Inside The Lords: small boats, civil servants and petty cash
Claire Fox reports on a turbulent week inside the House of Lords.
Inside The Lords this week, we first heard a ‘repeat’ of the statement from the government about plans to crack down on illegal immigration. Unfortunately - but perhaps unsurprisingly - this was used by both parties to engage in some rather tiresome mudslinging. Both were as bad as each other. The Labour Party continued to sound like they will never concede on any plan to battle small-boat crossings, hiding behind international law as though it’s an immutable block; but the Conservatives made out that the opposition were all for ‘open borders’, which just sounds like cynical electioneering. What the country needs is a proper debate on immigration - perhaps even broader than the small-boats issue, looking at the entire system and seeing what needs to change. Instead, we seem to be playing the same old game of caricaturing one another.
The real danger doesn’t lie in Suella Braverman or anyone else using ‘incendiary language’ about levels of illegal migration, but in gaslighting people who say there is a problem with border enforcement being out of control. By the way - you’re not a country if you can’t control your own borders. You don’t have to support the government’s blunt approach to the issue, but if you keep telling people that there’s ‘nothing to see here’ or that they can’t do anything for fear of breaching international law, they’ll start to disbelieve the whole system. We don’t want people to become cynical about the concept of asylum - but it’s hard not to when the conversation is so censorious.
The other big talking point in parliament this week is the row over civil service impartiality. Again, Braverman has been accused of impugning the civil service’s reputation by allegedly criticising them as a block. Whether she did say it or not - she wouldn’t be entirely wrong. We all know that from Brexit to the gender wars, there is a problem in the civil service of political bias getting in the way of enacting the democratic will. None of this is helped by the timing of the Sue Gray appointment, which even senior, ex-civil servants have shaken their head at. We need to talk about these things - which is why I urge you to read our Substack on this topic and listen to our Battle of Ideas festival debate on it. Let us know what you think.
Aside from big political hot potatoes, I’ve also been speaking on other issues like financial services and whether a totally cashless society is a good thing (it’s not). We’ve also been going through the process of discussing which EU law to keep, which to trash and which to reinvent during the Retained EU Law Bill. While I may not be able to do the detailed legalistic scrutiny, I have a good nose for BS. It’s always worth calling out double speak, whatever the law is, and whether from the government or the opposition benches.