Northern Ireland Protocol

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Tuesday 28th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

The noble Lord should not ask for too much; he cannot ask me to control the Foreign Secretary’s diary, but I will certainly let the Foreign Secretary know about the great interest of the noble Lord and his committee, whose work I very much value, in that matter, but I cannot commit to him in any way. Although I think it invidious to single out individuals I say that, in addition to my right honourable friend the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary and the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland have both played an enormously distinguished part in bringing about these arrangements. As we laid out in the Statement, we believe that we now have a situation where we will have a single medicines pack for the whole of the United Kingdom, including Northern Ireland. To supply to Northern Ireland, business will need to secure approval for a UK-wide licence from only the UK’s MHRA and not the EMA as well.

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, I am a big admirer of Northern Ireland and its people, having served there for some years. Does my noble friend agree that those who argue that they now want Northern Ireland to be treated and governed in exactly the same way as the rest of the United Kingdom are quite wrong? On the contrary, does not the Windsor Framework confer or confirm an enormous advantage on the people of Northern Ireland and the economy of Northern Ireland which will give them great gain and benefit in the future? All that is needed now is for the people of this nation with the most devolved and established parliament of its own in the United Kingdom to get together and make that parliament work.

[Lord True (Con)]

My noble friend is right. There are certainly advantages which this framework enables to continue in north-south access and north-south trade. However, I repeat that there is the corollary, which was neglected and which the UK and the EU have addressed in this agreement, of obstruction to east-west trade. I agree on the institutions, but I stick by what I said at first. I am not going to put anybody in a box. It is reasonable that all those who have suffered and considered and laboured in very difficult years across many decades—indeed, I go back to the time when my noble friend was a Minister—reflect and examine the documents before us.

Democracy Denied (DPRRC Report)

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, I have a simple question to add to this excellent debate: are we set up, as a Parliament of two Houses, to achieve increased parliamentary scrutiny of the ever-swelling activities and plans of the modern Executive? We all want to see that and are all striving to find ways to do so, as the noble Baroness has just reminded us.

In putting that question forward, I will use not my own words but those of my noble friend Lord Hill of Oareford, a former Leader of the House. On Tuesday, he asked

“does a session in front of the Treasury Select Committee amount to proper accountability? Is the TSC properly set up and resourced to provide proper scrutiny? Clearly, the answer to both questions is no.”—[Official Report, 10/1/23; col. 1346.]

My answer is also no. In fact, I extend that to most of our hard-working departmental committees, all working under present limitations as they are. If we want proper evaluation of the stream of statutory instruments, many of which are highly technical, we must recognise that that stream is bound to increase as regulation, the powers of regulators and things such as complex trade agreements become ever more fast-changing and require more rapid responses.

In the 1970s, some of us took the decision that Parliament, as it then operated, could no longer call the Government to account effectively or really examine their swelling powers—that was 50 years ago. After a prolonged debate and some experiment, the Select Committee system for each department that we have today was set up and the old, weak Estimates Committee system was swept away. That innovation, agreed by all sides in Parliament and fully supported by the Executive, of which I then happened to be a part, has done extremely well over 40 years and helped shed new light on—and, in some cases, sharply limited—the expanding executive activity and acquisition of powers which is going on all the time and worries us so much. However, in the digital age of far greater executive power and control which has come about since then—everything shifting and evolving ever faster—the parliamentary system of scrutiny, of both legislation and executive programmes, clearly needs further strengthening in many ways. My belief is that, to match that greater spread and depth of complexity, we need a far stronger committee system in both Houses.

The Hansard Society rightly questions whether our clumsy and antique system of negative and affirmative procedures—we have all lived through endless examples of those—really work any more. Do they have any teeth? My instinct is they do not. The Hansard Society also wants a sifting committee to decide which SIs should really be scrutinised in depth. I can see what it is thinking, but that really misses the point: the sheer complexity of government and the need to move ever faster to keep up, especially on the regulatory and trade fronts, requires much more specialised focus to sift those instruments effectively than anything that can be provided by one single committee.

Trade agreements are living and changing processes; they cannot be fixed arrangements nowadays. We need all departmental committees to have the resources and powers to go in depth into those matters because, in the modern conditions of the digital age, that is what is necessary. To plunge deeply and effectively into the executive powers being sought, establishing whether they should have proper scrutiny and of what kind, requires the sort of intense questioning from many sides that only a very well-resourced committee with real powers and good relations with the media and public can deliver. Our committees are underresourced for the modern age and underpowered, compared with the committees of any other Parliaments.

In my last few seconds, I add the reflection that the first power needed is one which most committees in most other free Parliaments in most other countries have: some control over the legislative agenda. To the best of my knowledge, we at Westminster, supposedly the mother of Parliaments, are almost the only Parliament in which the legislative agenda and programme is left almost entirely under strong executive control. That too should change.

Cabinet Manual: Revision (Constitution Committee Report)

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Friday 16th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, on what she has just said and on securing a slot debating this issue. That we are debating it as the last item on a Friday afternoon before Christmas has some message in it, given that it is a key constitutional issue, but I leave noble Lords to deduce that for themselves.

I view this debate and the whole issue as a replacement exercise: we are searching for how to replace the standards, conventions and moral behaviour patterns of a past age with something new and more effective. The fundamental point, of course, is that the rule of law must apply to both rulers and ruled at all levels. That is why we know Soviet communism failed eventually and why Chinese Communist Party rule will eventually fail despite the brilliance of the Chinese people and their economy. The question for us is how to deal with this problem in an age of hypercomplexity and hyperconnectivity.

This search began in modern times back in the 1930s with Lord Keynes and his belief that his kind of modern economy and society would be run smoothly by educated administrators and enlightened governors all sharing the same principles and duties—a marvellously civilised and unprejudiced elite, mostly, by implication, from the middle class and public schools. I tried to expand on this in my book Freedom and Capital in the early 1980s, but we are told that Clive Priestley in the Cabinet Office first called it in 1985 “the good chaps theory of government”. More recently, that expression has been given wings brilliantly by that 21st century Bagehot, my noble friend Lord Hennessy, whom we are going to hear from shortly.

What it all boils down to is that there was assumed to be a certain unwritten exemplar of behaviour and decency in the way that government was conducted which there was no need to write down, but now, in this very different day, age and context, that no longer works. Hence the intensified calls to fall back on up-to-date written codes and guidance telling us how constitutional government works and what rules should be observed—and so enter the Cabinet Manual that we are now discussing, the Ministerial Code, the Civil Service Code and a whole host of other rulebooks.

The difficulty that comes, when you write everything down, is that it is full of subjective views and opinions. That is just where the present Cabinet Manual rests, with the Prime Minister’s deciding judgment about any transgressions, and it is why some people call for it to be put into statute law. If that is the next move, the trouble is that then come the judges, the judicial reviews and all the rest, bringing law into politics. That is where we are already, in fact, with judges facing impossible dilemmas: on the one hand, they have to implement the law as laid down not just by Parliament but by international norms, while on the other they face a body politic increasingly driven by populist instincts and inward-looking nationalist priorities and fragmented by identity politics and post-Brexit legal uncertainties.

Add to that the heaving sea of online connectivity, transparency, polarised opinion and the noise of argument about what is right and wrong, what are good and acceptable ways of carrying on and what are bad, with precious little prospect for common ground between the two. The uproar reaches a crescendo of accusations and rumours, with the rawest kind of partisan politics wading in. I think it was Jim Callaghan who once warned that a rumour can travel round the whole world before the truth can even get its boots on.

Small wonder, then, that with absolutely everything disputed—now even, heaven save us, gender—and everything up for grabs, demand grows for a better-codified order, revised and updated with renewed constitutional clarity. Incidentally, all this leads to a horrible atmosphere in and around politics in which people denounce each other as though in China, where the spy is watching at the end of the road, or recalling the French revolution’s chilling cry of “J’accuse” being enough to send someone to the scaffold—or at least, in modern terms, to suffer public pillorying in the media and banishment and dismissal, as recently occurred in the deplorable case of Conor Burns MP. Hence the understandable desperate impulse to write it all down.

However, one has to ask: will this desire to have the matter written down in letters of gold have any impact on standards of behaviour? Frankly, I doubt it, without huge changes of attitude and a perception of common purpose, which would make it all unnecessary anyway. We have enough rules and procedures written down already—codes of a sort.

By far the best course would be for pressure everywhere, in the media and Parliament, to ensure more honest presentation of the dilemmas and complexities of public life and governance. Leaders there must be, with impeccable standards—that is essential—but where we allow gigantic half-truths to prevail in public debate, that is where the dodging, weaving, dissembling and deviating begin and the arguments about rule-breaking in high places take centre stage. Examples are most vivid in the role of Parliament and its relations with the Executive and the judiciary; in what is guidance and what is law; in half-baked economic theories about how to stop inflation, where I think the public are being very badly misled; in how to stop the UK from falling apart—the devolution issue; in distorted ideas about levelling up; and in many more areas besides.

More honest debate over major issues, presented and explained, would produce the conditions in which little dishonesties and deceits were more rapidly exposed and discouraged, and honest government conducted strictly under the rule of law was delivered in a constitutional framework. Lord Denning reminded us:

“Be ye never so high, the law is above you.”


We should need no further codes or manuals to remind us constantly of that.

COP 27

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Tuesday 15th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I am sorry if noble Lords thought that I was being too reticent by not straying into some areas. We have a wide-ranging Statement about to be made, and I would not want the House to draw any conclusion from what I say or do not say. What your Lordships must understand is that this is a difficult time. There has been a lot of criticism of this Government’s commitment to renewables, but I underline that we have achieved a fourfold increase in renewable use since 2011. Renewables now make up 40% of our electricity supply—something that, in 2010, Mr Ed Miliband said was a pie-in-the-sky idea. That pie has come down from the sky, but we do need to make it larger and I will listen to the point that the noble Baroness made.

On wind, more than £1 billion of government investment is already boosting our offshore wind sector, and major port and manufacturing infrastructure, and safeguarding many jobs. The Hornsea wind farm—it is offshore, I concede—has lately come onstream, and it is one of the largest that exists. As to debt, I cannot be specific about that, but I will take away and pass on what the noble Baroness said. We are obviously conscious that there are specific nations with specific problems; for example, some of the small islands are nations that we are particularly concerned to address in a specific way.

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, the Prime Minister’s commitment to UK net zero is admirable and reassuring. There are obviously some huge problems ahead, but there are also some very good signs. For instance, I read in the papers that Morocco is committing to provide 10 gigawatts of solar-driven electricity by cable to the United Kingdom, which is the equivalent of five nuclear power stations—so there are hopes as well as problems. However, the real difficulty is that 40% of global emissions come from Russia, China and India, and that proportion is going to rise in both percentage terms and volume terms. What exactly are we going to do about that?

[Lord True (Con)]

Well, my Lords, we will use such diplomatic power as we have. I have discovered in life, at a relatively advanced age, that you may pour wisdom into many people’s ears but they will not necessarily listen. I think the whole House agrees with what my noble friend just said; it is essential that all nations step up to the plate. The best we can do—and I believe that we did it in Glasgow, and that the Prime Minister has done it at COP 27—is use the UK’s considerable diplomatic influence in partnership with our allies. For example, we are working on Just Energy action with South Africa and Indonesia, and we are working alongside other developed nations.

We must use our diplomatic power to the greatest extent possible and we must, by our exertions, set an example to the rest of the world. If I could tell your Lordships’ House that with a click of the fingers, I could change the policy of very powerful nations in other parts of the world, I would, but every time Ministers of this Government meet Ministers from high-polluting countries, we will certainly make that point.

Economic Update

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Wednesday 19th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, we will continue to go for growth by delivering support for families who need it most—for example, by cutting the tax burden that would have taken place with the national insurance tax. That levy reversal will give 28 million people an average of £330 a year. We will go for growth by launching investment zones, as I said when responding to the most reverend Primate. We will introduce minimum service levels for transport services shortly in Great Britain, to ensure that strike action cannot derail economic growth; I look forward to support from the Liberal Democrats for that legislation. We will accelerate infrastructure projects across the country and have announced over 100 of them for transport and energy. We will also speed up delivery to undertake the complex patchwork of restrictions and EU-derived law.

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, does my noble friend agree that, thinking about the future and the practical situation that we are in, there is quite a lot of sense in reviewing the energy cap again in April 2023, provided that it does not push up the CPI, because every time that happens it increases government expenditure elsewhere? There is a growing realisation that, next year, energy prices internationally—oil and gas—need not rise nearly as fast as they have in the past. There are some signs of fall already. Therefore, if we can organise effectively an international co-operation with other major consumer countries in persuading the powers-that-be in the production world to increase oil and gas production, including America, OPEC and other countries, the difficulties of Russian withdrawal can be overcome, and we can see a much more favourable inflation rate. That in turn will begin to unwind all these worries about benefits matched to inflation and demands for wage costs well above 5%.

[Lord True (Con)]

My noble friend, with his immense experience in the energy sector, has been something of a voice crying in the wilderness on energy policy over decades under different Governments. His point about volatility is critical and is one of the reasons why we must review the nature of support going forward. Obviously, we will need to talk, and are talking, to other energy producers. We have had a very sharp increase. There have been significant fluctuations. We introduced an energy profits levy, an additional 25% tax on the profits of oil and gas companies which, listening to people on the opposite Benches, you would not know had even happened. That is going forward and is not a one-off. It will raise £7 billion this financial year and £10 billion in the next. We are looking to iron out the contracts to help renewable energy industries and there is a package that I hope will come forward before too long.

CHOGM, G7 and NATO Summits

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Monday 4th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

As I have said, future decisions are for the spending review, but the Prime Minister has said that he expects it to set out a trajectory towards 2.5% by the end of the decade. In relation to the noble Lord’s first comment, President Zelensky made clear during the Prime Minister’s recent visit to Kyiv that Ukraine has no interest in surrendering sovereignty, and we want to support it to finish the war on the terms he describes.

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, my apologies for arriving a minute late to my noble friend’s Statement; it came up a fraction sooner than I expected and quicker than I could run to get here. I wish, if I may, to ask a question, but first of all I agree with those who welcome the orderly transfer of the secretary-generalship of the Commonwealth. As I said in the debate which we had on Thursday on this subject, I think that is the right way for it to go: it gives the present secretary-general a chance, as it were, to wind up and complete her term of office—I know that she has some more leadership ideas for facing Commonwealth difficulties to share with us, so that is a good thing.

My question is this. Did I hear in reports, but not in this Statement, that at the G7 the Ministers and the Heads of Government entertained the idea of trying to create a counter to the belt and road initiative of the Chinese, which now involves memoranda of understanding with 141 countries, and two-thirds of the Commonwealth as well? This is a huge entanglement by China. I know that most of the first two gatherings were about Ukraine, but it is relevant because it is of course China’s neutral stance that is influencing half the world not to support us in challenging the Russian atrocities, but instead apparently to condone them. As long as that goes on, and half the world is not with us against the Russian horrors, and against their attack on humanity and international law, then Putin is going to get some encouragement to continue, so I would like to know whether there is anything in the brief on that particular subject.

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

What my noble friend is asking about is the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, which I mentioned in response to the noble Lord, Lord Newby, which is the G7 initiative to narrow the investment gap for sustainable, inclusive, climate-resilient and quality infrastructure in emerging markets and developing countries. We, through the G7, intend to mobilise the private sector for accelerated action and support just energy transition partnerships. As I mentioned, one has already been set up with South Africa, and we are currently working towards further partnerships with India, Indonesia, Senegal and Vietnam. It is that initiative that the G7 will be developing within that space.

Afghanistan

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Wednesday 18th August 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con) [V]]

My Lords, the terrible debacle in Afghanistan confirms—indeed, the debates in both Houses of Parliament today confirm—that the world has reached the end of an era. Among other things, it cannot rely any longer just on American security guarantees. That also has major security implications for the increasingly dangerous situation in Taiwan.

That offers a clear lesson that western security pundits have been rather slow to grasp. President Biden himself says that America

“cannot afford to remain tethered to policies created in response to the world as it was 20 years ago.”

Nor can we. As the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, observed a few moments ago, my noble friend Lord Hague said that we must not give up on all responsible overseas intervention. That is right, but are we playing the intervention role in the right way and in the right country context?

In truth, our long intervention in Afghanistan was of the classic, old-fashioned military occupation kind of the sort that worked in past centuries—although only with great difficulty in Afghanistan—but in this revolutionary digital-power age influence, persuasion and peacemaking, or peace imposing, work in completely different ways. The lessons are old, but the digital age has magnified those factors a thousandfold. The battlefield now lies almost entirely in the realm of continuous psychological warfare, the undermining and deconstructing of hostile visions, new, ever-deeper and much better intelligence links, and persistent demoralisation and division of the rival camp.

Sheer size of weaponry and defence spend are no longer enough, if they ever were. General de Gaulle once wrote:

“Nothing lasts unless it is incessantly renewed.”


Security and stability within nations now rests on completely changed foundations, as does the prevention or swift suppression of armed and violent conflict. Those foundations depend on the domination of communications, the domination of cyber superiority and constant news and information superiority—plus, of course, carefully targeted funds in the right areas—as much as, or more than, having troops on the ground.

In Afghanistan, account has now to be taken of the entirely altered distribution of world power: hard, soft, smart and sharp—whatever you will. Of course we want America as a partner, but America is no longer the automatic leader in this field. I realise that all this is difficult for the traditional policy and planning mindset to grasp, but to root out medieval dictatorships and the lawless terror methods that they use, we must now—and this is difficult—work with, at least on this front, China, Russia and Asian and African powers generally, and the new networks that govern and are reshaping the modern world, including the worldwide Commonwealth network.

G7 and NATO Summits

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Thursday 17th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

As I said, it was a very successful summit. I said in response to an earlier question that non-US allies within NATO are increasing their defence spending. The decisions and agreements made at NATO aligned very much with the integrated review, so we will certainly play a leading role, as we always do, in helping to move this forward.

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I give a warm welcome to the aim to expand the G7 into a D11—a new grouping of democracies. Will that consist purely of heads of nation states or will it continue to include the two chief EU figures, as hitherto? I particularly welcome the Prime Minister’s aim to move on from the outdated “special relationship” phrase, which was used so much with the USA. Does my noble friend recall the observation of our noble friend Lord Hague a decade ago that our links with America should be “solid but not slavish”? Does she agree that a revised US connection should be based more on partnership than on simple followership? Should we not have our noble friend Lord Hague’s wise adage very much in mind?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

The Government’s aim in inviting Australia, India, South Korea and South Africa to the G7 summit was to increase co-operation among democratic like-minded partners on global issues, reflecting our shared value of openness. We do not see this grouping of 11 democracies as fixed, limited or replacing the G7, but it was a symbol of our desire with others to strengthen like-minded international co-operation. We look forward to the US-hosted Summit for Democracy, which will take place later this year.

On my noble friend’s point about America, he is absolutely right. The original Atlantic Charter demonstrates that the UK-US relationship has been one of partnership rather than followership for decades. We look forward to that continuing.

His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Monday 12th April 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con) [V]]

My Lords, as my noble friend the Leader of the House reminded us at the beginning of this debate, it was the Queen herself—Her Majesty—who said several years ago that the Commonwealth

“in lots of ways is the face of the future.”

While Ministers in successive Governments, along with a lot of commentators and others, may have ignored this prescient message, Prince Philip was certainly never one of those. On the contrary, as we have heard, the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme, both national and international, has spread like wildfire cross the Commonwealth and given it new vitality, connectivity and cohesion at every level, as the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson has just, quite rightly, been emphasising.

Both the digital revolution and, now, the pandemic have given these schemes even greater relevance and appeal, and they are spreading out far beyond Commonwealth members. I am told that up to 144 countries are now running Duke of Edinburgh’s Award schemes, and that more than 8 million young people have participated in the idea since it began in the 1950s. It is all still growing fast; it is all very fresh and expanding. Last year there were just short of half a million new entrants, both here in the UK and across the world, with 1.3 million 14 to 24 year-olds completing award programmes.

All this is the true path, like no other, to a better, more stable and prosperous future for many countries and societies. The impact will indeed last for generations, as Gordon Brown eloquently reminded us on the BBC this morning. There have been links too with a similar Irish scheme, as Mary McAleese, the excellent former Irish President, following her meeting with the Duke some years ago on his visit, explained yesterday. It could help a lot on that difficult front too.

It is hard to think of a finer legacy that anyone could bequeath to help heal the world and define our own nation’s role and pathway in entirely new world conditions.

Integrated Review

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Monday 23rd November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con) [V]]

My Lords, does my noble friend agree that the battlefields of future warfare will lie increasingly right inside our societies and inside people’s minds? So, while these measures are obviously extremely welcome for our Armed Forces, in the Prime Minister’s own words, we must

“upgrade our capabilities across the board”.—[Official Report, Commons, 19/11/20; col. 488.]

Will she also assure us that when the integrated review eventually appears, having looked further at our defence needs, it will fully reflect what the Trade Secretary calls the “Pacific mindset”—along with the “Commonwealth mindset”—since these are the areas where our key future alliances increasingly lie for security and defence, as well as for trade and investment?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

I thank my noble friend. He is absolutely right that we must look across all our capabilities to ensure an integrated response across the board to the threats and opportunities of the modern world. He is also right to emphasise the importance of the Commonwealth and the Indo-Pacific region. One of our greatest strengths is our alliances, along with our deep ties with the nations of the Commonwealth. We will continue to work closely with them, and of course the Indo-Pacific is the fastest-growing economic region in the world, so it is a crucial transit point for global trade, and a home to UK allies and trading partners. They will be at the forefront of our thoughts.