On 20th February 2024, the Bishop of Southwark made a speech during the second reading of the Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill, raising the potential issue of religious education foundations being affected inadvertently by the bill, and expressing concern about the far-reaching implications of the bill:
The Lord Bishop of Southwark: My Lords, I expect that the name of Field-Marshal Julius Jakob Freiherr von Haynau does not elicit the sort of interest that once it did in your Lordships’ House. He was, none the less, a staple of O-level history when that subject would have elicited the admiration of the Secretary of State for Levelling Up. Field Marshall von Haynau was an effective but severe Habsburg military commander during the revolutionary years of 1848 and 1849. His imperial standing, however, did not prevent him being chased down Borough High Street in my diocese in 1850—where my diocesan headquarters now is, very near the cathedral—by two draymen from the nearby brewery of Barclay Perkins to remonstrate with him about his military conduct in Italy and Hungary.
I mention this once-famous incident to illustrate that there have always been strong currents of feelings about issues, including those abroad. Some of these fall into what one might call the dissenting tradition. As a Church of England Bishop, I recognise that I am an heir to a different tradition, but surely our history has taught us that consensus has been built up around what is obviously true and lived out with integrity, rather than by suppression.
There is a royal prerogative in foreign affairs, as there is around peace and war. His Majesty’s Government treat with states and, where necessary, apply sanctions, but not all and every entity is derivative of the Executive. Surely if Edmund Burke has taught governing parties anything, he has taught them that few, if any, of these things should be taken into account in ways which are harmful to the nation.
As the Government’s own impact assessment on the Bill demonstrates, we address business other than that which is directly before us. It is for bodies which have a mandate separate from His Majesty’s Government to determine how, within the law, we obtain the best outcome with the assets we have, and to do so while being accountable to the people we serve. For example, Section 17 of the Local Government Act 1988 already prohibits local authorities from making procurement decisions on non-commercial grounds.
I recall from when I served on the staff of St Paul’s Cathedral, and later as a parish priest in Tower Hamlets, the declarations of the nearby borough that it was a nuclear-free Hackney. I am not sure what that achieved but it was a matter for them. More significant is that some of the action in respect of apartheid South Africa would not, as we have heard, have been possible had such a Bill been in force then. There was, let us remember, sharp controversy about disinvestment in South Africa, but it was at the level of argument, not statutory prohibition.
The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester, who hopes to be present for later stages of the Bill, has raised with me a concern which I think has merit: that public funding means that a number of religious foundations in education will be caught by the prohibition on saying anything about these matters. Perhaps the Minister would be prepared to confirm that this is not the intention of the Bill and, if so, what can be done to mitigate the possibility.
From these Benches, we have not called for a boycott or disinvestment, or sanctions against Israel, but we find a number of things alarming in the implications for our liberties and freedoms. One is blanket prohibitions about statements, even on matters such as Uighurs in China. One may argue that the Secretary of State may permit such things, but why should this require the permission of the Secretary of State? The other is that there can be no justification for singling out a particular country in the Bill, as many noble Lords have already said, to put it beyond exception in the regulation-making power in the operation of any resulting statute. It is also deeply worrying that territory illegally occupied by the same state is treated identically in the Bill, as if it is the sovereign territory of that state. This is not in accordance with the repeated statements from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office on the need for lasting peace on the basis of a just, negotiated settlement.
I endorse what the Minister said about the need to eradicate anti-Semitism, but have the Government heard the concerns of bona fide Jewish bodies? For instance, a motion passed unanimously at the recent conference of the Union of Jewish Students, which represents 9,000 Jewish students, stated that
“the UK government’s recently proposed BDS Sanctions Bill weakens the ability of British Jewish students to approach the conversation about Israel in a nuanced manner”.
The motion went on:
“UJS reaffirms its support for the democratic right to non-violently protest and opposes the government’s proposed Boycott Bill which is a curtailment of that right, as well as presenting a risk to British Jewish communities and a setback to Israeli-Palestinian peace”.
It seems clear that, rather than there being a concern that local authorities operate a separate foreign policy from that of His Majesty’s Government, we should query why the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities is pursuing policy objectives for the Occupied Palestinian Territories that are at variance from those of the Government as a whole.
Extracts from the speeches that followed:
Lord Grocott (Lab): My Lords, I agreed with so much of what the right reverend Prelate has just said and I apologise if I repeat some of the points he made. My remarks about the Bill will focus entirely on Clause 3(7) and specifically on the Occupied Territories.
I shall argue that these provisions in the Bill are contrary to UN Security Council Resolution 2334, as mentioned earlier. I shall argue that the clause perversely gives the illegally Occupied Territories special protection under UK law. I shall also say that the clause undermines British foreign policy, both in respect of the illegality of the occupation and the pursuit of a two-state solution.
On the UN resolution, the clause fails because it gives equal status, with no differentiation between Israel on the one hand and the Occupied Palestinian Territories on the other. Resolution 2334, endorsed by Britain and passed in 2016 by 14 votes to nil, with one abstention, could not be clearer. The resolution:
“Calls upon all States … to distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967”.
As my honourable friend Wayne David said, speaking for the Opposition in the Commons, the Bill
“gives special protection to goods and services from both Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Moreover, it gives greater protection to illegal settlements in the OPT than it does to any other state in the world except Israel”.—[Official Report, 12/9/23; col. 132.]
That brings me to the point about UK law. It is surely perverse in the extreme to afford special protected status to Israeli settlements that UK Governments of both parties—not to mention the UN resolution—have repeatedly stated to be part of an illegal occupation. How can the Government on the one hand condemn the continued expansion of the settlements while on the other be passing a law that has the potential to help the settlements become more established and prosperous?
Lord Stevens of Birmingham (CB): My Lords, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwark’s mention of Hackney reminded me that, some years back, when you left Parliament and crossed the bridge, you came across a sign saying, “Welcome to Lambeth—a Nuclear-Free Zone”. It appeared that the London Borough of Lambeth felt that it could set its own nuclear deterrence policy and, presumably, any inbound Soviet nuclear weapons would contour round it to Wandsworth.
That points to the intrinsic fact that defence and foreign policy are, rightly, matters for our elected national Government. I was casting my mind back to, I think, two weeks ago, to an Oral Question about the Scottish Government. Contributions from all Benches across the House were strongly critical of the suggestion that the Scottish Government in Holyrood might be usurping the Westminster Government’s exclusive competence on foreign policy. It is not clear why that argument, made a fortnight ago, is not deemed to apply today to other governmental or public bodies, in addition to the devolved Administrations.
Furthermore, although there have been legitimate concerns about aspects of the Bill, it is worth reminding ourselves that it does not stop us as private individuals, businesses or civil society organisations choosing who to buy from, who to boycott and where to invest. It contains statutory safeguards so that governmental and public authorities can take account, for example, of environmental and labour standards, including the prevention of modern slavery.
Baroness Blower (Lab): For my part, I favour boycott and disinvestment. In democratic societies, with the freedom that should confer, boycotts are a way of bringing non-violent pressure to seek to bring changes. Like many other noble Lords, I spent many years engaged in boycotting the apartheid regime in South Africa, and I am very pleased to have done so. Had I been in Bristol in 1963, I am sure that, even as a young person, I would have supported the bus boycott to protest the bus companies’ refusal to employ black and Asian crews. But even those who oppose BDS are prepared to say that this proposed legislation is the wrong way forward. Again, Yachad and the Union of Jewish Students, both opposed to BDS, are equally both opposed to those aspects of the Bill.
As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwark said, the Union of Jewish Students described the Bill as a curtailment of the democratic right to protest non-violently. Yachad says:
“Democracies are fragile and need to be protected. Using legislation to clamp down on free speech and space for dissent harms our democracy. The idea that we as Jews are somehow safer because it will now be made illegal for public authorities not just to boycott Israel, but China or Myanmar, to name just a few examples, and furthermore will be barred from even saying that they would do so, were they allowed”—
we have heard reference to this—
“makes a mockery of our commitment … to the concept of democratic rights and free speech”.
Lord Oates (LD): Some years later, I had the privilege of working in the first democratic Parliament in South Africa. I can absolutely attest to what the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, said: the absolute saving grace of the UK was that local authorities and others had been prepared to take financial decisions on the basis of moral and political disapproval when, sadly, our Government were not prepared to do that and were seen as an aider and abetter of the apartheid regime.
Much was made, both in the Second Reading debate in the other place and repeated by the Minister today, about not having rival foreign policies, but Clause 3(7) conflates Israel and the Occupied Territories, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwark pointed out. This seems to represent the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities running an alternative foreign policy to the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, rather than local authorities doing the same. That has really grave implications. I hope that the Minister can tell us what representations have been received from British diplomatic posts across the globe about the impacts of this Bill, which goes absolutely contrary to Resolution 2334 and other international obligations, as other noble Lords have said.
The Church of England in Parliament 
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