Presumption of Innocence and EU Law

Richard Shepherd Excerpts

Monday 10th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Sir Richard Shepherd (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)]

I just want to add a few words to this conversation. I commend the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) for setting out so well the anxieties many of us will feel. It is not very long ago in our history that we were enormously proud of both our constitution and our legal system. It is, as the hon. Gentleman has pointed out, a common law system that covers Northern Ireland, England and Wales in our own domestic competence.

We should not ignore the simple fact that the legal system is an intimate facet of nationhood and the lines by which we govern ourselves. Ours has been a very long march to get where we are today. I think it was with Edward III—I have no doubt I will be corrected if I am wrong—that we started the separation of the judiciary from the monarchy, which led to the development of our judicial system. I think that is how most schoolboys of my generation understood its development.

The right to have a legal form that has withstood that number of centuries is not a casual thing. It is the most extensive, worldwide system of justice: one thinks of India, Australia, Canada, the United States and South Africa. It is a huge range, yet the way in which the Government have come to their conclusion confronts us with a clear loss of confidence in the very essence of what this Parliament is about and who we are. We cannot divorce ourselves from that tradition and one cannot accept that it will be swept aside by mandates from bureaucrats on the European continent. This is not an attack on them; it is an argument for confidence in our own constitution and legal system.

I believe, although some will disagree, that, by and large, the people of this country have confidence in our legal system and the fact that it will secure their liberty. The equal recognition of different judicial systems is a very alien concept. The rules and laws of Roman law and civic law are different from our laws. We do it case by case, and from that we found a tradition of what enforces the things that matter to this country—the defence of something absolutely essential to the development of our freedoms and liberty.

I wish the European Union well, but I do not think it should trespass into areas that are absolutely central to the sovereignty of the British people. That is why I am pleased that the report so assiduously crafted by the European Scrutiny Committee is central to this debate.

I have dealt in mere generality, but a profound concept is under attack. Our judicial system—the biggest and most important in the world—should not be subservient to a bureaucratic administrative system designated and designed elsewhere with the central purpose of consolidating the power of the European Union. That is why I am pleased that the Government have at last woken up to the very fact that this is about our law, our legal system, our freedoms, our independence and the right of the people of this country to determine what systems they should live under.