Religious Intolerance and Prejudice
Lord Triesman Excerpts(5 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Triesman (Lab)
My Lords, I start by thanking the Minister—not just for launching this debate, but for what was a very important speech. I want to read and study his contribution again. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Patten. I know this is what Ministers normally get to do at the end of debates, but I want to thank everybody I have heard so far. I have not heard a speech from which I have not learned a good deal. One of the conventions of the House is that we only refer to people on our own side as our noble friends. However, I think this is an occasion when the friendship and empathy across the House is a great deal more significant than which side we are sitting on. So, if I do not use the convention, it will be because I see people across the House in exactly that spirit. I am looking forward to what my noble friend Lord Griffiths says at the end, though I have not heard him yet. He is a very distinguished leader of his own Church, in which he has played such a significant part. I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Popat, is not in his place at the moment. He has also been a formidable champion of many of these issues and I want to record my thanks to him.
Ten, maybe even five, years ago I could not have imagined that we would be having this debate, nor felt that it was necessary. The headlines that we saw yesterday about the dire increases in hate crime might not come as a surprise because we have probably all charted them. They do come as a surprise, however, because somehow we have arrived at a point in this country where these things are manifest and serious. I am not going to repeat all the statistics because your Lordships have read them and heard them in other speeches. They are devastating. It is true from these statistics that some communities in particular have found themselves in the crosshairs of this—the Muslim community, and the Jewish community of which I am part. It moves me and has made me want to speak today because I reflect on my own family’s history, as my noble friend Lord Kestenbaum did a short while ago on his. He talked about the escape of his family from Germany. More or less none of the members of my family who were in mainland Europe escaped, with fatal consequences for pretty much all of them. One part of my family escaped from Portugal in 1492—the Portuguese have managed to track them back all that distance, which must mean that their Home Office is a good deal more efficient than ours. The reality is that our family survived because that branch escaped all that time ago.
Part of what I say, reflecting on what has been said by my noble friend Lord Hain and others, is bound to sound a little angry. I do not mean to indulge in anger or victimhood, but I want to understand what we are trying to deal with.
The issues that we have begun to explore today have led the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Cressida Dick—somebody I greatly admire and trust—to indicate the level of work and attention that her force will give to them. I welcome that enormously. Equally, however, I do not wholly buy into the certain amount of complacency shown by the Government when they say this is simply down to increased effectiveness in keeping records. There are very real problems which go beyond police recording; indeed, the Minister made the same point himself, and I am glad that he did. Everybody knows that a great many victims feel that they have to shrug these things off and somehow carry on without reporting anything to anybody. They either see that there is little prospect of action or believe that it has become such a normal part of their lives that they do not report it. If anything, I suspect that the crimes we have been discussing which go unreported, as with crimes against lesbians, gay people, bisexual people and transgender communities, would have boosted the figures significantly had they been reported. It is not a spike in the statistics; when you look at them, there is an unrelenting, upward curve.
I will quickly mention two examples from my own experience. A lady who worked for me was punched in the face on a London bus two days after the Brexit result, when she was with her five year-old daughter. She was not visibly from any minority community; as it happens, she was from Latvia. However, she spoke with a strange accent, which caused huge fury to somebody. She would not report it. She said that what she would do was to take herself and her daughter back to where they came from. It may be that many of the people who took part in that referendum wanted exactly that outcome, but the reality was that she decided not to report it but to go. The other example is of my own intern in your Lordships’ House, who just a few weeks ago was set upon by three thugs in the East End of London. She is visibly and, I would guess to most people, obviously a young Muslim woman. She has been badly injured; thank God, she is moving around again, albeit on crutches. She was attacked for those reasons, and she is just one of many examples. It is all very close to home, which is the point I wanted to make.
We are seeing not just something in the general population; we need to reflect on ourselves as well. Political elites do not always do as much as they could, or the right things in the circumstances. We see many advocates of a decent, tolerant set of relationships, and that is very much what I see and experience in this House—I described all noble Lords speaking in this debate as friends in a sense, and I meant it. But I fear that others should hang their heads in shame. Boris Johnson has become a man whose public bigotry is a significant issue. It is unbelievable to me that he should talk of Muslim women as he does, but in fact he has talked of many minority communities in much the same way. The leader of my own party, it is sad for me to say—having been involved in the party, and its general secretary—has a long history of rhetoric but is wholly bereft of action. Inaction has allowed anti-Semitism to fester in the Labour Party, and the serried ranks of bigots, who are waiting for action to be taken, see that it somehow never matures. In these cases leadership rarely says the right things, and it appears that in my party it does not do the right things. Above all, for me it is what you do rather than what you say that tells people who you are and what your values are. A Labour MP who can walk around a difficult and tough constituency in the north-west without any kind of police escort or protection cannot walk through the Labour Party conference without police protection. That is a fundamental, visible example of a significant problem. Many of us have experienced similar things—not that we needed police protection, but similar kinds of abuse.
I say to my noble friend Lady Deech that in my experience it is not always about Israel and Palestine—in fact, that is unusual. The thing which apparently I do, and which people know about me without ever asking my view, is that I use whatever authority I have to prop up my friends the Rothschilds and George Soros to make sure that the secret network which makes so much money for that part of the community is intact. One could have heard it in the 1930s of course, and we are hearing it again now.
It is a sad truth that we are becoming an ugly and intolerant country. This is a tragedy for the United Kingdom, given its history and ability to absorb peoples. As many others have said, civility and respect are not quite dead in this country but I fear they are heading for a rather shallow grave.
The internet, which is the default mass publishing house for trolls, racists, homophobes, liars, fakers, charlatans and racial supremacists, has deepened the ugliness and intolerance. Freedom of expression is, of course, tremendously important, but I urge noble Lords to reflect on when the expression of something goes beyond freedom of expression into something that is, by repetition, more significant. If we look at any individual statement by Bannon, it is unlikely that we would see it, in itself, as the cause of anything. Yet, aggregated, such statements were sufficient to help the President of the United States say of a group of Ku Klux Klan members that they were not “bad people”. If we can begin to define where things move from being expressions of opinion into being dangerous, we should do it.
The problems have been there below the surface for a long time; we need to face them. Black communities in the United Kingdom have faced them and we need to do so too, in a very candid way. In the case of Jewish people, Conor Cruise O’Brien rightly described anti-Semitism as a very light sleeper. Sadly, many of us who have experienced problems in the recent past will know just how lightly it is asleep.
The speech given by the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, at the Second Reading of the anti-terrorism Bill was, I thought, exceptional; I applaud it, and I applaud what she said today. It is absolutely clear that, unless you can engage with communities who can engage with other people, the likelihood of finding solutions is very small. I assure her, as I am sure others in the House will, that many will support the positions she has taken and argue for them.
I do not think people’s fears are fanciful. My late father used to keep a packed suitcase—a bit like the parents of the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi—because he thought things would probably go wrong in this country. I always thought that was crazy but I am now beginning to see things which appear to be going very wrong. Any number of my friends and relatives are beginning to plan their departures to various places— Canada seems the most popular destination because they feel it is likely to be tolerant. What an extraordinary thing—I could not have imagined that this would happen in my lifetime.
Some of it is unquestionably down to the politics of identity. The sorts of social alliances that were so cohesive for us over so long a period have broken down in many ways. People still respect those institutions—most of us try to ensure that they remain healthy—but the truth is that people can identify themselves in smaller and smaller groups, which identify themselves partly through not being part of another identity. They are in many cases hell-bent on describing how their group has been set upon by the most considerable disadvantage. For those reasons, they regard themselves as needing a remedial case to be argued, which places them above others.
What might we do? First, I agree completely with those who say there is no place for hate crime. I do not like the idea of criminalising people, and I do not think it often works, but it is essential that people understand that the Government of this country will pursue crimes and seek to convict criminals, and that the regime which criminals then experience is enough to make them reconsider what they do. I do not see any point in thinking otherwise. I think of how the late Lord Scarman dealt with some of the issues that arose out of the original Notting Hill riots. It was an absolutely clinical intervention and it had a dramatic effect.
Secondly, the leaders of political parties must act expeditiously against members of their parties who promote hatred. This should apply absolutely to Islamophobia as much as it does to anti-Semitism or any other form of discrimination. They are in many ways distinctive, but they have much in common.
Thirdly, I will not repeat the point made by my noble friend Lord Hain, but I completely agree that fundamental economic change is important to raise aspirations and people’s feeling that they are part of this society.
Fourthly, and for the sake of our future, it is important to look at and address the school curriculum, the way teachers work and the sorts of things that happen to kids in classrooms. There are good arguments for classroom discussions that enable all pupils to take part, with everyone being properly heard and their opinions respected. We need to focus on evidence and a means of dealing with fake facts. We need to draw on the external and community resources around schools, and we have to moderate opinions and strong emotions to try to retain cohesion. We have an amazing teaching force in this country in many ways, and it is perfectly capable of doing this. I am well aware that I am making no greater an appeal than to make sure that all the things in the Runnymede report of 1994, reprinted in 1997, are finally done. Of course a lot has been done in schools—it would be stupid for me to suggest otherwise. However, I suspect that we have not done as much as we could.
For those reasons, I make one final point to your Lordships—to my friends, right across the House. The existential issues may take us a generation to deal with. As the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, said, that applies to universities too, but it applies also to the next generation. If we do not get it right, our future as a cohesive people will be in the gravest jeopardy.
Estates of Deceased Persons (Forfeiture Rule and Law of Succession) Bill
Lord Triesman Excerpts(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Pearson of Rannoch
My Lords, I think the noble Lord, Lord Spicer, and I have something to say.
Lord Pearson of Rannoch
My Lords, I have two questions for the Minister that I asked in Committee but to which I did not get an answer. First, will he confirm that the noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, is 100 per cent right when he says that when the happy day comes—he did not put it like that—when the 1972 Act is repealed by the House of Commons and your Lordships’ House, it will then be definite that we are out of the European Union?
However, the question is not quite as simple as that. In January 1997, your Lordships were good enough to give Second Reading to a Bill in my name that did exactly that—it repealed the 1972 Act. At the time I was advised by the Clerks that this would still leave us with a problem from the Eurosceptic point of view, which wants nothing to do with any European legislation whatever. That problem would be that all the EU law that had been sewn into domestic law since 1972 would remain valid in British law. At the time, the Clerks advised me that one is not allowed to introduce a Bill into your Lordships’ House that is not capable of practical fulfilment. Their advice at the time was that it would have taken 12 parliamentary draftsmen some three months to identify all EU law sewn into domestic law, which could then have been repealed at our leisure. I am glad to say that they even suggested having a massive Henry VIII clause at the end of the procedure. Therefore, my first question to the Minister is: would it really still be the case that EU law remained in British law? There is far too much of it; nowadays the majority of our national law is passed in a wholly undemocratic process in Brussels to the exclusion of Parliament in this country.
My second question to the Minister was, and is, as follows. When, as I say, the joyous day comes that the 1972 Act is repealed, that surely means that the Lisbon treaty falls in its entirety, because the Lisbon treaty is only an amendment to several other amendments to the 1972 Act. When that happens, is this country still obliged to follow the provisions of the Lisbon treaty which govern how a country leaves the European Union? That is a process, I think—I may be wrong—under Article 50 of the Lisbon treaty, which takes two years and puts the Council in charge of the process and, indeed, the cost of the country leaving the European Union. When we repeal the 1972 Act, does that provision fall as well? Are we then, as the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, said, free of the whole wretched thing, or are we still bound by Lisbon? What about the domestic law which is sewn into our law? Surely that remains binding until repealed by Parliament.
Lord Triesman
My Lords, I apologise to both noble Lords who have just spoken. In my eagerness to get up I may have mistakenly thought that we were coming towards the end of a deliberation. My reason for thinking that was that this has been in some ways a very one-sided debate. There does not seem to be huge difference across the House, whether it is between lawyers or non-lawyers or members of one party or another. For those reasons, I hope that the House will allow me, a non-lawyer, at least temporarily to fill the shoes of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, whose name is to the amendment.
A number of noble Lords have made very clear-cut responses to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Waddington. I fear that the noble Lord, Lord Flight, is frightening himself with what may be extremely fanciful personal anxieties, which I hope that he will be able to put to bed as he rests tonight. The noble Lord, Lord Pearson, does not seem to be speaking to this debate, amendment or, indeed, to anything else that your Lordships are discussing. As I understand it—no doubt I will be corrected if I am wrong, not least by the noble Lord—we are not debating the repeal of the 1972 Act, but trying to understand its status in United Kingdom law.
Lord Pearson of Rannoch
My Lords, in actual fact what I have said is relevant to this amendment because it says that all British law is only there because of the 1972 Act. I am merely asking what happens when it is repealed.
Lord Triesman
My Lords, I am sure that on the day that proposition is in front of the House, we will have an energetic debate and probably get to the bottom of it at that time. I am very tempted to respond to the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, who asked what he should do. It would probably be ungracious to try to answer that question, but I suppose that sitting on his hands or repairing to one of the bars are among the available options. However, he illustrated the fact that there is a great deal of commonality right across the House on this issue.
I am among those who do not like declaratory clauses—I am wholly with my noble friend Lord Richard and the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, on this. I cannot understand what such clauses do other than call into question the fundamentals of our law and the statements that have been made about our law by the House of Lords and others. I cannot see the point. However, I accept that it is a political reality that there is a desire to see this kind of declaration in the Bill. That is why we support the amendment. If there is to be a declaration, it might as well be accurate. If we are going to declare things, let us be precise and accurate. The whole debate boils down to a simple proposition about what we learnt was Sir John Fiennes’s excellent writing of the original legislation, regarding which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, was far too modest about his role.
That Act and Section 3 in particular are the head lease. There is nothing in any other Act that does not flow from it. The more we try to obscure that or suggest that there are other things that may flow from it, the less likely it is that anyone will understand that the declaration is accurate in any sense. This is a technical, not a party political, matter. We have had fantastically good advice. What a benefit it has been to all of us. Let us carry the amendment, which I hope will be pressed, and have a declaration that we can at least say is accurate.
The Advocate-General for Scotland (Lord Wallace of Tankerness)
My Lords, I thank my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay of Clashfern for moving the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard. Indeed, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in an important debate, which has flagged up the importance of the basis on which community law has effect in the legal systems of the United Kingdom. My noble and learned friend said that there was nothing in principle that divides us on this matter. As the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, said, it is a technical matter that to some extent relates to statutory interpretation. I hope that everything that has been said previously in Committee, and what I will say today, will reassure the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, that there is neither sinister intention, nor are any dog whistles being blown. The purpose is to assert the position that almost everyone who has contributed to the debate has made clear—European Union law has effect in the United Kingdom by virtue of statute passed by Parliament.
I join the tributes paid to my noble and learned friend Lord Howe of Aberavon, who, we fully understand, has gone to a memorial service. My noble friend Lord Lester of Herne Hill quoted Lord Denning in the case of Macarthys Ltd v Smith, in which he indicated that,
“Community law is part of our law by our own statute”.
Dealing with the question of where Parliament stood on this, in the passage from the debates on the 1972 legislation quoted by the Constitution Committee in its report, my noble and learned friend Lord Howe of Aberavon said:
“the position is that the ultimate supremacy of Parliament will not be affected, and it will not be affected because it cannot be affected”.—[Official Report, Commons, 5/7/72; col. 627.]
That is something to which we as a Government would certainly subscribe.
The key reason for wanting this declaration is that in spite of that, and in spite of the near unanimity in this Chamber that that is the position, we are aware that others have advanced arguments in courts or have written articles that have cast some doubt on that assertion. I know that there are always reservations about what are essentially declaratory clauses in Bills, but this one is important. As your Lordships’ Constitution Committee indicated,
“Clause 18 is self-evident: it restates, but does not change, the law”.
In response to one of the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, I should say that including such a declaration in no way raises doubts about other issues of parliamentary sovereignty. The Constitution Committee said:
“We are confident that if parliamentary sovereignty were to be questioned in any other context, the existence of clause 18 would not prevent the courts from upholding the well understood and orthodox position”.
Lord Hamilton of Epsom
What I am saying is that I am sure that that will be the position of the Government, and I did say that it would be subject to judicial review. It may not necessarily pass the censor within the terms of judicial review that we do not have any transfers of sovereignty involved in such a treaty change. I think that we may well be involved in a referendum, and if we are, I can reassure the noble Lord—I am sure he would like to know this—that I shall very much advocate that we actually support any treaty change of that sort. That is because if the eurozone disintegrates, there might be a bit of schadenfreude from people like me in the Conservative Party, but I have to say that it would give us another major financial and banking crisis on top of the one we have already had. So I will campaign enthusiastically that we should accept such treaty changes.
I do not think we should sit here and imagine that there are going to be no more treaties coming in the life of this Parliament. Things change, and they can change very fast. The eurozone is in a state of major crisis and I am not sure that they can go on putting sticking plasters on it for another four years.
Lord Triesman
My Lords, a short while ago the noble Baroness, Lady Nicholson, said that the legislation had already served part of its purpose in that it has engaged us in debate. I have to confess to her that I have not run into a huge amount of discussion of it elsewhere. Nevertheless, I do not deny the truth of the point that we have had a major debate, but the points made by many noble Lords still bear testing. It is plain from this legislation that it is not intended that anything other than the passage of the Bill and the discussions on it will happen during this Parliament. I listened to what the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, said in an intervention, but unless I misunderstood it Clause 4(4) provides for an exemption around the stability mechanism, so that will not become the subject of the whole package of a parliamentary decision and a referendum either. So let us start, if we may, with the reality of the position: there will not be an event of that kind.
The tests that may arise would be likely, if they happen at all, to occur either in the Parliament that follows this one or in the Parliament beyond the one that follows this—some way off. Those are exactly the circumstances which my noble friend Lord Grenfell described—I think he was the first person to use the words—as a step in the dark, and the noble Lord, Lord Williamson, made more or less exactly the same point. One of the things that concerns me, and one of the reasons I have added my name to the amendment so that the Front Bench is offering its support, is that inevitably we will have a period during which we test whether these new constitutional arrangements make sense, work well, are deliverable, do not undermine the Government of the day and do not undermine the parliamentary process. But the plain fact is that we do not know. I doubt if there is a noble Lord in this House who could do more than I can do, which is to suppose what might happen, but we do not know. What we do know is that when it is tested, we are more likely to know. Those are the circumstances under which we will gain any kind of authoritative understanding of what this constitutional change may mean. I do not think we do ourselves any favours by pretending that we know when we do not.
There may well be minor issues or whole treaties. On the former, the noble Lord, Lord Howell, may be right to say that referendums would not arise around smaller things. Periodically, if he is right, they could be around whole treaties, which are much larger things. Moreover, I accept what the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, said, that these are likely to be very unusual events in themselves. What is more, I shall go on to assert something which is critical to the clause because I want to try to deal with this as a debate on an amendment tabled at the Report stage. I continue to assert that some of things which might be considered to be large and significant issues, and therefore may well call for referendum conditions after decisions reached by both Houses of Parliament, will not themselves create the need for a referendum either.
I say that because I do not believe that any Government in the foreseeable future will carry legislation in either House about joining the euro—I can assure the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, that I have never advocated it, so I can say that with a clear conscience. I cannot believe that either House will succeed in persuading a majority of either House that we should relax the Schengen conditions and change our border arrangements. I know from first-hand experience as a Minister in the last Government that there was not the smallest chance of that happening, or of anyone believing that it would be desirable for it to happen. I shall not regale the House with arguments about an island people and so on, but noble Lords will understand the temperamental mindset of this country over a very long time. I do not believe for a moment that either House would carry by a majority the need for legislation which would then go to a referendum on changing the fundamentals of our legal system from what it is now to one based on Napoleonic law or some of the other systems of law in Europe, and I do not believe that either House, whoever is in Government, would succeed in conceding decisions on our taxation regime to anyone else and put that to a referendum vote. The things that really might bite on the people of the United Kingdom, if they were asked to think about them, will not be put to them. I shall come back to the insurance policy that the Bill claims to be in that context and why the sunset clause is a reasonable solution.