Did you mean far speaker:Lord Patten?
Lord Patten: ...Members of Parliament before and have been through this turmoil. I went through it once in my life. It was disturbing in some ways but reassuring when I suddenly found I had my noble friend Lord Hayward’s family as my new constituents. They seemed to put up with the situation pretty well as time went on. None of us knows what will happen in the next few months, and I think we need...
Lord Patten: ...this subject extremely well. I have four points to make and none of them seeks to undermine health and safety matters—I am not a jeerer at health and safety matters at all. First, the excellent wartime tag, Keep Calm and Carry On, is a pretty good one provided that one is not complacent. My second point is that risk assessments of threats to life and property are a real public good—of...
Lord Patten: ...the road that the noble Lord has set for us today. It is interesting to reflect, since the elections on the 23rd are about Europe, that very hard words were used in the run-up to the Second World War about Europe and our attitudes to it. There were people accused of being traitors or collaborators. The country and the nation were split very much between 1938 and 1940, but then it really...
Lord Patten: ...use for the nuclear generation of clean power. By comparison, the dangers presented by nuclear weaponry need little elaboration, save to note a fundamental point. It is manifest that, since World War II, their possession by some stops their use by others. I say this with a little background. We in this place rightly are enjoined not to clutter up our speeches with otiose or redundant...
Lord Patten: ...it until it disappears completely from the surface of the earth”. Heigh-ho! That really is hyperbole on stilts at a time when Saudi Arabia is violently and in the name of religion pursuing proxy wars against other brands of Islam all over the Middle East and Africa, from Yemen to Libya and back. Such terror simply begets other terror. A very important issue that was not touched on by the...
Lord Patten: My Lords, every time that I get into our utterly dependable 1950 Series 1, Mark 1 Land Rover down in the West Country, I am reminded that its very construction and materials are the result of a post-war “Export or die” approach, for it is made of ex-aerospace-destined aluminium. Steel was reserved for only the most critical of exports, such as the Austin Atlantic for the United States....
Lord Patten: ..., with our new albeit surprising freedoms to do this kind of stuff we can unilaterally decide to do all this in short order after 24 months or whatever period, and it can be delivered without trade wars. I will exemplify how this works or might work with a worked example; I do so with some temerity, seeing down the Bench from me my noble friend Lord Green of Hurstpierpoint, that strikingly...
Lord Patten: ...been turned back to some silvan or rural idyll, outside of the airfields of East Anglia where the nissen huts have vanished and the concrete airstrips have reverted to the ploughland of pre-World War II times. One of the ways that more housing, more building, will be made more acceptable—this is a great political challenge for the age—and less prone to protest and thus delay, is if...
Lord Patten: My Lords, I warmly congratulate my noble friend Lord Glasgow on what he has just said about high-speed rail, and not only on what he said but on the way that he said it, which was lucid and clear, so unlike many speeches that the political classes tend to unleash on the innocent electorate. They say all that stuff about how we are about to be nudged by the nudge unit, the need for a national...
Lord Patten: ...later on in my speech. It is also very important to judge the OSCE against the things to come in 2012; 2012 may see more dangerous moments than have been seen at any time since the end of the Cold War, the events of 9/11 included. The litany is long and scary: Iran, North Korea, India-Pakistan and the side-winds of withdrawal from Afghanistan, Syria and the flashpoints around...
Lord Patten: ...in mid-November 2009 to the Royal United Services Institute said that our Olympics would be, "possibly the greatest security challenge that the United Kingdom has faced since the Second World War". I recognise that there have been no fatalities in any Olympics since that pipe-bomb explosion in a crowded Atlanta park which, alas, killed two poor people in 1996, in a city which I visited at...
Lord Patten: ...West of Spithead, told a conference at the end of that week in London that the 2012 Olympics and Paralympics pose the "greatest security challenge" that Britain has faced since the Second World War; yet we have no idea from anything that is published how on earth this challenge, including cybersecurity attack, which could bring ticketing and the rest of the Olympics and Paralympics to...
Lord Patten: ...come out. That is a task that we can reasonably ask the Ministry of Defence to turn to. I know that organisations such as Warrior want to work closely with the ministry. We will, I suspect, see wars continuing. We will also, I am told, in these recessionary times, see more young men and young women joining up, for a whole host of reasons, to the armed services. They may have had an...
Lord Patten: ...said, I have just two points to make. First, I want to stress the need for a new economic understanding to replace the violent swings in opinion that we have seen on how to run things since World War 2. I agree with something the noble Lord, Lord Judd, just said, so correcting the balance. Secondly, I want to give a few pointers on how that might be done. I must tell the House that in...
Lord Patten: ...at home will enable us not only to continue to shoulder our burdens but to do other desirable things as well, such as to improve ever more carefully targeted, good-value foreign aid, driving towards the targets set by the international community. Equally, and here I agree with my noble friend Lady Hooper and the noble Lord, Lord Jay of Ewelme, in his masterly maiden speech, that the time...
Lord Patten: ...into thinking that I might be seeking a free transfer to the Bishops' Benches; but the text for my speech comes from the late Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Suhard, who wrote of that post-war city in 1947: "When I go round the suburbs with their dreary factories, or the brightly lit streets of the centre, when I see that mass of people, some refined, some destitute, my heart is...
Lord Patten: ...and disadvantages of a flat rate of income tax. My Lords, I am glad to have the opportunity to ask what I believe is the first Unstarred Question of the new Parliament. I particularly look forward to the responses that will come from the three Front Benches. I shall expect nothing of the Minister other than a stalwart defence—and, indeed, advance—of the status quo, with all its...
Lord Patten: .... We also have to guard against the unimaginable happening, which is another reason why I support the amendment. My noble friend Lord Alton spoke about the Eugenics Society before the First World War. I did not know about that, as he explained it to the House. One never knows how some of these provisions will be used somewhere down the line. I prefer caution where one is dealing with the...
Lord Patten: ...is not. Much of that rootlessness and dissatisfaction with where we are is because of the prior destruction of so many of our towns and cities, and their social, economic and built fabric, in post-war years. I applaud very much the thoughtful approach of the noble Lord, Lord Rogers of Riverside, and other noble Lords who wish to make urban life more desirable again—to make people wish to...