EU: Scottish Independence

Lord Soley Excerpts

Wednesday 28th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

That is a question that Her Majesty’s Government have not entirely considered yet, since we have every confidence that when it comes to a referendum the people of Scotland will vote to stay in the United Kingdom. The question of the rebate and of the United Kingdom’s financial contribution is, as Members may have noted, itself under negotiation.

[Lord Soley]

My Lords, do the Government also realise that it is not just Spain that is concerned about the break-up of the country, but a whole range of other countries, including France with regard to Corsica? Automatic admission as the consequence of the disintegration of an individual state would not be looked at happily by the European Union. My noble friend Lady Liddell made a very important point when she spoke about the importance of informing the Scottish electorate of the consequences of a division that might not be recognised by the European Union and also, if it was recognised, could still result in major differences in what it opted out of, in the way that the noble Lord, Lord Steel, mentioned. It is a profoundly important issue, not just for the rest of the United Kingdom but for the Scottish people.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I can confirm all of that. It is a recognised, long established principle of public international law that when a part of a state secedes it inherits obligations under treaties but it has to apply to join international organisations. When the Soviet Union broke up, that applied to Ukraine, Belarus and others. When India broke up, it applied to Pakistan and then to Bangladesh, so this is a well established principle.

House of Lords (Cessation of Membership) Bill [HL]

Lord Soley Excerpts

Friday 29th June 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley]

My Lords, I will not be quite as brief as the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, but I shall do my best to limit my speech. I anticipated the noble Lord, Lord Steel, this morning: I came in thinking that he would not want a debate on the main Bill that we all saw the other day and the phrase on my lips was from the famous Monty Python sketch, “Don’t mention the war”. However, I shall mention it once and hope that I get away with it.

The noble Lord, Lord Steel, is taking the right approach to reform of the House of Lords. We will achieve far more than we would by bringing in huge Bills that, at the end of day, would cause more problems than they solve. When I have conversations with my colleagues in the Labour Party, we mention from time to time that we have promised for 100 years to either get rid of the House of Lords or reform it. When I am asked why we have not done so, I answer that you might know what you are against but, if there is a great deal of disagreement about what you are in favour of, it is very difficult to deliver it—and that has been the experience. We all remember, or at least know of, the way in which Enoch Powell and Michael Foot led their campaign, which is a classic example of not moving forward. Without mentioning the war for too long, it is a fatal approach if you do not work out clearly what you want the second Chamber to do, otherwise you will not get the rest of your questions right. If the answer to the question, “What do you want to do?”, is that you want this House to continue to scrutinise, as it does now, that would raise the questions of, “Why is it that the House of Commons cannot scrutinise better?”—I say that as an ex-MP with a great deal of knowledge of the subject—and, “Why is it that legislation reaches this place in such a terrible state anyway?”. It is an important point. Noble Lords will be pleased to know that that is the end of the war.

The noble Lord, Lord Steel, is taking the right approach, although we ought to consider doing this in other ways as well. There is a lot to be said for allowing a Member to decide when he or she wants to retire. It is not a good idea in any job to allow people to drift; to come in occasionally, less and less, and act as though they are retiring slowly. It does not make sense for the individual either. When I decide to go, I would like to make a clean break and retire. That would make much more sense because you would enter another phase of your life and move on. That is important. I think some of my colleagues here feel the same and would say, “When I decide to go, I want to go”. The advantages of this have been made clear.

My noble friend Lord Wills made a point about the expulsion issue. I am not sure, bearing in mind recent history in this House, that we will solve this problem until we have a clear procedure on how we deal with breaches within the House that fits with the rule of law generally and the way in which the courts are likely to interpret it. It is a difficult area. Although I do not dissent from Clause 3(5), it refers only to events outside the United Kingdom. We have either to remove those two words or leave them in and address the bigger issue in the way that I have described.

I turn now to a more contentious issue. I greatly enjoyed the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, and I agree with his comments about Nick Clegg and other MPs of all parties who slag off the House of Lords; they find it a cheap and easy line. That, though, is a terrible mistake; as the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, pointed out, it would be easy to reverse that and throw it back at them. However, we would get involved in a slanging match, and that does not make sense.

One of our problems—and this is the contentious part—is the name of this place. “The House of Lords” is increasingly seen as a very old-fashioned 17th, 18th or 19th-century name, and we have a problem with it. I remember one of my colleagues in the Parliamentary Labour Party, quite a few years ago, saying to me that his answer to the House of Lords was, “One Peer for every lamppost”. It is that kind of thinking that enables people to make insults about one place or the other. It also enables the general public to say, “Oh well, they are all the same”. They see a photograph in the paper—it is always the same photograph—of Peers sitting in their robes as though that is the way we are every day of the week.

At some stage we will need to address the name in order to convey to people what our job is and that we are part of the legislative system but we do not pass laws. This is one of the problems about the election issue. We advise, revise and recommend but we do not legislate. At the end of the day, we cannot force through legislation; only the House of Commons can do that. It is an important point.

If we support Bills of this nature and introduce others along the same lines, we might achieve far more reform of this place and win a great deal of public support. The Bill that the Government have brought forward will, quite frankly, confuse the debate and the war will continue.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Soley Excerpts

Monday 14th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I will return to those speeches that I have read. I admit that I have never taken the MA in legislative studies at the University of Hull, but I referred back to my views. This House is clearly part of the legislature; this is a two-Chamber legislature.

[Lord Soley]

Really, the Minister cannot get away with that. The issue is that we cannot legislate because the House of Commons can always overthrow what we do. The Minister spoke about the Queen in Parliament. He should remember that she, as part of it, also cannot legislate. The House of Commons overrides at the end of the day and decides what the law is. We can advise; we can recommend; we can revise; but we cannot legislate in a direct sense.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

In which event, the primacy of the House of Commons is in very safe hands.

Remembrance Day

Lord Soley Excerpts

Thursday 10th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley]

My Lords, it is a delight to follow the noble Lord, Lord James. He is absolutely right. We have discussed this at some length and I will touch on that in a moment. One thing that I would add, and what is often forgotten about the loss of life, is that in that campaign more than 200,000 slaves were released and often taken back to Africa when possible. So it is a far more important campaign than people realise.

I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Selkirk, and thank him for the help he has given me on the Arctic convoys, which I will talk about in a moment. What I really want to mention are memorials. We think of them as remembering individuals, as they do and should. However, they are also—this is where my views have changed, or developed, over the past 20 or 30 years—an educational process. They teach us about our history—not just the history of Britain but of the world. I will return to that in a moment. It has been touched on to some extent by others.

I want to mention the Arctic convoys because I frequently go to the west coast of Scotland. I have always known about the Arctic convoys and the dreadful conditions in which sailors from both the Merchant Navy and the Royal Navy served. Not only were there constant air and naval attacks on them, but if the ice built up to a certain extent on merchant ships they simply turned over. If your ship turned over in that sea, you would die very quickly. I said that there ought to be a museum since there was not one and many people thought that there should be. I was proud to attend recently the 70th anniversary of the Arctic convoys at Loch Ewe on the west coast. I was delighted to learn that people were now trying to fund a convoy museum. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lee, and my noble friend Lord West, who have both indicated that they will in some way assist, if only in publicity or by lending their names to this group.

Jock Dempster, who is one of the veterans and chairman of the Russian Arctic Convoy Club, was presented with a medal by the Russians who were present. Americans and Canadians were present, as were some of our own people. However, there was very little recognition by the British Government of our involvement in the convoys. There is feeling about that. The Russians cannot understand why we do not remember it. The Russians teach their schoolchildren about the importance of the Arctic convoys. Their children know about it. They also know about it in the Russian ports in the Murmansk area. It is a classic example of an area that we have, somehow or other, allowed to slip from our memory.

There is now a charity that has been set up to build a Russian Arctic convoy museum. If anyone is interested in supporting it, they should look at the website. It is certainly something that I want to support and I have lent my name to it as a patron. It is very important that we remember the Arctic convoys. The charity would also like a medal to be struck for the Arctic convoys. I say to the Minister that I understand the problem of having separate medals for separate parts of a campaign. There is, after all, the Atlantic Star. However, I cannot believe that it is beyond our ability to come up with some additional way to recognise specific campaigns within a larger strategic area, such as the Battle of the Atlantic. The circumstances of the Arctic convoys were quite exceptional and brutal. I ask the Minister to look at ways of recognising that particularly heroic time.

The noble Lord, Lord James of Blackheath, has anticipated me. I was going to say a bit about the need for something on the slave trade. He talked about the loss of life; I have mentioned the number of slaves who were released. It is important because, as I have said before in this House, it is probably the world’s first example of a humanitarian intervention. As I have also said before in this House, when people rather loosely—and, in my view, foolishly—throw around claims about illegal wars, we must remember that several captains in the Royal Navy were brought before the court, as the noble Lord, Lord James, will know. Appeals were heard in this House, and they were charged with interfering with trade on the high seas and fined for it. That is an indication of how attitudes move. You have to say, “Thank heavens they continued”. That is an interesting aside on our history.

The noble Lord, Lord James, also mentioned the last charity that I want to mention. I declare an interest as unpaid chairman of the Mary Seacole Memorial Statue Appeal, which has been part of my educational process. Back in the 1970s, I was asked by some of the Caribbean people in my then constituency of Hammersmith to help to identify the grave, which had been overgrown, in Kensal Green Cemetery where Mary Seacole was buried. I knew about her background as a Crimean War nurse who was also greatly appreciated in Central America. There were no nurses, as such, then. Florence Nightingale put the nursing profession on the map but it is impossible to see Mary Seacole as anything other than a battlefield nurse. She went out on to the battlefield and looked after the wounded. She was a remarkable woman, who ended up being so popular in the United Kingdom when she returned from the Crimea bankrupt—because she had funded herself by running what was called the British Hotel there—that the troops here held concerts for three days to raise money for her. Troops do not do that unless they have a very positive memory of someone. Yet, by the beginning of the 20th century, Mary Seacole had been forgotten to our history. Both the noble Lord, Lord Loomba, and the noble Baroness, Lady Flather, who I should thank for being a great supporter of Mary Seacole, recognise that British military history is full of international history, too. The British Indian Army has been mentioned on many occasions; there is Africa and so on. However, the people who alerted me to the grave of Mary Seacole in Kensal Green Cemetery were among the Caribbean people who came over to volunteer in 1939 and very often ended up servicing the anti-aircraft guns. We did not stand alone in 1940, we stood with the empire and dominions behind us and the contribution they made was enormous.

If you walk out into the Royal Gallery, look at Daniel Maclise’s picture of Nelson dying on the flagship and you will see a black sailor pointing up at the Frenchman who shot him. Look to the left of it and you will see what we would then have called Lascar seamen and women tending to the wounded and doing other tasks. The Royal Navy tells me that close to 200 sailors at Trafalgar were of African origin and that 20 per cent of those on Nelson’s flagship were non-British.

The values we defend and fight for are about freedom, democracy and the rule of law and the educational role here of all these things is important. If I succeed in raising funds for the Mary Seacole memorial it will be the first memorial to a black woman in Britain. That is also important. What she did for the military was profoundly important but what she did and still does today in the school curriculum is remind people that our history is not a narrow one, built just in this island alone; it is literally an international history and we rely on that to convey the message about freedom, democracy and the rule of law. I would ask Members to bear this in mind when they look at these charities. They are not just monuments of stone; they are monuments of feeling, of history and of thought.

Scotland: Civil Service

Lord Soley Excerpts

Thursday 6th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I hesitate to get too embroiled in current political arguments in Scotland. The coalition Government do not agree with the SNP Administration on Scotland’s future but they are an elected Administration with a policy programme that their Ministers wish to pursue. In delivering that programme for Ministers, all civil servants must comply with the appropriate ministerial code.

[Lord Soley]

Does the Minister accept that there is a need for a policy on the United Kingdom? Many of us in this House are concerned that no one is speaking up for the advantages of keeping the United Kingdom united. If we are not careful, the arguments for splintering, dividing and breaking away will get very strong. The Government need a policy that advances the arguments in favour of keeping the United Kingdom united. Let us put our heads above the parapet and defend it.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I entirely agree with that. This Question, however, was about the division between what is political and what is administrative; what it is appropriate for the Civil Service to do and what it is appropriate for politicians to do. I am a strong supporter of the union myself, although I am not a unionist fundamentalist, as the Scottish newspapers are apparently alleging some are. We are finding a new balance between the devolved Administrations and the London Administration. It is very important that we all engage in the active debate on what that balance should be, but that is a political activity.