Lord Moynihan (Con)

My Lords, I will speak for the first time today to support my noble friend’s amendment, because it is important to set this Bill in context. I, for one, am not in favour of the financial regulation in the Bill. I have a degree of support for many of the amendments that came out of the Tracey Crouch review, and the propositions on fan-led change are reasonable for the Premier League to consider. What worries me is that we are introducing—the only country in the western world to do so—the imposition of regulatory control over one of our major sports. Even countries such as Russia and China, which have sports laws, recognise the overall authority of the International Olympic Committee, FIFA and UEFA. They do so in recognition that they would not be able to host or to participate in their sporting events if they did not accept that overall authority. On the first day in Committee, it was clear that the Government were not prepared to countenance putting the important rider in the legislation that we would do nothing that would threaten the role and playing of our clubs in European competitions and the World Cup—and, if we include women’s football, in the Olympic Games too, but that is a matter for a latter amendment. I am concerned about the imposition of regulatory control, being the only country that does this, because, as was rightly pointed out by my noble friend, this does not in any way generate growth. On the contrary, it proposes a whole series of measures that will restrict the competitiveness of the clubs in the Premier League, which, in turn, will mean that the waterfall of financial support that comes through to all professional football in this country is lessened, not increased. I speak from the position of somebody who has had the privilege of being involved in sport for 30 or 40 years. When I was interested in becoming a Member of Parliament, I wanted to go to Moscow as an athlete for the Olympic Games. Had we legislated that the athletes could not go, I would not have been permitted to go. As it was, I led a campaign for the athletes to go against the boycott that my then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, strongly supported. I felt that, under the autonomy and independence of sport and the vital principle that sportsmen and sportswomen should not be political pawns, it was right for the competitors, who wanted to go, to compete in Moscow, however much they may have opposed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, as indeed I did. I recognised that to use sportsmen and sportswomen as the only way to demonstrate opposition to the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union was wrong, when people could buy tickets for Aeroflot in Piccadilly and go to watch the Bolshoi in Leningrad, and while trade and diplomatic relations continued.