"My Lords, I rise to talk to Amendment 181, which is grouped with this. Britain has an unwritten constitution, which gives us flexibility but also lacks constraint on changing Prime Ministers or Governments beyond trust in their behaving like good chaps. As we have discovered in recent years, not all …..." Lord Wallace of Saltaire - View Speech
"Before the noble Baroness sits down, can she clarify one point? We are heading towards a model of English governance in which there will be roughly 35 elected mayors. Do the Government envisage that the Council of the Nations and Regions will then have the Scottish Government, the Welsh Government, …..." Lord Wallace of Saltaire - View Speech
"This time on a Thursday afternoon, just before the Recess, is not the ideal time to call a Division, much as many of us on these Benches would have liked to do so. We do not resile from the view that this Bill is constitutionally deficient and democratically damaging, but …..." Lord Wallace of Saltaire - View Speech
"My Lords, democracy starts with local engagement. As the saying goes, all politics is local, and people start by worrying about their own local community.
We talk about pride of place in government policy, but place is not usually the whole of Yorkshire, for example, or even the whole of …..." Lord Wallace of Saltaire - View Speech
"My Lords, I am not at all sure that the Government understand that decentralisation and devolution are fundamentally different things. What we have here is a Bill for continued central control of the governance of England, subject to allowing mayors rather more powers. I therefore strongly support these amendments from …..." Lord Wallace of Saltaire - View Speech
"My Lords, we on these Benches hesitate to criticise the due diligence process by the security services and the Civil Service; it seems to have been effectively and efficiently done but disregarded by the Prime Minister’s political advisers and overridden by the Prime Minister. Presumably he thought the task of …..." Lord Wallace of Saltaire - View Speech
"My Lords, if we are going to have a whole-society response, we had better make sure that the whole society is informed about the nature of the threat. Nearly a year ago, the strategic defence review talked about the need for
"My Lords, we are hearing from administrative figures in the United States, including the Secretary of War, that this is a crusade and that we are fighting a battle between Christianity and Islam. Can the British Government make it very clear that, to quote Tony Blair in his past days, …..." Lord Wallace of Saltaire - View Speech