Together with France we announced our intention to recognise a Palestinian state. In this column on 26^th July I remarked that, although  this was ‘gesture politics’ nevertheless, I acknowledged that sometimes in politics a gesture is called for. Recognising Palestine – gesture politics?
Our gesture was to give vent to our growing despair at the consequence for civilians of the ferocity of Israel’s assault on Gaza. Equally, the accumulation of years of frustration at a growing policy of ‘apartheid’ in Israel’s stewardship of the occupied West Bank (this will be received as a controversial statement but, having once been the minister responsible for our assistance to Palestinians, I believe it to be justified: It is time to call a spade a bloody shovel).

For years the objective of our policy has been the implementation of a Palestinian state based on the occupied West Bank. Throughout this time however, Israel’s actions have been designed to thwart any such prospect.
Now that we have announced our determination to recognise Palestine, Israel has brought forward its most controversial development: building some 3,500 dwellings in the East 1 corridor, linking East Jerusalem with existing illegal settlements, and cutting the West Bank in half. The intention is clear, and has been made explicit by Israel’s Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich:
“they’ll keep talking about a Palestinian dream, and we’ll keep on building a Jewish reality…a reality that buries the idea of a Palestinian state, because there’s nothing to recognise’.

How are we to respond?
Equally, how are we to respond to man-made famine in Gaza, as well as the continuing devastation of civilian life?
Every time ministers come to the Commons to face the anger at what is being done in Palestine, they reiterate that they are very cross about it; They refer to the actions that they have taken – some modest reductions in arms sales and the sanctioning of a handful of individuals. When MPs point out that these measures have had no impact, the Secretary of State, David Lammy refers to ‘further action’ that we will consider.
What action?
Well, I did ask:

 Hansard 20 May Column 934

Sir Desmond Swayne
The House wants to know, and Israel needs to know, exactly what the Foreign Secretary means by “further action”.

Mr Lammy
I would ask the right hon. Gentleman to consult the Oxford English Dictionary and look at the two words.

I think Mr Lammy demeaned himself with that answer, but I understand his difficulty. He is appalled and angry about what is happening in Palestine but he is at a complete loss. We are in thrall to the Trump administration and know that it will not tolerate any effective sanctions on Israel. We have other fish to fry. So, we stand and watch as Gaza burns and the West Bank is swallowed. We will be judged accordingly.

Some of the striking headlines indicating what the Free World’s media made of the Trump/ Putin Summit in Alaska:

— Sky News: “Putin behaved as if he was in control and running the show.”

— Politico: “Putin’s triumph in Alaska”;

— The New York Times: “President Trump gave President Vladimir Putin a warm public reception, effectively ending his diplomatic isolation”;

— Bloomberg: “The US-Russia summit showed how little Europe matters in Trump’s world”

— CNN: “Putin still achieved significant successes”;

— The Washington Post: “Putin won, regardless of the outcome”;

— Financial Times: “Negotiations ended without a ceasefire, despite the warm reception given to the Russian leader by the US president”;

— Al Jazeera: “A big victory for President Putin” at the summit with Trump in Alaska”;

— El País: “Trump ended Putin’s isolation without achieving a ceasefire in Ukraine”;

And my own assessment: I thought it was utterly revolting.
To have to watch the murderous assassin and war criminal, the abductor of thousands of children, the author of the atrocities in Bakhmut, being welcomed with pomp and ceremony, even the red carpet, it was truly disgusting.
Trump and Putin were all over each other like a rash. The way they flattered and complimented each other was grotesque. They clearly deserve one another. As my Granny used to say,  ‘judge a man by the company that he keeps’.
Contrast all that with the way that Zelensky was ambushed in the White House back in March.

So Trump’s advice to Ukraine is to ‘do a deal’ by giving up sufficient territory to satiate Putin’s appetite.
How can you do a deal with someone that has a track  record of breaking them?
And with someone who has made it clear that Ukraine should not exist as an independent nation at all?
Anyway, there was a deal: It was called the Bucharest Memorandum of December 1994. The deal was that Ukraine -then possessing the third largest stockpile of nuclear weapons- agreed to give them all up, in return for a guarantee of its independence and territorial integrity. The deal was with Russia, USA and ourselves.
 Is Ukraine supposed to just shrug of the abrogation of that deal and trust Russia with another one?

*

The Alaska Summit was preceded at Chevening with a ‘love fest’ between David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary and the USA Vice-President. Mr Lammy has said some pretty uncomplimentary things about Trump in the past. In 2017 he called him a ‘tyrant in a toupee’, and much worse.
I gently reminded him about this in the Commons on 25^th February (Hansard column 526):

Sir Desmond Swayne
Does the Secretary of State regret recanting the views he originally expressed in assessing Trump? When the time is right—it is certainly not any time now—can I urge him to consider following the example of Archbishop Cranmer by plunging the offending hand first into the flame?

Mr Lammy, Secretary of State
Er—[Laughter.] This is a serious debate and a serious discussion. As I have said, that is, in a sense, old news; there is so much news before us, and so much history to be forged, which requires diplomacy …

There is something grotesque about watching elderly ladies and gentlemen being hauled away by burly policemen, for doing no more than peacefully displaying a piece of card expressing their opposition to genocide and their support for Palestine Action.
At the same time, a retailer displaying a card in his shop window, expressing his contempt for shoplifters, was ordered by a policeman to remove it.
What on earth has happened to freedom of expression, that we are being rightly reprimanded by both the President and Vice President of the USA during their visits here.

Following the demonstration at the weekend, consider the enormous police and crown prosecution time and effort that will go into processing the 534 arrests on charges of terrorism.
Really?
…For displaying a poster?

Palestine Action was banned as a terrorist organisation following their penetration of an RAF airfield and causing millions of pounds worth of damage to military aircraft: one might say of the ban, that they had it coming. Nevertheless, there were already serious offences, with custodial sentences, with which the perpetrators could have been charged. And which would not have put the police in the ridiculous position of having to arrest hundreds of entirely peaceful protestors.
We are told that there are more serious concerns that led to the banning of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, so serious in fact, that we cannot be told what they are.  Which, in my estimate, is an intolerable abuse of secrecy in a liberal western democracy.

The events of the weekend are only the latest in a long litany of heavy-handed police intrusion into our rights to express our opinions and concerns. Notwithstanding that some others will find those opinions offensive. Putting up with having to take offence, is a proper price to pay for living in a free society.

I have no doubt that chief constables and individual policemen have made errors of judgement when interfering where lawful expression has fallen well short of incitement or harassment.
The principal culprit, however, is Parliament itself. MPs have not been vigilant in defending liberty and have left sufficient ambiguity in the law as to put the police in a dilemma and provide scope for the ‘woke’ tendency amongst their number.
Parliament has all the power necessary to resolve these issues. Alas, the composition of this current Parliament ensures that there is no will to do so.
As a proud democracy we are shamed by the criticism of President Trump and Vice-President Vance, and we should hang our heads accordingly.

The 30% reduction in graduate recruitment this year has been attributed to the substitution of artificial intelligence (AI) in those roles that graduates might otherwise have filled.
I’m not entirely convinced. Recruitment is sharply down across the board and may well be a measure of the impact of the steep increase in employment costs brought about by the Chancellor’s budget, and its impact on overall business confidence.
I was told by one large recruiter that, having previously given over to AI the entire process of sifting the curriculum vitae of all its applicants, it was now having to hand it back a human process because the AI employed by graduates, when crafting their applications, had proved more than a match for the AI system that was designed to score them.

The key thing to keep in mind about AI, is that the intelligence is artificial. Its strength is that it can handle huge amounts of information, vastly more that our brains can. But it still has to be told exactly what to do with all that information by algorithms designed by human minds. Accordingly, it can be trained to detect patterns across enormous data sets at lightning speeds. These were once functions that we struggled to do ourselves, taking much longer and with a greater propensity to make mistakes.
AI can work very hard for us when we are clever enough to harness its possibilities, but it cannot think. Which is what only we can do.

Elon Musk believes that AI is ‘summoning the demon’ and in 2015 he signed an open letter together with Stephen Hawking and others warning of the pitfalls of AI development.
I’m reminded of Hal 9000, the name of the computer in the 1969 film A space Odyssey, which decides to end the mission by blowing up the spaceship and its crew.
The danger is not that AI can be intrinsically good or evil, only that its applications can be developed by stupid, negligent, thoughtless, even evil but nevertheless, very clever people.

The two great dystopian English novels of the last century are Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World. The late Neil Postman, a trenchant critic of digital technology, pointed out that In the former, the regime deprives us of our liberty by harnessing technology to deceive us, withhold information from us and monitor our every movement and conversation.
But by contrast, Huxley paints a picture where truth is drowned in a sea of trivia and irrelevance, where we have so much information we are reduced to passivity.
“Orwell feared those that would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one”.

I wonder which of these dreadful visions AI better lends itself to.
Perhaps it is a danger of the worst of both. Certainly, the mass surveillance society developing in China, assisted by AI, is the most obvious oppression. But then the development of social media and online retailing, which influences what we do, buy, and desire, is an equally frightful prospect.

In what remains of the summer my suggestion is to turn off our screens, read books, and think for ourselves.

The Prime Minister has received another letter from MPs, of all parties, demanding the official recognition of ‘Palestine’ as a state.
A constituent has emailed to express her surprise that my name was not among the signatories.
The Simple answer is that I had already sent just such a letter to the Prime Minister in May, signed together with the ‘Father of the House’ , Sir Edward Leigh.

The Government’s reluctance to comply with the request is based on the two arguments. First, one can only play the ‘recognition card’ once, so you need to be sure that you wait and choose the moment when it will have maximum impact. Second, UK policy is to recognise legitimate governments rather than ‘states’ and that, at present, there is no government of anywhere called Palestine.
That we want such a government and state, is not in doubt: it has been the cornerstone of our policy in the region for as long as I can remember. Parliament has already voted for it, but the Government, like its predecessor, continues to wait and watch, notwithstanding that France has now stolen a march, by beating us to it.

Will France’s action make any appreciable difference?
It is too soon to tell, but I am not optimistic.
I accept that were we to announce our recognition for a Palestinian State it would amount to no more than a political gesture. It would be a measure of our anger and frustration at the current state of affairs. Nevertheless, sometimes in politics such gestures are called for.
The reality is that, such has been the pace of illegal settlement by Israelis in the occupied West Bank of the Jordan, any glance at a map, will show that the prospect of an economically viable and geographically contiguous Palestinian state is now almost zero. When I had ministerial responsibility for this brief, I fulminated against the Government of Israel, but to no avail.

Were there to be a Palestinian State there would have to be very extensive rolling-back of Israeli settlements. Those of us who can recall the vicious opposition to the dismantling of some twenty Israeli settlements in Gaza under the orders of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2005, will know how difficult it will be to secure Israeli abandonment of the Occupied Territories to accommodate a Palestinian state. Particularly so, when the settler movement, including elements of Israel’s Government, are motivated by an ideological -even ‘divine’- belief in the restoration of ‘Greater Israel’.

I am deeply Pessimistic.
Hamas chose its moment when it launched the calculated barbarity of its grotesque attack on Israel: It knew that, having sown the wind, Gaza would reap the whirlwind; It did so, in order to scupper the rapprochement between Israel and its Arab neighbours, particularly Saudi Arabia, and to radicalise a new generation.
Israel, by the ferocity of its own response, has fallen into the trap laid by Hamas. I fear that Israel will now be subjected to another generation’s worth of terrorism, and I’m afraid that we are going to experience it too.

On 16^th January, in this column, I raised the danger that taxpayers may have to pay compensation to Gerry Adams as a consequence of the Government’s decision to repeal the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023.
On Wednesday I asked the Prime Minister about it. He had just previously answered a question about it from his own backbenches, in which he explained that the Government was bound to proceed with repealing the Act because the courts had struck down it down as being unlawful.
When I put my question, I pointed out that he was quite wrong to state that it had been ‘struck down’, nevertheless he repeated those word for a second time in his answer to me.

I don’t believe the PM would deliberately mislead the House of Commons, but it is very odd that such a senior and experienced lawyer should describe the outcome of the legal process so incorrectly: No court can strike down an act of Parliament, the courts enjoy no such power: The ‘High Court of Parliament’ is our supreme law-making body: No court trumps it

[To be fair, there was a time when the PM’s terminology occasionally would accurately describe events: For the 48 years between the enactment of the European Communities Act 1972 until its repeal on 21 January 2020. During those years the courts were empowered to disapply an Act of Parliament if it was found to contravene European Law (and they did so in the Factortame case when the 1988 Maritime Shipping Act -designed to protect our fisheries -was overturned). That constitutional abomination is ended however, as the supremacy of Parliament was restored by BREXIT.]

I believe the PM’s confusion arises from his imperfect understanding of the Human Rights Act 1998. That Act makes provision for the courts, when they encounter an act of Parliament that breaches human rights protected by the 1998 Act, to issue a ‘declaration of incompatibility’.
But it is only a declaration. It does not disapply the ‘offending’ law, it certainly doesn’t strike it down. It merely declares that, in the opinion of the court, that it compromises a European Convention right. The declaration does not alter the law passed by Parliament.

Of course, Parliament may choose to address the incompatibility identified by the court and amend the law, but there is no obligation, or even expectation, that it should do so.

The situation is that the Government has chosen to repeal the Northern Ireland Legacy Act and it should not seek to transfer the blame to a decision by a court. The Government must take responsibility for its own choices, particularly when the choice it has made, opens the door to the grotesque possibility of compensation paid to terrorists, whilst placing aging former British soldiers back in the dock for actions they took to defend the public from those very terrorists.
It’s nothing short of diabolical.

Last month, a man who burned a copy of the Quran was found guilty of a religiously aggravated public order offence. Clearly, his action was in poor taste, but I believe it should not have been a criminal offence, and that Parliament never intended that it would be.

The Government is consulting on a definition of Islamophobia. Quite rightly the preface to the consultation document states that “Any proposed definition must be compatible with the unchanging right of the UK’s people to exercise freedom of speech and expression – which includes the right to criticise, express dislike of, or insult religions and/or the beliefs and practices of adherents.”

I am not reassured. The danger is that blasphemy laws are creeping in by the back door, through public order offences, where the expression and actions of those who criticise the Muslim religion are deemed to cause ‘harassment, alarm and distress’ .

The Public Order Act 1986 is being misused—far beyond the intent of Parliament—to police what we can and cannot say about Islam.
Part 3 of the Act created new offences relating to racial hatred, and this was later amended to include religious hatred. Nevertheless, Part 3  clearly states “Nothing in this Part shall be read or given effect in a way which prohibits or restricts discussion, criticism or expressions of antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse of particular religions or the beliefs or practices of their adherents”.
So, clearly, the Public Order Act was never intended to become a blasphemy law.

Ever since the violent furore that followed publication of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, public conversation about Islam has been muted by self-censorship in fear of a violent response by those who are offended. But In a free society nobody should have right not to be offended.
Nevertheless, charges have been brought for causing “distress” to the “religious institution of Islam” and making the author responsible for the violent reaction of those who will not tolerate the opinions of others.
The Public Order Act is being used to prohibit us from saying what we like about religion: A person may be found guilty because of the violent reaction of those offended.
 From Sir Salman Rushdie to the Batley teacher still in hiding with his family, the threat of violence is what lies behind these attempts to use the Public order Act as new blasphemy law.

The problem is that the guarantee of freedom to criticise religions, which I quoted from part 3 of the Act, only applies in Part 3 -the part that deals with  racial  and religious hatred.
Parliament never thought Part 1 of the Act, which makes it an offence to cause “harassment, alarm or distress” by using “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour” would be used to criminalise the expression of opinions about religious belief. But that is exactly what is now happening.

A definition of Islamophobia it will make matters much worse whatever its intent.
To defend our religious liberty and freedom of expression it is vital that we clarify the law to stop the misuse of the Public Order Act by the courts.

A couple of days ago I received a letter headed with a large, coloured logo ‘REPAIR’, giving a time and place for a meeting at Westminster.  At first glance I thought it was advertising one of those sessions where you can take along something broken and get it fixed -Just like the excellent group that meets regularly at the Avonway Community Centre in Fordingbridge. On closer inspection however, it turned out to be a meeting to discuss the demand for reparations to be paid by the United Kingdom to Caribbean nations for our part in the Slave Trade.
This was the same agenda about which the Prime Minister was ambushed at the Commonwealth summit in Samoa last October.

That the slave trade was a despicable business is uncontested. Equally, that the UK enterprises and individuals participated in it and profited from it, is also uncontested.
Nevertheless, it was Britain that led the way by abolishing the Slave trade in 1807, and slavery throughout the Empire in 1833. We used our naval power to impose our own abolition of the trade on the rest of the World: 13% of the Royal Navy’s manpower was assigned to the West Africa Anti-Slavery Command. Historians have called that endeavour “the most expensive example of moral action”

It is wholly impractical to try to undo the wrongs over so many generations.
The demand to do so, is based on the assumption that both individuals and nations still suffer from the legacy of the Slave Trade. Comparisons however, between per capita incomes in the Caribbean and West Africa simply do not bear this out.

Leading the charge for reparations is our own Church of England, which has launched its own ‘Spire Project’ to pay initial grants for £100 million, with an aspiration eventually to reach £1 Billion. This is against a background of parishes for which clergy cannot be afforded, and where the taxpayer is being asked to subsidise repairs to church buildings.
The premise on which the project is founded, is that Queen Anne’s Bounty (the amount given in 1703 to pay for parish ministry) was funded by investments in slaver enterprises.  This is false: the Bounty was funded by investments in annuities and the profits paid were afforded from Government tax revenues.

Of course, individual churchmen were involved in slavery. We regard this now as horrifying, but at the time it was commonplace. Slavery was universal, even freed slaves owned slaves.
The Church’s position does not take account of the fact that it was the Church itself, together with individual churchmen, that led the great campaign to abolish slavery and who subsequently expended blood and treasure in the effort to supress it.

Why should we be overly concerned by the Church misappropriating funds properly intended to fund its own parish ministry?
The reality is that this is the leading initiative in a much wider endeavour designed to put similar pressure on other institutions and ultimately on all of us as taxpayers. The opening demand for which is the mind-boggling sum of £15-£18 Trillion.

Rishi Sunak, when Prime Minister, made it clear that UK will not contemplate paying reparations.
We will have to see if the present Labour Government will stand firm. Reading the runes, it’s not reassuring.

Rather than having specific legislation to change abortion law, almost every crime bill which has come before Parliament over the last few years, has presented the opportunity to a dedicated group of enthusiasts, to use each such bill to try to amend abortion law. Hitherto they have largely been seen off….Until now.

 The fundamental shift in the make up of the Commons that took place at the last election changed everything. Notwithstanding that abortion is a ‘conscience’ issue where the party whip is absent, all but four Conservatives voted against changing the law on Tuesday night. On that day, The Commons, by a majority of 242, made a major change to abortion law, without any of the procedural checks which normally precede such changes. There were no evidence hearings, nor any pre-legislative scrutiny of a draft bill, nor any sessions in a standing committee. Instead, just 46 minutes of a Back-Bench debate and a winding-up speech by a Minister (herself a previous leader of attempts to amend abortion law) who refused even to take interventions.

The consequence of the amendment is profound: it will no longer be illegal for a woman to carry out her own abortion at home, for any reason, at any gestation, up to birth.
It will remain a punishable criminal offence for any provider, clinician or other individual to assist her, but she is free of any criminal penalty when she does it herself. And in the days of ‘tele-medicine’ this will present little difficulty: Since the pandemic you can order medicine to abort a pregnancy over the telephone, without any face-to-face consultation and without any check to establish the length of gestation.
(An amendment to restore the pre-covid regime of face-to-face consultations with a doctor, before securing the abortion prescription was soundly defeated).

The debate centred on the rights of women to control their own bodies and the need to remove the prospect criminal penalty from vulnerable women.
But how many vulnerable women are coerced into abortions by controlling and abusive partners in the age of tele-medicine, unscrutinised by an appointment at the Doctor’s surgery?
Equally, the demand for absolute control of a woman over her own body, ignores the fact that, in pregnancy, there are two bodies that need to be considered. At what point in gestation does the child have rights too?
This key issue wasn’t even touched on in the short time that the debate lasted.

Profoundly shocking, was the great cheer of approval that went up when the vote was announced that the amendment had been carried.

“ Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet, saying, In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not”  Matthew 2,17-18