Public Order Bill

Debate between Yvette Cooper and Julian Lewis

2nd reading
Monday 23rd May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is certainly right to suggest that it is an unwise Government who try to silence those who disagree with them; it is also an undemocratic Government who seek to do so.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

Will the right hon. Lady give way?

[Yvette Cooper]

I will in due course.

The Home Secretary said to us this afternoon:

“From day one, this Government have put the safety and the interests of the law-abiding majority first.”

She claimed that she was prosecuting more criminals, but the opposite is the case. Since she came to office in 2019, crime has gone up by 18% and prosecutions have gone down by 18%, so I have to ask her what planet she is living on. Just because she says things stridently, that does not make them true. When she wonders about being on the side of criminals, maybe she should remember that it is a Conservative Government, and a Conservative Home Secretary, who are literally letting more criminals off—literally. There are hundreds of thousands’ fewer prosecutions every single year than there were under the Labour Government. Prosecutions, cautions and community penalties are going down, even now when crime is going up, and that genuinely means that rapists, abusers, serious offenders, thieves and thugs are all less likely to be prosecuted than they were seven years ago. There is just a one in 20 chance of someone being prosecuted on this Home Secretary’s watch.

The Home Secretary said too that she would not “stand by” while antisocial behaviour caused misery for others, but she is. There are 7,000 fewer neighbourhood police than there were six years ago, and the police are failing to send officers to more than half of all reported antisocial behaviour offences. People and communities across the country are expressing serious concerns about antisocial behaviour being ignored time and again by this Home Secretary.

[Yvette Cooper]

I will give way first to the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), and then to the hon. Gentleman in due course.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

I cannot see what these general points about the record of individual Ministers have to do with the substance of the Bill. What does have to do with the substance of the Bill is the difference between the right to protest peacefully within the rules and the right to insist on repeatedly bellowing a message—on and on and on—irrespective of the fact that other people have heard it and now want to exercise their right to go about their normal life. If I had insisted on intervening on the right hon. Lady when she was not allowing me to do so, that would be the parallel with the sort of abuse these measures are designed to stamp out. I obey the rules, and so should protesters.

[Yvette Cooper]

I do not think this is about bellowing; I think this is about serious offences and the committing of crimes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Yvette Cooper]

My right hon. Friend makes an important point: people across the country want to be able to protest against big new projects that are planned for their area, such as major transport projects, or plans to turn a woodland into a car park or to close a library. That is why it is important to ensure that we have our historic freedoms to protest and people’s voices can be heard, and that we have the right to be protected from intimidation and harassment and we fulfil our responsibilities to keep essential services running. There should be a shared understanding across the House that there are rights to be balanced and important principles that should be respected on both sides of the House—for example, the principle that respects the historic freedom to protest, but also ensures that our essential services keep running.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

I thank the right hon. Lady for giving me a second bite of the cherry. I fear I have to confess that I am possibly the only Member here today who was actually arrested once—for taking part in a counter-demonstration 40 years ago, when we played the national anthem in public against a group of protesters against the Falklands taskforce, which was embarking to the south Atlantic.

The point that I am trying to get over to the right hon. Lady with the use of the words “bellowing” or indeed “incessant bellowing” is this: when the huge pro-nuclear and anti-nuclear demonstrations took place, everybody stopped and allowed each other to have their protest; and then the protest was over, and that was that. The idea that the same people could go on protesting day after day after day without being interfered with by the police, either for obstruction or causing a public nuisance, is ridiculous. What will she do to defend the right of other people to go about their normal lives once the protest has been made but the protesters will not stop?

[Yvette Cooper]

There are two different issues: there are issues in respect of the kinds of protests that might cause serious disruption to the vital public infrastructure that we all depend on, but there may also be protests that, to be honest, might be a bit annoying but do not actually disrupt anybody at all. In a democracy, we should recognise that even though the right hon. Gentleman and I may think that the world should move on, if people have strong views, they should be able to express them.

There should be a shared understanding across the House—

Counter-Terrorism and Sentencing Bill

Debate between Yvette Cooper and Julian Lewis

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons
Tuesday 9th June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) , and he is right: this has been a thoughtful debate, often in a cross-party spirit.

Terrorists want to destroy our way of life, divide our communities and undermine our democracy and our values, and we can never let them succeed. We rightly pay tribute across the House to those on the frontline, fighting terrorism, preventing and tackling attacks, in our police forces and security services, those in local government and communities who work so hard on prevention, and those in faith groups and our prisons. We remember, too, those who have lost their lives or who have lost loved ones to appalling terror attacks.

We face threats not just from Islamist extremism and terrorism, but from far-right extremism and terrorism, where the threats have grown in recent years. We have to always be vigilant, to ensure that those extremists and terrorists can never succeed in dividing our communities and undermining the democratic values for which we have fought for so long.

Many of the challenges relating to this legislation are the same ones that we have addressed and dealt with for many years—how to deal with people who have such warped ideology that they are determined to wreak huge destruction, including killing children; how to deal with people who have become so dangerously radicalised that they may be hard to address through traditional criminal justice system measures; and how to ensure that while we protect our national security, we also protect our democratic values and our freedoms and sustain justice, the rule of law and community cohesion. To do so, we need strong powers to tackle terrorism but also strong safeguards and strong checks and balances.

I want to talk specifically about some of the Home Office measures in the Bill, particularly around TPIMs and the Prevent programme. TPIMs came in after control orders, which were introduced to deal with difficult situations where perhaps the evidence relating to dangerous terrorist suspects depended on intelligence that could not be dealt with in the same way through the courts. There were similar approaches in cases where someone had become so dangerous and still proved dangerous even after their sentence had been served. Those were very difficult circumstances that only applied to a minority of cases.

Control orders were not perfect, and they were applied in those limited circumstances. Long-standing Members will know that I have spent almost a decade arguing with the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) about the decision made in 2011 to end control orders and replace them with TPIMs, rather than simply amending control orders to deal with some of the areas that needed improving. I thought it was wrong to make the decision to downgrade some of the powers in the TPIMs that were introduced. It is worth briefly addressing why, because it has an impact on the decisions that Ministers are making today.

First, I thought it was wrong to remove the ability to relocate dangerous terror suspects and to remove any possibility of doing so, to remove them from dangerous networks. The consequence was that two people who were on TPIMs managed to abscond—something that had not happened in relocated cases. The Government’s independent reviewer, Lord Anderson, recommended that relocation be reintroduced, which eventually happened in 2015.

My second concern was about preventing the ability to constrain some communications for dangerous terror suspects. Again, many of those measures have been changed since, because the Government have recognised that some restrictions need to be in place for online or phone communications where there is significant evidence that someone poses a danger to the public.

My third concern was about the two-year limit set for TPIMs. Control orders were set for a year but could be renewed. TPIMs were fixed at two years. I raised questions in 2011 about what that would mean for the small number of people who might still be extremely dangerous after two years and what provisions would be in place to ensure that the public were protected. Again, Ministers have now recognised that issue and are changing it back.

In many ways, we have had an unnecessary 10 years of administrative going round in circles and changing the burdens on the Security Service and police forces, when we could have made more sensible amendments at the beginning to address those issues. It would be interesting to know whether Ministers now recognise that those changes were wrong and that we should not have made them in the first place.

[Dr Lewis]

May I say from the Government Back Benches that some of us are convinced that the right hon. Lady has been proven right, but will she acknowledge the motives of former Governments being cautious in these very delicate areas?