Public Disorder

Lord Thomas of Swynnerton Excerpts

Thursday 11th August 2011 Lords Chamber

[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.