A very worrying legacy of closing schools during pandemic lockdowns has been a shortening of the attention span of pupils, with consequent deterioration in behaviour. This makes huge difficulties for our overstretched teachers. This is a time when schools will have to make herculean efforts rebuild the habits of consideration for others, good behaviour and discipline.
Strangely, the headmaster of the Harris Westminster Sixth Form in London has chosen this moment to order pupils to desist from addressing beaks as ‘sir’. Instead, they must preface any remarks with the teacher’s title and name, excusing themselves first if they are not sure of the name.
The reason given for this imposition is because ‘Sir’ evokes respect and compares unfavourably with the female staff alternative of mere ‘Miss’.
Well, I certainly wouldn’t want to be called ‘Miss’ but in the Army we called female officers ‘Mam’ which just as respectful as ‘Sir’. Perhaps this woeful headmaster might have thought a bit more carefully and come up with this military solution instead of guff about a “better and more equal world”.
I suppose it could have been worse. I’m told there are schools where they embrace familiarity and the beaks are referred to as Pat, Bill, Chis and even Nicky. We all know what that breeds.
Eco Madness
The energy policy announced by Sir Kier Starmer defies belief, it is just bonkers: He has announced a ban on further exploration and extraction licences in the North Sea.
To be clear, this is not a ban on new oil and gas sources, it is just a ban on any new British oil and gas sources.
Surely sensible eco-warriors realise that we will be dependent on hydrocarbons for the next 30 years or so, even as we approach our target of ‘net zero’ carbon dioxide emissions. So, as we will have to use oil and gas anyway, it much better that we use our own than have to import from sources that generate significantly higher emissions and come with all the supply hazards that have driven energy prices through the roof. The policy gift-wrapped for Putin.
Its implementation would swiftly lead to the decline of inward investment and skilled jobs. For the first time I find myself on the side of the unions.
“simples!” as the meerkat would say.
PR
Out of the blue, four constituents emailed me to ask for a meeting with me at Westminster because they were attending a rally, in favour of electoral reform: they wanted an electoral system which awarded seats in proportion to the votes cast for each political party, typically known as ‘proportional representation’ (PR).
I agreed to meet all four of them in Parliament at the same time. We had a perfectly civil conversation but, alas, no meeting of minds. We were proof however, that you can agree to disagree about important matters without any unpleasantness whatsoever.
Typically, I get half a dozen letters or so, each year on this subject. We did, readers may recall, have a referendum on the question back in 2011 (it was the price demanded by the Liberal democrats for entering a Coalition government with the Conservatives). We voted by 70% to 30% to keep our existing electoral system. I remain of the view that it settled the matter for a generation. I am not inclined to reopen the question in what is a crowded political agenda.
There is no perfect voting system. Each methodology has advantages and disadvantages. The principal weakness of our current system is that it often disproportionately rewards the winner, granting them a numerical majority in Parliament despite only getting more votes than other parties, but not a majority of all the votes cast. Equally, I would argue that this is its principal strength: It ensures that, more often than not, the party that got more votes than any other, forms the Government.
The difficulty with more proportional systems is that they tend to lead to permanent coalitions which hand disproportionate power to small parties that supply the governing party with a majority. Israel would be a good example: there the largest party invariably needs to gain the support of minority religious parties to cobble together a coalition. This has led to a whole raft of religious legislation, including sabbath day observance, of which a majority of Israeli citizens disapprove and for which only a small minority vote.
The discipline imposed by our own system is that a party needs a very broad base of support to secure any parliamentary representation whatsoever: they have to be ‘broad churches’ that form a coalition before any election. Continental PR systems however, which strictly reward parties according to the total of votes cast for them, give them the freedom to be more ideologically focussed and exclusive. The focus of coalition building then takes place after an election where parties come together to thrash out an agenda for government that was never put to the voters at all.
With the plethora of complex voting systems where some votes are counted multiple times, formulae are applied, and out comes a result from the ‘sausage machine’ that is difficult to understand, we have, on the contrary, a refreshing simplicity: the candidate with the most votes wins.
Online safety
Several constituents have emailed me to ask if I would set out in this column my views in The Online Safety Bill.
The Bill Has completed its passage through the Commons and is now going through its detailed committee stage in the Lords, where debate rages over the extent to which the details of mandatory age verification should be set out on the face of the Bill or in subsequent regulations.
The Government has added offences the Bill which include revenge porn; hate crime; fraud; and threats and incitement to violence. Also, the promotion or facilitation of suicide and people smuggling. Further amendments will include controlling or coercive behaviour, in recognition of the specific challenges women and girls face when going online.
Ofcom, the UK’s independent communications regulator, will oversee the regulatory regime, backed up by mandatory reporting requirements and strong enforcement powers, including blocking access to non-compliant sites from within UK, and eye-watering fines of up to ten per cent of annual worldwide turnover.
That said, when the Bill was first published my principal worry was that, in its laudable intent to protect children, it nevertheless came at the expense of free speech.
At the heart of the problem was the creation a new category of ‘legal but harmful’ content, empowering lawful content to be removed when considered ‘harmful’. In effect, this subcontracted power of censorship to service providers and raised all sorts of questions about what constitutes a ‘harmful opinion’. It would also have introduced a ridiculous situation where censorship online could exclude opinion that would remain perfectly legal if said or published in print.
Mercifully the ‘legal but harmful’ provisions from the Bill has been struck out.
Instead, content that is illegal will be required to be removed along with any legal content that a platform provider prohibits under its own terms of service. Adults can choose whether to engage with legal forms of abuse and comment that fall short of being unlawful, so long as the platform they are using allows such content. It is a free market.
Arguably, the changes to the Bill have ensured that it substantially protects free speech while holding social media companies to account for their promises to users, guaranteeing that users will be able to make informed choices about the services they use and the interactions they have on those sites.
No solution is ever perfect. The provider retains the ability to silence lawful content which breaches its own rules. In effect it can exclude arguments of which it disapproves. I do not see a way around this. After all, it is the provider’s own platform and they can make their rules in the same way that publishers impose their own standards. Indeed, nobody has an absolute right to see their opinions printed in any particular newspaper or print publication.
In mitigation we will have to rely on the powers of the regulator to see that providers apply their rules properly and fairly. In addition, there will be reputational damage to providers who capriciously censor content when other publications draw attention to it.
A concern that I have which does not fall within the scope of the bill which may have a chilling effect on lawful expression, is a ruling by the Commons that social media content generated by Members of Parliament shall be subject to the scrutiny and ruling of the Commissioner for Standards in Public Life. How long will it be before this official tells MPs what they can and cannot say on social media?
Votes for EU Citizens?
What could possibly be Keir Starmer’s motive for considering an extension of the general election (and referendum) franchise to EU citizens settled in the UK?
Whilst, we are generous with our local government franchise, allowing settled EU nationals to vote for local councillors, nevertheless, there are few, if any, jurisdictions that extend national voting rights to the citizens of other countries. I certainly don’t know of any, beyond our own historic rights for the Ireland and some to Commonwealth countries
General Elections and referendums can change the whole course of our country’s progress and history in a way that local council elections can never do. Accordingly, the right to participate in national elections should be reserved for our own nationals.
It isn’t even as If they’ve asked: The move appears to an unsolicited offer, or to be strictly correct, potential offer by the Leader of the Labour Party.
If EU nationals settled in the UK really want to vote on our national issues then they can apply to become one of our nationals. The process is straightforward, and you only have to have lived in the UK for 5 years in order to apply.
There are almost three and a half million EU nationals settled in the UK. Were they to be automatically granted the right to vote in our general elections and referendums then, as a group of voters, they would amount to more than all the voters in Wales. They would potentially have more influence on the outcome of any poll than one of the constituent nations of our United Kingdom.
So, what could be the motive for this sudden and unsought generosity to participate in determining the national affairs of the UK?
Forgive me, but I’m a politician, and I simply can’t help it: My suspicious mind immediately leaps to the conclusion that Sir Kier has spotted some electoral advantage for the Labour Party by expanding the franchise in this way. To be blunt, I suggest that he expects the bulk of this new cohort of voters to vote Labour. Perhaps he even dreams of harnessing their support to reverse our referendum decision in 2016 to leave the EU. After all, he tried to do so several times during the 2016 to 2019 Parliament.
My advice to any voter is to be very careful if considering voting for a party that contemplates being so careless with the right to vote. We could very well find that we’d lost sovereignty over our affairs once again.
Local Elections in New Forest West
Rarely do local elections have much to do with local politics. However hard local politicians struggle to keep a local focus, the political parties centrally fight them as proxies for future general elections. Last week was no different.
Of all the voters that I spoke to in the New Forest, they were focussed on the national picture and saw their vote as a comment on the Government’s performance rather than that of New Forest District Council which, almost without exception, they considered to be well run.
Of the two local issues that were raised with me, the biggest was potholes, which is a County Council responsibility rather than a matter for the District Council. The other was confined to specific locations where controversial housing developments had been approved. On this last question, my postbag divides between those who recognise that one of the major problems that we face in the New Forest is a desperate shortage of housing; and those who insist that the proposed developments are in the wrong place.
In any event, having had local elections based on a national rather than local focus, it is extremely difficult to make sense of the results. The psephologists have an algorithm for scaling up last week’s results where elections were held, to attribute similar results to where they weren’t held at all. And, so proceeding, to forecast what the result of a General Election would have been. I am very sceptical of the value of this exercise. First, even where national performance is at the forefront of their minds, nevertheless, people vote quite differently at local elections than they do at general elections.
Second, it is difficult enough to interpret the outcome on a party-political basis even within a relatively small geographical area. Take, for example, the New Forest West parliamentary division which comprises 12 of the New Forest District wards contested last week. Of those wards, in one each voter had three votes, in nine each voter had two votes, and in only two they had one vote as in a general election. To make interpretation even more complicated, it is clear from looking at the difference in votes cast for candidates of the same party within a single ward, that hundreds of voters used their multiple votes to vote for candidates of different parties.
Even more difficult, not every one of the main parties fielded a candidate in each ward. All this before we take into account the average turnout of only 33% against a general election where you would expect nearer 80%.
So, for what it is worth, taking the votes for the leading candidate of each party in each ward in New Forest West, I estimate that of the 25,542 votes cast , the vote shares attributable to each party are: Conservative 37%; LibDem 23% ; Labour 15%; Green 13% ; Independent 12%. As for what any of this bodes for the general election -which might not even be until Jan 2025, I suggest it is far too soon to tell.
Coronation
At the mystical heart of the Coronation is the intimate moment when the king is anointed with Holy oil, sourced from the Mount of Olives, before being prepared and blessed by the Orthodox Patriarch in Jerusalem.
In fact the ritual predates the crowning of King Solomon, to which it is often attributed. It was carried out two reigns previously, over 3000 years ago, when the Prophet Samuel anointed Saul as Israel’s first King, then subsequently, when Saul proved something of a dud, Samuel sought out the youngest son of Jesse, and anointed David, as King instead.
Though instrumental, Samuel was a somewhat reluctant participant. He didn’t rate the prospects of monarchy and he warned the people of Israel that, by demanding a King like other nations, they were making a rod for their own back, with taxes and other oppressive impositions. His greatest fear was that kings would wander from proper devotion to the one true God. His fears were not misplaced. To put it mildly Israel’s experience of monarchy might be, at best, described as ‘mixed’.
A fellow from the Plymouth Brethren used to come campaigning with me at elections. He was happy to deliver leaflets and canvass voters, but he wouldn’t vote himself. When I challenged him about this, he told me it was because he believed in the principle of Biblical Monarchy.
Well, good luck with that! As we went through the reigns described in the Bible there was perhaps only one paragon, Josiah 640 -609 BC (to whom our own Edward VI was compared by contemporaries as ‘the new Josiah’ in 1547). Many of the others were pretty dreadful.
Of course, our own experience of monarchy has also been mixed. We’ve had both saints and monsters. Nevertheless, we had a very unsuccessful, and not to be repeated experiment of doing without a monarch from 1649 to 1660.
Undoubtedly, what has saved our monarchy was the wisdom of separating the institution from political power so that it could become what it is to-day: the focus of unity, majesty and awe.
The thought of replacing our Head of State with an elected politician is just grotesque. Think about it! Which one of us would you vote to have instead?
Completing Brexit
The Brexit Freedoms Bill, or to give it its proper title, The Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill, passed through the House of Commons with a healthy majority. Since when it has been given fairly rough treatment in the Lords.
When we exited the EU we retained all EU laws to provide a period of continuity and stability. It also afforded us the time to examine each of them in detail to see if we wanted to keep them, amend them or remove them. The Bill gives ministers the power to do this with a default setting that they will lapse, if not specifically retained, by 31st December this year.
It is vital to our productivity that we remove this ball and chain of red tape that holds us back from experiencing the economic benefits of having left the EU.
The principal argument that has been made against the bill is that the procedure allowing ministers to make these decisions about what to retain and what to discard, lacks democratic accountability and that Parliament should debate each one of the 4000 pieces of legislation.
As I said in this column of 26th April Frost in Morocco (desmondswaynemp.com) this would effectively delay the process for years. In effect it would be a wrecking measure.
I rather suspect that it owes more to a determination to keep us close to the EU regulatory orbit, in the hope that one day we may re-join, than it does to a fastidious preference for parliamentary scrutiny.
As for democracy, the reality is that these laws were made in the EU Council of Ministers by qualified majority voting and in secrecy – not even a transcript of the deliberations. The swifter we review them the better.
I hope I am mistaken, but I suspect that ministers are beginning to get cold feet. There is a very significant volume of work to be done. Officials will have to go through all the legislation and offer ministers advice on the options. It will be hard work.
Is it achievable whilst officials work from home?
Will some in Whitehall resist on the basis of their ideological objections to the whole concept of completing Brexit?
I think the Prime Minister needs to appoint someone from the business world with a track record of successful delivery to grip this entire endeavour, which is in danger that it just isn’t going to get done. Perhaps another Tsar?
*
As a postscript, I see that the civil service unions want to negotiate a four-day week with no loss of pay, such will be their claimed increased productivity.
I once worked for a firm that retained the 3 Day week, imposed during the miner’s strike in 1973, for a couple of years afterwards because of their very real increased productivity. Alas, they ended it because it didn’t work for their customers who wanted contact 5 days per week.
This will prove the rub for the public who need the services provided.
Much of the work of my office is spent contacting public sector organisations on behalf of constituents who have had difficulty making contact themselves. There is no doubt that this has become so much harder and more frustrating since the arrival of ‘working from home’.
I don’t believe we should even consider the possibility of a shorter working week until they are all back in the office and we can actually measure their productivity.
Expelling Bridgen
Raab
I look back on my ministerial career with great affection. I thoroughly enjoyed my close relationship with my private office of six civil servants and my wider interaction with the Civil Service generally. I don’t recall ever having a cross word. Perhaps I was just fortunate, or maybe I’m looking back with rose- tinted spectacles.
I do recall however, two occasions when my staff went to great effort to persuade me not to do something that I was determined to do. Of course, when it became clear that I was so determined, they quite properly facilitated the decision that I had made. I have no doubt that on both occasions I was right, and that the outcome was successful. I speculate, but I always suspected that the inability of my officials to persuade me not to persist in my intention, was judged a failure on their part, by their superiors.
Dominic Raab’s experience in government may have been a very different, but he has my support. I really wish that the PM had refused his resignation. My reading of report is that he is very largely exonerated, and on the two counts on which he is criticised, they both, in my estimate, fall below the threshold for resignation. On the contrary, in the circumstances, Raab’s reaction was entirely understandable.
Bullying should always be rooted out. That’s why, when I was a schoolmaster, the cane was our first resort when it came to bullying. I fear however, that there is a danger that the pendulum has swung too far the other way and that demanding exacting standards in the workplace is becoming impossible. As a consequence we are becoming less and less efficient -something that constituents are constantly drawing to my attention – and so proceeding, we will become ungovernable.
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