Indexing of UK state pensions to inflation for entitled recipients in Canada, in order to facilitate the proposed free trade agreement – Lord Thomas of Gresford.
Lord Thomas of Gresford: My Lords, I remind your Lordships that, at Second Reading of this Bill, on 8 February, I referred to a legal action brought by Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner Group, who has been somewhat in the news over the last weekend, against the journalist Eliot Higgins, who had investigated his activities. When his case was justly struck out last May, Prigozhin said that he brought court...
Lord Thomas of Gresford: My Lords, I am sorry to hear that the magistrates were upset by the introduction of this change. I was articled as a solicitor in the office of the clerk to the magistrates of the Ruabon Bench in north-east Wales. The chairman of the Bench was Lord Maelor, formerly TW Jones, the Labour MP for Merioneth. He had gone down the pit at the age of 14 for 12 shillings a week and later served time in...
Lord Thomas of Gresford: The Minister refers to a small cohort. Has he any idea how many nuptial agreements exist as a percentage of those people who get married these days?
Lord Thomas of Gresford: Your Lordships will soon gather from my croaky voice that I returned from a northerly cruise on Wednesday with something of a cold. It was 10 days without responsibility. No money was used on board; at mealtimes, all I had to do was sway my way into the restaurant, and the food was there ready cooked. There was no lock on my cabin door—but, with the North Sea all around me, I was going...
Lord Thomas of Gresford: The noble Lord, Lord Robathan, referred to his experience in the forces in Northern Ireland. It reminded me that when I was defending in the Brighton bomb trial in 1986, I was surprised to discover that Daniel O’Connell, the leader in the 19th century of the fight for Catholic emancipation and the scrapping of the Act of Union 1800, was, despite his nickname of “The Liberator”,...
Lord Thomas of Gresford: My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes, who has demonstrated her expertise in this field as chair of the Fraud Act committee. Last year’s economic crime Act was designed, as this Bill is, to reveal the ill-gotten gains—the “stolen wealth”, as my noble friend Lord Fox called it—of those subject to sanctions or otherwise engaged in criminal...
Lord Thomas of Gresford: Can the Minister define in a few words what the necessity is in this particular instance?
Lord Thomas of Gresford: My Lords, I, too, am a member of the Sub-Committee on the Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland, under the excellent chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Jay. The noble Lord, Lord Frost, has just demonstrated to us that he would not get an O-level in the constitutional law and practice of the United Kingdom. He told us that this unconstitutional Bill was drafted to strengthen the UK’s...
Lord Thomas of Gresford: My Lords, the existence of Princess Elizabeth was borne in on me in 1947 at the time of the royal wedding. It was a blaze of sudden colour—and I still have the souvenir illustrated magazine that my mother kept—in a post-war world of austerity and ration books. “But where did she get the coupons for that dress?”, the grumpy ones said. After the shock of the death of her father, it was...
Lord Thomas of Gresford: To what would the Minister ascribe this lack of public confidence? Is it the sayings of the Lord Chancellor, or of Suella Braverman? Why is there a lack of public confidence in human rights in this country?
Lord Thomas of Gresford: My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, not just on introducing this debate but on her lifelong attention to human rights. I am very pleased to have heard her speech today. The ECHR, passed in 1950, set out a series of articles for the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms. In the last 70 years, there have been just 16 protocols that have added to or amended...
Lord Thomas of Gresford: My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, in particular, on her focus on clean air as a human right. It is curious how the Conservative Party continues to undervalue the great British achievement promoted by Winston Churchill: the European Convention on Human Rights. When it was drafted by the team led by Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, a prosecutor at Nuremberg and later Lord...
Lord Thomas of Gresford: My Lords, 71.2% of the 1,500 cases prosecuted last year resulted in a conviction. However, of the 55,000 complaints, 23,259 victims did not support further action. What causes have the Ministry of Justice identified for nearly half of complainants refusing to support a prosecution?
Lord Thomas of Gresford: The Minister referred to challenging conditions in prison. Would he accept that it is a violent environment? Are prison officers who are sick or injured by assault, or who—very importantly—fail the fitness test, entitled to their full retirement pension between the ages of 60 or 68, or is it diminished because they have not reached the retirement age?
Lord Thomas of Gresford: Cafcass is concerned with representing the interests of children in court. In the report assessing the risk of harm to children and parents in private law children’s cases, published by the Ministry of Justice in June 2020, the expert panel recommended that the MoJ should commission “an independent, systematic, retrospective research study on the implementation” of the current law and...
Lord Thomas of Gresford: My Lords, I want to take up the last point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Goudie, about the protocol in Northern Ireland. Page 447 of the 2011 edition of Erskine May states: “By long-standing convention, observed by successive Governments, the fact of, and substance of advice from, the law officers of the Crown is not disclosed outside government. This convention is referred to in...
Lord Thomas of Gresford: My Lords, I express my full support and that of the Liberal Democrats for the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, for producing this amendment. I congratulate him in particular on the success of his negotiations with the noble Lord, Lord True. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord True. This is a very sensible way to deal with a problem that I had not appreciated until last year, when I...
Lord Thomas of Gresford: My Lords, the Statement says that “there is no such thing as a risk-free society; we cannot guarantee that no one released from prison will go on to commit a serious crime. Let us be very clear about that as we have a more honest debate about the assessment of risk”.—[ Official Report, Commons, 30/3/22: col. 831.] Well, let us have an honest debate. In 2020-21, the Parole Board...
Lord Thomas of Gresford: My Lords, I do not think that the Government should hide behind the fact that an inquest is inquisitorial in procedure and not adversarial—that is a myth. It is not the case that there are no adversarial proceedings at an inquest. I have been in many inquests for trade unions, insurers and families, and each side tries to put forward a particular view of the facts which may impact...
