Fiscal Outlook

Baroness Meyer Excerpts

Thursday 10th September 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Meyer (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Bridges on securing this important debate and on his excellent opening speech.

The Prime Minister wants to “bring back hope”, but he blames Thatcherism and Blairite economics—which he once supported—for Britain’s problems. What is his solution? More state control and more regulation. He calls it “business-friendly socialism”, but how can an economy be business-friendly with more union power and less economic freedom? We have been here before. In the 1970s, the state controlled large parts of the economy, while trade unions wielded enormous power. I remember those days: rampant inflation, power cuts, rubbish piling up during strikes, disrupted transport and economic decline.

The Soviet Union offers an even starker lesson, with state-controlled production, prices and investment. Private enterprise was not allowed. The result was shortages, inefficiency and stagnation. The Soviet Union collapsed because central planning destroyed incentives, innovation and production. Governments cannot create prosperity by controlling the economy, yet the Prime Minister appears determined to take us back to an era in which the Government owned and trade unions ran the economy.

Here lies the first contradiction. The Prime Minister says that growth cannot be ordered from the top down, yet he advocates public ownership of essential services and wants to decide which sectors of the economy should be prioritised. History shows us that Governments are notoriously bad at picking winners. The second contradiction is fiscal. The Prime Minister embarks on his 10-year plan when the fiscal headroom has fallen to just £8 billion, welfare accounts for almost a quarter of government spending and the national debt is approaching £3 trillion. Yet he has already run up a potential bill of more than £50 billion while proposing further uncosted public ownership. Nationalising water alone could cost some £140 billion.

Where will the money come from? Will the Prime Minister break his pledge and Labour’s manifesto commitment not to raise taxes? The tax burden, as we have heard before, is already at a record high. Any further increases will discourage hiring, investment and entrepreneurship and accelerate capital flight. Some 27,300 high net worth individuals and 6,000 business owners have left Britain in the last two years, taking with them investment, ideas, jobs and tax revenues. There comes a point when higher taxes produce less growth and revenue by weakening incentives to work, save and invest. Policies that suppress growth do not protect the poor and vulnerable. Ultimately, they make the poor even poorer.

Will the Prime Minister borrow more? We already spend £110 billion a year servicing our debt—money that could be spent on education and defence. As my noble friend Lord Hannan has said:

“The markets are not interested in moral hazard or in justice. All they care about is whether they will get their money back”.


The bond markets are taking note. As we heard before, 10-year yields are at a record high—higher than under Liz Truss. Some economists warn that Britain could again find itself going cap in hand to the IMF for a bailout, as we did in the 1970s.

Rather than reverse Thatcherism, the Government should remember that her reforms reversed Labour’s economic decline and reduced our debt. With welfare spending continuing to rise as our population ages, we are passing an ever-larger bill to our children. This is the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the Prime Minister’s programme. He wants a bigger state when we can no longer afford the state we already have.

But the Prime Minister has an opportunity to build the pro-business, innovation-led economy he wants. The Chancellor’s recent call for more private investment, more profitable businesses and more wealthy founders is encouraging—but that requires less government, not more; lower taxes, not higher ones; and an economy that rewards enterprise rather than penalising it. Will the Government rein in spending, reform welfare and reverse the most damaging elements of his predecessor’s Employment Rights Act so that Britain can once again be a country where businesses want to start, grow and stay?

Preparing for an Ageing Society (Economic Affairs Committee Report)

Baroness Meyer Excerpts

Friday 4th September 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Meyer (Con)]

My Lords, people aged over 85 are the fastest-growing population segment, but we are also having far fewer children. This is a problem, as the excellent report highlighted. The committee doubts that financial incentives can reverse falls in fertility. I do not entirely agree. Since the 1950s, successive French Governments developed a strong, pro-family system, with tax advantages and practical benefits aimed at larger families. It worked: France had the highest fertility rate in western Europe. Today, France has not escaped the recent decline, but its fertility remains higher than ours, at 1.56 per woman.

The Government can create an environment in which it is easier for people to have more children. Higher taxes, housing and childcare costs have made it harder to start a family, just when fertility drastically declines with age. The Centre for Social Justice estimates that 3 million women may remain childless. It calls them Britain’s “missing mothers”. Not wanting children is a choice; wanting them, but being unable to afford them, is a problem.

There is another worrying statistic. In 2023, almost one in three conceptions ended in abortion—the highest proportion on record. Yet the Government recently removed women from the criminal law relating to their own abortions at any stage of gestation.

Then there is the other problem, addressed by many noble Lords, of intergenerational fairness. Immigration is not the answer. As Professor Andrew Scott told the committee,

“immigration may buy you time”,

but it does not solve the fundamental problem. Immigrants grow older, too.

Instead of all this, we need a fundamental change in our attitude towards ageing. Retirement should not be seen as the finishing line. We should encourage people to remain active, engaged and useful for longer. As we said before, look at this Chamber. Many Members are well beyond conventional retirement age. That is a perfect example, and we should stop treating older people as a cost and recognise them as an underused resource. This week, 84 year-old actor Peter Marinker, recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, is performing Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape” alone on the London stage. What better example could there be?

What steps will the Government take to change our attitude towards older people, and will they consider reducing taxes and improving housing and family policies to make it easier for people to have children?

Contemporary Cultural Boycotts

Baroness Meyer Excerpts

Thursday 9th July 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness Meyer (Con)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, for introducing this important debate. Freedom of expression has always been the lifeblood of great art. Art flourishes through freedom, not conformity. History reminds us what happens when freedom is lost.

In the Soviet Union, writers and artists who challenged the official ideology were censored, blacklisted, imprisoned or sent to the Gulag. My own family experienced that world. My aunt was a dissident writer and a close friend of both Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Anna Akhmatova. She chose satire as her way to defy the regime, rather than open political confrontation. Even so, she spent days under interrogation in the Lubyanka. She watched friends and fellow writers disappear into the Gulag, including her friend Solzhenitsyn. Like Akhmatova, she knew that in such a climate silence could become a means of survival.

Britain is not the Soviet Union, and I am not suggesting otherwise, but history teaches us that freedom is rarely lost overnight. It is eroded gradually as people begin to censor themselves, because they fear the consequences of speaking openly. The New Boycott Crisis suggests that this climate of fear is now affecting our cultural sector. As James Marriott wrote in the Times, something has gone badly wrong. A world once built on talent, merit and creative risk has, he argues, been replaced by a culture of fear, informal sanctions and institutional cowardice.

The report identifies two groups as particularly affected: Jewish artists and those with gender-critical beliefs. Since 7 October, some Jewish artists, as we have heard, have found themselves judged not by the quality of their work but by their identity. Likewise, gender-critical artists, such as Rosie Kay and Róisín Murphy, have described the professional backlash they faced for expressing lawful views. The problem arises when cultural institutions become so fearful of organised campaigns that they no longer defend artistic freedom. Instead, they quietly exclude those views considered controversial, not because they are unlawful but because they are not fashionable. The greatest casualty is self-censorship. We never see the play that was never written, the exhibition that was never staged or the young artist who decided it was simply safer to remain silent.

Does the Minister accept that artistic freedom includes the right to hold lawful gender-critical beliefs, even when those beliefs are not popular and considered controversial today? If public bodies are under a statutory duty to uphold freedom of speech, how will the Government ensure that this duty is honoured in practice rather than being quietly abandoned in the face of organised campaigns?

Online Communication Offence Arrests

Baroness Meyer Excerpts

Thursday 17th July 2025 Grand Committee

[Baroness Meyer (Con)]

My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, I too consider freedom of speech very close to my heart for personal reasons. My mother was born the day before the Russian Revolution, in February 1917. I can only imagine my grandmother, having just given birth, hearing the chants of over 100,000 women marching through Petrograd demanding bread. They were soon joined by peasants, workers and soldiers, exhausted by war. The Tsar was forced to abdicate and a provisional Government was formed, but Soviet committees quickly sprang up. By March, the revolution had spread across all of Russia.

Amid the chaos, Germany saw its chance and transported Lenin from exile in Switzerland to Petrograd. He called for

“All power to the Soviets”


and the overthrow of Kerensky’s fragile Government. In October, Lenin seized power. One of his first acts was to establish the Cheka, his secret police. Anyone deemed a threat was arrested, deported or executed. That is how most of my grandparents’ family disappeared.

Once in power, Lenin built a one-party state, starting with the restriction of any political opposition and the arrest and deportation of anyone who did not support communism. Titles and ranks were abolished. Land was confiscated from landowners and farmers. All schools were brought under state control to include ideological teaching. Newspapers were censored. Political opposition was suppressed. Workers’ rights increased, and there was a reduction of working hours. A state planning body—Gosplan—was established. Does it all sound very familiar?

These policies devastated Russia. Industrial output fell by 40%. Some 6 million people died of famine. Then came Stalin’s purges, the reign of terror, where more of my family were arrested and executed, and another 1.2 million people perished. These events destroyed a civilisation and replaced it with a regime built on fear and silence. We must not assume it could never happen again.

Today, in Britain, we face a quieter, but troubling, assault on freedom of expression. This is not the mark of a confident democracy. Once the state begins to police thought and language, the line between protection and repression vanishes. Freedom of speech is not a luxury. It is the foundation of all liberties. Let us not ignore the lessons of history. If we allow fear or ideology to override our freedoms, history may not just echo, it may repeat itself, and on our own soil. Will the Minister agree to revise and scrap the non-hate crimes that make our freedom of speech practically impossible?