"My Lords, finally we have the Gray report. The country owes Sue Gray a tremendous debt of gratitude for undertaking her task fearlessly and thoroughly. It was typically dishonourable of the Prime Minister to try and persuade her at the 11th hour not to publish it at all, and typically …..." Lord Newby - View Speech
"My Lords, it is a great pleasure to be able to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury, on his speech this afternoon. I first met the noble Lord over 30 years ago when he and the late Lord Bell were trying with mixed success to persuade my then …..." Lord Newby - View Speech
"My Lords, when we debated this issue on Tuesday and President Putin’s intentions were already pretty clear, I doubt that we fully comprehended the scale and ruthlessness of what he had in mind. Now we have no such doubts. By his own words, we know that he wants the demilitarisation …..." Lord Newby - View Speech
"My Lords, I begin where the Prime Minister concludes his Statement:
“We do not need laws”,
he says,
“to compel people to be considerate of others. We can rely on that sense of responsibility towards one another”.—[Official Report, Commons, 21/2/22; col. 45.]
"My Lords, this has been a very sombre 24 hours. President Putin yesterday set out his view that Ukraine had no legitimacy as a state, and said he was sending so-called peacekeepers—in reality an invading army—into Donetsk and Luhansk. Today, and even since the Prime Minister made his Statement, he …..." Lord Newby - View Speech
"My Lords, I suspect that the noble Baroness the Leader of the House can never have been so uncomfortable in repeating a Statement by the Prime Minister as when she read out the Statement today—because it is truly abject. It relates to 16 gatherings in Downing Street at a time …..." Lord Newby - View Speech
"My Lords, as the Statement makes clear, the situation in Ukraine is now extremely perilous. The precise intentions of Russia are unclear, but if it were to launch a major invasion, as the Statement makes clear, the consequences would be horrendous. The Prime Minister set out the three strands of …..." Lord Newby - View Speech
"My Lords, we obviously share the relief being felt across the whole country that the peak of the omicron wave seems now to have passed. However, Covid is not over. Yesterday, the ONS reported that one in 20 people in England caught Covid last week and government-reported cases still number …..." Lord Newby - View Speech
"My Lords, I begin by expressing my support for the extraordinary work being done by NHS staff and all those—including pharmacies and volunteers—who are helping to make the booster programme such a success.
The decision to scrap the requirement for a PCR test following a positive lateral flow test clearly …..." Lord Newby - View Speech