King’s Speech

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Wednesday 8th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I feel very shocked and sad about the death of the noble and learned Lord Judge. He was a kind, lovely man and I will miss him very much. We have had some excellent speeches today, including the three maiden speeches. I fear I will bring the tone down a little, because I am very angry—as usual—at what this Government have put into the Speech. It is a massive failure.

Our liberal parliamentary democracy is in danger. The right to protest has never been more restricted, while the power of state surveillance has never been more widespread. Protests can be declared illegal at the whim of police officers who believe they might cause more than minor disruption. A woman in a bright floral dress can be handcuffed at Ascot for possessing nail glue in her make-up bag and tourists or passers-by can be stopped and searched if a protest occurs near them. You can also be arrested for reminding juries of their right to act on their conscience—a right outlined on a plaque inside the Old Bailey. By contrast, undercover police and informers can be given legal immunity by their bosses for breaking criminal laws.

Our police are also replicating the widespread adoption of facial recognition by authorities in Russia and China without any democratic safeguards on this public identity parade. They are seeking further powers to break the everyday privacy measures that tech companies have introduced to safeguard our conversations and financial transactions. Look at the government plans to spy on the bank accounts of those receiving benefits, whether they are the working poor, disabled or doing their best as a carer. It is a new low in this Government’s constant vile behaviour. Never in our history have a Government intruded on the privacy of anyone’s bank account without very good reason. Now we are treating all people on benefits as potential criminals. If MPs think this is a good idea, let us ask them to go first. With all the cases of corruption, second jobs and undeclared incomes, would MPs be okay if the banks had the ability to raise red flags on their accounts? That seems to make sense—to test the system before we use it on other people.

After 13 years of Tory Britain, you can spend three years in prison for erecting a climate crisis banner above a bridge while violent men and sexual predators are quietly fast-tracked for release to help with prison overcrowding. However, we all know who is not facing jail time: the water company CEOs who fleeced customers for billions of pounds, filled our rivers with sewage and are now asking for our bills to go up so they can take even more of our money; Conservative Party members who benefited from the billions handed out via the PPE fast-track scheme and numerous other scams; and the Tory donors from the oil and gas industry who have had their payback through tax breaks, new licences and delays in the net-zero policy. Those are climate criminals who are costing us a fortune now and costing future taxpayers billions to clean up the mess and mitigate the damage caused by flooding, wildfires, food shortages and other climate catastrophes.

We need to repeal all the laws that this Government have enacted to restrict protest, strikes and voting. The minimum service levels that they are imposing on rail workers this Christmas are a form of slave labour, as people lose their right to strike. The Green Party would give people a positive right to protest, with legal backing to ensure the distinction between non-violent and violent protest. There is a strong tradition in this country of non-violent direct action, from people opposing the felling of trees in Sheffield to the rural campaigners who stopped fracking wells. That tradition is a democratic safety valve against corruption and state bureaucracy. Ending the corrupt system of contracts and privatised services will take more than a change of government—it needs a democratic revival.

Civil liberties are not a side issue in bigger policy debates; they can shape them. If you want to insulate homes in Britain and give consumers cheaper bills, do not clog up the prisons with people who campaign to insulate Britain. If you want to stop the climate’s lurch towards a planet-wide extinction event, then just stop oil and do not lock up the people who will be seen as heroes in 10 years’ time. Non-violent direct action is a democratic tradition that does not rely on big funders and corporate backers, which is why it resonates with ordinary people. That is also why juries often fail to convict when they hear what motivates these protests and, predictably, it is why the police are now arresting a lot of people for simply reminding juries of their right to convict according to their own conscience.

Finally, I will talk about the Government’s scapegoating of refugees. If the Met Police are looking for hate speech this weekend, they need look no further than the Home Secretary, as she is deliberately trying to divide people when we desperately need a Government who bring communities together. Not content with a broken country where everything has stopped working properly, we have a Home Secretary aiming to break the bonds of shared humanity between people. This Government’s secret contract to hire an expensive prison hulk to detain refugees is a disgrace. So is the Rwanda contract. However, both of these are a precursor to renting prison space in foreign jails for British nationals. Successive Conservative Governments since 2010 have increased jail time by 57%. It is a policy based on deterrence and they are now proposing to do the same with longer sentences, but it has done nothing to bring down crime.

This Government have lost touch with the real priorities of ordinary people. The sooner we can have a general election, the sooner we can get on with the job of fixing broken Britain and solving the climate emergency.