Freedom of Expression

Lord Dykes Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I assure the noble Lord that in the case of the individual concerned in the Question, we are undertaking some fact-finding meetings with the member of staff and the higher officer on duty at that time. I think that the noble Baroness and the noble Lord will be comforted by that. The noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, perhaps strayed into other events that have taken place around the Palace of Westminster. We all have the right to give our views on Brexit—and, my goodness, we have done that—but when that strays into some of the more aggressive behaviour that we have seen, it is absolutely unacceptable.

[Lord Dykes (CB)]

Should the Leader of the House not be more enthusiastic about the slogan cited by the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford? After all, it is used frequently and is well known as the slogan of the chairman of Pimlico Plumbers in London, a very famous and distinguished remainer.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I think my noble friend the Leader of the House is no more enthusiastic about the slogan than I am, but everyone—I thought the noble Lord was going to refer to the wife of the Speaker of the House of Commons—has the right to air their views on what is an incredibly heated topic at the moment.

Brexit: The Customs Challenge (European Union Committee Report)

Lord Dykes Excerpts

Monday 1st April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dykes (CB)]

My Lords, in this House we are fortunate to have had many reports about Brexit and all its complications from the various sub-committees and the main European Union Committee. I am sure we are very grateful to all Members who have worked hard on those reports. They are of immense detail and complexity, but also immense conviction and persuasion. That does not gainsay my feeling at the end of reading them all carefully, which I try to do if I can: one comes to the inevitable conclusion that there is no substitute for actually staying in the European Union.

I very much congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, on leading this discussion of the report and the other three members of the committee who have spoken so far. I thought the concluding remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, on the numbers were very relevant and need looking at again. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Horam, for his words highlighting the dangers and difficulties of producing the customs union concept in the way that my great friend Kenneth Clarke was trying to explain properly on the radio this morning. He did a very good job but there are many minuses as well as many pluses.

On the report itself, I agree very strongly with all the remarks made by the three ensuing speakers, with their worries and anxieties about what this all means. I hope the Minister will kindly look at the report’s conclusions, on page 48. I am particularly concerned about paragraph 191, which states:

“The UK Government’s estimate that 96% of UK goods trade would be able to pay the correct or no tariff up front and not go through the repayment mechanism has been challenged. We call on the Government to clarify the methodology it used to arrive at the 96% figure”.


Then, on a totally different subject, paragraph 193 states:

“We welcome the Government’s stated intention to uphold current UK food standards and not lower them in free trade agreements with third countries”.


All that is a danger if we go ahead with this matter. I beg to differ, and conclude with a few remarks about the broader scene now facing us in what is yet another—although not the final—emergency, drastic week for this House, and particularly for the House of Commons.

[Lord Wigley (PC)]

Will the Minister address the difficulties arising from the lack of infrastructure for customs dealings between Ireland and the UK using the UK as a land bridge, particularly at Holyhead? I do not think it was visited by the committee; nor did witnesses from Holyhead come before the committee.

[Lord Dykes]

This is not the first time I have agreed with the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, on these matters, and I do so strongly—partly in the nervous realisation that I know much less about Holyhead than he does. The noble Lord has referred to this in a number of speeches; I agree with the broad outline of his comments and thank him for intervening today.

The background to what is happening is a tragedy and a matter of great sadness for this country. No Prime Minister with any wisdom and good sense would have set out to totally ignore the wishes of almost 50% of those who voted in what was only an advisory referendum, even though David Cameron said he would abide by the decision. Even after the futile election of 8 June, after she had lost her mandate and was able to carry on only artificially via a dubious deal with and huge bribe to the DUP, the Prime Minister defiantly carried on. She chose not only to ignore the wafer-thin majority in the first referendum but to deal just with the ERG—not even with the whole of her own Conservative Party. The ERG came first in all her dealings and all her discussions. This again reveals the huge weaknesses in our now totally dilapidated political and parliamentary system, which can be removed only with drastic and radical reforms, which should not be done by politicians—they would never agree—but by sensible outside experts and professorial characters of distinction, men and women. We have to get rid of this bandit politics disease in Britain and come back to reassuring the public.

In that context, I conclude by saying something in contrast to the miseries we are all experiencing with this Brexit process—Brexit is on the verge of being registered with the NHS as an official disease, and anti-Brexit is part of it. However, public opinion has changed, and it was, at last, reassuring to go on the march on 23 March with over 1 million like-minded people from all over the country, including many former leave voters who now grasp the looming disaster of Brexit. The 6 million-plus signatories to the petition underline the huge change in public opinion on this matter. None of these reports is rendered less important and valuable because of this, but that is the reality.

This is especially true for our precious and increasingly internationally minded younger generation, and often, at the other end of the age scale, for the many thousands of UK citizens working and living elsewhere in the European Union—perhaps a more relevant union for us than that other union Mrs May refers to. The European Union is precious to the modern populations of its modern member states.

Finally, I want to quote Margaret Beckett, speaking in the Commons debate on 27 March. She said,

“I invite colleagues who … resist a confirmatory vote to look starkly at … what they are saying. They are willing … to terminate our membership of the European Union even if it may now be against the wishes of the majority of the British people”.—[Official Report, Commons, 27/3/19; col. 391.]

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Taverne (LD)]

My Lords, I was not a member of the committee but, having read its report several times—it is not an easy read—I am impressed. First, as many speakers have pointed out, it provides convincing evidence once again of what would be the disastrous consequences of a no-deal Brexit, and I trust that the Commons will rule out that option conclusively.

The report should be, or should have been, compulsory reading for those who plan to vote for the Clarke amendment, for a form of customs union presumably on the lines of the facilitated customs arrangement analysed in this report. This, the Government claim, would enable the UK to control its own tariffs for trade with the rest of the world. It is the option which seems to be the present favourite to win the Commons beauty contest to be voted on today.

However, that option has many serious snags. As pointed out in chapter 5 of the report, the present EU customs union requires a common commercial policy—in effect, a single market. To allow for the freedom to make separate trade agreements with the rest of the world, the customs union proposed by the Government, and, one must assume, by the Clarke amendment, seeks to avoid this. But the committee tells us that, for this kind of customs union to work and for us to enjoy a frictionless border with the EU as a non-member, there would still have to be convergence of regulations. We would, we were told, become “a regulatory satellite” of the EU. Would this be acceptable to most Brexiteers, or to those who support a soft Brexit? Instead of winning back control, we would, we are told, be subject to control by satellite.

The facilitated customs arrangement would also be immensely complex, involving different tariffs for EU and non-EU countries, including possible payments and repayments collected or paid on behalf of other countries. Compliance would, as many other speakers have pointed out, be a very hard and costly task for small to medium enterprises. Being part of a customs union without being a member would also require very complex negotiations, which are hardly likely to be welcomed by the 27 after their recent experience of endless delays and changes of tack by a succession of incompetent Brexit negotiators.

But what all Brexit advocates—even soft Brexit advocates—ignore is the most important development of all, to which the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, referred. There is strong evidence that the people’s will has changed since the referendum and is no longer the people’s will today. The evidence is not just the march by over a million people, or the petition to revoke Article 50 signed by some 6 million. Professor Curtice, who is much invoked by the Government and Brexiteers, long maintained that opinion had not shifted. He has now changed his view. A vote today, according to his findings, would be 54% to 46% in favour of remain; according to YouGov, it would be some 56% to 44%.

This shift should not come as a surprise, and there is every reason to suppose that it will grow. Nearly all Brexit news is bad: on overseas investment; a growing number of manufacturers and service companies which are planning to leave the UK; a likely crippling shortage of nurses and other professionals in the NHS, caused by the exodus of EU citizens; and so on. It is true that there are lots of leavers crying, “We want out”, and “Why haven’t we left yet?” No evidence will change their minds. However, there must be many of the 52% who voted leave who care about the future of their jobs and the prospects for their children, and they will not be impervious to what manufacturers such as those in the motor industry and Airbus tell us.

There was an extremely extensive poll of intending leavers on the eve of the referendum about the reasons why they intended to vote “out”. Many gave different reasons, but they all agreed that leave would have no downside—no prospect but that of life in the sunlit uplands. Now it is becoming plain what Brexit means: any form of Brexit, however soft, will make us poorer, especially the most vulnerable. It would be a strange twist to the present confusion if we left the EU because MPs believed they were obeying the people’s will, when—

[Lord Dykes]

I am sorry to interrupt the noble Lord, as I agree strongly with his words, but in the context of what he was saying two sentences ago can he estimate the number of people who accompanied Nigel Farage on his long trip from Sunderland?

Brexit: Foreign Language Teaching and Public Service Interpreting

Lord Dykes Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dykes (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the first two speakers, and I thank my noble friend Lady Coussins for launching this debate. This is a subject that is seemingly not big on the horizon, but actually it is crucial. I thank her also for the marvellous work she has done over the years as a chairman of our All-Party Group on Modern Languages, which has achieved great things. The emotional, marginal nature of foreign languages in Britain—which is really a curse—might suggest that we would not have very frequent meetings, but we do. We have interesting and varied meetings, full of content, with lots of outside participants, such as members of the Institute of Linguists. It is a very inspiring group. I am therefore grateful that today’s debate has been led by my noble friend Lady Coussins, and for what she said to raise the alarm on this issue.

We are dealing here with yet another miserable piece of Brexit legislation, and what a sad time this is for the country. One has to speak broadly about Brexit, because it is the background to all these matters. Today, in Committee on the Trade Bill, things were dealt with that would not have been necessary if the Government had handled the events subsequent to the election on 8 June 2017 more intelligently, in a way that would have led us to a different and more constructive channel of recovery and a rethinking of the nightmare that is affecting this country. It has made people thoroughly miserable. Youngsters feel fed up and have lost their morale as a result of what the senior citizens in the Government and politics have done, seemingly on their behalf but potentially causing only damage and destruction. This may seem a small segment of the Brexit background, but it is a very important one.

In recent years, the language background in Britain has been depressing. It is good to see the expansion of Spanish and Mandarin in British state schools and others, particularly for younger children, and to see how well and intelligently they deal with it and what they achieve. Learning Chinese is very difficult for older people, but children can cope with it. Other languages, however, are now in decline in universities and schools—German is a good example of this—but there is absolutely sacred evidence of their importance.

Years ago, I went to Dusseldorf to speak to the 50 officials at the British trade office who were promoting UK exports. Their first grumble—a familiar one in this country, which is spoiled by English being the dominant international language—was that so many British companies would not produce their pamphlets in German because of the extra expense, saying, “Why bother? Aren’t the Germans good at speaking English?” Many years after that visit, specific research showed that 9% net of business was lost by British exporters in Germany because we would not put our documents into German. German has really faded now in this country, and I hope that will not be so in the future.

I am spoiled by providence and my origins of birth. For some reason, I have always found languages very easy: I enjoy speaking and reading European languages, as well as Russian, but that is rusty because I have not used it in recent years. Due to finding it easy, I have a natural enthusiasm for language learning and teaching, which does not affect the ordinary citizen. I quite understand that. I am not criticising the ordinary citizen in this country for not feeling that way or for supporting the idea that they do not need to bother because “they all speak English”.

If it is unfair I will apologise to him immediately, but I was told on good authority that the previous Prime Minister, David Cameron, could just about manage to say “bonjour” and nothing else when he was at the Council of Ministers. But look at what our foreign friends in the EU can do. Some years ago, I had the great privilege of visiting the European Parliament, which has become increasingly important now. I heard the then President Barroso make a speech in five different languages, with several paragraphs in each. We could do that as well. There is no reason that British people should not be intrinsically just as good at foreign languages as anybody else, if they put their minds to it. I have spoken on this at great length because I wanted to focus on the background and on how this curmudgeonly attitude in Britain about languages has affected government policy.

On the Immigration Act, I was very impressed with the two documents, by Nicola Newson and James Goddard, that we in the House of Lords were given. They were very helpful in giving us the background on this. The second paragraph on page 72 of the first one deals with how this all started. It says:

“The shortage of teachers is not limited to a few subject-specialisms as in the past. The ASCL survey of January 2016 asked about the subjects found to be difficult. As might be expected the existing shortage subjects of maths and science head the list, but they are now joined by significant numbers of schools having problems recruiting teachers of English, modern foreign languages”—


which is the subject of this debate today—

“geography, history and other subjects”.

Later in the same document we get a Written Answer from the Minister, then Nick Gibb. He said in September 2018:

“The Government has commissioned the Migration Advisory Committee … to provide independent advice … to help develop a future immigration system. The Department welcomed their interim report in March and the contribution it makes to the immigration debate. Their analysis is incomplete and it would be wrong to pre-empt their final report. The Government will take account of the MAC’s advice when making decisions about the future immigration system”.


As my noble friend Lady Coussins quite rightly mentioned, the salary figures are usually below the threshold anyway, so the problem is intrinsic and it has to be tackled. I hope that will be so, because the Immigration Act is only a part of this. Regulations will follow later when the second stage of this exercise gathers momentum, and I am very sceptical about the Government getting it right.

I will refer briefly to the second document, Foreign Language Skills: Trends and Developments. I mentioned earlier the damage that is done, particularly to younger members of our society, if these things are closed down, reduced, not properly funded and so on. On page 9, paragraph 4, I was struck with the definition of “multilingualism” in the EU. Let me remind everybody of the idea that all 27 sovereign countries in the EU are happy with sovereignty and happy working together as a club in a succession of treaties. Why cannot Britain be the same? The definition states:

“Under the subsidiarity principle, member states of the EU are responsible for language rights and education. However, the EU is empowered to promote language learning and linguistic diversity among its members”.

That is one of the great attractions of the EU and another reason why we should stay in.

Syria

Lord Dykes Excerpts

Thursday 29th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dykes (CB)]

The noble Lord, Lord Alton, has made some very interesting points, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.

It is with great glee and enthusiasm that I thank the noble Lord, Lord Roberts of Llandudno, for launching this debate. He and I came into the Lords at the same time in 2004. We have been friends for many years and I was in the same party group for a while. It has always been a pleasure to work with him and to listen to his natural proclivity to be a man of peace—peace in Europe after the Second World War and peace in the world. He has done great work in that field. A notable feature of the Liberal Democrat Party is that that is one of its priorities, as we know.

It is also a great pleasure to speak in the same debate as my good friend, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Coventry. We have at least one shared interest: we are both patrons of the Dresden Trust, which works for peace between Coventry and Dresden. The right reverend Prelate knows far more about the symbolism than I do, but that body also helped in the rebuilding of the Frauenkirche by paying for the orb and the cross on the top of the dome, as well as other things. It is a great pleasure for us to reflect on those things from time to time. Again, that sends out a message of peace in a place that experienced what he called a ferocious European civil war. I think there were 22 years between the first instalment, the First World War, and the second instalment, the Second World War. Fortunately, after the Second World War, the victorious allies handled the situation much better than they did after the First World War, when Germany was humiliated beyond all measure.

It is also a great pleasure to follow the excellent speech of a good friend and colleague on the Cross Benches, my noble friend Lady Cox, who is an expert on the Middle East. It was interesting to hear about her church-sponsored visit there. The right reverend Prelate, too, spoke about what he did when he visited on a separate occasion.

So many complications in this situation are created by local elements and by international actions and mistakes. I first went to Baghdad in 1988, when the city was full of American and British businessmen and officials and supporters of the United States and Britain saying that Saddam Hussein led the finest Government in Arabia. He was popular with America at the time. America supported him very strongly against Iran in the terrible tragedy of the Iran-Iraq war. Even after the gassing in Halabja, I remember vividly that the Americans publicly said that the Iranians had done it—because they were the devil then whom the Americans disliked and hated, and they thought Saddam Hussein was fine. Subsequently, Saddam Hussein made a mistake by not consulting the Americans before he invaded Kuwait, and was quite rightly driven out by the international community a year later.

A good friend of mine who lives in Israel has great experience in these matters. He holds moderate views and his support for international peace is well known. I will not give his name as he has not given me permission to quote him. However, he remarked that the man and woman in the street in Arabian countries see double standards in the international community, because Saddam Hussein was rightly expelled from Kuwait a year after the invasion but Israel is still in the West Bank, 50 years or more after the 1967 war. That double standard is one of the elements in this terrible tragedy of the conflict in the near East and the failure to resolve it.

I had enormous sympathy with the United States after the 9/11 attacks, as I am sure does everyone here. However, in its response after those attacks, America made mistakes in the near East and Middle East. Having worked with the Taliban in the old days to get the Soviet Union to leave Afghanistan, the Americans then fell out with the Taliban, or the Taliban fell out with them—and look at what is happening now in that tragic country.

Over 1 million people marched down Piccadilly to protest against the UK’s involvement in the invasion of Iraq. It was the first time I had ever been on a march. Millions of people thought that the UK’s involvement was a mistake, but the march was ignored by the then Prime Minister. However, by then, of course, we were devoid of proper information about the invasion, and we wondered about some of the details. I was then in the Liberal Democrat group, trying to monitor some of the effects of the war on civilians in Iraq. As we know, it was an illegal war and we admired France’s resistance to it—although it was vilified in the United States for that.

We tried to monitor what was happening to civilians but we could not get any names. A leading defence figure in the Liberal Democrat group, who, sadly, expired many years ago at the very young age of 62, managed to get the numbers that were going into mortuaries and hospitals. The figures were huge. But even now we do not know how many casualties there were in the Iraq war. No information has ever been given by the then Government or by the current American-sponsored Government in Baghdad.

Iraq remains a broken country—and so does Libya, because of the mistakes that were made, not so much by America this time but by France and Britain with the final NATO attack on Gaddafi, which caused his death following the previous judicial murder of Saddam Hussein. Perhaps he should not have been hanged—I do not know. There are lots of arguments about these things.

Then we come to the current tragedy of the Syrian civil war. Has the West sufficiently understood that it has to be careful in handling the response to this? In this case, France under François Hollande was too fierce. I did not expect that but that, too, was a mistake. However, the Americans and the British decided that they could continue their historical primordial right of having a presence in those areas—mainly for oil, of course, in the case of the United States but for other reasons too. There was the Sykes-Picot agreement and other events in the history of that tragic development. We thought that we ourselves would decide who would be in charge of those Middle Eastern countries, with the exception of Israel, which we are leaving alone. The United States had 35 vetoes to stop Israel behaving and following international law. I am a friend of Israel but I think that that was a great mistake; the situation would otherwise be very different now.

In Syria we now see the effects of those mistakes, and the West, either deliberately or accidentally, continues to misunderstand the details of what is happening. It is a classic civil war, much of it between Sunni and Shia, although the media hardly ever mention that—in fact, the BBC has never mentioned it. Various elements from outside have come in, and we know the tragic history. More recently, the Russians have come in with the Iranians. What a mistake by the West was the isolation of Iran. I am so pleased that Britain and others in Europe decided to end that and not to go along with the United States, which still wants to pursue Iran’s isolation. How ridiculous that is when it is such an important country.

Iran has resisted the efforts of Saudi Arabia to create hegemony in Syria, and we now see the last elements of this tragic, awful war. I have never been there; I am simply talking about what I see in the commentaries in the press, in social media comments and on the internet. It looks as though the Syrian Government are now winning as a result of assistance from Russia and support from Iran, with subsequent groups coming in from Lebanon and so on. That may be the best result—I am not enough of an expert to say—but it is a tragic civil war. You can always cite crimes on both sides and among all the groups, but it has to be resolved.

I was told that the Syrian Government were always very accommodating towards Christians—both those from abroad and the large Christian community of various kinds living in Syria, who were always a big feature. However, they are now reluctant to accept that the West has much of a role to play, and that is a tragedy. In view of what has happened in the past, they are suspicious of the West’s attempts to become involved in these matters. The West had a one-sided approach of saying, “We’ve decided from outside that this incumbent Government is a rebel Government without any legitimacy”. That is not what outside parties should do. Leading international countries should let the local people decide these things themselves. The final outcome in Syria will be what the Syrian people want it to be —they know best. There are faults and mistakes on all sides but we must encourage a decision by the Syrian people; otherwise, once again, the West will be seen as flimsy and inadequate and its response will be badly received. Israel will remain without a solution to a problem that should have been solved years ago. Mahmoud Abbas is incompetent. He is now 85 years old; he has ruled for 11 years beyond his election mandate and Hamas is still locked into Gaza. The whole thing is a grotesque tragedy.

Given its use of vetoes, the United States’ recent criticism of Russia and China for trying to veto what it is doing is grotesque hypocrisy. The United States bears a heavy responsibility for misbehaviour in the Middle East and for the way it has abused the United Nations, particularly the Security Council. Years ago it was a member of the high-level panel which wanted to reform the Security Council and the rest of the UN, but that was vetoed by the US. It refused to allow the Security Council to be examined and the high-level panel could only initiate other reforms—but even then the United States responded by saying that it did not agree with those either. It put forward 600 suggested reforms and amendments for the proposed modernisation of everything but the Security Council, and the initiative just petered out. No reforms were carried out, apart from to agencies—a few details at the margin.

The West must learn these lessons. Until we get a real, solid and lasting peace in Syria, with all its complicated elements, and until the Sunni/Shia element is pulled out of the situation which has been created at the expense of the brave Syrian people who have suffered so much, the more difficulties we will find in the future. The West must rehabilitate itself and its reputation by now being intelligent, open-minded and pragmatic, and genuinely seek peace, including with the incumbent Government in Damascus.

Syrian Refugees

Lord Dykes Excerpts

Thursday 29th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dykes (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Nicholson, and her very wise words. I agree with a lot that she has said. Above all, I warmly thank the noble Lord, Lord Truscott, for taking the initiative in launching this debate. It is extremely timely, with the tragedy that has been laid out so clearly in the speeches that we have already heard. I agreed with most of them wholeheartedly, particularly those that set out the tragic statistics of this later stage—the refugees, the deaths and so on—and the great tragedy of the disintegration of Syria, which has always been a very great country. Therefore, it behoves us all to think very seriously about how we resolve these matters.

I am also saddened by looking back at the examples of how the West has miscalculated so much on these foreign policy initiatives in the Middle East and elsewhere, but mainly, and tragically, in the Middle East itself. I am going back a long way now and thinking about the 1 million, or maybe even 1.5 million, people marching down Piccadilly to object to the Iraq war. I was one of them. There is a notion that there was another motive behind the war and not just the ones that were stated at the time. Regime change was hinted at last week by a very prominent international figure who used to be the Prime Minister of this country. That, as we know, is illegal under international law unless it is certificated in advance by the United Nations through the appropriate machinery and resolutions. That did not happen in that case. Saddam Hussein before then had invaded Kuwait and quite rightly was expelled by the international community, with the United Nations leading the way, a year later. I am a life-long admirer of the state of Israel, but I find it rather peculiar, in contrast, that Israel is still in Palestine, 50 years after the 1967 war, because of the way in which the United States has allowed that to happen and international law to be violated in that way by the key democracy in the Middle East, which is Israel.

None the less, we look now at the results of the West’s mistakes in Iraq and what happened there. Whether the eventual judicial murder of Saddam Hussein was right or wrong is a very interesting question and a difficult one to answer properly. The situation in Syria is that Assad is still in power. Even if one finds a regime obnoxious and the leader of that regime even more obnoxious—people have different views on that—it is not for the West to determine who is in charge of running a country or how a country is run; that is for the United Nations to determine. Look at the situation in Libya. Again, having had a friendship agreement with Gaddafi, he was then killed by his opponents in Libya, which was regarded by many as a good thing. But is it a good thing when those countries are now broken countries? They are not operating properly at all, and that is partly the responsibility of the West, led by the United States, which has made many mistakes in the Middle East. Thank goodness that now, at long last, the United States has agreed to let Iran attend the conference. It took a long time to be persuaded, but now Iran and other parties essential to this will be there to try to resolve the problem.

I believe that the problem can be resolved, but only with a different approach. Church leaders, and Christian Aid’s excellent memorandum on the subject, called this approach an “inclusive peace gathering” to achieve peace in Syria. It cannot be selective, with some people excluded and others included. That is a great mistake in the West, and the more we do it, the more mistakes we make. It must be put to an end now.

I make my final request to the Government, echoing what the noble Baroness, Lady Nicholson, said: we must be more generous in taking more Syrian refugees than the figures that were enunciated for the five-year period to 2020. In comparison with other European countries, this is a very niggardly number. Once again, church leaders are quite right in saying that the number should be at least doubled, and perhaps more than that. There is a lot that we can do to resolve the situation with humanity and common sense.

Israel and Palestine: Humanitarian Aid

Lord Dykes Excerpts

Thursday 24th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Lord Dykes (LD)]

Will my noble friend—

[Noble Lords]

This side!

[Lord Dykes]

Will my noble friend explain to the House why the UK Government and other European countries abstained on the war crimes resolution, which was passed by a majority in the United Nations and will have to be followed up, including, of course, as regards any war crimes by Hamas?

[Baroness Northover]

My noble friend is quite right—we abstained on this with the other EU countries. We are seeking to stop the bloodshed now. However, we urge that all sides act proportionately and take every step to minimise civilian casualties.

Foreign Affairs: Global Role, Emerging Powers and New Markets

Lord Dykes Excerpts

Thursday 6th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dykes]

My Lords, it is always a great pleasure to follow the very wise words of the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, and his enlightened expression of the need for countries, particularly those going through very severe periods of austerity, as we are and as are other countries in Europe and elsewhere, to maintain civilised values in their external links with the outside world. It is also a pleasure to follow the equally wise words of my noble friend Lord Bates and his justified idealism about the need for a proper definition of politician and statesman. He did not have time to elaborate but I hope that he will not mind that I mention a rather cynical definition of a politician. Fifty years ago, a former US Defence Secretary, whose name I have forgotten, said to one of his friends, “Listen, honey, I’m a politician. That means that when I’m not kissing babies I’m stealing their lollipops. Never forget it”. I thought that rather harsh working definition of a politician should have been overtaken by events—and indeed that has proved to be the case in certain countries, and in Britain, too, which unlike the United States has a gentler view of the important requirements of a capitalist economy, but a modern, welfare capitalist economy, as the Germans have been so adept in creating, and the French in their own way.

I declare an interest, as I live in France. It does not mean that you have to be emotional and bombastic about your own country. We are all European countries, and we can be proud of every single level of our attachment, down from the individual street to the village and town, the county, zone, region and country. I am intensely patriotic about Britain, but I see plenty of faults here as well, as one does in other countries. But I am even keener that we resume our place as a legitimate and modern member of the European Union. I thank particularly the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, at the beginning of the debate, and the noble Lord, Lord Judd, who also referred to this in very strong terms. There is a need for this country to resume and reattach itself to its political maturity, of which we were very proud for many decades. Why have we become so insecure and immature about our European link, a very precious thing that we negotiated with great pain and difficulty over many years? We took 12 years to get in because of two French vetoes, then two years afterwards the then Labour Government decided that they wanted to renegotiate a substantial portion of the terms. No wonder our colleagues, patient as they are, begin to get very exasperated sometimes with our EU membership, particularly with the antics of what is admittedly still quite a small minority of Conservative MPs in the other place. They are going through a charade, partly because of UKIP but also for other reasons, of attachment to a pretend sovereignty that no longer exists in any country—not even in the United States, in the end, a country that is regarded by some people as being in decline.

I thank warmly the noble Lord, Lord Howell, as others have done, for launching this debate. It is always a great problem when you are talking about the whole world, but he did it very effectively, because he focused quite rightly on a number of things, particularly the Commonwealth. You can sound like one of those terrible travelogue films from the cinemas in the 1950s, which would say at the beginning, “As the sun pulls away from the jetty and the ship sinks in the east, we say goodbye to such and such a territory”. He did not do that; he focused on some of the modern requirements in this country in the sense of the Commonwealth, which is a very important body in every way. It is developing, as someone said, with an inadequate budget—but I hope that that will be changed in future. I appreciate, and have always been glad about, the attachment of the Commonwealth entity into the Foreign Office, as it is a more modern position and configuration for the modern world.

I, too, praise, as the noble Lord, Lord Howell, and others have done, the Foreign Office for the work that it has done over the years. I have always been distressed at the demoralisation of the Foreign Office by what is coming up to 15 years of cutbacks in expenditure, budgets and so on, in two or three phases. Yet another phase is now threatened by the Treasury, which is not so keen so often to cut back its own establishment in physical terms, as it lectures other departments on cutting back theirs. The Foreign Office has put up with this for many years. It does dent morale if people constantly say to diplomats, representing this country overseas with great pride, that they must just think about trade and commerce and nothing else. That is not the job of a diplomat; it is an important component, but it is not the exclusive job of a diplomat, and I think that other noble Lords have alluded to that.

I endorse the views expressed on the role that Britain can play in the Middle East, as a particular example of where we need to exert ourselves more. There was an incipient sign of this recently, but then it became rather gentle again, with the usual obfuscations that personally I find very depressing and unnecessary. This country needs to assert itself, with others, including Germany, which has always had that problem after the nightmare of the Third Reich, in dealing positively vis-à-vis the Palestinians in the search for a proper, genuine and just settlement between Israel and Palestine. It is a most important issue. The present Israeli Government are not a particularly attractive Government—and I am sad to say that, because I am a great admirer of Israel. It is a wonderful country, with many outstanding achievements. But to some extent the geopolitical wisdom of yesteryear, as with the United States, has left it a bit at the moment, and I regret that. Israel needs to understand that it cannot be defiant all the time, so that in the end the Palestinian territory is the only one in the world without civic and voting rights as a genuine entity and country. The UN charter cannot allow that. Therefore, that would mean the end of the Zionist state as we know it. I personally would prefer there to be two states, side by side, including a Zionist state with perhaps not too much religion—because a lot of Israelis are a bit worried about that as well—but an adequate, normal or normative amount. Then they could reach that solution with Palestine that would mean shaking hands and getting on. I was an official observer for the EU Commission in the South African elections, and the day after you saw the scales fall away from people’s eyes as the nonsense of apartheid was demolished and destroyed—although not immediately. It takes time. But it has happened, and it can happen between Israel and Palestine. If any two countries can work together in future, it is those two, and it is up to Netanyahu and Lieberman to see that, I hope with the advice in future of the British Government, who have been a little too hesitant.

If the United States is in decline and ceasing to be a leader of the western world, it must at least in this coming period, working on the global basis that the noble Lord, Lord Howell, has advocated for this country, make sure that it reaches the solution necessary in the Middle East. It would be the greatest tribute that there could be to Barack Obama. He was given the Nobel Peace Prize in advance of this achievement. I hope that that prize was justified.

European Union Bill

Lord Dykes Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Quin]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the entertaining and knowledgeable contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Kerr. In response to the exhortation by the noble Baroness a minute ago for brevity, I was tempted to say that I agree strongly with my noble friends Lord Dubs and Lord Anderson, the noble Lords, Lord Taverne and Lord Kerr, and others, and then just sit down. I hoped that I would receive some popularity points as a result. However, I would briefly like to add one or two thoughts.

My first objection to the Bill is on constitutional grounds. The Constitution Committee talks about the Bill breaking new ground in the UK constitution by its imposition of referendum requirements on such a large scale. Reading that, I was reminded of the earlier inquiry, in which I participated, by the Constitution Committee into referendums generally. The report published in April last year said, significantly:

“The balance of the evidence that we have heard leads us to the conclusion that there are significant drawbacks to the use of referendums. In particular, we regret the ad hoc manner in which referendums have been used, often as a tactical device, by the government of the day”.

I strongly agree with that statement in the Constitution Committee’s report.

In introducing the debate, the noble Lord, Lord Howell, said that voting had almost got into our weekly habits in the present day, particularly in relation to television programmes. With respect, a light-hearted vote on whether to keep the redoubtable Ann Widdecombe in “Strictly Come Dancing” is not really the same as referendums about Britain’s future, which should be better thought out than seems to be the case in the Bill. Nor am I simply making a party-political point in opposing this part of the Bill. I spoke against the idea of the European referendum that my party had decided to hold on the so-called European constitution and I did not like the referendum in the 1970s, which essentially seemed to have been called to get my party off the political hook at the time.

The Government are proposing referendums not just in the Bill but also via their localism agenda and in many other ways. We need to confront a choice here in whether we want to be essentially a representative democracy or a plebiscitary democracy. I would much prefer that we did not treat this subject lightly but tried to establish some common and cross-party rules about when and where referendums are an appropriate part of our political system. It may be that there would be cross-party agreement that they should be used in cases of fundamental constitutional reform, although that is not always easy to define. It is unwise to jettison our precious representative democracy and move down the plebiscitary road. The Bill makes a great mistake in the way that it tackles that issue. I also very much agreed with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, when he decried the expression “referendum lock”. It is such a negative starting point for our relationship with the European Union and it seems to pander to the view that this is always a threat and never an opportunity, as I believe it can be.

My second objection to the Bill is on political grounds. It tries to pander to Euroscepticism, although, ironically, it does so significantly unsuccessfully, as we saw in the debates in the other place and, indeed, in the debate here today. Indeed, the Conservatives in particular have repeatedly made that mistake at European elections and by-elections, where they have not been the beneficiaries of pandering to Euroscepticism. That benefit has tended to go to UKIP and other political forces.

The Minister talked a lot about public opinion. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, was barracked in a lordly way when he referred to the media and the BBC. However, he was right; it is relevant to this debate. How the public get the message about Europe, if we are talking about reconnecting them to Europe, is an important aspect. The noble Lord was right to raise the issue, although I would raise it from a very different standpoint.

It is also very much the responsibility of Ministers to be positive about Europe. The noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, spoke about this when he said that very often Ministers after Council meetings declared that they had won famous battles—things were seen in terms of a battle rather than co-operation. When I was Europe Minister, I would often try to point out to people that in the three Councils that I attended—on home affairs, foreign and general affairs and agriculture—very often the meetings were harmonious. Decisions by voting were the exception rather than the rule and people worked very much towards a consensus. However, it was hard to get that positive message across in the media; a battle is much more newsworthy than good news about a harmonious European Council. While I accept to a certain extent that Ministers could have been more robust, it is difficult sometimes to get that positive message across, because of the old adage that the good news is not news, whereas bad news is intrinsically newsworthy.

I echo the point made by my noble friend Lord Anderson, who said that during his time as a constituency Member of Parliament he was struck by how little the issue of Europe was raised. That was certainly my experience, too, even when I was Europe Minister; indeed, as I had previously been an MEP, I had some profile among my constituents on European issues. Even now, knocking on the doors, as I and others in this Chamber do, I know that it is seldom raised as an issue in terms of the frantic Euroscepticism that seems to dominate so many parts of the media.

Slight reference was made to this earlier. While I have no objection to newspapers crusading if they want to on particular issues—although sometimes I wish that they would simply report the news rather than crusade about it—I must say that the screaming headline of the Daily Express on 11 February, “Britain in the EU: This must be the end”, had me completely mystified, particularly when I found out that it referred to prisoners’ votes and the European Court of Human Rights. The noble Lord, Lord Pearson, made an attempt at defending this by saying that in the recent treaty the EU as a whole had acceded to the European system of human rights, but we all know both that that system predates the EU and that the EU has absolutely no responsibility whatever for the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights. Presumably the Daily Express is knowledgeable enough to know that it does not have anything to do with the EU at all.

[Lord Dykes]

Further to that, does the noble Baroness acknowledge that, when an independent survey was commissioned for the last calendar year to check thoroughly and independently 125 banner headlines in the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express about wicked things happening in Europe, it was found that not a single one was correct?

[Baroness Quin]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for making that point so effectively.

This Bill ends up by pleasing no one. It does not please the Opposition, as was clear from the elegant speech of my noble friend Lady Symons; it does not please most Conservatives who have spoken in this debate, I am pleased to say, or most Liberal Democrats. I look forward with some incredulity to the closing speech by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, who was teased somewhat, but quite rightly, by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr. I have certainly heard those who are now Liberal Democrat Ministers in this House take a rather different view from that of their colleagues in the other place on the subject of referendums and be staunchly pro-European in a way that does not square with the contents of this Bill.

I hope that we manage some changes such as the sunset clause, which my noble friend mentioned, or some kind of limitations on the scope of using referendums. Fundamentally, however, I wish that we could go back to the drawing board to have a proper think about the role of referendums in our political system and a much more informed debate across the country about our European future.