Public Services: Economic and Climatic Challenges

Lord Maxton Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Maxton (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for being slightly briefer than the time he was allowed. I also congratulate and thank my noble friend Lord Rooker for getting this debate, and for speaking so forcefully on it. Some of us, with not longer memories than that of the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, but with perhaps a more selective memory, of course remember the Rooker-Wise amendment back in the 1970s. Those of us who come from a certain tradition remember with a great deal of pride that he moved that amendment and the Government acted upon it.

I will make the debate a little broader than it is at present.

[Noble Lords]

Ha!

[Lord Maxton]

Well, not the debate; the debate is broad but the content so far has been limited. I am not going to talk about floods because, to be honest, I spent the period of the floods in Scotland where, although there were some floods, we did not suffer anything like as much. I spent the new year period on the Isle of Arran, where we have had worse new years than that.

We live in a society that is much changed and improved from the one that was there when the Labour Party—and my own family goes back a long way in the Labour movement—was formed. We ought, on this side of the House, to take a certain amount of pride in what we have achieved in the past 100 years, because we have achieved a great deal. However, one thing above all that we have achieved, which is where resilience comes in, is that there has never in those 100 years been an armed revolution, an uprising, in this country. I sometimes say that, historically, the only party in this country which has ever suggested an armed uprising is the Conservative Party, which in 1913-14 suggested that Ulster would be right if it rose up against the British state and armed itself and fought. Anyway, we have not had a revolution.

One of the reasons that we have not had a revolution is that the Labour Party has been democratic. We have believed in achieving our aims through democracy and not through some form of uprising or revolution. In my own city of Glasgow in 1919, there was a threat; people observed it as a threat and the Government of the day thought that it was a threat, but it never was—there was never a chance of there being a Russian revolution in this country. We must be aware of that fact, but we must also be aware that the world has changed very dramatically and we have helped that change. We live in a world which is changing very fast indeed; it has changed and will continue to do so. It is our job, in political circles, to manage the change that is going on. It used to be when I joined that our job in the Labour Party was to change society; now society is changing, and it is our job to manage that change for the benefit of those we represent.

There are two areas where we are not changing fast enough. One is in our democratic state itself. We are not developing our democracy fast enough and adapting our democracy to the changes. This building itself is representative of that fact. The building is falling down: everybody says it, and what do we do? We are talking about mending it, repairing it, changing it and staying here. This building was built before the motor car was invented, before television, before radio, before computers: it was built for carriages and for a class society that no longer exists, I hope. So why do we stay here? Why do we not build a brand new building for the 21st century somewhere else, designed for the technological revolution that has taken place, where we can genuinely carry out our democratic government processes, while we spend the money to turn this place into a high-class museum based around democratic principles? That is what we ought to be doing.

More importantly, we ought to look at how we carry out our democracy. The Minister will know well what I am about to say. The idea of voting in a general election by going to a school and putting a cross on a piece of paper with a pencil is absurd to many of our young people, for whom mobile technology is part and parcel of their life. It is one reason, only one, why our young people are put off the whole democratic process. They feel it has nothing to do with them. They vote on “Strictly Come Dancing” or “The X Factor” using their mobile phones. I am not suggesting that that is how we proceed. I know well, because my sons have admitted it, that they voted five or six times in some of those contests: there is no checking on it.

If we had some form of ID, some form of smart card technology, to say, “This is how you can vote, as long as you can prove who you are, and you can only vote once”, surely that is the way forward. It is a way to attract young people, a way of both stopping fraud in our electoral system and expanding the numbers of those who are able to vote. One would no longer be tied to going to a school. One would be able to vote in a wide range of places. Eventually, one would be able to vote in one’s own home and therefore the number of people who would be able to vote in general elections should—and will, in my view—increase quite considerably. It would also lead to a greater respect for politics among the young.

I have to ask both those on the Benches opposite and those on our own Benches to accept that the compulsory introduction of some form of smart card identification is going to be absolutely necessary in a modern world. We cannot go on avoiding this issue. Someone once described it to me as “a King Canute issue”, but I think that that is very unfair on King Canute as he said that it will have to come back. At some point we will have to have some form of identification, not just for electoral purposes, but it will be essential for the poor and those whom we represent in the Labour movement. All of us carry some form of ID: our parliamentary pass, our bank card, our passport, whatever it might be. It is the poor who lose out all the time from not having some form of identification which recognises them—through their social security or whatever it might be. We need to have some form of ID card compulsorily introduced, and I hope that our Labour Party will have that as part of its manifesto in 2015.

I turn lastly to the issue of education. I accept that my own experience is in a different education system, in Scotland, but I have a general point. It is absurd that in this day and age, when nearly all the world’s knowledge, philosophy and ideas are available on my tablet—here it is—or one even smaller than this, that we have a Secretary of State and a Government talking about returning to the basic principles of numeracy and literacy, sitting children in school, learning by rote. What sort of world is he living in? It is absurd. We ought to be ensuring that every child has access to learning, teaching them or showing them how to learn.

I would not dream of going to the library and looking up a fact. If I want a fact I look it up on this tablet. If I want to know what a philosopher thought, I look it up on this. I do not go running to a library or expect a teacher to have to tell me; I want to learn. Therefore our basic philosophy in education should be that education is about learning; literacy, numeracy and the other things are tools by which people learn. If they become redundant, as the wringer in the wash-house has become redundant, as all sort of tools have become redundant, then so be it.

I have not picked up a book in two years; I read a Kindle or I read on the tablet. I can read anything I want, and I can get it in two and a half minutes. I do not have to go to a bookshop and look at the books; I get it straightaway. Why is this not being made more readily available to our children so that they, too, can get this benefit in full? Many of them do; they are the middle-class children, the children of those of us who know how to manipulate and use the electronic systems. We must look to turn our education system towards learning, rather than teaching, towards children being able to use electronic devices to learn from, rather than all the time concentrating on the so-called basic skills that they need.

I finish by making this plea again. Please, please, please, we have to have an ID card. Please make sure that it is introduced as soon as possible.