BBC: EU Coverage
Lord Giddens Excerpts(10 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Giddens (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, on initiating the debate, which in my assessment is important if only to signal the necessity for having a much longer, fuller discussion on this issue in your Lordships’ House at a later date.
It is very possible that there will be an “in or out” referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU over the next few years. An incoming Conservative Government are committed to hold such a referendum before the end of 2017. Labour has said that, if elected, its Administration will hold a referendum if there is treaty change in the European Union. In my assessment, at some point over the next few years there will have to be treaty change in the EU to consolidate the structural reform of the Union following the euro crisis.
A decision to leave the EU would be massively consequential for the country. I am at the opposite pole from the noble Lord, Lord Pearson—in other words, I am a passionate and committed pro-European. However, I hope that the noble Lord will agree with me that a referendum must be preceded by a fully open and informed public debate over an extended period. That is crucial if a referendum takes place. As by far and away the most respected and trusted national broadcaster committed to impartiality, the BBC should and must play a central role in such a public debate. I hope that the corporation will start to think about, and prepare for, the eventuality of a referendum now rather than wait until such a decision actually approaches. The past history of the BBC’s reporting on the EU shows how problematic and difficult its role will be.
The 2005 Wilson report was important and hard-hitting, as has been said. Eurosceptics have concentrated on the now famous liberal “institutional mindset” that the report diagnosed at the BBC. Just as important in my view was the documenting of uninformed reporting and the pronounced tendency to see the EU through what was called the “domestic or Westminster prism”. The BBC took the report seriously, as has been said, and made a large number of notable changes, including the appointment of a full-time Europe editor. Since then, a whole string of further reports have appeared, including the BBC Trust review of impartiality which came out in July 2013. However, I am a social scientist and I like hard data. More important in my view is the content analysis of the BBC news reporting carried out at Cardiff University from 2007 to 2012. That research emphatically refutes the view that conservative and Eurosceptic voices do not get a hearing. They in fact feature almost twice as frequently as opposing views: the supposed “liberal bias” has more than been corrected.
However, perhaps more importantly the research shows that the EU is presented largely in terms of infighting between domestic political parties rather than the issues at stake. Political figures also dominate. These findings run completely counter to what audiences covered in the research actually say they want—that is, for the ideological opinions of politicians, activists and special interest groups to be minimised in favour of factual commentary and impersonal assessment. As I have stressed, this is an absolutely core requirement, with crucial relevance if and when there is a referendum. It would be good to hear the Minister’s views on how such an outcome could be achieved, and on the proper role of the BBC in securing it.
Lord Dykes (LD)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, in this debate and to deliberately embarrass him by praising his recent book on Europe—Turbulent and Mighty Continent—which I read with great pleasure, but also with apprehension that things might not be so easy in the future. It is a book, however, that underlines his traditional support for Europe, which I share as well. It was more impressive than the book I wrote two years ago called On the Edge: Britain and Europe, about the danger of Britain coming out of Europe almost by accident and carelessness, rather than any—
Lord Dykes
I assure the assemblage here that that was not a pre-arranged conversation: it was entirely spontaneous. As usual, the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, was exaggerating in his latest remarks. Be that as it may, it is very sad once again to see that old apprehension and fear of the European Union coming out in the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, although we expect that kind of thing from him because he is against what he calls “the project”. Of course, however, most other people in most of the other member states—virtually all of them, without exception—are in favour of the project, and so am I. It will develop according to the wishes of the sovereign member Governments in that Union as they decide to work together through the integrated collective institutions. The European Parliament now has a 50:50 role, which I believe is a very good thing. I commend the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, as a previous Member of that Parliament, who was probably one of the pioneers of that eventual plan. We will now see much better legislation coming out of those institutions as a result of the EP’s greater involvement.
I do not agree at all that the BBC is biased far too much in favour of Europe: far from it. Its coverage has improved as a result of the recent suggestions referred to in this debate today and I commend it as a high-quality public broadcaster based on a financing system that has the confidence of the public. It is coming up for review again in due course. Once again, the dark gothic forces on the right wing of the Conservative Party will be agitating for the abolition of the licence fee, as they do every seven-and-a-half years on a regular basis, led previously by the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit. That will always persist, and I disagree strongly. I go to the United States a lot, and anybody who is not in favour of something like the BBC should have the misfortune of being forced to watch Fox TV, for example, or listen to Fox radio, which is even worse. The BBC has therefore led high standards of broadcasting, impartiality and objectivity on a massive scale in respect of most issues.
Of course, there has been a dumbing down from the competition—based on the television equivalent of the tabloids and comics that masquerade as newspapers in this country—and therefore the BBC itself had to do some dumbing down as well. That would include dramatising stories on Europe. I thank my noble friend and colleague, Lord Teverson, for the absolutely prime example of the euro and the way in which the BBC behaved. It startled many of its adherents and supporters in the way it presented the “fate of the euro”—so-called—as a result of the international banking, financial institutions and hedge fund crisis. It was not caused by anybody in Europe or in Britain, but mostly by people in the United States. I refer to the way in which the BBC said that the euro was on the verge of extinction: Jeremy Paxman used the word “meltdown”, implying that the euro was going to finish in a few weeks’ time. Paul Mason, one of their more polychromatic and overexaggerated correspondents—he now has a different portfolio—dealt with those matters as well, and he said that the euro probably had just a few days to live before it ended. That is a total travesty of the truth on any objective measurement, as my noble friend indicated in his remarks.
Take the euro as an example. It is essential to reflect on its reality as an international currency. It has three or four weak member-adherent countries of course, but look at what is happening now. People who were writing off Greece said that Greece in a few weeks’ time would have to leave the euro and have a new drachma, heavily devalued and so on, and it would not be able to manage. Portugal, just recently doing its first bond issue, is no longer asking for international assistance after three years. Greece is coming out of these tremendous travails. All of them voted solidly—the Greek Parliament, too, with big majorities; there was total public support from all the political parties, apart from the right-wing neo-fascist party—for the reality of supporting the euro as the greatest unifier of the developing economy of the European Union. It has been a massive success. Let us look at the most recent payments figures for the world. The euro is now an international reserve currency of immense dimensions. I should mention here that the United States is a much more heavily indebted country than any in Europe: the federal debt alone is $17 trillion. Fifty American cities are bankrupt and at least 50 states are on the verge of bankruptcy or, like California, they are already bankrupt, yet there are no complaints about the United States because it is the leader of the western world and it can do that: send the dollar out and the more people who buy it, the better. Will it go on forever? I doubt it.
The figure for the US reserve currency is now 39.5% for total payments transactions across the world, but the euro percentage is now 32.5%. It is getting closer and closer. Confidence in the euro—led by Germany as the strongest economy but also by France, which is bravely supporting the strong currency system—is high. Britain is afraid to do so after we were driven out of the exchange rate mechanism, and we have been afraid of the euro ever since. Devaluing is an easier option here, and that is what we do. We have devalued seven times since the war, three times by government action and four times in the marketplace. The pound is now not a very strong currency, as my noble friend Lord Teverson indicated. That will persist as the way out because it is the easy way out. The Italians did that but then they changed their minds and joined the euro, which is now benefiting Italy. That is a classic example of where the BBC went over the top because of the pressures in this country as a result of the atmosphere created by the Europe haters developing their political activities and political parties like UKIP, which will not last forever and I am sure is just a temporary phenomenon. Britain must regain its self-confidence as a proud international member of this community, as we are of NATO, the UN and other institutions. We must be an active participant in the European Union because if we are not, we will go down the path of loneliness, desolation and isolation.
Employment
Lord Giddens Excerpts(10 years, 8 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Freud) (Con)
My Lords, it is appropriate that we should be debating the labour market today after yesterday’s figures showing record numbers of people in work and unemployment down again.
I believe that we will benefit from having a frank and open discussion. We have seen exceptional progress in recent months, but we know there is more to do and we must not be complacent. Indeed, the performance of the labour market in the recent recession can be seen as something of a puzzle. Previous recessions saw dramatic falls in employment. Yet despite this being, on some estimates, a deeper recession than in the 1930s, we did not see the number of people in work fall anything like as much as the experts predicted. GDP fell by more than 7% but the number of people in work fell by only one-third of that. I have yet to see a full and convincing explanation for why employment did not see the fall expected. There probably is no single reason. Active labour market policies and the flexibility of our modern labour market, as well as the bitter experience of those who went through past recessions, may all have played a part.
The resilience of the labour market in the recession has been matched by robust improvement now that we are getting the economy back on track. There are 1.3 million more people in work since the election, and more than 30 million people are working—more than ever before. In fact, if you exclude full-time students, the employment rate is now back to the peak that we saw before the last recession, and we have had further good news, with the female employment rate now at an all-time high.
I am often struck by what appears to be a widening gap between the impression that people have about the labour market and the reality of these figures. Many predicted that the fall in public sector jobs would not be matched by an increase in the private sector. They were right, but not in the way they expected. The rise in private sector jobs has not just matched the fall in the public sector but has far exceeded it—up nearly 1.7 million, with total employment up by 1.3 million as a result. Recently, there were reports that most of the growth in private sector jobs since 2010 has been in London. When I asked my officials whether that was true, I received a surprising response. Using already published and easily accessible data from the Office for National Statistics, the true position is almost the complete opposite. Nearly 80% of the rise in private sector employment has been outside London.
We are regularly challenged on the rise in long-term unemployment, particularly among young people. Long-term unemployment is a scourge, and through the Work Programme and the Youth Contract we have put in place just about the most comprehensive response that has ever been seen. Yet what those who criticise our record fail to mention is that the previous Government hid long-term unemployment by artificially removing people from the claimant count. They shifted people about to become long-term unemployed on to training allowances or into short-term job schemes, taking them off benefit in the process. We have put a stop to those methods, so now the figures are a true count of the number of long-term claimants. What really worries me is that the Opposition’s proposed jobs guarantee would result in the exact same problem, with long-term unemployment misrepresented as people are shifted off the claimant count.
People are rightly concerned about the effect the recession has had on young people. However, if we are to tackle youth unemployment, we need to have an understanding of where the real problem lies. When people talk about a “lost generation” of 1 million young unemployed, they are including those in full-time education, who make up nearly a third of the total. In fact, one young person in every 10 has left full-time education and is unemployed, and this proportion is the same for all under-25s and for those from an ethnic minority. This means that youth unemployment remains significantly lower than after past recessions: 9% of young people have left full-time study and are looking for work compared with 12% in 1993 and 14% in 1984. When it comes to NEETs—young people not in any form of education or work—we are not where we want to be, with a higher NEET rate than in many other EU countries. This is mostly due to lower participation in education in the UK. Although the NEET figures are now improving, this is something that the Government will continue to address. The other side of the picture shows that, among 20 to 24 year-olds who have left education, our employment rate outperforms the US and the EU average, and that, of the large EU economies, we are second only to Germany.
I should like to move on to some of policy responses we are making to the main labour market challenges that this country has been facing. It is unheard of for inactivity to fall in a recession, yet that is what has happened. Excluding students, inactivity is currently the lowest on record. The number of people claiming inactivity benefits has fallen by nearly 350,000 since 2010. People are better off in work and we did not want to repeat past mistakes by allowing people to drift into inactivity. Maintaining an active labour market policy ensures that people do not become detached from the world of work and are well placed to benefit as the economy picks up. We are changing the culture. People who can work are expected to work and, with our support, employment is rising. But challenges remain. Although falling, there is still a working age inactivity rate of more than 22%.
We have been successful in getting lone parents into work and have a record lone-parent employment rate. Before November 2008, lone parents could claim income support until their youngest child reached 16 years of age. This child age threshold has been progressively reduced and now stands at age five, and we are introducing additional measures best to support parents to prepare for work when their child is old enough. As noble Lords will be aware, the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister announced further measures to help hard-working families. These included bringing forward a childcare package that will provide tax-free childcare for almost 2 million families. This will help parents go out to work and provide more security for their families.
Our reforms to the benefit system are a key part of the Government’s long-term economic plan to build a stronger economy and secure a better future. Much of our effort has been focused on improving the support available for people who are on sickness benefit but able to work to enter or rejoin the labour market. We are not just writing off people on long-term sickness benefits, as happened in the past. We believe it is only fair that we look at whether people can do some kind of work with the right support—support offered by Jobcentre Plus, specialist provision or through the Work Programme. We need to ensure that the longer-term unemployed do not drift away from the labour market. That is what happened in past recessions, with worrying consequences. It is because we are not going to allow that to happen again that we are investing in the Work Programme. That is expected to provide personalised support to more than 2 million claimants over the life of the contract.
The Work Programme is the largest employment support programme that Britain has ever seen, with far more financial risks sitting with the provider. Payment is by results, with higher payments for getting those with the biggest barriers to employment into sustained work. The Work Programme is better designed than previous employment programmes and is supporting more people into sustained work. Industry figures show that the Work Programme has already helped nearly 500,000 people into work and, of these, more than 250,000 have escaped long-term unemployment and got into lasting jobs. While all contracts are on track to hit their contractual JSA targets, there is significant variation in performance. The worst performing providers are being tightly managed to ensure that they up their game. One contract has been terminated. For the first time, a government employment programme is harnessing the disciplines of the marketplace so that only those providers who succeed are retained to help claimants into work.
Of course, young people still face many challenges, particularly in making that important transition from school to work. Youth unemployment is falling but we need to continue working to bring it down in the aftermath of the recession. We need to ensure that young people have the experience and skills that they need to succeed in the labour market. The Government are raising the participation age so that all young people are now required to continue in education and training beyond the age of 16. We are also implementing wide-ranging policies to improve standards in schools, reform post-16 academic and vocational education and ensure that apprenticeships continue to meet the needs of a modern labour market. We have a wide range of programmes, including those funded by the European Social Fund, and the Youth Contract, to support young people who are NEET to return to full-time education, training or employment.
In a recent report commissioned by Tesco, 60% to 70% of young people said that they had concerns about lack of experience. Many said that they wanted more help from business and struggled with CV writing. That is why it is so important that, through Jobcentre Plus, young unemployed people are given the opportunity to be referred to a careers interview with the National Careers Service. They can also work with local employers who offer work experience and pre-employment training to give them the chance to build up their CVs and job skills.
Apprenticeships play a vital role for many young people, helping them at the outset of their working lives to progress their careers, and the Government offer a £1,500 grant to smaller businesses to take on their first apprentices. Yesterday, the Chancellor announced an extension of this scheme. The Government will now be making more than 100,000 additional incentive payments for employers to take on young apprentices aged 16 to 24, providing a major boost to their job prospects. Traineeships are a new programme to help young people aged 16 to 23 to develop the skills and vital experience that they need to secure apprenticeships and other sustainable jobs.
This Government continue to support economic growth across the regions and help to create the conditions for businesses to feel more confident in hiring more people. Private sector employment has been rising across the UK, and we need to ensure that this continues. To satisfy the recruitment needs of employers, Jobcentre Plus and Work Programme providers use their local labour market knowledge and expertise to improve claimants’ skills and readiness for work. Local enterprise partnerships, in England, provide the vision, knowledge and strategic leadership needed to drive private sector growth and job creation in their areas. Through our strong local offer, Jobcentre Plus district managers work with local enterprise partnerships to ensure that their strategic economic plans make the important link between growth, unemployment and social exclusion. In Humber, Jobcentre Plus and the local enterprise partnership have mapped local and national employment support services and identified where they need locally to plug the gaps.
Developing City Deals has provided a blueprint for working together and co-designing local initiatives. Cities are being given greater freedom to invest in growth and enterprise and being given greater powers, including the power to boost skills and jobs. In Leeds, DWP supports the city region to achieve its aim of being a NEET-free city. Its plan is to enable small businesses to provide apprenticeships when they would not normally have the capacity to do so. The aim is to deliver 680 apprenticeships over three years.
My 2007 independent report on the future of welfare, Reducing Dependency, Increasing Opportunity: Options for the Future of Welfare to Work, came on the back of a long-term aspiration to secure an employment rate of 80%. On the basis that the ONS now defines it—looking at those aged between 16 and 64 rather than between 16 and 59 for women—today this would be equivalent to an employment rate of around 78%. Clearly, a lot has happened since then, not least the deepest recession in nearly a century. Our first aim must be to regain the ground lost in the recession, which would mean a rate of 73% against the current level of 72.3%. It is interesting to speculate that, because most students are outside the labour market, rising participation in education makes it harder to achieve higher levels of employment. But, of course, it is no bad thing to see more young people in education. So, adjusted for that higher participation in education, that 80% employment rate probably translates today into a level some three percentage points higher than the 72.3% that we are currently looking at.
Lord Bates (Con)
My Lords, I understand that, by convention, the mover of the Motion is given the opportunity to be uninterrupted and then can respond to questions in the wind-up.
Lord Giddens
My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Freud, on having initiated this debate, and I congratulate him in a non-partisan way on his work on welfare and on other areas, such as mesothelioma, which has touched me and my family personally. I greatly appreciate his efforts in that discussion. He will be pleased to know that I do not propose to emulate my noble friend in trying to rubbish him, but I want to develop an analysis which is quite different from that which has been offered by noble Lords so far.
I shall argue that when considering the level of employment in the UK it would be a great mistake to concentrate only on the incipient economic recovery and the return of demand. As the Minister said, net new jobs are being created, and there is certainly a debate to be had, as my noble friend said, about what kind of jobs they will be, who will hold them, how many are part-time and so forth. However, I shall concentrate on much deeper structural trends which provide a much more sober picture than some of the portrayals being offered so far because some of these trends are utterly dramatic. They are absolutely profound in their medium-term implications. Even in the short term, recovery in the job market could be completely subverted by them, and these changes are accelerating in the here and now.
The changes I have in mind are driven by two convergent sources of technological transformation: computer technology and robotics. It has aptly been said that we are entering a second machine age, one that it is totally different from anything we have seen before. One of the most important features of this technological innovation is that in some areas these innovations—and it is amazing when you look at the details—are exponential, not linear, and they are resonant with implications for the future.
The two fields—computer technology and robotics—are tied together by digitalisation. As digital areas, they are truly global, not national in any sense. Only some 15 years ago, it was confidently said by experts in the field that there was a range of tasks that computers could never do, essentially because computers cannot be creative. These tasks included driving a car and translating a natural language. With the advent of supercomputers, all this has changed. Most noble Lords will know that the Google driverless car has gone for something like 400,000 miles without accidents. The only two accidents it had were when two human drivers crashed into the back of it. Supercomputers can now do translations of natural language sources, including, for example, translations of poetry, as well as human translators. That is quite an extraordinary transformation.
The same thing is happening in the area of robotics. About 15 years ago I went to the Sony media lab in Japan and talked to the head of Sony at that time. He said, “From now on, we are concentrating on robotics; this is going to be our main emphasis”. I saw some of the robots they had there. They could barely walk. They could not climb stairs. They could not do the most mundane tasks. This was 15 years ago. How things have changed. I will give you a couple of examples which sound trivial but are actually a bit awesome to me. A robot recently took on the world table tennis champion at table tennis. The robot was winning for most of the match. The human suddenly came from behind at the end, and in fact triumphed, but it will not be long before the conjunction of the computer and the robot will beat all human table tennis players. If you see someone playing table tennis at the top level, it is a completely amazing phenomenon. To think that a machine could be on the verge of beating the world champion is quite awesome.
There is also a robot stand-up comic. It is able to innovate, to tell stories, to tell jokes which the robot itself invents and, as it were, to play the audience just like a human stand-up comic. For example, the robot stand-up comic said, “I went out with an Apple gadget. It didn’t work out—she was always i-this and i-that”. The robot stand-up comic also has a way of deflating the situation when it does not get a laugh: it will say, “Oh well, I’ll have to do better next time”, or, “Hmm, that was not good enough”. It sounds trivial, but there is something awesome going on here.
The implications for work and jobs are huge. Many of my economist friends and colleagues are working intensely on them. Supercomputers will be able to take over a large number of professional and technical jobs. Jobs which only a few years ago it would have been inconceivable for machines to do are now lined up for destruction. They include jobs in the law, the medical profession, accountancy, finance and other areas. These are not low-level jobs, but at least medium-level jobs. We are talking not about the distant future, but of the next 10 years. Some of these changes have already happened. For example, machine translation is already replacing human translators in some of these areas; that is quite widespread.
One detailed analysis carried out by economists in the United States concludes that 40% of technical and professional jobs are vulnerable to takeover by intelligent machines. This is a level of job displacement not seen since the transformation of agriculture by industry. Agriculture used to employ 40% to 50% of the population, and it is now down to 2% or 3%. It is potentially a level of job displacement of that order. That is why it is hard to get one’s head around it. It is easy to dismiss and say that it is just hype about a distant future. It is not that at all, I assure noble Lords. These things are already happening. It is most advanced in the American economy, but it is happening in many other economies, too. So what we see when we go into a supermarket and we are more or less obliged to checkout by machine, or we go into a bookstore and find the same thing—or we go into other shops where there is a checkout machine—is at the lowest level of what will increasingly happen, and is happening, at a higher level. That is serious stuff for future employment.
Could the Minister reflect on or give me a response to three questions? On my first question, an easy or ignorant response would be to say, “Oh well, new jobs have always been created in the past when you have technological change”. We absolutely cannot say this with any certainty here, because we have never been in a position where machines have outstripped us intellectually and physically in this way. What work is going on inside the Government on that issue? This is quite different from the rosy picture and the debate about the immediacy of jobs; it is a surging trend that could be massively important for how we look at the future of employment.
Secondly, if it proves true that there is not enough work to go around in 10 to 15 years, we might have to be much more imaginative about the role of work in life than we are today. Many of my economist colleagues are thinking about this; an example in your Lordships’ House is the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, in his recent book. They suggest that we should return to themes that existed primarily in the 1960s of basic income and negative income tax. Is any thinking going on inside the Government about those issues, should those trends become exponential, as to me they will?
Thirdly, and finally, these trends are going along with a phenomenon that my noble friend Lady Donaghy mentioned—the large-scale displacement of wealth and large-scale inequality. It is driven in some part by these technological changes, as has been demonstrated in the United States, where there has been an absolute decrease in the amount of wealth taken by the majority of wealth-holders; almost all of it has gone to the top. A similar pattern is seen with income: the closer that you get to the very top, the greater the proportion taken. That is a really disturbing trend, and it is pretty similar here. We need some seriously new policies to produce a more equitable society in this world of high technological change. I conclude by asking the Minister: where are these policies?
25th Anniversary of the World Wide Web
Lord Giddens Excerpts(10 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Giddens (Lab)
My Lords, I join the queue in congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, on having initiated this debate, and say what a great addition she is to your Lordships’ House. That is my three minutes more or less gone.
I will be more extravagant than most other speakers so far and say that the internet has been the greatest transformative force in history bar none, because of the speed of its transformation; as has already been mentioned: it took 20 years. The invention of writing is perhaps the only parallel, but that took 5,000 years and was the prerogative only of elites. It is the greatest transformative force because of its scope, because it is the instrument of globalisation on a level never seen before; and because of its intensity—it enters all our lives. We see people going along the streets who cannot let go of their mobile phone. It has become an intrinsic part of who they are. There has never been anything like this before in history, so it is not surprising that it is rather difficult to come to terms with its longer-term impact.
I will make some brief comments on higher education and the advent of MOOCs. MOOCs are not a kind of medieval curse; the acronym stands for massive open online courses, which promise to be deeply transformative of universities. When I was running the LSE about 15 years ago, we all thought that the future of universities would be online. We had consortia with other universities in the United States, but that did not really work. The only experiment that worked a bit was with the University of Phoenix, which was more or less an online university.
MOOCs are transforming that situation. Now these courses are being adopted by the elite American universities: Harvard, MIT and Stanford. They promise to be both deeply shocking to traditional universities and also to add to their armoury. In this country we lag behind. The Open University is in the forefront, but the Americans—as before, perhaps—are well in the lead.
The advent of massive online courses will not see the end of the campus-based university, because such universities have other things to offer. We are not having this debate online, but in your Lordships’ Chamber. There is what sociologists call the “compulsion of proximity”—the need to be with other people—and the added value of having been to a campus-based university. However, massive online courses will probably transform universities as fundamentally as Amazon has transformed the book trade; that is the future they offer.
They also offer the opposite—the digital divide, which has been referred to by many people. Billions of people will be able to follow these courses online and interact with other people in real time, in seminar groups across the world. That will be possible for billions of people in Africa, for example. It will be like mobile phones; Africa will be able to jump a stage in the evolution of education.
I conclude by saying, “Don’t go all high-tech”, because back to the future will often be one of our political remedies. We used to think that the car was the instrument of the future, but now we are going back to bicycling and walking. That will be true of all areas. I wave my piece of paper, but that is not because I think I am just a remnant of a previous age; there will be many areas where simple, back to the future solutions will be just as important as technologically developed ones.
Mesothelioma Bill [HL]
Lord Giddens Excerpts(11 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Giddens
My Lords, I should like to begin by expressing my heartfelt sympathy to anyone who has, as I have, lost a loved one to this horrendous disease. It is essentially a death sentence for anyone who contracts it. I would like to correct my noble friend Lady Taylor, who is not in her place. It is not always contracted in the workplace. You can contract the disease in other contexts too, and that is true of the person in my family. It is important to say that. It is relevant in this debate not just to concentrate on this country but to look around the world at the eccentric, problematic and tortured history of this disease and the response to it of the legal system and the building and insurance industries. There is a lot to learn here that is relevant to our debate.
Asbestos was originally called a “magic dust” and it was used extensively with that in mind in all sorts of installations around the world, where, of course, it still remains. There is still an enormous amount of asbestos in many buildings in very many countries across the world, especially developing countries, where it is still in a lethal state. There is a very interesting book on this and—my noble friend just referred to this—on the resistance of industry and government to accepting liability. It is by Geoffrey Tweedale and has the appropriate title Magic Mineral to Killer Dust. That is what it is today. As noble Lords have said, it can take 20 to 50 years to appear, and in that sense tracks to some degree the history of tobacco, the diseases from which also take a long time to come out and took a long time to identify. It just makes me wonder what other lethal diseases might be lurking out there in the world, a point I will come back to later on, because we now eat so many foods with additives that no one has ever experienced before and we ingest all sorts of substances from the air that have never existed before because they are new forms of synthetic materials. It just makes me wonder what lies in store elsewhere if diseases like this take such a long time to come out and therefore to identify.
It is difficult to establish the aetiology of diseases that come to light after many years. Tracking the history of mesothelioma is really intriguing in this respect because there was enormous resistance at first to identifying it as a single syndrome or disease, and secondly to identifying its causation. Again, this tracked the tobacco industry. The disease was known in some sense since just after the turn of the century, but it was not until the 1960s that a vital set of researches was published in South Africa that changed the consciousness of the medical profession, and then, quite a long while after that, the other authorities involved.
As often with these sorts of things, publicity was gained for mesothelioma by the fact that the film actor Steve McQueen died of it. He worked with racing cars and he apparently ingested asbestos from their brake linings. That brought it to the public consciousness in America, but it is important to stress that there was very strong resistance from the building industry, from the asbestos industry and particularly from the insurance industry in most countries. They just picked apart the research in much the same way in which the tobacco industry tried to pick apart the research on lung cancer. Hence, in all countries, it was a long time before either business or Governments accepted any liability at all. In most countries, there was an endless turmoil of lawsuits, which meant that most people who brought the cases got no benefit from them at all, and neither, often, did their dependants. I am sure noble Lords know that in America there was a complete bottleneck of such cases. That is in nobody’s interest. It is partly for that reason that I join other noble Lords in welcoming this legislation and congratulate the noble Lord on his part in it.
However, I worry a lot about the cut-off date. It is clear that the scheme must have some kind of limitation, but I just worry that it is a recipe for bitterness because it has a wholly arbitrary element to it. I have seen someone at close hand dying of this disease. If you also consider that the cut-off date is 25 July 2012, it is clear that it is purely a date on which the Government responded to their consultation. It is an administrative date; it bears no relation to suffering, and there is terrible suffering from this disease.
I join other noble Lords in suggesting that, at least at some point, a further exploration with the insurance industry is surely warranted. Mesothelioma is not like the whiplash industry: there is no element whatever of moral hazard in it. However, we know that there are large areas like that in the insurance industry with lots of problematic claims. You could argue that mesothelioma sufferers are paying for this grey area of the insurance industry with this arbitrary cut-off. I hope the Minister will give some attention to the impact that that might have on a family before simply going ahead with it in other parts of the discussion of this Bill. If the Minister has not read it, I recommend reading Geoffrey Tweedale’s book. It is a salutary tale of resistance to regulation and the devious practices that can be involved in it.
In conclusion, I have two questions for the Minister. First, will the Government at least give some attention to the moral and psychological impact of a cut-off date of this sort? Could they see whether there is any way in which it could be neutered for the sufferer? As I said, it bears no real relation to the awful depth of suffering, not just for the person but for the dependants of that person. Secondly, will the Minister consider working proactively with the insurance industry to scan similar problems in advance? This is where I come back to the point I made at the beginning: that there might be lots of potentially lethal diseases stored up in our environment, so it would seem sensible to try to develop a kind of proactive response to this. I do not know whether the Minister has any scheme in mind or whether the insurance industry, the Government and medical research could work together. We do not really want this sad and sorry tale repeated elsewhere, because next time it could have even more devastating consequences.
Leveson Inquiry
Lord Giddens Excerpts(11 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Giddens
My Lords, I want to comment on the relationship between the press and the internet with regard to the Leveson inquiry. I shall do so partly because this has not been discussed in much detail by previous speakers and partly because I would like to seal off a possible escape route from the implications of Leveson in relation to the famous “last chance saloon”. I am not entirely sure what that metaphor of the last chance saloon actually means; in the cowboy films that I remember, the hero went in and drank sarsaparilla, whatever that was. But sarsaparilla was thought to be a very innocent drink and the others insulted him, so he shot them. What this has to do with press freedom I am not sure. It is a more obscure metaphor than one might imagine.
We are living through a period of big transition in our society. One by one the institutions of our system are being peeled back, as if by a giant can-opener, and what is inside is not always all that delectable. This has happened, as everyone knows, in the banking system, in Parliament, in the police, in television and of course in the press. I do not think that one can see this as coincidental; it is clear that the internet and new information technology are playing a major role here—in other words, transparency and openness are being forced upon institutions in a much more thoroughgoing way than was ever true before.
The relationship between the press and the internet is obviously a complicated one. In some respects, it has clearly advanced the cause of investigative journalism. In all the areas that I have just mentioned, the press has played a fundamental part. That is an affirmation, if one were needed, of the indispensable role of a free and responsible press in a democratic society. It was the dogged persistence of one particular newspaper that served to uncover press behaviour that, as the Leveson report says,
“at times, can only be described as outrageous”.
That has been quoted many times.
Personally, I find Lord Justice Leveson’s work exemplary and his arguments for a self-regulatory system, driven by incentives and underpinned in law, irrefutable—I therefore disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Trimble, who spoke before me—and there have been some very powerful speeches today that have backed that up. However, what of the argument, which is made quite often these days, that the rise of the new media makes regulation of the press redundant? The newspapers, as several speakers have mentioned, are experiencing dwindling sales, in part because of the internet, which is a sort of chaotic free-for-all. Why regulate an industry that is doomed anyway? Many say that that will simply accelerate a decline from which we will lose.
Speaking as a social scientist who looks at these issues historically and in some detail, I have to say that that argument seems to be wholly wrong and actually against the best interests of the press itself. I offer three main reasons for this. First, although, as the noble Lord, Lord Trimble, said, it is commonly heard now that the printed press is on its last legs and might not survive even another 10 or 15 years, I would be very sceptical about that argument, based on what has happened to previous media. It used to be said, for example, that television would destroy cinema. That has not happened; now we simply have two forms existing alongside each other. It used to be said that television would destroy live football but actually the opposite has happened. I do not believe in such predictions, and I think that there is a future for the classical printed press alongside the internet. The question is what that future will be.
Secondly, it is clear the papers will exist in substantial part online, but it is fairly clear that there is little future for them if they are driven by a race to the bottom. Innumerable websites already specialise in outrageous opinions and endless tittle-tattle. There is no real possible competition for a newspaper in that context, so they will have to look for another model.
Thirdly, it seems that newspapers will survive and prosper online only if they generate trust and create revenue, either through attracting advertising, which has always been crucial to newspapers, or through charging their customers or both. If one examines it in detail, each strategy has far more chance of success if readers recognise that certain standards of reliability and authenticity are guaranteed.
We should note that this applies to strictly online newspapers. We might note the success of the Huffington Post, for example, which has been used widely across the world, but which is quite often translated into printed sources. Articles from that source appear in orthodox newspapers very often, but they do not appear there first. I conclude therefore that a regulatory system of the kind set out in the Leveson report is not only of benefit to the public but also to the press itself, and possibly indispensible to its secure future.
All the institutions I mentioned at the beginning—the banks, Parliament, the police, television—will emerge the stronger as a result of the impact of the new transparency. We see that in the case of Parliament clearly already. The same could very well be true of the press.
We owe it to the public to establish a system that is in their interests, but does not trample on their freedoms and rights, as so many other noble Lords have eloquently argued. Let us now get on with it. Let us forge a cross-party consensus. The public will not forgive us if we fail.
EU Report: Women on Boards
Lord Giddens Excerpts(12 years ago)
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Lord Giddens
My Lords, unlike other noble Lords who are speaking in this debate, I am a strong supporter of obligatory quota systems for gender equality, and certainly at the national level. They create a platform for advance that no other approach can rival. We have a lot of evidence on this. Voluntary approaches by and large do not work, no matter how ambitious they are. After more than a century of struggle for women’s rights, 86.5% of board members in the EU are still men—that is almost 90% after such a long period. That shows that we are dealing with very deeply embedded forces. Radicalism of all sorts is required on the issue, not only for reasons of social justice but because of the need to tap an unused reservoir of human capital. We owe the EU Commissioner, Viviane Reding, a debt of gratitude for putting the issue so forcefully on to the EU 2020 agenda, even if her original proposals do not look as though they will go through.
I have two questions for the Minister. First, what plans do the Government have not just to implement the recommendations of the Davies report but to go beyond it, especially to introduce some form of sanction? Without sanctioning mechanisms, we are not going to get near the targets. Secondly, does the noble Baroness agree that only those countries that have introduced enforced quota systems have made fast and substantial progress? We know the famous case of Norway, but in a whole string of other countries there has been a dramatic change in the course of even a year or two after the introduction of such legislation.
Sport
Lord Giddens Excerpts(12 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Giddens
To ask Her Majesty’s Government how they will build on the success of British sport in summer 2012.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston
My Lords, I am sure the whole House will wish to join me in taking this opportunity to congratulate all our athletes who participated and won medals in the Olympic and Paralympic Games this summer, the wonderful volunteers who made the Games so special and everyone who contributed to the organisation of the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
The Government are committed to making sure that both the Olympic and Paralympic Games have a lasting legacy. Elite sport will receive £500 million over the next four years leading up to Rio. Grass-roots sport will benefit from £1 billion of investment to provide facilities and opportunities to take up sport. The UK will host a number of major sporting events and we will build upon the already successful School Games providing competitive sport in schools.
The legacy of the Games goes beyond sport and all parts of the Government will work together so that the UK as a whole takes advantage and reaps the benefit of what we achieved as a nation this summer.
Lord Giddens
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for that response and echo her sentiments. Does she think that the sense of solidarity and national purpose which was so visible during the Olympics can be sustained or, possibly, extended? If so, how might that be achieved?
Baroness Stowell of Beeston
I agree with what the noble Lord has outlined as being part of the success of the Games this summer. I was very proud that my noble friend Lord Coe was at the Labour Party conference last week to pay tribute to Dame Tessa Jowell for everything she did as a Minister to ensure that we succeeded in getting the Games. He made the point very clearly that to build on the success of the Games—and as I said in my previous Answer this is not just about sport, although sport is hugely important and we need to build on it—we must continue that bipartisan and cross-party approach to make sure that we take all the available benefits.
Youth Unemployment
Lord Giddens Excerpts(12 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Giddens
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Adonis on having secured this debate and on introducing it in such a lucid and compelling way. To quote him, I say, “Oi! I would give you a job any time”, although my noble friend has held a lot of interesting jobs.
As the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, said, youth unemployment is a gigantic problem across the world. In the Middle East and north African countries, more than 90% of young people aged 16 to 24 are not in work. A high proportion of those young people are NEETS or, as they like to say in continental countries, ninis—neither in education nor work. Ninis is a slightly more compact way of putting it. Indeed, youth unemployment was one of the sources of the Arab spring, as we know. Twenty per cent of young people in the EU are ninis and, as has been mentioned and as is very familiar, the problem is especially acute in Spain.
I ask noble Lords to remember that measuring unemployment is very complex. Sometimes it is better to measure by rates but often it is better to measure by absolute numbers, as long as you factor in population growth and so forth. It is very important to be precise about the statistics that one is using. However, these statistics clearly show that in a global society, there is a structural problem of enormous significance with potentially long-term consequences. To summarise what other noble Lords have already said, it could be said that youth today, in industrial countries and in the UK, faces a perfect storm. I will mention three factors here.
First, this recession—it may be a depression, as my noble friend Lord Wood said—is no ordinary recession. It seems, to me anyway, to be in some part a crisis of competitiveness in western countries as a whole, which will be very difficult to repair and which will demand large-scale restructuring. There are no easy options for us here any longer and the processes of reconstruction will bear heavily on young people, even if only on the “last in, first out” principle.
Secondly, as the right reverend Prelate mentioned, the older generation now has a stranglehold on resources—for example, in the housing market or, in future, pensions. My source is in some part The Pinch by David Willetts MP, an interesting discussion of intergenerational inequality. Younger people are bound to struggle in such a situation. It implies that we must have greater intergenerational equality. I would dispute to some degree what the right reverend Prelate said about early retirement ages because countries that have those, such as the southern countries in Europe, also tend to have high levels of youth unemployment while countries in the north that have a very high proportion of older people in employment, such as Finland, also have low rates of youth unemployment. Those things are not necessarily oppositional.
Thirdly, it is very important that a major part of what restructuring will involve is that fundamental changes are happening in labour markets. There is a leap in the levels of job destruction, primarily as a result of the impact of IT and automation, as has just been mentioned. The lifespan of an average medium-sized firm today is only about one third of what it was in the 1970s and therefore young people today will face a very volatile job market. For that reason, I have some reservations about apprenticeships—at least, in how they should be structured—because life skills and adaptability are likely to be as important as technical skills. We just do not know when a technical skill will become obsolete. It could happen almost overnight as it did, for example, in the printing industry some years ago.
The level of youth unemployment in this country is lower than in many other EU countries but, as the noble Lord is especially prone to say, if you measure it in absolute terms its increase is perhaps not as great as some critics argue. However, it would be a great mistake to try to normalise these statistics because young people are going to face the very demanding structural conditions that I have just mentioned. For these reasons, the crisis is too deep to be addressed simply by active labour market measures. I am not necessarily against the youth contract, the Work Programme and so forth—they are mostly continuations of new Labour policy under other names anyway—but those are really palliatives, even if a lot of money is spent on them.
I have three questions for the Minister. Macrostructural intervention is likely to be far more important but here the Government’s cupboard is worryingly bare and their policies on job generation are alarmingly weak. First, where will new net jobs come from? In this country we have, as it were, a primitive policy of deregulation which I do not think any other country in the world is following today. Surely more active collaboration between government and business is needed, as are more long-term planning and a more active industrial policy than the Government have.
Secondly, how will the Government confront inequality of a structural nature, which has a massive impact on long-term youth unemployment, and what is their position on the need to further reduce child poverty where, after all, new Labour has been pretty successful? I am in favour of a tax that would switch from the very rich to the very poor. That is a sensible and, now, a feasible idea.
Finally, the Government should be boosting numbers in higher education rather than cutting back. Countries in the southern rim—Spain and so forth—have about 40% in higher education, like us. Successful countries such as Germany or the Scandinavian countries have 53% to 60%, which has the dual function of keeping people out of the labour market and getting them into jobs. I welcome the Minister’s comments on these points.