King’s Speech

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Wednesday 24th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I give a warm welcome to the noble Lord, Lord Hanson of Flint. I went to school in Flint, so there is a special connection there. Also, I am full of hope listening to how the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, handled the earlier Statement on the prison crisis, especially on hearing his previous knowledge of and engagement with the nearly 3,000 IPP prisoners still languishing in jail indefinitely. A friendly warning: the Minister should expect to be pestered by many of us on this issue until Parliament’s admitted mistake—an actual miscarriage of justice—is put right.

This focus on prisoners is pertinent while discussing criminal justice in a debate on the humble Address. As legislators, we should be suitably humble about nodding through laws that can potentially imprison ever-greater numbers of our fellow citizens and turn erstwhile innocent people into criminals for activities that have to date been lawful. In that context, the proposal for the full trans-inclusive ban on conversion practices, as we have heard, is worrying. The law is unnecessary, as gay and trans people are already protected by existing laws from those vile abuses described by campaigners for the legislation. The dread is that, instead, we risk criminalising medical staff, teachers, therapists, religious support workers, even parents—and even free speech—for helping gender-confused young people and not simply affirming the disquieting and wrong-headed notion that they are born in the wrong body. Meanwhile, hard-pressed shopkeepers in the future could be punished for selling tobacco products to a 28 year-old and a 27 year-old—one legally, the other illegally. This is a recipe for chaos, let alone creating a thriving black market in cigarettes. As a non-affiliated Peer, I look forward to lampooning this particularly daft law, pushed as a flagship piece of legislation by Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Government and now enthusiastically embraced by the new Labour Government.

Sometimes we should ask: are we creating new laws as a substitute for tackling deeper problems? In his speech on the humble Address, referring to the proposed crime and policing Bill, the Prime Minister declared that we will take back control of our streets. That is good, but how? By giving the police new powers, he says. But are the undoubted problems we have on our streets really because the police do not have enough powers? Would the recent grotesque and disturbing scenes of violence and rioting in Harehills really be solved by the police waving around those proposed new respect orders when, on the night, officers retreated from the streets of Leeds, seemingly abandoning the local community to frenzied criminality?

It is just not serious to suggest that you can solve the deep-seated cultural problem of declining respect in society—a crisis of authority, as it were—by resurrecting those discredited Blairite ASBOs, rebranded as respect orders. What is more, over recent years there has been a proliferation of these quasi-criminal behaviour orders, about 30 at the last count, yet anti-social behaviour is soaring. In terms of civil liberties, these behaviour orders do not specify particular offences, which means that the police can use them in a subjective, expansive and arbitrary fashion, often reinforcing a sense of unfair two-tier policing. On the night of the Euros final, the Met issued a killjoy anti-social behaviour dispersal order banning football fans from the Westminster area, yet it claims that it does not have enough powers to disperse Just Stop Oil or pro-Gaza activists from anti-social disruption here at Westminster on a regular basis.

Finally, it is only weeks since we witnessed one of the most chilling examples of out-of-control streets. That was, sadly, in the build-up to the general election. We saw unprecedented levels of ugly intimidation that mired electoral campaigning. To give a few examples: a trembling rabbi, a Conservative candidate, was surrounded by a hostile mob, screamed at and called a snake; a Labour candidate was hounded off the streets to chants of “Zionist devil”; young female leafleteers were harassed and filmed by older men bellowing “genocide” in their faces; tyres were slashed; campaign offices were daubed with blood-red painted anti-Semitic libel, “Zionist child killer”. This Islamist sectarianism that has burst into public life and poisoned the democratic process must be confronted, not by laws but by courage. Those who try to silence concerns with the accusation of Islamophobia ignore that many Muslims were themselves threatened with Allah’s wrath if they voted for Labour’s infidels. We cannot allow this menacing trend to be swept under the carpet, so it was gratifying to hear the maiden speech by the noble Lord, Lord Goodman, addressing extremism and to hear the Secretary of State, Shabana Mahmood, defiantly declare that:

“British politics must … wake up to what happened at this election”.


Hear, hear. Taking back control of our streets means more of this honest plain speaking and political leadership, and rather less of mealy-mouthed platitudes and performative lawmaking.