Representation of the People (Electoral Registers Publication Date) Regulations 2020

Lord Patten Excerpts

Thursday 3rd September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord True spoke of Covid-secure working. It is very good to see him on the Bench today and so many Members speaking in the Chamber. That has been a characteristic of the Order Paper today, with far more Peers here and speaking. It is an important symbol to the country at large as we encourage people to get back to work. Going on the Underground this week to my own office and coming back to your Lordships’ House to take part in this debate, I have seen how good it is for people to get together again. The more we have Covid-secure working, the better—whether in electoral calculations or in any other way.

That said, I intend to concentrate my remarks on two areas aimed particularly at parliamentary rather than local government registration. First, people changing constituencies, as is going to happen, and seeing them carved up and redistributed is always disturbing for the Members of Parliament involved. About 20% or 21% of your Lordships—about 170 in number—have been Members of Parliament before and have been through this turmoil. I went through it once in my life. It was disturbing in some ways but reassuring when I suddenly found I had my noble friend Lord Hayward’s family as my new constituents. They seemed to put up with the situation pretty well as time went on.

None of us knows what will happen in the next few months, and I think we need reassurances. My noble friend the Minister took us through the new forms of electoral registration—online, telephoning, less knocking on the doors and all the rest of it—which cause problems, of course. If any other Covid-19 problems suddenly occur, we must not give way to again delaying this process, because we must have the parliamentary redistribution ready by 2023. It is easy for me to say that, but the fog of pandemic seems more all-enveloping and all-confusing than the fog of war ever was. I do not know what will happen, but I look for reassurances that we are going to get on with the task, which hard-working EROs and their teams, working in a Covid-secure way, are doing.

My second point is that security is very important. As I just said, my noble friend took us through the different ways in which potential electors are being approached—telephones and all the rest of it. It is quite clear that the next general election, whenever that is, will be beset by accusations that people are trying to interfere with the elections themselves, whether they are foreign actors, hackers or whoever else. The last thing we want is to see the veracity and truthfulness of the electoral registers undermined in any way with accusations that they were improperly collected. Mercifully, as far as I heard in the list of changes my noble friend read, algorithms were not introduced at all as something that might come along down the track. We should be grateful for that. I urge the Government and EROs nationally to do all they possibly can to ensure that no security breaches happen in any way at all and that security is maintained.

Conduct of Debate in Public Life

Lord Patten Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to listen to the noble Lord, Lord Winston, particularly his thoughts about how things used to be in this Chamber. That was in what some would think of as the good old times, when the Whips’ Office would send something round when they wanted you to attend and vote which said, “Your Lordship’s attendance is most earnestly requested”. That is very different from the sort of threats about being there on the night for a three-line Whip, or else. The noble Lord also said that he would like people to speak without notes. I will do my best in my remaining five minutes.

This is the best of times and the worst of times for the debate tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey. Why is it the best of times? It is because he has put a stake in the ground, so we have to do some serious stuff in thinking about turning back the rising tide of vitriol and toxicity that surrounds debate. It is the worst of times because, for the next 14 days, we are going to get all that vitriol and toxicity in the run-up to the elections on 23 May. May we and people in those elections be protected from violent threats and excoriation, and from physical violence and death, which we have seen in the past. I would never have thought 20 years ago that we would be thinking in that kind of way. When it is all over and the results have come out, then it will be the best of times again for us to continue down the road that the noble Lord has set for us today.

It is interesting to reflect, since the elections on the 23rd are about Europe, that very hard words were used in the run-up to the Second World War about Europe and our attitudes to it. There were people accused of being traitors or collaborators. The country and the nation were split very much between 1938 and 1940, but then it really was serious. It was not about changes in trading relationships and the free movement of people, or changes in statutory provisions and the way in which justice is run between different countries in Europe. It was actually about matters of life and death. One of the first things that we need to do is to try to get people to reflect, as I think the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Rochester was saying, about whether matters are serious or not. Our next step should be to try to promote more of a discussion in this country that might reflect a slowing down of the frenetic pace that will be there for the next two weeks. It would try to reclaim the Twittersphere and, following the slow food movement, perhaps there would be a slow debate movement.

I propose to your Lordships that we should all think very hard about trying to get together a group of sensible people, who would be widely recognised as that but also as not being politicians. Broadly speaking, we politicians are thought to be the cause of the problem in the first place. I mean a bunch of people who might be chaired by some acceptable celeb—perhaps someone from the entertainment world who is instantly recognised but perhaps someone from the medical world, from environmental protection or whatever. She or he should be readily recognised not as being a politician in any way but as a free-thinking person who, with a group of other free-thinking people, would say “Enough’s enough, so let’s spend time talking in some place”. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Rochester suggested your Lordships’ Chamber but perhaps it should be in a less partisan place than the Palace of Westminster. The group should talk for a few hours—perhaps half a day—and say, “It’s got to stop, and this is why”. They would need the advice of people who think spiritually such as the humanist associations, who have valuable insights into all this, and those in minority communities, such as the Muslims or the Jews. The Jews rightly feel threatened and afeared, just as they felt in 1939 when those vicious arguments were used.

We would certainly need someone such as the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury to be there. Doubtless, the right reverend Prelates from Rochester and Leeds would have some other brother or sister bishop whom they would like to see there on the day. I will probably get into terrible trouble in the confessional, as I have not consulted him, but I would also like to propose and volunteer the services of his eminence the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, firmly rooted as he is in Merseyside and Liverpool. Your Lordships might think, “That isn’t the right cast”; there are people such as the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, who understand about casting and perhaps they would have a better cast of people to do it. However, a bunch of such people on a stage, talking slowly, rationally and reasonably—following the lead we have had from the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey—might well begin to turn the tide. We might just see an ebbing of the tide of the vitriol and toxicity that we have seen so much of in the last decade.

Civil Society and Lobbying

Lord Patten Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, I am right behind what the noble Baroness said about the importance of charities and I am right behind them—but no charity is beyond scrutiny. During 2016 so far there has been a growing chorus of concern about the lobbying activities and associated behaviour of one charity set up by statute, the National Trust, and particularly the activities and behaviour of those in the regions away from London, with some terrible publicity recently for a once universally revered outfit.

I am not clambering aboard any bandwagons here, for in a short debate I sponsored in your Lordships’ House back on 12 November 2001 on the need to modernise the National Trust’s governing legislation, many issues were raised concerning inadequate corporate governance, lack of transparency, lack of regional representation in particular, and lack of regulation of its activities. All that was missing then, from today’s cocktail of concerns, was growing concern about lobbying by the National Trust.

The distinguished social theorist, the Anglican canon and the London solicitor who set up the National Trust in late Victorian England—and our predecessors in this and another place who passed the statute in Edwardian England—could not have foreseen what a landed leviathan the National Trust would become. The National Trust, indeed, has accumulated holdings that no Whig magnate in our House in the 18th century could ever have dreamed of accumulating. It has more than 600,000 acres of land, close to 600 miles of coastline and about 250 monuments and buildings. Yet the National Trust is totally unregulated, except by itself. Some people say that it is out of touch and increasingly remote. That, perhaps, is simply a function of the scale and size of the National Trust.

I believe that the present scale and organisation of the National Trust is inconsistent with the Government’s modernising agenda, which I strongly support, because devolution and accountability are increasingly part not just of regional rhetoric but of regional reality. Yet in 2016 the National Trust has set off on a totally new course with its additional lobbying activity, producing a new and positive blizzard of lobbying and a maelstrom of demands and advice, in relation to—just listen to the litany—global climate change policy, fracking, wind farms, and then, as if it was Defra, proposing a six-point national agricultural policy for post-Brexit rural times, with farmers, of course, to be denied subsidy or support unless they pursue particular environmental agendas. These environmental agendas may not be wrong but the suggestion is certainly extraordinary.

At the same time, and in lock-step with a change of focus into becoming this new lobbying organisation, the National Trust seems to have developed a new line in what can only be called autocratic and out-of-touch behaviour, whether towards farmers or cricketers. We just heard about cricketers and warm beer from the noble Baroness on the Front Bench. Just listen to what we have seen in the last four weeks. As far as farmers are concerned, there was the gazumping of local farmers in the Lake District, who were all at an auction to bid for a very delicate, upland hill farm area where they have long been active as the last, rather fragile link with our traditional farming heritage, and very welcome low-cost custodians of our man-made landscapes. Up pops some agent of the National Trust, bidding hundreds of thousands of pounds more than any chartered surveyor would suggest the land was worth as farmland, with all the casual insouciance of someone waving the cheque-book of a land-accumulating Ukrainian oligarch.

Let us turn to cricket and football and the National Trust’s attitude to these activities. Just yesterday, as reported in the Times—and therefore it must be true—the National Trust is evicting the local football and cricket teams from pitches in the park of Shugborough Hall in Staffordshire. They have been there for decades—almost time out of mind: father to son, and, I dare say, mother to daughter—playing football and cricket and occupying just 1% of the 900 acres of the Shugborough estate. This was because, as a National Trust representative was quoted in the Times as saying:

“Football and cricket really are non-traditional activities”.

You could not make it up. Generations ago the aristocrats used to encourage people to play cricket and football there. I suppose that was noblesse oblige, which is not always to be sneered at—whereas the new autocrats of the National Trust want to turf them out. Again, you could not make it up.

The trust needs to be better regulated. It was set up by statute for the benefit of the whole nation and its citizens, not just for the executive and paid-up members of the National Trust. There needs to be someone to whom complaints can be made, whether by an aggrieved tenant farmer or a member of the general public such as me or anybody else who just happens not to be a member of the trust. After that there is an urgent need for a full review, best set up by the National Trust itself, into its own governance since 1907. It has grown and grown in a way that is not its fault or that it could ever have predicted. I urge it to do this. The noble Lord, Lord Bragg—I apologise for not having suggested this to him in advance—would make a splendid independent chairman of such an independent commission into the National Trust. It would look at the trust to make quite sure that indeed acts in the national interest, cleaving to its statutory and charitable origins.

Civil Society

Lord Patten Excerpts

Thursday 11th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

The speakers list as published by the authorities of the House this morning makes engaging reading, with myself and my friend and noble friend Lord Cormack down co-jointly to be the eighth speaker. I do not want to alarm the House by suggesting that we may be entering into some sort of lordly duet; we have done a deal through the usual channels that I will stand now and he will stand later. Still, it is a thought, as procedure develops in your Lordships’ House, that we might have a bit of this.

Equally engaging has been the report from the House of Bishops, on which I congratulate them. It is an interesting read and I agree with quite a lot in it. I do not want to alarm them by saying that, but I do. I was fascinated by the fact that it is termed a “pastoral letter”. It seems to be a bit of an innovation for the Anglican Church to refer to such things as pastoral letters. Whatever next? Will we shortly be having encyclicals issued ex cathedra by the most reverend Primates from their cathedrals in Canterbury or York? I await that with great interest.

By comparison, Catholics have long been used to pastoral letters, generally shortish and pithy, to be read out by parish priests at the direction of their bishops as a substitute for Sunday sermons, on everything from the need to go to confession more regularly to the need to help the poor, the lonely or those who are imprisoned. This all goes back to the opening of these issues by that great Victorian Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Manning, who fearlessly waded into secular matters, which I welcome any bishop, or indeed any faith leader, doing at any time. He was on the commission by the then Prince of Wales—Princes of Wales do this kind of thing—on housing for the working classes, in the latter part of Victorian times, and spent four hours talking to dockers, trying to bring about peace in the dock strike in the 1880s. So this is a strong tradition, and many of these things led to the doctrine of subsidiarity. Many of them then got spun into those short, pithy pastoral letters that I was told to sit up and listen to in earlier days.

The House of Bishops, by comparison, has produced something much longer: a dense, detailed document that is almost a manifesto—I do not use that term in a political sense—about how to change, in its words,

“the trajectory of our political life”.

During the course of its 52 pages, which I have read, the bat is not swung at any political party or creed, which I think is a triumph. However, some people come in for it; people who are called “self-interested consumers” come in for a bit of battering by the Bench of Bishops, although I am not quite sure who they are. However, when you get to the end, where I was expecting the ultimate pithy description of what this new trajectory of our political life should be and how to get there, the answers are still a bit unclear. I think we need to sharpen the focus.

I would like to do that today by trying to look in particular at the charitable sector. In the House of Bishops’ pastoral letter there are certainly some passages on the charitable sector in the set of pages between page 35 and 38 on strengthening institutions, but they are rather brief. I want to look at the problems of charities in civil society under the magnifying glass—in a way that I do not think the House of Bishops quite did, but you cannot get everything into every pastoral letter, however short or indeed however long. I want to examine three big problems facing what I think of as “big charity”. There is a world of difference between the 150,000 or so smaller charities, which are very close to their communities and to grass roots, and the big players—the top 50 or 100 charities with big incomes—and how they behave.

In an age when we are all rightly concerned with ethical behaviour and with transparency, those who run big charity, compared with those who run the myriad little charities, have a few questions to answer at the moment about their behaviour. First, there are questions about how they approach ways of raising money from individuals—often the widows whose mite they seek to get their hands on—using direct-mail bombardment, direct texting campaigns and insidious forms of cold-calling in the case of some nameless charities, and using not volunteers but organisations with paid-for staff. That is wrong, so I welcome the Fundraising Standards Board taking issue with them and seeking to introduce new guidelines with regard to those poor, ethically challenging practices on behalf of the big charity world. I also welcome the fact that the Charities Minister in another place, Mr Rob Wilson, has spoken to some of them about putting their house in order.

Secondly, many find being approached in the streets by third-party marketers purporting to be fundraisers—a practice known colloquially as “chugging”—pretty disturbing. I know some people who would never dream of giving to a charity which chugs, because they think it is out of kilter with what should be the DNA of a charity, whether big or small. Therefore, in their use of direct mailing, cold-calling and chugging, some in the charity world—the top 50 or 100—are in a competitive race to the bottom of charitable behaviour, and I deplore that.

Thirdly, big charity—not all of it—undoubtedly pays some of its chief executives far too much in relation to the ideals and charitable DNA of those charities; not just people getting £100,000 a year but people being paid £200,000-plus a year. The right reverend Prelates are not paid anything remotely like that, and they give an example to us all of just making do—reusing old cassocks, that sort of thing. The Anglican Church shows a lead on those matters which big charity could usefully follow.

All this increase in pay seems to be cheered on by the charities chief executives body, which is as much concerned about pay and rations as it is about pay and ethics. It is wrong. I far prefer the spirit of the anti-hunger charity Mary’s Meals, whose CEO, Magnus MacFarlane Barrow, recognising of course that staff have to be paid, and paid reasonably so that they can bring up their families, said:

“We have a conviction that those who are paid to work for Mary’s Meals should never be paid high salaries. This is because we work with some of the poorest people on earth, as well as tens of thousands of volunteers all over the world, and we would find it hard to do that while paying ourselves high salaries”.

I say, amen.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Lord Patten Excerpts

Thursday 24th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Alton, has just pointed to the clear and indisputable fact that religious pluralism is in the deepest peril worldwide. My sense is that this is at its highest point today within the Muslim world, despite the terrible fate of Christians in Mosul and elsewhere in Iraq that the noble Lord, Lord Alton, pointed to. We must all deplore the attacks of Sunni on Shia, of Shia on Sunni and of both Shia and Sunni, when they can, on Alawites and Ismailis. It is Muslim on Muslim, exactly as the noble Lord, Lord Alton, said.

I predict that this terrible intolerance of one sort of Muslim for another is spreading fast from the near and Middle East with attendant violence, even now, to countries such as Indonesia, which is the largest Muslim-majority nation on earth and has hitherto had quite a good reputation for religious pluralism and interreligious harmony.

Of course, Christians of different sorts have been just as bad in centuries past. We must never forget that. In England a few centuries ago, my co-religionists routinely burned or eviscerated and cut up the co- religionists of the right reverend Prelates on the Bishops’ Bench. When times altered politically, the Protestants took the chance to return the grisly compliment to my co-religionists. This is a terrible stain on both of us, which we must never forget. It can never be eradicated, any more than the joint attacks by both forms of Christianity on the Jewish faith, particularly in Europe, which are another stain on our history. Fingers should be pointed not at individual Muslims but simply at present facts. Centuries and horrors later, we all go to each other’s churches, visit each other’s synagogues and, despite terrible attacks on the latter which still happen in so-called civilised Europe and while our theological debate can be pretty vicious within different faiths, interfaith harmony more or less obtains between us.

Alas, in the Muslim world interfaith disharmony is spreading fast, not diminishing. That may take not just decades but centuries to play out until it reaches what Christians and Christians and Jews have managed to reach, if the lamentable history of interfaith warfare is any guide.

The noble Lord, Lord Alton, has already pointed to Indonesia. We have the danger of that country being next. It is a complex country that I have visited. So much depends on the actions about freedom of belief by the new President. He faces increasing harassment, discrimination and violence, which fly in the face of the Indonesian constitution, against not just Christians but Ahmadis and adherents of traditional indigenous faiths and beliefs. Only zero tolerance by President Yudhoyono towards religious intolerance will stop the rot spreading, to the great disadvantage of minority religions and the stability and peace of the many islands that make up Indonesia. In the short term, Christian churches face persecution, such as happened this Thursday at churches such as HKBP Philadelphia church in Bekasi or the Yasmin church in Bogor, to give just two examples.

These threats spread and we see them spreading now, today, into Brunei in a state-sponsored way. There, the new penal code introduced by the ruler brings full-on Sharia penalties for those of other beliefs or those wishing even to change their beliefs. I have been trying to tot up the number of international agreements this breaks under the new Brunei code, starting with the declaration of human rights, through to the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, both ratified by Brunei, to the ASEAN charter on respect for fundamental freedoms, under Article 2. The list lengthens. Unless Brunei draws back from the introduction of severe penalties of the most violent physical sort for even the propagation of faiths other than Islam or for persuading people to change religion, it will unleash a moral, civil and religious tiger within Brunei, and that country will end up turning on itself.

Voluntary and Charitable Sectors

Lord Patten Excerpts

Thursday 26th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, what a difference 2,000 years can make, from when Jesus Christ enjoined the charitable not to let their left hand know what their right hand was up to in the matter of charity, to the contemporary world, where, in the West at least, charities and the voluntary sector are an integral, very public and almost institutionalised part of how we choose to live now. I shall concentrate both on the good that the charity and voluntary sector does and on the less than good that parts of it do. For, increasingly, once threats from poverty and violence are diminished in the most disadvantaged countries in the world, the way we live in the West, with the voluntary sector enhanced and enhallowed in the way we go on, is exactly the way they want to organise their lives as well, as soon as possible, developing civil society as they achieve peace, security and recovery.

Our Prime Minister and others on the United Nations high-level panel face what to do next in respect of developing post 2015 the millennium development goals, to which so many charities and voluntary organisations give so much. He, and we, can look for advice from many bodies. I shall concentrate on one; the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development, which I warmly support. CAFOD, as it is known, is of high reputation; it is a member of Caritas International, a global network of more than 160 organisations working to enhance international development—for example, by educating many people in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as by helping in times and places of extreme need, as the organisation is doing this very day in South Sudan.

My take on CAFOD—not what it tells me, but my understanding as an outsider—is that it does this in a highly cost-effective, low cost-to-income ratio way, with none of the six-figure salaries for CEOs that some charities these days seem to permit or bestow. CAFOD, as a co-chair of the Beyond2015 coalition, will, I am sure, give most practical advice on what to do next, building on one of the central tenets of Roman Catholic social teaching, which is always and everywhere to be involved in partnerships and always and everywhere to promote subsidiarity; doing things that can be done closest to the people who wish them to be done and who will co-operate with organisations. This is because churches, all-faith groups and groups who have no faith at all are often best placed to reach the poorest in countries where civil society, government structures or social care are weak. The voices of people in this situation should inform the United Nations in its next steps, as research on individuals in need and listening to their voices in a report recently produced by CAFOD so clearly demonstrates.

This issue involves all-faith groups. Interfaith work is so important, as the recent trip to and work in the Central African Republic aimed at promoting peace and stability there shows. This involved the organisations Islamic Relief, Muslim Aid and the Muslim Charities Forum, and CAFOD worked with them. Such good work is something to applaud, but such manifest good is, indeed, unusual and, alas, not always universal. This theme brings me, with regret, to some less than good examples of charities and voluntary activities which can damage not only their reputation but the sector generally. Here I switch from developing countries to the United Kingdom.

My little list would include the following. First, there are those salaries for a few charitable and voluntary sector CEOs, which to some seem very high. Secondly, there are allegations of extravagance and excessive use of expenses in the charitable sector, as with the current furore over a senior Greenpeace executive regularly commuting by air over distances such as 250 miles, with the unfortunate subsequent reports of Greenpeace volunteers concerned about this, about expenses and about waste cancelling their own Greenpeace donations. Thirdly, too many organisations are tipping their campaigning activities over the edge from campaigning about poverty, say, into the politics of poverty pure and simple. I agree entirely with the noble Lord, Lord Judd: one of the central roles for charitable and voluntary organisations is advocacy, but there is a clear difference between advocacy and campaigning.

Fourthly and lastly, some charities employ or incentivise, through a commission-on-money-raised basis, street workers in groups badged as charity workers stopping the general public. These are not the real volunteers that we know on poppy days and flag days. A lot of people do not like this, all the more so because such people in what I think of as the “stop and raise” trade are vigorous—trending abrasive—in their style towards collecting in the street. I think that they could learn from the average charming and smiling Big Issue sellers that we pass on the streets outside. In any event, a talented young full-time charity worker was telling me last night that not only does her own organisation refuse to use such people because of these reputational issues but such street workers do not promote the sustainable repeated long-term giving that is in the interests of charities themselves.

My noble friend Lady Needham—I beg her pardon; Needham Market has one of my favourite churches with its magnificent roof, and I often visit it when I am there. My noble friend Lady Scott of Needham Market told us that there are some 2,500 new charities a year. When there are so many new charities, there is always the risk of wrongdoing, corruption and things going wrong; we must not deny that. If the Charity Commission needs extra powers to investigate, it should be given them. I strongly support the Charity Commission chairman, William Shawcross, in what he does to root out the dodgy, reinforced as he will be from next Monday, 30 June, by the commission’s brand new CEO Paula Sussex, with her impressive record.

The charitable world must realise that it is going to become more and more the focus of examination and demands for transparency, and rightly so in the interests of the poor and others in need of help. I also sometimes think that the voices of those in the charitable world about their own could and should be louder when things go wrong.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I am happy to give that assurance and I will be in touch with the noble Lord later in terms of what precisely the answer is. We have asked the Law Commission to look at the content of social investment by charities within the confines of charities law, and I will come back to the noble Lord on that.

The noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, asked about the JustGiving report, to which I trust the Government will respond in good time. Payroll giving has developed a good deal. I am well aware from one or two members of my family who work in the City that payroll giving has spread across the City. It is a useful contribution from those who can afford to pay. We all also need to focus on philanthropy in our unequal society. That is the sort of thing that I hope archbishops and bishops will be saying loud and clear. When I think of those within the community I particularly recall the contribution that the Sainsbury family has made in all sorts of ways to medical research, the University of East Anglia, the National Portrait Gallery, et cetera, with the money it inherited. I regret that we have not seen from the City and the financial sector as much in the way of philanthropy from those who have been lucky and successful enough to give back to society what they have gained economically. I hope that we will hear from others on that theme.

A large number of other issues were raised. In terms of campaigning and advocacy, there should be a natural tension between society, the voluntary sector and the state. That is unavoidable. The last thing we would like is a voluntary sector that always said the state was good. I grew up in the Church of England, and it seemed to me that it was far too close to the powers that be. As a boy I would sing:

“The rich man in his castle,

The poor man at his gate”—

not something that I assume the Church of England sets as a hymn very often these days. Thankfully, Churches now see themselves as unavoidably criticising the status quo. Voluntary organisations, of course, should be doing advocacy and campaigning. I should say to the noble Lord, Lord Patten, that I am not sure that I do see a clear difference between campaigning and advocacy.

When I was doing the consultation on the Transparency of Lobbying Bill, I met the Alzheimer’s Society, which told me about its dementia campaign—an absolute classic of a campaign—to raise public awareness on an issue to which society, the state and the media had not been paying sufficient attention. The noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, talked about the carers campaign that had very much the same effect. That is precisely one of the many roles that the voluntary sector should have.

However, we all understand also that there is a point at which campaigning and advocacy becomes political in a partisan way, and therefore approaches a boundary over which campaigners should not step. I know Charity Commission paper CC9 almost off by heart now. CC9 is relatively clear and therefore the challenge made by the noble Lord, Lord Finkelstein, is one that is unlikely to be offered.

[Lord Patten]

I am extremely grateful to my noble friend. Is he satisfied that the Charity Commission has all the necessary and relevant powers to deal with the issues of political campaigning to which he is referring?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I am satisfied that it has all the powers that it needs. The Charity Commission is now very stretched. Its budget and therefore its staff were cut. Digitisation would help a great deal to make it easier for the Charity Commission to do its job, but the role of the Charity Commission is an issue that I know the new chairman and the new chief executive wish very much to take up with Members of both Houses of Parliament, and I encourage others to take that further.

On the question of regulation, I have been the trustee of two musical charities which dealt extensively with children, particularly primary school children. I am conscious that a certain degree of regulation is useful and necessary for charities. That is another argument that we will continue to have in this respect. On the international role of charities, the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, touched on the problem of Greenpeace in India. It is not only a problem for India or for Greenpeace. Those of us who follow what happens in Russia, Sudan, Nigeria or Saudi Arabia know that the foreignness of some non-governmental organisations is something that those concerned with sovereignty have great concerns about. We do our utmost to support both those working for voluntary organisations and those working for civil society organisations in more authoritarian countries. I am not suggesting that India in any way is authoritarian but there are many other countries in which this becomes more difficult. That is one of the issues with which the Government are concerned and with which Foreign Office embassies are much concerned.

I am conscious that it would be impossible to cover everything in this debate. I merely want to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, for introducing it, and all those who have contributed. I say yet again that this is the sort of debate that this Chamber does well. The future development of the voluntary sector is an extraordinarily important part of maintaining an open society and an open democracy. It is an issue to which this House should return regularly.

Standards in Public Life

Lord Patten Excerpts

Tuesday 4th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, I have long admired the noble Lord, Lord Bew, for his ability to tease out of sometimes very dense language extremely important points, and he has just done so in his speech. Indeed, it was he who inspired me to read the whole of the report, which is dense and curious, sometimes, in its language. The noble Lord referred to the phrase, “the lower social grades”—a slightly grating phrase. I think that Aldous Huxley would have recognised that phrase, with his standard gammas, unvarying deltas and the rest.

That said, as I ploughed through the report, which the noble Lord, Lord Bew, inspired me to read, I became surprised—so I searched the harder—to find no specific mentions of your Lordships’ House in a longitudinal study, which strikes me as a major lacuna. There are mentions of all sorts of people—police, judges, and those in the front line giving out advice—but no mention of your Lordships’ House. I think that that needs to be addressed in future reports of this sort if we are to have the full value that we should get from them.

I can only make assertions, because there is nothing in this report which will stand up what I am about to say, but does the Minister share the concern expressed by some people in my hearing that there are things wrong with this place which need to be addressed? For example, some people feel that it has got terribly large and therefore is not very effective in what it does. I think that, had questions been asked in the longitudinal survey, we would have got some very interesting answers.

Most importantly, I am convinced—anecdotally; perhaps I listen to the wrong kind of taxi drivers—that the impression of your Lordships’ House has gone down sharply in recent years. If there is one thing that has affected that perception it is that a revolving door is still possible between someone becoming a lawmaker, then becoming a lawbreaker and leaving the service of your Lordships’ House, and then, having served whatever sentence was given, coming back into your Lordships’ House, having been a lawbreaker, to be a lawmaker. You do not have to be a taxi driver to think that there is something a bit rum about that.

I end on the note that something should be done and be done quickly. It always used to be said that nothing could be done quickly about changing the laws of succession so that men and women could be in the right order of birth to become head of state in this country. The blessed Norman St John-Stevas used to stand up and say that it was quite impossible to do. Suddenly, the Zeitgeist changed and it was done. We need to make sure that as the Zeitgeist changes over this issue, the revolving door that goes between lawmaker, lawbreaker and lawmaker no longer exists.

Freedom of Religion and Conscience

Lord Patten Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten]

My Lords, the entirely virtuous pursuit of freedom of religion and freedom of conscience, whether by Governments or by churches, should be underpinned by two fundamental principles. The first is that everything should be all right at home, which is the launching pad for these suggestions in the United Kingdom. The second is that the Government and the churches should be even-handed in their approaches to these issues abroad.

On the first issue, as to whether everything is all right in the United Kingdom as far as freedom of religion and conscience is concerned, there are some who would say that it is not. How so? We have a head of state who is also head of the established church and we have three gorgeously enrobed bishops here in their places to show that they are part of the body religious. However, if you go a little further than that you see that we live in a very secular society. Religion is a minority sport—I happen to play it myself but it is not played by the majority of people in this country.

Some people say that we have aggressive secularism. I see no problem at all with secularism, atheism or agnosticism—I see a splendid example, in the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald of Tradeston, of the best sort of atheist, agnostic or secular person—but as we look around the United Kingdom, we see recent examples, such as the wearing of the cross by that Coptic Christian. That was judged by UK courts, to their shame, to be not right, although it was put right by Europe. Just imagine if someone in a place of work had said to Mr Sikh, “Take that turban off” or had said to Mrs Muslim adherent, “Take that scarf off”. I suspect there would have been outrage that these things were suggested in the first place.

Christianity and other religions are under various forms of attack. The Plymouth Brethren, for example, feel that they are facing prejudice in some parts of the United Kingdom. Some people find the Plymouth Brethren a bit odd and a bit strange. People used to think that Roman Catholics were a bit odd and strange, but we have to protect those people who are different in their religious beliefs. We must be convinced that all is well on the home front.

Abroad, we have to be equally convinced by the second fundamental principle, that the churches and Her Majesty’s Government must under all circumstances be even-handed in the way in which they approach the promotion of religious rights and freedom of conscience. I will mention three countries where some people have suggested that we have not been even-handed. Turkey is a fellow NATO member and one-time cadet member of the European Union. It is a terrific place to do business in but not very free as far as religion is concerned. Sometimes people have said that UK Governments—in the past, I am not just speaking about since 2010—have been pretty muted in what they have said about the terrible conditions of the Alevi Muslim minority sect. It is also pretty rough to be a Greek Orthodox in Istanbul today. An Anglican vicar—I hope I have the term right—came to see me not long ago in your Lordships’ House. He tries to minister to holidaymakers—it is a very good job that they go to church in a couple of the peninsulas in Turkey—but he says that he is not given the freedom to have a public service anywhere. He has to have the mass or celebration, as in the old days, in a house church. He asked why the Turkish Government cannot be nicer to Anglicans. I said that I did not know. I am nice to Anglicans and try to be nice to them all the time, and I think that the Turks should be nice to Anglicans.

In Egypt, we have the so-called Arab spring, which is an Arab winter for the Copts, on which I do not have to elaborate a moment longer. Then there is Bahrain, which is a great strategic partner of ours and an old ally. We value the close relationship. However, those of lesser standing among Muslims in Bahrain do not get the right level of attention compared to the minority who actually run Bahrain.

I look to Her Majesty’s Government and the churches to adopt these two fundamental principles.

Gaza

Lord Patten Excerpts

Wednesday 8th February 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten]

My Lords, while I certainly do not assert that I see no blockades, I certainly see some facts. In 2011, Israel issued 3,893 medical permits for Gazan children to go to be treated in the West Bank or Israel itself, according to parental choice. On aid and trade, 2012 opened with more than 85,000 tonnes of civilian goods being delivered to Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing between 1 and 9 January alone. On average, about 47,000 tonnes are delivered each week, with horticultural and agricultural goods of high quality such as flowers, strawberries and tomatoes going in the other direction—and that is good.

Civilian goods do flow but they flow in parallel with a real blockade against arms, munitions and some dual-use materials that can be misused, exactly the kind of blockade we would be employing to protect the United Kingdom if we suffered persistent attack from some near neighbours—I guess.

Gaza is experiencing poverty and needs much help. However, those needs are best addressed by the international community working with Israel to better meet those ends while at the same time explicitly and publicly appreciating what seem to me at least to be Israel’s somewhat understandable security needs in the region. I hope that Her Majesty’s Government agree with this and I equally hope that my noble friend will make that clear at least in his response to this debate.

Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe

Lord Patten Excerpts

Monday 16th January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten]

My Lords, it is reasonable and fair from time to time to point a finger at any organisation. Rather like the small child who had the unfortunate experience of watching Lord Randolph Churchill canvassing and pointed his finger and said, “Mama, Mama, what is that man for?”, it is quite fair to point a finger at an organisation from time to time and say, “What is that organisation for?”. There will be more of that later on in my speech.

It is also very important to judge the OSCE against the things to come in 2012; 2012 may see more dangerous moments than have been seen at any time since the end of the Cold War, the events of 9/11 included. The litany is long and scary: Iran, North Korea, India-Pakistan and the side-winds of withdrawal from Afghanistan, Syria and the flashpoints around Mediterranean. Add to that not just that Russia at the end of December fired a salvo of two Bulava-30 intercontinental missiles from the White Sea to hit its targets on the Kamchatka peninsula, nearly 5,000 miles away, at exactly the same time as China formally confirmed for the first time in a statement from its Ministry of National Defence that it had also successfully fired from a submarine some Julong-2 ballistic missiles in the face of the imminent Taiwanese elections, and the atmosphere for 2012 can be seen to be pretty turbulent, to put it delicately, at a high level.

All these issues arise in the middle of severe economic difficulties in Europe and the US that affect our capabilities in everything from conflict prevention and resolution to hardcore defence. The West must not fail in economic regeneration, for the old USSR failed as its old economic system failed and lost as a result military and economic power, which are simply inseparable.

Yet the new economic reality demands difficult but necessary cuts in capabilities of all sorts. We see this with the United States. I do not know the current view of the United States Government on the OSCE, but President Obama issued new strategic guidance on 5 January this year, coincidentally just after those Russian and Chinese missiles started flying. His announcement demonstrated that, just as we in the UK once faced up to the need to withdraw from east of Suez, so the US is now pulling back a bit, for reasons that I fully understand, from west of Suez. It is quite clear and quite deliberate. This is not only in the face of the difficulties of funding the most capable armed forces that the world has ever seen—the Pentagon being much larger than that of the next 10 countries combined—but, I sense, because President Obama sees himself as a Pacific president and not as a European president. Unfortunately—and I think this applies right across the political spectrum in the United States—the US also sees most European countries as not even, when the going was good, fulfilling their defence responsibilities to the extent of, let us say, spending 2 per cent of GDP per annum, with the honourable exceptions of France and of the United Kingdom. Not only that but the forces that they do have left are not deployable. My right honourable friend Philip Hammond was right to say earlier this month in the US:

“Too many countries are failing to meet their financial responsibilities to NATO, and so failing to maintain appropriate and proportionate capabilities”.

Less diplomatically, I would say that most NATO countries are getting a free ride. It is because of that and because of American disillusion that we see, Dover beach-like, the slow, almost unnoticed, withdrawal of once very detailed and intense American involvement in Europe. Their attention is going elsewhere. I do not see this as declinist in any way; I simply see it as realistic and reasonable on the part of the United States. We must set the OSCE against this background. I do so declaring my interests as recorded, but also I have nothing in the way of foreign affairs expertise to declare—no membership of even the smallest think tank.

How should we see the OSCE? It is itself a creature of the Cold War, as my noble friend Lord Bowness said in his splendid introductory speech, but now boasts 56 members, ranging geographically in a pretty contorted way from the US all the way through to those “-stans” in central Asia. None of the countries at either end of this geographical arc is exactly European, although the core of the membership most certainly is. No longer is the OSCE a Cold War forum for better East/West understandings as it once was. It now has—and I have done my research—three self-styled dimensions: politico-military, economic and environmental, and human.

Conflict resolution, for example, is part of its remit, and I applaud that. It does excellent work. However, it is interesting watching the delightfully titled—and I do not make this up—“chairperson in office” at the head of the OSCE. That is what he is called. The rest of his title is Irish DPM, Eamon Gilmore. When presenting his 2012 priorities last week in Vienna on 12 January, he ranged over an extraordinarily lengthy and sprawling shopping list, from protecting freedoms of expression in the digital age to money-laundering and back again. It is very hard to get one’s hands and arms around these concepts as always necessarily being integrated. Discussion of money-laundering must be very interesting indeed, and I imagine sometimes quite amusing, when Governments of member countries like Belarus or Montenegro are brought to account.

The big question in asking what the OSCE is for is whether we would today invent such a geographically extraordinary, democratically diverse and sometimes very unfocused organisation that is largely unknown to most politicians and opinion-formers, let alone to the general public. We would almost certainly not invent it in its present form, despite the good work that has been done, which I do recognise; it has, for example, brought Russia to the bar of world opinion over the Georgian situation, tried to help resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and all the rest.

Am I going to say that it should be abolished? Again, probably not, at least not at the moment, on the grounds that it is there; that it brings together all sorts of good countries, indifferent countries, bad countries, and some very bad countries indeed from Europe and central Asia, in the spirit of jaw-jaw being better than anything else; and that it tries to encourage the setting of better standards and freedoms, even if these are much more honoured in the breach in the case of Belarus and a number of the aforementioned “-stans”.

Does it need reform, and does it need more focus? Surely the answer is that someone has to get a grip on this organisation, reform it and give it some focus so that one can point one’s finger at it. I will then readily understand what this organisation is for. To get greater credibility, even though it is a consensus-driven organisation, it might have to face up to suspending some of its freedom-repressing members until they decide to reform themselves rather than benefit from the cloak of respectability that is thrown around their shoulders from simply having OSCE membership bestowed upon them. It is politically very poorly led. No one is getting a grip on it or giving it a political lead.

I end on this point. In March this year, NATO, which is in high-profile difficulty, as many of your Lordships will know, hopes to begin to try to resolve at the forthcoming Chicago summit of NATO countries some of the difficulties that are facing it. OSCE’s difficulties are of a much lower profile. As a number of other distinguished speakers have already said, it has such a low profile that most people do not know that it exists. However, it too needs the treatment of such a summit, or of some similar mechanism, urgently to resolve what it is really for. I do not know the answer to that at the beginning of 2012.