Lord Speaker's Corner

Lord Speaker:

Archbishop of Canterbury, welcome to the Lord Speaker's podcast. We have been friends and acquaintances for quite a number of years and it's a real privilege for me to have a conversation with you this morning. And I'll call you Justin, and you call me John, from now on.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

That's very nice, John. Thank you.

Lord Speaker:

First thing to say to you is that you wear fancy clothes. Sometimes you have on exotic headgear, your neighbour across the Thames is the Prime Minister, you can walk up to Buckingham Palace to see your friend, King Charles at any time, do you suffer from imposter syndrome?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Appallingly. I get up early in the morning and I take some exercise and I spend some time praying. And this morning, even this morning, I was in my prayers saying to God, "What am I doing here? I must be the worst archbishop there has been for many, many centuries." [laughter] A real sense of being completely fraudulent.

Lord Speaker:

The two of us were present at the death of Queen Elizabeth, very sombre occasion, and so well-conducted by yourself. And I was privileged to be at the Coronation, having a front row seat.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

I remember.

Lord Speaker:

Where you had the primary position. And it touched me when you put the crown on King Charles's head, you stepped back and looked to say, "Is it right on?"

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Is it level?

Lord Speaker:

And then went back. It reminded me of going for a suit with the tailor, he gets you done and he say, "Wait a minute, the shoulders, it's lying right at the shoulders." So that was a very human thing.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

It was one of two blunders I made in that service. I shouldn't have done that, but-

Lord Speaker:

I think it was wonderful.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Well, thank you. It is very noticeable. I made two mistakes in that service. But it was... You are quite right, the funeral, it was sombre but it was so powerful. And I think one of my curious moments was actually the catafalque and the coffin, with Her Late Majesty in it, arriving at Westminster Hall. You must have been there.

Lord Speaker:

I was at the Hall, yeah.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

I don't know if you remember, I was standing by the door, I don't know quite where you were, and it was a hot September day, and the sun was getting a bit lower and you could see these long shadows ahead of the Household Cavalry who were dismounted with their plumes. And I was looking at them as the shadows before they actually appeared, and the shadows were wrong. And when I looked, when they arrived, I realised because they all had their sabres reversed over their shoulders. And that was the moment when I realised that this was real. It sort of hit me very powerfully at that moment. But with all the most senior people in the country to receive the coffin in Westminster Hall, in this extraordinary historic place, I found that of one of the most moving parts of the service.

Lord Speaker:

I found it the most solemn occasion possibly I've been at, but somehow didn't feel a sad occasion.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

No, I agree with you. There was a huge sense of a life well-lived and properly completed. That is a gift that all of us would like.

Lord Speaker:

In terms of your early life. Now, you've made it very open that you were the son of alcoholic parents, but you went to Eton, then you went to Cambridge and then you became an oil executive, classic establishment route forward.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

I know.

Lord Speaker:

But then, you had the road to Damascus and then you became a priest as a result of that. How did you navigate that journey?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Well, growing up was pretty complicated to put it mildly. And there was a lot of moving around, moonlight flit on one occasion to avoid the rent, I think that was probably the case with my father who was drinking very heavily at the time. And then when I was in the oil industry, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I worked in, particularly the last six years, in a really wonderful company with great colleagues. And then there was a very clear sense of God's call to ordination. And my wife and I, we had three children by then and my wife and I sat and prayed about it and talked about it, took a day out to fast and pray about it.

And at the end of the day, we'd drawn down some paper, a line down the middle, and the reasons not to and reasons to do it. And at the end of the day we had three pages not to and one line to do it. Was, ‘if this is God, then it's the best possible choice.’ And so you don't decide to get ordained. You decide to offer yourself to the church, and the church decides. And by the skin of my teeth, I got through the process.

Lord Speaker:

But am I correct in saying the Bishop of Kensington said, "There is no place for you in the church."

Archbishop of Canterbury:

He said, "There's no future for you in the church." Yes. He said, "Of the more than thousand potential ordination candidates that I've interviewed, you don't come in the top thousand."

Lord Speaker:

Very good. How wrong he could be as a result of that. But then you had experience in Coventry, in Durham, in Liverpool, and then Canterbury. And we had the privilege of sitting together in the chamber when I was Senior Deputy Speaker, and I was sitting on the Bishops’ bench, and I remember you telling me about your experience in Liverpool. And when you came down to Liverpool, yourself and Catherine, said that London is a foreign country.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Oh, you remember that? Yes.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah, I do remember that.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Absolutely.

Lord Speaker:

And by the way, I had Michael Heseltine in here for an interview,

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Oh, gosh.

Lord Speaker:

He made the statement that Liverpool changed him.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

It changes. It's a wonderful, wonderful place. It's one of our greatest cities, and they'd obviously say the greatest and I often agree with them. But, Michael Heseltine, when I was there, was still remembered as a hero. As one of those people who backed Liverpool. And I still saw this extraordinary, when I was there 2007 to '11, through the banking crisis, and the great recession. I remember someone in Toxteth, where we were living saying, "What recession? We've been in depression for the last 40 years." And you saw a place - rows and rows of tinned-up houses, dereliction in the docks. It's changed quite a bit. But the poverty is still really extreme, and it's not that Liverpool lacks spirit or entrepreneurial will or get-up-and-go. It's got as much as anywhere, probably in the world, but it's just one of those forgotten places by central government too often.

Lord Speaker:

Then you moved to Coventry as a dean. And Coventry had been bombed in 1943 and the priest at the time, Reverend Arthur Wales who picked up the carpenters’ nails after the bombing and then made the cross of nails as a result.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

That's right.

Lord Speaker:

That's become really symbolic as a result of that. It's lasted. And am I correct in saying that it symbolises the issue of reconciliation?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

It symbolises reconciliation.

Lord Speaker:

And the link with Germany and Dresden?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Yes, and at the end of the second World War, the dean of Coventry at the time, sent a team, first of all to Kiel, which had been very heavily bombed, and then to Dresden, and because Dresden ended up in East Germany, the communist government refused to let the Frauenkirche, one of the great churches of Dresden, be rebuilt. And after the fall of the wall, the Frauenkirche was rebuilt, and Coventry contributed the cross at the top of the Frauenkirche, a cross of nails, because that sense of the horror of war, the mutual suffering, that Coventry and Dresden endured has embedded that link very, very powerfully, and with many other cities across Germany. There's about 48 places that have a cross of nails to link them to Coventry. And the Community of the Cross of Nails, which I oversaw when I was working there, now has about 250 centres around the world - a very large number in places that have suffered from war. I mean, Hiroshima would be another one.

Lord Speaker:

And then you met Pope Francis and gave him, as a gift, the cross of nails.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Yes.

Lord Speaker:

And if I'm correct, then he gave you a replica of the staff of Pope St. Gregory?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

That's right. It was an extraordinary meeting. I took off my cross and gave it to him, and to my surprise, I didn't know what was coming, he gave me the... Gregory the Great had a beautiful ivory-carved crozier, the thing that bishops carry, which he'd held in his hand in 597 when he sent Augustine here to start the church, the Roman Catholic Church, in England in 597. And I got a wooden replica of it, beautifully carved, and made for a pastoral staff. It was an extraordinary gesture because Francis never does a symbol by accident, he is a genius for symbolism, and it recognised the pastoral responsibilities that Archbishops of Canterbury had. It was a great moment of ecumenical unity.

Lord Speaker:

And you've become a great friend of his. Maybe we can come on to that later, but your interest in conflict areas and poorer areas, there's a common bond between you on that.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Yes.

Lord Speaker:

But am I correct in saying you're the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Yes, I'm 105.

Lord Speaker:

Absolutely. And every aspirant for Canterbury says nolo episcopari.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Yes.

Lord Speaker:

Does that mean there is not an existing, an ambitious bishop?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Oh. Well, put it this way, when Rowan announced his retirement and Ladbrokes started putting up the odds, I was 130 to one. So nobody expected it, least of all, me. I think, I don't know. I mean, there probably are people who would like the job, but that's quite a strong disqualification. Most of the bishops I know say, and I believe them, that it's quite a complicated job and they prefer... They're very happy in their diocese.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah, you have no power, but you have responsibility for everything. Is that correct?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Yes, that's more or less accurate. It's the privilege of the mug throughout the ages.

Lord Speaker:

And your speeches in the Lords, and we'll come onto the Lords issues, but your speeches in the Lords always contain something from the Bible, as a result of that. But some would say you're too evangelical, you're too political. But if Christianity is about changing the world, hence it must be political.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Yes. I mean, going back to Aristotle, politics is about how we organise society. And I think Wes Streeting put it very, very well, because I'm accused of virtue signalling and politics and virtue signalling in politics. Wes Streeting a few months ago was asked about that and he said, "He's the one person in the country whose job description specifically says he is to virtue signal." And I hadn't thought that, but I think that's accurate. That religion, Christian faith or other faiths, if they don't influence the way you understand justice and the way the world should work, they're just in a watertight compartment and what are they worth?

Lord Speaker:

I think St. Basil the Great, you quoted St. Basil the Great in one of your speeches warning about the common need as a means of private gain. Now, that's a really sharp subtle comment on today's society.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

I think that's right. And it was intended as such, and I know you are obviously very, very neutral and impeccably so in your current job, but in the past you were certainly influenced by your own faith in how you saw the world. Roman Catholicism and Catholic social teaching has within it not a sense of common need but of common good. And it's a very, very different thing. It's to say, "What do we do that enables the benefits of an incredibly wealthy society to be spread with justice and righteousness?"

Lord Speaker:

Yeah. And also, I think you quoted Matthew 6:21, "Where your treasure is there, your heart will also be there." But you compare that to the fight for the heart and soul of the country. Do you build your treasures up and then do nothing else? You and I looked at the banking crisis, and perhaps we can come on more to that, but a number of people who have made quite a lot money from banking have said to me, and I think it was echoed by Mervyn King when he came to our committee, that he's met people who've retired from banking who then say, "I want to do something useful."

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Yes. I think what comes to my mind, I'm sorry you're going to get a bit of God here, but I am the archbishop.

Lord Speaker:

Oh, you're here for that.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

It's my job. It comes to my mind is that parable of Jesus about the man who has a big harvest. So he says, "Oh, this is wonderful. I'll build another barn, I'll put all my grain in there and I'll have a really relaxed happy time because I've made lots of money." And Jesus says, and God said to him, "You fool, your soul will be required of you this night." We can't wait and calculate the moment when we're going to serve each other because we don't know how long we'll live and we don't know what opportunities we'll have. I was immersed in the financial world for 11 years, I met fabulous people who I admired hugely. I met people who were not quite the same. We interviewed both on the Parliamentary Banking Standards Commission, and the ones who I most admired had a very broad view of society, were generous with what they had, and sought to do well in the world, not when they retired but right through their life.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah. In fact, one of them said to me that his most contented time was when he was young, he was a student, and he helped out in a house for older people and those with disabilities. So it's touching something that maybe in today's society we're missing.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

There was a report yesterday that came out which pointed out that companies get much better productivity, much better morale, where they have a strong policy of encouraging volunteering, and it needn't be hugely time-consuming. As you say, that sort of thing, just going and helping out where you're not important, you don't matter, nobody cares who you are, and it makes a big difference.

Lord Speaker:

And your faith, is that a vehicle of change? Or is it a bulwark against change?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Oh, that's a really interesting question. It compels me to welcome change. It compels me. Christian faith is revolutionary because it seeks people who disagree to love one another and it seeks churches to, constantly, to be involved in the process of seeking justice. I was on a Zoom call last night with people from all around the world, and all fairly radical activists, but deeply Christian. And they're seeking indigenous rights, they're seeking reduction of arms sales, and fighting against gun crime in the States, all kinds. And in this country, it was a couple of people, racial justice. And I was so struck that for them, faith meant whatever their instincts, they had to welcome change, because they had to see the change that God wants to make because God's involved in our world. And to work with God to see as my wonderful predecessor, Rowan, who you probably remember.

Lord Speaker:

I do, I do well.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Said once, "Our job is to see what the Holy Spirit is doing and get in there and do it with him."

Lord Speaker:

Yep. Well, in terms of change, I suppose that's where your supporters or critics come in change, as a result of that. But if you look at the Church of England, the past hundred years, almost all of the archbishops have been Oxbridge-educated and all are white.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

All are white. And in the last several hundred years, all are white, and they're probably all Oxbridge-educated.

Lord Speaker:

Does that need changing?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

It is changing. I mean, it's changing. Archbishop of York wasn't Oxbridge-educated. Thinking back, you'll find plenty of others. But if you look at the bishops today, for what it's worth, I'm the only old Etonian, the vast majority did not have a private education. And that means, inevitably, that in the future we're likely to have women, we're likely to have people from global majority heritage, and we're likely to have people who are not Oxbridge-educated. It's certainly not anywhere in the job description.

Lord Speaker:

You have responsibility for the larger Anglican community to the world, and you only have soft power to do that. For example, I think the Archbishop of Nigeria, and we know same sex blessings and their position for women is very sensitive. The Archbishop of Nigeria, I think, said that you are promoting a second reformation.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Oh, good. I'm not. I'm trying... throughout history, we have seen developments in understanding in the church. Newman wrote a wonderful book on this when he was still an Anglican, before he went to Rome. And then he rewrote it when he was at Rome, and it was even better, to be fair. But the church interacts, it's part of its society. It interacts with what's happening in society. When Galileo discovered that the earth went round the sun rather than vice versa, although the church-

Lord Speaker:

What happened to him as a result of that?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

It was not good. That was your lot. But very quickly, and then with the Enlightenment and the science and Darwin, the church realised that it had to change its understanding, and for instance, the early chapters of Genesis, to see that they are not history, they are theology, and they're telling us incredibly important things about the nature of human beings. As we've discovered that, for example, in the thing you suggested that nobody chooses to be gay or straight or bisexual or trans or whatever, that we have to adapt our understanding while still maintaining a church that seeks people to be holy, to be faithful to committed relationships with one another, not to be promiscuous, to seek to love one another and to be loving to others.

And we all know, there's scarcely a family in the country that doesn't know someone who's gay, for example, or gay couples who are wonderful in how they bring up adopted children, or children who've been conceived through interventions, and in the country people realise that's the case. I'm not saying the church just goes with the flow. There are plenty of things the country supports that I really don't, but we do have, when science changes, when the understanding of the realities of the natural world change, and of human nature, we must pay attention.

Lord Speaker:

I suppose some would say that the primary message of Jesus was love one another, love your neighbour. So the respect for same-sex couples or whatever else, that flows from that.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

It does flow from that. He also, Jesus is very clear about the need for holiness and obedience to God's commands, and that's where the disagreement lies. And what the Church of England is seeking to do is just to make pastoral accommodation for different people without changing its doctrine, that biblical marriage is a lifelong union of one man and one woman. And that's what we're seeking to do. It's a difficult process. I mean, Pope Francis has been advocating for praying with and loving people in same-sex relationships very carefully himself, and it's proving as difficult.

Lord Speaker:

He's getting into hot water.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

He's got into very hot water. You find the same thing with the Methodists, you find the same thing everywhere.

Lord Speaker:

Of course.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

It's dealing with changes in the world around us.

Lord Speaker:

Reform in the Lords, before I go into that, maybe just a quick look at the Parliamentary Commission for Banking Standards, because I think we were there originally for a few months.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Two years.

Lord Speaker:

But it went to two years, exactly, as a result. And you were very generous in that you were Archbishop of Canterbury, it was announced, but you still stayed with the Parliamentary Commission for Banking Standards.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

It wasn't generosity, I was fascinated. And I thought it was really important.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah, I think we did a lot of good work there.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

I do too.

Lord Speaker:

And again, I remember us sitting together talking about it. And at root, it was about cultural change in the banks.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Yes, exactly.

Lord Speaker:

My view is, maybe we missed a little bit of a trick there.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

I think we have. I think we have to recognise human nature that people will always be tempted by very large sums of money, and we're talking megabucks. But I think we did miss a bit of a trick. I think the City is one of the great glories of our economy. I really feel that, but it's not always as helpful to our economy as many think. You'll remember that I failed to get an investigation into what the net contribution of the City was since say 1945.

Lord Speaker:

And the productivity.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

And the productivity. Including the crash.

Lord Speaker:

Absolutely.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Because the crash cost directly less. They've got a lot of money back from denationalising the banks, but if you then take into account the costs of the guarantees we gave, which were a trillion pounds, if you take into account the indirect impact of the collapse of the banking system on confidence in the economy, on investment, we still haven't recovered in many parts of the country.

Lord Speaker:

Absolutely. In terms of reform for the House of Lords. First of all, the House of Lords itself, what's the value added to the House of Lords to the political system?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

I think there's two key things. One is that it does the real nitty-gritty detail of revising legislation. I mean, you'll have sat, and I've sat, at one in the morning, as you go through yet another clause that just needs tweaks here and there and there's always people who are very good at it. We've got Law Lords in there. We've got people who understand more law than anyone even knew existed, and are capable of really making good points. You've got experts in every area. If you're doing artificial intelligence, there's always someone who's a world expert. So it's revising legislation and sending it back to the Commons for reconsideration, but it's subordinate to the Commons. There's no question. And quite rightly, because it's not elected. The other great thing is, I think, I'll give you an example. Do you remember earlier in 2024 when David Cameron was Foreign Secretary, there was a debate on foreign policy?

Lord Speaker:

Yeah.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

And the people who spoke in it, I mean, it was an extraordinarily powerful debate. They were real experts in their field. And at the end, David Cameron gave a masterclass in summing up. It was brilliant. Everyone on all sides was saying, "What an extraordinary capacity." And there you got the big picture from people who know what they're talking about. So I think those are the two things. We can't make policy, quite rightly. We can't, except, for a bill for seeking to extend Parliament. We don't have a veto, we don't do money bills, but there is influence without the final word. And I think you look at the States with two equally powerful houses and that just ends up with real clashes. You need something that's a bit more reflective. So that's what I would say we do.

Lord Speaker:

So you would sum that up by saying it's a coalition of the knowledgeable and the willing?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

I would say it's a coalition of the knowledgeable and the wise, I think. Not all of us. I'm not saying everyone in there is wise. I mean, that's absolutely clear, and I'm not including myself. But I've heard, in there, things that have changed my whole view of a particular problem coming from someone who really understands it.

Most bishops, we don't have a whip in the Bishops. Everyone is individual, and they vote on their conscience and on what they believe the right thing is. Quite often cancel each other out because we vote in opposite directions. But on that occasion, most of the bishops were against Brexit. But I remember well, the day after the Brexit referendum, we all said, "Right, that's it. Now we've got to make sure this works as well as it will." We fully accepted that. Plenty of bishops still think it wasn't a terribly good idea, but that's not going to alter how it works.

And I remember wrecking amendments to the Brexit bills, the various bills that went through. We always opposed the wrecking amendments and we were consistent in supporting the government, the Conservative government at the time, in getting done what the people had voted for. I think that's proper in the House of Lords, where something's been in a manifesto or where there's been a referendum and where the governing party is putting that through, you can seek to improve, but you mustn't seek to veto and destroy except in circumstances I've never seen in my life.

Lord Speaker:

So it's a think-again chamber.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

It's a think-again chamber. 'Are you sure? Are you really sure this is a good idea?'

Lord Speaker:

As Senior Deputy Speaker, I had a lot to do with the Bishops, as you know, I still have quite a lot. But I've always respected the work that the Bishops do here because my opinion is that they reflect the issues in their community. For example, Bishop Paul, of Durham, who retired.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Oh, he was... Oh.

Lord Speaker:

On the two-child policy, which is now a big issue. He was in advance of everyone else.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

He was.

Lord Speaker:

He chaired, it's not the proper terminology, but the warm homes, warm areas during COVID, as a result of that. Bishop Alan Smith, St Albans, he came to see me, about his concerns on gambling.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

And he got-

Lord Speaker:

We set up a committee and that had a huge effect. Hasn't solved the problem, but it's taken us forward quite a bit.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

It took us forward a lot. Bishop of Durham was, you're absolutely right. Bishop Paul, and you think of Bishop of Chelmsford, Guli who came here as a refugee at the age of 12.

Lord Speaker:

She had a profound speech about Iran.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Very powerful speech. Usually, does make a very powerful speech. One of the things I noticed because I'm a diocesan bishop, I'm in Canterbury, things about immigration, I listen to people in the diocese the whole time. And I hear both sides and I hear the compassion for those seeking to escape horror. And I hear also the frustration about the impact in the local community. So we effectively were the people who have a set constituency almost in the Lords, and we do our best.

Lord Speaker:

Identity is a big issue now, politically. And there's always a public person and there's a private person. Who are you in the public sense? And who are you in the private sense? Who are you and what am I?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

I think that in the public sense, you put on a role, you wear it. And the Archbishop of Canterbury or ABC as all the internal memos call me. ABC is the senior member of Parliament, is the senior layperson in the country, does all the grand occasions as we've talked about, seeks to lead the church, seeks to work internationally, seeks to influence debates, can be, at moments of stress, a vicar to the country. All these things, speaks publicly for the church.

Privately, we're just the same as anyone else. We wonder about the right thing to do. We have to be those who, and rightly, who pray and seek the will of God. But we're very normal. I'll give you an example. I won't say which one, but one of my kids, after the Coronation, was having a meal with us. And I was on the telly and I was looking at myself and thinking, 'oh yes, that looks quite good.' Slightly self-complacent. And this particular offspring came up behind me, patted me on my head and said, "Dad, you think you're very important. I think you're old and bald." [Laughter]

Lord Speaker:

Well, actually, I had one many years ago when I was an MP, and the local paper had some big issue, problem locally, and the front page was, "Council calls in the big ones." And there was a photograph of me. Very good. And then one of my sons sat at the table and said, "Mum, you have said the world is in a terrible state. Don't you think that it is when you see him as a big one?" So there you are. So that's it. [Laughter]

Archbishop of Canterbury:

What did your wife say?

Lord Speaker:

Oh, she agreed.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Oh, yes. That's what happens at home.

Lord Speaker:

The identity element and the private self, you had an excellent interview in Archbishop's Conversations with Gabriel Byrne. It was a fantastic...

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Oh, it was extraordinary.

Lord Speaker:

He said, about the private self, that the private self always tries to make sense of it.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Yes. I think that was a very, very striking comment. I remember it well. And you try and channel things and enable the private self to be influenced by the public and the public to be influenced by the private. They mustn't be contradictory, but they are complementary. They're not identical.

Lord Speaker:

In terms of the questions, who, what, where, when? You said then that you're asking the wrong questions, as a result of that. Rather, the question should be that who shapes you and who leads you?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Absolutely. Those conversations were extraordinary. I'm doing a couple more I think later this year. But they're extraordinary. What I'm trying to find out in those conversations is exactly that. How do people in, who have a public persona, how do they work out what's right and wrong? Because that's a real challenge at times. How do they know what to say and what to do? You think of someone extraordinary, I think one of the most extraordinary was Nick Cave, the singer and poet, who's just published another album, which is-

Lord Speaker:

And who's lost family.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

And he's lost-

Lord Speaker:

Two.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Two sons. And listening to how actually, in his case, faith and compassion have shaped his way of thinking, of singing. He brings the two together very powerfully, and it's a remarkable thing to listen to.

Lord Speaker:

You mentioned, as a pastor, you're dealing with people every day who have issues, problems, and having many funerals that you conduct. Grief is at the centre of that. I listened to David Frum who is a Republican strategist talking about the death of his daughter, Miranda. And I know you have shared that. But he said, "When you lose a child, the nights are the worst, in that, the thoughts come crashing to your mind. And it's like seasickness. The grief ebbs and surges with intervals of comparative calm."

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Beautifully put.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah. Now, how do you minister to people in areas like that and how, as far as possible, can you console them?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

I think what we have to understand is that grief, he put it beautifully there, it surges and then you have moments of calm and it will always be with us. I was talking someone the other day, a couple of days back, about this and how they are going through intense personal grief at the moment. Something happened a couple of years ago, someone, they lost a child, they lost. And they say, "I'm always being caught by surprise." I'm not sure. I mean, I think it's different with everyone, how you... One of the things is to enable people to know what they might expect. Everyone grieves differently, but for instance, one of the things I'll often say to people is, things will happen, it will make you wonder if you're losing your mind. You'll forget things. You'll go downstairs and think, why did I come downstairs? You'll forget places and names. You'll forget. You're not going mad. You are overloaded with grief. Don't worry.

I say to people, if you are not finding that the surges and the moments of calm, the balance changes, then make it clear to people. Get some help. There's very good experts in helping people. I say, don't ever say you'll get over it. Don't ever let anyone say you'll get over it. Remember, there'll always be that gap in your life. You have to rebuild your life around the gap, with the gap in it. And the other thing, the key thing someone said to us, they found very useful, my wife and I said to a couple we knew, the big significant days; anniversary of death, birthday, Christmas, attack the day or it will attack you. So do something on the day in which you celebrate the life of the person you lost. We do that on November the 5th, the birthday of the daughter we lost. And we do something that day.

Lord Speaker:

Sexual abuse in the church. I've been involved, when I was an MP, in trying to get some consolation for those who have been sexually abused. And when we look to the church for, first of all, love, understanding, integrity, repentance, and forgiveness, those who have been sexually abused have been robbed of this. And some, can't get over it. I know of a fifty-year-old individual who was contacted by the press as a result of sexual abuse taking place in his former school. And he took the call in the garage rather than the house, because he still, to this day, had not told his family.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

I so understand that. The levels of abuse in the church, historic abuse, and the lack of good systems to prevent abuse, that was the biggest surprise. It's the thing I didn't anticipate in this job.

Lord Speaker:

The Catholic Church is very much suffering from that still.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

It is. And I found out very, very quickly how wrong I was. And it requires a whole cultural change, which certainly, at parish level, we've gone through. You'll always have abusers. There are always wicked people around. The question is, can they be spotted and prevented and will you react properly when you get stories of abuse? It is a dismissal offence in the church to cover up abuse now. And that happens. We've had a significant number of independent reports. We have a whole system in place now. When I came in at Church House in London, there was one person halftime as the centre point for contacts. And most diocese had one or one between two or three diocese.

At Church House now, I can't remember, it's 30 people or 40 people. The budget's gone from £50,000 to over £20 million a year. And it's all over the country. It's something you cannot be complacent about. And even as I'm saying this, I hear the voice of survivors saying, "But you haven't dealt with this yet, archbishop, you haven't dealt with that. You haven't dealt with the other." And they're right. We have made huge progress, but not yet enough.

Lord Speaker:

In terms of that. My own feeling is that there's a relative wall of silence in the church yet, and there's an uncomfortableness to express that from the clergy. And I feel that there's still a view that we have to protect the institution, and that's done at the expense of individual.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

I agree that that can happen. And it's the default reaction. I suppose, Parliament has been going through the same thing over sexual harassment and stuff. And the automatic response is, "Oh, oh, don't say anything. We can't afford that." One of the things Jesus said is, "If you want to be my disciple, you must take up your cross and follow me. Those who seek to guard their life in this life will lose it, and those who are willing to lose their life will gain it." I interpret that for an institution as saying, "To the devil with our reputation, we need to be transparent and honest, and that needs to be the culture." And as I say, we're better, but we're not there.

One of the ways we've done it over the last 10 years, we've had very large number of independent reports, and they are very independent. And that has given us significant criticism, and that's the right thing to do. There comes a point, we've now got a very independent national safeguarding team.

Lord Speaker:

In terms of reform of the Lords, we've got the Labour Party's proposals for abolishing the hereditary peerages, and we had the Lord Speaker's report on reducing the size of the house to 600. That got a bit imbalanced with Boris Johnson coming in. So we've still got quite a bit of work to do on that. But in terms of the issues for the reform of the House, how comfortable are you with it? And do you think maybe the Bishops could be next on the chopping block?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Funny enough, I was anticipating that question. The reform of the House has to go ahead, and the decision about the Bishops is one for Parliament. It's not for the Bishops obviously, to decide whether they're in or out. I think they make a huge contribution. You've talked about what they do. But if Parliament decides otherwise, that's the prerogative of the House the Commons to decide, and obviously we accept that. I think it would be a great pity. I think it would lose something in the way the constitution works. But it's really up to the House of Commons, that one. And I think clearly there are too many of us. I mean, I've not come across anyone in the House who doesn't say there's too many.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah, the solution for it is the problem. I mentioned Pope Francis and yourself. Again, two individuals who've struck up a friendship, which many people wouldn't have expected. And having spoken to a number of priests in the Church of England, they've admired both your work and Pope Francis in travelling to what Francis called the peripheries. For example, Sudan and Africa. And again, priests have said to me that you have taken on quite a number of risks in a personal sense being over there. But you seem to be driven by the same agenda, whether that's the poverty, the inequality, the environment with Francis, with Laudato si'.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Laudato si'. I've been very fortunate. It's been a huge blessing, the relationship with Francis. He was put in two days before I was. And we joke about that. He says, "I'm the senior by two days." He is the senior in a million other ways, but that's different. But I've learned a huge amount from him. I would certainly see him as someone whose example has shaped, in a fresh way, my theology. His passionate concern for the poor and the excluded has been something that I've taken on board more and more, listening to him. And that's been one of the greatest privileges of my life.

Lord Speaker:

Lovely. On the future, the world and young people. We're not leaving young people with a good legacy.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

No.

Lord Speaker:

And our generation, in many ways, had the best of the world, whether it's in...

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Golden Age.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah, exactly. As a result of that. As a bishop, as a leader of faith, how can you set the young people's hearts on fire?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Challenge, excitement, adventure, not complacency, not empty reassurances and promises. The thing I was talking to about 300 young people on Friday evening, three days, four days ago, in Bath, mostly teenagers. And I said, "You are to be the revolutionary generation. You ought to be the generation that reshapes what we're doing about climate, about poverty, about equality, about faith." We had a six percent increase in people under 25 attending Church of England churches last year. First time for 70 years or something. And I find real transparency, acknowledging where we've gone wrong, saying to them, I would always say, one of my cliches is, "You can never go wrong by becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ. That's the greatest decision anyone can make in their life. It won't be comfortable. It'll be the most enormous adventure. It'll be hugely challenging, and you'll change the world."

And I find that kind of challenge, I think they're an amazing generation. Snowflakes? Rubbish. They are an amazing generation that look at the world and want to change it. Well, bring it on. And the great threats to our world of vastly growing inequality and of war. And war, of course stops any action on climate change. Of migration, these are things we can change. And they are the people we must educate, we must encourage, we must liberate, to ensure that they can change.

Lord Speaker:

In doing that, I recall the Dominican, Timothy Radcliffe.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Oh, he is wonderful.

Lord Speaker:

He gave the opening homily at the Synod last year.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

He did.

Lord Speaker:

He was asked by Pope Francis. And he said, "Religion is too important to be serious about it." In that, he looked at the Gospel, and the Gospel was lively, embracing, and if you like, humorous at times, with that.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Yeah, humorous.

Lord Speaker:

And he said that we've become too serious instead of being playful with quite a number. And I know myself, sometimes sitting at a church, that you would have the priest saying, "The world is bad. It's evil." But then when we go to the car park, it's full of fancy cars. We then talk to people who are going on their holidays abroad, as a result of that. They embrace the world in every way. But in church we're told, "Oh, no, no, keep away." We're in the world.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

We're in the world. We're not meant to be of the world, Jesus says. We're in the world. And there is so much to be joyful. I start with hope because God raised Jesus from the dead. Death is conquered. The grimness of the world will be overcome in the grace of God. Yes, there's a lot wrong, but there's a lot right as well. I look at, even during the riots in August, what happens? People come out to clear up and to say to the rioters, "Stop that. That's not us." That was inspiring and moving.

Lord Speaker:

As was the NHS - the clapping for that.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

As the NHS, as the election. Do you realise we had an election which completely changed the government, and huge number of changes in holding of seats. And from the time the polls closed to the time we had a new government, without a hint of difficulty, was 14 hours. And the Prime Minister in his farewell speech said to Keir Starmer, Rishi he said, "Your successes will be all our successes." It was gracious, it was swift, it was clean. You and I both know how many places, there is nothing like that.

We've just seen Venezuela where a clear electoral result was overthrown by the military and by a tyrant. The world is not all bad. I find, in politics, that the vast majority of people in politics are well-intentioned, seek to do well, take huge risks. The last campaign was dreadful for women candidates.

Lord Speaker:

Terrible.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

And yet they just gritted their teeth and pushed through. There's a lot to celebrate in the world.

Lord Speaker:

So this concept of being in the world, if I could go back to Francis, he scolded priests for giving sermons that were dense. "No more than eight minutes," he said, "People can understand what's going on." And he also said that what they should do is that they should engage in activities in the role of formation, read poetry, novels, watch films, storytelling.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Exactly.

Lord Speaker:

That's what will get people. So you're at one with that, I presume?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

I'm at one with that. And you talk about humour, if you look at many of Jesus's parables. We lose, they're never read in a way that gives the humour. Take the lost sheep. It's a joke with a sting in the tail. He starts off, "There was this shepherd, and he had a hundred sheep." And they're all thinking, well, shepherds were well known for being a bit ditzy in those days. And not like now, before I get emailed by all the shepherds. But in those days they were a bit ditzy. "So there was this shepherd" and they were all going, "Oh, this is a good one." "He had a hundred sheep, he loses one."

"So he leaves the hundred sheep in the wilderness and he goes off looking for the one." They think, "oh, typical shepherd. 99 more he's going to lose." "And then he finds the sheep, he doesn't go back to the flock, he goes back home carrying it." "Can't it walk?" Everyone's giggling away. And then he says, "God's like that." And you've got a humorous story with a real bite to it. "God's like that. He cares so much for each of us."

Lord Speaker:

Am I correct in saying that Rab Butler was your uncle?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Great uncle.

Lord Speaker:

Your great uncle.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Yeah, grandmother's brother.

Lord Speaker:

Right. I remember Chris Patten saying about a conversation that Rab had, giving that he was the best Prime Minister we'd never had. Him and Macmillan didn't get on, as a result of that. But a distinguished Chancellor, Home Secretary, the architect of the 1944 Education Act.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Education Act, yeah.

Lord Speaker:

And one of his young staff asked him, "What's the most important lesson that you have learned in politics?" And Rab responded, "Easy," he said, "That it's important to be generous rather than efficient." Now, I would not take that as-

Archbishop of Canterbury:

I didn't know that one.

Lord Speaker:

I would not take that as literal.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

No.

Lord Speaker:

But there seems some political philosophy underneath that.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Yes. I mean, Rab was an incredibly... I knew him quite well, and he brought up my mother during the war. He was an incredibly clever man, and he was very widely-read, and he had a very clear Christian ethic and approach to life. I remember him saying to me one day when I was at college, he said, "Oh, I've just finished reading John's Gospel." And he was talking about that and the need to be generous and to love. It's not a binary choice. You can be generous and efficient, and should be, but that's a classic Rab-ism; clear and pithy. He was a great one for the pithy remark.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah. But was it love underneath that you think?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

It was deep love underneath that. And real care for people, and a very dry sense of humour. And very perceptive about human nature.

Lord Speaker:

Good. Archbishop Justin, we've been friends for many years, and we could go on and on and on. But the curtain has to come down today on it. But can I thank you for coming along, I've always admired your work, your openness, your honesty, your care for the poor, disadvantaged, the message that we are one, it's a community globally, and you have carried that out. So it's been a privilege to have you this morning. Thank you very much.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Excellent. And, John, thank you. And the admiration, I can assure you, is mutual. The way you lead the House. Thank you.

Lord Speaker:

Thank you very much.

 

Lord Speaker:

Lord Anderson, David, welcome to the Lords Speaker's Podcast. It's a pleasure to have you. Can I start with your early life, I believe that you were brought up in Scotland, in Elgin. Your family had a tartan business, but that was discarded and your family came down and your father was a teacher.

Lord Anderson:

Yes, that's right. My family made kilts and tartans, actually in Edinburgh, and I grew up in Edinburgh and in Elgin. And I was quite a patriotic Scot as a boy, I loved the history, I knew all about Bannockburn, I knew all about Culloden. But I have to accept it's 50 years since I lived in Scotland. So when I had to decide where I belonged to when I was made a member of this place, I decided on Ipswich where I now live rather than perhaps Inverleith where I grew up.

Lord Speaker:

And your father had been a teacher?

Lord Anderson:

Yes.

Lord Speaker:

He had an influence on the King at Gordonstoun.

Lord Anderson:

He did.

Lord Speaker:

He had a relationship in his academic capacity with Tony Blair, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. So you were well-connected, were you not?

Lord Anderson:

Well, he directed Charles in Macbeth at Gordonstoun, which was a great success for the prince, and I think a great success for my father. Blair, he probably knew the best because he was his housemaster at Fettes College in Edinburgh. And Blair probably caused him more trouble than the rest of them put together. My father in fact predicted a brilliant career for him on the stage. But of course he found other things to do. And much later in life when he'd moved to England, he ended up as headmaster of Eton. And young Cameron and young Johnson were among his charges there.

Lord Speaker:

Was that a good start for you, did you gain anything from that background?

Lord Anderson:

Nothing at all. I remember watching Blair in the rehearsals. I think he played Mark Antony in Julius Caesar, who of course is the Tribune of the people. My mother had to make the costumes. And they were all made out of sheets. And she'd edged Julius Caesar's sheet with blue and the same for Cassius and Brutus. But Mark Antony, because he was the Tribune of the people, got a red edged sheet. And she always claims credit for launching Tony Blair into the Labour Party when he could so easily have gone the other way.

Lord Speaker:

So a portent of the future?

Lord Anderson:

Possibly, yes.

Lord Speaker:

And your mother's modesty is not recognised. Okay. Now, when you went to university, after that you went to America, and then you went to the EU and you were in Lord Cockfield's office. Now that was very interesting I would suggest because Mrs. Thatcher sent him there to implement the single market. Which as we know, there's been a long journey in that. And the single market isn't seen as favourably now as it was then. Could you give us your experience of that office? It must've been a fascinating time.

Lord Anderson:

It was a very inspiring time. And it taught me that the European Union can work if people get behind the agenda. And it taught me that the United Kingdom could play an absolutely central role in that. He was the father of modern income tax, as you know, a Conservative peer, sent there by Mrs. Thatcher, but a man of a very great intellect.

And he got together with Jacques Delors, who was the president of the commission at the time, an equally intellectual man. And when the two of them agreed on something, it simply got done. And what they agreed on was a programme of 200 laws that were necessary to complete the internal market, remove all the barriers to trade in goods, services, movements of capital, movements of workers between the member states of the EU.

And it was my absolute privilege to be in his office for six months watching that happen. I think the other thing he taught me was that Europe was only going to work if it was sufficiently democratic.

One of the things I used to have to do was travel with him every month to Strasbourg to the European Parliament where it then sat and answer questions from parliamentarians. And I remember he gave us a lecture on the first day of the new year. He said he thought some of us weren't treating Parliament as respectfully as perhaps we should. And he reminded us of what happened to the Stuart Kings in this country when they got high and mighty and above themselves. And he said, "One day it is the Parliament that will hold the power in Europe, and you must remember that when you interact with them." And I thought that was a great lesson as well.

Lord Speaker:

During the Brexit debate, I remember democracy and the lack of democracy in the EU being criticised. And if my memory is correct, the governor of the Bank of England at the time, Mervyn King, made that very point as well. Could you give us your views on that? How did that happen, it got to that stage?

Lord Anderson:

Well, the cheap point to make is that some of those criticisms were made by people who then tried to prorogue our own Parliament. So perhaps difficult to take lessons from some of them. But I think it's true.

Lord Speaker:

Mervyn King didn't do that.

Lord Anderson:

No, of course, Mervyn King didn't, no. But I think it is true that the concept of a European parliamentary democracy never really cut through in this country. Indeed, it never really cut through entirely anywhere else in Europe. And I think that was fanned by a very hostile press, which did seem to be unique to this country, that suggested that everything was being done by unaccountable commissioners in Brussels. Which of course wasn't true. And the commission simply proposes laws, and they're passed by the Parliament and by the member states sitting in the council. But I'm not sure that really got through sufficiently. And so it was possible for people in whose interests it was to paint the EU as a profoundly anti-democratic or undemocratic organisation.

Lord Speaker:

You then studied and became a lawyer and were assigned to Brick Court Chambers. Why did you become a lawyer?

Lord Anderson:

Because my father told me it was a good idea. He'd rather wanted to be an advocate and settled for being a school teacher, which he did extraordinarily well. And it hadn't occurred to me. I'd done a degree in history, which I'd absolutely loved. History was my first love. But he didn't think there was much of a career in history. So he suggested I turned to the law. Which I did, initially with some reluctance.

What I really came to enjoy was the European law because you were inventing effectively a new system there, a system that had to be common to all the different countries of Europe. Disputes were adjudicated in a central court in Luxembourg. And it seemed to me much better to do it that way than to be fighting each other as we had been for hundreds of years. I thought there was something rather inspiring in that. And also something intellectually very interesting about helping to devise a new system of law that could govern relations between all those states.

Lord Speaker:

And you are involved with the EU Court of Justice, and if I remember, you were involved in 150 cases.

Lord Anderson:

Something like that.

Lord Speaker (07:05):

What stood out from your time then?

Lord Anderson (07:08):

Well, so many. I mean, one big one was the Factortame case, which again brings up this question of parliamentary sovereignty. Because this was an Act of Parliament, our Parliament, the Merchant Shipping Act 1988, which had been promised by the Conservatives just before an election.

And which prevented Spanish people or people who resided in Spain from owning British fishing vessels. Of course, a lot of these Spanish people had lived in England a long time. And some of them had even been born here or lived here since they were young children. And they were suddenly deprived of their livelihood and required to sell boats that they'd perfectly legitimately purchased.

So we took a case about that. And in the end, what the Court of Justice said is, "Well, we don't care that it was the British Parliament that signed off on this law. You are all under a duty to accept the supremacy of European law, and that means not discriminating against Spanish people. And so you will please disapply the law."

And so our own courts obediently did. This was terribly exciting as a young lawyer. But I did wonder in retrospect whether it might've been one of the reasons for Brexit. I remember my clerk, I was talking to him the morning of the referendum result, and he knew I wasn't very happy with it. And he said, "Well, there you are Mr. Anderson, you shouldn't have won Factortame." So these things have a way of coming back. And that's what happened.

Lord Speaker:

And you were involved in Europe and human rights law, and I believe that you spent time in Eastern Europe engaged in those subjects.

Lord Anderson:

I spent a lot of time in the years after the Berlin Wall came down travelling in Central and Eastern Europe and teaching judges, prosecutors, lawyers, students about European law and about European human rights law. Though I should say, they probably had more to teach us about human rights law because they understood what it was like having your human rights violated in a very serious way.

What they were fascinated to learn about was the mechanisms of the Council of Europe, which they all then joined, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which enabled people to bring cases there.

But it was a very inspiring time. And again, it was striking how they looked to the United Kingdom for guidance. Mrs. Thatcher had made a speech, which I remember seemed almost eccentric at the time, in which she described Prague, Warsaw, Budapest as great European cities. And that wasn't forgotten in Eastern Europe. And as a consequence, we were held in high regard. And they liked talking to us because of course we'd joined late, we'd joined the European Union late, just as they were hoping to do. We were therefore able to give them a bit of guidance on what it was like being a new member.

Lord Speaker:

Did our country have a real punch at that time globally? What would you say about Britain's position now regarding soft power?

Lord Anderson:

Well, I think we've had punch globally for at least 200 years, probably a bit longer than that. And I hope we'll continue to have it. I think we have a very high degree of soft power, and a lot of it is cultural. I think there is still great respect for our institutions and so on.

What I think we've lost by leaving is the influence on global standards, global negotiations. You think of the standards that govern mobile phones throughout the world. They were developed by the EU. You think of data protection standards developed by the EU. Competition law, effectively an EU model that's rolled out across the world. And I'm sure we're going to see the same thing with the regulation of artificial intelligence and the industries of the future.

And I think the real loss for us is no longer being at the table when those decisions are made and no longer having influence over them. Of course, we can continue to do our own thing, we can continue to have brilliant ideas. Perhaps some of the ideas will be much better than those that the EU has. But at the end of the day, if you don't have those connections and if you don't have that influence, that mighty influence in the councils of the world, then you are really going to be a footnote when it comes to mapping out the legal structure for the future.

Lord Speaker:

And on behalf of the Secretary General of the Council of Europe, I believe you looked at the issue of freedom of the media, particularly in Eastern Europe.

Lord Anderson:

I was invited by the Secretary General to do some monitoring with a small team in four countries, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, and Turkey. It's the first time anything like this had been done. And I think it was partly because Russia and Turkey had young new presidents, their names were Putin and Erdogan. This is almost 25 years ago. But they're both still there. And they were talking a good game about freedom of the media and they rather hoped that we would pat them on the back and say they were doing a good job.

Thankfully, in retrospect, we didn't. We didn't like the way journalists continued to disappear and be killed and be prosecuted for libel and all the rest of it. But it was an absolutely fascinating insight into those countries and the differences between them. And at the end of the day, I had to report back to the representatives of all the states of the Council of Europe, along with interlocutors from the countries that I'd been monitoring. And they heard what we had to say and acted accordingly.

Lord Speaker:

Our human rights mission globally, do you feel it's lessened over the years from the time you were undertaking this mission?

Lord Anderson:

I don't think there's ever been an age when human rights have been particularly conspicuously respected across the world. I think states that accept a series of international rules that constrain what they can do to their own citizens are still pretty unusual. And to my mind, that is the genius of the Council of Europe. It's a very imperfect institution. Russia is no longer a member. But with the exception of Belarus, the other countries of Europe are. And they do keep each other up to the mark, both through the court and through the political mechanism, which I attend two or three times a year, the Committee of Ministers, where they decide how to enforce the court's judgments. And I've no doubt that it has been a really powerful and useful engine for bringing those countries of Central and Eastern Europe into the European fold, ensuring that they more or less conduct themselves according to European values and in providing a bit of discipline for when they don't.

Lord Speaker:

And then from 2011 to 2016, I believe you were the independent reviewer of terrorism. Now that would be the time of the Westminster Bridge atrocity, the Manchester Arena and Borough Market [attacks]. So that must've been a very tense and demanding time for you.

Lord Anderson:

Well, those atrocities came just a few weeks after I'd finished doing the job, but I was brought back at that stage really to sit in MI5 for three months and visit frequently counter-terrorism policing. And just sit down with them and try and work out what had gone wrong. So this wasn't an inquiry or I wasn't seeking to allocate blame. I was seeking to have them speak completely freely with me. And with them produce a list of things that they needed to put urgently right.

As we were doing this, we didn't know of course, whether this was just the beginning, and the big attacks that we'd seen in Westminster and Borough Market and the Manchester Arena were just the beginning of something much bigger. Fortunately, they turned out not to be.

But it was a very good time to do that because often if you're trying to suggest to an institution that it's done something wrong, the defensive redoubts are built and windows close and people clam up. I think they were so shocked. We'd done incredibly well until 2017, there'd been very, very few deaths for 12 years from terrorism in this country. And I think people were looking at Belgium and France and possibly beginning to feel a little bit smug. Well, we had no cause to be smug after those incidents. And there was a genuine openness and willingness to change, which I thought was very inspiring.

Lord Speaker:

Could you, if possible, share some of your insights in terms of what went wrong?

Lord Anderson:

Well, there were some specific errors which MI5 put its hand up to in the specific cases. I think what it was more useful to focus on were the systems and how they weren't working, in particular for joint decision-making between MI5 and the police.

You had in Manchester for example, a young man, Salman Abedi, who blew himself up, who was known to have been dabbling in crime, drugs, low-level criminality in south Manchester. But the police in south Manchester had no idea that there might be ... they didn't know which of the people they were looking at raised national security concerns.

And one of the messages that came out was that more decisions had to be made jointly by MI5 and police. The secret ring had to be expanded a little bit just to let more people know at least the very basis of what suspicions were to enable more effective policing.

I think another big thing was the need to cooperate more with the private sector. The days when you could just have a big computer in GCHQ that would handle all the data you needed, if they ever existed, have certainly now long gone. And if you are going to be effective, for example in stopping people from buying bomb-making ingredients online, you're going to need collaboration from big private companies as well, online marketplaces or online sellers and so on.

And for that, of course you need trust. And the biggest thing I think I did as independent reviewer was the invitation of the three party leaders at the time, work for a year and produce a report, which I called A Question of Trust, on what our law of surveillance and investigatory powers needed to look like in the future.

And it wasn't that the law was exactly wrong, but it was extremely obscure. No one even in Parliament really understood what was being done under it. And the climate was absolutely rife for conspiracy theories, particularly when Edward Snowden, if you remember?

Lord Speaker:

I do.

Lord Anderson:

Who stole information from the CIA, NSA, came on the scene. It was dangerous. And it was dangerous because there was not sufficient trust of the people that are supposed to keep us safe. So what we ended up with was a bill which became an Act of Parliament, which greatly increased the transparency. That doesn't mean telling the bad guys everything you're doing. But it does mean being clear with Parliament and the public what the powers are and how in principle they could be used.

And the other big change we made, and we borrowed this from North America, from Canada and the US, was to introduce authorisation by judges of warrants for the most serious interferences. If you're going to bug somebody's phone or something like that, you don't just add it to the pile of 10 warrants that the Home Secretary signs off on every single day. You actually have a judge as well have a really careful look at it. And that I think gives the public some assurance that these powers are not going to be misused.

Lord Speaker:

Your report, A Question of Trust, have your recommendations been implemented?

Lord Anderson:

Yes. I mean, pretty much every one. So the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 is my fault if you don't like it. And along with others who wrote reports at the same time, I think I could say I was one of the progenitors of it.

One thing that gave me particular satisfaction was that the United Nations rapporteur on the right to privacy came to the United Kingdom to look at this law. And these rapporteurs do not tend to look particularly favourably on what we do in the UK. They often have a long list of criticism. And this particular rapporteur described it as world-leading and said that we were up there with a small handful of countries who had successfully reconciled the demands of security with the right to privacy. And I thought that was a very pleasing recommendation.

Lord Speaker:

One criticism I've heard over the years is that the communications between the different police forces is, some would say, unsatisfactory. And the number of police forces in England, is it 45 or whatever it is, that needs streamlined. What's your views on that argument?

Lord Anderson:

It's what no politician dares to say. But not being a politician, I will say it.

Yes, the 43 force model in England and Wales has long outlived its usefulness. You've seen that that's been bypassed in some respects, for example, counter-terrorism, to some extent organised crime. You've got the regional organised crime units, you've got the NCA. But it's still a source of massive inefficiency.

And as you rightly say, the police have not cracked data handling. It's a perennial problem. I think it's partly about money, but it's not just about money. And in a world which increasingly happens online, and in which crime also increasingly happens online, it's great to have neighbourhood police officers on the corner of the street, but you also need them on the internet to combat the online fraud and all the other interferences that we're seeing.

So I think that's a real challenge. And I don't think you're going to crack it by the 43 force model.

Lord Speaker:

My previous existence in the House of Commons, I was involved as an observer with the Proceeds of Crime Act and the City of London Police that oversees the financial sector. And it seemed to me there was a disparity between what they did, the City of London Police, and the police in the rest of the country.

Lord Anderson:

Yes. Well, the City of London is a very unusual force with its own proud independent traditions. But of course we've now got the National Crime Agency as well, which is, I think, still finding its feet but beginning to find them rather well. I have a niece who works there, so I mustn't say anything impolite about it.

Lord Speaker:

Well, should we go further in terms of integration in that?

Lord Anderson:

We could certainly integrate further at the force model, there's no question, at the force level, there's no question about that. I think counter-terrorism policing actually works very well. The structure was developed by Tony Blair after, if you remember, the London tube and bus attacks in 2005.

Lord Speaker:

I do, yeah.

Lord Anderson:

Again, the sense was this might be the beginning of something much, much bigger. Ian Blair, when he was commissioner, went on the radio in 2006 and said he thought we were going to lose more lives, more civilian lives to terrorism than we lost in World War Two. Well, I assume he was thinking of the 30,000 or 40,000 killed in the Blitz. Fortunately, that hasn't happened. We've lost a total of about a hundred lives in this country from Islamist terrorism this century. And I think that's a lot better than we thought it was going to be at the start of the century.

But we do have a policing model which is actually pretty well adapted to the terrorist threat. I think we can be pretty proud about how we've managed things over the last 20 years. Yes, there have been moments of panic, moments where media in particular have gone overboard. They've been seduced by these images of young men from London pretending to be medieval warriors with swords, all to capture the front page. But we didn't lose our heads. We introduced some strong laws, but where necessary we've pared them back again. And I think although it's certainly premature to say we've ridden out this particular episode in our history, I think we've got through it at least with our basic values and our basic rights pretty much intact.

Lord Speaker:

From your time as independent reviewer of terrorism, what's the main lesson that you learned there? And what's the message you will give to politicians and society for the future?

Lord Anderson:

Remember what terrorists want, they're not like other criminals, they want three things. They want revenge, they want renown, but above all they want reaction. And if you are foolish enough to overreact to what they are doing or to what they are threatening to do, then you are giving them exactly what they want. Because you are marginalising whatever suspect community they are trying to draw their support from. Whether 30 years ago that was Irish people, whether more recently it was Muslims. And you are polarising society into exactly the extremes that the terrorist would like you to believe that the world is all about.

You've got, and it's hard to do it sometimes, but you've got to retain the rule of law. And I think if I may say so, long before I joined it, the House of Lords took a very important role in this. It did not join the clamour to say, "Yes, let's allow the police to lock people up for 90 days before they're charged." It did not go in for the worst excesses of internment that we'd seen in the seventies-

Lord Speaker:

And it helped change the law on that.

Lord Anderson:

It helped change the law. They stood out against some things that were illiberal. And instead of having 90 days, we now have 14 days that the police are allowed to keep someone before they're charged.

I made a point of always asking senior police officers when I saw them, "Do you miss 28 days? Do you wish you had 90 days?" They always said no, 14 was enough. So it's so important to keep your balance. And I think in a way we were quite well-equipped to do that in this country because we'd had the experience of Northern Ireland. We did make some terrible mistakes in Northern Ireland. I mean, internment, you understand why it was introduced, hundreds of people being killed every year in the early seventies. But it still leaves a stain. It still plays a part in dissident Republican propaganda. And I think we learned something from that when 9/11 came along and we had a chance to react in a slightly more measured and mature way.

Lord Speaker:

Northern Ireland, I would say the view held is that that was a great success eventually because it brought the different political factions together and helped stabilise society. I presume that you agree with that?

Lord Anderson:

Absolutely, yes. And I credit, among others, Jonathan Powell, of course was Tony Blair's chief of staff. I've been lucky enough for the last five or six years to work in a small way with Jonathan who has taken his experience from the Good Friday Agreement, which he brokered, and applied it all over the world. So he's the chief executive of a peace-building NGO, which I chair.

And the peace deal was done in Colombia. Similarly in Mozambique, Spain - Eta, various other theatres where Jonathan and this charity have played a part. Most of them unfortunately you can't talk about, and many of them are still going on.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah, aspects of Northern Ireland he couldn't talk about as well.

Lord Anderson:

Indeed. But it is a very rare gift to broker an agreement like this. And of course you have to remember the agreement is not the end point. The agreement is usually only the beginning. We certainly saw that in Northern Ireland.

Lord Speaker:

The terrorism aspect about it, Jonathan Powell, whom we had the privilege of inviting along here, when he came, he was very open and he said, "Look, if any peace deal is going to be made, then you have to talk to terrorists themselves." Now that's a controversial subject and some people would never agree to that. What's your view?

Lord Anderson:

Well, he's entirely right about that. And as an organisation, one of the things we do is talk to people that governments couldn't talk to. And for that reason, some of our funding comes from western governments who see the value of us having conversations that they couldn't have themselves.

But there's always, if you think even about Russia-Ukraine, near the start of the invasion talks began on the agreement to let the grain ships out through the Black Sea. Now, that was not exactly the major issue in that conflict. Very far from it. But at least it was a channel of communication, at least it was personalities perhaps getting to know a little bit about each other.

So when the climate changes and talks in some respect become, perhaps wider respect, become possible, you have the basis for doing it. And I think there are very few conflicts worldwide, if any, where you couldn't apply the same principle.

And one thing that I think was very effective in Northern Ireland was the establishment of back channels whereby people couldn't talk officially to each other but could still find ways of signalling intentions and communicating indirectly before it was possible to meet.

Lord Speaker:

There's been quite a bit of discussion in society about the sovereignty of Parliament, particularly amongst politicians. Could you give us your views on that? And maybe tackle the issue of power, where does power lie in this country?

Lord Anderson:

Well, after the Factortame case, some people might've said the powers lie with the courts. If the courts can strike down acts of Parliament, then what's the point of Parliament? Now we're out of the EU now, so that's not going to happen again. And I'm glad we have a political constitution not a judicial constitution. I don't look with envy to the United States where the Supreme Court can strike down anything Congress can do. In this country we have the opposite. We've actually had a couple of bills through in the last 12 months which aim to reverse a decision that the Supreme Court has taken because Parliament decided that it took the right course. So I think in having a political constitution where Parliament is in charge, we've done the right thing.

Where I think the difficulty lies is in the relationship between the executive and Parliament. Now of course, we don't have a complete separation of powers in our system. The two have always worked closely together. But I think it was Gladstone who once said that our constitution more than any others presumes the good sense and the good faith of those who work it. And I'm not sure we've seen that uniformly over the last five or 10 years in particular.

And I'm thinking of things like these framework bills which they put through that don't really say anything, except that ministers shall have the power to make regulations to do largely what they want within perhaps certain very vague limitations. I'm looking at the power of the state to conclude international treaties where actually the House of Lords has through our new International Agreements Committee achieved a little bit of leverage. But considering the breadth of the subject matter of a modern international treaty, I think you could make an argument for Parliament being more involved.

So I think there are some adjustments to be made between the power of the executive and Parliament. And when you see the contempt that is shown by an executive that thinks it can prorogue Parliament, get it out of the way in order to do what it wants, and that really takes us back to the Stuart period, I thought that was an outrage. I'm glad the Supreme Court stopped it. I would've been even more glad if we could have stopped it in Parliament.

And in fact, one thing I was engaged in as a young peer recently arrived in this place was drafting a bill that would've achieved that. There wasn't time unfortunately to put it through at the time when we controlled our own order paper. But it's better I think for Parliament to sort these things out where it can rather than the courts.

Lord Speaker:

Our esteemed historian who's in here, Lord Peter Hennessy, has called it the 'good chaps theory' in the constitution. Are you a supporter of that?

Lord Anderson:

Yes, I think he was saying exactly what Gladstone was saying in 1879, that our constitution more than others presumes the good sense and the good faith of those who work it. And it's a very delicate balance. And if you display anything less than that, not just for Parliament but for judges or for the BBC or for the other institutions that collectively make up our democracy, then I think you're treading a very dangerous road.

It reminds me a bit of the City of London, we had Big Bang in 1986. Before that it was a place where your word was your bond. You probably were at school with a guy on the other side of the table, or at least you knew his reputation, and therefore great books of regulations were not necessary. And I think to some extent that is how our political settlement has worked for quite a long time.

What I think the last few years have shown us, and I hope it was just a Brexit phenomenon, but I'm not sure that it was, is that some of those assumptions about good behaviour can't necessarily last. And it may be, I hope we're not going to need books of regulations and government by regulator, it's a pretty dismal prospect, but I think there is more that we need to do about standards in public life. Not only to enforce them on people who overstep the mark, but also to give the people out there confidence that we do have a working and honest system of government. And I'm not sure that confidence at the moment is very high.

Lord Speaker:

What has led to that you think this dramatic fall in confidence?

Lord Anderson:

Well, I think ... it's easy, isn't it, to get on your high horse as a crossbencher who's never been elected to anything. You could say the root of it all was the financial crash of 2007, 2008 because this country hasn't really got very much richer since then and people aren't feeling any richer than they were. And I think with that sense of economic disadvantage comes the sense of being left behind, a sense of being disregarded. You look at very rich people flaunting their wealth, you look at politicians apparently being influenced by that. And it's very easy to fall into a corrosive cynicism that goes beyond the sense we're not being very well governed at the moment towards the sense that, well, actually nothing works at all. And then beyond that into the conspiracy theories that the whole thing is a pretense and capitalism stinks and we need to start again.

We're maybe halfway along that road. I'm not saying we haven't been there before. We've perhaps been there for example in the 1970s. I'm certainly not making a party political point. But it's dangerous. And if we are wise, we will adjust to that. And to my mind, standards in public life is the thing you have to fix first. If you don't do that, it's like putting water into a leaky bucket. You can have all the brilliant ideas for constitutional change and proportional representation or reforming the House of Lords or whatever you want to do. But if people don't feel that there is a basis to trust those who are taking decisions on their behalf, then it's a waste of time. So that's where I would start.

Lord Speaker:

And the Nolan Principles which were established in the 1990s, is that the foundation that we should build on?

Lord Anderson:

Yes, they're terrific. But you have the Committee on Standards in Public Life, which is the guardian of the Nolan Principles, coming up with-

Lord Speaker:

Lord Evans.

Lord Anderson:

Yes, Lord Evans, former director of MI5. So they're not a bunch of revolutionary firebrands. They came up with a series of very sensible recommendations, most of which the government hasn't implemented. I actually have a private member's bill at the moment which I hope might get a second reading later in this session. The point of which will be to put those proposals on the statute book. And it may be that if it doesn't happen that way, we'll have a government after the election that is prepared to look at that.

Lord Speaker:

I mentioned the good chaps theory and the unwritten constitution that we have. I presume you'll be a supporter of the unwritten constitution. But what could we do to ensure that our constitutional arrangements maybe are bedded further?

Lord Anderson:

Well, it's a great question. I actually wrote a piece recently called Writing a Constitution, but it didn't end up in favour of a codified constitution like most other countries have. What it did suggest is some strengthening of important things. And one thing was this question of standards in public life.

So for example, you have an independent advisor on ministerial interests who cannot initiate an investigation of their own initiative. They need to have the consent of the Prime Minister before they can do that. Well, if the investigation was going to be into the Prime Minister or someone who's politically close to the Prime Minister, it's hard to see how that is acceptable.

I think we need tightening of rules on lobbying, perhaps an offence of corruption in public life. So there's that whole side of things.

Then I think there's the question of parliamentary reform, which perhaps is a subject of its own. And then there's the question of constitutional watchdogs. We do have a constitution. It's written down in all sorts of different places. And I think it's absolutely right that it's not enforced by the judges. But should there be somebody with the authority to say, "This bill seems not to comply with our constitutional norms as they've evolved over many years."

We have the Constitution Committee in this House on which I'm privileged to sit. And we've actually just agreed to do something I think very significant and very exciting, which is to adopt a little code of all the principles that we have applied in our reports over the years, so that next time a bill comes along that we think is on constitutionally dangerous territory, instead of just saying, "We think this might be constitutionally dangerous." We can say, "We think chapter 5.5 of the code may be infringed by this provision and the House might want to have a careful look at it."

So it's to provide a sort of institutional memory of the things that are important in our constitution. And it's to focus a bit of attention, rather as the Joint Committee on Human Rights has the Human Rights Convention that it can apply and refer to, I think its reports are very influential in this House and in the other place. Similarly, I think if we had a constitutional code or a code of constitutional principles for use in legislation, then that would help actors in the constitutional drama. And I think it would also help inform the public, people who are interested in knowing more about our constitution, but find it very difficult to see what it's all about because it's not written down in one place, might find that easier as well.

Lord Speaker:

Some would say abolishing the House of Lords is the way to having better governance. But do you subscribe to the view that if we abolish the House of Lords, that's just one aspect that should be reworked in terms of governance? I remember Lord Sedwill, former Cabinet Secretary, making a point that the governance overall has to be looked at, whether it's a civil service, whether it's Parliament, the executive, whether it's a relationship in devolution with the rest of the country.

Lord Anderson:

Yes, that's not an excuse for doing nothing. And there are certainly things that I would do if I had the chance to reform the House of Lords. But in terms of do we need a second chamber? I rather like what Meg Russell had to say about this. She said second chambers mean second thoughts. And if you like evidence-based policymaking, you like them. And she points to I think more than 80 countries in the world that have second chambers. About half of those incidentally aren't fully elected. Although most of them have an elected component.

And I think what we bring is the advantage of time, where if something has been rashly inserted into a bill as it goes through the Commons, we can take time to sort it out. And we bring expertise. And actually we have some political weight of our own. I'm not one of those who thinks it's all about the Crossbenchers, far from it. I think it's important to have Crossbenchers in the House for the particular qualities that hopefully we bring. But I think it's often the big political beasts who give what we say some real force.

And if someone like Michael Howard, a past leader of the Conservative Party, perhaps a future leader, but certainly a past leader, stands up in a debate on a government bill and says, "I don't think this bill should be threatening to break our international agreements in the way that it is." Then that has far more cut through than if it was said by a lawyer or even a senior retired judge.

In terms of the reform of House of Lords, you mentioned you have your own views, can you share them with us. But also in the wider context about governance in the country, what would you recommend there? So both the House of Lords and the rest of the government machine.

Well, I would love to see, and I don't know how you do it, but I would love to see a House of Commons that was more serious about its part in legislative scrutiny. As it seems to me, if you're a member of Parliament, your incentives are very much to stay close to your constituents. And absolutely right, you are representing them and you are looking for them to re-elect you someday. And your other incentive is to be loyal to the party of which you're a member. Because if you're ambitious, you want to rise in that party. And neither of those incentives really align to doing the legislative scrutiny, which it's really a large part of what Parliament is there for. And as a consequence, we are having to do that ourselves.

Now, I would love to find a way of changing the incentives in the Commons. To some extent it's been done by the select committee system and by the election of select committee chairs, which I think does give some MPs an alternative route. But for the time being, I would say that the scrutiny we provide is essential.

Lord Speaker:

In 2018, you applied to become a member of the House of Lords as a crossbencher, and you went through the House of Lords Appointments Committee. Why did you decide to apply? And what did you think you would bring to the House of Lords?

Lord Anderson:

Well, it had never crossed my mind, but it was my experience really as independent reviewer, giving evidence to parliamentary committees, listening to debates where they were debating proposals that I'd been involved with, and just seeing what a wonderful careful job the House of Lords did, whether it was on the Justice and Security Act 2013, Investigative Powers Act 2016. And I was encouraged, I didn't know there was still a people's peers scheme whereby you could simply apply with a CV and six referees. But an existing member of the House told me I could do that and encouraged me to do it. And so I did and I've never regretted it.

Lord Speaker:

And what have you gained from being a member of the House of Lords?

Lord Anderson:

I've gained everything. I started as a lawyer. And lawyers certainly in the sort of area where I practised, if they're not careful, they can become quite narrow. You get used to following instructions from your client, you make submissions, you never express your view to the court, you make submissions based on the evidence, based on the decisions of higher courts. And you can have a very agreeable life without really poking your head very far above the parapet at all.

And what I saw first of all with the independent reviewer job, and then more recently with the House of Lords, is that it is a very exciting world out there. There's a variety of people to meet that I wouldn't have met probably in my old profession. Arguments don't just happen on the day that's been appointed for them three months in advance. And they're not always decided by fully rational judges who if you don't like the judgement can be appealed to an even more rational appellate body. Political arguments blow up out of nowhere on a Sunday afternoon. And sometimes you need to be on the radio and expressing a view. And I find that intriguing and important and ultimately more satisfying, possibly even more useful than the practise of law.

Lord Speaker:

If you were to address a citizen's assembly, and the question was abolish the House of Lords, given your skills as an advocate, how would you win the argument?

Lord Anderson:

Well, I'd win it by going for change. And I'm afraid I would make some big changes. I cannot see a principled argument for retaining a quota for people who are hereditary peers. It's difficult for us to say this because you and I know how good some of the hereditary peers are. But I always think, well, if they're that good, then there will be a way of getting into the House of Lords through a more meritocratic route.

The political cronyism, again, simply has to stop. It cannot be the case that by dint of giving £3 million to a political party, you can secure a place in the House of Lords. If it's not corrupt, it's as near to corrupt as makes no difference. And it's a terribly bad thing for our image.

So I think what I would try and do with a citizen's assembly, I'd point to what some people call our output legitimacy, I'd point, in other words, to all the great work that we do, the culture of justification that we represent, the questioning, the probing, not taking things at face value. And saying it's important that that continues.

You could look at this country like a family, and in the House of Commons you have parents who tell young children what to do. But if the parents are wise, they will sometimes take advice from grandparents. And it seems to me that's what we represent in the House of Lords. We don't have the power, but we have influence. And if people have good sense, they will listen to us.

Lord Speaker:

Well, thank you very much for that. That was replete with wisdom, experience, and honesty. I'm grateful for you to that. And I wish you well in your future work in the House of Lords, but also as you work in the legal area. Thank you very much.

Lord Anderson:

Thank you very much.

 

Lord Speaker:

Baroness Young, Lola, welcome to Lord Speaker's Corner. It's a delight to have you. Could I take you back to your early days? You grew up in a foster home and you have made such a leap from there, that you're now in the House of Lords. Give us a flavour of your early life then.

Baroness Young:

Gosh, how long have you got? No, I'll be brief because, yes, it's something that I've talked about quite a lot because I do think it's important for people outside in particular, but also specifically young people who are in the care system to understand that yes, there's lots of doom and gloom around those statistics, but that ultimately there are possibilities, not to let that define who you are for the rest of your life.

So yes, I was put in the care of a foster mother, white foster mother, elderly woman in North London when I was a baby. My parents were professionals, but they weren't married to each other. And in those days, 1950s stigma, and they were originally from Nigeria, came here to study. And then when my foster mother died, when I was about 14, I then went into children's homes. And that was a very difficult period of my life until I was 18, I had to leave care. Feels like on the stroke of midnight, there's somebody from the council saying, "You're no longer in care, off you go." And I think in those days it was much more difficult than it is today, and it's certainly not easy today. So that in brief, is my childhood.

Lord Speaker:

Give us an insight into your character. Because there must have been resilience there and determination.

Baroness Young:

Yeah. It's interesting, John, because I've been looking at my care notes. I don't know whether you know, but when you've been in the care system, you are entitled to see the records that were kept on you. And I had a certain sense of who I was then and things that I felt at the time. But I was really interested to see that, I'd always thought I was a creative person, for example, and there's references to me making things out of discarded cardboard and drawing portraits and reading a lot. So to me, whenever I talk particularly to young people, I say that thing about reading is absolutely essential. It was books, having an insight into worlds other than the world in which I was living, which was very unusual at that time, and especially compared with my friends. I went to a very good comprehensive school that had been a fee paying grammar school.

So, a lot of quite middle class people around me leading lives that I had no inkling about. But reading books was absolutely essential and it didn't matter whether they were fiction or nonfiction. I wanted to know as much as possible. And I think also for me, although it may sound a little bit strange, popular culture was a big influence on my life. So we were a family, we didn't have very much money, but we had a television and I would see comedy shows and a lot of stuff imported from America. And those were the times when I would see Black people.

So I'd see them on comedies and dramas from the states, but I would also see them getting beaten up in the civil rights movement. And I would also see Black people getting beaten up in South Africa, protesting against apartheid. So all of these things that were going on around me, I like to think that because I wasn't constrained as it were by parents, it wasn't anybody saying to me, "Stop watching that or don't read that." Which isn't to say I was totally free to do anything. But it was a very different context. But that enabled me to see what was going on around me.

Lord Speaker:

Truth to power: I notice that you worked for North Thames Gas and you approached the management and asked, "Why can't women wear trousers?" And you're making a statement today, to me.

Baroness Young:

[Laughter] I hope we've passed the time where it's a statement for women to wear trousers. But it was slightly bizarre that I had to ask permission. That was in 1971, I think.

Lord Speaker:

And you then went into social work. Was that because of your experience early times?

Baroness Young:

Definitely, yes. And it was that feeling that somehow I owed the system something. Eventually I got to a position where I thought, "Well, actually, I don't owe them anything." I'm happy that they looked after me in a moment where I could have been having a really awful time. But I knew pretty soon after taking up that role, it wasn't enough to sustain me in that field of work. Working with other children who'd been through that experience when I was barely out of that experience myself.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah. You then left school and went to university, I believe?

Baroness Young:

No, not straight away. No. I was a mature student. I went to-

Lord Speaker:

Snap. I was the same.

Baroness Young:

Oh, really? So I was 32 or something when I went to do a degree and I had a child and was married. So I went actually from school, I went to North Thames Gas Board, then I went from there to the social work role, then I went to drama school. All of that happened before I even sniffed university.

Lord Speaker:

Good. So your degree in dramatic arts, where did that lead you to?

Baroness Young:

Well, to be slightly persnickety, so the course at the New College of Speech and Drama wasn't degree level, it was a diploma, London University diploma. So from there I went into acting. So I became an actor, or actresses as we used to be, but an actor. And I did a lot of rep theatre and did quite a lot of television. And then it was at that moment where I thought, "Well, I feel like all that reading I did as a young person. I'm not sort of building on that." I missed out on university basically, because unsurprisingly, I didn't do very well in my A-levels when I was in the children's home. So it wasn't that space where you could thrive. So yes, I went to... I did a part-time course, part-time degree at Middlesex University, and then went on to do a PhD there and then became a lecturer there, et cetera.

Lord Speaker:

And you were involved in children's TV and radio, and you became very well known for that.

Baroness Young:

Yeah.

Lord Speaker:

And in many ways you were an advocate. How did you develop those skills?

Baroness Young:

So, I developed those skills almost by accident, to be honest with you, because when I became an actor, there was a committee of Equity, which is the actors’ union, it was called I think the Afro-Asians committee. And so all of a sudden I was in this context with other Black people and people of South Asian descent, and we were talking about representation and why wasn't there diversity? So this was in the 70s way before it's become the norm to talk about those things. So it was an activist role, even though at that time I hadn't really realised it. And then from there, I was recommended to take part in Arts Council committees and other work of that nature. And I became one of the go-to people to talk about race and inequality in the arts and creative sector because of that experience.

Lord Speaker:

And you took up the racism aspect where there was a negative view of Black people. Can you elaborate on that?

Baroness Young:

Yes. Well, it is interesting because I've been writing about this recently, so a lot of this is fresh in my mind.

Lord Speaker:

Did you have a 1995 book, Fear of the Dark?

Baroness Young:

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so that was from my PhD, which was about the representations of race and gender and sexuality in British cinema. And when I started on that, people said to me, "Well, there isn't really very much or anything on British cinema. Black people only appear in American films." That was the thought. So I went and dug deep in the archives of the British Film Institute and went around seeing these obscure films from the 70s, and actually went back to shortly after the second World War and looked at films of Paul Robeson, for example. And it was really, really interesting. And so what I was trying to draw out were the ways in which we can say that things have changed around race and racism, and that's true. But because progress isn't linear, it's hard to describe what the gains have been. So for example, we can talk now about, yes, there's much better representation visually of black and brown people on television in advertisements, dramas, et cetera, et cetera.

Much better than when I was acting. But by the same token, we still don't have people in those positions behind the camera as it were. So directing, producing, exec producing, script editing, et cetera, et cetera. So there's still battles to be won as far as that goes. I think it's fair to say. And I think having grown up in the 50s here, again, people used to spit at me in the street and there would be all these slogans written on walls, which made it quite clear about where they wanted us to be, which wasn't there in North London. And so that may not happen in the same way. Well, it certainly doesn't happen in the same way now as it did then. But we still have, as we know far too commonly, racist incidents, still deaths, still over representation in the criminal justice system. All of these different things that are different kinds of manifestations, not only of racism, but the ways in which systems, in my view, fail people continually. And so, that I see as my job is to try and make some of these systems work a little bit better.

Lord Speaker:

Doreen Lawrence, who will be coming on the podcast soon. She has almost had a lifetime of advocacy.

Baroness Young:

Yes, of course.

Lord Speaker:

Given her son Stephen has been murdered. Do these campaigns influence society?

Baroness Young:

I think they do because, for one thing, you can't ignore them.

Lord Speaker:

And that's not any comment on Doreen who has done-

Baroness Young:

No, no, no.

Lord Speaker:

Fantastic job.

Baroness Young:

I think they do because the name, I mean, you've only got to say Stephen Lawrence, and there'll be a whole generation of people for whom that will invoke a lot of high emotion. I think the thing is to, and I'm sure Doreen will speak for herself of course, but for someone like me to know that there's that reference point. So, for anybody who wants to get complacent about how wonderfully tolerant and how everybody mixes together, and we have the ideal diverse society, that complacency doesn't really help. What we know is that we have to continually work at it. And I think the work that Doreen's done around that has been phenomenal because it's lifted the profile of that and not only centred it on him, and her, and her family and that tragic loss, but also extrapolated from that to a wider meaning for society. And that's really, really important.

Lord Speaker:

And I well remember the Macpherson Report when it came out and it spoke about institutional racism. Does that still exist in organisations?

Baroness Young:

Yeah, it's an interesting term actually. And when I was doing... I did something called The Young Review, which was looking into the over representation of young, Black and Muslim men in the criminal justice system. And there were lots of references to Macpherson and indeed some of the reports that predated that. So the question was... The question for me is always, 'how does that phrase help us to understand what's going on?' And the moment it doesn't help, the moment when it stops helping us to understand what's going on is the moment when it's outlived its usefulness. So, I think it's possible to identify the ways in which individuals within a system can be channelled into acting in a particular way. So it's not trying to absolve the individual of responsibility, but it's saying that if you work within a particular system, if you work within a command control system such as the police, you have to do things in a particular way.

So if you're a rogue person like me or somebody who wants to be imaginative or creative in a particular way, I know I would never fit into that system. So the moment you fit into that system, you have to ensure that you maintain that institution, that system, or you can buck against it. And if you do buck against it for long enough, then you'll be out on your ear, as it were.

So, I'm really interested in that term, institutional racism. Because now, I would ask, where does it get us when we're talking about what happens to people in certain situations? And for example, I'd go back to COVID, when the moments when we were in the first lockdown and they started issuing photographs of the first people who died from COVID. And me and my friends were looking at this and saying, "Well, wait a minute, there's an awful lot of Black and brown faces in this list. Why is that happening?" And it's too simple an explanation to say, "Racism." I think that's a part of it, but it's how does that play out? What does it mean? Until we can unpack that we won't be able to understand what it is that's happening, what the forces are that have given us that particular situation.

Lord Speaker:

What means do we have of progressing that then?

Baroness Young:

Well, I think we can talk about it in the context of the House of Lords, I think we have an opportunity. The way I see it for me as an individual within the House of Lords, and as you say, coming from this slightly uncommon background, I might say in the Lords, is to give a voice, to have that platform, to use that platform in order to say, "I think we need to look at this in a slightly different way." So how do we look at this in a way that we are asking the right questions? Because if we don't ask the right questions, we're not going to get the right answers, okay. And some of that involves looking back, I'm a great believer in how the past tells us something. Not to say that it determines where we are, but it tells us something about what's gone before, obviously.

But it also tells us where the continuities are and where the discontinuities are. And in those continuities, how is it possible to break them down in such a way that we don't continue on this path? And if I can give an example that's not necessarily to do, not directly to do with racism. But if you think about any one of the scandals that have happened recently, you can talk about Post Office, you can talk about Windrush, you can talk about Grenfell, all of those different things. We always say, "We are never going to let this happen again." And then the next time we say, "We've learned our lesson, it's not going to happen again." And then the next time we say, "We've learned our lesson." Do you see what I mean?

Lord Speaker:

Absolutely.

Baroness Young:

So to me, it that looking back, let's see what it is that we've truly missed. Because these trite phrases don't provide any comfort to the people who suffer from these instances.

Lord Speaker:

Windrush is an example because the history of that, goes way back to 1949. And the people who have come under scrutiny as a result of that. Why do you think that has taken 60, 80 years to get done?

Baroness Young:

Well, again, it goes to that point that I was trying to make earlier, which is when you look back, yes, it goes back to ‘48, ‘49, the Nationality Act in 1948, you can go back further. So the roots of that issue go way, way back. So again, so what I'd be saying is let's look at what pre-dated Windrush, what were the attitudes? What were the predispositions in our politicians? Again, I've been looking back in the 50s and some of the rhetoric around race is absolutely deplorable. So if you build up a culture in its broader sense, or an atmosphere or an idea which says, "Okay, well look, we've got these people here. And it's like, we are not going to work. Somehow we don't work as hard to make sure that they get their rights as we should be working," I guess is what happens.

And once that situation is condoned, it then becomes quite hard to roll back on that. So if there are politicians using certain rhetoric in the public domain, then maybe for a large sway of the public, they'll think, "Well, why should we be bothered about this? It's nothing to do with us. Why should we be supporting these people?" And you don't get that same kind of pushing from the general public that I think that that issue deserves. And if you think about it in terms of the contribution, and I don't say this lightly because I know everybody wants to celebrate diversity when it suits them. But if you think about the contribution towards the building up of the public sector in the post-war period. Whether that's public transport or whether it's National Health Service, et cetera. A lot of those people were key to that.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah.

Baroness Young:

And the interesting thing for me is also that although it doesn't manifest itself in the same way, is that my mother and my father, when they came here, my father came to study microbiology with a view to becoming a doctor, and then was called to the Bar, decided to switch professions. And my mother was in training to be a tuberculosis nurse. And again, whilst they were here, they were working in hospitals, they were working in chambers, they were doing all this work and contributing. And that contribution wasn't fully acknowledged at the time. And even more recently, it's not been given the prominence that it should be, I don't think, in the way that it should be. So it is almost like there's a balance sheet. Well, yeah, you've got these people who are doing good things here, and then you've got your bad apples over there. And we think on balance, not so good.

Lord Speaker:

It takes me back to the 70s and Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood' speech.

Baroness Young:

In 1978.

Lord Speaker:

And by the way, he was sacked by the then Prime Minister, Edward Heath. But did that knock back the social progress of Black people?

Baroness Young:

Well, I think yes, it did loads of different things. And actually, I think even before that, there was the notorious conservative MP who made the statement containing the N word in relation to, 'if you want... for a neighbour.'

Lord Speaker:

I think it was a byelection if I remember.

Baroness Young:

Yeah, yeah. That was Smethwick, I think it was.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah, Smethwick. That's right.

Baroness Young:

So that was a terrible period. So, actually it's another facet of history that doesn't necessarily get talked about. Because I encounter some young Black people who think that that generation of Black people were not exactly passive, but they weren't active enough. And there were loads of movements within those communities then trying to fight this really oppressive atmosphere because those statements gave legitimacy to the people who would spit at you in the street and throw things at you or call you names in the shops or not let you on the bus or whatever. And so again, it built up that atmosphere. And I know that there was also reinforcement from popular culture then because you had the Alf Garnett thing, you had Love Thy Neighbour, you had all of these comedies, which were based on poking fun at, at best, but being really derisory about and insulting about, at worst, our communities.

So that makes you think, "Well, we are going to stick together because we've got to find a way to survive in this context because we're not going anywhere. And our allies amongst white populations who were there as well, you might remember Blair Peach being killed in that anti-racist march in ‘70... I can't remember the exact year. But was it ‘76? I can't remember. But it was in the 70s. Anyway, a white activist who was killed, and we never really got to the bottom of that. So there's lots of interesting histories, I suppose is a broader point that I would make. And that's an area that I'm interested in too.

Lord Speaker:

Culture and politics, you spent a lot of your life, as you said, adult life in culture, popular culture, radio, TV. Lord Bragg gave a very good speech a few weeks ago in the House of Lords on the relationship between culture and politics. And the historian Simon Schama, he did a very good programme on that, saying that culture can move politics. Do you agree with that?

Baroness Young:

Yes, I do. And in fact, all my... Well, I say all, most of my favourite artists and works of art and ways of working within the arts and creative sector, I like them because they've got something to say about our society, our cultures, our societies I should say. Whether that's a global community that we're looking at or very small community based in a little part of London. So, absolutely. And for me, that's the really interesting thing about culture, because the very word itself is loaded with political connotations, if you like.

When you talk about somebody being cultured, if I said, "Oh, John, I always think of you as a very cultured person." You might be thinking to yourself, does she know that I'm a big fan of hip hop? Because you wouldn't say that was a part of that culture. So I'm really interested again in how you unwrap those words and think about what they actually mean. But absolutely, if you use culture as I do, and a lot of people here do, it's an encompassing thing. It's about that world or those worlds of creativity and innovation where an artist or groups of artists want to connect with people and want to say something to people. And it might be saying something about love or it might be saying something about war, but it's there wanting to make that connection.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah, it strikes me as something that I experienced in my youth where classical music or opera, that was way beyond us. Did that strike you as the same?

Baroness Young:

Yeah. I mean, in fact, it is interesting. There used to be a club in Hackney called 'Not for the Likes of Us', or 'Not for Me and You' and what it was, was a nightclub that played classical music. So to me, there are these two-way streets, or more than two ways, which one is culture should be all embracing and everybody should have the opportunity to have access to opera, classical music, as well as hip hop and whatever else you like. So there shouldn't be any constraints on that. And by the same token, we know that some of these art forms and cultural forms are valued more than others. So how do we balance between those two? Because often what happens or what seems to happen, we could say that there's a minority of people that really, really enjoy going to the opera or going to see classical ballet.

And the funding that goes into those art forms will seem to many to be disproportionate in terms of the number of people that actually enjoy them. So, what do we do? We then talked about, particularly in the 70s and 80s and into the 90s, the idea that these art forms should be readily available for everybody. So you have outreach programmes, and you try and find ways to say to what would've been traditional working class people. "Enjoy, understand, get some understanding of." But then that also shouldn't preclude those same groups of people saying, "Well, actually what we really like is the music that we make on our phones or that our friends make in the studio or whatever." Or we like the way that people do parkour or street dancing or whatever. Those are also valid cultural forms and people should be able to enjoy a mix of those without being denigrated from any direction.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah. You're a crossbencher. Is the non-party space important for you?

Baroness Young:

Absolutely. Absolutely, yes it is. And I think, when I think back on my life and wonder whether I would've wanted to be an MP or something, I can't think of a political party into which I feel I would fit. And obviously if you're in a political party, you're not going to agree necessarily 100% with every single policy.

Lord Speaker:

Or not agree at all. As you say.

Baroness Young:

[Laughter] It's true. As we can observe from the chamber often. But it is the case that you need to have a broad sympathy for that. So I feel much more comfortable being in that space, which is like, okay, you can follow where you think your fundamental values and principles and that you feel you... I can't say represent because obviously we don't represent in that sense. But from our worldviews and from the things that are important to us, I need to be able to feel that I can vote in accordance with that conscience, with that ethical framework to which I subscribe.

Lord Speaker:

In 2009, your focus on modern slavery received prominence. How did that come about?

Baroness Young:

One of those serendipitous things, John. I just happened to be in my office. The phone happened to ring just before I left, and it was a call from the crossbench office saying that Anti-Slavery International wanted somebody to put down an amendment to the Coroners and Justice Bill of 2009. And I said, "What is it?" It was to criminalise forced labour and domestic servitude and like virtually everybody else, including people in this House. I said, "Well, isn't that already a crime?" And no, it wasn't. Forced labour on these shores. And I mean, we can go into the history of that, and again, I think that's quite interesting and important. But the point was that it was a historical anomaly that we hadn't made legislation on this, and this seemed like the right moment to put that right. And during the course of that, I learned so much.

I learned an awful lot from fellow crossbenches and other peers across the House. I learned how to work with a campaign. I learned how NGOs can play a really productive and supportive role in this and so on and so forth. And I also learned the importance of taking people with me on that journey, if you like. So it was a really good experience and eventually it happened. And again, it was really interesting to see how that Labour government resisted introducing that piece of legislation until the 11th hour. But eventually they saw the sense of it. And as we know, when you put down an amendment, it's not necessarily that it's going to be reproduced in its entirety or exactly the same. So they fiddled about with it a bit. But in essence, that was the start of this country's move towards the Modern Slavery Act, which was six years later.

Lord Speaker:

Sadly, modern slavery is still with us and alive today, but what progress has been made since 2009?

Baroness Young:

Well, first of all, a huge raising of awareness, absolutely phenomenal. And it seems almost impossible to think what the situation was then. Shortly after that amendment, I set up a group – the All Party Parliamentary Group on Ethics and Sustainability and Fashion, and we used to have a body of people would come along, and it was really hard to recruit members of both Houses into that group, because they couldn't see the point of it, "What's fashion got to do with environment? What's fashion got to do..." So that's where we were in 2010. We didn't even have an inkling of the extent to which fashion was contributing to environmental degradation, the second most polluting industry in the world. And people weren't aware of that. So working again with academics at this time, getting to know what the research was in this field was really important to be able to make the arguments.

So that group was set up and it gradually developed to take on more about the labour problems in fashion supply chains. So to me, because I like clothes, I like fashion, and I always said to people, "I want to be able to buy clothes and think, well, at least I've tried to find out where these are coming from." But most people don't. Now I think we've got, particularly with younger people, I think it's hard to overestimate the number of young people who approach us, me, whatever, wanting to do something about this, including those who work in the industry itself.

And now we've got to a position where British Fashion Council do regularly hold seminars and so on, and are engaged in these areas around environmental sustainability and forced and abusive labour systems. So the raising of awareness is hugely important because then it forces it onto the table of the politicians who may be reluctant for various reasons and say, "Well, we don't want to place a burden on business," and all the rest of it. But actually who's bearing the brunt of the burden of the people who are literally dying in some cases, in some of the most extreme cases of abusive labour practises abroad.

But also, people who are being damaged here. I think people still underestimate the extent to which we have these problems in this country. It's not only about overseas, and it's not only in the fashion industry, of course it's across every business sector.

Lord Speaker:

And you've been a strong advocate of transparency in supply chains. Could you give us a view on that?

Baroness Young:

Oh, my favourite topic, beware. [Laughter] No, I didn't even know what a supply chain was about 15 years ago. So again, that's part of my education and other people's education to understand what these terms mean. But in terms of, again, in fashion, I like fashion not just because I like the subject, but because it's clearer there than it is in some other areas. But you can extrapolate from what happens in that industry to some of these other areas like construction industry for example. And in fact, because it's more difficult. Okay, so we could have a conversation, John, which goes, "Oh, where did we source our uniforms from?" And we can, I know that Parliament is doing some good work on this area, looking at where we get our materials from, where we get our food and tea and what have you, from. So you might be able to say, "Yes, well, with a clear conscience, I can wear all this stuff and I know that it's been ethically sourced."

But if you are walking down the street, how many times do you think, "I wonder where these paving stones have come from?" How many times do you think, "I wonder what the supply chain is for those railings outside?" These are also part of the problem. So in the construction industry, for example, this issue of child labour quarrying in remote areas of countries like Vietnam or India or Pakistan where it's very, very difficult to keep an eye on what's going on, but when you do see the footage of children, eight and nine carrying stones almost as big as they are down the hills, up and down hills, you think, "Do we want to pay that price for having our nice streets to walk on?" So that's putting it in a slightly simplistic way, but I think that people have to understand the extent to which, whilst we all would say unequivocally, we abhor those labour systems. We're all implicated.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah, yeah.

Baroness Young:

We're all implicated. So what is it that we can do here in order to try and mitigate some of the worst of those practises

Lord Speaker:

In regard to companies? How do we hold them up to the light?

Baroness Young:

Yes. Well, this is again, one of my topics, and I do have a private member's bill, I'll take this opportunity to flag that up and don't ask me to recite word for word because it's such a long title. But essentially what we are working on, and it is definitely we, and I'll explain that if we've got time in a moment.

Lord Speaker:

Sure.

Baroness Young:

But what we're working on is for commercial entities and also public authorities because we mustn't forget the huge leverage potentially that government contracts and public bodies contracts could have in terms of making corporations face up to their responsibilities. So the idea of this bill is that the commercial entities and public authorities have a duty to prevent environmental harms and human rights in their value chains. So on one level, that's quite simple, and it's easy for me to say, "Okay, from now on, every commercial entity and every public body has got to make sure that they're not doing anything that makes abusive and exploitative labour systems work within their supply chains."

And that's easier said than done. Typically, some industries will have a supply chain that's metaphorically miles long. It is this hyper distributed supply chain. So you've got, even with a pair of trousers, you've got one company will make the fabric. If it's a mix of fabric, the fabric may be made in different places. Another company will supply the buttons, another company, the zips, another might put just the legs of the trousers together and another company, the pockets. So you can see how those commercial companies that are involved in fashion, for example, find it really difficult to understand and monitor what's going on in their supply chains. But they have to take responsibility for it because otherwise what happens when the people who live by a particular river in China find that they can no longer use the water from that river because it's dyed red from the factory up the road that is making clothes, making a whole bunch of red dresses for some fashion chain in this country. We again, are implicated in that practise.

So we have to hold businesses to account. We can say the consumer has a responsibility, sure we can. But then again, you think, even I find it difficult to keep track of these things. So you can imagine a family or people that are pushed financially looking up all of these different companies to see which one is... no, that's not going to happen." So as I say, it is down to these commercial entities and the public bodies to make sure they take full responsibility.

Now, again, I would say it's not necessarily that you expect them to be 100% to know every detail, but by the same token, if something happens in your supply chain and you say, "Oh, I didn't know about that." That's not a good enough answer. If you can say, "Yes, we were aware that there's a gap here and we've been working and here's our record of what we've been discussing trying to implement to mitigate those circumstances." And that would be acceptable if that's a genuine attempt to try and make sure that those things don't happen. But if it's just some tick box exercise, "Yeah, we sent an auditor down there to have a look and everything seemed to be okay." That's not good enough.

Lord Speaker:

Let's take you on young people. In terms of the views of young people, there's quite a gulf between them and older people. And also in terms of political choices, there's such a vast difference from young people and older people. Do you feel that young people are more aware of these issues and will focus on them more in the future, given the problems of globalisation, the financial crash, COVID, that's changed the world and young people now in terms of getting housing, in terms of progress, in terms of the future, it is generally acknowledged they're not going to be better off than their parents in the future.

Baroness Young:

Yes. Again, this is a really interesting question to me because if I can go back to my era, this idea that you'd be better off than the previous generation, I don't remember that being in the air. So what's happened is that this expectation has been driven into people, you must own your own place, otherwise you're not a proper human being, a fully adult human being if you don't own your own property and all the rest of it. And so I'm not saying that's wrong. All I'm saying is we've changed the expectations but not being able to fulfil them. So that leaves people feeling discontent. And I think that breaking up of the problems into these different areas so that people, not just young people, but I think particularly young people, is what you're getting at, will look at individual issues and think, "Well, I understand that. I understand and want to do something about all the people that are sleeping on the streets," that line the streets as I walked here today, which is shocking.

And they want to do something about it. And so what I find, again, is one of the great things about working in the fashion industry is that it's full of young people. It's full of bright young people who want to do things differently. I mean, I've even been involved in teaching students in Italy remotely who begged me to do a session on the Modern Slavery Act. I mean, these are MA fashion students. So it's like this whole idea that young people are not interested in politics, they're not interested in the politics that we've grown up with and that we've handed to them and the world that we've handed to them maybe? But they are interested in how they can make the world a better place.

Now you can say that's naivety or idealism or whatever, but I like to think back again historically, to say that if 120 years ago women had just said, "Oh, wouldn't it be nice to have the vote?" "Yeah, but you're wasting your time. Don't bother with that. That's never going to happen." Or enslaved Africans that said, "Okay, well we might as well just accept we're going to be slaves to the rest of our life." Where would we be? It'd be a completely different world. So you have to keep plugging at these things.

So I am very encouraging of young people who want to do things. I get a lot of requests from young people asking if they can shadow or get work experience. And I always try and be positive, always try and sort something out that will help them to get a wider view of not just the issue as it were, but how they can use these instruments like Parliament, like MPs, like peers. We are very underused in many ways. Don't you think John? Because people from the outside know quite what to make of the House of Lords?

Lord Speaker:

Yeah.

Baroness Young:

People, they think, "Oh, wow, really? Can we come along and watch debates?" A number of people who don't even seem to realise they can come along and watch debates is extraordinary. So there's something that things like this session, hopefully we're encouraging more young people to be involved. Because it is their future, isn't it?

Lord Speaker:

Finally, when I was asked to come into the House of Lords, quite a number of my friends said, "What are you thinking? Why are you getting in there?" Why did you come into the House of Lords? And if you're talking to young people, what would you say is the advantage of the House of Lords for you, and its usefulness for society?

Baroness Young:

It is a good question because some people said the same to me. Yeah, some people said the same to me. But surprisingly, quite a lot said, "This is really good," it's because of coming in through that route, okay. I think if I'd come in through a party political route, that would've been a whole other thing. But coming into what was called, the 'people's peers' route, made it very different. And in fact, people were saying, "Oh, can you do this? Will you be able to do that?" So to me, it was much more encouraging. The person I always quote on this though is my son, who at the time was 20. And after giving me huge congratulations when he heard I'd gotten in, he said, "You do realise, mum, you're now part of the problem." So it was like that little reminder to 'keep yourself grounded mother,' and not get ideas above your station.

Because I think you can just rest on your laurels. So to me, right from the get go, I had some very good advice, and I always remember Patricia Scotland saying to me, "Observe, just look and see. You're not on a timeframe. You've got time to learn how things work here." And that was a great piece of advice. So it took a little while for me to understand how I could play a useful role, but what I hope now I'm able to do, I say to lots of different groups and people come to me and say, "Oh, I want to have a screening of a film that's about mental health issues and men, and how we can help open up men." And I say, "Okay, well let's go through the all party parliamentary groups and see which of them deal with mental health and that. And we will invite those MPs and those peers to attend this screening along with some of the panellists that you are suggesting."

And we help them to book a room and all the rest of it and those kinds of things. Otherwise, what better place to have a platform? And I think it's something that John Alderdice said in his interview with you, was that if you ask people to come to the House of Lords, very often they come. And they do come. And for whatever reason, I've had a big fashion company, top top fashion company brought its staff here to have this debate about modern slavery and so on.

And again, they wouldn't normally. Yes, they're big fashion, big in the fashion world, but they wouldn't normally have that access to be able to say "Look, this is what we've been talking about and this is what we want you as staff to promote within your practises." So I think it's an invaluable platform to get things done actually. And I think that the thing about raising awareness is really important because that is another, change of metaphors, that's another rung on the ladder towards achieving what you want to achieve. Because if you can get people behind you, then you can help to change politicians' mindsets.

Lord Speaker:

One of the aims of this podcast is to highlight the experience that's in the House of Lords and the policies that we have where we can have a global footprint on that. And I think you have illustrated that admirably today. So, Baroness Young, thank you for your time.

Baroness Young:

Thank you, John.

 

Lord Speaker:

Lord Rees, I'm delighted to welcome you to Lord Speaker's Corner, and it's a privilege for us to have such a distinguished scientist along. Can I start by asking you about your early life? Because it seems that you had an unconventional education with your parents establishing a private school and you went on from there to university.

Lord Rees:

Well, I went to the school which my parents established, which was in the country in south Shropshire, had a really idyllic upbringing in beautiful surroundings. I went to the school till I was 13, but they then thought I should go to a more sort of academic school and I was sent away to a boarding school, Shrewsbury School, despite the fact that they were rather anti-public schools of the traditional kind. But I shared their views to be honest. But it was a very good place for getting taught and I got entry into Cambridge University at the age of 18.

Lord Speaker:

And you studied astrophysics there for your PhD?

Lord Rees:

Well, I studied maths and I realised that was a mistake because the other students doing maths, I realised they thought differently from me, I like to think in a more sort of synthetic way rather than long, logical arguments. And so after I got my bachelor's degree, I thought I'd try and do some postgraduate work. And I got into a group that was doing astrophysics and this was really trying to make sense of new mysterious phenomena that has been discovered, evidence for black holes and the expanding universe and all the rest of it. And so I got into that and it was a style of work that suited me quite well and it gave me a bit of advice that I would pass on to all young people thinking about a scientific career. Pick a subject where new things are happening, then you can be the first person to use new techniques, use new data, et cetera. Whereas if a subject's stagnant, then you are stuck doing the problems the old guys got stuck on. And so it's not so encouraging. So pick a subject where new things are happening.

Lord Speaker:

And today, where is that happening, where are the new things happening, and what areas would you encourage young people to get into?

Lord Rees:

Well, I would encourage astronomy again because the subject seemed on the roll when I was starting 50 years ago with the discovery of evidence for the big bang and black holes, et cetera. Whereas if I think of just the most recent five years, discovery is about planets around other stars, the James Webb Space Telescope looking right back to the formation of galaxies and lots of new ideas about why the universe is expanding the way it is, et cetera. And it's a wonderful exploration. But of course we do it not just to explore but to learn about the basic laws of nature, which of course manifest themselves in a far more extreme way out in the cosmos than we could ever simulate in our labs. And so we can actually extend our knowledge of the laws of nature and, as it were, test them to breaking point. And that's why it's really part of fundamental physics to understand the strange phenomena we find out in the universe.

Lord Speaker:

And how would you characterise the development of scientific understanding in the universe?

Lord Rees:

Well, I would say it's extraordinary that we can talk with a straight face about how the universe has evolved from the time when it had been expanding for just a millisecond, all the way from a millisecond up to 13 billion years. We understand the outlines, not the details obviously, but that's a change from a time when I was starting research, when there was a big controversy about whether the universe was in a steady state or whether it was evolving, even that wasn't clear then. My famous mentor, Fred Hoyle, believed the universe had always been there, had never changed. So that's been a big change and I think we've learned a great deal about the entities in the universe, understand stars, and we've discovered some new surprising entities which are behaving in ways we could never predict. But I think if you look 10 years ahead, we fill in the details of all those things, we'll have further checks of Einstein's theory of general relativity.

But I think the most important thing is going to be to understand the planets around other stars. We know our sun is surrounded by the earth and the other familiar planets, but what we've learned is that the night sky is far more interesting because the night sky contains stars, nearly all of which are surrounded by a retinue of planets just as the sun is surrounded by the earth and the other planets. And of course that raises the question, is there life on any of those planets? And that's the question which I'm always asked if people learn I'm an astronomer. Then lay people, they ask, 'are we alone?' And it's the most fascinating question in science, I would say almost. And so I'm not surprised that everyone's keen that we should make progress on it.

Lord Speaker:

And what's your position on that?

Lord Rees:

Well, I think to be open-minded because we just don't know, we've got to search for any evidence. It could be that life is a rare fluke that only existed here, but I think most people would suggest that life exists in some form in other places in the universe. Whether it exists in any advanced intelligent form is less certain, of course. And if there are aliens, I don't think there'll be like little green men with eyes on stalks. They'd be completely different from us, but it's worth a search. But that's a new area. And this of course links astronomy to biology and other subjects. And if I could put in a plug for astronomy as a subject, it's something which appeals to young people. Dinosaurs and space are the two things that the young kids like and one has to build on that enthusiasm to get people keen on more science.

And I think what is very encouraging is that there's so much for them to learn about. And I think I'd say this, if you look at all the sciences, astronomy and evolutionary biology are the two subjects that have a positive public image. People are a bit ambivalent about genetics and nuclear science because they know they could be used for good and for harm, whereas they're unambiguously positive about understanding the natural world and about the stars. And after all, astronomy is not just a fundamental science, but it's the most universal environmental science because everyone throughout history has gazed up at the same sky, the same vault of heaven and interpreted it in different ways. But it's something which brings us all together.

Lord Speaker:

If I'm correct. Did you say that the impetus for the evolution of life started elsewhere?

Lord Rees:

Well, that's a possibility. We don't know. I don't think that's very likely actually. I think it started here and we don't yet know exactly how it started because we've known for 100 years or more about Darwinian evolution, how from very simple life then over millions of years, natural selection leads to the development of the marvellous biosphere of which we are a part. But there's still a mystery and we don't yet understand how the very first life evolved, how you get some complex molecules to the first replicating metabolising entity that we could call alive on which natural selection can act. And that's still a mystery.

And there are people in the laboratory of molecular biology in Cambridge and other places working on trying to understand how this might have happened. But of course, what we also hope is that there may be some evidence from trying to get a spectrum of the light from planets around other stars, which would tell us if they have any vegetation on them, for instance, from the colour of the light, et cetera. And I think within 10 or 20 years we will have some evidence of that kind. So the question's entirely open at the moment, but I think we'll get some evidence and this will be an exciting development in the next 20 or 30 years.

Lord Speaker:

How important is it for scientists to engage with wider society and your membership of the House of Lords? How has that assisted you otherwise in reaching out?

Lord Rees:

Yes. Well, I mean I think obviously as an educator and as a professor, one should outreach to the public whenever possible. I do that in the case of astronomy. But I think if you think of science in general, and I have some perspective on that because I was for five years president of the Royal Society, which is our academy for UK and the Commonwealth for all the sciences. And that is concerned with all the sciences. And I think it's very, very important that although obviously most people won't know the details of sciences and no scientist knows more than just a tiny fraction of the overall field, we have to specialise. But I think it's very important that everyone has a feel for what science is about, how it operates and how it's advancing by settling controversies and firming up things that are speculative. And I think that's very important because in so many areas of politics and policy, there is a scientific dimension, obviously energy, environment, health, the pandemic and all that.

They have a scientific dimension and the decisions which should be made are decisions made by the public and representatives because scientists have no expertise in ethics particularly. But I think in making those decisions, it's very important that the politicians and the public who elect them should have some feel for science, what it can do and what it can't do. And also of course have some feel for numbers and statistics and the fallacies that could come from misinterpreting those things. So I think it's very, very important and it is really something which is relevant to school level education, to have an education which gives everyone a feel for numbers and a basic idea of the environment they live in.

Lord Speaker:

How important is it to have individuals of experience and expertise in the House of Lords and does that assist science in engaging with wider society?

Lord Rees:

Well, I think it's very important that they should be in the political process in the Commons and in the Lords. And of course it's easier to have them in the Lords because they can continue with their profession in some way. And they are people who may have spent 20 years or 30 years of their career full-time doing science, and therefore that's probably too late in the present system for them to go into active full-time politics in the House of Commons. And so I think it's natural that the House of Lords is a better location for scientists and experts in other things like engineering and medicine than the Commons. And I think it's very good that there are people who are appointed by the Crossbench route.

Lord Speaker:

The fundamental responsibility of members in the House of Lords is to ensure that there's better law. How with your experience has that helped you and what tangible benefits do you think your membership in the House of Lords has delivered?

Lord Rees:

Well, I think there are a lot of laws which govern bioethics, which are better in this country because of the way they've been through the mill of the House of Lords. Take the most famous case in 1980s, the law on embryo research saying that up to 14 days it's possible to use human embryos, but beyond that it's not. That was a consensus which developed, and it was formulated by a committee chaired by Professor Mary Warnock who was a philosopher.

Lord Speaker:

Oh yeah, I remember that.

Lord Rees:

And I think that was something which was adopted by other countries. And that's an example where a group of experts including philosophers and scientists were able to actually come to a consensus. And there are other examples when we need more expertise than you can find among active full-time members of the House of Commons. And so it is very important that this should happen. And of course there are more and more issues of this kind coming up. I think to take one example, it's going to be possible to genetically modify not just animals, but even humans perhaps to some extent. And the question is that ethical? And if not, how do we constrain it?

Lord Speaker:

Do you think there's a risk that humanity won't get past the end of the 21st century?

Lord Rees:

Well, I think I've written some books on this topic and I think we will certainly have a bumpy ride, but I think we will still be there. You can imagine scenarios that wipe everything out, but I think we'll still be there. But the reason I'm not very optimistic is that we are more empowered by technology than we ever were. And one species, named the human species, is having an effect on the rest of the natural world in a way it never did in the past because there are now 8 billion of us and we're all more empowered by technology and we use more energy and use more resources. And so we are depleting natural capital as it were, and there's a risk that we will leave for our descendants, a depleted world with mass extinction, et cetera. And I think it's an ethical imperative that we should change our policies so that just as we benefit from the heritage of centuries past, we leave a positive heritage for the future.space

We must be good ancestors as it were of the future generations. And that's a very important ethical system. But also the other thing I worry about is that new technologies are so powerful that even a few people, a few dissidents or a dissident group can cause some kind of accident, which could cascade globally, massive cyber-attacks, which can knock out the electricity grid in a large region. And of course that will lead to social disruption in a few days. And these things can spread globally in our world, which is interconnected in a way it never was in previous centuries. And so I think we are vulnerable to classes of catastrophe, which are not just local but can spread globally. I mean COVID-19 spread globally as we know, and any other pandemic would spread globally and even worse than the prospect of future pandemics, which could be more virulent and more transmissible than COVID-19, is in my view, the possibility that people with evil intent might engineer more dangerous viruses because it's possible by a technique called gain of function to make viruses more virulent and transmissible than the natural variants.

And if that can be done and that leaks out by error or by design, that could cause an even worse pandemic than the natural ones. And of course you mentioned AI, and AI and everything that goes with it means that we are more and more dependent on complicated networks, which we don't fully understand. And some people worry about them taking over the world as it were. I worry less about that than about them breaking down some bugs being present in the system, which is very hard to deal with. And if we become overdependent, then that of course will cause a catastrophe. It may cause the electric grid to break down. We had a mini version quite recently when the air traffic control system broke down because of some bug or some incorrect entry into a system. And so these systems are so complicated and so interconnected that I think we're going to be very lucky if we can escape severe setbacks of this kind.

Lord Speaker:

I think you've said that this could be achieved by just a lone wolf?

Lord Rees:

I think so. I'm not a technical expert especially in that, but we know that lone wolfs can carry out cyber-attacks and we may get to the stage when some biologist can, as it were, play God on the kitchen table and make some new variant of a virus, which is very, very dangerous. And I do worry about that, and I think that's very intractable because you can't build a nuclear weapon in your back garden. It needs big facilities and they can be monitored globally as we know by the International Atomic Energy Agency. But if someone really wants to make a dangerous pathogen, then they could do it in an existing lab or maybe in a private lab that no knows about.

And it's very, very hard to be able to verify compliance with any regulations. And of course there are special labs that have high security and they are monitored. But I think the point is that we can have these regulations, but enforcing regulations globally could be as impossible as enforcing the drug laws globally or the tax laws globally. We've not had much success in either of those two. So I do worry very much indeed, and I think that the only way we can make ourselves adequately safe against a possible mega disaster of an engineered pandemic is by accepting more intrusive surveillance than we've had to accept up till now.

Lord Speaker:

What advice would you have for politicians and government? My experience, whether in the House of Commons or in the House of Lords, is that governments are largely behind the curve than society itself, technology is increasing, but the laws that regulate that are way behind it. So what advice do you have?

Lord Rees:

Well, I think they have to bear in mind that there are new things that are happening, cyber-attacks and all that, which are at the frontiers of engineering expertise. And it's very, very hard to legislate for those. But we have to because they can be so colossally important and we do have to develop technology in a benign way because as technology gets more powerful, then the stakes get higher, it can produce more benefits. And of course we need those benefits to get clean energy, not just for the global north but for the global south, and we need to have lots of innovation for that. But that same innovation can be misused and legislating for that or regulating for that is something which should be done. But as I said, I think it's very, very difficult. And the biggest problems are things that could be of global consequence. So even a tiny, tiny probability is too much, but which are very hard to regulate. And I would put generating new engineered viruses as top of my list.

Lord Speaker:

You mentioned clean energy sources, the drive for clean energy sources, you're suggesting that globally that should be taken so seriously it's on the same lines as the Manhattan Project or moon landings. And if I'm correct, the relationship between the rich countries and the poor countries where the rich countries have to develop this to ensure that the poor countries skip the fossil fuel era. There are huge ramifications in that. Could you explain your thinking?

Lord Rees:

Yes. Well, I think this is a very, very important thing which I address in one of my books, that we can, if we have the will, move towards net-zero in the rich countries to the north. Whether we are going to is another matter, but we have the technology and we could do that. But of course, the countries of the global south at the moment are producing far less energy per capita than we are in the north, but there are more of them, and by 2050 there'll be four billion people in the global south, I mean India and Sub-Saharan Africa, et cetera. And we want them to develop, they'll need more energy per capita, and it'll be no good if we in the north have achieved net-zero if at the same time by 2050 the global south is producing as much CO2 as we in the north are today.

And so as you say, we've got to ensure that they can leapfrog directly from what they're doing now, which is very low consumption of energy and often rather primitive techniques, directly to clean energy bypassing coal and oil. And that's very hard, but we've got to see if this can be done. And it's rather like they all leapfrog directly to mobile phones never having had landlines throughout Africa. And so in the same way we would hope that we can collaborate with them and it can't be neo-colonialism, it's got to be through helping their technology and we've got to ensure that they can develop clean energy on a scale to suit their own countries.

Lord Speaker:

And the thorny question of redistribution of resources, would that have to be involved?

Lord Rees:

The inequalities within nations between the richest and the poorest and the equality between nations, the global north and those in the south are of course unacceptably large. And we need a political system that gradually reduces them, and we should do that and help the global south to advance. And this is not just for altruistic reasons. If that doesn't happen, then I think we can expect continual disruption and of course massive migration because the one thing which they do have in the globalist south is the ability to travel and also the knowledge of what's happening. They all have TVs or smartphones and things like that, so they know the injustice of their fate.

It's not like 100 years ago when they were living lives separate from the rest of the world that didn't know what they're missing. So I think for all these reasons, we've got to ensure that there's a levelling between nations as well as within nations. And this is going to, I think, involve something which is a mega version of the post-World War II Marshall Plan and Lendlease and things like that whereby we invest in the global south and help it to develop.

Lord Speaker:

And you've advocated the establishment of supranational institutions to fight climate change and others with an appropriate regulatory framework. Does that apply to AI as well as these other subjects?

Lord Rees:

Certainly. I think the special problem of AI is that the main players are now multinational conglomerates as we know, which are dominating the world's market. And it's very hard to tax these companies properly and for the same reasons can be very hard to enforce regulations on them. But we've got to try and it's good that it starts being made in a number of ways to try and get agreed regulations, but of course, the fact that there's a few really dominant players in the market makes it more difficult for nations to assert themselves even in collaboration. But I think it's very important to ensure that there is regulation of these new technologies.

Lord Speaker:

Now you've made the case for carers to have increased conditions in that, I suppose with an ageing society, their role is going to be more important.

Lord Rees:

It is, of course, it depends not simply on the ageing society, but the trajectory of our health. I mean, if we have a long and slow decline, it's going to be far worse in terms of the number of healthcare workers needed in the population. So the idea is to extend healthy years of life and not those where we are dependent on others. Whether that could happen, I don't know. Of course there are some people who want to extend the lifespan in a big way. There're three labs, two in California and one actually in Cambridge called Altos Labs, which are bankrolled by billionaires who want to extend their lifespan and live much longer. And I rather hope they won't succeed because this would be a fundamental new kind of inequality.

And the way I would see it is that these billionaires when they were young, they wanted to be rich, now they're rich, they want to be young again, and that's not quite so easy to arrange. And if they could arrange it, that would be perhaps not good for society. But on the other hand, extending the healthy lifespan for everyone and extending medical knowledge is surely a good thing. And that's going to be something where we hope that AI may be able to help.

Lord Speaker:

Non-humans travelling huge distances and time spans, which humans cannot do, they're unattainable. I think you've made that point?

Lord Rees:

Yes, yes. I haven't answered the second part of your question about aliens. I think that there probably is some kind of life out there, a long way away on a planet orbiting other stars, whether it's anything like us at all, I don't know. I mean, I think it's probably something unrecognisably different. And I also, I'm sceptical about the idea of a human space flight being worthwhile. As you know, humans went to the moon 50 years ago, and we are old enough to remember that. And I certainly thought it'd only be 10 years before the footprints on Mars, but of course that didn't happen and people haven't even been back to the moon. I talk about that. But now that robots can do the things that humans were needed for 50 years ago, the case for sending people is getting weaker all the time.

So my line on the human space flight is that it should not be funded publicly, certainly not by government agencies because they've got to be very safety conscious and that makes it very expensive. Robots can do all the practical things, assembling big structures in space and exploring the surface of Mars and all that. If humans want to fly into space as an adventure, then perhaps they can be supported by sponsorship or the billionaires. We know that Messrs Musk and Bezos are spending billions on space exploration and they could perhaps launch the kind of people, adventurers prepared to accept a very high risk and therefore be launched much more cheaply. So my line is that robots should do all the practical things and only people who really have a high appetite for risk should be going into space, and they should be privately funded, not by the rest of us.

Lord Speaker:

You mentioned Musk. He has indicated that humans could live on the moon or Mars, but I think the point you made is that space travel will not sort out the problems that we have on earth.

Lord Rees:

Yes, I mean, I disagree with him on that. I think there might be a few crazy pioneers living on Mars, just like there are people living at the South Pole, although it's far less hospitable than the South Pole, but the idea of mass migration to avoid the earth's problems, which he and a few other space enthusiasts adopt, that I think is a dangerous illusion. I don't think it's realistic and we've got to solve those problems here on earth. Dealing with climate change on earth is a doddle compared to making Mars habitable. So I don't think we should hold that out as a long-term aim at all.

So I don't agree with him, but I think he is an extraordinary figure, and I think we've got to hand it to him that despite being a rather strange personality, he's got great achievements in that he's transformed two major industries, electric cars and rockets, because in fact, more than 100 rockets per year are rockets that he's made, the Falcon Rockets and there've been more than 100 launched with no failures at all. And so he has done a much better job than the big conglomerates that used to work for NASA in producing efficient rockets, which can be reused, and that will make it cheaper to actually send stuff into space and more feasible to have some engineering done in space and even solar energy gathered from space.

Lord Speaker:

The advances that scientists and technologists will make, do they need a wider buy-in from society and politicians? And if they do, how do you envisage that turning out?

Lord Rees:

Well, I think much of innovative science is best supported by the public purse, whether it's in universities or in standalone research institutes is a different matter. That's a separate debate, but pre-competitive research is best done and supported publicly. And I think one thing we've got to do is to ensure that the UK is a leading player in this. We have a very strong tradition in research and we don't have much in the way of raw materials. So I think it's fair to say that if we don't get smarter, we'll get poorer. So let's ensure that our science is well-supported. The last few years has been rather worrying, the Brexit and the loss of the support from the European Research Council, Horizon, et cetera, that made the UK less attractive. And so we've had more people leaving the UK for other countries than attracting, what we want is to make this country an attractive place for doing research. And that probably does involve some slight changes and not doing something we're doing now like charging huge amounts of money for visas.

Lord Speaker:

With a world of technology, our young people in education, and you have a real passion for that, they need to understand science more. What way should the curriculum be changed to ensure that that's the outcome?

Lord Rees:

Yes. Well, I think that's a very important question because more people now accept we need to have a broader curriculum. Post 16, we shouldn't have specialised A levels, we should have a technical stream and all that and give people more choice so that a choice made at 16 doesn't foreclose what happens later when you have to make a decision for higher education. And I think that's generally accepted. What's happening now all too often is that young people, who when they're very young are fascinated by dinosaurs and space and all that, they aren't sufficiently well taught to maintain that enthusiasm. And when they get to age 16, when as you know they have to decide on specialisations for their A levels, many of them drop science. And that forecloses the option.

Lord Speaker:

Particularly physics.

Lord Rees:

Yeah. And that forecloses the option at age 18 plus of going back and doing a specialised science course. So we've got to keep options open to the age of 18 and have less specialisation. And I would go further than that.

I think we've got to make our higher education more flexible. We want to have a mixture of technical and academic education post 18, and we also want to get away from the view that universities are to provide three-year courses between the age of 18 and 21 for full-time residential students, we need to give people a chance to intermit and come back later. At the moment, one thing that's wrong, for instance, is that if you're a student and you go to university at 18, and if things don't work out for you, you have problems and you drop out after two years, then you are dismissed as wastage and your university vice chancellor is berated for the wastage and there's an incentive to lower the quality of the degree, which is not a good idea. What should happen instead is that someone in that position should get a certificate.

They should say, I've had two years of college and have the opportunity to go back and do more courses at a later stage and any time through life, indeed. And the government in a small way has moved in the right direction by the lifelong learning entitlement - a loan rather the grant. So I think we need to move in that direction. And I think we also need to ensure that people can do a mixture of online learning and residential learning to enable people of a mature age to participate. I don't think online learning alone works except for motivated mature people doing a professional master's degree or something like that. You need to have a mixture, but I think we can learn something from the development of online teaching. But I think the main thing is that we need to make access to higher education, and that includes technical education more open and more flexible so that you can accumulate credits through life.

Lord Speaker:

And do you think lifelong learning can assist and enrich people's lives and wellbeing?

Lord Rees:

Oh, definitely. I think it can. Yes. And of course it doesn't have to be formal. Of course, once people get the bug that it's good to read a lot, then they can learn informally. There's a difference between formal education and education, but I think it should be possible for people to get education when they want it without financial sacrifice.

Lord Speaker:

And maybe as a launchpad, models like the Open University.

Lord Rees:

Well, the open university was a great pioneering achievement of course.

Lord Speaker:

And I did a degree there...

Lord Rees:

Yes, and I think that showed that there is a demand, and it could be far better now when we have far better online facilities than they had with late night TV programmes in effect, weren't they? And so we could do far better. And so I think that's a real model. And I think also that's a model that could be spread around the world.

Lord Speaker:

Science, technology, engineering, and maths, STEM subjects. You've been very strong in them, but you've also added another subject, arts, to make it STEAM.

Lord Rees:

Yes.

Lord Speaker:

Why is art so important not just to the culture, but to the political process?

Lord Rees:

Well, I think it's very important that people should study the arts, and especially if they can actively pursue an art and creative art, that's very good for everyone. But I think education in languages, for instance, shouldn't be allowed to lapse as is happening now. And I think that clearly just as I deplore the fact that people don't know the difference between a proton and a protein, it's equally sad if they can't find Taiwan or Iran on a map. And many people can't do that, or if they don't know the basic literature of their country and the history of their country. So I think wide education ought to include the subject which are typecast as humanities, as well as science. So when I said that everyone should understand basic science and their environment, the same thing goes for understanding the history of their country and the language.

Lord Speaker:

The distinguished historian Simon Schama made programmes with the BBC where he said that the culture and arts have an impact on politics and a very important impact. How do you see that? What's your view?

Lord Rees:

Well, I mean, I think that politicians ought to certainly be aware of history. If I could say something which is against science, if we have a senior politician, I'd rather they got a PhD in history than in dentistry, for instance, because one is more relevant to the decisions they have to take. So I certainly think that we want to have politicians who know the background context to the decisions they're making. That's crucially important.

Lord Speaker:

You have thought very deeply about the future of humankind. And when you look into the future, would you say that you're fundamentally a techno pessimist or a techno optimist?

Lord Rees:

I would say I'm a techno optimist but a political pessimist, in that I think we already have the scientific knowledge that would enable us to provide a lifestyle like we have in this country for everyone in the world. But we're not heading that way at all. And the reason for that is the politics. It's very, very hard to arrange to reduce these inequalities and all that. So I'm a scientific optimist and I think science is going to continue to increase the scope of what we're doing. But the downside is that politicians haven't proved very effective at the international relations that would lead to the benefits being spread. And of course, as I mentioned earlier, the advances in science give new deeper downsides as well as more exciting upsides. And so we've got to ensure that we can harness the benefits and minimise the downsides.

But I think the main thing that I'm pessimistic about is the politics, which is going to make it very, very hard to collaborate and also to move towards a world that's sustainable because we know that we have to minimise the risk of pandemics and all that sort of thing. But we know also that if we go in as we are now, we are heading for a world that's going to be depleted in many ways with mass extinctions and all that sort of thing. And so there's a risk that we will leave a worse world for our descendants, and I think that's something which we should feel ashamed of given what we have benefited from generations past.

Lord Speaker:

And you say that the electoral cycle of four to five years works against these scientific ambitions?

Lord Rees:

I think it does, and I think we could get round that by having more commissions outside politics so that there's an acceptance that they're decided in the way, like the Bank of England and all that, which don't reverse policies when the government changes. I think that's one thing that we ought to be able to do. I think apart from that, we've got to perhaps accept that we delegate more authorities to multinational bodies. We already have the International Atomic Energy Agency, we have the World Health Organisation. I think we need an international body to deal with AI and all those issues, and I think for biosecurity, et cetera, and maybe others. So I think we've got to accept that many of the challenges we face can't be tackled by each nation separately, and so we need to delegate more of our national decisions to an international body.

Lord Speaker:

In the defence area, what are your worries about the future with automatic weapons, which some distinguished scientists would say there's no control, no regulation on it at the moment.

Lord Rees:

Well, it is a worry of course, automatic weapons, which are not under direct human control and things can happen very quickly, so that a third world war could be over in a day. So we've got to avoid that kind of situation. And I think we've also got to avoid the introduction of new weapons, bio and all that. And also nuclear weapons of course, which have been with us for 70 years. We've avoided through luck as much as judgement, nuclear exchange. I mean, at the time of the Cuba crisis, Kennedy said that the risk was between one in three and evens. And McNamara in his later years you remember, said that they were lucky rather than wise in order to avoid catastrophe at that time.

And there were many near misses. And I think that it is also a new class of threats and something which we discuss at our centre in Cambridge, that if the command and control system for nuclear weapons is sort of automated, then of course there's a risk that people will be overconfident about how reliable it is and can't tolerate any kind of probability of things going wrong in something as colossal as that.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah, in the Cuban missile crisis, I think President Kennedy, in his own words, didn't take the advice of the chiefs of the defence staff, but deliberated on the issue and discerned it and established a personal relationship with Khrushchev in Russia. So we need sensible politicians. What advice do you have for making politicians sensible?

Lord Rees:

Now we need on a bigger scale, people to be prepared to make decisions, and they will do that if the public is behind them and the public will only get behind them if there are charismatic influencers who do persuade them. And in my book I mention a rather disparate quartet of influencers on my list. The first is Pope Francis, who's encyclical in 2015.

Lord Speaker:

Oh, Laudato si'

Lord Rees:

Yeah, the Laudato si', that was the first time a Pope had stated that humans have a responsibility to the rest of creation and don't just have dominion over it, which was a traditional view. And he had a standing ovation at the UN, and he made a big impact on forging the consensus at the 2015 Climate Conference. He did that. And so he's my first. My second is our secular Pope David Attenborough, who is worldwide being a leader, influencer of getting people to care about nature and the problem it's in. And two others, Bill Gates, who I think deserves credit for being someone who talks sensibly about technology and points out it isn't reasonable with our known knowledge of technology to move towards net-zero and all that.

And fourth, Greta Thunberg, who's enthused a whole younger generation, and of course the younger generation who will be alive at the end of the century. They're naturally the ones who care most about this, but we ought to care about the lives of our grandchildren and care equally about this. So it's influencers like that who may be more charismatic than the average scientist, and they can help to raise these issues on the public agenda in competition with the noise level from urgent policy questions, which politicians clearly get preoccupied with for most of their time.

Lord Speaker:

Well, Lord Rees, not just I'm delighted but privileged to have you along. This has been a fascinating experience for me, and I hope when this is made, that many people will listen seriously to you, not least the politicians. So thank you for your wisdom.

Lord Rees:

Thank you very much.

 

Lord Speaker:

Lord Mandelson, Peter, welcome to Lord Speaker's Corner. I'll take you back to your early time. You're the grandson of a famous politician, Herbert Morrison, Deputy Prime Minister, 1945 to '51. You have met, if I remember, 14 Prime Ministers including Clem Attlee whom Harold Wilson introduced you to in the 1960s. So is it safe to say it's in the blood from an early age?

Lord Mandelson:

I think it's safe to say that I am biologically attached to politics and the Labour Party. I mean, most politicians like me like to set out the political journey that they took throughout their lives. I'm afraid my political journey ended before it started. I was literally born into the Labour Party and it remained my home, my family ever since.

For some reason too, I seem to have been recurringly dogged by controversy all my life. I don't know why. I mean, I started being controversial when I was at school and my headmaster denounced me in front of the school assembly as an industrial militant who was trying to tear apart the fabric of the school community. And that was because I was campaigning at the time for comprehensive education. He didn't like that, because he was the head of a state grammar school and it sort of rather continued. Even in my first job when I left Oxford University, I went into the economic department of the TUC and that became controversial. They thought I was far too political and that ended prematurely. Then I was controversial when the National Executive Committee of the party divided over whether to appoint me as the campaign director in the 1980s. And then again in the New Labour years, all these people operating in the dark, that's when I became the Prince of Darkness. I mean, I hope now that I'm-

Lord Speaker:

Who labelled you as Prince of Darkness?

Lord Mandelson:

Private Eye. It actually came from something that Clare Short had said. She bemoaned in the 1990s these people surrounding Tony Blair who operated in the dark. Anyway, now I am the Dark Lord, [laughter] no longer the prince, and I hope to lead a rather more sober, quiet and uncontroversial existence in your House.

Lord Speaker:

Good. Well, I remember being quite amused when you said that in your family car journeys, the game you played was looking at constituencies and remembering the MPs.

Lord Mandelson:

It was ridiculous. I was very good at it, I have to say. But I mean my parents were driven to distraction and my poor brother was bored to tears, but I liked them to name constituencies and then I would tell them who the MP was. I mean, ridiculous.

Lord Speaker:

And then you became a councillor in Lambeth and I think you got disillusioned with ‘Red Ted and his socialist kingdom.’

Lord Mandelson:

I think I had two defining political experiences when I was younger. One was, as I say, working in the economic department at the TUC in the 1970s during the period of the Jim Callaghan Labour government when the trade union thought they were jointly running the country. And whilst I believe that the Labour Party and the trade unions should remain close, I don't think they're interchangeable in their roles. And I formed a view then about how the party and a Labour government and the trade unions should operate in slightly different spheres.

Then I became a councillor in Lambeth in the early '80s during the sort of heyday of the far left, the so-called ‘loony left’. Ted Knight was a Trotskyist, the leader of the council, and I was in the minority of the group who fiercely opposed him. And that was a defining experience for me, John, because I mean, although apart from one or two excursions in my political life, I've always remained broadly speaking with the same political outlook.

I am a centrist Labour person, rather as my grandfather was. My grandfather who was, as you said, Herbert Morrison, the first secretary of the London Labour Party. He was the first Labour leader of the London County Council in the 1930s and then was Attlee's deputy. His view was very strongly that the Labour Party was a national party or it was nothing. It had to appeal across geographic, social, class, professional boundaries. It had to represent and speak for the country as a whole, and I'm very much my grandfather's grandson. But what I saw in Lambeth was a very, very different Labour Party, a very different outlook. And I thought that these people were not only completely alien to the traditions, the social democratic traditions of the Labour Party, but were also colossally electorally damaging to the Labour Party. And that's why, when the time came in the 1980s after I'd worked in Westminster as a shadow cabinet researcher and parliamentary aide, I then went to work in London Weekend Television.

I went into current affairs television and became a producer on Weekend World, which was presented at the time by Brian Walden. But the moment I saw the opportunity to jump back into politics and to join Neil Kinnock's team, I did so. I was 30 years old. I'd been working as a volunteer in the Brecon and Radnor by-election.

Lord Speaker:

- I remember that

Lord Mandelson:

Neil was reorganising the Labour Party headquarters, creating a new directorate of campaigns and communications. And I asked whether I could apply. And he eventually said, "Yes, I'll support you." Roy Hattersley was his deputy, he also supported me. But it was quite controversial with the National Executive Committee with the entire NEC of course, who did the interview. And I was very clear what I stood for and what I believed in and how I saw the Labour Party, how I saw its future, how I saw its professionalisation, its modernisation. And of course, I backed Neil Kinnock, who was on a mission effectively to save the Labour Party.

If you remember the conditions -

Lord Speaker:

- I do

Lord Mandelson:

We were in the early 1980s, and I would just say this about Neil Kinnock, if he hadn't saved the Labour Party in the 1980s, there wouldn't have been much left for Tony Blair to modernise in the 1990s. So he took on the far left, he took on the Militant tendency and he turned around the Labour Party in the '80s. And we were in the 1987 general election, which was the first campaign I directed as Labour's campaign director. We reinstated ourselves as the alternative to the Conservatives, because of course by then the SDP had been created. They were pointing a dagger to our existence in the 1980s. But in that sense, but also in other ways, the 1987 general election was a very profound watershed for me.

Lord Speaker:

That's when I came in, '87, so I remember it vividly.

Lord Mandelson:

Is it? Well, the reason it was a watershed election for me was because I learned in that election the limitations of communications in politics. That of course if you have good policies, you don't throw them away on bad presentation - of course. And you had to embrace the media and make the media as it will work for you in communicating with the public. But that if you didn't have coherent policies and a philosophical outlook and a strong offer, unless your election campaign was anchored firmly in those policies, it wouldn't be successful. But personally, it was a watershed election for me.

It was quite a traumatic one, because in the first weekend of the election campaign, the News of the World chose to torpedo me and to try and torpedo the campaign by splashing on their front page, and then believe it or not, continuing the story on pages three and four, about me being a gay man. About being a gay person in politics whose partner, who I'd been together with for seven years, had fathered a child and that we were together helping to bring up this child. And it was a brutal thing on that first weekend of that election, and I remained fairly scarred by it.

It was very difficult in the 1980s. It made me, of course wonder whether I could ever be a Member of Parliament, this controversy that surrounded me, sparked by this News of the World story. But then do you remember Ted Leadbitter?

Lord Speaker:

I do, yes.

Lord Mandelson:

So Ted was, he'd been re-elected in '87 and it was going to be his last Parliament. And I thought, "God, can I have one shot, at least overcome all the difficulties and whatever." I can't say that Neil Kinnock was very pleased about that. He wanted me to remain in my job, but he said, "Look, kid, have a shot at it. I don't think that a constituency party like the one in Hartlepool is going to select somebody like you, but let's see, give it a shot and then when you come back, we'll open a bottle of Champagne."

Lord Speaker:

But you're assiduous in campaigning. I knew that.

Lord Mandelson:

Well, I was fairly assiduous. So I spent a year literally, John, knocking on every door of every party member and trade union delegate in Hartlepool. And I thought I was doing okay. I was what I was, I was a southern, gay, Oxford educated smoothie from London. I was not a Hartlepool type to put it mildly, but I was doing well. And then 24 hours before the selection, my leading opponent in the selection went back to the News of the World story, photocopied the whole story, put it anonymously in brown paper envelopes and put it through the door of every single party member in Hartlepool and trade union delegate to kibosh me. And that's when I discovered the innate decency of human beings, people in the Labour Party. They recoiled at this. It was such a horrible thing to do. And they gave me 60% backing on the first ballot and I was home and dry. And that's how I became selected in Hartlepool.

Lord Speaker:

When I speak to university students or young people and they ask me what makes a politician? I say, "Politicians have got to be resilient." So I think you have underlined that and you've got a gold medal for that.

Lord Mandelson:

Now gold medal for resilience, that's true. Famously a fighter, not a quitter. As I said later on, when I continued to be dogged by controversy in my political life, it didn't end there.

Lord Speaker:

[Laughter] Good. Now, take me back to the 1945-51 government when you mentioned your grandfather, because my memory of the history is that when the NHS came in, there was a view that it would be a regional NHS. There was a real political drive to say, "No, this is a National Health Service." Was that in the DNA of politicians like your grandfather?

Lord Mandelson:

You have to understand the difference between my grandfather who was essentially a municipal socialist - he was a local government man - and Ernie Bevin, who was a completely trade union man, and by the way-

Lord Speaker:

Foreign Secretary.

Lord Mandelson:

... my grandfather fell out with Ernie Bevin over the nationalisation, Morrisonian nationalisation after the war, because only Bevin thought, "Well, all you need to do is take state ownership of it, put the trade union representatives on the board, and they can run it along with the managers." And my grandfather said, "No, that's not how we're going to do it. These nationalised industries have got to be run arm’s length from the government in the national interest, and they have to serve the public, the consumers. And so we're going to appoint people to run those nationalised industries who don't simply represent the workforce. They represent the public at large, albeit with trade union representatives." So he seriously fell out with Ernie Bevin over nationalisation. And then he fell out with Nye Bevan over the NHS. Why? Because my grandfather believed that healthcare was the flip side of social care. That you couldn't really divide these two essential public services.

Lord Speaker:

A contemporary debate today.

Lord Mandelson:

A very contemporary debate today. And he said that the only part of government that can effectively deliver both sides of that coin joined together will be local authorities. I mean, large local authorities who would know their area, know their services, know their people. Nye took a different view. He said, "Look, this has got to be an absolutely centrally run national service." And as he said, as Minister of Health sitting in Whitehall, "I want to hear when a bedpan crashes to the floor in Tredegar, and I'll be controlling our response to that bedpan." And my grandfather said, "This is ridiculous. You can't build a care, a health, and a social care service just run from Whitehall." So they fell out over it a bit, had a good debate. Nye won, Nye won the argument and it became a centralised, centrally run national service. Now, there were good arguments for that, John, I'm not disputing that.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah, of course. Of course.

Lord Mandelson:

And to set it up from scratch, you probably did need to set it up as a national service. But of course, fast-forward all these years, we're now having a debate about decentralising public services and the way that they are run and delivered - tailored more to individual need and closer to the people in the communities they serve. But of course, particularly as you say, the social care/healthcare argument, so it's come full circle. But my grandfather, he had strong views. They all had strong views in that government. I mean, Attlee was the inimitable chairman of the board. His job was to make sure that this Morrison and that Bevin and that Bevan and this Hugh Dalton and that Stafford Cripps and this John Strachey, that they could all come together amid their disagreements and yet function as a single cabinet, as a team. And by and large they did.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah. Let me take you back to when you left local government, then you went to Weekend World and I think you worked with John Birt, who's a good friend, who's in here as well. And then you went into politics again, as you say, director of communications. What did you learn from being a TV producer and your engagement with industry that assisted you in politics? Because you went to Department of Trade and we'll maybe come on to this later, but you were very keen in establishing an industrial strategy. So you tackled that with vigour, but you must have had views on that before you went back to politics maybe as a result of your Weekend World.

Lord Mandelson:

Weekend World, and I smile when you say John Birt, because John is a very clear, coherent, always sort of surgical person in the way that he would say, "Look, our job is to explain." And this was a very cerebral programme. I mean, Neil said, "Oh, we've got to have this guy Peter Mandelson become our communications director, because he knows all about television," as if I was some producer from Hi-de-Hi! or Blind Date or whatever. No, this was a very cerebral current affairs programme. But here's the point, John. What it taught me was that if you're clear enough in your own head, you can explain things to the public and bring the public with you as it were on a journey. And that you need to, in order to engage the public, present clear difficult choices to the politicians that you interview so that the public has got an idea, an insight about what it's like, what goes on in a minister's mind or a Prime Minister's mind when they are choosing between probably imperfect and unpalatable choices.

I mean, very rarely do we have a choice between what's available and perfection. It is a choice between what's available here and what is far from perfect over here, and there's a trade-off in each option, in each way that you might choose. And politics is a messy, complicated business. As I say, nothing is ideal and what government is about, and this is why I loved government, I loved it when I stepped away from the campaign machine, and the back room, and the whole Prince of Darkness thing. I loved being a minister, because having those rigorous debates with your colleagues, with your civil servants, knowing that at the end of the day you're going to have to make up your mind, take a decision, make a clear recommendation, and then when it's adopted, go and sell it to the public. Then bring the public along with you so that they know about some of the difficult trade-offs and invidious choices that you've made in arriving at this particular policy conclusion.

And what Weekend World did in a very real sense was prepare me, to train me to analyse policies in that way and to put those difficult choices and trade-offs to the ministers we interviewed in the studios afterwards, because we all wrote these interview plans, structures – ‘if he says this, bash him with that. If he goes that way, confront him with that choice.’ And it was a very good training for me. I enjoyed it, but I infinitely preferred being on the other side of the table: being interviewed rather than writing the scripts for the interviewer.

Lord Speaker:

What stopped me at the time of Weekend World, I think it was a Sunday programme, but it was an hour long.

Lord Mandelson:

It was an hour. I know.

Lord Speaker:

Exactly. And we don't have that nowadays. We've got a couch with three or four people on, they get a couple of minutes. So there's no explanation.

Lord Mandelson:

It's nanosecond stuff. No, no. This is what John Birt designed. I mean, this was an hour's worth. I mean, half of it would be analysis and explaining and half of it interviewing the minister or whoever it was. It was tough stuff. But it attracted viewers.

Lord Speaker:

Oh, very much. Brian Walden was forensic.

Lord Mandelson:

And we miss it. Well, he had these forensic people working for him.

Lord Speaker:

Exactly. You were doing the business. I forgot about that. Good. Communications is different nowadays, particularly with social media. And there's positive-

Lord Mandelson:

All done in a second.

Lord Speaker:

Exactly. Positive aspects to social media, but there's a toxicity to it as well.

Lord Mandelson:

That's quite different now.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah. Do you have any advice for people in this environment?

Lord Mandelson:

Yes. I mean, look, in a sense, the News of the World was pretty toxic to me, but it was like an Exocet. Now, this is a constantly flowing river of poison, of polarisation, of people being mean to and about everyone else. And my advice to politicians now is get off it. I'm not on Twitter. I've oftentimes asked, said to my office-

Lord Speaker:

Yeah, I looked you up on the weekend by the way and you weren't there.

Lord Mandelson:

... "Why can't I be on Twitter? Everyone else is on Twitter." They said, "No, no, no, no. It's a really bad idea if you're on Twitter. Not only you'll say things you regret and you'll then be cancelled or whatever, but you'll hate the things that people say about you and you'll be engulfed in this sort of stuff." And so I'm not on Twitter, and I would say to my colleagues in politics, get out of the Twitter sphere. It's not the real public, it's not the real world. It's like a little microcosm of hateful people talking to each other and scoring points both off each other and everyone else. They just delight in targets. You have to have a target the whole time. Get off it, go out on the doorstep, talk to the public.

Lord Speaker:

So there are more positive ways of communicating?

Lord Mandelson:

Much more positive ways of communicating. Just remember when you're on the twittersphere, you're communicating within a bubble. You're not talking to the general public. And time and time again, you have politicians, my friends who are now on the frontbench in the Labour Party saying, "Oh look, this is really taking off on Twitter." And I said, "Well, let it take off on Twitter, because it's not the general public." "I know, it's going viral." I said, "Yes, but it's going viral in a bubble."

Lord Speaker:

In terms of what's happening nowadays in the political environment, you've got deepfake. And I think there was a video of Joe Biden asking people and Democrats not to vote in the primary as a result of that.

Lord Mandelson:

This is the big new challenge with artificial intelligence.

Lord Speaker:

Exactly. And the oversight board for Meta said that they don't want it removed, but they want it labelled. Now we have a number of distinguished peers and baronesses here working on the online bill, for example, Baroness Kidron, Baroness Morgan, and others in that. I suppose that you'll encourage them in that, but how far should we go in that area?

Lord Mandelson:

Well, I think that Baroness Kidron and Baroness Morgan are two very good examples of two fantastically publicly-motivated members of this House who probably would not be able to do this and raise these arguments and present these flags if there wasn't a House of Lords, by the way. Perhaps come back to that in a moment. But the House of Lords has also had, their Communications Committee has produced a very, very good report recently on AI.

Lord Speaker:

Baroness Stowell

Lord Mandelson:

And what I liked about Tina Stowell's committee's report was this, perfectly realistic about AI. Warning of possible courses it might take or eventualities and flagging up some of the risks associated with large learning machines. But they're not saying, "Oh my God, let's all crowd in and smother this at birth." They're not saying, "Oh, this could have such terrible, profound existential dangers. We've got to almost regulate it to death before it even gets off the ground." There may be a need for some sort of basic backstop legislation, I don't know. But my inclination would be to say, look at the opportunities that AI offers us, both in raising productivity and efficiency in the private sector, but also potentially transforming the delivery, the design and delivery of public services as well. Making them much more personally tailored and relevant to people. AI has the potential to transform diagnosis and preventative medicine in the National Health Service. So just be careful what you wish for when you move too quickly towards regulation, you don't want to smother it at birth.

Lord Speaker:

Yep. I'm reminded of Northern Ireland when you were Secretary of State, and I think we overlapped for a time on that. But when people asked me about that, I said, "It's a very different type of politics. It's all about personal relationships and bringing people together, and it's foreign to the department element there." But you were engaged in that. And I was involved in Omagh in the first weekend in that, and I kept up a continuation for that, because I was charged with the post-Omagh.

Lord Mandelson:

I'm so glad you have.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah, but I remember people like Michael Gallagher was there and his son Aiden, a car mechanic, 16 years of age. And Michael Gallagher, he's the best of humanity, and he's kept that going. And you have been and still are very close to him on that.

Lord Mandelson:

I had a problem. That was in the summer of 1998.

Lord Speaker:

'98.

Lord Mandelson:

I came in the following year, 1999. And the problem was it wasn't that my department, the Northern Ireland office, was insensitive or indifferent to what had happened. It was a terrible, terrible calamity for those families and all those who were affected.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah, 29.

Lord Mandelson:

You've mentioned Michael and his son Aiden. Heavens, there were so many others. And I said, "Look, this has got to be a priority. We've got to get to the bottom of this. We've got to find out who was responsible. We've got to bring them to trial." And they said "Secretary of State, you've got to leave this to the police. This is not a matter for you." And I said, "Well, the families are really agitated about it and they feel that we could and should be doing more, and I want to go to Omagh." "No, no, it's better if you don't go to Omagh." I said, "Well, why not?" They said, "Because you will stir up emotions. You will create expectations. You might lead people to believe that what we're doing might deliver some sort of justice earlier than frankly we're going to be able to do." I said, "No, I'm very sorry, but I'm going," and I went.

And it was a terrible, I mean, it was so emotional. It was emotionally draining, and I never let go of Omagh from that moment onwards. Months went by and I kept saying to the security director and the NIO, I said, "Tell me, give me an update on how the Omagh investigation is going." And I could feel him, he's a great guy, but I could just feel him slightly bristling. I said, "Well, I want to talk to the chief constable, Ronnie Flanagan." "No, Secretary of State, that is really not your job to talk to the chief constable." I said, "Well, I want to."

I talked to the chief constable and I just didn't feel that anyone was properly explaining to me why we had so much intelligence, John. To me it was a matter of joining the dots. And I said to Ronnie, "I'm really not happy with this." And he said, "Look, Secretary of State, it's our job, not yours. But as an exception, if you want to meet the investigating team, I will allow you to do so." I went to their offices, went to where they were conducting the investigation, sat down and talked to the three or four leading members of the investigation. I felt it was all I could do was to just demonstrate my political ministerial interest and commitment. And it has been a long journey of delivering justice over Omagh. Not entirely perfectly or satisfactorily, I have to say. But I still engage. I cannot leave from me and from my mind that initial experience I had.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah, I was down in Omagh, in fact, an hour after the bomb went off and it left me with-

Lord Mandelson:

Were you the security minister in the Northern Ireland office?

Lord Speaker:

Yes, at the time. I was the only minister on duty.

Lord Mandelson:

Yes, you were minister on duty. It was a weekend.

Lord Speaker:

On the Sunday I went down with John Prescott to visit, and then Tony Blair came across, he was on holiday in France and I phoned him. He came across and Bertie Ahern came up and there were intense talks taking place on that Sunday and all the participants came. But to talk about the separation of powers, on the Sunday, my office said to me that Willie Thompson, Ulster Unionist MP who represented Omagh, he had requested to come down to Omagh with me, but they said it was not appropriate. And I said to him, "Look, get him down. He's the MP for the area. It's very important, because there's a message here and the message is that this is an all-party issue. And as well as that, this is an atrocity on the whole of Northern Ireland, not just a section of Northern Ireland." So the mindset was a bit different from the political mindset, the administrative mindset.

Lord Mandelson:

Well, it was complicated, but I felt just as you felt that weekend and afterwards, I felt I had a duty to represent those families and their interests, and that's what I did.

Lord Speaker:

But as well as that, you saw the Assembly restored, you saw the police service reformed, and that wasn't easy at all. Can you give us an insight into that because-

Lord Mandelson:

No, what happened was Chris Patten, another member of this House, had done a really first-rate job in reviewing the entire Royal Ulster Constabulary. And radical change, radical replacement of the RUC by a new Police Service of Northern Ireland. I was completely committed to it and its implementation, and I did carry out that implementation. I introduced the legislation, we did it all. There were two things I was worried about. Chris wasn't really happy with me at the time about this. One was that I was just slightly worried that the supervisory boards that we were creating, the overseeing boards politically representative of all the parties, every section of the community across Northern Ireland, that they may not realise the need and the propriety of standing back away from any operational activity or decision of the police. I was worried about frankly, political interference by elements who frankly were connected with criminality. And so I just tweaked that a bit. Chris, not happy.

The other thing he thought was a bit excessive, I think. I wanted to save the face of the RUC. I didn't want to humiliate the RUC. They had made such sacrifices. They had lost so many of their members to the terrorism of the Provisional IRA. I had met families and widows and I wanted in saying goodbye to the RUC and finally standing them down and replacing them, I wanted to say a thank you. So I asked Her Majesty the Queen whether she would agree to awarding of the George Cross to the RUC as an acknowledgement and recognition of their sacrifice they had made. And in many, many cases, their bravery in the face of that terrorism. I knew all the political reasons why they had to go, and the Queen agreed, and we had a ceremony and I thought that was a nice way to stand down the RUC. But some disagreed. They said, "Come on, the RUC should just be swept away." And I said, "Come on, we can do this in a nicer way."

Lord Speaker:

Yeah, but it was a fantastic achievement when you consider it was, again, two different mindsets, two different political beliefs and bringing them together.

Lord Mandelson:

But look what we've got now. Now you've got a Sinn Féin First Minister in tandem, in lockstep-

Lord Speaker:

With DUP.

Lord Mandelson:

... with the DUP. And everything they decide they have to decide together. Each has a veto. I mean, it's an amazing achievement, it is one of the signal greatest achievements of British politics, certainly of New Labour...

Lord Speaker:

Are you positive for the future?

Lord Mandelson:

I'm very positive about the future, because they keep on encountering these potholes and hurdles in the road and they'll go over them. They'll go around them. It will last, because that's the will of the people of Northern Ireland. They want it to work.

Lord Speaker:

In one of your government appointments, you were Secretary of State for trade, and as I mentioned earlier, your view in industrial strategy and you seem to have a big global approach to these issues. Probably reinforced again by your role as Commissioner in Europe on that. And I think you mentioned Lee Kuan Yew was very influential-

Lord Mandelson:

In Singapore, yes.

Lord Speaker:

... in giving you that view. But you've said that the drift economically is from west to east. What advice do you have for the country at this time, particularly as we go forward economically? Because since the banking crisis, I think we've been quite sclerotic in terms of our GDP growth and economic growth. I think it's 0.4% per year.

Lord Mandelson:

We have not had a brilliant decade, that's for sure. Look, I tell you what my advice is, don't be defeatist. Don't be fatalistic. Of course the world is changing. Of course China and the Asian countries are fast emerging. There are other large, populated countries that have plenty of natural resources and critical materials that perhaps we lack. They're now creating and developing some fine universities. And by the way, the future of any economy, the future of our economy, our future prosperity as a country is going to be built on the broad strong shoulders of our great universities in Britain. So let's not be defeatist or fatalist about this just because we see others emerging. The global economy is not a zero-sum game. And if we invest and we raise levels of public and private investment, if we invest in our infrastructure again, if we invest in our skills, we invest in AI and the introduction of technology to some amazingly new fast emerging markets and industries, which didn't exist 10 or 20 years ago.

Now we can compete, John, in this country. Okay, we've had a terrible 10 years. We've had global financial crisis, we had austerity, we had Brexit, heaven help us, we've had Covid, and we've had all the divisions, political divisions of successive Conservative, Prime Ministers and ministers. But look, I think the country's ready to turn a page. They want to start a new chapter in our national story. And at the root of that has got to be our drawing and our strengths, leveraging our science base, mobilising our great universities. But making sure that whilst we have some of the best entrepreneurs and private investors in Europe and the world, they need a government that's backing them and doing some of the heavy lifting, some of the pump priming. That's what I discovered. The essential partnership between public and private, between business and government. We're operating sensibly, going with the grain of markets, but a government doing what sometimes only a government can and should do. And that's what we've got to do again.

Lord Speaker:

Would you recommend keeping a link with China?

Lord Mandelson:

We have no alternative but to keep a link.

Lord Speaker:

There's some saying we should-

Lord Mandelson:

Oh, I know, but I mean it's barking. Look, I don't like China's political system. I don't like their complete disregard for conscience in a broader sense of the term in which they conduct themselves both at home and internationally. I think Xi Jinping, by the way, in the way in which he's taking the country and operating a very centralised system, rather authoritarian system, is doing China colossal damage, potentially, economically. So there are many things I could say about China, but also we are in one global boat, John.

Lord Speaker:

And globalisation is not bust as some pessimists would say.

Lord Mandelson:

Globalisation is changing. It's not stopping and it's not reversing, but it is changing. Structurally our economies, the structure of international trade, the structure of many supply chains are changing and we've got to adapt to those changes. But at the end of the day, we are in one giant global economic boat and we've got to row together and make sure that we move forward at pace, but in a way that doesn't simply benefit and bring rewards to those who are the most advanced. But those others in the world who want to catch up, they want their opportunity to do what we've done. To trade, to generate economic growth and prosperity, to lift people out of poverty. The last thing we should be doing now, and all these people who say, "Oh, we don't like trade or we don't like globalisation." What they're saying is, what you want to do is kick away the ladder that we've climbed up in our economic growth so that others, developing countries, are not able to follow us. Well, I don't agree with that.

Lord Speaker:

You have said that generally speaking, politicians are not good at strategy. They're good at tactics on that.

Lord Mandelson:

Did I say that?

Lord Speaker:

You did somewhere. I'll tell you afterwards where you said it. [Laughter] But in terms of that strategy, the need for long term thinking is important. What's been your approach to strategy as opposed to tactics?

Lord Mandelson:

Values are your starting point. Your public policy goals are what the country needs and what the public wants. The policies are your means of pursuing those goals. But if you're constantly thinking in a completely transactional short term, here today, gone tomorrow way, you're not going to be able to drive that great ship of state in pursuit of those big goals and pursue consistently, consistently the policies you need to underpin them.

Our great, the bane of British economic life and history is this constant muddling through the whole time, chopping and changing. If not just from almost one Prime Minister to the next or one government to the next, it's one minister to the next. When you've had as we've had in this country, seven Business Secretaries in as many years, seven Digital Secretaries in as many years, every single year, your priority or your emphasis or what a particular minister wants to do in their portfolio changes. No consistency. That's not what other countries do. And they're more successful than us in developing, pursuing and implementing policies over the longterm. And that is going to be the driver and the measure of success of the next government of our country. Big goals, big missions, clear policies consistently pursued over a long period. That's the only way we're going to be able to get up out of the economic mire that we're in at the moment.

Lord Speaker:

And as an experienced communicator, with the strategy it's important that alongside that is a story about the future and providing what-

Lord Mandelson:

You're explaining to people what you're doing, why you're doing it, where you're going, and you're asking them to come on that journey with you. And there will be pitfalls and elephant traps and setbacks, and you've got to explain those as well. And if you do, people will understand. People prefer honesty now. We've had a really difficult time. The other day, the other week rather, Labour adjusted its borrowing policies to do with investing in renewables. And people said to me, "Oh God, this is going to be a disaster, another U-turn, the public's going to think we're not competent." I said, "Well, actually the public like a bit of honesty. They'd rather be told now what has to change and what has to be adjusted in accordance with economic realities than have that hidden from them and then discover further down the course." A little bit of honesty with the public goes a long way in my view.

Lord Speaker:

Let's go on to the House of Lords. You've been a member of the House of Lords since 2008. In fact, you have been a minister in both Houses. How do they compare with each other?

Lord Mandelson:

Well, they're completely different. I mean, the-

Lord Speaker:

What about scrutiny?

Lord Mandelson:

The House of Commons is a sort of bull pit. It can also be a pulpit as well as a bear pit. It's the adversarial end of our parliamentary system. And quite honestly, a lot of detail goes by the board. A lot of scrutiny goes by the board. A lot of clear, honest debate goes by the board, because people are so busy taking chunks out of each other. That's fine. That's the adversarial bit of politics. Our end of the parliamentary system is different. It's about scrutiny, it's about debate, it's about revising, it's about advising. It's about saying, "Look, we have people here who know an enormous amount on the subject matter of these bills, of this legislation. They're able to bring this experience and this knowledge in an informed way. Listen to what we're saying."

And what strikes me about the House of Lords now is the colossal number of amendments that the government actually accepts and sometimes initiates in the House of Lords, because they know they're going to be properly debated and scrutinised here rather than in the House of Commons where you've had debates guillotined and short-circuited. You've had a headlong rush to pump the bills through like a sausage making machine until they come to this end when there's a more reflective approach.

And what worries me, John, about the ideas, the proposals of my own party to sweep away the House of Lords, is that what they're proposing to do, what they're envisaging. If you take their proposals, or the report of Gordon that was done for the Labour Party, they no longer want to see a House, a second chamber having that role. I mean, as far as I can see, I've read the proposals very carefully. I can't see anyone focusing on what is the essential role of a second chamber, which is to revise, advise, and reform what the legislation that comes from the primary, elected chamber. Instead, what's being proposed is something completely different, is to abolish the House of Lords, put in its place a second chamber of the nations and regions of the UK in order to entrench the constitutional status of self-governing nations and regions of the UK.

Now, there's an argument to be had about further devolution. There's an argument to be had about how much more you might want to invest in Scottish and Welsh devolution. There's an argument to be had indeed about devolving, decentralising government in England as well. But the idea that we should almost entirely rewrite our country's constitution and indeed write it down for the first time, and to enshrine in this constitution a whole new concept of self-government of nations and of regions of England, which as far as I can see don't yet exist; that the job of the second chamber is not only to entrench that self-governing status, but also to ward off from the House of Commons policies and legislation that might question or impair that self-governing status of nations and regions; and that you are simply creating a second chamber to give a voice for those self-governing nations...

Well, we haven't even got to the stage in this country of agreeing that we want self-governing nations and regions, let alone doing away with the entire role and purpose of the House of Lords in order to create a second chamber that would entrench those rights. And I think that we've got to have a far deeper conversation and analysis about this than has taken place to date. Well, we haven't had a substantive discussion about it in our own party, let alone a debate in the country. And yet we're told six months away from a general election, all this is going to happen, abracadabra, in the first term of a Labour government. Well, I mean there are real issues of principle. There's a real question mark over the continuing, necessary role of the House of Lords. There are other questions, by the way, about reforming the House of Lords.

Its numbers, its members, how they're appointed. The hereditaries and the by-elections, et cetera, all of which I'm absolutely up for. Let's have that serious discussion about how the House of Lords has got to be changed. But that's quite separate from a completely different set of proposals to do away with the whole thing. And I'm afraid that, having looked at the proposals very carefully, I mean, what I see is a sort of multi-layered cake with an assortment of very diverse ingredients in it with a thin layer of icing at the top, which is called a new second chamber of the regions and nations, which has barely been put in the oven yet, let alone fully baked.

Lord Speaker:

And in the speeches I've made on it, I stressed the fact that our role is complementary to the House of Commons. We don't make legislation, but we scrutinise. And I think you mentioned about the number of amendments. If I remember the Levelling Up Bill, which has come to us, on day 10 of the Levelling Up Bill, the number of amendments were greater than on day one. So I think that tells you about the depth of scrutiny. And what I've said to people is, we're getting quite animated about this, "If we're going to do something about this, then the strap line has to be "seek to understand."'

Lord Mandelson:

Look, the House of Commons needs a House of Lords. It can't do all the work, all the amendments and all the revising and all the scrutinising and all the reviewing that a second chamber can do. They're too busy operating the sausage machine. I mean, they're too busy… questions and gladiatorial contests and all the theatre of the House of Commons and whatever. Look, the House of Commons is the essential fulcrum. It is the pivot of our parliamentary system. And we in the House of Lords have to respect that by the way. They're elected. We're not.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah, absolutely.

Lord Mandelson:

We respect that. We don't pull the rug from underneath legislation that has been endorsed by a majority in the House of Commons. But what we can do and what the House of Commons expects us to do is take a second and a third look and help them improve the legislation. And that's our job. And yet that precise thing is being proposed to be swept away, put in the dustbin in order to create a completely different chamber to entrench self-government or whatever. This hasn't been thought through. I'm sorry.

Lord Speaker:

No, you've made that very clear on that. Is there anything else you'd like to say before we wrap up this chat?

Lord Mandelson:

No, except that it's been a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you very much for the opportunity and you've taken me down memory lane. But what I really want to do now is to live the next period of my life in a slightly more, I don't know. I don't know what I'm going to do in the next period of my life, but I enjoy being a member of the House of Lords. And I hope that whatever I do next, I'm looking forward to creating a third career. I've done politics-

Lord Speaker:

A third man creating a third career.

Lord Mandelson:

Third man creating a third career. I've done politics. I've created an advisory business, Global Counsel, done that for 13 years now. Perhaps time for something else, a third career. I don't know what it's going to be, but I hope it'll enable me to be a more active member of this House.

Lord Speaker:

Yes, resilience. Lord Mandelson, Peter, it's been a real pleasure for me to interview you. And if I look at the clock, I think we've outdone Weekend World in the time that we're conversing.

Lord Mandelson:

Well, I hope we haven't lost our viewers.

Lord Speaker:

Absolutely. But listen, thanks very much. I'm really grateful for you coming along. Thank you.

Lord Mandelson:

Pleasure. Thank you.

 

Lord Speaker:

Lord Ricketts, it's a real pleasure to have you here at Lord Speaker's Corner. If I'm correct, you did a BA at Oxford. And then since then, man and boy, you have been a Foreign Office servant. So could you tell me what inspired you to go into the foreign service and what has kept you there? I mean, you're a real diplomatic individual.

Lord Ricketts:

Well, thank you very much for having me on Lord Speaker's Corner, and I'm very relieved I don't have to stand on a soapbox. Yes. In my university years I didn't think very much about my career. I had already started to love going abroad. I went to France with a pen-friend at the age of 16 and I just loved it. The difference, the exotic sense of being in another country. And so I was always clear I wanted to do something linked to international affairs.

And my third year at university, my friends started all to do serious sounding things like join banks or join accountancy firms and so on. I began to think I better think a bit about what I want to do.

So I actually applied to the Foreign Office through the civil service exam and the BBC for their news traineeship, and I got offers from both. Such was life in those days where people got job offers more easily than they do now.

And I think I went to my tutor and I said, "I've got these two offers, which shall I choose?" He said, "Young man, I think the Foreign Office would be a more structured career." And so I went into the Foreign Office without a great deal of thought, and I was 42 years there, and I loved every minute of it.

Lord Speaker:

Good. And what is it that makes diplomacy exciting and a rewarding career?

Lord Ricketts:

Well, the world is such an interesting place, and there are constantly differences between countries, tensions between countries. But understanding how other countries work... Speaking a language is an enormously rewarding thing because you can't really understand a country unless you can speak the language, which means also understanding the culture behind the words in the language.

Now my only foreign language is French. I don't think there are such things as hard languages and soft languages. All languages are hard to learn. But I think the connection with other people, building bridges, and opening up opportunities, trying to damp down tensions, it's constantly fascinating. Whether you are serving in an embassy abroad or in the Foreign Office at a desk in London, I found the substance of the work always fascinating.

Lord Speaker:

How does the balance between civil servants and ministers work, particularly the churn that there is in ministers?

Lord Ricketts:

If you are going to be a civil servant, you have to accept the deal, which is that you will carry out the policies of the elected government. If you're somebody with extremely strong personal convictions, you're probably not the right person to be a civil servant, because in the end you carry out what the government of the day decides to do. Occasionally that can be challenging, but very few civil servants in the end take the other alternative, which is to resign rather than carry out a policy. But it's become more and more a problem, the rapid churn of ministers.

If I think back to 40 years ago, many ministers did years and years in the same department. Cabinet ministers might be there pretty much through a full parliament. I worked closely with Geoffrey Howe when he was Foreign Secretary, and he did a long stint as Foreign Secretary, and we've had ministers in the Foreign Office like David Lidington who did many years as minister for Europe.

It's got much, much shorter now. And the problem is you are constantly going back to square one, briefing a new minister, introducing them to contacts around the world, and then they change. So the friction, the cost in terms of resource and effort in the civil service of constant ministerial changes is very high.

Lord Speaker:

I remember Chris Mullin telling me when he was a junior minister in the Foreign Office, and he was responsible for Africa, the African leaders complained that every year there was ministerial change, so it didn't allow the ministers here to build up a knowledge of the country enough, and the African leaders felt that they were being short-changed in that.

Lord Ricketts:

I think that's absolutely right and it applies all around the world. Human contacts take time to build. Trust and confidence has to be created, and if it's a new face walking through the door every time, you essentially go back to square one.

So it is much better if, especially in the jobs that require you to understand Africa or the Middle East where the human relationships are so important, I think it's much better if ministers can stay two or three or four years and really get to know people.

That's what we do with ambassadors. When we send ambassadors to countries, normally it's now four years, three years if the country is more difficult, perhaps a year if it's really tough like Afghanistan or Iraq. But the norm is four years, and that's the time where you make the connections and then you can use them and benefit from them.

Lord Speaker:

Do you think it's important that civil servants speak truth to power with their ministers, and has that changed over the years?

Lord Ricketts:

It's absolutely essential that ministers get frank and honest advice, otherwise they'll make bad decisions. And that's what civil servants want to do. But it does require the ministers to create the environment where people feel safe in saying unwelcome things, bringing messages that the minister may not want to hear, that the proposed policy won't work. So we are suggesting you do something else.

And it's up to ministers to set the tone, and it has got more toxic in recent years. I mean there's been a bit of a culture of people finding that their advice is leaked into the newspapers if it's not welcomed from somewhere in the political echelon, whether special advisors or ministers. That's incredibly damaging to trust and confidence. And if ministers reject advice because it doesn't fit with their preconceptions, also people then go back into self-preservation mode and will only tell ministers what they think they want to hear.

So it's in ministers' own interest to create the climate where frank advice can come, it can be challenged, but people will never feel inhibited from saying what they honestly think.

Lord Speaker:

Has there been over time, politicisation of the civil service?

Lord Ricketts:

I think to some extent there has. The civil service is a very strong and deeply rooted institution, and the ethos is neutral. People will adapt to the government of the day and follow their instructions. But the trend by ministers to want to choose their own senior officials, the permanent secretary who runs the department and perhaps the people immediately in the private office around the minister, the more that happens, the more ministers want to pick and choose someone who they think will work well with them, the more political things become.

And at the extreme end of that spectrum, there's the US example where when a US administration changes, 3,000 or 4,000 officials change because they are political appointments. We are light years away from that here, but any trend towards ministers wanting to pick the official that they think will be most comfortable for them is in my view a dangerous trend, because then you tend to get people picking those with the same kind of outlook and view. You begin to lose the challenge that the civil service ought to represent.

Lord Speaker:

The essence of the House of Lords is to scrutinise and ensure good law. What do senior civil servants and diplomats add to that?

Lord Ricketts:

It was a new experience. And to be absolutely honest, I didn't realise how much sheer hard work goes on in this place to scrutinising draft legislation. A lot of it comes from the House of Commons in a pretty, let's say, unfinished state and requires a great deal of hard work.

And I fully admire the talent available on all the benches in this House. For example, on the crossbenches, the non-political Lords of which I'm one. We have judges, we have barristers, we have extremely experienced people who've worked with legislation in their previous life, who know what works and can see the risks of what could not work. And therefore, they propose amendments, and they spend hours, and evenings, and nights discussing it, advocating for it, and from time to time getting support for it, sending back to the Commons.

That's a new world for me. I watch it carefully. I try to study some of the bills that I'm particularly interested in and vote when I get the chance. I have not actually got involved in proposing amendments, partly because my life is a part-time peer. I have other activities outside the house. I'd started them before I was given the privilege of coming here. And so I can never be absolutely sure that I can be there on a Tuesday evening when some important stage of legislation is reached.

So in fact, I've found my mark more in the work of committees than in the process of legislation, which does require members of the House of Lords to be pretty available to adapt to the calendar in which legislation goes through. So I've been rather more observer than an active participant. But I've been very, very impressed by the quality of scrutiny that goes on because of the range of experience we have in this house.

Again, it's been a surprise to me, a very welcome surprise to find that you have leaders here in all different walks of life who have had fascinating lives outside this place and bring that to looking at legislation. I think it's an irreplaceable role actually.

Lord Speaker:

We have very serious situations in the world now geopolitically, whether we're talking about Ukraine, whether we're talking about Gaza, or whether we're talking about Rwanda, which has been through our House this week. Some would say that the unelected House of Lords really shouldn't be involving themselves in this. What's your answer to that?

Lord Ricketts:

I think we need in this country all the expertise we can bring to bear in helping the government of the day navigate this very dangerous world. As you say, we've got multiple crises going on simultaneously at the moment. The government have to cope in all sorts of areas. Rwanda is a rather special case, because they've chosen that as the place where they want to remove asylum seekers as part of their plan to reduce small boats. There are many strongly held views on that around the House. I personally doubt that that will act as much of a deterrent.

But where it comes to the war in Gaza, or the war in Ukraine, or the strikes against the Houthis in Yemen, I mean we have in our House many former Chiefs of Defence Staff, other distinguished military leaders. We have people, of my own background, National Security Adviser, Foreign Office, Cabinet Secretaries.

These are people, we've all of us lived through multiple crises in our lives, and I hope that we can help to bring to bear some of that expertise both in the debates and in the committee work that we do. And my own committee, the European Affairs Committee, which I'm now really fortunate to be chair of. We are just completing a report on the implications of the war in Ukraine for how the UK and the EU work together. And we've got a lot of fascinating evidence that we'll be producing in a report shortly.

That's the kind of thing where we've got the time perhaps to look at different angles that busy ministers and senior civil servants won't have that time. So I hope that is at least some help.

Lord Speaker:

You were chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee just before 9/11. You stood down and then you went to Nato during the Iraq War. How have these issues affected Britain's standing in the world?

Lord Ricketts:

Yes, I chaired the Joint Intelligence Committee for a year. That's the place where the intelligence agencies bring their assessment, their raw intelligence, their reports, and then we put them together into an assessment. We balance out all the various bits of information coming in, intelligence, news reports, reports from ambassadors around the world, into one assessment that goes to ministers. And that's always been a very respected process.

Actually I jumped from that across to the Foreign Office for two years, and I worked very closely with Jack Straw through the run-up to the Iraq war and actually the outbreak of the Iraq war, which is a period of high emotion and some difficulty in terms of squaring one's loyalty as a civil servant to the huge moral pressures that were around in the run-up to the Iraq war.

And I think in those periods, Britain was seen as a major country in terms of trying to deal with international crisis with the Americans as well. Much criticism of the decision to follow America into the invasion of Iraq, and there were many hesitations around it at the time, but Tony Blair decided he would do that. He had parliamentary support to do it. In the end, it turned out badly.

And that and the bad experience in Afghanistan I think has really knocked confidence in the US and in the UK about the idea of intervention in other people's wars in the sense of sending ground forces and potentially long-term commitments there.

And ever since Iraq and Afghanistan, ministers here have held back from that. There's been no great public or parliamentary support for it, which tends to mean that the authoritarian states and the more reckless states push forward, if they sense that the West has pulled back from that.

So one of the reasons I think we have such an unstable world is that the US, Britain, and others have stepped back from the very direct and interventionist approach which they took in the period of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Lord Speaker:

Was it a signal to the rest of the world regarding Iraq, and Britain, and America's position, that the ethics and immorality of diplomacy was lessened?

Lord Ricketts:

Yeah, I think it was certainly a lesson that the decision was taken in the short term after 9/11. First, certainly Tony Blair had a burning conviction that there was too much of a risk in letting Saddam Hussein have what he thought were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Turned out they weren't there. Not enough thought was given to the longer term.

And I think this is always a problem, particularly in democratic countries where all the impulse, all the pressure is for short-term decisions, immediate responses, and that crowds out time for thinking about the longer term. And I think the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan are rather that you have to think about the longer term consequences. What is the political settlement you want to get to by your military intervention? And it's proved elusive in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

And in subsequent conflicts, I think western countries been much more cautious about intervening. And they've tended, if at all, to use airstrikes as they did in Syria and now against the Houthis in Yemen, but not commit ground forces.

But that does leave the world without the international arbiter role that the Americans played for half a century after 1945. And there, you see the authoritarian countries pushing forward. Russia in particular in Ukraine now, China flexing its muscles, countries in the Middle East more willing to go their own way. Iran feeling, I think unconstrained. And that's part of the reason we are facing such a world of disorder at the moment.

Lord Speaker:

And the Iraq war, the link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, do you think that there was something to that by the US and the UK going ahead with that war?

Lord Ricketts:

I personally don't think there was ever any evidence of a link to Al-Qaeda. That was part of the case that the so-called ‘neocons’ made in Washington. I don't think we ever found any evidence for it.

I think Tony Blair's feeling was that after 9/11, he couldn't afford to leave a leader like Saddam Hussein in control of what he thought were weapons of mass destruction. And therefore, the risk of going into Iraq and dealing with these weapons was less than the risk of leaving Saddam Hussein alone.

That was a historically wrong decision. I think it was made for good motives. I don't think the intelligence was accurate. I don't think it was really tested enough with the rigor it should have been.

And for civil servants, that was a difficult time. I was then the job of political director in the Foreign Office with Jack Straw. I remember coming to work on a Saturday morning. There were a million people demonstrating against the war, and we all knew war was coming very closely. Jack Straw and I had spent six months trying to get UN resolutions, which would either have given Saddam Hussein pause or at least given us the legal base to act. And we didn't get them.

I decided I wasn't going to resign in terms of conscience. I thought that in the end, the government had parliamentary approval for what it was doing. But there were people who were concerned. I remember hosting a meeting for staff in the Foreign Office where people could air their problems, discuss things, test whether senior officials like me had thought about the consequence. It was the only time in my career where I've seen people really actively struggling with their duty to support the government as civil servants and their moral uneasiness about what was going on.

Anyway, that is now history, but I think it'll be a long time before the US or the UK launch a major war of that kind without the most careful scrutiny.

Lord Speaker:

Simon McDonald has been in this room, and he mentioned about Brexit, and his views on Brexit are known now that he was opposed to that. But he informed me that he had a meeting with his staff in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, a whole range of views on it. But it helped gel them together and helped them understand even more the distinction between civil servants with their views and a neutral civil service. Does that still prevail?

Lord Ricketts:

I think it was a testing time, but yes it has. And I think in my own department, I know so well the Foreign Office, I think genuinely, people would've had views as citizens. It doesn't mean that because you've spent a lot of time working in Europe, you're necessarily hugely pro-European. But people accepted that this was the decision taken in the referendum, whether the referendum, it was right to call it or not is another matter. And it was their job to do the best they could to implement it in a way that promoted Britain's interests effectively. So I think people were professional in their approach.

I think it was difficult. I think to be an ambassador in a European Union country after the Brexit vote would've been very tough. I retired in early 2016, so I missed it by six months. But to have had to explain to all my French contacts and friends what Britain was doing would've been difficult.

But that's what a civil servant diplomat is paid to do. Now I think, we're in much better territory where everybody is focused on moving on from where we are and trying to do the best job we can for the UK in the circumstances seven years after leaving the EU where we need to be minimising all the barriers and the obstacles.

But I think in the months after 2016, the civil service was under real pressure. Yes, people must have had questions. In the end, I think everybody decided the right thing was to try and work with the government to pull it through.

Lord Speaker:

The rules based international order would seem to have been damaged, particularly after the Iraq war. What advice do you have for governments, for ministers, to try and ensure the revival of that?

Lord Ricketts:

You're quite right. The international order, which was never perfect, came into being in 1945 with the UN after the Second World War has been unravelling, partly because of the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the pullback that we've seen from America.

But if the authoritarians thought that they could now exploit a vacuum with Putin launching the war in Ukraine, with Xi Jinping flexing his muscles in the South China Sea, with terrorists launching attacks in Israel, well actually they've been shown to be wrong, because what the Ukraine invasion has done is bring America back to leadership of European security. They've done more than anyone in terms of arming Ukraine, of supporting them economically. They've moved forces back to Europe. Nato is stronger and larger than it was before, more focused on keeping the peace.

So I think the Western institutions, US and its allies have performed effectively on Ukraine. And the crisis in the Middle East is extremely worrying. It's gone on very long. The toll of civilian casualties is very high, but which country is doing most to try to broker a solution? It's America.

And so the Americans are back in that role, which they in the end are the only ones, the indispensable nation to try and bring Israel together with the Palestinians, and see there has to be a better way than simply a security response to the Palestinian issue.

No other country can do that. China's not doing anything. Russia's certainly not. And all the many non-aligned countries who sat on the fence in the Ukraine war chose not to condemn Russia, certainly not support sanctions. They're not doing very much either to try to bring tension down, reduce the violence.

I think we do have a real lesson to learn though, that those non-aligned countries when we went to them to ask for support, tended to say, "Well actually, you invaded Iraq, so why are you now saying we should condemn Russia for invading Ukraine? You haven't been very interested in our issues." In Africa, you mentioned earlier, on climate change, you haven't been funding that. You haven't been spending the development assistance we need or worrying so much about the crises on our doorstep. So this is very hypocritical for you to now expect our support.

I think we have to think seriously about that. We have to spend more time talking to these important non-aligned countries, India, South Africa, Brazil, Indonesia. Why have they felt that this international order, which we thought was in the interest of all countries, actually was serving the West's interests? That's a serious issue I think for the years to come. And it means ministers in all our countries spending more time out in these countries listening, understanding their concerns, and giving their priorities more focus than they've had frankly in the 20 years where we've been absorbed in Iraq, Afghanistan, in financial crisis, Brexit, Covid, the rise of populism in many countries in the West. We've been quite inward looking, and I think we've suddenly realised that we need to be more engaged with a wider group of countries, who are cynical frankly about the idea of an international order.

Lord Speaker:

Do you think the Ukraine war and others have helped pull Europe together? And during your time as Ambassador of Nato, you saw on the ground the Americans, and what they did. Could you give your views to a wider audience on that, and why it's so important to have America and Europe?

Lord Ricketts:

Absolutely. My first time I served in Nato was in the Cold War, where Europe absolutely depended on the American military guarantee against the Soviet Union whose declared objective was to overrun the West and establish domination in the world. That didn't end well for them.

But in the period after the Cold War ended, I think people perhaps felt that we no longer needed to invest in the level of defence we had, that there was no real threat from Russia, that we should spend money on our domestic priorities. And America reduced its engagement in Europe, began to focus more on China, confrontation that will be the key one, the structuring ones for the next generation.

And then, Putin reminded us all that war in Europe is not something that's been consigned to the history books. First of all, he went into Georgia in 2008. Then he helped himself to 20% of Ukraine and Crimea in 2014, and then he went for the whole thing with his extraordinary gamble of an all-out invasion two years ago now.

And that has brought America back into full engagement in Europe. For how long that will last, I don't know. But it has reminded people that when we are facing down Russia, the US is absolutely indispensable. The European countries can't alone deter Russia.

But as you say, the effect of Ukraine I think has been to pull European countries, including the UK, closer together. I think it put all the rows between the UK and the EU over Brexit into proportion, when you've suddenly got full scale war two hours flying time away. And the subject of our report that will be coming out shortly from my committee is that relations have improved between the UK and the EU as a result of the Ukraine war. We've been working much more closely on issues like sanctions against Russia, which only makes sense if you do them in the widest possible group. And in other areas, we are coordinating more effectively on defence of Ukraine, supplying arms, a whole series of areas where we're talking more to the EU.

So I think the effect has been both to strengthen Nato and also to focus the EU on its geopolitical role, which it's underplayed up to now. And I would never have imagined that the EU would've funded out of its collective EU budget arms deliveries to Ukraine. That would've been a taboo at any time up to the outbreak of this war.

So a little bit of a sense of the EU discovering that they can play more of a geopolitical role, and I think the need for them to be working closely with the UK reciprocated from London, we'll see how durable that proves to be. The EU has not actually been very effective over the Israel-Gaza war. Countries have been divided on how to deal with that. But on Ukraine, they have been effective, and I hope that we can use that to build some rather deeper rooted cooperation in foreign policy that will last in the years to come.

Lord Speaker:

The historical reality is that for every war, there has to be a peace process eventually. How do you see it working out with both Ukraine and Gaza?

Lord Ricketts:

In Ukraine, I felt from the beginning it's most unlikely that there's going to be an outright victory by either side. I don't see the Ukrainians driving Russia out of every millimetre of Ukrainian territory, unfortunately, including Crimea. Nor do I see the Ukrainians collapsing and Russia overrunning the whole of the country.

So at some point, there is going to be an armistice, a truce, with a dividing line between a US... A Russian occupied zone and independent Ukraine. That is not a good outcome, and it will be for President Zelenskyy to choose when that time comes.

But it's not necessarily a terrible outcome. If you think of the armistice in Korea, which has now lasted over 70 years, what's happened in North Korea, completely dismal. South Korea, spectacular economic success. If you think of the division of Germany in 1945, West Germany hugely successful, East Germany a failure, and eventually unification between the two countries.

So I think if we can get 80% of Ukraine, independent Ukraine on the path to EU membership and Nato membership, imagine the result of that in the 20% still occupied by Russia. They will benighted and rather sad places. And I think the problem for the Russians will then be to stop talent moving from the occupied part of Ukraine towards the west.

So I don't think we should look on a truce or an armistice in Ukraine as necessarily a terrible thing. In Gaza, the war has to come to an end sometime. And in my view, the Israelis have to think that the policy of purely a security response to the Palestinian problem, occupying Palestinian territory, repressing Palestinian opposition, that hasn't worked. The awful terrorist attack of 7 October showed that that has not worked, and however difficult, they need to start thinking about a two-state solution. We'll need the moderate Arab countries to come in and fund the enormous reconstruction program that is going to be needed, with European and American help, probably also provide security. New Palestinian leadership that can be much more focused on working with Israel, not the terrorism we've seen in the past. And frankly, a new Israeli government who can put behind them Prime Minister Netanyahu's policy security only, and look at a political settlement. Because at the end of the day, the security settlement hasn't worked.

But that's asking a lot. But sometimes, crisis can produce opportunity, and I just devoutly hope that in this case that will prove to be the case.

Lord Speaker:

So in many ways, it's a rerun of the Oslo Accords for a two-state solution. But do you see the possibility for a wider conflagration in the Middle East spreading even further?

Lord Ricketts:

Just before coming to that, you're right. And the Oslo Accords were about as close as we got. And the reason people like me support a two-state solution is not because it's easy or ideal, but because I just don't see any alternative. The alternative is a forever war between the Israelis and the Palestinians, which is in nobody's interest. And I think probably an Israel-Palestine settlement can only be reached by widening the scope.

I think it was Eisenhower who said, "If you can't solve a problem, enlarge it." And so peace between Israel, and Saudi Arabia, and the remaining moderate Arab states, that could be part of a solution, which would give Israel more of a sense of belonging in the region and integration into what after all is a very dynamic economy. For as long as this goes on, the risk of a wider war is there. The Houthis wouldn't be firing missiles at Western shipping if it wasn't for this war. Hezbollah are on a knife edge frankly, for wider military action in the north of Israel. The risk of an Israel-Hezbollah conflict is absolutely there. And Iran is enjoying poking the West, provoking the West, encouraging their proxies to make trouble wherever they can without directly involving themselves.

So it is urgent that this is Israel-Gaza conflict is brought to some sort of at least a ceasefire, so we can start to build an outcome that gives Israel security, but also recognises that the Palestinians have rights as well. All that is easy to say and extremely hard to do, but we're at a dangerous moment, John, at the moment.

Lord Speaker:

If I can reflect on Northern Ireland, is that when there was the conflict between ourselves and the IRA, that the conflict led to a recruiting drive for young people to sign up for the IRA. Is it a parallel with Gaza and Israel here?

Lord Ricketts:

Yes, there is. Absolutely. I mean, there must be a generation of young Arabs in Gaza, but perhaps more widely in the Middle East, radicalised by what they've seen going on in Gaza. And the huge challenge for a new Palestinian leadership, rather like in Northern Ireland, is to turn that round and to say, "However we've been provoked, this is not a solution to our problem." And that the right way is to accept the reality of Israel, and to work with Israel, and find a peaceful settlement, find a way of coming together. And it's probably even more difficult than it was in Northern Ireland, but Northern Ireland shows the power of two communities saying, "We've had enough of terrorism and violence, we're going to come together in our mutual interest." That has to be the objective in Gaza and the occupied West Bank as well. Although my goodness, it feels like quite a distant prospect at the moment. It's a case of leadership that's really what's needed in the region.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah, there was that opportunity that the leadership, as you mentioned years ago, but it dissolved.

Lord Ricketts:

Yes, it's been tantalising. It's come close sometimes, and Prime Minister Rabin and other Israeli leaders. For the moment, it feels a long way away. But it feels to me that the Netanyahu policy has failed. And I suspect that Prime Minister Netanyahu won't be Prime Minister very long after this conflict has been at least put into a ceasefire. Equally, Hamas won't be around. We need new leadership on both sides. That's a matter of course in Israel for the Israeli people. But there has to be a better way than just waiting for another terrorist attack on the lines of 7 October and then responding to that. We've got to try and move on from that.

And the Americans are crucial. Britain has been playing, I think a very effective role. Moderate Arab countries are more involved than they were. If you think back to the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Kissinger did most of that shuttle diplomacy himself. Now we've got Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Egypt, UK, other Europeans involved as well, which is good.

Lord Speaker:

Let me take you back to Brexit. What's your view on Brexit? What have been the consequences on Brexit?

Lord Ricketts:

My own professional view as a former diplomat is that it has left the UK less influential in the world and poorer than we would've been if we'd stayed in the EU.

If you look back, it turned out to be an extraordinarily bad moment for the UK to decide to leave the EU and to try and seek a future as a free trading nation. The world has been in retreat from global free trade for some years now. The Americans have been pulling back, other countries. Barriers are going up rather than coming down. That's a very tough world to go and make your living in a world outside your closest economic block.

So I think there's no question that Britain's role in the world was diminished both by leaving the EU and both by the manner of it as well. The chaotic way in which it was done, the years of British politics being completely preoccupied with that issue, not really engaging with the wider world. And we've got to build back from that. Every time the government has threatened to break international law, it just does rather further damage to our international reputation.

And so I think we need a period now of re-engagement with the world, recognising that Brexit is a fact. We're not going to be re-joining the EU certainly in my lifetime I would say. But there's lots we can do to improve links to reduce obstacles, and frictions, and barriers in the years to come. As long as we convince the European countries that we are serious about it, and that we will carry out the agreements we've signed, that we will be clear about what we need, and then good partners in delivering it. Incremental improvements are possible and they are needed. I do not think we are going to see a night and day change in our relationship with the EU anytime soon. Remember, the EU has massive issues of its own to cope with now, like the proposal to bring Ukraine and six or eight other countries in. I mean, that's an agenda for 10 or 20 years.

And so Britain needs to be working bit by bit to rebuild good links with our European neighbours. Having found that the idea of pure independence, pure sovereignty in a world as troubled as this one with as many barriers, hasn't been a good solution.

Lord Speaker:

Is there such a thing as sovereignty in the modern world?

Lord Ricketts:

Nobody has complete sovereignty in the modern world. Not even America. And even the world's biggest superpower cannot simply ignore other countries, has to work with other countries.

I think Britain has always been great when it's worked with allies and partners, when we've provided the ideas. And I'm very interested in the period as the Second World War finished, where Britain was absolutely fundamental in the design of the United Nations, the international financial institutions. British ideas, American clout, hard diplomacy, helped to lay the foundations of the international order.

And we can play that role again, provided we accept we do it with our friends and allies as partners, and not in some kind of British exceptionalist mode, which I don't think has worked.

Lord Speaker:

So what we need is the equivalent of a Marshall Plan after the Second World War. Would you agree?

Lord Ricketts:

I would agree. I would agree, absolutely. And we need the leadership that led to that, the vision that saw that investing in the rest of the world, from America, from Europe, rebuilding Ukraine, putting the resources into the Middle East to try and move beyond that, dealing with the problems of these non-aligned countries who have seen the international order not as serving their interests. All that is going to require major investment. Not just from governments, I think from private investment as well. And there, the City of London is an unsung asset for the UK I think. For example, in dealing with climate change, I think you could say we need a new Marshall Plan to save the planet from the devastation of climate change. But that needs real political leadership.

Lord Speaker:

And I think you've said on climate change, there's not just an environmental program that's required, but there are also security implications with climate change. Can you elaborate on that?

Lord Ricketts:

There certainly are. There's no doubt about it. I mean let's take for an example, the Sahel region bordering the Sahara Desert. It's an area where the French have played a major role for many years. But successively, their position has been knocked back by a series of coups by extremist Islamist regimes taking over in countries like Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger.

And it's happening partly because of desertification, which is depriving rural communities of their living. Young men are migrating to the towns, they're becoming radicalised, and longstanding dynastic rulers have been overthrown. And the French are being kicked out. French bases around the region have closed. This is an area where a great deal of migration come through, from the very populous parts of more southern parts of Africa.

So we have migration, we have trafficking, we have instability, we have Al-Qaeda and its offshoots setting up shop there. And this is partly because of the stresses put on traditional regimes by climate change.

And there are many other examples as well. I think if you look over to Sudan, for example, Eritrea, Somalia, exactly the same sort of phenomena happening. So climate change can produce radicalisation, which can stimulate migration, which is then an immediate issue for our countries as well.

Lord Speaker:

And on immigration, I think what you infer is that we need a long-term strategy for immigration. Not just focusing on this year, the number of immigrants that come, but it's a global issue.

Lord Ricketts:

It's absolutely a global issue, and it can't be stopped, I think by building more walls or preventing desperate people from coming. Really the problem starts at home in the countries where these people are not finding jobs, or are finding that wars, and chaos, and instability are making life impossible, at which point they then all move towards the wealthy countries.

It is just worth a slightly more optimistic note remarking that nobody wants to be a migrant to China or to Russia. They want to come to the West because of the quality of life here, because of what we offer. Of course, many of them bring skills, and we in many cases need the contribution that they can give.

But this is only going to get greater. And the greatest proportion of under 25s is in Africa. And unless we can help African countries improve their economies, create job opportunities, deal with climate change at home, a lot of those people are going to want to migrate towards the wealthy, well off, West European countries. I think that's just inevitable. It's a huge issue for the next generation of diplomats, parliamentarians, and citizens.

Lord Speaker:

And demographics have to come into that. The European countries as a whole, the populations are going down. So it would be suggested that we need more people to come in to service the economy.

Lord Ricketts:

Absolutely. And we've seen, for example, in Germany, Germany accepted over a million migrants from Syria and Iraq in that very fraught period in 2015, and pretty successfully integrated them. There have been tensions. But when far right parties have recently called for mass expulsions of migrants, we've seen millions of people demonstrating against that policy. In other words, in favour of maintaining a generous, welcoming approach towards the migrant communities that have come to Germany, because partly Germany needs their support and they've many of them integrated effectively.

It's the same in all our countries. We are a declining population in terms of age, and the demographic of the workforce is getting smaller. We're all getting older, I'm afraid, John. And we are all going to need in our declining years, more support.

So yes, we need young people coming into our countries, and the politicians have really got a responsibility to get people to see that that can be an advantage, shouldn't be seen as a threat or a risk. Of course, it comes with implications for public services, and housing, and all the rest of it. But I think if the political class could see that as the opportunity it is rather than a threat, and encourage, perhaps the inevitable public worry and anxiety about that, then we are in real trouble.

Lord Speaker:

There is a view of politics and politicians that the population don't have much trust in. Is politics a noble profession, is it a vocation?

Lord Ricketts:

I call myself a parliamentarian rather than a politician, because I don't belong to any political party. But I have worked with politicians throughout my career. And I've seen almost all of them have been decent, hardworking, well-intentioned people who want to make a difference, who want to serve the national interest. I think that's why they went into politics.

And I've seen bosses down the years like Geoffrey Howe, like Jack Straw, like David Miliband, working late into the night every night trying to add value to the problems that were crowding onto their desks.

And so I don't think the politicians have got worse from that point of view. I think the climate in which they work has got more toxic. I think it's become more difficult to be a politician and not to be affected by the abuse that seems to become the currency now in talking to politicians.

But yes, I think politics is a noble profession. I think being a public servant is a noble profession. You commit your life to trying to do better for your country in these different ways, and that deserves some respect. And the cultural abuse, it's extremely unhelpful, because I think it drives away many talented people from wanting to do that.

Lord Speaker:

Lord Ricketts, you're a supreme example of the type of expert voice that's in the House of Lords. And I'm delighted and privileged that you have come along to share that experience today. So thank you very much, and this will go out, and there'll be many people looking at that, and I think will be grateful for your contribution. Thank you.

Lord Ricketts:

Thank you, Lord Speaker, for the privilege of coming and talking to you.

 

Lord Speaker:

Good. Lord Lamont, Norman, welcome to the Lord Speaker's Podcast. Can I start with your early life? You started in Shetland, seems a long way from a boy in the most northerly part of the United Kingdom to the City and to Westminster. How did you start in Shetland?

Lord Lamont:

Well, my father was the surgeon. When I say the surgeon, I mean the only surgeon. He did everything. I think today there are several surgeons in Shetland. And he had a very active life getting on boats, going out to see people. I went to school there, stayed there until I was, I think 11 or 12. Then we moved to Perthshire.

But growing up in Shetland, was a great experience. I mean, it's very cut off. Hard life really for many people there. Closer to Norway than it is to Aberdeen. Jo Grimond was once asked, "What's the nearest railway station?" He had to fill in a form. He said, "Bergen." [Laughter]

So I think actually in a funny way, Shetland is less Scottish than many other parts of Scotland. And many people there have an affection for the concept of Britain. I think I'm a very strong unionist, but I think that's affected partly by having been born in Shetland.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah. In fact, I think at the time of the referendum in the Scottish Parliament, Shetland had a different point of view from the rest of Scotland.

Lord Lamont:

They didn't want the devolution. That's right. And Shetland also in the referendum, were you referring to the referendum about the Scottish Parliament?

Lord Speaker:

Yes, yes.

Lord Lamont:

In the EU referendum, not the 2016 one, but the one that Harold Wilson had, they were the only part of the UK that voted not to join the EEC. And the reason that was given for that, rather jocularly, was that the government published a pamphlet setting out all the advantages of joining the EEC. And they had a map on the front of the British Isles, and Shetland was not included. [Laughter]

Lord Speaker:

Good. And I've always had the impression that Shetland and other islands felt that Edinburgh was a long way away, and maybe that-

Lord Lamont:

Yes, I think that's absolutely right. That's what I was trying to say. They looked to London as much the same as Edinburgh, really. And I think many people there did have a feeling of being British, as well as being Scottish, but a strong feeling of being British.

Lord Speaker:

And then you went to Cambridge. And your friends there, Michael Howard and other individuals. Leon Brittan, you were a good friend of his. What was your experience in Cambridge like? You seem to be the frontline people. Were you all going to make Prime Minister?

Lord Lamont:

[Laughter] I don't think so. I think we all wanted to get involved in politics. I don't think we thought about becoming Prime Minister, or certainly I didn't. I think that I was always very interested in politics. My mother was very political in Shetland. I mean, she was a supporter of the Conservative Party in Shetland, which had a bigger vote then than it does now, even though it was still a liberal constituency.

And she used to take me to political meetings in Shetland, they did have such things. I mean, I remember being by my mother's side where Sir David Maxwell Fife, I think he was then Secretary of State for Scotland, spoke in a village hall in Shetland. An abiding memory.

But I went up to Cambridge, interested in politics. I wouldn't say I was a diehard Conservative. I joined the Liberal Club, the Labour Club, the Marxist Society, and the Conservative Society.

Lord Speaker:

A Marxist?

Lord Lamont:

And the European Society, as well, to look at all the viewpoints. But I remember I met Kenneth Clarke and John Gummer, Lord Deben now, and got drawn into them. And I decided I had more in common with the Conservatives. I had quite a long flirtation with the Liberals actually, because of my connection with Jo Grimond's constituency.

But I became more aware of politics. I think, I thought, shall I become a journalist when I leave? Shall I be a civil servant? I thought the world of public affairs was exciting and something I wanted to be involved in. And then gradually the thought occurred to me that maybe I could actually get involved in politics.

And I have all these friends, as you say, Michael Howard, Leon Britain, Peter Lilley, John Gummer, Kenneth Clarke. We all tended to be on the Macleod wing of the Conservative party, very much liberal Conservatives rather against the Ancien Régime. Our views since have dissipated and we've all become different.

But in those days, we were all Macleod-istes. But I think in the Union debates at Cambridge, we sort of found our feet and found our identity.

Lord Speaker:

And Ted Heath, famous for our entry into Europe. What was your opinion at that time? Did you have a different opinion from him?

Lord Lamont:

Well, I supported joining the EEC as it was then called. I made my maiden speech, and I had a go at Enoch Powell who was opposing it. And-

Lord Speaker:

And Michael Foot?

Lord Lamont:

Michael Foot was opposing it. But Enoch Powell, I had heard speak at Cambridge once in favour of joining the EEC. Now, when I was in Parliament, he was opposing it. So I made a little bit of fun of how I'd been converted to being pro-EEC by Enoch Powell, and he was very generous about that and very nice to me afterwards.

But that was my maiden speech. And I believed at that time in joining the European Economic Community, I believed in the free trade area. My shift to Euro scepticism and supporting Brexit was really because as I saw it, the nature of Europe changed.

Ted Heath, you don't get many people who say a good word for him these days. But I have to say at the time I admired him. He was a contrast, a bit of a breath of fresh air with the old-fashioned Ancien Régime we'd had. He was a big contrast to Sir Alec Douglas-Home: a very honourable man, but gave an impression of being something of an amateur. Whereas Heath was a master of detail.

I think the Conservatives chose him as leader of the Conservative party, really, because they thought he was the only person who could take on Harold Wilson, who was a great mastery of detail. Heath didn't have Wilson's debating skills, Wilson's Witt, but he had this great grasp. And although I subsequently became disillusioned with what happened with Heath's policy and disagreed with some of it, I admired his sense of purpose.

His determination that Britain should not get into a cycle of decline. Britain needed to be modernized in all sorts of ways. He was quite a radical person. I remember Richard Crossman, the Labour Cabinet Minister, gave a series of lectures at Harvard where he talked in awe about Ted Heath. He called him the battering ram of change. He was just so amazed that Ted Heath could get so much done.

Unfortunately, Ted Heath got into this terrible situation with the miners, which led to chaos, the three-day week, and led to his eventually losing the premiership. But not to go into that in too much detail, but that was all very much caused by, I think, the monetary policies of Ted Heath. The expansion of the money supply.

Lord Speaker:

Prices and incomes policy.

Lord Lamont:

Yes. We, in a futile attempt to deal with it, rather than tightening monetary policy, chose to have a statutory prices and incomes policy. I mean, people today can hardly believe that we used to have laws that regulated the price of milk, regulated the price of bread or anything. Anything in the shops was subject to legislation.

And this, of course couldn't possibly work in a free market economy. And that also fuelled inflation. And although I felt that the unions had to be tamed somewhat, in one sense, the unions were reacting to the inflation.

Lord Speaker:

But you were the youngest MP.

Lord Lamont:

Youngest Conservative.

Lord Speaker:

Conservative MP, 1972 if I remember. But your first contest was against John Prescott, and obviously he won. What was it like engaging with John Prescott at the time?

Lord Lamont:

Well, he was quite distant. I thought he was, to be honest, surprisingly edgy. I mean, he beat me by a small narrow majority of 24,000 votes, so he didn't have much to worry about. But I remember he kept denouncing me and wasn't very friendly at the count.

But I subsequently got to know John a little in London and in the House. And I like him very much and I respect him. And I think he was a very good MP who brought a lot to politics, and I can see why he was important to the Labour Party. I have a lot of respect for him.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah, there is a lot of respect for him. You then joined the Treasury, I think in 1986, and you were there for about seven years. And you had a close engagement with Nigel Lawson. Sadly, he just died recently. Give us a feel for that engagement and what you learned from Nigel Lawson.

Lord Lamont:

Well, I'd known Nigel Lawson really ever since I left university. I joined a political club that he was a member of in London. I'd got to know him over political dinners. And also I worked for a while before I became an MP in the Conservative research department.

And Nigel was working there, rather part-time, I think it was while he was also editor of the Spectator. But he was speech writing first for Alec Douglas-Home, and then for Ted Heath, and I got to know him then. I also got to know Nigel in a strange way. I was in competition with him to be the Conservative candidate for the constituency of Blaby for the 1974 election.

And this selection took place in 1972. And the shortlist for the constituency was Nigel and me. And the selection committee very wisely, I'm sure, absolutely wisely, chose Nigel instead of me. But I got into the House of Commons before Nigel because a few weeks later I got picked for a byelection in 1972. And Nigel sent me a charming postcard saying 'I'm so pleased I did you a wonderful favour by defeating you.'

Lord Speaker:

The exchange rate mechanism was a very-

Lord Lamont:

Maybe I should just say people to this day get very puzzled by why Nigel was in favour of joining the ERM. Because people associate the ERM with the single currency and that it was a dress rehearsal for the single currency. Nigel did not believe in the single currency. He was not a European federalist, a European unifier. He did support joining the EEC, but he didn't support a political Europe.

But he believed that by linking your currency to a hard, low-inflation currency, like the Deutschemark or like the ERM generally, which was a currency grid, your inflation rate would eventually converge with that of the low inflation rate countries. So it was after the period when monetary supply controls, control of the money supply had failed, proved too difficult as a guide for policy.

That was what the conservatives did originally in 1979. They set money supply targets. But money supply proved very difficult to control, very difficult to measure. And Nigel moved to the position of thinking exchange rate targeting was the answer to controlling inflation, and that was why he wanted to join it.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah, the exchange rate mechanism, that features a lot in your political life. And John Major supported you at that time, but I think there was a parting of the ways after that relationship and your views on it. Could you give me a few?

Lord Lamont:

Yeah. Well, the exchange rate mechanism, the fixed exchange rate system, it was John Major as chancellor who joined. I played no part in it. Most people seem to think I invented it. And I carried out the policy.

Actually when Nigel resigned, I was asked in the House of Commons by Giles Brandreth at question time, "Why haven't you resigned at the same time as Nigel Lawson?" And I replied to him, "Because I don't believe in joining the ERM." Well, that was a rather ironic thing because I became the Chancellor of the Exchequer eventually, who had to implement our policy of being in the ERM.

You merely need today to mention the words ERM to Conservative MPs, and you get a shudder. They think it's all... But actually, although I personally would not have joined the ERM, and although I personally didn't think it was a disaster when we had to leave, I think the period we were in the ERM for two years did actually do the economy a huge amount of good.

It did precisely what Nigel Lawson had thought it would do. It lowered inflation very dramatically. I mean, when I became Chancellor of the Exchequer, on the day I became, inflation was nearly 11%. Shortly after I left, inflation came down to two or three percent. It was painful. It was a tough medicine, but it really worked. And the period after we left the ERM, and the period after I was Chancellor, ushered in the longest period of growth, I think there was 60 quarters of positive growth.

Now, a lot of Conservative MPs mistakenly say, "Oh, that's because the pound was devalued." It wasn't just because the pound was devalued. It was because interest rates came down and inflation was now super competitive. We had inflation below the level of Germany for the first time for many years. And that was why we had this long boom, the main beneficiary of which was Gordon Brown and Tony Blair.

But when Conservatives say the ERM was a disaster, I think it was a political disaster. It was a great humiliation. But we would never have had the growth that we subsequently had if we hadn't actually had the discipline of being in. But it was a good thing we got out because it couldn't have gone on forever.

Lord Speaker:

William Hague and I did a visit to Japan, just the two of us, and one morning we went out running together and he said to me, "Interest rates are 8%." We went upstairs, showered, ate breakfast, and then he said to me, "Interest rates are about 12%." He says, "Given that I'm the PPS to the Chancellor, do you think I should fly back?"

I said, "I think that'd be a good idea, Will." [Laughter] As a result of that. And that was a really turbulent time. What was it like being in a room at that time? Because your memory, and that has still been same.

Lord Lamont:

Well, you're going back to the ERM?

Lord Speaker:

Yeah.

Lord Lamont:

Well, it's a complicated story, but people often say, "What was it like? What did you think?" I didn't have time to think about it. I just had to do what we had to do. A number of countries were under pressure in the same way, and they all put up interest rates, so we had to go.

The day started off, interest rates were 10, not eight, 10%. We put them up to 12. And I said to John Major, "The game's up. We will have to leave the ERM." But unfortunately, various cabinet ministers didn't agree. Douglas Hurd, Michael Heseltine, and Kenneth Clarke and they formed a committee with the Prime Minister. And they insisted really, that I put interest rates up to 15%, which I didn't want to do. I said, "It'll have no effect." Anyway in order to-

Lord Speaker:

It didn't, yeah.

Lord Lamont:

I put them up to 15% and it had no effect, and then we put them down again. It didn't look very pretty and it was very stupid.

Lord Speaker:

You were derided for that at the time, but some economic historians would say that you gave birth to inflation tracking and the public debt element. And that's what was a catalyst for the, as you say, the economic situation, which Tony Blair and Gordon Brown ushered in.

Lord Lamont:

Yeah. Well, thank you. I mean, I'm well aware now, opinion has swung a bit, not unanimously, but a bit back more in my favour, or in favour of what actually happened. After we left the ERM, I mean, we'd gone from control of the money supply to targeting the exchange rate. We had to have a new policy.

And the policy, which I introduced, I didn't invent it, it had already existed in New Zealand, was that of having an inflation target. I was a bit sceptical when we first introduced it because inflation targeting, which is targeting a specific rate of inflation, two to four percent, we introduced it, and then it became two percent. It's essentially backward looking. You are looking in the rear mirror, but of course when you are trying to fight inflation, you have to look forward as well. So I never abandoned looking at the money supply as well.

When I introduced inflation targeting, I did at the same time argue and say that we should have regard to the money supply as well, which was more of a forward-looking indicator of that. But the amazing thing is that inflation targeting until very recently has worked extraordinarily well.

I mean, people are at this moment, very critical of the Bank of England, and inflation has gone through the roof, but due to a lot of factors outside anybody's control. But over the whole period since inflation targeting was introduced, the 2% target has been hit for most of that time. It's only recently it's gone astray.

Lord Speaker:

Well, your views in QE in the Bank of England and independence of the Bank of England. Give us your views on that.

Lord Lamont:

Well, I was very much influenced by Nigel and became strongly in favour of an independent Bank of England. And I don't wish to make a point against John Major, but he and I had some disagreements about interest rate policy. And I felt sometimes he wanted to subordinate interest rate decisions to political factors. And I felt politics should have nothing to do really with it. You can't time an interest rate because there's a by-election or you've got a closing of a mine that you want to distract attention from.

And I did feel that from what I'd seen inside government, not just under John Major, but even under Mrs. Thatcher, politics intruded into interest rate decisions. And I felt this was wrong and led to bad policymaking. And so I was a strong supporter. I tried twice to persuade John Major that we should make the Bank of England independent.

But on both occasions, he rejected it. And I did actually go and see both Gordon Brown and Tony Blair when they were in opposition. And I told them that it wasn't my business to do anything to help the Labour Party, but I think it would be in the interest, thought it would be in the interest of the country, if they made the Bank of England independent.

I remember Tony Blair said to me, "You don't understand the Labour Party. They'd never accept it." And the day before Gordon Brown announced that he was making the Bank of England independent, he did ring me up and he said, "Well, we've decided to take your advice."

Lord Speaker:

So there you are. Okay. You were less guarded in some of the comments you made, like the green shoots and je ne regrette rien, and singing in the bath, tell me about them.

Lord Lamont:

Singing in the bath actually was slightly misreported. I didn't sing in the bath the day we left the ERM. But I think it was two or three days after we'd left the ERM. I was strolling in the garden in the British Embassy in Washington because I had to go to the IMF.

And I forget which interviewer it was, but someone caught me and they said, "You seem very cheerful this morning." It was a very sunny day in Washington, and someone said, "You seem very, very cheerful." And I said, "Well, that's funny you say that. My wife heard, says she heard me singing in the bath." That was the remark I made. I didn't say, "I sang in the bath when we left the ERM."

Je ne regrette rien. Well, that was a sort of, I was asked a question by a journalist, "What do you regret more? Singing in the bath or seeing green shoots?" And I replied, "Je ne regrette rien." How do you reply to a question like that?

Lord Speaker:

The role of the House of Lords, it's been questioned that there's wanting reform. Some people think, like Gordon Brown want route and branch reform, assembly of the nations and regions. What merit does the House of Lords have with its present composition and the different membership from the House of Lords from the House of Commons?

Lord Lamont:

Well, I think the House of Lords is a reforming chamber, and it is also a chamber of people of experience and expertise. And I think a second chamber is I think, important. I know there are countries in the world that have unicameral or one chamber government. But I think the House of Commons doesn't always scrutinise legislation as carefully as it should, and I think it's important to have proper scrutiny. I think the House of Lords does that well.

If we were starting from scratch, completely greenfield, I don't think one would design the House of Lords as it is today. I think ideally it would be 200, 300 very eminent experts, probably elected and maybe on a regional basis. I don't mind about that. I think that's the Gordon Brown plan.

But I don't think it's very easy to get there from where we are now. And I don't think that all the talk about the House of Lords is too large. Optically, it does look too large, but you know as well as I do, that in fact, there are 400 people or so who are here a lot of the time.

Also, the people who come occasionally make a valuable contribution. I once had a very interesting remark from Mrs. Thatcher. I asked her, "What do you think of the House of Lords?" And she said, "I think those who come the least often make the best contribution."

And if you think of somebody like Lord Browne of Madingley, or the Astronomer Royal, who come occasionally and make very outstanding speeches of great expertise, I think there is a role for them. But people look at this, theoretically, very large number.

I personally thought the scheme that was introduced by your predecessor and was observed by Theresa May, of gradually reducing the numbers, I personally thought that was very sensible. I strongly support it. As I say, ideally, if you were starting from scratch, I think we'd have a much smaller House and I think it would be elected.

But we're never going to get to that stage very easily without having a constitutional convention, cross-party agreement. So I would stick with what we've got now, but lower the numbers. But it does require discipline by Prime Ministers not to appoint all their cronies and friends. And I think Prime Ministers have got a bit loose with the appointments that they've been making. There have been too many of them.

I think it's also important that you don't just make into members of the House of Lords people who are, sort of, would be MPs. Being a member of the House of Lords is different from being an MP. And I don't think people should treat this place as though they were constituency MPs.

Lord Speaker:

How has the House of Commons changed since your day? Because some would say that the House of Commons now is a chamber where little scrutiny goes on.

Lord Lamont:

Well, I think that's absolutely right. I sort of used to wonder whether this was really true. But looking at some debates in Hansard of the House of Commons recently, I've been shocked at how truncated some quite controversial legislation has been. And key amendments have had, sort of, half an hour's debate or an hour's debate, and reply from the minister lasting 10 minutes.

I think the use of the guillotine and timetabling is really very reprehensible. So I think the House of Commons has changed, but I think the House of Commons has changed in all sorts of ways. It has also changed. I think there are, to be honest, too many professional politicians there.

And when I got into the House in 1972, I would guess the average age of the House was much older, and there were people who'd served in the war. People who didn't necessarily have an ambition to be a minister were content to be a constituency MP and do their service to the country. And it was a more stable assembly, really. I think in many ways, politics has become more volatile, more unstable in the House of Commons, and it's not always an attractive sight.

Lord Speaker :

You're a really strong proponent of Brexit. I've mentioned earlier, you were an early person in that area. But I get the feeling from what you said, engagement with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, John Smith, and others, that you're reaching out now.

And I was quite struck by the initiative you undertook at Ditchley Park where Peter Mandelson and others were there. What was the reason for that? Was it to ensure that Brexit worked and political parties came together?

Lord Lamont:

Well, the invitation, as I understand it, the whole thing was the idea of Peter Mandelson. I mean, I was invited by Ditchley to go to this gathering to discuss Brexit and the future relationship. But I wasn't advocating any modification of the trade and cooperation agreement or modification of Brexit.

What I strongly believe in, I mean, I believe in Brexit strongly, but I believe that we should have a strong, harmonious, relationship with the EU, as a third party. And I think that's perfectly possible. And I think the fact of Brexit, the fact that it happened, caused a lot of angst and a lot of bitterness. And the people within the EU who, I mean Donald Tusk was reported as saying there was a special place in hell for those who voted for Brexit. I think we've got to overcome this and work together.

And I believe that even though we are an independent nation state and a third party to the EU, there are areas like foreign and security policy, where Britain can play a leading part in the continent of Europe. Our security concerns are shared with the EU. Britain played a leading part [on Ukraine].

I think one of the benefits of Brexit was the greater agility we have in foreign policy. We were able to act more quickly and send arms more quickly while France and Germany were agonising over this and agonising within the EU. The EU eventually got its act together, but 27 countries, it inevitably took a lot longer.

And I read the other day, someone in Brussels said, "Well, if Ukraine had been relying on the EU, the Russians would've been marching all over. Britain was the first off the mark." But all I wanted at that gathering at Ditchley was to explore different ways in which we could improve our relationship, show that we were friendly. That we want to have partnerships in all sorts of areas like Horizon, for example. That's all it was about.

Can I just say for me, Brexit was not really about economics. It was about sovereignty. It was about independence of this country. I mean, while I was Chancellor, I negotiated our opt out from the single currency, and I lived through this whole thing, and I saw how the nature of Europe was changing. And before I became a minister, I believed this was all rhetoric. It wouldn't really happen.

All this stuff about a United States of Europe, a political union. But my experience as a minister was that they were deadly serious about this and wanted it to happen. And we were going to become more and more politically integrated, and that would undermine our democracy at home.

And that's what I feel to this day. And so I don't agonise about Brexit and worry about the economic consequences. I think the economic consequences will be fine. But for me, the prize was avoiding political union

Lord Speaker:

During the Major premiership, in the '90s, we had the Maastricht Treaty, and John Smith was very prominent in that area. What was your opinion of the Maastricht Treaty? Because it caused a lot of division in the Conservative party.

Lord Lamont:

Yeah. Well, the Maastricht Treaty, if you remember, was the treaty that had the single currency provisions in it. So when I say I negotiated our opt-out from the single currency, I was negotiating part of the, well, I was negotiating our opt-out from the single currency, from the Maastricht Treaty as regards to single currency.

So I thought as Mrs. Thatcher put it, the Maastricht Treaty was a bridge too far. It wasn't just the single currency. There were other provisions like an integrated policy on security, defence. Well, some of this was amended, but we then had the Maastricht Treaty followed by the Lisbon and Nice treaties. And for me, that was all far too much.

Lord Speaker:

You mentioned Mrs. Thatcher. What was it like working with her?

Lord Lamont:

Well, I always got on well with her, but Mrs. Thatcher, it was her willpower that was so remarkable, and her courage. And she would sometimes just ask questions no one would had thought of asking, "Why don't we do this? Why isn't this possible?"

And she was a person of great integrity, I would say as well. She never did anything dishonourable, never wanted to do anything dishonourable. Very clear about what she wanted. And an inspiring person to work for, but she could be very difficult.

Lord Speaker:

What was your most difficult engagement with her?

Lord Lamont:

Well, I remember once, if I can tell a story, it's rather a long story, but she was once came back to this country and told me that she wanted to subsidise film studios in Rainham Marshes on Essex. And I couldn't believe she wanted to do this.

And I said to her, "But, Prime Minister," I didn't believe that we wanted to subsidise industries. "Prime Minister, there's no unemployment in Rainham Marshes in Essex. Prime Minister, we have to build the roads to get there." And she got anger and angrier and angrier.

And I remember she said to me, "You are impossible. All you ever say to me is no." And then she said, "If you'd been in my government since 1979, I wouldn't have achieved anything." And I said to her, "Well, Prime Minister, you're always right about everything, but you're forgetting I've been in your government ever since 1979." [Laughter]

Lord Speaker:

Very good. What advice have you got for the Conservative government now?

Lord Lamont:

Well, I personally think that Rishi Sunak's pursuing the right policies. I would say stop quarrelling, stop bitching with each other, support the Prime Minister. He's the best Prime Minister you've got. He's a serious, highly intelligent person. Any country would be proud to have him as Prime Minister and back him.

Lord Speaker:

Last question. Given your longevity in parliamentary life and your comments about the House of Commons and House of Lords, what advice would you give to young people about embarking on a political life?

Lord Lamont:

Well, I always encourage young people to think about having a career in politics. I think we all need to be interested in politics. I was taught at school that the Greek word for idiot was apoliti, somebody who's not interested in politics. I think it's the duty of everybody to be interested in politics.

And I think our country will only prosper and do well if people of ability and talent who might succeed in other walks of life, are prepared to take the risks. And there are risks in a political career, and you risk your reputation. It's a very dangerous job being a politician, but people have got to be prepared to do that for the public good.

And I like to think that there are people who will always feel this is a challenge. It's a great thing to do, and that they're going to embark on it.

Lord Speaker:

And apoliti, that will stay in my mind. So thank you very much, Lord Lamont. It's been very, very revealing and engaging.

 

Lord Speaker:

Lord Forsyth, Michael, we've known each other for a long time. Take me back to your early days in Arbroath.

Lord Forsyth:

Well, I was actually born in Montrose.

Lord Speaker:

In a council house?

Lord Forsyth:

Yes, yes. In a council house. And I had various moves, which ended up in Arbroath and I went to school in Arbroath. I went to Arbroath High School, got the most fantastic education. I did five years of Latin and Greek and maths and physics. Of course in Scotland, we'd never had a national curriculum. And then from there I went on to St. Andrews University. I mean, my father started his own business, he overextended himself. The business went down and we went back into council housing, but then he picked himself up and started again, and paid down all the debts. And it's made me very, very wary of folk who are critical of people who start up in business and it doesn't work. I'm very supportive of free enterprise. But when I went up to university, I thought I was a socialist, John.

Lord Speaker:

And you come out a Thatcherite.

Lord Forsyth:

I did. Yeah. Mainly because of Keith Joseph. And I got involved with Margaret in the early years, in the seventies when the country was in quite a state. Inflation was at very high levels, interest rates were very high, unemployment was dreadful, and we had the collapse of the old industries. And that's how I got drawn into politics. But I never really wanted to be a politician. And I'm not sure, I didn't really expect my life to be so dominated by politics, which has been a huge privilege. And it really saddens me to see how the reputation of Parliament and politicians has been damaged. Whereas, as you and I know, the vast majority of parliamentarians are good, decent folk trying to do their best for their country.

Lord Speaker:

You mentioned Margaret Thatcher. You were known as a really robust Thatcherite in Scotland, and it was probably a bit of an uncomfortable position, but I don't think that aspect, it worried you given a lifelong engagement with her during her life. What was it like to work with her and relate?

Lord Forsyth:

Well, I can tell you a story about Margaret. During the Maastricht Treaty, Margaret stopped being Prime Minister. John Major was Prime Minister, I was in his cabinet. And she was holding drinks parties for backbenchers and telling them the Maastricht Treaty was a really bad idea and they were all coming back and saying they were going to vote against it. So John Major said, ‘You know her, will you go and talk to her because we're going to have to start having a go at her.’ So like a fool, I rang her up and said, ‘I'd like to come and talk to you about the Maastricht Treaty.’ So I arrived and she said... I went into a room, she got the Maastricht Treaty, all annotated, and she said, ‘Which section of the treaty would you like to discuss, Michael?’ And I said, ‘I'm not here to discuss the treaty, Margaret. It's just that if you go on with these parties, the party machine's going to be turned against you and it would be really damaging to you.’

At this point, there was a thermonuclear explosion. And I remember her screaming at me, ‘Michael, how can you of all people use that argument on me? Do you think if I ever cared about me, we would ever have achieved any of the things that we did?’ And it was a bit like that for me in Scotland. I mean, I was very concerned about education, I was concerned about health and a number of issues. And I had lots of ideas upon what we could do.

Lord Forsyth:

I mean the Daily Record was the sort of daily assault, but I think it's really important to have courage and to have the courage of your convictions. And we did some good things. We established the University of the Highlands and a number of initiatives. And I do think, even though what we were doing was very unpopular and against the grain as it was then, I do think when we warned about the dangers of devolution and the platform that we'd give to the nationals and so on, that has come to pass. But in politics, you've got to accept change and make the best of it. And I think there's further work to be done there.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah. Maybe I could take you to Dunblane where you had a really prominent role, but in many ways with politicians working with each other, it's usually in private and people get the idea that Prime Minister's questions is the norm for politicians. But in Dunblane, you brought other politicians in. Why did you do that, and what effect did it have when you brought the Prime Minister up?

Lord Forsyth:

Well, I mean, Dunblane was just, I mean, it's the worst thing that's ever happened to me. It was in my constituency. I was the Secretary of State. I knew the murderer because he used to come regularly to my surgeries. It was a huge shock. I still get flashbacks of that scene in the gym. It was just horrendous. I was really anxious that it shouldn't be turned into a political squabbling match. As soon as I was given the news, I said to my office, ‘Find George Robertson.’ George Robertson was my opposite number, and he lived in Dunblane. I said, ‘Find him, get him on the plane with me.’

And we did it together. And together we went to see John Major and Tony Blair, and said to both of them, ‘look, you need to come together.’ There's a lot of political people giving contrary advice. But they came together, and that was hugely appreciated by a community which was traumatised by this horrible murder of 18 people on the 13th of March 1996. And one of the things that really struck me about the late Queen Elizabeth, because she agreed to come afterwards and meet the bereaved families, was it's very difficult to give any comfort in these circumstances where you've lost a child like that. But I don't think there's anyone else in the world who could have given as much comfort as she did.

It was a bad time. And that was in March of 1996, and shortly after that, we were told that everything that we'd been told by the scientists, that BSE couldn't jump across the species and infect people, and CJD and all of that, that was reversed. And then we had an E. coli outbreak in Scotland. So it was quite a tough time. This is pre-devolution, and there's a Secretary of State and four ministers plus your involvement in cabinet. And I must say, I think John Major was hugely supportive, and he ran a cabinet where he gave his Secretaries of State time and space to get on with the job and held them to account. But we've moved steadily since then towards a kind of presidential system, where ministers are there for five minutes, and you can't run a country like that.

Lord Speaker:

The writing was on the wall for the Conservatives in Scotland really, I think since from the 1992 election. But you were firm in terms of being Secretary of State and running things yourself because you were very prominent in that. But you were seeing the writing on the wall, in terms of the Conservative support in Scotland. What was your determination at that time, in terms of the Scottish Parliament versus Westminster, and what do you feel about that now since the Scottish Parliament's been established since 1998?

Lord Forsyth:

Well, I remember saying to George [Foulkes], or anybody who was listening in the Labour Party at the time, may even have said it to you.

Lord Speaker:

Yes.

Lord Forsyth:

Just be careful what you wish for. I mean, my perception at that time was that the Labour Party were quite keen on having a Scottish Parliament because the Labour Party was so dominant. But they ran a campaign which was basically the Tories don't care about Scotland, Scotland's getting a raw deal, et cetera. They used the language, the rhetoric of nationalism. And I said, ‘If you ride the nationalist tiger, it will divide you.’ And that by creating that platform, there was a danger.

And I think one of the things that went wrong from the point of view of people voted for it, but I thought it would lead to pressure on the Union, which I really care about. And I also thought it would lead to us becoming the highest tax part of the United Kingdom. And that was the so-called Tartan Tax, and that would be damaging to our economic outlook. And that we would, because the Secretary of State pre-devolution, I sat on all the key cabinet committees. I was involved in Whitehall, I was able to say, ‘Yes, but hang on a second. This is not going to work in Scotland.’ And you had at that time in both parties, really talented people like yourself, like John Smith, Donald Dewar, Robin Cook, Gordon Brown, real tight, Malcolm Rifkind on our side, and Ian Lang, people like that.

But of course, none of them chose to go to the Scottish Parliament. They wanted to be in Westminster. It means it's so important to actually have effective means of communicating between the two parliaments, something that George Foulkes regularly brings up in the House of Lords today. But I basically, as a junior minister, I was responsible for health, social work, education, sport, and the arts, and you had to cover all of that. So I see why there was a bit of a democratic deficit. I see that.

And it was a hugely demanding 7/24 hour role, but I wouldn't have missed it. But the things that really concerned me was, 'is the education which I got, is that still available to people in Scotland? Is there still an opportunity?' And I didn't think there was then. I mean, I used to go on about the five hours reading, writing, arithmetic, right and wrong. And I think under the Scottish Parliament, I think where we were once way ahead of England, we're now behind on education.

The fact that you don't pay university fees is great, except it means that Scots can't get places at Scottish universities. I mean, my old university is now dominated by overseas students, Americans and so on. It's very hard for Scots to get into St. Andrews. I mean, I wouldn't be able to get into St. Andrews today, and I don't think I would've got the quality of education at Arbroath that I got. And that, to me, that remains a central facet of politics. But I mean, you would think the same, I dare say an SNP person would think the same. But we've got a long way to go in terms of social mobility and improving standards in education, in my view.

Lord Speaker:

So I detect 25 years later that you are not a convert to the Scottish Parliament.

Lord Forsyth:

I'm a democrat. That's what people voted for. But I think the Scottish Parliament needs to be very careful. If you have a huge differential on income tax between England and Scotland, you're going to find it hard to get well-paid, top people to come to Scotland and we'll lose our people to England. So I think there are some issues. I think the fact that the nationalists have been so obsessed with independence and that the kind of bread-and-butter issues have not really been at the forefront of political debate and accountability is a problem. But if you're asking me, would you reverse the devolution? No, of course not.

Lord Speaker:

Let me take you on to the House of Lords. And you've been very prominent, both on the floor of the House of Lords, but also in the committees that you have served, and particularly as Chair of the Economic Affairs Committee. One thing that's struck me about that is that you have not stuck rigidly to just economic affairs, but the economic implications, for example, in social work, in universal credit and student fees. And it seems to me that the remit of a House of Lords committee has more of a reach and a depth than a House of Commons committee who consider the departmental role solely. Is that a fair analysis?

Lord Forsyth:

Yeah. I mean, I love the House of Lords. When I lost my seat in '97, John Major offered me a place in the House of Lords and I turned it down. And I turned it down because I'd lost my seat, we'd lost all our seats in Scotland, and I just thought it was completely wrong to be translated to the House of Lords. Fortunately, I was asked again in '99, and when I came in, in my maiden speech, to my shame, I said that the House of Lords should be elected. And then after about six months, I realised what the House of Lords was and what it was doing. And I realised that that would not work. If it was elected, what am I going to do, knock on doors and say, ‘Hello, I'm Michael Forsyth. Vote for me. I'm very good at revising legislation. But of course I haven't got any power to change things because ultimately the decision rests with the House of Commons.' I mean, that's not a credible position.

And just to answer your question directly, chairing the Economic Affairs Committee, and as a member of the Economic Affairs Committee, was a huge privilege. I got two former Chancellors of the Exchequer, a former permanent Secretary at the Treasury, former Governor of the Bank of England, really high calibre people. And we operate completely differently from the House of Commons, as you well know. That our approach is evidence-based, and we always produce a report which has got consensus agreement, evidence-based consensus agreement, no one grandstanding because we've all had our careers, but trying to get at how we address this problem.

So for example, on HS2, you were on the committee…

Lord Speaker:

I was on the 2015 committee…

Lord Forsyth:

Yeah, the 2015 committee said, ‘We're not sure about the business case for this. We think it might be better to spend the money on infrastructure in the north, look at it again.’ Ignored. Four years later, I chaired the committee, we looked at HS2 again, we said, ‘Costs are out of control. If you don't get this under control, perhaps by making the train go a bit slower, perhaps by looking at the terminus, various other ideas, if you don't get this under control, you're going to end up cancelling all the routes in the north. And the effect of that will be that you'll end up with a very expensive white elephant.’ That was four years ago. Ignored. Unanimous report. Same on social care, which you mentioned.

Lord Speaker:

Which was a very substantial report and still referred to today.

Lord Forsyth:

Yeah, it was a great report. It was a great report because there were good people on the committee, and we took evidence. And the evidence is absolutely clear. If you don't tackle this problem with social care, you'll have a problem with waiting lists. You'll have a problem with beds and the health service, and more importantly, you'll have elderly people being put to bed at three in the afternoon because there aren't enough care workers and all that. And it explained what was required, but the government ignored it. Boris said, ‘I will fix social care.’ Well, he didn't.

Because one of the things that report pointed out is the problem is not people having to sell their houses. The problem is that we are not paying enough for the people who do this wonderful work, and we're not doing enough to create a career structure and training. And the problem is that the relationship between the health service, social care is not integrated, that the demand varies according to local authorities. Some of the local authorities, which have the biggest problems, have got the lowest tax base and a whole range of issues. And it was unanimously supported in this House, on all sides. But nothing, as we sit here, the problem's got worse, not better.

Lord Speaker:

You and I know, politics is a serious business, and there's a difference between the rhetoric and the implementation. Give us an example of that.

Lord Forsyth:

Well, I think that the House of Commons, the House of Commons that you and I remember, I remember going past in a taxi after I'd been kicked out and a taxi driver saying to me, ‘Do you miss that place?’ He didn't know I was in the Lords, do you miss that place? And I said, ‘The place I miss no longer exists.’ And he said, he looked at me and he obviously thought 'poor lad's got early dementia. He doesn't know where he is or whatever.' He didn't understand what I meant. The House of Commons now, I think, is broken. The House of Commons that we were members of, having a guillotine motion on a bill was a very, very rare thing and always caused a row - requiring the bill to be timetabled. Now all legislation is timetabled, which means it comes up to this House, vast tracts of legislation which have not even been discussed in the House of Commons, not even voted on in the House of Commons, often not particularly well drafted, full of Henry VIII clauses, which just passes power on to the executive without proper accountability to power.

Lord Speaker:

So maybe you can explain that. It allows a Secretary of State to change the law by secondary legislation.

Lord Forsyth:

Exactly. Even amend the legislation itself or gives them powers to do stuff. And there's no guidance on how they would use these powers. And so it is a huge transfer of power from Parliament to the executive, and a huge diminution of accountability. Now the House of Lords does a fantastic job. We sit for longer hours now than the House of Commons. I mean, just a few months ago before the recess, we were sitting till one in the morning and the House of Commons was going home at four o'clock in the afternoon.

And all of this is done by dedicated individuals who have to put up with all the abuse that we see in the tabloid press about the House of Lords.

And yet the work on that legislation is being done here and nobody notices. A cabinet minister said to me just before the summer recess, ‘I'm so sorry that you're having all this trouble with legislation because of the Liberals and the Labour Party.’ And I said to them, ‘The reason we're having all this trouble is because you lot have not been doing your job.’ And they said, ‘Well, what do you mean?’ I said, ‘You don't scrutinise legislation.’ And they said, ‘Well, I didn't realise.’ I explained what it was like in our day. And they said, ‘Well, I didn't realise it was like that’, because they'd only been in Parliament a short time.

So I feel very angry about the rhetoric about we must have an elected House of Lords, we must do this and that. Coming from people who do not understand what Parliament is for or about, and do not understand the fantastic work which is done in this house and the way in which the House of Commons is failing in its function. It's just abandoned its function of considering legislation properly. And then we have Secretaries of State who are just moved after five minutes, who are not allowed to run their departments. And we've moved from a system where we have the Prime Minister is first among equals in cabinet, to where we have a sort of presidential system where the Prime Minister is surrounded by special advisors who then boss around cabinet ministers. It is no way to run a country and we've seen the consequences of that. So we need a root and branch, I believe, reform of the House of Commons and the process of government. And we need considerably more respect for the House of Lords and the work which it does.

I do think we need reform. What is really dispiriting is, as you say, no names, no pack drills, but some of the appointments to this House, you would think, I mean, Caligula appointed his horse as consul in order to discredit the institution. And I think that we've had examples of that. And sadly, we have examples of people who are really able, who are sitting on leave of absence and not actually coming into this House. Now out there, there are lots of really good people, who if they take this place seriously, could make a great contribution. If you come in here as a crossbencher, you are interviewed by the committee and you're asked, ‘Have you got the time? Do you have the necessary skills?’ They look at the range of skills that are available.

But if a political appointment, no undertakings given, no commitments made, no consideration given. I mean, okay, you can say originally the hereditaries, it was because you were the pal of the King. Well, I think we need to move away from that. And then also, if you look at our frontbench, and if there's a change of government, it'll be a problem for Labour as well. One third of our frontbench ministers, who have a really tough job in this place because every minister at the despatch box answers for the government as a whole, a third of them are unpaid.

And the reason that that's the case, is because the number of ministers in the House of Commons, there's a limit on the total number of ministers, has been allowed to increase. Because of course, if you make them a minister, they've got to vote for the government. And so departments have got many, many more ministers than they used to have. And there are not enough for the Lords. And yet ministers in the Lords work very hard indeed. And the idea that you have to have private means in order to be a minister, I thought we ditched that in the 19th century.

So there's a lot that needs to be reformed, and you well know, across this House there is a consensus on the things that need to be done. We'd like to have legislation to achieve that. It would sail through this House, but the government refuses to provide time. So we can find time, government time for the Animal Trophies Bill, but we can't find time to make this, this House of Parliament with its great expertise and contribution, more efficient and more acceptable in a democratic world.

Lord Speaker:

I have advocated in a number of speeches that any reform should in part be incremental, for the point of view of better governance. Because you've eloquently made the point, that with the House of Lords and the scrutiny, that ensures better governance. In fact, the UCL inquiry made the point that 55% of the legislation that's passed by the House of Commons has had some input and influence in the House of Lords.

Now explain to people the relationship between the government and the opposition in terms of the House of Lords. It's not a naked engagement, it's much more a consensual engagement. Because I've made the point to people that when the government come with their legislation, it gets examined here. And my colleague and friend Helen Little, when she was in the Treasury, she had a bill, I think it was relating to energy, that came up and that was changed quite dramatically. But when she took the time to reflect on it, she said, ‘I didn't understand a lot of this stuff.’ And there was that expertise in the laws. And I interviewed David Blunkett recently, and he said that whilst he was annoyed initially on that, it made for good law.

Lord Forsyth:

Absolutely right. And actually, one of the things that's gone wrong, we don't have a written constitution. We rely on what one of our colleagues calls the Good Chap Theory-

Lord Speaker:

Peter Hennessy.

Lord Forsyth:

Peter Hennessy, the Good Chap Theory of government. I mean that sounds like kind of an old boys’ sort of thing. That is our constitution. Our constitution is respect for those conventions. And one of the conventions was if the House of Lords amended a bill or proposed an amendment, you in the Commons, the government, would not immediately respond by saying, ‘This is rubbish.’ That they would consider it carefully, and they would look at the arguments and they'd give a considered response. That's gone. That's gone. Equally, on the other side, I mean, I think I was told that on the Levelling-Up Bill, there are a hundred pages of amendments. Now that is-

Lord Speaker:

Well, on the 10th day of the Levelling-Up Bill, there were more amendments than there were on the first day.

Lord Forsyth:

Yeah. And there are two reasons for that. One is really bad drafting and things not thought through and it not being discussed in the Commons. And the other, is people using the process as a campaigning platform to put forward their policies. That's not what the House of Lords is for. I mean, the House of Lords must always take the view that the government will get their business but try to get the government to think again. And the government needs to be respectful of those changes. And the government needs to be respectful, also, of their colleagues in the House of Commons.

And I think that relationship with MPs... I mean, when I got in the House of Commons, I didn't want to be a minister. Just being a member of the House of Commons is a huge privilege, and there's vast amounts you can do for your constituents and so on. So I think there's a lot to be done. And I agree with you, it should be incremental. We could have a bill to deal with the size of the House of Lords, to deal with some of the anomalies in the House of Lords, to deal with some of the problems I've been discussing in terms of ministers are being unpaid and so on. And it would sail through the House of Lords.

Lord Speaker:

House of Lords Appointments Commission as well.

Lord Forsyth:

Yeah, all of that. All of that. But you see there again, when I was offered a place in the House of Lords, it was unthinkable for me to come to the House of Lords having just been kicked out of the House of Commons. We've now got to a stage where people give up their constituencies, out of pique, because they feel they should have come to the House of Lords. I mean, that shows things have gone a bit off the rails and people are not respectful of the institutions to which they've been privileged to be elected.

Lord Speaker:

Can I take you onto the social aspect? For many years you were against assisted dying legislation, but you changed your mind. And the last time it was debated in the House of Lords, you actually put an amendment down on it. Take us through how this happened.

Lord Forsyth:

I put down an amendment actually, which flouted the convention, which I've just been telling you is so important.

I put down an amendment because I wanted the government to provide time so we could have a debate. Because what happens is every time that there is a measure on assisted dying, people who are against it table lots of amendments. So it runs out of time and it dies because it has to be private members' legislation. So I tried to get the government to commit to providing time so this matter could be discussed. Complicated, sensitive, really needs to be properly debated in government time. Why did I change my mind? My father, when he was dying, I went to see him and he was in a lot of pain. He'd been in a huge amount of pain and there were problems controlling the pain. And I said to him, ‘I am really sorry, dad, you're going through this.’ And he said, ‘Well, Michael, you're to blame for this.’

And I was completely taken aback by that. I said, ‘How'd you mean I'm to blame for this?’ He said, ‘Well, you have consistently voted for what I wanted, voted against it, which was the ability to be able to just ease out of this because I'm at the end of my life.’ I know you should not be influenced by your own personal experience in that way. But when I thought about it, all the arguments, I mean, I've raised a lot of money for Marie Curie, and I do believe that people should be able to die at home. And I supported the hospices. And when I was health Secretary, I introduced pound-for-pound funding in Scotland for the hospice movement. I support all of that. But for some people, it just isn't possible. I've always felt a hypocrite because if I, God forbid, but if I was told you've got motor neurone disease, I would want to have that ability to be able to avoid just choking to death and all the pain and suffering it would cause.

But so I kind of thought, well, I'd quite like it for myself, but I worried about it being abused. And I'm now persuaded that it is possible to set up a system where you can limit the abuse. But at the moment, there's nothing to protect people from being taken by greedy relatives to Switzerland or many other countries. And in Scotland actually, the Scottish Parliament, I think is way ahead of us. And there the time has been provided and there's a bill going through and it's been properly consulted.

And I think it would be ridiculous if we end up with the Isle of Man allowing it and Scotland allowing it, but not England. I mean, you can go to Gretna to get married because there's a differential in the laws on marriage, but you couldn't have a differential on the laws on assisted dying. So I think we need to have a proper debate about this. And I think if you look at the opinion polls, the public are way ahead of Parliament on this issue. And it's never a good idea for Parliament to be too far behind public opinion on something sensitive. So my view is, respect everyone's views, but Parliament needs to discuss this. And people abusing, because that's what they're doing, abusing our procedures to prevent a decision being reached on this, I don't think does us any credit.

Lord Speaker:

On the social side, you're an enthusiastic mountain climber.

Lord Forsyth:

The last mountain I did was the highest mountain in Antarctica, which is called Mount Vincent. And I was so lucky, we had perfect weather. And you stand on top of the mountain, and because the air is so clear, you can see for 150 miles, and all you see is mountain after mountain after mountain and not a footprint anywhere. And in the silence, because it's so cold, nothing can survive. In the silence, no birds, no wind, no noise. It's a spiritual experience. And that was the last one. Quit while you're ahead.

Lord Speaker:

I think you climbed Kilimanjaro and it was for charity. Explain your charity work there.

Lord Forsyth:

Well, Vincent and Kilimanjaro, I raised some money for DEBRA. There's a horrible thing called EB, which is where the skin is not attached to the body. It's a horrible, horrible disease. I have a niece who died from it. And also for Marie Curie, and my wife was involved in an Indian charity helping women with babies and nutrition and so on. So I raised a bit of money for that. I paid for the expeditions myself. And then I wrote to all my friends and people I knew in the City and said, ‘I'm giving some exorbitant sum, would you support it.’ And we raised, I can't remember exactly, about half a million quid or something of that order. But I've done Vincent and I've done Kilimanjaro, and I've done Aconcagua, which is highest mountain in the Southern hemisphere, which is, I think it's about 23,000 feet. But I'm not fit now. The thing I hated John, was having to go to the gym every day. Some people love that. Having to run up and down mountains behind my house and do the training. But I couldn't, I mean, I struggle with the stairs now.

Lord Speaker:

Well, Michael, thanks for this. It's been a very engaging conversation, and I think there are issues which you have articulated here, which many people don't know about. So thank you for that.

Lord Forsyth:

Pleasure.

Lord Speaker:

Thank you.

Lord Speaker:

Well, welcome, Lord Heseltine, Michael, you have a vast experience over the past seventy years as one of the most influential statesmen. Looking back over that time, how has politics changed and what position do you feel we're in at the moment?

Lord Heseltine:

I don't think politics ever does change. I mean, I think - read Shakespeare and every piece of devious behaviour, every plot, it's all there, all the weaknesses of human beings, he parodies it brilliantly.

I've never taken a view that there's something new about politics. You're dealing with human nature and, by and large, that's a very encouraging and exciting thing to think and be experienced by.

Of course, there are the exceptions and they're the ones who get the headlines and often create the public impression but they are, fortunately, for all of us, a very small part of the total.

I'm hesitant about seeing something different about the present circumstances. Of course, the challenges are different because, of course, society evolves and different problems emerge. Today, I think the great change ... Well, this is the most extraordinary thing because one of the big issues today across the world is immigration and understandably, in recent years, people have felt pretty cheesed off, because their living standards, at best, have remained static.

People, quite understandably, hope things are getting better and they haven't been getting better, and so they look for people to blame, the BBC, the civil servants, but top of the list, immigrants, and the problem is going to get worse, for the simplest of reasons, because whilst we may have our anxieties about our relative underperforming living standards, literally billions of people have got one of these [a smartphone] and they can see how we live.

They're not crooks, they're not evil people. In the main, they're relatively young people who say, "Well, I want a share of the action. I've got my own life to live. I've got children and dependents and I'm going to try and get them into this totally different world that now represents what we regard as the western world", so they're going to keep coming.

Global warming, what is it? 70 million people are going to be dispossessed by rising sea levels. Where are they going to go? Of course, you can say they move a bit further inland but once you start telling people to move, they, understandably, start saying, "Well, why don't I choose where to move to?"

The whole immigration issue, which is now increasingly toxic in democratic politics is in its infancy compared with what generations yet to come are going to face.

Lord Speaker:

Is that a dismal message then for politics? Is there hope somewhere?

Lord Heseltine:

Well, you know, you shouldn't be in politics unless you've got something called hope. I mean, what's the point? I suppose you could say, "Well, things are pretty ropy and they're not likely to get much better but, at least, I can try and help those who are in increasing trouble" but that would be a very depressing approach to life.

Certainly, it's something that never occurred to me, there's a limit to what anyone can do and the circumstances are always very stretching, but there are things you can do and there are things that can help and if you can be in a position and you have the ideas and, above all, the drive to pursue them, then you can have an extraordinary, exciting, and I hope, comfortable life.

Lord Speaker:

But given the political situation where we have elections every four or five years and we have manifestos, is it not the case that we can't solve problems in four or five years, so the discourse in politics, the engagement we have with the electorate has to change?

Lord Heseltine:

Well, you raise an important point about whether democracy can deliver the perfect solution. I think you're back with Churchill, it's not a good system until you look at all the others. The great thing is there are these temptations in the human psyche, get power, hold it, at any cost, and that's what people at the extreme do. We've seen catastrophic consequences in my lifetime, the Second World War is a classic example of that, but you've only got to look at problems going on in the Sudan or the problems we saw recently in southeast Europe, to realize that that nasty tendency of the accretion of power, the abuse of power is an element and that is why democracy is such a vital protection.

People perhaps don't make sometimes the most sophisticated judgment but they are a check on the abuse of power and I think that there is a priceless connection between the need to consult the people and listen to the people and the exercise of power.

Lord Speaker:

Looking back over your long career, you faced many challenges and we can come onto some of those later on. I know you have said that your legacy will be trees, but what's your political legacy, you feel?

Lord Heseltine:

Oh, well, it has to be Liverpool. Liverpool changed me. There's no doubt in my mind. I started the regeneration in London. It was London and its derelict Docklands that really got me going.

Perhaps in terms of buildings, money spent, visible success, London is still the example I would choose, but it isn't, because 18 months after I had become involved in Liverpool, replicating what I had been doing in London, they rioted.

Lord Speaker:

Toxteth.

Lord Heseltine:

Toxteth riots. I said to Margaret, an interesting conversation this actually, in terms of Margaret and her reputation.

Lord Speaker:

We're talking about Margaret Thatcher.

Lord Heseltine:

We're talking about Margaret Thatcher. Yes. Look, I said, "As Conservatives, we have to be completely on the side of law and order and the backing of police and absolutely no question at all.

I think there's something more complex about these riots, and if you let me, prime minister, I'd like to just say to my junior ministers, you look after the shop, I'm off to Liverpool" and I arrived and I didn't have any great agenda, except as I had said to the prime minister, "I want to get inside this thing."

The first two or three days were welcoming, "Very good to see you, Secretary of State, of course, it's only the riots that brought you here but anyway, here you are, and you're listening and we like that, we appreciate that."

Then, of course, inevitably, on day four, the journalist, there's always one of those in the back of the crowd, "Secretary of State, you've been here for four days. What are you going to do about it?"

Well, what had I found in those three days? It was indelible, in my memory, everybody knew what was wrong, he was wrong, she was wrong, they were wrong, everybody was wrong, except me.

No one had any positive contribution to make about what they would do, so I was asked this question, "What are you going to do about it?" Well, I could have said, "Well, I'll go back and talk to my friends in London and I'll tell them what the problems are" but that didn't wash with me.

I spent another couple of weeks going all around, looking for things that I thought could be done, which would actually show people that this atmosphere of decline and despair could be remedied and changed.

After my three weeks, I gave a press conference and I published a list of 30 projects that I said, "Look, let's start here" but the problem with that was, who was going to start?

Lord Speaker:

Yes.

Lord Heseltine:

For 18 months, once a week, I turned up at Liverpool, I has a taskforce from public and private sector. They did the hard slog all week. They had a notebook, a page a project. Thursday night, we went through the notebook. Any trouble, I spent Friday trying to sort it out.

What changed me? For the first time, I was involved, personally, in acute levels of poverty and despair, in acute examples of dereliction, in a public environment of hopelessness.

I thought, "I better hang around and try and do something. People have been generous." One of the most moving moments of my life, to be honest, was when the mayor of Liverpool, Joe Anderson at the time, came to see me in London and said, "We'd like to give you the Freedom of the City." This was a council of 60 Labour councillors giving a Tory the Freedom of the City. It brought tears to my eyes.

Lord Speaker:

I would like just to ask you a couple of questions in that, because when you went there, some of the news stories were 'the prime minister wants him out of the way. You know? He's going up to Liverpool and, by the way, this is an impossible job, so why is he taking that on?'

Going from those stories to getting the Freedom of the City from Labour people and sitting beside Joe Anderson when you got it, how did you achieve that? Because politics is not easy. Politics is very difficult. You seem to have shown the graft and the desire for engagement and listening to people, which in today's social media is missing that discourse of listening, engaging with people, and understanding them.

Give us more insight into that.

Lord Heseltine:

Yes. I think I can help you with that, because if there's a problem about politics, it's two mountaintops, and the more articulate politicians get to the top of the mountaintops and bang on at each other, and their supporters follow the lead, so anything the Labour Party does is wrong, anything the Tory party does is wrong, the Lib Dems don't matter, they can't do anything, and that is the dialog. Whatever comes up, it's coloured against that background.

I had a list of 30 things in Liverpool that I thought needed to be done. It was no use being in Conservative central office and saying 'how do I go about that? 'The first question would be who owns this piece of sand? Classically, it was a piece of derelict land. Who owns it? Find out, sit down. What do you want to do about this? Oh, well, the local authority won't give ... I said, okay, we'll go and see the local authority together. You want some government money? Okay. I have a budget, I can help a bit but I'm not going to spend money on this land unless we get somebody who will say, "If you do this, I will do that." You've got a builder who says, "Yeah. If you clean that up, I'll build a house."

But that is very technical, but something much more subtle happened, because the people who came together no longer were shouting abuse at each other. They were looking at a piece of land and working out the technical problems of actually turning it into a green site and putting a house on it. They became friends, because they had a drink together in the pub at the end of the meeting.

That process, which accelerated later on dramatically in a thing called City Challenge, brought together people who, in their traditional working mode, never met, never talked. They filled in forms, they had telephone calls, but they never sat there and said, "Look, we're all basically on the same side. This is Liverpool, we'd like to help" and once that happened, the human relationships changed and I think I did play some part as a catalyst, but in the process, it made me realise of the huge potential there is in the devolution of power to the local communities of this country.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah. In fact, I was going to suggest you acted as a facilitator and as a catalyst but along with that, there was a human element to it as well, that you just get down to people as to what they felt, how you could move forward together. It wasn't you leading out front. It was you engaging with them and walking along with them was the problem. Would that be fair enough to say?

Lord Heseltine:

Yes, but again, I've been extremely fortunate. I've had a number of interests and a number of careers. First of all, I started a business, much of it in property. Secondly, I was a birdwatcher and deeply involved in environmental culture. I came from South Wales where we were a relatively prosperous middle-class family but you couldn't drive very far without knowing that there was another world.

All of these things, did I think equip me. When we sat at these meetings, these endless meetings, I could talk to the property people, as someone who knew what it was about, how to do it. I had done it on a private scale.

I was equipped by my background for the process of facilitating. I think my understanding coming from South Wales of the two nations did much influence me, that ... Well, the most shocking thing that happened to me at Liverpool, and I was deeply shocked, when some Conservative supporter said, "Why are you bothering there? There's no votes for us there." I was really absolutely shocked that they could think like that.

Lord Speaker:

Absolutely. In many ways, you have continued that journey and you did the development corporations. I think just in the past few weeks, you visited Teesside and when we had the Levelling Up Bill here, I actually predicted to my staff that you would come in and they said, "Why?" Because I said, "He's the grandfather of levelling up and devolution."

How much farther do we need to go today in that to ensure, if you like, a UK-wide more harmonious engagement where we don't see London being exceptional?

Lord Heseltine:

A long way. This is the tragedy. If I could roll back and change history, I would go back to Radcliffe Moore's report of 1968, which the then-Labour government commissioned, and, basically, the report looks at the public administration at local level in this country and it found out that there were 1300 authorities and why? Because historically, the pattern had evolved when the only means of getting anywhere was either by foot or horse, so you couldn't get very far and, therefore, you needed this proliferation of authorities to administer public welfare.

Radcliffe Moore looked at the 1300, analysed the contemporary position of the 1960s, and said, "You need 60." I was Peter Walker's junior minister in the then-1970 government, which had to deal with this proposal and the conservative party couldn't live with the abolition of the two tiers, too many Tory councillors and it was too important a part of the political structure but Peter managed to persuade them to take the 1300 down to 300 and, basically, that's where we are.

We need 60. If you have 60, by and large, you have identifiable units, the large cities, Bristol, Manchester, Liverpool, London, of course, Newcastle, and you have counties, and that takes you to about 60 authorities. They're all different, they all have different strengths and opportunities, different weaknesses and they, by and large, attract a loyalty, because people know which county they're in and that sort of thing, and there's a regiment of there's a cricket team or whatever it may be, that is the building block upon which Radcliffe Moore said we should build a modern society. He was absolutely right.

Now so far, we've got to the point where we have now got mayors in most of the major conurbations and one or two missing but, by and large, we've made progress there but we've made very little progress in the unification of the counties, one or two have done it, but not that many.

The politics, the party politics of doing something are extremely difficult and how do I know? Well, I have to tell you, because in Scotland and Wales, in the 1990s, I used primary legislation to get rid of all the two tiers, they're all unitary authorities now, and I was helped, because there weren't many Conservative councillors and so on, the backbenches of my party, there was little interest in the subject but in England, there was massive interest in the subject.

Lord Speaker:

Yes.

Lord Heseltine:

The fact is we have not made enough advance. Now if you could make advances, and you could, you could and should, then what you can do is to take the powers of London, which are all functionally divided, housing, transport, education, skills, home office, whatever it may be, they don't meet either.

When someone says to the home office, "What's the problem about Liverpool?" They will say, "We want a Chief Constable, we're doing this, we're doing that." Well, that is an important part of Liverpool's problem but what about the housing? What about the transport? What about the education and all of these other things? There is no coordinating process.

First of all, Whitehall has got to go back to the position where there are regional groupings of the Whitehall departments. Secondly, it needs a central grouping under a senior cabinet minister of the relative departmental ministers. Thirdly, they then need to say to the elected mayor of the 60 authorities, "You work out the strategy that is relevant to your area, strengths and weaknesses, opportunities, threats, and we will work with you in partnership and we will mould the money that government can afford to meet your strategic vision."

That has a terrific effect and the real tragedy is that every other capitalist economy in the world does it, except us.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah. Yeah. When I took up this position, my first visits were to Belfast, Edinburgh, and Cardiff. It was to bring people together, to establish an informal inter-parliamentary group, which is now established here with House of Commons representative and House of Lords representative.

In the run-up to the Brexit internal market bill, the First Minister of Wales in speaking to the Institute of Government said that the House of Lords was really, really helpful but this isn't rocket science. This is just bringing people together to understand them and to engage them.

I feel certainly, as one who comes from Scotland that we could be a foreign land in many ways, in terms of people having other people's ears on that. Do we need more of that engagement and to make it more formal, so that we can get UK-wide full engagement?

Lord Heseltine:

I hesitate to, especially to you, talk about Scotland and Wales but my feeling is that the devolution arrangements have actually been devolution of Whitehall to Cardiff, Edinburgh and Belfast.

I don't think that's the right end product. I think that, again, it's not for me to work these things out but Swansea, Cardiff, mid Wales, north Wales, Pembrokeshire.

You can do the same thing in Scotland, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, Aberdeen, the Highlands. I think that devolving on within the devolved authorities would be a very exciting project.

Lord Speaker:

Absolutely. I'm strictly non-political in this position, so no comment, but what I will do, I'll say the comments of Professor James Mitchell of Edinburgh University, public policy expert, and he had an article in the Holyrood magazine, a number of months ago, stating that in many ways, in his opinion, Holyrood is a mirror image of Westminster, in that we don't have that further devolution element. You have people with the same views as yourself on that.

The reform the House of Lords is on agenda, whether it was the Conservative manifesto in 2019 or the report with Gordon Brown for the assembly of the nations and the regions. If we're going to reform, what would you advocate for the House of Lords?

Lord Heseltine:

Well, if I ... You'd have to be prime minister to be in a position-

Lord Speaker:

Exactly.

Lord Heseltine:

... drive such an agenda, and I would not drive it all, because it's one of those wonderful things that if only we reform the House of Lords, but how? And what will be the consequences?

Basically, you couldn't invent the House of Lords. I mean, it's an anachronism. It's part of our history. It's an evolution. It's where it is. But the moment you started to rationalise it, you'll end up with what? A second House of Commons? Is that really going to change anything? If you bring the bitterness of party politics into a second chamber, probably not coincidental in its electoral strategy with the existing ones, so you get the blockage of changing power like you get in Congress? Would it attract better debates?

I, personally, because I can see where the momentum takes you, and I know it won't be any better and it won't solve anything, I would not, myself, commit the government I led to anything like the time-wasting debates that would be necessary to bring about an unpredictable change.

Lord Speaker:

Would you sanction incremental change?

Lord Heseltine:

Well, there's been incremental change. We've seen the hereditaries down to a relatively small number. We've had the life peers introduced. It hasn't done anything to change public mind about these things.

But the House of Lords has got one great strength, in my view, and that is that the debates are polite, they are often conducted by people who are real experts in their field, who do not actually subscribe to one party doctrine or another, who genuinely give their time, because they have a contribution to make, and because it's all rather low-key, the government can use it as a testing ground or admit when it got something wrong without a terrible sort of, "Government Defeated" headline all over the place.

The British constitution is a very sophisticated process. Nobody would create it if they started with a piece of paper and a crayon, but that's not the point. It's what we've got, and before you change it, you should be very clear that what you're putting in its place is better and, therefore, more effective in delivering what people want, and I don't see what that would be.

Lord Speaker:

You think the concept of a second chamber is really important in terms of keeping a check on the main chamber?

Lord Heseltine:

I think the second chamber does have the advantages of a more informed debate, a quieter debate, less publicity, and, therefore, the ability of governments to be more flexible in the way they decide policy.

All of that is a plus. Going to a replica of the House of Commons, which, in one way or another, is what it would be, would not, in fact, enhance those attributes.

Lord Speaker:

We see the debt ceiling negotiations in Congress and it went to the very edge, as a result of that. If someone was elected to the House of Lords, in my own mind, I would envisage me going to a community hall and people asking me what I'm going to do to repair the local school, to ensure a more adequate facilities in the hospital, to fill in the potholes in the road, and if I said to them that, "Look, I don't take part in any financial debates", I'm sure, and you'd have had this in Liverpool, "What use are you?"

Lord Heseltine:

Well, of course, but you've got to face it, public don't like us. They don't trust us. They don't believe we're up to any good. 'What are they in it for? They're only in it for their own purposes.'

Journalists, estate agents, and politicians, you do the public opinion testing, we're all at the bottom of the queue and I think we always have been and, sadly, I don't see how that changes.

But I understand why it's the case, because, you see, if you're a senior minister, the only decisions you're ever asked to make are those that nobody else can make. They're all controversial. In the nature of human beings, if you agree with them and you do what they think is right, they think you're a good chap, well done, all that. If you disagree with them, they think you're an idle shirker who never listened, who doesn't give a damn, dah, dah, dah.

Every day, you are making these decisions. You are accumulating an awful lot of enemies. Every day, let alone over a year or five years. But that's the business you're in. You know?

Lord Speaker:

Yeah, but you need resilience as a politician.

Lord Heseltine:

You need resilience.

Lord Speaker:

You've demonstrated that admirably.

Lord Heseltine:

That's a very important point, because young people say to me, "I'm thinking of going into politics." I say, "Don't. If you are only thinking about it, don't. It's a tough, thankless, 24/7 career and in the end, you'll be kicked out. You've got to have that determination and that tenacity and that conviction and, I hope, the vision."

Lord Speaker:

When you're a minister, perhaps you were irritated with the House of Lords holding up your legislation at times. Now you're on the other side of the fence here. There's a real merit in being able to hold up legislation for a while.

Lord Heseltine:

Yes. I had a ... Now I can't remember what it was but I remember being absolutely furious with the House of Lords over a piece of legislation that I was responsible for and Peter Carrington, Lord Carrington, was the leader of the House of Lords at the time, or leader of the Conservatives in the House of Lords perhaps. That would have been the case.

I came to see him and I said, "This is intolerable. These unelected people are stopping the government's mandate and you've got to ..." I had some wild scheme that I wanted him to pursue. He said, "Michael, we don't behave like that here." He was quite right.

But, yes, I mean, in the House of Lords, I don't, myself, play a big part but on the big issues in which I have a voice and some experience, I value the opportunity to be able to express it in the House of Lords and, certainly, on Europe and on devolution, I have participated and will continue to participate.

Lord Speaker:

Absolutely. Your voice is still very strong here and people come in and they listen to you and understand. One of your former party colleagues who is a cabinet minister is now in the House of Lords and when I asked him what the difference between the House of Commons and the House of Lords was, he said, "Well, believe it or not, when I was in the House of Commons and I made speeches, nobody listened to me, but, surprisingly, when I'm in the House of Lords and I make a speech, people come up and make comments and ask me about it."

Maybe that's because of the length of time that people have been in politics, the lack of party-political confrontation here that I have described this place as, in many ways, the best think tank in the country.

Lord Heseltine:

I think you make an important point and I think that, by and large, in the Commons, the speeches are about proposed legislation and they're relatively narrow in their focus, and they're relatively partisan in their concept whereas in the Lords, you have both such a wide range of experience, not just from ex-politicians but from people from a whole range of very important public and private sector activities, that you are getting an expertise that you could never replicate in the House of Commons.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah. I remember in the Brexit debate, when we were talking about Article 50, or Prime Minister Theresa May's proposals, that a number of peers spoke about Article 50 and then Lord Kerr of Kinlochard stood up and says, "Well, I can tell you about Article 50, because I wrote it. It was with this pain, which I wrote it." You can't get experience like that elsewhere.

Lord Heseltine:

No. You can't replicate that. No.

Lord Speaker:

But now, Lord Heseltine, you're an unaffiliated peer and looking back at the legal landscape, certainly, when I went into the House of Commons in 1987, there was an ideological element to our politics with Labour, working class, supporting workers, social justice, Conservatives, aspiring middle class people, business and law.

With the social media, we now have identity politics, to an extent, and it would seem, to me, that the ideological element has been lost, in part, in place of the identity politics. Say, for example, Labour voters now, what the polls would tell you is that the preponderance of university-educated individuals voting for Labour, millennials voting for Labour, the urban areas voting for Labour whereas with the Conservatives, you would have the rural areas voting for it, and maybe a higher proportion of non-university people being in that.

Now I only cite what the opinion polls are seeing, is there a kernel of truth in that?

Lord Heseltine:

If I may pick your first point up about me being an unaffiliated peer. I mean, this is funny.

Lord Heseltine:

But it is ... I mean, I make few claims myself but in life, in the last 70 years, quite difficult to think of a big political battle in which I haven't been at the forefront on behalf of the Conservative Party. Actually, I'm a member of the Conservative party and they're constantly writing and asking me for funny. It's quite fun. I sent to the Scottish Conservatives, because they've got a saner view about Brexit.

But the idea that I am unaffiliated, I just find a joke of major scale.

But on the analysis that you put about the party changes, I think this is probably about Brexit and frozen living standards. I think that Brexit is such a historic disaster that a large number of the sort of people who are involved in the world that is affected by Brexit have lost faith in the Conservative Party whereas a lot of people, particularly, working class people in the red wall seats still believe that their economic fortunes can be changed if the government changes, because we got rid of the bureaucrats and the BBC and the blob and all this other rubbish.

They're learning the hard way, that they were deceived, and my guess is that the Labour Party will make inroads into that sort of constituency, much less in the constituency that is an anti-Brexit-oriented constituency.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah. There's an apocryphal tale that when you were at Oxford, you wrote that you wanted to be a millionaire at 25, in the cabinet at 35, and the prime minister at 55.

What do you say to people ... Because, again, I remember that in one debate or one interview, you said that we betrayed our young people. Given that we need hope in politics and you reinforced that earlier in your conversation, what hope can we give young people at the moment?

Lord Heseltine:

Yes. Hope is very important. Yes, I have said we have betrayed a generation and I believe it profoundly. The world is shrinking. A major reason why it's shrinking, but in my long political experience, time and again, I came across the role of government and the technological interface that sustains the industrial base and I discovered very early on, first in space and then in defence industries, the enormous cashflow that central governments are providing to force-feed the technological advance.

Silicon Valley, good slogan, everybody likes it, we all want to be Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley is the agency of the American defence budget and the space agency. That's where the money comes from, on dramatic scale. I can give you the figures, the Star Wars program, the screen that would stop enemy rockets.

Lord Speaker:

Ronald Reagan's thing.

Lord Heseltine:

Ronald Reagan's Star Wars. General Abraham sitting in my office, $29 billion Secretary of State and today, I could do a partnership with Heriot-Watt University in Glasgow who are at the leading edge in this technology, $100 million out of my $29 billion. I think he thought I would smile with appreciation. What I heard him say was, "I got $29 billion of taxpayers money and I know where every advanced technological base is taking place and I'm going round all of them and do partnerships and all of it will go back into the American industrial base."

China, that is a government using public money to create what has to be the most extraordinary transformation of any society in human history. India, massive scale. Europe, massive scale. Where are we? On the fringe.

Of course, we want to be a leading edge but how do you become a leading edge if you can only afford so much and you've cut yourself off from the technological base and the funding of Europe? You can't.

To that extent, it's a delusion. Immigration, there is no solution to British immigration that does not, in fact, involve Europe, because they are coming from outside Europe into Europe and then from France into this country. The only credible solution is a two-fold solution, one is to put a wall, a ring, a protective barrier around Europe and that would be seen by many people as an immoral reaction to poverty outside but if you were to couple it with a Marshall Aid program, of the sort the Americans did after the Second World War and to come to deals with the countries from which the immigrants are coming to create the conditions that persuade them to stay there, then you have an effective policy and you have a moral policy.

We aren't part of that and we are talking about stopping the boats. They'll find another way.

Then environmental policy, I mean, we could debate how serious climate change is, I'm personally not going to risk by being on the wrong side of this issue, so do you think this country can solve the climate change issue? Inside Europe, with 400 million of us, we can do something, we can talk as equals to the big power blocks. Outside, do people really listen?

What we've done is to create a separate unity called United Kingdom. Outside one of the power blocks that is bound to affect us in numerous ways, and what I see is an empty chair in one of the major power blocks of the country, and it came home to me ... The other day, I was on holiday with my wife in Cyprus and I suddenly realised that Cyprus is closer to the centre of power in Europe than we are. That's unforgivable.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah. In this post-COVID world, which we're now experiencing, has there to be a changing role for government? You mentioned about the Americans. We have the IRA Act, Inflation Reduction Act by the Biden administration, which is putting in over a trillion dollars in grants and tax-deductible allowances for that.

Do we risk it? We've really been left behind and is it too late? How do we get on that bandwagon?

Lord Heseltine:

This is how it always was. As I explained to you, the Star Wars program was exactly this in a different context. The Europeans are going to respond on a similar scale, compatible with the European economy, to what President Biden and the Chinese are already doing.

We have cut ourselves off, and so what is the solution? There is only one solution and that is to re-join the single market, and the quicker we realise that, and the quicker we do it, it can't be done tomorrow and it can't be done easily but it must be the purpose and if there is one criticism of body politics in this country today is that no serious politician is arguing this case.

I know why, because they're terrified of the populist voice and the effect on the populist votes in an election context, so there is a disconnect between the truth and reality of Britain's increasingly disconnected posture in the world and the ability to garner votes of people who think that Brexit was part of the problem.

Lord Speaker:

Okay. We have to be part of a bigger fraternity.

Lord Heseltine:

We are part of Europe. We can either seek to influence it or let them make the decisions which will affect us anyway. We have been for 1,000 years and more, part of Europe.

Lord Speaker:

Your experience at the end of the Second World War, the Marshall Plan, as you talked, you and your contemporaries seemed as if that experience, it infiltrated your very political and human being of the Second World War, is that correct?

Lord Heseltine:

You absolutely put your finger on the epicentre of my political faith. I helped to start, as an undergraduate at Oxford, a subunit of the local Conservative Party. It's called the Blue Ribbon Club. Blue cover, three interlocking circles in gold, United States, Commonwealth, Europe.

I was introduced to politics at the time the Conservatives were leading the vision of Europe. It was a very simple vision. It must never happen again. It started with the Schuman Plan, inspired by the men and women from the resistance movements and the prisoner of war camps, who had seen three wars in Germany and France in three-quarters of a century. It must never happen again.

The Conservatives developed Churchill's great speech, "We must create a kind of United States of Europe." He didn't say they must create, he said, "We must create" and then, of course, the great winds of change speech by Harold Macmillan explaining that the end of empire had come, we could no longer afford, even if we wanted to maintain that hegemony of such a large part of the world's surface. Ted Heath secured our accession.

My generation saw that as a vision, as compatible with the concept of humanity and peaceful conditions in a way that history had denied so many people. My party has blown it. It is unforgivable and it must be reversed.

Lord Speaker:

Well, Lord Heseltine, can I thank you for the privilege of this conversation with you? Your resilience, your openness, your honesty, and your relevance to today's society is every bit as fresh as it was from day one, so it's been a real pleasure for me and thank you very much.

Lord Heseltine:

It's been a privilege, my Lord Speaker.

Lord Speaker:

Thank you.

 

 

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