Queen’s Speech

My Lords, I apologise to the House for diving in and out all day. I have been attending and speaking at a government conference organised many months ago. I apologise and will not delay the House long. I pay tribute to the extraordinary speech of the noble Lord, Lord McColl. For three years, from 2002-05, in my capacity as president of UNICEF UK, I did almost nothing but deal with issues revolving around child trafficking—usually child sex trafficking. It changes you; it changes you a great deal as it is shattering. It left me with two overwhelming feelings. I have a problem even saying this but it left me with a kind of disgust at my own sex. Clearly it is 99.9 per cent a men’s issue that must be solved by men. Interestingly half the people who are attempting to solve it are women. This is not something that women can solve; it is an issue that only men can solve. Every Member of this legislature should be involved in seeking the solution one way and another. The other factor is the economic one. It is a vast business. I have looked at that UNICEF figure many times. Every 30 seconds, a child is trafficked. The other terrible thing is that I came to hate the name ““uncle””. The House will be stunned by how much of this ghastly trade is carried out by relatives. The name ““uncle”” crops up time and again when looking for the perpetrator, the trafficker, the organiser or the profiteer. These are things that we all have to reflect on very deeply. I thought the noble Lord’s speech was marvellous. I am proud to have been here to listen to it. That was not the subject that I was going to touch on. Noble Lords as old as me will remember that after ““Housewives’ Choice”” there was five minutes of a story, a hymn and a prayer. I will be speaking for about five minutes, and there will be no hymn and not much of a story, but there is a reflection and a question I want to put to the House and the Minister. We are living at a moment of extraordinary opportunity. One of the disappointments in reading the media in the past three or four months and in looking at a lot of the activity taking place is that there seems to be a feeling that if we could just push things back to the way they were in 2006, all would be well. I do not want things to go back to the way they were in 2006. Much of what was happening in 2006 was rotten. I hope that we can take advantage of the opportunity presented to us to reappraise, reassess and recalibrate what the future might look like. One word becomes overwhelmingly important. It is ““trust””. This is as much an issue for Her Majesty’s Opposition and the Liberal Democrats as for the Government. In politics, we are no longer in a position to afford one scintilla of mistrust creeping out from what we do, the decisions we make or the thinking that lies behind them. Trust has moved from being a desirable aspect of what we do to being the entire ball of wax. For the past 11 years, my job has been visiting schools up and down the country—I have visited more than 400 of them—and engaging with teachers and young people. My question is, from where are we going to rebuild trust? On what basis are we going to create a new relationship with young people? How are we going to help teachers to encourage the children in their care to believe in civil society? I made a short list as I was waiting to speak. The banks have turned out to be institutions we can no longer trust. I have recently had an incident, which I shall pursue elsewhere, with Barclays Bank, as a result of which I read the FSA’s paper Treating Customers Fairly—Towards Fair Outcomes for Consumers, which was published in July 2006. When read alongside the events of the past three months, that document takes on a Monty Python aspect. There is no relationship between what the FSA believed banks should do and what banks’ relationship with the public should be, and the reality that has unfolded during the past few months. The police, who have at times behaved in the most extraordinarily intemperate way, as we all know, have done their job in terms of beginning to break down trust. I am not sure that I dare any more to say to a child, ““Don’t worry about it. Just go and see a policeman””, and if I say that to a teenager, I get a very old-fashioned look. The media have come up several times in this debate. The media treat trust as a fungible. It is a matter of convenience. The noble Lord, Lord McColl, asked a good question. What do they think they are doing running advertisements when they know exactly what the result of those advertisements is and exactly what they are encouraging punters to do? So, we cannot trust the media, we are having problems with the police, and we can no longer trust the banks. Thank God for head teachers and doctors, although they survive purely on the fact that their reputations are so strong that they are able to deal with the worst depredations of the media; the media take plenty of pot-shots at doctors and head teachers. What can civil society do? My noble friend Lord Griffiths mentioned that the Government intend to give new powers to teachers and head teachers. They do not really need powers; they need the support of the whole of civil society to create a bedrock from which they can begin to produce a generation of young people who will reject the values of the past five, 10 or 20 even years and build something better. Why? Because the world that these young people will inhabit will be infinitely more difficult than ours. They will deal with problems, such as climate change, that we have barely scratched the surface of. It will be a completely different world. Equipping young people with the agility, flexibility, imagination and courage to deal with that world is an enormous task. It is not a question of giving teachers the powers to do that; it is a question of civil society getting behind those to whom we look to do that and to give them the encouragement, the self-belief and, most of all, the sense that we all know what we are asking of them and that we will back them to the hilt.