Debate on the Address

My Lords, I beg to move that an humble Address be presented to Her Majesty as follows: "““Most Gracious Sovereign—We, Your Majesty’s most dutiful and loyal subjects, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal in Parliament assembled, beg leave to thank Your Majesty for the most gracious Speech which Your Majesty has addressed to both Houses of Parliament””." Let me say first that it is a great honour and pleasure to move this Motion. I thank my noble friend Lady Amos for giving me this opportunity. She is a warm, generous and open person, as well as a very talented one, as I am sure noble Lords will agree. I would make the same comments about my noble friend Lord Grocott, except maybe to give them a slightly more masculine tinge. Both noble Lords are extraordinarily democratic in their approach to colleagues, and that is true for the House as a whole. In the gracious Speech the Government have stated their intention to reform the House of Lords. I am not against reform, but I would ask the reformers to remember that there are two aspects to democracy. One is how Members of the House are selected and the other is to provide a public forum for the open, objective and expert discussion of public issues. This is something which in my short experience I feel the House is exceptionally good at. Whatever happens in these reforms, that quality should not be sacrificed. I can still remember my first missive from my noble friend Lord Grocott. I am pretty new to Parliament so I was impressed when I got a thick letter with the words, ““From the Labour Group”” printed on the back. I thought that it would be full of information about interesting things to do, people to meet and ideas to discuss, but it had just a single slip of paper in it stating, "““Please contribute to the fund for hospital expenses and the cost of funerals””." I thought, ““I do not want to be reminded of my mortality so quickly””. It brought to mind perhaps the most ambitious classified ad that I ever saw on eBay: it said ““Used tombstone for sale. Would suit family called ‘Naisbit’””. I carefully checked that there is no Lord Naisbit in the Chamber. Before coming into your Lordships’ House I was the director of the London School of Economics, an institution which I am pleased to say is often mentioned here—sometimes even approvingly. There are many economists in your Lordships’ House—I am sure that is a good thing—but not everyone is persuaded of the virtues of the subject. Economics is said to be the only subject where two people can share a Nobel Prize for saying completely opposite things. This happened when Friedrich von Hayek and Gunnar Myrdal shared the Noble Prize for saying completely opposite things in 1974. Why do economists exist? To make weather forecasters feel good. Mention of economics brings me back to the gracious Speech, which quite rightly begins with the Government’s economic record. If you want to show the health of an economy, you should not look at its rate of unemployment but at its rate of employment. In the UK at the moment 75 per cent of the labour force is in work. Is this not an extraordinary achievement? Compare it with the percentages for France, Germany and Italy. In France and Germany, only 63 or 64 per cent of the labour force is in work. This means that you have to pay out a lot more in unemployment benefits; you cannot spend the money on hospitals, pensions or the other things that people need. In Italy—I do not mean to sound too down on Italy, which is a lovely country—only 51 per cent of the labour force is in work. So the Government have considerable economic achievements to their credit. This has not been purchased at the expense of social justice. The Government have introduced a fairly substantial minimum wage. This was much criticised at the time but it has not destroyed jobs. The New Deal means that there is virtually no long-term unemployment in this country and only a very low level of youth unemployment. Compare that, again, to France. In France, about 30 per cent of people under 30 have never held a proper job. It is a very different situation here. The Government have hit upon a combination of economic prosperity and stability, as the gracious Speech says, low inflation and very substantial social justice. More than 2 million people have been lifted out of poverty since 1997. Is that not a substantial achievement? Is that not an achievement to be proud of? Yes, it is. A good deal of the gracious Speech concentrates on security, crime and international terrorism. I know there are many in your Lordships’ House who have worries about the Government’s policies in these areas. I think it is entirely right and proper that the House should be a bastion for the defence of our liberties and our freedoms. However, I ask noble Lords to consider not only our formal freedoms but our real freedoms. Freedom is not real unless you can utilise it. Am I free if I cannot go outside my house at night for fear of juvenile gangs? Am I free if I dare not go to my local park, even in the daytime? Am I free if I live with some realistic fear of international terrorism? Noble Lords should remember that the new international terrorism is totally different from the terrorism of the IRA or ETA with which we are familiar. That is local terrorism oriented towards local nationalist objectives. It is a muted form of terrorism, whatever the barbarisms carried out in its name. We now face a much more ruthless form of terrorism in which the terrorist leaders say that if they could, they would kill millions of people. Osama bin Laden has said that he would kill millions of Americans. This is a new threat; we must mobilise to counter it, and you cannot do so, I think, with just a classical civil liberties position. We must be prepared to find an appropriate balance between traditional civil liberties and protection. I do not want to hammer the theme of economists too much, but I remind noble Lords that it is an economist, Sir Nicholas Stern, who has just produced the definitive report on climate change. The Prime Minister has described this report as the most important one to be produced during his period of office. Again, there are some sceptics when it comes to climate change—some people do not believe it and say that the risk is exaggerated—just as there are sceptics about international terrorism, although one group tends to be on the left and the other on the right. But climate change is different. We cannot wait around to see whether the sceptics are right or wrong. We must act, and we must act now, to counter climate change. I am very pleased that there is a sort of cross-party consensus on this issue. I beg to move. Moved, That an Humble Address be presented to Her Majesty in the following terms: "““Most Gracious Sovereign—We, Your Majesty’s most dutiful and loyal subjects, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal in Parliament assembled, beg leave to thank Your Majesty for the most gracious Speech which Your Majesty has addressed to both Houses of Parliament””.—(Lord Giddens.)"