Unfortunately, I was not able to contribute on Second Reading, as the debate was terminated before I had the opportunity to try to persuade the House of the merits of my case against the Bill, but I am very grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) for at least putting several of the points that I wanted to make on the record then.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Dr Whiteford) on the polite and efficient way she has brought the Bill before the House and steered it through to this Third Reading debate. No private Member’s Bill is an easy thing to deal with and she has demonstrated great skill in being able to get this Bill to this stage. It is no secret that I oppose it. I am open about that, but I wish to start by putting on the record the fact that those of us who oppose it do so on the basis that the Istanbul convention will do nothing to achieve the aims that its supporters think it will. It will certainly do nothing to stop violence against men and boys, and I am just as concerned about that as I am about violence against women and girls, leaving aside for a moment the position of transgender individuals, which we have not considered at great length so far.
It is important to note that the views that my hon. Friend and I have espoused—we have yet to hear in depth from my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope)—are supported by a larger section of society than some in this House might think. After the Second Reading debate, even though I had not been able to contribute to it, I received emails from people from all over who were saying, “Good for standing up for our rights as men, because sometimes we feel that we are not getting a fair crack of the whip.”
This morning, we have seen something remarkable happen to this Bill, and I am grateful that we have had the opportunity to put certain matters to a vote. Anybody watching the proceedings may have wondered what was going on, but we have demonstrated this morning that those who support this Bill have actually gone through the Lobby to vote to weaken it. We have been given a bit of a clue; if ever a Bill has to have its title amended, the chances are that it has been seriously filleted. On this occasion, the fact that the whole of clause 1 has disappeared and the whole of clause 3(e) has disappeared demonstrates the extent to which this Bill has been chopped and changed, not in Committee, but on Report.
Incidentally, the Minister on Second Reading was my right hon. Friend the Member for Great Yarmouth (Brandon Lewis), rather than my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton), who is here today. He said that amendments would be tabled in Committee, but we now know that none was, even though they must have been ready, because they were tabled on 1 February, when the Bill had its Committee stage, and they were online the next day. That was the first indication that something was amiss.
The series of Government amendments that have been accepted have had the effect of making the Bill very different from when it was introduced. The requirement for the UK to ratify the Istanbul convention has gone. Now, as reflected in the Bill’s new long title, it only makes
“provision in connection with the ratification by the United Kingdom of the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence (the Istanbul Convention)”.
Even the words “and for connected purposes” have been removed.
The whole of clause 1 has been removed, and that was the crucial point of the Bill. We were told that the whole object of the exercise was to impose a duty on Her Majesty’s Government
“to take all reasonable steps”—
so the Government were not expected to do everything in their power—
“as soon as reasonably practicable”.
It was a very modest clause to enable this country to become compliant with the convention, but that is all gone now.
For those who support the Bill and the campaign behind it, it is worth putting on record exactly what it now looks like and will do. Essentially, it now requires no more than that the Secretary of State lays a report before each House of Parliament to set out
“the steps required to be taken to enable the United Kingdom to ratify the Istanbul Convention”.
We all know what those steps are anyway, so there is going to be nothing new in it. It has been said many times that the only thing the Government still need to do is sort out how we are going to deal with extraterritorial jurisdiction. I accept that that is not an easy thing to do, but it has been done in respect of other offences, which leads me to think it would not have been that difficult, given how many years it has been since the convention was signed, to have worked out by now why primary legislation is not ready. We have still not heard whether primary legislation is going to be included in the next Queen’s Speech, for example.
The timescale is crucial. As originally drafted, the Bill would have required the Government to set a specific date
“by which the Secretary of State would expect the United Kingdom to be able to ratify the Convention.”
That requirement is now gone, as we are talking only about a “timescale”, which could of course be anything: a day, a week, a month, a year, a decade—all are timescales.