Lords
Proceedings
14 July 2026
Violence Against Retail Workers
My Lords, last week I met a group of retail workers from across the country, not represented by the big trade associations but from local convenience stores and corner shops. Is the noble Lord aware that their specific concerns at present focus on the violence coming from pop-up vape shops? These ar…
Lords
Committee Stage
9 July 2026
Contemporary Cultural Boycotts
My Lords, I am delighted to have the chance to bring to the attention of the Government and the Committee the themes in this recent report, The New Boycott Crisis. If we value art as a crucial mirror on society, the corruption of art reflects social trends right back at us and we should look back cl…
Lords
Proceedings
2 July 2026
Imprisonment for Public Protection
My Lords, I will be there on 15 July and urge everybody to go to the MoJ and join in—advert over. The point was made that we see these as trivial offences but some of them are serious, but what is trivialised is the recall. The mother of the prisoner to whom the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, referred rec…
Lords
Proceedings
3 June 2026
Murder of Henry Nowak
My Lords, close to the end, the Minister said that this has nothing to do with racism, but it does, because the murderer played the race card and the police believed the murderer and his family about racism rather than the dying Henry, who, because of those accusations, died thinking that the state …
Lords
Proceedings
18 May 2026
King’s Speech
My Lords, I want to focus on dilemmas around national security at home. I fear that relevant Bills in the gracious Speech betray some confusion about who the enemy is, and this disorientation can mean laws and policy that punish the wrong people. This was brought home by the points made by the noble…
Lords
Debate
28 April 2026
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
My Lords, I thank the Government for listening to the voices of concern, including those of the bereaved parents, for our children’s safety to be at the forefront of all our minds.
As we move forward to the next steps, it might be a bit late in the day to make this suggestion, but I have an idea to…
Lords
Debate
24 April 2026
5 contributions
Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill
My Lords, we will hear from the Cross Benches.
My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Baroness for letting me get in. I have sat through 13 days of Committee on this Bill and I have hardly spoken at all. I will cut what I intended to say, as I know we are beginning to run out of time, to allow others who still want to come in to have a chance…
+3 more contributions in this session
Lords
Debate
22 April 2026
Crime and Policing Bill
My Lords, I thank the Minister for the Motions in his name, and I am pleased to see the government Amendments 11C to 11F to include guidance on evidence collection and the exercise of seizure powers in the Secretary of State’s statutory guidance. We are happy to accept these. But I add that it is ov…
Lords
Debate
20 April 2026
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
My Lords, I say at the outset that I shall support the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, should she choose to test the opinion of the House, and the noble Lord, Lord Nash. What I have already said at great length is recorded in Hansard , so I will just say that the scope, the timing, the lack of scrutiny…
Lords
Debate
16 April 2026
2 contributions
Crime and Policing Bill
My Lords, Motions C, D and E relate to the several amendments on fly-tipping the Conservatives tabled on Report. I thank the Government for their amendment on points on licences for fly-tipping offences. Although our previous arguments in support of this policy were opposed by the Government, I welc…
My Lords, I moved Motion Q at the beginning of the debate but was, I confess, slow out of the blocks. I should have spoken to Motion Q before Motion Q1 was moved, but I was concentrating on the Marshalled List and missed my opportunity. But the principles are the same.
The Government cannot support…
Lords
Proceedings
15 April 2026
2 contributions
Southport Inquiry
My Lords, I cannot imagine what it is like for the parents of those three little girls and the other injured children to hear the key word that was used in relation to the inquiry: that these events were “preventable”. That is the most chilling idea: they could have been stopped. The butcher behind …
My Lords, I do not usually call for bans, but I would like to call for a ban on the phrase “lessons must be learned”. That is what makes the public feel cynical. I have been here for a few years, and “lessons must be learned” has been said so often to me, but none has ever been learned, as far as I …
Lords
Oral Questions
15 April 2026
NHS Adult Gender Identity Clinics
I am not quite clear about the questions I am being asked. However, I return to the point about safeguards and say to your Lordships’ House that I have already outlined the strong safeguards, the professionalism and the medically informed evidence. Contrary to what is being suggested, there is no ca…
Lords
Debate
27 March 2026
7 contributions
Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Cass—that was totally compelling. We will all have to read it and reread it, but it gave us a real sense of what it would be like. Sometimes, we are talking in the abstract.
In a more concrete sense, I think of this group of amendments as the workers’ righ…
“For goodness’ sake”—well, a bit of empathy might be helpful.
Our main focus is understandably on doctors, even nurses, but we must be careful not to assume that those with medical degrees—the professionals—are entitled to a greater respect for their consciences than other relevant workers: like po…
+5 more contributions in this session
Lords
Debate
25 March 2026
6 contributions
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
I do not want to delay, and I have written a lot more.
At the very least, to finish off, I would have thought that, before Parliament embarks on such drastic measures in delegated power form, handing these powers over to the Government—I note that the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, said that they were o…
I keep being interrupted. In Australia, after the ban more than 50% of children are still using social media. Teens are being pushed underground, away from mainstream platforms into darker corners of the internet, without safeguards and with zero moderation. It is risky and dangerous behaviour. Rath…
+4 more contributions in this session
Lords
Debate
20 March 2026
4 contributions
Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Llanfaes; that was a tour de force. Goodness knows, we rarely agree, and I am hardly a Plaid supporter, but I am from Wales. I want to reflect on couple of tiny things that she said in why I wanted to speak.
Family and friends in Wales were comple…
My Lords, I cannot let the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, get away with that. What happened on Wednesday night was a separate issue. As it happens, I argued for a change in the law in relation to decriminalising abortion—but now I am on this side. This sort of easy “swatting away”, “culture war”-style ar…
+2 more contributions in this session
Lords
Debate
18 March 2026
2 contributions
Crime and Policing Bill
My Lords, I wanted to sound really definitive in saying that I oppose Amendment 424 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, which would remove Clause 208, and that I oppose Amendments 425 and 426D. However, the good thing about this place is that I listened to the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf…
I have finished. That was it.
Lords
Debate
18 March 2026
Crime and Policing Bill
My Lords, I have a lot of sympathy with trying to tackle ways of taking away the romantic attachment to terrorism as some kind of heroic endeavour, so I completely understand the reasons for this amendment. However, I cannot see how it would work in practice at present. I cannot see how it would dea…
Lords
Debate
13 March 2026
4 contributions
Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill
I thank the noble and learned Lord for a comprehensive and useful set of answers. I asked a rather more banal question—it was a long time ago—about workforce challenges. What if the social workers or the psychiatrists cannot be found? We are already acutely short of psychiatrists and social workers …
My Lords, what influenced me to look positively at a number of amendments in this group, and to table Amendment 150, was that some jurisdictions with assisted dying legislation explicitly prohibit doctors from initiating assisted dying discussions. I know that there was a bit of a row earlier about …
+2 more contributions in this session
Lords
Debate
11 March 2026
3 contributions
Crime and Policing Bill
My Lords, I thoroughly welcome these sensible and proportionate amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, which he more than ably explained. I was prompted to speak on Amendment 393B having just read the Government’s Protecting What Matters action plan. I have plenty to say on that, bu…
My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 407, on the recording of sex in police data. It is a real shame that the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, is unable to be with us because she would have introduced it very elegantly.
A year ago, in March 2025, Professor Alice Sullivan’s Review of Data, Statistics and R…
+1 more contribution in this session
Lords
Debate
11 March 2026
Crime and Policing Bill
My Lords, I want to give enthusiastic support to this amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Sater. I think that a criminal record disclosure regime is very important—we all understand that we do not want the worst of the worst working with children and so on —but the impact on rehabilita…
Lords
Debate
9 March 2026
2 contributions
Crime and Policing Bill
My Lords, I know a young man who has just got his driving licence. He is very excited and sees it as a rite of passage; he is now a grown-up. He has joined the club of drivers and he shows his driving licence with pride. I can assure noble Lords he has no idea that applying for a driving licence mea…
My Lords, to follow on from the noble Baroness, Lady Lawrence of Clarendon, one difficulty that we have had in relation to any discussion such as this is that the police are under an enormous amount of pressure because of the horrible things that happen—understatement of the year—to imagine that all…
Lords
Debate
9 March 2026
4 contributions
Crime and Policing Bill
My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 369, which would introduce an express statutory right to protest and impose negative and positive obligations on authorities that recognise the right to protest. We were told in Committee, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, has reminded us, and we have bee…
It might well be that that protester is just on a general demonstration. If you are an Iranian or Chinese dissident, you might be on a civil rights demonstration, arguing for the right to protest. That would equally be the target of the ire of your authoritarian, anti-protest, anti-civil liberty reg…
+2 more contributions in this session
Lords
Debate
4 March 2026
6 contributions
Crime and Policing Bill
My Lords, I want to clarify or come back on a couple of things.
I will ask a question then. I understand that the noble Lord says that this has been trivialised into just Twitter or non-crime hate incidents. However, hate crime law very often involves speech. Therefore, it is not just a question of GBH and so on. Also, one of the reasons why it has not been poss…
+4 more contributions in this session
Lords
Debate
4 March 2026
2 contributions
Crime and Policing Bill
My Lords, I have serious reservations about the Government’s amendments on aggravated offences. I appreciate that this puts me at odds with the Minister, but I knew that long before today, because in Committee he made a passionate speech, as he has today, telling us how proud he would be to move the…
To clarify, in the first example I gave, of Helen Joyce, it was called criminal harassment for the tweets and the aggravated factors. The police actually dropped it in the end, but they—not me but the police—called it criminal harassment with transgender aggravators. In the example I was giving, the…
Lords
Debate
3 March 2026
4 contributions
Tobacco and Vapes Bill
My Lords, following on from that very useful contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, it goes without saying that the amendments in this group on the tensions between the Bill and the Windsor Framework are crucial. I want to commend the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, for leading on this issue, beca…
My Lords, I shall be brief, because the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, has explained what his amendment is trying to do. I just want to query whether narrowing the powers before the science is settled is an admirable aspiration. That gives authoritarian power to the Government to do anything they want bec…
+2 more contributions in this session