Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill

Lord Stevens of Birmingham Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 20th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevens of Birmingham (CB)]

My Lords, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwark’s mention of Hackney reminded me that, some years back, when you left Parliament and crossed the bridge, you came across a sign saying, “Welcome to Lambeth—a Nuclear-Free Zone”. It appeared that the London Borough of Lambeth felt that it could set its own nuclear deterrence policy and, presumably, any inbound Soviet nuclear weapons would contour round it to Wandsworth.

That points to the intrinsic fact that defence and foreign policy are, rightly, matters for our elected national Government. I was casting my mind back to, I think, two weeks ago, to an Oral Question about the Scottish Government. Contributions from all Benches across the House were strongly critical of the suggestion that the Scottish Government in Holyrood might be usurping the Westminster Government’s exclusive competence on foreign policy. It is not clear why that argument, made a fortnight ago, is not deemed to apply today to other governmental or public bodies, in addition to the devolved Administrations.

Furthermore, although there have been legitimate concerns about aspects of the Bill, it is worth reminding ourselves that it does not stop us as private individuals, businesses or civil society organisations choosing who to buy from, who to boycott and where to invest. It contains statutory safeguards so that governmental and public authorities can take account, for example, of environmental and labour standards, including the prevention of modern slavery.

The advantage of speaking this late in the debate is that you have a chance to reflect on where the balance of opinion is across the House. It strikes me that there are probably three major points of controversy that have so far arisen. The first concerns the breadth and ambiguity around the bodies captured by the definition of a “hybrid public authority”. I think the contributions that particularly concerned universities require further deliberation as this Bill progresses. More broadly, the use of Section 6 of the Human Rights Act 1998 as the litmus test for what is and is not in scope of the Bill requires further consideration to avoid the breadth and ambiguity that many previous speakers have spoken about.

The second point of controversy is the free speech concerns, particularly as they relate to academic freedom. As I read them, the Explanatory Notes provide significant reassurance on that point. The question that we will want to test is whether the reassurances in the Explanatory Notes are sufficiently reflected in the substance of the Bill. We heard a moment ago from the noble Baroness, Lady Bryan of Partick, about the Bill requiring double- think: local authorities could pass resolutions as long as they did not act on them. My question to the Minister is: is that not in fact already the status quo? It is not the Bill that creates the problem she described.

The leading case in this area is the judicial review against Leicester City Council, initiated in 2014 and heard by the Court of Appeal in 2018. The reason Leicester City Council was successful in its appeal is precisely that it attested that, although the council had passed a resolution, it would not have, in the words of the Court of Appeal,

“any direct practical effect upon the procurement and purchasing policies actually adopted by the Council”.

So Leicester’s defence was a hypocrisy defence. The executive mayor of the council said that responsibilities for procurement rested with him rather than with the council and, on that basis and due to other associated reasons to do with the public sector equality duty, the council won its appeal. So this is a legitimate question to raise, but that is actually just a characteristic of the status quo. All of this points to the fact that the free speech protections described in the Explanatory Notes need to be a lot clearer for most of us, I suspect, to feel comfortable with what the Bill requires.

The third of the controversies that has arisen so far obviously relates specifically to the fact that we are being asked to take a substantive view on the use by public bodies of BDS tactics against Israel and the Occupied Territories. In our Second Reading debates, the Government are usually criticised for commandeering powers to decide, but today the criticism seems to be that the Government are forcing us to decide this question in the Bill.

As someone who supports both Palestinian and Israeli rights of national self-determination, the policy test I apply is whether these BDS tactics will help or hinder a just and sustainable peace. The answer becomes obvious when you discover that leading global BDS founders’ clearly expressed goal is to prevent a two-state solution and destroy the world’s only majority-Jewish state, which is why they single out Israel alone among the nations and why they remain strangely mute when it comes to Iranian terror, Syrian gulags or Houthi slavery.

Instead, notwithstanding the pessimistic view of the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, we should be working for a better future: peace restored, Hamas removed, Gaza reconstructed, Israel secure, Palestinian statehood in prospect and the Abraham accords proceeding. Progress on all these fronts will be underpinned, not undermined, by vibrant and successful Palestinian and Israeli economies, something that BDS aims to destroy.

Just as the Cold War was not ended by Lambeth Council, BDS will not end conflict in the Middle East. In fact, careful scrutiny reveals its problematic aims and its destructive consequences. It seems to me that, within our governmental and public bodies, it is not illegitimate for Parliament to circumscribe the reach of this toxic campaign.