King’s Speech

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Wednesday 8th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, I make no apologies for saying just a word about the sad death of Lord Judge. Some Members will know how closely I worked with him over the past few years, both on the Elections Bill and primarily on criminal justice measures, including the issue of imprisonment for public protection. I shall sorely miss him personally.

I will not go down the rabbit hole offered by the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, except to say that, if a large number of Members are not participating in voting in this House, they might consider why they are still in it. If the Government got Bills right in the first place, we would not have to amend them so frequently. In fact, as the Leader of the House pointed out yesterday, rather tongue-in-cheek, out of the 8,000 amendments tabled, over 2,500 were tabled by the Government. That demonstrates how appalling legislation was in the first place—but let us move on.

This King’s Speech is sadly denuded of anything that will offer Britain hope; it is a last hurrah. I am sad because this opportunity could have been taken to deal with some of the central issues facing the nation, not least on ageing and on the impact that artificial intelligence is likely to have.

The Minister who introduced today’s debate, for whom I have a lot of time, raised a few things with which I agree. One of them is the absurdity of short prison sentences. Led by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, the Justice and Home Affairs Committee will shortly produce a lengthy and detailed report on this issue, which I hope the Government will take seriously; it will help to accelerate sensible sentencing and support the judiciary to do so.

However, there were murmurs that this King’s Speech was to develop clear blue water between the Government and the Opposition. I fear that this will fail, because some of the measures thrown up in recent times by the current Home Secretary do not really appear at all, and some measures denoted by the Justice Secretary, such as life means life, have been in place for 20 years. The whole-life tariff extension, for those crimes that would warrant it, is likely to have a minimal impact— I should know, because the words “life means life” were ones I issued back in 2003. I hope that, when the Victims and Prisoners Bill reaches this House, we will be able to do something substantive on IPP.

There were many things in the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Marks, with which I agreed; I will not repeat them because we have an indicative time limit. I will say just this: we have had so many Justice Secretaries that it is hard to keep count of them. The present one is a great improvement on the last, and I hope that he will be able, over the next nine months or so, to demonstrate that still further. The Crown Prosecution Service is in meltdown—there are 75,000 outstanding cases, the courts are under enormous pressure and the Prison Service is on the edge of collapse—so what we need is decisive action to ensure that we get this right. Of course we need tough sentences for those who commit the most horrendous and heinous crimes, including those spelled out by the Minister at the beginning of today’s debate, but we also need to use common sense.

My noble friend from the Front Bench mentioned something as simple as shoplifting causing havoc to both retailers and the public, such as in the small shop in south London that last week put up a notice saying, “We are sorry we can’t put the goods on the shelves any more. You will have to ask at the counter”, because of the number of organised thefts that had taken place and the inadequacy of the police to deal with them. These are issues which, alongside the very big ones, affect people day in, day out in our communities, so we should take them seriously.

I will say something about the current Home Secretary. Floating the idea that you should punish those who are homeless on the streets, or even to suggest that those charities which befriend and try to bring some comfort to those on the streets should be prosecuted, is an outrage. I know that many Conservatives agree with that. In fact, the twist here is that the Leader of the House yesterday reminded us of the returned convention of the Lord Chancellor walking backwards. If I were the Lord Chancellor, I would not turn my back on the present Home Secretary either. It is quite clear that some parts of the briefing on the King’s Speech were more about future elections within the Conservative Party than the well-being of the British people—that is very poor. For a Government who may be on their way out, they could at least, in their last breath, show that they care about the real issues affecting the British people.