Queen’s Speech

Lord Paddick Excerpts

Tuesday 24th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, as the lead for home affairs on these Benches, together with my noble friend Lady Hamwee, I want to concentrate on some worrying trends in this Conservative majority Government in the area of home affairs. Contrary to what the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, said in his opening speech—and here I agree with the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwark—this Government appear to be careering down an authoritarian and xenophobic path, with the potential to create division in our communities.

When we debated what is now the Psychoactive Substances Act, this Government, and the Labour Opposition, refused to pause to allow for an independent, objective, science-based review of existing legislation to ensure that the prohibitionist approach that has characterised the so-called war on drugs to date is the right path to continue down. Instead, we set a dangerous precedent in making illegal the manufacture or supply of anything that can be consumed that alters a person’s mental state, making them happier or more relaxed for example, unless the Government allow it. Making any activity of a particular kind illegal unless the Government add it to a list of permitted activities is a dangerous path to follow.

It is time that we treated drug addiction as a medical issue rather than a criminal one, put drug addicts into treatment rather than into prison, and explored the practicalities and consequences of a regulated and controlled drug market. Rather than having a market driven underground and controlled by criminals, with no safeguards for the chemical composition of the drugs or the people they are sold to, starting with cannabis the Government should take control to ensure that strength and harm are limited and that drugs are sold only to responsible adults.

Even more worrying is the attitude that this Conservative Government appear to have, or at least condone, towards those living in this country whose origins are overseas. While dressed up as an attempt to make the UK “a hostile environment” for undocumented migrants, the implications for race relations, police community relations and a culture of xenophobia appear to be being ignored, despite today’s new figures showing significant increases in hate crime—both Islamophobia and race hate crime.

When we considered what is now the Immigration Act, the noble Baroness, Lady Lawrence of Clarendon, and I opposed the provisions relating to policing. I was a front-line police officer in the 1980s, and because of deteriorating police-race relations, senior officers took the deliberate decision not to allow officers to proactively enforce immigration law. In the Immigration Act, police officers are thrust into the forefront of enforcing immigration law with the creation of a new offence of driving while illegally in the UK. Not only does that new offence have the potential to produce the sort of degradation in police race relations that caused the police to rethink their approach to immigration law in the 1980s, it also has the potential for the law to be used disproportionately against black and other minority ethnic people. White overstayers from Australia and Canada are unlikely to be stopped and questioned by the police to establish whether they are driving while illegally in the UK.

Perhaps emboldened by the failure to stop these provisions in the Immigration Act, a failure that was the direct result of the Bill being so bad that we had to ration the votes that we brought against the Government, they now, in the forthcoming Policing and Crime Bill, intend to make it an offence for someone who has been arrested not to state their nationality or to produce a passport within 72 hours, but only if a police officer or an immigration officer suspects they are not a British citizen. Again, the potential for the disproportionate application of this legislation, and the impact on police community relations, is clear. Why has the Home Secretary criticised police for using stop-and-search powers disproportionately against ethnic minority communities, viewing it as damaging to trust in the police, while continuing to push legislation that will inevitably increase such criticism?

This Conservative Government appear to be heading in entirely the wrong direction if they intend to keep their citizens safe. Rather than providing further opportunities to criminalise, the Government should be making strenuous efforts to enhance relations between the state, its agents and communities rather than relying on draconian powers that will inevitably enhance division and suspicion.

The Investigatory Powers Bill, carried over from the previous Session, is even more worrying, but time does not allow me to cover the full horror of this legislation. Among other things, it will require internet service providers to store for 12 months details of every website everyone in the UK visits, the overwhelming majority of which will be completely innocent. In pre-internet terms, it is the equivalent of everyone in the UK being followed by a private detective 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so that if it subsequently comes to light that they may have committed a crime, their presence at the crime scene can be confirmed. The Government will argue that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear, but this runs completely contrary to suspicion-led policing and investigation. Moreover, we have all seen how, once stored, our data become vulnerable to theft, hacks and misuse. The risks inherent in asking providers to store all our data for 12 months are clear. Added to this, the Bill, which will allow such privacy-invasive records to be accessed by the police without a warrant, could cost the industry more than £1 billion in set-up costs alone, which is government money that could be much better spent elsewhere.

The counter-extremism and safeguarding Bill has been condemned by a powerful coalition of opponents, including the former police chief in charge of the Government’s anti-radicalisation programmes, who warns that it could actually fuel terrorism. The current police chief in charge of that programme says that Ministers’ plans risk creating a thought police. Rather than subjecting people who express views the Government do not like to banning orders and closing down premises where such views are debated, the Government should instead be ending the discredited and the despised Prevent programme and empowering community-based individuals and organisations to promote a moderate counternarrative that truly reflects the values of world religions.

I started this speech discussing how the Government, against all evidence, decided to ban things in the previous Session, and I have ended by talking about how the Government intend to ban more things in this Session. That runs contrary to my and most British people’s liberal values. Banning things does not make them disappear. The answer is always more education and more debate, but it looks as though the Government are keen to take what they see as the easy but ultimately ineffective way out.