Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Geraint Davies Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading - Day 2
Tuesday 16th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op) [V]]

Our hearts are with the family and friends of Sarah Everard, and our thoughts with those who gathered in peace and solidarity to mourn her death, in a vigil that was so badly and aggressively handled, and into which we need an immediate inquiry. In its aftermath, this Bill is our opportunity to help women to reclaim the streets for good, turn back the tide of rapes, and replace fear with confidence. Instead, however, the Bill curtails our rights to peaceful protest and assembly. It gives harsher punishments for attacks on slave-owner monuments than for sexual violence against women. It persecutes our Roma and Gypsy communities, and it attacks our right to roam the countryside while giving rapists freedom to roam our streets; rape is up by 35%, and 99% of recorded rapes never go to court.

We need investment at scale in Nightingale courts, equipped with the latest DNA forensic testing technology, so that rapists can be charged, prosecuted and convicted in weeks, instead of victims living in fear for years, as this Bill allows. The Government should empower our citizens and communities, but instead they attack the rights of all of us to peaceful assembly and protest—trade unionists, EU remainers, climate change activists, anti-war protesters, and vote-at-16 enthusiasts. They are curtailing the freedom of expression that feeds a healthy, responsive democracy. That will drive protest underground, generating heat in place of light.

This Trojan horse Bill may display popular measures on dangerous driving, protecting protectors and Lammy reforms, and I am sure that in Committee, Labour will support those few crumbs of goodness beside the poison chalice that this Bill represents. This thoroughly rotten Bill needs to be rejected and recast in the next Queen’s Speech. It fails to reclaim our streets from the grip of fear; and amid a pandemic, a recession, and the serial abuse of women on our streets, it constitutes an attack on our fundamental values, our democracy, our freedom, and the very laws that protect those things. We should reject the Bill.