Europe, Human Rights and Keeping People Safe at Home and Abroad

Lord Clarke of Nottingham Excerpts

Tuesday 24th May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

I agree with a lot of what the hon. Gentleman says. The specific allegation is that British-made cluster munitions, which will have been made and delivered probably 30 years ago, may have been used. We do not believe that that is the case, but the Ministry of Defence—he will have heard a Defence Minister say this from the Dispatch Box today—is carrying out an urgent investigation. It will look at the evidence and then decide how to move forward. We have a high level of confidence that British-made cluster munitions have not been used in this conflict, but we must of course look at the allegation that has been made, and any evidence presented in support of it, and respond appropriately.

[Mr Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend mentions Libya. With hindsight, it is clear that after the fall of Gaddafi we did not really give enough support to the Government we then recognised. The place collapsed into anarchy and is a possible base for ISIS. About half an hour ago, the Secretary of State for Defence said we were offering security assistance to the Government we now recognise, if and when they request it. Will the Foreign Secretary tell me whether his Department and other Departments are giving every other possible diplomatic and political support to that Government? Until they can establish themselves as a real Administration capable of delivering services to their public and of winning public support, we run the danger again of having a slightly fictional Government in Tripoli, while the rest of the country falls prey to anarchy or even ISIS.

[Mr Hammond]

As I am sure my right hon. and learned Friend would readily agree, hindsight is indeed a wonderful thing. [Interruption.] The Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood), reminds me that elections were held in Libya after the fall of Gaddafi. It is since then that things have gone wrong.

On support to Prime Minister Sarraj and the Government of national accord, yes, we are providing technical, diplomatic and political assistance. My right hon. and learned Friend will recall that I visited Tripoli a few weeks ago. We are working very closely with Prime Minister Sarraj, both bilaterally and through the European Union. Prime Minister Sarraj was at the meeting in Vienna last Monday in which 20-odd countries got together to discuss how we can best support what that Government are doing.

The situation in Libya is complex, but I think Prime Minister Sarraj is approaching it in the right way— a bottom-up approach. He is not trying to create a Government who can rule Libya in some monolithic fashion, because that is not practical. He is trying to create an umbrella Government within which municipalities are empowered to deliver the services and run the structures that people need. We have considerable experience of that approach—including, indeed, in Syria—working with devolved levels of government in small areas to try to establish good governance from the bottom up. I suspect that that will be a more realistic approach than a top-down approach.

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[Mr Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe) (Con)]

I propose to resist the temptation to give the House my arguments in favour of Britain remaining in the European Union. [Hon. Members: “No!”] Those Members of Parliament who find it irresistible to hear me on the subject made their way to the debate in Speaker’s House last night, where I debated against, among others, my old colleague Lord Tebbit. On this occasion, I agreed so completely with what has been said by both the Foreign Secretary and the shadow Foreign Secretary that I thought I might desist, particularly as over the next 30 days I shall be making many more speeches on the subject.

This afternoon, I look forward with a certain amount of relief, after this interminable campaign, to the fact that this House and the Government are going to return to the government of the country on domestic issues. We can return to an agenda that will spare us from the fear of millions of criminal Turks coming to this country, our sovereignty being sacrificed to faceless men in Brussels and all the rest of it. A lot of serious issues are facing this country at home. They are described today as, “How to keep people safe at home and abroad, and how to protect our human rights”, so I shall turn to that.

[Alex Salmond]

rose—

[Mr Clarke]

With great respect, I am trying to keep my remarks short. As I become more long-serving, I find that I get ever more garrulous, and I know that huge numbers of Members wish to speak in this debate, so if I may be allowed to, I will resist the temptation to give way, much though I normally enjoy it.

When I looked at the Queen’s Speech, listened to it and heard it being analysed afterwards, it seemed to me that the Prime Minister was rather looking to his legacy. He has already become one of the longest-serving Prime Ministers since the war and he has announced that he is not going to be Prime Minister into the next Parliament, so this Queen’s Speech has rather more of a theme than most Queen’s Speeches have. He described it, using the slogan that we are all supposed to use now, as a “progressive, one nation” theme. I do not like slogans, but I can hardly object to that, as I have been trying to describe my own political views in those terms for years. But it also looks at disadvantage in society and improving the life chances of those who have disadvantages, and, in effect, tries to address the still weak state of meritocracy today. I was one of those who benefited from the brief window of meritocracy and social mobility that this country enjoyed quite a long time ago as a result of the Butler Act of 1944, although I hasten to add that I would not go back to that old system nationally or anything of that kind.

We all know that one of the worrying things in our society is a growing awareness of widening inequality, both of incomes, thanks to the absurd levels to which some corporate salaries have been allowed to rise over the past 10 years, and of opportunity for those born in the less advantaged parts of the country. The thing that I was mainly impressed by in looking at the contents of the Queen’s Speech is how we are seized of that. This growing inequality is sensed by more and more people, and it is very real for many of our younger generation. Inequality of opportunity and of income is a subject that has always concerned those of the left, but in my opinion those of us who believe in free market economics should be just as concerned by this threat to the stability of our society as our socialist opposite numbers are. It behoves us to do something about it.

I therefore hope that the Children and Social Work Bill, which contains proposals to tackle the inadequacies in what we do for children in care and improve the operation of the adoption system, will be one of those measures—I will not go through the whole Queen’s Speech—that gives positive effect to the agenda of recreating a fairer society in which opportunities are much more widely available to all sections of society.

The most prominent Bill in the Queen’s Speech was on prison reform. Obviously, I very much welcome that. I say “obviously” because the Secretary of State for Justice and the Prime Minister, who made a very noticeable speech, have reinforced an agenda that our party first set out when we were in opposition before 2010. It is an agenda that I propounded and tried to give effect to as Justice Secretary for the first two and a half years of the Government.

I congratulate the Secretary of State for Justice, who I regret to say is not in his place, because he appears to have achieved more success in overcoming the hesitations in practice of some of the more senior members of the Government than I did. He has been able to promise things that I wish I had achieved and has a much bigger agenda than I was able to deliver. I got rid of indeterminate sentences and did a great deal to improve training for work in prisons by outside employers, among other things, but it looks as though there are things that will at last be tackled.

The problem is always that we have a fear in this House of the reaction to anything entitled “prison reform”, because it is seen to be dangerously wet. In recent decades, both parties have been subject to the fear of the right-wing tabloids every time they have looked at this subject. It is not wet; it is part of protecting people from harm in this society that everything should contribute to the reduction of crime. When people are rightly sent to prison for criminal offences, it is an achievement if most of them do not return to crime, but become honest citizens when they are released.

I think that we can get public support for these changes, so long as we emphasise the fact that at the moment 48% of prisoners are convicted again—they return to crime—within 12 months of being released. That shows how little progress we have made in dealing not with the hard-core criminals who will be in prison for long periods of their life if the police succeed in catching them, but with all those who suffer from drug abuse and mental health problems; those who have never had a basic education and are not numerate or literate; and those who could benefit from training, preparation for work and rehabilitation to return them as honest citizens. I hope, therefore, that we implement these changes, as well as legislating for them.

I welcome Dame Sally Coates’s report on education, which addresses the fact that although we have always tried to educate prisoners, what is delivered is very patchy and limited. I hope that we implement all of it. I welcome the interesting idea of the six reform prisons, but I hope that it does not mean that the most adventurous reforms are confined to those six prisons. I think that we should keep an eye on the 48% figure and judge our progress in a few years’ time on whether we are able, at last, to reduce it.

[Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)]

Will the right hon. and learned Gentleman give way?

[Mr Clarke]

No, I will not.

I do not think we will deliver much in this area unless we tackle one other problem, which is the enormous number of people we incarcerate. In large part, that is a response to the populist demands that have led to our toughening up sentencing for the past two decades. We now have 86,000 prisoners, which is about double the figure of 20 years ago when I was Home Secretary. As Justice Secretary, I signed up to quite substantial reductions in public spending in my Department on the basis that we would reduce the number of prisoners to something like the level that we ought to have in our jails. I was not able to deliver that and after I left, the number started drifting up again. That has the effect that we do not have the money to deliver programmes in areas such as education, which I have mentioned.

[Crispin Blunt]

Will my right hon. and learned Friend give way?

[Mr Clarke]

No, I will not give way; sorry.

Between 2012-13 and 2014-15, there was an 85% fall in the number of prisoners taking A-level-standard qualifications and a 42% drop in those going for Open University qualifications. When we lower the number of prisoners, we will be able to finance what we wish to do. In my opinion, proper rehabilitation programmes cannot be delivered in overcrowded slums.

If I went through all the other topics in the Bill that I would like to support, I would start to exclude other Members from the debate, which, as I have said, I am anxious not to do and which I promise you, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will not do. However, may I briefly welcome the criminal finances Bill?

On the fight against crime—I think my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary is replying to the debate—we in this country are very bad at dealing with white-collar crime, and there is growing awareness of that. If someone wishes to rob a bank, they go to the LIBOR market; they do not put on a balaclava and pick up a shotgun—that is much less profitable. At last we are starting to do something about that, and I hope I can be reassured that the Bill will tackle not just tax evasion, which is quite rightly high on the public agenda, but money laundering. London is still the money-laundering capital of the world. For an African despot or a serious international criminal, London is the best place to put their money, because they can trust the bankers to look after it and not to steal it from them. I welcome the fact that we are going to improve the reporting of suspicious activities. I hope we will also impose a duty on those at the head of the institutions involved to ensure that they take positive steps to stop those working for them encouraging such activities.

I will continue to follow progress on the Investigatory Powers Bill. We have to get the balance right between the powers our agencies must have in order to deal with the threat of terrorism and crime, and the privacy that we retain in our society to defend the freedoms we want.

I particularly welcome the fact that there was no mention whatever in the Queen’s Speech of repealing the Human Rights Act or any legislation on human rights. I hope that means we are proceeding on this front with very considerable caution. I looked at the speech by my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary in which she was reported to have said things on the subject of the European convention on human rights. Actually, what she said was rather ambiguous; it was not a change of Government policy. I hope I am correctly reassured that there is not the slightest question of our giving up the convention or trying to weaken the jurisdiction in Strasbourg.

I wait to hear a good reason for getting rid of the Human Rights Act and for stopping British judges applying the principles of the convention. When we are taken to Strasbourg, which is where people will go again if we get rid of the Human Rights Act, we lose only 2% of cases. I do not get frightfully worried about air hostesses being allowed to wear crucifixes with their uniform, which is the kind of case we actually lose. As someone has rightly pointed out, the Council of Europe has systems, so we are not in fact being forced to give prisoners voting rights.

Our reputation for human rights will be damaged if we are seen to retreat from where we are. The Court in Strasbourg and the convention are the best levers we have to make sure that liberal values are defended in Russia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Georgia and other countries, which do abide by the judgments in Strasbourg—and they get defeated many more times there than we do. I therefore trust that very considerable thought is being given to this subject. I am not aware of any harm being done at the moment.

Of course I believe in the supremacy of Parliament, but even Parliament must pass legislation consistent with the high standards of human rights that we have always had. I see no harm whatever in British judges, or judges in Strasbourg, being allowed occasionally to challenge the way in which our legislation is interpreted by officials in the Home Office or elsewhere, and even occasionally by Ministers, when that interpretation really ought to be reconsidered.

Subject to that, and assuming we are all putting human rights in our foreign policy, as the Foreign Secretary eloquently said we are, for which he has my full approval, I think we will see, once the slight madness of this referendum is over—I am of the generation who do not think that referendums are the best way of determining this country’s foreign policy or the basis of its trade and economic prosperity in tomorrow’s world—that this is not the programme of a Government who have been driven off their agenda, but the very solid reforming programme of a Government who have the best interests of the country in mind. We should be able to achieve some very real social advances if we implement it.