Palace of Westminster: Restoration and Renewal

Lord Desai Excerpts

Tuesday 6th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord because he has more or less helped me to say what I want to say. Economists make a distinction between the normative and the positive: “normative” is what we want there to be, ideally, while “positive” is what actually happens. I consider this Motion and report as normative observations—this is how we would like the world to be.

As the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, just said, this started in 2007. Almost every word he said is so right, so ideal, but of course it did not happen. I am always puzzled when people say there are 60 fires per day or whatever it is downstairs and we have to do something urgently. By 2025, we are to move out—2025. If we are at all serious about health and safety problems, and we want this to happen in most of our lifetimes, it cannot be right to wait until 2025 to decant ourselves. Of course, as noble Lords have said, every estimate of the time to completion and amount of expense will be proved wrong by a factor of three or four. We know that. The money numbers do not matter, and one cannot compare full decant and say it will cost less than if you do not decant. We know from past experience that none of that is true. What will happen is, in a sense, very simple. The noble Lord, Lord Naseby, has no friends in the House today—except me, and that is not much help—but he will be proved right in the positive world, whereas we will pass this Motion for the normative purpose. Of course we will pass it, but it will not happen. It is like House of Lords reform: it will never happen because every time we have a scheme, somebody will think of something else and we do other things.

We are not actually taking this at all seriously. If we really thought this place was a health and safety hazard, we would not come here another week. We would have thought of a decant by now. Even now, 11 years after the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, in his former existence, was thinking about this, we do not have a place to decant to, because this is a palace, and you can only decant people from a palace into another palace. I have a simple suggestion: we should decant ourselves to Buckingham Palace. It is the only building large enough to contain all the facilities we have, with room to spare. The present owners would have to show us some kindness, but it will at least make the State Opening of Parliament much easier for them than it is right now. We have to think in those terms, because except for maybe Windsor Castle or Buckingham Palace, I do not believe there is another building in the vicinity of London that will accommodate all the things that go on here. If we think like that, we could get a decant in 18 months. But we will not do it. I can assure your Lordships that it will not happen because, as I said and as economists know, that is a normative situation and we are not going to do it. We will have committees and debates—after all, this debate is happening at least two years after the report and 11 years after the debate started. Even so, in the Commons, one-third of the Members were not there to vote on the crucial decant amendment. The majority was very small—almost the exact image of Brexit, with 52% to 48%, or 236 to 220. As only 456 Members voted, the Commons does not think this is either important or urgent. On the final resolution, fewer than 456 voted. One should not think that the Commons has made this important decision and we ought to follow it. It has not.

Maybe we will or will not do this, but we ought to think of a more urgent way of decanting, if decanting is what we are going to do—which I doubt. The way we are going, we will pass this Motion and act on what the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, has proposed. We shall stay here and muddle our way through without either House decanting. We will complain and suffer, but we love this place so much that we will not be able to move out. Given that, let us enjoy the situation.

European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Desai Excerpts

Monday 20th February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, the advantage of following the noble Lord is that he has woken you all up and I can now get on with what I want to do. I have spoken about five times on this issue in your Lordships’ House. Your Lordships may not remember, but I have. My line has been very consistent. Whatever we may think of the referendum as a process, we cannot judge its quality by the result. If you do not like the result, it does not mean that the process was bad.

The result was quite remarkable—52% to 48%. In England it was 53.3% to 46.7%. Few people remember that out of 34 million votes, 28 million were cast in England. In England the difference was between 15 million and 13 million. The difference of 2 million was exactly the difference at a national level—18 million to 16 million—so the 3 million votes on either side were cast in the three devolved regions. So the majority for Brexit comes from England. This was an English nationalist vote—make no mistake about it—and we have to take it seriously because this is the largest part of the United Kingdom.

There is a double process. First there is the divorce and then there are negotiations on cohabitation. A lot of people in the debate today, with a lot of good will, have mixed up the two processes. They want to have a good cohabitation. More or less, they are saying, “Yes, I want a divorce”, but then, “Let’s forget it. I want the same life as we had before”—in other words, we want the single market, we want the customs union, et cetera. As the noble Lord, Lord Finkelstein, said, this option may not be available.

First, we have to do not a hard Brexit or a soft Brexit but a quick Brexit. The precise breaking up of the legal membership has to be done as quickly as we can. That will leave more time for the negotiations on the quality of the cohabitation, which are going to be long drawn-out. Even a trade deal will be long drawn-out if you want a trade deal with 27 other members. All the other things noble Lords have mentioned, including security and human rights, will take a long time to negotiate—so let us get the Brexit bit out of the way as soon as we can, maybe in six months. The Government may be able to come back after that to consult Parliament about the shape of the cohabitation. Once the Article 50 process is finished, we will be free to discuss among ourselves what to do next. But that distinction has to be made.

The only amendments to the Bill that will be admissible will be to clarify whether we want the parliamentary process to be there between invoking Article 50 and Brexit—whether Parliament should be consulted at all or whether we should give the Government a free hand to get on with the job and finish Brexit as quickly as possible.

The most important thing that will be discussed in the divorce negotiations is the budget. I am on the Financial Affairs Sub-Committee of your Lordships’ Select Committee on the European Union and I can say without any doubt that practically no one knows what the bill is going to be. It is a fiendishly complex issue. In October, the Financial Times, no less, said that the bill would be £20 billion. In November it said that it would be £60 billion. I could give your Lordships almost any number between £10 billion and £200 billion on perfectly sound grounds. The problem is that what we pay will be the subject of the hardest negotiation possible. For example, there is a multiannual financial framework which is agreed for seven years—2013 to 2020—and we are going out in the middle of this seven-year budgetary agreement. Therefore, the question is: we agreed to pay something in 2020; do we get out without paying or can they say, “Hey, come on, you made commitments”? Not only that—there may be a committed scheme, say, to launch a road in Estonia for €10 billion, of which only €5 billion may have been spent so far. We have agreed to spend the other €5 billion and pay our share of it. Do we stop paying it?

So there will be a number of complex issues about the budget, and unless we get that right, and get it right early, we will not be able to proceed with the other good things in life that we want out of the European Union. My view is that we need clarity of thought about this problem—and the sooner we do it, the better.

Strathclyde Review

Lord Desai Excerpts

Wednesday 13th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, we know that the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, is a very nice man. I have known him for all the 25 years that I have been here, and he has shown great courtesy, charm and ability. So the question before us is: why does the Prime Minister not like him? Why has he given him what in rugby terms is called a hospital pass? He has been given the thankless task of trying to make a major tactical mistake by the Government, which was shown by your Lordships’ House to be worth definite rejection, seem respectable, retrieving the disaster that was visited upon the Government by pretending that the fault was somehow that of your Lordships’ House.

We have had an interesting and wide-ranging discussion today. We have had a kind of admission by the noble Lord that, strictly speaking, conventions were not broken on 26 October by the two Motions that were put to the vote. In the debate on the day, the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, said she was introducing her Motion because she knew that within three days the House of Commons would be holding a discussion on precisely the tax credit issue, so she was genuinely asking the House of Commons to think again. We all thought what would happen, after we had debated and passed the Motion, was that the House of Commons would think again. Indeed it did, and the Chancellor thought again too. As the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, said, it is the most popular thing that the House of Lords has done as far as the British public were concerned, and the most effective thing, in that the Chancellor dropped the policy. He had to revise his policy, come the Autumn Statement.

Given that all these things have happened, why do we have to consider all sorts of questions about the position of this House vis-à-vis the House of Commons, matters of power and privilege and all that? Why can we not just admit that, strictly speaking, had the Government wanted drastically to cut tax credits—they have the privilege to do so if they want to—they should have done it via primary legislation? That would have been the end of the matter and we would not have been able to do anything about it. So why did the Government do it by statutory instrument? It is precisely because there are 1,000 of them every year. I was privileged to be on the first committee of your Lordships’ House on the scrutiny of secondary legislation and, let me tell you, they are mind-numbingly boring. However, you have to go through the details because those details matter; they have to be examined. I think someone in the other place thought, “Statutory instruments are so boring that no one’s going to take this one seriously and it will pass”. It is precisely because secondary legislation is overused that a trick was tried on us that failed.

I remember Lord Simon of Glaisdale, whose name was mentioned earlier, who used to warn us about Henry VIII legislation and so on. There is indeed a problem; if we are going to have 1,000 or 1,200 pieces of secondary legislation, someone has to scrutinise them. I also agree with the many noble Lords who have said that your Lordships’ House would scrutinise them with much greater care and attention than would the other place. However, given that, we also ought to ask whether a lot of those sorts of decisions should not be much more open and transparent and be part of primary legislation, and not in skeleton Bills? Therefore, those are the issues.

I want to make one slightly radical suggestion about financial privileges. I accept that since the 17th century or before that it has been the House of Commons’ privilege to have powers with regard to financial matters. In 1911 the House of Lords blotted its copybook and got smashed for that reason—quite rightly so—and in 1949 our powers were again curtailed. Coming to today, the relationship between our two Chambers is quite different, because your Lordships’ House is no longer a seat of privilege or a place of feudal Lords. It is a place as representative of the great British public as is the House of Commons. Yes, we are unelected, but we are not unrepresentative. Also, as was proved on 26 October, we sometimes have better judgment on financial matters than another place.

Therefore, when we examine all the big questions of our constitution, we ought to ask ourselves: is it not time that we used the expertise of this House and its representativeness to have a greater input into financial matters than it is allowed today? It will not happen any time soon—if we ever have this great constitutional convention we may be able to consider that—but we should certainly not leave that question undiscussed in our future deliberations.

House of Lords Reform

Lord Desai Excerpts

Tuesday 15th September 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure and privilege to follow the noble Lord.

All sorts of things have been said, so let me start with something that has not, and that is about the way the public, and especially the media, view the House. Whenever there is any whiff of scandal or when they want to criticise us, the picture they give is of the State Opening of Parliament. People are invited to ridicule us because there we are in our robes and tiaras and so on—this is not a frivolous point but is very much evident. I have proposed before in this House that we should move the State Opening of Parliament from here to Westminster Hall. The Commons and Lords should be invited to sit down together, so that we do not have to be in robes, and Her Majesty should give a speech about her personal moments, rather than having to read the Prime Minister’s speech, and then invite the Prime Minister to read the speech he has written. This would do lots of things: it would reduce the absurdity of the House of Commons people standing at the Bar; it would get us out of our robes; and it would increase our respectability in the eyes of the public, because people cannot understand that we do not actually come in robes every day—they still think we are always like that, prancing around. That is my one constructive suggestion for the evening.

Being the 22nd person to speak, I think that practically every solution that I could have thought of has been put forward. However, we have what economists, artists, engineers and so on generally call a “stock-flow” problem. We have a large stock of life Peers and the egress is very small, with maybe 20 per year; the incoming flow is always much larger than the annual egress, especially around election times. In the nice paper that the House Library has produced, I notice that over the past 15 years we have had a large ingress around election time—either in the year before an election or in the year of the election. In 2000 and 2001, there were 87 new Members. In 2004 and 2005, there were 96 new Members. In the Parliament of the coalition Government, the figures were really extreme: in 2010 and 2011, there were 129 new Members; and, when the coalition was going out, in 2013 and 2014, there were another 69, so there were 200 new Members within the coalition Parliament. It is a problem when one has a limited reservoir; with little egress and a lot of people coming in, the place will be flooded—and we are flooded right now.

There are solutions. First, let the Prime Minister do whatever he wants by way of appointments but say to him that, to begin with, he can only give people a peerage but not the right to sit in the House of Lords. That right would be rationed by the number of people exiting. Either we have “one for one” or we have “three for one” or whatever. That will slow things down. Secondly, we should try another solution: as we did at the time of the reform of the hereditary peerage, each party or constituent group should select from within it a number of people who should leave. That could be done by a “first past the post” or proportional system. If we could say that the number would not reduce from 800 to 400 unless each group decides to halve itself; and, perhaps after deciding whatever the necessary number of voluntary retirements should be, the groups would choose who leaves. In that way, we could reduce our numbers ourselves voluntarily. We could say to the Prime Minister, “You can appoint who you like, but those men and women can come here only if there is a vacancy”.

If we combined those two things, we may within five or 10 years achieve a House of Lords of about 400, which is the ideal size. But it would have to be done by a drastic reduction in the current numbers and a limit on the number of people coming in to match the number of people leaving.

English Votes for English Laws

Lord Desai Excerpts

Thursday 16th July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

In the same vein, I should say that the advantage of having a proper Bill that undergoes pre-legislative scrutiny by both Houses, and is debated and passed in both Houses, would cover all the unanticipated and unanticipatable consequences of such a narrow construction of the question. If we do not at the beginning take care to examine all those consequences, we shall regret it and have to come back to this question again and again in a very messy way. The best thing to do is to follow proper procedures, use the strength we have in the two Houses and come to a proper conclusion on what is the most important constitutional question for the United Kingdom.

Caste Discrimination

Lord Desai Excerpts

Wednesday 15th July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My Lords, I do not have exact figures and names to hand but I am very happy to write to the noble Lord with them.

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, is not the problem that the majority Hindu and Sikh organisations are responsible for discrimination of the minority in their own ethnic origin community? I do not think that one should quietly concede the majority’s view in this respect.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I agree with the noble Lord that this can be a problem within communities of that nature, and is not generally something that is within the British culture.

Iraq

Lord Desai Excerpts

Friday 26th September 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, in the previous three debates we have had on Middle Eastern issues, I have urged intervention every time. I also said that the question was not whether we should intervene but when, and that the more we delayed the decision the more difficult it would be when we did intervene. Here we are on the fourth go at the debate: we are going to intervene.

As many noble Lords have said, let us also be quite sure that what we are debating today is only the first step of a long process in getting there. There is absolutely no reason to expect a quick solution to such a difficult problem. Again, as we have discussed in the past, the Middle East has been in this crisis since roughly the middle of the 1970s—the past 40 years have been bloody in terms of wars between Iran and Iraq and various other conflicts. We were in Iraq in 1991 and again in 2003, and in the past three years Syria has exploded and all sorts of problems have happened.

Wars last a long time; they may have ebbs and flows. In the 17th century, wars of religion in Europe lasted 30 years. Our Civil War lasted for at least 25 years. Therefore, we should not expect a quick resolution but we should be clear that what we want to do in this particular phase of this war is to save Muslim lives. I very much want to say that there is a deep crisis in Muslim society as it is faced with modernity, and there has been for a long time. Right now, the most killing of Muslims by Muslims is taking place. Our first duty is humanitarian intervention to save those lives. Yes, there are dangers to us, and we are very much aware of them. However, we should convey clearly that we are there to save Muslim lives. Unless we do that, we will be thought once again to be intervening from above and to be going away after our task is done. We should not do that. Let us have some patience this time. As the right reverend Prelate said, the young men and women who go over there from here are idealists. We have to remember that they go there because they feel that the life they have here does not satisfy their deeper urges. After all, young men and women went to fight in the Spanish Civil War; they were doing a similar thing.

We have to understand the dynamics of what these young men and women are doing and not just say immediately, “They are all terrorists and when they come back we will put them all in jail”. Let us understand where they come from and what they are tying to do. If we extend our understanding to both Muslim society at home and Muslim society in the Middle East, we shall be much more successful than we have been in the past.

Draft House of Lords Reform Bill

Lord Desai Excerpts

Monday 30th April 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, the answer to my noble friend’s question to the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, as to why Lloyd George did not support an elected House is very simple. At that time, the unionist opposition was proposing an elected element for the House of Lords precisely to make it more powerful. One thing that Lloyd George did not want was a House of Lords more legitimate and powerful than he already had facing him, which is why the 1911 Act carefully avoided going down the elected path. All the themes that we have discussed—an elected House, the way to reconcile a quarrelling House of Commons, joint sessions and referenda—were rehearsed way back before the Parliament Act 1911 was passed. You have only to read Roy Jenkins’s book, Mr Balfour’s Poodle, to find that out. Again, given where we are, do we want to make the House of Lords more powerful than it is?

I compliment my noble friend Lord Richard on the excellent report of his Joint Committee, but I should say that one of the central contradictions is that the Government have proposed a draft Bill but have been somewhat timid with their reforms. Had they been really bold, they would have said, “We want an elected House of Lords, but it would be difficult to retain the primacy of the House of Commons unless some drastic things are done along with the Bill”. Everyone has agreed—including the Joint Committee’s report, the alternative report and many of the witnesses—that Clause 2 will not do because it will not resolve the issue of the primacy of the House of Commons. The question would then be: is the primacy of the House of Commons there not because it is elected but because we are unelected? If we get elected, will the primacy of the House of Commons make sense any more? That is the question that people ought to pose. The financial privileges of the House of Commons derive from way back in the 17th century, before it was elected in anything like its present form. That had to be reaffirmed and established in statute in the 1911 Act because those privileges were not guaranteed by the conventions of that time. If we are again to assert the primacy of the House of Commons, we have to establish that in statute—perhaps as a separate Parliament Act, not mixed up with the House of Lords Reform Bill. If you do not do that you cannot rely on conventions because, as the balance of power changes, conventions will change—and previous conventions will, no doubt, be challenged. One of the things we therefore have to do is make quite sure that if the two Houses of Parliament want to preserve the primacy of the House of Commons we must spell out what that primacy consists of and establish it by statute, because nothing can be taken for granted in an unwritten constitution whereby one Parliament can change what another Parliament does.

The nub of the problem is the nature of the elections to the House of Lords, which a lot of noble Lords have spoken about. It is clear that if we have elections on whatever territorial basis—either singly or as a group, as we do for the European Parliament—the House of Lords will replicate the House of Commons. If the Lords is elected by PR, that would in at least some people’s eyes be more legitimate than first past the post; and a House of Lords elected on the same territorial basis as the House of Commons, by what some may think is a better method, will no doubt challenge the legitimacy of the House of Commons. One should not be surprised by that. One ought to look at that issue in advance and do something about it.

What I proposed in my submission to the committee somewhat overlaps with what the noble Lord, Lord Low, said earlier. It was that we should have elections to the House of Lords for 80 per cent of its Members—I would prefer 100 per cent, but I pass on that—but the elections should be on a regional basis. Of course, we are not a federation and it is difficult to justify a second Chamber if the country is not a federation, as many experts told the Joint Committee. We already have three devolved Parliaments, and England is supposed to have 10 regions. I know that the regions do not actually want autonomy, but we shall have to impose some autonomy on them. If we elect an equal number of MPs from the 13 regions—quick arithmetic tells me that if we have 20 from each region we would have 260 elected Lords in a House of 300; and the number could be adjusted to 450—and the list is regional and not attached to any constituency, the Members elected will in some sense be representative but will not be rivals to the way that the House of Commons derives its legitimacy.

There is another advantage—a House of Lords elected by regional lists will fill the one big gap in our system. Your Lordships’ House is at present always accused of being too London-biased and that a regional dimension is missing from our Parliament. If we could get a regional dimension into Parliament through elections, either directly or indirectly, it would provide for an elected element to the House of Lords that would not challenge the legitimacy of the House of Commons, which is based on an entirely separate constituency system.

That is one way of reconciling two difficult problems. As for the 20 per cent who would be appointed, I entirely agree with the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Low. We have many electoral colleges, including the Royal Society, the BMA and the Law Society. Each could elect one representative, and the appointed element would also have some legitimacy. These sorts of schemes have been proposed for the British constitution over the past 100 years; there is nothing new about that. In that way, we will have an elected element in your Lordships’ House, it will not threaten the legitimacy of the House of Commons, and we will definitely have a better House than at present.

I shall say just one more thing. It is a fallacy to think that elected people do not have expertise. You have only to go to the House of Commons, which over many years has included professors, lawyers and scientists. I recall Dr Jeremy Bray, whom I used to know well; he was a distinguished scientist and a very good MP. Elected people can have expertise. You do not need to be unelected to be an expert.

Libya

Lord Desai Excerpts

Monday 5th September 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Naseby]

My Lords—

[Lord Desai]

My Lords—

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, we have not yet heard from a Conservative Peer. We have plenty of time.

[Lord Strathclyde]

My Lords, I would not want the House to think that we were minimising the reporting of the number of casualties on the Libyan side. The wording that both the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, and I have used is that there have been relatively few casualties compared to many other conflicts of this kind. In fact, the UK Government through DfID are now providing urgent humanitarian support into Tripoli, including medical help, food and other basic supplies. A key component of that is to provide surgical teams and medicines for the treatment of up to 5,000 war-wounded patients and to boost local medical staff’s expertise in war surgery techniques.

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, the noble Lord said that the need in Libya was to establish a democracy, and that is quite rightly the challenge. Could he suggest, through the Prime Minister, that the Commonwealth has a lot of experience in a diversity of multi-ethnic and multi-tribal situations? Perhaps the Commonwealth could provide the kind of support that Libya needs right now.

[Lord Strathclyde]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Desai, has come up with a good and sensible suggestion. I understand from my noble friend Lord Howell of Guildford that this idea has been raised by others too, and that it is being studied to see what experience we can bring from the Commonwealth in order to help the people and the transitional Government.

House of Lords: Working Practices

Lord Desai Excerpts

Monday 27th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, first, I join many others in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad, on producing an excellent report. Having said that, I am going to disagree with it—but only with one aspect of it, about which I care passionately. I shall disagree with paragraphs 29 to 42, which relate to Question Time and the Speaker’s powers in the Chamber. I was a member of the Speaker's Committee when we were first asked to formulate the duties of the Speaker. I think it was understood among the members of all different parties—the noble Lord the Leader of the House was a member of it—that if we were going to preserve self-regulation, we could really have only a Speaker with minimal duties in the Chamber.

Unlike many noble Lords, I am not distressed that occasionally at Question Time we have a bit of a kerfuffle. What has happened is that, first, in the past year we have had many new Members who are eager to make a contribution, which is a perfectly good thing. Question Time is more crowded than I remember in my 20 years here. Secondly, there is a structural problem. The coalition is a new thing and because it is new to the coalition itself, not only to the rest of us, it did not quite make up its mind whether it was one party or two. When it comes to holding the balance between different groups about who gets a turn, it is a difficult thing for the Government Front Bench because within those behind them there are two views on whether they are two parties or one. We on this side very much wanted to enforce the idea that it was only one party so that each time a noble Lord opposite got a chance, we had to have a go—as, of course, did the Bishops and the Cross Benches. I think things will settle down.

As I have not come from the House of Commons, I am not at all enamoured of its culture in this matter. I very much appreciated what the noble Lord, Lord Martin, said with his experience as Mr Speaker but I do not want us to get into that culture at all because what will happen is that there will suddenly be 10 people standing up to attract the attention of the Speaker. It is like a Mexican wave in the House of Commons; every time something happens, 15 people get up. I do not know why they do. What do they mean to accomplish by that?

There have been difficult times for the House but, usually, the noble Baroness who is the Chief Whip or the Leader of the House have managed to calm nerves down and we have had business done. I am not one of those people who want to hurry us, even gently, towards having a more powerful Speaker within the Chamber. If we do that and adopt the recommendation of the Goodlad committee, I very much hope that after the one year of experiment we are given a genuine option to reject. We should not blindly go on renewing something like that because that way lies the thin end of the wedge, and very soon we would have the Speaker intervening in Statements and debates and so on.

Self-regulation can be preserved. During the debates on the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill, the House got into a very bad mood about filibustering and this and that but then it came back from the brink and re-established itself as a self-regulating Chamber. I very much hope that we trust the House to do its thing. We hope that the newly arrived Peers will get a bit more mentoring and that we will all get better manners and calm ourselves down. I hope that we do not begin to lose self-regulation and boost up the Speaker. I can see noble Lords shaking their heads because they come from another place and they want to bring that old heaven on earth here, but I say no. I have lived on this flat earth and I want to go on living on it for a long time.