King’s Speech

Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts

Wednesday 17th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Reid of Cardowan]

That an humble Address be presented to His Majesty as follows:

“Most Gracious Sovereign—We, Your Majesty’s most dutiful and loyal subjects, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal in Parliament assembled, beg leave to thank Your Majesty for the most gracious Speech which Your Majesty has addressed to both Houses of Parliament”.

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)]

My Lords, it is an honour and a privilege to be asked to deliver this speech. It is also a pleasure, since I am joined by my noble friend Lady Hazarika as seconder to this speech. This will be news to noble Lords, but we were born in the same county in Lanarkshire. We were born in the same town in Lanarkshire. Indeed, we were born in the same hospital in the same town in Lanarkshire—although, sadly, the merest glance will confirm that it was not in the same decade.

I cannot pretend to your Lordships, and nor would my noble friend, that Lanarkshire politics is a sort of preparatory school for the refinement of the House of Lords. Indeed, I was prompted to think about Lanarkshire politics this morning when I noticed in the ceremonial guide that the Gentlemen at Arms were requested to hand in their axes after the meeting. Certainly, my noble friend Lady Hazarika, among others, will know of the unfortunate tale of the leader of the council in Lanarkshire who was so ground down by the internecine warfare in his council that he was eventually hospitalised and received a get well card which read, “The Labour group wish you a speedy recovery by 18 votes to 12, with nine abstentions”.

There is no such lack of empathy in this House. Indeed, I owe much to the courtesy and assistance of so many noble Lords in this Chamber. I cannot mention them all, but there are certainly two. I will mention the noble Lord, Lord Soames, who, as Armed Forces Minister, reached across the Chamber of the House of Commons and gave me such wonderful help, advice and encouragement when I was a new shadow defence spokesman that I ended up with his job. I thank him for that.

The other noble Lord cannot be with us today, but I want to record my thanks to my noble friend Lord Kinnock, not only because he introduced me to parliamentary politics but for his courage and leadership against Labour’s first bout of infantile leftism in 1983—coincidentally, the year that Michael Gove briefly joined the Labour Party. Without the leadership of my noble friend Lord Kinnock, there would have been no future Labour Governments. I have to say that, without people like that, I would not be moving this humble Address today. Therefore, I do not approach today’s programme for government in a tribal fashion; I commend it to the whole House.

There may be some noble Lords who, having known me for some years—I see the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, laughing in unison—think that I cannot reach across party boundaries. For those sceptical of my qualifications to make such an appeal, I can tell them that I am, as far as I am aware, the only Labour defence spokesman ever to have addressed a Conservative audience in the Carlton Club. I will tell noble Lords what happened. At the end of an official defence visit to Cyprus, on our half-day of rest and recreation as we all relaxed around the pool of the spa, as you do, I was challenged, in the pool, by that delightfully eccentric Conservative MP Lady Olga Maitland. She challenged me to address her organisation Families for NATO, more widely known as “Babies for the Bomb”. I was happy to do so. I was less happy when she took to explaining to the bemused Tory audience in the Carlton Club that the only reason this Labour stalwart had accepted the invitation was that when she tendered it and I accepted it in Cyprus, in her words “Neither of us was fully clothed”. I have to say I am not suggesting this as a template for future government relations.

Of course, there are areas of controversy in the King’s Speech—it is a very full programme—but I believe that there is much that should be given a fair wind by all sides in this Chamber: on planning, infrastructure and economic growth; on industrial strategy and local devolution; on clean energy and children’s well-being; on safer streets and stronger borders; on reforming our public services, which is desperately needed; and on restoring our capability in national defence. I believe that it is a solid foundation on which to bring about the reset that our new Prime Minister mentioned on his first day in office.

It will fall to my noble friend Lady Smith to take this programme forward. I have to say she has a hard act to follow. She follows a Leader in this Chamber whose patience and courtesy seemed to me at times—how can I put it?—too good to be True.

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)]

But I know that my noble friend Lady Smith is up to the task because, in my view, what Churchill said of military leadership also applies in politics:

“Without the title deeds of positive achievement no one”


has the power or the right to give clear leadership. I believe that my noble friend holds those title deeds, and not only through her service in this Chamber. I know that, as my Minister in Northern Ireland, she led and commandeered not one, not two, not three but four departments of state. So I warn my colleagues on the Front Bench: keep a tight grip on your portfolios.

There are many of our former colleagues that all of us would have wished to see here today—particularly on these Benches, if I might say so, because of the new Labour Government. There are too many to mention in full but, personally, I will miss the late Baroness McDonagh. She was respected and loved by so many of us. It is a tragedy that she did not live to see the Labour Government that she did so much to achieve.

There is now a huge responsibility on that Government, not just in implementing legislation in singular Acts that pass through this Chamber but in restoring faith in politics. As we cast an eye over our continent, we can all see the spectre of those three horsemen of extremism: economic instability; a contempt for the whole political class; and foreigners to blame. We do not need a crystal ball; we have all read the history books. These conditions have always been the harbingers of extremism. Even now, it is sweeping across Europe. For now, we have escaped it, but we may not always escape it. The next few years will determine that. It falls to us to plant the flag of democracy, including social democracy, firmly in the ground and to defend it. Above all, we need to persuade the British people to trust government and politicians a bit more through our integrity, our actions, our attitudes and our service.

So as the lodestar for the coming years, we could not choose a better one than the final words of the final speech of the late John Smith, given the night before he died:

“the opportunity to serve … that is all we ask”.

Surely that should be sufficient for all of us. I beg to move.