House of Commons: Ministers

Lord Elton Excerpts

Monday 30th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bridges of Headley]

It is always good to see the noble Lord on such fighting form. I did read that—I always read the newspapers on a Sunday morning, obviously. It is always interesting to read about what might or might not happen in the weeks ahead. I shall save what might happen for the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde.

[Lord Elton (Con)]

My Lords, Parliament was invented to control government. No Minister was allowed into either Chamber until the reign of George I; then they came in by invitation or permission. Since then, they have multiplied, and the body that was invented to control them is now populated by large numbers of them. If we are going back to basic constitutional principles, surely we should increase the weight of parliamentarians and reduce that of the Government.

[Lord Bridges of Headley]

I am sure that noble Lords and Members in the other place will wish to return to this matter as the boundary review continues its work. Let me remind noble Lords that, if the number of MPs were reduced to 600 but the percentage of Ministers in the other place were to remain the same, the number of Ministers would need to fall by about seven, in my calculation, from 92 to 85. However, as the noble Lord points out, over the years there has been a considerable rise in the number of Ministers. In researching for this Question, I came to the understanding that there were about 60 Ministers when we had an empire. In the intervening period, while we may have lost an empire, Ministers have certainly found a role.

Soft Power and Conflict Prevention

Lord Elton Excerpts

Friday 5th December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Elton (Con)]

If your Lordships will spare me a moment, I would like to add a footnote to the debate which I think has not been mentioned before, certainly not in the 20 speeches that I have listened to.

It is based entirely on a subjective, personal observation but one in which I have considerable confidence. It is that wherever there is a conflict resolution effort going on in the world there seems to be a Norwegian, and very often they have started it. At this point, I declare a shadow of an interest: my mother was Norwegian. I saw the Norwegians at work when I was part of the successful international effort to secure a treaty banning cluster munitions. I am raising this point because I discovered that the Norwegians have conflict resolution as an academic subject both in their schools and in their universities, so they have a fund of people qualified to do the work that we have been talking about. I wonder whether the most reverend Primate or the Minister on the Front Bench would give thought to our doing the same in this country.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Lord Elton Excerpts

Thursday 24th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Elton (Con)]

My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Morrow, I would like much more time, but would have liked it to prepare what I have to say. I do not think I have ever embarked on a debate and learnt so much about what is going on in the world that I did not know. I knew the generality, but we now have the particularity, which is very stark. It is interesting that we make this assault on this difficult problem seven days after what was probably the best and longest debate this House has held, on the Assisted Dying Bill, where we looked at death on the individual scale. It seems that we are now turning the microscope round and using it as a telescope to look at death on the ethnic and global scale. The two chime together. It is a grim thought that this current of dark, heartless evil runs through the whole human race and through every faith at some stage in its development.

I approach this with perhaps an unusual level of humility as I listen to the expertise and the visible bravery and courage of others in the debate. First, I would like to leave in your Lordships’ minds—this may puzzle your Lordships until I get to the end—the thought that, when the Syrian disaster first began to grab our attention, it was clear, although not apparently recognised in the echelons of power, that all the minorities who were threatened actually trusted Assad and, rightly, feared the rebels.

We have had a number of approaches this morning and this afternoon. My noble friend Lord Anderson, who is not in his place at the moment, started by saying that peace depends on building bridges between faiths. He was echoed by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Coventry, who pointed out that it would be extremely helpful if, at the local and particularly the national level, all sorts of faiths represented in a troubled area could get together to show what was happening and to condemn it. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, pointed to where this is happening at the bottom of the pile, although involving people at the top. It is being done by the astonishing—and in future, I hope, saintly—Canon Andrew White, who is living out a very frail life, in extreme danger, bringing polar opposites in Iraq together. That is one element that we need to pursue.

Next, I echo my noble friend Lady Berridge, who pointed out the importance of religious education. It may amuse her to know that in the flotsam and jetsam that will eventually wash up on some distant Whitehall desk is a tiny paragraph or two of mine from the Queen’s Speech debate—not yet answered—on the similar point that religious education is needed to underpin the civics and the civil behaviour of our population. The noble Lord, Lord Parekh, was looking for some means of controlling micro-oppression, as I might call it. What does that is understanding, and education is where you begin to build it.

As has been described by many noble Lords, we are watching a forest fire. My noble friend Lord Patten said it was spreading to Indonesia, but we need to look the other way, too, as it is spreading here. Fires burn in different ways: a heath fire can burn underground for weeks and burst out long after the fire brigade has gone home and gone on holiday. It can also burn fiercely, brightly and scorchingly. That is what is happening.

The noble Lord, Lord Desai, used an interesting phrase. He said that Article 18 cannot be enforced and that, if we are honest, we need arms, I think he said. However, we cannot go down that road for reasons that the noble Lord, Lord Singh, pointed out and which our Lord pointed out to Peter somewhere near Caesarea Philippi, because, in the end, it brings evil in its train. However, we can at least deny to the forces of evil some of their materiel, or the weapons of war, which are now reaching a serious scale, for instance in Nigeria.

My noble friend Lady Cox pointed the finger at, among others, Saudi Arabia. That happens in other areas, too. Saudi Arabia was among the first to support the rebels in Syria. Has the time come not only for me to sit down—as my noble friend is pointing out—but for my noble friend and his colleagues to look carefully at whether the whole arrangement of our alliances in the Middle East and north Africa should be considered and, probably, drastically revised?

Electoral Registration: National Voter Registration Day

Lord Elton Excerpts

Tuesday 4th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the noble Lord will be aware that Bite the Ballot has developed a schools programme, Rock Enrol!, which is now also on the gov.uk website. We are encouraging schools to play that with 16 and 17 year-olds. We are also encouraging schools to continue the citizenship education programme; there will be a new element of that for the national curriculum this September. We are all conscious that PSHE has never been quite as good as we all wanted it to be. However, it is there and we very much hope that schools will be taking this further.

[Lord Elton (Con)]

My Lords, the Minister has just announced that there will be a substantial grant for this purpose through the Government of Scotland. How will he ensure that it is expended in a politically neutral way?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, once you support other bodies you can never be entirely sure that they will do exactly what it was that you wanted. There are five organisations for which the Government have today announced funding. In addition to those two which I have mentioned the Hansard Society, in partnership with Homeless Link, Gingerbread, which works with young people, single parents and social housing tenants, and Mencap, which works with people with learning disabilities, have also received grants.

The Future of the Civil Service

Lord Elton Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I would prefer to write to the noble Lord on that extremely sensitive issue. I think he will understand why. Such matters under the Civil Service Code are for the Scottish Government in the first instance and will be dealt with by the relevant Permanent Secretary. But I will go back and write to him. I know where he is coming from and the point he is trying to make.

We have had a worthwhile debate. It is very good to have a range of different contributions from people who have seen the evolution of British government—

[Lord Elton (Con)]

My Lords, I am sorry to interrupt, but will the noble Lord add the usual assurance that he will provide a copy of that letter to the Library?

Church of England: Holistic Missions

Lord Elton Excerpts

Thursday 21st November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Elton (Con)]

My Lords, it is my pleasant duty to start by congratulating the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Carlisle on speaking to us from the depths of history as well as the depths of theology to prove that the Anglican Church is well founded and likely to survive many storms, as it has survived many before.

I also warmly welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Lawrence, and congratulate her on a most moving speech, which revealed the new and valuable dimension that she brings to our collective knowledge. I welcome her commitment to sharing that experience with us whenever it is appropriate. If anything is valuable in a democratic Chamber, it is direct experience of the realities of life, however harsh, in which Parliament can take a hand. She is very welcome here.

This debate is principally about the welfare state, which is not what it was. I have two personal memories about what it was, or that are relevant to it. The first was at the age of 12, sitting with some 300 other of my schoolfellows in the school assembly hall listening to a very enthusiastic young man with horn-rimmed glasses and wild hair talking to us about something called the Beveridge report. I recall him telling us that, when it was implemented, the world, and particularly this country, would be a better place, that a new era would dawn and that everything would be lovely. There was no examination on the subject, so I apologise to your Lordships for not recollecting more of the talk than that.

Some six years after that, I was walking with my father one evening in the fields near our house and he said to me, “I joined the Labour Party in order to achieve various things. With the passage on to the statute book of the National Health Act and the National Insurance Act, all those objectives have been achieved”. I see the contented smiles on the Front Bench opposite, so I regret to say that he then said, “That being so, I see no purpose whatever in remaining in any political party and I’m going to sit on the Cross Benches”. Those are my two memories; they are the sort of marker buoys for the start of a sailing race which brings us to where we are, and it is somewhere very different indeed.

I find it very difficult to unthread the tangled collection of ideas raised during this short debate and in the report. The report I welcome warmly, because it has triggered this very badly needed discussion. It has some shortcomings. If I can be really petulant and elderly, I would say that the principal ones are the very small type, the use of white print on blue and the use of semi-colons instead of full stops practically throughout, which means that you never have a capital letter to go back to when you are sitting in an ill-lit passenger seat in a car trying to read the thing going up the M4. On a purely practical point, I ask ResPublica to revise its publishing criteria.

However, its research criteria are excellent. The research base for the report is pretty narrow. Nineteen parishes out of 43 dioceses do not amount to a great deal. It is not enough to come to conclusions on, but it is plenty to start the discussion. I think that we can all endorse, and everybody has endorsed, the extraordinary variety of the existing interventions of the Anglican community into social efforts to improve the life of all.

The noble Lord, Lord Roberts of Burry Port, hit the nail on its head when he pointed out that, actually, the Church of England is not the only church. That chimes in with one paragraph on page 8 of the report, on the social and spiritual mission of the church, where it was thought necessary to start with a little apologia about the necessity of the church taking social action at all. That rather took my breath away, because surely the duty of the church is not to run churches like a chain of theatres around the country trying to fill the house with suitable programmes; it is to be the body of Christ in the community. You cannot be the whole body of Christ if you are only one church when there are many churches. We must have a broad co-operation in this.

What puts the Church of England at centre field in this country is the existence of its organisation and its resources in the form of buildings. The report refers to the church in many communities being the only landmark at the moment. It seems to say that there were other landmarks—there were pubs and schools, which were of course the social landmarks. More and more villages and towns have lost most of their pubs and schools, and some have lost all of them. The church is the last visible central link; its spire puts it ahead of the chapel, which does not make it any better than the chapel, just more visible. It is also apt to be bigger and can house more people. However, the church is ultimately conservative with a small c, which means that it is full of pews. If churches are to diversify their activities, they need to make a clean sweep. I think I see agonised expressions on the faces of the right reverend Prelates to my left because if there is anything more divisive and difficult to do to a medieval church than remove the pews, I do not know what it is. But the fact is that it is done very successfully. The church ought to publish a brochure showing that, extolling the fact that the atmosphere of the place can still be spiritual, and explaining that far more members of the community can make use of the church. Incidentally, members of the existing congregation, which may possibly grow, will also find that they are able to do new and inventive things. That is another spin-off of the report.

Like my noble friend Lady Berridge, who made a very good speech, I attended a meeting recently in the Jerusalem Chamber, where the final version of the authorised version of the Bible was agreed, to hear Professor Linda Woodhead of Lancaster University give a PowerPoint presentation. She gave a most illuminating account of the position, outlook and membership of the Church of England. I strongly recommend that account to my episcopal friends and ask them to distribute it as it was a suitable forerunner to the great declamation by the noble and right Revd Lord, Lord Carey, in Shropshire, which nobody has yet had the bad manners to mention, which warned of the end of the church unless something changed. We now have to look at whether what is being proposed is the right change. A good deal of reservation has been expressed about that, not merely because it puts everything in the hands of one church but because of its rather obscurely articulated union with government. The union of government and church is a very dangerous institution, indeed. If the church is seen to co-operate with the Government, de facto it is not co-operating with the Opposition and it is likely to get all the flak that the Government get for things that go wrong which are not the fault of either of them.

I turn to the practical difficulties of what is proposed. The subject of how the two organisations can co-operate and make use of their respective resources is a very fruitful one, and the Cabinet Office is possibly the right body to engage in it. However, what really matters is what happens at the bottom end in the parish. Parishes vary very much, as do churches. I lead a fragmented life which means that I worship in three churches regularly and in a fourth from time to time. One of the churches, in which I was for some years a licensed lay minister, and in which I now have the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford’s permission to serve, is a tiny chamber about four times the size of the Bishops’ Bar. It has a thriving life but no room to expand. Apart from arousing great hostility, taking the pews out would not increase the congregation. I also worship fairly regularly in a church in south London, which I suppose is rather bigger than the Peers’ Guest Room. I fear that this speech is going to read very badly in Hansard. That church’s congregation is rather more black and ethnic minority in origin than it is white. It is a very harmonious congregation. Then we go to a very big church in west London, which is humming with activity and full of people, and which has a completely different ability to help. We do not want to think that one size fits all but we want to realise that it is not only the Anglican parishes that are there when there are all the denominations which your Lordships have just heard recapitulated. I will not run through them.

So what is it that the Church of England has to offer? Because it is becoming increasingly ecumenically minded, it has the ability to focus the activities and interests of all the Christian family—the Kingdom of God on earth, as it strives to be—and to arrange the interlocution between the churches and the Government, not to be the only voice but to orchestrate it. I am warming to my theme and have just thought of all the clear principles that I should adduce, but the time stands at 12 minutes and I am grateful to your Lordships for your indulgence.

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port]

Perhaps I might suggest, as the Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, that the Lord Roberts of Burry Port is a hybrid creature who is not yet a Member of your Lordships’ House.

European Commission: Staffing

Lord Elton Excerpts

Monday 4th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the Prime Minister made it clear in his speech in January that it is in Britain’s long-term interest to stay within the European Union. The Deputy Prime Minister made an extremely strong speech about the position that we will be taking on future membership. I look forward to a speech from the leader of the Labour Party—I think that Europe was not mentioned once in this year’s Labour Party conference—which will ensure that all three parties hold a similar position.

[Lord Elton (Con)]

My Lords, after reminding the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, that he does not represent anybody any more than the rest of us do—we represent ourselves—could my noble friend tell us what steps Her Majesty’s Government are taking to ensure that the, we hope, increasing number of representatives of this country on the staff of the European Commission are aware of the detail of what the national interest actually is, and that they are kept aware also of the effects of European legislation and regulation on the economy, the community and the functioning of the law of this country?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, many of these things are very informal. When I go to Brussels I talk to British officials, as do many of my colleagues. There is a British-Brussels network. The last time I was in Brussels I addressed the alumni of an Oxford college that I used to teach in. There are informal contacts and they keep in touch. However, one does not wish to instruct officials of the Commission, who are there to do a good job and to network between the national and the European.

Syria and the Use of Chemical Weapons

Lord Elton Excerpts

Thursday 29th August 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Elton]

My Lords, it is not often that so much has been said, and so quickly, at the beginning of a debate. The danger of repetition is very great, and it also makes it possible to be briefer than one might otherwise be. I suppose it is true, as the noble Lord just said, that our reaction to any prospect of war is conditioned by our previous experience, and my previous experience about the decision to go to war is not a happy one. It is impossible to escape the first question on this, which is certainty as to what has happened to which we are reacting. I read through the JIC report on chemical weapons use by Syria with increasing confidence that we knew what had happened, particularly when I got to the sentence which said:

“The JIC has therefore concluded that there are no plausible alternative scenarios to regime responsibility”.

I then turned the page and found that the next paragraph stated:

“Against that background, the JIC concluded that it is highly likely that the regime was responsible for the CW attacks on 21 August”.

That struck all the chords present in the literature that we received on the eve of the advance into Iraq.

The function of this House is to scrutinise ruthlessly what is proposed by Governments when it could cause great risk to this country. Therefore, one has to be sceptical in the extreme before one is happy to agree with a proposed military intervention. We are told that there would be no intervention in the civil war. But any military response would be directed at Assad, must be to the advantage of the rebels and will be seen as an intervention on their behalf. Nobody has considered who they actually are. The Minister will tell me when he replies, but am I not right in saying that large elements of the rebel forces are in fact jihadist terrorists, whose aims are the overthrow of democracy and the rule of law such as we have in this country? Those would be the people whose chances would be enhanced by a successful invention against Assad or the regime. That is a national interest on which we need to keep a close eye.

One really cannot get it all in in five minutes but everybody agrees in theory that we have to be clear about what we want to achieve by doing this. We call it an objective. If it is a military objective, it has to be pretty precise. The noble Baroness, Lady Farrington of Ribbleton, tried to get in on the end of—I do not know why I have forgotten his name but I know it very well.

[Noble Lords]

Ashdown.

[Lord Elton]

Yes, right. Past form tells me that I shall forget it again next time. She tried to get in on the end of his time to point out that nobody has said what the intervention is actually going to be but apparently it is going to be either cruise missiles or aircraft-delivered explosives. Well, if you drop bombs on dumps of chemical weapons, you are then the aggressor because you spread them around the country. On the other hand, if you decide to attack those people who are thought to be in control, you release them from control. I cannot see what an effective military intervention would be. Until we know what it is going to be and how it is supposed to succeed, we cannot give even a tentative green light.

As to a purely humanitarian intervention in the way of aid, this is a battlefield; it will not be possible to deliver it without armed support. If you have armed support, then you are invading. It is not at all clear what is being proposed when we are asked to support in principle an armed intervention. The bottom line is: will it do more harm than good in the long run? Will our humanitarian intervention actually be inhumane? Until we know the answer to those questions, we must proceed with the greatest caution. I, for one, do not see the way in which we can.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

So far as we know, the weapons are still well controlled by the regime, and one of our expectations is that if there are indications that the regime is losing control of them, the Russians as well as others will be very concerned about that loss of control.

A number of noble Lords have talked about punishment. I regret that one or two of our American allies have used the word “punishment”. The intention is deterrence, not punishment. The intention is a limited and proportionate response that will deter the regime from thinking that it can use chemical weapons again. The risk of inaction, about which my noble friend Lord Ashdown and the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, have also spoken is that if we do nothing the regime is likely to assume that it can use chemical weapons again, and in larger quantities if it wishes. The argument, therefore, for a limited, carefully calibrated and proportionate response is to say, “Thus far and no further”.

[Lord Elton]

My Lords, can the noble Lord help us? It would be very helpful if he said what sort of form this limited and proportionate intervention might take.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

For very obvious reasons, I am not able to say that. I am privy only to some of the discussions that have taken place on this, but I can assure him that the intervention would not be aimed at command structures. Someone suggested that we want to take out the President himself or, indeed, that it would be aimed at chemical weapons stocks. For very obvious reasons—

EU: Subsidiarity Scrutiny

Lord Elton Excerpts

Tuesday 5th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, in the nature of events, red cards are to be used in an emergency situation, not as part of the normal procedure. Perhaps it would help the House if I point out that last year, the Swedish Parliament issued 20 reasoned opinions; the Luxembourg Chamber of Deputies issued seven in 2011 and a larger number in 2012; the French Senate issued seven last year; and the House of Lords issued five. It is not the case that we are the only Parliament to be active in this regard.

[Lord Elton]

My Lords, under what circumstances would my noble friend consider that Her Majesty's Government should exercise themselves through the diplomatic network to engage the interest of other Parliaments in matters that concern us and appear not to have reached their attention?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, Her Majesty's Government do operate a diplomatic network in precisely that area. I hope that scrutiny committees through COSAC—the Conference of Parliamentary Committees for Union Affairs of Parliaments of the European Union—also now operate actively in this regard. I am told that it has become a much more effective body since I used to attend COSAC meetings many years ago when I was the chairman of a sub-committee. There is now a set of offices in Brussels of national Parliaments which provides a network where national scrutiny committees can get together. I hope that the Lisbon treaty arrangements will allow that network to become more and more active.

Ministerial Code

Lord Elton Excerpts

Tuesday 5th February 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, at that point we begin to get into fundamental constitutional issues about the relationship between the Executive and Parliament. While preparing for a Question on collective responsibility that will come up next week, it occurred to me that this was something over which we fought a civil war in the 17th century and then had a further revolution in 1689. However, we never quite resolved the question of how far it is the Executive who have independent authority or how far Parliament is able to assert its sovereignty over the Executive.

[Lord Elton]

Is the Minister aware that Parliament was invented to control government and not to serve it, and therefore that it is perfectly proper for Parliament to have a view on these issues and to try to change them?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

It is perfectly possible for Parliament to have a view. Having read several recent reports by the Public Administration Committee and the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons, I can say that Parliament makes its views felt extremely actively and frequently.