Conversion Therapy Prohibition (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) Bill [HL]
Lord Harlech Excerpts(3 months, 1 week ago)
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Lord Harlech (Con)
My Lords, I think the convention of the House is for noble Lords to give way when there is an intervention.
Lord Cashman (Lab)
I say to the Government Whip that I have an advisory speaking time of five minutes. If he allows me the two minutes over that he has given to others, I will take the intervention.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)
My Lords, it is a delight to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe. I pay particular tribute to the contribution from the noble Baroness, Lady Hunt, which I found insightful and helpful. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, for introducing the Bill because it enables those of us who support a ban on attempts to supposedly cure people of their gayness to nevertheless explain why we have grave concerns about the Bill, especially as there was no pre-legislative scrutiny.
Like everyone in the House, I hope, I am certainly not anti-trans, and I am not worried about what consenting adults do in public or in private, but I am worried about children and young people, and it is about safeguarding that I want to speak. I certainly support the outlawing of conversion therapy with regard to sexual orientation, and I am respectful of trans people whose lives are greatly improved by their change in gender.
However, there are major risks affecting transgender issues in relation to young people. We are talking not about a way of life or sexual preferences but about serious, potentially life-altering medical or surgical intervention. Our former colleague Baroness Ruth Rendell campaigned against female genital mutilation and helped to introduce laws that made it an offence to send a child abroad for that procedure. I wonder what she would have thought about prescribing pills to a 16 year-old that could lead to infertility, the loss of sexual function and physical complications, without thorough advice and counselling, at an age when the decision to end the possibility of childbearing is surely too young.
I should know. Just as some people are sure from an early age that they are gay or would be happier in another gender, I always knew I would never have a child, but it took until I was 26 before a surgeon was willing to take the step beyond just taking the pill. Even then, he took me to a psychiatrist for an assessment before he actually booked an anaesthetist—and that was only to tie my tubes. I do not regret the psychiatrist, and nor do I think that was inappropriate—and I was 26 at the time, not 16.
Puberty blockers, which are given off licence because they have not been licensed for transitioning children—they are the same drug that we use for chemical castration—are wholly more significant than just tube tying, yet the Bill risks criminalising any psychiatrist, therapist, teacher, doctor, or perhaps parent or church minister who seeks to engage with that youngster and test their request to transition. Is it not a duty on any surgeon or prescribing medic to be absolutely sure that a young person really understands all the consequences of such a life-changing and irreversible medical intervention before they simply affirm and assent to the patient’s request?
There is of course an interesting question about whether the Bill covers only a discussion about whether the patient is certain they want to make a change. What about discussions the other way—the automatic gender-affirming treatments that come close to persuading someone that they want to transition? Perhaps it is those therapists who are engaging in conversion therapy, albeit directing someone to transition as a way of resolving unhappiness or dissatisfaction in their current life, or mere confusion because they are still very young. That is not neutral exploration; it is one-way advice. It says, “This is the answer to your problems”. Sometimes it is, but the idea that we criminalise discussion that explores the reason for the desire for change and checks that the young person fully understands the impact of physical change, with the possible or probable loss of childbearing and sexual function, probably before they have even enjoyed good sex, is ludicrous.
Informed consent, especially at 16, needs complete understanding. Sixteen year-olds cannot vote. They cannot have a tattoo until they are 18; they cannot marry until they are 18. While we believe that marriage—which can be undone; we have already had examples of that—cannot take place until they are 18, we seem content for a 16 year-old to risk their future without the benefit of talking therapy to ensure that they understand the risks.
My friend’s daughter started hormone treatment at 16. Within months, her voice had broken and she will now have a man’s voice for the rest of her life—from age 16. There are practitioners who are very happy to speed transition for young people—irreversible changes without parental consent. Gender Plus, for example, markets itself as follows:
“Post-assessment referral to our associated hormone clinic is available to those aged 16 years+ … Hormone clinics … will be run as a hybrid offering of in-person and virtual appointments (consent must be taken in-person)”.
It also states:
“The clinics are … nurse led, run by our Nurse Consultant who has several years experience”
with GIDS—the Tavistock. Apart from final consent, a nurse-led virtual consultation is all that is necessary for that agency for potentially life-altering, irreversible medical intervention that is likely to lead to infertility.
This unquestioning affirmative approach is not open-minded, and it is at odds with standard practice in all other clinical encounters. My fear, despite what the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, says, is that this Bill will outlaw anything other than unquestioning affirmative treatment. I could not support it in its present form.
Lord Harlech (Con)
My Lords, before the noble Earl speaks, I just want to say something to the House as gently as possible. This is a very impassioned debate and the speaking time is of course advisory, but I remind the House that there is business to come after this Bill. If we can respect the advisory time as closely as possible, I am sure that everyone would appreciate it.
Elgin Marbles
Lord Harlech Excerpts(5 months, 1 week ago)
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Lord Lexden (Con)
My Lords, the Elgin marbles—or Parthenon sculptures, as some prefer—are famous for two reasons. The first reason is of course because they are magnificent treasures of civilization, part of the heritage of our world. The second reason that they are famous is as regrettable as it is persistent. These great treasures have an almost infinite capacity to provoke heated arguments about their ownership and their location. It is almost impossible to mention them in everyday conversation without instigating a dispute on these points.
This has not always been the case. The sculptures were brought to our country between 1801 and 1812 by the 7th Earl of Elgin, about whom many unkind things are said. They were placed in the possession of the British Museum by Act of Parliament in 1816. For the next 165 years, there was scarcely a peep of protest from anyone in Greece—which had become an independent country in 1832—about their residence in one of the world’s greatest museums. During this long period, the idea that the British Museum’s possession was permanent became a settled conviction in Britain.
The peace was shattered some 40 years ago. Since then, politicians and other leading figures in Greece, a country whose friendship has always been greatly valued in Britain, have repeatedly demanded that the treasures should be installed once again on the Acropolis, from which, in the Greek view, they were illegally removed by the much-criticised Lord Elgin. No one, I think, can doubt the strength of feeling that exists in Greece. It has the power to damage and blight good relations between our two countries, particularly at official and diplomatic levels. People of good will, in both Greece and Britain, must surely seek to diminish the acrimony with which the heated and recurrent arguments, engendered by dispute over ownership and location, have invested the great and famous sculptures.
Those seeking to understand the issues more fully will be greatly assisted by a recent detailed study by one of our leading scholars, Sir Noel Malcolm, a most distinguished historian of international standing with a particular interest in the Balkans, a fellow of the British Academy and of All Souls, Oxford. Sir Noel Malcolm’s meticulous scholarly study was published earlier this year by Policy Exchange, an organisation of enormous value in promoting debate on political and public affairs. Not all scholars reach clear conclusions. Sir Noel Malcolm does so. He finds the claim that the removal of the treasures was illegal to be false. He finds the claim that Elgin saved the treasures from serious damage, dispersal and destruction to be true. The central point is this: the British Museum has full legal entitlement to the treasures which Elgin saved for posterity.
It should perhaps be noted that no Greek Government have ever sought any form of legal judgment on the question of ownership, yet the words “theft” and “robbery” are freely bandied about on the Greek side.
The absence of serious doubt on the question of legal ownership is immensely important, but it does not settle definitively an issue of this kind. I sought the view of a retired Conservative Minister, an academic philosopher well-known for his careful consideration of all sides of highly contested issues. He told me that, in his view, the Elgin marbles have a special and disproportionate importance for the Greeks which sets them apart from almost anything else that has ended up outside their mother country. Should not that view incline us to consider sympathetically the Greek demand for the transfer of the sculptures from London to Athens?
However, must not great weight also be given to the fact that, in over more than 200 years, the Elgin marbles have become part of Britain’s cultural heritage? Some assert that a mere 200 years are of no significance in a roughly 2,500-year-long history of the sculptures, but that is to ignore the important fact that these 200 years constitute the great majority of the period during which, in post-classical times, the sculptures have been seriously valued as works of art.
Professor Mary Beard, who has done so much to extend our understanding of the ancient world, has said that
“after 200 years the Elgin Marbles have a history that roots them in the British Museum as well as in Athens”.
Surely such a statement confers great merit on the suggestion, which has been given wide publicity, that some form of loan arrangement might be instituted between the British Museum and the Greek Government. Mr George Osborne, the current chairman of the British Museum trustees, has become the principal champion of that idea. He tells us, not infrequently, that he is exploring the ways in which a loan scheme might be agreed with the Greek Government, with, as he put it recently,
“Greek treasures coming our way in return”.
At present, a loan is the only basis on which any of the Elgin marbles could go to Greece. They are the property of the museum, which is prohibited by an Act of Parliament from selling them or giving them to anyone else. A loan would be wholly compatible with the British Museum Act 1963, which states:
“The Trustees of the British museum may lend for public exhibition”.
It is a power that the trustees have not in the past been reluctant to use. The 1963 Act goes on to state that
“in deciding whether or not to lend any such object, and in determining the time for which, and the conditions subject to which, any such objects is to be lent, the Trustees shall have regard to the interests of students and other persons visiting the Museum”.
This surely rules out open-ended and potentially permanent arrangements.
There is another crucial issue. In any agreement with Greece, the museum would need to be certain that it will get its property back. The current policy on loans makes clear:
“The Trustees of the British Museum will lend only in circumstances when the perceived risk to the object is considered reasonable and when the borrower guarantees that the object will be returned to the Museum at the end of the loan period”.
If proposals for a loan, the subject of this debate, are to succeed, two essential preconditions would surely have to be met. First, the Greek Government would need to give a binding, legally enforceable commitment to restore the sculptures to their owner at the end of the loan period. Secondly, the length of the loan period would need to be firmly established. On the latter, various possibilities have been mentioned, ranging, I think, from five to 15 years. Can my noble friend the Minister say whether the Government have a view on the maximum time the sculptures should be on loan from the British Museum? Would the Government seek to ensure that a loan agreement fully respected the British Museum’s ownership of the Elgin marbles?
Would it not be wholly wrong, in seeking an agreement with Greece, to jeopardise the interests of the British people? Although the British Museum may have its difficulties at present, which will keep Mr Osborne busy, it has never failed in its duty to hold the Elgin marbles securely, in its own words,
“for the benefit of the world public, present and future”.
Lord Harlech (Con)
My Lords, for the benefit of the House I tell noble Lords that two noble Lords have given notice that they wish to speak in the gap. It is an incredibly tight debate and I am sure we want to hear from everyone and the Minister’s reply in full, so I implore all noble Lords to stick to the speaking time.