Social Policy

Lord Maginnis of Drumglass Excerpts

Wednesday 16th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Maginnis of Drumglass]

My Lords, I am grateful to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester for having sought this debate. It is timely, appropriate and particularly relevant. I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Wei: an intervening duty prevented me from getting into the Chamber, but from the shadows I listened carefully to what he had to say and found it inspiring. If he lives to be the oldest Peer in this Chamber, he will contribute a great deal during that time.

I am sadly aware not just that our nation now tries to survive on compromised ethical values, so that it appears to be almost improper to acknowledge the basis of our moral values, but that individual, family and community expectations have escalated too far beyond what is good and necessary for a happy and stable society. After 27 years in Parliament, I think that I know why, how and from where much of the problem derives. It is basically because what should be a Government of the people has now become a Government for the people. Government—this was particularly evident during 13 years of new Labour, but it does not apply exclusively to any single party—has become largely a cabal of detached intellectuals whose reason tells them that they know what is best for everyone else and who would be content to have what I will call a United Kingdom that is totalitarian in effect and authoritarian in nature. Some would seek to cover that objective with the euphemism “a nanny state”, but that is too simple and very dangerous.

For some reason, the previous Government had resolved that discrimination was wrong and that all society should be tarred with the same broad brush. As a result, we should become little more than computerised numbers; we should carry identity cards; we should all be seen as potential child abusers and be vetted if we regularly drive our grandchildren and their pals to and from school; and we should be subjected to potentially 42 days’ interrogation if under suspicion. Just yesterday, it was ordained that, if parliamentary colleagues and I were to have a preview of the Saville report, we should be prepared to submit ourselves to what was literally five hours’ house arrest. What folly; what an insult; what an incentive for one simply to surrender to the idea that as individuals we no longer have responsibility to make judgments or set personal standards but should merely go with the flow.

In your Lordships’ House, we have already nullified some of the greater aberrations of the previous Government, but why is all this happening in the first place? However bright and intellectually competent our elected colleagues in the other place may be, too many of them have virtually no concept of “of the people”. It was decided some years ago that your Lordships’ House should not be dominated by a single stratum of society. After 18 years’ experience in another place and nine years here, I think that this House in its present form does a tolerably good job. I believe that, in our lives outside this House, we have, overall, more meaningful contact with society than have many of those in the other place. It is now about time that we had a critical look at how and why the other place has lost touch with society. As well as encouraging intellect and education—and, as a schoolmaster, I have respect for that—we must have experience. We cannot have a relationship between government and society when the greater part of government has never properly belonged to or participated among society, never done real jobs, never managed or organised and never served as an integral part of society.

My challenge to government is that, for every intellectual giant who comes to the Front Benches via Oxford or Cambridge, or wherever, there has to be another who comes from industry, from business, from the land, from the caring professions and from real hands-on experience and who is “of the people”. Only then can we begin to restore the partnership between government and civil society. If we had government that, like many of us in your Lordships’ House, knew the practicalities of evaluating things, running things and even understanding things that impact directly on society, we could stop administrating this country by expensive and faceless quangos, by committees and by minders, with their thousands of CCTV cameras, and become, once again, a proper democracy where leaders can be valued for their experience, judgment, observance of moral rectitude and practical responsibility. We have sadly gone so far in the opposite direction that it will take resolve, time and more than a modicum of common sense to achieve this. Can we start today?

I cannot speak about government and society without mentioning how personally hurt I was yesterday by the Saville report and the Government’s capitulation to what we saw on television last evening to be a well orchestrated hangover from a 30-year campaign of terrorism. Of the families of the 496 who died in 1972, over 97 per cent were ignored. The report lacked balance—3,720 died during the terrorist campaign, so the £192 million pounds spent on Saville represents a mere 0.37 per cent of the victims. I know that the Prime Minister tried valiantly to balance his remarks, but from my perspective 40 years of education is no substitute for 40 years of hands-on experience. For 99.6 per cent of those families, the Government’s identification with civil society was absent, just as was any apology from the Northern Ireland Assembly’s Deputy First Minister and one-time terrorist commander and killer, Martin McGuinness.

I conclude my remarks with a practical proposal that deals with one of the most pressing issues affecting the relationship between government and society—law and order and our escalating prison population. We now have over 85,000 in our prisons. I am glad that the right honourable Ken Clarke has recognised the extent of the problem. If I were to evaluate it in financial terms, I would point out that the £45,000 that it costs annually to keep a person in prison—maybe this comparison makes sense—is greater than it would cost me to send a grandchild to Eton for a year. Over 40 per cent of prisoners reoffend within five to six months of release from prison. These are the Government’s own figures.

On this issue, the Government are letting society down. The nub of the problem is largely that we have failed to differentiate between criminals and offenders. I shall define that. Criminals are those who, as a profession, dishonestly exploit society for a living, who virtually dictate what happens in our prisons and who dominate young offenders. My definition of “offender” is one who breaks the law through a deficit in his character, which may be, and often is, that he lacks proper communication skills—certainly that represents 25 per cent, some would say as high as 40 per cent, of our prison population. We send them to share the company of those who are dedicated to crime and then release them to a disorganised and inadequate lifestyle where their godfather mentors are able to exploit them further. According to Marina Kim on “Talking Politics”, in 2007-08 recidivism cost our economy more than £9.5 billion.

Rather than repeating myself, I refer to a speech that I made on 19 December 2008, at col. 334, when I proposed a clearly segregated two-tier prison system, where we would not provide the criminals with a steady stream of potential offenders but where we would accommodate offenders within a safer, protective system that allowed the probation service, social workers, families and communities to rediscover social responsibility, and where every pound spent—properly targeted and managed by a Minister who understood the nature of society—could make such a difference.

Today government and society seem to exist on different planes. We have allowed that to happen as we scrambled over one another to get a bigger and bigger share or control of the power of money when times were good. The chasm between government and civil society was not inevitable, but we allowed it to occur. Perhaps now, in more straitened times, we can grasp the opportunity to pause and consider how we can effectively restore the ethos of decency and responsibility and bring a greater degree of humanity back to our relationships.