Brexit: Other Policy Areas

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

On the issue of social care, the noble Baroness will have heard responses from my noble friend who was pressed on the progress of the Green Paper on social care. I cannot add to what she said. As regards Brexit squeezing out legislation, we made it clear at the beginning of the session—which we knew would last slightly longer than usual—that Brexit would be a priority. However, we have so far introduced 63 government Bills, 44 of which have received Royal Assent, and, in addition to the European Union (Withdrawal) Act, 10 exit-related Bills are in Parliament or have received Royal Assent. So we have introduced 52 Bills that are not related to exit. It is not the case that Brexit has squeezed out all relevant social legislation.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the Minister referred to the capacity of the Civil Service. The Conservatives were keen to reduce Civil Service numbers, did so in 2016 and planned to in 2017. Since then, I understand that they have had to go through some emergency recruiting to bring numbers up to what is needed to handle preparations for Brexit—and in particular a no-deal Brexit—and have not yet started on the number of extra civil servants we will need to staff all the agencies that will have to be created to replace those EU agencies that provided us with shared services. Can he give us some estimate of the additional number of civil servants who have already been recruited and the extra numbers we will need if and when we leave?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I wish I could, but I honestly do not have those figures in front of me. The Civil Service has always had the flexibility to reflect government priorities and move people around from one department to another. At the beginning of the Blair Government, when constitutional reform was a priority—with the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and reform of your Lordships’ House—resources were pushed into that. In the 1980s, when we had nationalisation, resources went there. So the Civil Service has the capacity to respond to challenges and, in my view, has always risen to that challenge.

Future Generations

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 26th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I am a great fan of the Youth Parliament and when I was in the other place I attended some of its sessions there. It gives young people an opportunity to taste public life and I hope that many of its members will go on to become Members of Parliament. Perhaps I may reflect on the broader issue the noble Baroness raises about whether we might give more powers to the Youth Parliament. It is a helpful and positive suggestion.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, is not part of the problem of short-term policy-making, when we should have long-term thinking, that the ministerial churn is enormous? A number of senior ministerial posts are on their third postholder since 2015 and are expecting a fourth within the next four to six weeks. The noble Lord is an absolute pillar of the example of long-term postholding in government. Does he have any recommendations to make about how we may shift from this constant change of ministerial office to a longer-term prospectus?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

The noble Lord makes a valid suggestion. I was a Minister 40 years ago and since then I have been churned many times, often against my will. The noble Lord makes a serious point. It takes time to come to terms with a portfolio and then to develop one’s own priorities and initiatives. It is demoralising, just when one has discovered one’s responsibilities and what one wants to do, when one gets the call from No. 10 to say that one’s talents have been recognised but need to be deployed elsewhere. It is right that Ministers should spend at least two years in the same position. However, it may not always be possible—as next month may show.

Referendums

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 13th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Robathan, that I was never a fan of my party’s behaviour on referendums. They require a great deal of care. I entirely support what has been said about the need to define much more tightly how and in which circumstances referendums are used.

We are now in an awful mess. We have an institutionalised two-party system, in which both parties appear to be irrevocably split, so it does not work. We have a number of people saying that the referendum has given us the will of the people, but we are a representative democracy. We have had three years in which those who led the leave campaign—Liam Fox, David Davis and Boris Johnson—were given responsible positions to try to implement the will of the people, and have failed to. So we are stuck. What we need, therefore, is a debate on our constitution and a concern for how to educate our masters, in a society that has failed over generations to have political education in schools or any sense of civic responsibility, so that we understand that democracy is a dialogue in which the people and the political elite hold each other to account.

That leaves us all with the requirement to talk about how we understand the British constitution. As has often been said, our constitution requires government by good chaps. When we have a large number of people in our political elite who are not exactly good chaps—I make no reference to any particular contenders for the Conservative leadership—it becomes difficult to make the constitution work or to maintain its conventions when they are challenged. The fact that we are three years away from a referendum campaign which was fought on the principle of restoring parliamentary sovereignty and we now have contenders for the Conservative leadership outbidding each other in their determination to dissolve Parliament, or at least to suspend or prorogue us so that executive authority can be used to drive through a hard Brexit, demonstrates what a mess we are in.

Democracy is a dialogue between citizens and the political establishment. That requires responsible political leadership. It also requires checks and balances which we only have in a conventional form in Britain, unlike the written constitutions of the United States, France, Germany or other countries. It requires responsible parties, and that has clearly broken down. It requires the re-establishment of a relationship between the public and the political elite which re-establishes trust. We all understand how that has broken down. After this very short debate we need to address, publicly, the issues of how we reshape and re-explain the British constitution.

European Parliament Elections: Non-UK EU Citizens

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 5th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

As I said in response to the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, the Electoral Commission will carry out its normal review and inquiry into the European elections. It will certainly look at the issue raised by the noble Lord that some of the forms do not reach the people eligible. The Government will of course take notice of any recommendations made.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I am sure that the Minister will recall that, at the weekend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer suggested that the Conservative leadership election makes it now practically impossible for us to leave in good order on 31 October. Mr Michael Gove, as a candidate for that leadership, has also suggested that we might take rather longer. This begins to open up the prospect that we could indeed have the 2020 local elections before we get to the point of deciding whether we finally leave. We need to make absolutely sure that the position of EU citizens resident in Britain and their right to vote is clarified before we come to the next round of elections in which they are entitled to participate. Can he ensure that the Electoral Commission has that fully in mind?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

Is the noble Lord suggesting that there is a scenario where we have another round of European elections?

Public Procurement and the Civil Society Strategy

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 23rd May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, if I may return the compliment to the noble Lord, Lord Maude, I learned a lot while working with him. One thing I particularly learned was how difficult it is to work across Whitehall. The entrenched traditions of departments—not only Permanent Secretaries but also Secretaries of State—make it very difficult to innovate or provide new means of dealing with digital, waste disposal or whatever it may be. I regret that some of the initiatives which we—the noble Lord, Lord Maude, in particular—took in government were not entirely successful because they ran into these structural difficulties.

I want to focus my speech on three things. First, unless we have a much stronger emphasis on local commissioning and much less on central commissioning, we will not achieve the sort of social value we are talking about. Secondly, part of our problem is that the focus on value for money makes it very difficult to bring social value back in. Thirdly—I pick up the theme of the noble Lord, Lord Maude—we have to rediscover the importance of the public service ethos as a motivation in outsourcing and in dealing with, in particular, the non-profit sector. That is part of the reason why we need to strengthen the non- profit sector.

The final chapter of the Civil Society Strategy recognises the structural problems of the model of outsourcing which successive Governments—Labour, coalition and now Conservative—have developed over the last 20 to 30 years:

“The reforms have led to a greater focus on outcomes and costs. However, they have also spurred the development of a transactional model of service delivery, with an often rigid focus on quantifiable costs, volumes, and timescales rather than on the relationships, flexibility, and patience which the reality of life for many people and communities demands”.


I spoke to a number of officials while preparing this speech, and many of them said that it is all very well to try to put in social value, but when you are arguing with the Treasury, value for money, which you can quantify, wins the day. The problems with quantifying social value are very considerable. There is an important distinction between public value—social value is part of that—and private value and between public motivation and private motivation. We all recognise that timescales of public investment are longer than the usual timescales for private investment.

I disagree with the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, that externalities are a matter for the private sector. The externalities that the DWP imposes on the National Health Service by some of the ways it treats universal credit benefit recipients are very clear. The externalities that the for-profit care sector imposes on the NHS by the way in which it does not provide sufficient health support for its members are also extremely clear. There is a range of ways in which the interconnectedness of particular contracts is not recognised in our current outsourcing, as we have seen with probation and in the extent to which cuts to youth services lead to more school exclusions and higher youth crime. The motivation for workers in the public sector are clearly not accepted as relevant in the economics of public choice theory which drives much of the value-for-money analysis which we still have. This is an issue I began to argue about with economists at the LSE when I was a teacher there. I used to be quite critical of the sort of economics taught in the next-door department when teaching my students.

The Young review of the social value Act in 2015—by a Lord Young with no particular connection with Cookham, so far as I am aware—said:

“the incorporation of social value in actual procurements appears to be relatively low”,

after three years of operation. It also said:

“the current state of social value measurement can make it difficult for public bodies to differentiate the additional social value offered by one bidder over another”.

Many commissioners used it as another way of defining value for money or negotiating down the cost of contracts.

The opening statement of the Social Value in Government Procurement consultation paper promises that:

“Central government will, in future, take better account of social benefits in the award of its contracts”.


That was several years after the 2012 Act had come in. The paper quotes David Lidington, who has said:

“We want to see public services delivered with values at their heart”.


That was what the Act six years earlier was beginning to talk about.

What we all should be concerned with is how to strike the right balance between traditional Labour municipalism, which assumed that only trained and paid professionals employed by the state could be trusted to work at the interface between the state and civil society, and libertarian Conservatives who want to shrink the state and leave most social welfare to volunteers and charities. A fundamental part of my party’s priorities is that far too much public spending in England is controlled by central government rather than by local government and that attempts at devolution in England have so far been limited, hesitant and undermined by continuing cuts in financial resources for local authorities.

I waded through the Civil Society Strategy White Paper. My strongest criticism is that there is no recognition of the negative impact of continuing cuts in local authority budgets or of the importance of accountable local government in linking citizens, civil society and government. In 120 pages there are two paragraphs on democratic government. One admits:

“Many people feel disenfranchised and disempowered, and the government is keen to find new ways to give people back a sense of control over their communities’ future”.


There is no mention of greater financial autonomy and revenue-raising powers. We are offered only citizen’s juries and “trusted local messengers” who will not, I assume, be locally elected councillors. The 300-word section on the role of local government states that,

“local authorities continue to play an active role in communities”.

It is very kind of the central government to allow them to do so. I was left with the suspicion that some of the enthusiasm for volunteers comes from the hope that unpaid people will do the work previously done by professionals whose jobs have been axed. There are examples of volunteers in the police force and in teaching English as a foreign language now that cuts have been made in paid people.

Much of the Civil Society Strategy is Newspeak of the sort that the Daily Mail and the Telegraph would ridicule if it came from a non-Conservative Government. We are told about the #iwill fund, the enabling social action programme, the good help programme, the good work plan, the Purposely tool—I like that one particularly—to enable,

“social entrepreneurs to embed purpose into their business’s DNA”,

the inclusive economy unit, the business against slavery forum, the Government’s democratic engagement plan, their innovation in democracy programme and even a body called OSCA that describes itself as a social impact lab. I am sure the Minister can explain to me precisely what a social impact lab does.

We are told:

“The public funding of … youth services has always been the responsibility of local authorities ... despite the pressures on public sector finances”,

and that the Government will,

“review … the statutory duty on local authorities to provide … youth services”,

with some suggestions that charities or the Big Lottery Fund might usefully fund them instead. The Big Lottery Fund appears a good deal as a source of funding, together with the dormant accounts scheme, which seems to have been spent three times during the course of 120 pages.

On education, the strategy states:

“we are pleased to support the commitment made by the Careers and Enterprise Company to create a toolkit to help embed social action as part of a young person’s career pathway”.

There is no mention of the rising number of school exclusions as cutting across any social integration or engagement for many deprived children, or of the impact of cuts in school funding on broader parts of education. The strategy was published several months after the publication of the report of the Lords Select Committee on Citizenship and Civic Engagement, which bluntly stated:

“The Government has allowed citizenship education in England to degrade to a parlous state. The decline of the subject must be addressed in its totality as a matter of urgency”.


Again, the Civil Society Strategy is dreaming of an alternative world in which such topics are already available, which very clearly they are not.

There is a direct contradiction between calling for greater local community involvement and taking schools—one of the core elements of local communities —out of local control by forcing them into multi-academy trusts, sometimes run by overpaid executives a good distance away from such communities. I should perhaps say to the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, that the ministerial foreword tells us:

“Businesses are rediscovering the original purpose of the corporation: to deliver value to society, not just quarterly returns to shareholders”.


Wonderful stuff—no evidence whatever is provided. The 2017 paper People Power: Findings from the Commission on the Future of Localism was far more persuasive on the broad approach needed to empower people within communities and to link different public services together, but the government paper on democratic engagement Every Voice Matters, which I also read in preparing for this debate, is even more vacuous than the Civil Society Strategy.

Several of those whom I have consulted in preparing this speech have told me that local government is much better than central government at understanding the concept of social value. I recall seven years ago being taken round one of the largest estates in Leeds by the head of the neighbourhood police team, who worked closely with local churches and voluntary groups, as well as with other services in Leeds. Now, of course, police cuts have forced the disbandment of most such teams, with the loss of most police community support officers. When I was taken round a similar estate in Bradford last year by our local council leader, we saw no sign of any police presence or of any other representatives of local or central government: no government support for a depressed, left-behind, politically alienated community, 40% of whose housing has been sold off, with much of it now being in the hands of private landlords without a stake or interest in the local community.

We need to empower local authorities and the non-profit sector much more than we have managed to achieve. Again looking at Bradford, I see that our social housing association is training apprentices and is specifically recruiting women and people from disadvantaged areas. Last year, it had several hundred applications for 10 new places. That shows that the demand is there but others are not required to do it.

I could go on, although I shall not, but I wish to propose that we have to deal with reinstating the concept of public value more than private value. We have to get the Treasury’s concern with value for money defined in conventional economic terms. We have to revive the concept of local accountable government with adequate funds to provide and co-ordinate local services. I suggest that, given that the current situation we are in has evolved over a succession of Governments, we need to rethink a cross-party approach to redefining some of these fundamental issues concerning the way in which the state, the third sector, the citizen and private enterprise interact in providing such an important part of our national community.

Electoral Commission: Referendums and Elections Spending

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 23rd May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I notice the impassive face of my noble friend the Chief Whip, who of course has great influence on what issues we discuss. He will have heard my noble friend’s suggestion, and I know that he will want to discuss it through the usual channels.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the Minister said that political parties “vary considerably”. Their finances also vary considerably, and one of the structural problems in British politics is that the Conservative Party is now able centrally to raise so much more finance than any of the other parties. I recognise—as a member of a party which has activists under the age of 50 and is therefore able to deliver its own leaflets without having to pay others to do so—that it needs some of this. But is it not urgent that financing that comes into the centre of the Conservative Party should be carefully examined to eliminate those large donations that come from people who are not domiciled in the United Kingdom or are not British citizens? Is it not also urgent that the rules be tightened to allow central spending to be directed to particular constituencies and thus get round the limitations on constituency campaign funding?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

On the last point that the noble Lord raised, there was a court case relevant to this. The Electoral Commission is now in the process of issuing guidance which will give clarity to what scores against the local candidate’s expenditure and what should score against the party’s national expenditure. I hope the noble Lord welcomes that. I was relieved to hear that my party now finds it so much easier to raise money than any other party; this will come as welcome news to the party treasurer. So far as donations to the party are concerned, my party tries to stick rigorously to the rules—as I am sure all parties do. If an impermissible donation is presented, we are obliged to return it within 30 days.

Political Parties: Donation Rules

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I am grateful for the consensual approach adopted by the noble Lord. Quite recently he attended a meeting with me, the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, my noble friend Lord Hayward, the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, and, I believe, the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, at which we sought to see whether there was a consensus on some of the challenges facing the electoral system. Subsequently, a meeting was held with the Electoral Commission. I would be more than happy to contact the Minister for the Constitution, who was also at that meeting, to see whether it would be helpful to have another round-table discussion to identify areas of consensus and to see whether we can make progress in developing a rigid and credible electoral system.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, if we are to re-establish trust in where money for politics comes from, we need to have answers to challenges fairly quickly. It is now nearly three years since the last referendum and we still do not have any indication of where the largest donation to the Vote Leave campaign came from and whether it was legitimate or illegitimate. Should we not somehow provide extra resources immediately for the Electoral Commission and all those investigating what are potentially criminal acts to make sure that we have answers as quickly as possible, if not during the campaign then at least soon afterwards?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

The noble Lord will be aware that some cases concerning the Leave.EU campaign have been referred to the police. On his question about resources for the Electoral Commission, the last time he asked me that I pointed out that there had been an underspend. Since then, the Electoral Commission has put in an increased bid for next year of, I think, 11% for resource expenditure and 18% for capital expenditure. That has been approved by the Speaker’s Committee on the Electoral Commission, because it is that committee that finances the Electoral Commission, not the Government. It has yet to be ratified by the other place but I hope that it will be. That would give the Electoral Commission the resources that it needs, to which the noble Lord referred.

Census (Return Particulars and Removal of Penalties) Bill [HL]

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 13th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, as my noble friend Lady Barker has made clear, we on these Benches also welcome this Bill and the proposed new census questions. This takes us into a broader debate on the 2021 census which we will undertake over the course of the next year. I recognise that this is barely the soup course of that—it is certainly not the main course—so perhaps the Minister could start by telling us, either now or during further consideration, when we may expect publication of the census order and the full consideration provided by taking it through the House. It is very tempting to ask about wider issues at this point, such as the integration of census data with other government data—household surveys and the like—and the discussions within government since the passing of the Digital Economy Act on how one begins to provide for administrative data replacing the survey data of the census in the next 10 years, as chapter 9 of the White Paper suggests. Clearly, when we discuss the census order, we will need to include debate about the future of the census and government management of public debate post 2021.

I cannot resist pointing out in passing that there seem to be some limits on UK sovereignty in the census process. Paragraph 1.29 of the White Paper notes that,

“the census in England and Wales aims to align with international standards set at global and regional level”.

I think that is code suggesting that we are aligning our national census with European standards. I am sure that many on the Conservative Benches think that is entirely improper and that we should move as far away from them as possible.

I have some specific questions. I also received a note from the British Legion about the Armed Forces questions. If I understand the difference between its note and what is in the White Paper, the question is about how far one includes the dependents of members of the armed services, and veterans and their families, in the survey one undertakes? I very much hope that the Minister will tell us more about that, either now or in Committee.

I noted with interest the discussion on questions of national identity from paragraph 3.115 of the White Paper on. In particular, it spends some time on whether or not one should allow Cornish identity to be written in. I give notice to declare that we would of course wish to insist that Yorkshire identity is also allowed to be written in under those circumstances. I was a little puzzled that it appears not to allow for multiple identities. As we know from the rather complex discussion we have had about different identities—English, Scottish, English and Scottish, British, European—these are out there in the public and it may be time to take some of them on board.

I also noticed the delicate discussion on whether or not one allows the Somali community, which has very particular needs, as discussed in the White Paper, to be identified separately from other African communities. It seems that, in public policy terms, there are some quite important questions about identifying particular communities. I once happened to canvass in a part of London which had a remarkably strong Congolese community. They were very surprised to know that I understood that some of them spoke Lingala and other languages; they did not expect a white person to understand anything about the Congo at all. There are good public policy reasons for wanting to identify certain communities, and I was puzzled about why that had been left out.

I was also slightly puzzled that there was no question on digital skills, given that we are moving towards a digital census. I am aware from discussions with the social housing association and other authorities in Bradford that there are some pockets where there are a remarkably large number of people who lack digital skills. Again, perhaps we might return to that in Committee.

As far as the new questions are concerned, I recognise their sensitivity but also their great utility. As a Liberal, I am in favour of open information as far as possible in an open and tolerant society and with the maximum transparency. We are, after all, talking about our preference for evidence-based policy, as against the myth-based policy that has unfortunately taken hold in British government in recent years. Perhaps the Minister could remind us, either now or in Committee, which other questions on the census are voluntary. I noted in the White Paper that the question about religion is voluntary. I am not sure whether there are others. It would be helpful if that was provided to be sure that we understand the categorisation taking place.

I also noted the question on heads of household filling in questionnaires. I wonder whether that is still appropriate and, although very convenient, whether it still provides something of a problem in some parts of the United Kingdom when it comes to sensitive questions such as sexual orientation and gender identity, thus discouraging full returns. I wonder whether there is a particular problem with heads of household in Northern Ireland.

I am torn on the question of privacy. I know that some within the LGBT community are concerned, as my noble friend Lady Barker suggested, about allowing this information to become public even 100 years after it was provided. Again, as a Liberal, I am in favour of making as much information public as soon as possible. I remember the exchange we had in this House when I was in government about the information in the Denning report and Lord Denning’s promise to those whom he interviewed that their answers would never be made public. The position I took as a junior member of the coalition Government was that, at the point when all of those who had been involved in that particular scandal were dead, it would be time to release those answers. I am in favour of limiting the length of privacy, but we should hear the concerns of those worried about it and do what we regard as necessary to allay them.

I welcome the Bill and the proposals. I look forward to further detailed examination in Committee and on Report.

Conduct of Debate in Public Life

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, we all agree that we are in a crisis of the sort just described by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris.

I recall talking to a good friend, a young female MP, some weeks ago. She said, “Do you know, as I was going through the Lobbies the other week, I thought for the first time since I came here that I was perhaps in the wrong sort of job in the wrong sort of place”. That is the level of toxicity the Commons has reached. She and some of her young female colleagues have also talked about the intimidation they face through email, social media and so on. I fear for them; all I have faced are the shouts of “Traitor!” that we get every now and again as we walk in and out of here. It is a real problem and will of course affect how many people come into or stay in politics. Things are very different from what it was like when I first started out as a political candidate, when the old sense of deference was there and people were glad to see you when you met.

We all accept that we face the major problem of maintaining democracy. Violent language by established politicians and columnists in national newspapers, as well as across social media, affects the quality of debate. Violent language encourages actual violence. Behind that, a deep distrust of the so-called political class has been growing over the years; the expenses scandal and the way we are portrayed in the media have contributed to that. The increasing professionalisation of politics means that we rank down there with bankers among those who are the least trusted by the rest of our community. There is therefore a disillusionment with politics as such. I find that the widening of the gap between the public and the professional political class results partly from a decline in party membership; again, when I started out in politics, the Conservative Party had more than a million members. Those grass-roots numbers, feeding back to the leadership, are now down to something like 100,000.

The decline in local democracy and local government is also a major problem because it increases the gap between the governed and those who govern. If your local school has been taken over by an academy with its headquarters 50 miles away, your social services and children’s services are being cut and much of what used to be your public services have been outsourced, not surprisingly, you fear that politics is remote and that you are losing control.

In the past few years, we have seen the rejection of evidence on global warming, vaccinations, international trade, regulation and everything to do with the European Union. We have seen that not just in Britain; we must recognise that it is part of a wider trend towards what Viktor Orbán calls “illiberal democracy”—the politics of feeling and guts and nationalism against these silly liberals who muck about with evidence and detail. So, we have to be nice to each other. That intolerance is marked by President Trump’s violent rhetoric, as well as by Viktor Orbán, the Polish Government and others.

What should our response be? We have to defend the principles of liberal democracy—all of us across all parties and outside the parties. As the noble Lord, Lord Harris, said, we have to defend the politics of reason, evidence, negotiation, tolerance of opposition and different views, the rule of law and respect for minorities who are so easily demonised by populists. I also agree strongly with the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, and others who have said that you cannot have too great a degree of inequality and maintain the sense of a national community. The social contract about which Locke and others have written is a contract between the governed and the governing, and those who are governed expect the state to give them security and a degree of welfare in return. We are in danger of allowing economic change, deregulation and the shrinking of government, which is very much what the Conservative Party has been pushing for through austerity, to widen the gap too much between what the Government do and what the governed receive. That, indeed, undermines democracy.

Several speakers, including the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, have also talked about the importance of educating our citizens. The failure of political education in this country is appalling. It is an issue that we have debated in this House. While we have to push at it, the problem is that it is a political football that easily becomes partisan and is perhaps the sort of thing on which this House could form a Select Committee—that is, on how to promote citizenship education in our schools. That involves an understanding of our national history, having respect for evidence and fostering an understanding of government and governance. Moreover, we need the teaching of citizenship to mean talking about not just rights but the obligations of citizenship—a term that, sadly, has gone from popular debate. I often hear on the doorstep, “I’ve got my rights”, but I never hear, “I should be doing something about my obligations”. Political education in all our schools should therefore be much higher up the agenda of all parties.

Who should respond to this problem? The Committee on Standards in Public Life has said that political parties should take the lead. Political leaders set the tone of public debate and our political leaders have failed. I do not mean just our current political leaders. David Cameron failed in many ways regarding his respect for evidence. I felt that in particular when we were dealing with European issues in the coalition Government. Tony Blair cultivated the press and refused to stand up to it when he thought that aspects of it were peddling other issues. As I say, it is not just the current Government, but when the Prime Minister fails to call out those in the European Research Group who come close to threatening violence if we do not accept a hard Brexit, she is failing in her role as a political leader. When she talks about how citizens of somewhere are much better than citizens of nowhere, she is dismissing explicitly, if one accepts David Goodhart’s terms, the educated half of the population. Incidentally, looking at the contenders to succeed her as leader, I think that Andrea Leadsom is the only one of those to have announced so far who would qualify as a citizen of somewhere rather than of nowhere, and will no doubt therefore receive the support of the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley. Jeremy Corbyn, as the leader of the Labour Party, shares in the responsibilities of political leadership. As some on his own Benches have said, he has also failed to exercise that.

The media have responsibilities, and the extent to which we have to listen to highly paid journalists who went to public school arguing that the liberal elite is refusing to recognise the will of the people, whom they understand and represent, is part of the nonsense of the situation we are now in—not to mention the calls for a more robust assertion of national sovereignty from people writing in newspapers owned by American citizens of Australian origin or British citizens who live in a tax haven in the Channel Islands. Business and finance also have responsibilities to wider society and the national community, which they fail to meet. Moreover, perhaps I may say to our two bishops present that the Church shares in the responsibility to talk about the moral dimension of markets, society and government. The Church ought to be saying that more loudly and clearly. I know that it will be sharply criticised by the media for doing so, but that is what you are there for and that is what you should be doing.

In the long run, we need political reform: restoration of local democracy, as I have talked about; devolution from Westminster back to the regions of England; and more open political recruitment and competition. Of course, that means changing the voting system; we have to remember that the referendum in 2011 was masterminded by the same team that led the Brexit campaign, and to win they promised the same nonsense about spending money on the NHS instead. Perhaps we might even consider building a semi-circular Parliament Chamber as our temporary Chamber to begin to change the atmosphere.

Lastly, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Rochester talked about a new national narrative, and I could not agree more. I spent some time on the Government’s advisory committee on the commemoration of the First World War, on which we fought a number of battles about how far we should represent this as more than just Britain beating Germany but as a wider conflict with wider responsibilities. I suggest again that we might consider a sessional committee on the teaching of national history in England. Mrs Thatcher attempted to address the question in her last year in government and intensely disliked what the committee she appointed came up with. Michael Gove is about to tackle it again. Let us do it on a non-partisan, cross-party basis and see how far we can get. There is a lot to do; our democracy is in serious crisis, and we should work together across the parties.

Elections: Online Interference

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 1st May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for that suggestion. As he will know, the Electoral Commission is independent of government, but I see no reason why it should not respond positively to the suggestion he made.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the Electoral Commission is independent of government but depends on government for its resources. Given the extent to which confidence in our electoral system and campaigning has been hit by various allegations, stories and uncertainties over where financial contributions have come from, is the Minister confident that the Electoral Commission has the resources to restore the necessary confidence in our electoral campaigns and elections at present?