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Mr. Howard: Is the hon. Gentleman not aware that my right hon. Friend the Member for Honiton (Sir P. Emery), the Chairman of the Procedure Committee, has written to the Leader of the Opposition today referring him not to a finding of the Procedure Committee in 1986 but to a finding of the Procedure Committee in the 1989-90 Session, which clearly demonstrates that that procedure would not be appropriate for this Bill?
Mr. Straw: I am afraid that the right hon. Member for Honiton cannot take away the words that he used in the House in February 1986 in plain support of a proposition that the Special Standing Committee procedure should be used more than it has been. The Procedure Committee went on to say, as did the right hon. Member for Honiton, that every Minister who gave evidence to the Procedure Committee suggested that it had greatly helped his or her handling of Bills.
One such Minister was the then Solicitor-General, who is now the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. The Home Secretary should talk more to him about this as about other issues. In his evidence, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland told how his 1981 Criminal Attempts Bill had been recast as a result of evidence before a Special Standing Committee. He said:
The Special Standing Committee procedure was designed exactly for this sort of Bill, a point reinforced by my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Maryhill (Mrs. Fyfe) in her excellent contribution about the way in which the Children (Scotland) Bill was greatly improved as a result of the use of the procedure.
Mr. Spearing:
Did my hon. Friend not hear the Home Secretary say yesterday that the procedure that he is describing is a diversion? Is he aware that 42 per cent. of the Newham population are of overseas background and that, on hearing of the possibility of such a Committee, the police community consultative committee wrote to the Prime Minister saying that it wished to give evidence?
Surely a diversion is diverting such committees from the practical contribution that they could make to our proceedings in this place and not the opposite, as the Home Secretary is saying.
Mr. Straw:
My hon. Friend emphasises that there is very widespread support outside the House, as inside, for that procedure. Most members of the public and organisations with an interest in the issue simply cannot understand why Ministers have refused to use it.
Yesterday, the Secretary of State told the House that he wanted to take this issue out of party politics, but we then learnt of his approach to consensus. Instead of agreeing to the proper scrutiny of his plans, he effectively told the
House, "These are my proposals--like them or lump them." That is not a recipe for consensus; it is the road to conflict, and he knows it.
This Bill needs far better scrutiny than a Standing Committee can provide precisely because so many in the ethnic communities and beyond are, in the Prime Minister's words, "unsettled by the proposals". Nothing that the Secretary of State has said so far has even attempted to deal with that concern.
The Conservative candidate for Cheltenham, for example, Mr. John Taylor, recently complained of the Tory party:
Mr. Tredinnick:
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Straw:
If the hon. Gentleman will excuse me, I will not do so, as I gave up part of this speech to allow his hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge to speak.
I shall tell the Secretary of State some of the issues on which that scrutiny should take place. They are: on the reasons for delays when the point of the Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act 1993 was to reduce them; on the need for better regulation of advisers, which was an important point that my hon. Friend the hon. Member for Maryhill also mentioned today; on the failure promptly to remove those who are here illegally; on the failure of the system proposed by which applicants will be forced to conduct appeals from abroad; on how employer checks can work in a non-discriminatory way; and on the whole principle behind the so-called white list. On top of that, there is the greatest anxiety about the fairness with which the present rules operate, even when a country is not and will not be on the white list.
Yesterday, the Secretary of State made light of the fact that, of the 1,495 asylum seekers from the brutal, inhumane regime in Nigeria, just one had been accepted for asylum last year. He said:
Do not people have a right to feel unsettled when they know of such stunning complacency in the face of the facts? If Britain is to be persuaded that the purpose behind the proposals is not to play the race card, let us have the case for them and let us have that case properly examined.
The Prime Minister told the House last Wednesday that he has always believed strongly in racial tolerance in Britain. No one doubts that, but the problem is that the
Conservative party has long been split on the issue of race. We may and do trust the Prime Minister on race, but bitter experience has taught us that we often cannot trust those in control of his party. There was Enoch Powell's
"rivers of blood" speech in 1968 and Margaret Thatcher's claim in 1978 that the country would be "swamped" by immigrants. More recently, there were the 1992 and 1994 Euro-elections.
We know that, for many in the Conservative party, the temptation to prey on people's worst prejudices is often too great to resist. What else are we to think of those chilling words from Mr. Andrew Lansley, who said that immigration has more potential to hurt? Is that the language of a party dedicated to good race relations and to the examination of important but sensitive issues? Or is it the language of a party ready to stir up prejudice in a desperate attempt to garner votes? I hope that, when the Secretary of State replies to the debate in a few minutes' time, we will hear from him, at long last, a complete repudiation of Mr. Lansley's views and of his candidacy.
The Gracious Speech contains two other home affairs measures on disclosure and better national co-ordination in respect of the fight against crime. We shall support the principle of both measures, while, of course, examining their detail with care. The rules on the disclosure of prosecution and defence evidence have to be changed. Justice is not served if the innocent are convicted or if the plainly guilty walk free. We shall support, too, the new proposals on the nobbling of juries and witnesses. None of us wishes to see a national police service, but organised crime is no respecter of boundaries, and national arrangements must reflect that reality. As for the new role for the Security Service, provided that there are proper safeguards for its necessarily secret work, it is plainly sensible, given the reduction in its other tasks, for its skills and resources to be used.
Neither of the two Bills realistically measures up to the scale of the crisis that now engulfs the criminal justice system. What is significant about the Queen's Speech is not what is in it but what is not. There is nothing in the Gracious Speech to tackle crime or the fear of crime, nothing to deal with criminal anti-social neighbours, nothing to cut court delays and nothing to stop our communities being torn apart by disorder and division.
The Secretary of State will no doubt refer to the fall in crime over the past two years, and that is welcome, but he fails to understand that the public judge the Government's record not on two years but on 16, and in 16 years crime has doubled. Violent crime has risen even faster. Yet fewer people are being cautioned or convicted than in 1979. Under the Conservative Government, not only is there more crime but many more people are getting away with it--just one in 50 of the crimes committed result in a conviction.
"I had the very salutary experience of cross-examining two of the leading authorities on criminal law . . . as to the likely effect of a Bill about whose provisions I was already experiencing a sinking feeling".
With characteristic honesty, he added:
"At the end of the final sitting of the Special Standing Committee, the draftsman informed me that not only did the Bill not do what it was supposed to do but that it could not be made to do it."
"They alienate ethnic minorities by pandering to xenophobic voters with promises of crackdowns on immigration".
"Those decisions are not made by Ministers . . . Every applicant has to establish a well founded fear of persecution."--[Official Report, 20 November 1995; Vol. 267, c. 340.]
He must know more than anyone that officials base their judgments partly on so-called Home Office country assessments. I have Nigeria's assessment here. In September this year--three months after the then Foreign Secretary spoke of its "growing cruelty" and "summary justice" and while Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others were awaiting trial for their lives--the Home Office was advising its staff:
"there is no evidence to suggest that Ogonis . . . face persecution from the Nigerian authorities"
for membership of MOSOP--the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. Yet that was the very organisation to which Ken Saro-Wiwa belonged before he was brutally and judicially murdered. That country assessment is not a white list; it is a whitewash.
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