Armed Forces: LGBT Veterans

Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay Excerpts

Monday 17th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I reassure the noble Lord that the Government have undertaken to look very closely at the recommendations of the report by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton. As has been indicated to previous questioners, there is a desire on the Government’s part to rectify what has been wrong. No one is disputing that a wrong took place. However, we want to address it extensively, sympathetically and consistently.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, the Government’s decision to ask the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, to conduct this review was rightly widely welcomed, as have been the campaigns by my noble friend Lord Lexden, the noble Lord, Lord Cashman, and others in your Lordships’ House. What are the Government doing to get the message out to encourage the largest number of people possible to come forward to inform that review? Are they satisfied that good numbers are already doing so?

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I can say to my noble friend that widespread information has been provided about how to give evidence and where the portals are to provide that evidence—it might be in person, virtually or by written submission. I understand that the review has already received more than 500 responses from across the whole of the UK. Indeed, we expect numbers to exceed 1,000. That is indicative of a very healthy level of interest and a very welcome willingness to contribute to the review process.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay Excerpts

Wednesday 19th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Boateng (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in welcoming to the House and commending the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Udny-Lister. His speech was particularly welcome in its focus on the importance—while recognising the Indo-Pacific tilt of the integrated review—of being active in Africa. He will find a ready echo of that sentiment on all sides of this House. I declare an interest at the outset as an ambassador for the Global Alliance for Vaccine and Immunisation and chair of Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor.

Global co-operation and solidarity are vital to effectively responding to and mitigating the health and socioeconomic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. The measures in the gracious Speech fall to be delivered at a time in which there is, globally, an increase in inequality, a threat to livelihoods and an increasing threat to peace and security and in which environmental sustainability and a capacity to respond effectively to natural disasters are threatened by the impact of the pandemic.

The challenge the virus presents to global diplomacy, to the work of effective multilateral organisations and to the effectiveness of a developmental response to the global crisis requires us, as a nation, to have an effective response to the pandemic and the health of the developing world, which is absolutely essential to our own continued health, and indeed to our security as a nation. The World Bank has rightly drawn attention to the need to ramp-up vaccine production to overcome current shortages in the world, and to develop partnerships across sectors to that effect. As such, it supports licensing deals and technology transfers to developing countries to increase supply and local production in different parts of the world, especially sub-Saharan Africa.

That raises the question, which I hope the Minister will address when winding up, of what position the United Kingdom will take in response to the United States’s very welcome acceptance of the need to address the issue of intellectual property and to bring about the changes in the WTO that will permit the manufacture and license of vaccines in countries such as South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Egypt and Senegal, which have the capacity, with some support, to manufacture vaccines. What will be the United Kingdom’s response to the US’s welcome initiative? We know that the EU has been lukewarm, to put it mildly, in its response. This is an opportunity for us to exercise our much-vaunted new post-Brexit freedoms outside the European Union, and come behind the United States to adopt a position in the WTO—with its welcome new, and very effective, leadership—to enable Africa and the developing world to develop their own pharmaceutical industries, and indeed to manufacture vaccines.

In the short term, there will clearly be a need for greater distribution of vaccines in the world. I have something to say briefly in response to the Minister’s quite correct assertion that we are now living much more in a time of competition in this regard. China has already provided vaccine assistance to 53 developing countries and has exported vaccines to 22 countries. China has exported 115 million doses of Chinese vaccines and India has exported 63 million. How many million doses have we exported? The answer is none. What are we doing, not just to support COVAX but to address this very real need, which exists throughout the developing world but particularly acutely where there are conflicts? What are we doing in Tigray and Cameroon to ensure that vaccines are distributed more effectively and provided in those war-torn areas? What are we doing to help bring those conflicts to an end?

Likewise—and I end my remarks on this—what are we doing in response to natural disasters, such as in St Vincent and the Grenadines? Will we deploy our ship in the region to help with the clear-up? How will we assist the country to respond to the very real need that exists there, at the moment, as we speak, for vaccines, because Covid has a hold in that country? These are questions that the Minister needs to answer, and answer in a spirit that we all understand and appreciate that we need a response—

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, I remind noble Lords of the advisory five-minute limit.

[Lord Boateng (Lab) [V]]

Indeed. I end on this note, with this challenge to the Minister. We are rightly thinking about the Middle East at this time. There was a great teacher by the name of Hillel in the Middle East, who lived at the time of our Lord. He said:

“If I am not for me, who will be for me?”


Yes, it is important to recognise our national self-interest, but he added:

“If I am only for me, what am I?”


We share a common humanity. He also asked: “If not now, when?” We need focus, we need resources and we need to act now.

Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill

Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard
Tuesday 9th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Fookes) (Con)]

I believe that we are trying to reconnect with the noble Lord, Lord Boyce.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

The noble Lord should now continue and we will see how well we can hear him.

[Lord Boyce (CB) [V]]

My Lords, this Bill sets out to make better provision on legal proceedings for our Armed Forces when they are, or have been, engaged in overseas operations. This is a very laudable aim, but the Bill’s significant emphasis on presumption against prosecution as a way of relieving some of the stress of legal proceedings is misplaced. It is the investigation and reinvestigation process that so wears people down, and prosecution, when it comes, may even be a form of relief. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, alluded to this matter of waiting in the last group of amendments.

Anyway, we should bear in mind that, even when the presumption is in place, there is no total lifting of the threat of prosecution after five years. As the Minister has told us, this can still happen if the Attorney-General sees fit. Furthermore, there could be the spectre of an even longer investigative process if the case falls into the hands of the ICC. I know that the matter of the ICC has been well covered this afternoon, and that the Minister has sought to reassure us on this point, but I am afraid that I am not convinced. Nor it seems is the ICC, which apparently remains unconvinced by any assurances that the Government may have tried to make in defence of the Bill.

This is by the way, because, as I have mentioned, it is the investigation process that needs primarily to be addressed: to be sharpened up to ensure that it is not a fishing expedition, that there is value in pursuing the matter under consideration, that it is constrained in length, and that reinvestigations are launched only after the most careful judicial oversight. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, has captured all this rather well, as indeed have other noble Lords. It is for these reasons and others that I support Amendments 5 and 28, to which I have put my name, and, indeed, other amendments in this group. I concur with much of what other noble Lords have eloquently said on the matter of investigations; I will spare your Lordships a repeat of all that has gone before in this group.