Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts

Saturday 10th September 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Woolley of Woodford (CB)]

My Lords, one of the downsides of being one of the youngest Peers on these Benches is that you are expected to go last. It is a privilege to pay tribute to Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. I would like to make two points, one general and one personal.

When we talk about public duty, we barely do the phrase justice when associated with Her Majesty the Queen. I recently watched that documentary again made about the Queen, telling the story through her lens, and I was struck by one of the phrases that she used when she spoke about public duty. She said that public service is sacrifice. My Lords and Ladies, what service and what sacrifice she has given us. We in both Chambers could take a leaf out of her book when it comes to selfless service; it is not about us and our often inflated egos, but about what we do in public service.

On a personal note, like some other noble Lords here, I would imagine, I had my day at the Palace. Almost three years ago to the day, I was knighted. When you go in, you do not know who is going to knight you, and I was nervous already. When I knew it was the Queen, I was as nervous as nervous could be. Most people out there only see the Queen on TV or on our banknotes, and there she was in front of me, in real life. She sensed my nervousness, leaned forward and made me feel extremely comfortable. She began chatting, and we were even joking at one point. My son in the audience was craning his neck like a giraffe and looking around, saying, “That’s my dad.” When I came out, I came round to him and he came to me enthusiastically and said, “Dad, you made the Queen laugh. What did you say?” I leaned back and said, “Son, it’s a secret.” It was a special day for me and for all of us. May Her late Majesty rest in deserved peace, and God save and good luck to the King.

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (Con)]

My Lords, I know that we all share a sense of gratitude that we are given the opportunity, as Members of your Lordships’ House, to pay tribute to Her late Majesty the Queen and to welcome King Charles III. I share that luck, and I want to share also one or two of the messages that I have received from all over the world and ask why so many people should write. The prince of the Yazidis has sent a note, saying: “We all grieve in your loss and we wish you perseverance in the face of this irreparable loss.” We have a message from the deputy head of the council of representatives of Ukraine. In the middle of a ferocious war, he finds the time to say, “We miss your Queen.” In fact, he put it more powerfully than that. He said, “We bow to your Queen.” That is Mykhailo Laba of the Ukrainian house of representatives, in the middle of war.

I think it is because Her late Majesty represented the goodness of our public life. That, I think, is the heart of the matter. I found that she had a tremendous capacity for stilling conflict. Some of your Lordships may recall a time not so long ago when we were in ferocious conflict, not just in this House but in the other place, and we received a message saying to come round to Buckingham Palace. We were split into two different groups, because there were far too many of us with both Houses. But the ferocity between us was so great, even in the parties themselves, that people refused to share black cabs—and when you refuse to share a black cab with a colleague, that really is a serious business. I recall well that we went up the steps in Buckingham Palace very slowly, with people not speaking to each other. When we got to the top, we were ushered into one or two of the big rooms. We were still highly hostile. I simply cannot remember the cause. Maybe it was one of those awful moments when we were fighting over whether there should be a general election. It was something as profound as that.

Quite suddenly, and totally quietly, the Queen, unaccompanied, entered the room, just by the doorway. She was almost invisible. She turned to the first person on her left, a man who was extremely angry, and just asked him how he was. He lost his nerve completely. The anger dissipated, and the black cloud over his head disappeared. As that happened, she turned to the next person and the next, and I promise you that, in about three or four minutes flat, we were all friends again. We waited, and the Queen came round to every person in that room and then went on to the next room and did the same. We all came back here in a completely different frame of mind. She had this extraordinary capacity for being the still, calm voice in the middle of the war, as it were. Perhaps that is why so many millions of people around the globe have expressed utter misery at her loss.

I can find no better way of describing her than a Shakespeare comment in “Henry VIII”. Forgive me, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but at that moment Shakespeare used the word “England” to encompass our sceptred isle:

“She shall be, to the happiness of England,

An aged princess; many days shall see her,

and yet no day without a deed to crown it.”

Is that not Her Majesty the Queen? Every single day for 70 years, and earlier than that, she did one piece of good if not more.

Armed Services: War Crimes

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Faulks]

The Government always stand behind our soldiers but to give a blanket undertaking like that would be exceeding my authority. With regard to battlefield immunity, which the noble Lord may be referring to, combat immunity remains part of the common law, although its contours are rather unclear at the moment, particularly in light of the Smith v Ministry of Defence case about the interrelationship of the Human Rights Act and that immunity. These are matters on which the Prime Minister and the Government are profoundly exercised.

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (LD)]

Will the Minister allow, under the current military law, for some information to be given to the families of the military police who were killed in Karmat Ali, and which they have so far not received. I was in that city the day after the deaths and all the information is readily available. When will the ministry allow it to be released to the families concerned?

[Lord Faulks]

I will take that request back to the Ministry of Justice and try to have some inquiries made.

Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts

Friday 18th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (LD)]

My Lords, I offer three short stories to illustrate the false thinking behind this mistaken Bill.

The first takes place in a dark private room in a famous nursing home. I am the visitor beside the bed of a very sick, motionless and almost speechless friend. In comes a doctor who, during a brief two-minute patient record check, comments loudly that this patient would be better off dead. Five minutes later, an agency nurse comes in. I thank her for her work to ease the patient to a more comfortable head position. She answers, “This patient should be dead; we need the bed”. I murmur an objection, fearful that the patient can hear and will feel distressed. The nurse replies, “All these old people taking up NHS space should not be allowed to survive. Those beds are needed for the living”. The wish to dispose of the old is prevalent in our society. We must fight it and not succumb to its throttling embrace through death on demand, which underpins this Bill.

Another night, another private room—this time in a famous NHS teaching hospital. The patient asks for more curative action from the nurses. The doctor explains that no more remedies are available and that all curative channels have been exhausted. The patient, understanding, asked next for palliative care. That never came; instead, the executioner—the youngest nurse—came with the dose of death. I realised that I, the visitor, was witnessing an unrequested, enforced and medically authorised killing. It was not a comfortable death and it left behind an overhanging sense of personal guilt for all, and of mistrust of the health professionals—another fundamental weakness of this Bill.

A third and final tale concerns the great Lord Tonypandy, formerly the much loved Speaker of the other place. His stomach cancer, he was told, was terminal. “How long?”, he asked, and was told, “You have still three weeks to live”. As he lay on his bed across the river, gazing from St Thomas’ at this Parliament, where he had given so much service to us all, an ancient Roman Catholic priest came as an unknown visitor to him, a lifelong Methodist. A real miracle took place and later that afternoon doctors declared him in full remission. His life, and joy in being alive, continued for another 20 years.

Doctors, as they are the first to say, are not God. They truly cannot tell when death will steal upon us. That argument underpinning this Bill is also false. Nor will the doctors act as the executioners themselves: the nurses will be instructed to act, or, more likely even, the untrained, unmonitored health assistants. The rigorous overview the Bill offers will not take place in the cash-strapped, overworked NHS. I do not want our trusted NHS to turn from being the National Health Service into the national death service—the change that this Bill offers. As for pain and caring for the acutely ill and dying, just five minutes walk away inside St Thomas’, I found the Lane Fox ward, the ultimate in NHS hospital permanent palliative care. It is calm, welcoming and staffed with brilliant professionals, where the memory of the late Lady Lane-Fox is gleaming. The patients have real lives, and each one exhibits personal value despite their highly vulnerable medical conditions.

Do not use my taxes on the proposed state death department, with its inevitable growth in records of hits and misses, of targets and bonuses for each bed emptied. Instead, spend funds on replicating the best of care offered by the model across the bridge, by the hospice movement and other home-based forms of GP-led patient care. I profoundly oppose this Bill and strongly oppose the thinking behind it for the malign actions that it would create.