At the hustings during the election campaign, when I asserted the strength of the economy, it was greeted with laughter and distain. So, when the Gross Domestic Product numbers were published last week, confirming further economic growth ahead of the rest of the G7, and the headline was ‘boost for Starmer’ :  the irony was not lost on me.

*

 I am sorry to have lost so many diligent and committed colleagues at the election, many of whom will now have to find employment to support their families. I used to meet with a dozen colleagues on a Tuesday morning for a short Bible study. Alas only two of us have survived.
I suppose that its very nature, politics is a risky career and politicians go into it knowing the odds.
Any career, profession, or employment can end in disappointment, defeat, and failure. Perhaps the only real difference with politics is that such defeats are attended with the glare of publicity.

*

Ironically, another group of politicians for whom I have a great deal of sympathy are the thirty or so Labour front-benchers who slogged it through the hard years in opposition, only to find that they have not been rewarded with a position in government.
Opposition is a thankless task for a shadow minister, you are on your own marking your government opposite number, but without the special advisers and civil service back-up that your minister enjoys. You will spend your weekends travelling, at your own expense, to make a speech somewhere in the vain hope that someone is going to take any notice of what you have to say.  I know, I did twelve years of it. To have done it faithfully, but not to have been rewarded with a government red box, will be a bitter pill to swallow.
 Undoubtedly, managing those the bruised egos will be a significant headache for the Labour whips, in addition to managing the expectations of their very large majority, many of whom may be rather unrealistic about their own prospects of achieving ministerial office any time soon.
I suspect that the Government whips office will do what they did with their large majority in 1997. They simply won’t need them all to get their business through the Commons. So, they will be able to run shifts, allowing many to spend more time in their constituencies building up a reputation for being helpful, rather than plotting, airing grievances and frustrations in the Members’ Tea Room.

As to how it will all turn out, its far too soon to tell.

National Insurance currently raises £145 Billion annually

The current cost of the state pension is £111 Billion annually

There is a common misconception that pensioners earned their State Pension, in that, as with an occupational pension, their National Insurance contributions and those of their employers, were invested to generate their income in retirement.
That was indeed the original intention when the state pension was conceived in the first decade of the twentieth century, but it was never implemented in that way.
The National Insurance contributions are not invested. Instead, they go into the government revenues with all other taxes to pay for current public expenditure. This expenditure will include pensions as well as defence, the NHS, and every other public expenditure. There is no direct read-across from the National Insurance levied, and the amount of the state pension.

National insurance contributions are necessary to qualify for the State Pension but they do not earn it: The State Pension is a ‘contributory benefit’.
Because our contributions are a percentage of our incomes, we will all make very different contributions, but qualify for the same benefit, a fixed amount of pension.

The tax system is complicated. There are two taxes levied on income from employment: Income Tax and National Insurance.
Why have two?
Why not simplify the tax system and just combine them into one?
These are questions that have occurred to several Chancellors of the Exchequer, including the current Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, who, in his last Budget, expressed his ‘aspiration’ that , when it becomes possible, to get rid of National Insurance altogether.
This will be a long way off because both Income Tax and National Insurance have intricate complications, making it difficult to combine them without creating a significant number of losers (including pensioners who don’t pay National Insurance).

The author of the current scam is a political party which is seeking to terrify voters with the false assertion that the aspiration to do away with National Insurance is, in effect, a threat to abolish the State Pension.

This is nonsense. There is no direct link between revenue from National Insurance and the State Pension, and here is the proof: we’ve cut National Insurance contributions by 2%, but the state pension has just increased by 8.5%, another £900, the highest increase for 30 years.

Further to my article in last week’s Forest Journal regarding the pernicious danger of smartphones. I can express my satisfaction at the removal of another intrusion to deny children their childhood: the removal of aspects sex education until year 9 (typically 12 to 13 years-old) and the complete exclusion of transgender ideology.
Of course, as a former teacher, I have some reservations about government telling teachers what to teach, when to teach it, and how to teach it. Nevertheless, some members of the profession had clearly taken leave of their senses, evidenced by the inclusion of inappropriate material, often provided a considerable expense to schools, from third parties with an ‘axe to grind’, and in many cases, an unwillingness to be transparent about that content with parents.

But let me return to the question of children and smartphones, which was debated at Westminster last week, and quote from my colleague, Miriam Cates MP’s speech last week:

“In this country, we often take the physical safety of our children for granted, but imagine if our streets were so lawless that it was unsafe for children to leave their homes. Imagine if, on their daily walk to school, our children had to witness the beheading of strangers or the violent rape of women and girls. Imagine if, when hanging out in the local park, it was normal for hundreds of people to accost our child and encourage them to take their own life. Imagine if it was a daily occurrence for our children to be propositioned for sex or blackmailed into stripping for strangers. Imagine if every mistake that our child made was advertised on public billboards, so that everyone could laugh and mock until the shame made life not worth living. This is not a horror movie or some imaginary wild west; this is the digital world that our children occupy, often for hours a day.”

The point is well made. The consequences are dreadful. I am besieged with requests from desperate parents seeking assistance in securing mental health interventions for their children. Suicide rates for teenage boys in the UK have doubled. They have trebled for girls. Incidents of self-harm for 10 to 12-year-old girls have increased by 364%. Anxiety rates for the under-25s have trebled. Feelings of hopelessness, worthlessness, loneliness and despair are growing among our youngest citizens. In just 15 years, childhood has been abolished.

The evidence and research points to smartphones and social media as the culprits. They have become an addiction throughout the developed world. This is hardly surprising given that the suppliers design applications with the intention of making them addictive.
It is significant that TikTok, one of most popular social media amongst children, severely restricts Children’s screen time in its native China, but unlimited in its ability to undermine them in the free world.

My prejudice has always been to resist interfering with the freedoms and personal choices of the people who elect me. Nevertheless, I do not think we can simply stand aside as we witness the creation of an ‘anxious generation’ whose confidence has been so undermined by hours and hours of often harmful screen time and starved of real social interaction with peers. It is our duty to protect our children.
The Online Harms Act is a start, but we now need to proceed much further and faster to to restrict access by age and content.

Below is a column I wrote for last week’s edition of the Forest Journal

I am thankful, that my childhood was ‘screen-free’ and ‘phone-free’ (though it was always worth trying every telephone box to press button B and see if tuppence was to be had).
Equally, I am thankful that my own children grew up before smartphones became available. Parents are now badgered by their children to get them one at an ever-younger ages. I understand that they are now by far the biggest strain of modern parenthood: trying to understand the technology, monitoring it, nagging, negotiating and fighting about it.
Of course they have their uses, not least the reassurance that you can maintain contact with your children and know where they are. Beyond that however, they open the door to far too many dangers.

The National Crime Agency has issued an unprecedented alert to schools, after cases of  “sextortion” increased eight-fold (this is blackmail where criminals, posing as teenagers, make contact with real children online).

Apart from enabling these approaches from sexual predators, smartphones expose children to inappropriate and extreme content: Seeing hardcore pornography, extreme violence, cyberbullying, self-harm and anorexia content are now all too commonplace occurrences for young people. 

Smartphones and the apps that they support are intentionally designed to be highly addictive. According to the regulator Ofcom  ‘many children are spending six and even eight hours a day on social media – sometimes even more’, instead of playing and interacting in the real world with friends. Little wonder then, that teachers say that children find it increasingly difficult to concentrate, that they are often anxious, and that so many are lacking in self-esteem.

Certainly, the Online safety Act is a good start with its very large fines for the media giants when they break the law.
Also, The Department for Education has published new guidance which backs head teachers in banning mobile phone use throughout the school day, including at break times, to tackle disruptive behaviour and online bullying.
The new guidance says that schools should prohibit the use of mobile phones, but they will have a free hand on how to do this. Schools will be supported to prohibit mobile phone use with examples of different approaches including banning phones from the school premises, handing in phones on arrival at school, and keeping phones securely locked away at school. 

Frankly, the smartphone has abolished normal childhood and polls say that 60% of parents want them banned for under-sixteens. The Government has now launched a consultation on this. I’m for going further and I would consider  banning access to social media until adulthood.

On Monday we passed second reading of the Government’s Bill to quash all the convictions of the victims of the Post Office Horizon scandal.
The purists, especially among legal minds, ‘tut tut’ about the constitutional enormity of Parliament intruding into the proper business of the courts. They fancy that we, like the USA, have a ‘separation of powers’ between the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. They are mistaken. Notwithstanding, the recent innovation of our pretended Supreme Court, the reality is that Parliament remains supreme as it always has.
We have no separation of powers: executive, judiciary, and legislators are all mixed up together in Parliament. The High Court of Parliament remains our real supreme court.

So, we are going to quash the convictions of the wronged sub-postmasters. Once we’ve compensated them, there will remain another important item of business: the prosecution of those who wilfully concealed the truth. This may present all sorts of difficulties and delays.
Here’s a thought. Given, that we’ve used Parliament to quash convictions, why don’t we use it to make some?
It wouldn’t be without precedent, indeed, in the sweep of parliamentary history we passed many such acts of attainder. There appear to be worthy candidates for this legislation, given the number of witnesses who have told the public inquiry that they have forgotten anything they ever knew about Horizon.

Well, I suspect that even the wronged postmasters would baulk at the prospect of politicians deciding who goes to jug. They’d be right: nobody would be safe.

Sir Graham Brady gave a candid talk at Durham University, which was swiftly leaked and filled several column inches in the Sunday papers. He expressed his view that he did not believe that wider party membership should have a role in the choice of party leader. As chairman of the Conservative 1922 Committee – the principal ‘man in a grey suit’ , his voice carries weight.
I agree with him. I was opposed to the reform  from the moment when William Hague introduced it.

Inevitably MPs will be familiar with the candidates in a way that ordinary party members cannot possibly match. MPs will have seen them perform and they will know their strengths and weaknesses.
A parliamentary ballot can be organised in hours, but involving the party membership adds weeks. Hustings and debates have to be organised in addition to the logistics of the postal ballot itself. This delay may paralyse effective government at a time when events demand swift and focussed leadership, which is exactly what happened in England in the Summer of 2022, and is now likely to follow in Scotland.

Political parties in Parliament need to have confidence in their leadership if they are to function effectively in either government or opposition. The final choice of leader by a wider party membership however, raises the possibility of a leadership choice that a parliamentary party decidedly didn’t want.
This is precisely what befell the Parliamentary Labour Party after Ed Miliband’s resignation in 2015.
Labour MPs voted very decisively against Jeremy Corbyn but their wider party membership chose him anyway, with all the unhappy consequences for them that followed.
 And for the Tories, Rishi led in every round of voting and ended with 137 votes in the fifth and final ballot, beating Liz Truss with 113 votes. The membership overturned that result, and the rest is history

On Monday, in response to a public petition, the Commons will debate ‘Assisted Dying’ once again.
We won’t vote on it -which will frustrate those who have written to me demanding a vote-, but we’ll talk about it. Hopefully, we’ll think carefully about it beforehand, during, and after the debate too.

By co-incidence, Dr Trudo Lemmens, Professor of Health Law and Policy at the University of Toronto, visited Westminster last week.  The Professor, who enthusiastically supported the introduction of MaiD (Medical Assistance in Dying)  in Canada, shared with MPs his concerns and misgivings about the way that the law quickly evolved, post implementation.

Canada’s 2021 MAiD law has a two-track system: Track One, for those approaching a reasonably foreseeable death, and Track Two for those who are not. Patients in group One require no waiting period and the procedure, once approved, will be carried out even if they subsequently lose mental capacity.  Those in the Track Two group however, require a 90-day assessment alongside an assessor with expertise in the applicant’s medical condition.  

Professor Lemmens told us that Canadian policy prioritises ‘access to death over protection against it’. It is now an obligation in Canada for clinicians to offer MAiD to all who qualify, including most disabled people who, by the very nature of their disability, qualify under Track Two.
(I had heard this previously from a Canadian practitioner who described how a disabled patient was told that the budget would not extend to adapting his dwelling to further accommodate the development of his disability, nevertheless, the Track Two process to medical assisted death was available instead!)
The Professor stated his concern that disabled persons and the elderly are often ignored, or are addressed by measures which will always be incomplete, more expensive, or easily de-prioritised in times of cost constraints.
 He told us that standards of medical care are no longer upheld so that death is prioritised over ensuring the ‘most basic professional standards of care’.
He said that many of those on Track Two engineer their health circumstances to move to Track One in order to bypass a waiting period and the thoroughly safeguarded assessment. And that this process is not solely driven by the MAiD applicants themselves, rather it is actively endorsed by the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers, who provide recommendations on how to transfer a patient eligible under Track two to Track One

He Concluded that death is now regarded as a legitimate therapy for suffering, regardless of other available therapy options or the actual source of the suffering. And that this has had effect of shifting MAiD from being a tool to avoid ‘suffering in death’, to now one of avoiding ‘suffering in life’.

I’m Glad we’ll only be debating on Monday and not voting. We need time to thoroughly think through the implications of what is being contemplated

See also:
Death in Oregon (desmondswaynemp.com)

 Esther Rantzen (desmondswaynemp.com)

Assisting Suicide (desmondswaynemp.com)

MAID (desmondswaynemp.com)

Assisted Dying -Again (desmondswaynemp.com)

There has been a ‘write-in’ campaign against the ‘intrusion’ of private sector providers into the NHS.
It’s an old ideological battle that dates back to when Barbara Castle was Secretary of State.
The reality is that most of our interactions with the NHS are through private providers because overwhelmingly our GPs are private contractors.

As it happens I‘ve received a batch of statistics from ministers which measure improvements in the NHS.
We are spending record sums on it, more in fact than any political party ever promised and our health expenditure compares favourably with other wealthy nations.
Notwithstanding to-day’s alarm from the GMC that our doctors are about to depart for the antipodes, the plain fact of the matter is that there are now more clinical staff -doctors and nurses- working in the NHS than ever before in its history. This includes an additional 50,000 nurses added since the last election.
In Local terms the statistics are that Hampshire & Isle of Wight Clinical Commissioning board has been allocated £3.43 billion for 2024/25.  In the Southampton University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, which serves most of my parliamentary constituency, there were 124 more full-time-equivalent doctors and 274 more nurses in September 2023 than there were in September 2022.
I could go on, but all these statistics are all about inputs. What is of concern to patients is the outputs: the number of successful treatments and appointments. In this respect the NHS lags behind the performance of comparable healthcare systems in other wealthy nations where survival rates for many conditions are better and waiting times are shorter.
We kid ourselves with the mantra that we have the best healthcare system in the world. Were it so, it is surprising, that nowhere else in the World has anyone copied it.

Over my time in Parliament, in opposition and in government, numerous clinicians have come to give me their insights about NHS. With few exceptions however, they have been short on remedies to fix the systemic problems that they identify.

I am certain that politicians, irrespective of party, are amongst those least qualified to run the NHS.
Accordingly, the whole thrust of Policy from 2010 was to take the politics out of it through the creation of NHS England, a body largely independent of government. Let politicians determine how much the nation can afford to fund the NHS, but let the professionals run it.
Alas, such is the nature of our politics that whatever goes wrong in the NHS, ministers will get the blame. Increasingly they now find that, despite being blamed, they have few levers to pull -having handed so much of the power over to NHS England.

Symptomatic of our political focus, in Parliament I find that every week I am inundated with invitations to attend meetings and receptions organised by all-party parliamentary groups (APPGs) campaigning for more NHS resource for their own particular disease (there is such an APPG for every known medical condition, perhaps with the exception of rigor mortis). Badgering politicians is no way to determine clinical priorities.

As to my own remedy, I think the NHS is far too big to be manageable – it’s the world’s largest employer, its culture is too bureaucratic and too centralised, it needs to be broken up and made much more locally accountable; it must become much more flexible and nimble in using the private sector.
Wes Streeting, Labour’s Shadow Secretary of state says he won’t let ‘middle class lefties’ interfere with his own plans to make use of the private sector… Well, good luck with that.

Understandably, I’ve received a large number of emails regarding arms exports to Israel following the fatal attack on the World Central Kitchen relief workers.

Since 2015, the UK has licensed at some £500 million of military exports to Israel.   These have included components for F-35 stealth bomber aircraft, components for Israeli armed and surveillance drones, and military intelligence and technology.
The case for these arms sales is twofold. First, Israel is a strategic ally in an unstable region where UK vital interests are at risk. This is particularly so, with respect to Iran, the region’s principal troublemaker, and exporter of terror (as we’ve seen again just last week in London with an attempted assassination on an Iranian Journalist).
Second, modern Israel has, since its creation in 1948, had to fight wars launched by hostile surrounding states determined to end its very existence. It has also been subject to continuous terrorist attacks and hostage taking, of which the 7^th October last year was the most brutal. We would have failed in our obligation to our friend and ally had we withheld armaments with which to defend themselves.

Hamas is a terrorist organisation dedicated to the complete destruction of Israel and its replacement with an Islamic State of a particularly unpleasant kind. Hamas is also the Government of Gaza. Therefore, a proper and lawful retaliation by Israel in response to the 7^th October attack by Hamas, inevitably involved a military assault on Gaza with brutal consequences for non-combatants. Hamas will have been well aware of these consequences when it planned its attack on Israel. Furthermore, Hamas’s military doctrine has always involved using its civilian population as a human shield. That is why it operates from schools and hospitals. And that is why it ordered the population not to comply with Israel’s warning to evacuate south of Wadi Gaza before the first Israeli Defence Force incursion into Gaza City. The ghastly misery of Gaza is first and foremost a calculated result of the actions by Hamas, with the intention to radicalise and recharge fighters for another generation.
In my estimate Israel has fallen for Hama’s strategy of radicalisation by its wholly disproportionate response and apparent disregard for non-combatants, with all the possibilities now  arising from a new generation full of hatred.

Notwithstanding some pretty suspect casualty statistics from Hamas-controlled sources, and some frightfully shoddy reporting by the BBC and others, nevertheless we can see from our own TV screens, from independent reporting, from the experience of aid workers, and from the dire reports by the United Nations, that the suffering of the civilian population is intolerable.
For months UK diplomacy, together with the USA, has sought to restrain Israel. We have demanded more access for humanitarian aid; we have demanded military operations which take much greater care to protect civilians and reduce collateral damage. We have deployed all the influence that we have as friendly powers. There comes a time however, when we have to do more than say that we are very concerned, or even very cross. At some stage we have to hold Israel to account for its misjudgements and the way that it is operating.
I think that a temporary suspension of our arms sales would now be a salutary, if not overdue, way of indicating to Israel the measure of our dismay.