Holocaust Memorial Bill

Lord Strathcarron Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 4th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strathcarron (Con)]

My Lords, I think it is fair to say that this whole project has not worked out as originally intended 10 years ago. Like so many other noble Lords, my objections are not to a memorial and learning centre—of course not—but to the location in Victoria Tower Gardens. From the start there was no consultation about using a public park and no assessment of the feasibility of choosing Victoria Tower Gardens. Worse, there was still no transparency or consultation when the fateful decision, the so-called “moment of genius”, was taken two months later to build the associated learning centre underneath the memorial.

This is a wonderful example of top-down decision-making where every consideration was given to grandiose gestures and political symbolism and very little given to the effect all this would have on those who had to live with it. The great and the good, deciding all this from on high, did not even research that there was an existing Act of Parliament forbidding them from doing exactly what they wanted to do. All this is precisely why nine years later we find ourselves in the mess we are in today.

Next, £50 million of taxpayers’ money was agreed to make this happen. Needless to say, nine years later that £50 million is heading north towards £200 million. Let us face it: no one has the faintest idea of what this will eventually cost. We have a wonderful example right here on our doorstep—the renovated Elizabeth Tower, which was signed off at £29 million and ended up costing £81 million.

It goes without saying that nine years later, following that fateful decision, not a single brick has been laid. We now have a situation where pretty much everyone who is affected by this decision is against it and the only people seemingly still for it either are not directly affected by it or are involved in it. In business studies courses, this syndrome is known as escalation of commitment theory and the sunk cost fallacy principle. Both describe themselves but can be summed up as a management, in this case the Government, continuing to double up on promises and investments already made rather than objectively assessing what is before them and what is likely to lie ahead—a lack of thinking that always leads to compounding the problem rather than solving it. Think HS2 or NHS Test and Trace as other recent examples.

In the same way that this project has suffered from chronic overspend, it has also suffered from mission creep as the focus has spread from the Holocaust as we know it to the memory of subsequent genocides in general. This brings me to my main objection. These new genocide memorials will be absolutely guaranteed to attract the many hundreds of thousands of demonstrators we have seen regularly marching through London who believe passionately that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza against the Palestinians. The fact that these demonstrators do not follow the dictionary definition of genocide is totally beside the point. They believe it is a genocide and so, for them, that is exactly what it is. To think that they will not descend on the Holocaust memorial in their hundreds of thousands to protest against Israel at what they will see as a series of memorials to other genocides is not only an irony beyond belief but wishful thinking of the most delusional kind.

Even if the police manage to secure the area around these Houses of Parliament, what effect will that have on not only those of us who work here but, much more to the point, the many hundreds of thousands of people who live and work near us? It is so obviously a police and public order disaster waiting to happen that that alone should be enough reason to pause and relocate before it is too late.

This whole ill-gotten, ill-fated project is in the wrong place at the right time. It is not too late to put the nine wasted years behind us and agree a better site. There are many far more obvious ones on offer. It is a difficult decision for those involved in keeping it alive, but the public interest must come first and it is our role in this House to make sure that it does.

Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act 2010) Bill

Lord Strathcarron Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 24th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strathcarron (Con)]

My Lords, I declare two levels of interest, as a publisher and trustee of a national designated museum.

My objections to the Bill concern only the effect of Clause 1 on freedom of speech and the inadequacies of the government amendments. Everyone knows about the law of unintended consequences, but more relevant here would be another famous law: the law of dangerous assumptions. The assumptions here are threefold and concern the three categories involved: employers, employees and third parties. The Bill assumes that employers are overwhelmingly uncaring and unsympathetic towards their employees. It assumes that employees need to be treated like a protected species, unable to deal with the comings and goings of life in the workplace, and it assumes that third parties—the general public—are disproportionately likely to be foul-mouthed, insensitive and unwittingly offensive.

These unrealistic assumptions amount to a classic case of a solution looking for a problem. In this case, the solution is so draconian, and the size of the problem so minuscule, that the free-speech aspect of the Bill fails the first and most elementary parliamentary test: is it really necessary? The cumulative effect of these unrealistic assumptions can be seen in the Bill as it stands: to turn our fundamental right to freedom of speech into a management-style risk. These may or may not have been the intentions, but they will certainly be the consequences. I prefer the charitable interpretation that they are not intentional, and they just have not been thought through. Thankfully, that is the task of your Lordships’ House as we scrutinise what comes our way.

To take real-world examples of why this part of the Bill will not work in practice, I refer to my declared interests. I publish about 50 books a year and the marketing of each book requires that my team come into contact with the general public—third parties—either at a book launch or a literary festival, or sometimes both. To take the example of a book launch, this would be a private event with invitations sent out to between 50 and 100 guests and I would typically have three or four employees there. In order to be said to have taken “all reasonable steps”, I should on the invitation request that guests do not talk to staff about any subjects relating to sex, gender, race, religion, origins or any other sensitive matter—even if what one says is perfectly legal. I ask your Lordships, after seeing such an invitation—one that discourages any form of legal sociability—would you go to such a cold-water event? Would Waterstones, for example, risk an in-store book signing by JK Rowling or Helen Joyce on the offchance that one of the author’s fans might be wearing a T-shirt that says, “Woman Equals Adult Human Female”, knowing that an employee could sue for hurt feelings—real or vexatious? These are real issues facing real businesses. I suggest we are wading into very dangerous waters.

Less parochially than my own media world, do we really want to live in a society where intelligent people cannot talk to each other openly and legally, for fear of saying something unintentionally offensive in the ebb and flow of normal conversation? Do we really want these conversations to have any rules at all, beyond being legal, let alone to be governed by the ever-evolving vagaries of compliance culture, guarding against the tiny percent who might offend, probably accidentally.

The rules change all the time. If I said the words “woman” or “headquarters” at an Oxfam event and one of its employees took offence and complained, how much trouble would it be in? I note that it invented the offence only a few days ago. I hope we can agree that this is a nonsense that turns one of our most basic freedoms—freedom of speech—from a right to a risk.

The museum I mentioned is a charity, and we receive about 400,000 visitors a year—all totally random members of the public, with totally random views on any particular subject. We have a staff of about 100, many of whom will come into contact with the visitors—the so-called “third parties” mentioned in the Bill. It is quite possible that a few of our staff might be among those who are recreationally offended. If we are very unlucky, there might be one who is professionally offended, and there may be a few who are just easily offended. We just do not know, because we have never had to pry into the private prejudices of our staff before, as we will now have to do to protect ourselves, if these provisions stand.

On the other side of the gate, by no means can we expect all of the 400,000 visitors to be up to date with the current thing, to be courteous or even to be sober. Any encounters between our visitors and staff are totally outside our control. What one is saying to the other is almost certainly legal, and yet, under the terms of the Bill, we will be responsible for the outcomes. This is not only obviously unfair; it is unworkable and inevitably adds totally unnecessary costs for the charity.

On Report in the other place, the Government added last-minute free-speech protection amendments but, on close reading, all these conditions would have to apply in each occurrence, which, taken together, amounts to an extremely narrow and highly unlikely set of circumstances. As I said, this was all done in a last-minute rush and has not been properly thought through. This is easily remedied by adding the word “or” to them, which would at least mitigate some of these encroachments, although, at this stage, we are dealing with least-worst options, regrettably.