The Brexit Bill survived with rather more ease than I anticipated: a majority of 22 against the Opposition amendment to deny the bill a second reading (318 votes to 296 votes).

The opponents of the bill stated that they were not trying to derail our withdrawal from the EU, but that their concern was that the bill is unbalanced in that it gives too much power to ministers in supervising the Brexit process and too little influence to Parliament. Clearly, there is an argument to be had on this, and I entered into that argument in this column a couple of weeks ago ( http://www.desmondswaynemp.com/ds-blog/the-brexit-bill/ )

We need to judge politicians not just by their words however, but by their actions.

The purpose of a second reading debate is to explore the general principle of a bill. Examining the detail of a bill follows in a separate series of debates on the committee stage (for which seven eight hours days of debate have now been set aside)

The principle of the Brexit bill, accepted on both sides, is that there is a need to provide continuity and certainty after Brexit by incorporating EU law into UK law so that it continues to apply after we leave, as it does now. Otherwise there might be a chaotic departure from the EU.

If the Opposition accepted this argument (–and they said they did), but nevertheless were worried that the bill gave too much power to ministers, and too little to Parliament, then the proper parliamentary way to proceed would have been to have supported, or perhaps abstained, at second reading, then to seek to amend the balance of powers in the detail of the bill at the subsequent committee stage. To have voted –as they did- against the second reading is to vote against the principle of the bill and to try to kill it outright.

Whatever opponents say about their motives, for them to have voted against the second reading is deeply worrying about their commitment to our departure from the EU.

MPs are not objective observers. We are partisans. Forgive therefore, my suspicions about the motivation of parliamentary opponents who campaigned to remain in the EU, nevertheless now say that –as democrats- they accept the referendum result, but then vote against the principle of the bill that is essential to deliver Brexit.

They say that they are defending parliamentary sovereignty against a power grab by ministers (because the bill gives those ministers the exclusive right to draw up regulations that will make the thousands of changes necessary to our law, before presenting the regulations to Parliament to be approved or rejected).

Humbug

Where was their concern for parliamentary sovereignty when these EU laws were made in the first place, with no role at all for Parliament in that Process?

The opponents of the Bill say they want Parliament to be involved in the detail of drawing up the regulations: that would take years.

I have spoken before in this column of the desperation of those who want to hang on in the hope that something will turn up to prevent us leaving the EU. Delay is the essential ingredient to such a strategy of hanging on in that hope. Nothing is more suited to supplying that delay than the current tactics of those who voted against this bill.

A number of organisations have encouraged their supporters to email me about the potential impact of the EU Repeal bill on their areas of concern (amongst the most vocal have been environmental lobbyists).
As I pointed out in this column last week, the purpose of the Bill is to provide certainty and continuity so that our legal and regulatory framework will be exactly the same the day after we leave as it will be on the day before we leave.

By ensuring that all EU law and regulation is incorporated into UK law and regulation, all those lobbyists should be reassured that nothing will have changed (including all our environmental protections).
This unchanged status does beg the obvious question ‘why have we gone through the whole process of leaving the EU if we are keeping everything the same, including all those burdensome regulations from Brussels?’
To which the simple answers are twofold: First to provide necessary certainty and continuity in the short to medium term; and second, because we simply do not have the time available to do any kind of sifting exercise, in order to determine what regulations we wish to amend, revise, or dispense with.

Having campaigned to leave the EU however, I am ambitious to change the regulatory and legal framework at our leisure over the years ahead. There seems to me something wanting in the outlook of my correspondents, who appear to take the view that we are incapable of making our own arrangements – to protect our environment, or whatever else – and that we need to rely on the EU to do it for us. This is a poverty of ambition that I do not share. I have every expectation that our regulation can be superior to anything that the EU has come up with (and that we can protect our environment rather better – the record of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy has much to answer for in terms of environmental degradation).
The whole point of ‘taking back control’ by leaving the EU is so that we can develop policy more suited to our own needs and that our own standards can be higher.

The mark on manufactures ‘CE’ (“Conformité Européene”) means only that a product meets the essential regulatory requirements, it is not a badge of quality as is the ‘British Standard’. We need to ensure that we reinvigorate British Standards so that once again they become the premier mark of excellence throughout the world.

This week we begin our marathon parliamentary proceedings on the BREXIT bill.

Its title is ‘A Bill To Repeal The European Communities Act 1972’ but in reality it is not so much a bill of repeal, as of enactment: the twin purposes of the bill are to leave the EU, and to ensure that on the day that we leave our UK law and regulations are identical to those of the EU that we are leaving. This is in order to provide businesses and individuals with certainty and continuity.
Subsequently we may want to diverge and to tailor our own arrangements, but there is too little time now to pick and choose. In the circumstances it is far simpler to incorporate virtually all of EU law and then reconsider bits of it at leisure.

This is an enormous undertaking, and will only be possible if the Bill expressly delegates powers to ministers for secondary legislation. This is already common practice in virtually all modern parliamentary bills. For example, if a bill were to grant new powers to local authorities to enable them to, say, compulsorily purchase land in order to build affordable homes, it might delegate to the minister power to draw up detailed regulations as to the circumstances in which the powers can be used, the limits, the consultation period, the compensation criteria, arbitration, and etc.
Subsequently, after the bill became law, the minister would draw up the regulations and present them to Parliament. This can be done in one of two ways, and the original bill would have specified which of them must be used.
The first method is to debate the new regulations in a committee followed by motions put to both Houses to adopt the regulations. Parliament has to accept or reject the regulations (there is no provision just to amend them).
The Second method is where the regulations automatically become law unless MP’s or peers ‘pray’ against them, secure a debate, and vote them down.
Either way, ministers only enjoy the powers specified by Parliament, and are still constrained by the need to secure parliamentary approval in the exercise those powers.

Such is the complexity of the BREXIT bill, we will have to go further. The European Communities Act 1972 explicitly set EU law above UK domestic law. We did not have to legislate to remove any conflict between EU law and our own, because the 1972 Act instructed the courts to give precedence to EU law. If our law is to be exactly the same as EU law on the day that we leave, then we will have to legislate to resolve all the conflicts that existed or have arisen over the decades, because the 1972 ACT, which automatically resolved them will have been repealed.

This will be a massive undertaking requiring amendments to hundreds of statutes, and it will only be achievable if we do it by secondary legislation -as I have described above, but in these cases we will be granting ministers power not just to make new regulations, but to make regulations that actually amend previous acts of Parliament.

There will be a huge protest about the use of ‘Henry VIII powers’ to steamroller Parliament by allowing ministers to alter laws made by Parliament. The reality is however, that the power is narrowly defined, time limited, and still subject to a vote in Parliament before it can be exercised.

Those who resort to hyperbole about dictatorial powers quashing parliamentary government have a quite different agenda. Their real purpose is to make the BREXIT bill unworkable, in the hope that the democratic decision of voters in the referendum can be ignored, and that we don’t leave the EU at all.

“Woe, Woe and thrice woe” I feel like Frankie Howerd in Up Pompeii. (Does that date me?).

I’ve been enjoying glorious sunsets at Druidstone on the Pembrokeshire coast (where Bob Marshall-Andrews used to have his Telly-Tubby house, I wonder if he’s still there) but despite the beauty of this place I can’t help dwelling on the approaching doom.

Next week Parliament will resume and we will begin a marathon slog on the Bill to Repeal the European Communities Act 1972. The Official Opposition has withdrawn from any pairing arrangements, so no quarter will be given. I was once the pairing whip, so I know exactly what that means: when a father asks if he can be absent in order to attend his daughter’s primary school nativity play, the answer has to be no. If an MP want’s to attend a constituent’s funeral, or that of a relative, the answer will be no. If you are ill, you will have to be on the parliamentary estate in order to be ‘nodded through’ the division lobby.
Whatever the question, the answer will be no. Even ministers on important government business abroad, including the Brexit negotiations themselves, must be ready to return at a moment’s notice.
There will be two years of very long nights and short tempers.

Only now is the enormity of the disastrous election result beginning to hit home. The purpose of the election was to secure a majority with which to negotiate Brexit from a position of strength. Now however, we have to negotiate from a position of significantly greater weakness, with Her Majesty’s loyal opposition undermining the Government’s negotiating position by tabling contradictory amendments to the Brexit Bill as the negotiations proceed.

Constituents have been writing to me (they always do) with their legislative priorities for the new parliament. I have to tell them to forget it. There will be no time for any other legislation. What many do not appreciate is that the bulk of the legislative process in Parliament, where all the time- consuming detailed work takes place, is in the standing committees. These committees are composed of a subset of MPs determined by a formula to reflect the composition of the Commons as a whole. The Democratic Unionists, on whom the Government relies for a majority, are too few in number to qualify for representation on the standing committees. It follows that the Government will not have a majority on any such committee, and therefore cannot risk it. As a consequence, any legislation will have to be taken on the floor of the Commons in a ‘committee of the whole House’ creating a complete legislative log-jam.

I see no light at the end of the tunnel, with the Government at constant risk of defeat.

It is at times like this that you have to concentrate on what you have already survived, in order to give you a proper sense of proportion.
We survived school, including liver like rubber that you had to hide in your pocket and hope to remain undetected; we survived those knee length bell-bottomed football shorts made of jaggy army battle dress fabric that chapped your inner thighs; and, hey, does anyone remember IZAL Medicated….

The Worst is always behind us: We will get through this.

I have had some angry emails about ‘political correctness’ linking President Trump and Sarah Champion.

I am always cautious about what people call political correctness because it means so many things to different people. Some of its agenda is just so daft that it becomes funny, or infuriating, dependent entirely on one’s natural disposition. Other aspects of it strike me as just politeness and gentleness. I shudder to recall some of the terrible things that we called one another at school, which now would be considered beyond the pale.

I doubt that Donald Trump and Sarah Champion would welcome being linked in any way. For my own part I do not see the link between the news stories about them that my correspondents think they have identified.

My email correspondents insist that President Trump was right to condemn the violent behaviour of anti-fascists at the same time as he deplored the violence of neo-Nazi demonstrators in Charlottesville.
I hold no brief for agitators who hijack every issue from the Grenfell Tower, to trade union disputes, to anti-racism, or whatever. On 9th July, in this column, I pointed out the similarity they bear to the ‘sans culottes’ of the French Revolution. In my estimate the fascism of so many anti-fascists differs little from UK to USA.

The fact is however, that a known neo-Nazi committed an act of terrorism by using his car as a weapon to kill a woman. Any attempt to add a ‘but’ in those circumstances creates the impression of some sort of excuse, be it ‘they started it’ or ‘the other side are just as bad’. That, in my opinion was the President’s error of judgement.

As for the notion that there were ‘good people’ demonstrating with the neo-Nazis, surely the sacrifice made across Europe and USA in defeating Nazism should warrant that anyone parading with swastikas should attract the universal condemnation.

That there is a wider agenda at stake involving the survival of US heritage and monuments commemorating the Civil War is an irrelevance when it comes to condemning a terrorist murder.

I have sympathy with some critics of the iconoclasts. We have seen campaigns here to judge the past by the standards of the present and to remove statues and change names. Are we to demand that statues of Roman emperors be removed from public view on the grounds that they too supported slavery?
The prophet Muhammad condoned the sale of captives into slavery too, crikey! now we really are getting into politically correct hot water.

As for Sarah Champion, her analysis was correct and she should have stuck to her guns. It is nonsense to speak of a problem with ‘Asian men’ grooming white underage girls in Rotherham and other northern towns. How many Chinese are involved, how many Indonesians, how many Tamils? Why should all Asian men be so branded when the reality is that the problem is with a tiny proportion of men from Pakistani backgrounds?
We need to say so, and recruit their own communities in condemning their behaviour. If we are in denial, than we can hardly blame their communities from remaining in denial too.

I have been in Rwanda for the last ten days, participating in the Umubano (friendship) international development project started 10 years ago by David Cameron and Andrew Mitchell.

Over the last decade, for two weeks every summer we have, with the co-operation and assistance of Rwandan government ministries and other organisations, brought from UK leading professors, surgeons, doctors, dentists and nurses, to practice and to teach. We’ve brought a whole range of experienced business people to help Rwandan entrepreneurs with their business plans. We’ve brought football and cricket coaches out to help train local coaches in a nation obsessed with sport.

All are volunteers and pay their own way, whilst the organisational costs have been met by many generous donors. The annual number of volunteers has ranged from under 50 when we first started, to over a hundred. Over the decade over 40 Conservative MPs have volunteered: One might say that this Umubano Party is now the third largest in Parliament.

The main effort has been in education: Annually we have run a teacher training course. The education ministry has fed and accommodated teachers at centres during what would otherwise be their summer break, and we have run a professional development course for them.

The requirement was initially driven by the decision to promote economic growth by moving Rwanda from the francophone zone into the English speaking world. Consequently, the language of instruction in Schools changed from French to English, so teachers needed to learn to speak it. I recall that ten years ago, our course was very much just basic English. Over the decade however, as English has developed, we have focused more on methods and approaches to teaching as a professional skill.

This year we had 700 teachers to train, 300 secondary teachers in Kigali, and 400 primary teachers with me in Rwamagana to the east. The teachers had been selected because they are the ‘mentors’ for the staff in their own schools. I had a class of 45, which I thought would be unmanageable, but actually it worked very well, not least because I was assisted by a Rwandan teacher from the ‘beacon’ Umubano School in Kigali (founded and opened just 5 years ago by Brooks Newmark, then an Essex MP and one of our volunteers). Frankly, I was bowled over by the commitment, enthusiasm and professionalism of our trainees.

Equally, given that I visit so many UK classrooms with every electronic gizmo, I was relieved to be reminded what can be achieved with only a bit of chalk and a painted black space on a wall.

We closed the project with a moving ceremony at the Genocide Memorial, the largest grave in the world, where 250,000 of the one million victims of the 1994 genocide are buried. We were addressed by a survivor of that genocide now in her twenties, together with a survivor of Auschwitz now in her nineties. When I first started coming here the nation was still traumatised, but now Rwanda is transformed and outward looking, it has joined the Commonwealth, and Rwanda’s Army is deployed on more UN peace – keeping missions than any other.

We leave a legacy of friendship and goodwill but, as a Member of Parliament, it is still difficult for me to explain to Rwandans, why – as a nation, having stood by and watched as the genocide unfolded, some of those same génocidaires now live comfortably in the UK, protected by our absurd human rights laws.

I’ve been walking through the streets of Kigali, the capital of Rwanda: A tiny landlocked country in the Great Lakes region of Africa, only the size of Wales but with a population of 8 million.
It is clean and litter free. Plastic bags are forbidden here: you may not bring any into the country.

For the last year or so I’ve cycled for an hour every morning that I’ve been in The Forest, from my home in Burley up through Bolderwood and the Deer Sanctuary, to the Canadian War Memorial. Yet I am still shocked afresh every day at the amount of litter that has been gratuitously thrown from cars. My particular bugbear are the blue polythene bags. It just wouldn’t happen in Rwanda.

Rwanda has an authoritarian regime which, nevertheless enjoys widespread popular support, as the outcome of the presidential election has just shown. The regime is not without its critics (to whom the BBC has given a disproportionate voice). The reality is however, that Rwanda is a haven of order and stability in a troubled region. It is a corruption free zone. You can be in the middle of Kigali at one in the morning, or out in the jungle, and either way you will be perfectly safe. Yet the country borders that basket case, the Congo, the only place on our planet where people still eat one another.

Stability and order are recipes for investment and economic growth, and Rwanda is the easiest place in which to do business in Africa.

It was not always so. Just 23 years ago, the Rwandan genocide consumed a million souls in just 100 days, a greater rate of productivity than even Hitler’s death camps achieved. Whole professional and managerial sections of society were wiped out. Every trapping of civilisation was lost: Rwanda was little more than a charnel house. The social and economic recovery from this national trauma has exceeded all expectations, but it comes at a cost.

I said that the regime was authoritarian. Only so much dissent can be tolerated. The media is not free in the sense that we in the UK would understand the term. The regime is determined to maintain control, and that includes control of the media. This is entirely understandable given recent history: they know the consequences of losing control. It was, after all, the free press and radio that told people where to go and incited them to kill whoever they found there.

Any politician who tiptoes ever so slightly towards ethnic politics will find himself joining the chain gangs in bright pink uniforms labouring at the side of the road. Yes, it appears that penal servitude remains part of the criminal code.

So that’s two things we could do with back at home: banning plastic bags; and hard labour for anyone who drops one.

During the referendum campaign I concentrated on the economic case for leaving the EU -which I believe will make the UK more prosperous; and on the political case for emancipating our democracy from a foreign jurisdiction run by people who we do not elect and cannot remove.

The received wisdom however, is that the referendum result was largely driven by immigration and the determination to gain control over the flow of EU migrants.
We are now wrestling with the need to honour this demand for immigration control whilst, at the same time, reconciling it with what has become an addiction in some sectors of our economy to a continued flow of migrant labour.

Our determination to have an effective immigration policy which does not do damage our industry, has contributed to the demand for a ‘transition period’ post-Brexit to smooth the process.
Certainty and predictability are important to industry and need to be given proper consideration. We do also need to consider however, that the desire to smooth the transition will also have the effect of prolonging it: The longer that transition, the more we delay the full economic benefits of exiting the EU.

As part of this transition process and to inform our new immigration policy, the Government has commissioned a new study of Industry’s needs for migrant labour. I find it hard to believe that we do not already have this information. In any event, we need to be cautious about such studies. They are very dependent upon the assumptions and models that underlie them, and they can be interpreted to suit a particular point of view rather that add to the sum of knowledge. Furthermore, the capital and infrastructure costs of immigration (the impact on housing, hospitals and schools) are rarely taken into account when measuring the economic impact of immigration.

No matter how smooth we want our transition to be, we need to address over the longer term some key questions about the scale of our reliance on migrant labour:
What is it about our education system that prevents it from equipping our young people with the skills that industry requires?
What is it about our welfare system that ensures that, even in areas where unemployment remains relatively high, low skilled jobs are filled almost exclusively in some industries by migrants?
Why is our largest employer, the NHS, so dependent upon migrant healthcare professionals when half our own applicants for student nursing places are turned down, and students with 4 straight A grades at A level still cannot get a place in medical school?

Until we have resolved these issues we are unlikely to make much headway in reducing immigration irrespective of our discontinued membership of the EU.

Over the last couple of weeks or so, MPs have been deluged with correspondence from their own parliamentary colleagues, as a number of them have sought support to be elected to the Chairmanships of powerful select committees.
There is a select committee for every department of state, and a couple with wider cross-governmental briefs such as the Public Accounts Committee. They exist both to scrutinise government performance, and to consider wider policy issues and strategy.

These chairmanships were, until 2010, essentially a stitch-up by the whips. The division of which party got the chairmanship of which committee was agreed by what is known colloquially as ‘the usual channels’ which means the respective whips offices. Once the chairmanships of the committees were divided up, the whips would simply appoint their own chosen candidate to fill each chairmanship role. This power of patronage was one of the ways in whips exerted party discipline: “keep your nose clean Comrade and follow the party line, and you will be rewarded with the chairmanship of the X select committee”

Things have changed dramatically. The committees are still divided up by the ‘usual channels’ on the basis of a formula which determines how many each party gets. The convention is that the Public Accounts Committee will always be chaired by an opposition MP and that the Treasury Committee will always be chaired by an MP of the governing party. Beyond these two however, there will be a bit of horse trading to determine which Party gets to chair which committee.
Once that division is made, the candidate to chair each committee, is no longer appointed, but has to be elected. So, let’s say that the chairmanship of the Defence Committee has gone to the Conservatives and that the Chairmanship of Home Affairs has gone to Labour. Only Conservatives will be eligible to put themselves forward to chair Defence and only Labour MPs to chair Home Affairs; but every MP has as vote for each committee chairmanship, so the several Conservative MPs seeking to chair the Defence Committee will, in order to win, have to canvass for support among Labour MPs as well as their Conservative colleagues. The winning candidate is the choice of the whole House and not just of a political party.

This democratic process significantly enhances the status and independence of the select committee system. In doing so, it has shifted the balance of power between government and Parliament more towards Parliament, diminishing the influence of both government and opposition whips.

Tony Blair hit the airwaves again: His headline was that the EU would be ready to do a deal on freedom of movement in return for UK remaining. (David Cameron thought so too when he began his negotiations, before we even had the referendum.) When I heard Mr Blair being questioned in detail however, his answers were much more nuanced, it was clear that there was no such deal in prospect.

During the referendum both sides agreed on only one thing: the importance of casting a vote in a once-in-a-generation opportunity to settle the EU question. We settled it and accordingly, Parliament voted to initiate the article 50 process: We are past the point of no return; We will automatically cease to me members of the EU on the second anniversary of our Article 50 letter. There currently is no means of stopping this process. To do so would require new treaty agreements with the EU.
Suppose we did get cold feet however, change our minds, and ask to stay. I have no doubt that we would be welcomed, but at a price. Remember that annual rebate Maggie negotiated, well forget that! Remember all the opt-outs we had from policy areas where we didn’t want to participate, forget them too.

We are leaving the EU, the only questions to be settled are the terms upon which we leave, now the subject of negotiation.

Do not underestimate however, the anger of our political establishment at what has happened and their desperation, even now, to stop it. They still believe that something might turn up. Whatever that ‘something’ might be, the vital ingredient of the strategy is the waiting for it: So, delay is essential.
The loss of the Government’s majority at the election is a gift to those who now seek to delay.

The Governments ‘repeal’ bill is an essentially straightforward measure to ease our exit from the EU. It repeals the 1972 European Communities Act which ensured that, wherever there was a conflict between our own law and EU law, then EU law would prevail. The bill now before Parliament seeks to incorporate exiting EU law into UK law so that on the day we leave the change will be seamless. But it’s a massive task, so the bill grants temporary powers to ministers to amend UK statutes by regulations which have a swifter passage through Parliament. There is nothing new here, it is a tried and tested way of making law.

You will by now have heard the great cry of anguish as politicians pronounce that, notwithstanding their respect for the referendum decision, these powers are too broad, the bill must be thoroughly scrutinised and amended, and so proceeding it will take a very long time to pass, if indeed it passes at all.
If it were not to do so, then our departure from the EU would be attended with confusion and uncertainty. That matters not to the bill’s opponents. They have only one object: endless delay; Delay for as long as it takes for something to turn up.