Lord Moynihan of Chelsea (Con)

I thank the noble Baroness. It is a pity we are discussing football and not chess, where maybe the clock would have been stopped to give me the time I would need in view of that lengthy interruption. The noble Baroness has made my point. In life, one takes risks. The fact that we have in this country the best football in the world is because enormous risks were taken in setting up the Premier League, and it has been enormously successful. The noble Baroness was basically saying, “We know best and, to impose our view of how it should be—the non-commercial view—we will have a regulator. By the way, when we have the regulator, we will impose all sorts of little baubles on the Christmas tree”, as we discussed earlier in these debates. One example was EDI. She was basically saying, “We will impose EDI on all football clubs. Just as that pernicious doctrine is fading away, we’re going to impose it”. The Labour Party—God bless—won an election and has the right to impose these Bills. I am merely warning about what will happen. I wrote to the Minister, who very kindly responded at length. The Labour Government often pray in aid the McKinsey studies on how EDI is a jolly good thing and leads to better organisations. I wrote to her pointing out that the McKinsey work has been completely discredited. She kindly wrote back to me saying, “Yes, I agree that the McKinsey work has been discredited, but many other studies have not been discredited and show that EDI is a jolly good thing”. So I called one of the most senior people at McKinsey and said, “Your studies have all been discredited, haven’t they?”. He said yes. I said, “Well, people are saying that there are many other studies that support the EDI idea”. He said, “There aren’t any. We’ve looked for them. They aren’t there”. The Minister did not give me examples—she may have examples, but she did not give me any in the letter—of anything but the utterly discredited McKinsey idea of EDI. That is just one example of the kind of baubles that have been put on this Christmas tree and that will make things worse in our industry. It is indeed late, as noble Baroness said, and I will try to wrap up. We do not know best; the market knows best. The market has produced one of the most extraordinarily successful industries that we have in this country. We are going to try to take the market away and impose on it all sorts of rules. I am here just to put down a marker—