King’s Speech

Lord Mann Excerpts

Wednesday 24th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mann (Lab)]

My Lords, I reference my entry in the register of Members’ interests as the Government’s independent adviser on anti-Semitism, a role to which the Prime Minister reappointed me yesterday. I join the welcome to the three new Members of the House. I have known my noble friend Lord Hanson for a very long time and I have known the noble Lord, Lord Goodman, for even longer. I have never been afforded the opportunity to meet my noble friend Lord Timpson in his many prison visits. I think all three will enhance the quality of this House.

I want to say a word on illegal immigration. There has been a bit of an old-fashioned debate going on recently about identity cards. We have identifiers in vast numbers of forms these days. The difference from when my noble friend Lord Blunkett raised the issue of identity cards nearly 20 years ago, when I was one of those who supported him, is the digitisation of the world. We have digital passports. The vast majority of people who wish to work in this country have digital passports and I am at a loss as to why I need digital identification for virtually everything I have to do in my life other than get a job. It seems to me that the pull factor in this country could be removed by requiring a form of digital identification for everyone who gets a job. I think that, rather than the various gimmicks that have been tried or huge expensive things, will in itself be the fundamental difference.

On the Government dealing with small boats, I say that we had a family business. We used to take trucks across the channel and to Holland regularly. They had 7 x 4 x 3 flight cases in which you could fit a body. In fact, we had a false body in them with ventilation. It would have been easy to smuggle people through, because trucks were virtually never stopped. There is some indication that the problem is being shifted back from small boats to lorries, which is where the problem was before. I think that the debate on identification and identifiers will take place and that this House should spend a good amount of time discussing how best that can take place. There is a certain inevitability, in my view.

I also want to talk about extremism. There is a new form of extremism in this country. It is not recognised across government, it is not recognised structurally and we do not put resource into it. We see extremism in relation to criminality and terror—rightly so. We are rather good at dealing with terrorism and that kind of extremism. We are not perfect and we never will be perfect, and the more resource is allocated to that, the better. That is one form of extremism, but there is what I call the soft belly of extremism as well: people who do not intend to break the law and who are not terrorists but whose entire approach and ideology is to destroy democracy, the system and society that we live in, and who have other aims and objectives. In my work, I am seeing the ongoing targeting of people in the Jewish community who dare not speak out because of what has happened to them, particularly in the workplace, purely because they are Jewish. That is organised, and it is done by extremists. The state does not know how they are organising, where they are organising or who they are because we have no system, unit or resources. It is imperative that government takes hold of this and understands who the people in this country are who wish to destroy our democratic system not by violence but by other means, who we will never catch through criminality and therefore who we will have to deal with in other ways. Critically, we need to know who they are and how they operate.