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Sir Desmond Swayne TD MP

Sir Desmond Swayne TD MP

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Size Matters

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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

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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?

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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

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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

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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

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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.

Confidence

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In this column last week I acknowledged that the sheer level of ambition of the Chancellor’s ‘fiscal event’ might spook what John Maynard Keynes called the ‘animal spirits’ of the  markets. Well, it certainly did, though calm has now returned, for the present at least. As I write Sterling is trading at a better rate than it was before the Chancellors statement. The reality is that Sterling has been falling throughout the year, together with so many other currencies, losing 20% of its value against the US Dollar, which is about the same as the Euro has lost. It has rather a lot to do with the virility of the Federal Reserve’s response to inflation, something that the Bank of England might learn from.

In the midst of the criticisms of the Chancellor’s plans, the International Monetary Fund piped up with its own critique. This is the Same IMF that denounced George Osborne’s spending cuts in 2011, telling us that they would result in mass unemployment. It didn’t, on the contrary, we achieved record low unemployment.  Last week the IMF’s commentary was about our tax proposals giving rise to greater levels of inequality. If I recall correctly my days as an economist, income distribution is measured by the gini coefficient, and UK has one of the most even distributions amongst developed countries.

Our problem really isn’t to do with the lack of equality, it is lack of economic growth.  It is exactly this that the tax proposals are designed to address. Equally important is the need to raise more tax revenue through that economic growth. Given that fully one quarter of all our income tax revenue is raised from the top one percent of tax-payers, it is precisely this top one percent  that we most need to encourage to maximise their initiative, enterprise and effort in order that, by paying a lower rate of tax individually, they pay even more tax collectively.

Parliament has been in recess since the very day that the Chancellor made his statement in the Commons. As a consequence, the only plotting of which I am aware is what I’ve seen reported in the news media. Frankly, I’m pretty sceptical about these stories of Tories conniving with Labour to defeat the tax proposals. Rarely does anything turn out to be quite as reported. Were it to be true however, any such plotters should remember that voting against a budget measure is a confidence matter, which should properly be repaid by withdrawal of the party whip. They should be warned.

Two fingers to Socialist Dogma and Envy

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In 1984 three hundred and sixty four  economists wrote to The Times to denounce Mrs Thatcher’s economic policy and predict disaster. Events proved them wrong.
I certainly hope that the same fate awaits all those economists, forecasters, pundits and journalists who have been almost hysterical in their denunciation of Kwasi Kwarteng’s Economic Statement to the Commons last week.

Previously in this column I have expressed my misgivings about the Government’s largesse and, most recently, its willingness to pay our energy bills (though I am persuaded that politically it had no alternative. Equally, the economic damage of recession as businesses and consumers retrenched in the face of their rising bills, would have been much greater than the costs of the relief package).

A number of correspondents have sought to goad me with the charge that the Government has now found the ‘magic money tree’ notwithstanding having denounced Jeremy Corbyn on account of his belief in its existence. I reply by pointing out to them that our scope to borrow eye-watering sums to address energy bills, is based on our comparatively healthy debt to national income ratio. And that this relative health is entirely the consequence of the fiscal restraint of the 2010-2015 Coalition Government which inherited an economic basket case and fixed it. They really did fix the roof, even though the sun wasn’t shining. It hurt but it worked.

I share entirely the free-market ideology that underpins the Chancellor’s statement. I support his vision for enterprise and investment to drive economic growth.  My only reservation is that reduced taxation should be matched by reductions in government expenditure: A bigger role for free enterprise ought to be matched by a smaller role for the state.

There are risks: The higher borrowing might spook financial markets and drive up the costs of servicing our debt. The tax cuts might, with so many supply constraints still present as an overhang from the pandemic economy, add fuel to inflation, to which the Bank of England will respond with further interest rate increases. Nevertheless, alternative courses were hardly attractive with the prospect recession and stagnation. The Chancellor was right to be radical.

What particularly upset my correspondents was the abolition of the cap on banker’s bonuses. I am glad he grasped this socialist nettle. It is grotesque to limit the pay for people simply because we do not like them. It’s like cutting the pay of Premier League footballers just because we think they earn too much. We’d soon regret it when they went to play elsewhere. The Financial crisis of 2008 was caused by a confused and ineffective regulatory environment and not by bonuses. We want successful bankers to come back to the City of London, earn here, make a success of it here, and pay their taxes here. I rejoice at the two fingers the Chancellor has raised to socialist dogma and envy.

A Moment of Reflection…

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I did reflect at eight o’clock this- evening. Indeed, I did so for longer that the mere minute that was officially encouraged. I confess however, that my mind wandered, and I found myself thinking about my own life rather than that of Queen Elizabeth II, an act of pure self-indulgence, please forgive me. My excuse is that she is part of the constant backdrop to my entire life, having been born four years into her reign. Everything that I can remember happened whilst she was our Queen: Her broadcast was part of every Christmas Day.

 I swore my allegiance to her on ten occasions.  As my mind ranged over the years, I recalled my Grandparents. They were enthusiastic Royalists. One granny had collection of coronation mugs which now adorn my office at Westminster. My grandpa, a soldier of the first world war , who saw the angels of Mons, had a photograph of the young Queen displayed in the ‘back room’ , he would always refer to her as “my Queen” and would stand to attention when the national anthem was played at the end of the evening’s broadcasts – yes! the telly -a very substantial item of furniture- stopped every night and didn’t resume till late afternoon the following day. There were only a couple of channels, and they were just black and white. Do you remember the Test Card with 359 lines?
After the national anthem the image on the screen would disappear into a white dot in the centre and a high-pitched whine would continue until it was switched off.

They never had a fridge: they didn’t need one; the cupboard in the front room was quite cool enough. The front room was only for entertaining, I only ever recall it being used once a year for ‘Hogmanay’ which was also my grandpa’s birthday. Life during the day was lived in the ‘scullery’ (a sort of annex to the kitchen) in which a coal fire was lit first thing in the morning.  After tea in the evening, life would move into the ‘back room’ where another coal fire was lit.
In the mornings my brother and I would scratch designs into the frost that had formed on the inside of the windowpanes. We would be sent down the street to fetch Granny’s “messages” (her shopping). This could be quite confusing because she would always refer to shops by the names that they had been known by years previously, when they had been opened by former Italian Prisoners of war that had decided to settle in the town.  There were  no supermarkets, you queued at each shop and asked for what you wanted at the counter. On our way to and from the shops we would rush up the footbridge if a train was passing and stand enveloped in smoke.
Even the money was different: We were given a threepenny bit to put in the collection on Sundays. We got two shillings pocket money (called a ‘florin’, now replaced by 10P) and if you got a ten bob note  (50P) on your birthday you were a wealthy boy – or even a postal order, remember them?

There were no mobile phones, no constant noise of social media, no tyranny of email. If you wanted to telephone someone you had to ring the exchange and ask to be put through to their number. Remember button A and button B in the telephone box?
Of course, the downside was that if you were travelling and were planning to meet someone, you had no way of letting them know that you would be late, or even not going to make it at all,   potentially ending a relationship when you had arranged to meet up with your girlfriend in Rome.

They lived modestly, but my grandpa always took pride in his appearance. I’ve inherited his morning suit and top hat. I wore them to every audience I had with Her Majesty when I was her Vice-Chamberlin, and I wore it to her lying in state last week

Monarchy

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Had we an elected president, who then died in whilst in office, undoubtedly there would be proper respect and ceremony to mark it. I doubt however, that there would have been displays of public grief and affection in the way that we have seen in the last few days. Would crowds of well-wishers have flooded to the presidential palace and to the presidential country retreats?Would there have been such ceremony, even in the midst of the mourning, to mark the inauguration of a president’s replacement?I was out very late on Thursday night walking along the Mall and watching the crowds thronging towards Buckingham Palace, some with flowers, others just to stand, wait, and reflect.On Saturday morning I walked up the Mall again, this time on my way to take part the Accession Council at St James’s Palace as a member of the Privy Council. The crowds were out in even greater force to witness the Proclamation of our new King with a great shout of ‘God Save The King’ followed by a rousing three cheers.Unlike relatively short presidential terms, a monarch provides something of a backdrop for a lifetime, providing a constant presence and reassurance. We may imagine that we have been almost familiar with our monarchs simply because it seemed that they were always there, an ever constant presence. 

 I was Vice Chamberlain to our late Queen from 2012 to 2014. I cannot claim to have known her better than any other of her subjects, but one of the rare privileges had by the Vice Chamberlain is private audiences with the Monarch when a humble address is sent by the Commons to the Sovereign. These take place following every State Opening of Parliament, they mark important events like royal marriages and births, but they are also used for more mundane business, for example, where the Commons wants a particular individual appointed to a job that is in the gift of the Crown.On these occasions the Vice Chamberlain is entirely alone with the Monarch, nobody else is present. My experience was that once the formal business was concluded, the Queen would relax and we’d have a brief chat. She had quite a sense of humour.I’ve told a story in this column before, but I think it bears repetition: When I presented my first humble address to the Queen at Buckingham Palace, I was briefed beforehand by a courtier about the proper etiquette. In particular, he insisted that on no account was I to observe the ‘former custom’ of walking backwards so as not to turn my back on the Sovereign when I left the room. He said that this sort of ‘flummery’ had been abandoned for good.So, I presented the humble address, I enjoyed our chat and then, when I was about to take my leave, with a mischievous smile the Queen asked me “ now, are you going to walk backwards?”.I replied that I had been ordered not to, but if she’d like me to..?She chuckled, saying it that she didn’t mind at all either way, but she just had the impression that I might be a stickler for tradition. I said that, if it was really all the same to her, then yes, I would like to walk backwards.She smiled and said “just make sure you don’t trip up, or I’ll be in real trouble”