The Government Chief Whip’s difficulties over a pairing arrangement brought back stressful memories of my time as Government Pairing Whip – the whip responsible for always having the numbers present at Westminster to see-off any rebellion by colleagues, or ambush by the Opposition.

You are at once most popular -as colleagues ingratiate themselves in the hope that you will look favourably on their slipping request- and most unpopular as others curse you having refused theirs.
Gavin Barwell, now the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, tells a tale (he definitely suffers from false memory syndrome) of overhearing me in the Whips Office on the telephone to a bereaved colleague “…I know your wife died, but you’re okay? will you be voting tonight?”

The Pairing Whip’s nightmare is when you have a close vote coming up and you get wind of a rebellion. Immediately you have to hit the phones to cancel the slips that you have already granted and get ministers overseas back to Westminster on the next flight.
Invariably I found senior secretaries of state accommodating no matter how disruptive I was being to their plans. The problem would always be with a back-bench colleague, rarely seen at Westminster, whose arrangements in Azerbaijan or wherever, were always more important than the Government’s majority.
A day or so later, by the time we actually got to the vote, and the whips had done their arm-twisting, their appeals to loyalty, or merely deploying their easy-going charm, and burned-off the bulk of the rebels, we would end up with an embarrassingly large majority to explain to a Foreign Secretary whose meetings in Washington had been abandoned.

There are three settings:
First, a one line whip, where your attendance is voluntary (we are not expecting whipped votes).
Second, a two line whip, where you are required to attend unless you have a pairing arrangement.
The system that underpinned this was a fixed long-term personal relationship between MPs on either side to pair with each other, and for one of them to stand out of the division lobby, by arrangement, when the other needed to be absent.  Towards the end of John Major’s Government the pairing agreement was suspended after a breach of trust not entirely dissimilar to last week’s events. The arrangements were not restored after the 1997 election because the Labour majority was so large that they could afford to run a shift system without recourse to personal pairing, resulting in the abandonment of the two line whip.
Third, the three line whip, where your attendance is vital. Even so, as the Pairing Whip, and knowing that a minister needed to be overseas, I would approach my opposite number in the Labour Whips office and we would agree a pair with one of his own absentees. The arrangement often went wrong because it was our own administrative arrangement and instruction, not a personal undertaking by the individuals involved. One of them would find that their plans had changed and, as they were now present at Westminster anyway, they voted without thinking. I would make them write a grovelling letter of apology to the Labour pairing whip. As he did to me. Luckily, it didn’t happen on a close vote.

None of this however, explains what happened last week, for which a convincing explanation has yet to be had.

 

Hundreds of constituents have emailed to express their dismay at the Government’s newly agreed BREXIT negotiating position.
They begin by telling me what they thought they were voting for in the EU referendum, which is fine. Overwhelmingly however, they go further and tell me exactly what the British People were voting for.
How can they possibly know?

 

I campaigned vigorously during those months in 2016 and I came across any number of quite differently nuanced opinions held amongst both Leave and Remain voters, in addition to the habitual caprice of so many voters who vote against something they don’t like rather than having a focussed view about what to replace it with.
I am always cautious when constituents tell me that everyone else thinks like them.

 

My experience was that although there was a firmly committed minority of voters on either side, most people made a finely balanced decision to vote Leave, but could relatively easily gone the other way, as indeed many Remain voters were not too troubled by the result because they too had made a finely balanced decision and might as easily have changed their mind.

 

As a representative I must exercise my judgement on behalf of my constituents, but in doing so I need to acknowledge that whilst I know how they collectively voted, I cannot possibly know why, or -in detail- what for.

 

That said, I campaigned to Leave: to regain control of our money, our laws and our borders. My principal problem with the Government’s position is that in a crucial respect it fails that test.
The Government has chosen to seek to preserve out unrestricted access to EU markets in manufactured goods and solve the Irish border problem,  by offering to maintain a ‘common rule book’. The only thing that is ‘common’ about this rule book is that it is the EU rule book that must be adhered to in every EU state. Currently, we can deploy a measure of influence over the contents of the rule book.
The reality is that under the Government’s proposals we will have none, but will simply have to do as we are told.

 

We are the eighth largest manufacturing nation in the world. When it comes to high tech manufacturing we are in the top three. It is just bizarre, given the importance to us of manufacturing, that we would allow all our laws, regulations and specifications to be determined in another country, with that country’s own interests in mind, and with no regard to our own.
It would also scupper our ability to make new independent trading agreements.
It is just madness, I cannot see how I could possibly vote for it.

 

That voting decision, in isolation, is the easy bit. The difficulty comes when we consider the bigger picture. A vote against the Government, if it is effective, may have grave consequences. I already consider BREXIT to be in jeopardy. The Government losing a key vote might end up putting the whole enterprise very much more at risk.

 

Yes, I want to vote to change the Government’s newly defined BREXIT policy, but when it comes to the crunch I would choose the Government’s BREXIT recipe if the alternative is no BREXIT at all -which I now judge to be a real prospect.

Few readers of this column will ever have heard of them: two Bedouin villages on Palestinian land in the Israeli occupied West Bank of the Jordan; They are being destroyed to make way for the expansion of two illegal Israeli settlements Kfar Adumim and Ma’ale Adumim.
Contemplate the misery as homes and school are bulldozed, and by a people who should know better having experienced their own history of suffering greater than any.

If I understood the minister correctly, the Government has expressed its concern, even its condemnation, no less.
I’ve done that, and it isn’t trivial: when I expressed my concern as a minister I did it with sufficient force that the Israeli Deputy Prime Minister and Chief Negotiator stormed out of the meeting. Ultimately however, they are just words.

Insanity is repeatedly doing the same thing in the same situation but expecting a different outcome.
We are not insane: we don’t expect a different outcome; we know our words will have no effect, and Israel will continue with impunity, and so, by our inaction, we make ourselves complicit.

Of course, I understand the realpolitik of the situation: our reluctance to take unfriendly measures against an important ally in a troubled region, particularly when that ally has the robust backing of our most important ally.

Israel should consider however, the implications of what it is storing up. These expanding illegal settlements make a viable Palestinian state impossible.
Which means a large population will be condemned to continue to live without equal rights, and with restricted movement. We used to have a name for that, so let’s call a spade a bloody shovel: we used to call it Apartheid, and Israel will have effectively confined the Palestinians to bantustans.

Clearly the world is looking the other way for the present, but how long could such a situation endure, anymore that it endured in South Africa?

They do seem to be pretty chipper of late.
I think that they have spotted that there is no majority in Parliament for any one flavour of BREXIT. An assessment that they have shared with friends in the Commission.
Accordingly, whatever the Cabinet decides to-morrow, will be rejected shortly thereafter by the Commission – who have been convinced that they don’t need to negotiate, or to concede anything at all.

They believe that panic will set in as we head for no deal (which will be orchestrated with renewed doses of ‘project fear’), so much so that Parliament will pull the plug on BREXIT  -just in time.

If events do unfold in this way it is worth considering what this will do to our national psyche.
As a nation we don’t believe that we’ve been defeated since the Noman Conquest in 1066.
Imagine if Lord Halifax had prevailed over Churchill after Dunkirk in 1940, and had managed to negotiate a peace that spared us occupation, but nevertheless meant accepting defeat. How different would our national self-esteem would be.
The EU has prevailed against 5 national referendums, Imagine how we would feel if it were to prevail against our own, as we meekly accept continued membership despite the attempted break for freedom of June 23^rd 2016.
We would be a different country.

As to whether events will indeed turn out this way, it’s still far too soon to tell

The Government is planning to restrict the exposure of children to the advertising of unhealthy food.

When I asked the minister why children from the lowest income groups are disproportionately amongst the fattest, and suggested that it wasn’t because they watched more adverts, he replied that he thought it might be.

I do not dispute that advertising may have some impact at the very margin, but children have always been the target of advertising for confectionery. I recall the Milky Bar kid whose sales pitch was that the Milky Bars were on him, a statement that would be unlikely to get past modern advertising standards.
The real difference is that so many children do so much less exercise than we did in the past.

One in five children starts primary school already too fat, but we will have that child in full-time compulsory education for 13 years, for 35 weeks per year, for 7 hours per day:  the lack of productivity is staggering if we cannot organise their day so as to ensure that they come out thinner than they arrived.
If we lack the political will to make schools the engine of a healthier lifestyle, I doubt that advertising bans will ever make up for it.

Airbus was part of the original ‘project fear’ during the referendum campaign. Yesterday the orchestrated re-heating of these fears was designed to pressurise the Government into holding on to many of our EU membership obligations.
This is curious because the aerospace industry is not subject to tariffs under World Trade Organisation Rules. So Airbus won’t suffer in that way when we leave. As for non-tariff barriers, all the countries outside the EU have no difficulty in getting their products certificated.
I think they really gave the game away however, when the suggestion was made that production might be relocated to that well known EU member… China!

Yesterday we had another row in the Commons over a long running complaint.

The Government is accused for interfering in the order in which private members’ bills proceed:

The order is determined fairly by ballot.
After surviving a second reading debate however, in order to proceed further, they need a money resolution which only the Government can put to the House.
The allegation, is that the government is promoting some bills of which it approves, from further down the queue, by granting them money resolutions, and demoting the bills at the front, which it doesn’t like, by withholding the money resolutions.
Yesterday great outrage was expressed again.

The irony is that last Friday the Government sought to interfere again in the order by another means.
At the end of the day, the established precedent is that the whip on duty prevents any bill from proceeding which has not yet been debated.
Last week however, the government announced that it liked the bill that was number 7 in the order and that, despite only the first two being debated, it was going to let number 7 through but not 3,4,5, and 6.
Sir Christopher Chope spotted this ruse and entered his own objection when the duty whip remained silent.
Instead of receiving the thanks of the House, which claims to be outraged about Government interference in the order of private members’ bills, Sir Christopher has incurred the opprobrium of the entire nation.

As it happens, Sir Christopher’s action has forced the Government to do the right thing and bring forward its own up-skirting bill which will benefit from government time and the government whip, suffering none of the vagaries of the private member’s bill system, so it will be on the statute book much quicker.
I doubt however, that Sir Christopher will be given any credit.
It’s a funny old world.

 

As to the issue the importance of the bill itself, I initially expressed doubts on the grounds that there are common law and public order offences under which up-skirting can already be prosecuted.
I was partially right: prosecution under existing law is possible. The difficulty is that it will not be treated as a sexual offence and offenders cannot be placed on the register. A new statutory offence is therefore desirable.
Essentially, up-skirting is the reverse of ‘flashing’: it is another way in which a perverted individual attempts to exert sexual power over another.
The sooner the new bill becomes an act, the better

As an officer cadet I danced at the Edinburgh Military Tattoo in 1979. We were billeted at Redford Barracks, and we were in uniform all day. By tradition, we wore nothing under our kilts, and so we received instruction, including a demonstration, on how to sit down without giving offence.

Up-skirting is a measure of our current moral turpitude, but I find it hard to believe that there is not an existing common law provision under which it could be prosecuted.

As for Sir Christoher Chope, about whose actions on Friday I have received large correspondence, he takes the principled view that no measure should pass without being first debated.
When I was a government whip, that was also the government view, and when on duty on a Friday, it fell to me to object -whatever the merits of any particular bill- to all the bills on the list which had not been debated that day.

If I am wrong about common law, then the government can amend one of its own bills, or give its own time to debate the up-skirting bill.
I remain of the view that I expressed in this column on 24th February however, that private member’s bills are not an effective way of legislating.

The passage of Lords amendments to the Government’s EU Withdrawal Bill have fundamentally weakened our negotiating position to secure reasonable conditions upon which to leave the EU on 29 March next year.

As I have said before in this column: the strength of a negotiating hand is based on the ability to walk away without making a deal. If your counterparty knows that you really won’t be able to walk away, then he can increase his price accordingly.

 

The estimate that I made of the parliamentary proceedings over the last week was that, given the make-up of the Commons, there is very little likelihood of the House accepting our leaving the EU without EU agreement on the terms.

Unfortunately, the EU Commission will have been watching too and may have drawn the same conclusion

 

 

I wonder how the announcement of the relaxation on the skilled worker visa cap was greeted in those households where young people with very impressive A level results, nevertheless had their ambitions to be doctors dashed when they were unable to get a place in medical school.

For years and years we have been turning qualified and enthusiastic young people from medicine and nursing degrees.

 

The doctors from overseas are drawn disproportionately from developing countries where the number of clinicians per head of population is much lower, and their services are correspondingly in greater demand.

People sometimes complain to me that doctors trained here, who subsequently emigrate, ought to repay some of the costs of their training. My word, that would take some nerve as we denude poor countries of their trained doctors!

(We do, of course, need to ask ourselves why so many of our own doctors leave the NHS within just a few years of having completed their training, and address the issues that cause them to do so).

 

We have belatedly started to address our shortage of training places with the reforms to nurse training about which I wrote in this column on 12th May, and with the announcement earlier this year that 5 new medical schools are to be opened, increasing the number of places by 25%.

 

The recourse to doctors from abroad however, is a return to a bad old habit.

Exactly the same is true of the needs for skilled personnel in every other enterprise. For years we neglected the shortcomings in our education system whist employers relied on inviting both skilled and unskilled workers from overseas.

 

It is a nonsense to imagine that we can just continue to import the next generation of skilled workers.