Conduct of Debate in Public Life

Lord Winston Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Harris for his introduction to this very useful debate, and also acknowledge what the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Rochester has just said about the role of the House of Lords, which I want to address in this speech.

Social media has been outlined as a big problem, and certainly there is no question that we have now reduced debate to mere assertion. This is an increasing problem, as a result of the issue in our education system. I do not want to pre-empt what my noble friend Lady Morris may say, but I am sure she would agree that it is very clear that the real problem we have is the failure to teach debate, particularly in primary school. No doubt she will talk about some of these issues.

I want to return to the issue of Parliament. My second speech in the House of Lords was on higher education and a piece of chemistry I was rather proud to know something about. I talked very volubly, asserting various things; then, as soon as I could, I decided I needed to let my pulse rate settle and my blood pressure come down, and so went through the voting corridor and to the bar to get a stiff whisky. Behind me, I heard an elderly voice say: “Lord Winston, that was a very interesting speech”. I turned around—it was Lord Porter, the Nobel prize winner for that piece of chemistry. I then had to spend a lot more on the whisky than I had intended, and we subsequently became friends. He was a remarkable man—though his use of the word “interesting” I will come back to.

One of the issues in our society now is the need to get attention—the love of celebrity. If I may say, we see this so often in the conduct of the House of Commons. It is astonishing that Prime Minister’s Question Time has been a showpiece for Parliament. It is absolutely unacceptable that that is how we judge our political measures in this country; it does us a great disservice. Unfortunately, it is generally copied; not just the arguments but somebody on one side making strident assertions and somebody on the other doing nothing but reading a prepared answer. That is not debate. In fact, it is quite destructive to proper debate, and we have to consider that.

If I may be impertinent, in 24 years in the House of Lords, I have never spoken on issues of conduct; I have avoided it. However, far too often, people come into the Chamber to give a prepared speech with no intention of debating or interpreting what has been said before, of putting some flavour on what is being said, or of speaking without notes. I think that is very derogatory.

There is competition to speak. We jump up together at Question Time and now lack the courtesy to give way to each other. That courtesy, now lacking, was an important part of that role model which was very impressive when I first came into the House of Lords. The acerbity in debate which we sometimes see has become political rather than rational, as we in the House of Lords should be as an advisory Chamber. This goes back to an Act of Parliament in the 1630s, when I think it was suggested that that should not be part of our business. Truncated business in the House of Lords is not always a good idea. Very short speeches do not always allow Members to give an adequate view of sometimes quite important topics. But I accept that I have only six minutes and am halfway through that already, and I do not want to disturb the order of the House.

In some respects, one thing that we in the Labour Party did in 1999 was rather derogatory. In the reform of the House of Lords, there was something that we forgot. Surprisingly, the presence of the hereditary Peers gave the House a kind of dignitas. I know we decided that we had to be much more ecumenical and popular in what we did, but we lost the wig on the Speaker’s head and the hats that we raised to the Speaker, and we stopped kneeling to the Speaker when we were admitted in introductions. That courteous and remarkable panoply of traditional respect was quite important in many ways. We still of course have the State Opening of Parliament, but we lost something with the loss of the traditions.

I am not a Tory but I am a conservative; I believe in conserving what we have of value and remembering why it is important. I am reminded of the novel by Tomasi di Lampedusa, Il Gattopardo or The Leopard, in which that character sees the gradual change that needs to happen in society. As a great aristocrat in Sicily, the Leopard recognises that he has to give way, but it is of immense interest that he gives way with courtesy and always sees the other side of the argument, even finally, when he recognises the need to give way to the new aspect of the Risorgimento. That brings me back to Lord Porter, who used a particular word when he approached me from behind in that voting corridor. He said, “Lord Winston, that was a very interesting speech”. He did not say anything pejorative, although he obviously felt quite angry about it.

Church of England: Disestablishment

Lord Winston Excerpts

Wednesday 28th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I agree with my noble and learned friend. The Government’s policy, in a word, is antidisestablishmentarianism.

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, I am one of those people who is unrepresented, as my noble friend suggested. In my view, the Church of England is hugely important to the nature of this country and in this House as well. Indeed, it is one of the reasons why I am proud to be British.

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I entirely agree with the noble Lord. Perhaps the Labour Party should disestablish the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) (Abolition of By-Elections) Bill [HL]

Lord Winston Excerpts

Friday 23rd March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Low of Dalston]

My Lords, that is why I proposed that we should keep going on this Bill. We have made good progress on it and, as the noble Lord has indicated, there is no assurance of getting further time for it. I accept that an agreement has been reached through the usual channels but the House is sovereign on these matters and I would like to put it to the House that, after we have heard the Answer to the UQ—

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. Although I personally have every sympathy for the Bill of my noble friend Lord Grocott, and I would like to hear whether he feels that there is a way of getting it through the House, the second Bill raises some very significant ethical issues which it is important to discuss. The conscientious objection Bill is not a trivial measure and it is right and proper that we discuss it in Committee, as arranged by the usual channels.

[Lord Grocott]

My Lords, although I am no longer a proper member of the usual channels, I can tell the Committee that, in discussions with those channels, it was decided that the fair thing to do was to split today between the two Bills. In answer to the question from my noble friend Lady McIntosh and without betraying any private discussions, I have every reason to believe that further time will be made available for the Committee stage of my Bill, which has the overwhelming support of the House.

Cannabis

Lord Winston Excerpts

Monday 12th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

The noble Baroness is a long-standing campaigner for drugs reform. I listened to her exchange a few days ago with my noble friend Lady Williams on this very subject. When I saw officials last week, I pressed them hard on the medical advice. The professional advice of medical experts in this country is that cannabis in its raw form has no medicinal value, which is why it is a Schedule 1 drug and subject to strict controls. I am very reluctant as a layman to second-guess those officials. However, the noble Baroness referred last time to the moving case of Alfie Dingley. The Home Office will do all it can within the framework of the current legislation to ensure that Alfie gets the treatment he needs

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, some 15 years ago, the Science and Technology Select Committee of which I was chairman at the time had a six-month inquiry on the medicinal uses of cannabis. We found and reported overwhelming evidence of the value of cannabis, that people taking cannabis did not get high on these drugs and that they were not dependent on the drug but it eased their symptoms, particularly with neurological conditions. As a result, we got at least one drug licensed for market. I absolutely agree with the noble Baroness that there is great urgency. It is 15 years, and it is about time the Government did something about this.

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I will report back to the Home Office the strong views expressed by two noble Lords—I gather they are impatient and not anxious to wait for the outcome of the WHO review, which I think will be completed in 2019. Any decision will be evidence based. On the general use of cannabis, I note that the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs said in its last report that,

“cannabis is a significant public health issue. Cannabis can unquestionably cause harm to individuals and society”.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Winston Excerpts

Tuesday 30th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, as the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill of Bengarve, said, this is a technical Bill. But, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds and my noble friend Lord Davies so ably pointed out, it has human consequences. We cannot escape these consequences, which are massive, and I want to dwell on them briefly.

When Ministers talk of science, they talk about and quote Nobel Prize winners and great scientists. However, when perhaps the greatest scientist of the last century, Albert Einstein, died, within seven hours his brain was taken out of his head, cut into small bits by a pathologist, looked at under a microscope and put in a jar marked “Pickles”. Subsequently, a lady pathologist at Stanford University, miles away from where Einstein had died in New Jersey, had another look at his brain. After excessive dissection, she decided that there was no difference between his and anyone else’s: it had a 100 billion neurons and each was connected in the usual way to 5,000 to 10,000 other neurons. There is a message here, which is rather well explained by my two noble friends on the Front Bench: put together, they have more brain capacity than Albert Einstein—I exclude the Whips and, of course, the Front Bench on the opposite side.

The fact of the matter is that our best innovations and attempts at becoming human come through collaboration and co-operation. This has been said repeatedly in this debate but it is often forgotten; increasingly, it is the key to Europe. Do not forget that for a long time we have stood at the head of science in this country. I genuinely believe, and I think there is evidence to support the belief, that this will slip away. Other European countries are starting to overtake us and we are being left behind. The economy, which has been so important to the Government, must be considered as well.

I want to explain the consequences for one scientist I have come across who is not from my university but from University College London. I left the Chamber to print out his email to me just 10 minutes ago as what he says is a revelation about how many European scientists feel, though he represents far more people than just scientists. He says that he is married to an Englishwoman and has two children, but does not want to take British nationality. Why should he, when he is Italian? He feels totally insecure. This professor—his name, which he has said I can use, is Professor Andrea Sella—wakes up at night with cold sweats worrying about his position in Europe. He says that this is common among many of his friends and I see this at Imperial College as well. He describes what he feels so amazingly that I want to read it to noble Lords. He says:

“The government keeps claiming that in regard to EU nationals all is settled. Yet it remains completely unclear what rights we will have in the UK after the UK leaves the EU. We’ve paid our taxes for decades but everything is uncertain. What is our access to healthcare? What about other services?”.


He goes on to ask about elderly parents who live overseas who may need care and who may wish to come to this country for that care, with their children’s help. He says he had always assumed that people might be able to bring their elderly parents over but now he is not so certain. He talks about the 3 million people who can apply for citizenship but points out that the Home Office is completely overwhelmed—that passports are missing for months on end and that in the past people have had to fill out an 85-page document, which adds to the complication. Of course, this becomes completely impossible for many people to manage.

He goes on to say something rather sad:

“Just a few days ago David Davis sat in front of Hilary Benn’s parliamentary select committee and waffled about our ‘anxiety, real or imagined’. What planet does he live on?”.


That is a really serious issue. There is an aspect of unreality about how this affects so many people whom we regard as our friends and colleagues and who contribute massively.

I shall tell your Lordships about Andrea Sella. This man is a leading chemist in this country—a professor. He regularly goes into schools and has probably spoken to around 100,000 schoolchildren in the United Kingdom over the last five or seven years. I have seen his activities—they are immense and purely charitable. There are very many scientists like him who help with our civilisation, and what is happening is a real risk.

He ends his email on a very poignant note. Perhaps in saying this, I could point out that I watched the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, shake his head when he heard my noble friend Lord Triesman speak. At the end of his email Andrea Sella talks about a maternal ancestor. He is not Jewish but his ancestor was. Apparently she called him early in the morning when the result of the referendum became clear. She said, her voice choking with emotion:

“How can these people forget so soon where nationalism leads you?”.


I must tell the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, that, amazingly, a number of Jewish people are now applying for German citizenship, so perhaps he will understand that some of us feel a bit offended when he talks about the House of Lords in the way that he apparently did—if what my noble friend Lord Adonis said is true. I hope that, when he comes to sum up at the end of this debate tomorrow evening, he will put the record straight and point out that these human issues are really important—and really important to us in the House of Lords.

Lobbying: Government Grant Agreements

Lord Winston Excerpts

Tuesday 19th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bridges of Headley]

It will not surprise your Lordships that I agree with my noble friend. As I said, £130 billion is paid out in grants, and it is absolutely concomitant on any Government to ensure that that money goes to where it is meant to go.

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, would the Minister not consider something which occurred in this House? The hybrid embryo Bill, an area with which I am particular familiar, was an example of a piece of science and legislation for which this kind of lobbying and consultation was really important. It depended hugely on the advice that we got from research councils and other experts who lobbied. Even I, who have a detailed knowledge of much about science, learned from that process. Therefore, it greatly helped our debate and decision on the process, which in fact turned out well. It would be a mistake to ignore that.

[Lord Bridges of Headley]

I completely defer to the noble Lord’s considerable experience in the scientific community. I say again that, if the grant is used to fund a public campaign to seek legislative or regulatory change, that would be in breach of the clause unless specified in the terms of the grant agreement. However, organisations are free to use their own funding to publicise their research. It is therefore perfectly legitimate for the recipient of a grant to appear on the media or write press articles so long as that does not incur costs to the public purse.

Succession to Peerages Bill [HL]

Lord Winston Excerpts

Friday 11th September 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

I am very grateful to my noble friend for allowing me to say a word. I want to be a loyal member of a paid-up Labour Party. I suspect, although I do not know, that there are quite a few disloyal members. However, I do not understand the argument here. Surely we are not talking about membership of the House of Lords or the size of the House; this is a different issue. We have to accept that we have to address that issue in a logical and rational fashion. I understand that on the whole my party is not particularly favourably disposed to the hereditary peerage for whatever reason. However, that is not really what we are discussing here, is it?

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

What we are discussing is whether as a House we want to continue with titles and the privilege and status—I think respectability has been mentioned—and whether that is a priority. Surely, if we are to do anything, the priority is to do something about the peerages in this House. That is something my party would like to do by removing by-elections for hereditary Members.

We want women, whether in this House or with the other titles they may earn, to get them by their own ability. The examples are the women who serve in this House. They may get damehoods before they get here. We would not want those to be inherited, I assume, because the awarding of a title is about what they have done for themselves. The point I am trying to make—perhaps ineffectively—is that surely the priority is for more women, whether in this House or with other titles such as dame, to receive them by virtue of what they have done for themselves. The examples I want to give are the people who have got peerages here on their own abilities rather than the abilities of some male forebear.

The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, was a dame before she came here. She did not get that because her father was a great athlete. She got it because she had won 16 Paralympic medals, 30 world titles and the London Marathon six times; she chairs the Women’s Sports and Fitness Foundation; and she was BBC Wales Sports Personality of the Year. The noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, is an actress and television presenter, and chancellor of the University of Exeter. The noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, is past president of the Royal Society of Medicine and a consultant professor of palliative medicine. These are women who have gained their titles—which happened to bring them here; some of them had damehoods before—because of what they did. Those are the examples I want to give.

There are, of course, people such as the noble Baroness, Lady Harding of Winscombe, the chief executive of TalkTalk and named as one of the 10 most influential women. She happens to be the daughter and granddaughter of Peers, but has her title because of what she has done in her own right.

Deregulation Bill

Lord Winston Excerpts

Wednesday 11th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

I support this amendment wholeheartedly. If my noble friend Lord Hunt decides to divide the House, I shall join him in the Lobby. I disagree with him on a fundamental point, which I shall discuss in a second, but the basis behind his amendment is absolutely correct.

One issue is that London in particular and the United Kingdom in general is increasingly becoming a centre for the healthcare market, which is burgeoning—and, increasingly, there are risks that various practices are being adopted that are not ideal for patients and in some cases are clearly not safe and not validated. If there is an issue about a regulatory authority considering the commercial value and income for the United Kingdom, that would be a very serious issue indeed.

On the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, I was not going to get to my feet until I heard my noble friend move his amendment, but I disagree with him fundamentally about that body. It is not a good body but one that we have been left with, and I think that it badly needs reform. It is nothing to do with mitochondrial transfer, which we will discuss in a couple of weeks—I think that it will regulate that perfectly well. But at present there are large areas that that body is not regulating well. My noble friend says that it is the envy of the world, but I say with deference to him that the fact is that there is not a single sovereignty anywhere in the globe that has adopted that model. No one has adopted that model because it is not widely respected outside the United Kingdom. That is a problem. None the less, we have it.

Palestine: Recognition

Lord Winston Excerpts

Thursday 29th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, I would like to take a slightly different tack in this debate: I want to talk about Joseph ben Ephraim Karo. He was a very distinguished scholar who was born in 1488. His family was expelled from Toledo in Spain by Ferdinand II and Isabella I as a result of the Alhambra decree. Most of the family died on their travels across the Mediterranean. Rabbi Joseph Karo, as he later became, survived and ended up writing one of the most important books of Jewish literature, the Shulchan Aruch, which is still regarded as the definitive description of Jewish law. Among other things, it is a model of moral attitudes to other people, which is one of the issues that it discusses.

After Portugal we lose exactly where Karo went, but after travelling through Turkey and, briefly, Greece, he went finally to Israel—where he intended to go all the time—landing in a place now called Tzvat, or Safed, in the north of Israel. There he established a synagogue, which I have visited, and his tombstone is there. I think that my family are the 21st generation of his direct descendants. They came to this country in 1680 and I regard myself as totally British in every way, respecting British values in absolute terms and delighted to be here rather than anywhere else. However, I am also a Zionist.

Karo lived in Safed, which I visited for the first time in 1958, at a time when Israel was the most liberal democracy anywhere in that part of the world, an extraordinarily socialist democracy that believed altruistically in the right of all people to live. Incidentally, I was very surprised to hear the right reverend Prelate talk about the status of Christians in Israel; after all, in Israel Christians are protected in a way that they are not in any other part of the Middle East, so it was a shock to me that he felt the way that he did.

I have been many times to Safed since 1958 and saw the gradual erosion of those principles as the reality of constant threat ground Israel down and threatened it more and more. It started with the fedayeen.

Safed is six miles from the Syrian border—a walk—and we know what is happening on the other side of that border. About 10 miles to the north is Lebanon, where we know that there are child soldiers, of whom we have seen photographs only this week in the British press, carrying automatic weapons and machine guns. One absolutely understands the horrible situation of the Palestinian people; no one could possibly tolerate what has happened to them, and no one can do anything other than despair at their plight and their despair and the shock that they suffer. The problem seems to me to be rather well expressed by the situation in the town of Safed at the time when Karo lived there, when there were around 14,000 Jews. We know that, incidentally, from a Syrian who visited him, one Yahya al-Dahiri, who wrote a very interesting essay about Safed.

A state has a duty to protect its citizens. Seeing people being beheaded on the border across the way, seeing absolute anarchy in all the states surrounding them and hearing the kind of language that the noble Lord, Lord Mitchell, referred to from the people who are currently in charge in Gaza—which of course Israel evacuated—the Israeli Government, wrong though I think they are, continue to dig their heels in. As my noble friend Lord Davies said, we cannot possibly give way to the idea of recognising a Palestinian state at this stage; I believe strongly that it would make the situation worse, and would justify the continuation of the kind of threats that we have seen.

I think that there are few people in this Chamber who read Arabic; I know that the noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington, does. Anyone who does will know that since 1948, six and seven year-olds have been subjected to the worst kind of anti-Semitism in the writings they are given in their schools—far worse than anything that the Nazis put out at the time of Auschwitz. We have to say that that really is a very serious problem.

There is hope. A few months ago, I went to a wedding in an Arab village in Israel and there an Arab man was hosting a strictly Jewish, kosher wedding. He had a partnership with a kosher caterer to make certain that his guests loved what they saw. It was a terrible tragedy for him because, as noble Lords might remember, in the Middle East last January there was a massive snowstorm. The reason why the bride had chosen that Arab village was that it was a totally safe, wonderful place where one felt completely at ease looking over the hills—but at one moment, all his vines were destroyed in the snow. He then went out and replanted them, because he wanted to try to satisfy that Jewish bride.

There is hope in Israel. We have to try to nurture that hope, and I do not believe we can do it by strengthening what are already the resolutions that are going to lead to violence.

House of Lords: Labour Peers’ Working Group Report

Lord Winston Excerpts

Thursday 19th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Haskel (Lab)]

My Lords, I begin by joining all noble Lords in saying what they are thinking: “Finally, the last speaker”.

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

Not quite.

[Lord Haskel]

Secondly, I add my thanks to my noble friends who wrote this report. As they say, the House needs reform.

The noble Viscount, Lord Tenby, reminded us that reform of this House has been debated for more than 100 years. Until 1949 the debate was about the powers of the House. From 1950 onwards the debate was about membership, and in 1999 this was settled to some extent. The reform debate should again turn to powers. Surely the question is: what are we for? Are we here to make the law or to check it over, to revise it? Are we here to hold the Government and perhaps the House of Commons to account? What is our relationship with the House of Commons and does it need to change, as other noble Lords have suggested? This decision is central to whether we have an elected House of Lords or not. As the paper points out, it is important to carry out these reforms while maintaining the primacy of the House of Commons.

Perhaps I may say to my noble friend Lord Richard that those of us who have been visitors to the United States over the past 20 years will have witnessed Congress, with two elected Houses, slowly disintegrating into pointless partisanship. It is where political debate has been marginalised in favour of last-minute deals—even on important matters such as the budget. That is no way to run a country and I join my noble friend Lord Howarth in thinking that there is a warning for us there.