Queen’s Speech

Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope Excerpts

Thursday 29th June 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Hudnall. Her speeches are always wise and repay careful study. This is my 34th Queen’s Speech—and they do not get better as they go on.

I listened carefully to the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell of Beeston, and I feel her pain. It is not easy to do this in six minutes on the Queen’s Speech, but we need to have a conversation about what is happening more widely and strategically between the various parts and communities of the United Kingdom. That is important, as we are not in steady-state politics at all. My first complaint about the Queen’s Speech is that I get no sense that the proposals are adequate for the purpose. We are in a period of substantial change, and we need political management of that change, which is absent.

Of course, a lot of activity is going to be devoted over the next two years to withdrawal from the European Union, but there is a parliamentary opportunity cost to that, in that we may not be able to go back and look at some of the other pressing and increasing pressures within our domestic agenda. I do not think the Government have a plan, and I commend to noble Lords who were not here to hear them the words of the noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, who spoke powerfully about that yesterday. He made a lot of sense to me when he was saying that we really need a plan. Like him, I think that this Queen’s Speech is not adequate for that purpose.

The second thing is that part of the Queen’s Speech sets out to establish proper stability and co-operation within the United Kingdom, and obviously I support that. We are in great danger, partly because of the opportunity cost in withdrawal negotiations of forgetting what is going on in the other constituent nations of the United Kingdom. I will say as neutrally as I can that the £1 billion going to Northern Ireland makes that worse. It makes it worse in Scotland and worse in Wales. Why? Your Lordships will recall that Northern Ireland has a population of 1.8 million. If you take £1 billion and scale that up throughout the United Kingdom on a per capita basis, my Twitter feed told me yesterday—from Chris Giles, whose judgment I trust about these things—that that would be equivalent to £35 billion spent in the United Kingdom. These things get noticed north of the border.

It is not that there is no precedent for this or that it is a unique occasion. I remind the House that in 2015, Sinn Fein was complaining that it was not getting enough money for its Fresh Start proposals. In the Stormont House agreement, the then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Ms Theresa Villiers, “underpinned” the Fresh Start proposals with £500 million of taxpayers’ money in the United Kingdom, and people in Scotland noticed that. So we have to be very careful about keeping the channels of communication open and making sure that we are actually a United Kingdom in the course of continuing these negotiations within Europe.

The gracious Speech fails to recognise that there has been a signal change in the public’s attitude to the generosity or otherwise of welfare state provision—the safety net—in the United Kingdom. I absolutely support those passages in the speech made by the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, and—this is not something that I expected ever to say—Jeremy Corbyn deserves some credit for exploring and exposing some of that during the election campaign. There has been a response, and if colleagues are ever in doubt about that there is evidence every day if they want to look for it. Yesterday NatCen’s 34th annual report on British social attitudes showed that the country clearly has a wish to become kinder. It stated that,

“after 7 years of government austerity, public opinion shows signs of moving back in favour of wanting more tax and spend and greater redistribution of income. We also find that attitudes to benefit recipients are starting to soften and people particularly favour prioritising spending on disabled people”.

That is everywhere in the press, if noble Lords want to find it. There is another example in today’s Independent: an Oxford University research project commissioned for the Trussell Trust shows that four out of five households that use food banks are deemed to be severely food insecure. That is the country we are living in.

In my final minute I will say that it is all right for Ministers to come to the Dispatch Box and say that universal credit is a fix for this because it is transformational. It is transformational for the top two-thirds or more of our community who can handle a very complicated system that has some design faults that are becoming more and more evident, but the bottom 15% in insecure, low-wage jobs are now having their lives manipulated by the rules within universal credit. That is something that we should watch very carefully. If the Minister would be kind enough to take that message back to the DWP, I would be very grateful.

I do not have time to pursue my concluding point but I thought I had better say something beneficial about the Speech. I think that the financial guidance Bill has opportunities and I look forward to taking part with the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, to try to make it work and to make financial guidance better in future for citizens of the United Kingdom.