Civilian Use of Drones (EUC Report)

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Tuesday 8th September 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, let me congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain, and other members of the committee on their excellent report. As the report notes, two types of drone probably get most attention in the media: those that are used to play with and those that are sent to kill. Yet there is a huge variety of other uses to which drones can be put in between these two extremes.

The report mentions continuities with model aeroplanes in the past, but I argue strongly that we have to understand drones in the context of the digital revolution. To me this is crucial to the issue of regulation and their future. That revolution, however, is widely misunderstood because it is often identified with the internet. The digital revolution has to be seen as the interplay between the internet, supercomputers and robotics, with supercomputers having the core role because of their massive algorithmic power. The iPhone in your pocket or handbag is a supercomputer more powerful than the biggest supercomputer of 30 years ago.

Drones are essentially flying robots and their extraordinary range of actual and potential uses comes from this conjunction of factors. In my speech, I shall continue to deploy the word “drone” in spite of what one source describes as “the interminable debate” about the use of the term. Drones are converging with orthodox aviation as well as providing ticklish challenges to airline safety. Most planes, most of the time, are flown by their computers in interaction with the supercomputers on which global air traffic depends. Used appropriately, drones can be deployed to protect orthodox air traffic rather than just pose problems for it, as the Government’s response to the report notes.

As the report makes clear, drones have the potential to be used positively in a vast range of environmental, ecological and scientific applications, in addition to their more commercial ones. They can even be combined with 3D printers. A drone has recently been wholly 3D-printed on a ship and carried out a successful short flight afterwards. My point is that this is an extremely rapidly evolving field, which overlaps in a fundamental way with dramatic advances in other areas of technology. It will be a demanding task indeed to reconcile the extraordinary potential of drones with the many risks that they present, not the least of which is their overlap with terrorism. Two IS militant figures were killed by drones, we were told yesterday, but IS is already using drones for reconnaissance and battlefield co-ordination and is said to be plotting to use drones to execute small bombing attacks on public events in the West. I know that the report concentrates exclusively on the civilian use of drones, as the noble Baroness said, but this must be watched because the division between civilian and more noxious uses of drones is going to be pretty fluid and difficult to draw.

I have three basic questions for the Minister. There is a great deal of agreement between the committee’s report, the Government and the proposed framework for the EU—an unusual event, I must say, in this House to say the least. However, I hope that the Minister will respond to this and that the Government will recognise just how fast the pace of change is likely to be in this area. I shall pick up what to me is the central point: this is part and parcel of the digital revolution, which is not just about drones themselves but about the total system within which they are enveloped. Constant updating and revision of whatever regulations are established will be absolutely essential in my view, and it would be good if the Minister could say something about that. It is not easy to have regulation which is continually evolving.

Secondly, there is not much here about drones and privacy, which is a huge issue already in the US, and rightly so. No existing category of law, either in the United States or the EU, is as yet robust enough to cope with this issue. The EU does have plans to deal with this, but it would be good to hear some comment from the Minister.

Finally, the Government are preparing a public dialogue this year on the use of drone technology. What form will this take exactly? I hope, again, it will recognise that the dialogue will have to be an evolving one. If I am right in my emphases so far as drones are concerned, we ain’t seen nothing yet. We are at the very beginning of their evolution and their integration with the wider digital revolution, which to my mind is probably the greatest transformative force to have global impact within such a short period of time ever in human history. The Industrial Revolution was crucial, but it moved quite slowly; when the first telephone was invented, it took 50 years to reach 75 people. The iPhone first came out in 2007, and there are now almost 1 billion in the world, and 3 billion smartphones. There has never been any pace of technological innovation like this, and it would therefore be a really bad mistake to treat drones just on their own, as an isolated phenomenon. They will be deeply integrated in the evolution of this revolution.

Children: Sexual Abuse

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Tuesday 15th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, on securing this debate and on her effective introduction to it.

To understand debates about child sex abuse now we absolutely have to have some historical context. I started working on this issue some 30 or so years ago now. That was a time of denial, both here and in the United States, let alone elsewhere. Cases of widespread abuse were coming to light in churches, in orphanages, in hospitals and in the family, but a veritable smokescreen was thrown up to try to block off the implications of all this. For example, people spoke of false memory syndrome, casting doubt on the testimony of many children who did at that time speak up. In a way, that is not surprising because we are dealing here with some of the most cherished institutions in our society. A substantial proportion of the cases of sexual abuse that came to light were against small boys. It is important to recognise this and not concentrate only on sexual abuse against girls.

I used to teach at the University of California at Santa Barbara—one of the most beautiful towns you could possibly live in. The jewel in the crown in Santa Barbara was the mission, which stood on the hill above the town—a really wonderful building. In that building, it was discovered that there was a long-term history of sexual abuse on a mass scale. A local newspaper referred to those involved, who were priests and friars in the institution, as sacred monsters. Over the period 1964 to 1987, fully one-quarter of the friars regularly abused the boys in the institution.

Noble Lords may have seen in the papers a couple of days ago that high-profile cases are even now coming to the fore in the Catholic Church in Poland involving some very high-ranking dignitaries. What we are talking about here is, as it were, the secret sexual history of our civilisation. We are talking about something deep-rooted, not a transient phenomenon; it has a very long history. The term “grooming”, for example, has been widely used recently. It is a fairly novel term, but I can assure noble Lords that it is a term for a very traditional practice. Grooming went on at the mission in Santa Barbara as in so many other institutions. Many questions are raised, therefore, by what has been called our Jimmy Savile moment. In some part, it is our moment of institutional discovery and the consequences will take a long time to assimilate.

I have three brief points on which I would like the Minister, if he has time, to comment. First, I hope the Government will accept that we are in this for the long haul; that we are at the beginning of a process that will go on for a long time. Operation Yewtree, after all, found 450 people who came forward to speak out. None of them had spoken out before. This is part of a much larger hidden history; it is not an individual case in any way at all. Therefore, a long-term strategy is needed.

Secondly, would the Minister agree that we need to focus on boys as much as girls? Boys on the whole are much more reluctant than girls to speak up, for well known reasons. Jimmy Savile’s victims included quite a number of boys under the age of 10, so it will not do to concentrate only on one sex when discussing this issue.

Thirdly, we need to hammer home the point made by Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, that this is not just a problem for the CPS and the police. That is precisely because it is essentially an institutional problem—an issue, in other words, for all of those in charge of the diversity of organisations within which such practices have been carried on.

Visas: Student Visa Policy

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Thursday 31st January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens]

My Lords, I declare an interest as former director of the London School of Economics. The LSE provides a fabulous example of the kind of a network of students and ex-students that can be built around the world. This is a means of transmitting British values and British institutions around the world. I very much agree with the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, when he said that this was of great value to British students as well.

I can only reaffirm the points made so eloquently by others. First, we should concentrate on attracting international students to the UK, not devise ways of putting them off. We are simply shooting ourselves in the foot—or perhaps an even more vulnerable part of the anatomy.

Secondly, as so many noble Lords have said, we must change the policy of listing overseas students as immigrants rather than as a separate category. We simply lose ground to the US, Australia and Canada, as many others have remarked, when the steps that have been taken so far are simply not enough.

Thirdly, what has not been discussed quite as much is that the worst kind of damage that is being done to universities and higher education is actually reputational. The reputation of British universities is fading in the eyes of potential overseas applicants around the world, and we have quite a lot of evidence of this. Noble Lords will know that once your reputation is damaged, it is very hard to recover. People here might not remember the example of Lancia cars, which used to rust to bits after about two years. No one buys them any more in the UK and they never got back in the UK. Once you have damaged your reputation, it is so hard to recover it, and this is what the Government are doing.

As other noble Lords have said, the Government are supposed to be against bureaucracy; that is one of their main objectives. They have created a monstrous thicket of regulations, which overseas students have to work through. I am one of the people who are mad enough to speak in this debate as well as the previous one on the EU, including the Prime Minister’s remarks that a good economy is supposed to be open, flexible and dynamic. This pile-up of regulations is the very opposite of that. As other noble Lords have done, I say to the Government: please, please rethink your nutty policy, in all of our interests.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

I would like to think that it has. I am more concerned whether it has been culturally absorbed by noble Lords. I am doing my best to emphasise to noble Lords that there is no limit on international students coming to this country.

[Lord Giddens]

My Lords—

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

Perhaps I may continue, because I, too, am time-limited and I will try to provide a comprehensive reply. I understand noble Lords’ interest in the matter, and I want to assist the House.

One key factor in why we need net migration figures and to note students’ presence in this country is because they are users of services. They form part of the requirements for public services, infrastructure and investment, and we need valid figures on which to base those. If we ignored them as part and parcel of those statistics, that could distort our view of the requirements in those areas. However, I note the arguments of noble Lords on this issue. I can say only that, at the end of the day, there are no limits on numbers.

The UK continues to have a great offer for international students at our world-renowned universities. Just yesterday, Universities UK stated:

“The UK remains one of the most popular destinations in the world for international students looking for a high-quality university experience”.

There is no limit on the number who can come, provided they meet language and academic requirements and can support themselves in the UK. As I said, there are generous work entitlements both during and after their study. Those securing a graduate-level job paying £20,000 a year can switch to a work route, and there are additional opportunities under our graduate entrepreneur scheme.

The Home Secretary recently announced further measures to encourage the brightest and best international students to stay and to contribute to economic growth. All completing PhD students will be allowed to remain in the UK for 12 months to find skilled work or to set up as an entrepreneur. We will add an extra 1,000 places to our graduate entrepreneur scheme.

Universities: Overseas Students

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Monday 5th November 2012 Lords Chamber

Asked By

[Lord Giddens]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their assessment of the impact of current immigration policy on the attractiveness of United Kingdom universities to overseas students.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office (Lord Taylor of Holbeach)]

My Lords, as the noble Lord will know, the UK continues to make a great offer to international students. Those with an adequate command of the English language and enough money to support themselves can come with no limit on numbers. When they finish, they can stay if they are doing a graduate-level job, again with no limit on numbers. Universities UK has reported that the number of international students continues to rise and UCAS acceptances are up 4%.

[Lord Giddens]

I thank the Minister for that reply. The point is that government migration policy threatens to do huge reputational damage to British universities, institutions which bring in some £8 billion in earnings from overseas students. Why cannot the Government adopt the same scheme as our competitor countries, especially the United States and Australia, and list overseas students separately from migration statistics, since we know that almost all overseas students—about 97%—go back to their country of origin?

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

My Lords, I think it must be agreed throughout the House that the previous system was open to abuse, with too many students just coming here to work rather than to study. The Government have sought to protect our world-class universities while targeting the less compliant new colleges, driving some 500 of the latter off the sponsor register. We want to continue to attract the brightest and best international students who will drive growth in our economy. Most observers would agree that our reforms are no more than common sense. We are not adopting the Australian or American model. We believe that it is right to have these figures as part of general migration although the net migration figure is obviously less than the top line one.

EU Drugs Strategy: EUC Report

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Thursday 19th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, on his introductory speech, and him and his colleagues on this very good and balanced report. In the UK, certainly in some sections of the media, we live in a sort of EU-bashing country, but there are so many areas where pan-European co-operation is valuable, or indeed essential, and the fight against drugs is one of these. I agree with the basic conclusions of the report: that the European drugs strategy has been an important beginning but needs to be tightened up and refocused. As the noble Lord said, the work of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction is rightly praised in all quarters and should certainly be defended for the future.

This report comes at a time when something of a sea change in drugs policy seems to be happening around the world. The so-called war on drugs has been declared a failure, not only by the United Nations drugs agency but by the leaders of some of the main states originally propagating that war in Latin America and elsewhere.

The reasons are plain to see: a punitive approach to drug use often compounds problems of public health. In prison in many countries drug addiction is not treated, exchange of needles is not available and other treatments simply do not exist. Diseases such as HIV readily take hold. Many prisoners in different countries who were not drug users before become so in prison and, in fact, many overdose when they leave prison.

In the bulk of what I have to say I shall follow up what the noble Lord, Lord Mancroft, said and what the report says about Portugal, since there has been so much debate about that country’s policies among those who follow these issues, and rightly so. We now have a lot more evidence about the consequences of those policies than we had a few years ago. A good example is an in-depth study by a Polish author, Artur Domoslawski, called Drug Policy in Portugal. As the report says, Portugal is traditionally a quite conservative country, marked by the strong presence of the Catholic Church.

When drugs emerged as a serious problem in the 1970s and 1980s the country first adopted a classical repressive approach. The new strategy was implemented in laws passed in 2000 and 2001. These laws decriminalised drug use; drug trafficking remained a criminal offence. All this is well known. In place of criminal courts, dissuasion commissions were set up. These bodies seek to turn people away from drug use. They have the power to impose civil sanctions for those who refuse to attend: for example, they can take someone’s driving licence away and there are even worse civil penalties than that.

At the dissuasion commission a person’s history and his or her addiction issues are discussed and treatment options proposed. The aim, essentially, is to avoid stigma but at the same time to lock the person into a treatment pattern. It is rightly described by some of the contributors to this study not as a magical formula but as a specific framework on which work is ongoing. The Government in Portugal also established a large number of outreach programmes with the aim of limiting the spread of drug use in the first place. There are some 70 projects across the country, mostly carried out by NGOs funded by the state but operating locally. The evidence shows some clear positive outcomes, which were briefly mentioned by the noble Lord. For example, the percentage of drug users among those with HIV dropped from 52% in 2000 to 15% in 2010: a pretty large drop, but the numbers are not that great in the first place.

All this is interesting, but Portugal is a small country, its experiment with a public health approach to drug use is quite recent and we know that drug use is often cyclical, so all the data we have might in the here and now not be valid 10 or 15 years down the line. However, in another report from the Cato Institute, published in April, the conclusions I have just mentioned are quite forcefully backed up:

“Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success”.

Quite rightly, I suppose, the report does not ask the Government to comment on this, but I would be interested to see what the Minister makes of the massive interest which has attended the Portuguese experiment and whether he thinks that it is directly relevant to this country. The UK Drug Policy Commission says:

“The UK invests remarkably little in independent evaluation of the impact of drug policies”.

Speaking as a social scientist, it is crucial to make such investments. Again, I would be interested to hear what the Minister says on this point. The commission also says,

“the United Kingdom remains at the top of the European ladder for drug use and drug dependence”.

In the light of government policy, perhaps he would like to comment on that statement too.

Food Security Policy

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Thursday 24th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens]

My Lords, I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, for initiating this debate on a manifestly important topic. I speak as a member of the aforementioned Sub-Committee D. I know that other members are here, too; they all seem to be clustered on the other side for some reason. As the noble Baroness mentioned, food security has zoomed up the global agenda in recent years, and rightly so. A range of reports have been referred to, a number of them from the UN. There is the Royal Society report, Reaping the Benefits, and the Government’s Foresight report, which is one of the best to be produced on this issue recently.

As the reports do, I want to discuss the issue on a global level. Noble Lords will forgive my being slightly didactic by sketching the backdrop to the world as I see it today. The industrial civilisation in which we live is spreading across the world. It is the first truly global civilisation in history and is far more advanced than any other civilisation has been. It is discontinuous with previous civilisations. Looking at the history of civilisations, one observes that they tend to go down a little and then gradually up. Around 1850, civilisation starts to rise steeply. I suggest that we have essentially created a new world, with which we do not have experience of dealing by looking at history. This is one reason why it is so hard to cope with the risks that we have created. Essentially, we face what I call “new-style risks”, associated with the globalisation of industrial civilisation.

New-style risks are not like old-style risks, which can be covered by insurance companies. I can unfortunately tell you your chances of being involved in an accident every time you get into a car, because there is a long series of events on which to base them. With new-style risks, which are about present trends accelerating into the future, you cannot use that kind of risk calculation. That is one of the reasons why we tend to be in denial about those risks. We are in a civilisation in which the risks that we have created for ourselves—these are all humanly created risks—are rising steeply, but we are not in a world that is getting close to managing their consequences, or even to accepting their seriousness.

Climate change is the granddaddy of all these things. Imagine it: we are on the verge of radically and irretrievably changing the world’s climate. There is no way of getting greenhouses gases out of the atmosphere once they are there and they will be there for centuries. What are we doing? Virtually nothing. Anyone who saw the IEA report that came out today will see that the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere is still increasing, not decreasing, and it is increasing by more every 10 years than it did in the years before.

Three of the biggest new-style risks are climate change, population growth and world urbanisation. We have no experience of any of these. In 1850 there were still fewer than a billion people in the world. It is not that long ago in historical terms. We are now almost certainly coming up to there being 9 billion people not that far into the future. This is likely to happen, and some people think that there could be as many as 11 billion. This is an extraordinary transformation in the history of the world; it is totally different from anything that we have had to deal with before.

In the case of food security, each of those three risks—climate change, population growth and urbanisation—overlap. Sir John Beddington, who was referred to earlier, spoke of a perfect storm affecting the future of world society. He said that from a 2010 baseline we would need to create 40% more food, 30% more water and 50% more energy by 2050. Failure to generate these could produce massive conflicts over diminishing resources. To me, the world is like that old joke. A guy jumps off a skyscraper—in the City of London, let us say—and, as he falls, people on every floor hear him say, “So far so good, so far so good”. That is about our approach to the risks that we face globally. We have to get on with it. We have to make far more of a dent in these risks than we have so far.

How can the UK contribute? In my view, it can contribute in four ways. First, the Government should support research, including blue-sky research, around the edges of nanotechnology, for example, and other areas that directly affect food production. We have to increase productivity of crops and their resilience in the face of climate change, as the Foresight report noted. Brazil has made amazing strides in these respects and we should learn from best practice around the world.

Secondly, as was said by the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, any solution must involve biotechnology, which I take to stretch quite a long way beyond GM crops, as well as conventional breeding techniques. Sir David King, another former Government Chief Scientific Adviser, got himself into trouble when he declared that food insecurity in Africa was partly the result of anti-GM campaigns. Obviously, there is a balance of risk. The risk of not feeding the world’s population is much larger, I think, than the risks involved in biotechnology.

Thirdly, we must counter changes in diet that are going on across the world and transforming our world dietary habits. It is weird to live in a world where 1 billion people go hungry and 1 billion people are obese or radically overweight. To me, the fast food corporations do not pick up the consequences of their advertising campaigns. They have to be picked up by publicly funded health services.

Finally, and fourthly, we must get to grips with food waste. It is estimated that some 40 per cent of food in the UK is wasted, if you include supermarkets, shops and restaurants. That is absurd in a world struggling to feed itself. I would welcome the Minister’s comments on any of these points.

International Women’s Day

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Thursday 1st March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens]

My Lords, my noble friend Lady Dean and other speakers have noted that there is quite a high proportion of men speaking in this debate. That shows that there is progress. I remember, not so long ago, when I was the only man speaking in a long train of Baronesses, although I have to say that I quite enjoyed that singular role.

In the film “Black Swan”, the actress Natalie Portman portrays a dancer who is under extreme pressure to be successful. The film documents her struggle with anorexia and bulimia, which, in the film, go along with a lot of self-harm and self-cutting. The ballet dancer Mariafrancesca Garritano, from La Scala in Milan, claims that one in five female dancers suffers from severe forms of eating disorder, which are also very common among female athletes. I was quite moved to see a piece about the British athlete Chrissie Wellington in a newspaper about two weeks ago. She has won no fewer than 13 Iron Man competitions—triathlons where they do a two-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride and then a marathon of 26 miles. Contributions from noble Lords will be gratefully accepted. In this account, she documents her struggle with anorexia and bulimia in a moving way. One thing she said that made an impact on me was that women suffering from these things are,

“driven, compulsive, obsessive, competitive, persistent and seek perfection”.

In my contribution to this debate I want to pursue a theme that I have raised once or twice before in your Lordships’ House, which is that although economic equality is important and crucial for women, it is not enough. Women in our culture, and increasingly across the world—and especially younger women—suffer from a tyranny of appearance and the body. To put things rather crudely, there is a great fault line in our society where men are judged, and tend to judge themselves, by accomplishment while women are judged—and surprisingly or not, tend to judge themselves—by appearance. This is a deep schism in our culture. Anorexia, bulimia, other eating disorders and self-harm are 10 times more frequent among women than among men. They are at the outer edge of the radical uncertainties that many women feel about their bodies and their identities—especially, again, younger women. The recent survey in the UK showed that 50 per cent of girls aged 16 to 21 would seriously consider having surgery to improve their appearance.

Eating disorders, self-harm and worry about body image are not the antithesis of the increasing economic success of women. On the contrary, as the examples that I quoted earlier show, they are especially common among achievers—and again, as I said before, in the younger generation. These disorders are spreading across the world in the most remarkable fashion to areas where they did not previously exist at all; they include China, India, parts of the Middle East, Latin America and urban, affluent areas of Africa. In Africa, it is possible to see within a few miles of one another one woman dying of classical starvation—in other words, simply with not enough food to eat—and another woman in a cosseted urban area dying from the effort to become thin, because anorexia kills. It is the most lethal of all the mental disorders among young women.

From this I would draw three conclusions, which I would be happy if the Minister would comment on if she has time. My first would be that the goal of the emancipation of women should not be just equality but should be freedom, where freedom is defined as being at ease with one’s identity, life and achievements, and recognising their importance—and being at ease with one’s body. Secondly, I propose that the emotional emancipation of women is just as important as their economic emancipation. At the moment, it seems to me that in affluent countries particularly, across the world, women are paying a huge price for success. There is a kind of emotional crippling associated with success. Thirdly, although the cultural stereotyping of women is defined by appearances everywhere, it is not at all impossible to think of policies that can combat it. For instance, one is a far more radical curbing of advertising aimed at young children. Anorexia now starts at six or seven years old, when girls are sometimes dressed in full make-up with nail polish. That overlaps with the sexualisation of children, which is one of the most noxious aspects of contemporary societies today.