Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

My Lords, in the context of Punch’s famous cartoon of the curate’s egg, this Bill is partly good. I would go further: it is in most parts good and wholesome. It has been attacked for being a ragbag. That was the expression used by the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford. Yet he then suggested half a dozen other ragbag provisions that should be added to it. It is, of course, a miscellaneous provisions criminal Bill. All criminal Bills, with few exceptions, are miscellaneous provisions Bills. The condemnation of the noble Lord, Lord Henley, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mayhew, that there is a lack of theme to the Bill does not demolish it completely. The late Winston Churchill once growled at a waiter who had presented a blancmange before him, saying ““Take it away, it has no theme””. Miscellaneous provisions Bills, by definition, cannot have themes, so should not be judged by that yardstick or measure—no more, for example, than a road traffic Bill should be. It involves so many different and disparate matters that it is essential, if one is to take advantage of legislation passing through the House, to add all manner of disparate parts to it. I have two general comments. First, we appreciate that for the past 40 years Parliament has suffered a surfeit of criminal justice legislation. This, we are told, is the 39th Bill of a criminal nature to be introduced in the past 10 years. The noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, gives a higher figure and he may very well be right. We appreciate that the law must change with changing events, and change swiftly. Nevertheless, the pace of change in relation to legislation has been wholly excessive. Her Majesty’s loyal Opposition need take no comfort from that. They need not dress themselves in any white sheet of purity because their fecundity regarding criminal justice legislation over the 18 years preceding 1997 was, if anything, greater than the record of the present Government. There seems to be a mentality which suggests that once a criminal justice Act has been in existence for a period of time, one should, at best, tinker with it and, at worst, take it to pieces. Both the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 and the Theft Act 1968—I had the privilege, as a Minister in the Home Office, of taking the 1968 Act through the other place—are, with very few exceptions, as fresh, as useful and as competent today as the day on which they received Royal Assent. The fact that something is ageing and aged does not mean that it has to be thrown away. Perhaps I should declare an interest because of my age. I feel, mischievously sometimes, that as an obverse to the Bill of Rights of the late 17th century, there should be a provision that Parliament should not be allowed to pass more than one criminal justice Bill per annum. The second matter I wish to refer to is the most vicious of vicious circles in the relationship between the volume of criminal justice legislation and the apprehension of the public in relation to their safety from crime. Parliament rolls out criminal justice Bill after criminal justice Bill; the public are incensed to believe that their position is becoming more and more desperate. As the public take up such a position, more and more criminal justice Bills come through Parliament. You may say, ““Hold on. A dread of crime is, after all, a legitimate and natural reaction in any civilised community. Why should people not feel shock and horror at young people being knifed and shot on their streets? Why should the weak, the aged, the infirm and the otherwise wholly vulnerable not feel terror at the prospect of being robbed or burgled? Why should not society feel abhorrence in relation to the scourge of drugs, especially among young people?”” That is not my case. Anyone who does not react to those fears would be callous and indifferent. But when you have a situation of near hysteria in society, when the community seems to be saying, ““We are engulfed by a tidal wave of crime and the courts, the police and Parliament are impotent to protect us””, that is the point at which we have to consider the viciousness of these vicious circles. In the past 10 years crime has decreased in Britain by about 35 per cent. I agree that it may, to some extent, very well be part of a general trend, as the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, said. In the preceding 18 years, crime doubled. One would have thought, therefore, that there might have been some prospect of one graph line going down and being roughly tracked and paralleled by the other graph line—but they are moving in wholly different directions. As was suggested by my noble and learned friend Lord Lloyd of Berwick, that may have a great deal to do with the editors of tabloid newspapers. I think it has something to do also with ruthless and unprincipled political propagandism, but that is a matter for another day. There are many measures in the Bill that I support. I commend, on the whole, the provisions for the rehabilitation of youths. There are difficulties, which no doubt will be discussed in detail in Committee, but I particularly welcome the activity aspects of a rehabilitation order and the fostering provisions, which are imaginative and link up with the more general law relating to children and young persons. It is a step forward to seek that ASBOs for young people should be reviewed every 12 months. That is a progressive and intelligent development. On pornography, it is only right that we should tighten the law in regard to its most scurrilous and dangerous form, if only to protect people from being murdered in sadistic sexual cases where the stimulation seems to come from such sources. I greatly welcome the protection that is specifically spelt out for NHS personnel and NHS premises. There will no longer be the threat that highly dangerous criminals might, theoretically, have to be released at a much earlier date than anticipated in the light of the totality of their sentence. This was brought to light in the Cardiff case about a year ago when the Home Secretary of the day, to his great discredit, attacked the learned judge who was simply carrying out the letter of the law and could not have passed any other sentence. In that connection, I make a plea for judges to be trusted and not to be shackled. Four hundred years ago, Lord Bacon said that if justice had a voice it would be that of an English judge. Provided the English judge is not confined to Anglo-Saxons, I believe that that principle still holds good in our day and age. On Clause 42 and the self-defence provision, that is intended to be declaratory of the current law, and nothing else. Some suggestion has been made in the debate that it extends the law to some extent, but I doubt whether that is the case. In 1984, in the case of Gladstone Williams, the Court of Appeal made it perfectly clear that an honest belief, albeit an unreasonable belief, held by the defendant was good enough. That was repeated in a number of other cases over the next two or three years, particularly in the case of Beckford, a Privy Council case, in 1988. I would quarrel with the wording of the provision because it relates to the defence of self-defence. Self-defence is not a defence; it is a matter that the prosecution has to expunge beyond reasonable doubt. I hope that it will be reworded to remove that mythology. I end on a theme to which I have returned on many occasions over the past few months—the question of the prison population. I have no doubt but that the Government have striven manfully to increase the number of prison places; I have no doubt that the Carter report, in advising—and that advice has been accepted by the Government—that there should be 6,500 extra places by 2012 is sound, with a further 5,000 to come onstream. We now have 81,000 prisoners in our prisons, which are bursting at the seams. We are imprisoning more people and, as my noble friend Lady Stern pointed out, more children than any other country in western Europe. We will never be able to build ourselves out of this problem. There is only one way we can tackle the problem, and that is by sending fewer persons to prison. You may say that is impossible. It is not. Our citizens are no more wicked, no more predilected to crime than the citizens of Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Greece and the other European countries. We have to inculcate, in one way or another, a different culture with regard to sentencing.