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House of Lords Debate: The Impact of Economic Sanctions (EAC Report)
Robert Skidelsky
Hansard: column 469-72
| Friday, October 12, 2007
My Lords, I, too, express my appreciation to the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, for the invariably good-tempered way in which he conducted the inquiry, and to the Clerk of the Committee, Robert Graham-Harrison, for his expert support. I concur with what previous speakers have said about the Government’s limp response.
A key issue with which we as Members of the Committee wrestled was the aims of economic sanctions. Some of us started with the view that the main aim was to get the sanctioned regime to change its behaviour or, at the limit, to overthrow it, but that was far too simple-minded. As the report states in paragraph 7:
“Sanctions can be applied for a variety of reasons, including to punish or weaken a target, to signal
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Monetary Policy
Robert Skidelsky
Hansard
| Thursday, July 12, 2001
My Lords,
May I add my name to those who have already congratulated Lord Peston and his colleagues on the Select Committee on the MPC for the admirable Report we are discussing this afternoon. It is an intellectual treat, a store of practical wisdom, and a notable contribution to economic education. It is also an example of the sort of thing your lordships house does superbly well.
We are constitutionally debarred from voting Supply. We do though have an opportunity to influence the principles of economic policy. I hope the two reports produced by Lord Peston and his committee will embolden us to seize this opportunity more confidently than we have in the past.
We are now almost at the point of having a critical mass of economists
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Economic Policy
Robert Skidelsky
Hansard
| Monday, June 25, 2001
My Lords,
This has been an interesting debate, and I am very pleased to be taking part in it. Lady Hollis has been her usual thoughtful, passionate, and charming self-a combination she has made uniquely her own; and my noble friend has done the best with the party materials available to him.
I wonder whether noble lords have fully grasped the revolutionary philosophy which had underlain this government’s economic policy. It’s easy enough to draw up its list of objectives: price stability, faster economic growth, world-class public services, the attack on poverty or social exclusion as it’s now called.
The revolution lies in the way the government, and particularly the Chancellor, sees the interconnections between these separate
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Higher Education
Robert Skidelsky
Hansard
| Wednesday, June 14, 2000
My Lords, I shall do my best to match the lightening speed of the noble Baroness, Lady Uddin. Debates in Parliament on the state of public services nearly always revolve round a single topic- money. Certainly, that has been the major theme of our discussion today. This threnody for impoverishment has been coupled with another- that is, the lament for vanished independence. Universities and their teachers complain of a growing weight of regulation, and I endorse everything that my noble friend Lord Renfrew said about this earlier in the debate. They are constantly being assessed for their research and teaching capacities, sometimes, it seems, by methods borrowed from Stasi, but which, in reality, are the methods of bureaucracies the world
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Debate on Higher Education
Robert Skidelsky
Hansard
| Wednesday, June 14, 2000
My Lords,
Debates in Parliament on the state of the public services usually revolve round a single topic: money. Whatever the service is, it gets too little money, its problems would be solved if it got more money, the government of the day, be it Labour or Conservative, is iniquitous in denying it more money.
In the case of higher education, this threnody for impoverishment is usually coupled with another: the lament for vanished independence. Universities and their teachers complain of a growing weight of regulation. They are constantly being assessed for their research and teaching capacities often, it seems by methods borrowed from the archives of STASI, but which in reality are the methods of bureaucracies the world over.
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