The Commons has not considered a bill on assisted dying since 2015 (when it was defeated by a decisive margin of almost three to one: 330 to 118), the subject has been debated several times since then, though without a vote. I have no doubt that it is time to test parliamentary opinion once again.

My own opinion, however, is unchanged.  
I accept that it is very difficult to stand out against the appeal of Esther Rantzen and others with terminal illnesses who wish to end their suffering on their own terms and at a time of their choosing. It is hard to prolong their suffering, or the suffering of others that surround and give support to them.
Nevertheless, hard cases can make bad law.

I fear that what may begin as a choice, will swiftly become an expectation. There will be an ever so subtle pressure on the elderly and infirm to end the effort and expense of carrying on living.
One can see the attraction from the economic point of view of the healthcare providers: it will be much more cost effective to make available a service that despatches terminally ill patients, than to continue to manage complex nursing requirements. Canadian clinicians visiting Westminster have warned us of this. And that the provision of the new life ending service there has been at the expense of palliative care.
 No patient should live in fear that their end will be grizzly, undignified and painful. Terminal conditions, properly managed and with the right palliative care can make for a good and peaceful death.

I debated this subject last year at the University of Durham. I was up against Baroness Meacher who was then sponsoring an assisted dying bill in the House of Lords. She was determined to keep the terms of reference as narrow as possible: there had to be a terminal prognosis of death within six months, with brace of safeguards including certainty that the patient was of sound mind.
She was rather undermined however, by her seconder, a psychiatrist who argued, on the contrary, that the service should be available to absolutely anyone who wanted it, indeed that one shouldn’t need to be ill at all.
There is a significant danger here. Those jurisdictions that have embraced assisted dying have all begun with tightly defined criteria and strong safeguards. Very swiftly however, the criteria have been extended including even, in some cases, to children.

In 2016 a teenager survived, physically unharmed, a bombing at Brussels Airport, which killed thirty-two others. She suffered post traumatic stress disorder and at the age of 23 in 2022 had her life ended by doctors at her request. I think we need to consider very carefully the direction of travel of assisted dying, and where that road will end.
For certain, the creation of a ’dying service’ would profoundly change the nature of the medical profession.

Parliamentary opinion has hitherto been very different from public opinion polling on this question, possibly because we argue in detail, rather than give an instantaneous opinion to a pollster, nevertheless I have great respect for parliamentary colleagues  – and for Esther Rantzen too -who argue in favour of change, though I disagree with them profoundly.

Given perpetual political controversy, people are often surprised to discover that
The Palace of Westminster can be quite a spiritual place: The design of the building is profoundly influenced by Pugin, our most prolific church architect of the 19^th century Oxford Movement; The Lord’s Prayer is carved into the external stonework right around the building; The iconic clock face on the Elizabeth Tower, which houses Big Ben, is surrounded with words from Psalm 37 “All through this hour Lord, be my guide”; Central Lobby, at the epicentre of the Palace, resembles an Orthodox cathedral, overlooked by icons of all the patron saints of our United Kingdom. Its central floor tiling design
displays words from Psalm 127 “Unless the Lord Build the House, those that labour, labour in vain”;
The hammer beam ceiling of Westminster Hall, the only surviving part of the original palace dating back 900 years, is held aloft by 26 carved angels.
The first official daily business in Parliament is prayers: in the Commons read by Mr Speaker’s Chaplain, and in the Lords by one its 26 Bishops.

Of Course, as with the rest of the nation, we have long abandoned the notion that the season of Advent, like Lent, was supposed to be a fast in preparation for the subsequent feast.
Nevertheless, the nature of the building, lit with Christmas lights, in the dark mornings and early evenings, makes it much easier to ‘plug into’ the proper spirit of Advent: Hope.
And don’t we need such hope when our TV screens are filled with the intolerable suffering of children in so many ravaged and war-torn places.

Advent carol services, of which there have been four in the last week at Westminster, begin with Isaiah’s prophesy of Christ’s Birth 700 years before the event. Isaiah’s was a time of hope when Israel had returned from 70 years exile in Babylon, to rebuild Jerusalem.
Advent is about Hope In darkest of times; Hope in the promise of a New Heaven and a New Earth.

Karl Marx regarded such hope as an ‘opiate’ to make the miserable lives of the proletariat tolerable by placing their hopes in the joys of a future life; An opiate propagated by the bourgeoisie to prevent the proles from rising and taking revolutionary action to change the terms of their miserable existence.
Arguably, religious belief in a future life may dull the disappointments of this one. Nevertheless, if we have religious hope, it in no way constitutes any disproof of what it is that we hope for. In the same way, during a night of anxiety we might hope for the dawn. Just because we desire and need the dawn to come, doesn’t mean that it won’t.
Marxism poses no threat to the Hope which characterises Advent. The real threat to it, is our own self-satisfied inability to recognise our need for redemption in the New Heaven and the New Earth.

In this column on 16^th October Rwanda – facing down the judges (desmondswaynemp.com) I said that I was not persuaded that abandoning our obligations under the European Human Rights Convention would jeopardise our ability to negotiate returns agreements for illegal entrants to UK.
  I think that what I said is still broadly true with respect to our near continental neighbours, all of whom are toughening their stance towards asylum seekers, and a few of whom are already showing a disregard for their obligations under the Convention. And several of them are now showing an interest in the arrangements we have been negotiating with Rwanda.
 I was wrong  however, with respect to the most important partner in this business: Rwanda has now made it clear that, were we abrogate our commitments under the Convention, then the deal will be off, and they won’t receive any of the illegal entrants that we are hoping top send their way.
This effectively closes off the route that I and many of my colleagues favoured, namely leaving the Convention altogether. Unfortunate, but we have to live with political reality.
 Instead, we must now capitalise on the increasing frustration of our continental neighbours, in order to collaborate collectively to drive reform of the Convention itself -which we all signed up to three generations ago, and which was made for a different world and a completely different set of circumstances than now prevail.
 Alas, this will not be deliverable in the short to medium term.

In the meantime, the Government has framed new legislation that delivers all the objectives that I set out in my blog of 16^th October.
I entirely understand the frustration of Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick. They urged the Government to adopt this course much earlier and to prepare for a defeat in the Supreme Court when, instead, the Government was banking on winning.
Nevertheless, we need to deal with the situation as it is, not as we would wish it to be. Howling at the moon and insisting on what me might have done differently won’t get us anywhere.
 It is no good complaining that the new bill does not go far enough, if it went any further, Rwanda would cancel the whole endeavour: End of story.

The Bill before the Commons next week uses parliamentary sovereignty to establish, beyond the jurisdiction of any UK court, that Rwanda is a safe destination.
What it doesn’t do, is to stop is individual appeals against deportation. We can live with that for the time being. After all, we have already legislated to establish that such appeals can be conducted remotely, once they are already in Rwanda.
Let’s get on with it.

We forget that we are not alone, all of Europe is experiencing the same problem -but worse than we are.
Whilst our Channel crossings are down by a third, Europe’s crossings are increasing exponentially. Were we to enter a pan-European deal, as the Opposition proposes, the EU has made it clear that this will be based on a ‘fair’ share-out of the entrants: we’d end up with even more of the illegal migrants than we’re getting now!

In this column on 16^th November https://www.desmondswaynemp.com/ds-blog/rwanda-facing-down-the-judges/ I pointed out that despite the beached Rwanda policy being an important part of the deterrent to Channel crossings, we have seen a reduction this year of one third.

The net migration figure however, is going in the opposite direction: In the year to June 2023 675,000 represents disastrous failure for those of us who have campaigned in election after election for a reduction in immigration.

Nevertheless, nothing is ever as bad as first reported.
About half the numbers are accounted for by students and their dependants. The reality is that tertiary education is one of our major export industries which is worth about £20 billion to the UK economy. It also allows own students to study at university at substantially lower fees, in effect subsidised by foreign students.
Those foreign students return to their native countries with a British education and goodwill towards us, which will have a beneficial impact on developments, commercial and diplomatic, for years ahead.
It is right however, that we have clamped down on short and ‘low value’ courses which attract migrants who really aren’t interested in study but just want to find a way of getting into Britain.
We need however, to cut the 150,000 dependants that postgraduate students have been bringing with them. So, beginning with courses starting in January, students on taught postgraduate courses will no longer have the ability to bring dependants; only students on designated postgraduate research programmes will have that entitlement.
All this begs the question of why we include students, here temporarily, in our migration statistics at all, when most other jurisdictions don’t. The answer is simple: we always have; So, any government that chose to exclude them would be accused of ‘fiddling the figures’.

Which leaves us with the other half of the net migration figure: those on work visas.
As I’ve said before in this column, there isn’t an enterprise that I have visited that isn’t having  difficulty recruiting staff.  We have a million vacancies, yet 21% of our working age population, nearly 9 million people (including 3 million ‘on the sick’) are economically inactive.
Little wonder then, that businesses and public services sponsor so many visas for overseas workers, making a mockery of the ’points-based immigration system’ which was modelled on Australia’s.
The argument is made that -were we to abolish the list of critically short occupations allowable and to raise the salary threshold, the consequent fall in the number qualifying migrants would fuel inflation and cause some sectors to grind to a halt.
I am sceptical. The counter argument is that, whilst migration is generating greater national income, the income per head of population is not growing in proportion. Genuine economic welfare may actually be falling as a result of the pressures on housing and public services arising from the growing migrant populations.
Furthermore, despite the numbers arriving, the shortages persist: 70,000 people were recruited from abroad for care roles in the year to June, while the number of vacancies in the sector dropped by only 11,000.

Foreign workers cost employers 20% less than UK employees: this incentive to recruit from abroad should certainly be removed.
But the strain on our society, economic an social, of immigration well beyond what we can safely absorb, will not be assuaged until we can curb our appetite for foreign labour and address economic inactivity amongst our own working age population.

I am at a loss to understand the surprise that so many people express when told that the tax burden is higher than it has ever previously been. It is also the case that public expenditure is higher than it has ever previously been. The two are not unconnected.
There seems to be an insatiable desire for the state to do more and more for us, inevitable placing a greater burden on taxpayers.

Rarely, do constituents come to me with suggestions for cuts in public services.
Those of us who believe that both society and our economy will benefit from lower taxes, need to come up with a coherent plan to restrain the apparently insatiable demand for more public expenditure

Over the last couple of years I’ve had my ear bent by so many local enterprises about the difficulty they are having in recruiting staff. It is a national problem: we have a million vacancies. With that in mind, I am now lending my support to  Starting Fresh – a campaign being run by Sodexo, one of our principal recruitment specialists, which aims to encourage businesses to employ more people with criminal convictions. The campaign is designed to help remove the barriers associated with the employment of ex-offenders.

 

Apart from the benefit to businesses in finding employees in a tight labour market, getting ex-offenders into work is an important part of making sure that they successfully reintegrate into their local communities.
Too often misconceptions and prejudice prevent businesses from tapping into this underutilised resource. Concerns about hiring people with criminal convictions can often be attributed to a failure to appreciate the quality of education which now takes place in prison. Many of the 50,000, or so, offenders who leave prison every year do so with formal qualifications they didn’t have before they were sentenced.

 

Businesses can access the Starting Fresh online hub, where they can find advice about how to make use of this underutilised resource and provide support in the workplace.

Sodexo also runs prisons on behalf of the Ministry of Justice and is, in addition,  using this campaign to let employers know they are welcome to visit their prisons if they are interested in offering job opportunities to prisoners when they are released. Organisations with multiple job opportunities can even run employer days in the prisons.

More information on the campaign can be had from https://uk.sodexo.com/startingfresh.hmtl