King’s Speech

Lord Newby Excerpts

Tuesday 7th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newby (LD)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord McInnes, on his speech moving the humble Address. The noble Lord was a force to be reckoned with in Scottish Conservatism, bringing the party to great electoral success. I am told by my Scottish colleagues that he did so in part by appropriating Liberal Democrat tactics of community politics. This shows what a shrewd and wise person he is. He is widely respected across all parties in Scotland and was famously praised by Lord Darling of Roulanish as a “house-trained Tory and a Tory you wouldn’t mind having in the House”. He sounds to me to be in the wrong party—but, in any event, we very much look forward to future contributions in your Lordships’ debates.

The noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, has brought to the House not only a wealth of experience in the charity field but great warmth and transparent honesty. We on this side of the House always looked forward to her answering Questions from the Dispatch Box because she brilliantly deflected the most fervent criticism with a sympathetic smile and a commitment to take the issue back to the department. We sensed that she sometimes silently agreed with the questioner. We now look forward to hearing what she really thinks from the Back Benches.

This is obviously the last King’s Speech of this Government, and it certainly has a tail-end Charlie feel to it. Within a year, the Government will be putting their record and their plans to the electorate, and there will be five broad areas against which they will be principally judged. The first is the economy. We do not know exactly how the numbers will move over the next 12 months, but we can be pretty certain that we will go into the election with anaemic growth at best, higher inflation than many of our competitors and, as a result, a continuing cost of living squeeze. Mortgage holders will increasingly be paying much higher rates of interest as their fixed-term loans come up for remortgaging.

Growth is the only way to ease these pressures, but this will require an industrial strategy, more private and public sector investment, an apprenticeship system that actually works and trading arrangements with our nearest neighbours that do not make exporting by small businesses prohibitively expensive. The King’s Speech promises nothing but warm words on all of this.

The second is public services, particularly health and social care. We have record backlogs in the NHS, widespread shortages of GPs and dentists, and a social care system that simply cannot meet demand. Partly as a result of the pandemic, we also have record numbers of people with mental health problems and an urgent need for enhanced public health interventions to stem the growing tide of preventable illness. The Government have at long last produced a workforce plan to address some of these issues, but it lacks urgency and funding for its implementation—and yet again, the Government have dodged the pressing issue of how to pay for long-term social care.

The third is the environment. Although the Government pay lip service to achieving net zero by 2050, their most recent policy pronouncements make that less rather than more likely. Rowing back on the timing of phasing out petrol and diesel vehicles has dismayed the industry as much as it has dismayed environmental campaigners. Pathetically low levels of installation of heat pumps not only put us behind virtually every other European country but make the decarbonisation of household heating a distant dream rather than an urgent requirement. The abject failure of the national grid to accommodate new patterns of electricity generation and use is now a national disgrace.

The Government’s response is to make it easier to drill for oil and gas in the North Sea. Despite energy bills being double what they were last year, the Energy Secretary—as the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, said—admitted yesterday morning that this policy will do nothing to cut energy bills. It will, of course, do nothing to help the switch to renewable energy, insulate our homes or help the most vulnerable pay their bills while prices remain high.

As far as the natural environment is concerned, the Government’s attempt to get rid of nutrient neutrality rules and their failure to clamp down on polluting water companies show a depressing lack of concern, to put it very mildly. All Governments should seek to hand over our precious natural environment in a better state than they found it. This one will abjectly fail to do so.

The fourth is international affairs. International crises are often the great unpredictable disruptors that preoccupy our politics, and in this Parliament Ukraine and now Gaza have done so. We have supported the Government in their response to Ukraine, and on Gaza we agree that Israel has the clear right to defend itself against attack, but we are concerned about the impact of its response on the innocent citizens of Gaza. We call for a humanitarian ceasefire and the release of all the hostages and call on the Government to intensify their diplomatic efforts to bring these about.

There remains the ongoing highly unsatisfactory relationship with Europe. We always claimed that Brexit would make us poorer, less secure and less influential. The past couple of years have amply demonstrated this truth. The Government have had to be dragged kicking and screaming back into the Horizon programme, took months to get a more sensible arrangement in Northern Ireland and have failed to do even the most minimal amount which could be achieved in respect of trade and free movement of people.

The fifth of the great issues facing us is the way in which the country is run. Of all the shortcomings of this Government, arguably the most significant is the damage they have done to our constitution. Their last manifesto promised a constitutional convention, but instead of serious thinking and measured proposals we have had a collapse of standards in public life, being daily illuminated by the Covid inquiry. All this has eroded trust in domestic politics, to such an extent that recent polling shows that some 60% of young people think we would be better off if we were run simply by a strong leader and did not even have to bother with Parliament or elections at all. Anybody who has done any canvassing in the past few years has been faced with a growing number of people who have given up on voting altogether and are angry and unrepentant abstainers.

Needless to say, there is literally nothing in the King’s Speech that addresses these crises in our political system. Instead of serious measures to deal with these five priority areas, we have a programme of shreds and patches. Some of the proposals we broadly support—for example, on renters’ reform, the football regulator and pensions reform. On some, the Government clearly lack a sense of irony: a rudderless Government proposing measures to deal with driverless vehicles, I am afraid, cannot but provoke a smile.

Other measures seem to have as their principal purpose driving a wedge between the parties, and they are likely to lead to a less, rather than more, fair and united society. How else can we explain the Home Secretary’s desire to criminalise the provision of tents for the homeless? How else can we explain proposals for even longer sentences when our jails are full to bursting point?

The silver lining to this whole King’s Speech is that it is necessarily the last that will be written by this wretched Government. The election next year will give us a chance to replace them with a Government who are honest, decent, fair and competent. The sooner we have this opportunity, the better.