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.

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