House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 25th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

This brought the House down—as it has done again today—and I lost my point. But it is a serious one: if we are going to share titles, although I am not sure that we should, it should work both ways.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, what a pleasure it is to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, and, indeed, one half of our Green Party. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, and I have known each other since we met on the slopes of Mount Sinai nearly 40 years ago. She knows how fond I am of her—she supplies my family with her lovely homemade jam—but, as always, I completely disagree.

She cared very much about the gendered amendments but not about the name of the House; I am exactly the other way around. It seems to me utterly bizarre that the Government should have a view on succession to titles. I get the argument of republicanism and I get that it is an irrational thing to have younger brothers inheriting before older sisters. But it is equally irrational to have a prejudice in favour of first-born children rather than younger children. In fact, the whole thing is irrational and cannot be justified wholly on logical grounds. If you start pulling at that thread, you very quickly end up with a French Revolution-style abolition of the entire shebang. If we want to do that, fine, but the idea that you can keep the titles but apply a Guardian public sector equality test to them seems to me extremely strange.

I speak in support of Amendment 97, standing in my name and that of the noble Earl, Lord Devon. I think I said at Second Reading that even the architecture of this Chamber is a link back to the old House of Lords: that it was in the minds of Pugin and Barry to recreate the idea of a throne room and a monarch taking the counsel of his bishops and barons. There is, I think, a thread in the make-up of this House that connects us back, certainly to the earliest House of Lords in the reign of Edward III and probably to the Magnum Concilium of which the noble Earl spoke; or, before that, even to the pre-Conquest witans—I think a Saxon king taking the counsel of his thanes and aldermen would have been doing something not unrecognisable to a Chamber that contains a partly hereditary element.

That thread is being snapped; the link is being sundered. It is being sheared in two, as the Fates were said to do with the thread of a man’s life, and we are being cut off from a part of our history and our constitutional inheritance. I am Tory enough to regret that, but I am Whig enough to recognise that there is something irrational about having an inherited element of a legislature. I wish we were replacing it with something better, as was originally the deal promised in 1998, but we have lost that argument and it is an argument for a different time.

I come back to the bizarre anomaly of having a House of Lords that does not contain any “lords”—as the word would have been understood for the previous 1,000 years. That seems a case of having our cake and eating it. If there are no lords of the traditional, recognised, aristocratic variety then by what virtue and on what basis do we continue to appropriate the name?

This question has been faced before. During the Cromwellian interregnum, the Lord Protector was always trying to bring the old aristocracy back into government. He wanted to sustain the legitimacy of his rule by returning to bicameralism. His problem was that none of the lords would agree to serve. If memory serves, there was one—the sixth Baron Eure, who was a parliamentary soldier who inherited his title when the fifth Baron Eure, who was a distant cousin of his and a royalist soldier, was killed on the battlefield at Marston Moor. He was the only lord, in the old sense, to serve in what came to be known, with spectacular banality, as the “other House”—hence the convention of how the two Chambers refer to one another that we have to this day.

If you do not have any lords, in the Cromwellian sense, do you not face exactly the same dilemma? We can probably do better than “the other House” as a title—we could call ourselves a senate—but it seems utterly extraordinary that we should pretend to the authority and legitimacy that comes from this very old institution when we have deliberately, and in contravention of promises made at the ballot box, torn that thread in two.

I would like an answer to this when Ministers come to respond. Let us please hear their defence of titles.

[Baroness Hayman (CB)]

My Lords, I have resisted so far the temptation to participate in the debate on the Bill. I shall keep to that, in the sense that I will resist the temptation to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, on the byways of nomenclature for the House itself.

However, I urge the Government Front Bench to think seriously about and respond positively to two issues raised by the noble Earl, Lord Devon. The first is the inappropriateness of this House in any way involving itself in the determination of peerage claims. This was an argument that I made, and lost, before the turn of the century, but I still agree with what I said then and I believe that it would be far better for the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council to take on that responsibility.

Secondly, we need to right the implicit wrong in the hereditary peerage: the sex discrimination against generations of women who should have inherited not only the title but the estate—which in many ways is much more important. I hope the Government will give us some hope that they will make progress on that.

I talked about inheriting the title. The noble Baroness, Lady Deech, pointed out the other anomaly of the husbands and wives of baronesses and barons. We should not right that wrong by creating another anomaly of giving someone else a title because of their sexual relationship with another person who has a title. That does not seem to make a great deal of sense or to be progressive in any way. I would just stop anyone giving their partner a title because of something that they have inherited or achieved.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 12th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Trenchard (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, support my noble friend Lord Blencathra in bringing forward this topic, and I very much agree with what my noble friend Lord Strathclyde has just said.

When I looked at my noble friend’s three amendments, I was inclined to think that Amendment 20 struck the right balance. It is important to retain the concept of the House of Lords as a part-time House, but I also believe that, to remain sufficiently involved in what is going on so as to be able to make a contribution to debates on matters in which noble Lords possess expertise and knowledge, a participation level of 10% may be on the low side. But, as long as your Lordships’ House retains its present sitting hours, 15% is a reasonable minimum participation level—although it would be difficult to maintain a full-time job outside the House and a 15% participation level if the House were to adopt similar sitting hours to the House of Commons.

However, my noble friend Lord Hailsham is right to provide in his Amendment 25 for the possibility that the House may resolve to exempt a noble Lord from compulsory retirement if it concludes that there was a good cause for that noble Lord’s non-attendance. I entirely agree with the point raised by the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, about low-attendance, high-impact Members.

I also support Amendment 37, in the name of my noble friend Lord Lucas. This amendment would allow the House to provide exceptions to compulsory retirement, but, interestingly, allows the possibility of first fixing and later changing the minimum participation rate through Standing Orders, which would provide for more flexibility. My noble friend Lord Blencathra is absolutely right to ask your Lordships to consider this matter, because the Labour Party manifesto also committed to introduce a new participation requirement, at the same time as excluding the excepted hereditary Peers. Those who believe that the House is too large may also support the introduction of a minimum participation level. I would expect that the retirement of a number of inactive Peers would make it easier for the Government to find a better way forward that would cause less disruption to the ability of the House to discharge its functions in a way that serves the country well.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I find myself questioning the premise on which this amendment rests, and indeed on which the Bill it is amending rests—namely, that there are too many of us here. It is repeated very often, but it is rarely interrogated or properly analysed. The case against the amendment from my noble friend Lord Blencathra has been eloquently made by others, and I am not going to repeat the points that they have made. My noble friend Lord Astor made an extremely good point about the perverse incentives that it would bring in, my noble friend Lord Hailsham made a very good point about its retrospective nature, and who can disagree with the compelling case made by the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, about the low-frequency but high-impact Members?

But we would not be having this debate at all if it were not for this general assumption that we need to free up space. Before I came here, I took that as axiomatic. We are always told that this is the second-biggest legislative chamber after the National People’s Congress in Peking. But too many Peers for what? Do we have difficulty finding a seat in the Chamber? I do not think so; if we look around, we see that there is plenty of space. Do we have difficulty booking a table in the Peers’ Dining Room? Do we not have our Written Questions accepted? Are we pullulating in such numbers that the ushers are unable to cope with us? I do not think so. If we are, the one lot of people we do not have a problem with are those who do not turn up very often. They, by definition, are the ones who are contributing least to the problem and, indeed, claiming least from it.

This Chamber has existed in one form or another since Magna Carta—at least if we count the conciliar form of government that took shape under King John and Henry III as the progenitor and ancestor of this Chamber—and at no stage has anyone felt the need to insert a minimum attendance requirement. It was assumed that it could be left to the patriotism and judgment of the bishops and barons to decide when something was sufficiently important to merit turning up. Have we completely junked that idea of trusting people’s own discretion and judgment?

If it really were a question of numbers and we really did feel that we were massively overloaded, why is it that almost every day we keep on admitting more Members here? If Ministers think that the problem is that this is too large a legislature, why do we seem to be gaining half a dozen people a week? I sometimes feel we are in one of those Gilbert and Sullivan operettas where everyone gets a peerage. I sometimes wonder whether that is the end game—that this country will end up becoming an oligarchy, where the real power is vested in the hands of the last remaining 500 people who still have the right to vote for the other place, and everyone else will have the right to sit here. But, you know, as long as they do not turn up, it is still not a problem—so I come back to saying that I dispute the premise.

I know that Ministers share my view, because they are not proposing a cut-off based on attendance, or indeed a cut-off based on age. They have looked beyond their manifesto and have decided to do the right thing, rather than be bound by the dots and commas of what their manifesto says. I hope they will extend that logic to the only democratically elected element of your Lordships’ Chamber, namely our hereditary colleagues.

[Lord Dobbs (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow my noble friend Lord Hannan, but we do have a problem with numbers. We are constantly being compared with the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. It is a silly jibe but it does us damage. It makes us seem stuffed like a goose. When did we last see 800 Peers in this Chamber—or 700 or 600? Yet the impression out there is that there are far too many of us who are here only because we are stuffed geese. There is widespread, if not universal, agreement that our numbers should come down. That is why I was very happy to join the noble Earl, Lord Devon, on his amendment, which will help to achieve that objective.

The noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, talked about a part-time House. We all talk about the value of a part-time House. Do we want a full-time House? No, I do not think we do, but neither do we want a no-time house. A peerage is not a zero-hours contract.

It is strange that the Government set out their deckchairs in their manifesto—so far, so very clear about a number of different measures that would help bring down numbers—but for some reason they now seem content to sit on their principles and watch the boats sail by. It is baffling that they do not do what they said they would do, and why they aim their cannons simply at the hereditaries, rather than at, for instance, those who do not participate. A fellow might be forgiven for thinking that some in the Labour Party’s main interest is not so much reform as a bit of cynical old-fashioned class warfare—perish that thought.

I constantly bang on about the fundamental principle that inspires the relationship between individual Peers and our institution, which is that we are here to serve this House. This House does not exist to serve us. The institution, not the individual, must come first. It is not simply a numbers game. More fundamentally, it is about the need to refresh this House to ensure that its experience and advice are up to date and that this House remains relevant. Sometimes you need a fresh wind to blow away cobwebs. If numbers matter, and the Labour manifesto said that they do, I suggest that the amendments we are discussing today would help.

In a slightly wider context, we all know that the Government will get the Bill through, but why do it the hard way—the bitter way? Why strip away the desire to compromise? Why poison the well? Why not show a little willingness, allow a little wiggle room on the Bill? Is it really to be seen just as the use of naked power?

We have, of course, had different points of view expressed, even on this amendment. But I believe that a quick and honourable deal could be reached on the Bill and, indeed, on a wider reform package in line with Labour’s manifesto. That deal could be done this afternoon between the party leaders over a cup of tea, and even before that cup of tea has a chance to go cold.

It is important for the credibility of this Bill, this Government and this House that the Government should try, and be seen to be trying, to come to a broader agreement, than they have done so far. I hope that the Government will open their door and reach out for agreement. That would be so much more dignified and productive than simply being seen to reach out for our hereditaries’ throats.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 10th March 2025 Lords Chamber

That leads me on to my key point, and I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Hailsham for the trailer that he has already provided. I have my Private Member’s Bill being discussed on Friday that addresses these very points and responds to the criticisms that we have heard, such as that from my noble friend Lord Howard of Lympne. It addresses those problems and will establish the appointments commission on a statutory basis but not extend its powers extensively in the way that some of these amendments suggest—ultimately, it is a matter for the Prime Minister to make the nominations to the Crown. There may be some restraints and limits, but there is a case for complying and fulfilling—the very points that the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, has made. For those who wish to pursue the arguments or to understand the arguments against the points made by my noble friend Lord Howard and others, turn up on Friday.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I do not want to detain your Lordships long. I feel that I also have to swim rather against the current, as my noble friend Lord Leigh of Hurley was doing. Is there not something intrinsically wrong with a committee of the great and the good getting to appoint one of our two legislative Chambers? Why bother to get yourself elected to another place and be one among 651, when you can get yourself appointed to a committee which would then, in its turn, appoint a huge chunk of one of the two legislative Chambers? Is that not the very definition of oligarchy?

I am conscious that what I am saying is going to be unpopular here, because we are all, I suppose, to a greater or lesser extent, beneficiaries of the existing system, and I am also conscious that it is going to be unpopular beyond this place. In my years as an elected politician, I found that the most popular thing you could say about any subject was: “This is too important to be a political football. Why don’t we just get all the elected politicians out of the way and let the experts get on?” If you wanted a round of applause on “Question Time” or “Any Questions”, all you had to do was say, “Trust the professionals”, because on some level, everybody loves the idea of an expert. Everybody loves the idea of a disinterested patriot who can raise his eyes above the partisan scrum and descry the true national interest. However, I have to tell your Lordships that no such person exists. We all have our prejudices and assumptions—the expert more than anybody if, by expert, we mean somebody who has spent their entire career in one particular field. The idea of having such people appointing jolly good chaps like themselves is the antithesis of representative government.

I heard all the arguments that were made about what is wrong with concentrating this power solely in the hands of the Prime Minister, and I agree with that. If this were happening in Xi’s China or in Putin’s Russia, we would all say, “How terrible—imagine having the Executive filling one of the two legislative Chambers. What a travesty. What an affront to democracy”. I slightly fall back on saying that, if we are not happy having the Prime Minister doing it all, and we do not want a committee replicating itself like some Borg in “Star Trek”, we have to come up with an alternative. My own preference would be to keep something closer to what we have, where we would at least have some diversity, with some of our Members having been through some kind of election, albeit with a small enfranchised group.

[Baroness Finn (Con)]

My Lords, I think we can all agree that we want the same thing: a House that serves with integrity, a Second Chamber that commands public trust, and an appointments process that preserves the best of our traditions while adapting to the demands of modern democracy.

The House of Lords Appointments Commission provides a non-statutory safeguard within the process for appointments to your Lordships’ House. It has a clear but limited role: to recommend non-party-political Members for the Cross Benches, ensuring that this House benefits, as many noble Lords have pointed out, from independent expertise; and to provide vetting advice on nominations for life peerages. Crucially, its recommendations are advisory and do not bind a Prime Minister.

Many of the amendments in this group seek to place the power of nomination to this unelected Chamber in the hands of an unelected committee, as my noble friend Lord Hannan emphasised. This includes proposing significant changes to the powers and operation of HOLAC, including making its recommendations binding, rendering it statutory or altering its remit entirely. While I deeply respect noble Lords’ intentions in tabling these amendments, I must express my concerns, which were echoed by several noble Lords, including my noble friend Lord Leigh of Hurley, about the direction of travel that most of these proposals suggest.

I appreciate my noble friend Lord Dundee’s Amendment 45 and the clarification that my noble friend Lord Hailsham has suggested in Amendment 46. These amendments would establish HOLAC on a statutory basis and establish a cross-party board to oversee its work. They received support from my noble friends Lord Attlee and Lord Norton of Louth, the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, and the noble Lord, Lord Anderson. Their aim—to secure greater legitimacy and transparency for HOLAC—is honourable. Their effect, however, would be disastrous: a great mistake, as my noble friend Lord Howard pointed out.

Placing HOLAC on a statutory footing would not clarify its role; it would fundamentally alter it. Legislation would create a legal framework against which HOLAC’s decisions could be formally challenged in court, opening the door for the malicious and the litigious to claim it had failed to fulfil its legal duties. Candidates who were not recommended for appointment as Cross-Bench Peers could contest the basis on which they were excluded. Those who failed the propriety test, which is based on judgment rather than law, could argue it had been misapplied. Instead of providing independent advice to the Prime Minister, HOLAC would become a body subject to judicial review, forced to justify its reasoning in court, constrained by legal precedent and bound to operate based not on judgment, but within the narrow confines of justiciability. The Prime Minister’s discretion, exercised on HOLAC’s advice, would be second-guessed in not this House but the courts—a point made brilliantly by my noble friend Lord Howard. The process would become slower, more contested and more uncertain, exposing every appointment to challenge, delay and dysfunction. We should be under no illusion: making HOLAC statutory would not reinforce its authority but undermine it. It would not enhance trust but erode it, and it would not improve the system but entrench its weaknesses.

Pro-democracy Campaigners: Arrests

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Wednesday 8th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

I am certainly willing to do that. Let me reassure the noble Lord that our position is quite clear. China is our fourth-biggest trading partner and the second-biggest economy. Trade between these countries has existed for some time. The United Kingdom Government, under both parties, have been very clear and robust about these breaches of international law. To suggest that we have done nothing that the Chinese Communist Party has been annoyed about is not true. The noble Lord can grimace, but the fact that we have given BNOs the right to come here was very much a concern of the Chinese Communist Party. We have acted—this has included sanctions for four Chinese officials and one entity for serious systematic human rights violations—and we continue to act. The idea that we can simply conflate our very strong condemnation of human rights abuses and then say that therefore we are not going to have any economic ties is simply not in the interests of this country or of the global economy.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for that last answer. He is quite right that we should not be pivoting on the basis of headlines; we should have the closest relationship compatible with our national security and the principles that we uphold. None the less, I am sure the Minister will recognise that there was a substantive change in Chinese policy towards Hong Kong from 2020. Until then, the letter, if not always the spirit, of the Sino-British declaration had been honoured. With the national security law and the cancellation of the LegCo elections and change in the rules, China is now blatantly in violation of the “one country, two systems” deal, which was the basis on which the transfer of sovereignty was made. Whether it is by the kind of targeted sanctions suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Purvis of Tweed, or by some other mechanism, surely there must be some response from the British Government when we see such an overt violation of a treaty to which we are one of the two parties.

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

Ongoing breaches of that agreement have been registered with the United Nations. As I have said, one of the biggest consequences of those was the United Kingdom Government’s actions in facilitating BNOs being able to come to this country—a very successful operation, on which I congratulate the previous Government. It was the right decision. It certainly annoyed the Chinese Communist Party, which saw it as a breach of the agreement, whereas it was a reaction to its ongoing breaches of the agreement. We are taking every possible step to raise our concerns about human rights violations, not only the introduction of the security legislation in Hong Kong but the ongoing breaches of human rights in other parts of China.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 11th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, there is one insuperable objection to the Bill, and it is not to do with the qualities of our hereditary colleagues, which have been referred to many times in this debate, most recently by my noble friend Lord Bethell. It is absolutely true that they do the unthanked, workaday, unremunerated jobs—they serve as Whips and sit on all the dull committees that make the place work—but I do not expect that to be as persuasive an argument on the Government Benches as on these Benches.

Seeing my noble friend Lord Remnant, I rather had this fantasy that he might be the very last hereditary Peer. That would have been an enormously suitable thing, but, again, I do not expect it to be a convincing argument.

It is not, by the way, the fact that we are removing the only elected element from the Chamber. Yes, they are elected by a tiny group of people but, none the less, that is more of a mandate than the rest of us have. We are here by the whim of the Executive. If you think about what a legislative Chamber exists to do and has existed to do since Magna Carta, we have been here to hold the Executive in check. On the idea of having one of our two legislative Chambers wholly appointed by the Prime Minister, if that were happening in Zimbabwe or somewhere, we would all say that it was shockingly undemocratic. Being beneficiaries of it does not make it any less so.

It is not even the breaking of the link back to Magna Carta, which my noble friends spoke of earlier. Look around at the architecture of this room: it was in the minds of Barry and Pugin to recreate the idea of a medieval King taking counsel of his bishops and barons. You take the hereditaries out of it and it is very difficult to see how we can remain being a House of Lords—the idea of our having titles will become absurd once we have snapped that thread with history.

Finally, it is not about the Government’s failure to build consensus behind this major constitutional change—and it is major, not a tiny tidying-up measure. Imagine if Olaf Scholz decided to remove 10% of the members of the German Bundesrat, or if Emmanuel Macron decided fundamentally to change the composition of the French Senate. It could not be done without a major constitutional process. There was an opportunity to build consensus, but the Government have a mandate, and there is no rule that says that a Government with a mandate need to be wise or consensual—we are all allowed to be immoderate and mistaken. That is how the system works.

I would make a defence not of the hereditary principle, which everyone says is indefensible, but of the hereditary practice that we see around us and which seems very defensible. We see it from high streets—every time we see a sign saying “Williams and Son Butchers”—right up to the Throne, and people do not seem to find that at all indefensible. But none of that is going to persuade the Government Benches.

Frankly, I am a supporter of an elected House. It always sounds transgressive to say that here, and I always feel slightly guilty doing it, even though it is, I think, the position of every party represented at the other end, from the Greens to Reform. I do not know why it is such an odd position.

The fundamental, insuperable objection to this legislation is simply that it breaks a deal. That was conceded by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, in her opening remarks, when she said that the mechanism for hereditary by-elections was never expected to be used. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg, confirmed at the time in the late 1990s, this was because he expected the second stage of reform to have come into effect before the first by-election took place. There was a bargain, in effect, between the hereditaries and the Labour Party, and the bargain was that the hereditaries would not hold up Tony Blair’s 1998 legislation in exchange for the remaining reprieved 92. To say that it is indefensible or irrational or does not make sense is utterly beside the point: the 92, if you like, were there precisely to be the pebble in the shoe, the reminder that the second stage of reform had not been delivered and that we were not going to remain with a Zimbabwean system of the Executive appointing half the legislature.

This Bill taps that pebble from the shoe without delivering the rest of the bargain and moving to a democratic upper House. Fundamentally, that is what is wrong. It is dishonest and dishonourable. To claim that the only reason that this cannot be done is because it is a delaying tactic and that, unless we all agree on everything until it is all agreed, nothing will happen, simply does not apply when you have just won 411 seats at the other end. The Government are perfectly capable, if they want to, of having a democratic upper House. They are refusing to do so for the same reason that every previous Government have: they like to have the patronage powers and to be able to move people out of the way.

I remind the party opposite that it has been its commitment since 1902 to have a democratic upper House, and they entered into an explicit bargain in 1998. The hereditaries delivered their side; the Labour Party should deliver its side. Pacta sunt servanda.

Long-Term Strategic Challenges Posed by China

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Thursday 19th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, everything that we thought we knew about China turned out to be wrong. Between 1979 and 2012, there was a steady, fitful but none the less one-directional move towards liberalisation. A lot of us—and I certainly do not exclude myself from this—made the mistake of assuming that there was a link between economic liberalisation and political pluralism. It seemed to stand to reason that, if people became accustomed to choosing a television station, a car, an internet provider or a phone network, they would start to demand choice in who was their mayor or regional governor. For a long time, with some setbacks and patchiness, that seemed to be the case—but we were wrong. As Kaiser Kuo, the head of the international part of Baidu, said, “Just because you don’t know the truth about what happened in Tiananmen Square doesn’t mean you can’t build a mobile phone app”. I think that we all tended to overlook that.

We have certainly been taken off guard by the suddenness of the changes since Xi Jinping took office. Before 2012, there had been the beginning of a burgeoning independent blogosphere in China. It was permissible to make some criticisms of what was going on. Okay, you could not come out and say that the entire party system should be overturned, but you were allowed to make complaints about prison conditions and even ask for a wider choice of candidates in some of the local elections. All of that stopped, almost overnight.

First, a prominent blogger was brought out on television and made a Stalin-type self-recriminating tearful confession. Then, one by one, others began to be arrested. Then the lawyers who defended them began to be arrested. Then the lawyers who defended the lawyers began to be arrested. After that, people got the message. In 2013, the axe fell; the Supreme People’s Court declared that, if you spread an unhelpful rumour—that is how it put it—online and it got more than 500 shares or more than 5,000 views, you might be liable to three years in a labour camp.

I think all of this passed us by in this country. I cringe when I look at what I was writing as recently as five years ago, about how these arguments were still going on in Beijing and there were still more moderate figures from the Hu Jintao or Jiang Zemin eras. We absolutely missed the extent to which an autocratic regime was being built—a revanchist, aggressive and centralised dictatorship. It happened almost overnight. I sometimes think of that classic “The Simpsons” episode where the Soviet Union comes back and the whole end of the Cold War is shown to have been a massive maskirovka. The Berlin Wall comes charging out of the ground and Lenin rises, zombie-like, from his tomb. Imagine something like that but with modern technology.

The Chinese have built a terrifying panopticon state in which some of the world’s largest and notionally private companies—Weibo, Tencent and Alibaba—act both as proselytisers for the regime, employing people whose job is to propagandise, and, rather more scarily, as spies monitoring online activity. We are seeing a terrifying use of facial recognition and geolocation technology to build the kind of dictatorship that would recently have been unimaginable.

This goes furthest in Xinjiang. Those roadblocks you see on the news are to check that some clever young member of your family has not taken the mandatory spyware off your mobile phone. That spyware looks for antisocial behaviour, covering everything from growing a beard to talking to foreigners, covering your hair, observing the fast or trying to access the wrong websites. If you do too much of that, an algorithm will sentence you to re-education with almost no human oversight whatever. If it can do that in Xinjiang, why not all over China? Why not export the technology to any friendly dictatorship in its sphere of influence? The world is becoming an altogether greyer, scarier and colder place.

I will not go over it again because it was so well described by the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, but at the same time we saw China, which until then had observed the letter if not the spirit of our accords on Hong Kong, suddenly stop bothering to pretend. With the security law, we saw the end of any serious dream of one country, two systems surviving. We also saw China beginning to press territorial claims on and cause disputes with not only almost every contiguous country—noble Lords will remember the clashes on the Indian border during lockdown, when Indian soldiers were shot—with the significant exception of Russia, but some remarkably distant countries. China maintains territorial claims against the Philippines, Indonesia and Brunei, not countries that would seem from a map to be especially nearby.

The notion of playing it long and peaceful global co-operation, which had been the defining notion since Deng Xiaoping, suddenly ceased. We saw that very clearly two years ago when China celebrated the centenary of the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party. We saw it in the iconography and the language. As noble Lords will recall, Xi Jinping spoke of foreigners dashing themselves to pieces against the mighty wall made up of 1.4 billion Chinese people. Marxism may have been ditched and the country may have adopted market mechanisms, but it remains hideously Leninist. There is still an absolute emphasis on the supremacy of the party and a disdain for any mechanisms of representative government.

When Xi Jinping spoke at the centenary, he donned a Mao suit. As in George Orwell’s 1984, proletarian overalls are the uniform of the party elite. Tempting though it is to push the Orwellian analysis, I am not sure it is quite right. For one thing, Orwell’s telescreens did not come close to the terrifying powers now being wielded by some of the spyware of Chinese tech companies. Actually, it is not so much Orwell as Huxley. China has begun to change the way in which people think. My late friend Roger Scruton got into terrible trouble, and was horribly misquoted in the New Statesman, when he said the Chinese Government were creating robots out of their own people. I recommend to your Lordships We Have Been Harmonised: Life in China’s Surveillance State by Kai Strittmatter, a China-based German correspondent. It talks about the way in which, when Chinese students are in foreign universities and do not need to worry about censors or paywalls, they still do not access websites that might be considered dangerous in China. Even when, in observed experiments, they were given links to what actually happened in Tiananmen, or to what are the claims of the Tibetans, or who is the Dalai Lama, or what is the argument with Taiwan, or any of the forbidden topics, they would not look at them because they had been conditioned to see it all as dangerous propaganda. That is why I say Huxley rather than Orwell; Huxley has a line to the effect that a population of slaves did not need to be coerced because they had been taught to love their servility.

So what can we do about it? I rather agree with the position set out by the Minister in his opening statement. There is not much point in engaging in economic sanctions of any kind. I generally think there is almost never any point in them because they hurt the wrong people; they prop up dictators and they hit poor people in your own country and in the other country. In this case, what we dislike economically about China, such as the theft of intellectual property, the insertion of bugs into things and reverse engineering, has all been happening now without any trade. That is not a question of economic sanctions; it is a question of invigilating the rules under the existing system. Our policy, as set out by my right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary in his Lancaster House speech, which was the first one that I can think of—there may have been others, but I am not aware of them—devoted to a single subject, is the idea of being engaged regionally in CPTPP and AUKUS, of standing by our allies but continuing to engage with Beijing, seems to me, in a world where we are necessarily choosing among imperfect options and where our resources are not unlimited, about the most effective.

I will finish with a point raised by my noble friend Lord Swire, about something that would have been much bigger news were it not for the horrifying abominations we have seen in Israel: the summit that happened between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping on Tuesday. What we see there is the illiberal powers combining quite openly and flagrantly against us. It is a reminder of how limited our liberal democratic ideals turn out to be in their geographical reach. We like to imagine that our system of government is so obviously preferable to the alternatives because nobody would want to live in a state where you can be arrested for saying the wrong thing, or disappeared, or where rulers can make up the rules as they go along and ignore the law. We have tended to think that that would just spread because people preferred it—but in their response both to the Russia-Ukraine war and to Hamas, we see how many countries simply do not see things that way.

The number of countries prepared to impose sanctions on Russia, in defence of the rule of law and the international order, was tiny. It was the anglosphere, western Europe and a handful of advanced east Asian democracies. The line-up over the horrifying Hamas atrocities is very similar. For a lot of people, victimhood has been elevated as the supreme virtue and claiming to be an anti-colonial oppressed power of some kind is a moral get-out-of-jail card that allows you almost any kind of atrocity. It turns out that those who really believe in personal freedom, individualism, the elevation of the individual above the collective and the rule of law are remarkably few.

Perhaps those values were always a little contingent, counterintuitive as they are in a tribal species that evolved in hierarchical kin groups. It may be that, when we look back at that summit, we will see it as marking the end of a brief liberal era that rested, when the chips were down, on the readiness of western countries to pursue their policy goals with force of arms. It may be that we are coming to the end of a brief interglacial; that the planet is now tipping again on its axis; that the cold weather is returning; and that the glaciers are creeping back.

Living with Covid-19

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

We will revise the workplace guidance for employers and work with them; again, it will be published shortly, before the full measures we announced yesterday come into effect.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, at the weekend Her Majesty the Queen was reported to have tested positive. I am sure noble Lords on all sides will join me in wishing her every success, but I was struck that, immediately, some commentators and politicians jumped on the announcement, saying that therefore we must not go ahead with the unlocking. Surely the two most salient facts are that omicron will reach even the most protected person in the country and that, if a 95 year-old woman can carry on working with her typical devotion to duty, we have reached the point where these non-clinical, non-pharmaceutical interventions are, if not wholly purposeless, certainly disproportionate?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

On behalf of the whole House, I am sure, I wish Her Majesty the Queen all the best and a quick recovery from her current illness.

Afghanistan

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Wednesday 18th August 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, sometimes in politics there are no good options. You have to choose between bad alternatives: you can do X and ugly things will happen or you can not do X and ugly things will still happen. Whichever one you have chosen, the media and a chunk of the public will point to those ugly things as clear evidence that you should have picked the other course, either because they do not understand the concept of lesser evils or because they affect not to.

The reality is that ever since the terrorist abominations of September 2001, we have been in a world of lesser evils. Every course of action open to the West will have carried costs. Going into Iraq and Afghanistan carried visible costs, dissipating blood and treasure and causing civilian deaths. I was and remain an opponent of the Iraq war: I continue to believe that the costs we incurred were higher than the costs that we would have incurred through non-intervention.

I am not going to pretend, however, that the costs of non-intervention would have been zero. There is always a balance to be identified, and to that extent I have some sympathy with at least the part of President Biden’s argument where he said, “Look, given the way in which the authorities collapsed, it is clear that our only alternative to Taliban rule would have been an open-ended occupation.” That is not a knock-down argument. As other noble Lords have said, the US has had a fairly open-ended commitment to South Korea since 1957.

All I am saying is that we should accept that every decision in Afghanistan was a choice among bad options. Going in was a choice among bad options. Prolonging the mission after the degradation of the al-Qaeda bases was a choice among bad options. Extending the mission to cover nation building, female emancipation and education was a choice among bad options. Leaving was a choice among bad options. None the less, I consider it to have been the worst choice. It would have been one thing to have gone in, attacked al-Qaeda and pulled out, but once we were committed, once we had made a statement of intent, our honour was on the line.

Let me quote, rather unwontedly, that sly and calculating former President, Richard Nixon. This is what he said in 1970, justifying what we would now call a surge, seen as a prelude to withdrawal from Vietnam:

“If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.”


Who can doubt that he was right? How do the decision and the events of last week look from Beijing or Moscow, the two great illiberal powers having just conducted a massive set of joint exercises in north-western China? How does this look from Taiwan or even Pakistan? If you are an up-and-coming young officer cadet, do you want to train in the US or in China? Might you start thinking of learning Mandarin? Has it not emboldened every tinpot tyrant from Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua to Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, partly because they are no longer in awe of the English-speaking powers?

We have become very blasé about the world through which we have lived. We can be anti-colonialist and dismissive in an attitude bred from decades of peace and security. But as that world reaches its close, we may soon have the opportunity to regret what has passed.

House of Lords: Remote Participation and Hybrid Sittings

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Thursday 20th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I thought long and hard about participating in this debate. I have been here for only five minutes. There is a weight of experience all around me that I am conscious of. I am one of those new Peers mentioned by my noble friend Lord Cormack in his introduction. I have known nothing except empty Benches, taped-off entrances and sterile corridors. None the less, I have been in politics for long enough to be aware of one iron rule: whenever anything is proposed, the opponents are very vocal and the supporters tend to sit back and take it for granted.

So I wanted to come here to lend my enthusiastic support to my noble friend Lord Howe and a number of my noble friends who spoke previously: my noble friends Lord Farmer, Lord Forsyth of Drumlean, Lord Howard of Rising, Lord Dobbs, Lord Trenchard and Lord Taylor of Holbeach, and others. I agree with everything they said, but the intervention on which I really want to focus came from the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, who quoted the Writ of Summons all of us receive when we are called here. Some of your Lordships have been around for a while and might have become a bit blasé, but I, being new, was terrifically excited to get a Writ of Summons from my sovereign, demanding my presence at this Parliament to be holden here in “our city of Westminster”. It is worth just for a second dwelling on the words that she used:

“We strictly enjoining Command you upon the faith and allegiance by which you are bound to Us that … waiving all excuses, you be at the said day and place personally present”.


Parliament has a peculiar centrality in the annals of this country. The biggest events in our history were experienced as parliamentary moments: the Reformation; the arrest of the five Members and the civil war; the Glorious Revolution and the Bill of Rights; the rise of Churchill and the formation of the wartime coalition; the entry into and then the withdrawal from the European Union. Take Parliament out of the equation and our national story becomes meaningless. That is why we must reverse changes brought in on a contingent basis to deal with a specific emergency when that emergency passes. Our meeting again here physically will be the supreme sign that the nightmare has passed, that the sun is in the sky again and that our national story can resume its course.

[The Senior Deputy Speaker (Lord Gardiner of Kimble) (Non-Afl)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Goudie, has withdrawn, so I call the noble Lord, Lord Haselhurst.