Democratic Institutions: Threats

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Moraes, whom I have considered a friend for some 30 years. He was a great champion for those in the European Parliament who had no voice but his—often overlooked and marginalised groups—and was always in the best Labour tradition of trying to build people up rather than trying to drag others down.

“But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it”.


So wrote JS Mill in On Liberty, which I think is still presented to the president of the Liberal Democrat Party as a kind of badge of office when elected. If noble Lords heard a clanking noise as we opened our debate, I suggest that was the shade of JS Mill hearing the opinions from the Front Bench of the party he served and loved, as expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, because he used the argument that every censorial and authoritarian Government begin with: he started talking about Russia and then he elided into talking about Elon Musk. This is how it always happens. We are presented with some terrorist threat, some terrible foreign actor, and then very quickly it turns into “someone whose opinions I happen not to like”. We, the nation that came through the great wars and travails of the 20th century upholding the principle of free expression, are now expected to throw it all in the air because we do not like someone who is expressing legitimate opinions that are rude about politicians.

Let us consider the JS Mill argument about the importance of the solitary opinion. JS Mill does not argue that free speech matters only for the heretic. He argues that it matters for the rest of us, because how will we know when a consensus is mistaken if we repress challenging or different views? During the pandemic, it was very difficult to express in public the opinion that the virus had originated from a lab leak. If we now look at the evidence, particularly well expressed by our former colleague Viscount Ridley and Alina Chan in their book on the subject, we see that it is very clear that that is the likeliest origin story—yet you would be silenced and forbidden to express that opinion.

Who is to say what is the currently correct but repressed opinion? If you think about it, almost everything, when it is a new idea, begins with one or two heretics: everything from the female franchise to religious toleration. Who are we to say that we should stamp out views that we happen to find difficult? As John Milton put it,

“opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making”.

In other words, as long as you have a free market of ideas, the true ones over time will drive out the false ones.

This is always a difficult argument to make, because we are a tribal species and we are driven by our DNA towards vendetta and feud. We are all in favour of free speech on our side, but we struggle when it is on the other side. I agree very much with what the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, said about why there should not be a state definition of Islamophobia. I think we should all be protected by the same laws. How many people will argue, as I would, that exactly the same must hold true about a state definition of antisemitism, and for the same reason? We should all be defended by the same laws. The people who got very angry and upset about, let us say, the arrest of Graham Linehan over a slightly off-colour joke about trans women or the incarceration of Lucy Connolly after the Southport riots are very rarely equally vocal in their defence of the free speech rights of, let us say, Kneecap when they say that the only good Tory is a dead Tory, or of Bobby Vylan saying, “Death, death to the IDF”.

I would set a very high standard for incitement since I would not consider any of those to be actually likely to incite people—I do not think a stoned theatregoer at Glastonbury is going to jump on the next flight to Ben Gurion Airport and launch himself at the first Israeli soldier he sees because of that call from the stage—but, wherever you set that boundary, you have to apply it consistently. I see that people have great difficulty doing so, not least when it comes to Twitter, which was, I think, the essence of the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace.

When Twitter was banning Donald Trump, we heard from the Washington Post, Vox Media and most Democrats that it was a private company, so it was allowed to do whatever it wanted. The left-wing economist Robert Reich said that the first amendment did not apply to private corporations, and he was absolutely right. However, now that it is owned by Elon Musk, the same Robert Reich says, “Oh, no, it’s an oligarchy. It’s nothing to do with free speech”, and the people who were all in favour of it—when, by the way, it was practising censorship—are now suddenly very upset about it because it is not practising censorship. As I say, we are a tribal species and we find it difficult to apply these standards consistently.

When I say “we”, I think I especially mean “we politicians” because we are sensitive to the attacks that we get. This is not new. A hundred years ago we could have been having a very analogous debate about the power of the press barons—the Rothermeres, the Northcliffes and the Beaverbrooks. Indeed, we were, and people in this Chamber and at the other end suggested various ways of silencing their opinions on exactly the grounds that we just heard. Yet, people were sensible. The British public were not a bunch of dupes. They were able to make up their minds and we came through the 20th century as a country that upheld freedom.

That is the real solution to disinformation and misinformation: not repression, but truth. The best way to defeat a bad idea is to present people with better ideas.

“Let her and Falsehood grapple. Who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”


So wrote John Milton in 1644. Ours is the country that gave the world Wycliffe, Wilkes, Milton, Mill, Lilburne and Locke—and that is only the Johns. What country has done more for free expression? How extraordinary that we should be hearing the sentiments that we have just heard in this of all places. Milton, addressing Parliament, said:

“Lords and Commons of England, consider what Nation it is whereof ye are and whereof ye are the governors”.


We defeated the Nazi and Soviet tyrannies but never lost our belief that freedom and free expression made our society better. How extraordinary, after that achievement, now to be seriously talking about ripping it all up because we do not like what is being said about us on Twitter. Lords and Commons of England, consider what nation it is whereof ye are.

Social Media: Use of X by Government Departments

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

The noble Baroness makes a really interesting point. She is right that misinformation, disinformation, propaganda and counterpropaganda are not new. Last week, my husband wrote an article for his local paper in which he reminded everybody that there is one day of the year when we look at media with a level of cynicism: 1 April. We need to be doing that every single day of the year. The noble Baroness makes an important point, which I will look at. A DCMS consultation is currently out; I will ensure that her point is fed in.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I was a little alarmed by the Minister’s response to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire. He does not like some things that are being said on X. He was not talking about incitement, harassment or the promotion of illegal activities. He specifically cited campaigning for a candidate whom he did not like—something that is legal but which he did not like. The Minister said, I think, that this might be a proper case for Ofsted toughening its regulatory powers. Would she like to clarify that, because I think we can all agree that we do not want to criminalise different political points of view?

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

I am sorry if I gave that impression. That is absolutely not what I meant; I meant that, in terms of its responsibilities, X has to follow the law. With regard to anyone standing for election, all of us who have done so know that there are ways and means for us to beat our opponents, and that is at the ballot box. We will continue to do so. Personally, I enjoyed campaigning against the candidate who was referenced; it is an incredibly important part of all this.

Last week, I had the final Question just before the football. I have the same Question today. I do not want to tempt fate, but come on, England!

UK-EU Relations

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Thursday 13th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

We can split hairs around particular wording, but I am absolutely clear that the UK Government advocates for and supports UK fishing communities, while ensuring that we meet our shared international obligations. I stand by those words. That is the Government’s position.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I commend the noble Baroness for what she said both on the pan-Euro-Mediterranean customs deal and on the youth mobility scheme. She essentially said, “It’s not something we’re asking for but, if the other side wants it badly enough, we might be prepared to discuss things”. This seems a very sensible line to take in any negotiations. If they want to put something valuable on the table, such as lifting the checks in Northern Ireland, we should be open to discussions. Why does the Minister not take the same line on the defence agreement? As one of two nuclear powers, we are by far the largest contributor to the defence of Europe. When it comes to putting stuff on the table, I can see why the EU wants us involved, but how on earth have we got ourselves into the position of being the demandeurs here?

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

I am quite proud of the position we are taking on defence in Europe. I am unclear why I should apologise for it. I refer noble Lords to the very clear message from the Defence Secretary, John Healey—including to our ally Ukraine—on our firm determination to ensure that our country is safe and also that we stand with our allies elsewhere in Europe.

Economic Growth

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, there is a group of Melanesian islands where supplies were dropped during the Second World War. When the war ended and the soldiers departed, a cult grew up on these islands. People thought that if they mimicked the behaviour of the soldiers who had been stationed there before 1945, the gods would start raining goods from the sky again, so they would light brands to show where the runways were and try and act like American soldiers, but, of course, the goodies did not come. That is what we literally mean by the phrase “cargo cult”.

A number of people, on all sides in politics and the media, seem to think that, if you keep going around saying “growth” and “investment”, and you wear pinstripe suits and spend time in City boardrooms, somehow growth will magically follow. But, of course, that is not how the world operates. Stimulating economic growth requires taking some difficult decisions. It is simple. It is not easy, but it is simple. The same formula works every time: you need free trade, light regulation and low spending.

But delivering those things is not so simple. Free trade should have been the easiest of the lot. When we reassumed control of our trade policy almost exactly five years ago to the day, we had the opportunity to raise our eyes to more distant horizons and rediscover our vocation as a global trading country. But, as became clear, not least in debates in this House, there was a terrific resistance even to doing trade deals with countries as friendly, as aligned to us and as similar to us in GDP as Australia and New Zealand. Although all sides use “trade”, like those Melanesian islanders, actually getting there when it means opening up our markets is altogether more challenging. Although I wish them every success, the Government will find that they have that same dynamic as they approach doing a trade deal with the United States. On paper it is easily done: USMCA standards are very similar to our CPTPP ones. In practice, doing a deal with Trump may be politically more challenging.

It is the same with deregulation. Everyone is in favour of deregulation; everyone talks about it. The Government have written to all the regulators and said, “What are you going to do?” Of course, the one answer that the regulators are not going to volunteer is, “We intend to do less”, “We intend to wind ourselves back”, or “We intend to dissolve ourselves altogether”. Warren Buffett used to say, “Don’t ask the barber whether you need a haircut”—I am not entirely sure what barbers and haircuts are, but I hear people talking about them. By the same token, it seems a strange thing to ask the regulators how to stimulate growth. What stimulates growth is having fewer regulators and less regulation. Again, that is easy to say, hard to deliver.

The toughest one, of course, is cuts in spending. My noble friend Lord Moynihan just last week published volume 2 of his book on how to achieve growth, where he shows with clear and pitiless statistical analysis that the key to growth is to get a larger private sector and a smaller state sector, and that the magic figure is around about a third. If you can get state-controlled spending to less than 33% of GDP, you are in a strong and growing economy. Of course, everyone will nod along again with that and, like the cargo cultists, they will say, “Yes, you know, we need a smaller, more efficient state, doing less but doing it better”. In practice, it is very difficult to get any meaningful cuts.

Both sides play games on this. On the right, people pretend that all manner of money can be got from foreign aid—which is this tiny sum in reality that is overspent again and again—and on the left there is something similar with wealth taxes. Both sides talk about waste and “cracking down on waste”, as though no one has ever thought of it or ever tried it before. The reality is that the vast increases in public spending have come in healthcare and in social security. Unless we are prepared to talk about restraining those budgets, we do not really mean it when we talk about cutting spending. In particular, if you drill down and ask, “Which bit of social security?”, it is pensions. I saw that even Vladimir Putin was not able to raise the pension age—it was the closest he ever came to falling from power—so I sympathise with any democratic Government trying to do it.

I will finish with a cheerful thought. Before we give up in horror and say, “It just can’t be done in a democracy”, or at least, “It can’t be done without a terrible 1976-style crisis”, almost all our problems in terms of the size of the state would be solved if we returned to the levels of state spending that we had in the early Blair years. I think there were a few Members opposite who were part of the Government then, and they will remember that it was perfectly comfortable—we were not living in some kind of Dickensian workshop. So, if we could just return to Blair spending levels, how difficult could that be?

Public Sector Productivity

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Wednesday 9th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe for introducing the debate and I am acutely conscious of the expertise and experience that others have brought to bear.

I will begin with a point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, about the difficulty of measuring productivity. Of course, that is absolutely true, but as a rough guide for a ballpark figure I looked at what the OBR had to say. It produced a report in 2022, which found that in the private sector productivity was back to 1.6% above where it had been on the eve of the pandemic, but in the public sector it was still down by 7.4%. If we carry on losing productivity in the public sector at this rate, we will suffer a further 20% decline within a decade, which the Centre for Economics and Business Research says would be the equivalent of £73 billion per year of extra spending. Think for a second about that: £73 billion per year. Think of the rows we have in this Chamber about the relatively trivial sums involved in the winter fuel payments or VAT on school fees.

Why is that happening? There are structural reasons why there is greater productivity when there is a profit motive; I think we all accept that. But why is the gap widening? What has changed recently? I think my noble friend Lord Patten was exactly on the button. About a year after the pandemic, when everything was supposed to have got back to normal and when my right honourable friend Jacob Rees-Mogg was a Minister, he was presented with a fait accompli by his officials. They said that he absolutely had to sign the lease on a building for a government agency or an arm’s-length agency in central London. He said, “Why do they need to be in this expensive place?” and they said, “Oh it is absolutely vital, Minister. It is actually walking distance from here: let’s go and have a look”. Of course, he found that there was nobody there. Hence, he began the campaign of dropping his—I thought rather polite—calling cards saying, “Sorry you weren’t at work”, which of course created a furious backlash from the Civil Service trade unions. But there are jobs that require you to be there.

Like the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, I used to work in newspapers. In fact, for a while I worked for the noble Baroness. I am sure she will agree that there were jobs, even then, long before the pandemic, that obviously could have been done from home. If you are doing the sudoku or writing the pets column or something, there is absolutely no reason to come into the office. It struck me even 20 years ago as slightly wasteful that people were doing that. But, equally, there were an awful lot of jobs, particularly the editorial jobs, where you really had to be there talking to people. How many of the civil servants absent from their desks are in the second category? I think there are rather a lot.

I think we can all see the impact on productivity. I was certainly struck by it when I walked around the cavernous, echoing and rather beautiful corridors of the Old Admiralty Building when I was involved with the Department for Business and Trade. It is extraordinary how immediately the impact is felt of people not being there for meetings, not talking about things and not sparking ideas off each other in the fallow times.

The point I really want to make—I will make it very briefly in deference to the Minister’s throat—is that this is a choice. There are problems the Government cannot avoid, such as the ageing population and the changing ratio of workers to pensioners, but this is a choice. You can give large pay rises to public sector workers, but you are then left with less money to grow the rest of the economy. What you cannot do is keep giving these pay rises at the same time as increasing their numbers.

There were two very large increases in the Civil Service that both had a temporary and contingent cause. One was the repatriations of powers after Brexit, which required people to do them at home because they were no longer being done in Brussels. The other was the pandemic, which required more people to be brought in for testing and for vaccination and so on. Both of those bumps are now in the rear-view mirror. Under the plans of the previous Government, numbers were supposed to fall back towards where they had been and there was a scheduled loss of 66,000 personnel. That was quietly reversed as almost the first thing the new Government did.

There was a time when the arguments were about economics and taking from the haves to give to the have-nots. What we cannot have is simply an argument about taking from the private sector to give to the public. Private sector workers already have worse pension deals. They are already required to be in the office more and they already work longer hours. We cannot keep squeezing the revenue-generating bits of the economy to fund increases in the revenue-consuming bit.

Conversion Therapy Prohibition (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) Bill [HL]

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Friday 9th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, to what problem is this specific Bill a remedy? We already have strong and effective laws against quackery and mis-selling, against coercion and control, and, of course, against harassment and physical abuse. Some are ancient common-law guarantees, some legislative. The Public Order Act 1986 defines harassment in a way that I think would cover the concerns raised by most of the supporters of the legislation in this debate. The Serious Crimes Act 2015 deals with coercion and control within families. So I am bound to ask: is this Bill a proportionate remedy to an identified problem or a way of sending a signal? Is it a form of declaratory legislation? If it is the latter, it opens the door to all manner of unintended consequences.

Given that we live in an age when people often struggle to distinguish general principles from the specific case, I ought to add that I have always been something of an outlier in pushing for gay equality. When the noble Lord, Lord Moore of Etchingham, was against Section 28, I was a teenager and strongly in favour of it. In fact, I was in favour even when it started life as Section 27, which some will remember before it was amended in legislation. I then went on in the 1990s—again very unusually as a Conservative—to be an outlying supporter of civil partnerships and the equalisation of the age of consent.

At that time I was, in fact, working for the noble Lord, Lord Moore of Etchingham. I was a leader writer at the Daily Telegraph. He is the politest and most civil of men so he did not show any sign that he thought that I was a complete lunatic but, courteous as he was, I could tell that he thought I was quite an extremist on the subject. None the less, I stand by what I thought then, partly because equality before the law is an important principle but mainly because privacy, the recognition of a private space and the dignity of individuals is a key principle, whether we are talking about gay people or about people with religious convictions. What they do is their business unless it becomes harassment or coercion of somebody else.

The noble Baroness, Lady Burt, introduced this Bill by saying that we do not want to trample on free speech but we do want to prevent these abuses. That, it seems to me, is exactly where the law stands now. So, before rushing to legislate further, we need to ask: have we exhausted every existing remedy? We heard some lurid stories from the noble Lord, Lord Cashman, about electric shock therapy and so on. I have never heard any suggestion that that is happening in this country. Are we legislating against something that does not happen in order to send a signal? If we are, that is almost a definition of laws that have unintended consequences.

Legislation should be our last resort, not our first. As Tacitus put it:

“Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges”;


that is, “The more rotten the state, the more laws it passes”. I believe, like our former Member, the third Viscount Falkland, that

“if it is not necessary to legislate, it is necessary not to legislate”.

Elgin Marbles

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Thursday 14th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, if there were a way of returning the marbles to the Parthenon itself, there would be no debate. It would have happened years ago. What Byron called the “wanton and useless defacement” would have been undone. Who could resist seeing those magnificent artefacts in their proper place—their solidity combined with this ethereal feel of their bare, bleached, marmoreal splendour; their realism, the flowing robes and flared horses’ nostrils none the less combining with this idealised beauty? But the argument is about moving them from one museum to another, and therefore it seems that this debate turns on what a museum is for. The clue is in the etymology—museums are there to channel the Muses, to elevate and ennoble the condition of visitors. The most pertinent questions to ask, with the display of any artefacts, are: where will they best be looked after? Where will they be most accessible to specialists, scholars and students? Where will people most appreciate their cultural impact? Where will the greatest number of people get to see them?

I think that I am right in saying the British Museum was the first public institution to use “British” in its title, yet it never saw its aspiration as being national. It always saw its role as being encyclopaedic—a collection of curios from every continent. This is more unusual than you might think; if you go to the museums in Copenhagen, Budapest or Prague you will find museums that tell the story of a particular nation and people. If you go to the museums in Washington DC you find even more ethnic particularism—a Chinese American Museum, an African American museum, a Museum of the American Indian and so on—but the British Museum never saw itself in those terms. Confident, at least in the 18th century in its foundation, it saw itself as a repository for the greatest works of mankind. Neil MacGregor, the museum’s director between 2002 and 2015, put it like this:

“The museum remains a unique repository for the achievements of human endeavour, and there is no culture, past or present, that is not represented within its walls. It is truly the memory of mankind”.


What overrides that claim? The main argument that one hears, and we have heard it in the debate now, is one of, if you like, a communal cultural claim—“We live in a particular area and therefore we have a right”. That is a notion that is difficult to reconcile with ownership and contract. Even if it were true—and I actually do not think that we are remotely connected to whatever Neanderthal people made the hand-axe that the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, was talking about; there was an ice age in between and the place was completely depopulated—I have no idea whether the Greeks of today are related to the Greeks of the time of the Parthenon. We are told by Constantine Porphyrogenitus that there was massive demographic displacement in the meantime, but even if they are—even if the Greek Prime Minister could claim personal lineal descent from Phidias—so what? If the noble Baroness’s great-grandmother had bought her house from mine I would not be able to turf her out because of some prior claim, because contract and ownership count for something.

I happen to agree with what my noble friend Lord Lexden quoted Professor Mary Beard as saying—that if you want to play the game of identity politics, then 200 years of being debated in this Chamber and revered, argued over, sketched and painted in this country also establishes some claim—but I do not think that is really the relevant criterion. The relevant criterion is one of ownership and if, as my noble friend Lord Frost says, these are the foundation of western art, then free contract is surely the foundation of western civilisation.

Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland: Follow-up Report (European Affairs Committee)

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Monday 11th September 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, as always, I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Jay of Ewelme, and his staff for these reports. I could give my whole five minutes over entirely to paeans and panegyrics, to odes and oratorios, to acclamations and encomiums, but I have done it before, as have the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, and the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, so shall we just take it all as read? It is a great achievement to have balanced the orange/green, remain/leave and left/right tensions three-dimensionally.

I agree with the thrust of the report’s conclusion: the Windsor Framework makes a few things a bit better and in a smaller number of areas it makes things slightly worse than the status quo plus the grace periods. The report is really an example of the importance of compromise, cool-headed temperance and the ability to talk things through in detail. I hope the Grand Committee will forgive me if I extend that logic, especially given the timing of the reconciliation Bill that we have just debated, and look at what is happening in the Province in terms of compromise.

One of the rather beautiful and underreported facts during the Troubles was the extent to which both communities consistently rejected violence. There was a Northern Ireland Life and Times survey in 1998, at the time of the Belfast agreement, and 70% of people who supported a united Ireland had no sympathy with physical force terrorism; only 8% supported it. Come forward one generation and 69% of people in that community now agree with Michelle O’Neill when she says that there was no alternative to IRA violence. Of course, this is partly just the passage of time, the sanitising effect of not being there with the funerals and the body parts and the physical destruction, but it also says something alarming about the readiness to compromise, to let the other side feel that they can live with something, on which all our deliberations, the amended Windsor Framework and the Belfast agreement itself rest.

Do not get me wrong: there has been immense progress in those 25 years—I do not think anyone will disagree with that—such as the Belfast dockyards and the Titanic quarter. The Corn Market, which I remember as a dingy and dangerous place, is now as beautiful a piece of street architecture as you will find anywhere in these islands. The sectarian murals have become tourist attractions. I hope it goes without saying that all of that is desirable and to be praised, but it all rests ultimately on a willingness to, if you like, elevate process over outcome, to accept that sometimes you are going to lose and that sometimes the other side is going to win and that that is not a threat to your whole identity. This point has been historically aimed at unionists, and not always without reason. I was amused by Senator Mitchell’s recollection at the 25th anniversary of David Trimble having said to him “You need to understand about my lot that they will travel hours out of their way to take an insult”, and we have all met politicians like that, but it applies equally to both sides.

Let me put it like this: if I were chiefly motivated by wanting a 32-county state in Ireland—whether I were on either side of the border—I would do things very differently. I would engage with British people in Northern Ireland as Brits rather than as misguided Irish protestants. I would have done a lot of things differently: I would not have left the Commonwealth; I would not have had a different foreign policy in the wars; I would not have made the Irish language a requirement. Those are water under the bridge, but going forward now is about finding a compromise that both sides can live with. We are in a world where we have a general retreat from liberal democracy, a general rise of populism and a “winner takes all” attitude even in countries that are old and established democracies—these are alarming tendencies. If there is one thing that we in this Chamber can do, perhaps it is to spread our irenic influence and to encourage people that, in the Windsor Framework and in everything else, we are never going to get 100% of what we want. That is the essence of any functioning open society.

Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 15th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fox (LD)]

My Lords, my name is on both of these amendments and I am happy to support them both. The proposers will be pleased to know that I do not intend to speak for long, because I have heard two excellent speeches that set out the reasons why supporting these amendments is important.

The noble Lord, Lord Hendy, talked about the danger of back-door watering down of legislation. It may not be this Government; once this is in statute, it could be any Government going forward. We do not necessarily have to distrust the people we see before us—I personally do not—but we do not know who in future will be able to use these measures.

If the Government want to water down workers’ conditions, that should be done through primary legislation, straight up, and negotiated and scrutinised properly. It should not be put through the backdoor, which could happen here. Throughout the process of the Bill, the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, has said over and over again that it is not the Government’s intention to water down workers’ rights. By supporting Amendment 50, the Government can make sure that they are absolutely as good as their word.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, one of the worst objections that I had when I was a Member of the European Parliament was to the doctrine of the occupied field—the idea that you could never withdraw from a field in which you had once legislated. So the acquis communautaire can only ever grow; it could go only in in one direction. You could call it a ratchet, a one-way street or, as its supporters did, a bicycle that has to go forward, but the objection was fundamentally the same: it lifted certain issues out of the democratic field and made them immune to the political process.

For what it is worth, I have never had much time for the idea that our workers’ rights come from the EU—the EU did not travel back in time and pass Barbara Castle’s Equal Pay Act 1970 or Neville Chamberlain’s Holidays with Pay Act 1938—but, whatever view you take of it, these are precisely the sorts of issues that ought to be determined by our national democratic mechanisms and procedures. You can take the view, as the noble Lords, Lord Collins and Lord Hendy, did, that this is wonderful, helps employers and all the rest of it, which is a perfectly respectable position, or you can take the view that there comes a point where too many workers’ rights means fewer workers—but surely that is a debate that ought to be had here and in another place, not something that is effectively made invulnerable to the ballot box.

[Noble Lords]

Then support the amendment!

Parliamentary Democracy in the United Kingdom

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Tuesday 25th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Lichfield. He brings to an implausible nine the number of alumni of Oriel College, Oxford. I say “implausible” because, as I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Murphy of Torfaen, will agree, it was a rather philistine place, yet it is punching rather above its weight at this end.

I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, for broadening and enlivening the breadth and nature of our debates. She knows how fond I am of her and how fond my children are of her delicious homemade jam. I agree with much of what she said about the overmighty Executive. I do not dissent from that by one iota, but I urge her not to catastrophise and to be careful about the language that we use in this legislature. If you have disagreements with this Government, it does not follow that they are a moral sewer comparable to 1930s Germany. Using language of that kind can imperil the very democracy which we are debating, because democracy depends on a measure of self-restraint. It depends on losers being prepared to accept the outcome and on winners being prepared not to take a winner-takes-all attitude. Above all, democracy depends on treating the other side as opponents rather than enemies and accepting that people with whom we disagree might still have one or two useful things to tell us. We have to give a lead.

Let me give the example of how quickly we descend to cancel culture and destroy people over one slip or one clumsy phrase. I will aim this more at people on these Benches. Thinking of cases such as Rupa Huq’s unfortunate comments about Kwasi Kwarteng, Gary Lineker on 1930s Germany or, most recently, Diane Abbott’s asinine remarks about whether Jews could suffer from racism, I ask, without defending any of those things: is it not better to live in a world where we have second chances, where there is the possibility of atonement and forgiveness?

“Use every man according to his desert and who should ‘scape whipping?”


If your Lordships’ response is that the other side started it: maybe so. But me? I am more interested in ending it.