Budget Statement

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Friday 12th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I also congratulate noble Lords who have made their maiden speeches today. It is nice to see my old comrade, the noble Lord, Lord Khan of Burnley, opposite and my noble friend Lord Cruddas, whose experience will elevate and ennoble our counsel.

There are three ways to cut a deficit: you can raise taxes, cut spending or try to grow the economy so that the deficit falls in proportionate terms. I have to say, I am astonished by how quickly a consensus formed on all Benches, here and in another place, that the first of those was the correct option, because raising taxes is not a long-term solution to a debt and deficit problem.

Essentially, the higher you raise the tax, the more that you find you are squeezing the revenue-producing bit of the economy to sustain the revenue-consuming bit, and people change their behaviour in consequence. When tax rates get to a certain level, people will begin to work shorter hours, take earlier retirement or, indeed, move their activities to friendlier jurisdictions.

By the way, this is not some abstruse point of the Chicago school of economics that has never been tried; we saw in practice that cutting tax rates leads to greater revenue with the successive cuts in corporation tax to 19%, with each successive reduction leading to more income for the Treasury.

Instead of raising taxes, we should be looking intelligently to cut taxes, especially those on employment and investment, to get companies hiring again. I would have liked to have seen cuts in national insurance both for the employer and for the employee. If we get the economy growing then we get more people at work, we get them earning and paying taxes, we are shelling out less and, left to itself, the deficit will dwindle and fade.

Northern Ireland Protocol: Grace Period

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Wednesday 10th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord for his question. Our overriding aim is to protect the peace process in Northern Ireland and the Belfast/Good Friday agreement. That is an avowed and primary purpose of the Northern Ireland protocol. As we implement the protocol in a pragmatic and proportionate way, we do so very mindful of the considerations he has in mind and protecting all aspects of the peace process.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, temporary derogations, waivers or exemptions are by definition not a long-term solution to the problems intrinsic in the protocol. Will my noble friend the Minister address the asymmetry—the absurdity—at the heart of the protocol: its contention that checks on goods between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland undermine the Good Friday agreement and may even jeopardise peace, but checks between Northern Ireland and Great Britain have no such consequences?

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My noble friend makes a very good point. The protocol was designed to deal with the very complex reality to which he alludes. It needs to be implemented in a way that takes account of all the strands of the Good Friday agreement—east-west as well as north-south—and enables cross-community consent for those arrangements to be sustained. That means that the smooth flow of trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland needs to be preserved, as well as an open border between Northern Ireland and Ireland.

Police and Crime Commissioner Elections (Welsh Forms) Order 2021

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Thursday 4th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to rise for the first time in this place among you. It can be somewhat unsettling arriving in the Palace of Westminster at the height of the lockdown and its associated restrictions. There are times, wandering down the empty corridors and seeing the black and yellow tape barring various entrances, when it feels almost post-apocalyptic, almost “28 Days Later”. But if the physical environment is necessarily sterile, the same cannot be said of the people. I have been overwhelmed by the kindness and generosity of noble Lords on all Benches, who have always taken time to help a new Member.

The same is true of the permanent staff. It is not uncommon on these occasions to thank Black Rod and her excellent team, and rightly so. They have conducted themselves through these difficult times with exemplary briskness, efficiency and good cheer. Similarly, the doorkeepers are often rightly thanked on these occasions. Already, I have had more than once had occasion to be grateful to them for their good humour and their good sense. Perhaps your Lordships might indulge me if I thank a third group, less-often thanked: the canteen staff. There have been occasions when I have found the sheer weight of the lockdown and the emptiness almost oppressive. A sure cure to that mood is to be steered towards the rock cakes by the smiling canteen staff.

Allow me also to thank two noble friends who introduced me and whom I am truly proud to call friends—my noble friends Lord Leigh of Hurley and Lord Borwick, two immensely charming men whose characters are superficially different but who both have that sincere charm that rests on largeness of character, generosity of spirit and an unfeigned interest in other people.

I come here after 21 years in the European Parliament. I am one of many such on all Benches; I lost count at about a dozen. It is fair to say that I was a little bit less popular in that chamber than some of my noble friends and some of the noble Lords opposite who served in Brussels and Strasbourg. I had a dear friend, a French MEP, a terrific federalist and a great believer in a united states of Europe, who used to tease me by quoting the Book of Genesis. He would say: “You’re like Ishmael, you’re a wild man, every man’s hand against you and your hand against every man’s.” I am not sure that this was entirely true. Certainly I was in a minority in the European Parliament, but now, as that verse continues, dwelling among my brethren, like Ishmael, I look back and see that I have many friends, including great believers in a united states of Europe, with whom I have spent the past year Zooming disconsolately as we compare conditions in our various countries.

Throughout my time in Brussels, I saw my animating principle as being the diffusion, the decentralisation and the democratisation of power, which brings me to the debate before your Lordships today. I was given some advice before speaking. Somebody said that for your maiden speech you should pick an uncontroversial topic. He looked at me significantly, “You particularly, Hannan, should pick something uncontroversial.” I toyed with the idea of the Non-Domestic Rating (Public Lavatories) Bill, which we are due to debate next week. However, I felt that, in the current mood, that was too much of a hot-button issue and I did not want tempers to run high, so I have confined myself to the debate on today’s statutory instrument, which, as my noble friend the Minister ably set out, is about varying the number of signatures needed for police and crime commissioner candidates and about the use of the ancient, exquisite and euphonic Welsh language, which, as the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, reminds us, is part of the glory of all of us in these islands.

Pericles, treated so often as a guru by the Prime Minister, said that great issues can arise from small questions. The issue of maintaining and strengthening local democratic control of police strikes me as a very great issue indeed. It is perfectly true, as the noble Lord, Lord Hain, pointed out, that turnout for police and crime commissioner elections has been disappointing. I feel the loss perhaps more than some in this Chamber, having been a very early advocate of the idea. In 2005, I wrote a book calling for what I then wanted to call sheriffs. I thought it great to revive the shrievalty as an institution. Eventually, in a very watered-down form, that idea took shape as policy.

I always quarrelled with the name “police and crime commissioner”. First, it is very boring. Secondly, it is technically inaccurate, making it sound as if you are the person in charge of the crime as well as in charge of the police. Thirdly, the commissioner is the opposite of an elected person, being someone who is given a commission. I took this question up with the then Police Minister, now my noble friend Lord Herbert. He said: “The trouble is, we focus-group tested it, and nobody liked ‘sheriff’. It sounded too American, too John Wayne—posses and stars and so on.” If that is true, what a sad comment it is on the ahistoricism of our country. Where on earth do people think that their cousins got the idea, the name and the institution from, if not from here?

I hope that with time we can strengthen the office, giving it not only more control over the police, but, ideally, the right to set local sentencing guidelines, while not interfering in particular cases. The answer to low turnout is to give more power and more meaning to the act of casting a vote in that election. As a general principle, we should strengthen and not weaken local democracy and local accountability. Perhaps this country’s proudest boast, the greatest gift that we have given to the happiness of mankind, is the idea that laws should not be passed, nor taxes raised, except by people who are answerable and that the people who pass and enforce the laws are in some way accountable to the people who are expected to obey them. That principle applies at local as well as national level. How to strengthen the police and crime commissioners—how to strengthen the shrievalty—is beyond the matter of this debate and well above my pay grade, but I hope that noble Lords will see an advantage nationally to us in trying to move towards greater local democracy and towards more purpose, meaning and honour in the act of casting a vote locally.

In many ways, your Lordships are the nation’s institutional memory. This Chamber is a repository for the accumulated constitutional wisdom of centuries. That imposes a commensurate obligation on us to keep intact and to improve where possible the freedoms that we were privileged to inherit and to pass them on securely to our children.