Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Bill

Debate between Stephen Pound and Robert Neill

2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons
Tuesday 25th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Robert Neill]

I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman. I have to say that from my own limited experience and from speaking to those who continue to practise, no area of law is perhaps more sensitive or more emotionally draining—not just for the parties, but for the practitioners who seek to advise them and the judiciary who sit on these cases—than family work. It is inevitably stressful and we ought to have a system that reduces stress, rather than makes it greater.

The evidence from other comparators also shows that the Bill is an advantage to the overall social objective and that some concerns are not justified. It is suggested that the Bill imports into law a concept of unilateral no-fault divorce. That is not strictly correct. It is currently the case that after two years of separation with consent or five years without consent, divorce can be granted without any allegation of misconduct. The truth is, as I will refer to later and as Sir Paul Coleridge, the chairman of the Marriage Foundation and a former High Court judge of the family division himself observed, that that does not keep up to date with the way people now change and move on with their lives. It certainly does not reflect my experience, and the experience of most people, that the divorce petition comes at the end of the breakdown of a relationship, not the beginning. Time and again, I have seen that with people who come to my surgery, with court cases I have been involved in or observed, and, as most of us have, with friends and acquaintances—people we know—where it has been the end of a sad and painful process that ultimately leads to the conclusion that the marriage is no longer sustainable and they want to move on. We ought to help them to be able to do that. My experience has certainly been that divorce is not undertaken lightly and I think the Secretary of State is right to recognise that.

[Stephen Pound (Ealing North) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Gentleman feel that the sacrament of marriage is made stronger or weaker by the passing of the Bill?

[Robert Neill]

As an Anglo-Catholic, I take the hon. Gentleman’s point about the sacrament strongly, but I do not believe, in societal terms, that it makes very much difference. In truth, many marriages are not in entered into in a religious context. The weight that is placed on the sacrament, even with those of faith, may vary. Perhaps it should not, but I think that is the reality. For those for whom it is important, it will be a difficult personal decision, as it has been for friends of mine for whom the end of their marriage was very difficult indeed. None the less, they thought it was appropriate to recognise what had happened and to make a break. It is a profound point for those of faith, but I do not think it is an argument against the Bill, as I think the hon. Gentleman agrees.

We also have to bear in mind the suggestion that there might be manipulation of a vulnerable party. I take that seriously and it has been raised by a couple of constituents of mine who think carefully and closely about these matters. However, my experience and all the evidence seem to suggest that the greatest risk of manipulation and pressure being put on a vulnerable party is during the period when the marriage has broken down and people have to wait perhaps for two or five years, especially if, as hon. Members have observed, they are obliged for financial or childcare reasons—or a mixture of both—to continue to live under the same roof. That is the point at which the vulnerable party is often most at risk.

It is perhaps significant that the study, “Finding Fault?”, points out that, at the moment, the system is to some degree “manipulated” by fault being used as a ground to speed up divorce. It is not that the marriage has not broken down, but that it is quicker for someone to get divorced if they allege fault than if they wait two or five years. That can have perverse consequences: people have to say hurtful things against the party with whom they are still living and attempting to bring up their children, so that they can speed up the divorce that they both know is inevitable. I cannot see how that benefits society or, for those of us to whom this is important, a Christian ethos for that family.

Joint Enterprise

Debate between Stephen Pound and Robert Neill

Thursday 25th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Pound]

Absolutely. The Supreme Court ruled that the law had been interpreted incorrectly, but that is only half of it. Interpreting the law incorrectly is one thing, but righting the wrong is what has to happen now.

[Robert Neill]

rose—

[Stephen Pound]

When it comes to righting wrongs, I give way to the hon. Gentleman.

[Robert Neill]

The hon. Gentleman is making a passionate case, and I agree with him that righting this wrong in the way the law has been applied is important. Does he agree that there is a distinction between the concept of joint enterprise and how it has been applied? For example, if he and I jointly agreed to commit a burglary, the application of joint enterprise in those circumstances would be perfectly reasonable. The problem is the extension to groups of young people when one of them commits acts of violence and when it is suggested that foresight can be equated with intent. That is taking the doctrine beyond a sensible application.

[Stephen Pound]

The hon. Gentleman has indicated a way forward. He knows the case of Craig and Bentley, which I remember very well indeed. Let us not forget that one of them was hanged in a joint enterprise. Is it not a salutary thought that if the present law on joint enterprise had been applied when we had the death penalty, 20 young men would have been hanged. Can you imagine? If everybody in a group of people where somebody dies was said to be guilty, as with Craig and Bentley, would they then all have been hanged? The mere thought of that is so horrific—so disgusting—that it surely brings into sharp relief the insanity of this legislation and the idea that this great blanket of culpability is cast over a whole group of people. This law is nonsensical. It is cruel; it is brutal; it is outdated; and it has to go.

Amazingly, this is the first time that we have debated this subject on the Floor of the House. I hope that today will be the beginning of a process that leads to people like Alex Henry seeing daylight, and his child and his family, again. When I last saw Alex—I have visited him a couple of times—he was keeping his head down and keeping his nose clean. He was working in the kitchen. He actually had kind words for the staff at HMP Whitemoor, but the hope was going out of his eyes. You could actually see him looking at that long, long stretch ahead of him.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) mentioned, Alex is a man on the autism spectrum. In his appeal, evidence was submitted on his behalf by none less than Professor Baron-Cohen. One cannot get a higher authority than that. Was that opinion accepted? Clearly not, because my constituent is still in prison. He is a young, autistic man who, for 40 seconds of his life, did not stop something happening. He did not do anything wrong; he did not stop it happening. Can it really be right in this day and age that the law we are all sworn to uphold—that we are a part of as part of the establishment of this country—is having that impact on people, disproportionately on young black men, and disproportionately on the innocent?

I profoundly hope that this debate is one of those occasions when something really good comes from this place—where we put down a marker to say, yes, we thank JENGbA for all its work, but even without JENGbA, in our own heart of hearts, in our own knowledge and analysis of the situation, we realise that this stinks. It is wrong—dangerously, destructively, corrosively wrong. We have to do something about it. Let today be the day that we consign the present interpretation of joint enterprise to the dustbin, move forward and bring the law back into repute—take it away from ill-repute. I hope that Kenneth Alexander and Alex Henry can then take their rightful places in society where we want them to be. May they be here in the House of Commons, in the Gallery or wherever, rather than behind bars at the nation’s expense. We cannot go on like this.

Freedom of Thought, Conscience and Religion

Debate between Stephen Pound and Robert Neill

Thursday 1st May 2014 Commons Chamber

[Robert Neill]

There is no doubt that we must move very carefully, and must ensure that Iran is genuinely complying with all the international obligations with which an accepted state should comply. Although—as we have heard from my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis)—there has been an occasional act of generosity towards Christian and other faith communities in Iran, it remains a matter of concern that since the election of President Rohani many Christians have been arrested, and more than 50 remain in prison. I think that the new regime is very much on probation, and that Britain, together with our allies, must be vigilant in ensuring that not too easy a ride is given to those who may wish to push it back in a reactionary direction.

Iran is indeed an important factor, but I want to say a little about two other issues which, although well known, are worth referring to again. What is happening in Syria is a horror story by any account. It is a horror story for all Syrians, regardless of their faith and regardless of where they find themselves in that country. There is particular concern about what is increasingly being shown to be the targeted persecution of the Christian community in Syria. The Christians are not alone: Alawites and Shi’a and Sunni Muslims have also been targeted in some cases. However, there is a real fear that the Christian community—which, after all, is one of the oldest communities in the middle east: we all remember the Damascene conversion, which is one of the roots of Christianity and dates back to its very earliest days—is under unacceptable and very frightening pressure.

The Christian charity Open Doors has been doing valuable work in screening many international media sources to find examples of persecutions of Christians. Its global researches have established that some 2,123 Christians have been killed because of their faith, and that 1,213 of them have been killed in Syria. We have also seen the systemic targeting of Christian churches, 83 in Syria and 492 in Egypt. Mass graves were discovered in the ancient Christian town of Sadad, which had been overrun by rebel extremists.

[Stephen Pound]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way; he is as informative as he is generous. Does he agree that one of the most extraordinary aspects of his speech so far is the fact that it has featured no examples of the mass conversions from Christianity that occurred in the Ottoman empire? Should we not be remembering, in our thoughts and in our prayers, the Christians who keep their faith even in the most horrendous circumstances? Is that not truly the most remarkable fact that has emerged from this afternoon’s debate?

[Robert Neill]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Those of us who are not afraid to regard ourselves and publicly label ourselves as Christians should consider that to be an important and integral part of the faith that binds him and me, and many others in the Chamber, to the Christians who are suffering outside. That strength is the great value that Christianity brings not only to this country, but to the world as a whole. As we know, there have been examples of mass conversion elsewhere in the world. Reference has been made to Nigeria, and heaven knows what has befallen some of the young girls who were abducted recently in the north of that country.

It is important that the western powers, in seeking to bring peace to Syria and to deal with a vile regime in the form of the Assads, do not allow that regime to be replaced by one of the many others that are dominated by foreign jihadis who are determined to destroy a vulnerable community in one of its ancient heartlands.

Although we of course welcome the opportunity for democracy that the Arab spring has brought, we must accept that there is a real concern that it has also brought something of a winter of persecution for Christians throughout the wider middle east. Open Doors and Christian Solidarity Worldwide have done a lot of work in this area. They have discovered, for example, that some 200,000 Christians are thought to have fled Egypt—a country where I have personal connections and which I have visited—since the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak. He was not perfect, but I am afraid that the situation for Christians has deteriorated greatly since then. At the end of March, a Christian woman, Mary Sameh George, was beaten, stabbed and shot to death in Cairo, apparently because in her car—a car she used to deliver food and medicine to the elderly—there was a crucifix. As Bishop Kyrillos of the Coptic Church has said, when such things occur, there is no sense that even the present regime has a full commitment to tackling those issues. It is very important that Britain and our western allies use every available means of pressure to ensure that, if the new regimes in Egypt and elsewhere want to be accepted in the world community, religiously motivated sectarianism is bore down on wherever it comes from.

We have sought to do our bit. Many parliamentarians from this place and the other place are part of the UK delegation to the Council of Europe, where we have the opportunity to debate these issues at length. However, we need that consistent approach from Her Majesty’s Government. Support for religious minorities is not tradeable against any other interest in the conduct of foreign policy.

The examples overseas are important, but I want to finish by saying a word or two about the situation at home. I am not afraid to define my political activity as influenced in part by my faith, as is that of many others, and we should not therefore allow a degree, which we sometimes see, of surprisingly illiberal secularism to drown out the mention of faith in our public space. I was genuinely saddened that the Prime Minister—indeed, it could have been the leader of any other major political party—was criticised for having raised the importance of faith in the public debate. That letter from a number of no doubt eminent intellectuals was the most illiberal exposition of liberalism that I have seen in many a long day, and we ought to say that clearly.

Local Government Bill [Lords]

Debate between Stephen Pound and Robert Neill

Thursday 21st October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Robert Neill]

As I hope I can demonstrate to my hon. Friend in a moment, what caused the previous Government’s plans to go awry was the fact that, not liking the results that they were getting, they decided to shift the goalposts at the very last moment—

[Stephen Pound]

Cliché!

[Robert Neill]

It was pretty much in extra time, with the referee about to blow the whistle. Then there came the next stage earlier this year, when the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles had bravely walked into the outer darkness—I believe that the right hon. Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint) did so at much the same time, but she has returned to bask in the sunlight of the Opposition Front Bench, so clearly does not share her right hon. Friend’s opinion now. The then Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr Denham), decided that his assessment of the Exeter and Norwich proposals was the same as his predecessor’s. However, he decided to do the opposite, concluding that there were compelling reasons, which had never previously been articulated anywhere, to depart from the presumption that a proposal had to meet all five criteria. That decision was ultimately struck down by the courts. That attempt to ram through a change and shift the goalposts in the dying days of a Government is why we are in the present mess.

The hon. Member for Norwich South (Simon Wright) is right to say that we need not go into the legitimate debates that we could have about the efficacy or otherwise of unitary authorities, because we have here a classic example of how not to go about a local government reorganisation. That is why we need the Bill—to sort out that mess and put an end to the proposals that, having been struck down by the court, would otherwise have been left hanging in the air at the end of the process.

I shall say a word about two of the arguments that have been deployed this afternoon, the first of which is the need for local councils to be master in their own house and restore power to what I accept are ancient and proud cities. There is a serious flaw in that argument, which runs through all the Opposition’s arguments: the fact that they confuse structures with power. That underlines and sums up the error in their approach to local government. They believe that we should give local authorities power by changing structures, reorganising and calling an authority unitary. On the contrary, we seek to give real power back to local authorities by removing the ring-fencing of centralised grants, providing them with the power of general competence, enabling them to work together collaboratively and removing restrictions on their right and ability to represent their constituents. That difference is a classic demonstration of the Opposition’s idea that power is all about tinkering, whereas we think it is actually about giving communities real choices rather than worrying about structures.