In this column last week,  I criticised President Trump’s trade policy, warning that it risked making US industry inefficient and uncompetitive (USA will increasingly mirror Russia in its economic decline and dishonest crony-capitalism.)
The attitude that underlies protectionist trade policy is all too common. It is the principle, after all, that underlies the EU’s customs union: a tariff wall to exclude or disadvantage trade with the outside world whilst promoting free trade amongst its own members. One might even go so far as to say that the EU provoked retaliatory tariffs from Trump, given the way that it penalised US manufactures and agricultural produce through its own tariffs and non-tariff barriers.
Worse still, for many years the EU subsidised its own agricultural produce through the Common Agricultural Policy, generating large surpluses, that were then dumped on world markets with devastating consequences for the earnings of less developed countries, whose only access to capital was dependent upon revenues from their own agricultural exports.

The ’exports=good and imports=bad’ approach to trade policy by ‘nationalist’ politicians’ is an ignorant throw-back to the Mercantilism of former centuries, which treated trade as almost a substitute for warfare, rather than a system of trade to mutual advantage.
A great economic power is not undermined by its reliance on imports. Even when Great Britain was the ‘workshop of the World’ following the Industrial Revolution, we ran a balance of trade deficit. The Cotton Industry, which was the engine of our economy, was reliant on a wholly imported raw product.  This was compensated for, not just manufacturing, but by ‘invisibles’ in the form of shipping and the export of capital -such as financing the US railroad expansion.

Both Trump and his Vice-President  are exercised over what they consider as the export of manufacturing jobs by US reliance on imports from overseas. But any calculation must recognise that it isn’t just about the jobs.
Obviously, if my climate doesn’t lend itself to growing desirable tropical fruit, I’m not sacrificing any domestic jobs by importing those fruits. However, Ricardo’s law of Comparative Advantage is rather more subtle: suppose I’m a highly skilled engineer and I employ a cleaner. Nevertheless, I reckon that I can clean more effectively and efficiently than my cleaner can. Should I stop exporting that jog to the cleaner and do my own cleaning?
Of course not, because, in the time that I give up to cleaning, I will have forgone the much higher earnings I could have earned using my engineering skills. The reality is that I don’t want the cleaner’s job even though I am better at it.
The same principle applies to an advanced economy: It should deploy its resources of land, labour and capital where it can do best and earn most -rather than incurring the opportunity cost of using some of them up to produce things of less value.

The UK doesn’t export a great deal of manufactured goods, but despite being a small Island our earnings from exporting manufactured goods are in the top ten internationally: our strength is at the high-tech end of precision manufacturing. So, the question is, given where our strength lies, should we be investing our very scarce capital and skilled resources into saving our steel making capacity, in a world where there is already a surplus, and where we haven’t made a success of it for decades?
Whatever the answer, its an important question to ask

When President trump announced his tariffs, describing it as ‘liberation day’, I told the Commons that, on the contrary, it was the very antithesis of liberation because tariffs always and everywhere reduce the choice available to customers. They are a conspiracy by producers and politicians against the interests of ordinary customers.
Nevertheless, tariffs have a long history even in our own great free-trading nation. Indeed, my own Tory Party split -and consequently was out of power for a generation- when Sir Robert Peel and the Duke of Wellington succeeded in repealing the Corn Laws in in 1846.  Thereafter, the burnt and bandaged hand wandered back towards the flame in the guise of a policy of ‘imperial preference’ before a policy of full-blown tariffs were once more disastrously imposed in the 1930ies.
Our post-war prosperity is largely a consequence of enlightened abandonment of tariffs, superintended by the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs signed initially by 23 nations in 1947, and which later became the World Trade Organisation.
The greatest US President of my political lifetime was Ronald Reagan. I recently came across his 1987 speech on tariffs. Here is an extract

“First, when someone says let’s impose tariffs on foreign imports it looks like they are doing the patriotic thing by protecting by American products and jobs, and sometimes, for a while, it works. But only for a short time. What eventually occurs is, first, home-grown industries start relying on government protection in the form of high tariffs: they stop competing and  stop making technological and management changes necessary to succeed in world markets.
And then, while all this is going on, something even worse occurs: High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars. The result is more and more tariffs, higher and higher trade barriers and less and less competition. So, because of prices made artificially high by the tariffs that subsidise inefficiency poor management, people stop buying.  Then the worst happens: markets shrink and collapse; industries shut down; and millions of people lose their jobs.
The memories of all this back in the 1930s made me determined that, when I came to Washington, I would spare the American people the protectionist legislation that destroys prosperity”

Regan was right and Trump is wrong. US businesses will quickly learn that their profits are increasingly dependent, not on innovation and efficiency, but on political favours in the form protectionist tariff barriers. Accordingly, their main effort will become lobbying the politicians for such favours rather than winning new markets. The USA will increasingly mirror Russia in its economic decline and dishonest crony-capitalism

On Tuesday we debated the second reading of the Product Regulation and Metrology Bill.
I’m not sure quite when we started calling weights and measures ‘metrology’, but my prejudice is that any recourse to newspeak is probably to cloak some Orwellian enterprise.
The Secretary of State insisted that it was a purely technical measure: That, as a consequence of Brexit, government needs new powers to regulate standards.
In order to reassure suspicious Euro-sceptics, he insisted that there was no hidden agenda to use the Bill’s provisions to establish alignment with European product regulations. On the contrary, he said that the Bill was a neutral measure, and that it could be used to establish new British standards which have so often in the past established the international standards.
Indeed he reassured us by saying that the last Conservative administration had been planning to bring forward just such a Bill.
We were not. Our Bill would have differed in a vitally important respect. Its aim would have been the same: to provide the architecture for establishing product standards given that we no longer rely on the European Commission to do that for us. But we would not, as the current bill does, handover the power to legislate entirely to ministers.

Parliament has done enormous damage to our constitution by delegating powers to independent law-making bodies, so much so, that when the public complain about some outrageous decision or situation, Parliament finds that it cannot put it right because it simply gave away the power to do so. We have had a classic example of this in the last few weeks when the woke-obsessed Sentencing Council sought to undermine a fundamental principle of justice, equal treatment before the law. When the Lord Chancellor and Parliament objected, we were told to get stuffed. We are now in the absurd position of having to introduce emergency legislation to put the Sentencing Council back in its box.

This Metrology Bill takes the proper power of Parliament to legislate and hands it unlimited to Ministers. Whilst, the aim of the bill may be about the better regulation of products; it also gives the Government the power to do what they like, when they like, for reasons they do not have to explain, and then impose it as they see fit. And all with the coercive and intrusive powers of search, confiscation and arrest, all of this without having to return and seek the consent of Parliament.

Democratic institutions, particularly when led by decent and principled people, need to take care to legislate against the worst case, such as government falling into less scrupulous hands. Power must always be limited, because -as Lord Acton observed- it corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Many of us will have watched President Zelensky being berated in the Whitehouse for showing insufficient gratitude, and for not having come to terms with his aggressor sooner, given that he had “no cards” and that “Russia has all the cards”.
We will have followed subsequent events with equal misgivings as the USA has developed an increasingly transactional approach to Ukraine: access to its mineral wealth, and even some of its infrastructure, as payment for past and continued support. Whilst US negotiations with Putin appear increasingly to be to Ukraine’s disadvantage.
The truce in the Black Sea, for example, will free the Russian fleet which Ukraine has successfully confined to port, when Ukraine has already secured its routes for grain exports. Equally, though any relief for Ukraine’s energy structure is welcome, nevertheless the agreement will neuter Ukraine’s most effective strategy which has been to decimate Russia’s oil processing capacity (as I pointed out in this column on 15^th Feb: Farage has tied his party’s fate to something over which he has no control )

On TV we have witnessed the appalling barbarity of Russian forces in Bakhmut, their ruthless targeting of civilians, the abduction of 700,000 children (the joint statement following  US / Russian talks this week made no mention of them, but USA has withdrawn from the international working group investigating  these Russian war crimes, and Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab, which was tracking 30,000 of the abductees have had their access to US intelligence systems withdrawn)

Despite our dislike and increasing horror at the way things appear to be turning out, isn’t  the US entitled to put its own interests ahead of those of an unimportant far-away country, irrespective of how aggressively Ukraine has been attacked?

In answering that question we need to examine the commitments that we in the UK made, together with Russia and the USA.
In 1994 Ukraine had the third largest stockpile of nuclear weapons – 1,900 intercontinental nuclear missiles. Enormous pressure was brought to bear in order to get Ukraine to sign up to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and divest itself of the weapons. Notwithstanding the resignation of government ministers in protest, Ukraine complied by signing the Bucharest Memorandum at the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe on Dec 5 1994.
In return for giving up its nuclear weapons it received assurances with respect to its independence and territorial integrity from Russia, USA and UK.
What are those assurances worth?

The Ukrainian translation of the memorandum describes them as ‘guarantees’ but the English version only as ‘assurances’. The distinction is that the US and UK did not consider themselves committed to going to war on behalf of Ukraine, as implicit in a ‘guarantee’. Rather, that our commitment was limited to diplomatic and materiel support.
Russia insists that it has not abrogated the agreement, stating that its undertaking was only not to attack Ukraine with nuclear weapons. This is a monstrous re-writing of the Treaty. In any event, Russia has indeed threatened the use of nuclear weapons.

I am confident that, thus far, the United Kingdom has honoured its commitment.
But, as we watch events unfolding, I believe that we are entitled to ask ‘what is an assurance by the USA now actually worth?’

I refer, of course, to the statement by Liz Kendall, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, to the Commons on Tuesday, which ministers and the Prime Minister had been trailing for weeks.
The Secretary of State told us that the facts speak for themselves: One in ten people of working age are now claiming a sickness or disability benefit. Almost 1 million young people are not in education, employment or training—that’s one in eight of all our young people. Some 2.8 million are out of work due to long-term sickness, and the number of people claiming personal independence payments is set to double this decade from 2 million to 4.3 million, with the growth in claims rising faster among young people and those with mental health conditions.

Taxpayers are paying billions more, with spending on working-age sickness and disability benefits up by £20 billion since the pandemic, and set to rise by a further £18 billion by the end of this Parliament, to £70 billion per year. In most other comparable countries spending on these benefits since the pandemic is either stable or falling, but ours continues to rise inexorably.

So, in response to problem which she had set out with such clarity, she announced savings of a mere £5 billion by 2029/30.

I put a simple question to her:
“because working is so good for mental health, will she require claimants to do socially useful work to retain their benefits.”
I got a one word answer: “No”

60 people were signed off onto sickness benefit in the time that Liz Kendal was on her feet telling us how little she was going to do about it.
I don’t disagree with any of the measures that she did announce, but they just are not going to be enough. She said that she would not proceed with any of the measures that were planned by the last government – and I didn’t believe they would be enough either.
There is a both a practical and moral case to require people in receipt of benefits, and who are able to work , to do socially useful work whilst they are out of paid employment.
As the number employment opportunities contracts due to the Chancellor’s disastrous jobs tax on employers, the need for an initiative of this sort will become more glaringly obvious.

Nothing will come of Nothing

The Government has abolished NHS England, the largest QANGO (quasi non-governmental organisation). Its function -managing the NHS in England- is now simply folded into Whitehall’s Department of Health (from whence it emerged under the Conservative /Lib Dem coalition government).
It was created to try and take the party politics out of the NHS. The theory being that this arms-length managerial body would be clinically led, with political responsibility -and controversy- being confined to the provision of funding. Alas, we cannot break our habit of blaming government for everything. Notwithstanding the eye-watering increases in funding, ministers continued to get the flack for the relatively poor performance of the NHS. Their frustration was that they had no levers left to pull with which to do anything about it, power having been handed over to NHS England. The Secretary of State became a bit like a spectator on the touch line at a soccer match, shouting advice to the players and being largely ignored.
Well, the current Secretary of State, Wes Streeting has had enough. I don’t blame him, but now he has no excuses, now he really is in charge. For all our sakes, I wish him luck.

Despite getting rid of this super-QANGO, the Government has created eight new ones for every week that has passed since the General election. Decisions that should be made by ministers accountable to Parliament, are continuing to be outsources to unelected officials.

One QANGO ripe for abolition is the Sentencing Council which has issued new sentencing guidelines for Judges, the effect of which will make a custodial sentence less likely for those “from an ethnic minority, cultural minority, and/or faith minority community”.
This is an outrageous double standard, a two -tier approach to sentencing.  It is an inversion of the rule of law to which we should all be equally subject.
The Secretary of State for Justice, Shabana Mahmood, is ‘incandescent’ (despite the fact that her Department supported the new two-tier guidance—her representative was at the meeting when it was approved on 24 January. Her officials were even given a walkthrough on 3rd March: a dummy’s guide to two-tier justice).
She then wrote the Sentencing Council expressing her dissatisfaction and asking for the guidance to be ditched.
The Council, under the chairmanship of Lord Justice William Davis has, in effect, told her to get stuffed (as the council is quite entitled to, Parliament having delegated those independent powers to it. But it is now high time we took them back again)
This is yet another example of the impertinence of the judiciary in the face of criticism from elected representatives. We’ll have to see how Shabana Mahmood responds in this latest display of the monstrous regiment judges.

On Tuesday I asked the Chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves, what level of ambition she had for finding savings in the welfare budget, given that servicing our debt is now costing twice what we are spending on defence (and which we urgently need to increase significantly).
This was her response:
“I agree that we need to get a grip of the welfare budget, which got out of control under the previous Conservative Government. Frankly, I am not going to take lectures from the Conservative party, which crashed the economy. Let me remind the House what the right hon. Gentleman said about the disastrous mini-Budget:
“I share entirely the free-market ideology that underpins the Chancellor’s statement…The Chancellor was right to be radical.”
He added:
“I rejoice at the two fingers the Chancellor has raised to socialist dogma and envy.”

I think that the financial markets and the British public have united in their view on the previous Government.”

 Lecture -Moi !
I didn’t give her a lecture, I merely asked a question. Nevertheless, I am quite flattered that, evidently, she studies this column. What she quoted so enthusiastically, but nevertheless, rather selectively, was word-for-word what I wrote here on 25^th September 2022 ( Two fingers to Socialist Dogma and Envy ).
It was my assessment of Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous mini budget. I don’t resile from anything that I said back then. I long for the implementation of all the measures that he announced. I just thought that to try them all at once, and at the same time as announcing a mind-numbingly expensive commitment to pay half of all our energy bills (and without first ‘rolling the pitch’ with the financial markets) was, to say the least, ‘high risk’.

Just weeks later I had to defend government policy in the annual no-confidence motion at the Oxford Union. I was half-way to Oxford on the train when breaking news came that Kwasi had been sacked. It wasn’t a good wicket on which to have to go out and bat. My speech is still available at
desmond swayne oxford union speech – – Video Search Results
I lost -heavily.

The upside is that the Chancellor is reading this column and I shall have to take that into account as I consider what to write about!

The Prime Minister was right to increase defence spending. We have neglected to properly fund our armed forces for far too long. It is a matter of deep regret that much of the worst damage occurred under the stewardship of my own political party.
I do not believe that the increase announced is sufficient, but it is an important start, and it is a realistic amount – given the current demands on the public finances.
The Prime Minister has chosen to fund the increase in defence expenditure by a pound for pound reduction in our overseas aid expenditure. As a minister once responsible for that expenditure, I know that this will be a popular choice. Indeed, this choice has been welcomed by my own party leader.
A popular choice does not however, make it the right choice. My preference is for the stance that the Prime Minister took when the then Conservative government under Boris Johnson reduced overseas aid expenditure from 0.7% of GDP to 0.5%. Starmer said then ”this is wrong because investing 0.7% in international aid is in Britain’s national interest…”

 Governing is about choices and the Prime Minister has made his choice. I believe it is the wrong choice. My own choice, had I been entitled to make it, would have been to raid the welfare budget. If we could only reduce our addiction to welfare benefits to pre-Covid levels, we would save £40 Billion, dwarfing the current proposals for increased defence. We have an army  – particularly of younger people-  who believe that their mental health is too fragile to allow them to go out to work. Yet, it is accepted medical wisdom that going out to work is good for your mental health.
We are currently awaiting the Government’s proposals on welfare reform. I hope that they turn out to be suitably ambitious, because the current bill is one that we can no longer afford to shoulder.

The cut in international development aid is even more dramatic than at first sight, because an additional £4 billion annually of that aid budget is being spent on housing asylum seekers in hotels. I know, as the minister once responsible, that one can support so many more displaced people in distress in their own region, than you can by resettling a lucky few here in the UK.

We entered into an agreement with the other rich nations back in the nineteen seventies to spend 0.7% of our national income on overseas development aid. It took us until 2011 to honour that pledge. In doing so, we were almost alone. Since when, we have stepped back again. Had all the nations that made the pledge honoured it -and done so immediately having made it, I believe that there would be far fewer seekers after asylum arriving on our shores from basket-case economies in poorer parts of the world.

I accept that there was too much wasteful aid expenditure. As the minister responsible it used to drive me into a state of apoplexy. I wanted to exclusively focus our aid on economic development to create jobs. For that is why the world’s poor seek to come here. They come here, not to live on benefits (even though we are ready enough to provide them). They come to seek work.
It is our own people who appear to be much more inclined to live on welfare benefits. That’s why we can’t afford to defend ourselves.

Were we to restore our commitment to spend 0.7% of our income on Aid, it would leave us with 99.3 % of our income for our own priorities. I think that is sufficient, even given our defence needs.

The PM and the Leader of the Opposition have been rebuked by Baroness Carr, the Lady Chief Justice, for an exchange that took place at Prime Minister’s Questions last week. Kemi Badenoch raised the absurdity of a judicial decision to allow the migration of a family of six from Gaza under the scheme exclusively designed for Ukrainians (this is just yet another in a long history of ridiculous immigration judgements) . The PM agreed, saying that the judgement was clearly ‘wrong’.
The Chief Justice has written to complain that it is the role of government “visibly to protect the independence of the judiciary” and that where it disagrees with judges, then the proper course it to appeal to a higher court. 
Well, strictly speaking she is correct, but she protests too much. The independence of the judiciary was not being questioned, politicians were merely remarking on the stupidity of their decisions not their independence.
Cleary the Lady Carr has ideas above her station if she thinks that the decisions of her judicial colleagues should be above the criticism of elected representatives, particularly when they so often offend against common sense.
I have long believed that Parliament should bring the judiciary to heel (see my blog of  25/09/19: Yes, it is a coup and my demand that Boris make ‘bygones’ his…top priority). Alas, that important agenda remains unaddressed.

Every now and again, someone will write to me demanding a written constitution for the UK. I never agree. We have far too many priorities for legislative time, to be able to set aside so much of it for the enormous task of finding an elusive consensus to establish what the constitution ought to be, what the powers -and the limits on powers- should be. It would require an enormous consultative undertaking and plebiscite. Properly done, it would take years.

Instead, we have no special category for constitutional laws, they can be amended or repealed just like any other law, so that no Parliament can be bound by its predecessor.
But now, I’ve come to the view (however disagreeable I find it), that we do already have a written constitution, and that it is the Human Rights Act 1998:  The Act requires that every government bill introduced to Parliament must be certified by a minister as being compliant with the Human Rights Act.
When courts subsequently rule that legislation is not compliant (irrespective of what ministers thought). Then Parliament meekly rushes to amend the offending statute.
It remains true in theory, that Parliament could simply ignore the court’s judgement, but in reality we inevitably surrender to rule by judges. Little wonder then that Lady Car has such an elevated conception of her status.

Parliament is currently, once again, meekly in the process of surrendering to the courts in the most egregious of cases. We are rushing through legislation to amend the Northern Ireland Legacy Act to enable Gerry Adams to resume his legal action seeking compensation for a conviction for escape from lawful custody during the conflict waged by the IRA in Northern Ireland, the Court having ruled that preventing the claim, as the Act set out to, is contrary to human rights.
 You couldn’t make it up.