Queen’s Speech

Earl of Devon Excerpts

Tuesday 7th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Earl of Devon (CB)]

My Lords, happy new year. In welcoming a new decade, a new Parliament and a new Government, we also welcome a new relationship with the world in 2020. While looking ahead with ambition, noble Lords will forgive me looking back for some historical wisdom.

Five hundred years ago, Henry Courtenay, the Earl of Devon, marked new year 1520 with a gift of oranges to his king and cousin, Henry VIII. The rare and costly fruit was imported from Iberia to Exeter, evidence of the harmonious new European trading relationships to be celebrated that summer at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, Europe’s last great medieval tournament and yet its first modern intergovernmental summit. It would be ironic if failure to secure EU trading terms in 2020 rendered Seville oranges a rare and costly gift once more. Noting my interests in the register, I ask the Government to do all they can to secure trade in agricultural produce to and from the continent and not to negotiate away British agriculture and our incomparable rural landscape.

As torrential rain has sodden the sowing season and flooded the country, while wildfires torch Australia, the most pressing business of this Parliament will be to legislate the means of achieving net-zero emissions. Many of those means reside within our rural, agricultural communities. Farming cannot deliver the environmental land management required without clarity and confidence in its commercial viability. For years, British farming has operated in a haze of uncertainty in which investment and productivity have flatlined. Now we have autonomy in agricultural policy, will the Government undertake to do all they can to ensure a flourishing farming future? I note particularly Devon’s vulnerable and venerable uplands. Farmed for over 3,000 years, they produce healthy, free-range meat from ancient pasture that sequesters carbon, retains floodwater and supports remarkable ecological diversity. Does Brazilian soya do that?

Echoing the noble Lord, Lord Patten, and the noble Baroness, Lady Young, I note that the Government have committed to planting 75,000 acres of new trees each year to reforest our islands. As the Minister is only too well aware, disease and pestilence are rife in our broad-leaf woodlands and the heroically under- resourced Forestry Commission, in its own centenary year, has been playing a losing game of whack-a-mole in response. If the commitment is to be met, how will the Government ensure access to sufficient quantities of disease-free deciduous saplings? Will they commit the scientific resources necessary to ensure that the trees planted can survive to a healthy harvest?

Returning to history, the continental harmony seen at the Field of the Cloth of Gold was short-lived—much like our membership of the European Union. It took barely 20 years for Henry VIII to break with Rome, fall out with France, divorce his Aragonese wife and behead the poor Earl of Devon. For all its promise, pomp and pageantry, it achieved little.

A far more significant event occurred with far less fanfare exactly a century later, with the departure from Plymouth of a bedraggled, patched-up ship, barely 80 feet long and crammed with over 100 souls—radicals, adventurers, merchants and families. The sailing of the “Mayflower” in September 1620 is one of the world’s most significant voyages. Its quadricentenary resonates with contemporary themes of religious tolerance, migration, indigenous rights, international trade and thanksgiving for the environment. We have an unparalleled opportunity to commemorate the deep cultural and economic bonds between England, Holland, the Wampanoag nation and the United States of America. It is also a helpful reminder to the 30 million-plus “Mayflower” descendants in the US that they came from Devon and might like to return for a visit this summer.

As patron of the “Mayflower”’s 400th anniversary, I congratulate the team on this year’s remarkable programme and ask the Government to confirm the ministerial support they are willing to give to Plymouth and the 13 partner communities hosting these events.

The “Mayflower” provides a vivid backdrop to trade negotiations with the US, which are key to the Government’s international ambition. I lived for a decade in California, and so support this endeavour. However, while enamoured of America’s ambition and invention and the opportunity it promises, I did learn while there a fresh veneration for our imperfect but beloved NHS, for the fierce apolitical independence of our judiciary and for the remarkable flexibility of our constitutional settlement and this mother of Parliaments. I trust that all three will survive this Government’s international ambition.