Russia: UK Companies

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 8th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

As I have said to the House, the UK has undertaken the largest-scale sanctions programme that we have ever had in our history. We continue to look at new sanctions, and obviously that has to be done within the legal framework that we have set. We amended elements of that framework early on after the invasion to ensure that we could take the widest possible range of action. We continue to look at what we can do, and we continue to speak to our Ukrainian partners about where they would find our efforts most effectively directed.

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

And what about the Channel Islands?

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

The UK operates its sanctions regime and will continue to have conversations with all Crown dependencies, overseas territories and others.

Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Friday 7th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Butler-Sloss]

Yes, that seems to me to present one of the problems with the Bill.

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, may I offer something at this stage? The ground has been well worked in the past and I have here some of the hearings that took place 10 years ago, when we discussed this matter. The whole question of the psychiatrist was raised then. Again and again, in discussing competence, it is the psychiatrist who seems to be claiming that someone lacks it. Making a judgment about people near to death is very difficult. Some 25% to 40% of patients at the time of diagnosis, and a similar percentage at other times on the cancer journey, suffer from depression or despair, but those conditions can be reversed. It depends on when you take the decision. Indeed, a neurologist suggested that in some conditions the whole issue of cognitive impairment must be taken note of. For example, patients to the lay person might appear relatively normal but could have severe cognitive impairment and therefore be unable to give informed decisions in such an area.

The training is not just for the people that these provisions have in mind. Once we move the debate, as we have consistently through this day, into the hands of experts, we are removing from ourselves the recognition that the experience of death and dying belongs as much to the non-experts as it does to the experts. With great timidity, I have stood up to speak at this moment, having heard in this morning’s debate from some of the leading lawyers and medical people in the land, and from people with a long experience of public life. I wonder whether it is true, for example, that a judge is, at the end of the day, the person in whom we can deposit all our confidence.

I remember the debates in my childhood that took place around the movement towards the abolition of capital punishment. You have a judge and a jury in that case, counsel for the defence and the prosecution, due process and forensic evidence—justifiable or not. You have the whole process of the law brought to bear on one case and one person, guilty or not guilty. The reason we went forward to abolish capital punishment was because of the possibility of an error of judgment—that with all that happening we might have got it wrong. As a simple lay person, I simply want to say that in this area it is infinitely more likely that we might get it wrong. It is for that reason that I stand against this Bill: because of the high possibility of getting it wrong, even when judges and the top medical people are involved.

My life sees me alongside dying people from first news to last rites and, indeed, beyond last rites—I have dealt with the people with whom one has to deal when they feel that they have not done everything that they might have done for mum. These are unhealed wounds that pastoral people have to deal with on and on, beyond the moment of death.

To think of the autonomy of the person as if that alone constitutes where this debate centres is, in my experience, utterly wrong. Consequently, when I saw the amendment that refers to,

“capacity to make the decision”,

I wondered whether the capacity we were talking about was that which pertained to the decision-makers rather than to the person dying. This is an immensely complicated area and it seems to me that we must question these rather forensic points that are being made about the capacity of this person, that person or the other person. Death and dying are individual in every case, and sometimes a friend can do more good than an expert.

[Lord Maginnis of Drumglass (Ind UU)]

My Lords, I have wondered at what stage I should intervene in this debate in so far as I am not a doctor or a lawyer. I find myself with the problem that life has not for me been exclusively about doctors and lawyers and those erudite few who can argue about other people’s lives. I hope that those who would try to persuade us that this Bill is a necessity for this so-called sophisticated age in which we live are able to understand that the majority of us live our lives on the basis of a moral code—it has never let me down in 77 years—where, collectively, we have least difficulty in finding ourselves able to coalesce in defence of what we usually refer to as the common good.

I get the impression that it is not fashionable to admit to a faith that is based on the 10 commandments but that there is a prevailing view of our times that favours—indeed, espouses—individual morality where there is no absolute right and no absolute wrong. It suggests that each individual has at a specific moment some inherent right to choose what falls within one’s own moral compass. Surely that is a selfish, if not arrogant, position that in this specific instance must toss us on the horns of a dilemma. Should we, from within this comfortable and privileged Chamber, acknowledge the established right and wrong in how we seek to protect the vulnerable, the elderly and those unable to protect themselves, or do we absolve ourselves by criticising those like the extremists in the Middle East, those who mutilate young women through FGM or abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell as they comply with the tenets of their own moral compass?

All I have to say, because I am not a lawyer or a doctor, is that we can decide to look the other way, to pass on the other side, or we can show the compassion and the responsibility of the good Samaritan, however inconvenient that may be to those who would turn our lives into a philosophy that is questionable, contradictory and argumentative.

Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Tuesday 19th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

I am utterly amazed by the noble Lord. He is now criticising us for spending £200 billion more than we planned, when part of that money is being used to provide the 1% uplift in benefits. Talk about wanting to have it both ways. On the one hand, he is criticising the Government for not borrowing enough, but now he is criticising the Government for borrowing more than we planned. The reason why we are having to borrow more than we planned is because of all the commitments made by the previous Government without a clue as to how they would fund them. That includes commitments on welfare. Welfare spending accounts for £1 in every £4 that the Government spend.

On the basis of the noble Lord’s criticism that we are spending £200 billion more, that would mean that £50 billion is going on welfare. In all the time that I have been involved in both Houses of Parliament, I have never seen a more irresponsible Opposition. It is not good enough for the right reverend Prelate to come to tell us that we need to do more to help working families with young children without explaining from where the money is to come or addressing the main problem.

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port]

My Lords, I have taken no part in this debate so far. Has the noble Lord not suggested somewhere where the money can come from; namely, that people like us could pay it? If children would benefit I am prepared to pay it. Is he and are we?

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths of Burry Port. I did not think that he was a bishop and I was addressing my remarks to the Bishops’ Bench, but I say to him that the burden of tax has gone up substantially, and the reductions in government expenditure have so far been quite limited. We are discussing not a cut in government expenditure but limiting the increase in government expenditure to 1%.

I have had several goes at persuading the right reverend Prelate to indicate where the money for his proposal might come from. One possibility might be for people to put wages up. If the Church of England were to put up its clergy’s wages, less would be claimed in benefits and more would be available for others, but that is not a practical proposition for the church because the church, like the Government, is faced with a financial crisis and has to live within its means. What is good for the church is good for the Government and is good for particular families.

The most irresponsible part of the arguments that have come from the Bishops’ Bench this afternoon is about what happens if inflation is allowed to let rip. I fear that that may be about to happen as we continue to print money and borrow. As the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, pointed out, we are borrowing far more than we planned to meet our commitments and to be fair to the most vulnerable. What happens when inflation takes off? I remember the 1970s, when inflation was running at very high levels, at 20% and more, and interest rates were at 15% and more. Who suffered? Children, the poorest and families suffered. There is nothing Governments can do to protect them once inflation takes off.

We do not want to go back to that kind of society. It tried to cope with inflation by protecting people through indexation, but it was unable to keep up with it and the result was, as the then Labour Prime Minister put it so eloquently:

“Inflation is the father and mother of unemployment”.

Jim Callaghan said:

“We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession, and now we know that you cannot”.

Those words were said as the Labour Government left in 1979, leaving another Tory Government to clean up the mess, just as we are doing now.

The right reverend Prelate’s amendment of course carries great emotional impact. We would all like to see working families with children have a higher standard of living, but the way to do that is to create the wealth that enables us to support those families and enables them to get the levels of income and employment that they need. You do not do it by shaving the edges of the currency, allowing inflation to take off and committing those families’ children as adults to a debt burden that, frankly, will be impossible to pay off. They would be paying the interest for the rest of their lives, and that would disadvantage their children. In rejecting this amendment, as I hope she will, my noble friend is speaking not just for our children but for our grandchildren, who are entitled to expect responsible government in these straitened times.

Savings Accounts and Health in Pregnancy Grant Bill

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Tuesday 7th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port]

My Lords, I need not detain your Lordships long. Since entering your Lordships’ House, it has been my principle to promise myself never to repeat points that have been made adequately before I get up to speak. I wish, indeed, that other Members of the House would share with me the same idea and ideal. But I am not going to apologise on this occasion for repeating precisely some of the things that have been said, and said very eloquently.

First, I need to say that last week’s debate was the most frustrating that I have sat through since coming here. I am not a politician; I am just a Methodist minister. I deal with people on the ground, their pastoral needs and their everyday concerns. But I wish that the two opening speakers last week had spoken the other way around. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, guessing what his opponents’ arguments would be, chose all the wrong targets. He did not itemise anything that was actually going to be said by my noble friend Lord McKenzie of Luton, who did not argue that we should ignore, or want to repeal, or object to the implementation of the Parliament Act 1911—not at all—but that using the Act, and the conventions that arise from it, we should seek, within the month that is available to us, to find some way of amending in small ways the provisions of the Bill that is now before us. I just feel that the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, chose the wrong targets and, in doing so, poured scorn on those who had not yet spoken; accusing them of opportunism, of wheezes, of procedural ploys, of games and the like. In my book—and mine is only a small book—that is an unworthy way of conducting an argument.

In the course of last week’s debate, it was said, more than once, that since 1997 64 money Bills had been introduced to this House, with all the rules and regulations that go with that. No one said—indeed, my noble friend Lady Royall asked the question directly of the noble Lord the Leader of the House—how many of those 64 Bills had been declared to be money Bills at the conclusion of their treatment in another place. I ask the Minister—his advisers are there—whether he can answer that question in summing up this debate. How many of the 64 Bills, 40 per cent of which came before this House in the previous Parliament, were declared money Bills at the end of their treatment in another place? That is a very important thing because there were people in another place who wanted to amend the Bill, who confidently expected the opportunity would arise for us to do it here, and who were denied that opportunity because at the conclusion of the Third Reading it was declared to be a money Bill. That is a very important question for us to know the answer to.

I ask the Minister, who of course is a finance Minister, not a social policy Minister, whether the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, is correct as against a statement I have had in some briefing material I have received. I want to know the answer to this. The Bill’s passage through Parliament is described for another place. It says that the Bill completed its Commons stages on 22 November, and following the end of the Third Reading in the Commons, it was designated a money Bill by the Speaker—so far so good—at the request of the Government. That is against what the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, seems to me to have said and I want to know which version is correct.

Having laid out my stall, as it were, I want to speak to a very narrow point. It is the plight of looked-after children. On all sides of the House, we are agreed that this represents a most needy part of our population. A small percentage, 0.6 per cent, of children are in care: 23 per cent of people in prison have been in care. We have to address this as a matter of urgency and it does not belong to one party or another, or to a coalition Government, or Opposition, or the Cross Benches to say “It’s our bag this one”. It belongs to all of us. It belongs to our society as a whole.

This abolition of the child trust funds is going to affect looked-after children in a big way. I know that Paul Goggins, in another place, had formulated, after consultation with Ministers, a possible amendment to the provisions of the Bill that would have benefited looked-after children. Because of the procedural way in which this Bill is now before us, that has been denied him, that has been denied us, and that has been denied looked-after children. Is it a waste of time? It is not for me. If I can put on the record of the proceedings of this House my concern that these children should be dealt with in a less cavalier fashion than the Bill provides for, I will be satisfied. But I will also be satisfied because as a member of the human race I can speak on behalf of vulnerable people in this way and urge the Minister that, if he cannot allow us to amend the Bill—which he cannot—he will at least promise us that the concerns of looked-after children will be taken forward by him with his fellow Ministers so that we can have greater satisfaction on this issue.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, as I said before, I have given a description of the process and indicated that there was no question that the Government in any way behaved in some out of the ordinary way with this Bill, as has been hinted at. I really think that—

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port]

As it was probably my suggestion that has led to this response, I should like to speak just for a moment. I was given very clear advice from those who prepared a briefing paper, which many of us read—I heard it being quoted all round the House—that it was done at the request of the Government. I am not hinting that improper stuff has happened; I was merely asking whether that was true.

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord. He is right to say that some of these points were raised by him, which is why I thought it was right to address them. This is an important point. I can confirm what he asked me to confirm, but I think that I should move on to address some of the many other points that were made on this money Bill.

The point that attracted the most interventions—and it is an important point—was on junior ISAs for looked-after children. That point was raised at the opening of the debate by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, who reminded us that proposals were raised in another place in that area, and a number of my noble friends and the noble Earl have touched on the point. I start by reiterating what my honourable friend the Financial Secretary said in another place—that we would need to think about this carefully and that we will think about it carefully. He has had conversations and we need to recognise the limitation of resources that are available. There is certainly no unallocated funding in the Department for Education budget that could be used for it, but we are considering the issue. My honourable friend is going to work with the Minister for Children. He made it clear that if we wanted to do something in this area, it would be possible to do it outside the scope of this Bill—a point which I think was touched on by the noble Baroness, Lady Howe of Idlicote. It does not require the Bill to be in place. I think that the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, also touched on that point.

I assure my noble friend Lady Browning that I do indeed talk to my colleagues. I was talking to the Financial Secretary only this morning and I shall relay these messages back in. Yes, the Treasury is a siloed place. My proposal that Ministers in the Treasury should all sit in an open-plan office has not yet found favour but my noble friend encourages me onward in that objective. The noble Earl also made a practical suggestion on whether an additional meeting involving noble Lords would be helpful. As I have said, my honourable friend the Financial Secretary is having meetings. I am not sure which additional meetings would be helpful but I certainly accept his offer.