Civil Society

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 11th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, what a lovely offering for Members of your Lordships’ House to have one Griffiths followed by another. It may never happen again and I hope noble Lords will make a note in their minds of the fact that they were here when it happened. In Fforestfach and in Burry Port the two Griffiths would be distinguished from each other, not by their political persuasions but because one is “Griff church” and the other is “Griff chapel”, so it is from a more angular view that I shall comment on the issues that have been raised.

I live near the Old Street roundabout, “Silicon Roundabout”, where buildings are going up at a rate of knots and high-tech industries are being created by the hundred day by day. Just up the road is the forthcoming development that will be so good when it happens—we have been disrupted for so many years—of the Crossrail station linking Liverpool Street with all the other places. At the Old Street roundabout—now no longer ours but until recently it was—stands the Leysian Mission. It was a mission outpost for the pupils and alumni of The Leys school in Cambridge—a Methodist school. Between the two wars the mission was a terrific place for addressing poverty. People would come in voluntarily to attend to the needs of suffering people during times of depression, offering clothing, food, recreation and a fight for justice. There was a poor man’s lawyer, a crèche and all those things. Thousands of people were helped.

The Second World War damaged the buildings and they were not quite as useful afterwards, but more importantly the welfare state made many of the services being offered no longer necessary or apposite. As I look back from this vantage point to the fact that such institutions—Toynbee Hall is another—lost their focus for proper reasons, I sometimes ask myself whether there was an unintended consequence of the creation of the welfare state. Let there be no mistake about it—I am a prime beneficiary of all the provisions of the welfare state, having enjoyed national assistance, national health, education and all the rest of it through all the instrumentalities that flowed from the creation of the welfare state. However, the unintended consequence is that it sort of diminished the perceived need for voluntary activity in community action and work. We have to work hard in the economic climate that we are now living through to rediscover and reinvigorate that sense of voluntarism. The voluntary sector is picking up, whether or not it wants to, on much of the work done by public institutions which are finding their budgets severely threatened. It is important to recreate this voluntary sector, as there will be a lot more work for it to do.

I want to focus on another side of the Silicon Roundabout. Right opposite diametrically is the Central Foundation Boys’ School. I am the chair of trustees for that and the girls’ school in Tower Hamlets. I want to point to the plight of a group of volunteers who serve as governors of that school. At the beginning of the previous Parliament, two education Bills were pushed through that made the academisation of our education system more rapid. The Queen’s Speech has promised another such Bill, which will make it almost impossible to stop the tide of this one-size-fits-all approach to solving our educational problems. I do not want to go into that for the moment. That school is not yet an academy—it may have to become one—but headmasters, headmistresses and governors are being given much more responsibility for running multimillion pound businesses without necessarily any of the skills or the salaries that go with that. They are accountable only to central government—nothing local at all. I simply warn your Lordships that there are impending problems in this area, as those who have not been trained to run businesses find themselves up against obstacles that they cannot solve. One of the glories of the voluntary sector in this country is the governance of schools—how many people give hours and hours of their time for this purpose—and the present economic and political situation will threaten this wonderful tradition in British society if we are not careful.

The last time I addressed the subject of the report Who Is My Neighbour? was, of all things, at Gray’s Inn, in the chapel there, when I preached the Mulligan sermon about a month ago. It is to remember a judgment made by Lord Atkin—another fine Welshman; I just wish his name had been Griffiths as well—as long ago as 1932. The rule he made to deal with a proliferation of precedents in the application of the common law was to prove foundational for all subsequent judgments. The Donoghue v Stevenson case had to do with someone who manufactured ginger beer, someone who sold it, someone who drank it and, to her consternation, discovered coming out of the bottle that she was pouring on to her ice cream a decomposing snail. Your Lordships can see that the opportunity to preach some pretty vivid sermons arises from these circumstances.

The point is that the dear Lord Atkin of Aberdovey concluded that there was a duty of care and a question of negligence in law not only between the manufacturer and his client, who sold it in the restaurant, and not only between the owner of the restaurant and the person who bought it, but also to the person who had received for nothing the gift from her friend, the bottle in which the snail was to be found. The dear Lord concluded that the duty of care—the laws of negligence—could not be applied in the courts other than restrictively and he longed for theologians and those into moral theology to look at the question of the unrestricted applicability of the duty of care and the question of negligence. It is the job of the church to do that. We want to point to the fact that this duty of care ought to apply generally, not just in the restricted way that the courts feel obliged to apply it.

It is the duty of politics, of course, to take those understandings and—since politics is the law of the possible—with its own restrictions address them. Who is my neighbour, the duty of care and the question of negligence are questions for British society as a whole and nobody should attack the church for raising them in a general way, even though we in politics must then see what we can do by way of response.

Church of England: Holistic Missions

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 21st November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise with great pleasure to follow the maiden speech of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Carlisle. It is not a good week to be a Methodist Minister, so I am hoping very much that the right reverend Prelate will recognise the sincerity of what I am about to say. The pair of us go back quite a long way. When I was on the management committee of an ecumenical project that he was running at Bar Hill, just outside Cambridge, I used to have to keep an eye on him to make sure that he was doing the right things. That is the right relationship of the Methodist Church to the Church of England. Subsequent to that, in Grasmere, when he was the Bishop of Penrith, we had a marvellous, county-wide effort and we met up again there. What he does in Cumbria for the cause of ecumenism is almost proverbial and is certainly trend-setting. I hope that since there are two other right reverend Prelates sitting there, they will learn from his example and follow the same route.

It is lovely to hear that extra dimension being drawn into the right reverend Prelate’s remarks. We must remember, as we concentrate on a debate that so specifically picks out the Church of England, that that is only one player in the field—of course, I want to draw attention to that. However, we look forward to many useful, helpful, edifying contributions from the right reverend Prelate. If they are not forthcoming, I will tell him so. Of course, I feel as if I am in the middle of a sandwich here, because I look forward with great interest to the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Lawrence, who has set a tone for British civil society and indeed for the national consciousness that we must all learn from. It is not for me to thank her for what she has not yet delivered, but I stand in great anticipation of what she will deliver.

On this debate, I have to say that my greatest anxiety is that it can delude us into thinking that the Church of England is where it all is. What does it mean to be a Methodist? It is often thought that John Wesley, when he started off, was a pietistic preacher, full of spiritual energy and indefatigable zeal. However, perhaps less is known about the fact that intrinsic to his ministry from the beginning were actions of social commitment that were totally convincing. He had a kind of mini health service, free at the point of need, which he ran from the place in City Road where I now work. He had a ministry to people on death row in Newgate Prison, a microfinance project with a commitment to helping the poor with their financial needs, and a ragged school, which attracted boys and girls from the Moorfield slums, clothing and feeding them if necessary. I can say only that the vital religion of a Methodist like John Wesley is coupled inevitably with a commitment to the transformation of society, so we do not have to think of it as an add-on at all. We think that we are not doing our job if we are not doing such things, and that is the end of the matter.

I have been the superintendent of the West London Mission for a number of years and was the boss of the late Lord Soper of Kingsway—although if anybody says that they were his boss, they need their head read—who initiated extraordinary work across the capital city that still exists to a large extent. That included a bail hostel with a day centre for over 25 year-olds—it is easy to get money for the needs of children and young people, but getting money for the needs of older homeless people is immensely difficult. There was total commitment, and it was open 365 days a year. He also initiated work with young offenders, a walk-in centre for people with addictions or substance abuse of one kind or another, which is multifaceted and free, again, for all who cross the threshold. That was a remarkable piece of work, with 80 employees and hundreds of volunteers who helped to keep it running. That, therefore, is of the essence; I have often said from the pulpit, “What’s the point of you having religion if you don’t bring a smile to someone’s face and make their lives a little easier?”. There does not seem to be much point otherwise.

I want simply to draw the circle outwards a little—no, I do not want even to do that. I do not like the compass having its fixed point in the Church of England, with ever larger circles drawn outside it. We are partners in this, and this whole thing must be seen in that sense. Why finish there? Why think that that is the range we are thinking of? My colleague, a very redoubtable Yorkshirewoman, is at this very minute standing up—if the programme that I have here is running to plan—to introduce someone from the Amida London Buddhist Centre. Ten minutes ago she introduced Mohammed Kozbar from the Finsbury Park Mosque as part of Inter Faith Week. Our work with the faiths is considerable.

John Wesley’s sermon on bigotry said that if someone else is doing a good piece of work, and it is recognised as being good, those of us who are Christian have no right to think that we cannot collaborate with them. You hold hands together and do the good, and that is the end of it. The work in the field of interfaith work has to be recognised at this point; there is so much of it around. I will give some figures: there are 289 social projects run by Islington faith-based organisations—that is 289 in one London borough. There are 536 volunteers, 68 full-time staff and 52 part-time staff. Some 74% of faith-based organisations work in partnerships across faiths and within faiths, and 65% are done in collaboration with people of good will who have no faith at all. At the end of the day, social need is social need, and you work together. If people who have faith feel that that is what motivates them, that is fine—but you do it with everybody else. Phrases such as the “unique place” of the Church of England, and self-aggrandising phrases like that, set my teeth on edge when I read this particular report.

I go back to Islington, as all good people do in the end. Of the social projects run by faith-based organisations in Islington, 32 are in the area of education, 20 in housing and homelessness, 25 in art and music, 19 to do with drug abuse, 20 in the field of health, 14 in the area of business and enterprise, and 13 in the area of employment. That is absolutely fantastic. Just two days ago, in the Cholmondeley Room—I hope one day that someone will tell me why it is pronounced “Chumley”; I am sure that there is a reason—we had a reception for Action for Children, which is a charity that I have supported all my life. It used to be the National Children’s Home, a good Methodist charity. There were 92 volunteers receiving their annual Stephenson awards. As was said in one of the speeches, the monetary value of the voluntary work being done there amounts to £500,000. It would cost the organisation that amount to buy in those services.

We recognise all the good that is done and have no reason to boast about it, because if we were not doing it we would not be the people of faith that we claim to be. There is no need to make a song and dance about it; it is the essence of our very being that we translate what we believe into action of the kinds that we have been talking about.

I am a little bit dubious, too, about the proposals and recommendations that have been made in the ResPublica document. Who wants an office in the Cabinet Office to centre all of this stuff? The Department for Communities and Local Government already has a base there, and it has accomplished a great deal in bringing faith groups together as one means of helping to build an integrated society in Britain. In 2008 the Department for Communities and Local Government produced a report called Face to Face, Side by Side, offering a framework for partnership in our multifaith society. Those are the notes that we need to hear because, at the end of the day, people of good will, whether of faith or not, and those of us who are of faith, know that we must make allegiances and common cause against deprivation and need of every kind.

I offer these remarks not to sink anybody’s ship or rattle anybody’s skeleton cupboard but rather to honour the Church of England as the state church for all the work that it does and recognise that it has a historic role in British society to do just this. But I plead with its representatives to see, in an instinctual way, the existence of others out there not as people for whom to broker involvement in the provision of answers to social need but as partners ready and willing to do our bit as best we can.

I am very grateful to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester for bringing this subject to the Floor of the House. I know that our concentrated thinking on this will raise the profile of the work being done but, perhaps, also challenge us to go on doing it in a more imaginative and colourful way.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Elton (Con)]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port]

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

Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I need not detain your Lordships for long because so much that needs to be said has already been said, and I shall try not to repeat it. The reports of the various committees have been adequately quoted and they are now on the record. I would simply say that I, too, want to stand by the thrust of them all. Observations have been drawn from the Bill itself, especially around the key points set out in Part 2. They have been repeated so, once again, I need not address the ambiguities and the lack of clarity in some of the phrases at the very heart of the proposals. The question that has been asked more than once is one that I will repeat without addressing it: what is the problem to which Part 2 is supposed to be an answer? In repeating the question, I hope that the Minister who is to reply from the Dispatch Box will do his best to see if he can provide an answer, since it has been raised several times.

At the outset of the debate, the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, declared that this Bill was a most misunderstood piece of legislation to which he sought to bring clarity. Pretty much all the speeches that have followed have shown just how misunderstood the Bill is, so he is to be congratulated on his prescience in getting the mood of the House right. I would like simply to piggyback on some of the methodological ways in which the cases have been built. The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, drew on his extensive experience in the criminal justice system to explain how he felt that the proposals in this Bill will impact on organisations working for rehabilitation and restoration within that system. We then heard magisterial speeches from my noble friends Lady Pitkeathley and Lady Donaghy on their respective cases, once again drawing on a wealth of experience and suggesting what might well be, at least prima facie on looking at the Bill, its impact on the activities that they have spent their lives addressing. We heard the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, talk about how the committee that he chairs is drawing its own uneasy conclusions from the legislation as proposed thus far: its haste, its ill judged nature, the way it has been put together so thoughtlessly with no pre-legislative attention, and so on.

I have been thinking about the year-long exclusion zone when all these bodies, agencies and the rest of it are not supposed to indulge in overt political activity. I remember being the victim of just such an exclusion zone myself. I used to do the “Thought for the Day” piece on Radio 4. Since I was at the time the vice-president of the Christian Socialist movement, as soon as an election of any kind drew near, I was withdrawn from the list of contributors because it was obvious to everybody that those two and three-quarter minutes between a quarter to eight and ten to eight in the morning could constitute a real undermining of the political process in this country. I just wish that I could have had the opportunity, if it was acknowledged that I had that power.

It is ridiculous for bodies that are set up to achieve certain objectives to be denied the opportunity to campaign and advocate for the realisation of those objectives. That is their raison d’être. I pick up on the intervention of the noble Lord, Lord Judd, in an earlier speech. There is a contradiction between charity law which requires a charity to do all it can to maximise income to address the objectives for which it is set up as against the way some of the provisions in this Bill just might work out.

I draw a couple of things from personal experience, after which I promise your Lordships I will sit down. For many years, as some of you know, I was living in Haiti. While there, we did everything we had to do to address the dire poverty. We sank wells, we organised co-operatives, we arranged microfinance, primary healthcare, education, literacy and we planted trees. We did everything, and my little outfit looked for collaborators and people of good will with whom to work. We found them in the NGOs and agencies from Britain and from other places around the world.

When I came back from Haiti to live in England, I was burning with the desire to continue with this work. I knew, although we had barely slept some nights because of the work there was and the depth of the poverty we were addressing, that all we had done was dip a toe into the waters. I came back wanting to advocate, wanting to campaign, wanting to get British public opinion onside for what remained to be done. We formed coalitions of interest; we campaigned on the streets; I put together a support group for Haiti; and so it went on.

It becomes natural when the fire burns deep inside the soul for people with common interests to put their energies together in order to knock on the door of government—in order to knock down the door of government, if necessary—so that it can be seen that something needs to be done and that the complacency with which people in countries such as ours live is not to be tolerated.

When I was working as the president of the Methodist Conference and touring the country, I made homelessness the charity that I wanted to support. I was briefed at every point by Shelter. I had been the director of a housing association, also working closely with Shelter. When Occupy did its stuff in the graveyard of St Paul’s Cathedral a couple of years ago, it had quite a lot of my sympathy—as well, at the end, a little bit of my frustration. If housing charities, whose work it is to try to alleviate homelessness or to draw attention in the public domain to the evil nature of the homelessness and the suffering going on because of an inadequacy of supply and an incapacity to meet the rental charges that young people and others are facing, do not take to the streets, knock on the doors and stir up public opinion in the year before an election, I will be very disappointed. If this Bill does anything to stop that, I will be very angry indeed. I wish it were withdrawn. I would like to hear what the Minister says about that.

Syria and the Use of Chemical Weapons

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 29th August 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port]

My Lords, we were urged at the beginning of this debate to remember what we were not discussing, but that has not prevented a number of us addressing those issues anyway. We were not discussing regime change, punishment or the thin end of the wedge. The tangle of knots of the noble Lord, Lord Hill, left one clear-cut issue that he wanted us to debate today. One thing, he said, and one thing only, was the question of the use of chemical weapons and what to do about it. There has been widespread, indeed unanimous, recognition of the evil of owning and using chemical weapons, the defiance of the outcomes of such usage, and of internationally agreed statements on such matters. The plea for a clear- cut, simple, open and shut discussion of this debate leaves me saying, “If only”.

The debate has drawn a number of expert people with great experience across a number of fronts to share with us their own feelings about the simple, clear-cut addressing of this question. Again and again we have learnt that 50 shades of grey might indeed be a more appropriate way of describing the varied responses and potential ways of looking at this question, whether from a legal, military, political or moral point of view. For the most part we have tried to keep on the ball, but it is clear that across all these fronts as many questions are raised by the issue of a potential military intervention as would be solved, especially, as we have heard from various quarters in the House, by an inappropriate use of or resort to force. The likelihood, even a small likelihood, of a mistake would quite simply tip the balance and make it quite likely, as the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury suggested, that there would be the opposite of an improvement of the likelihood of a positive outcome in the medium and long term from whatever action we take now.

My contribution, which will be very short, is to look at things from the top deck of the Clapham omnibus and to ask how such an intervention would play out. What perceptions would it feed, real or imagined, in ordinary people? We could look internationally for starters. What would be the attitudes of people in the countries and movements that traditionally support Syria when they saw yet again an intervention of this kind from the West, bringing and wreaking its own damage? It might be very clear-cut and a precise course of action with a very welcome, simple outcome, but it might not. The peoples of the Middle East, as has been referred to again and again in this debate, are both angry and frightened at present. They are bitterly divided and increasingly violent. To launch cruise missiles into this volatile situation would be to invite the unforeseeable, and for the unwanted to make its explosive appearance. We must be terribly careful that we can convince ourselves that we have exhausted all other possibilities and looked at every other possible way forward before we take such risks, which are great.

What about the opposition forces in Syria? Who are they? Whom would we support? What inner dynamic would we be likely to create between those groups of rebels and the Government by intervening in this way? Is it not likely that even the best organised might take the arms that we might offer them, if it comes to that, without necessarily ending up as our friends—indeed, the opposite? What about the people of this country who are sick and tired of these adventures and no longer believe politicians? It would behove all of us to ensure that the public of this country were given the fullest and frankest possible information so that they can sense the genuineness of what is being proposed. We must be careful along those lines. The British public are much more aware of the weakened state of the United Kingdom in the world at large than their Governments sometimes are.

Some of us have been working for better understanding between religions, races and classes in the cities. The slightest mistake in an intervention of this kind would set back the work of people in the communities I know about by light years. We are beginning to build trust and confidence in each other and to work together to common ideals. Why is the United Kingdom in cahoots with the United States all the time, and perceived to be at the forefront of these attacks? While we condemn the use of chemical weapons unreservedly, we must try and try again to stir the diplomatic pot and keep efforts on that front alive.

We must use our imagination. For example, I read a Church of England briefing in which it was asked whether any consideration had been given to the possibility of asking the United Nations Security Council to pass a resolution directing Syria to place its chemical stockpile under UN protection for the duration of the conflict, and authorising all necessary action should it refuse to do so. That is a simple proposal that we have not heard elsewhere. There must be others. Why do we not convince ourselves that we have exhausted those others before we take the action that we are now talking about?

Electoral Registration and Administration Bill

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Tuesday 24th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port]

My Lords, I cannot claim to have the allure or charisma of Simon Cowell but, if your Lordships will excuse me, I am trying to dip my toe for the very first time into the waters of this kind of debate. I have sat for many hours in a House that is stuffed with constitutional experts, people learned in the law and those with glorious and glittering political careers behind them and, in some cases, ahead of them. I cannot compete with them in their analysis of what is happening around us, and I have not wanted to compete with their excellence or experience. However, I feel that I must remind myself that as a citizen of this country, all these discussions relate to the constitutional arrangements under which we all live, claim our rights and want ourselves and our children to flourish, and I have as much right to speak in these debates as anybody else. It is in that sense that I dare, almost with the feeling that I am making a maiden speech, stand here and offer some thoughts now.

I was terrifically interested in the cascade of figures that the noble Lord, Lord Trimble, gave us about what happened when the voting arrangements in Northern Ireland changed from household registration to individual registration. I believe that the noble Lord said it was a straightforward move from one to the other, but that it took 10 years to return to the same level. Perhaps that ought to be a stark reminder that in anything we do in this Bill we should try to avoid losing so many voters that it will take us 10 years to catch up. We might learn from that experience, perhaps avoid making the same mistakes and try to tread a safer path.

One of the great disappointments in my experience of the House is the way we have, in more recent times, got round to discussing constitutional measures. I feel that of all the things on which we ought to seek a consensual arrangement, something that we can all subscribe to, constitutional arrangements ought to be on the highest rung. I have sensed the trading, whether obvious or subterranean, that has been going on between the parties in government as they seek to satisfy each others’ needs and expectations. It has been a major feature of the way constitutional arrangements have been discussed in the House latterly. That may be a layman’s observation, but it is deeply felt, and I feel the need to say so before I continue with my remarks.

In 2009, when we considered our electoral system under another Government, we were all very clear that we must reach whatever arrangements we end up with consensually. Let me read what was said in the other House by the then shadow Conservative Minister about moving towards individual registration. She said that these plans,

“should not be rushed but taken step by step to ensure that the integrity of the system is protected ”—

the noble Lord, Lord Norton, talked about the integrity of the system—

“and not only protected, but seen to be protected, so that there is no perception of harm being done to the system … I can assure the Minister and the House that any future Conservative Government would never take risks with the democratic process”.—[Official Report, Commons, 13/7/09; col. 108-9.]

In that debate, the Liberal Democrats made similar fulsome promises:

“I do not think that anybody was suggesting that the timetable be artificially shortened, or that any risk be taken with the comprehensiveness of the register”.—[Official Report, Commons, 13/7/09; col. 112.]

That was the assurance given us by the Liberal Democrats.

Here we are with an arrangement or a direction of travel that all of us want to see happen, which I am convinced we need to make happen at a pace that will assure us of the assimilation of experience gained and a confidence in destinations reached. That seems to me to be so self-evident that I cannot quite understand why the acceleration of individual registration is being given so much attention. Since I did A-level Latin, I have always subscribed to the tag, festina lente—it is slowly that we make the most speed in a forward direction. After all, we are talking about a change of culture, and a change of culture does not happen by diktat or by the imposition of a set of new rules and regulations that push things forward artificially. Therefore, we should do as my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer suggests; take the proper steps at the proper pace, with good monitoring in place and proper scrutiny at each step, so that we can have confidence in what we end up with.

However, I have one more problem that I want to share with noble Lords. It was an article in one of our newspapers by an Oxford professor—not that Oxford professors are always right. I suppose a Cambridge man might say that. He says,

“To move straight to individual registration risks moving straight to mass disenfranchisement of the young, the urban, the mobile and ethnic minority voters”.

That is my overriding worry; it is the main point that I want to offer in this speech. I have been considering this Bill at the same time as I have been trying to evaluate a report on what happened with the riots in our inner cities almost a year ago. I live in the East End; at my front door is the borough of Islington, at my back door the borough of Hackney. I am not far at all from everything that was happening last year. There are lots of young black teenagers within the company I keep and the people I try to offer mentoring to. In conversation—although I can only be anecdotal about this—I do not detect a heightened understanding of the probity, necessity or valour of voting. It is not just that we have to raise awareness, as the noble Lord, Lord Bates, suggested; we must educate and shape the expectations of whole bodies of people who feel disenfranchised and quite at odds with the system. I do not want to say anything that would appear to condone last year’s events. However, I know that if you do not feel you are a stakeholder in a society, you have no motivation to involve yourself with it or with shaping its future. So I look at the literacy and numeracy levels with which people leave some of our schools; I look at the lack of character formation within some of our schools; I look at the brokenness of the homes and the difficult social patterns within which people live. All these things are very real. We frame constitutional arrangements in order to prepare a country for this generation to grow up in, with all the diversity that there is in our land in these days.

I am trying to articulate, then, the needs and deep desires of ordinary, young, urban people across the ethnic groupings of our city. I do not want the system that we end up with to threaten their involvement, because they have so much to give. They are genuinely talented people, but they do not feel plugged in. We must work on that a bit harder.

I have finished my remarks, and since I am six minutes early, perhaps the credit can be given to my noble friend Lord Wills as some kind of compensation.