Queen’s Speech

Lord Elton Excerpts

Tuesday 10th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Elton (Con)]

My Lords, I am a refugee in the sense that this is the only night on which I can be present for the start and finish of the debate. I apologise for the fact that my three very short subjects are not on what might be considered the notional Order Paper for tonight.

I congratulate both the noble Lord, Lord Bamford, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham on their contributions. I was particularly heartened by the right reverend Prelate’s plug for the north-east as the sole region in profit on its overseas account, and regarding the charming nature of almost all the population. Coming from the south-east I am not familiar with the latter condition. In fact, I decided some time ago that I wanted to address the extraordinary change that has come over the nature of British society during my lifetime. I could go into lengthy detail, but it is worth condensing it by saying that one’s default expectation of anybody who one was dealing with was that they would be honest, spoke the truth, kept the law, kept their word, honoured their cheques if they were the sort of people who had cheque-books, be faithful to their spouses and, of course, would know the difference between right and wrong and would stand on the side of right. That is what one expected and anything else was a disappointment, and quite a severe one on some occasions.

An illustration of the extent of the change is simply the length of the traffic jam going to primary schools in the mornings—parents cannot risk their children going to school on their own. In my youth children of six were expected to be able to walk four miles to school and four miles back every day unaccompanied, and people did not worry. They played in the street and people did not worry. They played in the fields and people did not worry. In many rural communities the way in which you told your neighbours what was going on at home was that you locked the front door to show that you were away and left the back door unlocked to show that they were welcome to come in, even so.

Life has changed and one has to ask why. The reasons are many and complex; they are economic, political, and so on. However, right at the basis is the difference that in my youth and until my middle age—decreasingly towards my middle age—the lifeblood of this country flowed through its churches, chapels, cathedrals, synagogues and meeting houses. People could not escape the repetition and emphasis of the moral truths which sustain the civilised society we wish to sustain—a safe, stable and mutually respecting society.

If noble Lords doubt my emphasis on the extent of the influences of the religious establishment at an appropriate point in our history, I should say that I remember clearly Sunday 26 May 1940, when we went to the big church near to where we lived in Old Headington in what is now north Oxford. We went 20 minutes early but could not get in without a struggle—many people could not get in at all—because King George VI had issued a call to the nation the previous week to pray for our troops surrounded at Dunkirk. I will not go into the history of the miracle that followed, but the nation went to pray—and the nation knew its morals because the nation went to church.

It is not the business of Government to fill churches but it is their business to ensure that there is some connection between the morality of the individual and the ethics of society. Indeed it is their business to see that individuals have a morality. I want to put an idea into the heads of the Ministers in the Department for Education that perhaps the time has come to reinstate religious studies in schools up to the sixth form and to give it the same status as the STEM subjects now have. If you make a subject an examination subject there is a great enthusiasm to study it and you do not damage your educational career by doing so. On the other hand, if it is not of that status and does not carry examination weight—it is not examinable in some schools—you lose customers. And it should then be connected to the teaching of civics so that people can see a connection between the morality which gives the reason for ethics, and the ethics which give stability to society. That is all I wish to say about that.

I chimed a little with the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy—with whom I also communicate via Hansard—when she spoke about the necessity for a fair society. I am an unashamed Tory. There must be inequality—you cannot have competition without inequality—but you also need fairness, and it worries me that there is no apparent restraint on the increasing vertiginous gap between the richest and the poorest in this country. My tiny suggestion is that we need more effective charitable giving in this country. At present we use gift aid, but that only provides motivation for the charities to ask donors to subscribe to the gift aid scheme. We want to motivate people who are not yet donors to become donors. This means that they want to get some benefit from it too. If what I am about to suggest was carried out 100% it would probably cripple that part of the Treasury that depends on income tax but, done proportionately, if mega-rich people were given a fractional percentage reduction in the income they do not give away, they would have a large incentive to give a proportion away. If you want to find a way of moderating it—we were talking about the connection of the churches, ethics and society—there is a good biblical example of 10% being a suitable amount to encourage people to give away. Anything more, of course, would be welcome.

On the Queen’s Speech, I find it extraordinary that we, in seeking to strike a figure on the world stage and influence policy despite our reduced military strength, stand as the founders of the greatest commonwealth ever seen. Our population is 64 million and the Commonwealth population is 2.2 thousand million. It embraces almost every ethnic group and just about every religion in the world and spreads around the globe. It was our invention and we are part of it. Ministers write speeches declaring the situation in this country and how we are going to deal with it. They prepare it for delivery in this House, with the other House present below the Bar, by the head of that great institution—who has been for decades the head of it—with not one word mentioned of what it is achieving, what it has achieved, what it could achieve, or how we are to exploit it or improve it. It does not mention the fact that CHOGM commissioned and received a report on the restriction of sexual violence in conflict, which is one of the flagship policies the Foreign Office is promoting. I find that extraordinary.

I hope that the Minister, through his colleague, will let us know the importance that the Government—and other Governments have not done any better—this country and all parties give to this great organisation, which could give us so much influence and support around the world. What do they really think of it and how often has it figured in the Queen’s Speech in the past 10 years?