Brexit: Human Rights

Lord Shinkwin Excerpts

Tuesday 12th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Cashman, for enabling us to acknowledge the crucial contribution that your Lordships’ House and Parliament as a whole have made, and must continue to make, to advancing equality. As he so effectively argued, it is vital that that continues beyond Brexit because there is so much still to be done to empower disabled people, in particular, so that we can enjoy the equality that is ours by virtue of our common humanity.

I take this opportunity to put on record my heartfelt thanks to all noble Lords and Members of the other place who have expressed support since my speech in your Lordships’ House on 24 November, reported in Hansard at cols. 414-17. I also want to put something else on the record. When I accepted the Equalities Minister’s offer to join the board of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, I did so in good faith that the offer was for the disability commissioner role for which I had applied and been interviewed. I subsequently discovered that that faith was misplaced because, unbeknown to me, she had already colluded with the commission to help get rid of the role when she decided to appoint me as a general commissioner instead. Needless to say, she did not make that point clear to me at the time she wrote to offer me the role of a commissioner on the board. Had the Minister bothered to ask me, I would have told her straight that disabled people desperately need a dedicated disability commissioner to champion our equality. That need cannot simply be abolished.

Noble Lords will know that I have respectfully requested that the Prime Minister dissociates the Government from this downgrading of disability. However, if that is what I am asking of the Prime Minister, then the very least I can do is dissociate myself as well. With immediate effect, I am therefore withdrawing my acceptance of the Equalities Minister’s offer to join the board of the commission, an offer which was made under false pretences. I will not collude in this shameful downgrading of disability, which Written Answers in the other place now show was taken by an Equalities Minister who informed No. 10 of the change to the commissioner role only 24 hours before my appointment. Even worse, the Equalities Minister did not even inform the then Minister for Disabled People that there was to be no disability commissioner.

In conclusion, I ask nothing of my noble and learned friend the Minister this evening, but I respectfully reiterate my request to the Prime Minister that she ensures the release of all the relevant communications, so that Parliament can understand how on earth the Equalities Minister could possibly think that agreeing to help get rid of the disability commissioner role would somehow help disabled people in our fight for equality.