Covid-19: International Response

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Monday 18th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, noble Lords have focused on one aspect of the present crisis after another and, quite properly, fears have been expressed about how the poorest countries in the world will cope with the outbreak of Covid-19. How will the untold numbers in refugee camps, drought-affected and locust-ravaged Africa or war-torn nations cope?

I welcome the Minister’s reference to the Government’s commitment to a future strategy, but that of course begs the question: how do we build back better? In the Labour Party I keep hearing the words, “We must see this as another Beveridge moment”. Who could disagree? However, it also has to be another Bretton Woods moment, another United Nations, with all its agencies, moment, another Marshall plan moment and—forgive me—another Christian Aid moment. We must adamantly refuse to allow the resumption of things as they were. This has to be a moment when we overhaul and recalibrate all these systems and institutions and make them fit for the purpose of building a world order where injustice and poverty, ignorance and idleness, and squalor and disease are overcome for all peoples.

The first Beveridge moment did not occur by magic in the summer of 1945; its recommendations had been worked at seriously for a number of years. The Labour Party secured a three-day debate in our own Chamber in March 1943, in the very midst of the war. This ensured that commitments were made that gave the implementation of the report a flying start. As then, so now. We must cope with and respond to needs and trends as we find them, but we must not take our eye off the ball. The future awaits us and our best efforts to shape it creatively and for the common good must go on right now. The Beveridge report dealt with our domestic agenda. The new Beveridge moment must envisage nothing short of the common good and the survival of the planet.

East Africa: Locusts

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Tuesday 4th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sugg]

My Lords, we are clear that the best way to deal with this outbreak is through pesticides. The primary method of controlling the swarms is through vehicle-mounted and aerial sprayers. That is what we will continue to advise and what the FAO, which is leading on the response, recommends as the best option.

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I readily recognise the superior intelligence of the right reverend Prelates in the matter of locusts and plagues. I cannot help thinking of all that is happening to combat the coronavirus epidemic, which has activated responses from all the continents of the earth, and contrasting that with foreseeable and regular outbreaks of the pestilence that we have recently seen television shots of—whatever we ascribe as the causes of all this. Many of us have lived in countries where that kind of thing happens and therefore cannot see them other than from the perspective of the people affected. When will the world wake up to the need to address, on behalf of the voiceless, as much of its energy and heartwarming sympathy to areas like this as it does to the other instance—without wanting to simplify or compare them in an inappropriate way? Is it not time for our Government, speaking perhaps for the global community, to increase levels of awareness and response?

[Baroness Sugg]

My Lords, we have locust swarms on a yearly basis, but this is a larger swarm than has been seen in decades. With the swarm increasing twentyfold over each breeding season and with planting activities for crops taking place, there is a need to undertake effective control measures right now. I certainly agree with the noble Lord that we need to address the global challenges we face, and I point him towards the UK hosting COP 26, which will be a great opportunity for the UK to show our world-leading efforts to get to net zero by 2050 and to address the impacts of climate change.

International Women’s Day

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, this afternoon’s debate marks the culmination of a week of questions addressed to the Government on the role and rights of women and the restrictions they face in our communities, our nation and the world. I hesitated long and hard before adding my name to the speaker’s list. I felt that I should just listen rather than speak on such a day and on such a subject. But my wife counts the Pankhurst sisters among her forebears. “Put your name down”, she said, and I did. I congratulate all those who are contributing to our deliberations and, in the end, I am delighted to be counted among their number.

The Library briefing for this debate identifies key issues and addresses them, in the main, by means of statistics. This allows us to look quantitatively at various aspects of the situations faced by women: domestic violence, representation in the boardroom and senior management, the gender pay gap, our educational system, health, and participation in leadership and political life. This approach allows us to build an evidence-based picture, to spot trends and to measure success—or the lack of it—in efforts to build a world of equal opportunity, equal rights and equal rewards. It offers a vital tool as we move forward.

The last thing we need today is to be damned with faint notes of paternalism: some nice, comforting, cheap words from someone like me about solidarity and support for the struggle—good, high-minded things such as that. I want to stand in solidarity and want keenly to offer support, but I would prefer that to be measured by what I do rather than by what I might choose to say. My reason for adding my voice to that of so many others today may be thought somewhat strange. It is self-interest that has driven me to speak. I am tired of being part of a culture, and heir to a history, of patriarchal domination. As a 21st-century man, I am weary of feeling imprisoned within a stereotype: that of male power, trapped on the wrong side of all those statistics, part of an unfair and unjustifiable system. I long for continuing and accelerating progress in the journey towards gender equality, certainly for its own sake but also, undeniably, because the freedoms that will thus be enjoyed by women will bring consequential freedoms to men.

As a white man, I could put forward an almost identical case for race equality. As a heterosexual man, I could do the same for justice for people of all sexual identities. As a Christian, I long for the extirpation of all that smells of anti-Semitism or Islamophobia. As a relatively well-off person, I must fight the corner of the dispossessed and marginalised. Progress in any of those fields of endeavour will inevitably bring benefits to me too. The freedom of others is the best possible guarantee of something approaching freedom for me. Is it selfish? I suppose so. Is it motivating? Definitely.

Let me bow out by borrowing some lines from the poet John Donne. The relevant lines for the point I am trying to make will be obvious, but I have left in two or three words that are superfluous to my argument but not without their importance at this time. We all know the original words anyway. No person is an island; everyone is a piece of the continent, a part of the main, and,

“if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less”—

those were the words I spoke of, in case your Lordships’ had not guessed. Any person’s inequality diminishes me because I am involved in humankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for me.

I am more than grateful for the opportunity to speak on a day such as this and on such a noble subject. I express the hope that I might be a beneficiary of all the progress aspired to by those who have contributed thus far to this debate.

Civil Partnerships, Marriages and Deaths (Registration etc) Bill

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 1st March 2019 Lords Chamber

Secondly, the Church itself must continue its conversation and debate, and reach conclusions through the careful process of listening, exploration and discernment about the right way forward and the right time for such a move. While I am grateful to the noble Lord for his amendment and deeply grateful for the speeches that have been made, and will gladly commit to passing on to my colleagues all the views expressed here, I hope the Government and the House will resist the amendment, as on previous occasions in this Chamber.

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, before the right reverend Prelate sits down, I ask for some clarification. Has he heard from those who have spoken that there is no intention or desire to ask the Church of England to proceed in a secondary place in response to this debate? We recognise the hoops you have to go through and the legal difficulties that are encountered. I just heard him say that the Church must make its mind up first; I think everybody here would agree with that. But why take so long? If the Church of England has admitted openly gay people to its ranks as priests, has the ground not already been covered? Are the essential issues not already clear? Has the agonising not already taken place? The next step is not a difficult one.

[The Lord Bishop of Oxford]

I thank the noble Lord for the question and the invitation to respond. During the time of my ministry, the Church of England has grappled with two other issues: the remarriage of divorcees and the admission of women to different orders of Christian ministry. In both cases, it has taken the Church in its processes a very long time to come to judicious conclusions. That is the way we are. Our decision-making processes are naturally set up to be conservative and to take time to implement serious change after careful thought.

To change canon law, there will need to be significant majorities in favour of such change in the General Synod of the Church of England. Therefore, I anticipate that this debate will continue into the lifetime of the next synod, which begins in 2020. The debate this morning has accurately highlighted the diversity of views across the Church and the significantly shifting diversity of view in favour of change—that is a subjective view. One of the things which impedes that change of view in the life of the Church is a fear lest it be seen to be in any way compelled to make up its mind by external forces, even if that is not the intention of the amendment—I recognise it is not, very clearly. However, that external pressure would itself be a rallying call to those opposed to change.

Home Office: Data Breaches

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Tuesday 5th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

The noble Lord goes a bit above my pay grade, but I am sure that he is right. The Question today refers to lost documents—that is, documents that are sent in good faith and then lost, and then the individual who has sent the document has great difficulty in obtaining whatever service it is that they wish to complete. As I say, the presence of a data protection officer and some of the digitisation that the Home Office is undertaking should help to alleviate this.

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, in answer to a previous Question, the noble Lord, Lord Ashton of Hyde, made ample reference to the secure keeping of people’s data. In reply to this Question addressed to the Home Office, we have heard pretty good evidence of anything other than the security of people’s personal data. Will the Home Office be subject to the same scrutiny, supervision and possible sanctions that small clubs will be subject to as a result of the misuse of people’s data in this way? Might it be appropriate to ask the noble Lord, Lord Ashton, to reply?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

The simple answer is yes—every public body will be under the same obligation.

India

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Wednesday 26th November 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I am conscious that I stand among people whose knowledge of this subject is far greater and more specific than my own. I will not detain your Lordships long.

The multifaceted nature of India as a country has been well referred to, on both the positive and the negative side. What impresses one about India is that a problem is always a big problem, even if we are talking about a small percentage of the total population. It worries me that the United Nations continues to point the finger at India in terms of its—shall we say—patchy record on poverty, dispossession, injustice and the rest of it, as I read in a report in yesterday’s newspaper. The worry for me is that when the figures are broken down, we see how disproportionately the suffering of all these injustices falls upon those who have few rights and a low place in society.

I am very glad that Mr Modi’s inaugural address has been referred to. As I understand from reading it very quickly, a big emphasis was placed on improving sanitation. The word appears many times. Sanitation of itself is not going to solve the problem. It might cleanse the situations where the scavenging and the rest of it is done, but unless those who do the scavenging have entitlements to good homes, access to education and the possibility of flourishing and developing, that of itself will not do much good. Mr Modi is not the first-high ranking Indian politician to make promises or commitments.

Nor is India without its statutes on the statute book promising progress in this area—the 1989 Act has been referred to. The problem seems to be a lack of will to enforce the legislation that exists. The noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, suggested that we ask Her Majesty’s Government to put pressure on the Indian authorities to support and perhaps to force those who implement law in India to actually apply the law that exists. I think that would go a long way towards progress in this area.

I began my life not scavenging in the same sense but scavenging on tips, crawling over refuse and picking it up in order that I and my family might survive—not excrement or anything like that, so I cannot say that it is in the same league. I simply know that dignity for me came through the educational path that was opened up for me. I can only hope that in India there will be a real concentration of effort to open these doorways of opportunity to people who are trapped outside the caste system. That is what we have to remember about the Dalits. The problem is not that they are lower caste; it is that they have no caste at all and therefore no position in society. It is the proportion of people in Indian society who suffer in this way that concerns me, as well as the fact that no action seems to be taken to implement legislation that is already on the statute book. I feel that it is legitimate to ask Her Majesty’s Government to put what pressure they can on the Indian Government to look at these areas in order that we might have measurable outcomes in the years to come.

It is very important for us to recognise that the Dalit question is not limited to India. There is a diasporic presence of Dalits in the West—not as much as in the East but at least a significant presence—and the vulnerability of Dalits, as people without caste, to things such as trafficking, slavery, bonded labour and so on is a concern for all of us. Therefore, we should not limit our attention to the Indian Government, but wherever this problem exists, we should address it.

The question of religion has been raised; indeed, three of us here have known religious affiliations. I think the last thing that any of us would want is for us to be heard, as members of the Christian faith, pointing the finger at people of another faith. I do not think that it is a question of faith at all. Certainly, I do not think that the Christian community is free of involvement in the problem that we are discussing, and we should recognise that.

It is a question of caste. We live in a class-ridden society and we are looking at a caste-ridden society. People who are trapped, without the possibility of escaping from what entraps them, are people all of us should stand behind. The equalities that we proclaim here in this country that break people out of being bound by class are the equalities that we should espouse and adumbrate for people, wherever they may be, who seek to break out of the caste system. I can only hope that this short debate will sharpen our minds and strengthen our wills to work for a world where class and caste are a thing of the past.

Bishops and Priests (Consecration and Ordination of Women) Measure

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Tuesday 14th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, who would have thought that last business on a cold and wet Tuesday could be so significant, so exciting? In fact, I called a rather bemused Table Office at 10 minutes to five on the last day of the summer term when I saw the Measure on forthcoming business and inquired urgently, “Am I allowed to speak?”. I have therefore been musing this summer what I should say on this seriously exciting stuff if you are a woman attending an Anglican church.

Perhaps I should briefly elaborate. If you are a woman in 21st century Britain and you take for granted your freedoms, you just need to read a novel such as A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, describing life today for Afghani women, to know how fortunate you are. If you are a woman in politics and lacking vision, you have just to pop to Victoria Gardens and stare at the statue of Emmeline Pankhurst; you will soon find fresh inspiration.

Women in leadership in the church is, of course, a trickier issue. With a few notable exceptions such as Elizabeth Fry, we are not brimming with role models in leadership—or so I thought until three years ago, when I visited the Anglican cathedral in Kampala, Uganda. And there you will find plaques on the wall to the people who left England in the late 19th and early 20th centuries at the invitation of the king of Buganda, who had asked the Anglicans to come with their Christian message. I noticed that the plaques on the wall fell into two distinct categories: the first was of small family groups, such as Dr and Mrs Manning and their six year-old child; and then there were women—women who left England alone to go to a land that they had never even seen in a photograph and never came home. Perhaps they would have gone anyway, even if, at that time, they had been allowed to use their talents in English parishes. However, I suspect that many women went overseas as, at that time, it was one of the few options for them to use their talents. The irony that they taught and led congregations of black men may only have dawned on later generations. No one knows the names of these women, but they are role models. Their legacy is obvious, as after exporting much of the best talent for decades, if not centuries, it is perhaps no surprise that 98% of the Anglican Church is outside England, and much of it is growing numerically very quickly.

Since I decided to speak, the issue of the best talent for leadership has arisen in another guise for the Anglican Church, which the recruitment of women as bishops may inadvertently assist. There are no published data on the social background of the leadership of the Anglican Church, but the Church Times journalist Madeleine Davies applied the criteria from the recent report by Alan Milburn’s social mobility commission to the current Anglican leadership and found that half of our bishops are from public schools. Although I rate the most reverend Primate as the most down-to-earth Etonian I have ever met, I am keenly aware that this is treading-on-eggshells territory. Half the bishops may have been on assisted places to attend such schools, and there was certainly no chapel at my state comprehensive, so that might be the explanation.

I am convinced that God, who lived on earth as a skilled craftsman, has given the competence to lead churches to some unusual suspects. Women as bishops will probably give a head start to broadening the educational background among leaders, and I hope that the work of my noble friend Lord Green of Hurstpierpoint to talent-spot and develop leadership will include looking at barriers to entry, recruitment in your own image and unconscious bias, which we all carry. Perhaps my noble friend could do a wee investigation of those on the approved list held by the Crown Nominations Commission to see what the future trend might be.

There is one additional aspect that my noble friend Lord Green might consider that did not trouble Alan Milburn but may disproportionally affect women in the church. I was so troubled by this issue that when I attended Synod in York I mentioned it to Dr Caroline Boddington, who I understand holds the list I mentioned. I referred to the women going to Buganda alone. They were, of course, single women. Marital status, I am told, is irrelevant to selection, but if an institution which has so many single people in its ranks ends up disproportionately promoting married people, one might want to investigate. God was, after all, a skilled craftsman who was single.

The Measure before your Lordships’ House is a wonderful opportunity for the church to be a role model for our boardrooms, Armed Forces and, indeed, Parliament to show how leadership is done at its best. I thoroughly welcome the transitional provisions to see women bishops join this House earlier than the current system would allow. I hope that the heart of the most reverend Primate is not sinking at my high expectations of future leadership by both men and women in the church. I have always believed it is a miracle that this state comp girl is a Conservative Peer. All that I have outlined is eminently possible. An exciting era is about to begin.

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I will make a short speech, if I may, at several levels. First, as a member of the human race committed to fighting for gender equality and the smashing of glass ceilings that prevent women from rising to the very top of institutions, I welcome this proposal. Secondly, as a member of the Ecclesiastical Committee, I simply reiterate the support that I gave for this Measure when the committee met earlier. It is about time, too. We all think that, and we now just want the action to proceed. Thirdly, as a member and former president of the Methodist Conference, I am determined that it should not simply be Anglican voices that give expression to their delight in this debate; Methodists across the land will rejoice at it. We will of course endeavour not to gloat at the tardy joining of Methodists by Anglicans on the road that sees women in top leadership. Fourthly, as the husband of a wife who is a direct descendant of the Pankhurst family—my wife is sitting in the Chamber at the moment so I had better say the right thing—I have learnt what can be achieved by the determination of women seeking after justice and righteousness. Finally, in my own right, I want to be able to show my grandchildren with great pride my name on the record when this Measure was accepted.

Poverty in the Developing World

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 28th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port]

My Lords, I am more than grateful for the fact that this matter has been brought before us for debate. Sometimes, as I sit on these Benches listening to the discussion of various pieces of legislation, I feel that I would like all of them checked out for how they impact on poor people, a kind of conditioning criteria by which we may judge the humaneness of the legislation produced by these Houses of Parliament. I am also delighted that a debate on extreme poverty comes before us like this, but I would want to check the abstract Latinate noun “poverty” against the poor people who constitute, as a phenomenon, the noun in question. I come from a crucible of abject poverty and have spent quite a lot of my adult life living among the poorest people in the world, so I cannot come to a debate like this without some kind of imagination filled with real examples on the issue.

I start by saying how personal the subject is to me just now. Our only daughter married a lovely Cambodian boy whose father, on the way home from school at the age of 15, was forcibly recruited into Pol Pot’s army in Cambodia. He spent the next three and a half years indoctrinated and drugged and was part of that army about whose devastating outcomes we know only too well. My daughter’s father-in-law has been traumatised by that and is a wreck of a man now. When we visit Cambodia, we are able, because of our son-in-law, to go well beyond where tourists go, into the villages and out into the countryside, and we experience a country that has known more than its share of trauma over the years. Therefore, for me, poverty is not just the absence of physical benefits and material things, but it is a state of mind that oppression, of one kind or another, has reduced one to over many years. Cambodia has become very dear to me and it is clawing its way very slowly out of the desperate situation of 20, 30 and 40 years ago.

I could add much to illustrate my concern and underline it by my experience over a number of years as chairman of Christian Aid’s Africa committee. I saw the effects of civil war in Mozambique, in Sudan and in Eritrea—Eritrea is slightly different—and all the devastating effects of war over many years. I shall never forget going to Mozambique and seeing no animals in the countryside because, over the duration of the war, they had been killed to feed people. I saw a young man who had been trained to fly MiG fighters for the Soviet air force by one side in that dispute, and once the Cold War was over, or at least the Warsaw Pact countries were loosening their hold on certain countries in Africa, he was retraining as a people’s lawyer to help ordinary people to identify their land holdings, the papers having been lost and the lands expropriated over many years.

It is stories like that that remind me of the small initiatives that happen in desperately poor countries to help people to take a step at a time out of poverty. Of course, the real matrix of my own understanding about extreme poverty comes from the 10 years that I lived in Haiti, the poorest country in the western world. I was there just three months ago and I saw the people living in tented villages and suffering from an outbreak of cholera. There are also those for whom floods, earthquakes, droughts and the terrible ravages of nature impose a kind of poverty on them that is wilful and hazardous and that comes at a moment’s notice. One can distinguish between that understanding of poverty and the chronic and endemic poverty that lasts generations and flows from the history of Haiti. It saw the first black republic in the world emerge from the shackles of colonialism in 1804, when 500,000 people, who had been plantation labourers, fled to the hills and went into subsistence farming. Two hundred years later, they have denuded the countryside of all its trees; they have completely impoverished the land; and 80 per cent of them are illiterate. While I was living there, AIDS reared its ugly head as early as the 1970s and 1980s—I remember it was such a new phenomenon in those days.

Therefore, the poor are very real in my mind. All the time, I want to try to imagine ourselves into the mindset of poor people as they look around them and wonder what options are available to them. I mentioned earlier—although will not dwell upon it—the poverty into which I was born, to a single mother with two boys living in one room for many, many years. Luckily, I passed the 11-plus and went to a grammar school—and was there with Members of this House in fact—but, for all that, I know that I have had a gilded life subsequent to those beginnings. What were the indicators that suggested to me that there was a way out of the poverty my mother and her family had known in the 1930s—soup kitchens and all that kind of stuff? During my childhood in the 1940s, our local Member of Parliament—to whose memory I pay immense tribute—was James Griffiths, who at that time was the deputy leader of the Labour Party. He turned down a job in Mr Attlee’s Cabinet in the Foreign Office in order to be Minister for Work and Pensions, in those days when our parliamentary leaders had lived a proper life somewhere else before they came into politics. Through his ministrations in the other place, he brought onto the statue book the Family Allowances Act—although that was Eleanor Rathbone’s creation—the National Assistance Act, the National Insurance Act, pensions legislation and so on. These, along with the Butler Education Act and the National Health Service, gave people trapped in poverty, as we were, a new horizon.

I ask myself where in the world that we live in, with this extreme poverty so endemic, similar indicators are to be found. We have the Bretton Woods arrangements, the World Bank, the World Health Organisation and the Food and Agriculture Organisation. They are all there, but how does that translate down into the mentality of people, who are trapped in poverty, who say, “This gives me my chance”? Until those great things that are thought up on high are appropriated by people below, they do not amount to much more than a bar of soap. That is the trick.

I will draw my remarks to a close as I see the time is up. I was present in Haiti just recently and remembered the work that we did planting trees. There are forests there that we planted 30 years ago. Building roads, forming co-operatives, organising little primary healthcare systems, education, literacy and desalinating seawater in order to give drinking water to people—these things can happen and can be done; but only by engaging with real people who are poor, not by talking about poverty until the cows come home.

I welcome the opportunity to play some part in this debate and urge your Lordships to look at this issue as something that should preoccupy us seriously and constantly through all our deliberations.