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Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am glad to follow the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, and I recognise the clarity with which he said that he does not feel that the scientific community has a monopoly of wisdom in this area and neither does any other section of the community, whether politicians or whoever. That is right. We certainly agree on that point although, having listened to the rest of his excellent speech, I suspect on nothing else. I have only three points to make, and I shall not elaborate on the points I made in Committee. First, the House has the opportunity to be ahead of the curve in reflecting the views of the population outside this House and another place. Despite the turmoil of the past few months since August—worries about the economy since the sub-prime crisis and the problems and gyrations in the stock market—it is a reasonable generality to say that, in the past few years, much public concern and discourse has concentrated as much on cultural issues as on political issues, all the more so because a lot of the economic debate of the past half century seems to have been rather laid to rest with the coming together of both the main political parties on public expenditure and their economic plans. That is why we have seen that concentration of the general public on matters such as the environment, climatic change and the overarching issue of care for creation, whether that creation came about by chance, as some might suggest, or by divine intervention, as those on the Bishops’ Bench would suggest. Right behind that is growing concern about the dignity of the human person, what happens as a result of manipulating humankind and how fast it is occurring, as the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, pointed out. That can be summed up in the tabloid shorthand of ““cloning””. The general public are becoming ever more doubtful that the ethical issues surrounding these matters are any longer empty of meaning or that they should be left as the preserve of the specialist—the religious, the scientists or whoever else. I am firmly convinced, and much persuaded by the argument made by the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, that the public need a source of trusted guidance on these issues that rises above the fray of debate. They need a place of resort to which they can refer and to which they can reply that is above the fray of full-on scientific advance at all costs or the satisfaction, for example, of adult needs and wants above all else. I do not think science has anything to be frightened of, and I am rather concerned that scientific opinion seems rather frightened of a national bioethics commission. My second point is that we need a national human bioethics commission that has representatives of different points of view—the strongly scientific and the strongly concerned with human dignity. I metaphorically tear up the rest of my speech on that because the points have been made by the noble Baroness, Lady Williams. Thirdly, such a commission would need to be chaired by a woman or a man who was known to be dispassionately above the fray of debate, neither passionately for nor against this, that or the other. He or she would need to be a figure of real substance, deserving of the greatest public respect—the sort of person who we might seek out to oversee, for example, a committee on standards in public life. He or she would need to be generally recognised as having an Olympian and dispassionate view and as being able to deal with the whole range of views, from members who believed in sex selection or full reproductive cloning to the upholders, as they saw it, of the dignity of life. I cannot see what the Government are frightened of in this, particularly not our formidable new Chief Whip, who I am sure is frightened of nothing at all. Why should she be afeared of a national bioethics commission for proper debate that rises above—for the fourth and last time—the fray of scientific or religious dispute? I hope that she will not take it amiss if, like a little lord echo, I say again what was said by the noble Baroness, Lady Williams: it is a tragedy that so much of the proceedings of the Bill and the characteristically excellent ebb and flow of debate has been marred by the application of a heavy, three-line Whip on what in this place and in another place has traditionally been a matter for individual, conscientious discussion.