Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Lord Desai Excerpts

Wednesday 27th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord with whom I came into your Lordships’ Chamber 20 years ago. There is an iron law of British politics that the Home Office introduces the maximum number of Bills in every Parliament. Every Home Office Bill is large and very complex, aims to cure the problems caused by previous Home Office Bills, and goes on to create new problems which subsequent Home Office Bills will have to cure. I do not think that we have seen any break in that iron law so far.

I shall speak only to Part 3. As far as policing goes, my experience is of being in Grosvenor Square in March 1968 and being chased by police horses rather than being on a police horse chasing demonstrators. From that point of view, I would have much preferred this Bill to have got us back to the Public Order Act 1986 and done nothing more. It will be 10 years on 2 June 2011 that Mr Brian Haw has been demonstrating in Parliament Square. He has been there since before 9/11 and before the Iraq war. In the mean time Parliament has—if I may use unparliamentary language—disgraced itself in its behaviour towards what is, after all, a non-violent demonstration. It is squalid; it is dirty; it embarrasses us. But that is the nature of freedom.

Freedom is not designed to have people demonstrate in morning suits, except maybe to go to the royal wedding, for which even the Prime Minister has had to agree to wear a morning suit. But the whole point of the freedom to demonstrate is that it will be embarrassing and troublesome. If we do not grant that freedom, what are we here for? What is the parliament of a free country for if it cannot tolerate a little bit of noise? And it is much less noise than the House of Commons makes itself—but that is beside the point. Is a little bit of noise so inconveniencing to Members of Parliament that we have to ban this, persecuting and prosecuting this man for years on end, and for what purpose? He is not breaking any law. He is not smashing glass windows in Great George Street or anything like that. He is just standing there saying, “It is shocking that 10,000 people, or whatever, have died”.

I supported the Iraq war. I have no compunction in that. I am a humanitarian warmonger, as I have often called myself. But I still feel that if someone wants to demonstrate in Parliament Square, if they do it peacefully and non-violently, they have a fundamental right to do that. It is no good having the Human Rights Act or abiding by the European Convention on Human Rights—as every Minister says he will do on the front of a Bill—if all we are going to do is prosecute innocent people. I have been on the prosecuted side. I have been on civil rights marches in America and on student demonstrations here. I marched against the Vietnam War. I will not forget my past, but I still think that the Bill should retain Clause 142 and junk Clauses 143 to 150.

We do not need a management committee or a clean-up operation. None of that is necessary. If noble Lords watched tourists going by as often as I have—I do not have a car, so I often walk round these premises and streets—they would see that tourists are fascinated that the British political system allows someone to abuse it right in front of Parliament. We should be proud of that. It should be a world heritage site more than anything else. I do not know how much it has cost us to chase this poor single man around the courts and so forth. Since the calculus is how many police officers we can employ, I am sure that we could have employed 10 or 15 police officers for the costs that we have incurred.

I urge the Government even now to go back to their libertarian principles. The Liberal Democrat Party has libertarian principles. The Conservatives were supposed to have libertarian principles once upon a time when I knew them. There is no problem and no harm is being caused. We should leave people alone and let them demonstrate. It is the oldest freedom and one that we have fought for over many centuries. We can once again get back to the sanity of the Public Order Act 1986. When it was passed it was perfectly adequate, and it had long been adequate before the previous Government, I am sad to say, panicked and brought in this SOCPA legislation, which is completely over the top.

There is still a chance to withdraw from all this nonsense and keep Clause 142, which allows for the Public Order Act to come back into operation. That is more than enough. It would be a proud tribute to the libertarian traditions of the coalition, while it lasts.