Red Benches No 4: The week in the House of Lords

Theresa May's peers, International Women's Day, and where is the real opposition?

Have to begin this week with the announcement from Theresa May that she’s not going to restand for parliament. The horrors of the hostile environment, the dreadful “Go Home” vans, will dominate memories of her political life (and a small matter of Brexit chaos), but have to acknowledge that she’s the reason I am in the House of Lords. The Green Party was offered a place on her resignation list, and it democratically chose me as its nominee.

Why? The whole process is totally opaque, but the best guess is that the Lord Speaker’s Commission, having held an inquiry into the representativeness of the House of Lords, had, based on previous election results, recommended more Greens. I also suspect that I was a trade-off for what was, at the time, regarded as the shocking appointment of four former members of Mrs May’s staff, Gavin Barwell (8), Stephen Parkinson (2086), Joanna (JoJo) Penn (369) and Elizabeth Sanderson (74). Given the lists of Johnson and Truss that followed, it looks very tame now.

The numbers are the tally of their spoken contributions in the House. As the figures suggest, Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay served as a whip and then (and now) Arts Minister, and Baroness Penn as whip, Treasury and then Levelling Up Minister (now on her second maternity leave - she was considered by many shockingly young- although soon supplanted as “baby of the House” by Conservative Lord Harlech, now a whip). I don’t know what Lord Barwell is now doing, his voting record suggests little presence in the House. (Yes. there’s no shortage of data about members of the House of Lords are doing, should you want to look around - you can find my 963 spoken contributions listed here.)

Have to note, after International Women’s Day, that Rishi Sunak’s record on appointing women to the Lords is the worst since John Major’s, a very different age. The excellent campaign group Unlock Democracy noted that if every woman ever to have been made a peer was still alive and sitting in the House of Lords today, men would still outnumber women by nearly two to one.

Of our 92 hereditary peers, not one is female (since the Countess of Marr - who received the highest vote when the number of hereditaries was restricted by the 1999 House of Lords Act - resigned in 2020). The number of female bishops is rising, under the application of the Lords Spiritual Women’s Act 2015, which prioritises their entry.

The House of Lords Library has a useful summary of how far we have not come, since appointed peers were allowed by the law change of 1958, with female hereditaries allowed by another act in 1963 (but since there’s male primogeniture in the England aristocracy, that has little meaning).

Yes I am writing about something claiming to be a democracy in 2024.

Part 1: Highlights

A. Rwanda Bill Report stage

Lovely to look now at the House of Lords voting page, with its string of stonking defeats - count ‘em TEN - of the government on the dreadful, international law-defying Rwanda Bill (neatly divided into five on Monday and five on Wednesday). It is seeking to send refugees to the African nation (from which we are regularly accepting people seeking asylum!) and refusing them the right to ever return to the UK.

The Guardian usefully explains some of the amendments and what they might mean.

But my fellow Green peer Jenny Jones powerfully highlighted that this is all likely to be sound and fury, signifying nothing.: “the Labour Front Bench, which seems to be rewriting the Salisbury convention that we do not try to stop anything in the Government’s manifesto. In fact, the Labour Front Bench is now suggesting—it has been articulated on numerous occasions—that the Lords must not interfere with any legislation or decision by the Government or the Commons because they are elected and we are not. Then what is the point of your Lordships’ House?”

And more blunt speaking about what Labour is doing in the House came from the somewhat unlikely source of former Conservative minister Lord Deben (you may know him as John Gummer) . I say somewhat unlikely, because increasingly we are seeing stronger opposition in the House to the government from what you might call traditional Tories - ones who actually believe in the rule of law - than from Labour.

March 20 has been set as the date the Bill is returned to the House of Lords. The Commons is expected to throw out almost all of the Lords amendments without concessions. The government is trying to overrrule the courts, so reintroducing the rule of law (and the reality that Rwanda is not a safe place and the Rwanda Treaty that is supposed to make it so has not been implemented) won’t work for Rishi Sunak’s campaigning plans. The one amendment on which there are at least murmurs of the concession is for people arriving irregularly in the UK who have supported British forces abroad, which has powerful backers.

B. Foreign Affairs debate

A small landmark this week in the second career of Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron, his first summing up of a debate in the House of Lords. He adopted the tone he’s taking as standard in the House, avuncular, terribly reasonable and grown-up, slightly patronising - he’s bringing serious politics into the Lords and we should be grateful for that. (Is this a covert lining up for a second prime ministership? It is perfectly possible without him being an MP, as Josiah Mortimer reported for Byline Times this week, relying on research the House of Lords Library kindly did for me.)

The debate was started by our genuinely respected Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon at 3.26pm, and finished at 10.41pm (with a 40-minute dinner break, limited by the advisory (oh no it is not) speaking time of five minutes. The topic was “this House takes note of the United Kingdom’s position on foreign affairs”, a “take note” debate being an open one in which virtually any subject goes.

Of course Gaza occupied a prominent place, with Ukraine and the Red Sea. There were a lot of predictable speeches given. This might have been an opportunity for a serious stocktaking, for bringing in rethinking of Britain’s place in the world, but for all its reputation as the more cerebral House, we saw little of that.

I couldn’t avoid speaking about Gaza, and finished with the cases of three child defendants facing the death penalty in our “friend and ally” Saudi Arabia (on which I got a response from Lord Cameron).

But I focused on the need to prioritise and rethink our relationship with the Global South. That drew on an excellent report I was chairing a discussion on in Brussels the next day, Geopolitics of a Post-Growth Europe. Greens are leaders of innovations in thinking about a society and economy living within the physical limits of this planet. Our thinking is now developing fast about how we can similarly innovate in foreign affairs and defence. What does applying the post-growth concept of sufficiency mean in this context? Well worth a read. (The chapter on Chile is particularly enlightening.)

C. International Women’s Day

Happily in the main chamber, with a whole day devoted to it, and on the actual day itself, Friday saw a broad-ranging, high quality discussion, with rather more depth and wider thinking than in the foreign affairs, That this House takes note of International Women’s Day and the steps taken to promote the economic inclusion of women.

Baroness Chakrabarti drew on the history of the day itself, including the role of Clara Zetkin, Baroness Gale on the importance of political influence in securing economic power, Baroness Northover on the particular dangers the climate emergency present for women. But one of the standout speeches was from crossbencher Baroness Boycott, who focuses on food campaigning:

“If someone had said to me, “In 50 years’ time, you’re going to stand up in Westminster and talk about food poverty”, I would have said that they were bonkers. …Last week, I was with a head teacher who said, “I noticed this curious pattern about a girl in the sixth form: she came into school only on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. This went on for a while, and I asked her teacher, who said, ‘Yes, it’s very, very weird’.” They found out that she and her mother had only one pair of shoes.”

Jenny Jones again nailed it: If we care about women, it is not enough to talk; we actually have to act. (And thanks Jenny for repeating my words from lasy tear about the damage done to women and girls around the world by financialisation: the financial sector is a threat to the security of us all.)

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Part 2: My week

Unfortunately on Thursday morning, I had to pull from Lord Blunkett’s higher education debate. (You have to be at the initial and final speeches of a debate, and a “substantial part” of the rest to take part in one, and I couldn’t make the start.) That was due to the press conference by the British Medical Association (BMA) launching its guidance for the scope of practice of Physician Associates and Anaesthetist Associates (following my fatal motion on the issue last month). It heard powerful and disturbing testimony from the parents of Emily Chesterton about the treatment of their daughter before her death.

Marion Chesterton speaking to the press conference

A. Regeneration of former industrial areas

But I did manage to make the Thursday afternoon debate on the fate of post-industrial areas, secured by Labour’s Baroness Armstong of Hilltop. Perhaps unsurprisingly it had a very Northern, and particularly North East, focus. I didn’t realise when I decided to focus my remarks on my visit to Newcastle and Tyneside last weekend, including the Byker estate, that Baroness Armstong had worked there herself.

My speech was focused on the importance of resources being controlled locally, with decisionmaking:

Westminster needs to get out of the road. It needs to stop providing directions and being a backseat driver, to ensure that local communities have the power and resources that they need to make decisions for their own future, not with direction from what is often far, far away Westminster.

B. Microplastics

People who watch a debate in the House often comment on how few peers there appear to be there. And generally you will only see those involved in the debate watching. But it doesn’t mean at least some peers aren’t working. There are several dozen meeting rooms in the Houses of Parliament, and they are usually packed with events, such as the one I hosted on Tuesday, about microplastics. It was arranged by Matter, a company with a clear, but entirely in the public good, interest in getting rules to ensure all new washing machines have filters to catch the plastic fibres from articial clothing - 70 per cent of what is sold now. (It makes the filters.) But to its credit, the company also promotes debate about reducing the need through tackling the plastic flood that is choking the world. There’s a useful summary here.

Adam Root, chief executive and founder of Matter, and Sian Sunderland, co-founder of campaign group A Plastic Planet, at the event.

C. Billboards

Great to catch up with Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer at a report launch from the important and growing campaign Ad-Free Cities on how billboards are concentrated in disadvantaged areas.

Billboards are a blight in poorer communities - and so much of it for junk food and gambling: all peddling misery.

A final note

An unexpected acknowledgement for my work on horticulture, both food-growing and environmental, in my listing in Horticulture Week as one of the “Leading Women in Horticulture” (£). Let’s not mention the state of the office pot plants.

So what did you think of this edition of Red Benches? Please let me know.

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