Oral Answers to Questions

Mark Menzies Excerpts

Tuesday 20th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Kenneth Clarke]

We are, of course, having to address Sure Start, as with every other programme, in the light of the resources—or rather lack of them—that we have inherited as a result of the economic situation, but the Government are concentrating Sure Start on its original priority purpose, which was particularly to target areas of deprivation and social difficulty. That part of Sure Start’s work does indeed have some relevance to what we have been talking about in our exchanges on youth justice and how to keep people out of criminality in their youth.

[Mark Menzies (Fylde) (Con)]

T8. Will the Minister pay tribute to Winston Churchill, who, exactly 100 years ago today, as Home Secretary, commented:“The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country.”?

[Mr Blunt]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. Of course, it is a delight to offer a tribute to the greatest parliamentarian of the 20th century. Right hon. and hon. Members should note that today is precisely the 100th anniversary of one of the great speeches on prison reform, given by Winston Churchill while he was in his Liberal phase. I am delighted that I will mark that anniversary by speaking to the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders. I am sure, Mr Speaker, that you will allow me to use the final phrase of that speech 100 years ago, when Churchill said:

“an unfaltering faith that there is a treasure, if you can only find it, in the heart of every man—these are the symbols which in the treatment of crime and criminals mark and measure the stored-up strength of a nation, and are the sign and proof of the living virtue in it.”—[Official Report, 20 July 1910; Vol. 19, c. 1354.]

Those are measures that we will live up to.