Gaza Humanitarian Foundation

Baroness Deech Excerpts

Tuesday 13th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

At the moment, it is an idea. We have seen no evidence that it will go forward. However, the noble Lord is right that humanitarian principles of delivering aid must be consistent across every area in which that aid is being delivered. Today, we are convening the UN Security Council in New York—it is probably meeting now—to look at what can be done to deal with the appalling humanitarian situation in Gaza.

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, the simple, straightforward solution is for the hostages to be released. We can see with our own eyes that the hostages are among the least well-fed people in Gaza. Why are the Government always so quick to believe Hamas and United Nations organisations? Why do they not share the widespread scepticism about Hamas, which is stockpiling the aid and preventing lorries going in? Why do they not note how UNRWA has been infiltrated by Hamas?

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

I hope that the noble Baroness heard one of my first comments, which was about the priority of getting the hostages out and released. Recently, Eli Sharabi was released; he was a shadow of his former self. There is a lot of suffering—by the hostages who have been kidnapped, the families of those who were killed on 7 October and the people of Gaza. The crucial thing is to get the aid in and the hostages out. Only if there is a ceasefire can we then talk about the future and see what else can be done for a long-standing peace.

Middle East Update

Baroness Deech Excerpts

Wednesday 7th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

I am afraid I cannot give my noble friend an up-to-date report but, as she knows, I have worked with a number of noble friends and across the House to ensure that community-building efforts that have been incredibly successful, particularly in terms of developing youth employment and developing enterprises, all help contribute to building that peaceful coexistence. But unless we address that fundamental issue about the situation in Gaza, we will be unable to make the sort of progress that she and I both desire.

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, it is a sad coincidence that this Statement is followed by one on India-Pakistan. Both situations are ones where this country was responsible for dividing land in a way that was unsuitable and crude, which has led to trouble ever since, and to migration and displacement.

As far as recognition of Palestine goes, I am afraid that India-Pakistan is a sad instance of how recognition does not solve a historic, millennia-old division between two peoples. I do not have a solution, but I will say this: over 100 other countries already recognise Palestine; it has made no difference whatever. I do not know why, but it does not make a difference because, as the noble Baroness, Lady Berger, said, it takes more than that. If there is to be recognition and peace, it has to start with education, of the Palestinian population in particular. UNRWA teaches children to hate. It teaches them that one day they will return and overrun Israel. Until the Palestinians accept history—that there is no going back and no right of return—no amount of recognition, especially coming from this country with its particular responsibility, will help. I call on the Minister to dial down the temperature by talking about peaceful education and by not always challenging Israel on everything it says, in particular in relation to the figures of casualties, where Hamas’s word is always taken and Israel’s is not.

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

I have written to the noble Baroness on a couple of occasions in response to the Written Questions she has asked on the casualty numbers. I hear what she says, but I think everyone in this Chamber understands that there have been huge casualties and there is certainly a humanitarian crisis. But I also agree with her. I think noble Lords will appreciate that I have been very committed to supporting the existence of the State of Israel for many years. I remain of that view, but for me, the State of Israel’s security is best supported through an arrangement where we see two states living side by side. We have divided communities now. My noble friend Lady Berger is also committed to a two-state solution; that is the way forward. She is also right that we need to ensure that we can take action to build that community cohesion and support, and education is certainly vital to that. Sadly, at the moment the people and children of Gaza are not getting any education at all.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Baroness Deech Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 25th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to support my noble friend on Amendments 91 and 94 and to extend them a bit. Titles are not trivial. I have been involved in this in a certain way, which I am coming to, for more than 10 years. Titles are property and they go back to feudal times. We cannot have two laws, one of total equality for people outside this House and another for those who are affected by the ability to sit and be addressed in this House. We all take a rather shallow course called Valuing Everyone; let us start, indeed, by valuing everyone.

This is what I want to move on to: I speak for hundreds of Dames who have husbands and dozens of noble Baronesses who have spouses. It is not a trivial matter that our spouses do not share our titles, whereas it works the other way around. I was in correspondence with Buckingham Palace about this a long time ago, having tried in this House. The Palace told me it was a matter of property and a very serious matter, and that only if Parliament willed it could titles be changed so there would be equality.

So, once more, I put in a plea. If someone is a Lord, of course their wife is a Lady, though I wonder why; it certainly ought to work the other way round if that is how it is. Likewise for Dames, because we cannot exempt ourselves from the equality that applies outside and not apply it in this House. Unfortunately, the last time I tried, I was undermined by the late, lamented Lady Trumpington, who told the House that, when she and her husband, whose name was Dr Barker, checked in to a hotel together, it gave them a frisson.

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

This brought the House down—as it has done again today—and I lost my point. But it is a serious one: if we are going to share titles, although I am not sure that we should, it should work both ways.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, what a pleasure it is to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, and, indeed, one half of our Green Party. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, and I have known each other since we met on the slopes of Mount Sinai nearly 40 years ago. She knows how fond I am of her—she supplies my family with her lovely homemade jam—but, as always, I completely disagree.

She cared very much about the gendered amendments but not about the name of the House; I am exactly the other way around. It seems to me utterly bizarre that the Government should have a view on succession to titles. I get the argument of republicanism and I get that it is an irrational thing to have younger brothers inheriting before older sisters. But it is equally irrational to have a prejudice in favour of first-born children rather than younger children. In fact, the whole thing is irrational and cannot be justified wholly on logical grounds. If you start pulling at that thread, you very quickly end up with a French Revolution-style abolition of the entire shebang. If we want to do that, fine, but the idea that you can keep the titles but apply a Guardian public sector equality test to them seems to me extremely strange.

I speak in support of Amendment 97, standing in my name and that of the noble Earl, Lord Devon. I think I said at Second Reading that even the architecture of this Chamber is a link back to the old House of Lords: that it was in the minds of Pugin and Barry to recreate the idea of a throne room and a monarch taking the counsel of his bishops and barons. There is, I think, a thread in the make-up of this House that connects us back, certainly to the earliest House of Lords in the reign of Edward III and probably to the Magnum Concilium of which the noble Earl spoke; or, before that, even to the pre-Conquest witans—I think a Saxon king taking the counsel of his thanes and aldermen would have been doing something not unrecognisable to a Chamber that contains a partly hereditary element.

That thread is being snapped; the link is being sundered. It is being sheared in two, as the Fates were said to do with the thread of a man’s life, and we are being cut off from a part of our history and our constitutional inheritance. I am Tory enough to regret that, but I am Whig enough to recognise that there is something irrational about having an inherited element of a legislature. I wish we were replacing it with something better, as was originally the deal promised in 1998, but we have lost that argument and it is an argument for a different time.

I come back to the bizarre anomaly of having a House of Lords that does not contain any “lords”—as the word would have been understood for the previous 1,000 years. That seems a case of having our cake and eating it. If there are no lords of the traditional, recognised, aristocratic variety then by what virtue and on what basis do we continue to appropriate the name?

This question has been faced before. During the Cromwellian interregnum, the Lord Protector was always trying to bring the old aristocracy back into government. He wanted to sustain the legitimacy of his rule by returning to bicameralism. His problem was that none of the lords would agree to serve. If memory serves, there was one—the sixth Baron Eure, who was a parliamentary soldier who inherited his title when the fifth Baron Eure, who was a distant cousin of his and a royalist soldier, was killed on the battlefield at Marston Moor. He was the only lord, in the old sense, to serve in what came to be known, with spectacular banality, as the “other House”—hence the convention of how the two Chambers refer to one another that we have to this day.

If you do not have any lords, in the Cromwellian sense, do you not face exactly the same dilemma? We can probably do better than “the other House” as a title—we could call ourselves a senate—but it seems utterly extraordinary that we should pretend to the authority and legitimacy that comes from this very old institution when we have deliberately, and in contravention of promises made at the ballot box, torn that thread in two.

I would like an answer to this when Ministers come to respond. Let us please hear their defence of titles.

Israel and Palestine

Baroness Deech Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for that question. We are continuing to work with Israel, the Palestinian Authority, the US and regional partners to build consensus on a post-conflict Gaza governance and security framework that supports the conditions, as he rightly said, for a permanent and sustainable peace. We have given the PA two posts to help support its work on this, and we will look towards doing even more as we move through the stages of the ceasefire agreement.

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, has the Minister read the wise words of the noble Lord, Lord Finkelstein, in this morning’s Times, where he points out that the time has come for the Palestinians to behave like all the millions or trillions of people displaced since the Second World War with the creation of new states? Does the Minister agree that the problem is UNRWA? The Arabs have to accept the existence of Israel and UNRWA must resettle refugees. It must get them settled in the countries in which they are living and make sure that they have full civil rights, so that their children grow up not to hate but to make a new life and take new opportunities in the countries where they are living, like all other refugees around the world.

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

I hear what the noble Baroness says, but, of course, many Palestinians are living in occupied territory. We want to ensure, through the peace process that has been agreed, that we work with all sides to bring them towards a consensus that will ensure the safety and security of Israel, as well as the safety and security of a Palestinian state. We must work towards that, and this agreement provides the basis to do so.

Anniversary of 7 October Attacks: Middle East

Baroness Deech Excerpts

Tuesday 8th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

I am a great admirer and fan of the BBC World Service and the soft power that it has exercised across the world for many years has been great. It was a great shame that the World Service was rolled up into the last funding settlement that was undertaken for the BBC. We are concerned about that and looking at it. I do not make any commitments to the noble Lord, but we certainly share his concern. That the vacuum has been filled by a Russian player adds to the concern that I would have. I also agree with him that it is important to have independent voices who are respected in the region.

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, the Minister’s words are much appreciated, but does she agree with me that the hatred that has come about since 7 October, which has been widely commented on around the House, has to some extent been fed by the BBC? There have recently been two independent reports, one of which I co-signed, which pointed out in great detail mistakes and bias on the part of the BBC. There have been the most appalling statements on the BBC Arabic World Service by people who hate Israel. Does the Minister agree that it is time for an inquiry into the BBC’s coverage? For example, Jeremy Bowen casually reported that Israel had bombed a hospital. This soon turned out to be untrue, but that statement, which he never went back on, gave rise to more slaughter and hatred. It is time for an inquiry into the BBC’s impartiality on this issue.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

The noble Baroness will understand that I am not going to accede to her request for an inquiry, but I think that all news outlets have a duty and responsibility to the truth. One thing I have found difficult in the coverage of this conflict is its focus on the destruction and hurt that have happened; I would like to see some balance around the political efforts to reach a solution as well. That would help people to understand what the conflict is about. I think that many people watching the TV news are obviously horrified, upset and distraught by what they see, but there is no great understanding of the background to it and why things are happening. All news outlets have a duty and a responsibility to ensure that their reporting is accurate.

House of Lords: Composition

Baroness Deech Excerpts

Thursday 5th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

The noble Lord is being a little patronising in saying that I do not understand constitutional issues. I will be happy to reach consensus, where it is possible. As the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, said, a quarter of a century ago there was eventually a consensus that transitional arrangements would be made for the remaining hereditary Peers.

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

Would the Minister use this opportunity to end another long-standing anomaly whereby the wives of Lords and Barons have the title “Lady”, which confuses them with those who have earned the title? This should end, or change so that our husbands, or the partners of women Peers, also get some sort of honorific title.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

I think there are mixed views across the House about this issue—I have to say that Mr Smith might not appreciate having a title. It does seem an anomaly, although not one that overly concerns the House. However, I note the noble Baroness’s comments.