Queen’s Speech

Lord Maginnis of Drumglass Excerpts

Tuesday 15th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Maginnis of Drumglass]

My Lords, in so far as I intend to pursue in more detail the issue that I raised earlier at Oral Questions, I want to make it clear that I am not anti-police. Concurrently with my first employment as a schoolmaster, I became a special constable and served for seven years. Later, as an Army officer, I had responsibility for joint planning and liaison with the police, and that during our troubled times in Northern Ireland. While I was an MP, I was parliamentary adviser to the RUC. I feel no need, however, to make similar ameliorating comments about my attitude to our virtually invisible and ineffective Home Office.

At the beginning of a new parliamentary year—I have seen 29 come and go here—one still waits with bated breath for some sort of signal that next year is going to be better. Such an expectation is difficult to sustain when one reads through the coalition’s programme for business in 2012, particularly in relation to creating a fairer society. Everything I read there confirms my impression of those exceedingly well educated folk who occupy the Front Benches in another place but who seldom appear to have rubbed shoulders with reality. Ideas hatched in some intellectually gifted corner of the Palace of Westminster float through a maze of implementation levels that are ill defined, largely disconnected and often wholly inefficient.

It is some years since the noble Lord, Lord Reid, described the Home Office as not fit for purpose, yet we continue without respite to find it delegating responsibilities in a way that it seems to consider absolves it from any real decision-making role. Just try, as I have, to discover why a police constabulary appears to be inefficient or corrupt and you will get the answer that I got last November when I was told by the Home Office that it had not held “aggregate data” on police since 2004. Why not?

One may be advised to speak to the Independent Police Complaints Commission. I have, only to be told that the fairly obvious injustice that concerns me was not within its bailiwick because my complaint overlapped with social services. I belatedly referred the issue to the Justice Department, but it could not intervene. I am referring to a case where a lady in her 80s was cheated out of her home. The Minister knows it well and over the past three years the Home Office has received hundreds—yes, hundreds—of communications through me about the matter. Successive Secretaries of State have been so concerned that none would meet me, despite the fact that Interpol was activated to pursue this elderly lady all the way to her son’s home in Austria. Does anyone in authority care that social services and police in North Yorkshire have conspired in the persecution of Mrs Hofschroer and her son? Are details of dismissals, forced retirements and other shady and costly measures pertaining to North Yorkshire Police available to legislators in Parliament? No. Basic justice is distorted by the system, but I can see nothing to address this major issue in the Government’s plans.

Not dissimilar, in terms of Home Office incompetence, is the well known case of Gary McKinnon, a once young man with autism who hacked the Pentagon’s computers and whom the United States wants to extradite, potentially to imprison for the rest of his life in its prison system, where there are, conservatively, 60,000 rapes per year. His defence has cost his family their home. For over 10 years Gary, now 45 years old, has been left in limbo, and yet the Home Office happily, if somewhat inefficiently, spends millions accommodating the legal rights of Abu Qatada. Is that how we expect the Home Office and Justice to deal with disability—with cruel indecision, without compassion and with detached unaccountability? I think not, so surely it is about time we sought to replace our failing nanny state with a fair and just one.

Truly, the right hand at the Dispatch Box appears not to know and not to care what the left hand is doing. Is it not time that the Government recognised that principled strategic command is a prerequisite for effective delegation? One of the follies pertaining to and emanating from latter-day political correctness is that government and justice should not impinge on each other. That is why we foolishly established the introverted and expensive Supreme Court, effectively a third unaccountable legislature with which society barely identifies. Law can be effective only when it relates to what society as a whole is prepared to accept and support. Society’s temper is reflected through those elected to another place and through this related scrutinising Chamber. The day we sought to wash government’s hands of responsibility, and in so far as we continue to divorce the law from government, we deny society the access and safeguards that democracy is intended to guarantee.