that thrived without any corporal punishment. It does however, take a lot of hard work and teachers do have an enormous amount on their plates. No doubt, there are extraordinary teachers who can quell disorder with just a stern look, but that ability is rare.
If punishing a pupil will involve a delayed and time-consuming administrative process, there may be a temptation to ignore the offence, perhaps to choose not to have heard a profanity, or answering-back muttered under the breath by a pupil, and so standards slip.

Yes, there are plenty of good schools, but ask yourself this question:
Overall, have our classrooms become better ordered and disciplined, and has society at large become more polite and less violent in the years since we outlawed corporal punishment?

 

Notwithstanding, the nonsense now being talked about a November election, last week’s bid by Adam Boulton and SKY for a commission to supervise election debates between the party leaders reminded me of just how much I detested them.

My recollection was that the debates in 2010 sucked the life out of the entire campaign with all the focus hanging on the debates to the exclusion of almost everything else. (That is until Gordon Brown forgot to take his microphone off in his car before making unguarded comments following an encounter when a voter gave him a piece of her mind about immigration).

It was a mistake for David Cameron to have issued the debating challenge in the first place, and a measure of Gordon Brown’s desperation that he accepted it.

In the 2017 election the debate was a shambles. Notwithstanding Theresa May absenting herself, the same exposure was given to regional parties and those only contesting a few seats, as was given to the main parties contesting every parliamentary division, which was quite absurd.

More important, the debates are a constitutional monstrosity: We do not directly elect our prime ministers in the United Kingdom, on the contrary, we elect Parliament. The only voters that will have the Prime Minister’s name on their ballot paper will be those in the one parliamentary constituency out of 650 that he or she is seeking election to represent.
The Prime Minister is accountable to Parliament and not directly to the voters. To invest the aspiring PM with head to head debates against  potential rivals is to give them the dangerous impression of power and authority that under our constitution they do not, and should not possess.

If we really want a presidential style of politics it is perfectly proper for us to entertain changing our constitution to directly elect the PM as Israel has done. There may be constitutional arguments and advantages for doing so, though I doubt it. I would be very reluctant to change because, in my experience, one of the problems parliamentarians have striven to redress over recent years is the relative weakness of Parliament as against the powers wielded by government. Directly electing the head of the government would enhance its power and authority vis a vis Parliament, which is the very opposite of what we have been trying to achieve.

We certainly ought not to consider changing our constitutional arrangements to suit media pundits whose primary concern is TV ratings and entertainment, however they might dress it up.

Dated 9th September

Last week I attended a meeting for MPs with an interest in the Equitable Life scandal which, before its collapse in 2000 was once one of our largest and most respected pension providers.

It’s a long history but this summary will suffice: about a million savers were affected and notwithstanding scandalous mismanagement of which the regulatory authorities were aware, the Government of the day refused to provide any assistance. It wasn’t until ten years later, when George Osborne became Chancellor in the coalition government, that a £1.5 billion compensation scheme was implemented.  (It also took a decade for the company’s auditors to be fined for failing to warn the policyholders).

Osborne’s scheme dealt differently with each of the categories of savers. For the vast bulk of policyholders however, their settlement amounted to less than a quarter of what they had lost.
As far as the Government was concerned that was the end of the matter. For the campaign on behalf of the policyholders and their 240 supporters in Parliament, that was never going to be the case.

I came late to this group. My prejudice was that first, the policyholders were relatively sophisticated savers and should have had more ‘nouse’ to spot that their returns were too good to be true. Second, that compensation would be paid by all taxpayers, many of whom would never have been able to afford to put aside the premiums which they would now be paying to compensate.

A number of constituents badgered me until I made sufficient effort to investigate and discover how wrong I had been: overwhelmingly Equitable Life’s clients were of very modest means with small savings. Second, an impression was given within the public sector in particular, that Equitable Life schemes were somehow government approved.

I read the two reports by the Ombudsman into the scandal which are quite shocking and reveal the level of regulatory failure, and the fact that the Treasury was aware of it. Consequently, I came to the view that this fact alone makes the Government culpable and liable to pay full compensation.

The second report by the Ombudsman required that the settlement be fair to the policyholders, but also fair to the taxpayer in terms of what could be afforded.
It was against the background of the frightful state of the public finances inherited by George Osborne after the financial crash that he designed his compensation scheme.

The situation with respect to the public finances has since changed dramatically, and that is why MPs and campaigners are demanding that the settlement be reopened and a more generous provision be made. Ministers however, insist that the 2010 settlement was final.
The matter now falls within the brief of the new Treasury minister, John Glen MP for Salisbury, who came to our meeting to listen to the case we made last week.

He made no promises, but I hope he was impressed by the number of newly elected MPs who have joined the group: clearly, the issue is not going to go away anytime soon.

Lack of savings provision for pensions is a major problem that we face for the future. There is hardly an incentive for younger people to make that sensible provision when they see the shabby treatment meted out to pension savers of a previous generation, for what was a clear failure by government.

This campaign will run, and run.

A couple of years or so ago, during a meeting with female refugees in a camp in Burma, it became clear to me that the translation was inadequate: Something the women were telling me was demonstrably making them very upset, yet the male translator gave a quite implausible explanation given the level of emotion with which the original statements were being expressed.
I sought the assistance of a Catholic priest who explained that there was a shortage of sanitary products and they couldn’t afford to buy any, with the result that teenage girls had to miss school during their periods.
It was one of those rare moments of power where, as a minister, you could fix a problem by issuing an instruction for ‘action this day’, and I did.

Recently the Red Box Initiative was brought to my attention by local campaigners who are supplying sanitary products direct to our schools in Lymington, New Milton, Ringwood and Fordingbridge.
Having come across this need in the desperate circumstances experienced by refugees in war-torn Kachin State, I was surprised to discover that the same applies even in the New Forest.
I understand that nationally, one in ten girls have been unable to afford sanitary wear.
It’s not always just a question of the expense however, some girls have difficult relationships at home and find it difficult to manage the whole issue of periods in their families.

I am always sceptical that any problem can be solved simply by government providing more money. Certainly, it would not help those young women where family circumstance rather than money is the root of the problem.
Even for those families living on benefits and in straightened circumstances, I have often been surprised at the choices that some make. In the USA expenditure would be conditioned by the rules of the ‘food stamps’ system. Here however, more generous benefits would not necessarily translate into a greater provision of ‘necessities’.
There is at least the prospect of a 20% reduction in sanitary product prices because the Government is pledged to zero-rate them for VAT when we make good our escape from EU regulation.

What I do find so very encouraging, is that public spirited individuals, having identified a problem, have set about doing something about it locally.
If you want to find out more contact redboxprojectuk.lym.brock@gmail.com

 

 

In Arusha the car pulled up to a small house in the Centre of town. Inside, it had been transformed into the offices of a local partner charity of Railway Children UK, Amani Centre for Street Children, who work with close to 1,000 (former) street children and youths across Tanzania.

Working on the streets with Amani’s dedicated social workers is where I met some “hardcore” street children and youth. Arusha is a big city (about half a million people, half of them below the age of 18), and the children who live on the streets there become involved deeply and quickly into a number of dangerous street behaviours, including serious substance use. Walking through the dingy and dirty alleyways and slum areas, we encountered children and youths who, in their fight to cope with street life, were happy to see us and the Amani staff. Some young children were carrying sacks bigger than them, filled with empty plastic bottles for recycling which earn them around 75pence a day. Often part of this goes on their transport back to the place where they sleep, and the rest is enough for one basic meal (a plate of rice, with some beans) and some street substances. Many of the children and youths we met were carrying around empty bottles filled with glue and petrol for sniffing, they had cuts and bruises which looked as though they hadn’t been cleaned in weeks, and were wearing dirty, ripped clothes.

They were surprisingly friendly towards me and the Amani street educators, giving us “high fives” and pats on the back, participating in the special group session that the street workers conducted, making jokes and discussing their problems openly.

The young children who are rescued by Amani street educators are taken to a temporary shelter in Moshi, the Amani Children’s Home. Here they receive a whole range of services to help rehabilitate them, re-start their education, and they are later reunited with a caring family member. The older youths are counselled intensively and given the options of going to study basic vocational training or joining a Youth Association Model – a group of youths developing a joint ‘business plan’ and life skills plan to get out of street life.

 

That afternoon we travelled through the hectic Arusha streets, past the pavement hawkers and rows of boda-boda “motorbike taxi” drivers to meet one of the Youth Association groups. They had already started their life skills session by the time we arrived in the centre of the city – Daraja Mbili. One adolescent boy stood in a circle of 20 boys, speaking with passion and conviction. We stood on the fringes and just watched for a while, as the youths challenged each other and debated the issues their business was facing. We were welcomed into the circle and Hija, the youth who had been leading the discussion when we first arrived, introduced his team to us. Hija is the chairperson of the NMC Youth Association which has 21 street youths in total, and is working on the business plan of creating and running public bathrooms, and charging for them. The transformation of the youths we had seen on the streets the night before into the motivated and dedicated youths in front of us was remarkable. Each youth had their own independent role and worked every day to help the start this business and make it a success.

At the end of the day, we travelled to the outskirts of Arusha to visit the family of a former street child, who was rescued by Amani and now reunified with family. I was with Hassan and Naomi, two of Amani’s dedicated family reunification workers. Speaking with them on the way, I gained more of a picture of how challenging it is to reunite former street children with their families. The reasons the children run away from home range from lesser issues like stealing from their family or neighbours, to having suffered severe physical and sexual abuse. The child we were going to see, Karim, had run away from home because of extreme poverty. Around 50% of Tanzanians live in extreme poverty; not eating 3 meals per day, unable to afford basic healthcare or education for their children, and living in a substandard home.

Karim’s mother had been given a conditional grant by Amani to help her repair her home, pay for medicine, and buy enough food for them to eat 3 nutritious meals a day. Although we had to stoop down to enter the shack in which they were living, they greeted us warmly and sat close together on small stools. The reunification seemed to be working. I stayed for some 45 minutes, listening to the translated version of the counselling from Amani’s social workers. It was family therapeutic intervention, and the main aim of the session was to help both the mother and child understand each other’s needs. Naomi explained to me that Amani’s staff had been trained for one week by Railway Children UK on this method of counselling and it was working remarkably well with the families of reunified children.

The most notable part of my experience on the Arusha streets was witnessing the tenacity of the street children to survive, the level of fun and comradery they managed to maintain, and the close relationships they had built with Amani’s social workers. They were like family. This seems to be the reason Amani is so successful in working with these children and youths – they treat them like family and give them guidance in the same way parents would.

Later that week, I travelled 80km north of Arusha to the Amani Children’s Centre in Moshi to see their holistic care programmes for rescued street children.

The huge yellow building that is Amani Centre for Street Children can hold up to 90 children maximum, aged 7 to 15/16. As I walked through the building, I went past the nurse’s office, counselling room, the colourful Starters Classroom and both the boys’ and girls’ dormitories. I learned that Amani’s programme is extremely extensive, offering street children healthcare, counselling, accelerated formal education, food, clothing, and a safe temporary shelter whilst they trace the families of the children in order to be able to reunite them.

The main thing that struck me at Amani was how happy the children were. They were laughing and playing, and reading outside. They seemed just like normal children, there was no evidence of the trauma and suffering they had gone through on the streets. And the caring atmosphere that I had previously witnessed on the streets continued at Amani Centre. Staff and children interacted as though they were family, and there was a warmth and friendliness to the atmosphere. A good number of children came up to greet me wearing huge smiles, and I happily joined in with a small group of kids playing hopscotch.

I was most moved by the story of one girl, Neema. Although only 13 years old, Neema had already gone through more hardships than most adults face in their lives. One of the weekend caregivers explained to me that she was the daughter of a commercial sex worker and that her mother had also sold her to men in exchange for money as she was growing up. Despite all of those challenges, Neema is a confident and cheerful girl at Amani Centre. When I first arrived at the Centre she was darting between the tasks of reading a story book on a bench outside, and playing a board game using pebbles with her friends. But when the lunch bell sounded, Neema took pride of place alongside the cooks, helping to organise the plates of food for all 60 children at Amani and ensuring everyone got their fair share without any quarrels. The staff told me that Neema was a natural leader, kind listener, and could be trusted with any task. When I asked her what she would like to do when she grows up, she told me her dream is to be a teacher.

I hope the above has conveyed the special experience I have been given, to get to know and understand the situation of street children in Tanzania. As I am part of the cross-party parliamentary group (APPG) on Street Children, I hope to take what I have learned from my time in Tanzania, both with Railway Children and with Amani, back to the UK Parliament to discuss with my colleagues. It is clear that issues involving street children are fundamentally important to the development of countries across the world, and that we are in a position to help those less fortunate than ourselves to become positively contributing members of their societies.

About Amani (Notes):

• Amani Centre for Street Children (full registered charity name)
• Amani Centre for Street Children was founded in 2001 by three Tanzanian volunteers. It is a Tanzanian registered charity.
• The HQ is based at the Amani Centre in Moshi, Kilimanjaro, Tanzania.
• The Amani Centre can house up to 90 children at any point in time and offers services to children including; food, clothes, accelerated formal education, healthcare, professional counselling, reunification with families.
• Amani also has a drop-in Centre and night shelter in the bigger city of Arusha, approximately 80 km from Moshi, where it works with street children and youths, and rescues young, vulnerable girls who are engaged in sex work.
• Amani has a smaller Satellite Centre in one of the poorest regions of Tanzania, Singida, where they focus on rescuing and reunifying children.
• In total, Amani works with almost 1,000 (former) street children and youths.
• Amani is supported by individual fundraisers and also relies on grants from foundations and larger institutions.
• Amani is co-funded (as a sub-grantee) by DFID and USAID.

 

Website:  www.AmaniKids.org