Did you mean war speaker:Lord Deben?
Lord Deben: Is my noble friend aware that the Government asked for the Climate Change Committee’s advice and then ignored it? First, the Climate Change Committee said that it was perfectly possibly to do this if there were a proper checkpoint. The checkpoint is not what we asked for. Secondly, the committee said that the Government should make sure that all extraction from the North Sea should be of...
Lord Deben: ...of new oil and gas, we have been very clear that the Government have to take into account the geopolitical position: you cannot just talk about the whole issue of the environment, because we are at war in Ukraine. We have a country determined to squeeze freedom out of Europe. We are concerned in all sorts of areas and we have to make very difficult decisions, so I hope my noble friend will...
Lord Deben: I do not think I understand what my noble friend is saying. Is he saying that a march against the Iraq war would be acceptable? After all, it was about current issues. Very few issues were more current at the time. How would people know in advance that it would be acceptable? That is quite important, too.
Lord Deben: ...point referring to the march of a million people, which of its nature is bound to discommode large numbers of other people. But as somebody who voted against a three-line Whip and against the Iraq war, it seems to me that unless you can accept that something so appallingly wrong can result in large numbers of people saying, “Not in my name”, you really cannot run a democracy. That is...
Lord Deben: My Lords, I have to say that I once had an aunt who was one of the most successful teachers I have ever come across. She was not properly qualified but was one of those people who came in after the war and could teach boys of 14 to sing in a very poor part of Newport in Monmouthshire. I do not start from any real belief that teacher training is a perfect answer, but I agree with the first...
Lord Deben: Perhaps my noble friend could help me. If a former constituent came up to me in the street and said, “Lord Deben, given Covid, the disastrous Brexit, the European war and the cost of living crisis, why have the Government thought it urgent to bring forward something for which there is no public demand, and real opposition across the House?”, what would my noble friend say?
Lord Deben: ...a utilitarian point of view. The second reason is because we need it to be better able to sequester. That means we really have to bring the soil back to the kind of strength that it had before the war. The third reason it is crucial is that there are particular soils with special issues. I draw my noble friend’s attention to the question of peatland, which is a remarkable and wonderful...
Lord Deben: ...in detail in this report. Curiously, the new generation is threatened in a way that is utterly different from the threat we faced when I was growing up. Then, we were threatened by nuclear war, but it did not happen. Climate change will happen: it does happen. It is not a threat in the sense of being possible; it is happening now and unless we intervene, it will overwhelm us. As I go...
Lord Deben: ...in Europe but to put two fingers up to what has been, in both the Council of Europe and the European Union, the great achievement of the last 50 or 60 years—that we have no longer had the civil wars that were part and parcel of our history. We are saying simply and blithely, without any real consideration, that because we think we might be leaving the European Union we are going to do...
Lord Deben: ...: how a nation decides how to put itself into a very much less favourable position than it is in at the moment. Sometimes people say, “Ah, but Britain will manage—look what it did during the war!” But we did not ask for the war; we did not say that we wanted it. It happened, and we said that we had to fight it. Here we are asking for it, and are seriously sitting around planning for...
Lord Deben: ..., and is what matters to us. We want to celebrate those things together. Here, I want the Church of England to be challenged and to decide for itself whether it is prepared to make this step towards a more ecumenical society. In discussing this with those who oppose it, I have discovered one rather serious thing: many of them do not want the Act changed because then they would have to face...
Lord Deben: As one of the 16 Members of Parliament who voted against the Iraq war and defied a three-line Whip, I point out to my noble friend that this situation is wholly different from that very foolish occurrence. In this situation we ought to support our allies, and to accept that we are involved and that our people are in fact threatened. The Prime Minister’s Statement should gain the support of...
Lord Deben: ...opinions, which are contrary one to another. I started with this point because of my concern about the families. It seems that it would not be a good beginning for this change if, immediately afterwards, the large number of Members of the European Parliament —from the right to the far left—who have said that they would see this as so clearly contrary to European law seek to refer it to...
Lord Deben: ...to hear the arguments and we had to respond to them. We had the response because the Jewish Society went to huge trouble to give us all the evidence from Sir Oswald Mosley’s activities before the war. Noble Lords may remember that that would have been a time when we were a generation who knew nothing of this, but I venture to say that a whole group of people went away from university...
Lord Deben: ...it was quite clear to me that the very powerful interests, whose infrastructure aim I entirely approved, had failed in their duty to look for alternatives to the proposal that they were putting forward. They had not, therefore, fulfilled the law. Now, sometimes it is easy for a Minister to make such a decision, but sometimes it is inconvenient. It is important that embarrassment and...
Lord Deben: ...of the British people. That means that those people should be particularly able to call upon this House. I live in a house which was previously occupied, a long time ago, by the man who won the War of Jenkins’ Ear—the Battle of Porto Bello. At that time we thought that British citizenship was of enormous importance. People who found it quite hard to explain how they had managed to...
Lord Deben: ...which had happened from this country, which had been an outrage and which was based upon false information provided by the American security services. I am one of those who voted against the Iraq war on the basis that I did not believe what the Prime Minister was telling me-or rather I thought he told me more than he knew, which is perhaps a more polite and parliamentary way of putting it....
Lord Deben: ...alive. But I must say to my noble friend that she is not helped by the traditional view of the Treasury. Not to embarrass anybody, I hope I may quote the housing report by Kate Barker, who put forward the totally improper suggestion that the reason why we are short of houses is because we do not have enough land on which there is planning permission. This is absolute nonsense. Housing is...
Lord Deben: ...in a second referendum people made a different choice seems an odd thing. After all, that was the choice the people made. I think that this is proof of why referenda are not an acceptable way forward, because the truth is that a referendum analyses what people think at a particular moment. I became opposed to referenda at my father's knee. I remember just after the war he was explaining to...
John Gummer: ...North and Leith (Mark Lazarowicz) about the system in Germany. Because of that system, the smallest party achieving sufficient numbers has had the Foreign Secretary for most of the period since the war, and the Free Democrats are always over-represented.