Lord Davies of Stamford: My Lords, I endorse the very powerful arguments produced by a number of colleagues, such as the noble Lord, Lord Lang, in favour of our spending more money on defence and taking defence requirements in this country rather more seriously than we have in the past. I have been transfixed over the last few weeks, as I imagine many others have, by the extraordinary courage and selfless...
Lord Davies of Stamford: My Lords, I have been following this Bill since its inception. I have not spoken up to this point, but I have been increasingly concerned about the effect of this particular legislative initiative and its potential impact on our reputation internationally, which had been very good in this area up to now, largely because of our role as one of the founding signatories of the refugee...
Lord Davies of Stamford: I am endeavouring to do so but I shall not stand here for very long. The ancient Spartans were helots. Their problem was that they had no rights—they had a growing population but no rights at all. I am very much afraid that if we take on board illegal immigrants and send them to some place in Africa, they will have no legal rights. It would be very worrying to have a population with no...
Lord Davies of Stamford: My Lords, I have listened to the debate this afternoon with great pleasure, and I must say with growing agreement with what was said—until I heard the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, who said that sentencing should be a matter for the Government of the day. That is a very dangerous approach, because it means that sentencing becomes a reflection of the political pressures on the...
Lord Davies of Stamford: My Lords, it has been a most interesting debate. I was rather surprised to hear the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, refer to a consensus emerging on this subject this afternoon. There has certainly been no consensus in the debate I have listened to; rather, a set of very different, diametrically opposed views based on different moral assumptions. There is nothing inherently wrong about that, but I...
Lord Davies of Stamford: I thank the Minister for giving way for just a moment. On the important matter of accommodation centres, who will be responsible for assigning a particular place or centre to an immigrant or failed immigrant? Will it be possible for the applicant or failed immigrant to leave an accommodation centre, or will he or she essentially be forced to remain in that centre?
Lord Davies of Stamford: My Lords, I want to refer to the case of my mother-in-law, a person of whom I was extremely fond, but I must make it quite clear that she was not a campaigner for law reform in this area. Indeed, she was not a campaigner at all; by instinct she kept away from public controversy. If I draw any conclusions from my memory of her experiences, I am responsible for those conclusions, not anybody...
Lord Davies of Stamford: My Lords, I do not think I shall ever forget the extraordinary pictures we saw the other day of human desperation at Kabul airport. That is one of those dramatic pictures you never forget. The most extraordinary thing about the whole incident was that I got the impression the British Government were extremely surprised by events and had not prepared for them at all. I would have thought that...
Lord Davies of Stamford: My Lords, I think these two agreements lack two fundamental things without which they will be much poorer than they would otherwise be. First, there is no cost-benefit analysis at all, and there should be for any great venture of this kind. As we know, we left the European Union very much on the basis of very extravagant promises: we were going to have much more money, there were going to be...
Lord Davies of Stamford: My Lords, the first thing that we need to do in a situation of this kind is to make sure that we do not deceive ourselves about the reality that we face. This recession will be twice as deep as the one in 2008-09, which followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and I think that it will go on for a great deal longer, quite simply because a high proportion of our fellow citizens have lost...
Lord Davies of Stamford: My Lords, in the course of the Government’s efforts to mitigate the collapse of demand in the economy with their furloughing system and so forth, which I thoroughly approve of, they are accumulating a lot of debt. Before this crisis, we were fast approaching a level of public debt at 90% of GDP, which is unprecedentedly high. At the time of the collapse of Lehman Brothers 12 years ago, by...
Lord Davies of Stamford: Is it not the case that what is really alarming here is that the collapse of consumer demand is likely to last for a very long time and that there is going to be a substantial negative-wealth effect, given that people will have been out of jobs while their businesses and indeed the stock market has collapsed? People will require years to build up their savings again to where they were before....
Lord Davies of Stamford: To ask Her Majesty's Government what estimate they have made of the additional cost of withdrawing benefits when claimants increase their revenues from other sources at the Income Tax rate of 20 per cent instead of the marginal rate of 63 per cent.
Lord Davies of Stamford: My Lords, the UK has withdrawn from the European Medicines Agency without putting anything in its place. This means that no new compound can be registered, licensed and made available for prescription in this country. The new compound might be an antiviral agent effective against coronavirus, or could equally be the vaccine which we are all waiting for. Can the Government tell the House, with...
Lord Davies of Stamford: My Lords, the narrow nationalism of this Government has been deeply depressing for a long time. But the fanatical, pedantic ideology that the Government have displayed in the last few weeks is quite unspeakable. The Government have withdrawn from the European Aviation Safety Agency and from Euratom. They have withdrawn from the EMA, the European Medicines Agency, in the middle of a pandemic,...
Lord Davies of Stamford: No, indeed it is not. I am not saying that the benefit we get is accumulating bullion, because we have a balance of payments surplus. That is the mercantilist idea, and I can only describe it as quaint; it is curious that people still believe in it. Yet the Government evidently do—because that is what it means when people say, “We’re in a better position, because they sell more to us...
Lord Davies of Stamford: My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Stevenson on getting the opportunity to debate this, and I particularly congratulate him on his initiative in making a very interesting constitutional suggestion. A lot of colleagues will probably have seen the Order Paper and thought that this subject was slightly technical and esoteric, which may be why the Chamber is not in danger of bursting...
Lord Davies of Stamford: My Lords, I disagree with this document on at least three principles. First, it is not at all even-handed. It is quite clear that the Palestinians are intended to have to earn certain concessions over four years whereas the benefits for Israel are available immediately. Part of it reads like a proposed diktat to the Palestinians, and I do not think that is very helpful if we want to restart...
Lord Davies of Stamford: Do the Government not appreciate that no one will invest in manufacturing capability in this country, the output for which will be dependent on demand from the single market to a considerable and possibly larger extent, in a climate of regulatory uncertainty where it is not clear whether at any moment our regulations might divert from those in the European single market? It seems to me that...
Lord Davies of Stamford: One hypothesis on which people are working is that this disease started with bats. Is there a possibility that other species of mammal or perhaps birds could be infected or could be carriers, possibly including domestic or farm animals, or are our veterinary authorities confident that that cannot be the case?