Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

I know that every second I occupy keeps the Committee from blasphemy—and I tender my apologies to certain Benches in particular—but I entirely agree with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd. This is codification of one tiny bit of the law. It leaves out various things. The first thing that it does not do is state what the defence is. It is most extraordinary. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, does in his judgment. In one sentence he says, ““This is what the defence is, whatever you call it. This is it””. Here it goes straight on to tell you all about the ““reasonable”” element in it. You never get there. You do not have anything in this about the onus of proof at all. I am afraid that I thought the Minister’s theory on Monday night—that the man in the street is well aware that the defence of self-defence is not really a defence but something the prosecutor will have to prove—came from cloud-cuckoo-land. No one who is not a lawyer could conceivably know the law’s position on this. There is nothing in this about whether action in defence of property is covered by self-defence. Forget about the 1967 Act, what does the common law say? The common law was fairly clear on that point. In other words, this is tinkering. Let me give a classic example of tinkering, and then I will sit down. Subsection (4)—on which I concentrated my fire earlier, before it was withdrawn, but I can say it here—states: "““The degree of force used by D is not to be regarded as having been reasonable in those circumstances if it was disproportionate in those circumstances””." ““Disproportionate”” and ““unreasonable”” are exact synonyms. I looked this up in Roget’s Thesaurus, which, against ““disproportionate””, has ““not reasonable”” or ““unreasonable””. This is just tinkering by taking a familiar and well known word, altering it and putting it into statute. It is not worth doing. The whole clause should be abandoned.