King’s Speech

Lord Patten Excerpts

Wednesday 8th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, I hope that during this debate, and indeed all the days of debate that we face on the King’s Speech, we will not hear too much of what we are endlessly told about new legislation and new measures: “This is the biggest and most important new measure in a generation”. We simply have not got enough generations to fulfil that pledge. It is bunkum and I think the Amalgamated Association of Speechwriters and Special Advisers should just cut that out of the lingo that they put in front of innocent Ministers.

The second point I will make is the perfectly obvious one that laws do not necessarily change everything and that when there are new laws, they are not necessarily effective. In some cases, new laws are not going to be effective at all. I take as my best—or worst—example the fact that we have a vanishingly small Jewish population in this country. We have 270,000 Jews in England and Wales out of 58.6 million. Their number is vanishingly small, they are easily identified and they are having a horrible time in what should be a liberal and tolerant country. They are concentrated in a small number of easily targeted urban areas. If there was any other racial group—and they are a racial group—of such a vanishing size, there would be national uproar: in particular, thought leaders from the progressive part of the world would be right there, arguing their case. Where are they? At the moment, the sound of silence is deafening, which I find very hard to take.

What is the use of all that expensive Holocaust education in GCSEs and the rest of it? It is money not well spent, I think. What good, in the end, will expensive new Holocaust museums do, wherever they are put, to right the wrongs that the Jewish community in this country face? I am told that poor whites are often to blame for this. I actually sometimes think that posh whites are, too: dinner-party casual anti-Semitism, the tap on the nose over the second or third course. None of this is going to be stopped by any law; it is going to be stopped by a national will that we no longer wish to have this sort of casual anti-Semitism in our country. We need a new body, or bodies, which I cannot invent, whose job it is to concentrate on re-education and deep education on this point—there are people who should be thinking about this—to remove the stain on the nation and make our vanishingly tiny Jewish minority feel safer, more secure, more welcome and much less inclined to up sticks and leave a country where they are very badly needed.

Lastly, I will look at where laws are not needed because we have lots of laws on the statute book which are not used or should be used more effectively, such as on rough sleepers. I pass rough sleepers all the time around Victoria station and on Victoria Street. Remarkably, we also now see small but increasing numbers of women rough sleepers and clearly battered women on the streets around here. It is on our very doorstep, but we have no effective co-ordination to deal with it—except that, even more shockingly, there is no rough sleeping around the Palace of Westminster or Buckingham Palace. The police, the city council and others dealing with this somehow manage to stop it in these sensitive areas, but a couple of hundred yards down the road it is simply ignored.

I only wish we had someone like Andy Street, magically transferred from the West Midlands to Westminster, because he would be co-ordinating and trying to deal with all this stuff now. Instead, Westminster City Council seems to ignore the subject, and the police are engaged with it around here and Buckingham Palace but not elsewhere. We certainly do not have a mayor of the city of London who seems capable of doing anything to deal with rough sleeping on the streets—he is too busy grandstanding and giving his views on international affairs and not getting down to this issue. We do not need any new laws to deal with it. It is a matter of willpower and organisation, exactly as the Dangerous Dogs Act, which we have forgotten about since 1991, will do so much now that it has been brought back in to deal with attacks on people. That Act was forgotten but it has been there for a generation.