Extension of Franchise (House of Lords) Bill [HL]

Lord Desai Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 19th July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, we are all grateful to the noble Lord for raising a very acute constitutional question. It may surprise many Members of your Lordships’ House to hear that I am very conflicted about it, because I am not at all sure that whatever activity I indulge in in my own constituency or in the country by way of politics necessarily qualifies me to vote in an election. The central fact is that we are an undemocratic House. Having arrived here, we are given the privilege of legislating, and we have to pay a price for that—it is very simple. The fact is that an undemocratic Chamber that is able, in a democracy, to legislate and lay down the law without any reference to the people has to pay a price. I am an economist: if you have a benefit, you pay a price.

The idea that every vote counts is really frightening. If a seat went one way or the other due to the vote of a local grandee, people would be outraged. Part of the Brexit rebellion and so on is that people are asking, “Who are these people laying down the law?” I am sorry but when we came here we gave up certain rights. If you want to vote, the way is open: leave the House and renounce your title. Everybody has that choice. Yes, the Members of this House should be able to vote but only after the House has been reformed and is an elected Chamber.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) (Abolition of By-Elections) Bill [HL]

Lord Desai Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 7th September 2018 Lords Chamber

I simply ask that we be careful what we wish for, for in attacking the rich legacy of public service, that fundamental duty to serve which we as a country and a kingdom have inherited, we impoverish ourselves. The politics of historical envy should not inform our decisions—unless, of course, we are admitting that we carry an enormous chip on our shoulder. I believe that we are bigger than that, and I believe that the issues at stake in this Bill are bigger, much bigger, than they are given credit for in this piecemeal reform.

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, has really raised quite a large issue for what the Bill proposes, which is a quite a small but important reform. Only by-elections would be removed, not all the hereditary Peers—I wish it were so, but that is another story. There can be no envy on our part because we will never become hereditary Peers nor will we qualify to run in a by-election. We have no capacity to be envious of what is happening. We are just troubled about the anomaly and the insult to democracy that this procedure involves. As to the noble Lord, Lord Northbrook, saying that a solemn promise was made, we have a very simple constitutional tradition: a Parliament is not bound by what a previous Parliament has done. If we had not continually revolutionised institutions by due process, we would not be where we are. We would have long ago been destroyed like the French monarchy was destroyed.

[Lord Cormack]

My Lords, I speak as a fervent monarchist and as one who accepts a little of what my noble friend Lord Shinkwin said, but let me just remind him that if this Bill is passed, and I hope it will be, there would be two hereditary Peers: the hereditary officers of state, namely the Earl Marshal and the Lord Great Chamberlain. They will be able to remain to fulfil their ceremonial function because when 92 was decided upon it was in fact 90 plus two. The only two true hereditary Peers who are succeeded by their sons, or daughters as it may be in the future, are in fact the Lord Great Chamberlain and the Earl Marshal. For the 90, if a Peer dies, his son or daughter could indeed be elected to succeed him, but the odds against that are fairly great.

I believe that what the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, is proposing is sensible and reasonable and I believe that my noble friend Lord Wakeham, whom we all hold in genuine high regard, should not worry about this being incompatible with Burns. The noble Lord, Lord Burns, has made it plain that if the reforms which he and his committee advocate come to pass, this issue will have to be addressed, as will the issue of the number of Bishops because of the proportion of the new House that they would represent. By taking this modest step, which removes no one from your Lordships’ House but merely closes one means of entry to your Lordships’ House, we would be demonstrating that we are indeed absolutely dedicated to incremental reform.

If one looks back at the various attempts to reform your Lordships’ House, incremental reform is really the only way forward. I saw only yesterday—

Local Government Finance

Lord Desai Excerpts

Thursday 13th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, we are very grateful to my noble friend Lord Kennedy for initiating this important debate. Unlike some other speakers, such as my noble friends Lord Smith and Lord Kennedy, I have no experience of local government, but I am an economist.

In all the years I have spent in your Lordships’ House, local authority revenue has haunted British politics. I am old enough to remember what was there before the poll tax. It was the biggest crisis in British politics that there was a need at that time, with the rating system, for the Government in charge to take the bull by the horns and revalue properties, because property prices had risen. Governments were proud that they had. Rising house prices is a fundamental part of British politics and we are alarmed when property prices are not rising. But when it comes to earning the state’s share of the rising capital value, we are suddenly very shy. Because of the Conservative Government under Mrs Thatcher, we do not want to go into the tricky idea of revaluing property and then passing on the standard rateable value calculation.

Then we got into the poll tax. We all remember what happened with that. It was a complete disaster. Then we had the council tax. I remember taking part in the debate on council tax and trying to point out that it would not be adequate unless there was flexibility to increase council tax or add new property bands, because property values would rise. We know that; it is a fundamental fact. So here we are discussing a variety of revenue sources. The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, talked about a variety of sources that his party has been proposing over the years—local income tax and various other things—but we are not taxing the most valuable asset local authorities have. It is like the elephant in the middle of the room: we know that when we talk about that we are going to talk about every little bit—business taxes and this and that.

At some stage, one of the political parties has to bite the bullet and say that we need a royal commission or some other official body to sit down and examine how much property prices have risen since the council tax was introduced. We all know that it is a gigantic sum. I have lived in a house in south London since 2004. I might not be too far wrong in saying that the property price has risen by three times. I am still paying the same council tax. It would be fair for me to pay a bigger local authority tax so that my local authority does not have to shut down local libraries. Yes, I can join the campaign to not shut down local libraries, but that will not solve the problem. They need money. If you unlock that particular source of local authority wealth—houses cannot run away; they have to be there, so you can be pretty sure it is your asset—then they will have a flexible and buoyant source of revenue. You could even cut the council tax rate and increase the revenue. It is a win-win solution. You could say, “If we get into power we’re going to cut the council tax rate but we’re going to revalue properties”. It could be done—if the Government want, I could do it in 15 days—and we would release this buoyant source of revenue and solve a lot of the problems local authorities have.

As I said, this could be done keeping the current structure of council tax intact. You do not need to be predatory or increase the tax rate. As some people may know, there is the philosophy of Henry George, who said in the 19th century that countries need only one tax: on the improvement of landed property. If you had that one tax you could abolish all others. I have done some work on that—I will go down that route—and we have a source of taxation that we are deliberately not using because we think it will be very unpopular. We are willing to go through austerity and all the hardships local authorities have. Even local authorities are not thinking about this as a source taxation.

Being an academic economist, I do not have to worry about the real world; I can think about ideal solutions. One feasible solution is to keep council tax but have a panel that revalues properties across the country. It does not have to rely on anything subjective; there is enough evidence in estate agents’ records. We know what transactions have taken place in each area and we know how much property prices have gone up. We could easily treble, if not quadruple, local authority income from council taxes. I know it will not happen. I have spent a lot of my life saying things here that will not happen that ought to, but we ought seriously to consider, on a bipartisan or all-party basis, that the time has come and we cannot deprive our local authorities of a fruitful source of revenue and go through torturous negotiations between central and local government.

Every party in one way or another tells us how valuable local initiative is, how much we want to decentralise and, once we have delegated power to local authorities, how power should be near the people. The Conservative, Labour and Liberal parties have slightly different philosophies, but we are all for it. It is only when it comes to giving the money that we suddenly become centralist. If we stay centralist we will deprive local authorities of proper revenue. That is unfortunately a sad truth, as some speakers have said, and more will talk about it. I suggest to the Government that they have a panel to revalue properties across the nation. They have enough problems on their hands anyway; one more will not make much difference, so they may as well bite the bullet. Then, we can have a proper yield from council tax. That will solve the problems of local authority financing.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome this opportunity to debate this important issue, and I am grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part. We have had a thoughtful and, on the whole, consensual, debate about the future of local government. As the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, said, right at the beginning, many of the key services on which our society depends—education, social services, housing and public transport—are not delivered by central government but by local government. Local government works hard to deliver quality services when it has had fewer resources to do so, as the noble Lord, Lord Smith, said. It works hard to deliver those services. Local councils have much to be proud of and I pay tribute to the way that they have made economies and efficiencies and yet still maintained a high level of public satisfaction.

I cannot claim the same intensity of local government service as many noble Lords who have spoken. I served three years on Lambeth Borough Council in 1968, when there were 50 Conservative and three Labour councillors, but I must have visited Pendle in 1971, because I then lost my seat.

This debate, which I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, for initiating, gives us an opportunity to stand back a bit from the day-to-day challenge of service delivery and look at some of the medium-term strategic issues that we have talked about—if not the fundamental rethink that the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, called for, at least a serious look at the challenges faced by local government and possible solutions. These strategic issues include finance—the main subject of the debate—but we have also touched on the relationship between central and local government and the redistribution of powers, and within that, the relationship between the NHS and adult social care, which has been one of the major themes. I also want to touch on the emerging and changing structures of local government, and new ways of working together, mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and indeed, working with the private sector to deliver those services.

First, a cautionary note: when I was no longer Housing Minister after my second visit to Pendle, I became a Minister at the Treasury. We need to set this discussion in the context of the challenging fiscal position in the UK. As we heard at the end of the previous debate, at nearly 90% of GDP, our public debt is the highest it has been in nearly 50 years. Our deficit is still above the post war average and above sustainable levels. We have the fourth highest deficit and the sixth highest level of debt out of 24 advanced economies.

We are having this debate against the background of trying to return to balance by the middle of the next decade, which is the right medium-term fiscal objective, enabling debt to fall back to safer levels. We cannot exempt, and we have not exempted, local authorities from this process. As I said, we have recognised their successes in making efficiencies over recent years. Looking ahead, local authorities will see a modest 1.2% increase in cash terms between 2015 and 2020, but looking only at central grants—RSG—does not reflect the totality of resources available to local authorities to deliver local services, including business rates and council tax, as well as dedicated grants, such as the improved better care fund.

Local government finance is a key element in enabling local councils to play their role. To facilitate their work, we have given councils important financial freedoms and flexibilities to help them manage their own budgets. For example, we have given councils new flexibility to use up to 100% of the receipts from the sale of land and buildings, to help make the up-front investment in the transformation of local services and therefore ensure further savings.

The noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, asked in his opening speech for more certainty and stability—I think those were the two words he used. In 2015 we provided more certainty and stability through the offer of a four-year financial settlement, and 97% of eligible local authorities have accepted that offer. We have also introduced flexibility to use the receipts from the sale of land and building, as I have just mentioned, not just to help pay the up-front investment in the transformation of local services, but to put more money into adult social care. We have also introduced the social care precept. As a result of those, against a challenging background, councils can now plan for the future with greater certainty over their funding than ever before, helping them to take more control and plan service delivery and transformation, and to achieve more effective collaboration with local partners.

For example, the transformation challenge award is a challenge fund to support local authorities to re-engineer their business practices and redesign service delivery. It helps local authorities to go further and faster with their transformation plans. Among many others, Lancashire County Council used it to develop and implement an integrated well-being and resilience offer, the London Borough of Brent used it to help local residents overcome barriers to employment, and Blaby District Council is using it to make housing support services easier to access. Much of this debate has been about business rates retention. The noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, and the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, touched on that.

As noble Lords have noted, there was no government finance Bill in the Queen’s speech, so there have been questions about our plans for the future of business rates. Looking ahead, I can assure the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, and others, that local government finance is still very much on our agenda. We are committed to delivering the manifesto pledge we made to continue to give local government greater control over the money it raises, and we will work closely with local government to agree the best way of achieving that. We have no plans yet on timing for a broad local government finance Bill; we will, of course, be looking at what can be achieved without primary legislation, which was something the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, touched on, although, of course, there will be some constraints on what we can do through that route.

We are planning to take this opportunity to open up a conversation with business and local government stakeholders, and ask what their priorities are for the future direction of local government finance reform. We are committed to making the right reforms and ensuring the long-term sustainability of the local government system, delivered on an appropriate timescale. That does not mean we have abandoned the idea of early action. We recognise the impact of increasing service pressures, and are already responding positively to help councils meet immediate issues. For example, as noble Lords have said, in addition to the money announced by the Government in 2015, at the spring Budget this year the Government announced an additional £2 billion to put social care on a more stable footing and alleviate short-term pressures across the health and care system. We have also allowed relevant authorities the flexibility to raise more income through the adult social care precept.

I note the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Smith—that the money raised from the precept is not quite as much in areas with low-valued housing. But the money raised from the precept is only part of the additional funding made available for adult social care. The majority of the funding announced in the spring Budget will be allocated using the improved better care fund formula, which takes account of the ability to raise money through the council tax precept for social care. Therefore, the total reflects relative need as closely as possible, in recognition of the additional challenges that social care places on certain councils.

In the medium term I reiterate our commitment to the fair funding review, which addresses local authority concerns about the fairness of current funding distributions and the lack of transparency and simplicity in how that funding is allocated. It has been almost 10 years since the current formula was reviewed, and it needs revision to reflect the rapidly shifting factors, such as changing population and demographic pressures, which determine local authority costs in providing services. The fair funding review will set new baseline funding allocations for local authorities by delivering an up-to-date assessment of their relative needs and resources, using the best evidence available. It will be a thorough, evidence-based review of what the relative needs formula should be and will consider a wide range of options for developing an updated funding formula by looking again at the factors that drive costs for local authorities. We cannot and will not do that in isolation; the review is using an open process of close consultation and engagement, and the team is working actively with the LGA and with representatives from all parts of local government through a technical working group to try to get this right. I recognise that local authorities are keen to make progress on this, as indeed are the Government, but they also tell us that it is important to get this review right. We shall continue to seek views on the approach and the target date for implementation.

Adult social care was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Smith, the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, and others. As my noble friend Lord O’Shaughnessy said in exchange at Question Time earlier this week:

“This Government’s ambition is to make the UK a good place for everyone to grow old, and we have put in place a programme of reforms across health, care, housing and other services to support older people to live independent and fulfilling lives”.—[Official Report, 11/7/17; col. 1158.]


For example, following the rollout of full devolution in April 2016, 10 local authorities and clinical commissioning groups for Greater Manchester have devolved responsibility for the health and social care budget to a new Greater Manchester partnership, which will oversee an annual £6 billion budget with which to commission both health and social care services. That has to be the way forward—breaking down the iron curtain between health and social care.

The ageing population still presents one of our nation’s most profound challenges—one of the themes of this debate—and it raises critical questions as to how as a society we enable all adults to live well into later life and how we deliver sustainable public services that support them. We have, as I said already, invested an additional £2 billion to put social care on a more stable footing and alleviate short-term pressures across the health and care system. However, further reform is required to ensure that the system is prepared to meet the challenges of the increasing numbers of over-75s.

To address these questions, the Government will work with partners at all levels, including those who use services and who work to provide care, to bring forward proposals for public consultation. The Government will consult on options to encourage a wider debate. The consultation will set out options to improve the social care system so as to put it on a more secure financial footing, supporting people, families and communities to prepare for old age, and to address issues related to the quality of care and variation in practice.

On emerging structures of local government and new ways of working, local government has changed since I was a first elected as a councillor nearly 50 years ago. The aldermen and town clerks that I recall working with have been replaced by chief executives, leaders and cabinets. Across government, we are making huge strides towards rebalancing the economy and empowering local government. Devolution deals have been mentioned in this debate, and we have supported such deals, strengthening local leadership and institutions through the establishment of mayoral combined authorities. We have devolved powers and funding away from Whitehall, so that those powers are exercised at the right level. We are also strengthening local leadership and institutions through the establishment of mayoral combined authorities. Directly elected mayors provide a single point of accountability for residents and are an ambassador for their area, boosting the area’s profile and helping to attract inward investment. On 4 May, six combined authority mayors were elected, representing 9.8 million people in England—33% of England, including London, now has a directly elected mayor with new powers to create jobs, improve skills, build homes and make it easier to travel.

We want to see these new city region mayors continue to develop innovative policy solutions. I will, for example, be interested to see development of the West Midlands Mayor’s mentorship scheme, which he hopes will attract mentors to help guide young people into worthwhile careers and out of unemployment. Councils are also innovating in how they work with each other—a point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley—and with outside bodies. This has produced new delivery models such as Achieving for Children, a social enterprise company created by the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames and the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames to provide their children’s services.

Touching on some of the issues raised in the debate, the noble Lord, Lord Desai, mentioned the poll tax. I confess that I was one of the Tory rebels who voted against the poll tax at every conceivable point as it went through the House of Commons—I was subsequently surprised to be appointed Chief Whip against that background. The noble Lord said, I think, that he could quadruple the revenue from council tax in a way that was almost painless. I think that we would like to see that scheme worked up in a little more detail before we finally commit ourselves to it.

On revaluation, I gently point out that the Labour Government, between 1997 and 2010, did not revalue in England, despite the powerful arguments for revaluation that we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Desai. The Government capture the rising values of property in other ways, for example, through inheritance tax and, of course, stamp duty. It is not the case that the public purse does not benefit from rising values. We have no plans to introduce new bands; adding new bands would be complex, involve the valuation of many homes and raise fairness issues about the ability of those liable to pay the tax. Many people living in high-value homes may be on fixed incomes and may have lived in them for a long time. It would risk penalising those people on low incomes, such as pensioners, who have seen their homes appreciate in value. They might face a substantial increase in taxes without having the income to pay it.

[Lord Desai]

The noble Lord will remember, during the poll tax debates, that we had the whole population studied. It was said there were houses where a working man lived with four adult boys working and others where there was a lonely old lady, and there was an injustice because their rates were the same. That is a myth. Let us face it: we need revaluation. People with a fixed income living in a highly valued property will be a very tiny minority.

[Lord Young of Cookham]

Well, I hope that the noble Lord’s words of wisdom have fallen on his Front Bench as well as my own. I just make the point that they did revalue in Wales, in 2005; 33% of homes were placed in a higher band and only 8% of homes were placed in a lower band. Two-thirds of the net rises were among homes originally in bands A to C, meaning that in that case revaluation hit the less well-off households the hardest. Therefore, I note the case that was made, but I have to disappoint the noble Lord and say that that is not on the agenda.

I was encouraged to hear the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, say that she has three energetic candidates waiting to fight in her ward. I will make it my mission to ensure that they are opposed by three equally energetic, dynamic and motivated candidates from my party so that we have a proper contest in whatever part of Southwark she may live in.

The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, raised the point about local authorities investing in property. Like him, I saw the article and made some inquiries following the leader in the Times on Tuesday about local authority property investments betting with taxpayers’ money. There are strong checks and balances in place to protect taxpayers’ money, and local authorities are required to ensure that they have the right skills and commercial expertise to make investment decisions. However, we are actively monitoring the nature and scale of local authority commercial activity, working closely with the sector to ensure that the governance framework continues to be appropriate.

Yes, we have to do more on housing; I recognise that. I have some briefing here on housing, explaining how we are building more council houses than the Labour Party. I will not read this out because I am short of time, but I agree with one of the thrusts of this debate that we need to raise our game on housing.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, that it says here that you should not comment on an ongoing police investigation, so I will not.

Constitution: Gracious Speech

Lord Desai Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, it is an honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Butler. I have a very different perspective on the question at hand and will make two new propositions. First, we have a sort of written constitution. The noble Lord, Lord Norton, who is about to follow me, once added a schedule to a regulatory reform Bill which listed all the Acts that no subsequent Government could change—the core of the UK’s written constitution. I once tried to play the game of asking what acquis Britannique someone wanting to join the United Kingdom from outside would have to sign. The acquis Britannique exists—we know it exists but we just do not admit its existence.

Secondly, we have been in an ongoing constitutional convention for about the last 40 years. In the 1970s, we joined the European Union and had the Kilbrandon commission. The decision to join the European Union continues to be somewhat fraught and disputed, although I believe the forthcoming referendum will confirm that it was the right decision. We decided not to become a federation when the Kilbrandon commission reported. Ever since then, we have been playing with this question of whether to have a federation or not and have created a somewhat patchy sub-federation which is not yet complete. The whole question of English votes for English MPs, or whatever it is called, is really the final capstone in creating a proper federation: we have devolved power to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland but have not found a way of devolving power to England because we do not want to create another Parliament for England. That is the problem: if we could only afford another Parliament for England, the English votes question would not matter, as we would have devolved power in England.

We have done various things but do not want to admit that these things have happened. My noble friend Lady Kennedy referred to the very peculiar way in which we reformed the Lord Chancellorship. It was very much a Thursday afternoon decision. Everybody had gone home, suddenly the Lord Chancellorship was about to be abolished and new tights had to be found for the new Lord Chancellor early on Friday morning, otherwise we would not have met. We also reformed the judiciary—remember how contentious that Bill was as it went through your Lordships’ House. We successfully made one of the biggest reforms when we did that.

We have done reform, but it can be done only by the party in power. It is not possible to say that the party in power should be more consensual. That is not what power is about: if you are in power, you have a majority and you exercise it. You then wait for the next Government, if they have a chance, to reverse what you do. That is exactly what the Conservative Party is trying to do with the Human Rights Act. It was not in power when it was passed; it is now in power and saying, “Let us have a go at this Human Rights Act and see if we can do it more to our satisfaction”. It is a very imperfect, clumsy way of doing reform, but it is the way we have in this country and we have to make the best of what we have. We must understand that we are in a continual process of constitutional reform. It is just that nobody has written it all down, although maybe the noble Lord, Lord Norton, has and teaches it every week to his students.

Let me give one example. The noble Lord, Lord Steel, pointed out how representation in Scotland, at both parliamentary and local level, has an element of PR added. When the boundaries Bill passes here and the number of MPs is reduced from 650 to 600—if the Prime Minister can still satisfy his Back-Benchers to get that done—there is no reason why the 50 extra people should not then come from a top-up through PR. That could be done without any major referendum on voting procedures or anything like that. It would then be very easy for us to correct the kind of historic wrongs that have happened to UKIP, the Greens and so on. We would have 600 seats by the conventional first past the post method and 50 by a top-up method. That would be the beginning of reform and done in the standard British way of adding an amendment to a Bill. We do not need a major reform of voting procedure or the entire election process. We have opportunities here. We need to consolidate somewhere in our minds or in some written form what are the major gaps left and why they are there. If we can do things that way, we have the opportunity now, especially through your Lordships’ House, to point out to the Government where those gaps are.

To end, one major gap is key and dealing with it could create a proper federal constitution here. As I said, we have about three-fourths of a federal constitution. If we reformed your Lordships’ House—another endless saga, I know—in a way that it would be elected but elected through a regional representation or list system, and if you could have, let us say, 10 regions in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, we could have 30 representatives from each of those regions. We would then have an Upper Chamber that would be a truly good and federal one as well as representing a lot of local and devolved authorities. There are possibilities like that. There are omissions in what the Government said. However, it must be said that we do not trust them to actually do things right. The right thing is to never trust any Government to do things right unless they have a check put upon them. That is what your Lordships’ House should do.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Lord Desai Excerpts

Thursday 24th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Baroness, who has done so much for the cause of religious freedom. I have also been impressed by the many noble Lords who have reported on human rights violations of Article 18 around the world.

I will concentrate not on what ought to be, but on what is, and why. The UDHR was more or less a dead letter in the years of the Cold War. We each tried to protect out patch and let the communists do what they liked by way of persecution. Their persecution was secular, not religious—they persecuted the religious and atheists alike. It is only since the breakdown of the Cold War in 1991 that the discourse on human rights has become important in the international sphere. I remember that because I did some work on it for the United Nations Development Programme some years ago. What has happened since the beginning of the 21st century is that the golden period of about 10 years when we could talk about human rights and enforce human rights has now gone, for two major reasons. First, the rise of Islamism, as a threat to Muslim states in the Middle East and Asia, has weakened the state in those countries. Islamism has also posed a terrorist threat to western countries, whereby the whole question of religious identity has become somewhat debatable.

In the past three or four years, we have witnessed the breakdown of the international order. We were used to an international order, with the United States, the UK, France, and so on going out to protect certain kinds of freedom around the world. What we have witnessed in Syria and since is that nobody is going to police this world. If nation states are weak with respect to attacks on minorities—if not complicit sometimes in attacks on minorities, as in ISIS, and Brunei and in various other places—and if the international system is not capable of rushing to the aid of people whose human rights are being violated, it is clear that that sort of international system is now dead. Not all that many years ago, people were against a unipolar system and were dying for a multipolar system of international relations. Well, it is here—and it is dreadful, because a multipolar system is an anarchic system, and in an anarchic system whoever has the power of armaments and money will get away with violating people’s human rights. It is not just about Article 18; the sheer safety of civilians is being violated across the Middle East. As many noble Lords have said, Muslims are killing Muslims in larger numbers than ever in the past. It is not just Sunnis killing Shias and Shias killing Sunnis; Sunnis are killing Sunnis as well, in ISIS.

The international system is helpless, because we have decided that liberal interventionism is no longer possible. That is our decision. Whether it is right or not, we have decided that it is not possible. If you cannot be a liberal interventionist, you cannot enforce human rights. You can have advisories, ambassadors and Ministers going around the world and cajoling states to do this or that, but they are not going to take any notice; why should they? Unless there is some sort of sanction of arms—let us be absolutely frank about this—behind our determination to restore human rights, they will not be honoured.

The only thing on which I would disagree with my noble friend Lord Parekh is that religions have not always lived in peace with each other—in fact, hardly ever. Eras of religious peace are rare; religious tolerance is a rare thing, which is why we always talk about it. I do not have time to go into examples, but most of the time religions are nasty to each other. World history could be written around that.

In this limited sphere, what can we effectively do? As in the example of Meriam Ibrahim, yes, if you can harness public opinion in a very large way, perhaps you can make a partial difference. However, our problem arises from the breakdown of the international order, rather than any particular nastiness on the part of any particular religion.

Chilcot Inquiry

Lord Desai Excerpts

Tuesday 1st July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I should also have acknowledged the important point that the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, made—that it is vital that we maintain and re-establish public confidence in public inquiries and in our political institutions as such. One of the biggest problems, which we all share, is the extent of public and media cynicism about the political process in this country. This inquiry is working with great care. Again, I stress that this is an independent inquiry—the Government are not in charge. The four active members of the Chilcot inquiry group are those who are responsible for what emerges, although of course a great deal of negotiation has gone on about the extent of publication. That is a very important part of ensuring that this is not in any sense a whitewashing inquiry.

On a previous occasion I was criticised by one or two noble Lords for suggesting that the Franks inquiry on the Falklands War was not entirely thorough or rigorous. I went back to the review that I had written in International Affairs on the publication of the Franks inquiry to demonstrate why I still hold that opinion. This inquiry is very thoroughgoing. It is being conducted by a number of people whom I personally trust and respect, and who are unlikely to be defenders of the “secret establishment”, so to speak. We very much hope that the report will appear before the end of the year; the Prime Minister has said that publicly. We are doing all we can—with a number of very hard-working officials, who are themselves doing all they can—to complete the final stages of the process of clearing these very difficult and delicate documents so that we can send out the second stages of the Maxwellisation process to those who will be named in the report. We will then move on from that to the presentation of the report to the Prime Minister and, we hope, to publication as soon as possible.

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, given the complexity of the process and the point that the noble Lord, Lord Owen, made, that we should not publish it in the new year, would it not be best to wait until after the election, when a Labour Government are in power?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we want to publish as soon as we can, and before we descend into the election campaign.

Syria and the Use of Chemical Weapons

Lord Desai Excerpts

Thursday 29th August 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, I have always been a liberal interventionist. If you live in a globalised world, you intervene if you think that something is wrong. When we debated this issue on 1 July I said that the question in Syria was not whether we were going to intervene but when. We could have intervened long ago, as the noble Lord, Lord Empey, among others, has said. Many hundreds and thousands of people have been exiled and killed, including women and children. We had perfectly good cause to intervene under the “responsibility to protect” doctrine. We did not intervene. We now face another opportunity for intervention, but I think that we are not going to intervene. It is quite clear that the mood of the House and the country is, “This is terrible, it should not happen and it is a moral outrage, but we are not going to intervene”.

However, we are going to intervene sooner or later because this war is going to last for much longer than we think. It is not just a Syrian civil war. As I said last time, this is part of a 40-year crisis of the Muslim Middle East and will go on. It is not just a Shia-Sunni war; it is a sort of rehearsal, like the Spanish Civil War, for the bigger conflagration that is about to come. We should therefore dread the possibility that the UN inspectors will find evidence and that perhaps the UN Security Council will co-operate. Then we will intervene. All the consequences that people have mentioned regarding what will happen if we intervene—all the side-effects and responses—will happen, even if there is full legitimacy for our move. In war, there are no clear, clean outcomes. The Second World War, which was the last, as it were, just war, was full of mistakes on all sides. There were the most God-awful tragedies, but we still respect that war because the end result was better than when it started.

What has finally come out in Iraq is a Shia majority and democracy—the only one in the Middle East. We got that regime change. In that debate, I said that I did not care about weapons of mass destruction; I cared that Saddam Hussein was a danger to his own people. That was why I wanted us to go into Iraq. I am a liberal interventionist. The whole problem is that the US and UK have created this structure for international order, which we have been embellishing by duties such as the “responsibility to protect”. We have now lost the will to sustain it. We may have also lost the power to sustain it, but we have certainly lost the will to sustain it. Red lines can be drawn, but red lines will be withdrawn and then drawn somewhere else.

We have now perhaps to rethink our entire doctrine. International order is a global public good. Do we have the strength and resources to provide it and protect it? We will have to come to the conclusion very soon that, even together with America and France, we do not have the will or the power to sustain the global public good we created. The noble Lord, Lord Howell, asked why the eastern powers are not intervening. They did not create this order; they do not care for this order; why should they defend this order? It is our responsibility, but we will not defend it. It is clear to me that the poor Prime Minister, on holiday, when the blood rushed to his head, thought, “My God, I must intervene”. I think that he should not go on holidays and then we may have a better world.

What we are facing now is that we are chickening out and that we will intervene the next time when circumstances will be much more against us. That will happen when this general war in the Middle East touches Israel. When Israel is under threat, that is the final red line that America will draw. That is when it will go and then we will be in a much worse circumstance than we are in right now. We will have another debate then.

House of Lords Reform Bill [HL]

Lord Desai Excerpts

Friday 10th February 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack]

I support what the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, has said. However, I ask my noble friend on the Front Bench and my noble friend Lord Steel to consider very carefully what the noble Lord, Lord True, has said, bearing in mind that the power of the Commons to expel, which it does have, is the power to expel from that particular Parliament. Expulsion from this place could be something very different. If we are to try to equate our rules with those of the other place, so far as they can be equated, all those things should be borne carefully in mind. That is why the offer of the noble Lord, Lord True, to withdraw his amendment should be accepted so that sensible discussions can take place on this issue.

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, I make the same request to the noble Lord, Lord True. Amendment 280, which was moved but later withdrawn by the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, proposes that there should be a right of appeal in case something is not quite right. We must always take the charitable view that if someone cannot pay back what they owe, there may be a reason for that other than intent. We ought to allow room for exceptions in certain circumstances.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I take up the cue provided by the noble Lord, Lord Grocott—I think we are within sight of a relatively limited Act that would command consensus all round the House. However, this proposed new clause would take us beyond the possibility of consensus at present. I think it would be appropriate if the noble Lord, Lord True, would withdraw the amendment. Certainly, I think that a number of us may wish to look at this particularly complex additional matter, but it is important to make some limited progress. I see that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, nods his head. That may be the best way forward.

Constitutional Change: Constitution Committee Report

Lord Desai Excerpts

Wednesday 7th December 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth. I welcome the report so ably introduced by my noble friend Lady Jay of Paddington.

I start with what the noble Lord, Lord Norton, said about the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill 2006. I recall that when the Bill was before your Lordships' House, it introduced a schedule of constitutionally significant Acts by way of saying that these are the Acts that shall not be amended lightly. I have always thought that that was a good device. The committee has difficulty in saying what the content of our constitution is. I offer Members of this Committee the following mental experiment. Suppose a country wanted to join the United Kingdom. What is the acquis britannique that it would have to abide by? That is in the constitution.

Suppose that Ireland, for obvious reasons, wanted to come back into the United Kingdom. What would we say that Ireland had to abide by? What would be the corpus of legislation? That is in the constitution. It is not unwritten at all. It is written down and available. The only sense that it is unwritten is that it is easy to amend.

We are now engaged in an exercise that says an unwritten constitution may be easy to amend. We may have a Crown in Parliament as sovereign and by that we now mean the House of Commons is sovereign and the Executive are even more sovereign than before. So it would be very easy for the Executive to do whatever they like. How can we introduce speed breakers in certain pieces of legislation to stop the Executive from getting away with whatever they get away with?

The noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, has already referred to this great experiment in which my Government, because it could not sack the Lord Chancellor, tried to abolish the office itself in the course of an afternoon. Not only did they not consult anybody but nobody told the Government that it could not be done without proper legislation. I remember being in the Chamber and the noble Earl, Lord Onslow, was beside himself with rage at what had happened. He had the House adjourned and insisted that the Leader of the House come to explain what had happened. Of course, the Government had to find a new pair of tights to fit my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer because they did not realise that if he had not presided over the next day’s proceedings the House of Lords would not have been able to function.

This is the degree to which the Executive have got so above themselves—the executives of all parties. They do not even bother to find out what the constitution is and whether it can be amended. We have to welcome this report because it says you can and should make a distinction between legislation that is of constitutional significance and that which is not. Although none of this is watertight—that is the nature of the case—it is still a distinction worth making for two reasons. First, let us be quite sure that there is a corpus of legislation that should not lightly be amended, and secondly, if you are going to introduce something new, you want to know whether it is going to be of constitutional significance. Right now, we have not got a watertight criterion for judging a priori before a Bill arrives so that we can say to the Government that we consider it to be of constitutional significance. The Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill was an interesting example. It is probably one of the most profound changes we have made to the way the House of Commons is elected, but it was not thought to be a constitutional Bill. Obviously, the Government care only about timetabling legislation in the House of Commons and very little else, so they are reluctant to call a Bill a constitutional Bill because the Committee stage would have to be taken on the Floor of the House of Commons, and that is expensive in terms of time. However, that should not be the only reason why Governments decide that things are not of constitutional significance. The PVSC Bill was a very important Bill, and in the House of Lords we tried, much to the annoyance of the Government, to prolong the discussion through various amendments, and I think we were right to do so. It was a pity that it was not given the importance it should have been given. That is definitely worth saying.

The Government might think of having a Joint Committee of both Houses of Parliament, perhaps a Joint Select Committee on the constitution, for Bills that they think are of constitutional significance or of having a standing committee that receives all Bills. If the committee declares beforehand that it thinks a Bill is of constitutional significance, it is up to the Executive to give cogent reasons why they disagree with the committee and then face the music. I think that sooner or later we will need a much more organised system for making constitutional change than we have at present.

Finally, I am looking forward to a reformed House of Lords. If the House of Lords is elected, that will be another speed break on the Executive, whatever majority they have in the House of Commons. I hope that the House of Lords increases its legitimacy and puts a stop to the way Executives carry on. It is about time we had properly behaved Executives in this country.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the question of constitutional change is one that we will continue to argue over, and the definition of what is constitutional and is not constitutional is something that evolves through debate and argument in Parliament as well as in academic seminars. Most of us think that we know what is constitutional when we see it, but sometimes we disagree with each other.

[Lord Desai]

The Minister describes how exemplary the Government have been about the House of Lords Reform Bill, although they were was in a great hurry to do the other Bills. Would it be right to conclude that the Government will abide by the rules when that does not bother people in the recent past, but that if it was the past they will not call it constitutional?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the Government, as I hear the Leader of this House say frequently, are strongly committed to the process of House of Lords reform. We will bring a Bill before the House and we look forward to the welcome that it will receive from the House’s resident constitutional experts.