I would just add a few words to what Lord Tyler has written about the power to subpoena witnesses. I was asked yesterday by a journalist whether a select committee had the power to require someone who was not a UK citizen to appear before it. I pointed out that select committees in the Commons …
Watching the Home Office Select Committee interrogate present and past Met Police Officers this week made me wonder whether the RSCPA should have been called in. I felt that the ferocious MPs on the Committee were (understandably) trying to make up for their previous failure to get anywhere near the full horrendous habits of some…
When I first came to the Lords (1999) the library was inaccessible for me because it was very heavy smoking area. Some of the dining areas were also unpleasant and dominated by cigar smoke. I remember Charles Kennedy coming to an afternoon tea in the Peers Dining Room that I hosted for all of us…
Baroness Meacher has tabled amendments at Report Stage of the Police and Social Responsibility Bill (for debate today Wednesday 13th July) to discuss the issue of ‘legal highs’. Mephedrone was one of the early ones, now there are clever chemists in China and indeed everywhere else creating new synthetic chemical stimulants every week. As one…
Like everybody else I was disappointed that the new Thameslink carriages will be made in Germany and not in Derby. This decision seemed contrary to our ambition to balance the economy more in the direction of manufacturing and less in financial services. After all, look at the success of rescuing Rolls Royce, which is now…
Congratulations to Len and JH who are the winners of the previous quiz. They offered very full answers. For this quiz, I have jettisoned the questions I was going to set – I’ll use them next time – and opted instead for a single and somewhat topical question. Given that the press is now part…
I don’t like the News of the World but I like closing newspapers even less. This is Rupert Murdoch trying to get out of a very deep hole. What about the staff who are suddenly on the dole when no senior person loses their job and the main charges are still unanswered? There are many…
First it was injunctions, now it is hacking. I did not take hacking seriously at first, for after all, as one who spends hours on trains, there seems to be no regard for privacy in the use by the owner of his or her mobile phone. But it has been revealed to have a darker…
The EU Committee of the House of Lords has today published a report on “Innovation in EU Agriculture”. It is the result of an inquiry carried out over the last year by the EU Sub-Committee on Agriculture, Fisheries and the Environment, which I chair. We are calling on Europe to act quickly and coherently to…
