Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I need not detain your Lordships for long because so much that needs to be said has already been said, and I shall try not to repeat it. The reports of the various committees have been adequately quoted and they are now on the record. I would simply say that I, too, want to stand by the thrust of them all. Observations have been drawn from the Bill itself, especially around the key points set out in Part 2. They have been repeated so, once again, I need not address the ambiguities and the lack of clarity in some of the phrases at the very heart of the proposals. The question that has been asked more than once is one that I will repeat without addressing it: what is the problem to which Part 2 is supposed to be an answer? In repeating the question, I hope that the Minister who is to reply from the Dispatch Box will do his best to see if he can provide an answer, since it has been raised several times.

At the outset of the debate, the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, declared that this Bill was a most misunderstood piece of legislation to which he sought to bring clarity. Pretty much all the speeches that have followed have shown just how misunderstood the Bill is, so he is to be congratulated on his prescience in getting the mood of the House right. I would like simply to piggyback on some of the methodological ways in which the cases have been built. The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, drew on his extensive experience in the criminal justice system to explain how he felt that the proposals in this Bill will impact on organisations working for rehabilitation and restoration within that system. We then heard magisterial speeches from my noble friends Lady Pitkeathley and Lady Donaghy on their respective cases, once again drawing on a wealth of experience and suggesting what might well be, at least prima facie on looking at the Bill, its impact on the activities that they have spent their lives addressing. We heard the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, talk about how the committee that he chairs is drawing its own uneasy conclusions from the legislation as proposed thus far: its haste, its ill judged nature, the way it has been put together so thoughtlessly with no pre-legislative attention, and so on.

I have been thinking about the year-long exclusion zone when all these bodies, agencies and the rest of it are not supposed to indulge in overt political activity. I remember being the victim of just such an exclusion zone myself. I used to do the “Thought for the Day” piece on Radio 4. Since I was at the time the vice-president of the Christian Socialist movement, as soon as an election of any kind drew near, I was withdrawn from the list of contributors because it was obvious to everybody that those two and three-quarter minutes between a quarter to eight and ten to eight in the morning could constitute a real undermining of the political process in this country. I just wish that I could have had the opportunity, if it was acknowledged that I had that power.

It is ridiculous for bodies that are set up to achieve certain objectives to be denied the opportunity to campaign and advocate for the realisation of those objectives. That is their raison d’être. I pick up on the intervention of the noble Lord, Lord Judd, in an earlier speech. There is a contradiction between charity law which requires a charity to do all it can to maximise income to address the objectives for which it is set up as against the way some of the provisions in this Bill just might work out.

I draw a couple of things from personal experience, after which I promise your Lordships I will sit down. For many years, as some of you know, I was living in Haiti. While there, we did everything we had to do to address the dire poverty. We sank wells, we organised co-operatives, we arranged microfinance, primary healthcare, education, literacy and we planted trees. We did everything, and my little outfit looked for collaborators and people of good will with whom to work. We found them in the NGOs and agencies from Britain and from other places around the world.

When I came back from Haiti to live in England, I was burning with the desire to continue with this work. I knew, although we had barely slept some nights because of the work there was and the depth of the poverty we were addressing, that all we had done was dip a toe into the waters. I came back wanting to advocate, wanting to campaign, wanting to get British public opinion onside for what remained to be done. We formed coalitions of interest; we campaigned on the streets; I put together a support group for Haiti; and so it went on.

It becomes natural when the fire burns deep inside the soul for people with common interests to put their energies together in order to knock on the door of government—in order to knock down the door of government, if necessary—so that it can be seen that something needs to be done and that the complacency with which people in countries such as ours live is not to be tolerated.

When I was working as the president of the Methodist Conference and touring the country, I made homelessness the charity that I wanted to support. I was briefed at every point by Shelter. I had been the director of a housing association, also working closely with Shelter. When Occupy did its stuff in the graveyard of St Paul’s Cathedral a couple of years ago, it had quite a lot of my sympathy—as well, at the end, a little bit of my frustration. If housing charities, whose work it is to try to alleviate homelessness or to draw attention in the public domain to the evil nature of the homelessness and the suffering going on because of an inadequacy of supply and an incapacity to meet the rental charges that young people and others are facing, do not take to the streets, knock on the doors and stir up public opinion in the year before an election, I will be very disappointed. If this Bill does anything to stop that, I will be very angry indeed. I wish it were withdrawn. I would like to hear what the Minister says about that.