Justice and Security Bill [Lords]

Debate between George Howarth and Jack Straw

Tuesday 18th December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Howarth]

The hon. Gentleman is correct and I am glad that he has added to what I have said.

I will address my remarks on part 2 to closed material proceedings. Usually, if I find myself in agreement with the Minister without Portfolio and the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes) on these matters, it means that I am in the wrong and I change my position. They tend to be far more liberal than me on these matters.

[Mr Straw]

Not difficult.

[Mr Howarth]

Indeed. However, I am reassured by the unholy alliance that has been formed between my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) and the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis). That has made me feel a little more secure about the extent to which I agree with those other Members. I rather think that I have brought on an intervention with that remark.

Border Checks Summer 2011

Debate between George Howarth and Jack Straw

Wednesday 9th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jack Straw (Blackburn) (Lab)]

The hon. Member for Hertsmere (Mr Clappison) has just told the House that he is ready to wait for the evidence and the results of the inquiry before reaching conclusions, and I think he is right to do so. It is a great shame that the Secretary of State jumped to conclusions impetuously, without any proper evidence and without allowing others to respond.

At the heart of this debate are the issues of the conduct of the Home Secretary and the level of ministerial responsibility, in terms of both competence in running a Department and moral responsibility for what happens in that Department.

[Mr George Howarth (Knowsley) (Lab)]

There is a long-established principle that Ministers take responsibility for what goes on in their Departments, and to be fair, the Home Secretary confirmed that principle earlier in the week. Would my right hon. Friend care to speculate on what she means by taking responsibility for her Department?

[Mr Straw]

As I shall explain, the issue is not whether a Minister mouths the words, but whether, in practice, that Minister acts in a way that demonstrates his or her responsibility for what happens in his or her Department.

The truth about the Home Office—which is the subject of all kinds of dark jokes, particularly when new Home Secretaries enter it—is that things are more likely to go wrong there than in any other Department. That is not because its staff are of less high quality than other staff; far from it. Overwhelmingly, the staff in all parts of the Home Office who served me during the four years for which I was Home Secretary showed the highest possible skill, dedication and commitment. They possessed the added attribute that they were dealing with people—such as prisoners, criminals and illegal immigrants—with whom most of us would not wish to deal day by day or week by week.

The fact that the Home Office is so often in the limelight for the wrong reasons, because there is a “fiasco” or “crisis”, is due to the nature of its business. Other Departments generally work with the grain of the people with whom they deal. There are two obvious examples. In schools, parents and pupils want, roughly speaking, what teachers and the Secretary of State want, which is better education. When it comes to health, patients and their relatives want the same as nurses, doctors and the Secretary of State, which is improved health care. The same does not apply in the Home Office, which is at the sharp end of the operation of the state. However much we may dress it up, the business of the Home Office is actually about enforcing the state’s monopoly over the use of force, and its monopoly over the deprivation of other people’s liberties. It is a hard, tough job, both for the person at the top and for those all the way down.

The other aspect that lies behind one of the core arguments in the debate is that, because the Home Office’s business is about the use of force, the deprivation of liberty and the refusal of rights, junior, young and quite inexperienced staff must often be accorded a very high level of discretion—discretion to arrest people, to allow them in, to lock them up, and so on—which is not accorded to equivalent people elsewhere. The whole system will seize up unless those lower down believe that those at the top are worthy of their confidence, and are ready to take responsibility when things go wrong.

I am not dewy-eyed about what can go wrong in a very large Department—of course not—and no Secretary of State is responsible for locking every cell door or checking every border. I recall occasions when, after a full and careful inquiry, one or two people had to be invited to pursue their careers elsewhere. That is inevitable. However, I believe that it must be done in a way that is judicious and judicial. Secretaries of State must ensure that they take the overwhelming majority of their staff with them. What they should not do—I am sorry that the Home Secretary has embarked on this—is adopt what appears to me, whatever the right hon. Lady’s personal motives, to be both a vindictive and a punitive approach of hanging someone out to dry because it seemed to her that that would be a way of saving her career.

Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Debate between George Howarth and Jack Straw

Monday 13th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Straw]

Funnily enough, I had not thought of that. Perhaps I should have. It is not that I am innocent of such considerations, but on this occasion it had not occurred to me.

The Bill does botch the job, however. It provides for a standard Parliament to be too long, at five years. It fails to clarify the procedures for confidence votes, opening up the possibility of a lame-duck Administration and constitutional limbo. It leaves a large loophole enabling Prime Ministers to use the prerogative power to prorogue Parliament, as happened recently in Canada. The mechanism for triggering an early Dissolution of Parliament may impinge—I put it no more strongly than that—on parliamentary privilege by creating the risk that courts could intervene on parliamentary proceedings.

Much of the incoherence of the Bill is a consequence of the unnecessary haste with which it is being rushed through Parliament. A week ago, the House debated the Second Reading of the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill. That too is being rushed through, with the Deputy Prime Minister breaking all previous undertakings about the importance of pre-legislative scrutiny.

If Members accept the imperative of a May 2011 date for the alternative-vote referendum—although I do not—at least the right hon. Gentleman has a fig leaf of an excuse for seeking to rush that Bill through at this early stage, but palpably no such excuse exists for rushing this Bill through. Had there been any justification, such as a packed legislative programme which might have hit the end-of-Session buffers, that excuse would have been blown away this morning by the ill-thought-through announcement by the Leader of the House that the current Session is to last for two full years.

[Mr George Howarth]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend, in all his newly proclaimed virginal innocence, for giving way. Does he not believe that this Bill and the other Bill to which he has referred are in some way linked?

[Mr Straw]

Let me say first, for the avoidance of doubt, that I have made no protestations of virginal innocence, and would never seek to do so.

The two Bills are certainly not cognate, but they are linked in the sense that they are the price that the Conservative party agreed to pay in order to stitch together this very curious coalition. I am glad, in saying that, to receive the approbation of many right hon. and hon. Members on the Government Benches. In any event, the idea that this Bill had to be bashed through very quickly was blown away by this morning’s announcement.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Straw]

I am delighted to do that, and I put that absolutely on the record.

[Mr George Howarth]

My right hon. Friend said a few moments ago that one reason why he felt inclined to give this Bill its Second Reading is a commitment made in the Labour party manifesto. Perhaps it would help if I reminded him of what we actually said in our manifesto. We said that we would have the following:

“Legislation to ensure Parliaments sit for a fixed term and an All Party Commission to chart a course to a Written Constitution.”

At least two elements which would make the Bill conform with that commitment are missing.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Straw]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. People say that such things will never happen, but I am sure that Stephen Harper is an honourable man—as honourable as any British Prime Minister. When senior politicians are up against it and are fighting for their life, they will clutch at any lawful provision, and it would be lawful to do that, so this issue must be considered.

[Mr George Howarth]

My right hon. Friend referred to my intervention on the Deputy Prime Minister as being about clause 2(1)(c), which I said in terms it was about, but the Deputy Prime Minister is so knowledgeable about this five-clause Bill that he confused it with clause 4(1), so my right hon. Friend is right about the answer but wrong about the question.

[Mr Straw]

I acknowledge the point that my right hon. Friend makes.

I want now to deal with the privilege of the House, which was much aired in the evidence that the Clerk gave the other day to the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee chaired by my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North. This issue has echoes of our debate 15 months ago about the Parliamentary Standards Bill. I recall that when I introduced the Bill there was a huge harrumph about the degree to which Parliament’s privilege would be being affected by its provisions. There was such a huge harrumph that the Government were defeated on those provisions and had to go back to the drawing board, so I have thought about this matter.

I would not dream of asking the Deputy Prime Minister to confirm this, but I dare say that the advice that he has received about the implications of this Bill are from similar sources to those from which I received advice on the 2009 Bill. I understand that the arguments are often finely balanced. I have certainly given similar undertakings to that given by him about the very long odds on the courts intervening, but this House and the other place are both highly sensitive to interventions by the courts on the privilege of the House. The hunting decision can be used in both ways: the actual decision of the courts, in respect of the Parliament Acts, was not to overturn a decision of this House, but the very fact that they entertained the argument was worrying. I ask him to think very carefully about that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Howarth]

My hon. Friend makes a useful suggestion, and doubtless he will expand on it if he succeeds in catching your eye, Madam Deputy Speaker. Issues of principle are involved, as well as of detail, and that is what I intend to try to deal with.

Before dealing with the Bill’s provisions, I want to say a word about the trust that was placed in our hands by our constituents at the general election. I hope that that does not sound too pious, but it is important that we discuss these principles when we deal with measures of this kind. Regardless of our party labels, we have been entrusted by our constituents with the ability to exercise judgment as representatives of our constituencies. That may appear trite, but it is important that we do not lose sight of it. Let me qualify the point, however, as I am not so naive as to assume that the 31,000 people who voted for me in Knowsley in the general election did so wholly or even mainly on the basis that I was the best person for the job.

[Mr Straw]

My right hon. Friend should not do himself a disservice. Would he give a wider audience to the fact that, as I recall, his 31,000 vote was either the largest or second-largest Labour share of the vote in England?

[Mr Howarth]

I have to tell my right hon. Friend that I am far too modest to consider looking at such statistics. Most of the people who voted, however, mainly voted for a particular political party. I am not trying to be unduly modest—that applies to every Member of the House, with very few exceptions.

It is important to remember why people voted for particular parties. It is partly because they agreed with the policies, but partly because they agreed with the values. As the House of Commons Library has made clear in its helpful note, my party manifesto included a commitment to fixed-term Parliaments, as my right hon. Friend said, but that was in the context of a written constitution. I have already cited the wording that was used. My right hon. Friend said that the use of “and” to link fixed-term Parliaments with wider constitutional reform and a constitutional convention was a question of my muddling up subjunctive and conjunctive clauses, but I doubt very much whether he had that in mind when he drafted that section of our manifesto. Knowing him, it is possible that he deliberately left the wording ambiguous so that on a future occasion he could make the claim that he made today. Not for nothing did the late Barbara Castle suggest that he could occasionally be devious—I do not think that she actually used the word, “devious” but that was the import of what she said—and had a great deal of low cunning. Our earlier exchange perhaps demonstrated that even though he is not standing for the shadow Cabinet, he still has a great deal of low cunning.

The manifesto commitment was ambiguous, but a further point needs to be made. How far does an Opposition party go towards deciding that it must stick to every measure in a previous manifesto when, as we did, it loses the election?

I understand that Governments and parties that contribute towards Governments are rightly judged by the extent to which they do what they say will do at a general election and in their manifesto, but it seems to me—and I hope to my right hon. Friend—that although the principles that we stand by as a party and our values as a party endure defeat and victory in a general election, specific policies, and certainly policies on such an issue, do not necessarily survive a defeat.

I was out and about in my constituency over the weekend and had many conversations about matters political, not just with Labour party members, but with voters. Surprise, surprise, not one of them said to me, “George, I want you to go down there on Monday for the Second Reading of the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill and vote for it.” They did not say, “Vote for it.” They did not say, “Don’t vote for it.” They have never discussed it with me at all. I have never had a letter on fixed-term Parliaments. I have never had an e-mail—no doubt I will get hundreds of them now—on fixed-term Parliaments. No constituent has ever discussed fixed-term Parliaments with me. Any belief that we have a moral obligation to support the Bill has passed me by.

There are other important things that we should take into account. I come back to the point that I made at the beginning. We are sent here to exercise a judgment about many things, one of which is the performance of any Government at any given time. One of the devices that we have at our disposal in such circumstances is a vote of no confidence. Normally, a vote of no confidence can trigger an election process, subject to the monarch and all the procedures that have to take place in those circumstances. I do not believe that our constituents want us to be in a position where we retain the right to pass a vote of no confidence if the effect of that vote is dependent on the proportion of Members who voted for it.

If a Government have lost the confidence of the House of Commons and that is manifested by a majority of one or two in a vote of no confidence, why is that wrong? Whether the Government have lost the confidence of two thirds of the House, a dozen or two or three Members, why does that make a difference? In the end, a Government who have run out of steam, run out of ideas or run out of confidence here or in the country should go.

I was sent here to make sure that whatever the political composition of the Government of the day, I had the ability on behalf of my constituents to say, “Enough is enough. Go!” That ability, which I have had for the 20-odd years that I have been a Member of the House, is circumscribed by the terms of the Bill.