The statement the Lord Chancellor to Parliament last Monday clearly indicated that he believed that sentences were too lenient or inappropriate.
He indicated that space for the longer prison sentences for more serious offences will be made available by no longer imprisoning minor offenders for short sentences.
I am not opposed to reform and I acknowledge the fact that short sentences have proved unsuccessful, and often make for a higher rate of reoffending.   I hope however,  that when more space is delivered by our largest prison building programme since Victorian times, he will consider that part of the answer to the problem of short sentences is to make them longer.
Because prison works – do not underestimate the relief to a whole neighbourhood had by removing persistent minor offenders can have.

They say fish Rots from the head down, so let’s start with the head – the capital crime: murder. The law shows its contempt for the sanctity of life by the leniency with which it treats those who take life.
On three occasions in Parliament I’ve taken the opportunity to vote for the restoration of the death penalty. My demand for justice would have been assuaged however, if the mandatory life sentence meant life -or at least some greater approximation to it- but of over 7000 murderers currently in prison, less than 1% have a whole life tariff. Typically, they only serve between only 11 and 16 years.

Moving on to Rape, the requirement that rapists serve at least two thirds of their sentences was reduced to only a half in 2003 – needless to say, I voted against the measure. Of the tiny proportion of reported rapes that finally make it through to a conviction, in 2022 twenty rapists received sentences of less than 5 years, some less than 2 years.
The scandal is that nearly a fifth of all sex offenders reoffend within one year of their release.

We are living through an epidemic of Knife Crime, and despite bill after bill in Parliament giving the courts greater sentencing powers, repeat offenders for possession continue to avoid custodial sentences. Taking violent crime as a whole, in the year to 2021 sentences fell by a quarter – down by 19 months.

Moving on to burglary, unbelievably the average Burglar will have been convicted for up to 27 offences before being jailed.
And when any custodial sentence actually is handed down, however rare, we go through the charade of the judge specifying a  term, and everyone else in court calculating on the back of a fag packet how long it will actually be, because they all know that most prisoners serve less than half their term.

So Let’s jump down to the tail, to  those crimes that make the lives of neighbours and neighbourhoods a misery: the anti-social louts, the vandals, the shop-lifters, the benefits cheats, the fly-tippers, the fraudsters: none of whom will see the inside of a prison cell, for them it’s ‘community punishments’
The Lord Chancellor said that he was going to ensure public confidence with a robust regime for community punishments. Well he would need to, because last year I asked in Parliament

“It is reported that community punishments can be discharged by working from home. Please tell me that isn’t true. “

The policing minister replied that although they would reduce the proportion of sentences that could be worked from home, they would retain them for ‘those unable to manage a brush and shovel’.

Leniency is measured by the public frustration that justice is not being seen to be done.
Let’s bring back penal servitude with hard labour!

Until July 2016 I was the minister with responsibility for UK’s assistance to the Palestinians, much of which was channelled through United Nations agencies, some in collaboration with the EU, and some directly by our Department for International Development’s operations based in Jerusalem .
I regarded myself as a critical friend of Israel, but I kept that criticism between myself, our diplomats and the Israeli ministers and politicians with which I interacted.
At one meeting with the Israeli Deputy Prime Minister, who was also their chief negotiator with the Palestinian Authority, my criticism was sufficiently forceful to cause him to storm out in rage.
I had made a number of complaints: illegal settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank of the Jordan; the unfair treatment of Palestinians; and the bulldozing of schools by the Israeli occupying authorities -built with funding from UK taxpayers.
My concern was that the proposal for a ‘two state’ solution to the conflict, with a Palestinian State co-existing peacefully alongside Israel (which was -and which remains- UK Government’s policy), was becoming increasingly untenable given the rate at which  Israeli settlements were expanding into the occupied Palestinian territory,  making it very difficult to include in any viable and geographically contiguous future Palestinian state.

When I no longer enjoyed that ministerial responsibility, I went public with my criticism for the first time: I led a debate in Parliament on the illegal Israeli settlements in February 2017
Occupied Palestinian Territories: Israeli Settlements – Hansard – UK Parliament
Following the debate I was invited  to meetings with any number of Palestinian representatives. Basic ‘due diligence’ revealed that many of them were on the record with all sorts of blood-curdling statements about the destruction of Israel, and they had associations with terrorist organisations.
In this light it is important to see the conflict from the Israeli point of view: it is impossible to negotiate a settlement with opponents whose aim remains the obliteration of Israel. The horrific attack by Hamas from the Gaza strip which they control and govern is just the latest and worst in a long history of terrorism. The curtailment of civil rights in Israeli occupied Palestinian territories, of which I previously complained, is itself very largely a consequence of the security measures that have had to be taken to protect Israeli citizens from the terrorist threat.
Israel has endured, bombings and killings for so many years. This latest atrocity is the last straw. The Government of Israel must destroy the terrorist organisation that is Hamas, in order to prevent it from continuing its own quest to destroy Israel and all Israelis.

The action against Hamas now presents huge dangers to Israel itself, to the occupants of the Gaza strip , and to the stability of the whole region. Nevertheless, what other course is open to Israel?
It must protect itself from continued attacks
Equally, no peace process can proceed whilst armed terrorists are determined that there should be no peace until Israel is wiped from the map.

I won’t be voting to raise the age at which it is lawful to purchase tobacco.
I don’t subscribe to the view that it is proper for the state to direct us to do things that are good for us, or to abstain from things that are bad for us. Providing warnings or encouragement is one thing, but giving us orders is quite another.

A number of journalists have demanded to know how I can continue to support the Prime Minister as leader of my party when such a profound philosophical difference has emerged between us.
Well, first, the PM made it clear that any vote on this question would not be whipped, so the pressure is off; it is purely a matter of conscience.
Second, democracy is messy: There will always be substantial disagreements on matters of principle within our political parties, and more so in the UK. Our voting system ensures that, to have any chance of success, a party must have a broad base of support. Proportional voting systems on the continent however, enable their parties to maintain much narrower ideological purity and still secure representation. The consequence is that multiple parties have to forge a coalition after an election and negotiate a programme for government that was never put to the voters. The virtue of the UK system is that we make our coalitions before any election, in that each political party is itself a coalition which puts its manifesto to the judgement of the voters. Inevitably, our ‘broad church’ polity means that, though united on most issues, our political parties will have significant disagreement on others.

So, back to tobacco.
I don’t doubt that had we known the dangers of tobacco when Sir Walter Raleigh first introduced it to England in 1582 it might well have been banned, but it’s too late now.
The experience in USA of the Prohibition era from 1920 to 1933, where attempting to ban a widely consumed product, in that case alcohol, gave rise to a crime wave, violent gangsterism and widespread flouting of the law, is a warning of how this might play out.
It is one thing to demand that youngsters prove their age, but as the age threshold rises year by year, are we really going to ask the retailer to distinguish between one old man who is entitled to purchase a packet of cigarettes, and another old man, albeit one year younger, who isn’t?
Are we really going to make sure that someone, now aged fourteen, is prohibited thought-out his life from enjoying the luxury of a cigar on New Year’s Eve?
Is this really the business of government?

Aside from rescuing us from ourselves, the principal argument for prohibition is the scale of cost that falls upon the NHS through treatments for smoking-related disease.
I accept that there is a logic to this. We have developed a system of socialised medicine where we share the cost of any individual ill-health among all tax-payers. It follows that anyone who recklessly endangers their health is a burden upon all the rest of us. Does it follow therefore, that we have the right to prevent them?
It may be logical, but it is the thin end of a very thick wedge. Its logic would soon extend to an absolute ban on smoking, and, so proceeding, to alcohol, and to any number of other products that food fascists have on their agendas

A constituent wrote to complain that he couldn’t find my blog on HS2. That’s because I’ve never written one…yet.

The reality is that most MPs are generalists. Of course, some bring particular, knowledge, expertise and experience from a profession or previous walk of life that they’ve been involved in. Others will master a brief and become expert in an aspect of policy in which they’re particularly interested, or if they’ve been appointed to a specific bill’s standing committee or elected to serve on a select committee.
Not many of us are polymaths, so we are reliant on advice of experts and to temper that advice with our own prejudices and the weight of opinion of constituents, and most important of all, participating in the debate in Parliament -which is, after all, what we were elected to do.

I’ve always had a healthy scepticism for large public sector infrastructure projects. The great age of the railway, though enabled by parliamentary legislation, was financed by private enterprise which carried both the risks and the rewards.
Nevertheless, HS2 with its huge implications for taxpayers, was given thorough parliamentary scrutiny. The Act that enabled it broke precedent by spanning two different parliaments (the members of the special standing committee, to ensure continuity, had to be from ‘safe’ seats which were unlikely to change hands in the election dividing the parliaments).
The Bill was subject to the hybrid procedure because it disproportionately affected so many different private interests. That procedure places a very significant additional burden on the MPs sitting on the committee, giving them a quasi-judicial role.  Various interest groups, represented by parliamentary counsel (specialist barristers) present evidence from witnesses and cross examine the witnesses of other interest groups. The MPs sit as both judge and jury, they can intervene to cross-examine witnesses themselves, as a trial judge might.
The snag is that, like a juror, an MP nominated to such a committee has to present for every session of what, in the case of HS2, was a marathon.

Though I had my doubts, I was never a partisan. I was prepared to accept the judgement of the standing committee that had examined all the evidence in such detail. Those MPs who were most vehement in their opposition clearly had a particular axe to grind: they were disproportionately those colleagues whose constituencies in the Chilterns, and elsewhere, were going to be dug up.
I was to some extent reassured by the pedigree of the protagonists. Philip Hammond, formerly the MP for Runnymede and Weighbridge, was the Secretary of State for Transport who gave the green light to the project, he also became one of our most conservative and parsimonious of chancellors of the Exchequer.

I always thought that halving journey times was a complete red herring. The case was always, in my estimate, built on the huge shortage of rail capacity on the routes north of London, where no new railway had been built for over 100 years. The question was one of ‘if we are going to build the new rail capacity that is needed, would we build an ‘old one’ or one using the latest cutting-edge technology?

We went for the latest technology, and that is largely responsible for the exponential rise in costs.
We have a duty to review the decisions we made in the light of the detrimental impact that these costs have on other important national priorities. It is always difficult to admit a mistake, particularly such a costly one, but it may be better than compounding the mistake by ploughing on.
I will await the outcome of the PM’s review before deliberating further.

I read that during a Department of Trade seminar, organised by its ‘LGTBQ+ Network’ sixty participating civil servants were asked to describe their weekend but were told avoid mentioning the gender of anyone, or pronouns that would give it away. An example given was not to say “I went home to visit Mum and Dad” because some people may have two mothers or two fathers.

I don’t have any statistics, but I suspect that families with two fathers or two mothers are still relatively rare. In all probability, many more families may be less fortunate in only having one parent, be it a father or a mother.

I cannot imagine how someone with a widow for a mother would be offended by any mention that I visited my father over a weekend. No more so, can I imagine that a fellow with two mothers at home would be upset by such a reference to my father.
It is, of course, complete nonsense. Irrespective of our sex and sexual preferences, we are all quite capable and broad-minded enough to chat about what we did at the weekend without our colleagues being upset by references to our mothers and fathers, whether they possess such parents themselves or not.

What this is really about is given away by the earlier part of the instruction namely, to avoid mentioning anyone’s gender. What they seek is the abolition of the concept of fatherhood and motherhood in entirety, replacing it instead with a gender-free concept of parenthood.

Now, I’ve previously made clear in this column that I consider this concept of separating sex and gender as pretty nutty. Nevertheless, given my preference for freedom of expression, if people want to espouse this nonsense, that is entirely a matter for them. In my opinion they are entitled to believe that there are any number of genders. Just as I am entitled to recognise only two, male and female (whist keeping an open mind about hermaphrodites).

What is increasingly sinister however, is the attempt to bully those of us who reject this new ideology which suggests that life is not unlike a supermarket where you can choose your gender much as you choose a breakfast cereal.
Telling us we will upset others by using gender specific nouns like mother and father, is clearly an attempt to coerce us into abandoning them. Effectively it is telling us that polite and decent people don’t use those offensive words.

I’m not normally a conspiracy theorist, but I’ve begun to wonder if there is one.
Why is it that this new gender ideology is trying to purge us of everything that we have considered familiar, even normal?
I don’t know, but I’m working on it.

Every time India launches another successful space mission, I get a raft of complaints from constituents demanding to know why UK aid is still going to India which is a rich country, evidently rich enough to afford a space exploration programme.
To be fair, India’s spectacularly successful space programme is run on a great deal of ingenuity and a pretty small budget.
Although India’s economy is growing spectacularly, and it won’t be long before it overtakes UK as the world’s fifth largest. That however, doesn’t make it a ‘rich’ country. Despite a growing middle class, the nation’s income is spread between 1.41 billion souls. India has the highest proportion of the world’s poorest people. So, if the objective is to relieve extreme poverty, then not having an impact on it in India, means that the objective will not be reached at all.
Nevertheless, politicians are not tin-eared. The chorus of criticism of continuing aid to India has been long-standing. As a consequence, in 2011 we completed a review which concluded that we would run-down our existing projects and discontinue grant aid from 2015.
We determined that we would continue with commercial loans and with the provision of expertise to a couple of the poorest state governments, enabling them to make best use of revenues they received from the Government in Delhi.
(Inevitably however, given that the UK stumps up its proper share to fund UN Agencies, if one of them, say, UNICEF for example, has an education project in a poor Indian state, some of that expenditure could be traced back to the UK.)
So that’s the position: We aren’t giving grant aid to India or funding their space programme.

I was surprised that some commentators said that I was “disobliging” to the PM by “challenging” him on this in the Commons last Monday, when he returned from The G20 Summit in India. On the contrary, I was giving him the opportunity to knock the myth about aid to India on the head, which, I am glad to say, he took. Judge the exchange for yourself

Hansard Vol 737. Column 693 Monday 11 September
Sir Desmond Swayne
In 2015, I went to Delhi to implement the coalition Government’s decision to end grant development aid to India. That policy hasn’t changed, has it?

The Prime Minister
The policy did change and we stopped providing traditional development aid to India in 2015. Most UK funding is now in the form of business investments which not only help India reduce carbon emissions and address climate change, but deliver jobs and opportunity for British companies here at home

This week’s spat about crumbling schools could not have been more exaggerated. We have been regaled with tales of children cowering under desks and pit props and that this is a metaphor for ‘broken Britain’ where nothing works.

This, of course, is the same Britain that recovered faster than any other economy from the pandemic; the Britain whose economy has grown faster than France and Germany; The Britain where we are educating one million more pupils in our schools than in 2010. The Britain where we are spending more on educating our children than ever before – by every metric: total cash, total real terms, and per pupil.
And as a consequence of thirteen years of education reforms  – all of them opposed tooth and nail by the opposition parties, this is the Britain where we now have the best readers in the western world, where 90% of our schools are rated ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ and where children from the most challenging backgrounds are now 75% more likely to get to University.

As for crumbling concrete, well, this is the Britain where Since 2010, we have invested billions of pounds in school capital. We have opened 650 new free schools. This is  Britain, where we launched the priority school building programmes, rebuilding or refurbishing 532 schools between 2012 and 2020. The Britain, where funding for school maintenance and rebuilding will average £2.6 billion a year over this Parliament as a result of a 20% increase on previous years. Indeed, far from cutting budgets this is the Britain where the amount spent last year was the highest in a decade.

Yes, this is the Britain where the BBC (in reality a partisan campaigning organisation) has ‘discovered’ that a number of the schools now with a concrete problem were due for rebuilding by Labour’s ‘Building Schools for the Future’ programme, which the Conservative-led government cancelled in 2010.
Hold on!, That government’s incoming Chief Secretary to the Treasury received a note from his predecessor stating that  ‘there is no money left’. Furthermore, that programme was expensive, bureaucratic, involved an  elaborate quango, with most of the money being spent before a single brick had been laid, and mostly built with the disastrous Private Finance Initiative which saddled schools and hospitals with interest payments and outrageous management fees for 30 years. It was a rip-off.

From the hyperbole you’d think that that the entire roof really had fallen in.
Of 22,000 schools about a hundred were identified as a problem. Only four have had to close temporarily.
As a former teacher I understand just how unwelcome this whole business is at the very busiest time – the start of the school year.
(My own school burnt down over a weekend and temporary classrooms had to be in place for Monday morning).
The reality is that the problem was known about and being addressed. The government continued to alert local government education authorities to their responsibility to survey, identify and manage the problem. The sudden need to raise the profile urgently now, was entirely down to new technical evidence leading to a change in our understanding of the concrete product itself. It is very inconvenient and disruptive, but we need a sense of proportion: One might be tempted to profanities, but Britain isn’t finished!

In the longer term however, let’s raise our game. Why have we been building schools since the nineteen seventies with an expected life-span of merely 30 years?
-And not very inspiring buildings either.
There are plenty of schools all over the country built by the Victorians that are beautiful and still giving good service. We would do well emulate our forebears.

 

One of the daily responsibilities of my Parliamentary Assistant is to trawl through the press and internet blogs to find interesting articles that I would otherwise miss.

This week’s selection included I wanna be black: the perils of self-identification by Manick Govinda in The Critic (The Critic is a monthly political and cultural journal)

It detailed a number of bizarre examples, here’s a selection:

An exhibition for artists called for artists who “identify as black”;
Another similar opportunity was targeted to “artists, academics, and researchers who identify as black”;

A white German woman went to great lengths to become (in appearance and attitude) what she believed to be the ‘quintessential black woman’;

A Theatre director , born to white  parents, was awarded a traineeship funded by Arts Council England, which was intended to address the under-representation of black and minority ethnic people in British theatre. Apparently, his argument was that because he looks like a person of “mixed heritage”, he had undergone the struggles of a black man as a consequence of his physical appearance;

A college student union published a statement asserting that it had “a long history of enabling its members to self-identify as being black…”

I’ve used this column in the past to explore the controversy surrounding the issue of self-identifying as a different gender. I can understand how someone might be confused about their gender, but self-identifying as a different colour, is a new one on me.
Four years ago I apologised to those who took offence when, in rather poor taste and equally poor judgement, I went to a Blues Brothers themed party as James Brown -the musician who invented Funk and grand-fathered Hip-hop. Nevertheless, it was intended merely as a tribute to a hero of mine. There was no pretence that I was a black musician.
This new fad however, of actually identifying as Black, has become more than a mere performance where, for some people, it isn’t enough just to have an interest in Black music, art, theatre, or whatever, instead they identify as actually being black.

Well, does it matter?
After all, it’s still pretty rare, and we are hardly fooled. Yet there is an impertinent presumption that we are required accept the fiction of false self-identification.
Despite my prejudice in favour of order and discipline, I have a libertarian streak: as long as you aren’t harming anyone else, you can call yourself whatever you like.
I was mortified when people were offended by my appearance as James Brown. But when two constituents explained to me precisely why they were offended, I understood and apologised.
I can’t believe people of any colour won’t be offended when a white artist claims an opportunity that was properly made available to address disadvantages experienced by artists who are black.
But then, in a free society, we have no right not to be offended.
Undoubtedly, many will be offended by my prejudice that the whole business is bonkers.

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.