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Sir Desmond Swayne TD MP

Sir Desmond Swayne TD MP

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Shooting Pests

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When we last had parliamentary proceedings on foxhunting it was before email and campaigning websites like 38 Degrees had become fashionable. Overwhelmingly, correspondence was delivered by a postman. The strength of a constituent’s opinion on a matter, and the determination to convey that opinion to their MP, would be tempered by the need to write a letter and purchase a stamp.

Now that foxhunting is back on the parliamentary agenda however, there is no similar restraint: your MP is only one easy click away. Consequently, I have had to spend much of my time clearing my inbox of hundreds of emails – in equal numbers from constituents on either side of the hunting argument.

I am afraid that many of my correspondents have got quite the wrong end of the stick. This week’s parliamentary proceedings are not about the principle of the hunting act and they do not seek to amend it. The Government has laid a statutory instrument before Parliament in response to the complaints of upland farmers about the problem of foxes killing lambs. The statutory instrument makes a number of small changes to regulations, not to the Hunting Act itself, to align them to what currently works in Scotland.

These technical amendments to the regulations will not lift the ban on hunting with dogs: Changes to regulations, secondary legislation (like statutory instruments) cannot be used to defeat the purpose of the original Act . The Hunting Act will remain in place and will continue to prohibit the pursuit and killing of a wild animal by dogs. What the changes do is to amend the exemptions – that Members on all sides of the House of Commons agreed during the passage of the Act – where they are necessary for the purposes of “pest control”.

The purpose of the amendments to the regulations is to:

Enable farmers and gamekeepers to make a judgement, based on the terrain and other circumstances, as to whether it is appropriate to use more than two dogs to flush out foxes and other wild mammals. This is particularly important in upland areas where the use of two dogs across large and difficult areas of ground, often covered by woodland, is not regarded as effective or practical. There is no limit on the number of dogs that can be used in Scotland;

To maintain the current restrictions of only one dog being used below ground in stalking and flushing out animals, but to enable the current provision for the protection of game and wild birds to be extended to livestock as well. This amendment will help provide upland farmers with an additional tool against livestock predation. A dog may be used below ground for a much wider range of purposes in Scotland;

To amend the requirement to produce evidence of land ownership or landowner consent in cases where a dog is used below ground. In Scotland there is no such requirement. This amendment will mean that the evidence does not need to be carried by the person carrying out the activity but can be presented at a police station within seven days. This is in line with the timeframe for presenting a driving licence under road traffic law;

To extend the scope of the “rescue” exemption to include “diseased” animals. This is a logical extension of the provision that enables hunting to be undertaken to relieve a wild mammal of suffering when it is injured.

These changes do not lift the ban on hunting with dogs and whilst placing greater trust in farmers and gamekeepers – those who know the land and terrain they operate on best – the controls remain more restrictive than those in Scotland. Any pests still have to be killed by shooting, and not by the dogs.
Foxhunting with a pack of hounds in the traditional sense that we have known it, remains banned. That is a battle that has yet to be refought. The Government had a manifesto commitment to put it to a free vote. I don’t know when that vote will come, but when it does, I am confident that my email inbox will know all about it.

West Lothian

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Last week the Government published its proposals to implement a system of ‘English votes for English laws’ to cries of outrage from various opponents, including the Scottish National Party. That this measure should have come as a surprise to anyone, is beyond my comprehension. It was a principal feature of the election campaign, from my own experience as a candidate, it was one of the most commonly discussed issues on the doorsteps – and the most popular.

The Government has been accused of putting the Union with Scotland at further risk by implementing the measure. On the contrary, the Scots already enjoy these powers, granting them to England will address one of the principal complaints that the English have about the Union.

The opposition of the Scottish Nationalists is all the more surprising given their stance in the last parliament: they took the principled view that English measures, on health and education for instance, where the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood determines these matters for Scotland, were none of their business, and they voluntarily abstained from voting on these questions. They have failed to explain why they have changed their minds in this Parliament.

This change of mind makes the measure necessary. Whilst Labour would never have agreed to a voluntary abstention when they dominated the Scottish parliamentary seats, now that they hold only one, their approach is of little consequence.

I have used this column before to express my view that a voluntary arrangement would be preferable. This was, after all, the approach that the Ulster Unionists adopted, when the old Stormont parliament operated. I do not like the notion of different classes of MP, some of which may, or may not vote, on particular matters. I think it would have been preferable to voluntarily have adopted the convention that MPs representing Scottish seats simply abstain on purely English matters. The abandonment by the Nationalists of their previous stance however, makes a formal change in the Standing Orders of the Commons (the nearest thing we have to a written constitution) necessary.

The issue is not new. We have wrestled with it ever since it was first identified by Sir Tam Dalyell of the Binns during the original devolution debates of the mid nineteen seventies. It was characterised as the ‘West Lothian question’ because that was the parliamentary seat that he represented. In his principled opposition to the prospect of a Scottish assembly he pointed out the absurdity of allowing the member for West Lothian at Westminster to vote for measures that wouldn’t affect his own constituents, but only those of English constituencies.

This theoretical possibility became real during the years of the Blair Government when English Education and Health reforms – and also the Hunting Act – where the support of Labours MPs in Scotland turned out to be critical in securing majorities for the measures, which would not have passed had they had to rely only on the English seats which were to be affected.

This is an outrageous unfairness to English voters. It has been crying out to be addressed for years. The determination to do so now, after an election with a clear manifesto commitment, is a way of cementing the Union by removing a grievance felt by the English – which, after all, are the largest part of it.

Neglected Tropical Diseases

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Last week on the morning that the story broke that UK overseas development aid was being squandered on finding a mate for Nemo, I was addressing the Gates Foundation on the occasion of their progress report on neglected tropical diseases. I hope that readers will agree that, unlike tropical fish fancying, eradicating disease is a perfectly proper use of our overseas aid.

These diseases, such as the scourge of Leprosy, have been around since Biblical times. In 2010 former US President Jimmy Carter came to a conference in Britain to galvanise a renewed effort to eradicate them, which resulted in the ‘London declaration’ expressing our ambition to eradicate them by 2020. Last week was the 5th anniversary of the declaration and an opportunity to review how we are progressing.

A medical research scientist once explained the difficulty of searching for cures by comparing the endeavour to a piece of Confucian wisdom: apparently the sage once said that the most difficult thing is to search for a black cat in a room without light, and particularly so…if there is no cat. I can understand the simile: the enormous effort searching with no guarantee that there will be a cure at the end of it. Of course there is scope for further research into these diseases, and we are paying some of it. Our problem however, is of a very different nature. The clue is in the name: neglected tropical diseases.

The irony is that we are awash with cures, what we have lacked is the will to distribute them.

Between 2010 and 2020 the pharmaceutical companies will have donated $17.8 billion’s worth of free cures. These numbers are so large that they scarcely mean anything to us – but reflect on it, only one billion minutes ago we would be back in Biblical times.

The cost of a pill to protect a child from bilharzia (a ghastly disease that eats away your organs from the inside) costs as little as 20 cents. The difficulty is not so much in finding cures for these diseases, as in providing the infrastructure and health systems to distribute them by the billion to remote and impoverished populations, and this is the proper role of international development aid, investing to increase the capacity and effectiveness of health services in the world’s poorest countries.

At this half way point between the declaration of our intent to eradicate these diseases, and the target date of 2020, I think we deserve a small pat on the back. We have certainly raised our game. The UK will spend £250 million over the decade on this endeavour. Poor countries themselves are spending their own meagre resources too. Ethiopia has launched a major initiative to clear a backlog of surgery to deal with trachoma (an excruciatingly painful cause of blindness). We have built up a fantastic international partnership with the UN, USAID, the Gates Foundation, Charities, and the Private sector – last year these companies donated 1.3 billion cures. The impact these partnerships are having can be dramatic: in 1987 there were 35 million cases of guinea worm disease (another really painful and debilitating condition), last year there were just 127, and so far this year only 4.

‘But’, because there is still a big ‘but’. There are still 1.4 billion people suffering from one or more of these dreadful tropical diseases, and half a million people die from them every year.

Medical science can be a grizzly business, as anyone who has thumbed through the pages of a medical text book to look at the photographs will know. These particular diseases are among the world’s most grizzly, the grizzliest of the grizzly, in terms of the grotesque disfigurement and disability that they cause. This leads to stigma, isolation and poverty.

We need to redouble our efforts to eradicate them if we are to realise our ambition to do so by 2020. My message to the conference last week was that, were we to fail, and still to be able to sleep at night, we had to make sure that no one could accuse any of us of not having done enough.

Complicity in Terror

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Rather predictably the Prime Minister’s timely complaint at Bratislava – that there are elements within Islam that are in effect ‘complicit’ in the rise of violent extremism – has provoked the predictable criticism from the usual quarters. The critics need to consider carefully what the Prime Minister actually said, because their critiques so often attack something that he didn’t say. Mr Cameron made no general criticism of Muslims or their communities. On the contrary, his remarks were directed specifically and forensically. So, if the cap fits….

What I have found very encouraging over the last year or so, is the growing strength of the reaction within Islam in opposition to the extremists. A fortnight ago UK parliamentarians were privileged to hear the Grand Mufti of Alhazar, the most prestigious seat of Sunni Islamic scholarship, lecture on the how the Ideology of the violent extremists is incompatible with the proper interpretation of Islam. There is now a determined, even evangelical, effort underway within our Muslim communities to challenge and reverse the influence of extremism.

Minhaj-ul-Quran has just launched the first Islamic curriculum on peace and counter-terrorism and young Muslim activists are being trained to take on the extremist ideologies in their communities.

What the Prime Minister was rightly drawing attention to, are those within Islam who, whilst not preaching violence themselves, never the less foster an environment where it can develop. I believe that this falls largely into two categories. First, those who place the blame for radicalisation squarely on the perceived injustice of our own foreign policy and its effects in Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan. By blaming Western interventions in the Middle East – however, fair, or unfairly – they take their eye off the growing cancer that is preaching another bout of hatred and death as the solution to all the region’s problems.

Second, those elements within Islam, whilst not themselves advocating violence as a remedy, never the less regard western values, including democracy, as inherently un-Islamic and therefore seek to seal off their communities from all the cultural influences to which our life-style exposes them. This gives rise to confusion about identity especially amongst the young, and creates the environment in which distrust and suspicion develops into hatred and violent intent.

The Prime Minister was entirely correct in pointing out that this conflict is within Islam, and a very small minority at that, even if its consequences are disproportionate and disastrous.

There is a very different analysis: I continue to receive internet inspired hate email which paints the rise of violent extremism as a war of all Muslims against Christianity, the so called clash of civilisations. This really is such utter nonsense and contrary all our experience. Whilst it is true that the consequences of the war in Syria, and its spill-over into Iraq, has been catastrophic for Christian minorities, its principal victims are fellow Muslims. This is a war within Islam. It is precisely for this reason that voices within Islam must be at the forefront of the effort to vanquish the ideology that promotes war and death as the vehicle for propagating religion. The Prime Minister was right to point out that those Muslims who are refusing to engage in this vital effort, are themselves complicit in the consequences that arise from their failure to do so.

Litter

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The increasing amount of litter being chucked out into the Forest is disgusting and a danger to livestock. For example, just look at the verges as you approach and exit Burley, notwithstanding the heroic efforts of the McDonald’s staff who work the verges south of the A31.

The cans, fag packets, stub ends, fast food boxes, crisp and sweet wrappers can be safely assumed to have come from passing cars. All the high energy drink bottles, water bottles, and increasingly sophisticated muscle gel pads etc. are more likely to have come from Lycra clad cyclists (rarely does one see runners there).

These litter bugs are just too idle to give a moment’s thought to the consequences of what they are doing. On the other hand however, the fellow who dumped his sofa at Picket Post a fortnight or so ago, clearly went to a great deal of effort. It is a pity he didn’t have the intelligence to spot that, in all probability, it would have taken less effort to dispose of it lawfully at the municipal facility on the way to Verwood.

What really gets to me are those people who assiduously bag up their dog poo and then leave the sealed bag on the ground or hanging from a bush for somebody else to deal with. Do they imagine that there is a collection service?

Are they worried that, were they to dispose of it properly, then they would be denying some Forestry Commission employee a livelihood?

I doubt it, I suspect they too are just idle and thoughtless.

Rewarding Losers

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Labour have taken their election defeat manfully and have launched a soul-searching examination of reasons for their drubbing at the polls. The collective whinge by the minor parties however, is in stark contrast. They prefer to blame our electoral system, which, they claim, is ‘broken’.

It isn’t. On the contrary, it appears to be working properly again having malfunctioned in 2010.

The Anglo-Saxon voting system, now copied and used in the majority of the world’s democracies, has a beautiful and well understood simplicity: the candidate who gets the most votes wins.

The purpose of the system is to identify, and to reward the winner. It isn’t its purpose to try and be fair to losers; on the contrary, it disproportionately rewards winners. For example, last month the Conservatives came first with 38% of the votes cast, but were rewarded with over 50% of the parliamentary seats. The advantage of this disproportionate winner’s reward is that the successful party gets a clear majority with which it can deliver legislation and govern decisively. This is in contrast to continental electoral systems which deliver indecisive results and leave the winner scrabbling to find coalition partners and to put together a compromise programme that nobody actually voted for. They have a tendency to put parties which command broad support, at the mercy of demands for concessions from small parties with comparatively little support.

Nothing of human design is ever perfect, and our own electoral system failed to deliver decisive results in 1973 and 2010. It is a matter of some satisfaction that last month it appears to have started delivering properly once again.

There is nothing new about the disproportionate winner’s reward delivered by our voting system. This feature is at the heart of why so many of us approve of it, and some disapprove of it. What the critics appear to have forgotten is that we rehearsed all these arguments and came to a decisive conclusion to stick with our Anglo-Saxon system in a referendum only 4 years ago in 2011. The winning margin was a whopping 70% to 30%, enough to settle the question for a generation.

UK politics is not a promising place for parties who want to occupy a niche. It may be tough on the minor parties, but the only way to do better, is to try and win.

Higher Pay for MPs

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Once again I have had the luxury of replying to the indignant emails, complaining about the proposed 11% pay rise for MPs, by saying ‘not me guv’ and telling them to write to the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) instead.

MPs used to vote on their own pay and allowances, which many people found shocking, but at least we were accountable to voters at elections, and had to bear in mind that we would have to look our constituents in the eye, and explain our actions. In the panic of the expenses scandal however, we handed over the determination of our remuneration to a completely independent body. The folly of this is now obvious. A truly independent body isn’t accountable to anyone, and so this has proved with IPSA. They have shown themselves to be serenely independent of, and impervious to, both public and political opinion.

IPSA have backed their proposals with a detailed study of the work that MPs do, and an international comparison of similar elected representatives. Whether IPSA’s conclusions are sound or not, is irrelevant, because their complete independence has shielded them from a political reality that is obvious to the rest of us: it’s the economy.

One of the principal roles of an elected representative (or, at least it certainly ought to be) is to set an example. At a time when we still have a substantial deficit in the public finances and are rightly imposing wage restraint on public sector workers, we cannot afford, either economically or politically, for our politicians to be paid more, whatever international comparisons there might be.

Ministers should not only share in the restraint being exercised by everyone else, they should be leading the way, and we have tried to do exactly that: We cut the pay for ministers by 5% after the 2010 election and then froze it for the 5 years of that parliament; last week I signed a disclaimer forgoing any rise in my ministerial salary during the lifetime of this parliament too.

Some constituents have written to me demanding that if the increase for MPs goes ahead, then I should reject it or give it to charity. There is a rub however. The increased pay proposal is cost neutral: the 11% pay increase is to be matched by reductions in allowances, pension benefits, and an increase in pension contributions. Are my correspondents suggesting that I take the hit on these, yet forego the matching increase? – And that’s on top of having cut and frozen my ministerial salary. It’s a big ask!

You can have your say by registering your opinion in the public consultation which ends 30th June. Responses should be emailed to mppayandpension@parliamentarystandards.org.uk or sent to MPs’ Pay Consultation, Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, 4th Floor,

30 Millbank, London, SW1P 4DU, but don’t write to me!

Repealing the Human Rights Act

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Over the last month since the election constituents have been emailing me asking me not to vote to repeal the Human Rights Act 1998. It’s a bit late! We’ve had the election and during the campaign I made explicit my determination to vote to repeal it. Indeed, the approach to the Act was a defining difference between the political parties. For my own part, I voted against the Act back in 1998 in the first place.

Some people seem to be under the extraordinary illusion that human rights began with the act in 1998, and that prior to that we lived in a dark age without any rights. What the 1998 Act did was to make the European Convention on Human Rights enforceable in our own courts, making our own judges follow the lead given by the judges in Strasbourg.

I am wholly opposed to this sort of rights legislation which I believe gives creative opportunities to judges to place some people above the law.

You may recall a spat back in 2011 when, in a speech at the Conservative Party Conference, Theresa May – the Home Secretary – condemned a judgement allowing a foreign criminal to avoid deportation on the grounds of his ‘ human right to a family life’ – because he owned a cat!

Now, it doesn’t matter if the fellow was spared deportation because of the cat, or some other circumstance, be it a lover or whatever. The fact is that he was placed above the law and spared the proper penalty for his crime. Had another individual done as he did, but without possessing a cat or having a lover, he would not have been spared. This is fundamentally unjust. It is, however, not only offensive to some abstract concept of justice, rather it is a significant practical problem: scores other offenders are walking our streets because judges have put their rights above the law, the will of Parliament, and the elected representatives of all our people.

I have a much more fundamental view of our human rights: I believe that we have the right to live as we please and do as we wish, so long as we do not break the law – which we are all equal before, and none of us – however mighty, is above. The real battle for those of us who value liberty is to constrain the ever-present legislative urge. Do not underestimate this struggle: the state, armed with all its coercive power, already extends into private aspects of our lives and homes which free Englishmen would never have tolerated in the past. This desire for ever more laws is almost universal: sometimes I wonder if am totally at odds with my constituents in opposing it; daily they write to me suggesting new laws to govern our lives as a remedy to some real or imagined problem: banning this or that, enforcing this or that. Heavens! Some even write demanding that it be compulsory to vote. The incessant demand for more law and regulation is the real threat to our liberty.

So called rights which place some people above the law, be they cat owning thieves, illegal immigrants or terrorists, undermines the fundamental principle of equality before the law, and ends up making a mockery of justice. The Human Rights Act 1998 should be consigned to the dustbin.

Referendum

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Increasingly there is speculation that the EU referendum may come earlier that 2017.

I was surprised that the revelation that the Bank of England has been ‘war-gaming’ scenarios arising from a vote to withdraw from the EU, made headline news. The only remarkable thing about it was that it was ever considered as a matter for secrecy.

As to how plausible these scenarios are, that is another matter entirely. Recent polling indicates that those wishing to remain in the EU are significantly ahead. I am a veteran on the ‘No’ campaign of 1975. I recall having a two to one lead in the polls for withdrawal, yet still losing that referendum. It is still very early days but I just do not detect the great groundswell that would be required to sustain a successful campaign to withdraw, in the face of what will be a well-funded and determined effort on the part of business and corporate interests to ensure that we remain.

During the recent election campaign I was asked at the hustings how I would vote in the referendum this time around. I replied that it is too soon to tell. I remain as hostile to the EU as I was to the concept offered to us back in 1975. I do believe however, that David Cameron has earned the right to be trusted with a renegotiation. After all, he is the only British Prime Minister ever to veto an EU treaty, ever to secure a reduction in the EU budget, and ever to bring back powers previously given away to Brussels. His record is a very good one.

Do I have any ‘red lines’ which will determine my referendum vote one way of the other?

I would certainly want to be shot of ‘ever closer Union’ from the original Treaty of Rome. Beyond that, the things which I dislike most about the Union are not the subject of renegotiation. For example, it is the institutions of statehood like the parliament which I regard as illegitimate. I want a Europe of nation states co-operating together, and not a Europe claiming to be a state in its own right. A parliament represents a people, and I just do not believe in a European people, rather the peoples of Europe have their own parliaments to represent them.

Counterintuitively, one of the things I like most about the EU is the principle of freedom of movement, and it is something that 1 million Britons have taken advantage of. I certainly don’t believe however, that it extends to a right to claim social security benefits anywhere in Europe.

Ultimately, this referendum, like the Great Charter of the eighteenth century, is a “knife and fork question, a bread and cheese question”: I believe that the outcome will come down to the issue of jobs; people will decide on the basis of how they think it will impact on their prosperity.

My own belief is that in the long term our prosperity depends upon our competitiveness, and my prejudice is that our competitiveness in international markets may be increasingly compromised by the burden of EU regulation. There is however, a rub: If we are to have continued access to the EU’s single market – which is the world’s largest free market – then, like Norway and Switzerland, we will have to abide by all the regulations anyway, but without having any voice in their making.

We are deluding ourselves if we believe that the referendum is going to present us with simple and easy options.

A Social Media Triumph

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I am delighted to have returned to my previous ministerial post at the Department of International Development. I had anticipated that I would do so. After all, I had only been in the job for 9 months. The Prime Minister knew I was enthusiastic, because I had told him that it was what I wanted. Given that the consensus was that I was making a reasonable fist of it, my working assumption was that I would return.

On Monday last week, as the reshuffle was in progress, I went to the department in Whitehall only to find that my security pass would no longer operate the entry barrier. Having secured the assistance of the staff, I went upstairs to my office. I discovered that my belongings had been packed into boxes. I joked with my private office staff asking if they knew something that I didn’t. They explained that this was just standard procedure because, were a minister to be moved and replaced, the office had to be ready immediately for occupation by the new minister. I think they were a little embarrassed by the circumstances but we had a good laugh about it. In that spirit I logged on to my Twitter account and tweeted that my pass didn’t work, my stuff was in packing cases: was this ‘the end?’

It was not intended to be taken seriously. Unfortunately hundreds of my followers on Twitter reacted rather differently. Some began to express their sorrow, and others their fury at my shabby treatment. Journalists began to call, asking me if I could confirm that I had been sacked. Colleagues sought me out to express their sorrow. Touched though I was by all this sympathy, I found the business of trying to explain it all, and that I still fully expected to be back at my post, very repetitive. In the end I simply had to go and hide at the far end of the library.

Later that evening the call from Number Ten came, and put the matter beyond doubt. Not for everyone however, a fellow did email me to suggest that this was a social media triumph: that I was indeed to have been sacked, but such was the ‘Twitter storm’ that the Prime Minister had had been forced to reconsider. Some people will believe anything!

Anyway, now that I have my feet firmly back under the ministerial desk, I make the observation that we did not hear very much about international development during the election campaign notwithstanding events which presented the opportunity to raise its profile: first the deaths of scores of people being ‘trafficked’ across the Mediterranean Sea; and second, the earthquake in Nepal.

I suppose the reason it did not become an election issue is that there is broad agreement about it among the all the main parties with the exception of UKIP. There clearly was no appetite to give UKIP oxygen by concentrating on an issue where the prejudice of the public was broadly in line with UKIP’s thinking – namely that we spend too much on international development.

I made my position clear however, at each of the six hustings that took place in my parliamentary division of New Forest West. The purpose of the international development budget is largely the same as that of our defence budget: to secure a safer and more stable world in which we can prosper; International development aid it is not charity, rather it is an investment that we make to secure safety and stability. It is no good us just wringing our hands at the political, social, security, and economic consequences of the tide of humanity desperately seeking to cross the Mediterranean and make a new life in Europe. We have to be prepared to invest in solutions to the problems that are driving them from their own countries. In short, we have to make life better there, and we have to tackle the forces that generate terrorism there.

My ambition is that by the end of this parliament we will understand this rather better and that, rather than grumbling about our foreign aid budget, we will be proud of what it is achieving.