In the early summer of 2003 when the government, grappling with the grizzly consequences of the invasion of Iraq, might have been thought to have something better to do, Blair decided to embark at home on a blatant and preposterous piece of constitutional vandalism. On 12 June 2003, there was an announcement on television that the office of Lord Chancellor was to be abolished and the Earl of Onslow interrupted a debate in the House of Lords to say that it was an outrage that this should have been decided without debate. Lord Cope of Berkeley, the Opposition Chief Whip, intervened to say that one of the things the government was doing was taking away from the Lords the services of the Lord Chancellor as their presiding officer, which led Lord Williams of Mostyn, Leader of the House, to rise and refer to what appeared to be a press release entitled ‘Reform of the Speakership of the Lords’ which talked, he said, of a new Speaker for the Lords being in place after the recess. Lord Onslow’s motion that the House adjourn was lost, but the cat was out of the bag.
Although the office of Lord Chancellor was older even than Parliament, Tony Blair had decided to abolish it and create instead a Ministry for Constitutional Affairs – and to do so without consulting Parliament or even the Queen. The Prime Minister seems to have thought that all that was involved was a change in the machinery of government and he had to be told that there were about 5,000 references to the Lord Chancellor in primary and secondary legislation and there would have to be a huge ‘transfer of functions order’ to allow others to exercise functions then exercised by the Lord Chancellor. Furthermore, those of his functions which were judicial could not be transferred to any old Secretary of State, but would have to go to a ‘residual’ Lord Chancellor until legislation was passed creating a new head of the judiciary. At the eleventh hour Lord Irvine had put forward a compromise plan under which he would stay in office until these necessary changes had been made, but this idea was not acceptable to the Prime Minister and Irvine’s services had been dispensed with. A more pliable Lord Falconer of Thoroton had then agreed to serve as Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs and was apparently under the impression that, there being no longer a Lord Chancellor, someone else would be found to sit on the woolsack when the House of Lords met in the morning. He was in for a rude awakening.
The Opposition Chief Whip let it be known that the Lords’ Standing Orders required the Lord Chancellor to be present and made it plain that there would be a most almighty row if he was not there. ‘But,’ said Falconer’s private office, ‘he has not got the uniform.’ ‘He had better find one,’ said Cope: and he did. Furthermore, he found himself compelled to continue to sit on the woolsack for many, many months while legislation creating a Ministry of Justice and a Supreme Court ground its way through Parliament.
Altogether it was a shocking tale of constitutional meddling and the arrogance of power. It also cost the public a mint of money: the Lords had now to elect a Speaker to replace the Lord Chancellor, and the new Supreme Court had to be found a lavish building in which to perform functions, which up to the time of Blair’s brainstorm the Law Lords had had no difficulty in carrying out in a modest room on the committee corridor in the Palace of Westminster.
Meanwhile, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was presiding over a commission charged with drafting a constitution for the European Union and the excellent Gisela Stewart, Labour MP for Edgbaston and a member of the commission, was being told by the great man that she had better shape up and agree with what he proposed or she would not get an equestrian statue of herself in her village square. Eventually the constitution was published and was found to contain 67,000 words with another 60,000 words in the appendices. Critics were not slow to point out that the Lord’s Prayer contains sixty-six words, the Gettysburg address 179 and the Ten Commandments 179. I spoke out against this piece of constitutional vandalism.
In November 2003, the government reclassified cannabis as a Class ‘C’ drug. I spoke against the order making the change and pointed out that downgrading cannabis and the decision to let off offenders with a caution sent out entirely the wrong signal to young people and made things almost impossible for parents. ‘Not only,’ I said, ‘does smoking cannabis all too often lead to the use of heroin and crack cocaine, traded by the very same dealers from whom the cannabis is obtained, it is a very dangerous drug itself. It is a mind-bending substance.’ And I then went on to quote what Professor John Henry, a toxicologist, had said at The Royal Society of Medicine conference in London: ‘Regular cannabis smokers develop mental illness. There is a four-fold increase in schizophrenia and a four-fold increase in major depression.’
I felt I had to explain why I felt so strongly about the matter, my son Matthew having had to leave Cambridge because of mental illness brought on by cannabis use. ‘I have to tell Your Lordships,’ I said, ‘that I know personally only too well that cannabis does ruin peoples’ lives. It has come close to ruining the life of someone very close to me who has suffered from schizophrenia as a result of cannabis use. That is the diagnosis so don’t tell me that cannabis is pretty harmless.’ The government got its order but in 2008 realised how foolish it had been and restored the original classification.
The beginning of 2004 saw the publication of the Report of the Inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly. We on the Opposition benches in the Lords had prepared ourselves well before is publication. Clearly there was no way in which Alastair Campbell was going to wriggle out of this one, no chance of Geoff Hoon and officials in his Department having been able to persuade Lord Hutton that they had treated Dr Kelly properly, and Tony Blair was clearly in for a roasting for having remained silent when papers reported that Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction could be used against us at forty-five minutes’ notice. Obviously it was going to be difficult for Michael Howard, Leader of the Opposition, who was not to see the report until the morning of the day on which it was to be presented to Parliament, but as it was so obvious that the government had misbehaved he would have in his head already the arguments to be used in the House. When, however, Michael read the report he must have been absolutely astonished, and a weaker man might have had all the stuffing knocked out of him. For the report was a complete whitewash.
A few days later there was a debate in the Lords. It was opened by Lord Falconer, still Lord Chancellor, and I followed. The report’s conclusion was that there was nothing wrong in the way Dr Kelly was revealed as the source for what Andrew Gilligan said on the Today programme. But that seemed quite bizarre. I reminded the House of what was said in Alastair Campbell’s diary: ‘GH (Geoff Hoon) and I agreed it would f*** Gilligan if that was the source – the biggest thing needed was the source out – spent much of the weekend talking to TB and GH re the source.’ Campbell had, in fact, said at the inquiry that in government circles it was recognised that it would indeed assist them to get Kelly’s name out in the open. ‘How on earth, in the face of all that,’ I said, ‘can one take seriously Mr Hoon’s statement that he made great efforts to ensure Dr Kelly’s anonymity? Far from doing anything of the sort, he agreed to the issue of a press statement and a course of action which he knew would lead to the naming of Dr Kelly. He did not even tell Dr Kelly what he was going to do.’
I continued:
As for the Prime Minister, he may not in the strictest sense have authorised the leaking of Dr Kelly’s name, but he presided over the meeting where it was decided to issue a press release that led, inevitably, to the naming of Dr Kelly. Campbell’s diaries show that neither he nor anyone else in No. 10 were the slightest bit interested in Dr Kelly’s welfare. On the contrary, they spent hours and hours in unminuted meetings, making unrecorded phone calls and plotting not how Dr Kelly’s interest might be protected, but how his being thrown to the media might be turned to their advantage. Campbell decided to wage war on the BBC, a war with no holds barred, and he was happy to use Dr Kelly as a weapon in that war. Dr Kelly, already under intolerable pressure, was given no support, but instead was thr
own to the media wolves and in that situation of mental turmoil, largely created by others, he took his own life.
Finally I reminded the House that the Prime Minister himself signed the foreword to the dossier which contained the words ‘His (Saddam’s) military planning allows for some of the weapons of mass destruction to be ready within forty-five minutes of an order to use them.’ The Prime Minister knew perfectly well, from the intelligence reports, that this did not mean that Saddam had long-range weapons at his disposal; but when newspapers took those words of his to mean that there was a threat to Britain from long-range weapons – when there was a headline in The Sun reading: ‘45 MINUTES TO DOOM’ and the Evening Standard wrote ‘45 MINUTES TO ATTACK’ alongside a photograph of a London street – Tony Blair did absolutely nothing to correct the false impression he had given.
There must have been thousands of people wanting to say what they thought about the government, Alastair Campbell, poor Dr Kelly and the Hutton Report. I could say what I thought and realised as never before how lucky I was to be a member of the Lords and able to debate great issues.
I was off work for quite a long time having a new knee; and on my return introduced a debate on immigration and asylum. I pointed out that by the latter part of the 1980s, with firm and fair immigration control established, immigration policy had ceased to be a very contentious matter, but Labour had allowed what was to all intents and purposes a free-for-all – with work permits handed out in ever increasing numbers. And with most immigrants going to the same parts of the country, an intolerable strain was being put on public services. Sham marriages, bogus students and fraudulent visa applications had made matters worse. Total net immigration to the UK, which in 1997 was 46,000, had over the previous five years averaged 157,000 a year. And it was estimated that over five million of the six million increase in population expected in the next thirty years would be due to new immigrants and their offspring. That was enough to populate six cities the size of Birmingham.
It does not seem that on this occasion my oratory was very persuasive, for in the years that followed things got even worse. When Brown got into office he proudly talked of his determination to cover great tracts of the country with concrete to house the growing population. Some were brave enough to point out that if we could limit immigration so that there were no more people entering the country than leaving, there would be no need for any of this massive housing development; but they, of course, were branded racists.
In the 2005 general election Michael Howard fought valiantly. The Tories won a number of seats but Blair was still left with a thumping majority. In the summer of that year my great friend Mark Carlisle died. For a long time he had suffered from ill-health but he never lost his zest for life. He was the most gregarious of men and my only complaint is that he liked drinking standing up. Because of the difference in height this used to give me a stiff neck. I felt it a great honour to be invited to give the address at his memorial service in St Margaret’s.
I will spare the reader an account of all I was up to in the next year or two but one matter is worth mentioning. A Bill to give effect to an agreement on European finance does not usually hit the headlines but in January 2008 I had the chance to put on record one of the most extraordinary betrayals of our country’s interests. The rebate on the UK’s contribution to the EU, hard-won by Margaret Thatcher, was protected by our veto and could not be taken from us without our consent, but Tony Blair surrendered a part of it for precisely nothing. It all started honourably enough with Blair championing the expansion of the EU into eastern Europe; and he seems to have convinced himself that the French would be prepared to agree to reform of the farm budget to pay for expansion if Britain sacrificed at least part of the rebate. That was inherently unlikely, Blair himself in 2002 having signed up to a CAP settlement to last through to 2013, but when the French gave the inevitable ‘non’, there was not the slightest need for the Prime Minister to do what he did which was, with great alacrity, to abandon his call for a budget freeze, abandon his call for a fundamental reform of Europe’s finances and hand over part of our rebate on a plate. What he ought to have done was take the rebate off the table, pack his bags and return home. The tale told of course was that all this was necessary to secure enlargement and we could not ‘will’ enlargement without being prepared to pay for it, but that is simply not what happened. When enlargement was already a done deal Blair had told the Commons: ‘the UK rebate will remain and we will not negotiate it away.’ That was the promise; and the promise was broken. We had by then got used to surrenders and with each one came the same lame excuse: ‘We had to surrender; failure to do so would have precipitated a crisis and, even worse, shown our lack of commitment to the EU.’ We can only hope that a new government has really learned a few lessons from Blair’s deceit over Lisbon and from this particularly dismal story about EU finance.
The Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill which arrived in the Lords in January 2008 contained a clause which made it an offence to incite hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation. It seemed clear to many of us that if there was to be this new offence, it was important that it did not damage free speech; and in due course I moved an amendment to ensure that the police did not construe criticism as threats or confuse strong criticism of a person’s conduct with incitement to hatred. There was, I said, nothing in recent history to show that the police were good at distinguishing between legitimate comment and language calculated or intended to stir up hatred. I cited the case of the Bishop of Chester who was the subject of investigation by the Cheshire Police after he had made some comments about research showing that some homosexuals could be reoriented to heterosexuality. I also cited the case of the Fleetwood couple interrogated by the police after doing no more than complaining about their council’s gay rights policy and the case of Lynette Burrows who was questioned after saying on the radio that homosexual men might not be the right people to bring up children.
The amendment was reached very late in the day but we won by eighty-one to fifty-seven. The decision was reversed in the Commons but when the matter came back to the Lords we won by 174 to 164 and the government did not make another attempt to reverse the decision.
One might have expected that to be the end of the story but, to my astonishment, into the next session’s Coroners and Justice Bill the government slipped a clause repealing the free speech provision. Lord Bach, in moving the second reading of the Bill, sought to justify the government’s strange behaviour, suggesting that in allowing the free speech safeguard to reach the statute book in the previous session the government had made clear its intention to return to the issue when circumstances allowed. In fact the government had not said anything of the sort and had merely intimated that if Parliament at any time wanted to return to the issue it would be able to do so.
In July 2009, my motion that the clause repealing the free speech safeguard should not remain part of the Bill was carried by a majority of fifty-three, but the decision was reversed by the Commons, and did not come back to us until 11 November. Lord Bach argued that we should not take our disagreement with the Commons any further and should bow to the will of the elected House, but rather overdid it when he referred to the ‘clear and unambiguous view of the Commons’. That gave me the opportunity to point out that not a single Labour member supported the government’s case, except of course the minister speaking from the front bench.
Indeed, almost the only person on the Labour benches throughout the debate was Mr David Taylor who, in spite of the government having refused to allow a free vote on this matter of conscience, stuck to his guns and voted for free speech. Before doing so he had said, ‘I thought that free speech, civil liberties and human rights were exactly the sorts of things that we were supposed to be in favour of.’
We won the division by a majority of forty-four, but then had an anxious night and an early start in the morning preparing ourselves against the possibility of the decision being reversed in the Commons
and our having to debate the matter yet again. But when the Commons met, a government motion that the House should not insist on its disagreement with the Lords was agreed without debate. Mr Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Conservative) did, however, rise and say:
On a point of order Mr Deputy Speaker, it would be useful if the Secretary of State could make a statement on the fact that the government appear to have run up the white flag on Lord Waddington’s amendment. This a great victory for free speech, and we should know more about it.
Not surprisingly the Deputy Speaker said it was no point of order and that was that.
After we had successfully amended the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill in April 2008 I had been astonished to receive a telephone call from one of our shadow ministers in the Commons saying that they were not going to support our amendment, but were going to put down their own amendment in lieu – the terms of which, I then discovered, would completely undermine the case I had been deploying. It was only after furious protests from Detta and myself and threats to resign the whip that these shadow ministers were eventually prevailed upon to change their minds. I thought it monstrous that they should think for one moment that it was right not to support colleagues in the Lords who had inflicted a very significant and wounding defeat on the government. But what I suppose was even more monstrous was that people who considered themselves Tories should not think it important to protect free speech and guard against people being prosecuted as a result of the authorities assuming that any criticism of sexual behavior must be motivated by hatred.
David Waddington Memoirs Page 31