King’s Speech

Lord Young of Acton Excerpts

Tuesday 19th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Acton (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to be contributing to this debate in response to His Majesty’s most gracious Speech and it is an honour to be following such excellent maiden speeches. I declare my interest as the director of the Free Speech Union.

I want to speak to your Lordships about the removal of peerages Bill, which, as my noble friend Lord True said, will need to be looked at carefully,

“lest it ever become a licence for the social media lynch mob”.—[Official Report, 13/5/26; col. 11.]

He referred to it as Peter’s law, since it is clearly inspired by the Government’s desire to punish Lord Mandelson, and therein lies the problem. The threshold for removal will have to be low enough to bring Lord Mandelson’s behaviour within scope, which means that removal will almost certainly not be limited to Peers who have been convicted of a criminal offence. It will of necessity be retrospective, since the sins that the Government want to punish Lord Mandelson for are those he has already committed. I fear the threshold will be something along the lines of bringing the House into disrepute.

I know from numerous cases the Free Speech Union has fought that this is a nebulous standard, easily weaponised by political activists seeking to punish their opponents. I will give just one example. It is the case of Anil Bhanot, a Hindu community leader who was awarded an OBE in 2010 for fostering community cohesion. In January 2024, he received a letter from the honours Forfeiture Committee, which sits in the Cabinet Office, informing him that it was minded to recommend he be stripped of his OBE because he had

“brought the honours system into disrepute”.

What had he done? Following a campaign by Muslim activists, the committee had received a number of complaints about replies that Mr Bhanot made to social media posts some three years earlier, regarding the murder of Hindus by mobs of Islamists in Bangladesh. Those replies, according to the committee, were Islamophobic; it singled out one in which Mr Bhanot said that accusations of Islamophobia were sometimes used as a weapon to chill free speech. That argument in itself, said the Cabinet Office, was an example of Islamophobia. The same complaints that were made to the Forfeiture Committee about Mr Bhanot were made to the police, the Charity Commission and the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. All three cleared Mr Bhanot, but not the Forfeiture Committee. It went ahead and stripped him of his OBE.

Would Members of this House be at risk of being stripped of their peerages for saying something similar, or even for making the same point in this House? Parliamentary privilege might not protect us, since the Conduct Committee can consider complaints about things said on the Floor of the House—and I assume that the committee would play a part in deciding whether noble Lords should be stripped of their titles. If that is a genuine risk, Peter’s law will inevitably have a chilling effect on what Peers feel at liberty to say, including in this House.

When arguing for Peter’s law earlier this year, the noble Baroness the Leader of the House said the reason the Government are bringing it forward is to restore the public’s confidence in the integrity of Parliament. But if it ends up preventing Peers speaking out about matters of national importance, for fear of being accused of bringing the House into disrepute, it will further erode the reputation of Parliament and not restore it.

UK Research and Innovation: Ethnic Minorities

Lord Young of Acton Excerpts

Monday 15th December 2025 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Young of Acton]

To ask His Majesty’s Government whether any UK Research and Innovation-funded grants to study in UK universities are not open to white or Asian applicants; and if so, what assessment they have made of the appropriateness.

[The Minister of State, Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (Lord Vallance of Balham) (Lab)]

Last year, UK Research and Innovation funded around 1,800 training grants to support about 27,000 PhD students. Some research organisations ring-fence a small proportion of UKRI-funded studentships for groups they can demonstrate are underrepresented in order to break to down barriers to opportunities and address inequality. None of the training grants funded by UKRI entirely excludes white or Asian students from applying for a PhD studentship. Around 1% of all UKRI studentships are ring-fenced by research organisations for widening participation.

[Lord Young of Acton (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as the director of the Free Speech Union. I thank the Minister for that Answer. I am afraid it is true that white and Asian applicants are told they cannot apply for at least one post, a post-doc post, funded by UK Research and Innovation. This is symptomatic of the capture of the research excellence framework by radical progressive ideology, as evidenced by recent research by Professor Eric Kaufmann at the University of Buckingham. I know that the Minister shares my concern and has recently taken steps to reduce the weight given to equity, diversity and inclusion in the REF. Would he like to take this opportunity to assure the House that, in future, research funding will be based on the applicant’s intellectual merit and not the colour of their skin?

[Lord Vallance of Balham (Lab)]

I think the noble Lord may be referring to the scheme run by the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, which is one of the world’s greatest research institutions, with 12 Nobel Prizes to its name. It has rightly taken two posts out of 128 specifically to increase black representation among scientists. This is very similar to what happened in 1995, when the Dorothy Hodgkin fellowships made positions for women more easily accessible; that led to a huge number of very successful women scientists emerging as a result of that. In terms of the research excellence framework, there is an increased weighting for research outputs, which I believe to be correct. There is, however, a significant weighting on strategy, people and research environment. A culture where bullying is tolerated, challenge is suppressed and diversity is not embraced is not conducive to great science.