Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

It is not. What I think the right hon. Gentleman is saying—I will listen to him in a moment—is that he proposes to defend what is left of the last Government's proposals, the author of which acknowledged quite early in my speech that they plainly needed to be changed. If I get the chance, I will listen to what the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) is trying to argue, but he seems to be reassuring us that life sentences fulfil that requirement for the very worst people—that they are looked at carefully before being let out again—and those people will be on licence for life: once they start going in for aberrant behaviour, they can be recalled to prison and punished once more. Apart from the very outlying people on the right and the left, I hope that I have satisfied everybody. It is high time that we reformed indeterminate sentences. Personally, I am amazed that they have survived judicial review and challenge in the courts thus far, but if something was not done, they would not survive very much further, which would lead to unfortunate consequences if a court suddenly started ordering us to release such prisoners and decided that they were being held unlawfully. I have recently described them as a ““stain on the system””. I said that at a private meeting in the House of Lords—although it soon found its way into the press—but it is my opinion. What we are putting in place is protection for the public: far more rational, certain, determinate sentences, which is much more in line with how we think the British system should behave. I will, of course, be followed in this debate by the right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan). I have already expressed my amazement at his position, and I have found some other quotations from him in my time. I cannot understand how he can match up to his present position. For example, when we both started in July last year, his leader—the current Leader of the Opposition—said:"““I don't think we should try to out-right the right on crime,””" and said that I was"““opening up an opportunity for us to redefine part of the debate about criminal justice.””" Only a few weeks ago, addressing the Howard League, the right hon. Member for Tooting said—in a lecture that I thought put him in a very convoluted position between his conscience and where he is at present—that"““our big challenge is to communicate that punishment and reform can and should go hand-in-hand…To deliver this calls for an honest debate””." The right hon. Gentleman, the shadow Justice Secretary, is a radical lawyer from south London—he is more radical than I am—and he is trying to ““out-right”” me in what is an absurd and hopeless case. What we are putting in place is an altogether rational and sensible system.