Public Service Pensions and Judicial Offices Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Kramer and Lord Mann

Consideration of Commons amendments
Wednesday 9th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, I had not intended to speak in this debate except to say a few words on the cost control amendments, at the request of my noble friend Lady Janke, who is leading for us on this issue. I shall now say very little on cost control, except that I am very much in the same camp as the noble Lord, Lord Davies.

My answer to the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, is that if the Government decide that a commitment they made to a 25-year agreement is one that they no longer wish to keep, they should reopen the negotiations, not turn to Parliament in the late stages of the passage of a Bill and take for themselves powers to simply override the commitment that they once made. This was supposed, from a public pensions perspective, to be a Bill that simply corrected unlawful parts of the structure that the Government had entered into that were struck down by the courts in the McCloud judgment. The Government used that as an opportunity to go far beyond that.

I have problems with the cost control mechanism altogether, because it basically says that the mistakes the Government made need to be paid for by the scheme members as a whole: we will correct the injustice to a particular group, but the cost of that will be picked up by the other pensioners in the scheme. Now the Government have essentially said that if they mismanage the economy, that cost needs to be picked up by the members in the scheme as well. At the very least, they should have gone back and negotiated with the parties with whom the original arrangement was structured.

I shall now speak to the other amendment, partly because of a word used by the noble Baronesses, Lady Deech and Lady Altmann: “anti-Semitism”. When I read Amendment 54, it is a direction—I think the Minister tried to emphasise that it is guidance, but it is not guidance, it is a direction, and it says that very clearly in the amendment. I was told that various people were very concerned not to vote against it in the Commons because they were afraid that they would be labelled anti-Semitic. I thought, “Nonsense, not in a Parliament like this, not among people of the standing we have in the House of Commons and the House of Lords.” Yet, I heard very clearly from the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, the notion that opposing the amendment is anti-Semitic. I oppose it, and I dare her ever to say that I am anti-Semitic.

When I see those crowds of refugees coming out of Ukraine, they are to me an evocation of my grandparents, my aunts, my uncles and my cousins who were taken to concentration camps or as slave labour for the Hungarian army on the Russian front. In every political campaign I have waged, I have been attacked for being a Jew. In the most striking attack, a physical attack on my son and on me with eggs and flour, we had to be barricaded into a room and rescued by riot police. I dare the noble Baroness to label me anti-Semitic, but I oppose that amendment, and precisely for the reason that the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, gave: this is total overreach. Israel and that issue is the excuse.

I look at the actions of the Government in so many ways. When I look at the powers they have taken away from local government, essentially trying to reconstruct it just as an agency of central government departments; when I look at what happens in this House, with skeleton Bills and Henry VIII clauses; when I look at the way that powers that came from the European Union were transferred directly to regulators, becoming, in effect, no longer either visible or, certainly, accountable, I see a constant shift of a central Government that feels they have the right to reach in and take and do whatever they please. With their 80-seat majority in the Commons, they can achieve exactly that and this measure is exactly part of that.

I referred to my family and will do so again. My grandsons have not only the heritage of those who died in the Holocaust but the heritage of those who were slaves. Had this particular amendment been available when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, she could have—and I think we know would have—directed local government pensions to invest in apartheid South Africa and would not have permitted anyone who objected who was part of those pensions to have refused that investment. To me, that is outrageous and it is the fundamental flaw that sits within this amendment.

Looking at this amendment, I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, who suggested that these pension funds are somehow owned by the taxpayer, that these pension arrangements are in lieu of salary. I do not believe that anyone would say that the salary paid to a local government official should be invested under government direction, so why should the pension of a local government official be invested under government direction?

I will speak later on the economic crime Bill, very much in support of sanctions against Russia. However, those sanctions apply to everybody; they apply to every asset, public and private, and to every pension. The rules are universal. I do not have a problem with universal rules, used in extremis, which is exactly the proposition that the Government will make to us today. I do have a problem, however, when local government is singled out—when the pensions of local government servants now come under the direction of the political interest of a Government. If the Government feel so strongly that the current trustees are behaving inappropriately, they could easily have made an arrangement whereby investment decisions are put to the members; they could let them decide what they think is ethical from their perspective and how their money should be used.

I agree very much with those who have said that this is overreach. If anybody uses that word “anti-Semitism” to address opposition to this, it tells you how utterly empty the policy is in and of itself.

[Lord Mann (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, we could have a long and interesting debate on the question of anti-Semitism, but I fear that issues are getting slightly confused. Unless I have read this government proposal inaccurately, the Government are not proposing to give themselves powers to instruct any local authority on what it should do; they are giving themselves powers to prevent local authorities involving themselves in what local authorities might like to describe as foreign policy.

I am, on balance, in favour of this proposal, but I could put an argument against it, which would be about its impact on the BDS movement—which is, I think, in my lifetime, the most unsuccessful political campaign that I have seen. It has attempted to close down links between British academics and Israeli universities and academics and, as a consequence, those links have been greatly enhanced and deepened. It has attempted to target all sorts of investments and has failed to do so. There is an example, though, of a local authority attempting to do what might be caught out by this amendment. Sussex County Council, in 2021, following a big campaign—well, not very big, but noisy—by a small number of people demanding that it boycott Israel, made a decision. But when one looks at the decision that it made, it was not making a foreign policy statement expressly; it was fiduciary duty, the council claimed.

Did the council boycott Israel, or the alleged targets, the settlements—that was the original concept of the BDS campaign—but, having failed in that, then shift to Israel? No, it did not. It went to where things have now shifted again. It targeted multinational companies that were, it alleged, operating in Israel. The precise companies that it targeted and the products that it cited were exactly—and I mean exactly—the same products and companies that Zelensky and the Ukrainians are repeatedly requesting to defend themselves from the Russian invasion. That is what that would have meant in terms of disinvestment. The BDS campaign was not a success anywhere. It is about the impact on the Jewish community—particularly the young Jewish community, which gets this and worse thrown in its face repeatedly and constantly. It is about virtue-signalling, when the people who did it did not even have the bottle to say what it was about but pretended, in that one example, that it was fiduciary duty. That is what is particularly abhorrent to me.