Queen’s Speech

Lord Gordon of Strathblane Excerpts

Monday 1st June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gordon of Strathblane (Lab)]

My Lords, I join most of the other speakers today in supporting the idea of some form of constitutional body which will ensure that we do not develop things on a piecemeal basis. I am reluctant to call it either a convention or a convocation because both of those imply rather large bodies. I do not think we need that. I think we need something like a planning authority, as it were. We need a committee that will comment, and have considerable reputational force behind its comments, on any proposals for constitutional change that are brought forward. It should be a committee of both Houses and some others. Let us be perfectly honest about this: MPs would be less than human if they could examine dispassionately possible further ceding of the levers of electoral influence to Brussels or their devolution to Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. There is a certain feeling of a loss of their own importance. Quite apart from the threat of asbestos, there is the threat of a functional void for Westminster if too much is devolved away and ceded to Brussels.

One of the advantages of coming from Scotland is that you at least run into MPs on a weekly basis. The great problem of this place, one of the things that makes it quite dysfunctional, is that the two Houses do not talk to each other nearly enough. That is remedied if you are waiting in a lounge for a delayed aircraft or travelling down on the train together. I have new travelling companions. I do not know many of them but I intend to get to know them—I refer to the 56 SNP MPs. First, I will commiserate with many of them because I am quite sure that they did not all expect to get in and quite a few of them will have had to make fairly drastic career decisions at the last minute, as well as family care decisions to cope with their work down here. They come down here and then realise, “Hold on, if I do my job properly I am really talking myself out of a job because if we get more devolution there will certainly be a fairly drastic reduction in the number of Scottish MPs and if we get independence there will be none at all, and I have given up my career which I might not get back into”. I am genuinely sympathetic. I admire their enthusiasm and I hope it does not sound patronising when I say that I just hope it does not go sour. I have a horrible feeling that you can no more vote austerity away than you can declare Scotland a midge-free zone. It is just not like that. If you earn four and spend five you cannot keep on doing that. You can either cure the problem quickly or make it longer, more drawn-out and more expensive. There will in fact be greater austerity if you slow the process down.

Unlike the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, I do not know what caused the tsunami in Scotland. I intend to listen to the Scottish National Party MPs to see if they have any idea of what fuelled their success. To some extent, the success is not quite as dramatic as it appears to be because the SNP got 45% in the referendum. In a way, 45% beats 55% any day of the week if the 55% is divided three ways, and that is exactly what happened. To be fair, the SNP share of the vote went up from 45% to 50%, which is a rather crucial figure. So there was that incremental growth but it did not come from nowhere. What they had, which rather surprised me, was tremendous discipline—perhaps that is an unkind word. They fired the enthusiasm of everybody who had voted yes in the referendum and persuaded them to vote SNP. What caused it? Was it a desire for independence? Nicola Sturgeon said that the vote had nothing to do with independence. She said that repeatedly on all the television programmes. It therefore seems strange that she then thinks that Westminster must give Scotland more powers, because the two things do not remedy each other. Her main case was “vote against austerity”, particularly when it is coming from nasty people in the Conservative Party.

Scotland’s position is a rather dodgy one financially. I am not saying that Scotland could not be independent, but looking at the rather bulky White Paper, I see that there are about two pages on finance. On page 75 of the document is the Scottish budget. Although the figures on oil revenues were drastically wrong, one could forgive that being published at the time of the referendum. It was perhaps a legitimately optimistic view of what the oil price and revenues would be. However, once you know that that is a false figure, you are, in my view, in duty, conscience-bound to publish a retraction. A private company would be in jail if it did not do that. The SNP published a budget based on an oil price more than twice what it now is in reality. Not only that but, partly at the insistence of the SNP but also for reasons of encouraging jobs, which everybody in the UK can see the advantage of, we have reduced the rate of tax. The overall universe that is being taxed has gone down and the rate at which it is being taxed has gone down, and that has a dramatic double-whammy effect on the Scottish budget. But a double-whammy is not enough. Nicola Sturgeon then says that they are going to spend more and borrow more. The Scottish budget then becomes a total mess. The Institute for Fiscal Studies says that there will be a minimum of a £6 billion hole. The trouble with billions and millions is that they sound the same. Everyone gets very worked up about where George Osborne is going to find £12 million of welfare cuts. By way of comparison, the Scottish £6 billion is, proportionately, the equivalent of six times that welfare cut. Where is that going to come from in Scotland?

I hope that the SNP will move amendments to the Scotland Bill demanding full fiscal autonomy, so that it can be pored over in Committee, particularly in this place, line by line. The SNP will, I hope, have the courage to admit that full fiscal autonomy would not benefit Scotland. If it has the courage to admit that, it will incur the wrath of bodies such as the Scottish Socialist Party. However, let me assure the SNP that that wrath will be as nothing compared with the wrath of the Scottish people if it signs up for full fiscal autonomy only to discover after the event what a disaster it is economically.

Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Lord Gordon of Strathblane Excerpts

Friday 16th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness O’Loan (CB)]

My Lords, by convention I must apologise to the House: I was unable to attend Second Reading as I had had major surgery 10 days before. I have listened to the debates and the element of compassion is very clear in all the Members of your Lordships’ House—but compassion is not enough. The Bill is introducing a significant change that is secured by the terminology that it adopts. That is why it is so important that we support the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, and the other noble Lords who put their names to this amendment.

The BMA stated yesterday that skilled and compassionate palliative care with good communication and patient involvement can help many patients’ fears of death. By focusing on assisted dying as a solution to people’s anxieties about end of life care, society is having the wrong debate. If we pass the Bill, people will know that there will be circumstances in which we as a society have decided that we want people to be able to commit suicide with assistance from the medical profession. The Bill provides that people must be assisted to commit suicide in specified circumstances; it does not provide that they must be assisted to die.

I have seen close family members die of motor neurone disease and cancer. I know that they were helped as they came to death by the loving care of good doctors, professional and expert nurses and other medical professionals, and by the appropriate application of palliative care. The Bill is about people who want to take their lives being provided with the wherewithal and being enabled by the medical profession to do so, and it is right that the content of the Bill should reflect that reality. One of our duties as legislators is to try to ensure the greatest possible clarity as we make laws—and it is for that reason that I support the amendment.

[Lord Gordon of Strathblane (Lab)]

I join the noble Baroness in arguing for greater clarity on this, and I am genuinely surprised at the level of opposition to what seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable, understated amendment. As the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, pointed out earlier, this does not at all affect the principles behind the Bill. There are still powerful arguments for allowing assisted suicide—and, although I am opposed to it, I recognise them. However, let us call it what it is. It is close to misleading to have the title of the Bill as it is the moment, any more than the title of the Homicide Act should be “Assisted Dying (Involuntary)”. No one would seriously describe a terrorist attack as assisted dying—but they have helped people to die, so I suppose you could justify it on that basis.

We try to narrow down a definition. If it is taking someone’s life against their will, we call it homicide or murder. If it is someone taking their own life, we call it suicide, and we have the Suicide Act 1961. It is that Act, not any other, that is amended by the Bill. How anyone can argue that a Bill amending the Suicide Act should not be called the Assisted Suicide Bill genuinely escapes me.

I draw noble Lords’ attention, although I will not quote it at length, to the Second Reading speech of the noble Lord, Lord Hameed, at col. 834, where he drew the very vital distinction between the withdrawal of artificial impediments to death taking its natural course and active intervention. That is a Rubicon that I think the public do not want to cross. I do not want to accuse the promoters of the Bill of any ill faith, but the fact that they choose to position the Bill as though it is on one side of the Rubicon when everyone knows that it is on the other rather gives me cause to think that they recognise that it is a Rubicon that the public are not yet ready to cross.

[Lord Tebbit (Con)]

I wonder if I could briefly settle this matter. I have just taken the extraordinary step of going to the Library and consulting the Oxford English Dictionary. I take it that most of us would accept the definitions of the Oxford English Dictionary. No one seems to dissent from that, so I will tell the House what it says here:

“suicide, n. The … act of taking one’s own life, self-murder”.

Can we settle the matter now?

Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Lord Gordon of Strathblane Excerpts

Friday 18th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gordon of Strathblane (Lab)]

My Lords, obviously this is going to be a very long debate, but frankly we do not talk about death nearly enough. After all, it is going to happen to us all. As Mark Twain said, death and taxes are the only two certainties in life. We seem to spend an inordinate amount of time finding out what our prospective Members of Parliament think about taxation, but given the timescale referred to by my noble friend Lord Elder and the fact, regrettable or not, that this is now firmly on the political agenda, it might be at least as important that people should find out at the next election what their MPs think about death and assisted suicide.

My quarrel with the Bill starts with its title. It is not about assisted dying but about assisted suicide. An assisted dying Bill would provide for the universal availability of palliative care, good medical care and good medical discernment of the moment when you no longer impede my natural progress towards death. The usual phrase,

“not officiously strive to keep alive”,

is often quoted. There is, however, a vital Rubicon between not impeding progress towards death artificially and deliberately taking life, to which the noble Lord, Lord Hameed, referred earlier. That, frankly, is a Rubicon that I do not think society is genuinely prepared to cross because it is the cement which holds society together. Once you allow it in one case, it will spread like wildfire.

The same thing applies to our attitude to suicide. We treat people who attempt to commit suicide with compassion and understanding, but we certainly do not encourage them to do it. Indeed, we inaugurate measures throughout society to try to prevent people committing suicide. If a doctor or a nurse, or indeed any one of us, were walking across one of the bridges and found someone trying to clamber over the edge saying, “I’ve got only six months to live. I don’t want to live. Help me”, none of us would feel that shoving them off was the appropriate response. We would try to talk them down and persuade them that life is worth living after all.

The present law likewise says that we should never deliberately kill other people. This proposed Bill makes an exception of people with certain conditions. What does that say about those people? It says in effect, “Look, we don’t really think your life is worth living, so we are giving you the chance of ending it”. That is not a great encouragement to those who are in that condition and who at that point need all the support and love that society can give them rather than inviting them to turn their backs on society.

There is also the point that many of the very deeply distressing cases which we are all aware of—I do not pretend to have an answer to how we should deal with the problem—are not covered by the Bill. Reference has been made to the comments of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Neuberger, in the Supreme Court on why we do not make this available to the chronically ill, who are going to suffer for a lot longer than the terminally ill. There is no logic to simply restricting it to the terminally ill. I can almost guarantee that before this Bill leaves the House of Lords it will be changed, and if not it will certainly be changed in the Commons, and if not then certainly within a year. This is going to go much wider than the proponents of the Bill ever imagine it would.

It is very important to realise that overt pressure from outside is not the main problem we are trying to guard against, but pressure from within oneself. Noble Lords have alluded to that feeling; people feel that they are becoming a burden, and therefore—as I think the noble Lord, Lord McColl, said earlier on—you feel that you should do the decent thing and just slough off this mortal coil. We do that at our peril.

I am surprised that more weight has not been given to the joint statement of all the faith communities. This is perhaps one of the very few occasions on which they have all come together, despite their different backgrounds, and have come out unanimously against the Bill. We ignore at our peril the experience of centuries that is contained in those faith communities. It is also important to notice that, although there are divisions, the official position of the medical community is firmly against the Bill. They do not want to be involved in killing—they are involved in care. Frankly, as a patient, I do not want my doctor to be involved in killing, even if it is not me.

It is also important to note that the relationship with GPs will be changed. There is also a danger—I put it no higher than that—because we should be finding a cure for the disease, not killing the patient. If we make killing the patient the easy and cheap option, that might just remove some of the urgency of finding cures, which I hope we can do for even the most intractable diseases.

It is time that we moved on to the next speaker. I am certainly in favour of giving the Bill a Second Reading, because it should be debated more widely and for a longer period of time.

Queen's Speech

Lord Gordon of Strathblane Excerpts

Thursday 27th May 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gordon of Strathblane]

My Lords, after that speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, I should immediately say that I warmly congratulate the noble Lord, Lord McNally, and the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Jones, on their appointments and that I recognise that the coalition is the best solution possible given the result that the electorate delivered us. Indeed, I frankly would like it to be a tripartite solution, because this country faces economic problems that will require almost a unanimous view in Parliament if the measures that are taken are to be acceptable in the country at large.

Alistair Darling said that the cuts that would be coming would be more severe than anything under Margaret Thatcher, so, if we are honest, we can safely say that three-quarters of the cuts proposed by the coalition would have been brought forward by a Labour Government anyway. The quicker that we recognise that, the quicker politicians will regain the respect of the public, who know that things are tough and that quantitative easing, necessary though it may be, is methadone economics and does not solve the problem in the long run.

From time to time, I have mused that, much as I love the pomp and ceremony of the State Opening of Parliament every year, there might be a case for having it only after a general election and setting out a programme for a five-year Parliament. I wondered whether the coalition Government had privately decided to do that, because there are 25 Bills. That is an ambitious programme to achieve in five years, let alone just one quite long Session of Parliament.

I am particularly concerned about the state of play in Scotland. The media and the political class in general had not really caught up with the devolution legislation that had been enacted until the health warnings in the prime ministerial debates, which said, “By the way, what you are about to hear does not apply in Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland”. It may not have escaped noble Lords’ notice that Alex Salmond has opted to delay public spending cuts for a year. To give him the benefit of the doubt, there may be legitimate economic reasons for going more gently in Scotland. However, it is also the case that the Scottish elections are due next year and I would not like to think that Scotland will face double trouble, perhaps under another Government immediately after the election, where we might have had slightly less pain if we had introduced the cuts more gently this year.

We have a problem in Scotland—I regret that a lot of my fellow countrymen would like to blame someone else for their problems. The reason why I think that there is a case for giving greater fiscal responsibility to the Scottish Parliament is that it would presumably end that, although I have heard SNP spokesmen blaming Westminster for the crisis in the Royal Bank of Scotland, which defeats logic. In Scotland, if you can blame someone else and the other person is English, you score double; if they are English Tories, you hit the jackpot.

I am also glad that we have a coalition with substantial Liberal Democrat representation in Scotland. Again, without being too cynical, if I were David Cameron, Scotland contributed one MP to my total and getting rid of Scotland left me with probably a safe Conservative majority in England, I would find it tempting to cobble together a deal with Alex Salmond. The Liberal Democrats would have much more to lose if that happened, so I hope that they will exercise a restraining influence. Like all Scots, I value the Union, if only because we Scots need something bigger to run than Scotland.

I also draw attention to the fact that in 2015 the five-year Parliament here will end and there will be Scottish government elections. We will therefore be faced with the electorate in Scotland having elections to Westminster under one system, elections to the Scottish Parliament under another and possibly even elections to the House of Lords under yet a third system. What a recipe for total chaos.

That brings me, naturally, to the House of Lords. I do not believe in an elected House of Lords, but I recognise the validity of a lot of the arguments put forward for it. You certainly can have an elected House of Lords, but do not try to make it subservient to the House of Commons. As the noble Lords, Lord Rooker and Lord Armstrong, both said, if the House of Lords were elected by proportional representation, which the Liberal Democrats passionately believe is a superior system, how would it not be at least the equal of, if not superior to, the House of Commons? You cannot say to a House of Lords that is elected, “You can have nothing to do with the Budget, with supply and everything else”. It will demand the powers and take them gradually. If not given them, it will threaten a total strike on all legislation until it is given them. That will happen ineluctably.

The second argument that I would put against election is to ask whether the public really want a second set of MPs. I doubt that they do. Are we going to pay an elected House? If we are going to pay and it is partly elected, do we pay the ones who are elected or do we pay everyone? If we pay everyone, how popular is that going to be with the public? It would mean great expenditure at a time when the rest of the nation has been asked to make sacrifices, all to achieve a political principle of how we put people here, not to change fundamentally the nature of the job that they do. The other point that I would make about an elected House has already been made by the noble Lord, Lord Rooker: there is no accountability if you are elected for a single term, because you are not responsible to anyone.

There are problems in this House. I am sure that we can do better and we must never be complacent, but, honestly, when you look at the two Houses of Parliament dispassionately, which do you think is in more need of reform? I am sure that even the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, would admit that it is the House of Commons; it is the more important House and it is certainly more drastically in need of reform. After all, do the electorate elect a member of the Government or someone to control the Government? One-third of the majority party or the coalition are in government and therefore have a somewhat vested interest in looking after it, while at least another one-third want to be in it and therefore will not be too hard on the Government in the hope of preferment in the future. The only people on the government or coalition side who will really be scrutinising the Government are those who will have been kicked out after the first reshuffle and will have nothing to lose. We have things to change in Parliament as a whole, but the first priority is at the other end of the building.