King’s Speech

Lord Triesman Excerpts

Wednesday 15th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Triesman (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, and to welcome the noble Lords, Lord Roberts and Lord Young. I hope that they, like me, will welcome the degree of unity that we often find across this House. I used to have arguments with Lord Geoffrey Howe, who used to say to me that I ought to be more contentious and pick arguments so we could get to the bottom of things. I used to say to him, “Tell me what you would like the argument about, we’ll rehearse one and then we can play it out in your Lordships’ House”.

I would guess that there are few United Kingdom Jewish families without relatives who are caught up in the unfolding tragedy in Israel and Gaza, and I am no exception to that. The solidarity across this House in the face of the events and the growth, which is absolutely manifest, in domestic anti-Semitism, the unity that we have and the way in which it has been expressed, have been inspiring and I am deeply grateful for that, just as I am grateful when the same comments are made about Islamophobia and our need to deal with it.

Hamas has created this catastrophe, assisted by Iran and Russia—but it created it, and the impact of the barbaric terrorist attack on 7 October, in which fellow British citizens were killed, just as there are fellow British citizens abducted as hostages. We want them back. The problem cannot be overstated. About 1,200 to 1,400 babies, children, families and old folk were butchered, overwhelmingly on the grounds that they were Jews. It made no difference to the Hamas terrorists if you were Thai or of any other nationality. On the day, they burned people alive, dismembered them and filmed them in their agony—and some of us, sadly, have seen those films.

To understand the scale of the shock that there has been to the community which I come from—I know numbers tell only part of the story—on 9 November 1938, almost an anniversary, the Kristallnacht pogrom took 91 Jewish lives. On 7 October, it was 13 times worse, and if you pro rata it, well over 100 times worse. This has to be central to our understanding of why people feel as they do. I am not going to pretend to your Lordships’ House that I feel a lot of personal fear—I do not pretend that I do—but I tell you now that I will not let my daughter go into central London on her own, although it is her home town, because I fear for her.

That, of course, is just the start of the horror that Hamas has caused, and we have to able to hold two contrasting thoughts in our heads at once, although it is not always easy: this is not a monochrome tragedy. The babies and civilians in Gaza are also lives taken—invaluable lives and futures destroyed—and when anybody uses the words “human shields”, they do well to remember that the word “human” is at the beginning of that phrase. Hamas is monstrous, but those who are rightly battling to free the 240 hostages have to remember that the shields are human. They have not chosen to be shields, they are not simply collateral damage and they need fuel, water, food and medicines delivered consistently through humanitarian pauses and safe routes. It is quite right that Israel should try to defang Hamas. The noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, made the point earlier that it was essential to know how. It is also right to defang the settlers on the West Bank who are so intent on not allowing Palestinian communities to develop their own political institutions.

I think there are other things we can do. We could certainly starve Hamas of some of the money that is rolling through the cryptocurrency world, which it is possible to regulate and stop. That hidden and illicit money is there. Plainly, this cannot be allowed to be a mechanism for terrorists to regroup and repeat their violence and, incidentally, nor does it excuse the grotesque threat by a senior Israeli Minister to use nuclear weapons in the region. It is high time for a political initiative, and for us that political solution has always involved the two viable states being created. I am sure that that is the right path, and I could not disagree more with the noble Lord, Lord Leigh, when he says it is not.

We need to grasp that political discussions must involve people with at least a basic view, which Hamas will never be able to accept, I know, and will never discuss in the form of a peace treaty—but then nor will Mr Netanyahu. He is rigidly antagonistic, and his Government alliance is even worse. Some adversaries, of course, have found a capability to talk about peace, whatever the precedents, but I must say that neither of these leaderships can. Both abhor a two-state solution, and we need to find a way to talk to others.

My closing comments—I am aware of the time—are that, throughout my adult life, I have counted on the architecture of our relationship with the United States. I think it is absolutely fundamental. As many have said today, NATO is fundamental, and Five Eyes is fundamental to our well-being. I believe that President Biden will be re-elected, but it is possible that he will not. I did not believe that President Trump could beat Hillary Clinton—which shows what I know. If he is elected, almost all of that architecture is liable to be destroyed, and I ask the Government what kind of contingency thinking they are doing to ensure that we have reliable alliances on which we can depend and where our defence is sacrosanct and durable, because, if we cannot plan for that possibility, I fear very greatly for where we will end up.