Previously In this column Parties (desmondswaynemp.com) I described my original detachment from the PM’s difficulties, because I voted against all the rules of which he had fallen foul. I also explained the confusion between regulation and guidance and how it applied differently between dwellings and places of work: I am confident that the PM is clear in his own mind that he attended work events rather than parties.
The difficulty is that the public perception is of serial rule breaking in Downing Street and even more important, that the PM has not been straight with Parliament about it.
I use the word ‘perception’ because we have yet to have see full facts from either Sue Gray or now, the Metropolitan Police. We are reliant on the hyperbole of journalists who were not present. A ‘prosecco-fuelled party’ might just have been a restrained glass of wine amongst properly distanced work colleagues in an office where they lawfully worked together. Access to the facts is important.

Also important, particularly for politicians reliant on the support of voters, is the public perception of these events, and that perception may already be settled opinion.
The calculation with which Conservative members of Parliament must wrestle is whether the PM is capable of regaining public trust and the authority to govern. He has, after all, managed it previously: My correspondence was equally large and angry following his failure to sack Dominic Cummings after his ‘eye-test’ at Barnard Castle. Yet he re-established a ten-point poll lead. Could he repeat the feat, or has he irretrievably trashed his brand?

They also need to consider the unpredictability of the outcome if they initiate the process of replacing the PM.
 There remain dedicated and enthusiastic supporters of Boris in Parliament, in the voluntary Conservative party and amongst the Public:  I know this because hundreds of them have emailed me. I recall, my own anger and bitterness when parliamentarians jettisoned Mrs Thatcher, which had consequences which lasted years.

A member of the public put it to me yesterday, that it would be absurd to remove a strong charismatic leader at such a time of national and international danger. It is a proper consideration.

Boris won a general election and delivered Brexit as promised. Does his parliamentary party owe him loyalty for having delivered them from the chaos of the 2017-19 Parliament, or has he become an embarrassment and permanent liability?

A number of my parliamentary colleagues are loathe to give satisfaction to the broadcast journalists who always opposed Brexit and are out for revenge. Equally, they know they are receiving a significant number of template letters whose authors claim to have hitherto always voted conservative – when they know full well that it often isn’t true.

All these things weigh on the mind.
To save anyone asking however, I’ll be keeping my own counsel

The numbers of unemployed workers are back down to the sort of levels that we experienced before Covid-19 struck and the number of vacancies is at an all-time high.
Nevertheless, before the pandemic we also had record levels of employment too. Now however, we have about a million fewer workers at work. If we accept rough estimates that some 500,000 Europeans have returned to the continent, then that leaves us struggling to explain why half a million people have become economically inactive.
Is it that the experience of lock-down and furlough have left them disinclined to return to the stress of the workplace and that they place a higher value on their time away from it?
Might a shorter working week tempt them back to work?

The demand for a shorter working week with no loss of pay has been on the agenda of the political left for some time. Most people recognise however, that it is economic suicide unless accompanied by greater productivity in the worked hours to compensate.

A shorter working week will not suit many enterprises: Most of us will have experienced the frustration of enquiring about an important piece of work, only to discover that the key person to speak to is on leave. Adding 52 further such days per year on which that might occur with a 4-day week, would not necessarily make for greater productivity.
Nevertheless, there may be enterprises which could cope well with a shorter week. In 1976 I worked in a factory that operated a three-day week.  Initially they had been forced to do so, as everyone had, during the Miner’s Strike of 1973-4. When the strike was over and the 5-day week was restored however, this particular company -having discovered just how much more productive they had become during the national emergency measure- carried on with just the 3 days working. 

A trial for a four-day week is due to run for six months later this year if 30 or so companies can be recruited to participate. Employees will get 100% of their previous pay for 80% of their previous hours in exchange for 100% of their previous productivity. Academics from Oxford & Cambridge will monitor performance   – but not nearly as closely, I expect, as the boards of directors will.

I am sceptical because my experience was of a manufacturing unit. I ‘m not convinced that the model will work for our largely service based economy, but if firms are willing to experiment, the results may be interesting. Of one thing I’m certain however, it certainly wouldn’t work in the Commons.

I was surprised by the accounts of strong-arm tactics by Government whips. I know too many of them well and they are not unpleasant and aggressive ladies and gentlemen.
I was myself a whip both in opposition and in Government and over the course of the decades I witnessed the waning of their influence.
My whip asks me how I plan to vote rather than telling me. It’s not unreasonable for me to let him know,  so that he can at least get the responsible minister to address my reservations and see if he can persuade me with reasonable argument.
That one might believe a threat to turn off government largesse in one’s constituency strikes me as highly improbable. Government expenditure just doesn’t work like that. You’d have to be quite gullible to believe any such threat.
Slightly more plausible would be a threat to stymie your prospects of becoming a minister, or other parliamentary career opportunity, were you flout the whip. Nevertheless, even that threat has diminished over recent years. There was a time when the Party Leader would focus on Cabinet appointments and leave the junior ministerial ranks to the Chief Whip to decide, but those days have gone. Equally, the appointment of so many serial rebels to high office has made nonsense of the notion that promotion is dependent on obedience.
The appointment to sit on Commons Select Committees, or to be Chairman of any of them was, until recently, entirely in the gift of party whips, giving them significant patronage and leverage. That however, was reformed under the Cameron premiership and those positions are now elected, removing another potential weapon from the armoury of the whips.
There have been other factors at work too which have led to more independence of mind among MPs.
First, the ease of electronic communication has given MPs much more exposure to the opinions and influence of their constituents. It also provides a useful network for like-minded MPs to encourage one another under the radar in any potential rebellion.
Finally, the opening-up of candidate selection processes to more democratic procedures, such as open primaries, introduced number of MPs who considered that it was more their own personal ‘brand’ rather than their party brand that won the day and, in turn, they exhibited a greater measure of independence. Though they were few in number, their attitude was very infectious.

The notion that whipping can influence a leadership challenge is just complete nonsense and it is secrecy makes nonsense of it. Whatever you may tell your whip, or anyone else for that matter, only The Chairman of the 1922 Committee ever knows if you really sent in a letter, and only you yourself will know how you voted in any subsequent ballot.
It’s a bit like the constituent who stopped me the other day and told me he’d only vote for me at the next election if I voted for a particular candidate after a leadership challenge. No doubt he trusted me to tell him who I voted for in any such ballot, but how would I ever know that he’d fulfilled his part of the bargain at the next election?

With whipping, I think we almost got to the position where, if you want to win, then you’ve got to win the argument. Which in a democracy, is no bad thing.

I voted against the regulations that deprived of us of so much of our liberty during the various iterations of lock-down over the last couple of years.
I also spent a significant amount of time explaining the regulations to constituents, advising them and answering their questions about what they were permitted to do. This was particularly the case for so many self-employed constituents who were unclear as to whether they could continue working. The principal difficulty was confusion between what was regulation and what was only guidance. This even confused police officers, with people being told to stop doing things which, in fact, they were entitled to do.
I rather think that Sue Gray’s inquiry into parties in Downing Street will focus on this distinction between regulation and guidance and, in particular, the fact that Number 10 is a place of work and not a dwelling, where the rules were quite different.
If this does indeed turn out to be the Monopoly “get out of jail free card”,  I fear it just won’t wash because the distinction between regulation and guidance was never clear in the minds of the public in the first place.
As far as they are concerned it looks like one rule for us and another for everyone else.
A significant danger for the PM, were he to be exonerated by Sue Gray’s inquiry,  is that some new allegation then hits the headlines. 
I have received a huge correspondence on this whole business, representing a number of different points of view. I’ve said I will reflect on all that constituents have said to me -and I will. 

On Wednesday last week Mr Speaker granted an urgent question to My Colleague Miriam Cates MP on the Government’s COVID vaccination strategy, which includes the policy of sacking -starting in April- any unvaccinated NHS and domiciliary care staff.
The question was timely because, as another colleague, Dr Andrew Murrison MP put it, “when the facts change, we are entitled to change our minds”. The reality is that when Parliament passed the regulations in December which enforce the policy of sacking unvaccinated NHS and care workers (although I voted against the provisions), we didn’t then know what we now know: Which is that risk the unvaccinated pose to patients declines after a very short period and that we have the alternative of regular lateral flow testing, which will tell, whether healthcare professionals pose a threat to their patients.
The vaccination doesn’t stop you catching COVID or passing it on, what it does is reduce your risk of serious illness. So, the rationale for forcing it on NHS and care staff has gone.
 The Government’s own analysis is that that 73,000 NHS staff and 38,000 domiciliary care workers will leave as a consequence of the policy of enforced vaccination.
We have no plan for how to replace them and there is already a critical shortage of domiciliary care workers, so much so that beds are unnecessarily occupied in hospitals because care providers have insufficient staff to care for them if they were allowed to go home.  

The Government should seek to persuade NHS and domiciliary care workers to be vaccinated, not threaten to sack them. The current course of action is just bonkers.
Alas, we made no progress in persuading ministers last week, there is still time, but it is fast running out 

 

 

In response to the Government’s ‘Plan B’ guidance, that pupils should wear face coverings whilst seated in class, someone anonymously  sent me a surgical mask on which they had inscribed “putting germ/ bacteria ridden cloths over kids’ faces for 8+ hours is ABUSIVE’.
I photographed it and broadcast it on twitter with the caption ‘whoever sent me this anonymously, I agree with you’
Later in the day a journalist asked me to respond to the storm of protest over the tweet which has ‘upset so many people’.  Well, as I’ve conceded in this column previously, I use twitter infrequently to broadcast only: I do not read any of the responses to my tweets. First because I’m sure they would drive me insane and second, because there are only so many hours in a day (the tweet in question having attracted 4,343 replies).  So, having not read any of them, I was unaware of the ‘twitter storm’ until the journalist tracked me down. Perhaps he’d taken the trouble to read the comments which I hadn’t. The only measure that I had was that some 47 thousand readers had flagged the tweet indicating that they liked it, which seem a pretty good score to me.

On Wednesday I raised the classroom face covering requirement in the Commons with The Secretary of state for Education. I was surprised and delighted that a number of other colleagues did so too (I had previously got the impression that I was a lone voice). I was even more delighted that the Secretary of State responded by acknowledging that the requirement was indeed a dreadful imposition and he wouldn’t let it last a day longer than he believed was absolutely necessary.
In support of the measure however, he referred to a study that purported to show a 0.6% lower Covid-related absentee rate in Schools that had required face coverings last November, than in schools that hadn’t.
Actually, having now read the study myself, all I can say is that it is so heavily caveated as to be pretty worthless. I then heard  Karl Heneghan, Professor of Evidence Based Medicine at Oxford University, deconstruct it in a radio interview in which he concluded that, in fact it, showed that the very opposite: that schools with face coverings fared worse!
The report itself acknowledges that it is not peer-reviewed and that ‘there is a level of statistical uncertainty about the result’.

There have been reports in the papers that in some schools whole classes have simply refused to comply. As I have pointed out to many of the parents who have written to me to complain about the requirement, it isn’t actually a requirement at all: It is merely guidance not regulation. Even that guidance acknowledges that face coverings should not be worn where clear sound or facial expressions to communicate are relied  upon– as a former teacher, I’d say that in class, that’s  ALL OF THE TIME!
Parents and pupils should know that they are not compulsory, but that you may end up having a row with your school.

And now I’m utterly vindicated: the former Children’s Laureate, Julia Donaldson – the author of the Children’s best-seller The Gruffalo has called the requirement ‘dystopian’ , the very word I used to describe face covering from the outset.
We really must stop making children do things just to make adults feel safer.

Next, Boris himself referred to ‘mumbo-jumbo’ -remember where you heard it first: I’m on a roll.

I’ve said this before, but the volume recent correspondence makes it worth repeating: Constituents who disagree with me often insist that, as their elected representative it is my duty to represent their views rather than my own.
Of course, it would be a foolish politician, reliant on the support of voters, who took no account of their opinions. Nevertheless, I am not the personal ambassador or advocate for any my constituents.
Though I typically receive 200 emails per day, they are overwhelmingly for the same correspondents.
My responsibility is to all my constituents, the vast majority of whom have never expressed any opinion to me at all, save through the ballot box. It would be entirely wrong were I to know-tow to the opinions of those. who shout loudest or longest.
The chief duty that I owe to my constituents is the exercise of my judgement in the debates and decisions in Parliament.
Of course,  I am influenced by arguments and experience that constituents bring to my attention, but when I differ, they often complain that I ignored them. I didn’t: I just disagreed with them, which is a very different thing.

Having tested our citizens for Covid more than the rest of Europe combined, the fact that we are now running out of testing capacity just about sums up our national hysteria about this virus. Apparently, some people are even hoarding test kits in the same way that they hoarded loo paper back in March 2020.
Given that the symptoms of Covid are common to any number of ailments: cough, sore throat, headache, fever; it seems quite reasonable to take a Covid test if you experience any of them just to ensure that you do not go about spreading it to those susceptible to a more serious bout of the illness. The reality is however, that the tests are overwhelmingly being taken by people who have no symptoms at all. Even worse, we are imposing a huge administrative burden on the education system by requiring the mass testing of asymptomatic children.
This vast enterprise is costing a fortune, were we all to follow the government advice of testing twice per week, In England there are 56.3 million of us, that’s 104 tests annually, 6 billion for all of us put together. The tests come in at £5 each, which amounts to £30 billion per year.
Is this a sensible way to spend such a vast sum of money, (instead we might increase England’s NHS budget by fully 40%)?
In the USA, where they tend to be very cautious in medical matters, people who have had Covid can return to ordinary life after 5 days if they no longer have symptoms – there is no requirement for further testing. That is an example we could usefully follow.

Learning to live with Covid, if it means anything at all, must surely include behaving normally if we feel perfectly well and not fearing a bogey man around every corner.

At this time of year I’ve often used this column to reflect on doom-laden prophesies about what to expect in the year ahead. After all, It’s that magnificent time when we can wallow in the short dark days and add to the gloom with blood-curdling predictions of disasters.
  A couple of weeks ago, notwithstanding that we are still wrestling with our current pandemic, Dr Jenny Harries, the head of our UK Health Security Agency  -what Stalinist mind thought up that nomenclature? – warned us that the next pandemic could be much worse.
Well, she could be right, but equally she could be spectacularly wrong: There is no scientific basis for her supposition. Whether her speculations were designed to be helpful, or simply to terrify us, is a matter for conjecture, but a number of people have been suggesting -from the outset- that our fears of the current pandemic were overblown. Personally, I was well ahead of Dr Harries: right at the start, I warned in the Commons that one day there may be a disease that will threaten our very survival; but that Covid certainly isn’t it – and that future generations will wonder at our collective acts of self-harm in our response to it.

For those of us who wallow in predictions of the dreadful prospects that the future holds, I recommend my favourite book of all time: The Coffee Table Book of Doom, which was published a few years ago by Art Lester and Steven Appleby. Here is a flavour from the advertising blurb:
“…with the apocalypse at hand, don’t fret about dying uninformed. The Coffee Table Book of Doom is a revelatory, brilliantly funny, superbly illustrated and erudite compendium of all the 27 doom-laden horsemen we need to worry about – personal doom, gender erosion, asteroid impact, pandemics, super storms, sexual ruin – and much more besides.”

I can’t speak for all 27 doom laden horsemen but surely we’ve had enough of pandemics and aren’t tired of the continued interference in our enterprises, personal choices, and our way of life from politicians who believe that they are best placed to make decisions on our behalf, rather that treating us as adults capable of assessing risks and acting sensibly?

 Anyway, there is still plenty to worry about: there is a volcano under a lake near Naples rumbling away and if it blows it will make Vesuvius look like a camp fire. The lava lake under Yellowstone Park could go at any moment, taking most of the USA with it…but then the volcanic cloud it might darken the skies, cool the planet and save us from climate change. Alternatively, it might reduce harvests to the extent that we all starve….

Every generation since we were expelled from the Garden of Eden has speculated that it might be the last, but we’re still here.

I recall some common sense from the Government’s Chief scientific officer, who said earlier this year that “we have to learn to live with Covid”. Well, whatever happened to that? 

The Government continues to be in thrall to scientific modellers with doomsday predictions.
The value of the output from any model -however robust its design- depends upon the assumptions that are fed into it. Some of the terrifying numbers from the modelling that we have seen in the last few days are the result of assumptions that take no account of the data that is coming out of South Africa -that the new variant, despite being more infectious, appears to be milder and consequent hospitalisations fewer and shorter. Many of the alarming numbers aren’t even the output of models at all, they are mere extrapolations: assuming that what has happened, will go on happening at the same rate, irrespective of experience that things rarely do so.

As I said in the Commons at the beginning of last week, this is all part of a ‘Ministry of Fear’ designed to ensure our compliance with instructions that compromise fundamental liberties, and indeed, condition us to demand even greater restraints on that liberty, so overawed are we by the present danger.

Part of this work of terrorising the population is undertaken with enthusiasm by the broadcast media, a job made so much easier by the twenty four hour news cycle which enables us to constantly receive the same bad news throughout the day from the moment that we wake up in the morning, hearing on the radio that we’d die horribly drowning in our own phlegm, repeated until the moment we go to bed.
What is astounding is that, as each new prediction is trotted out, no account is taken of the previous record of the source. Let’s take, for example, one of the media’s favourite modellers, Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London.
In 2001, Professor Ferguson predicted 150,000 human deaths from foot-and-mouth; but under 200 died. In 2002, he predicted up to 50,000 deaths from BSE; in the end, 177 died. In 2005, he said that 150 million people could be killed by bird flu; 282 died. In 2009, a Government estimate based on his advice said that a “reasonable worst-case scenario” for swine flu would lead to 65,000 British deaths; in the end, 457 people died. He predicted 85,000 Covid deaths in Sweden consequent on their policy of avoiding lockdown; in fact, 6,000 Swedes have died. In July this year he predicted that 100,000 daily cases was almost inevitable following our release from restrictions. It just didn’t happen.
Yet the broadcasters will quote the latest models as if they were the Gospel truth.

My prejudice is that the latest scare won’t be anything like as bad forecast. We look to ministers to resist the measures being urged upon them which will damage society and the economy, but then, on the basis of past performance that expectation looks pretty shaky too.