Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Steve Baker Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading - Day 2
Tuesday 16th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Robert Buckland]

Not at the moment.

I am particularly pleased to thank my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (James Gray), who represented the family of Ellie Gould, the murder victim of whose case I think everyone in this House is fully aware. It is important to take on board the points he made about domestic homicide. I have spoken elsewhere about the importance of getting the balance right when it comes to the categories of murder. I committed to a review—I did that last week—and I will bring before the House further information on the content of that important review.

In the minutes left, I am pleased to commend to the House a radical new approach to the way in which we deal with young people—children—who are incarcerated in the secure estate. The days of locking them up and forgetting about them absolutely have to end; we all agree on that. That is why the measures to clarify the legal framework surrounding new secure schools will allow a complete change in the way in which we deal with, support, rehabilitate and educate children in our care. Schools with security will have education, wellbeing and purposeful activity at their very heart. As ever, I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Rob Butler) for his constructive suggestions and his work as a member of the Justice Committee.

Let me outline on the record the important provisions in the Bill relating to unauthorised encampments. Many right hon. and hon. Members have raised the issue. It is a real concern for many of our constituents.

[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

The pages of the Bucks Free Press attest to the sheer scale of the costs to our green spaces and our communities of unauthorised encampments. Does my right hon. and learned Friend agree that on this issue and on protests, the Opposition are refusing to engage with legitimate limits on both freedoms?

[Robert Buckland]

My hon. Friend puts it very well. This is all about balancing the rights of Traveller communities to use authorised encampments and to enjoy the lifestyle that they have chosen, and the rights of householders not to have their local communities despoiled. That is what we are seeking to do. The Bill, in my strong submission, allows that balance to be maintained and enhanced.

The Bill is part of our wider approach to making the criminal justice system smarter, and to keeping our streets safe from the worst criminals, while giving offenders opportunities to turn their life around. We can rebalance the justice system. We can restore faith in it, which has sadly been in decline for too long. The Bill is a welcome step forward, and I commend it to the House.

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Steve Baker Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Monday 28th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

I rise to speak to the amendments about noise, including Lords amendment 73 on processions, Lords amendment 80 on assemblies, and Lords amendment 87 on one-person protests. I am pleased that the Stop Brexit man, Mr Steve Bray, has come up, because I completely agree: he is profoundly annoying. He is very persistent, and he seems to have singled me out personally on a great many occasions—[Interruption.] I can’t think why. No indeed, I am grateful to Members for raising that. I cannot imagine why. The thing about Steve Bray is that he has become a great British institution. He is an oddball, he is a novelty, he is entertaining and, yes, he is annoying. Indeed, he could often be quietened down just by being offered an interview, and I would recommend that course of action to anyone.

The crucial point about Mr Bray is that he did not make one blind bit of difference to the course of events in this country—an entire waste of money for whoever has been paying for him to be there. Indeed, on his birthday one year he ran into me and my right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois), and posed for a beautiful selfie so that together we could, cheekily, enjoy his birthday. He is a great British institution, entirely pointless, and willing to celebrate with his opponents on his birthday. I do not think we should accept any amendments in order to target hard cases, because hard cases make for bad law.

I also wish to mention an article written jointly by me and the former right hon. Member for Beaconsfield, Dominic Grieve QC. In the aftermath of the protests over the Sarah Everard vigil, he and I wrote an article contextualising this Bill. I had then, and I have now, considerable concerns about what we are doing on protest, but I decided to hold my nose and vote with the Government. I have often said to people that I cannot be fighting on every front; nor should I be since I was elected as a Conservative. However, one person alone has persuaded me that I should agree with their lordships on the Bill. That person is the ostensibly Liberal Prime Minister of Canada, Mr Trudeau, and his treatment, ostensibly from a left liberal perspective, of protesters with whom he disagreed.

I note that the hon. Member for Croydon Central (Sarah Jones) condemned anti-vax protesters, and yes, they may well have a dangerous point of view. I have been pro-vaccine throughout this crisis, but we cannot condemn protesters because we happen to disagree with them politically. Goodness knows, right now I am the victim of a defamatory campaign in my constituency by people who evidently have not bothered to trouble themselves to look at my views.

[Sarah Jones]

Just to be clear, I am not against people having a position; our amendment seeks to make sure that clinics ensure that people get their vaccines, that NHS workers can get to work, and that we do not have anti-vax protesters stopping people going to work and doing their business.

[Mr Baker]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for that clarification. Like her, I would like people to have the freedom to get vaccinated, and I have said that throughout the crisis.

With apologies to my right hon. Friend the Minister—and he is a friend—I agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman) and others. I commend to my right hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick) just flirting with it—just get in that rebel Lobby with us. Let us say to the Government that actually this is going too far on noise. It is time to say, as the hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Lloyd Russell-Moyle) vividly demonstrated, that yes protests are inherently noisy and annoying. If noise is ever used as a weapon, I am sure other instruments of law could be used.

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)]

As the dogs of war are unleashed in Ukraine, and women and men are dying defending their independence and freedom, it is timely to reflect on our own freedoms as citizens. We are debating one of the most egregious attempts to stifle our most fundamental rights, with ill thought through reforms without evidence-based justification. I am not alone in that assessment: more than 800,000 petitioners, ex-police chiefs and senior advisers as well as three UN special rapporteurs and Members of the House of Lords from across the political spectrum all have deep-rooted concerns about the Bill and its lasting implications in limiting our freedoms and dividing our communities.

Surely the freedom to protest is one of the most important freedoms. Protest has been the engine of reform throughout Britain’s history from the peasants’ poll tax protest of 1381 to the recent Black Lives Matter movement. The rights to challenge authority, to speak up, to chant and to march are freedoms that are part of who we are; we relinquish them at our peril.

Conservative Members will complain that the Bill does not remove the freedom to protest. Not in so many words, but the right to protest must include the right to be noisy. A quiet, supine protest or a protest denied because the shouting was too loud is no protest at all. The point of protest is to give a collective voice to those who feel that they have not been listened to, particularly for marginalised and oppressed communities who have been told too many times to keep quiet. The Public Order Act 1986 was introduced by the Thatcher Government in the wake of the miners’ strike. Are Ministers really saying that Thatcher did not go far enough and that she was a soft touch on protestors? That is not how I remember it. I beseech the Home Secretary and Ministers to think again, even at this late stage.