Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Markham’s Amendment 71. It was criticised from all the other Benches on grounds of fairness. I just want to interrogate slightly what the critics mean when they say that this regulator will make things fairer. We are famously a fair-minded people—you can always appeal to a Brit’s sense of fair play—but the word can be ambiguous. Does it mean equity, merit or need? Suppose that the noble Lord, Lord Bassam of Brighton, and I were to buy a cake together, and he spent £3 on it and I spent £2. What would be the fair distribution? Would it be a 60:40 distribution—in other words, dependent on what we had put in? Would it be 50:50? Would it depend on which of us looked hungrier—in other words, based on need? Sometimes these things are all merged together. I find that, in politics, the word is a kind of boast; it is used to mean, “Look at me: I am a nice, caring person”. It is a way of signalling your decency: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” When applied to this particular case, we are in danger of entering into a kind of Atlas Shrugged world, where we politicians and state regulators decide what is fair, rather than leaving it to those most involved. The noble Lord, Lord Addington, says that we want a regulator that can bite and leave scars. I would rather not have the scars. I would rather have our extremely successful football system unscarred. He added that it existed for decades without regulation, which I think tells us something. I accept that we have lost that argument and will get some kind of regulator, but I appeal to the Government, at least on the other amendments in this group. The Minister, at Second Reading and again at the start of Committee, repeatedly said that she wanted the scope of the regulator to be restricted, and I do not for a second doubt her sincerity. We also have heard lots of people on all sides already trying to extend its scope—not to limit and circumscribe it but quite the opposite. Indeed, if we look down the list of some of these amendments, we see that, even before it has come into law, people are saying that it needs to apply to women’s games, we need regulations on diversity of ticket holders, and so on.