Last week’s ‘write-in’ email campaign purports to have the support of 62,000 members of the public and demands, on account of pensioner poverty, that the basic state pension should not be taxed.
I know that many pensioners are struggling but those who haven’t qualified for the state pension can apply for Pension Credit and anyone who is wholly reliant on the state pension as their sole source of income will not be paying any income tax on it because they have a personal tax free allowance of £12,570. In addition, pensioners do not pay National Insurance.
To exempt well off pensioners from paying tax on their basic state pension would be deeply unfair to the pensioners who are struggling, and to everyone else still at work and paying taxes to pay the pensioners.

Many of my correspondents forget that the pension is a state benefit, albeit not a universal benefit, but qualified for by national insurance contributions, a state benefit nevertheless.
We are often indignant when reminded about this. We insist that we are entitled to our pension because we have earned it by paying our contributions. Not so, we qualify for it by paying our national insurance contributions, we do not earn it. when we fully qualify we all end up with exactly the same pension notwithstanding that some will have paid many thousands of pounds more in contributions than others.
If our contributions were going into a fund and our pension was dependent upon the investment returns on the amounts we paid into that fund, then we could legitimately claim we had earned it, and not merely qualified for it.
Alas, there is no such fund. Our national insurance contributions are a tax like any other.
The reality is that current taxpayers are paying the pensions of current pensioners in the hope and expectation that this arrangement between the generations will continue.
So, perhaps pensioners might moderate the demands that will be placed on future generations as the numbers of the retired increase, and the working population shrinks.

The baby boomers enjoyed the ability to earn defined benefit private pensions which are no longer available, they had free higher education, and much easier access to house purchase.
My children have none of these things, and no prospect of being able to spend as much as a third of their lives in retirement.
The suggestion that the state pension should be untaxed is quite out of place.

I’ve received a host of ‘write-ins’ recently. These are identical emails, originally from a single source, where the sender is supposed to write in their own details and the name of their MP (although often enough the sender hasn’t followed the instruction and “Dear [insert name of MP here]” remains at the top.
I’ve never really worked out how important they are to those who send them and there are often far too many to reply to. When someone sends me a letter, I can be sure that the effort of writing it, purchasing a stamp and going to the post box is a measure of the importance of the issue to the sender. This is clearly not of the same order as clicking with your mouse on a link that generates an email Identical to thousands of others.
On occasion, when I have replied, I’ve had a response from the sender saying that they had no recollection of sending me an email at all. Recently, I got a reply from a lady telling me that her email account had been hacked and was being used without her knowledge or consent.
I can quite understand my New Forest neighbour Sir Julian Lewis MP and his decision not to entertain email correspondence at all.

I know I’ve written this stuff several times in this column, but it bears repetition after the events of the last few weeks in the Channel, the Mediterranean and indeed, off the coast of West Africa.
I receive a large and often intemperate correspondence about the traffic of small dinghies across the Channel. I share the frustration of my correspondents as we wade through the treacle of the courts process to get the Rwanda deal up and running (which, I believe is essential to break the business model of the gangs that profit from Channel Crossing).
Equally, we watch with incredulity at the slow pace at which alternative accommodation is identified for migrants, in order to try and save the millions of pounds daily that it is costing in hotel bills. Every time a new location, or a berth for a barge is identified, a parliamentary colleague will be leading a campaign to try and ensure that it doesn’t end up in that constituency. (I wonder if all those people who wrote to me to oppose the housing development at former RAF Sopley, realise the close shave they may have had)
Nevertheless, Some of my correspondents really do need to get a better sense of proportion. A constituent wrote to me last week saying that all that his father’s generation had sacrificed on the battlefields in WW2 had been a waste given the current flood of illegal migrants. I told him that the his statement was grotesque and that he should reflect on the dreadful magnitude of how things would have turned out had the efforts of that generation really been in vain.

Of course, the Government must redouble its efforts to get a grip on what is happening on our own shores. But as it does so it is worth recalling that the opposition parties have no answers beyond offering ‘safe and legal routes’ to UK by those currently trying to get here illegally by dinghy. The reality is that we have already made generous provision for refugees to resettle here and our ability to be even more generous is utterly overwhelmed by the illegal trade across the Channel. In any event, no matter how many legal routes are offered, those who don’t qualify will continue to try their luck in a dinghy unless we can stop them, because the demand to come here is limitless.

France is struggling to secure its border with Italy, as Italy and Greece wrestle to halt the flow across the Mediterranean. Indeed, every European jurisdiction is trying to fix their own migrant problem as the EU itself cannot get agreement from its member states on a common approach.
Beyond, Europe the problem is so much greater. Pakistan is host to millions of refugees from Afghanistan, as Turkey and the countries surrounding Syria host millions of Syrian refugees.
The states of Central America see a continuous flow northward to try a penetrate the borders of the USA. I could go on.

The fix that we find for our problem to halt the flow to the shores of the UK will ultimately be as temporary as Donald Trump’s wall, unless the rich developed world return with urgency to the task of improving the economic prospects of millions of people in wretched poor and war-torn countries. Until that happens, people are going to continue to risk everything to get here.

Last week in this column [  It’s Still Barking (desmondswaynemp.com) ]I drew attention to the therapies, short of surgery and drug regimes, that will be offered to children following the closure of the Tavistock clinic for those expressing doubts about their gender.

It is a welcome development that children under seven-years-old are to be spared chemical intervention for what might only be a passing phase, but being over seven years old, is still far too young to place any confidence in a child’s judgement about changes that can irrevocably alter the course of a lifetime.
Even adults may need to think and talk things through very carefully before going ;under the knife’ or the chemical cosh.
There is on the horizon however, the prospect of legislation that will make even merely discussing the subject a legal minefield. The Government is committed to banning ‘conversion therapies’. This commitment was initially to apply to therapies that purport to convert homosexuals into heterosexuals. The commitment has however, been extended to prevent any therapy that seeks to dissuade a person who wants to change their sex.

There are some pretty weird and undesirable practices involving beatings and exorcisms (usually associated with minority cults) which have been used to try and change sexual inclination or dysphoria, but they are already unlawful. Even were a person to give their consent to undergo such ‘therapy’ it would still be unlawful: one cannot consent to actual bodily harm, so the perpetrator still commits an offence.
So, I do not believe that the determination to ban conversion therapy is motivated by a desire to spare potential ‘converts’ egregious interventions.
Rather, I believe that the motive is ideological: It is no longer tolerable to believe that there is anything ‘disordered’ about either homosexuality or an intention to change one’s sex. To seek to intervene therefore, and try to ‘cure’ anyone is counted as a shocking form of thought crime.
Nevertheless. Some people do believe that these things are disordered and in a free society they have the right to say so, even if we disagree.

Furthermore, the difficulty any legislation banning conversion therapy will have, is that it is likely to severely constrain freedom of speech. There may be conversations that young people ought properly to have with their parents, teachers, their friends, clinicians and clergy in order to explore what is really right for them. How can these conversations, or -dread the thought, even prayers – avoid coming within the compass of any kind of conversion therapy. At the very least there will be a severe chilling effect on sensible input from professionals.

 

Even before there is legislation, I understand that the Church of England has already taken a lead in abandoning common sense: it has issued guidance to its schools that any child identifying in a different sex, should not be questioned, but simply affirmed in their chosen identity. We can always rely on the CofE -of which I remain a member – to be completely daft.

With the Closure of the Tavistock Clinic after the damning review by Dr Hilary Cass, followed by the public reaction to very poor taste advertising by Costa Coffee and by Nike, I had hoped that we have passed the high-water mark of the sex versus gender hysteria.

Last week the NHS gave some indication of what will do to replace the therapies that were previously offered at the Tavistock to children as young as three years old..
First, a minimum age limit of seven-years-old will be placed on referrals to gender identity clinics.
This is because children under seven will not have a sufficiently developed understanding of the reasons for, and consequences of referral to a “specialist incongruence service”. They haven’t the intellectual appreciation of sex and gender to comprehend the enormity of changing one’s sex or to analyse the personal issues and anxieties they that they have been experiencing in order to sufficiently distinguish the extent to which discomfort about their sex, is actually the real cause. To put it bluntly: They just aren’t old enough.
Hold on a minute!
How many children over the age of seven do have these intellectual capabilities?
How many teenagers, turbo-charged with hormones and facing all sorts of anxieties, can be sure of the necessary objective rational analysis of their feelings?

We don’t let them drive till they are seventeen. We don’t let them buy a beer till they are eighteen
We don’t let them buy a packet of fags till they are 21.
Yet we’re not going to intervene to prevent them embarking on an irreversible life-changing medical journey from the age of seven.

It may be better than it was, but it’s still barking.

I am often asked for advice about fundraising by local good causes and charities. I’m afraid that I have not been much use to them: it’s an area where I only have my own limited personal experience and certainly no expertise.
Recently however, I’ve been badgering the government to raise the sales cap on lotteries for hospices and similar good causes. My involvement with this has led to several contacts with the People’s Postcode Lottery which has been quite helpful with my campaign.

 

Players of People’s Postcode Lottery have raised over £1 billion for good causes.
The trust funded by PPL offers funding of up to £25,000 and can be for a specific project, or just general core costs.
They have now agreed to run a ‘virtual funding workshop’ for charities and good causes based in my parliamentary constituency of New Forest West and I’m delighted to partner with PPL to help voluntary organisations receive funding for all the brilliant work that they do.

This workshop will offer the opportunity to hear from the People’s Postcode Lottery team about the funding that is on offer to good causes. The workshop will also include a question-and-answer session where you can ask PPL’s charity experts any questions you may have about the funding on offer, or about anything else.

The workshop will take place at 2PM on Thursday 14 September over Zoom. To register, please email funding@postcodelottery.co.uk , they will provide further details including the Zoom link.

Please feel free to share this invite with any voluntary organisations based in New Forest West you think might be interested and I look forward to seeing them at the ‘workshop’

 I have had a high regard for Nigel Farage’s political and campaigning abilities and I shared his most important objectives. Nevertheless, I often found myself in disagreement with him.
My principal concern was that the success of his political party was dependent upon the destruction of my own Conservative Party.
I have always regarded it as a strength of our voting system that it requires broad coalitions to come together as a political party to have any chance of success at the ballot box in a general election. Narrow, ‘single issue’ political parties have never succeeded in building the necessary breadth of support to triumph in our elections. My fear was always that significant support for Farage’s political party would be at the expense of the Conservative Party and that, whilst it would deny the Conservative Party the opportunity of winning and forming the Government, far from delivering success for his own party, on the contrary, it would deliver victory to parties with agendas that could not be more opposed to his own.

Nevertheless, though his political party was never in danger of winning, Nigel Farage has had a key role in our politics. Were it not for the threat that he posed to the success of the Conservative Party; I have no doubt that David Cameron would not have included a commitment to an in/out referendum on EU membership in his 2015 election manifesto. That commitment was designed explicitly to prevent Eurosceptic voters peeling off from the Conservatives to Nigel Farage.
I believed that the commitment to a referendum was an absolute necessity if we were to have a chance of winning, but we wouldn’t have offered it were it not for the danger posed by Farage.
I think it is safe to say that we would not have regained our national sovereignty had it not been for his intervention in our politics.

Now, by being denied continued banking services by Coutts and Nat West Farage has, by the tenacity of his campaigning, exposed a growing threat to our liberty. It is an absolute outrage to discover that large public companies are acting as Orwellian thought police and withholding commercial services on the basis of their investigations.
 What I might believe is no business whatsoever of my bank. Its only proper concern is that my account is in credit, or if it isn’t, that they are being paid handsomely in recompense.

It is astonishing that the board Nat West Bank, so ready to trumpet its standards and values, should express its full confidence in its chief executive, after she has divulged client confidential (and false) information to a BBC Journalist to undermine Nigel Farage’s campaign. The board, by backing their chief executive, have made themselves culpable and should also resign.

I doubt that shareholders in Nat West had any idea that the bank which they own had taken upon itself to censor the politics of its customers.

If my memory serves me correctly, it was in 2007 that we passed regulations that prevented any commercial undertaking from discriminating against customers on the basis of their sexual orientation. Clearly, we now need to go further and prevent enterprises from discriminating on the basis of a customer’s lawful political activity: My politics is no more the business of my bank, than what I do in bed.

Well Done, Nigel Farage

Our last week or so before the Summer recess was plagued with repeated votes on matters that we had already dispensed with weeks ago, when we went through detailed scrutiny of the Illegal Immigration Bill. The reason for the repeat performances were the wrecking amendments sent back to us by the House of Lords. I use the word ‘wrecking’ because they fundamentally undermined the purpose of the bill by tying any deportation up in interminable legal knots and appeals.

Given that a division can take up the best part of twenty minutes, to have to go through the division lobbies 18 times in an evening, is quite a demand on precious time. Of course, the rejoinder to that is that we ought to modernise our procedures and adopt instantaneous electronic voting.
Well, such repeated voting happens very rarely, and the advantage of going through the division lobbies to vote is that it affords the opportunity to badger the PM and other senior ministers with issues that you want resolved.

Anyway, the repeated ‘ping pong’ as the amendments went back and forth between the Lords and Commons generated a considerable correspondence from constituents. The bill is a popular one: overwhelmingly, voters want to see the small boats stopped. The ‘unhelpful’ amendments by the House of Lords filled my email inbox with demand for Lords reform, or even abolition.

I am not an enthusiast for reform, and certainly not for abolition. More often than not, the Lords do a good job of scrutinising legislation in greater detail than the Commons ever have done for the last 25 years. We simply don’t give enough time to it. Overwhelmingly, most Lord’s amendments are accepted by the Commons without dispute.

There are four reasons why I don’t believe we will ever give over the time necessary for considered debate over Lords reform.
First, there are always more pressing issues to deal with on the political agenda.
Second, whilst a part hereditary, part appointed House, is nothing that any of us would have designed were we starting from scratch. Nevertheless, it is there and, for the most part, works satisfactorily.
Third, there is nothing approaching consensus of any kind with respect to what a reformed House of Lords should look like. The reality will never find sufficient agreement.
Fourth, MPs are jealous about their constituencies: they would never welcome an elected member of the Lords on their patch also claiming  to represent their constituents.
Fifth, were we to elect the Lords, then the elected peers would have a legitimate demand for real political power. They would not be satisfied with being a mere revising chamber, as is the case now.
That political power could only come from the Commons. The notion that we will be prepared to share power with the Lords, is for the birds: Dream on.

Lords reform?
Forget it!

In this column on 21^st June Inflation -3 (desmondswaynemp.com) I expressed my concerns that that the Bank of England was in danger of causing a recession by driving interest rates too high.
 I have always believed that the real source of inflation was disproportionate growth in the quantity of money relative to the goods and services available for it to buy. Money, like any commodity, has a value inversely proportional to the quantity available of it. It was for precisely for this reason that primitive societies quickly abandoned experiments using seashells as a form of money.

Since the banking crisis of 2008 we have increased the quantity of money by 50%, with half of that increase taking place in response to the Covid pandemic since 2020.
It is quite technical, but the increase was almost exclusively engineered by the Bank of England’s policy of quantitative easing, euphemistically referred to as ‘printing money’ but, in reality, buying up debt in the form of corporate bonds to make credit readily available.
It was almost as if we had become addicted to it: it went on for years
The purpose of the policy was to prevent the economy going into recession following the banking crisis and then the pandemic, but it just kept being extended.
Many companies which, in ordinary circumstances, would have folded when their business models no longer responded effectively to changing consumer demand, remained afloat and were kept alive on cheap credit. In a properly functioning market they would have been liquidated and their resources would have gone into more productive enterprise.

Though, I quite understand the Bank of England’s motive in seeking to avoid recession, the task that it was primarily charged with was the control of inflation. My belief is that, on the contrary, its monetary expansion was the principal driver of inflation.
Now however, after putting the policy into reverse with a bout of ‘quantitative tightening’ -selling so many of the bonds it had earlier purchased – the money supply growth is firmly back under control. This should, after a time lag, bring inflation down. After all, it took a considerable time for inflation to result from the earlier monetary expansion.

The danger now is that, by continuing to raise interest rates, the Bank of England, is making mortgage holders and debtors so much poorer, which will drive the economy into recession quite unnecessarily, instead of waiting for the monetary contraction that it has lately engineered, to take effect.

It is very frustrating to watch, but politicians gave up control of monetary policy to the Bank of England with Gordon Brown’s reforms in 1997. Perhaps it’s time to take back control

Last Monday the Commons gave a second reading to the Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill.  The purpose of this bill is to give legislative effect to a commitment made in the 2019 Conservative election manifesto Viz.
“We will ban public bodies from imposing their own direct boycotts, disinvestment or sanctions campaigns against foreign countries”
I supported that commitment: Of course, whilst individuals and private organisations can suit themselves, I believe that foreign policy is the preserve of the Government and that we should not have local authorities or other public bodies pursuing their own foreign policies by boycotting countries of which they disapprove. It should only be for the UK Government, with parliamentary support,  to deploy sanctions.

In the days preceding the second reading debate I received a large correspondence divided equally between those asking me to vote against the bill, and those urging me to vote for it. In the event, I abstained, not because constituent’s opinions were equally divided, but because I have grave reservations about the way that the Bill goes about implementing the commitment, though not sufficient to enable me, in conscience, to vote with Labour against my own party manifesto.
I will need to see how the bill is amended at committee and report stages before reconsidering how I will vote at third reading.

Clauses 1 & 2 of the bill deny public bodies the power to boycott or disinvest. Clause 3 however, empowers a minister to make exceptions, that is, to name countries against which public authorities are able to implement boycotts.
But Clause 3, part 7 specifically excludes Israel, the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the Occupied Golan Heights from this exception-making power. The message being sent is ‘these are places, alone in all the world, whatever they do, however bad it might be, we will never allow economic sanctions against them’

Were Clause 3, part 7 to be left out, the bill would still achieve its objective of preventing public authorities meddling in foreign policy and it would prevent them implementing sanctions, including against Israel.
Leaving the clause as it is however, sends a powerful message to Israel that we give them an absolutely blank cheque for their continued occupation of Palestinian territories. This is at a time of high tension when we have the most right-wing government of Israel ever.
 We still adhere to the policy of a ‘two-state solution’. But the policy of Israel has been to accelerate the building of illegal settlements in the West Bank of the Jordan to exclude the geographical possibility of any future coherent unified Palestinian State.

I support Israel as the only real democracy in the region and I support its right to defend itself. Its present policy however, is a block in the way of the peace process. The entirely gratuitous and unnecessary message we’ve inserted into this bill has no proper place at this time.

Perhaps even more bizarre, clause 4 of the bill makes it an offence for a person subject to clause 1 (presumably the leader of a council or other public body) to publish a statement saying that they disagree with it, or what they would do were they not subject to it.
Gadzooks! We only recently passed legislation guaranteeing freedom of speech, yet here we are introducing a vicious restriction on it. Of course, we have to obey the law but surely we have to remain entitled to say we disagree with it and what we might do had it not been implemented.

I’m an optimist: I’m confident that the Bill won’t get to third reading without being thoroughly amended.