I have no difficulty with the Government compensating those who have been damaged by the British state in recent years. The Horizon scandal and the Tainted Blood scandal being two obvious examples.
I just don’t hold the same view when both victims and perpetrators have been dead for over a century.
Recently I was at a lecture by a clergyman who told us that we all needed to apologise and atone for slavery. I disagreed vociferously on the ground that I had nothing for which to apologise, as I haven’t ever enslaved anyone.
Now some Commonwealth nations are demanding mind-boggling sums from Britain as reparations for the slave trade. They badgered the Prime Minister into abandoning his original stance ‘this is not on the agenda’, to one of ‘opening a discussion’. Such discussions open the door to a slippery slope: The original  flat refusal to engage was the correct response and he should have stuck to it .
Many Britons were engaged in the ghastly slave trade and profited mightily from it from about 1650 to well into the 19^th Century. Africans and Arabs profited from it too.
Monstrous though slavery is, it had been a universal institution for millennia. Even the Maroons -the escaped slaves in Jamaica- kept their own slaves. Freed slaves in North Carolina owned slaves until the American Civil War in 1861.
Britain abolished the Slave trade in 1807 and slavery throughout the Empire in 1833. We used our naval power to impose our own abolition of the trade on the rest of the World: 13% of the Royal Navy’s manpower was assigned to the West Africa Anti-Slavery Command. Historians have called that endeavour “the most expensive example of moral action”
Whilst contemporary UK subjects can’t claim the credit for the action of our forbears in stamping out the trade. Neither should we be asked to pay compensation for being involved in it in the first place.
Some of the Caribbean nations that suffered under the enslaved plantation system have prospered  whilst others much less so. It is not the history of slavery that has blighted those that have not prospered, so much as other circumstances, not least weak and corrupt government.

We must not pay up

Around this time of year I get half a dozen emails demanding an end of the practice of turning the clocks back one hour to Greenwich Mean Time and promising all sorts of economic benefits from doing so.
Some of my correspondents have simply forgotten, a few others weren’t even born when we last tried exactly that experiment. We kept British Summer Time all year round, but we renamed it British Standard Time. I was twelve when the experiment started in 1968. It was dreadful living in Scotland going to school in the dark. I doubt that any economic benefits were delivered because by 1971 the nation had had enough: Parliament voted by 366 to 81 to end the misery and restore the status quo ante. I’m always amazed that some people want to try it out again.

As we approach the budget, full of apprehension, with both business and consumer confidence plummeting, the former having taken a further hit with this week’s second reading of the Employment Rights Bill -adding five billion pounds to business costs, I’ve been considering how Labour’s first few months have gone so spectacularly wrong.

I put it down to lack of focus on what ought to have been their  main effort.
 As officer Cadets, our training at Sandhurst drummed into us the that first principles (of war) were the selection and maintenance of the aim: you have to choose your overriding priority and then stick to it.
The Massai put it rather more elegantly: Huwezi kuwafukuza swala wawili which, paraphrasing from the Swahili, means ‘you just can’t chase two gazelles’.

Labour’s stated overriding objective was economic growth, summed up by the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, as ‘invest, invest, invest’. Yet the main effort of the first weeks after the election was clearly something quite different: The new administration was determined to frame a narrative in the public mind that it had been bequeathed a disastrous legacy by the wicked Tories who had pursued a ‘scorched earth policy’ leaving behind a wasteland, everything broken and a massive financial black hole; And that, as a consequence, things would have to get worse before they could get better, and the Government was going to have to do some very painful stuff by withdrawing Winter Fuel Allowance from some nine million pensioners, with much worse to follow in the Budget on October 30^th.

This political strategy has a long lineage: You get into Government and announce that you never realised things were really this bad. The Coalition Government did exactly that in 2010 when it inherited from Labour a financial deficit of fully 10% of the national income, which dwarfs the mere 4% (and already in steep decline) that the new Labour Government inherited this July.
Nevertheless, Labour’s pursuit of this same strategy was clearly at odds with their stated priority of securing growth through investment, which requires confidence and optimism, not the misery spouting from government commentary. Little wonder that business confidence, which had been soaring, plummeted.
The Government’s stated priority would have been much better served by rehearsing the positives that it had inherited Viz. the fastest growth and the second lowest debt in the G7, inflation firmly under control and interest rates falling, record low unemployment. All of which is now at risk as a consequence of the bucket of cold water that the Government has poured over them.

Add into this mix ‘wardrobe-gate’ and the mayhem in 10 Downing Street with the defenestration of the PM’s Chief of Staff, Sue Gray, and it makes nonsense the corporate stooges who wrote to The Times last week praising political stability.

This week party members will receive their ballots to vote in the Conservative leadership election.
There are two very strong candidates, but we have to choose between them. I’ve set out the reasons for my own choice below.

It starts with honesty. We need to be clear about why we lost the election. We lost because we were seen as incompetent and divided, and no-one knew what we stood for. This wasn’t entirely fair but it was true enough to turn off millions of voters who left us for Reform, the Lib Dems, Labour, or to stay at home and not vote at all.

To restore our reputation for competence, to unite the Party, and to rediscover what we stand for – we need leadership. 

Leadership isn’t about grabbing media attention, though we certainly need a good media performer. It’s about doing the hard work to identify the real causes for our national malaise – on productivity and growth, on defence and security, on social breakdown and the state of the public services – and putting in place a plan to fix them. 

It’s about setting a clear direction, with explicit policy commitments on the main issues the voters care about: immigration, the economy and the public services, especially the NHS. When the leader is clear on direction, the troops will unite and follow.

And it’s about being professional, diligent, decent and respectful towards all strands of conservatism (and indeed non-conservatives). We need courage and radicalism, but with the spirit of emollience and courtesy. You don’t win by hectoring people. You win by putting across a clear and persuasive message.

This combination – clarity on policy direction, and an inclusive and generous spirit – is what Robert Jenrick represents. He has set out a detailed analysis of what is wrong with our country, a clear set of Conservative principles to address them, and policies to get there. His pledge to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is a case in point.

  I like and greatly admire Kemi Badenoch. If Rob had been knocked out of the contest earlier, I would have backed her. Indeed, I backed her in the last leadership contest. I share her politics – pro-Brexit, pro-growth, anti-woke – and I recognise her strengths as a punchy debater and, of course, if Kemi wins this contest, I will gladly follow her. We have a great chance of winning back power from this plainly failing Labour government, and we will need unity to do that. But for the next week we have a choice and I see Robert Jenrick as the stronger of the two

My rather bleak conclusion in this column last week Tens of Thousands May Have To Die (desmondswaynemp.com) has prompted some robust emails from both the supporters of a ‘free Palestine’ and those of a ‘greater Israel’.  Which rather re-enforces my prejudice that neither side is ready for the level of compromise required to reach a peaceful settlement.
It strikes me that there are four possible scenarios:
First, a continuation of the status quo with occupied territories, the absence of a Palestinian state, together with the consequential economic disadvantages,  intermittent terrorist outrages, intifadas and bouts of open warfare.
Second, The rather unlikely triumph of Israel’s sworn enemies, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, resulting in genocide and the complete replacement of Israel by ‘Palestine’.
Third, the equally unlikely possibility of a single secular state embracing both Palestinians and Israelis, as well as the Arab Israelis.
Or fourth, a two state solution, which is the objective of UK, European, and US policy, with Palestine and Israel both enjoying full statehood and living side by side.
These last two possibilities would require historic concessions of enormous magnitude on both sides. Compromises would have to be territorial and economic. They would be painful and neither side could be wholly satisfied. It would require leadership of enormous courage and vision, neither of which has been in evidence for many years.
Hence my bleak conclusion that killing will continue until there is a willingness to compromise and the leadership on both sides to embrace it.

I recall Maggie’s magnificent and dogged determination to secure our annual rebate from the European Union when Brexit wasn’t even a distant dream. Equally, I recall Tony Blair’s gullibility in giving half of it back again in return for what turned out to be …absolutely nothing.
I consider the ceding our sovereignty over the Chagos Islands by this present Labour Government to be a much greater error of enormous magnitude.
We have given away something that we owned and controlled, in return for a promise that we can continue to use it as before, but from now on, we’ll have to pay handsomely to do so.
Furthermore, we have done so by handing a vitally important strategic asset to a country which is in a growing partnership with one of our principal adversaries, to the consternation of our greatest ally.
What on Earth were they thinking of?
The scent of weakness rapidly spreads: Argentina is now salivating at the prospects for the Falklands, as is Spain over Gibraltar.

My email inbox has registered another spike in correspondence over the situation in the Middle East.
If largely falls into two categories. First, those for whom Israel can do no wrong. Including some evangelical Christians who share a bizarre (and quite unscriptural) belief that Jesus will not return until ancient boundaries of Israel are fully restored.
Second, those who believe that Palestinian violence is entirely justified by Israeli intransigence, and many of whom come dangerously close to suggesting that the very existence of Israel is the source of the problem.
Though my correspondence does not reflect it, my prejudice is that a majority of my constituents  share my own ability to see it from both sides.
When, as the UK minister responsible for our Palestinian outreach, I challenged the Government of Israel on what I considered to be their disastrous stewardship of Occupied Territories (which included the bulldozing of schools paid for by UK taxpayers), I believed their policy to be a calculated effort to prevent the two-state solution which was the very objective of our own policy. When I put this to Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister and Chief Negotiator, our meeting ended abruptly.
Equally, over the years, we have seen the rare opportunities for a long-term settlement squandered by aspects the Palestinian leadership. The resort to terrorism has only reaped greater suffering on their own people and set back negotiation further.
When Hamas launched their pogrom last October they could have been in no doubt about the whirlwind that they would reap. Hamas now claims that their objective was to re-energize the prospect of negotiations. I believe they knew exactly the destruction that would follow and that their real purpose was to radicalise a new generation. Something in which Israel appears to be obliging them.

Tens of thousands may have to die before either side is ready to make the level of compromise necessary for peace.

After hearing reports on Radio 4’s early morning Farming Today programme, about the difficulties farmers have been having registering poultry in accordance with new regulations. I decided that I’d better get on with it, rather than end up being fined.
I didn’t experience the frightful computer problems that I had heard reported. Nevertheless, I resent the absurdity of having to register my one surviving hen (alas, nature is red in tooth and claw).
I can understand that government might need regulate large commercial undertakings, but there is something rather Orwellian  about a state that wants to keep tabs on those of us who keep a few chickens in the garden as a hobby, or for eggs at our own breakfast table.