It was a busy week on the referendum front, I wonder if public interest can sustain this until 23 June.

Lord Howard of Lympne came out in favour of leaving the EU. I was his parliamentary private secretary when he was leader of the Opposition, then when David Cameron took over I became his parliamentary private secretary for the next seven years. There is a growing spat over the question of a second referendum arising from a better EU ‘offer’ prompted by a ‘No’ vote in the initial referendum. Personally, I only want one vote in one referendum: Out! I am confident that we can amicably agree the details subsequently without another vote.

There are risks that will arise from leaving the EU, including a possible economic shock, but there are risks too from staying. I hope that leaving will prove quite as shocking and as economically liberating as Konrad Adenauer’s withdrawal from the stifling regulatory regime imposed on post war Germany, and the abandonment of which gave rise to the ‘Wirtschaftswunder’ – their economic miracle.

Just think of the shock of not paying £billions to the EU; the shock of being released from £billions worth of regulatory burdens; I could go on, -and what is truly shocking is that we’ve put up with it for so long.

 

 

I had a rush of emails over the weekend prompted by the campaigning website 38 degrees. Correspondents tell me that the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Treaty between the EU and the USA presents an existential threat to our NHS. This is based on a legal opinion secured by a trade union from a leading Queen’s Counsel. Frankly, I am deeply sceptical. The proposed treaty specifically excludes healthcare. I have always rather suspected that one can secure the legal opinion that you want, if you are prepared to pay for it. In any event –by definition- 50% of legal opinions will be proven incorrect if they are tested in court.

Personally I am in favour of free trade and support the proposed treaty -as regular readers of this column may recall. (My earlier article can be found at:
http://www.desmondswayne.com/blogs/4588303273/Transatlantic-Trade-and-Investment—17th-January-2015/9549237 )

We gave up our right to negotiate trade treaties when we joined the Common Market. It is the EU parliament that will ratify the treaty and not our own at Westminster.

Constituents who really are troubled by the proposed treaty and its alleged threat to the NHS however, should focus on the fact that it is to be a treaty between the EU and the USA.  They can draw the obvious conclusion and vote accordingly in the Referendum on 23 June!

 

 

The Prime Minister has a good record on the EU: he is the only PM ever to have brought a power back to the UK which had been previously ceded to the EU; he is the only leader ever to secure a cut in the EU budget; and the only one to veto an EU treaty. Furthermore, the only reason that we are having a referendum at all, is because David Cameron campaigned on the basis of a manifesto commitment to do so at the last election.

A number of my Eurosceptic colleagues have been very critical of the package that the PM has renegotiated. I believe that he has secured a significant change: the removal of the UK from the treaty obligation to ‘ever closer union’ is an important marker for the future when this legally binding change is incorporated into the next EU treaty. In its effect it will give us a new and different status within the EU. Were we to vote to remain in the EU we would do so under more favourable terms than we have at present.

EU migrant access to UK benefits was one of the areas where the PM was not as successful in the renegotiation as he originally hoped. He has improved the situation, but the new agreement does not match his original ambition. My fundamental problem is that he had to ask at all. The rules that govern the receipt of benefits in the UK, funded by the UK exchequer, ought to be the exclusive prerogative of our own UK Parliament, and not a matter for horse trading at the EU Council.

All sorts of terrors will be threatened in an attempt to persuade us to stay. In the long term however, our prosperity will depend on our competitiveness, and I am confident that outside the EU we have the ability to deliver greater competitiveness than we can within it. Of course, there are risks about leaving, but I believe that the risks are greater if we stay.

This is not a new position that I have arrived at. Regular readers of this column will know that I voted to leave the Common Market in 1975. So many of my constituents complain that back then they were duped: that they thought that it was just about trade, and they only discovered later that it was a political project that, amongst other things, would rob us of the power to decide who can live in the UK and claim benefits here. Nobody can legitimately claim ignorance this time around.

The PM urged Members of Parliament to decide the issue on the basis of their conscience and not to be swayed by party activists, and I will certainly obey him in that respect. Fundamentally I want to live in an independent country that can reach its own decisions, and control its own borders. We cannot do so in important respects so long as we remain in the EU. I will be voting to leave. Hopefully, second time lucky.

The proof that Einstein was right when – a century ago – he produced his theory of general relativity, predicting – amongst other things – the existence of gravitational waves, is unlikely to change our outlook on the week ahead, or the one just passed, but ought it to?

Certainly, the physicists are not understating its significance as the biggest scientific discovery of the century. One professor has likened it to watching only one channel on the TV and then discovering that there were others with completely different programmes. Another said that it will give humanity a new “sixth sense”.

What we do now know is that 1.3 billion light years away (and a light year is 6 trillion miles, so we are looking at a distance of 6 000,000,000,000 x 1,030, 000,000,000  = 7, 800, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000 miles) two massive objects spiralled into one another causing a storm in space, the waves from which  just reached Earth after travelling, – by my reckoning – 1.4 billion years at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second).

Frankly, the numbers are just too big to comprehend, but that is the point: We ought to stop and wonder at our lack of comprehension, and consider our place in the universe, and – by comparison – how trivial some of our preoccupations might seem. It puts me in mind of that great favourite among hymns:

O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder Consider the works thy hands hath made, I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, Thy power throughout the universe displayed Then sings my soul, my Saviour God, to thee: How great thou art!

Similarly, when I was at School, above the science block entrance, were inscribed the words from the book of the prophet Micah “there are many things yet hid, for we have seen but a few of his works”.

This awe ought to arrest us and give us a proper sense of proportion. It did to me last week. I was giving a speech to a City audience about economic growth and I was agreeing with the Growth Commission which had said “economic growth can relieve humanity en masse from drudgery and poverty, nothing else ever has”. When, of course, it occurred to me that spiritual values like awesome wonder had often achieved exactly that. The Book of Common Prayer, for donkeys’ years was, and is, a relief from drudgery.

I’m not sure what the City economists and accountants made of it.

A number of constituents have written to me to complain about various aspects of state pension reform. A mistake common to most of them is that they treat their contributions as if they were savings that had been paid into a retirement fund – on which they are entitled to draw when fully paid-up, and that any reform constitutes a change in the terms and conditions upon which they made their contributions in good faith.

The system just doesn’t work like this, and most people should be very glad that it doesn’t. For the overwhelming majority of us, had our national insurance contributions been paid into a savings fund, they would never have generated anything like the level of income in retirement that the state pension now affords. So, for most of us, it’s a bargain.

Our contributions, are in fact just taxes. They qualify us to receive a pension but they don’t pay for it. They just go into the total available to pay for all government expenditure, including, of course, the current pensions bill. So, in a sense, our national insurance contributions are paying the pensions of those who are already retired, in the expectation that the national insurance contributions of younger earners will pay for our pensions when we retire.

This leads to the critical need for reform: as we live longer and are retired for so much longer, the proportion of those of working age is shrinking relative to that of those in retirement. If the bill for pensions is to remain affordable for the working age people who are having to pay it, then we need to reduce that bill by either cutting the pension or by delaying the retirement of those who receive. Delaying the pension is much the more sensible course.

Under the Pensions Act 2011 the pension age for men and women accelerates to reach 66 by 2020. One of the current campaigns argues that this disproportionately affects women in their mid-fifties (born after 5^th April 1951) and that for them the change should be reversed. I recognise the complaint of those who now find that they have to retire later (my wife is one of them),  but the line has to be drawn somewhere – to the frustration of those just the other side of it. The campaigners need to explain why these particular women should be protected from a rise in State Pension age, when women just days younger – and men of all ages- will wait longer for their state pension.

 

 

In 1975 I campaigned and voted to leave the Common Market. My attitude to the European Union has not altered a great deal over the years – as regular readers of this column will be aware. I do believe however, that David Cameron has earned the right to be trusted in re-negotiating our EU membership. As Leader of the Opposition he withdrew his members of the European Parliament from the federalist European Peoples’ Party and instead created a new Eurosceptic block. When he got into government he became the first Prime Minister ever to repatriate powers from the EU: First by withdrawing UK from the Euro bail-out mechanism that the previous government had signed-up to; and second, by leaving scores of Justice and Home Affairs arrangements that we had previously opted into. He is the only UK prime minister ever to veto an EU treaty, and the only one ever to secure a cut in the EU budget. He enacted the Referendums Act which requires a referendum every time that powers are ceded to the EU, and now he is implementing his election promise to re-negotiate the terms of our EU membership and delivering the In / out referendum, that his opponents said would never happen.

Given this record, I believe that I owe it to the Prime Minister to wait and see what his negotiations achieve, before coming to a decision about how to campaign and vote in the referendum.  Many constituents however, have already made up their minds and write to tell me as much. Overwhelmingly my correspondents are in favour of leaving, but this week I had my first letter from an outraged EU enthusiast. His beef was that the PM’s investment in trying to negotiate us out of the aspiration to ‘ever closer union’ was the height of gesture politics, and is of no substance whatsoever. I disagree profoundly. The objective of ever closer union, which is central to the Treaty of Rome – the initial founding treaty, informs the judgement of the European Court of Justice that determines the interpretation of EU law and all of our disputes with it. Dispensing with a UK commitment to ever closer union would be a very significant departure. It would mean that, whatever speed the rest may choose to go at, we would no longer have join them at their destination, or even go in their direction.

After the demands in the tabloids, I am surprised that I have had only a couple of emails from constituents telling me that foreign aid expenditure should be diverted to supporting our own flood victims and building better flood defences.

I just do not share the indignation of tabloid leader writers who appear to be incensed by the thought that the UK has been spending money on flood relief in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Mozambique and many other countries. The fact of the matter is that we have been spending record amounts on flood defence back in the UK too over the last decade. Clearly, we are going to have to spend more, but as the 5th richest country on the planet I am confident that we are quite capable of finding the necessary expenditure without taking it from our international development budget, which is designed to assist the world’s poorest people.

We spend 0.7 percent of our national income on international development, which means that we can set our other national priorities with the 99.3 percent that is left.
Notwithstanding the severity, and misery of the floods we have experienced we do still need to keep a sense of proportion. In the last great devastating floods to hit Pakistan in 2010, 2000 people drowned and 20 million were driven from their homes – fully 12 percent of the population. An area the size of Italy was devastated with hundreds of billions of pounds worth of damage.

The purpose of our international development expenditure is to increase our own national security by investing to make the world a safer, more secure, and more prosperous place. One way of promoting this is by spending money to ensure that poor countries are more resilient to climate change, the flooding, and the other hazards that it brings. Were we not to do so, and instead to spend 100 percent of our income on ourselves, then we can only expect even greater flows of population as the world’s desperate people seek a better life here.

A number of constituents have emailed me to demand the prosecution of Sports Direct for allegedly not paying the minimum wage. Of course, it is proper that the law is enforced, and if it is found to be inadequate, it must be strengthened. Politicians however, must have nothing whatsoever to do with individual decisions to prosecute. To allow them to have any such influence would be to breach the important constitutional principle of ‘the separation of powers’. We have witnessed the corrosive influence of political agitation recently when the Police responded to the demands of Tom Watson MP to pursue allegations against Leon Brittan, which they knew to be groundless. If politicians were to decide who is investigated, prosecuted, or imprisoned, then our Liberty would not long endure.

For the benefit of those constituents who email me about the dangers of Islam, I want to share the contents of a letter from Dr Mohammed Fahim, Imam of the South Woodford Mosque, which was inside his Christmas card:
“ISIS are criminals who hijacked Islam, a religion of peace, tolerance and justice. They are not Muslims, even if they claim that they are responding to wars waged against innocent people in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, or the treatment of the Palestinians by the Israelis, and the support given to tyrant rulers in the Middle East.

Any Muslim who agrees with their Ideology or condones their evil practices, or sympathises with them in any form is regarded by God in the Quran and by the tradition of the prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, as an unbeliever. This means he is not a Muslim. A severe punishment awaits him in this life and in the Hereafter, as detailed in the Quran in verse 93 chapter 4 and verses 32-34, chapter 5.

Those who carried out the heinous attack on innocent harmless victims in Paris on 13^th November, are nothing but criminals who should be eliminated, and their organisation destroyed. Our hearts and prayers are with all the victims and their families. May God be with all of them. May God’s peace prevail.”

Tim Peake’s spectacular launch into space coincided with a visit I made to the Southern Hemisphere, so I was looking out at  completely different stars to the ones that I habitually see with my telescope in the New Forest. The awesome size and age of the Universe laid out before us in night sky never ceases to fill me with wonder, and presents a certain tension -if not a standing challenge-to my professed Christianity, particularly at this time of year.

The principal Christian truth is that we are the critical factor in understanding God’s purpose: that humanity is central to the creation; that we were created to glorify God and enjoy him forever; and that -to this end- God created Heaven and Earth and then intervened in human history, through Jesus Christ, to redeem mankind and restore the integrity of  that original purpose. This dramatic intervention took place only a couple of thousand years ago. Indeed, human history itself only stretches back before Christ by some 5,000 years.

So the key problem is this: Given that the age of the Universe is nearly 14 billion years, why did The Almighty leave it so long before adding the central feature of the creation –humanity, and to make his key intervention –through the life of Christ?

I believe that the answer, if there is one, lies in the fact that we are literally made of stardust: the heavier elements -so critical to the formation of the larger molecules essential to the existence of Life, take eons of time to form, being the product of the life-cycle of generations of massive stars, and the enormous pressures created by their subsequent collapse.

The proper response therefore, on looking out into the Universe, from the space station window, from the Southern Hemisphere, or from a garden in the New Forest, shouldn’t be one of ‘how insignificant we are’ as such recent and tiny occupants in such an incredibly old and massive universe. Rather it should be the opposite: ‘How incredibly important we must be to God’s purpose’ that we are the product of such a vast and time consuming process.