Border Checks Summer 2011
Debate between Jack Straw and Lord Jackson of Peterborough(12 years, 11 months ago)
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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.
Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)
I think that the House would take the right hon. Gentleman slightly more seriously were it not for the case of, say, Mr Steve Moxon, who in 2004 revealed the evident failings of the previous Administration on immigration, particularly in relation to one-legged Romanian and Bulgarian roofers. For his pains he was hounded out of office, as indeed was the then Member of Parliament for Stretford and Urmston, the right hon. Beverley Hughes.
Mr Jackson
I am happy to clarify what I said. There is evidently a double standard in what the right hon. Gentleman says. He talks of keeping the respect and trust of people who work in the Home Office or the Ministry of Justice, but those who have revealed the failings of the last Administration on immigration have been hounded out of their jobs.
Constitution and Home Affairs
Debate between Jack Straw and Lord Jackson of Peterborough(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Straw
The hon. Gentleman will have to allow me to say that I consult my colleagues about the whipping arrangements that would apply. [Interruption.] My right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson) is speculating about whether the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes) is worried about something. My advice is for him to worry about how he and his party are going to vote and we will worry about how we vote.
Mr Jackson
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way, and I am glad that the sinner is repenting. Does he regret the use of the guillotine on so many important Bills during the last Parliament? In the Housing and Regeneration Bill, for instance, which I was involved in, more than 200 Government clauses were tabled between Second Reading and Report, so Members were not allowed proper analysis and oversight of that important legislation. [Interruption.]
Mr Straw
My hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover (Mr Skinner) says that there were no guillotines, as they were programme motions—but they come to the same thing.
Let me say to the hon. Member for Peterborough (Mr Jackson) that I regret the use of guillotines full stop, but sometimes they are necessary. However, I sat in the House in opposition for 18 years, and the first Bill I sat on—the Housing Bill, in early 1980, 30 years ago—was the subject of the most ruthless guillotining, and that on a major measure. There are plenty of other measures of profound importance that were also the subject of guillotining.
My view, both in government and in opposition, has been that the House—certainly over the 30 years in which I have been in it—has not got right the way in which it should deal effectively with legislation on the Floor of the House, and I think that there is a better way. We need to provide for more time, but if we do that, the quid pro quo needs to be limits on speeches, so that people can constructively take part. We also need to look at something that I facilitated on at least one occasion, which is ensuring that when the business is subject to programming or guillotining, some Opposition and Back-Bench amendments can also be the subject of votes. I put those proposals before the House for consideration.
I have set out our view on many of the proposals that are, and will be, the subject of a broad consensus. As I have said, on every proposal that the Deputy Prime Minister brings forward, we shall seek constructively to work with the Government to achieve consensus. However, it seems that consensus was the last thing on the mind of the governing parties, when one turns to some of the elements of the coalition agreement. In his first speech as Deputy Prime Minister, outside the House, the right hon. Gentleman told the nation that he proposed to secure the biggest shake-up of our democracy since the Reform Act of 1832. He described the Reform Act of 1832 as a “landmark”, from
“politicians who refused to sit back and do nothing while huge swathes of the population remained helpless against vested interests. Who stood up for the freedom of the many”—
we have heard that phrase before—
“not the privilege of the few.”
Well, not quite, Mr Speaker, for the truth is that even after the passage of the Great Reform Act of 1832, huge swathes of the population—92% of the population—remained without a vote, helpless in the face of vested interests. The Reform Act of 1832 gave the vote, a limited franchise, to the property-owning class, of whom there were remarkably few, and deliberately ensured that nobody else had the vote—no women, no working men; just 16% of men, and no women whatever.
Let me also say to the right hon. Gentleman that had the Great Reform Act been the landmark in democracy that he suggested—I do not know where he got that from; certainly not even from Wikipedia—none of the agitation of the Chartist movement that followed would have been necessary. Those of us who know a little bit of history will remember that it was the wholly dashed expectations of 1832 that fired up the great Chartist movement. However, the comparison with 1832, if not appropriate, is certainly heavy with unintended irony, for, however limited the effect, the first Reform Act at least extended the franchise. The programme to which the right hon. Gentleman has signed up will reduce the franchise, as I will explain. Some reform!