Inside The Lords: farmers, football and Emily Damari

Bring them home: Claire Fox wraps up the final week Inside The Lords before Christmas.

It’s Parliament’s last day today. Despite Christmas being round the corner, it’s been a bit hard to feel festive inside the Lords, as the Labour Party seems hellbent on rushing through lots of things before we break up. I don’t say this to be sectarian - but it really feels like this government doesn’t quite know how to govern.

One example was a debate initiated on family farming - a really wonderful discussion, but there was only one Labour backbencher there and that was the head of the Countryside Alliance who has come out against Labour’s plans for farms and inheritance tax. The minister was all alone, and despite many explanations from peers about how the figures on inheritance tax were wrong and that this move would target the wrong people, he simply read out the ‘computer says no’ speech. In fact, he even suggested there was a moral panic being created around it. See my speech on the issue below:

We then had another discussion on abolishing hereditary peers, this time with a packed chamber. There’s nothing justifiable about the hereditary principle - but neither is there a democratic justification for those of us who have been appointed, or law Lords, or bishops. When Blair was elected, Labour promised that no hereditary peers would be removed until there was a general reform of the House of Lords, a promise which this government has now broken. It’s a cheap move - and an indictment of their lack of ambition that they’re not able to tackle the real issues with an unelected chamber. And - would you believe it - Keir Starmer is rumoured to be nominating a whole new slew of peers, including his erstwhile chief of staff, Sue Gray. You couldn’t make it up.

I spent a long time this week discussing the Football Governance Bill, which is a problem for many reasons. Most egregiously, the Labour Party wishes to set up a state-appointed regulator that could strip a club of its licence if it failed to meet any of the requirements of this Bill. That is outrageous. The reason why I got involved is because Labour has boasted about its desire to make one of those requirements an EDI policy. There are already rules outlining that the state should not get involved in football - doing so can risk being kicked out of the European leagues. And yet, here we have our government explicitly trying to make football political. The government have even had the nerve to accuse those of us trying to scrutinise this Bill of ‘filibustering’. To punish us, they ensured that the House was sitting until midnight! They won’t accept anything other than cheerleading.

Here is a link to a thread of my speeches, which you can watch on X/Twitter, including my amendment below, which was to remove the mandatory requirement for EDI in all football teams and threats of losing their license should they not comply:

The question of politics and football is tricky. On the one hand, I hate the forced wearing of rainbow laces, taking the knee and so on. But football fans themselves can bring moments of clarity, in spontaneous political expression. Spurs fans did that this week, cheering for Emily Damari, the British hostage left rotting under Hamas kidnap. Her uncle Robin also drew attention to the fact that his team, Crystal Palace, has released a statement in solidarity with the hostages after the news of the pogrom last October.

This kind of grassroots support matter - because Emily’s name should be mentioned every day in parliament. In years past, parliamentarians campaigned for British hostages, but David Lammy and others, while they might talk about ceasefires, fail to champion her. I will mention Emily every moment I can, and demand, as we all should, that we bring her and her fellow hostages home.