Freedom of Speech

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Friday 10th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, that is a refreshing and stimulating speech to follow and I congratulate my friend, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness. I join all others in paying tribute to the most reverend Primate for introducing this debate and for the manner in which he did so.

I was struck by a number of speeches that, in the last hour, have sought to bring a sense of perspective to this debate. I single out the speech of my noble friend Lady Sanderson of Welton—I entirely echo what she said about Rose Tremain—and the invigorating speech of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, who effectively said to us, “Don’t look for offence when it is not necessarily intended”. We are in danger of becoming oversensitive, because free speech is indeed—as the noble Lord, Lord Cashman, said—the life-blood of a free society and democracy.

I remember sitting in the gallery of another place in 1965, I think it would have been. I was a young Conservative candidate for Grimsby, having bloodied myself in Bolsover in 1964. Michael Foot held the floor. He later became a close and dear friend, much as I disagreed with most of what he said, although we bonded over Bosnia and addressed a rally together in Trafalgar Square. In the House of Commons, Michael Foot was holding forth. He said, “You need vigorous debate in the House and in the country. When I am addressing rallies, I don’t duck: I wait until I see the whites of their eggs.” Michael Foot was true to that.

One of my most undying memories is of a party we had—parties are very fashionable at the moment, are they not?—in a colleague’s house not far from here to mark the 80th birthday of Enoch Powell. There were two great parliamentarians; I disagreed with both of them on many things, although I had the honour of giving the address at Enoch’s funeral. What struck me there was that the speech of appreciation was made by Peter Shore and the presentation of a silver salver inscribed with the words “Poet, scholar, soldier, orator” was made by Michael Foot. He and his wife Jill used to meet Enoch and his wife Pam on a regular and frequent basis because they respected each other as parliamentarians. You do not have to agree in order to respect. Many of the better things in this House and the other place are achieved by parliamentarians of different political persuasions working together.

A sort of intolerance has crept in, accentuated by social media; if I could have one Christmas wish, I would uninvent it, although of course I cannot. It creates a situation where recently, for instance, it came to my notice that a group of people from outside the House refused to attend a meeting inside it because they disagreed with the views of the chairman on a wholly different subject. We must get beyond that. We must really respect.

One of the problems is that we have social media but we no longer have many real meetings. When I was a young candidate, and at all the 10 general elections I won, I used to have meetings in my constituency every night. In the 1960s and the early 1970s, they were often quite packed. The attendance tended to fall off but I kept the meetings; I never had fewer than 20 people there but, in the 1960s and the early 1970s, it was not unusual to have 100 or 200 people. There was vigorous debate but there was no bitter argument. There is a difference between vigorous debate and bitter argument. We have to try to get the bitterness out of public life and not be overly sensitive.

I do not agree with a lot of what the noble Lord, Lord Cashman, said but, to quote Voltaire—to whom the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown, alluded—I would defend to the death his right to say it. Now we have a group of people who are saying, “I don’t like what you say and I will do everything possible to prevent your saying it”. That is a real difference.

In the area of gender, some women have been vilified to an absolutely unpardonable extent. Professor Kathleen Stock has been mentioned a number of times in this debate, as has JK Rowling. They are merely stating views and opinions—some of us would say facts—that have been indisputable since time immemorial. It is important that they are not vilified. The term “cancel culture” is perhaps the most sinister in our modern political vocabulary. The most reverend Primate has done a great service in giving us the opportunity to debate some of these things. I beg noble Lords in all parts of the House to remember, in this season of good will, that toleration and understanding are as important as they ever have been.