King’s Speech

Lord Winston Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, as a budding geneticist when I first came into the House of Lords in 1995, I looked around the Chamber and I could tell the hereditary Peers. They were taller, more confident, had louder voices and were much more knowledgeable. Some of them were larger, all of them were well fed, and without exception they shot game and talked about it at the tea table at 4 o’clock in the afternoon.

It was only when I chaired the Science and Technology Select Committee—which was then a much larger committee than it is now—with everybody around that table being larger, more experienced and far more knowledgeable than me, that I suddenly realised that I could not tell which party people came from, nor indeed whether they were hereditaries. In fact, they were completely indistinguishable, and I have to say that the hereditaries were certainly not indefensible in their presence there.

Without going into the detail of the number of that committee’s reports, they became nationally and internationally well known. This was a really important committee, respected by scientists all over the world. On antibiotic resistance, for example, 25 years later I remember Beryl, Baroness Platt, putting up a clawed hand—she must have been about 80—challenging the speaker who was giving us a seminar on antibiotic resistance. She said to him, “Forgive me, I see that you have just contradicted what you say on page 139 of the document you’ve just circulated”. She was not a medic; she was an engineer. That was the quality of the people around that table.

I also remember with great fondness the fact that we had Nobel Prize winners, among whom was George Porter, who won the Nobel Prize in 1967 for chemistry. I remember that we had a very controversial report, and he suddenly realised that it was going to be very controversial because it was about cannabis usage. We were talking about this and suddenly, in a loud stage whisper—a hoarse voice—he said to me, “Robert, I’ve never had cannabis. What’s it like?”

Anyway, the point is that this was an extraordinary group of people, and it showed the quality of the House of Lords. We boast that we are an expert Chamber and we talk about our expertise, but the question is: really are we, and can we do a lot better about this?

It was therefore a great pleasure, after two years’ dearth of having any new scientists or medics in the Chamber, to see the noble Lord, Lord Vallance, make his maiden speech this week, and what a fine speech it was. It was a bit of a pity that the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, gave him rather a hard time. That seemed to me to be against the conventions with a maiden speaker, but the noble Lord held his own very well with a most extraordinary maiden speech—in fact, one of the best I have heard. We have to remember that when people like him do great public service, often publicly, they face a great deal of unpleasantness. He certainly did during his recent career during the plague. He did exceptionally well.

Months ago, I was almost a lone voice in this Chamber when I opposed the so-called precision editing Bill, which would have modified animals and plants to make them able to be released into the environment. The genetics were poor, and I believe the scientific advice the Government got was well below what it should have been. I think it was, in fact, what the Government wanted to hear rather than what should have been said. Indeed, we have not done this yet but we can now, by law, release organisms into the environment that are either mutant plants or mutant animals. Nobody in the Chamber really had the expertise—apart, I suppose, from the Green Party, which was prepared to join me in opposing this. It is important because there is no doubt that we might have done some damage.

What was extraordinary was a letter I got from the noble Lord, Lord Benyon, after this had passed for Royal Assent. He wrote to me saying this: “Thank you so much for your work on the Bill. I learned a great deal during these interventions. I hope we did not make too many mistakes”. That was an extraordinary letter to write, and it was greatly impressive. It is nice to see that collaboration between parties that are often opposed in this Chamber.

The key thing that we have to remember is that this has to be an appointed Chamber of some kind. To my mind, that appointment needs to be much more carefully regulated. We have been reluctant to accept regulation, but we need statutory regulation to make sure that we really get the expertise we need. We have to ask ourselves: who do we actually need in the Chamber? What expertise are we missing that we could have? We could then do it that way, both for the Select Committees and in particular with the membership. Once we have done that, we will have a House of Lords that will be respected and will be really effective in helping the Government by challenging legislation when it is not quite right.