‘Liberal democracy’ has come to mean rather more than just some means of ensuring majority rule.
It includes the separation of powers between the different branches of government: executive, legislature and judiciary -guaranteeing the independence of the justice system so that no politician can order anyone’s arrest or imprisonment. It has also come to include the independence of many other institutions including, of course, the press and broadcast media. These refinements guarantee our rights and liberties. Democracies can be quite as prone to tyranny as any other form of government. It is worth remembering that Hitler first achieved power after winning an election.

These proper restraints on democratic power are nevertheless, a source of constant frustration. A number of citizens not only fail to understand their importance, they appear not to be aware of their existence. Much of my correspondence is taken up with demands that this or that be done, where there is no lever that government can pull address the complaint. Typical of this sort of correspondence is alleged bias in BBC coverage.
I quite understand the frustration: you go to the trouble electing a government and expect it to be able to take action to address the issues that you consider to be important, only to discover that it can’t.

This frustration is shared by elected representatives, although I trust they have a better understanding of importance of the proper constraints on their powers. The temptations to set aside those restraints, always for the best possible motives, are constant.

The Chairman of the Magistrates Association has called for the rules which prevent convicted criminals from becoming magistrates to be set aside, in order to promote more diversity on the bench.
Its’s enough to make your blood boil, certainly those who emailed me about it were already at boiling point.
Is it the purpose of the courts to deliver justice, or to promote diversity by adding a sprinkling of criminals to magistracy?

Happily, notwithstanding the independence of the judiciary, those rules that currently prevent criminals from joining the bench, cannot be changed without government action, – action which will be informed by the common sense that comes from periodically having to seek democratic support from hard headed voters.
Phew!

I know quite a few public spirited individuals who voluntarily pick up litter wherever they go, I am among their number.
I despair at the amount of litter that is left in and around our magnificent Forest, most of it simply thrown out of passing cars.
I achieved some notoriety in the press earlier this year by being too explicit in my use of language to a group of school children visiting Westminster when I described what I really thought about litter louts.

Now one of my correspondents demands that I do more, and even lead a campaign. I am at a loss as to how respond. To be frank, although I abhor litter and those who are responsible for it, I do have important fish to fry.
Even if it were my top priority, what’s to be done?
I’m reminded of Oliver Cromwell’s despairing question when confronted with the nation’s growing vice (which then included playing sports on Sunday). He asked “if I were to arm one in every ten, will that be enough?”

Being in Moshi at the foot of Kilimanjaro I missed the furore over Boris Johnson’s comments about burkas, and the opportunity to participate.
I did get lots of emails about it however. Communication by Royal Mail had almost dried up completely, until this week -that is,  when the Boris Burka effect caught up and a batch of letters arrived on the subject; perhaps it just takes longer to get round to writing to your MP, finding a stamp and making it to the post box.

It is well covered ground. I wrote about it, in this column almost exactly two years ago (the article can still be found at http://www.desmondswaynemp.com/ds-blog/bhurkinis-barton-sea/
or simply use the search tool top right and enter ‘Burkinis’

I also recall Jack Straw, when he was a minister under Tony Blair, sounding-off about how uncomfortable he felt when a woman attended his surgery in a niqab with only a slit for her eyes.
(I digress, but as for the Islamic demand for ‘modesty’, having travelled extensively in the Middle- East, when a woman can only show off her eyes, it is amazing what she can make of them).

My view is unchanged: although, with the exception of a very few lucky individuals, most of us look at our best with all of our clothes on,  I believe that people should be allowed to wear as little or as much as they please. So, I’m with Boris, in that I would not join calls to ban the burka, any more than I’d seek to ban naturism. I also agree with him however, in that I do not like them: I believe that they isolate their wearers from healthy social interaction, and that they are a symbol of male power over women.

Boris clearly gave offence, but holding a disciplinary enquiry in my political party is just absurd.
Within the range of terms that might give offence, I thought his use of language at the lower end of the scale.
The enjoyment of our right to freedom of speech, does from time to time incur the possibility of giving offence. Some have a lower threshold for taking such offence than others.

In the scale of things, I am much more concerned about our proper right to freedom of expression being eroded than I am to people taking offence.

6.45 and it’s still dark -we’re in Mwanza not so far from the Equator.
We approach what looks like a pile of old sacks dumped on the verge of a busy street.
As we wait, small boys -from seven to early teens snuggled together, start to stretch and emerge from under the hessian, polythene and cardboard.
The charity street worker explains that the boys sleeping off to one side on their own are the ones that wet themselves at night, so they are excluded from the communal warmth.
The boys are familiar with the street worker and greet her warmly. In turn, she is practised at extracting information about what has happened during the night: have they been harassed by the authorities, or anyone else, are there any injuries or are any of them sick?
A new boy is brought forward by the others, his first night, he hasn’t slept because he was too frightened.
The street worker asks the others to bring him to our centre later in the morning, and we move on to check-in with other groups of boys of different ages close by.
I ask about girls. I’m told that you won’t find them: they hide themselves away because it’s much more dangerous for girls.
We did however, see a young mother packing-up her bedding and hoisting her baby onto her back.

By 7.30 we’re having coffee at a stall on a market square, stallholders and street vendors are setting-up shop. Many of the boys that we saw earlier are congregating round some burning cardboard for warmth. Others are buying something to eat –they have some earnings from fetching and carrying for the vendors.
A motorcyclist stops and gives 1000 shillings to a vendor to distribute ten buns amongst the boys, apparently he comes by and does it every day.

We end up back in our centre, little more than an old classroom a few hundred yards away, little boys and girls are making things with putty and playing games, and a ‘pop-up’ school comes by.
The new boy sits with a social worker. He has had enough and wants to go home, but it’s a very long way. Our family workers will have to check it out and address the issues that led him to run away before he can be re-integrated with his family with appropriate follow-up.
Later that evening I saw him accommodated in a very basic but cheerful and loving short-term shelter: The emphasis is to avoid long term institutionalisation.

Also that day, I saw the mutual support groups that the charity sets-up and assists with help and advice until they are in a position where members can be supported with a loan or training to get a livelihood and somewhere to stay. The high point was meeting seven older boys who had been trained at the technical college over the last two months in shoe-making. Their instructor swelled with pride at what they had achieved: he was right; they were excellent shoes.

So what drives children to the streets?
It’s no different from the reasons one might run away here: neglect; abuse; inability to come to terms with a new step-father or step-mother.

I am currently teaching ‘life skills’ to young adults near Kilimanjaro. My experience with street children took place last week when I was with Railway Children, a charity based in Crewe (they called it Railway Children because the founder was a railway executive and when he visited India he noticed that the street children congregated at railway stations).

 

 

 

Ever since the referendum last in June 2016 I have had a fairly constant flow of emails from constituents who regarded the result as a catastrophe demanding that the referendum be re-run. One of the particular features of this correspondence is that the authors want a continuing conversation with me, and any answer that I give only encourages further emails and argument. Whilst email lends itself to a conversation, I get over 100 emails daily in addition to the many other things that I need to do, which makes it difficult to conduct multiple conversations with constituents released from the disincentive of paying for a stamp and making their way to the post box.

Now this daily flow has been augmented by scores from constituents outraged by what they consider to be a betrayal of the BREXIT vote implicit in the Government’s evolving negotiating position.

A common feature of both sets of correspondents is their certainty that they speak for everyone else, that everyone they converse with agrees with them, and that as their representative I should do likewise.

I think their belief that their own opinions are universally held springs from two sources. First: many people mix in company with people just like themselves, so it is not surprising if they hear opinions similar to their own. Second, we are a tolerant and polite people, when some bore keeps banging on about their hobby-horse, instead of taking issue and arguing with them, we take the line of least resistance by pretending to agree, even if only in the hope that it will shut them up.

As for my responsibility to represent them, my duty is to represent all my constituents, 99.99% of whom have not expressed any opinion to me whatsoever. I owe them my judgement by listening to the arguments and debate, a debate that takes place in Parliament with other elected representatives. I must not be prisoner to any vociferous email lobby.

A common theme of the latest surge of email correspondence from those who believe that their pro-BREXIT vote is being betrayed is that this is such a gross affront to democracy that the entire edifice of government now needs to be razed. These are what I call the ‘crazies’, who adhere to a doctrine of ‘revolutionary defeatism’: they believe that because the BREXIT settlement will not be exactly to their specification, like Sampson we must bring the whole temple down on our heads -whatever the consequences, and a new democratic Britain will somehow emerge from the ruins.

I am not going to join any political suicide squad. I voted for a ‘hard Brexit’ in the referendum, but there were plenty of other BREXIT flavours being touted. After all, for years constituents have been telling me that they were duped in the 1975 referendum because they only thought they were voting for a ‘Common Market’ not signing-up to  political integration. Well, I voted ‘No’ in 1975 because I didn’t even want the market, and I want to be free of its limitations now. Can I be sure however, that many, perhaps even a majority of BREXIT voters, would be satisfied to be free of political integration and yet hang on to the market?

My duty must be to secure what is the best BREXIT achievable according to my judgement, but in doing so I must not put at risk the prospect of achieving any BREXIT at all:  That really would be an affront to our democracy.

If Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh, allegedly members of the Da’esh kidnappers and murderers known as the Beatles, are found guilty then I’m sure that they should be denied the death penalty.
They are, after all, members of a death cult that pursues ‘martyrdom’ and perversely believes that, were they to be martyred, they would be rewarded in heaven with the services of 42 virgins.
(I understand that some scholars question the translation and insist that the meaning is ‘raisins’ and not ‘virgins’. My word, there will have to be a major effort to manage expectations in paradise).
Much better to imprison them for life so that they have years of boredom in which to dwell upon the virgins (or raisins) that they are presently going without.

The first priority however, is to secure a conviction rather to put the cart before the horse and fret about the punishment.
The Government had exactly the right priority in furnishing the United States with the intelligence and evidence that it held against the two alleged terrorists so that they could be brought to trial, without making our assistance conditional on the outcome of any trial (by securing an assurance that, in the event of conviction the death penalty would not be invoked).
That the Government has had to suspend its assistance to the USA because of a legal challenge from the mother of one of the accused, illustrates just what a mess our Human Rights law is now in.

As I’ve made clear, for these particular individuals, if guilty, there are better punishments, but that must be a matter for the judgement of the court in the jurisdiction in which they are to be tried.
If we have evidence that could convict gruesome murderers we should provide it irrespective of what punishment may await them.

The great roar of indignation in Parliament earlier this week about the Government’s failure first to secure a ‘no death penalty’ assurance from USA before giving our assistance, is another measure of how out- of-step our ‘great and good’ political class has become from the people that they are supposed to represent.
In my experience the good people of these islands are not so squeamish about the possibility of the death penalty as their liberal- minded politicians appear to be.

The Government Chief Whip’s difficulties over a pairing arrangement brought back stressful memories of my time as Government Pairing Whip – the whip responsible for always having the numbers present at Westminster to see-off any rebellion by colleagues, or ambush by the Opposition.

You are at once most popular -as colleagues ingratiate themselves in the hope that you will look favourably on their slipping request- and most unpopular as others curse you having refused theirs.
Gavin Barwell, now the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, tells a tale (he definitely suffers from false memory syndrome) of overhearing me in the Whips Office on the telephone to a bereaved colleague “…I know your wife died, but you’re okay? will you be voting tonight?”

The Pairing Whip’s nightmare is when you have a close vote coming up and you get wind of a rebellion. Immediately you have to hit the phones to cancel the slips that you have already granted and get ministers overseas back to Westminster on the next flight.
Invariably I found senior secretaries of state accommodating no matter how disruptive I was being to their plans. The problem would always be with a back-bench colleague, rarely seen at Westminster, whose arrangements in Azerbaijan or wherever, were always more important than the Government’s majority.
A day or so later, by the time we actually got to the vote, and the whips had done their arm-twisting, their appeals to loyalty, or merely deploying their easy-going charm, and burned-off the bulk of the rebels, we would end up with an embarrassingly large majority to explain to a Foreign Secretary whose meetings in Washington had been abandoned.

There are three settings:
First, a one line whip, where your attendance is voluntary (we are not expecting whipped votes).
Second, a two line whip, where you are required to attend unless you have a pairing arrangement.
The system that underpinned this was a fixed long-term personal relationship between MPs on either side to pair with each other, and for one of them to stand out of the division lobby, by arrangement, when the other needed to be absent.  Towards the end of John Major’s Government the pairing agreement was suspended after a breach of trust not entirely dissimilar to last week’s events. The arrangements were not restored after the 1997 election because the Labour majority was so large that they could afford to run a shift system without recourse to personal pairing, resulting in the abandonment of the two line whip.
Third, the three line whip, where your attendance is vital. Even so, as the Pairing Whip, and knowing that a minister needed to be overseas, I would approach my opposite number in the Labour Whips office and we would agree a pair with one of his own absentees. The arrangement often went wrong because it was our own administrative arrangement and instruction, not a personal undertaking by the individuals involved. One of them would find that their plans had changed and, as they were now present at Westminster anyway, they voted without thinking. I would make them write a grovelling letter of apology to the Labour pairing whip. As he did to me. Luckily, it didn’t happen on a close vote.

None of this however, explains what happened last week, for which a convincing explanation has yet to be had.

 

Hundreds of constituents have emailed to express their dismay at the Government’s newly agreed BREXIT negotiating position.
They begin by telling me what they thought they were voting for in the EU referendum, which is fine. Overwhelmingly however, they go further and tell me exactly what the British People were voting for.
How can they possibly know?

 

I campaigned vigorously during those months in 2016 and I came across any number of quite differently nuanced opinions held amongst both Leave and Remain voters, in addition to the habitual caprice of so many voters who vote against something they don’t like rather than having a focussed view about what to replace it with.
I am always cautious when constituents tell me that everyone else thinks like them.

 

My experience was that although there was a firmly committed minority of voters on either side, most people made a finely balanced decision to vote Leave, but could relatively easily gone the other way, as indeed many Remain voters were not too troubled by the result because they too had made a finely balanced decision and might as easily have changed their mind.

 

As a representative I must exercise my judgement on behalf of my constituents, but in doing so I need to acknowledge that whilst I know how they collectively voted, I cannot possibly know why, or -in detail- what for.

 

That said, I campaigned to Leave: to regain control of our money, our laws and our borders. My principal problem with the Government’s position is that in a crucial respect it fails that test.
The Government has chosen to seek to preserve out unrestricted access to EU markets in manufactured goods and solve the Irish border problem,  by offering to maintain a ‘common rule book’. The only thing that is ‘common’ about this rule book is that it is the EU rule book that must be adhered to in every EU state. Currently, we can deploy a measure of influence over the contents of the rule book.
The reality is that under the Government’s proposals we will have none, but will simply have to do as we are told.

 

We are the eighth largest manufacturing nation in the world. When it comes to high tech manufacturing we are in the top three. It is just bizarre, given the importance to us of manufacturing, that we would allow all our laws, regulations and specifications to be determined in another country, with that country’s own interests in mind, and with no regard to our own.
It would also scupper our ability to make new independent trading agreements.
It is just madness, I cannot see how I could possibly vote for it.

 

That voting decision, in isolation, is the easy bit. The difficulty comes when we consider the bigger picture. A vote against the Government, if it is effective, may have grave consequences. I already consider BREXIT to be in jeopardy. The Government losing a key vote might end up putting the whole enterprise very much more at risk.

 

Yes, I want to vote to change the Government’s newly defined BREXIT policy, but when it comes to the crunch I would choose the Government’s BREXIT recipe if the alternative is no BREXIT at all -which I now judge to be a real prospect.

Few readers of this column will ever have heard of them: two Bedouin villages on Palestinian land in the Israeli occupied West Bank of the Jordan; They are being destroyed to make way for the expansion of two illegal Israeli settlements Kfar Adumim and Ma’ale Adumim.
Contemplate the misery as homes and school are bulldozed, and by a people who should know better having experienced their own history of suffering greater than any.

If I understood the minister correctly, the Government has expressed its concern, even its condemnation, no less.
I’ve done that, and it isn’t trivial: when I expressed my concern as a minister I did it with sufficient force that the Israeli Deputy Prime Minister and Chief Negotiator stormed out of the meeting. Ultimately however, they are just words.

Insanity is repeatedly doing the same thing in the same situation but expecting a different outcome.
We are not insane: we don’t expect a different outcome; we know our words will have no effect, and Israel will continue with impunity, and so, by our inaction, we make ourselves complicit.

Of course, I understand the realpolitik of the situation: our reluctance to take unfriendly measures against an important ally in a troubled region, particularly when that ally has the robust backing of our most important ally.

Israel should consider however, the implications of what it is storing up. These expanding illegal settlements make a viable Palestinian state impossible.
Which means a large population will be condemned to continue to live without equal rights, and with restricted movement. We used to have a name for that, so let’s call a spade a bloody shovel: we used to call it Apartheid, and Israel will have effectively confined the Palestinians to bantustans.

Clearly the world is looking the other way for the present, but how long could such a situation endure, anymore that it endured in South Africa?

They do seem to be pretty chipper of late.
I think that they have spotted that there is no majority in Parliament for any one flavour of BREXIT. An assessment that they have shared with friends in the Commission.
Accordingly, whatever the Cabinet decides to-morrow, will be rejected shortly thereafter by the Commission – who have been convinced that they don’t need to negotiate, or to concede anything at all.

They believe that panic will set in as we head for no deal (which will be orchestrated with renewed doses of ‘project fear’), so much so that Parliament will pull the plug on BREXIT  -just in time.

If events do unfold in this way it is worth considering what this will do to our national psyche.
As a nation we don’t believe that we’ve been defeated since the Noman Conquest in 1066.
Imagine if Lord Halifax had prevailed over Churchill after Dunkirk in 1940, and had managed to negotiate a peace that spared us occupation, but nevertheless meant accepting defeat. How different would our national self-esteem would be.
The EU has prevailed against 5 national referendums, Imagine how we would feel if it were to prevail against our own, as we meekly accept continued membership despite the attempted break for freedom of June 23^rd 2016.
We would be a different country.

As to whether events will indeed turn out this way, it’s still far too soon to tell