Public Disorder

Lord Corbett of Castle Vale Excerpts

Thursday 11th August 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Elton]

Many of your Lordships will have seen a young person with presumably stolen goods in his hands and without concealing his identity in any way being asked whether he was afraid of being caught. His answer was that people are never caught and if he was it was a first offence, which would mean an ASBO, and what difference did that make? My first question is: are the courts able to give adequate sentences and are places available for custodial sentences for the numbers that will be needed? Rubber sentences are no good, any more than are rubber bullets in such circumstances. My second question is: will the Minister pay particular attention to what the most reverend Primate said about what is going on in our schools? It is essential that we re-establish not only order but ethics and morals in our schools. Will she listen to our former noble friend Lord Pearson when he draws attention to the fact that what is sown in our schools is sown by people trained in our training colleges who will remain in their profession for 40 years? It is vital that the right people are taught the right things.

[Lord Corbett of Castle Vale]

My Lords, as a former MP in the city of Birmingham, I pay humble tribute, as others have done today, to Mr Tariq Jahan of Winson Green, for his quiet, firm dignity in playing such an important part in ensuring that hotheads did not get hold of what was potentially an inflammatory position in that part of the city. I endorse the comments that have been made around the Chamber for any inquiry into the incidents in the past few days to be essentially local. People like Mr Jahan and others in that community, and those in other areas, have a lot to contribute to this inquiry. They live there. Through their places of worship, whether it is a mosque or whatever, they know these people, the families and the area. There is a wealth of experience there. I hope that the Minister will take seriously, as I am sure she will, that we should have a series of local inquiries to feed into a national inquiry. They need to be conducted locally. There is no point in asking people to get on trains and buses to come down to London. They should be held in their areas. They should be wide open to anyone who wants to make a contribution. Unless we listen and learn—I agree with those who have said that we all have responsibilities for this—we will find ourselves in this position again in a few years’ time.

[Lord Thomas of Swynnerton]

May I intervene? The Minister will have heard my noble friend Lord Dear saying that he did not want to contemplate the idea of riot police, such as the CRS in France. I wonder whether it is possible to reconsider the hostility to that French innovation. I remember a liberal Lord in this House, the first Lord Gladwin—I remember him because he was my father-in-law—suggesting that if we had had a CRS in the 1970s we would not have had to send the paratroops in to deal with the riots in Northern Ireland and would have avoided Bloody Sunday.