.. DS Blog

Sir Desmond Swayne TD MP

Sir Desmond Swayne TD MP

Twitter

Reforming the Lords

By

The Prospect of Reform of the House of Lords has been raised once again as a ‘first-term’ objective for an incoming Labour Government.
I rather doubt it, any new government usually finds that it has much more pressing priorities for the legislative time available to it.

Nobody would have sat down and designed the House of Lords as it now is, but it works effectively as the revising chamber for legislation that the Commons simply hasn’t given enough time over to scrutinising thoroughly.

The first Lord’s reform of 1911, when they conceded power over finance and were restricted largely to delaying powers when in disagreement with the Commons, was designed to be temporary. The expectation was that an elected House would replace it within a decade or so. Of course, it never happened.
When, in 1998, the Blair Government culled the hereditary element, they allowed 100 hereditaries to remain temporarily -elected by the hereditary peers themselves. This arrangement was to only supposed to endure until a through reform would subsequently replace them with elected peers. They are still there, and every time one of them dies, a byelection is held amongst the hereditary peers to elect another to serve instead. The irony is that the remaining hereditaries are the only peers with any democratic legitimacy, because at least they were elected by someone.
In 2011 the Coalition Government, under pressure from the Liberal Democrats, invested precious parliamentary time in an attempt to legislate for elections to the House of Lords. It all came to nothing because the Commons could not agree on any particular scheme by which it would be achieved. My estimate is that exactly same outcome would be repeated were a government to attempt it again.

There are two fundamental reasons why the Commons will find reasons to prevent the Lords being elected. First, no MP wants a peer on their patch purporting to also represent their constituents too.
Second, we are savvy enough to realise that were the Lords to be elected and so legitimately claim to represent the people, they would no longer be content to be a mere revising chamber and without financial control: So, there would be enormous pressure on the Commons to share real political power.

There is reason why ordinary voters too should beware of democratic Lords reform: the huge bill that would come with it and which would be another claim on our taxes.
Were the Lords to become elected tribunes of the people, they would no longer be content with expenses and a per diem allowance, they’d want salaries and pensions just like MPs. They would demand staff too. They’d need offices to operate from and to accommodate their staff. This extension to the secure parliamentary estate would present a huge new capital cost, in addition to all the extra running costs.

And all for what?
To elect more politicians when we already have quite enough.

Abortion ‘Rights’

By

Petitions that gain over one hundred thousand signatures can secure a debate by parliamentarians in Westminster Hall. These clash with legislation being debated in the Commons Chamber, so it often isn’t possible to attend Westminster Hall, irrespective of the number of emails from constituents and lobbyists asking one to do so.

Last week however, I did manage it. The petition -prompted by the US Supreme Court’s reversal of Rowe versus Wade- demanded a human right to abortion services in the UK.
The petitioners and the MPs who supported them were quite misguided in their belief that legislating for such a right would have any effect whatsoever.
Unlike the USA, we do not have a written constitution that is subject to the interpretation of judges. In the UK there are different sources of law, but the supreme law is statutes enacted by Parliament. One such, is the Abortion Act 1967 which sets out the restricted terms on which an abortion can be lawfully had. The establishment of a new ‘human right to abortion’ would not alter the Abortion Act in any way and would not empower activist judges to set it aside: It would be pure gesture politics.
Only an amendment to the Abortion Act can change the terms on which abortion is made available.

What escapes the judgement of the promoters of a ‘human right to abortion’ is that there is more than one human life to be considered.

Taken for Fools

By

I return the subject I have often covered in this column: Channel crossings, about which I – quite understandably- continue to receive a lively correspondence.
 Whilst I share the anger and frustration of my correspondents, I do not agree with their analysis that there are simple solutions if only we had the will to implement them. On the contrary, the matter is as complicated as you can get, with international treaty obligations…and the rest.
The Government is wrestling with the complexities and is determined to get on top of them. The opposition parties however, believe that the solution is to make more ‘safe and legal’ routes available so that migrants are spared the danger and expense of paying gangsters to bring them by dingy.
 I think this is naivete of the first order: the ‘safe allocations’ would quickly be exhausted and everyone else would simply resort to dinghies once again.


At least a part of the problem is of our own making. We are a ‘soft touch’ and we allow ourselves to be taken for fools. For example, the Albanians -who make up about one third of this year’s arrivals in small boats, yet there is no war or oppression in Albania. Equally, if you claim, as an Albanian, that you have been trafficked as a modern slave, surely it is reasonable that, once having been rescued, you be returned to your home.
Given the choice, I’d rather live in the UK than Albania, but as a country that has an acute housing shortage and which saw net migration of half a million in the last year for which figures are available, we cannot be in the business of making such choices freely available.

So, how is it that we accept the claims of well over half of our Albanian asylum applicants?
Why does France accept only 2.3 % of their Albanian claims?
Why do Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and eleven other European countries not accept any of such Albanian claimants?
Clearly, there is something wrong with our law, our processes, or our judgement. Actually, it is probably all three.

Economic Inactivity

By

Notwithstanding record low unemployment figures, the size of the workforce has shrunk: the number of people in employment is still lower than before the pandemic. Virtually every enterprise that I visit or speak to is under-recruited, they just can’t get the staff that they need.

So often in their response, like the Confederation of British Industry, they demand increased immigration to deliver the workers that they need.
As a small and crowded island that saw net migration rise to half a million in the year to June 2022, we cannot just go on importing the next generation of workers. An imported workforce comes with additional housing needs and demands on public services. We have to moderate our addiction to foreign workers, now even Labour says so.

There are now 630,000 more economically inactive adults of working age than before the pandemic. The Chancellor had the right priority when he announced last week that he is to fund the department of Work and Pensions to require hundreds of thousands more benefit claimants to meet a work coach to get the support they need to increase the hours that they work.

I am an elected member of the Commons Work & Pensions Select Committee and when I’ve asked witnesses about the cause of the reduced workforce, I’m told that long-term sickness has increased because of the inability of the NHS to deliver the necessary healthcare. I’m sceptical: in the past work-related sickness was overwhelmingly musculoskeletal, but now it is stress and anxiety related. These conditions, however debilitating, are quite treatable. After all, work is good for mental health and self-esteem.

Given that I represent a constituency with one of the highest age profiles I was particularly interested in data that Phoenix Insights, a longevity think tank has shared with me. Their polling casts doubt on the suggestion that poor healthcare is a cause of economic inactivity. Of the 50 to 64-year-olds who have left the workforce since the pandemic, only 16% gave long-term sickness or disability as their reason for doing so. The main reason they gave was that they didn’t want to work any longer. In fact, 70% of those who left work in their early fifties said that they did not want to go back to work.
Interestingly, we appear to have a more negative attitude to work that in the USA or Germany: 58% of workers in the UK liked their job, compared to 74% in the USA and 73% in Germany. 40% of workers in the UK said that the coronavirus pandemic made them rethink how they view working, compared to only 28% in the US and 30% in Germany

I have misgivings about increasing benefits when real wages are falling. Perhaps cost-of-living pressures may still exert pressure to return to work, but I think there is a message in these statistics for employers too: quality of life in the workplace is going to be a key element in recruitment

Size Matters

By

I was privileged to be invited to speak at a dinner at the Honourable Artillery Company, an ancient regiment with a formidable reputation and illustrious history. (I was surprised: members of my own regiment would never have allowed an after-dinner speech to stand between them and the bar).

I told them that I believe that the war in Ukraine has changed everything: we have seen a whole nation mobilized in a war of national survival. Most of the fighters are not regular soldiers, reserve units -like the Azov at Mariupol, have played a critical role.

We, by contrast, have optimised for expeditionary operations much further afield beyond the NATO area, fighting ‘wars of choice’ against adversaries over which we have significantly greater capabilities.
The Chief of the General Staff in his lecture to the RUSI Land Warfare Conference stated that we must now prepare for war in Europe against a ‘peer adversary’. With that in mind, what can we learn from Ukraine’s experience against that very peer adversary?

I suggest the lessons are:
-The importance of number of manoeuvre formations that can be put into battle
-The quantity of infantry, thickened by anti-armour and anti-air capability, to protect long lines of communication
-Engineers to keep those lines open
-The manpower challenges of protecting civilian populations and infrastructure
-The even greater manpower requirements of urban warfare and the need to rotate exhausted troops

As my colleague Julian Brazier, formerly MP for Canterbury, says “mass is back; Quantity has a quality all of its own”

The last time that the main threat came from Russia the Territorial Army provided potent blocking units equipped with Anti-tank missiles and mortars. Yet, there are current proposals to strip them of them. Which would seem to me to send a signal that the infantry is not taken seriously except to backfill regular units.
I do not underestimate the importance backfill or of augmentees. They are a vital resource, many ‘serial mobilizers’ have made magnificent contributions providing critical support to the regular Army, enhancing the reputation of the Reserves. Many sacrificed their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But over-focus on backfilling has a danger: Reserve peace-time activity must also work for people with challenging civilian careers too or we will lose the very capabilities that have made the reserves so versatile and deployable.

My prejudice is that we are rapidly losing our ability to mobilise our reserves as fighting units. Their establishments are to be cut by a further 10%: The Army element of the Integrated Review would reduce reserve unit size below the capability to deliver realistic training -striking at the heart of unit spirit.

Were I not the blockage between the bar and my audience I might have gone on to explore a number of short-comings, not least recruiting – Gadzooks! We used to do our own. We’d send a troop out to shopping centres on a Saturday and bring in the Black Country’s finest. They would start training on the very next drill night. Now I get emails from frustrated constituents who have been made to wait almost a year.

Events this year prove that size matters once again, we cannot carry on reducing the Army. Equally, regular soldiers are very expensive at a time when there is little ready money.
The Chancellor, did say in the autumn statement that he would spend more on defence but first he needed to re-open the Integrated Review prepared before the Ukraine war. This is the opportunity to make the case for the reserves.

Language Police

By

A year ago the House of Commons Standards Committee proposed a new addition to MP’s Code of Conduct Viz. “Respect: Members should abide by the Parliamentary Behaviour Code and should demonstrate anti-discriminatory attitudes and behaviours through the promotion of anti-racism, inclusion and diversity”
I opposed the proposal vociferously, if a code is to be taken seriously and enforced, then it is not just a restraint on the freedom of MPs, but also on the choice that can be made available to voters. Though, the desired ‘behaviours’ may appear uncontroversial, the highly charged debate over sex and gender reveals that what constitutes openness to ‘inclusion and diversity’ is, on the contrary, still highly controversial.


In Parliament last week my colleague Mark Francois MP badgered the Defence Secretary over cost overruns and delays to Type 26 frigate programme. He ended with this question “…why does it take BAE Systems 11 years to build a ship the Japs can build in four?”
The Following day Sarah Owen, the MP for Luton North, made a complaint to the speaker regarding what Mr Francois had said the day before. She was clearly angry and demanded to know how “we can discourage all Members of the House from using ethnic slurs”.
Would Mr Francois have been in breach of the proposed code for failing under the new Respect requirement?
I rather think that Sarah Owen would have thought so.
Personally, I would have exonerated Mr Francois. He was not denigrating the Japanese, on the contrary, he was complimenting their comparatively greater efficiency. He was, after all, showing them a measure of ‘respect’. In the end these things are a question of taste and I certainly wouldn’t want the language police to be able to censor that.
As it happens, we managed to see off the proposed new addition to the Code of Conduct. I kicked-up a fuss and so did others. The Committee on Standards withdrew, albeit with rather bad grace -saying that the criticism had been exaggerated and that the proposed addition had been purely aspirational and would not have been enforced.


Alas, some of the other proposals in the same document survived, including that the Commissioner for Standards should police the use that MPs make of social media to ensure that our criticisms are proportionate and not too personal. So, no new -Elon Musk inspired- freedom of expression on Twitter for MPs.


The Committee may have shelved its proposals for now, but I doubt that the agenda and ambitions have gone away for good. Vigilance is the price of Liberty. Policing what we say and how we say it is but a short step from policing our thoughts and how we think.

You wouldn’t want to become a burden, would you?

By

I’ve had great many emails and postcards over the last few days promoting legislation to make ‘assisted dying’ lawful. This is a matter that has been debated in Parliament several times over the last few years. By ‘assisted dying’ what is really meant is doctor assisted dying. In my estimate Government will be unwilling to invest legislative time in such a measure unless there is an overwhelming consensus within the medical profession in favour of it. Currently that is most certainly not the case. Though, I accept that it is the case amongst the public in general. Opinion polls typically report support for assisted dying as high as 75%. There is nothing new in this, the majorities have always been overwhelming ever since they first started asking the question. A response to an opinion poll however, does not constitute an argument. Equally, when pollsters ask a member of the public their opinion, they do not ask how often, or for how long the subject has occupied the respondent’s mind before reaching the declared opinion.


I have debated the question several times in this column and in Parliament and earlier this year I debated it at the University of Durham. I was up against Baroness Meacher who had sponsored a Private Member’s bill in the Lords. She was assisted by a psychiatrist who was a member of the ‘My Life, My Death’ campaign. The Baroness was determined to focus on the narrow terms of her bill and the safeguards built into it (terminal diagnosis with only six months to live, sound mind consent verified by qualified physicians etc.), but she was thoroughly undermined by her assistant who wasn’t having any of it. As far as he was concerned, this was a service that should be available for anyone who wants it.
One of the most alarming aspects of assisted dying in those jurisdictions that have implemented it, is the way that the scope of the provision has so swiftly expanded from the original restricted circumstances that were originally specified. It does appear to be a very slippery slope indeed. One example will suffice. I was deeply troubled by the report in the Spectator of the recent euthanising of 23-year-old Shanti De Corte in the Netherlands. She was tired of having to take daily anti-depressants to deal with the PTSD she had suffered since when, at the age of sixteen, she was with a school trip caught up in a terrorist bomb that killed and maimed many, though she was not physically injured herself.

In Parliament the debate has always focussed on the dilemma facing people with degenerative conditions and their loved ones. I accept that these are hard cases (though there are many who, with the assistance of palliative care, die peacefully with dignity) but the greater danger in my estimate, is changing the law. My fear is that what would begin as a choice, would by degrees become an expectation. After all, with such reduced quality of life is it fair to go on consuming enormous clinical resources?
  “you wouldn’t want to become a burden, would you?”

Fracking -another missed opportunity

By

I have never been fanatical about it, but I’ve been in favour of fracking. I thought we should have started almost a decade ago. Indeed, I recall Ed Davey as Secretary of State with responsibility for energy policy in the Coalition Government, telling his party conference to “get fracking!”. Alas, now he is Leader of the Liberal Democrats he has changed his tune.
Fracking has certainly transformed the energy situation in the USA and ended their reliance on unstable and unsavoury regimes.
My prejudice is that the dangers are somewhat overdone, after all, we have been fracking for thermal energy in the UK at hundreds of sites without incident, but the technology is largely the same as fracking for shale gas.
To be realistic however, Fracking was unlikely to be a ‘silver bullet’ to our energy supply problems and certainly would not have had a major impact in the short term (that’s why it was a missed opportunity not to have got it underway when Ed told us to). Nevertheless, it could have made a useful contribution to our energy mix. Given that we will still be reliant on hydrocarbons for years to come, even as we strive for ‘net zero’, I’ve always thought that we’d be better off extracting our own than relying on increasingly expensive and unreliable imports.
So, I voted against labour’s motion to in the Commons last week, the chaos surrounding which, appeared to be the last straw for Liz Truss as PM.
It almost seems ancient history now but I think an explanation should still be had.
The vote was billed as a ‘matter of confidence’. In other words, any Conservative defying the three-line whip and not voting with the Government to defeat the Labour motion, would have the whip withdrawn: they would no longer be members of the Conservative parliamentary party.
I quite understand the difficulties faced by a number of my colleagues on the question of fracking. Some have constituencies that are very much against it and which have experienced mild tremors at the first exploratory sites. More importantly, there was a clear commitment in the Conservative election manifesto of December 2019 to maintain the fracking moratorium. So, they found themselves being whipped against what they understood to be the policy on which they were elected.

Nothing however, is ever quite so straightforward. The Labour motion sought to repeat the trick that was pulled during the last Parliament in what was then an attempt to derail Brexit. This time the object was to suspend the Standing Orders of the Commons (the nearest thing we have to a written constitution) in order to secure legislative time to pass laws against fracking.  In our system such legislative time is in the hands of the Government: you don’t get it unless you win an election. So, turning things upside down and taking legislative initiative away from the Government, as the Labour motion sought to do, was properly considered to be a matter of expressing no confidence in the Government.

The problem was that the Chief Whip had informed the parliamentary party that it was a matter of confidence and that Conservatives therefore had to vote with the Government, but the minister winding up the debate told the House that it wasn’t a matter of confidence. Result: utter confusion all round and a gaggle of members in the doorway to the ‘No’ lobby arguing whether it was or it wasn’t. Nobody however, was physically forced into the division lobby (nothing is ever quite so dramatic or exciting as reporters would have it).

The resulting furore has led to the cancellation of the last of the Truss deregulating policies. The opportunity we missed years ago, is to be missed again.

The Dream Lives

By

The end of the Truss regime has led to publication of any number of newspaper columns serving as obituaries for right-of-centre economics and heralding the return of orthodox centrist social democracy on the basis that the experiment didn’t just fail, it failed spectacularly.
I disagree profoundly. The experiment, far from failing, never even commenced. It would indeed have proved useful to see what impact tax cuts and radical supply-side reforms would have made in several months time. Alas, we will never know because the endeavour was aborted before the measures were implemented.

I have always been an advocate for precisely those economic policies, nevertheless I am not convinced that that the outcome would have been a rosy one. I fear that the implementation would have been purchased at the cost of very high interest rates (in this column on 25th of July I predicted they might rise to as much as 7%) because the increased purchasing power arising from tax cuts would have an impact before many of the supply-side reforms would improve productivity. Consequently, inflation would rise even further, and the Bank would have to respond with higher interest rates. Equally, markets -sceptical of the policy (notwithstanding our relatively low debt to GDP ratio brought about by George Osborne’s years as Chancellor) would require a ‘premium’ to persuade them to cover our deficit.

It was for these reasons that I backed Rishi in the head-to-head contest with Liz Truss. As I said in my blog Backing Winners (desmondswaynemp.com) of 27 July, I saw no ideological difference between the two candidates (indeed and between most of the earlier leadership contenders). They shared the same objective of a low tax, free market, entrepreneurial productive UK. The difference came down the speed at which the changes could be made and getting the government finances into better shape before commencing. The Conservative Party made the wrong ‘call’ and the result was the disaster Rishi had predicted.
We must not however, allow this catastrophe to undermine the possibility of pursing prosperity through these radical remedies, albeit at a sensible pace and having prepared the right conditions.

The narrative currently being pedalled by some right-wing critics is that the abandonment of ‘trussenomics’ means that the Tories have snuck back into a ‘remainerdom’ comfort zone of big government, high taxes and burdensome regulation: Sacrificing all the potential liberations of Brexit.
This is nonsense. The dream remains thoroughly alive, even though we had to act decisively to stop it becoming a nightmare.

More Poo

By

Notwithstanding the turmoil at Westminster and in the financial markets, I find that I am inundated instead by a host of emails demanding to know why I voted to allow sewage to be discharged into our rivers. As I said in this column almost exactly a year ago, I haven’t. On the contrary this is the first Government to set a clear requirement for water companies to reduce sewage discharges. Water companies are having to invest £3.1 billion now to deliver 800 storm overflow improvements across England by 2025, which will reduce discharges by 25%.

The fact is that we previously had little idea how much foul water was being discharged, because it simply wasn’t being measured: In 2016, only 5% of storm overflows were monitored. Following the action of this Government, almost 90% are now monitored, and by next year 100% of all storm overflows will be required to have monitors fitted. This new information has allowed regulators to take action against water companies. The Environment Agency and Ofwat have launched the largest criminal and civil investigations into water companies ever, at more than 2,200 treatment works, following the improvements that have been made to secure the monitoring data. That follows 54 prosecutions against water companies since 2015, totting-up fines of nearly £140 million.

It is now a legal requirement for companies to provide discharge data to the Environment Agency and make it available to the public within an hour of the discharge. That’s what I voted for.  The Environment Act that will clean up our rivers and restore our water with tough new duties to tackle sewage overflows for the first time.

Ofwat is currently working up proposals that will enable it to take enforcement action against companies that do not link dividend payments for shareholders to their environmental performance.

Last month the Government laid before Parliament the storm overflows discharge reduction plan which starts the largest investment in infrastructure ever undertaken by the water industry: an estimated £56 billion of capital investment over the next 25 years, with strict new targets for water companies to reduce sewage discharges. 

By 2035, water companies must ensure that overflows affecting designated bathing waters meet strict standards to protect public health.
Why so long?
Because just banning discharges, as my correspondents demand, without first building the very significant infrastructure necessary to make accommodate the foul water, will ensure that it -with nowhere else to go- backs-up into out toilets and drains. Then the s—t really will hit the fan.