Nature’s Rights Bill [HL]

Lord Lebedev Excerpts

Friday 3rd July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lebedev (CB)]

My Lords, this Bill addresses one of the greatest crises of our times: the ravaging of nature and the destruction of the environment on which we depend and of which we are an inseparable part. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, on her good fortune in coming second in the Private Members’ Bill ballot and using that opportunity to bring forward this Bill. I lend my voice in support of her.

The noble Baroness has made the case for the Bill with admirable clarity and passion. She is right to remind us in this House of the scale and speed with which the natural world is being destroyed. With deforestation, loss of habitats, the hunting of endangered species for gain, unsustainable farming practices, the ruthless race for rare earths, the rapacious approach that so many nations take to mineral extraction, and the accumulation of plastics and other waste in our rivers and seas, mankind is, in so many ways, laying waste to the planet which is our only home and demonstrating a reckless disregard for its creations, of which we are only one part.

This global phenomenon is sadly all too apparent in our poor stewardship and disdainful lack of care for nature in these islands. The UK is one of the most depleted nations in the world. Valuable habitats have been lost to unsustainable development. Our rivers continue to be polluted by poorly regulated water companies and inadequately supported farmers.

The sanctity and preservation of nature is a deeply personal cause for me. My grandfather, Professor Vladimir Sokolov, was a pioneering zoologist and ecologist and a member of the Brundtland Commission, which helped to define our modern understanding of sustainable development. As a boy, I travelled with him to Africa and across the old Soviet Union, inspired by his tireless work to protect nature. I have tried in my own small way to carry on that work by campaigning against the illegal wildlife trade and supporting indigenous communities to protect their way of life and the precious environments on which they and the species they live alongside depend. I am particularly moved by the efforts I have been proud to support to safeguard African elephants and other megafauna, but, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, reminds us all, nature demands our care and requires our protection.

I know that some aspects of the Bill and the expansive legal and regulatory protection it envisages will not be to the taste of many of your Lordships, but no one has been clearer about their wish that this Bill be improved through debate and dialogue than the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett. Working with civil society, she has made clear that we need a broader conversation about precisely the measures we need to implement to recognise the interdependence between our species’ fate and that of others.

What cannot be in doubt is the need for greater urgency and action. The Government and their predecessors have taken some important steps, such as moving away from the wasteful system of subsidy we had in the common agricultural policy and providing public money for public goods such as carbon sinks and enhanced habitats. The 25-year environment plan, with its targets for habitat reclamation, the creation of marine protected areas and the establishment of the Office for Environmental Protection, is a welcome move forward, but the public expect us to go further. I am sure your Lordships are familiar with the work of the gifted nature writer Robert Macfarlane. His latest book Is a River Alive? is a runaway Sunday Times bestseller, its popularity speaking to the new clamour for us all to recognise what we owe nature. We need to recast the language of rights and duties to arrest and transcend the destruction of the natural world. This Bill will help us do just that, and I am pleased to be able to support it at its Second Reading.

Online Communication Offence Arrests

Lord Lebedev Excerpts

Thursday 17th July 2025 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Lord Lebedev]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what estimate they have made of the number of people arrested daily for non-threatening, online communication offences, and what assessment they have made of the implications of such arrests for freedom of speech.

[Lord Lebedev (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful to have the opportunity to discuss the question of free speech this afternoon and look forward to hearing from the Minister in due course. I know how seriously he takes concerns that have been expressed across parties in this House and the other place, and I hope that we can find consensus.

Free speech is the foundational freedom, the freedom on which all our liberties depend. We recognise that parliamentarians in both Houses cannot do their jobs of checking abuses of power and upholding freedoms without having their right to free speech protected, and parliamentary privilege has long existed to defend just that right. But free speech—the ability to provoke, challenge, argue and dissent—should not be a privilege extended to a few; it is the essential right of all citizens. There is no cause so noble, no argument so sound, that it does not deserve to be challenged. Beliefs we now regard as antique, ridiculous or pernicious were once orthodoxies, which were overturned only because dissident voices challenged them. Restricting the vote solely to men who held property, maintaining a legal ban on homosexual acts and believing that prices and incomes should be controlled by legislation are all now seen as past follies. All were once the present wisdom, all discarded only because of brave dissidents.

For me, the word “dissident” has a special resonance. I grew up in Soviet Russia, a regime in which expressing the wrong opinion led to imprisonment. A famous house on Granovsky Street, where I grew up, had once been home to the likes of Khrushchev, Molotov and Trotsky. During my childhood, the presence of secret policemen, there ostensibly to protect us, was a constant reminder that a word out of place could mean cancellation in its most brutal form. In that environment of oppression, I came to admire those who were the dissidents, who spoke out so that others might live free—the Sakharovs, Brodskys and Solzhenitsyns. I have sought to honour their memory in my work as a media proprietor, always seeking to champion voices that challenge. Sadly, today, my motherland is not much better.

Comparisons with the Soviet era may seem overwrought to some. In the England of my boyhood, they would certainly have been misplaced. But consider this: in November last year a journalist, Allison Pearson, had the police at her door for a single tweet. In January this year, two parents were arrested by eight officers and detained in a cell for six hours for private messages on a WhatsApp group. In May this year, the heroic human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell was arrested for displaying a placard criticising the terrorist organisation Hamas. Last month, the Turkish human rights campaigner Hamit Coskun was found guilty of a criminal offence in court for burning a Koran. This month there have been reports of a police investigation into what a musical act at Glastonbury said on stage, and also calls from elected representatives for the arrest of a columnist, Rod Liddle, for what he said about that music festival. These are all examples of criminal justice, the system that is there to defend our freedoms, being deployed to investigate, intimidate and punish those with dissident positions.

You do not need to admire any of the people I mentioned above to find this deeply concerning. You can think them rude, mistaken or offensive, but the right to free speech means nothing if it does not mean the right to offend. I dislike the symbolism and reality of book burning but, to make a man a criminal—to find him guilty of the crime of racially or religiously aggravated hatred—for the expression of an opinion is to bring back blasphemy laws by the back door. I find calls from a public stage for soldiers to die sickening but, once we start telling artists what they can and cannot say—no matter how offensive it is—we strangle art in its cradle.

The tendency to police—literally—what people are saying has been encouraged and enabled by not just this Government but their predecessors. The Malicious Communications Act 1988 and the Communications Act 2003, specifically Sections 1 and 127, give the police the power to arrest individuals for what they say online. On average, 30 people are arrested daily. In 2014, under the coalition Government, something called non-crime hate incidents were introduced—words uttered that are not yet criminal in themselves but which the police should officially record none the less and hold against people. Since 2014, more than 133,000 such incidents have been recorded; that is more than 13,000 each year. Some of those who have had their names recorded in police files are children whose words were taken down when they were below the age of criminal responsibility and may be held against them for the rest of their lives. The innocence of youth has been replaced with the presumption of guilt.

The think tank Policy Exchange has estimated that investigating these incidents has taken up to 666,000 hours of police time. Every hour devoted to policing speech is an hour not spent investigating phone theft, shoplifting, burglary or assault. When this is juxtaposed with 90% of all crime going unsolved in 2023 and 89% of violent or sexual offences going unsolved in 2024, it is hard to conceive of a worse waste of police time. It is perhaps no surprise that Britain’s most effective police chief— Sir Stephen Watson, the chief constable of Greater Manchester—has stated that this policy is now “past its sell-by date”. He knows that Manchester is safer when his officers are chasing violent muggers rather than egregious tweeters. Sir Stephen enjoys the support of Manchester’s Labour mayor, the commonsensical Andy Burnham. I hope the Minister will follow his lead.

I had hoped that this Government, with a Prime Minister and an Attorney-General who are distinguished human rights lawyers who have represented unfashionable causes and unpopular defendants, would understand how important it is to allow dissent. But there has been no move to get rid of non-crime hate incidents and no clear message in defence of free expression. Indeed, as this House learned only last week, former Attorney-General Dominic Grieve has been asked by this Government to further restrict free speech by introducing a new definition of Islamophobia, designed to punish those who dare to question certain beliefs. What impact does the Minister believe Government-sanctioned restrictions on free speech, on Islamophobia grounds, would have had on reporting into the grooming gangs scandals? Would it have made the work of brave reporters such as Andrew Norfolk on uncovering the Rotherham scandal easier or more difficult? I think we know the answer.

I hope the Minister will give those of us who wish him well reason to believe that Labour—the party of George Orwell, Michael Foot and Tessa Jowell—still understands how precious free expression is and how important it is that we defend it.