The Web of Evil

The government are announcing some tweaks to the Bank of England and Financial Services Bill, notable mainly for repealing (before it had even had a chance to be introduced) a measure designed by the coalition that would have found senior bankers responsible for wrongdoing on their watch even if the regulators had no proof they personally had broken the rules. This might have concentrated minds a bit in the financial sector but, given the modern City’s overreliance on rate-fixing and moneylaundering, it was never going to survive for long under a purely Tory government.

That contentious business is behind us now, though, and we’ve moved on to some mere tidying-up at the end. It’s all pretty dry stuff.

Lord Bridges of Headley: My Lords, the amendments in this group are being made to correct an error made in the National Savings Regulations 2015. Those regulations revoked a number of statutory instruments with effect from 6 April 2015. By mistake, these included the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Consequential Amendments and Repeals) Order 2001, which I will refer to as the 2001 order. The 2001 order, which was revoked, was used to make most of the consequential amendments and repeals that were required to give effect to the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. It amended a range of primary and secondary legislation, including the Companies Acts, the Bank of England Act 1998, the Building Societies Act 1986, the Pensions Acts and other legislation related to financial services. In some cases, the amendments made by the 2001 order have been superseded by subsequent legislative developments, but in many cases they are still necessary, and the repeal of the instrument making them has left the law in a state of considerable uncertainty.

Wait, what? The department, like every other, had been tasked with binning as much previous footling legislation as possible. In its eagerness to do so, it overlooked the fact that one of the orders it was wiping out actually made some important changes to central legislation, which therefore—technically—immediately snapped back to its original state, where it has remained since April. Myriad legalistic horrors rear up at that point, with people and organisations suddenly and unexpectedly falling foul of regulations that until a moment before had said something quite different.



How do you fix such a spectacular snafu? By making it never have happened:

Lord Bridges of Headley: The only way in which this regrettable uncertainty can be cured is for the revocation of the 2001 order to be cancelled out. That is what the amendments do. Amendment 27 provides that this revocation shall be taken as never having had effect. This amendment would have retrospective effect. We do not believe anyone would be adversely affected by the amendment. On the contrary, the law will be assumed to be as it was in force before the accidental revocation of the 2001 order. This amendment will restore the law to what it is presumed to be.

Just like that, the Treasury are reaching back into the past and erasing their error from history. At no point will this law ever not have applied. At the last minute they have set our dimension back on its correct path as we go about our daily lives, oblivious to the carnage that has been averted and not aware how grateful we should be to our intrepid timecops.

Above all I’m sure that, like mine, your confidence in our political institutions has been reinforced no end by the fact that a set of regulations, which was scrutinised by both Houses, essentially deleted a chunk of existing and implemented primary legislation and not a soul noticed for months.

Debate on the Report of the European Union Committee on The EU and Russia: before and beyond the crisis in Ukraine
( Full speech here ) Ukraine is a country that I love and respect. If any of your Lordships would like a bit of fun, I would willingly take you down to look at the old missile factory, although it is not producing missiles anymore. The people there are still nice. [Hansard]

( Etc. )

Lord Cameron of Dillington: This long-lasting sore on the face of responsible access to the countryside has got to be firmly gripped, and soon.

Baroness Howells of St Davids: Some may not have heard of her, but a woman called Mary Seacole, despite many prejudices, went out to nurse the soldiers of the British service. I have met men who have spoken and written about her role in saving the lives of British soldiers. She may have been considered an unqualified nurse but, being of African descent, she used her bush medicine—they told me—and kept many men alive. Some are now probably on the brink of not being alive. [Hansard]

Mary Seacole, of course, was a nurse in the Crimean war, a noted highlight of the 1850s. The last known survivor of that war did actually die surprisingly late, in 2004, but then she was a giant tortoise that had been used as a ship's mascot.

   
They're in a debate about World War I commemorations. They have a speakers list, with a rough time limit for each speech of eight minutes. Lord West is in the middle of his contribution (where he also said this), talking about post-traumatic stress in soldiers shot for desertion, when he notices the noble Baroness, Lady Trumpington, sitting on the benches opposite, waving imperiously at him with her stick. (Hansard has made her say "My Lords" because there is no official procedure line for "waves imperiously at speaker with stick".)

Baroness Trumpington (Con): My Lords—

Lord West of Spithead (Lab): I am sorry, did the noble Baroness want to speak?

Baroness Trumpington: Yes, I want to say something. Hurry up and say what you are going to say.

Lord West of Spithead: I shall give way.

Baroness Trumpington: I have a question for the Minister. My father served as a regular soldier in the 9th Bengal Lancers. As such, he fought, and won an MC, in Mesopotamia. What is Mesopotamia these days? [Murmuring. One or two Peers sitting near her helpfully whisper "Iraq" but she doesn't hear them.] Is it involved in future commemoration events? Will the commemorative events go further to include India, which sent a great many people?

The Minister can't answer any questions until the end of the debate, some three hours later. He shrugs and waves wildly at Lord West to continue. Lord West gallantly tries to find some way of tying what Baroness Trumpington has just said to his own speech:

Lord West of Spithead: Yes; Mesopotamia, Iraq—it is all still in a mess, isn’t it? The best ever intelligence on Mesopotamia was the Naval Intelligence Division notes, which were actually jolly useful and I wish that we had read them better before we decided to go into that bloody place. [Hansard]

If you were in a particularly cynical mood you might argue that Iraq is indeed commemorating the fighting of a hundred years ago by enthusiastically re-enacting it, but that very likely wasn't the noble Baroness's point.

Lord Hoyle winds up his contribution to a classic Thursday afternoon low-impact debate in the Lords (“That this House takes note of the role of government in generating economic prosperity and employment”) with an improvised flourish that could almost be accused of being tautologous:

Lord Hoyle: If [the Government set up a business investment bank], not only will we benefit, but all of us in the country and the country as a whole will benefit as well.

Are these three ways of saying the same thing? Or are there subtle gradations of meaning between them? psychonomy is firmly convinced that the first “we” refers to members of the Lords listening to Lord Hoyle's speech, several of whom could well make a fortune out of any such investment bank.

That leaves “all of us in the country” and “the country as a whole” to contend with. Perhaps they are indeed separate categories: “the country as a whole” could cover the geographical extent of the UK and any things that it contains, such as infrastructure and geological features, while “all of us in the country” could, as psychonomy firmly contends, take in not only the population but any visitors from abroad (in line, it turns out, with the existing definition of “licence fee payers”), although this doesn't seem to take into account people from that population who are currently elsewhere.

It's unclear which category animals fall into. Does the degree of consciousness dictate whether a beloved pet is merely part of “the country as a whole” or can be counted among “all of us in the country”? With one ostensibly innocuous sentence, the noble Lord has plunged us into a philosophical rabbit-hole.

In the event, though, after much discussion, we think we have nailed down what Lord Hoyle was driving at:

Full marks to Lord Taylor of Holbeach. In a question about allegations by the Metropolitan Black Police Association that the Met is still drenched in racism 20 years after the Stephen Lawrence case, Lord Waddington chips in with what, even for him, is—despite the years that I've worked here, and I know this sort of thing shouldn’t surprise me any more—a jaw-dropping contribution. Lord Taylor has to frame his answer carefully and on the hoof, and all credit to him for that.

Lord Waddington: My Lords, does this not come close to the pot calling the kettle black? What could be more institutionally racist than insisting on having a black police association?

Lord Taylor of Holbeach: For my part, I am reassured that any drivers that ensure that the police more fully reflect the communities that they serve must be a good thing, so I cannot join with my noble friend in this regard. A lot of progress has been made in increasing the number of police officers from BME backgrounds but there are still too few, and there are still too few in the higher ranks of the police force. I hope that one of the considerations of the direct entry scheme will be to ensure that some of the higher levels of the policing profession are from British minority ethnic backgrounds. [Hansard]

Is this a thing? I had no idea. *downloads Land of Hope and Glory*

Lord Soulsby of Swaffham Prior: This country is well known for its ability to sedate wildlife.

One of those times where it's very hard to tell whether or not someone's being sarcastic.
Democratic Republic of Congo

Question

Asked by Lord Ashcroft

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether the Foreign Secretary achieved all the objectives of his recent visit to the Democratic Republic of the Congo with Angelina Jolie. [Hansard]

Baroness Hamwee: My Lords, when I went to see the latest Bond film, "Skyfall", there were two Members of your Lordships' House in the audience. I think we both found that the least credible part of the film, which was a high hurdle, of course, was the active executive role taken by the chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee. [Hansard]