Last Tuesday evening, in an effort to conserve fuel. I decided to cycle to a meeting in Bransgore despite the filthy weather. On my return journey, having cycled up the long hill between Bransgore and Burley, I changed to high ration to make the most of the downhill sprint. Alas, a vehicle coming up the hill in the opposite direction, failed to dip its headlights and momentarily dazzled me: so that I slipped into the rough edge of the road; went head over heels; gashed my leg through waterproofs and trousers, and ended so heavily bruised I’ve been limping ever since. So, ended my contribution to easing the current fuel crisis.

I have received a number of representations from frustrated constituents still awaiting HGV tests that were suspended during the lockdown. Apparently, there are 40,000 tests in the queue.
In addition I’ve had quite a correspondence from former HGV drivers explaining why they gave it up and what it would take to persuade them to return. They tell a similar tale: they say that the terms and conditions deteriorated to such an extent over the last decade or so, that it was no longer sufficient compensation for the long and anti-social hours that they put up with. They tell me that the hourly rate of pay has halved. They put this down to the influx of foreign drivers who were prepared to do the work for less money and with poorer conditions.
Many of those foreign drivers returned home during the lockdown and there is no pressure for them to return, given that there is plenty of work for them in Europe which is itself short of some 400,000 HGV drivers.
Notwithstanding, the demand of the employers is that visa restrictions be lifted to encourage the return of the foreign drivers. This cannot be the answer because it was the influx of foreign drivers that drove down wages and conditions in the first place, causing our own HGV drivers to retire or look for more rewarding work elsewhere.

In a free market a shortage of a particular skill will drive up the wage paid for it, and that higher wage will attract workers prepared to acquire the particular skill so much in demand, therefore addressing the shortage. To be fair, this is what has been happening recently. There are many reports of significantly higher wages being offered and even substantial ‘golden hellos’ being paid to newly recruited drivers. Over time this will address the shortage…but we don’t have time, the crisis is now…so bring back foreigners immediately!

As it happens the shortage of HGV drivers has been a minor irritant for months. Many of us will have noticed the odd fuel pump out of commission more often than usual. It was no more than an inconvenience, and one that we could certainly have lived with. What made it intolerable was our own behaviour rushing to the pumps to fill up unnecessarily.
So, was the scare of severe shortage deliberately engineered, in order to create the panic buying, as a way of forcing the Government to lift visa restrictions on foreign HGV drivers which employers had unsuccessfully been demanding for months?

Whilst there were many more damaging aspects to lockdown restrictions, I found masks one of the most irritating. The removal of all the restrictions in July was a great liberation, but the potential for a return -set out in the Government’s plan B, with mandatory masking included- is most unwelcome.

As an Army officer training for chemical warfare, I was instructed that once I had ordered troops to mask-up, I then had to look for the first opportunity to un-mask, because masking led to physical deterioration in effectiveness and psychological disorientation -a growing sense of isolation. Of course, the military respirator we used was much worse than the Covid face coverings, yet people do tell me that they feel that sense of isolation and anxiety, that they find it sinister seeing so many people masked, as social beings facial expression is one of the subtle ways we communicate.

 

In Parliament there is definitely something political about masks: In a crowded House of Commons at Prime Minister’s Questions there won’t be an unmasked face on the Labour benches, whereas on the Conservative side there will be only be half-a-dozen masked faces at most.

 

Had it not actually happened, I would never have believed that a Conservative government would order us to wear masks and introduce fines for those who disobeyed: how very un-British.
That extraordinary intrusion into our personal choices took place when the lockdown was over; we had survived the first wave without the NHS being overwhelmed; all the shops were open again; then -out of the blue- came this order to mask-up without any prior parliamentary debate or vote.
For years the World Health Organisation assessment was that masks were ineffective at preventing the spread of disease. Then that advice conveniently changed overnight just when governments were looking for new tools to change normal social behaviour, as enforced lockdowns were coming to an end.

 

When our government announced its new masking rules, that very evening at the daily televised briefing, the Deputy Chief Medical officer gave the game away: She was asked for the scientific evidence to support the new policy on masks; her reply was that it was not a matter of evidence but of providing ‘reassurance’. 
So, having so successfully terrified us with the dangers of the virus, they then had to find something make us feel safe enough to go back out into the everyday world but at the same time to provide an  ‘in-your-face’ reminder not to indulge in too much ordinary social intercourse.
It these respects masks do work: There is no doubt many people are reassured by wearing them and by finding others wearing them. Equally, they do provide a highly visible and constant reminder to behave differently to normal: They are a means of social control.

 

I doubt however, that masks prevent the spread of disease. This is not question for medical expertise: Just think of it from an engineering point of view; the mesh that makes up the material with which you cover your face contains microscopic holes that are 5000 times larger than the virus which can pass through them. They can only have the most marginal effect. I suppose that ‘every little helps’ , but then consider the habit people have of constantly fiddling with them – completely undermining the original advice we were given to wash our hands and keep them away from our faces. Add to this mix the fact that so many of us wear the same mask again and again.

 

In the end it is a matter of opinion, and everyone is entitled to their own. Personally, I disliked having to appear as if I were about to rob a bank

I have received a very large number of emails asking for my support against a cut of £20 per week in Universal Credit. I think it quite disingenuous to describe the ending what was always a temporary increase in Universal Credit as a ‘cut’.
At the outset of the first lock-down in March last year,  the temporary increase was made in order to address the needs of a surge in the number of newly unemployed people who had no previous experience of having to navigate living on benefits: It was an emergency measure.
If however, you had the odd £6 billion to spare and you wanted to address the needs of our most vulnerable people, you would not spend it by giving every recipient of Universal Credit an extra £20 per week, irrespective of their particular circumstances, including whether they had any children or not. There are much better targeted ways of relieving want amongst the most needy. The action that was taken in that particular way was purely because it was an emergency and that it was a temporary.
The circumstances in which the increase was made have now changed profoundly: Currently we have one million vacancies; Every employer that I meet vents his or her frustration that they just cannot recruit the staff that they need. It would be irresponsible to prolong the increase in Universal Credit when we need to raise the sights of claimants to take the opportunity to work longer hours or get a more demanding and better paid job.

Nevertheless, as a member of the House of Commons Select Committee on Work and Pensions, I am not tin-eared to the evidence that we have taken over recent weeks. I accept that we need to address the aspects of benefits that prevent people from taking a job or increasing their hours. First, childcare costs – the cap on the amount claimable has not been increased for 18 years. Second, the ‘taper’ (the amount of benefit you lose for every additional £1 that you gain from working) was always originally designed to be more generous in order to always ‘make work pay’. Unfortunately, George Osborne raided the budget when the state of the public finances demanded. As soon as it is affordable, we need to put that right.

In this column on 28^th June I expressed my hope that the issue of the reform of system of social care would be expedited by the appointment of Sajid Javid as the new Secretary of State for Health and Social Care.
I also questioned one of the principal motives for reform: what politicians often refer to as the ‘scandal’ whereby people have to sell their homes to pay for their residential care.
I have always taken the view that the main way that people save in the UK is by acquiring a home, and that paying for your residential care was a proper demand on your savings, which in so many cases means your home.
Of course, there are many other things we might have preferred to spend our savings on, including passing them on to our families, but if we need residential care, why should we expect the community to pick up the bill if we have a property that we could sell to meet the expense?
Any sense of unfairness arises, not from the assumption that we ought to pay for our care, but from the fact that we might have to but that others won’t. This is the same perception of unfairness that arises from any means-tested welfare system: the belief that you are penalised for having been prudent, but that the impecunious, profligate, or just less fortunate, get a free ride.

The Government’s proposals, announced last week, with a cap on care costs of £86,000 -after which taxpayers will meet any further costs, are designed to address the sense of unfairness.
Government’s critics however, appear to be attempting to ride two different horses at the same time: first they argue that it is immoral for taxpayers to be expected protect the inheritance of the relatively wealthy by preventing them from having to sell their homes to meet their care bills. Yet at the same time they argue that so many of them will have to sell their homes anyway, because relatively few will have the £86,000 readily to hand to pay for their bills before the taxpayer comes to the rescue.

The critics have fundamentally misunderstood one of the main purposes of the reform.
Consider our main motive saving: whist it may be prudent to save up against the possibility of lean times ahead; most of us save up for something positive that we want to get or to do, including passing such savings on to our children.  I certainly couldn’t be motivated to save up for care costs, because my hope and expectation would be to never to have to be cared for.
On the other hand, rather than save up to meet unwelcome possibilities, we insure against them: We insure our homes against burglary, fire and flood. Equally, it would be sensible to insure against care costs in order to avoid having to sell our homes. The difficulty is that such insurance is not readily available because of the potential unlimited liability that might arise from many years in residential care. The purpose of the £86,000 cap is to quantify and fix that liability so that the insurance market can bring forward affordable schemes -should you wish to purchase one- to protect you from the first £86,000, and prevent you from needing to sell your home if you don’t have £86,000 to hand.
I hope it works.

A couple of weeks ago, in Parliament’s debate following the overthrow of the elected government of Afghanistan, I put the question of what we might do were it to happen here: would we join the Resistance or would we flee?
To say that the question was not well received would be an understatement. Nevertheless, I believe it is an important question: do we believe that our liberty, democracy and values are worth fighting and dying for?
We enjoy these freedoms because so many of our forebears fought and died for them.  It is a difficult question for us to face with a measure of humility as we watch events unfold from our comfort and security. Yet in our own generation and in Afghanistan 457 of our men and women fought and died for those very values and many more suffered horrific injuries.
Also, as we consider the reasons behind complete collapse of the trained and well-armed Afghan forces in the face of a numerically much inferior enemy, we must also remember that over the last few years no less than 70,000 members of the Afghan security forces bravely fought and died for these values too.

The resistance continues in the Panjshir Valley where elements of the Afghan Army, together with the Vice President have pledged to fight on under the leadership of the Sandhurst-trained Ahmad Masoud, the son of the mujahedeen leader ‘The Lion of Panjshir’ who was assassinated on the orders on Bin-Laden in 2001.
Are we going to leave them to it, or will we assist in the way that we supported Ahmad’s father in his resistance to the Taliban?

Realpolitik demands answers to certain questions. First, what are their realistic prospects?
The Taliban are already claiming victory in the Panjshir but this is fiercely denied by the resistance. I hope we have much better military intelligence as to what exactly is happening than we had earlier this summer.
Second, what would the consequences of western support for resistance in the Panjshir be?
Currently the Taliban have ‘hostages’ in the form of all those that we failed to evacuate in the last weeks. We want them granted safe passage out of Afghanistan. Notwithstanding announcements of amnesty, there are many reports of summary reprisals against Afghans who assisted NATO and the Government of Afghanistan. I do not doubt that western assistance to the resistance in the Panjshir will make the predicament of those Afghans now in fear and hiding very much worse.
On the other hand, I doubt that the Taliban have much appetite for our good opinion so the only leverage we really have is financial. To put it bluntly we will need to ‘incentivise’ the provision of safe passage out of Afghanistan. So, in the end it comes down to danegeld, but as the English discovered with the Vikings, payment doesn’t always lead to compliance with the obligations for which the payment was made.

If the prospects of resistance are realistic then an assessment needs to be made on the basis of risk to those Afghans who are -in effect- now hostages, as against the potential benefits to Afghanistan as a whole of an effective and successful resistance.
I do not know the answers to these questions, but I believe it is important to ask them. Just as it is important for us to examine ourselves and ask, what would we have done had it happened to us.

You should never underestimate your adversaries. I recall that in the ‘Cameron camp’ during our years of frustration as the Official Opposition, we never underestimated the skills of Tony Blair as the consummate political performer. We even used to refer to him as ‘The Master’. Clearly, you cannot win 3 general elections in a row with majorities to dream of, without an immense ability to manage your political party and to reach out beyond your committed and faithful supporters. I always saw Tony Blair as a political ‘star’ of similar calibre to Bill Clinton in the USA. All this, without sharing his political outlook or his policies… that is until now:
When Blair spoke out last week about the ‘imbecilic’ decision to leave Afghanistan in the way that the US Biden administration did, I do not think I could have come up with a better way of describing it. A monumental strategic error has been made.

After a twenty-year commitment, expensive in both lives and money, I entirely understand the urge to withdraw. But to do so without first establishing the capabilities of Afghan forces, and to do so in a way that so undermined their morale, and to have done it during the Taliban’s fighting season instead of waiting till winter until they return to their tribal fastness, and to have done it with so little planning for the detailed logistics of withdrawal, all of this amounts to an enormous blunder with incalculable consequences.
A Regime that assassinated female judges, female TV presenters, bombed girl schools, markets and weddings has been handed control. It remains intimately connected with Al Qaeda; it has released 500 of the world’s most dangerous terrorists which we left imprisoned at Bagram -when so much sacrifice went into their capture. And now we discover that we have left them with the pick of $85 billion’s worth of the most modern weapons. Frankly, it is just incredible that such an act of self-harm could have been allowed to happen.

So, were the billions of pounds that we spent and the British lives that we sacrificed, in vain?
I certainly don’t believe so: Hundreds of terrorist outrages were prevented by the work of our troops in Afghanistan.
It was a righteous cause and the years of education and healthcare that improved so many lives were certainly of enormous benefit to millions.

The one bright spot of the last few days has been the magnificent performance of our Armed Forces in the most difficult and stressful of circumstances, evacuating 15,000 souls in the last fortnight, retaining their professionalism and efficiency in the face of such extremes of human misery. They really are The Best.

*

…and Gazing at the photograph of our paratroopers crammed aboard the military aircraft bringing them home, there isn’t a Covid mask to be seen. Hallelujah!

To my mind there is a clear distinction between sanctuary and resettlement.
There are many brave Afghan men and women who are currently in grave danger and it is right that we offer them sanctuary, if they can get to us or if we can rescue them. Given their bravery and commitment to their native land, I would expect such sanctuary to last as long as the danger itself. Once the opportunity arises (if it does, but it may never) I anticipate that they would want to return to help rebuild their country.

There are very many more Afghan men and women who are not in grave danger, nevertheless they have lived difficult lives in a war-torn country, they are about to lose what rights they have and their life chances and opportunities are about to get very much worse. There have been demands in Parliament that we resettle permanently as many of them that wish to come to our shores and are able to escape.
With the best will in the world, though we regret their desperate situation, we are in no position to make that unlimited offer.
Angela Merkel made such an offer in 2015 and the result was one million takers.
 We ought to help as many as we can, but it does come down to a question of numbers. In the circumstances, our offer to accommodate 20,000 Afghans -especially the most vulnerable women and girls, is proportionate. Particularly so, when our support to other nations in the region which take refugees is taken into account.

There are countless places in the world where life is so much less eligible than here in Britain: Countries where there is ghastly oppression, injustice, poverty, warfare, famine and disease. The people of those countries would dearly wish to come to Britain for a better life -and many try to. It is to our credit that we wish we could be more generous in our welcome. I believe that our contribution is better made in development aid deployed to the places from which they seek to escape (that is why I was dismayed by our decision to cut our aid budget, though we remain the world’s second largest donor).

Some go further and argue that not only should we have a much more generous resettlement scheme, but that -because of our involvement in Afghanistan over 20 years – we are obliged to do so. I do not agree and I revert to the distinction that I have drawn: We do have an obligation to provide sanctuary to those who, by assisting us or by the roles they have played, have put themselves in particular danger. For the wider population, beyond our offer of 20,000 places, our obligation has been met in blood and treasure over 20 years as we sought to bring a measure of security, education, healthcare and economic development to their country.
I wish that we had completed the job and that we had avoided the huge strategic error of withdrawal. I pray that we will learn the right lessons.

My contribution to this column last week was quickly overtaken by events. The Chief of the Defence staff, Sir Nicholas Carter’s analysis that the Afghan security forces were pursuing a sensible strategy of consolidating in the cities, turns out to have been quite detached from actual events on the ground.
Equally, my own suggestion that we might be being too hasty in our determination to expedite evacuations, turns out to have been ill-informed. Nevertheless, the concern about providing asylum for translators has been a long running saga over recent years and is likely to have had an impact on the morale of those who had no alternative but to continue taking the fight to the Taliban.
In 2016 I had a meeting with President Ghani where one item on my agenda was to get a more constructive approach from his government regarding facilitating the return to Afghanistan of failed Afghan asylum seekers from the Britain. His response was that he was a ‘war president’ and his first concern must be the men and women who were fighting the battle, rather than taking up any of his time with arrangements to accommodate those who had chosen to run away. It was a fair point.
My own view was that our proper contribution to Afghanistan was not in providing asylum, but rather in the hundreds of lives sacrificed by our armed forces and the billions of pounds that we spent on education, healthcare, humanitarian aid and economic development. The humiliating defeat of this enterprise inevitably means we will face what we sought to avoid, namely enormous new demands on our ability to provide sanctuary and asylum. 

There is no hiding the magnitude of the disaster. An enormous unforced strategic error has been made by the decision to withdraw before the Afghan armed forces were capable of defeating the Taliban.
Our enemies will be celebrating the humiliating defeat of western democracy and a huge morale boost will be given to Islamist terrorists the world over.
It is pure wishful thinking to believe that the Taliban will not return to their former policy of harbouring foreign terrorists and promoting the violent assault on our values. The disaster in Afghanistan is unlikely to be confined there.

Almost as an afterthought, Afghan students who had been successful in the highly competitive Chevening Scholarship scheme, which enables them to study for a master’s degree in the UK, have been told that there is now no time to arrange their visas. But, hey, don’t worry: they can defer their scholarships until next year.
As if the Taliban regime will be going to facilitate such an endeavour. 

I visited Afghanistan twice as a minister with responsibility for driving forward the economic development effort that we were making there. In fact, I had spent some time in the country on a number of visits in the mid-nineteen- seventies when it was a very different country. I recall hiring a horse for a couple of days and riding out on my own to the stunning lake at Band-e-Amir and to the standing Buddhas at Bamiyan (- subsequently destroyed by the Taliban).

Given the blood and treasure that we have sacrificed over the last twenty years, I believe that NATO’s withdrawal is a profoundly mistaken policy. It is some years since NATO troops were actually involved in the fighting: with the exception of US air attack missions, NATO’s contribution has been largely confined to training and mentoring the Afghan security forces, whom we are now abandoning.

The advance of the Taliban is a catastrophe for women, girls and religious minorities, as well as to the ordinary liberties of everyone in that country. The prospects for educated women, many of whom have taken leading roles in the Parliament, media and the professions, are particularly bleak.
We can expect another even greater wave of refugees seeking to arrive on our shores.

The Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Nick Carter has said that we shouldn’t write-off the Republic yet: that there are signs that the population is showing the sort of defiance needed to win this battle; that they are rallying in support of the security forces which are pursuing a sensible and realistic strategy of consolidation to  fight the Taliban to a stalemate. He says we must help them stay firm and force the Taliban to the negotiating table. He concludes that much depends on who wins the “battle of the narratives”
He’s right: winning the ‘battle of the narrative’ is vital for morale, the maintenance of which, is a most important principle of war and essential to success.
Our policy however, appears designed to do the exact opposite. We do seem to be ‘writing-off’ the Republic. Our proper concern for the safety of Afghan interpreters who served our armed forces is laudable and indeed, our sacred duty. Our haste however, in securing their evacuation,  sends a clear signal to those who are still fighting, that we believe there is no hope. Now a similar commitment is being given to evacuate Afghan journalists.

I pray that the Afghan warriors, so many of whom have been trained by UK forces at our ‘Sandhurst in the Sand’, will prove the defeatists wrong.

Several constituents have written to me, outraged at the prospect of ‘Covid passports’ and quoting Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the USA, who said
“those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety”
Franklin couldn’t have been writing in more different circumstances: his concern was the liberty of the Pennsylvania legislature, for the purpose of  meeting military expenditure, to insist on its right to levy taxes on the State’s  founding family, rather than to be bought off with a lump sum in return for an acceptance by the assembly that they had no right to tax them.
However impressive the quote may sound (and I’ve used it myself) it is a bit of a tight fit when it comes to shoe-horning it into the debate on compulsory vaccination.
My retort to the constituents who quoted Franklin to me is that, on the contrary, I have secured both my safety and my liberty by freely choosing to be vaccinated: a course that I recommended to them, and which I recommend to everyone else.

Nevertheless, regular readers of this column will know that I am deeply concerned about the creeping encroachment on liberty. I’ve twice used this column to set out my opposition to Covid passports and to the decision to make Covid vaccination compulsory for anyone working in residential care homes.
I do not want to live in a society where we would routinely have to produce our bona fides in order to secure access to venues and enjoy our full civil rights. I’m confident that were such a system introduced -and we are not there yet, with the parliamentary battle still ahead of us – it would be very difficult to subsequently dismantle it and it could be the fore-runner of a system of identity cards.

I understand the Government’s preoccupation that, whilst we have had enormous success with the vaccination programme, progress with the youngest age cohorts has been less impressive. From the outset I believed that the vaccination roll-out for younger people should have been incentivised on the basis of ‘carrots and not sticks’.

Frankly we have made a poor job of trumpeting the effectiveness of the vaccines: We have thoroughly undermined them by maintaining restrictions even after the vulnerable groups had been vaccinated and by insisting on isolation and quarantine conditions notwithstanding fully vaccinated status. This sends completely the wrong message to younger and less vulnerable people. Which is possibly why the Government is now having to raise the prospect of making their lives less convenient and agreeable should they choose not to bother.

As for those who write to me about the Government’s malign and hidden agenda to deprive us of liberty. I reject it utterly. Though I disagree with their policy, I know these ministers personally, they are among my friends, they have the best of motives, even if they are mistaken.  But I do accept that the threat to our personal freedoms are growing in intensity and we have to decide whether we insist on holding on to them, or we are going to allow the growing power of the state to take them from us  whenever it chooses.