In the Queen’s Speech we had also been promised a great programme of constitutional change, with referendums on devolution for Scotland and Wales and on a mayor for London; and the European Convention of Human Rights was to be incorporated into United Kingdom law. As to the last, I and only a few others spoke out about the dangerous territory into which we were moving. There was clearly the risk of clashes between Parliament and the judiciary, but few appreciated that the judges, who were going to have to interpret and then apply the very general words of the convention, might interpret them in the way most damaging for Britain and most likely, for instance, to undermine the country’s security and our immigration control. It is really quite extraordinary that in February 2012 the Court of Appeal, in setting aside a ruling by a judge that a man from Nepal should be allowed to remain in the United Kingdom, commented that it looked as if the judge had been on ‘a search for reasons for not deporting him.’
I raised in the Lords Basil’s treatment in quarantine kennels. We had been persuaded to send him back to England in January 1997 so when we had got home ourselves we would not have to wait too long before being able to collect him. We were recommended a place in Deal and every now and then we used to get cheerful messages from the establishment telling us how well Basil was doing. Eventually we went to collect him and to our surprise he was brought to us in the arms of a kennel maid. ‘You are not to worry,’ she said, ‘he has not had much room to move about and is a little stiff,’ but in the car as we drove north he was whimpering, and that night as he lay in the basket I had put by our bed he was very distressed and having difficulty in breathing. First thing in the morning we took him to the vet in Clitheroe who, in accusatorial tones asked me how long I had allowed my dog to be in such a terrible state. I told him that I had only just picked Basil up from quarantine kennels, and his only response was: ‘Oh my God!’
He said that he would have to carry out a thorough examination and it was agreed we would come back later in the day. When we returned to hear his verdict he said the dog was riddled with cancer and had to be put down. Back home I rang the kennels who protested that only a day or two before Basil had been seen by a vet who had declared him as fit as a fiddle. I made a formal complaint about the kennels, and I raised the matter in the Lords. And I like to think that the appalling way in which Basil had been treated did help Lady Fretwell’s successful campaign to get rid of quarantine for pets.
I went to a police dinner at which Richard Wilson, later to replace Robin Butler as Cabinet Secretary, recalled that when Tony Blair arrived at Downing Street and the staff were lined up to greet him one lady was weeping copiously: ‘Poor Mr Major, poor Mr Major,’ she wailed. The new Prime Minister, not knowing quite how to respond, said, ‘I am sorry.’ ‘No you are not,’ said the lady, ‘you meant it.’
As the weeks went by, William Hague, the new Leader of the Opposition, proved himself nimble on the floor of the Commons but after getting on a waterslide at Alton Towers wearing a silly cap he went downhill metaphorically as well as physically.
At the end of the year there was a splendid Privy Counsellors’ dinner in the Royal Gallery to celebrate the fiftieth wedding anniversary of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. We then set off for Australia and in the New Year flew to Tahiti and sailed up to the Marquesa Islands.
By now so-called friendly hours had been introduced in the Commons. They were no doubt friendly for families but they were really nice for the government, with the Opposition losing one of its only weapons – the power to harry the government late into the night and wear down its troops. Now the timetabling of Bills was to be routine, which resulted in them coming to the Lords with great chunks that had not been considered in the Commons. A system of deferred divisions was also introduced, allowing MPs to vote on a Wednesday on matters debated after 10 p.m. during the previous week when they might not have been in London, let alone the chamber. We were confident that when, sooner or later, Labour was booted out, these abominations would be consigned to the parliamentary dustbin, but I am ashamed to record that they have all been adopted by the coalition.
In the summer of 1998 I represented Parliament at the Tynwald Day ceremony in the Isle of Man. That year the event was attended by a representative from the Faroe Islands and at dinner one of my hosts asked me if I had ever been to the Faroe Islands. I said I had not. ‘Don’t go,’ came the reply. ‘It’s puffin for breakfast, puffin for dinner and puffin for tea.’
In the Queen’s Speech for the 1998–9 session it was announced that: ‘A Bill will be introduced to remove the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords. It will be the first stage in a process of reform to make the House of Lords more democratic and representative.’ When the Bill arrived on the scene there were some acrimonious debates and veiled threats that if the government pressed ahead without revealing its plans for a more democratic house its whole legislative programme might be at risk. At this stage I received a mysterious invitation to dine with Robert Cranborne*, then Leader of the Opposition in the Lords. At his London house I found myself with Janet Young**, Bertie Denham and one or two others who had been involved at some time or other in the business management of the House; and Robert proceeded to tell us what he had been up to. He had had meetings with the Lord Chancellor, Derry Irvine***, and had reached agreement that a number of hereditary peers should remain in the House pending long-term reform and as a guarantee that such reform would take place. Jack Weatherill, the former Speaker of the Commons, had been persuaded to introduce the necessary amendments to give them cross-bench respectability. When it came to the question of the shadow Cabinet’s attitude towards all this, Robert was noticeably reticent: but under the impression that there would be little trouble, if not great enthusiasm, at the other end, we all said we would go along with what was proposed. What we certainly did not know was that when Robert had put his plan to the shadow Cabinet William Hague had given it an unequivocal thumbs-down.
The next day there was a meeting of the Association of Conservative Peers in the Moses Room and Robert told colleagues of the agreement he had reached with the government. He had asked me to get to my feet after he had spoken to express my support, and up I duly got. But I had hardly got into my stride when William Hague and a clutch of minions burst into the room. There was an awful pause after I had finished my remarks and then William set about me, because I was in the firing line, and then Robert. I cannot remember what he said but it was not complimentary, and outside the Moses Room there was an exchange between him and Robert which finished with Robert being sacked. The deal, however, had been done; the Weatherill amendment was carried, and in 2011 there were still ninety-two hereditary peers in the House. There have been a few deaths among the original ninety-two, but Derry, no doubt imagining that the promised changes to make the House ‘more democratic and representative’ would not be long delayed, had also agreed that there would be by-elections to provide replacements when deaths occurred.
In the 1999–2000 session the government introduced a Bill to lower the age for consent to buggery and homosexual acts from eighteen to sixteen. I found very offensive the suggestion that the Bill was extending the rights of 16–18-year-old boys. That, I pointed out, was rather like saying that a railway company bestows rights on its passengers when it leaves the train doors unlocked. The Bill was about removing from young people aged between sixteen and eighteen the protection they then had had against older people minded to prey on them.
The session also saw the scrapping of Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1986 which prevented a local authority from intentionally promoting homosexuality and from promoting the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship. At that very moment the Lambeth, Southwark and Lewisham Health Authority was funding a guide to the etiquette of ‘cruising and cottaging’ so it did not seem that after the introduction of Section 28, those minded to advertise and applaud promiscuous gay sex ha
d learned the error of their ways. The North Bristol National Health Service Trust had certainly not, for it had just funded a so-called educational pack which encouraged children as young as fourteen to act out homosexual scenes, including pretending to be a married man addicted to having sex with other men in secret. ‘Allowing councils to promote homosexuality,’ said the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sachs, ‘would run counter to a moral code shared by all the world’s great religions. There is a great danger that lifting the existing ban could lead to the promotion of a homosexual lifestyle as morally equivalent to marriage.’ And he has, we now know, been proved right.
The scrapping of the section proved to be the first of a whole raft of measures presenting a gay lifestyle as valid as any other and devaluing the institution of marriage. No sooner was the ink dry on the legislation licensing civil partnerships than people were demanding that civil partnership ceremonies should be allowed in churches, and soon after that there were even demands that gay marriage be legalised. Legislation was then introduced to ban the mere criticism of homosexual acts and preachers were being arrested, tried and convicted of offences under the Public Order Act after being assaulted by hooligans pretending to be offended by the preachers’ biblical quotations. But it did not even stop there. Soon there was legislation ostensibly to stop discrimination against persons in the provision of public services, but used instead to drive out of business Catholic adoption agencies, to ban employees from wearing crucifixes, to deny a registrar the right not to have to conduct a gay civil partnership ceremony and to punish a couple running a B&B for turning down a gay couple. In short, in this brave new world people were being persecuted for sticking to their Christian beliefs and acting according to a moral code which only a few years before had been accepted as the proper guide to behaviour by the vast majority of people. I spoke out against the government’s proposals on all these matters, with some others of a like frame of mind, and some good came to me from it.
First of all I got involved with the Christian Institute which was deeply concerned at what was going on, and I began to work with Baroness (Detta) O’Cathain when issues were raised which touched on the right of Christians to follow their beliefs. Detta’s Christian belief was rock-firm, and she was also firm in muscle. My legs were in a poor state and there came a day when they gave out on me. Lord (Ian) McColl was in the House and fearing something might be seriously amiss rang for an ambulance to take me to St Thomas’s. After a while a flustered ambulance driver appeared at the peers’ entrance and explained that everyone in London seemed to think they had got Asian flu and there was not an ambulance to be had, but he would wheel me to St Thomas’s. That he duly did, but by the time I had been checked over and deemed fit to return to Parliament, although still unable to walk, he had gone off duty and very sportingly Detta wheeled me all the way back to the House.
Few MPs and peers fail to find themselves involved in voluntary work of one sort or another. When I was MP for Ribble Valley I used to be asked by the then president of the East Lancashire Scouts to take the salute at the parade and march-past of the Scouts on St George’s Day. He then died and, not only did he in his will leave all his property to the Scouts, he included in the will a request that I should succeed him as President. It was a cunning move and when a delegation turned up at Stable House to seek my acceptance of the honour I could think of no reason to refuse. In fact, it proved a very worthwhile experience and I treasure the silver acorn I was awarded for my endeavours. I had to resign when we moved south but used all my powers of persuasion to get Lord Patel of Blackburn to take over from me in the hope that that might encourage more Asian boys to join the movement.
I was then also President of the Hertford Society which promotes the interests of Hertford College, Oxford. Many years earlier the college had refused my son James a place, but eventually I forgave them and was mollified when I was made an honorary fellow.
I was for a number of years a trustee of Natural Justice, a charity concerned, among other things, with the effect of diet on criminal behaviour, but eventually gave up when my ears packed up and I could not hear what was going on at meetings.
As to the Overseas Service Pensioners’ Association (OSPA), of which I have for many years been President, it has among its members many former servants of the Crown who had worked in Southern Rhodesia and stayed on when it became Zimbabwe. It was a very serious matter for them when, first, run-away inflation reduced the value of Zimbabwean pensions to a pittance and, then, Mugabe and his government ceased making any pension payments at all in contravention of the terms of the independence constitution agreed at Lancaster House. At that juncture, the British government should have stepped in and assumed responsibility for payment of the pensions in the same way that they had done when the governments of other former colonies had defaulted. But, to its shame, the British government said it was under no obligation to help because Southern Rhodesia had been ‘an internally self-governing colony with its civil servants recruited by Rhodesia House in London rather than by the Colonial Office’. Those Crown servants were to be abandoned even though Rhodesia had been thought so much a British responsibility that Mr Smith’s unilateral declaration of independence had been resisted in every possible way. It seemed pretty daft and downright immoral to me, but I have got nowhere when I have raised the matter. That is not quite right. I did get somewhere with Lord Malloch-Brown who, having heard my pleas, seemed entirely persuaded and went away to tell the Foreign Office so. But after a month or two he came back and said most apologetically that he had failed to persuade his superiors.
I have been President of OSPA for far too long, and have asked them to look for someone to take on the Presidency – a step I was reluctant to take because, with the days of Empire fading into history and the last of its servants trooping to the grave, the winding up of the organisation might not long be delayed. There is, however, still important work to be done by the organisation. It is surely our duty to see that the good name of the Service is not sullied and that the public understands that those who went out to the colonies were motivated by a sense of public service and were there to help prepare the people for independence, not (as left-wing propagandists pretend) to bully the people and profit at their expense.
A few years ago there was a service in Westminster Abbey attended by the Queen to celebrate the work done by the Colonial Service over the years, and I asked Richard Luce to give the address. I remember the Queen listening with rapt attention as he described how, as a young district officer in Kenya, he dispensed justice under a tree; and I like to think that when a short time later he was appointed Lord Chamberlain I might have had a small hand in it. OSPA is very lucky to have Lord Luce at hand, always prepared to take a keen interest in its affairs.
Lastly, I seem to have spent an inordinate amount of time supporting the National Council of Resistance of Iran which works tirelessly to hasten the day when Iran will be rid of the present tyrannical regime. Numerous articles under my name have appeared in American and other newspapers, and I was one of those who brought proceedings to have the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI) removed from the list of organisations proscribed under powers in the Anti-Terrorism Act 2001. When Gilly and I went to Paris to meet Mrs Rajavi, the President of the NCRI, and attend a rally I found myself addressing 70,000 people in a gigantic hangar-like building somewhere in the northern suburbs. For me that was a record.
So I find it quite difficult to be bored and rarely succeed.
In the general election of 2001 William Hague led the Conservative Party to defeat after a lacklustre campaign in which he said that there were only a few days left to save the pound. The claim was not convincing, the government having promised a referendum if they concluded that the time was ripe to join the euro. When the votes had been counted William resigned and the Party had to set about electing a new leader. The obvious candidate was the one with vast experience of government, Kenneth Clarke, but I could not support him because of his pig-head
ed refusal to compromise in the slightest over Europe. Various people begged him to say that he would not force-feed the Party with his views and would listen to the opinions of others, but he went down to defeat having steadfastly declined to say anything of the sort. So Iain Duncan Smith won, but there were soon doubts as to whether he was up to the job.
John Prescott was now busy cooking up plans for elected regional assemblies. In the debate on the Queen’s Speech I expressed surprise at the extraordinary interest being taken in these developments by the bishops. ‘Perhaps,’ I suggested, ‘unbeknown to me the synod has just slipped through an addendum to the creed: “I believe in the Balkanisation of England, another layer or two of local government, a multiplication of councillors and a Europe of the regions”.’ The Bishop of Bristol talked about bringing decision-making closer to the people, but that was not for one moment what the government’s plans meant. As I pointed out in the debate on the address, the plan was for powers devolved from Whitehall to go to regional bodies, not to existing local authorities which really were close to the people. Happily, the bishops did not get their wishes.
There could be no better reminder of our Christian heritage which some are trying to airbrush out of our island story than the fact that we have an established Church of which the Queen is Supreme Governor, with bishops of the Church sitting in Parliament. I do, however, confess that the bishops do sometimes try my patience – as I no doubt try theirs. They are very quick to talk of things like regional government where they have no special expertise, but in recent years they have been remarkably reluctant to speak out on matters of faith. It is ridiculous that it should have been for me, Detta and a few others like Rodney Elton* to defend the right of people to live by their Christian beliefs and practise their faith in the face of the rising tide of atheism, while the Bishops’ Bench has for most of the time stayed silent. The bishops, with one or two honourable exceptions, seemed to have become quite reconciled to ‘equal rights’ prevailing over the rights of people to practise their faith even when the result has been, as it was in the case of the Catholic adoption societies, reducing the chance of young children finding a good home and loving parents. Perhaps now after the spirited defence of the Church by the excellent Lord Carey and the intervention of the Queen, some of these bishops and other churchmen will at last wake up to the great danger the Church is now facing as a result of their not having faced up to the threat from secularism and atheism long ago.
David Waddington Memoirs Page 30