I will come on to that later. We need to remember, in all of this, that the trustees of any pension scheme have an absolute fiduciary duty to those who rely on the performance of the fund for their current or future pension. We do not want anything that ties their hands, such as someone saying they should go only for very low-yield investments because that person has objections to the activities of companies that might give a higher yield. There are times when we must question whether it is right to put trustees under that kind of pressure. It is also wrong to suggest that pension trustees, in addition to or instead of their absolute duty to pension scheme members, should have some kind of duty to be a mouthpiece for the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office or the British Ministry of Defence. They are not an arm of Government; these are legally independent trustees, and they have to have that legal independence properly protected.
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As I have said, I do not want to get into a big argument about the best way to ensure peace and stability in the middle east, and I note a number of the points made about the activities of BDS. I caution strongly against assuming that those characteristics apply to anything more than a tiny minority of the people in these islands who have genuine concerns about the illegal activities of the state of Israel, who genuinely believe that the United Kingdom needs first to make clear to the state of Israel that breaches of international law are not accepted and who believe that the British Government are not taking nearly enough steps to help Palestine get into a position where it can be recognised as a sovereign independent state. We should all be contributing to a two-state solution in the middle east.
Going back to the comments of the right hon. Member for Newark, he is arguing that people and Governments in other countries would assume that a decision made by the Wirral Council pension fund trustees or the Hertfordshire County Council pension fund trustees somehow mirrored the views of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office or Her Majesty’s Government’s policies on defence. There are some totalitarian regimes in the world where every public sector organisation and most of the private sector organisations are allowed to say only what that Government tell them to say, but Britain is not one of those countries—well, not yet, although we are maybe getting quite quickly to that stage.
It is noticeable that the current Government seem extremely keen to increase our trade with some countries that exercise that kind of totalitarian control over all their public bodies. I would have thought that a Government who sing their own praises about the devolution of authority to local councils would want to celebrate giving councils the right to take a different view from the Government, if that is in the interests of the residents of that council area, and highlight it to other Governments at every opportunity.
Taking the right hon. Member’s argument to its logical conclusion, he said that matters of foreign policy should be debated here and not in council chambers or town halls around the UK, but why on earth not? In the debate on Second Reading, he said that
“we do not want to see local councils trying to influence foreign policy decisions”.—[Official Report, 5 January 2022; Vol. 706, c. 100.]
I beg to differ; I want to see councils with the ability to influence not only foreign policy decisions, but decisions on all aspects of domestic policy. These policy decisions are rightfully taken by the Government of the day and held to account by the Parliament of the day, but to suggest that councils should be frozen out from having any input on those decisions is a dangerous precedent.