Queen’s Speech

Lord Newby Excerpts

Tuesday 10th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newby (LD)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to be able to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury, on his speech this afternoon. I first met the noble Lord over 30 years ago when he and the late Lord Bell were trying with mixed success to persuade my then employer, an eccentric and wilful man, that in order to influence the Government you had to be reasoned and moderate not didactic and threatening. The noble Lord’s calm and thoughtful approach then, seen again so clearly in his elegant speech today, has been the hallmark of his career and helps to explain why he is held in such high esteem across the whole House.

The noble Baroness, Lady Fraser of Craigmaddie, has a very distinguished track record in the charity sector and made some very thoughtful contributions during the passage of the recent Health and Care Bill. She is, as she explained, a relative newcomer to your Lordships’ House but we will certainly look forward to future contributions from her. I am sure that, as her name flashes up on the annunciator, the Chamber will fill as people flood in to hear the pearls of wisdom that we have now come to expect from her.

One sentiment in the Speech with which we can all agree is the eager anticipation of the Platinum Jubilee next month. It will be a unique opportunity for the nation to come together and celebrate the unique service of our Queen, and I am sure that the whole nation is already looking forward to it. Certainly in Ripon we already have the crocheted EIIRs on every public railing across the city, and quite a sight it is.

At the time of the last Queen’s Speech we were still in the depths of the coronavirus crisis, and it dominated public policy and debate. This year we are faced with two major new threats, one external and one internal. The external threat is of course the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which poses major short-term problems about how best to support the Ukrainians but also longer-term issues about peace and security in Europe. The internal threat is the economic crisis. We are faced with inflation on a scale not seen for decades, interest rate rises that will damage both businesses and households, a fuel price crisis that is already leading to many having to choose between heating and eating, and one in seven households living in food poverty. To meet these sorts of challenges effectively, a country needs to come together under trusted leadership. It needs social cohesion to meet the common threats and a Government to whom people can look up to promote the common good. So how do this Government and this Queen’s Speech match up to those requirements?

On the Speech itself, to put it mildly, there is no overarching theme. There are a series of populist measures to assuage the intolerant right, a series of measures which try desperately to provide some shards of benefit from the economic and security disaster of Brexit, and insipid and half-baked measures which enable the Government to claim that they are doing something about levelling up. Three proposed Bills exemplify these sub-themes.

First, there is the proposal to sell off Channel 4. The Government hate Channel 4 in its current form because of its news coverage and generally iconoclastic approach. They believe they know better than the company’s own management about what is good for it, and do so in the face of near-universal condemnation. The proposal also cuts across their alleged priority of levelling up. As Henri Murison, director of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, put it:

“On the tests of whether it is good or bad for closing the north-south divide, the privatisation of Channel 4 is going to undermine levelling up. It is completely incoherent of government”


he says, to promise two pieces of legislation—the other being the proposal for a levelling-up test to be applied to all government decisions—

“that completely contradict each other”.

As with the proposals on public order and human rights, the plans to privatise Channel 4 have everything to do with a populist ideology and, frankly, nothing to do with the common good.

Secondly, the Brexit freedoms Bill will, according to Ministers, allow the Government to repeal hundreds of pieces of EU law via statutory instrument—in effect, without any meaningful parliamentary scrutiny. The much-missed noble Lord, Lord Frost, said that such a process was justified because EU law was not really law at all. That statement was of course itself untrue, but in any event the principle of repealing primary legislation by secondary legislation is, as a general rule, anti-democratic and unacceptable. The fact that some of the legislation targeted relates to areas such as environmental protections makes this doubly so. There is a convention, widely accepted across the House, that we do not normally vote down statutory instruments. If this Brexit freedoms Bill becomes law—and from these Benches, we will oppose it—I hope that your Lordships will become more assertive and strike down offensive Brexit-related statutory instruments introduced under its provisions.

Thirdly, we have the levelling-up and regeneration Bill. This Bill may well contain some sensible measures—for example, giving communities more say on proposed developments and requiring owners of empty high-street properties to rent them out—but it completely fails to rise to the multi-faceted challenges of levelling up.

Of course, some missing Bills also tell us much about the Government. The Government have dropped their commitment to ban imports of fur and foie gras. At a time of food shortages, the slogan “Let them eat foie gras” might have a resonance in some quarters but I suspect it will have a limited appeal.

More significantly, although it is missing from the Queen’s Speech, the Government are threatening a Bill to tear up the Northern Ireland protocol to assuage the implacable DUP. They do so in the hope that the EU will then back down yet, as its response to the Ukraine crisis has shown, the EU under pressure tends to show resilience. Sabre-rattling across the Irish Sea is therefore both foolish and potentially extremely damaging to our national interests. It also fails to recognise that the vast majority of Assembly Members elected last week are pragmatic on the protocol and want practical reforms through negotiation, not its wholesale abandonment.

However, government is not just about Queen’s Speech legislation. It is also about expenditure and taxation, and the role of government as the bully pulpit to set the tone of national debate.

On expenditure and taxation, the household budget crisis, which is now affecting millions of people and is set to intensify as inflation and interest rates rise further, requires immediate action. Some specific things the Government could do, such as a windfall tax on oil and gas companies, should be a no-brainer. The arguments that such a tax would harm investment or the incomes of British pensioners are belied in the first case by the comments of the chief executive of BP, and in the second by the fact that the proportion of shares in these oil and gas companies owned by British pension funds is extremely small. The proceeds of such a tax could be spent on supporting the most hard-hit households.

The greatest single indictment of the Government is that, by the actions of the Prime Minister and some of his colleagues, they have lost all moral authority and with it any ability to appeal to people’s sense of community, responsibility and better values. Anybody who has done any canvassing in recent weeks knows that many people have simply given up on politics, because they believe that if government Ministers break their own laws, why should they listen to, believe in, or follow anything they say?

I do not know whether the Prime Minister and his colleagues realise how pervasive this attitude is. To take one example, in North Yorkshire there is a big programme to train apprentices. Sometimes the trainees break the college rules. When admonished, their response is now increasingly, “Why should we worry? The Prime Minister breaks the rules and gets away with it. If he can do it, why can’t we?”

The period ahead will present the Government with difficult choices and hard decisions. In taking them, they need, as far as is humanly possible, to bring the country together by being seen to act fairly and honestly. To get through the economic crisis with the least amount of social harm, people need to feel that we are all in it together, that the broadest shoulders are bearing the greatest burdens, and that government understands their problems. They require this of all politicians, but government bears an especial burden. Sadly, this Queen’s Speech and this Government completely fail to rise to the challenges that we as a country now face.