King’s Speech

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 9th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

That was a very interesting speech about cigarettes—good. It is interesting, because what you are going to try to do is stop people smoking. What I know about smoking is that most of the people who smoke—and I work with homeless people—are great smokers. Most of the other people I know who live in poverty are great smokers. I am interested in looking at it another way: what about getting rid of poverty? If we get rid of poverty, we can get rid of the driving force that turns people into addictive persons.

I am addicted to red wine. I gave up the addiction to cigarettes 30 years ago, but I still find I need to have a few drinks every now and then, and I do not always stick to two glasses. That is largely because I come from poverty. I know those addictive powers. I know the way that you almost feel that you need to hide somewhere, and the palliatives provide one of the best ways. Virtually all the homeless people I have worked with have been smokers and users of drugs and all sorts of things. I always tell people that one reason I came into the House of Lords was to get rid of poverty.

When I look at the King’s Speech, I feel sorry for the guy. He had to say that he wants to do things such as hand out licences to extend the amount of oil that we are getting, and so on. There was not an awful lot to encourage us that, in this year before the election, the Government would say, “Okay, let’s do something original and new; let’s inspire the electorate”, thinking that they might be voted in for another four or five years.

This week, I had a run-in with Suella Braverman after she came up with the incredibly mad idea—I do not think anyone in the Government would agree with her—that people who are homeless and sleeping in tents, the street homeless, have made a lifestyle decision to become a part of the homeless fraternity because they want to give up on paying taxes and live off begging and so on. I find this really difficult and I have written about this; I do not know of any piece of research that I or any other people have been involved in over the past 30 years—or 32 years since the Big Issue started—that shows the kind of data that the Home Office must have turned up to find this out. Why would you talk like that without the data? But the data is not there. If you talk to most people who are caught in the trap—the bastille—of homelessness, they will talk to you about all the reasons why they ended up homeless. They will not say that they simply decided it at some stage.

What Suella may have done wrong is to have got a number of people around her who said, “Yes, we talked to a homeless person the other day; they said they like to be on the streets”. I know those people. I have met a few of them. Some of them are ex-members of the Armed Forces who have been caught in bivouacking and all those things—I knew three or four of them who used to live on Wimbledon Common, up there with the Wombles, for years, even decades. Most of the people who say “I want to be on the streets” do not want to be in the hostels; they do not want to be controlled. Unfortunately, hostels—even those run by the best charities—are very hostile places to be. They are not places of safety. Quite a number of people who move away from them end up on the streets, because it is the less bad choice.

What I am worried about when I see the Queen’s Speech—I mean the King’s Speech, the gracious, what do you call it?

[Noble Lords]

The gracious Speech.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Forgive me; I will get it right by next year, I promise. One thing that worries me is the talk of giving tenants a better ride. The Government say they are going to protect tenants. Earlier this year, they said that they were not going ahead with the banning of Section 21, but I hear from the noble Lord, Lord Markham, that they will in fact do something about it. What does that mean though? This has been in the manifesto since 2019 and there has been no movement in the last four years.

Yet if we look at the reasons people end up on the streets, Suella is right about one thing. I checked with a friend of mine who runs a church in Hounslow only the other day and said, “Who is coming to you who is most desperate?” I will tell you who it is: a new cohort of homeless people who have been given asylum and then told to leave their hostels or their hotels within a matter of a week or two. Actually, Suella is right: there is a new group of people coming on the streets, but driven there by the Home Office. At the same time, there are people on the streets who are there because they are not getting the correct social help that would address their mental health and all the other problems.

I wanted to talk about other things but I just say, lastly, that I came into this world to do something about homelessness; I came into this House to do something about homelessness. What is happening in Gaza really frightens me. Everywhere I go and whoever I talk to—and I speak at many places—I do not meet people who are siding with His Majesty’s Government and siding with Israel. Most of them are saying, “A ceasefire, please”. If I am walking around and I go to a meeting in Norwich and there are 100 people, most of them say to me, “John, we’ve got to stop the bombing”. It may not make military sense to stop the bombing, but what worries me is the possible outburst of anti-Semitism—the most evil thing, that I as a child was taught to embrace, because I came from an anti-Semitic Catholic family. I am seeing it. I want to head off that anti-Semitism and I think we may be walking into a trap. I am sorry; I might be the only person in the House who believes this, but I worry about the homelessness that is being created and I worry about the long-term effect on Jewish people in this country, because people are turning away, and that really worries me.