Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Lord Taverne Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 22nd October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taverne (LD)]

My Lords, there have been substantial changes since the last time this subject was discussed in this House. One of the most important has been the changed attitudes of the professional organisations. How extensive this is is significant. Earlier this year, the British Medical Association moved to a neutral position on assisted dying, and that reflects the position of similar medical bodies, including the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal Society of Medicine, the Royal College of Nursing, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and many others.

Now, why have they changed their position? One letter, signed by a number of eminent people, suggested that it was because they no longer felt they should oppose the views of not only their members but their patients. Of course, we know how extensive public opinion supports the Bill.

In the past and, indeed, in the present, it has been strongly argued that palliative care is the answer to the problems we face. However, as eminent members of the profession, including a former president of the BMA, observed in an email that other noble Lords may also have received, we now know that palliative care is no panacea. Many previous speakers have also shown why this is so. The Office of Health Economics published a study in 2019 which found that in Britain 17 people a day would have no relief from their pain as they died even if there was universal access to specialist palliative care, which, of course, there is not. We all much appreciate palliative care, of course, but we must take this into account.

If the Bill is passed, no one, even if they have the money, will need to make the traumatic journey to Dignitas in Switzerland—traumatic particularly for those who accompany them. As they all want, those who now go to Switzerland will be able to die at home and people will be able to ask a doctor to supply them with a lethal dose—a vital change to avoid people making a botched attempt at suicide, which can have the most appalling and catastrophic consequences. It promotes the case for autonomy, as was very powerfully put by Professor Grayling and other noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley of Knighton. One should have control of one’s own life. This is a humane Bill, which, however, needs one improvement: to add as beneficiaries those who suffer incurably as well as those about to die.

EU Referendum and EU Reform (EUC Report)

Lord Taverne Excerpts

Wednesday 15th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taverne (LD)]

My Lords, the last speaker was correct in telling us that there are some very unpleasant elements inside Europe in some of the parties. What the noble Lord did not mention is that all our friends—our allies, members of the Commonwealth, the democracies of the world—are desperate that we should stay a member, while the voices which are keenest that Europe should break up are those of Mr Donald Trump and Mr Vladimir Putin.

This has been an excellent debate and I have learned a lot from it. I had not appreciated fully, until I heard the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, and the very effective speeches from the noble Lords, Lord Liddle and Lord Jay, quite how huge the problems are of extracting ourselves from the European Union and how serious the consequences would be of the prolonged process which would have to take place.

I want to refer to a more particular issue: science and the European Union. A recent survey in Nature showed that 83% of scientists want Britain to stay in the Union because being in the European Union is good for British science. Sir Paul Nurse, for example, an ex-president of the Royal Society and a Nobel prize winner has written:

“Permeability of ideas and people is crucially important to science, and it flourishes in environments that pool intelligence, minimise barriers, and are open to exchange and collaboration”—

a point which has been made by many people in this debate. The European Union, he wrote,

“helps provide such an environment, and scientists value it”.

Then there were the 150 fellows of the Royal Society who wrote in March to the Times warning that Brexit could be “a disaster for science”. The reaction of the leave campaign was, as usual, to trot out someone from the small minority who contradicts those views. That is its normal reaction to the majority views of experts who seek to destroy its arguments.

When the IMF, the OECD, the Bank of England, every international economic authority and 90% of British economists concluded that Brexit will reduce our growth rate and adversely affect wages and jobs, their views were contemptuously dismissed. When the universally respected IFS, whose objectivity has never before been questioned, confirmed the Treasury’s detailed forecast of the harm Brexit would cause, we were told that the IFS was a lobby for the European Commission. Here I should declare an interest, because a long time ago, in 1971, as a recent Financial Secretary, I was asked by the founders of the IFS to become its first director, was responsible for its launch and helped it take some of its early steps. I am rather proud of having been the midwife at the birth of this baby, which has grown into such a formidable adult.

This excellent and most informative report from the Science and Technology Committee illustrates many of the reasons why scientists are so strongly pro-EU. They want to be part of a body that promotes big science, that is, science that is now performed on an increasingly large scale. The report quotes Professor Cowley, head of the UK Atomic Energy Authority:

“In the years since the early 1980s, Europe has become the world leader in big science. More and more science is progressing towards big science”.

One could cite many examples, but perhaps the paragraphs that sum it up most comprehensively, and which have been referred to by the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, and others, including my noble friend Lady Sharp, are paragraphs 157 and 158. Paragraph 157 states:

“It was repeatedly put to us that one of the most significant aspects of the UK’s EU membership is the provision of opportunities to collaborate. We view the EU to have three main influences: the provision of collaborative funding schemes and programmes; ensuring researcher mobility; and facilitating and fostering participation in shared pan-European research infrastructures”.

The next paragraph continues:

“Many would maintain that the provision of collaborative opportunities is perhaps the most significant benefit that EU membership affords science and research in the UK. These collaborative opportunities are not just between Member States but can extend to non-EU and non-European countries”.

What are the arguments against? Several have been referred to, but the main culprit, as usual, is bureaucracy. As the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, pointed out, there is an urgent need for reform of some of the regulations, but I quote Sir Paul Nurse again. He says:

“The UK can be very bureaucratic. At the Francis Crick Institute, where I work, we recruit the best in the world, wherever they come from, so we plough through the paperwork. But it costs us effort that would otherwise be spent on biomedical science. In contrast, when we recruit scientists from within the EU, the bureaucracy is much less”.

Our excellence in science is one of our greatest national assets, and so is that of our universities. The effect of Brexit on science and our universities has seldom featured in media reports of the referendum debates, but let me once more cite the views of people who are not generally politically partisan but who know what they are talking about: Universities UK and the vice-chancellors of the Russell Group. They are unanimous in expressing their deep concern about the serious damage Brexit will do to both those precious assets. For example, Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, the eminent vice-chancellor of Cambridge, has warned that Brexit could mean that Cambridge could no longer expect to maintain its status as one of the very top universities in the world.

Brexit would harm science and diminish our universities.

European Union Referendum Bill

Lord Taverne Excerpts

Wednesday 18th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taverne (LD)]

The noble Earl referred to previous considerations of this matter. Three commissions have looked at it. They disagreed about whether the age should be lowered, but they all agreed that there was a great gap in the evidence as to whether young people would be sufficiently responsible in weighing up their vote to take care to be informed about the issues. But is not the evidence now clear, because we have had the Scottish referendum where all those questions were answered?

[Lord Allen of Kensington (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the amendment. As a Scot involved in the Better Together campaign last year, I saw first-hand 16 and 17 year-olds taking this responsibility very seriously. I had robust debates probably more with 16 and 17 year- olds than with their parents. They were not necessarily on our side, so this is not about manipulating the position. They were one of the most knowledgeable groups because they had literally done their homework. As your Lordships have heard, more of them voted. The facts are that 75% of them turned out and voted compared to 54% of 18 to 24 year-olds.

We often criticise young people for not getting involved in the political process but I think, having spent many years in television, that we, too, were part of that problem. We could not get young people to engage in the political process but now we have a great opportunity. However, surely we are putting out mixed messages. We want them to engage but we do not want to give them the vote.

The Scottish referendum showed that young people are knowledgeable and can be trusted with the vote. They take this new responsibility seriously. This House has already decided to lower the voting age for local government elections to 16; 16 and 17 year-olds will be given the vote in the Scottish Parliament and I believe that Wales will follow suit. Do we really want to say to 16 and 17 year-olds that they are old enough to be involved in the debate but not old enough to be involved in the election. These elections will have more impact on them than they will on any of us.

European Union Referendum Bill

Lord Taverne Excerpts

Wednesday 28th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dobbs]

It is certainly a central argument. I have a 20 year-old who is a devout Corbynista. I would love to take the vote from him, but I do not have the right to do so, even though I think that his judgment on politics—as well as choice of football club—may be rather flawed. If one takes a totally logical approach, as the noble Baroness was saying earlier, there are many elderly people who are perhaps not as capable and as competent as they might be in exercising their judgment. We have to look for a balance. I cannot see how we can face 16 and 17 year-old voters and say yes in Scotland and no as far as Europe is concerned. Although I shall end up with some very strange bedfellows on this one, I urge my noble friend to take a very close look at this issue again and see whether the Government cannot make progress on it.

[Lord Taverne (LD)]

My Lords, when the whole question about the voting age came up and the suggestion was made that it should be reduced to 16, I had considerable doubts about it, for the sorts of reasons that have been advanced by a number of people, in quite reasonable speeches, who are opposed to the change.

However, the fact is that there have been a number of inquiries into this and most also turned out to be very doubtful. First, there was the 2004 commission which qualified its recommendation that the voting age should remain at 18 by saying:

“We propose further research on the social and political awareness of those around age 18 with a view to undertaking a further review of the minimum age for electoral participation in the future”.

Then there was the Power report in 2006 which recommended that the voting age should be lowered to 16, explaining:

“Our own experience and evidence suggests that just as with the wider population, when young people are faced with a genuine opportunity to involve themselves in a meaningful process that offers them a real chance of influence, they do so with enthusiasm and with responsibility”.

It came to the opposite conclusion to what I had felt earlier, that someone of 16 might not be sufficiently informed or use their vote sufficiently responsibly at 16.

Then came the Youth Citizenship Commission of 2007 which did not recommend a reduction of the voting age. It found that there was in fact a majority in favour of lowering the age but it thought the sample was too small, saying:

“This is a relatively small and not necessarily representative sample of the population”.

So there was a diffidence about the commission’s recommendations because of a shortage of evidence. The commission went on to say:

“We have found that there is a real evidence gap”.

However, there is no longer an evidence gap. We have had experience from a very wide sample and everyone has found that people in the lower age group deserve praise for the way they approached their task. They found them very responsible and very keen to get the right information. The general feeling was that this lowering of the voting age had been an enormous success. I think that the Scottish referendum has completely altered the situation because this gap in the evidence which the previous commission spoke about has been filled.

There is one other consideration which we should take into account. One of the serious consequences of a vote for Brexit in the referendum is that it will almost automatically lead to the break-up of the United Kingdom. If Scotland votes for staying and England votes for leaving, I cannot see that there will not be another referendum. One has to consider Scottish reactions very carefully. If I was a young person in Scotland—that would have been some time ago—I would be furious if I was allowed to vote in the Scottish referendum but not in the referendum which is of even greater importance if it involves the whole of one’s future. The same position may obtain in Wales because Wales may well decide as well to lower the voting age. If one really wants to keep the United Kingdom together I do not think one wants to confront young Scottish voters and others in Scotland who will be equally adverse to it. That only increases the chance of the break-up of the United Kingdom. The evidence is now plain that young people act responsibly and that they care about the information; the evidence should suggest that there must be a change in the law.

[Lord Higgins (Con)]

My Lords, I am not in favour of these amendments and I think it would be very naïve to suppose that if we accept them we will avoid a slippery slope as far as the age of consent is concerned, along with the many other issues that have been raised. If that kind of change is to be made, rather than being pushed into it by the precedent of what happened in Scotland it is very important we should have an overall view of the whole issue in a Bill which is publicised and which allows the public to express their view on all these issues. The Government are right to say they will use—with very minor exceptions—the same franchise as was used in the very recent local election.

Many noble Lords have been over this course before. I remember very well when I was in the House of the Commons that the issue of lowering the voting age came up. I said to my secretary that if I got a single letter—at that time I had an enormous mailbag—from someone in the lower age group saying they would like the vote, then I would vote for it, but if I did not get such a letter I would vote against it. I did not get such a letter. In this day and age we are not inundated to the same extent with mailbags. Instead we are inundated with emails. I wonder how many Members have had an email from someone in the age group which the proposal would enfranchise saying that they would really like the vote. I have not had one. I have had enormous numbers of emails but not one like that. That is because this issue has not been publicised. This has become an internal view of the House of Lords and we are not taking other arguments sufficiently into account.

Arbitration and Mediation Services (Equality) Bill [HL]

Lord Taverne Excerpts

Friday 23rd October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taverne (LD)]

My Lords, I have long much admired the campaigns of the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, in favour of human rights and I strongly support this Bill. It reasserts the principle that there must be equality for all under a single law of the land, especially in one area where the principle is widely ignored and denied—namely, the rights of Muslim women. I have not previously spoken on the subject and will concentrate on one issue only.

I had one major reservation about the Bill—a reservation which, to some extent, is shared by the noble Baroness, Lady Uddin. Since there is such strong evidence that English law and procedure have been ignored in so many ways in so-called sharia courts, and given the difficulties that clearly exist in effectively protecting the rights of Muslim women, is not the simple answer to outlaw sharia law outright in any judicial or quasi-judicial proceedings in the United Kingdom?

I have been persuaded against that argument by someone who is, I am told on very good authority, regarded as one of the wisest counsellors in dealing with Islamic extremism and radicalisation, Councillor Saima Ashraf of Barking and Dagenham. She has had strong personal experience of discrimination but still favours keeping the option of arbitration and mediation under sharia law.

As a non-believer, I accept that, unless there are strong reasons to the contrary, we should respect and protect the right of faith groups to decide disputes in accordance with their religious beliefs. I can see that those who are brought up under strict sharia law, as the law for true believers, might regard a total ban as the imposition of alien values and as an example of discrimination against Islam. That would not be the best way to promote tolerance and understanding between religions, and in fact the Bill does not outlaw so-called sharia courts but provides the safeguards against discrimination which exist under English law, and these must prevail.

However, my adviser stresses two very important issues which have not been mentioned so far: monitoring and education. It is absolutely essential that we have effective monitoring to ensure that the safeguards are being observed, and this must be accompanied by education. I believe that we should make sure that Muslim women in England are made explicitly aware of the rights that they have here, and that should certainly include Muslim women who do not speak English. There are many cases at the moment of women being ignorant of their rights and even of their legal status. If, however, monitoring does not provide an effective safeguard or it shows that the abuses which are now widespread continue, then outlawing all sharia law will be the only course left.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Taverne Excerpts

Monday 1st June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taverne (LD)]

My Lords, it is quite clear that in the next five years we will face a great constitutional upheaval. Major taxing powers for Scotland and government plans for English votes for English laws will both have profound implications for Wales and Northern Ireland, and then there is the issue of devolved power to cities with elected metro mayors. This hugely ambitious programme of constitutional reform cannot possibly be achieved bit by bit. The noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, made a magnificent speech that provided unanswerable arguments in favour of a constitutional convention. Such a programme must be coherent and acceptable to the different nations of the UK and should strengthen the union.

However, there is one missing piece, to make sense of the whole. We are going to face something that is in effect much more akin to a federal Britain. The question arises: how will these different elements in a much more federal Britain be properly represented? In fact this presents an opportunity: in a federal Britain we could then transform the House of Lords, which has resisted previous rather poorly prepared and unacceptable attempts to do so. We could have a new upper Chamber that in effect performed some of the functions performed in Germany by the Bundesrat. Such an upper Chamber could be greatly reduced in size. That would also cure our present intolerable overcrowding, which prevents the proceedings of this House from being as efficient as they should be.

There is another proposal in the Queen’s Speech that has not been mentioned but which sets a profoundly undesirable constitutional precedent: a statutory limit on income tax and VAT. The new Government may well face a major economic crisis: our recovery is fragile because a sharp decline in productivity has caused a huge trade deficit, the largest in the OECD, that has been financed by the inflow of hot money. We are on our way to a new housing bubble caused by rising house prices. The eurozone may be in deep trouble if Greece is forced out, and foreign investors may get scared by the possibility of Brexit. That hot money may flow out very rapidly and cause a major crisis. If we face an emergency and the need for drastic measures to protect the pound, the Treasury’s hands will be tied by its inability to raise taxes and it will be forced to rely on ever-deepening spending cuts.

Personally, I am completely out of sympathy with the Government’s aim of a shrinking state. Lower taxes should not be our primary concern as a matter of principle. The lowest-taxed industrial societies are the most dysfunctional, as shown in that seminal book The Spirit Level by Wilkinson and Pickett. As the famous American judge Oliver Wendell Holmes observed:

“Taxes are the price we pay for a civilised society”.

Contrary to Conservative belief, higher-taxed democracies on the whole, in the decades before the crash, had a faster, not slower, record of economic growth. We already have a society with huge inequalities. Income tax and, to a lesser extent, VAT are progressive. Cutting public spending even more will be deeply regressive. Moreover, at some point ever-greater austerity inflicted on the poorest in society may not work. An economic crisis will lead not to one nation but to an even more broken society.

I have one further point, which may comfort those who fear that we are in for a long period in the doldrums for the Labour Party, or the disappearance of the Liberal Democrats. In 1959, after a calamitous defeat for Labour, many forecast that they would never again see a Labour Government. Roy Jenkins, a very wise man with a great sense of historical perspective, wrote in an article at that time that things did not look good, but that we should remember 1902, when there was not a cloud on the horizon for Salisbury’s Conservative Government, with the Liberal Opposition deeply divided in the aftermath of the Boer War. Within four years there was the greatest anti-Conservative landslide in history. Things may not prove quite as they look at present.

Legal Systems: Rule of Law

Lord Taverne Excerpts

Thursday 10th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taverne (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, speak on this topic in this august legal gathering with hesitation and misgiving. I last practised law in 1966 and had only 12 years at the Bar and one year as a Silk, practising mainly before that friendly god the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. I was then lucky enough to become a Minister at the Home Office in that glorious period between 1966 and 1967 when Roy Jenkins was Home Secretary, which was the greatest period of law reform since the Second World War. Since then, however, I have not been directly concerned with the law. It has changed profoundly, and whatever law I once knew I have forgotten—hence my hesitation, especially since I shall voice some critical comments.

I believe that recent discussions about our legal system have missed one very important point. The Government rightly argue that the cost of legal aid has soared and must be controlled. Lawyers and others concerned with justice rightly complain that cuts in legal aid have restricted access to justice—a fundamental right in a democracy—but no one blames the legal system. I fear that we can no longer claim that the legal system in England and Wales is a model for the rest of the world, in at least one very important respect. I shall restrict my comments to civil litigation, but I believe equally valid criticisms can be made of proceedings in criminal cases.

The costs of litigation are not only exceptionally high by international comparisons, but unpredictable and can end up being out of all proportion as a subject matter in dispute, causing financial ruin to the parties. Valiant attempts to limit and reduce costs, such as the reforms proposed in 1999 by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, and the proposal of Lord Justice Jackson, implemented in 2013, have not prevented the seemingly inexorable rise in costs. At the same time, according to the Government’s own figures, when the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act became effective in April 2013, legal aid was no longer available to some 600,000 of the million or so who previously qualified.

Our legal system has become dysfunctional. Why? I will mention some plausible explanations. Losers have to pay winners’ costs, so costs are ratcheted up. Once you start to litigate, you have to go on to the bitter end, because abandoning your case half way means you are the loser. Lawyers, who charge by the hour, have no compelling incentive to limit costs. Even when they want or try to, they have to react to opponents’ moves.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, who I have always greatly admired, put forward reforms that offered hope by giving judges control over litigation to see that it was conducted efficiently and economically. So why have costs risen even higher? I am told that a major reason is that there is now much more litigation about costs themselves, which can be very large. Lord Justice Jackson was asked to review the rules and principles governing those costs, and judges now have discretion over their awards in the light of the conduct of the parties. However, this leads only to more jockeying and argument about costs, adding to their total. The sad fact is that the amount of litigation about costs has no parallel in any other country.

Once the issues have been defined, the parties’ lawyers must provide the court with estimates of the cost of running the entire case, which the court must review and approve to make sure costs are not disproportionate. Budgets are approved at the first case management conference after the close of pleadings, but this means that would-be litigants have to retain lawyers to start proceedings and work out budgets. They have to commit themselves to proceedings that may be very expensive, without any idea of what they will eventually cost. Who wants to go to law if their means are limited?

No wonder there has been a vast rise in the number of litigants in person—but litigation demands legal knowledge and expertise in court procedure. Those who argue their own case without either are almost bound to be less likely to obtain justice. Inevitably, cases argued in person also take much longer and add to the costs of administration.

What should be done? First, I have always had doubts that the public are best served by lawyers being paid on the taxi-meter principle: by the hour. More importantly, there should be a major review of the administration of civil justice. It is perhaps the oldest public service. Access to justice at reasonable cost is a vital principle, and the fact that it is no longer available undermines our claims to be a civilised society. Yet this public service has never been independently reviewed. Of course lawyers must play a major part in any review, but they should not themselves be the final arbiters of how the public can best be served. There is something seriously wrong with a system in which, to litigate, you have to be a plutocrat or a pauper.

Justice: Academic Research on Jury Decision-making

Lord Taverne Excerpts

Wednesday 12th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Faulks]

As to the latter question, as the noble Lord will know, that is no new suggestion. It dates back as long ago as when the Roskill commission made suggestions to that effect. There are no current plans to remove trial by jury. As to other changes in the jury system and legislating to that effect, the noble Lord may be aware that there are provisions in Part 3 of the Criminal Justice and Courts Bill dealing with, among other things, questions of electronic communication devices and the restriction on them and the restriction on jurors using the internet to obtain information during the course of the trial, which can of course compromise a fair trial, which is in no one’s interest.

[Lord Taverne (LD)]

My Lords, will the Minister bear in mind that the legal profession has traditionally been very conservative about certain changes? When, in the 1960s, I was a Home Office Minister and we introduced majority verdicts, the general view of the Bar was that the sky would fall and that that would be the end of justice as we knew it. More recently, it has been accepted that that is one of the most important changes that has taken place. Is it not highly desirable that we should know how juries proceed and work, based not on anecdotal evidence but on solid evidence of the kind that the noble Lord, Lord Blair, described? That is obviously in the interests of justice.

[Lord Faulks]

I have considerable sympathy with what my noble friend says. He will probably be familiar with Professor Cheryl Thomas’s work in which, despite certain doubts about the ability of some jurors to reach reasoned decisions, she remains a considerable enthusiast for the jury system. I accept that no system of trial should be beyond research or examination.

EU: Police and Criminal Justice Measures

Lord Taverne Excerpts

Tuesday 9th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taverne]

My Lords, I am glad that the negotiations between the Conservatives and the Liberals inside the coalition have come to a sensible conclusion. In passing, one wonders what has been achieved in exercising the block opt-out; what we are left with having opted out of is not of any great significance.

The Conservatives have sensibly given way, contrary to their original stance, on the major measures for police and crime co-operation in the European Union. There is nothing more difficult in politics than changing your mind in the light of the evidence. It appears as if that is what the Conservatives in the Government have done, and I applaud them for that.

It is also fair to say that this has been a major victory for the Liberal Democrats in the coalition, and for this House, particularly the important work and results communicated in the Bowness and Hannay committees. It is also of very great importance that it has been a signal defeat for the UKIP-and-Tea-Party tendency inside the Conservative Party.

I ask two questions of the Minister. Is there any indication of the present attitude of the Commission to the opt-out proposals and what sort of timetable is envisaged? Secondly, will the Conservative leadership in the Government, including the Lord Chancellor and the Home Secretary, now join with Labour and the Liberal Democrats in exposing UKIP as the party which is soft on crime?

I am sure the Minister will agree that since UKIP rejects any legislation for co-operating on crime in the European Union, its policies can only benefit people-traffickers, porn-merchants, paedophile rings, money-launderers and other criminals who operate across borders, as they increasingly do.

[Lord McNally]

My Lords, on these specific questions, I have seen only the initial response from the Commission that was carried on the news-tapes; as far as I could see, that response was constructive in terms of welcoming this approach from the British Government. Of course we have had to get to this point before going into more formal discussions, but officials have had technical discussions with the Commission and the Council, focusing on the legal framework under which the decision will be made, to ensure a shared understanding of the legal processes around the 2014 decision. I know that my right honourable friends the Justice Secretary and the Home Secretary spoke today to Commissioner Reding and Commissioner Malmström respectively. There is no doubt that the Commission has responded in a way that we find constructive. I will cover another point made by the noble Baroness, about whether there would be gaps and lacunas in this. That would not be in the interests of any of us; we will negotiate with both sides to make sure that the move from one jurisdiction to another is a smooth one.

On the question of UKIP and how our respective parties respond to it, that is a matter for the political campaigners. However, in this Statement my right honourable friend the Home Secretary has demonstrated what we would expect of her, given her high office. She has taken account of the national security and policing needs in coming to these decisions, and she should be congratulated on that.

Defamation Bill

Lord Taverne Excerpts

Monday 25th February 2013 Lords Chamber

Tabled by

[Lord Taverne]

2: Clause 6, page 3, line 36, leave out “believed” and insert “decided”

[Lord Taverne]

My Lords, I still feel that the words I moved at an earlier stage are better than those of the Government but, as both sides wish to give effect to what was said in the Flood case, there is not that much between us. In the circumstances, I shall not move my amendment.

Amendment 2 not moved.