Hansard (parliamentary official report) 11 Jan:

“Sir Desmond Swayne 
What support the Church is providing to the Anglican Hospital in Gaza. 

The Second Church Estates Commissioner 
(Andrew Selous)
The House may not be aware that the Anglican Church is one of the largest providers of healthcare and education globally. The al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza is an example of this. Before Christmas, the hospital was severely damaged again and a tank demolished its front wall. Most of the hospital staff were taken away by the Israeli Defence Force and the Church of England has asked the Government here to inquire about their wellbeing and whereabouts and to request that they be released.

Sir Desmond Swayne 
Intimidation by hard-line settlers has prompted the Patriarch to say that clergy are fighting for their lives, and that the Armenian quarter faces a ‘violent demise’.
Is a Christian presence in Jerusalem still viable?

Andrew Selous 
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for bringing this issue before the House. He is right: a century ago, a quarter of Jerusalem was Christian; now, just 1% of the population is, and in the Armenian quarter of the old city, the Christian presence has come under intensified threat from intimidation and aggressive property acquisition by settlers. The Church of England is very concerned that the rule of law should prevail in Israel and the status quo be maintained. It is unconscionable that Christians should be driven from the holy land.”

I quote this exchange that took place in the Commons last Thursday to draw attention to two important issues. First, with respect to Gaza, whilst I support Israel’s right to go to war against Hamas (which was the subject of my last contribution in this column A special place in Hell (desmondswaynemp.com) ). I don’t believe that I have a single constituent who isn’t horrified by the consequent destruction and suffering of Palestinians in Gaza.

Second, the long-standing concerns I have had about Israel’s stewardship of the West Bank. On Wednesday I heard a dreadful report  (as yet, uncorroborated) of a visit by Israeli defence Force to a charity in Jenin which runs a home for disabled children, I’m told that they ‘trashed’ the place and took away all the Children’s winter clothes. I hope it isn’t true – and one has to be cautious about any partisan reports (as the BBC has learnt -or failed to learn- to its own cost).
What I will say however, as a former minister responsible for our assistance to Palestinians in the occupied West Bank of the Jordan River, I reached the conclusion that the Government of Israel had abandoned any prospect of a two-state solution and that this was made evident by support for the building of Israeli settlements in the West Bank that would make any future Palestinian state geographically and economically unviable.
Whenever, I’ve badgered  current ministers about this, they always respond by saying that we constantly raise this issues with Israel. Well, I did that too. At least I did so sufficiently robustly that the Deputy Prime-Minister stormed out of the room. There must come a time however, when constantly raising matters to little effect, demands a different response.

Having, on many occasions over the last 50 years, participated in political protest marches -indeed, I organised some of them – I am loathe to restrict the right to protest peacefully, irrespective of whether I approve or disapprove of point that any particular protest is trying to make.
I believe that freedom of expression is an essential ingredient of our liberal democracy. None of us has a right not to be offended by the peaceful protests of those with whom we disagree, however profound that disagreement may be.
Nevertheless, I also believe that a balance has to be struck between the right of some to protest and the rights of others to go about their lawful business unmolested and without great inconvenience.
It was for this reason that I voted for measures to constrain the sort of protests that were typical of groups like Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion, which deliberately sought to severely disrupt the economic and social life of anyone not themselves involved in the protests.
I think it is now time to consider some restraints on the repeated weekly disruption caused by pro-Palestinian marches in London and other city centres. I understand that Lord Walney, the Government’s adviser on political violence and disruption, has raised the possibility of charging the organisers with the costs of policing the marches (£17 million in the case of the Metropolitan Police Force between early October and early December alone). Personally, I would be reluctant to introduce such a principle, which could be used to stifle any protest by making it too prohibitively expensive. I think a better solution would be make a provision where such protests could, in certain limited circumstances, be confined to a suitable location rather than occupying the public highways.

Together with a number of senior parliamentary colleagues, I watched the footage taken from public and private security cameras, and also the body cameras of Hamas terrorists involved in the pogrom of 7th October.
When it finished, nobody spoke, we just filed silently from the auditorium having witnessed such unspeakable scenes of horror.
The merciless torture and killing, including women, children and babies wasn’t the worst of it. Neither was the grotesque mutilation of their corpses. What really affected me were the scenes of the terrorists whooping with joy as they phoned home on their mobiles to boast to their families about exactly what they had just done, demanding that mothers be brought to the phone so that they could hear the detail and offer their congratulations.
For me, the ultimate degradation was the jubilant chanting over the corpses that ‘God is Great’. These cannot be the worshipers of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful (anymore than the perpetrators of similar massacres in sixteenth century European wars of religion were the servants of Christ). There has to be a special place in Hell for this blasphemy

On 19^th December, just as Parliament was about to go into its Christmas recess, the Government published its reforms to the National Planning Policy Framework. This is a vitally important document because it sets out the terms within which local planning authorities (in our case the elected New Forest District Council) must determine planning applications.
I say it is vitally important because housing development is, by a country mile, the most common complaint that prompts constituents to contact me.
There is an acute housing shortage nationally, and the New Forest is no exception. Few young people, born and brought-up in this district have any prospect of being able to afford a home here either to purchase or to rent. Nevertheless, almost every significant housing development becomes the focus of local opposition.  Increasingly, even though residents accept the need for more houses, they believe that proposed developments represent the sort of housing that it suits developers to build, rather than the sort that the community actually needs.

The new National Planning Policy Framework is designed to support the Government’s commitment to building more homes; more quickly, more beautifully and more sustainably.
It gives much  greater scope to local planning authorities like NFDC to determine what kind of development is appropriate through their own updated local plan; to reject inappropriate development and protect the Green Belt.
In this respects it builds on the reforms that have been implemented incrementally since 2010, including abolishing housing targets imposed from Whitehall.  Frankly, those Labour-imposed regional targets simply didn’t work. In fact, they built nothing but resentment: housebuilding fell to its lowest peacetime levels since the 1920s. By contrast, net housing supply last year was higher than any point under the last Labour government’s targets, and over 2.5 million extra homes have been delivered across England since 2010. It is just bizarre, given the evidence, that the Labour Party have announced that, were they to return to government, they would re-impose the central housing targets.

The new Framework was preceded by a consultation which began in December 2022 and ended in March 2033 and generated 2,600 responses.
One of the issues consulted upon, and about which the Government has yet to respond, was the question of implementing the power set out in the Levelling-up Act 2023 which will enable local planning authorities to decline applications from developers whose previous record has been poor.
Currently every planning application has to be determined entirely on its own individual merit. It is important that this new power to take into account the developer’s previous record is implemented as soon as possible. One of the reasons given by opponents of proposed housing developments is the developer’s poor record of honouring undertakings and abiding by the conditions upon which permission has been granted in the first place. Giving the promised power to planning authorities would improve public confidence in the planning system by ensuring that developers raise their game.

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!