Inside the Lords: mental health, bad tempers and trade-union bureaucrats

Claire Fox reports from the last week inside the Lords before Easter.

We have broken up for the Easter recess, but a lot has happened in the past few weeks. And a lot of it has reflected rather grouchy Labour benches who seem out-of-sorts and unhappy with their own front bench’s policies. This has all made for some interesting, if tetchy, exchanges.

As I’m not affiliated to a political party, I have to choose (and limit) which Bills I want to follow in the Lords, and sometimes that is driven by my personal passions rather than politics per se. Recently, I’ve been involved in discussions about the Mental Health Bill. I was a mental-health social worker many decades ago, so this is a policy area I feel strongly about. It’s a very important piece of legislation addressing state powers to section people.

One gap in the legislation, that I tried to amend, is the question of what happens to those with mental ill-health when they are released from prison. Without continuity of care in the community post-release, those ill ex-prisoners can be left without support, ending up spiralling into a situation in which they may be a threat to themselves or the public. This all culminates in being locked up again - a revolving door that helps no-one.

Prison reform is one of my passions. It is why I have been part of a group of peers constantly raising the scandal of IPP prisoners, many of whom are still imprisoned indefinitely years after their original tariff, despite parliament abolishing the IPP sentence over a decade ago. So, earlier in the week, I challenged the government to provide any data to back up their irrational and cruel decision to exclude considering any IPP prisoners from their emergency early-release scheme:

I also moved an amendment calling for a review of what some have described as a problem of over-diagnosis, whether of ADHD or mental illness, a subject that can cause a lot of controversy. Such conditions are now tangled up with individual identity and NHS inadequacies (my timeline on X is a firestorm of anger and abuse). I have been tracking this development for some years, and indeed wrote about the dangers of pathologising all aspects of life when I wrote my book on free speech, I Find That Offensive! I argued that the young especially are ill-served if we encourage them to see every social, cultural and personal problem through the prism of mental health – it denies them the valuable tools of resilience for example, and helps explain why so many seem to think that encountering offensive views is so traumatic. Since then, this problem has skyrocketed, and increasingly the ups and downs of life, alongside normal emotions like exam stress, anxiety or nervousness, are seen as signs of a medical ‘condition’. In the context of the Mental Health Bill, as I argued in the Lords, services have become inundated with requests for referrals and help. My fear is that this may leave those who genuinely have need of intervention and diagnosis for serious conditions fighting for attention - and often being missed. The SEND crisis in schools is a case in point, and indeed I asked a question on over-diagnosis in schools at a short Lords Question Time:

When I was making my speech on over-diagnosis, I was taken aback that a number of Labour peers seemed particularly incensed - Shami Chakrabarti and others shouting ‘shame’, despite the fact that I was making much the same arguments as put forward by Labour’s Wes Streeting and even Tony Blair recently. What had I said that so incensed them? My thesis – I should not take their angry heckles personally. It’s a displacement activity; in this instance Labour peers are angry at their own health secretary for cutting PIPs (citing over-diagnosis as one reason so many are dependent on disability welfare payments). This rankles with Labour peers, who in opposition were happy to accuse any such moves as proof of the cruelty of evil Tories. Reluctant to attack their own leadership, they lash out.

The cracks in Labour’s ranks are widespread, a problem created by a technocratic approach to governance which lacks any core principles or clear mission. So, when ministers seem to be attacking everything they hold dear, backbenchers let their fury spill over and people like me catch the flak. For example, despite the fact that I congratulated their own justice secretary for taking on the Sentencing Council’s two-tier sentencing proposals, those Labour backbench peers who are more used to their party pushing an identitarian special pleading approach were hissing me!

I must have been in a congratulatory mood because I also gave the government its due for its action relating to NHS England. It is important for democracy that the government has abolished the world's largest unelected quango. But this is not a silver bullet. In Wales, we're told the buck stops with the elected Senedd, but Welsh NHS provision is abysmal and drowning in bureaucrats and red tape:

A debate on the government’s intervention into encryption was another example of this bad temper among the Labour benches. The government is trying to open up a backdoor on services and devices provided by Apple and others to allow messages of private citizens to be accessible to the authorities. Those human-rights lawyer types in the chamber, who can’t use the usual ‘Tory authoritarian’ line, were silently seething as their own government defended attacking civil liberties:

Labour does seem to be in a mess - and the Treasury can sometimes seem so tin-eared. The government was given a chance through ping-ponging amendments to review and/or put right any negative outcomes of their disastrous NIC increases, but the response from the front bench was almost sneering indifference, with the usual £22 billion black-hole cliché wheeled out. Even if it were to be true, why does the government want to attack growth and jobs?

Later on, we had a debate on the decision to cancel council elections - a decision that will deprive 5.5million voters of their right to hold local politicians to account. This was a chance for people to boot some politicians they didn’t like out, and perhaps to support some new blood. It was very annoying to hear the minister treating it as a technical matter. I tried to make clear what's at stake.

Perhaps to try to sooth querulous internal unease in the party, Labour is pursuing some more palatable policies on familiar territory. Something tells me the attempts at creating an anti-Muslim-hatred/Islamophobia definition is one such initiative. Outside of debates in the chamber, I attended a discussion about the government’s working group to provide a definition of anti-Muslim hatred/Islamophobia. I and others queried why there were no non-Muslims invited to be on the working group - aside from Dominic Grieve?! - and whether this kind of identitarian approach might be divisive and inevitably have a chilling impact on legitimate conversations. For the record, I also think the ‘official’ definition of anti-Semitism is equally as dangerous for free speech as one on Islamophobia.

Another example is the much-heralded Employment Rights Bill, which the Labour benches felt very at home discussing. Phew - workers’ rights: after all, the chamber is full of ex-trade-union bureaucrats. Safe territory (even if its hugely burdensome regulatory red tape does clash with all that rhetoric about growth). During the Second Reading debate, it felt like being caught in a time warp. Some of the Tory speeches sounded like a Thatcherite parody and Labour behaved as though at a trade union conference - but then there were three previous TUC general secretaries who are now Lords, as well as myriad other national union leaders and officials. I too was a trade union rep for many years, although very low down the pecking order, and have no problem with trade unionism per se. But times have changed and I am worried about contemporary trade unionism, in which unions throw their members under the bus for voicing what they call ‘controversial’ views - think UCU’s disgraceful treatment of Kathleen Stock or Jo Phoenix, or almost any other academic. Meanwhile the Darlington nurses have even had to set up their own union to ‘protect the dignity of women in the workplace’ after traditional NHS trade unions shunned their courageous fight for single-sex changing rooms for female hospital staff.

If that all makes for pretty depressing reading, know that free speech and open debate is still alive and well in the Lords - in the form of Debating Matters, which held a championship in the Palaces of Westminster last month. I was delighted to have been invited to attend, and it was great watching the debates. When young people come prepared, as Debating Matters demands they do, their arguments can far outweigh anything you might hear in the chamber.

In the spirit of open discussion, I will be speaking at PopConversations with Mark Littlewood on Monday night, 7pm - put your questions to us both to get straight answers. Register for free here.

Finally, if anything indicates the skewed priorities of our government, it’s making policy and promising legislative change based on a fictional Netflix drama. So don’t miss a rare Mea Culpa from me: I was wrong about Adolescence... sort of. Watch my take here, and I’ll see you after Easter: