Students from less advantaged backgrounds are going to university in greater numbers than ever before.

Our Universities are thriving and are right up at the top of the world rankings. Their alliances with business and with the technological advances of the third industrial revolution are vital to our economic prosperity as a nation. In all this the income from tuition fees has had a transformative effect. Without that fee income I just do not believe that government would make good the lost revenue, with all the other pressing demands on the public finances.
Important scientific research and innovation would be less well funded, and the opportunities for students to go to university would diminish.

 

Scotland is an object lesson: Scottish students pay no tuition fees. As a consequence universities like St Andrews limit the number of Scottish students to a mere 20% of total, and in their own country, but you can hardly blame the universities for preferring students that pay the fees.

 

When we were devising the current system of student finance back in 2010. We sought to gain the advantages of a graduate tax with without the disadvantages.
Our system is progressive: wealthier graduates pay more; the income threshold at which you start to repay will shortly be raised from £21,000 to £25,000. Also, any outstanding balance is written-off after 30 years. This writing-off of significant balances was a deliberately designed feature of the system, in order to reduce the costs paid by less well-off graduates.
The disadvantage of a graduate tax is that many graduates that achieve high levels of income would end up paying more than the cost of their degrees, and this is avoided under our arrangements.

I believe that I would have no difficulty persuading a student about to begin an engineering degree at –say, Imperial College London, that if it ended up costing him £50,000, he’d be getting a bargain and should have no doubt that it would result in higher levels of income, rewarding him for the investment that he had made.
I know that I could not make the same case for all courses at all institutions: many students are not getting the same value for money, but they are all paying the same amount.

 

The disappointing part of our reform was that it was supposed to create a demand-led market in higher education, but it hasn’t. Amongst other innovations we expected shorter degree courses to be offered to students who wanted them. We expected universities to charge different fees depending both on reputation and what was actually on offer.

Unfortunately, the imposition of a maximum fee of £9,000 per year has had the perverse effect of almost all universities charging exactly the same, and without the incentive to compete and innovate.

 

The Government, I believe, has just made exactly the same mistake with its proposal for a maximum charge for electricity. I fear that all the electricity companies will end up charging the maximum just in the way that universities have.

 

 It is competition that drives prices down and innovation up, not government controls. The job of government is to promote competition by ending restrictive practices. Trying to fix prices has rarely, if ever, worked.

 

I bumped into Grant Shapps at the Conservative Conference in Manchester and we exchanged pleasantries -we were after all ministerial colleagues in the same department, and I was always in awe of his intellect, his sheer determination and energy. He didn’t give the slightest hint of the ‘plot’ which has subsequently emerged. Perhaps he realised that I would not be remotest of prospects (or perhaps he just thought me now of too little consequence). In any event, he has now been ‘outed’ in a Machiavellian master-stroke by the government whips. I know how dreadful it is being at the centre of a media feeding frenzy, so I do not envy him, but hey, he had it coming.

Understandably. I have had a huge correspondence about splits and leadership challenges. I share my correspondents’ frustration, but not their evident surprise: I cannot recall when it was not so.

I was David Cameron’s parliamentary secretary for 8 years, both as leader of the opposition and Prime Minister. I cannot remember when there wasn’t plotting. I did the same job for Michael Howard, and I was in the Whips office during Ian Duncan-Smiths turbulent leadership: The battle was continuous. John Major fought a long guerrilla war with elements of the Parliamentary party. No less so, did Maggie. Even Churchill had to endure continuous sniping from his own side. The Other parties are no different. Blair spoke of the scars on his back, and Jeremy Corbyn had the most turbulent contests up until the June election.

Our electoral system ensures that our political parties have to be broad churches of generally like-minded people who, nevertheless will be bound to disagree on important issues affecting the future of our country. This should not surprise us but, add to that mix the large egos disproportionately possessed by politicians, and the short attention span of our journalism which has a tendency to see everything through the prism of ‘personalities’, and it is little wonder that the headlines scream.

Of the inundation of emails, not one has urged me to use my influence dispose of the current PM. They have all supported her. I believe they are right to do so because the challenge that we face as a nation is one of policy not personality. There are two key issues to be addressed:
First, to negotiate BREXIT on advantageous terms.
Second, to maintain financial stability whilst at the same time addressing the proper public demand to improve the housing situation, productivity and stagnant wages, care for the elderly, growing student debt, and… I could go on.

None of these priorities would be advanced by the distraction of a leadership election. If there were a candidate who so obviously were going to make a better fist of it than the current PM then one might understand the motive, but there isn’t.

This is a time to hold our nerve, to knuckle down, and get on with the job.

Gadzooks!

Is it collective hysteria, or what?
Have we all taken leave of our senses?
What was the celebration that was last week’s Labour Conference actually a celebration of?
They did not even come close to winning the election: nearly sixty seats behind the Tories, and notwithstanding the progress that they did make, they still managed to lose heartland seats like Mansfield -and all that, despite the most uninspiring and cack-handed campaign mounted by the Tories in recent memory

As for the vision: a return to the socialism of the past that did so much lasting damage to the UK economy.  They even let slip that they were ‘war-gaming’ scenarios such as the run on Sterling and investor flight that would accompany a Labour election victory -how reassuring.

Now it is the turn of the Tories (the problem for the Forest Journal reader, is that I write this as the Tory conference begins, but you read it after it has concluded), so what will they make of it?

They failed to deploy their strongest suit during the election campaign: Economic competence; they inherited an economic crisis arguably worse than that of Greece, and turned it around, cutting the deficit by two thirds, whilst at the same time generating 3 million new jobs,  and –for most of their period in government- maintained the fastest rate of economic growth of any developed economy.

Despite not campaigning on it during the election nevertheless it remains their strongest card.

The difficulty however, is that a whole a whole series of other issues that cannot be ignored, did seize proper priority during the election campaign: long term care for the elderly; sluggish wage growth –particularly in the public sector; NHS expenditure; police numbers; student debt, and since the election others have emerged such as the growing squeeze on Defence expenditure. The critical problem for the Tories is to address these –which means spending more, whilst not trashing their own brand –economic competence- by letting the deficit rip.
I hope the best brains are working on it.

But what about Brexit?
Shouldn’t the best brains be working exclusively on that?
Well, that’s my priority, and it’s the priority of a number of constituents who email me daily, but then 99.99% of constituents don’t email or write to me at all. My suspicion is that, whatever the headlines may scream, their busy lives demand a focus on things much closer to home. Which is why I have some confidence that, in the medium term, the messianic rock star cult of Jeremy Corbyn will pass them by, just like the cult of Hugo Chavez or Nicolas Maduro.

That’s my hope, at any rate.

Given the way that our European partners have hitherto sought to conduct negotiations in public -and by megaphone, I had expected the Prime Minister’s speech in Florence to have been comprehensively rubbished by them within minutes of its delivery, as part of their strategy to build more pressure for the next negotiating session.
I am relieved to have been proved wrong, and the fact that I was wrong indicates that the negotiations might now proceed with a fairer wind. President Macron’s demand for more detail will be accommodated, but in the proper forum: at the negotiating table.

I had also expected to be deluged with vituperative emails from the Zealots among my constituents, incandescent about delay and betrayal. I am glad that I was wrong about that too: I have had only three. Which is just one quarter of the number of constituents who, in the same time window, have emailed asking me to write to the Secretary of State for Defence about the massacre of songbirds on UK bases in Cyprus. We may have been divided on the European question but at least we remain a nation of animal lovers.

I understand the frustration of the three correspondents however, who have written demanding no delay or transition, and in favour of a completely clean break unconstrained by any agreements or continued expense. I have never believed that leaving the EU without agreement would be the catastrophe that many commentators predict. Their predictions of disaster are merely an extension of the project fear they deployed during the referendum campaign, they have merely moved the goal posts.
Were we to leave without agreement we would continue to trade with the EU on the basis of World Trade Organisation rules, which are the rules which already govern the greater part of our trade, which has always been outside the EU. Indeed, the release from the EU common external tariff would provide a huge boost to that trade. Furthermore, some countries outside the EU trade with it rather more successfully on World Trade Organisation rules, than we have managed to do so from within the EU internal market.
Clearly, a two year transition period announced in the Florence speech delays all the economic advantages that many of us believe would accrue from our departure.

I have campaigned for 42 years to leave the EU, I can live with a further two years to reach that goal.
Whilst I remain sanguine about leaving without agreement, nevertheless I believe that there remains an advantageous agreement to be had. The imposition of tariffs and customs restrictions on our EU trade certainly won’t be to our advantage, especially in those enterprises where overseas investment in the UK was based on free access to European markets.
We simply have to be hard headed in the negotiations about the balance of advantage in terms of savings from freer trade, weighed against the bill we are expected to pay for it.

What my 3 correspondents ignore is the changed reality arising from the outcome of the election in June: a government without a parliamentary majority.

The Brexit Bill survived with rather more ease than I anticipated: a majority of 22 against the Opposition amendment to deny the bill a second reading (318 votes to 296 votes).

The opponents of the bill stated that they were not trying to derail our withdrawal from the EU, but that their concern was that the bill is unbalanced in that it gives too much power to ministers in supervising the Brexit process and too little influence to Parliament. Clearly, there is an argument to be had on this, and I entered into that argument in this column a couple of weeks ago ( http://www.desmondswaynemp.com/ds-blog/the-brexit-bill/ )

We need to judge politicians not just by their words however, but by their actions.

The purpose of a second reading debate is to explore the general principle of a bill. Examining the detail of a bill follows in a separate series of debates on the committee stage (for which seven eight hours days of debate have now been set aside)

The principle of the Brexit bill, accepted on both sides, is that there is a need to provide continuity and certainty after Brexit by incorporating EU law into UK law so that it continues to apply after we leave, as it does now. Otherwise there might be a chaotic departure from the EU.

If the Opposition accepted this argument (–and they said they did), but nevertheless were worried that the bill gave too much power to ministers, and too little to Parliament, then the proper parliamentary way to proceed would have been to have supported, or perhaps abstained, at second reading, then to seek to amend the balance of powers in the detail of the bill at the subsequent committee stage. To have voted –as they did- against the second reading is to vote against the principle of the bill and to try to kill it outright.

Whatever opponents say about their motives, for them to have voted against the second reading is deeply worrying about their commitment to our departure from the EU.

MPs are not objective observers. We are partisans. Forgive therefore, my suspicions about the motivation of parliamentary opponents who campaigned to remain in the EU, nevertheless now say that –as democrats- they accept the referendum result, but then vote against the principle of the bill that is essential to deliver Brexit.

They say that they are defending parliamentary sovereignty against a power grab by ministers (because the bill gives those ministers the exclusive right to draw up regulations that will make the thousands of changes necessary to our law, before presenting the regulations to Parliament to be approved or rejected).

Humbug

Where was their concern for parliamentary sovereignty when these EU laws were made in the first place, with no role at all for Parliament in that Process?

The opponents of the Bill say they want Parliament to be involved in the detail of drawing up the regulations: that would take years.

I have spoken before in this column of the desperation of those who want to hang on in the hope that something will turn up to prevent us leaving the EU. Delay is the essential ingredient to such a strategy of hanging on in that hope. Nothing is more suited to supplying that delay than the current tactics of those who voted against this bill.

A number of organisations have encouraged their supporters to email me about the potential impact of the EU Repeal bill on their areas of concern (amongst the most vocal have been environmental lobbyists).
As I pointed out in this column last week, the purpose of the Bill is to provide certainty and continuity so that our legal and regulatory framework will be exactly the same the day after we leave as it will be on the day before we leave.

By ensuring that all EU law and regulation is incorporated into UK law and regulation, all those lobbyists should be reassured that nothing will have changed (including all our environmental protections).
This unchanged status does beg the obvious question ‘why have we gone through the whole process of leaving the EU if we are keeping everything the same, including all those burdensome regulations from Brussels?’
To which the simple answers are twofold: First to provide necessary certainty and continuity in the short to medium term; and second, because we simply do not have the time available to do any kind of sifting exercise, in order to determine what regulations we wish to amend, revise, or dispense with.

Having campaigned to leave the EU however, I am ambitious to change the regulatory and legal framework at our leisure over the years ahead. There seems to me something wanting in the outlook of my correspondents, who appear to take the view that we are incapable of making our own arrangements – to protect our environment, or whatever else – and that we need to rely on the EU to do it for us. This is a poverty of ambition that I do not share. I have every expectation that our regulation can be superior to anything that the EU has come up with (and that we can protect our environment rather better – the record of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy has much to answer for in terms of environmental degradation).
The whole point of ‘taking back control’ by leaving the EU is so that we can develop policy more suited to our own needs and that our own standards can be higher.

The mark on manufactures ‘CE’ (“Conformité Européene”) means only that a product meets the essential regulatory requirements, it is not a badge of quality as is the ‘British Standard’. We need to ensure that we reinvigorate British Standards so that once again they become the premier mark of excellence throughout the world.

This week we begin our marathon parliamentary proceedings on the BREXIT bill.

Its title is ‘A Bill To Repeal The European Communities Act 1972’ but in reality it is not so much a bill of repeal, as of enactment: the twin purposes of the bill are to leave the EU, and to ensure that on the day that we leave our UK law and regulations are identical to those of the EU that we are leaving. This is in order to provide businesses and individuals with certainty and continuity.
Subsequently we may want to diverge and to tailor our own arrangements, but there is too little time now to pick and choose. In the circumstances it is far simpler to incorporate virtually all of EU law and then reconsider bits of it at leisure.

This is an enormous undertaking, and will only be possible if the Bill expressly delegates powers to ministers for secondary legislation. This is already common practice in virtually all modern parliamentary bills. For example, if a bill were to grant new powers to local authorities to enable them to, say, compulsorily purchase land in order to build affordable homes, it might delegate to the minister power to draw up detailed regulations as to the circumstances in which the powers can be used, the limits, the consultation period, the compensation criteria, arbitration, and etc.
Subsequently, after the bill became law, the minister would draw up the regulations and present them to Parliament. This can be done in one of two ways, and the original bill would have specified which of them must be used.
The first method is to debate the new regulations in a committee followed by motions put to both Houses to adopt the regulations. Parliament has to accept or reject the regulations (there is no provision just to amend them).
The Second method is where the regulations automatically become law unless MP’s or peers ‘pray’ against them, secure a debate, and vote them down.
Either way, ministers only enjoy the powers specified by Parliament, and are still constrained by the need to secure parliamentary approval in the exercise those powers.

Such is the complexity of the BREXIT bill, we will have to go further. The European Communities Act 1972 explicitly set EU law above UK domestic law. We did not have to legislate to remove any conflict between EU law and our own, because the 1972 Act instructed the courts to give precedence to EU law. If our law is to be exactly the same as EU law on the day that we leave, then we will have to legislate to resolve all the conflicts that existed or have arisen over the decades, because the 1972 ACT, which automatically resolved them will have been repealed.

This will be a massive undertaking requiring amendments to hundreds of statutes, and it will only be achievable if we do it by secondary legislation -as I have described above, but in these cases we will be granting ministers power not just to make new regulations, but to make regulations that actually amend previous acts of Parliament.

There will be a huge protest about the use of ‘Henry VIII powers’ to steamroller Parliament by allowing ministers to alter laws made by Parliament. The reality is however, that the power is narrowly defined, time limited, and still subject to a vote in Parliament before it can be exercised.

Those who resort to hyperbole about dictatorial powers quashing parliamentary government have a quite different agenda. Their real purpose is to make the BREXIT bill unworkable, in the hope that the democratic decision of voters in the referendum can be ignored, and that we don’t leave the EU at all.

“Woe, Woe and thrice woe” I feel like Frankie Howerd in Up Pompeii. (Does that date me?).

I’ve been enjoying glorious sunsets at Druidstone on the Pembrokeshire coast (where Bob Marshall-Andrews used to have his Telly-Tubby house, I wonder if he’s still there) but despite the beauty of this place I can’t help dwelling on the approaching doom.

Next week Parliament will resume and we will begin a marathon slog on the Bill to Repeal the European Communities Act 1972. The Official Opposition has withdrawn from any pairing arrangements, so no quarter will be given. I was once the pairing whip, so I know exactly what that means: when a father asks if he can be absent in order to attend his daughter’s primary school nativity play, the answer has to be no. If an MP want’s to attend a constituent’s funeral, or that of a relative, the answer will be no. If you are ill, you will have to be on the parliamentary estate in order to be ‘nodded through’ the division lobby.
Whatever the question, the answer will be no. Even ministers on important government business abroad, including the Brexit negotiations themselves, must be ready to return at a moment’s notice.
There will be two years of very long nights and short tempers.

Only now is the enormity of the disastrous election result beginning to hit home. The purpose of the election was to secure a majority with which to negotiate Brexit from a position of strength. Now however, we have to negotiate from a position of significantly greater weakness, with Her Majesty’s loyal opposition undermining the Government’s negotiating position by tabling contradictory amendments to the Brexit Bill as the negotiations proceed.

Constituents have been writing to me (they always do) with their legislative priorities for the new parliament. I have to tell them to forget it. There will be no time for any other legislation. What many do not appreciate is that the bulk of the legislative process in Parliament, where all the time- consuming detailed work takes place, is in the standing committees. These committees are composed of a subset of MPs determined by a formula to reflect the composition of the Commons as a whole. The Democratic Unionists, on whom the Government relies for a majority, are too few in number to qualify for representation on the standing committees. It follows that the Government will not have a majority on any such committee, and therefore cannot risk it. As a consequence, any legislation will have to be taken on the floor of the Commons in a ‘committee of the whole House’ creating a complete legislative log-jam.

I see no light at the end of the tunnel, with the Government at constant risk of defeat.

It is at times like this that you have to concentrate on what you have already survived, in order to give you a proper sense of proportion.
We survived school, including liver like rubber that you had to hide in your pocket and hope to remain undetected; we survived those knee length bell-bottomed football shorts made of jaggy army battle dress fabric that chapped your inner thighs; and, hey, does anyone remember IZAL Medicated….

The Worst is always behind us: We will get through this.

I have had some angry emails about ‘political correctness’ linking President Trump and Sarah Champion.

I am always cautious about what people call political correctness because it means so many things to different people. Some of its agenda is just so daft that it becomes funny, or infuriating, dependent entirely on one’s natural disposition. Other aspects of it strike me as just politeness and gentleness. I shudder to recall some of the terrible things that we called one another at school, which now would be considered beyond the pale.

I doubt that Donald Trump and Sarah Champion would welcome being linked in any way. For my own part I do not see the link between the news stories about them that my correspondents think they have identified.

My email correspondents insist that President Trump was right to condemn the violent behaviour of anti-fascists at the same time as he deplored the violence of neo-Nazi demonstrators in Charlottesville.
I hold no brief for agitators who hijack every issue from the Grenfell Tower, to trade union disputes, to anti-racism, or whatever. On 9th July, in this column, I pointed out the similarity they bear to the ‘sans culottes’ of the French Revolution. In my estimate the fascism of so many anti-fascists differs little from UK to USA.

The fact is however, that a known neo-Nazi committed an act of terrorism by using his car as a weapon to kill a woman. Any attempt to add a ‘but’ in those circumstances creates the impression of some sort of excuse, be it ‘they started it’ or ‘the other side are just as bad’. That, in my opinion was the President’s error of judgement.

As for the notion that there were ‘good people’ demonstrating with the neo-Nazis, surely the sacrifice made across Europe and USA in defeating Nazism should warrant that anyone parading with swastikas should attract the universal condemnation.

That there is a wider agenda at stake involving the survival of US heritage and monuments commemorating the Civil War is an irrelevance when it comes to condemning a terrorist murder.

I have sympathy with some critics of the iconoclasts. We have seen campaigns here to judge the past by the standards of the present and to remove statues and change names. Are we to demand that statues of Roman emperors be removed from public view on the grounds that they too supported slavery?
The prophet Muhammad condoned the sale of captives into slavery too, crikey! now we really are getting into politically correct hot water.

As for Sarah Champion, her analysis was correct and she should have stuck to her guns. It is nonsense to speak of a problem with ‘Asian men’ grooming white underage girls in Rotherham and other northern towns. How many Chinese are involved, how many Indonesians, how many Tamils? Why should all Asian men be so branded when the reality is that the problem is with a tiny proportion of men from Pakistani backgrounds?
We need to say so, and recruit their own communities in condemning their behaviour. If we are in denial, than we can hardly blame their communities from remaining in denial too.

I have been in Rwanda for the last ten days, participating in the Umubano (friendship) international development project started 10 years ago by David Cameron and Andrew Mitchell.

Over the last decade, for two weeks every summer we have, with the co-operation and assistance of Rwandan government ministries and other organisations, brought from UK leading professors, surgeons, doctors, dentists and nurses, to practice and to teach. We’ve brought a whole range of experienced business people to help Rwandan entrepreneurs with their business plans. We’ve brought football and cricket coaches out to help train local coaches in a nation obsessed with sport.

All are volunteers and pay their own way, whilst the organisational costs have been met by many generous donors. The annual number of volunteers has ranged from under 50 when we first started, to over a hundred. Over the decade over 40 Conservative MPs have volunteered: One might say that this Umubano Party is now the third largest in Parliament.

The main effort has been in education: Annually we have run a teacher training course. The education ministry has fed and accommodated teachers at centres during what would otherwise be their summer break, and we have run a professional development course for them.

The requirement was initially driven by the decision to promote economic growth by moving Rwanda from the francophone zone into the English speaking world. Consequently, the language of instruction in Schools changed from French to English, so teachers needed to learn to speak it. I recall that ten years ago, our course was very much just basic English. Over the decade however, as English has developed, we have focused more on methods and approaches to teaching as a professional skill.

This year we had 700 teachers to train, 300 secondary teachers in Kigali, and 400 primary teachers with me in Rwamagana to the east. The teachers had been selected because they are the ‘mentors’ for the staff in their own schools. I had a class of 45, which I thought would be unmanageable, but actually it worked very well, not least because I was assisted by a Rwandan teacher from the ‘beacon’ Umubano School in Kigali (founded and opened just 5 years ago by Brooks Newmark, then an Essex MP and one of our volunteers). Frankly, I was bowled over by the commitment, enthusiasm and professionalism of our trainees.

Equally, given that I visit so many UK classrooms with every electronic gizmo, I was relieved to be reminded what can be achieved with only a bit of chalk and a painted black space on a wall.

We closed the project with a moving ceremony at the Genocide Memorial, the largest grave in the world, where 250,000 of the one million victims of the 1994 genocide are buried. We were addressed by a survivor of that genocide now in her twenties, together with a survivor of Auschwitz now in her nineties. When I first started coming here the nation was still traumatised, but now Rwanda is transformed and outward looking, it has joined the Commonwealth, and Rwanda’s Army is deployed on more UN peace – keeping missions than any other.

We leave a legacy of friendship and goodwill but, as a Member of Parliament, it is still difficult for me to explain to Rwandans, why – as a nation, having stood by and watched as the genocide unfolded, some of those same génocidaires now live comfortably in the UK, protected by our absurd human rights laws.