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Lord Davies of Brixton Excerpts

Thursday 29th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)]

The House has seen four brilliant maiden speeches today, and I am sure that in the coming years we will benefit from everyone who has joined us. It is my honour and pleasure to follow my friend, David Pitt-Watson, who has now joined the House as Baron Pitt-Watson. His territorial designation is

“of Kirkland of Glencairn in the County of Dumfriesshire”.

What an asset he will be to the House—what a CV. In his speech, he only touched on what he will bring to our deliberations. This House will welcome, value and learn from his range of experience. Wikipedia has him down as a businessman and a social entrepreneur, but also a Labour councillor and a Labour bureaucrat, blending a life in academia and a life in business—successful, but always with a social purpose in mind.

I will touch on just a few things from my noble friend’s extensive CV: a Pembroke visiting professor at the Judge Business School, Cambridge University; influential books translated into five languages; and a lifetime achievement award last year from the International Corporate Governance Network. The citation for that award states that he is

“one of the most influential pioneers of responsible investment and stewardship. His leadership in creating ventures that advanced governance advocacy and institutional stewardship services set new global standards and inspired market-wide change”.

I am sure that many Members of the House will also welcome the fact that my noble friend is always a Scotsman. Finally, I hope the House will forgive me when I say I particularly welcome David because he is greatly interested in pensions, for that is how we met many years ago. He is not just interested but a tenacious and ultimately successful thought leader, and one of the leading advocates of a new type of pension provision, collective defined contribution schemes—CDCs. This will be of increasing importance in our development of better pensions.

Moving on, I look forward to the valedictory statement from the noble Lord, Lord Offord. It will be interesting, if not necessarily in line with what I believe.

On the subject of the debate, I want to make just one crucial point. I hope that everyone has now read or, better, watched Prime Minister Carney’s brilliant and important speech that sets in my mind the context for this debate. There is a new international political geometry. First, it is clear now that size matters; economic power, soft power and military power will also be increasingly important. Secondly, the delusion of “take back control” has been exposed for us all to see. Thirdly, we can no longer rely on the United States. We will always be friends—culture and language will always bring us together—but it will be that friend that we know we cannot rely on any more.

The inevitable conclusion of this, given our broad political and cultural affinities to Europe and the simple fact of geography, is that we have to work out a new relationship with Europe. Brexit has been a disaster. Let us talk seriously about how to proceed rather than being swept along by events.