Criminal Law

Lord Clarke of Nottingham Excerpts

Monday 10th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe) (Con)]

May I ask the shadow Home Secretary to reconsider the rather extraordinary step she has taken of presenting this archaic motion and, indeed, ask the House to consider quite where we are getting to on this issue? Nobody enjoys a good procedural row in the House of Commons as much as I do, and this is one of the best we have had for many years. It is perfectly straightforward—people are entitled to do this if they wish—but the House ought to reflect on what impression this is going to give to the outside world if we are not careful. We are discussing serious matters, yet we are all frolicking about in a rather schoolboy manner while the Whips try to get people to come back for an unexpected debate early in the evening. Let us be candid about what is happening.

Some 20 or 30 years ago, this sort of thing was quite excusable, and people just thought it was one of the things this House did, usually at bizarre hours of the night. Nowadays, that is not the mood out there and we have to be careful that we do not feed the thoughts of those who do not have a very high regard for parliamentary debate and for party politics, and who believed they were told to expect, as every Member of Parliament expected, that we were going to spend an evening having a serious discussion on how we organise our policing and criminal justice system to deal with the extremely important and growing problem of international and cross-border crime. If the whole thing collapses in time for everybody to go and have a good dinner in the early evening, that will not rise to the expectations of serious members of the public who expect us to have a proper debate.

[Steve Baker]

I disagree with my right hon. and learned Friend profoundly. I came into politics only because I was sick of the state of it, yet tonight I see the House of Commons alive. We have the opportunity to find out whether the Government are even asking the right questions. Surely he can see that this is about Parliament seizing back the initiative and reconnecting representatives with the public, who are so upset, largely because of the incompetence of the Labour party.

[Mr Clarke]

I have every respect for the strongly held views of quite a lot of Members, including a lot on my side, who do not agree with me on this evening’s measures, but I think we would win back the respect of the public if we had a serious debate on them. We will not if we bog ourselves down in arcane procedural arguments, most of which are a novelty to people sitting in the Chamber at the moment; we are going into hitherto unknown areas. I have never previously heard a Front-Bench spokesman move this motion at any stage in any serious debate, and I do not expect I will for many years to come.

I sympathise with the shadow Home Secretary’s position; indeed, I agree with her on quite a lot of things. Her problem is that she is leading for the Opposition when in policy terms she agrees with absolutely everything the Home Secretary is proposing, and so do I. I congratulate the shadow Home Secretary on her responsible approach to the subject. Everybody in this country responsible for the fight against crime and for the criminal justice system, and wanting to protect the public, is in favour of this opt-in. I am even more closely aligned with her than with some of my colleagues. I voted with her on the Maastricht treaty. I also voted with her on the Lisbon treaty, which paved the way for these international agreements being reached. That has enabled us to be so much more effective than we used to be in dealing with international criminal fugitives, who not only thrived on the Costa del Sol but were very present in London when they fled to this country before we steadily began to develop today’s arrangements.

The shadow Home Secretary has, however, got absolutely no arguments against the Government’s proposals on the merits. She is therefore making a mountain out of a molehill of a parliamentary procedural thing, which she thinks serves her purpose. Of course she is also enjoying herself, which I quite understand in ordinary party political terms. She is allying herself with my right hon. and hon. Friends who profoundly disagree with her and with the Home Secretary, and who are totally opposed to me in my support for these criminal justice measures. The alliance between the shadow Home Secretary and some of the most dyed in the wool Eurosceptics in this House is a very unlikely one, but I go back to where I started.

[Chris Bryant]

The right hon. and learned Gentleman knows that I agree with him on many issues relating to the European Union, but I gently suggest to him that good Europeans like us need to understand that we have to carry the country with us. That requires proper processes in this House, not chicanery and not a proxy motion; we need a proper motion on the Order Paper, which is why every Committee that has considered this matter—the Home Affairs Committee, the Justice Committee and the European Scrutiny Committee—decided that there should be a separate motion. That is all we are calling for.

[Mr Clarke]

I hope my opening remarks made it quite clear that the one thing I am not going to do is get drawn back into this entertaining procedural debate we had earlier on. It seems to me as plain as a pikestaff that if we have a vote at 10 pm on what is apparently on the Order Paper, the Government will be bound either to proceed with the opt-in to 35 measures or not to proceed with the opt-in to any of them. I repeat that the public are expecting the House of Commons to debate this seriously. It may be that there are not enough Members of Parliament against it and there are not enough arguments against it to delay us much longer, but I do not think that is the case. Some very respectable Government Members are going to oppose it—if they ever get the chance.

One way or another, this argument about whether or not the strict requirements of parliamentary procedure—allowing everybody to get wildly indignant about what we all know is synthetic anger at the way the procedures have been brought forward—is not a wise way of proceeding. One thing that unites most Members so far, all the way from my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) to me, is that we think these are serious issues, and to break down now in an atmosphere of such trivial argument will be a triumph for the UKIP but something that all of us ought to regret.