Crown Prosecution Service

Lord Dobbs Excerpts

Monday 23rd February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

My Lords, there is the code that is issued and I can assure the noble Lord that the tests remain the same: sufficiency of evidence that there is a realistic prospect of a conviction and, if that test is met, the ensuing public interest test. I think that that has been enunciated on a number of occasions.

[Lord Dobbs (Con)]

Is my noble and learned friend aware that the failure of the Crown Prosecution Service to prosecute the allegations of female genital mutilation recently was greeted with despair on all sides of this House? It is a crime and the evidence is absolutely clear, yet we have been unable to prosecute a single case in this country. Is there nothing that the Government can do to ensure greater effectiveness and a greater sense of justice in this matter?

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

My Lords, I can assure my noble friend that it is the resolve to bring to justice those who commit female genital mutilation where there is evidence to do so. Female genital mutilation is a form of child abuse and we should recognise it as that. With regard to the trial to which my noble friend referred, it was right for the Crown Prosecution Service to put this case before the court. On three separate occasions—once before the trial and twice during the trial—the judge dismissed applications by the defence to stop the case, thereby agreeing that the evidence should be considered by the jury. The jury considered the evidence and came to a verdict, which we respect. In this year, the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, when we have talked so much about the jury system being a bulwark of our civil liberties, it is important that the jury system does work.

Scotland: Devolution

Lord Dobbs Excerpts

Wednesday 29th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dobbs (Con)]

My Lords, the last time that I had the pleasure of being squeezed between the formidable frames of the noble Lords, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard and Lord Foulkes of Cumnock, was in the debate on the EU Referendum Bill. That was a bracing experience, and I am sure that this one will be just as much fun.

That wonderful novelist and Scotsman Walter Scott once wrote that there is no path that leads through the Highlands that has not at some time or other offered a little danger for an Englishman. He added that the clans may squabble among themselves, but in the end they will always unite against those who wear breeches on their bottoms and have purses in their pouches. Those of us who are enthusiastically English—or indeed Welsh, or Irish—might be forgiven for feeling that we have escaped that moment of danger and reached our goal, with a referendum result that has reaffirmed our union. But like so many Members of this House today, I wonder. The moment of greatest danger may yet lie ahead.

I want to salute Scotland and its people. When I was there campaigning, there was not a single voter that I met of any political hue who did not take the task in front of them with extraordinary seriousness. For Scotland, the referendum was a triumph, the turnout Herculean—almost Romanian—in proportions, and the result, thankfully, was decisive. Yet, on that long march back home, we picked up a few pebbles in our boots.

Financially, things will not be easy. The Barnett formula will live on, even when its own creator says that it should be dragged off to the knackers’ yard. The English will still be expected to pay, and the poor Welsh will undoubtedly still complain of injustice. Fiscally, with the threat of different income tax regimes either side of the border, how will companies and individuals resist the temptation to move perhaps only a handful of miles to greener pastures? If there is to be different provision on a wide scale, not just in health and education but in social services, how will we stop families border-hopping in search of the best outcome?

Perhaps the most difficult challenge of all, though, will be political. The West Lothian question has now become the “West-Minster” question. How do we guarantee fairness to English voters to ensure that they are not treated as second-class citizens? Many commitments have already been given. All those vows that were made shortly before the referendum were clearly a result of high principle rather than low panic, but the hounds still snap persistently at our haunches. How on the one hand do we satisfy the legitimate expectations of Scotland without, on the other, arousing the largely dormant demands of the English?

We should never underestimate the natural pride of the Scots. After all, why else—and I may never be forgiven for saying this—is Judy Murray still in “Strictly”? Not for the strength of her Scottish reels, I fear, but, I suggest, because of the depth of her Scottish roots. Yet we ignore the English, their sense of fair play and their tolerance at our peril.

I have one fundamental anxiety about this bright new world that lurks just around the corner. If, after the election next May, the English wake up to discover that they are being governed by a party, or particularly by a coalition of parties, that they themselves rejected in decisive numbers, in those new circumstances it could be the English who start questioning the union. If that coalition were to be held in place or even imposed on the English through the support of MPs from an overrepresented and devo-maxed Scotland, our union boat could be rocked to tipping point.

Assisted Suicide

Lord Dobbs Excerpts

Wednesday 25th June 2014 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Dobbs]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they have issued guidelines as to whether those who assist a family member to end their lives in the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland can expect to be prosecuted.

[The Advocate-General for Scotland (Lord Wallace of Tankerness) (LD)]

My Lords, the Crown Prosecution Service published a policy in respect of cases of encouraging or assisting suicide in February 2010. This sets out factors that may be relevant in deciding whether prosecution for assisting suicide is in the public interest.

[Lord Dobbs (Con)]

As ever, I am grateful to my noble and learned friend. This morning the Supreme Court, in a landmark decision, said that the current law may be incompatible with human rights law, and that it might very well rule on this. It also said that it is our duty in Parliament to decide these issues. It put the onus back on us to decide. We will have that opportunity in a few weeks’ time with the Assisted Dying Bill of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer. There are reports, which I hope I have misheard, that there may be an attempt to stifle discussion of these very important matters by voting the Bill down at Second Reading. Does my noble and learned friend agree that it would be inappropriate—and, indeed, highly irresponsible—to cut off debate on such a sensitive issue, given the passions on both sides about this hugely important question?

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

My Lords, I am certainly aware of the judgment passed down by the Supreme Court this morning. In a preliminary consideration of it I agree with my noble friend that it indicated that it is a matter that Parliament ought to consider. The Government will take a collective view on the Assisted Dying Bill of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, to respond to that debate. It is fair to say that historically it has been a matter of individual conscience, which the Prime Minister confirmed in April this year. Therefore, it would be inappropriate for me from this Dispatch Box to indicate what noble Lords should or should not do on 18 July. I fully expect, however, that on a complex issue that raises passions on both sides—which I very much respect—your Lordships, in traditional manner, will give proper consideration to a range of arguments including, no doubt, the judgment passed down by the justices of the Supreme Court.

Scotland: Independence

Lord Dobbs Excerpts

Tuesday 24th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dobbs (Con)]

My Lords, for many Englishmen, Scotland is a land of mists and mysteries, and I am an Englishman. I confess to being something of a genealogical nut and yet in 40-odd years of clambering up my family tree I have found not a single drop of Scottish blood.

Perhaps the trolls and social-media Stalinists would claim that this gives me no right even to participate in this debate, and that I fail the McTebbit test, or whatever passes as an appropriate test of my loyalties north of the border. So let me be clear: I support two teams—England when it is playing Scotland, and Scotland when it is playing Germany, France, Italy, or almost any other country.

The world of books has always been of some importance, so perhaps I should use that as a starting point. The first book I ever remember reading was Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, as a boy, by torchlight beneath the covers. Even on a cold winter’s night in Hertfordshire I could walk on warm sands with Jim Hawkins and his famous Scottish creator. The Scots, as we have heard, have always been renowned for their literary imagination, with Barrie, Burns, Conan Doyle and Kenneth Grahame—an endless, illustrious list given by the noble Lord, Lord Birt. Of course, as many have mentioned, there is Walter Scott.

I prepared for this debate by reading for the very first time that classic novel of the north, Rob Roy. That would tell me something about the Scottish spirit, I thought. It is a rather long book, so it came as something of a surprise to discover that I was more than half way through it and still had not set foot in Scotland. Dare I admit it—parts of the dialect were a bit challenging. As I am sure all noble Lords will know, it is set in the years immediately after the Act of Union. It is a novel of national pride, cultural aspiration and, most of all, reconciliation One of its heroes is Baillie Jarvie, a man who—I am using Scott’s words,

“although a keen Scotchman, and abundantly zealous for the honour of his country, was disposed to think liberally of the sister kingdom”.

I think Baillie Jarvie was saying that we are better together. He scolds the foul-tempered Andrew Fairservice thus—although I will not attempt the accent:

“Whisht, sir!—Whisht!—it’s ill-scraped tongues like your’s that make mischief atween neighbourhoods and nations. There’s naething sae gude on this side o’ time but it might hae been better, and that may be said o’ the Union”.

That may still be said of the union, and even more so of ill scraped tongues.

My noble and learned friend Lord Wallace, and several others, referred to a nation punching above its weight. I prefer to think of it as a nation singing above its scale. Scotland has certainly done that. There are so many great inventors, industrialists, engineers, academics, surgeons, artists, and just plain good exceptionally hospitable people. We have already heard stories of great Scotsmen and women in so many areas—in business, science, education and military valour—which I will not repeat.

However, let me turn to one area of great national pride and cultural interest—that of sport. It is a stunning matter of fact that Scottish athletes who made up 10% of Great Britain’s team at the Olympics hauled in 20% of our medals. Who will ever forget the pride of the entire country at that extraordinary achievement? Could that have been achieved by Scotland on its own in isolation? I doubt it. Look at the English premiership these past few years—the finest football league in the world and run by, yes, Scots. I am sorry, but it is the shocking truth: Alex Ferguson, Kenny Dalgleish, David Moyes, Paul Lambert, Steve Kean, Owen Coyle, Alex McLeish, and on, and on, and on—Scotsmen to a man and in every lilting post-match syllable. Has that smacked of arrogance in the English? Arrogance is usually administered with a firmer hand than that. If my old friend Francis Urquhart had ever heard of the drive for independence, I suspect that he would have concluded that the demand for it came from south of the border, not the north.

Those Scots are everywhere, even here in Westminster. As my noble friend Lord Forsyth pointed out so passionately earlier, take out those with Scottish roots from the list of Prime Ministers these past 100 years—the Campbell-Bannermans, the Douglas-Homes, the Browns and the Blairs, the Macmillans and the MacDonalds and all the rest, and you are left with a remarkably short list. Take out a couple of Welshmen who crept in there as well and the list is shorter still. So have we English lost out? No, all of us have gained.

There is a golden thread, a mixture of sentiment and common interest, that has bound our peoples together that makes us stronger, not weaker, and that has made this union one of the most adaptable and successful ever devised by man. Do I take all this for granted? Of course I do at times, I am English. Was I taught too little at school about Scottish history? Absolutely I was. Do I wish this union of ours to continue? Most certainly, and with all my heart.

Even as an Englishman it is impossible to walk the fields of Culloden without feeling the power of its history. You cannot read the pages of Rob Roy or listen to the songs of old Scotland, even with a dull English ear, without being taken up by the romance of Scottish culture. Walk through the streets of Edinburgh in August, as I do, and you will see heads held high—just as they are bent low when walking those same streets in January. I defy you to sail the seas of the west coast in the company of Para Handy without laughing with every blow of the puffer’s bilge.

I have not an ounce of Scottish marrow in my bones. I represent a party that would gain mightily and overnight if Scotland disappeared and took all of its Labour MPs with it. The rest of us would move on. Yet we—the English, the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish—are more than friends, we are family. If Scotland were to decide to quit, to leave us and go its own way, it would be the greatest sadness of my political life. May that day never come.

Female Genital Mutilation

Lord Dobbs Excerpts

Thursday 20th March 2014 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Dobbs]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what are the impediments to bringing prosecutions in cases of female genital mutilation.

[The Advocate-General for Scotland (Lord Wallace of Tankerness) (LD)]

My Lords, the Crown Prosecution Service can consider prosecuting only those cases that have been referred to it by the police following an investigation of a number of significant factors affecting the reporting of female genital mutilation. Those include a lack of information from affected communities and the age and vulnerability of the girls and women, which prevents them from coming forward to report offences or to give evidence in court. However, your Lordships’ House should be in no doubt that the Crown Prosecution Service is working hard to bring a successful prosecution.

[Lord Dobbs (Con)]

I thank my noble and learned friend for the encouraging reply and initiatives the Government have been taking. However, he will understand when I say that these are not yet enough. Female genital mutilation is a crime. It is estimated that 66,000 women and children in England and Wales are victims, yet there has not been a single prosecution. Can my noble friend assure the House that, while we are rightly sensitive to the interests of minority cultures, the Government will never neglect our fundamental British culture, which deems that this practice is little less than butchery and must be stopped? While the Minister rightly emphasises the role that education has to play in stamping out this practice, will he accept that by far the best way of driving this lesson home and saving as many innocent women and young girls as possible is to ensure that those responsible are identified, prosecuted and locked away, where they can do no further harm?

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

My Lords, there is widespread frustration that there has been no prosecution, albeit that there has been legislation on the statute books since 1985. At present, the Crown Prosecution Service is considering or advising the police on 11 cases, four being re-reviews of cases that had previously been considered and where a decision was made that no further action should be taken. My noble friend is absolutely right: this is a crime. It is a very serious form of violence against girls and women and is a form of child abuse. I assure my noble friend that the criminal law applies to everyone, without exception.

Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill

Lord Dobbs Excerpts

Monday 24th June 2013 Lords Chamber

There is a clear need to intervene and correct these failings by giving the people a say through a referendum. If the Government receive a mandate for their policy through a referendum then all the other procedural failings to date would become an irrelevance. The resulting legislation would not suffer from ongoing questions about its legitimacy that would inevitably gnaw away at and undermine it. Moreover, Amendment 48 would help to redeem our reputation as a democracy committed to constitutional due process and fair play. Therefore, I strongly commend Amendment 48 to the House.

[Lord Dobbs]

My Lords, I will attempt to be very brief, I promise that. We have a flexible and unwritten constitution, which means that proposing a referendum in these circumstances is unusual, irregular but not improper. However, in my view, it is wholly wrong. I endorse almost every word that the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, said in his objections to the amendment. I add that there is something strange. I do not understand why the amendment insists that Peers would be denied a vote in this referendum. It is restricted to those entitled to vote at parliamentary elections. However, that is not my fundamental objection to the amendment. The noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, is as outraged as I am about it.

At the heart of the Bill is that we will no longer discriminate against individuals because of what they were born. If the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, believes that that is revolutionary then so be it. I would not resile from that description. We would not be considering the amendment if we were changing the law to give women equal rights with men or black people equal rights with whites. Would we throw the entire principle of equal rights into doubt in those cases by insisting on a referendum? I think not. I suspect we would find such a suggestion appalling.

I asked myself a very simple question about the amendment, as with so many amendments that we have discussed. If we were to strip the word gay or same-sex from it and replace it with black, women or, indeed, Welsh, what would happen? There would be rivers of outrage flooding throughout the country. That is why I believe the amendment to be entirely misconstrued. To discriminate against people for the way that they were born is wrong. In my view, it is indefensible. No amount of referendering could ever make that right.

[Lord Stoddart of Swindon]

I support the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Anderson. Together with him, I suggested this solution at Second Reading. The fact is that this bit of legislation has undoubtedly split the country. All of us have had very abnormal postbags and e-mails in this context. Indeed, I have had the biggest postbag since I proposed, promoted and got through this House a Bill to ban same-sex wards. It is quite obviously something that the public think very strongly about. It can only really be tested through a referendum because it not only makes such a difference to an institution that has been around for some thousands of years but has constitutional implications. Those are some of the reasons why there should be a referendum.

The political parties have had their say and are virtually unanimous. The Cabinet has had its say; whether that was unanimous I do not know. The wider Government have had their say. The House of Commons, albeit with a so-called free vote, has had its say, and has made a decision. The House of Lords is having its say. The only people who are not having a say—because they have never been given the opportunity—are the wider public and the people who are going to be affected by the Bill. That is why I believe that there should be a referendum.

There is another reason: I am not satisfied by the way that the Bill has been gestated. The noble Lord, Lord Anderson, asked, “Why the speed? What do the Government want to go so fast for?”. As it so happens, I have a newspaper cutting here, from the Sunday Telegraph, of a very interesting article by Mr Christopher Booker. I am not going to read the whole article out, as it is a bit late for that, but I will read a part of it. He writes:

“As I recounted here on February 9, the drive to get same-sex marriage into law was masterminded from 2010 onwards by an alliance between Theresa May, the Conservative Home Secretary, Lynne Featherstone, the Lib Dem equalities minister, and gay pressure groups, led by one called Equal Love. They pushed the issue forward, not in Westminster, but through the Council of Europe, culminating in March last year with a day-long ‘secret conference’ chaired by Miss Featherstone in Strasbourg. With the public excluded for the first time in the Council’s history, it was here that—with the active support of Sir Nicolas Bratza, the British president of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR)—a deadline was set for their planned coup of June 2013. If, by this date, ‘several countries’ had managed to put gay marriage into law, Sir Nicolas pledged that his court would then declare same-sex marriage to be a Europe-wide human right”.

It seems to me that that was the gestation, or part of it, of this particular Bill. It almost sounds like a conspiracy, but I do not like using that word. Nevertheless, that is the article by Mr Christopher Booker, or part of it. I think it is good for this House to have heard it, because it gives the Government the opportunity to say whether Mr Booker’s article and his findings are correct. I therefore hope that that will help the noble Lord, Lord Anderson and of course, as I have already said, I will be delighted to support his amendment.