Contribution
My Lords, this has been a long and very interesting debate, and I am extremely grateful to everybody who has contributed. To the people who have said very nice things about me, thank you very much; it is not deserved but it is very kind.
It was encouraging that there were lots of suggestions about how the ODC concept could be improved and made more appropriate. I am really interested in getting this conversation going so that we can get something important into the public consciousness: that we are aware of and are tackling this problem head-on. The only problem I have is with people who say there is not a problem, because there clearly is a problem and we need to face up to it.
I will just pick up a couple of points because I am aware that we have been here for some time. I thank my fellow long marchers, the noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington, who has been on this for a long time, my noble friend Lord Horam and the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, from whom I was hoping to hear but I know it went sideways. I had not realised that we had a hidden long marcher in the shape of the noble Lord, Lord Hacking, who has been at it for 53 years, apparently, which is very good, so I ask him to become an honorary long marcher with us.
It is important to think carefully about how this is impacting across the piece. My noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe raised the impact on older people: 30% of people aged over 50 are unemployed. Can that be a good and useful way for us, as a society, to behave?
I thought that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester, for the first time from those Benches, said something about which I thought “hello”. It was a question about how many people we can absorb. It was a really important and courageous point to have made because, in the past, people have said we should have safe and legal routes without ever saying where they are coming from and how many there are going to be. I really appreciate and support what the right reverend Prelate said.
My roommate, the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, has kept me on the straight and narrow. Your Lordships have seen his legal expertise, which enables him to fillet a problem in no time at all.
Finally, my noble friend Lord Blencathra is a worthy guerrilla fighter, but, unfortunately, the guerillas are heading back to the hills, because we could not get colleagues in the Commons to pick up the torch and run with it. The background is that the Executive are taking part at the expense of the legislature, and they are still doing it. When we had our debates on those reports, the noble Lord, Lord Collins of Highbury—who is a great friend—used to nod enthusiastically from the opposite Benches about how we had to do something about it. Now that he is on the Government’s side, somehow, it is “Oh dear, I’m not sure we can quite do it that way”. There is a battle to be fought, but it has to be done from the Back Benches and it has to include the Commons, without which the first thing the Government will say is that unelected Lords are trying to teach the elected Commons how to do its work. It is game over once that is said; it is a dog whistle that always resonates.
I thank everybody who has participated and will finish with one minute of a very personal nature. When I was younger, I went to a business school in America. People used to come to talk to us who were not businessmen to tell us something about the world outside business. We had a concert pianist once and so on. On one occasion, we had an agronomist talking about soil management and how it was key to maintaining outputs. He introduced us to a man called George Washington Carver, who was the first Afro-American agronomist who studied in the Mississippi Delta. He found that sharecroppers trying to scrape a living out of cotton-growing had not realised that, if they grew cotton out of the same soil all the time, it would be depleted; you need break crops, such as sweet potatoes and peanuts. But he was not just an agronomist; he was a philosopher. On that day, 60 years ago, we were told what his philosophy was, which I will use as my parting words. These are Mr Carver’s words:
“How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday … you will have been all of these”.
With that, I take my leave.