Political Party Finance and the Electoral Commission
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(3 weeks, 4 days ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, in following the noble Lord, Lord Maude, with whom I worked in the coalition many years ago, I am thinking of the 2022 Act, through which the Conservative Government were certainly trying to advantage themselves and disadvantage their competitors. That is one of the reasons why we have this Bill before us today, and this is a debate to which we will return.
Last Thursday we debated the problem of rebuilding public trust in our democratic institutions, so it is highly appropriate that today, we move on to discuss the Electoral Commission as the guarantor of the integrity of our campaigns. To play its role effectively, the Electoral Commission needs to have sufficient powers and to be seen as independent of government. In last Thursday’s debate, the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, argued that political debate is
“a free and open encounter”—[Official Report, 25/6/26; col. 820.]
in which truth will always emerge victorious, regardless of the channels of influence available to, for example, Elon Musk, as opposed to the ordinary citizen. In his speech, the noble Lord, Lord Frost, denounced
“the absurd and dangerous Rycroft review … which was written … to justify unnecessary and authoritarian solutions.”.—[Official Report, 25/6/26; col. 808.]
The noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, decried
“self-righteous campaigns against foreign actors”—[Official Report, 25/6/26; col. 816.]
as an effort by the establishment to distract the public from what she sees as the real reasons for public discontent.
Both the noble Lord, Lord Frost, and the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, regard the BBC as a greater threat to democracy. All three dismissed the impact of money on politics. Yet all of us who have been involved in democratic elections know from painful experience how important financial resources are. Money on its own does not win elections if candidates are poor and messages weak, as Reform has been discovering. But effective campaigns carry costs. When one side is richly funded and the other is skint, campaigns are not an open and fair contest.
American democracy is providing us with a test case in the importance of money in politics. The Supreme Court’s ruling against congressional limits on political donations opened the sluice gates for donors to try to buy candidates. The sums of money now involved in congressional elections are eye-watering. A presidential campaign costs more than the GDP of several members of the UN. That brings with it corruption, and foreign interference. The Republican Party and the think tanks which drive its agenda have been captured by ultra-wealthy individuals and companies which resist progressive taxation and government regulation and often deny climate change and the impact of their products on human health.
Growing inequality between the extremely wealthy and the ordinary citizen exacerbates this distortion of democratic debate. Wealthy British expatriates who avoid paying tax but nevertheless want similarly to reshape British politics aim to change the balance of public debate in this country. The flow of private money from ultra-wealthy sources in America is now a greater threat to free and open debate in Britain than money flowing from Russia, China or—until the recent elections—Hungary. That money flows into third-party campaigns and partisan think tanks as well as political parties, and we will need to look at that.
So far as I understood last week’s speech from the noble Lord, Lord Frost, he sees the ultra-wealthy as better able to understand and support the real wishes of ordinary voters than government, or what he calls the “British political class”. I am not sure whether that makes him an anarchist or an illiberal democrat, which is to say, an authoritarian in the style of Viktor Orbán or Donald Trump. I believe in liberal democracy and in creating, so far as possible, a level playing field for all contending opinion in public debate and, in particular, in political campaigns. For that, we need a trusted Electoral Commission with sufficient powers to punish those who break the rules.
I hope that the Conservative Front Bench will admit the error it made in government in attempting to limit the independence of the commission and enormously increase campaign spending limits. Wealth piles up on one side of politics—which is not, whatever the noble Lord, Lord Frost, believes, the side of the poor or the left behind. Money is a vital aspect of political campaigning, but massive flows of money pollute politics and endanger democratic debate, and we must use the forthcoming scrutiny of the Representation of the People Bill to regulate that flow more tightly.
Democratic Institutions: Threats
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(1 month ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire
That this House takes note of the threats to democratic institutions in the United Kingdom, including disinformation, foreign interference, and levels of public trust in politics.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, I am sure we are all grateful for how cool the Chamber is today. I want to talk about the interconnection between domestic and foreign threats to British democracy.
Philip Rycroft, in his report this spring, warned that
“there is a long-term and worrying loss of trust in our democratic system and processes”.
He further warned that the problem of public disillusion makes it easier for hostile foreign actors to interfere in British politics, seeking
“to sow distrust and exacerbate divisions in UK society, with the ultimate aim of undermining confidence in our democracy”.
Later in the year, the Chamber will consider the Representation of the People Bill, which addresses the issue of foreign interference but only touches on the alienation of a substantial proportion of Britain’s citizens from Westminster politics. The Rycroft report recommends that we amend the Bill to strengthen its protections against foreign finance and disinformation, which, as he rightly points out, are deepening public mistrust. However, the UK was already an outlier among democratic countries for public disengagement from national politics, before financial globalisation made it easy to disguise where political donations came from and social media made deliberate disinformation campaigns a regular part of our political life.
All of us involved in politics should be concerned about the depth of public disengagement from political life and of disillusion with our democratic institutions. Some 50 years ago, several million British citizens belonged to political parties; now, that figure has sunk to less than 1 million. In the first general election I was aware of, 80% of registered voters turned out. In 2024, turnout was down to less than 60%, while the number of eligible voters not on the register is estimated to have risen to between 6 million and 8 million. That means that the massive Commons majority of Labour MPs, on whom our current Government rest, received the support of not much more than one-quarter of adult British citizens. Registration and turnout were lowest among young people.
Opinion surveys confirm deepening public mistrust of “Westminster politics”. Similar trends in declining confidence are observable in other democratic states, but disillusion with democratic institutions has fallen further in the UK than in most other comparable countries. The Electoral Commission has recently reported that public trust in politicians has marginally improved, rising to 14%—we are down there with bankers and worse than estate agents.
We may disagree on the underlying causes for what a recent report from Demos described as a democratic emergency, but I hope we all agree that we face a major problem which will require co-operation across our parties to resolve. I have been involved in politics in West Yorkshire for most of my career, and I am painfully aware of the reality of feeling “left behind” in what were once council estates, where sold-off council houses have been sold on to distant landlords and converted into houses in multiple occupation; where the shrinking and outsourcing of local services means that public service workers are rarely seen; where local companies have given way to distant private equity owners; and where local government is distant and too close to bankruptcy to provide much assistance. I understand why many of them feel abandoned and inclined to vote against any established party.
Some 350 years ago, John Locke wrote about the state as resting on a social contract between government and citizens. Our left-behind do not see much of a social contract; for many of them their only contact with government is with the DWP. If we are to rebuild trust between citizens, political institutions and government, we need to treat the people of the United Kingdom as citizens rather than as consumers or as people who sit at home and wait for public services to be delivered. We need to inform them about political choices and engage them as far as we can in local public life.
The overcentralisation of government and politics in Britain has left us with what a Commons inquiry into voter engagement a decade ago called
“broad negative stereotypes about Parliament and Government … which go beyond healthy and necessary scepticism”.
We will not regain public trust until we reform and modernise both Houses of Parliament.
Our Chamber provides essential scrutiny of legislation, but the accusation I heard the other day that we are “just a bunch of failed politicians” is not entirely untrue. Labour’s manifesto promise to establish a Modernisation Committee in the Commons has so far achieved little more than improving accessibility for disabled Members. On one of the Bills I was concerned with in the last Session, the Commons spent less time debating the Report and Third Reading stages than in voting down amendments to the Bill. The style of the leader of the Opposition’s intervention in yesterday’s Prime Minister’s Questions fed into the worst stereotypes of partisan Westminster politics.
A healthy democratic country is one in which citizens are all engaged in public life, to one degree or another. The Thatcherite revolution, replacing public services with private provision and reducing the role of local government, reduced the visibility of state action and the opportunities for ordinary citizens to participate. David Cameron, as Prime Minister, wanted to limit the anti-social effects of our market society by building a voluntary “big society”, but that never progressed much further than the modest experiment with “citizen service” for a small number of young people. Labour’s English devolution Act completed the Conservative destruction of district councils and gave most power in devolving government to 30 or so elected mayors. There is little local democracy in that, with no chance of meeting your councillor to discuss politics in the street or the pub.
The strategic defence review, published 12 months ago, set out a vision of a national society remobilised to meet the new threats that our country faces—a “whole-of-society” approach, as it called it, with volunteer reserves for civil emergencies and
“the development of a new force that is modelled on the Reserves and connects local communities with Defence: recruited and employed locally”.
Alongside this, it welcomed the Prime Minister’s launch of a
“national conversation on defence and security”
to persuade citizens to take their share of the responsibilities involved. We are still waiting to be persuaded. The noble Lord, Lord Coaker, told us last week that he has been designated the Minister of the national conversation. I think the SDR intended that it should be the Prime Minister who led it.
The public need to be informed. Last week, I read a published report from the French equivalent of our Government’s Defending Democracy Taskforce. I find it extraordinary that the British taskforce does so little to inform Parliament or public more fully about the work it does and the threats it counters. British citizens are unlikely to respond to the SDR’s call for active engagement in ensuring our security, unless they regain greater trust in our political institutions, both national and local. That is a challenge for all of us who believe in liberal democracy.
Foreign interference is much more likely to gain traction in British politics when public trust is so low. Foreign state interference was a challenge before social media achieved its current dominant role in political communication: Russian money flowed into the Conservative Party and the Brexit campaign, as the ISC’s Russia report described. Russian assassinations on British soil go back to Soviet times. We have since seen examples of Chinese and Iranian state interference. We just learned that an Israeli company attempted to influence the Scottish elections. American corporations, foundations and extremely wealthy individuals have interfered, most prominently Elon Musk, who has been beamed into a Tommy Robinson rally in Trafalgar Square and used X algorithms to spread disinformation and attempt to shape election campaigns.
Others from these Benches will talk further about disinformation and social media, and about tightening controls on donations to political parties and campaigning bodies from abroad. I want to talk about how we should strengthen our domestic defences against these malign influences by informing and educating our citizens on how to discriminate between evidence and fictions, and engaging them again in addressing the difficult choices that national and local government have to make.
Some may disagree that foreign interference constitutes a threat. On Tuesday, the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, who is in his seat, defended Elon Musk’s use—and misuse—of X to promote a political party. I am surprised that someone who campaigned so vigorously to defend national sovereignty from the European rules that our Government had participated in shaping should be so relaxed about interference from the United States. He knows well the rising flow of finance across the Atlantic to support third-party bodies and partisan think tanks in Britain that promote everything from climate change denial to the banning of abortion to the shrinking of the state, and he appears entirely relaxed about it. I look forward to hearing his definition of a healthy democracy, which I hope might be a little familiar to traditional Conservatives from Burke to Macmillan, and to learning how he considers it possible to reconcile that vision with the libertarian, minimum-state approach that neoliberals on both sides of the Atlantic want to create and attempted, under Mrs Thatcher, to create in Britain. I also look forward to the definition by the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, of what the Conservative Party now considers a healthy democracy, which I suspect is somewhat more constructive than the noble Lord’s.
Multiple reports from both government and Parliament have advised us that better political education is what we need, particularly so now that the cacophony of social media is making it more difficult for readers to distinguish fact from fiction. The move to votes at 16 adds new weight to education about the responsibilities of citizenship. I have visited several secondary schools, both state and independent, in recent months to discuss how they will adjust their curriculum to meet the demands of citizens preparing to vote. What struck me most, in every school, was the response from teachers that they are already overloaded with topics to cover on social, economic, political and personal life, and cannot persuade their colleagues to spare more time in form for this. A lot more work is needed on this aspect of the curriculum review.
I was also told by teachers and students alike that teenagers now rely on social media—most of all TikTok—for their political information, which raises questions about the wisdom of a full ban on social media for under 16 year-olds when that birthday will give them the right to vote. The Minister to whom I posed this dilemma some days ago replied that the BBC would be asked to provide more news and discussion suitable for teenagers. The following day the BBC announced substantial cuts in its news services, which cuts across any hope that it can somehow lay on more for new voters.
MAGA Republicans in the United States are doing their best to dismantle public service broadcasting, along with so many other aspects of public services. We need the BBC to hold the balance and struggle to verify the facts in our often-contentious political debates. The BBC, for all its flaws, provides a shared platform for our public debates.
Discontent with democracy increases when economies hit recession or rapid technological change, both of which now face us. Our democracy is challenged when hostile states or malign foreign actors threaten our prosperity or our way of life. The chaos of British government over the past decade has intensified popular discontent with our political institutions, opening the door for wealthy populists, here at home and from abroad, to exploit ethnic grievances to undermine democracy further. Across all democratic parties, we need to rebuild public trust in order to defend our weakened democracy.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for that very thoughtful reply. I am very sorry to hear about the noble Baroness, Lady Anderson. We all hope we will see her again soon.
We will be continuing this debate in a range of other contexts over the next year—on the Representation of the People Bill and in many more discussions about online safety, and so on. We have not agreed how to resolve the problem of public trust, but I think we do all now accept that we have a serious problem of public trust, which will be tested, as the noble Lord, Lord Walney, was suggesting, as we go through the economic disruption of AI and other factors. We well know how, in periods of economic disruption, democracy is challenged, so we will continue to have some real problems.
We could perhaps have spent a little more time on the question of local community and the loss of the sense of localness. I thought the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester’s speech was extremely interesting in that respect. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, who suggested that we used to have a concentrated media scene, that we had local media. The first time I fought a parliamentary campaign in Huddersfield, the Huddersfield Daily Examiner was the thing which everyone read to keep in touch with local politics. We have lost a lot of the network of local media, as we have lost the network of nonconformist churches and others which held local communities together. Moving to the virtual online world is part of what has torn our society, to some extent, apart.
I would love to have taken further the role of think tanks and foreign Governments. I spent 12 years at Chatham House in the last period of the Cold War. We had delicate relations with the Soviet Union and others, and the Sunday Times attacked us for having a relationship with think tanks in Moscow. Certainly, there are delicate roads one has to tread, and it is very easy to fall off on one side or the other.
I enjoyed the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Hannan—as always. He is one of the most wonderful pamphleteers I have ever come across. He can make a plausible argument about almost any subject you wish. We have not discussed money enough—not just state money but private money. Among the threats to democracy are extremes of wealth and poverty. What we see going on in the United States at present is how extremes of wealth pouring through American politics are biasing what would otherwise be a free flow. The noble Lord quoted John Stuart Mill, who said that truth always beats falsehood in a free and fair fight. Extremes of money prevent a free and fair fight, so I will end by quoting Francis Bacon to the noble Lord:
“Money is like manure, of very little use except it be spread”.
I would add that money, when put together in piles that are too large, begins to stink.
Let us continue this argument. I look forward to the many arguments, on Bills and other things, that we will have over the next year—before I retire from this place—discussing how we maintain the quality of our democracy and do our best to ensure, through education and everything else, that not only do we have good chaps in the elites but, as the noble Lord, Lord Norton, suggested, we help to build more good chaps among the public as well.
Social Media: Use of X by Government Departments
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(1 month ago)
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Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
My noble friend is absolutely right. We have seen the issues of dis- and misinformation, and in recent weeks we saw what happened in Belfast and in other parts of the country. Bad faith actors are using social media platforms to try to sow division, whether that is through bots or other sources, and we need to be very aware of that. That is why Ofcom has been given the tools through the Online Safety Act, which Members of your Lordships’ House discussed for eight years to try to get right. The tools need to be used and Ofcom needs to do its job.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, on Thursday, this House will be discussing threats to democracy. We are close to the point now where one has to see X— and Elon Musk—as something of a threat to British democracy, deliberately putting out misinformation, using algorithms to promote the most anti-democratic candidate in the Makerfield by-election, and so on. Do the Government not need to look at much tighter regulation on X and other social media which are actively attempting to bias the way in which people in Britain understand our democratic life?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
The noble Lord is absolutely right. Everything that every Member of your Lordships’ House does every day is to promote British values and ensure that they are protected. That is why we have the Defending Democracy Taskforce and why we have just had the Rycroft review; it is also why, in the most recent by-election, the Joint Election Security Preparedness Unit was set up to try to tackle some of these issues. Although I am a huge advocate of freedom of expression—I ran Index on Censorship until the general election—it is about making sure that, within the prism of freedom of speech, we are protecting the values that we hold most dear. That is why we have given powers to Ofcom; obviously, we will continue to review those powers, and, if they do not work, we will need to do more.
Foreign Interference in UK Democratic Processes
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(1 month, 1 week ago)
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Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
I know how excited the noble Lord will be about the legislation that will be in front of your Lordships’ House, which he will be able to scrutinise, and I am sure that my ministerial colleagues will enjoy the inevitable debate. The noble Lord is right: we obviously responded immediately to some of the biggest areas of immediate concern that we could legislate for, and our full response to the report will follow very soon. But several reports, including from the Foreign Affairs Select Committee in the other place, have looked at this space. We need to make sure that we respond to everything in the round and take some time, but also act quickly, given the potential impact that we see every day.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, the report that the noble Lord, Lord Pack, referred to was by a French government agency about the apparent operations of an Israeli company in exerting influence over campaigns in France, Britain and a number of African countries. The report mentions co-operation between the French government agency and the Swedish, British and Dutch Governments, as well as others. But would it not have been appropriate to alert our own population to what was going on? Now that we know that we have this sort of foreign influence through social media, coming from a number of different countries—not just from state actors but from private actors, such as the Israeli company and private actors in the United States, which exert considerable influence—should the British Government not have reported to their own public to tell us what was going on?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
The noble Lord raises an important point. Obviously, France is one of our key allies—we have seen images only today of the President with the Prime Minister at the G7. I reassure your Lordships’ House that our position is that it is dangerous to jump to any conclusions on the basis of a single report. The UK Government will draw on our own analysis and draw our own conclusions.
Cabinet Manual: Guidelines for Government Formation
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(1 month, 3 weeks ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire
To ask His Majesty’s Government what consideration they have given to including in the Cabinet Manual guidelines for government formation in the event of the next election not providing a Commons majority for a single party.
The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent) (Lab)
My Lords, as the Prime Minister announced yesterday, the Government have committed to updating the Cabinet Manual to ensure that it remains an authoritative guide to our constitutional arrangements. This update will restate and underline the rules and conventions that underpin our democracy, including those relating to elections and government formation. We will ensure that the second edition accurately articulates arrangements where there is no overall majority in the House of Commons. We will engage with parliamentary committees in both Houses on the draft text.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, I welcome this announcement and thank the Minister for alerting me to the Statement yesterday. The coalition Government produced the Cabinet Manual as a guide for future Governments to the conventions of our unwritten constitution. It was intended that successive Governments should update it after each election, but the chaos of single-party government and rapid turnover of Prime Ministers means that this is the first one. As it is now highly likely that the outcome of the next election might be one in which no single party has a majority, can the Government pay particular attention to the area of government formation to allow sufficient time to negotiate and establish another stable coalition Government?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
The noble Lord knows how fond I am, and I am delighted to have been able to announce that we are updating the Cabinet Manual. While I understand that everybody in this building is very excited about elections—we all campaign for them—it is not yet two years since the previous general election and there are another three to go, and I look forward to ensuring that there is another Labour Government. In terms of ensuring the premises of formation of government, as ever, the convention remains that it is those best able to command the confidence of the other place.
Lord Mandelson: Response to Humble Address Motion
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(4 months, 1 week ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, we on these Benches hesitate to criticise the due diligence process by the security services and the Civil Service; it seems to have been effectively and efficiently done but disregarded by the Prime Minister’s political advisers and overridden by the Prime Minister. Presumably he thought the task of establishing and maintaining a close relationship with President Trump demanded someone like Peter Mandelson in spite of, or even because of, his flaws.
Can the Minister tell us when further files will be released? I have just looked through the first package that has been released, which is actually very thin. There is clearly an awful lot more to come out—to repeat, there is a lot to come out not just from London but from Washington, which will overlap on to this.
I am sure the whole House will be happy that the Minister has been appointed by the Prime Minister to look further into this. We will all do our best to co-operate with her in making sure that standards and procedures are improved. Can she tell us more about her work programme in her new responsibilities on ethics and standards? Will that work be primarily within government or across the parties and both Houses to make sure that, as far as possible, it gets the maximum buy-in from everyone concerned and interested in politics, and will therefore have the best chance of succeeding? Will she, for example, consider strengthening the parliamentary oversight of major public appointments, which is, after all, a common occurrence in a number of other parliamentary democracies?
How do the Government propose to strengthen further the Ministerial Code? Will they commit to regular revisions with advice from committees in both Houses?
Does the Minister recognise that the case that many of us keep making for putting the Ethics and Integrity Commission, ACOBA and a number of other bodies on a statutory basis is a matter of future-proofing? We do not know what the outcome of the next election will be but it could be extremely messy and lead to some form of coalition Government. We need to make sure that we future-proof our standards and commitments to make sure that any new Government who come in will find it easier to accept them than to override them. We have plenty of lessons from Washington of how easily things can go wrong, and we need as far as we can to prevent them similarly going wrong over here.
Can the Minister say a little about implications for the House of Lords? I note that the Conduct Committee is being charged with the rather difficult task of looking at our standards. The Leader of the House reprimanded me the other week for referring to us as a part-time House and replied that we are now effectively a full-time House. Yes, we are, but the way in which we are managed and governed still assumes that we are part-time and earn other things outside the House, and that that requires us to have a different set of concerns about private, commercial and financial interests and activities outside from those in the Commons. If we are now to be judged on the same level as the Commons as a full-time House then that is quite a radical readjustment of the way one thinks about the second Chamber.
Can I also ask a little about what happens when Peers are disbarred from the House? Will the Government consider putting before the House the idea that they should no longer be able to hold their titles? Removing them from the peerage roll would be perhaps a more important way of signalling that they no longer have a position of honour within our political system.
Of course, behind all this there are some broader issues about the financial and political culture in London, Washington, New York and Westminster. Wealth and money in politics is something we are all going to face as the Representation of the People Bill arrives in this House in a few months. We will need to look at that very carefully. I hope we may be assured that the Government will work with us to make sure that money does not override other matters in our life.
The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent)
I thank the noble Baroness and the noble Lord for their questions. It is incredibly important that these matters are addressed, not least because they now drive a huge amount of my own personal work. I will come on to that.
First, I will provide an update following the Statement made in the other place last week by the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister on the release of the first tranche of documents in response to the humble Address Motion of 4 February. As the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister rightly stated:
“Jeffrey Epstein was a despicable criminal who committed … disgusting crimes that destroyed the lives of countless women and girls. What he did is … unforgivable”.
His victims must be
“our first priority. Peter Mandelson’s behaviour”—
including encouraging Jeffrey Epstein to fight his conviction for abusing a vulnerable young girl—
“was an insult to them and their suffering”.—[Official Report, Commons, 11/3/26; col. 359.]
We should also never forget that every time we discuss Epstein’s horrendous behaviour, his victims relive awful experiences. These survivors must be front and centre when we debate all issues related to Jeffrey Epstein, his network and their impact.
That is why there is a cross-party consensus in both Houses for full transparency and accountability. The Government are committed to publishing all documents relevant to the humble Address and last week published the first tranche. These documents relate specifically to the decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US and the discussions that subsequently led to his dismissal. Further work is ongoing to compile the rest of the information in scope. The Government recognise the urgency with which this work must be completed and will keep your Lordships updated as it progresses.
The Prime Minister has taken personal responsibility for Peter Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador. He has acknowledged that it was a mistake and apologised, not least for believing Peter Mandelson’s lies. While the documents point to public reports of an ongoing relationship between Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein, the advice did not expose the depth and extent of their relationship, which became apparent only after the release of files by Bloomberg and then the US Department of Justice.
As the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister set out last week, there are specific documents that this Government would like to disclose but the Metropolitan Police has asked us not to do so yet to avoid prejudicing the ongoing criminal investigation into Peter Mandelson. We have agreed to that request. We will publish these documents once the Metropolitan Police has confirmed that this will no longer prejudice its investigation.
The Government have already taken steps to address weaknesses in the system and I will update your Lordships on the further steps we will take. As noble Lords will be aware, the Government have asked the Conduct Committee of your Lordships’ House to review the Code of Conduct to consider what changes are required to ensure that Members of your Lordships’ House can be removed when they have brought the peerage into disrepute. We are also exploring whether the committee can further strengthen the rules on lobbying and paid advocacy.
The Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister also announced that the Prime Minister has asked the Ethics and Integrity Commission to conduct a review of the current arrangements relating to financial disclosures for Ministers and senior officials, transparency around lobbying, and the Business Appointment Rules, and I look forward to receiving its report before the Summer Recess. The Chief Secretary also confirmed that we will conduct a review of the national security vetting system to ensure that we learn the lessons from the policy and process weaknesses related to the Mandelson case.
With regard to some of the specifics that were asked, I think some of the questions from the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, will be slightly easier for me to answer, given that they are in my direct purview. On the questions asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, we have been clear that many more documents will follow in coming tranches. The noble Baroness was concerned about who is seeing what and when. I want to be clear that, while we are withholding some documents at the request of the Metropolitan Police, we have agreed with Simon Hoare MP, the chair of PACAC in the other place, that he is seeing all documents being withheld, so a member of His Majesty’s Opposition is seeing everything as we go through it.
Given the scale of what we are doing and the fact that we are complying and will comply with both the spirit and the letter of the humble Address, it is appropriate that we are releasing the documents in such a way that is sensible given their nature, but also that the ISC is seeing them so that it can deal with them. I assure noble Lords that all the documents will be published and that noble Lords will have the opportunity to see them all—but, given the live police investigation, we have to take this step by step.
I just want to touch on the 56 documents. I have read the paperwork related to them but I do not recognise the 56 documents. The noble Baroness asked specifically whether legal advice had been taken on the schedule. I have not seen that, but I will revert to her if such advice exists. She also questioned whether the Prime Minister had misled the Commons. He absolutely has not; his comments all the way through are in line with the paperwork being released in each tranche.
On some of the specifics raised by the noble Baroness, obviously she is aware that I cannot comment on the Committee of Privileges of the other place—that was Parliament holding a former Member to account. She asked about some of the things that we have already done, as did the noble Lord, Lord Wallace. I will touch on severance payments, which were a core theme from the noble Baroness. As the documents show, Peter Mandelson initially requested a sum that was substantially larger than the final payment—more than six times the final amount—despite the fact that he was withdrawn from Washington because he had lost the confidence of the Prime Minister. As the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister explained yesterday, the Government obviously found that to be inappropriate and unacceptable. The settlement that was agreed was to avoid even higher costs from a drawn-out legal claim at the employment tribunal, given Peter Mandelson’s employment as a civil servant rather than a Minister.
As noble Lords will know, Ministers can be dismissed without recourse to the employment tribunal—let us hope I am not experiencing that soon—but civil servants are treated differently. As can be seen from the documents, Peter Mandelson’s settlement was in line with his employment contract and standard Civil Service HR processes, avoiding the risk and high costs of drawn-out legal action and ensuring he was quickly removed from the payroll. As set out in the documents, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury approved this payment in line with standard HMT guidance on the use of severance payments.
I have already touched on the issue of vetting, but I want to spend a couple of moments responding to the questions from the noble Lord, Lord Wallace. On the question about the release of further documentation, given that this request is supported by both Houses but is about the Commons and complying with the Commons, obviously we need to lay those documents when the House is sitting. Those documents will come forward in due course, either before or after the Recess.
I look forward to discussing many details of my own work programme with Members of your Lordships’ House, not least the noble Lord, Lord Wallace. I truly believe that if we are to rebuild faith in politicians, and in what I consider to be one of the most important buildings in the country, it has to be a cross-party, cross-government and cross-Parliament project, so I will actively seek to work with all Members of your Lordships’ House on where we believe the gaps are, what we can realistically fix and how we can rebuild trust.
With regard to the Ministerial Code revisions, the noble Lord will not be surprised that, unlike his colleagues in the other place, who suggested that we may want to put it on a statutory footing, we will not be seeking to do that, but I am very aware of what he said about future-proofing standards. Many people who have been at this Dispatch Box and at Dispatch Boxes in the other place are aware that we rarely get to look at standards in the round. The last time that was done with a clear objective was in establishing the Nolan principles. I view this as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to make sure that we get this right. We have a Minister dedicated to it—I do not know the last time that happened—so it is about how we can ensure we use this moment to fix the things that typically get pushed to one side.
However, I agree with my noble friend the Leader of our House, Lady Smith: we are a full-time House with part-time Members and we are different from the other place. Noble Lords will be aware that I used to be a Member of the other place and am married to a Member of the other place; what he is expected to do and what I did before I was on the Front Bench are two very different sets of responsibilities. We need to make sure that we do not lose what is so special about this building and our Chamber, and some of the expertise we have because of people’s outside interests compared to the other place.
The noble Lord raised the Representation of the People Bill and the impact of money. He did not touch on the Rycroft review, which will be coming forward and will very much tie into our discussions on these issues.
I conclude by reiterating that Jeffrey Epstein was a despicable individual, and Peter Mandelson’s decision to put their relationship before his victims and the vulnerable is reprehensible. As the Prime Minister said, the victims of Epstein have lived with trauma that most of us can barely comprehend. They have had to relive it again and again, and they have had to see accountability delayed and too often denied. Peter Mandelson should never have been appointed. The Government will comply with the humble Address and I will provide further updates to your Lordships’ House in due course.
Iranian State-sponsored Cyber Attacks: Mitigation and Preparation
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(4 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
The noble Lord is right that we need to make sure that we are protecting British industry and working with key allies. Last year, cyber attacks cost the economy £15 billion, and it is a growing threat. We need to work with business, but also to be led by it because it knows what infrastructure is there. As some noble Lords will be aware, some of this is low tech as much as high technology, and people are seeking every vulnerability. We all need to be cognisant of that and make sure there is a genuinely whole-society approach.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, if we are going to have a whole-society response, we had better make sure that the whole society is informed about the nature of the threat. Nearly a year ago, the strategic defence review talked about the need for
“a national conversation led by the Government”—
political leadership by the Government—to inform and educate the wider public about the nature of these new cyber and other hybrid threats from a number of different countries: Iran, Russia, China and others. When are the Government going to provide that political leadership through the national conversation which was proposed?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
My Lords, I am disappointed that not everybody looks at the NCSC’s website in the same way that I do to ensure that they are updated. The noble Lord is right that we need to make sure that people are aware. It was one of the reasons why it was so important in the run-up to the national alerts we had on all our phones last year that materials were made available about what else could be done in terms of resilience and what other things needed to be done. I urge all noble Lords to make sure they are also protected. I hate to do this, but there is a cyber offer available to every Member of your Lordships’ House, and I believe only 10 of us have accessed it. It would be very good if all Members of your Lordships’ House took up the security offering provided to protect us while we talk about others too.
UK-EU Customs Union
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(5 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, we have been hearing different versions of economic and political reality in this debate. I want to focus in my short speech on two issues that lie behind negotiating a customs union: the question of sovereignty and an EU reset; and the foreign policy, security and defence aspects of again moving closer to the EU and its member states. Right-wing media again leapt up to cry, “You’re threatening British sovereignty” as soon as resetting our relationship with the EU was proposed, but the idea that the UK could somehow maintain absolute sovereignty in an integrated international economy with instant communications was always a myth.
I recall Geoffrey Howe, when he was Foreign Secretary 45 years ago, talking about sharing sovereignty with our European partners. He did not spell out explicitly that the alternative was yielding sovereignty to the United States, adopting US regulations and following its international political lead. We are now seeing that alternative spelled out brutally in threats from President Trump against our attempts to tax and regulate US tech corporations that dominate our social media, and to maintain higher standards of food production than US exporters want. I think it is clear, in an underlying way, that the alternative the noble Lord, Lord Offord, and others want to present is a Britain that would become like the Republican vision of the United States, with a small state, gross levels of inequality and a very damaged society.
As other noble Lords have said, particularly the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton, we now face a much more hostile global environment, in which even middle-level powers such as the UK find it hard to stand up alone to pressure from China or the USA. The collective weight of European democracies, exercised through the EU, is, however, capable of maintaining autonomy. We need to contribute to that collective weight to protect our preferred patterns of market and product regulation and our environmental and social protections. We are a social democracy, and we do not wish to become an American-style very unsocial democracy. We need to co-operate on security and defence, pooling our efforts to resist the imperial ambitions and subversive activities of Russia and China and now, sadly, also of the United States.
Britain played a leading part in developing the EU’s co-operation in foreign policy. I recall Jim Callaghan, when Foreign Secretary, returning from an early meeting of what was then called European Political Co-operation and enthusing about how useful it was in promoting British interests. Five years later, Lord Carrington’s London report set out proposals to institutionalise regular consultations on international threats and initiatives. When the Berlin Wall came down, I recall the Metropolitan Police asking Chatham House, where I then worked, to organise a seminar on how to build closer police co-operation with our European neighbours. When Europol was then established, it had a substantial number of UK staff and a British Secretary-General. Similarly, when the European Defence Agency was set up, it had a further number of impressive British staff concerned to promote both shared and UK interests.
Brexit threw all this away, with Brexiteers arguing that America was the only ally we needed, that the Indo-Pacific was the future and that European co-operation contributed little to Britain’s security. We have now learned how wrong they were, and our Labour Government are hesitantly beginning the long, hard path back to what we have lost. The Government are still too timid on this, as on other policy areas, and they need to explain to the British public how much our international context has changed for the worse, how much more important our security and defence have become, and how our natural partners in defending and promoting our national interests are our neighbours across the channel.
UK-EU Relations
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(1 year, 5 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, we on these Benches note with interest the call from the noble Lord, Lord True, for a substantial increase in our defence spending—and no doubt for the higher taxes to pay for it. We also think that the correct adjective to describe the Government’s approach to the EU is not ruthless but timid. It is timid in defining a reset by the negatives of what we are not doing, rather than what we are doing. It is timid because we are not really investing in finding out what we require and what costs and benefits that would have.
I want to ask the Minister: first, are we rebuilding the expertise in Whitehall, which we had abandoned in recent years, on how the EU works, on relations with the Commission and on the complications of regulations in the European Union, which we have to relate to and which I think a great many people now simply do not understand? Secondly, since we are clearly heading towards the sort of relationship that Switzerland has with the European Union—untidy, painful but necessary—are we spending a lot of time talking to the Swiss about the difficulties of their relations with the European Union? That is where we are likely to end up if this timid half-reset proceeds within the boundaries which the Government, frightened of the Daily Mail as they are, are about to pursue.
Baroness Twycross (Lab)
On whether the Government’s approach is timid, I note that if the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, believes we are too timid and the noble Lord, Lord True, thinks we are potentially going too far, it is possible that we are getting the balance right. The Government are determined to reset the relationship with our European friends. The EU is the UK’s largest trading partner, and it would be irresponsible if this Government did not attempt to make sure we have good relations with the EU. This has been a priority of this Government. It is five years since the UK exited the EU, and we are determined to make sure that, with economic growth being the number one mission of this Government, boosting trade abroad, including with the EU, is absolutely essential to delivering a strong economy at home.
Civil Servants: Compulsory Office Attendance
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(1 year, 6 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, we are having a debate both on a general principle and a particular situation. I have not discovered enough about the strike at the Land Registry and the issues involved there to want to comment on it. We would need to know what sort of work they do there and whether they need to be in the office most of the time to do that sort of work.
I live in Saltaire at weekends, 200 miles from London. I have a new neighbour who works for a London publisher, and she tells me she will need to be in the office at least once a month. But she is an editor; it is relatively easy for her managers to discover how effectively she works because, if she rapidly turns out an edited book on screen, her productivity is clearly rather good. I have another neighbour who works as an accountant for an accountancy company in Canary Wharf, and he goes down at least twice a month. There are reasons why, if you do that sort of job, you can easily work from home. If, on the other hand, you have a public-facing job, you need to be facing the public in the right place every day. We should not have hard and fast rules on all this.
By and large, post Covid, there are many jobs in which a 60/40 balance is just about right. I say with amazement that a member of my extended family is head of the risk analysis team of an international bank. The team is based in the City, but part of it is based in the other capital of the international bank. He works at home two days a week. He works extremely effectively and hard, and I am happy to say that his bank pays him a great deal. It would have been unthinkable some years ago for those people not to have been in their bank all the time, but computers now allow you to do a lot of that work at home.
Incidentally, it is quite right to say that the better-off have it easier here. If you can afford to have a larger house and a special place to work, that is much more comfortable than working on your kitchen table. However, the world in which we were 25 years ago, where the assumption was that you were always in the office, has gone. Covid and computers have changed that.
I declare an interest in that I have spent most of my life as an academic. As an academic, you never go into the office more than three days a week. The quiet that you need to do your research and write your lectures is not one easily interrupted by your colleagues coming in and saying, “Hey, how about a coffee?”. However, when I worked in a think tank, I needed to be in at least four days a week. Since I was in an international think tank, I worked over the weekend very often, flying from one place to another. It depends on the sort of job you have.
For parents, childcare is clearly an important part of the work/life balance. I notice that from those in my family who have children. I am happy to say as a grandparent that the obligation on grandparents to pick up the children from school has declined with the ability of parents sometimes to work from home and stop in the middle of the afternoon. That is good. I hope that we get away from the world in which City law firms and banks expect their younger people to work 10 to 12 hours a day and on Saturdays in the office, killing their social life and their opportunities to meet others and have children. That is an appalling obligation, which I trust is going.
Where we are now, with good management—I accept all that has been said about the poverty of decent management and good HR within the Civil Service—we ought to be able to reach a stage at which, one by one, looking at the variety of different jobs, we agree a different pattern of working that will probably come out at between 60/40 and 80/20. We should not weaponise the debate. I know there are some—the Jacob Rees-Moggs of this world—who would like to be able to go around and leave little cards on desks. He does not seem to be aware that the Civil Service does not have sufficient office space for everyone if they now came in. One by one, we are able now, I think, to accept that society and the economy are changing.