Football Governance Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Blunkett and Baroness Fox of Buckley

Committee stage
Monday 9th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

I rise to move Amendment 54 in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, and to speak to the associated Amendment 159, which relates to Schedule 5 and the role of the regulator in relation to the code of practice.

I hope we will not spend an hour on this group. Having sat through parts of the first two days in Committee, I have heard exactly the same arguments this afternoon as I heard on the previous groups, including on the definition of football, what we mean by competition and even what fairness is. Well, I know that fairness is not the argument about whether the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, pays his due share towards a piglet pie at Brighton’s football ground.

What is this all about? It is quite right that we in this House should scrutinise, raise legitimate argument and challenge a Bill of this sort, but I say to the Premier League, and to those who are, by the very nature of the debate over the last three Committee days, involved in taking the briefings: overdo this and you will do so at your peril, because at some point millions of fans out there might learn what is going on with the filibuster taking place in this Committee and, when they do, they will be very angry.

The Premier League, with its money and its brilliant legal and lobbying support, needs to just reflect on whether this filibuster and what is being done in this Committee is benefiting it. I think not—sometimes overdoing it can be really detrimental.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I have no idea whether there is filibustering going on, nor whether everybody on this side of the Committee who I have not spoken to is in the pockets of the Premier League, but I feel there is a kind of gaslighting going on. I take the Bill seriously. I have read as much as I can. Nobody in the Premier League has come anywhere near me, should the noble Lord want to know, nor written my speeches or talked to me.

It is just not fair. There is a lot in the Bill to get one’s head around and to try to speak to. If there is repetition going on in this debate, it is people on the other side constantly saying that anyone scrutinising the Bill must have been got at by the Premier League. That is certainly not true of a wide range of us.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, that if you do not have the hat on, you are not wearing it. It is not an individual I am talking about.

I would like artificial intelligence or GPT to do a word count of exactly what the Benches opposite have said over and over again over the last three days in Committee. I started to do that again this afternoon. There were the same phrases, the same arguments and the same resentment all over again about the idea that we should regulate.

Bear in mind, this whole issue came out of the report of a former Conservative Sport Minister. It was subject to a White Paper by the previous Conservative Government in February 2023, and legislation was then drawn up by the Conservative Government. After all that further scrutiny and debate outside, we are now debating it under a Labour Government—ho, ho, ho.

Let us be clear: get this wrong and it will not be the Premier League that loses out; it will be a pyramid, which by its very nature is built from the bottom. Without the rest of the EFL and beyond, we would not have a Premier League. You could ring-fence the 20 clubs, which is what some of them would like; I am sure it would be fantastic for the noble Baroness, Lady Brady, to know that West Ham would never be relegated. I would love Sheffield Wednesday to never be relegated ever again. In fact, I ought to declare a reverse interest: my family and I sponsor a member of the Sheffield Wednesday squad, Callum Paterson. My only resentment is that the manager does not put him on the field often enough. There we are, Saturday after Saturday—and, these days, Sunday after Sunday—seeing competition working and seeing the struggle that is going on.

Schools Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Blunkett and Baroness Fox of Buckley

Report stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Monday 18th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I have also put my name to Amendment 105. I commend the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, on their work on this issue, which has been very important, and the Minister on listening and moving forward.

I start off with a bit of a caveat, because a lot of good things have been said: as an ex-teacher, I too am only too aware of the dread of pushy parents intervening in the minutiae of school, turning up and demanding to see this, that or the other. More seriously, we know what happened when a group of activist parents gathered outside Batley Grammar School and demanded to dictate what the curriculum was. That is not what this is about at all.

The context for the Government, which is very important, is that at the moment, because parents cannot see this material, it has been left in an informal morass of people hearing stories and getting particularly worried. Parents have had to resort to freedom of information requests to see third-party materials, and that really is not helpful. There is a rather excellent exposé by Milli Hill entitled “Worrying truth of what children are REALLY learning in Sex Education”. We are leaving it up to journalists to do these exposés. That just worries parents, so we have to grab this back.

Most parents think that, when their children are being taught about pronouns, that is helping with their English grammar, but then, when they read in the newspaper that it has something to do with policing language and gender ideology, they understandably worry. They worry when they hear about the affirmation of radical medical interventions, such as the amputation of sexual organs. These things are really scary. I urge the Government to grab hold of these horror stories and deal with them. I would like to see them acting on this very important issue.

There are matters that go beyond the scope of Amendment 105. The issue of parental access and teaching materials talks to a problem of parents feeling that the curriculum on contentious issues is being politicised. There is an excellent new report from Don’t Divide Us called Who’s in Charge? A Report on Councils’ Anti-racist Policies for Schools, which I will pass on to the Minister and I hope she will even meet the authors. The reason why I refer to it is that I do not want people to think this is just about the gender ideology issue. It is a sort of broader feeling that many parents have that there are third-party providers creating a political atmosphere in school, and that even schools themselves are doing the same. That raises problems of parents’ trust in what is being taught to their children.

I therefore query Amendment 101, on British values, despite the brilliant speeches we have heard in support of it. I was initially attracted to this amendment. After all, it mentions

“freedom of thought, conscience and religion … freedom of expression, and … freedom of assembly and association.”

These are my passions; I go on about them all the time. I thought, “Great—can we get them into schools?”. But when I talk about freedom of expression, freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, these days I am often written off as some sort of alt-right lunatic who—

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

Surely not.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

There we go. I am written off as someone who wants free speech only in order to come out with hate speech. I say this because even something such as free speech is contentious. I do not think that trying to use an amendment such as this, including the word “citizenship” to get around the fact that there are contentious arguments about values, will resolve the problem. I wonder whether I can be consoled by those who tabled this amendment that it is not about avoiding a political argument via using the law. It could end up politicising the curriculum.

For example, I disagree with the proposed new paragraph on “respect for the environment”. We have to take into account that Section 406 of the Education Act and schools’ legal obligation to remain impartial can be compromised by things that people in this House are passionate about politically but that maybe should not be in schools.

That finally gets me to my concerns about Amendments 118B and 118H, which call for

“a review into teaching about diversity in school curriculums”.

I am concerned about their emphasis on British history including

“Black British history … colonialism, and … Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade”—

not because I do not think those things should be taught, but we have to ask whether this is being promoted for historical or political reasons. The recent controversy over the OCR syllabus on English literature being changed, when we had the works of Keats, Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen and Larkin removed, was justified not on literary merits but on the basis of an emphasis on ethnicity, diversity and identity. That kind of politicising of the curriculum does not do any service for the pupils we are teaching and is making parents rather suspicious about what is going on in schools.

Elections Bill

Debate between Lord Blunkett and Baroness Fox of Buckley

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Committee stage
Thursday 10th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

Go on, defend it. The noble Baroness used to be in the Communist Party.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

Very good, well done everyone, carry on.