Nature’s Rights Bill [HL]

Lord Winston Excerpts

Friday 3rd July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in the gap. I congratulate the noble Baroness on introducing this interesting debate. I hope the Bill goes to Committee where I am going to have some serious objections to it, but we will come to that in due course.

We have to accept that, if nature has rights, it is difficult to see how they can be enforced. If nature has rights, how do those rights become protected? If there is a conflict, who resolves that conflict? Is it merely lawyers? Because there will be different issues. We have to understand that the definition in the Bill of nature and of those rights is extremely difficult. They would need a great deal of disentangling if we did that.

This is the case even with medicine, and here I agree completely with the noble Lord, Lord Frost. One of the issues is that these things are so difficult to disentangle and very difficult to define. If we look at Aquinas on the history of the embryo, for example, even he had difficulty. He had to define the notion of life and whether in fact the embryo was alive. He decided that it might be once it had an anima, but maybe not while it merely had flesh. That was one of the issues with Chara.

I would argue that, ultimately, if we are really going to look at this, we have to recognise that even the conflicts in medicine are massive. The biggest single cause of death in humans worldwide is bacterial organisms. At what stage do we deal with this and how can we possibly do it in terms of natural justice?