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Queen’s Speech

My Lords, two very important events will take place during the period that the gracious Speech covers. The first is the effort to come to an agreement in Copenhagen next month. No doubt speeches in your Lordships’ House will cover that with great effect in the coming days. The other important event, which was touched on in the speeches last Thursday, is the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference in May 2010. I know that the Minister will be as concerned as I am about many of the ramifications of that treaty regarding its ability, for example, to deal with the proliferation of fissile material, the proper funding of the IAEA in the future, and all the ramifications, not just as regards the proliferation of weapons but dealing with their effect on terrorism. It is an incredibly important moment for the world, but as was pointed out last Thursday, it comes at a difficult time for this country, because the conference will be held in May 2010. As a country, we are likely to have our eyes on the elections. It concerns me, as it concerned my noble friend Lady Williams of Crosby and the noble Lord, Lord Hannay of Chiswick, that a high-level eye should be kept on that ball by the Government and opposition parties in the run-up to that review conference. I was dismayed by the response of the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, who did not reply in detail to the points they made. I want to highlight the importance of political will in getting things right for that conference. I am sure the Minister accepts that. Set against the negotiations on those dramatic international treaties, it is hard to refocus one’s eyes on some of the more detailed points that must be addressed in the Bills proposed by the Government in the gracious Speech. I wish to touch on two. One is the draft Immigration Simplification Bill which is unlikely to come before us as legislation before May. The Government have said that they are putting the Bill out for consultation but at the moment it fails to address the need for a route to safety for refugees. For far too long in this country, our perception of economic migrants has been conflated with asylum seekers. It will be a disgrace if the consultation on asylum support suggests that the Government are determined just to make life more difficult and miserable for asylum seekers. The draft Bill refers to a new streamlined power of expulsion to replace the current powers of deportation and removal. I look forward to hearing more detail on that and, no doubt, the Government will organise meetings on the draft Bill over the coming months. It is a matter of enormous regret that we are discussing a draft Bill of such sensitivity in the run-up to an election. It would be a great mistake if it was used for election headlines. It was particularly telling that when last Tuesday evening Channel 4 screened the film "No Way Home", about children travelling on top of a train through central America to the United States, the TV critic for the Times, Andrew Billen, made the same point that President Eva Morales of Bolivia has been making for some time, that it is difficult to imagine a world where free trade is everything but there is no free movement of labour. We should also bear that in mind in forthcoming trade talks. My last point relates to the Digital Economy Bill. It has been suggested that a more appropriate name for it should be the "Internet Policing Bill". It would place a duty on internet service providers to intercept the web traffic of users to see whether they were illegally downloading. Given that we are subject to infraction proceedings by the European Union regarding the illegal trials by Phorm and BT of interception of web traffic, there is much to be discussed in the Bill. Some of it relates to the Home Office. There are many precedents for young people who share music. I am sure that all your Lordships used blank tapes to record LPs when you were young. I accept that the commercial scale of downloading—