EU Council

Lord Flight Excerpts

Monday 28th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Flight (Con)]

My Lords, I cannot entirely agree with the comment of the noble Lord, Lord Davies, that Sub-Committee A was of the view that the UK would suffer if it did not join the banking union. The point was surely that the body to which the ECB is accountable has a voting structure and if virtually all EU members did end up joining the banking union, theoretically it would then be possible for it to tell the UK what to do. In the negotiations over the banking union this country should ensure that the independence of banking policy is safe.

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

I completely understand the points that my noble friend makes. Those are very alive in the minds of our Ministers and officials negotiating this because they are keen to safeguard the position that my noble friend sets out very clearly.

Death of a Member: Baroness Thatcher

Lord Flight Excerpts

Wednesday 10th April 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Flight]

My Lords, I pay tribute to Margaret Thatcher, who I believe was easily the greatest Briton of my adult lifetime. I will refer to six particular points, some of which have been touched upon by others. First, something which has struck me strongly has been the enormous loyalty, devotion and affection felt towards Lady Thatcher by all those who have worked for her, including the police who were responsible for her safety, and which she very much reciprocated. She was in many ways such a warm person, quite the opposite of her public image.

The second point, which is related to that, as many noble Lords pointed out earlier, is that she was a person of great kindness, compassion and modesty. Ahead of every general election she would pack her bags at No. 10 because she by no means took it for granted that she would win an election, even if she was ahead in the polls.

For millions of British people from all walks of life, men and women, she was their heroine. So many people who met her have said to me, “That was the highlight of my life”. They realised greatness when they were in its presence.

Fourthly, and again, this is a point that was made by others but which comes out so strongly, she was someone of great integrity, honesty and principle, and she had a strong sense of duty both in national politics and in her own private life. She was also the key champion of personal aspiration and of equality of opportunity, and this was not only about enabling people to own their own houses, but about enabling them to start their own businesses and buy shares. She was the person who very much got rid of damaging old-fashioned class loyalties and turned a majority of this country into the broad, non-offensive label of middle class. What she achieved has led to that.

She was also the architect not just of our turning round the British economy after the problems of the 1970s but of a business revolution. I will give some brief quotes from leading businessmen, by no means all members of the Conservative Party. The noble Lord, Lord Browne, formerly of BP, said that she,

“breathed life into free enterprise”.

The noble Lord, Lord Sugar, said that she created the,

“opportunity for anyone to succeed in the UK”.

Sir Richard Branson said that she,

“understood what was needed to make business thrive and to turn the country into a country of entrepreneurs”.

Many people forget that before her time even the terms venture capital and entrepreneur hardly existed in the English language, and certainly there was very little of it in practice. So much of what has been a success story in this country since then has been the growth of small businesses and new businesses, employing more than 13 million people. I cite, although it is perhaps a little specialist, the Cambridge cluster that has come up: 629 businesses with a turnover of more than £11 billion, employing 53,000 people, and in the key new areas of IT and technology, life science and physical sciences. Lady Thatcher would have been proud of that, and she would have seen that it promised a promising economic future for this country. Certainly, in the first 20 years of my own life, we never even thought about the ability to be entrepreneurs and to get new businesses up and running.

I was privileged to have got to know Lady Thatcher a little after she became Prime Minister, and the more I knew her the more I admired her. I echo the comments of others, even in the latter parts of her life, as regards her beauty, and those amazing eyes. I often think warmly of when I put her into her car after events which I had attended. If she had had a good conversation, particularly with young people, she showed even then how much she had enjoyed her evening.

I end by also conveying my condolences to her family. The loss of a mother, no matter who she is or at what age, is always harrowing and I think of the country as a whole which has lost, I repeat, its greatest figure in my lifetime.

Public Disorder

Lord Flight Excerpts

Thursday 11th August 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Browne of Ladyton]

My Lords, the Government are right to have recognised that gangs and gang culture lay at the heart of some of the worst violence that we have seen on the streets of our cities over the last few days. They are also right to appreciate that lessons can be learned from the Community Initiative to Reduce Violence, the gangs initiative in the east end of Glasgow that has been running since 2008, led by Detective Chief Superintendent John Carnochan and his deputy Karyn McCluskey. Both of them could be here in London much quicker than Bill Bratton could be—unless, of course, he is here for another purpose.

However, the Minister should recognise that that initiative, successful as it has been, is part of a wider initiative in Scotland known as the Violence Reduction Unit. It was born in Strathclyde Police and grew into a national unit between 2005 and 2006, and addresses many of the issues that noble Lords have raised in their interventions already, particularly the last one about early intervention with young people in our communities. I ask the Minister to not just take part of that broader package south, or across the United Kingdom, but to look at the whole package and see what can be learned from the Violence Reduction Unit.

[Lord Flight]

My Lords, all the circumstantial evidence is that these riots did not just appear spontaneously. What evidence is there to date, if any, that there was a fair degree of central organisation, if not orchestration, even down to the use of Sun Tzu tactics in riots? This required people to understand what those were about and how to use them. So my question simply is: what, if any, evidence is there of central organisation?

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, like the most reverend Primate—and, I think, the House—I find the prevalence of children as young as seven and eight in these events deeply shocking. I agree with the most reverend Primate that issues to do with education—education for citizenship, education for virtue—are vital, as is early intervention. However, some very pressing and urgent questions need to be asked in respect of schools. Many schools have attached police officers. Many schools in the communities that have seen disturbances over the last week will be in a very fragile state at the beginning of term. Can the Minister confirm that every secondary school that wishes to have an attached police officer in any of the communities in question will have access to them, and that funding constraints will not be an obstacle to that?

Secondly, I expect we will find that most of the young people involved either have been excluded from school at some point or indeed may not even be attending school at all. On any one day in the school year, 1,000 pupils are excluded from school, many of them for acts of violence and serious disturbance. One of the issues that has to be looked at, coming out of these events, is the whole way that we deal with pupils excluded from school. They need to be properly supervised; they need to be properly organised; there needs to be some inspiration in the provision for them. I also believe that that should be a punitive element for those who are excluded from school in respect of acts of violence. The underclass that we have talked about this afternoon begins, alas, in our schools. Unless we tackle it in our schools we will never tackle it at all.