Organic Products (Production and Control) (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020

Debate between Lord Mendoza and Lord Robathan

Tuesday 10th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mendoza (Con) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, I had imagined that joining your Lordships’ House might prove intimidating, but the welcome I have had from everyone has been extremely friendly. I thank in particular the police officers, the security staff and the doorkeepers. Black Rod, the Clerk of the Parliaments and officials here have all helped me to begin the process of fathoming how this place works. The embrace of the Government Whips’ Office has been a particular delight. I also thank the Prime Minister for nominating me, and my noble friend Lady Finn and the noble Lord, Lord Trevethin and Oaksey, for acting as my supporters.

I hope that your Lordships will indulge me in speaking on a subject that has occupied a large part of my life since March. I have the honour to serve as the Government’s Commissioner for Cultural Recovery and Renewal. Your Lordships will know that this is a hard and perilous time for organisations and people in the cultural sector. Cruelly, often the more independent the organisation, the most commercial it is and the least reliant it has been on government grant, and the harder it has been as audiences and visitors have been kept away.

Since March, I have played a part in conceiving, developing and overseeing the necessary £1.57 billion Culture Recovery Fund. I am proud of what has been achieved to date through so many working together. It has relied on ministerial leadership and joined-up working by brilliant officials across DCMS, the Treasury and No. 10. It has brought together great arm’s-length bodies, such as Arts Council England, Historic England, the National Lottery Heritage Fund and the British Film Institute. There have been regular working groups covering museums, entertainment, tourism and heritage, bringing in knowledgeable sector expertise.

Over the last weeks, thousands of grants, large and small, have been announced for places up and down the country—for churches and cathedrals, heritage sites, steam railways, museums and galleries, dance, theatre, orchestras, music venues, festivals, arts centres and independent cinemas. Many have never had or needed public funding before. The process will carry on over the coming weeks. It will not end the crisis for culture, but it will help. We continue to work to get places open, with fuller audiences and visitors where we can, so that they can continue to bring joy and happiness, promote economic growth, help society and add vibrancy to local communities, villages, towns and cities. Culture will return.

Turning to the SIs, as the Minister clearly explained, the Government are not altering regulatory policy at the moment. The SIs are keeping in place existing regimes that come over from retained EU law. At the risk of repeating what the Minister said, they amend the 2019 regulations to refer to Great Britain rather than to the UK in order to help the legislation operate in line with the Northern Ireland protocol.

As provost of Oriel College at the University of Oxford, I witnessed the wonderful range of academic endeavour from arts to sciences. I am privileged to be able to discuss the work of students, researchers and academics in, for example, biochemistry, biomedicine and medicine. Powerful gene-editing technologies such as CRISPR-Cas9 are now ubiquitous. They are used to develop GMOs and potential therapies and cures for a range of diseases, such as some forms of blindness and cancer. This country leads in much of that research. I support legislation that allows this progress to flourish.

[Lord Robathan (Con)]

I congratulate my noble friend on his excellent speech. We have more in common than he may realise. We were both brought up in the suburbs of north London, we went to private day schools on the edge of London, and then, as he knows, we both went to Oriel College, Oxford. What he may not know is that we both applied to be provost of Oriel College. There the similarities end. He became provost. I was not considered. I know why, because I have good intelligence; it was because I was too old. As it happens, that is pretty sensible, because I am too old, but the 2010 Equalities Act might have had something to say about that.

I had a rather undistinguished military career and then became a Member of Parliament because I needed a job. He has had a stellar career, which we heard only a little about in his speech. With great enterprise, he founded Forward Publishing, with Will Sieghart. With even greater enterprise, and I suspect some financial benefit, he sold it 15 years later to WPP. Since then, he has made a name in the cultural field and in the arts charities’ fields. There is too much to list, but he was chairman of the Prince’s Foundation for Children and the Arts, he is chairman of the Landmark Trust, he was a commissioner of Historic England, and this year, as we have heard, he was appointed the Government’s Commissioner for Cultural Recovery and Renewal—et cetera, et cetera. As we can tell from his speech, he has a huge amount to offer this House, and we look forward to further contributions, when Oriel College can spare him.

Oriel, our college, was the very fortunate recipient, about a century ago, of a large donation from Cecil Rhodes, which built undergraduate accommodation—the Rhodes building—where there is a statue of him. I regret that some woke members of the governing body, possibly ones rather ignorant of history or with a different interpretation of history than some of us, wish to rewrite history. Rhodes was a very controversial, unpopular figure in his time, who was much criticised. He fought the Boers and his nadir was the Jameson raid against the Transvaal. However, the descendants of the Boers he fought founded apartheid half a century later. His rather uninteresting and usually unregarded statute is part of history and part of the historic built environment of Oxford. I particularly regret that there are pusillanimous dons trying to curry favour with left-wing students by trying to bring the statue down.

My noble friend Lord Mendoza has been outed as a Tory. I fear that he may find himself in a minority on the governing body; the only Tory in the village, we might say. However, I hope that he will bring some balance and common sense to Oxford University, which remains an institution that is admired around the world. In welcoming him, I should tell him that we have one last shared interest, which I only discovered yesterday when he gave me some political betting tips. I am also a political gambler, so I am very grateful for his tips.