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Mr. George Robertson: The hon. Gentleman was asleep.
Mr. Banks: The hon. Gentleman knows that I was not asleep, because I occasionally tried to intervene during his
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speech. I recognise, as does the whole House, that he is effectively opposing tougher sentences, which the public want.
It is not a matter of importing English and Welsh methods into Scotland, which, in my view, has always had much better legal and education systems. The so-called reasoned amendment suggested that we should not press ahead with tagging in Scotland, simply because there had not been a pilot scheme for it there.
That is a ridiculous way to try to get off the hook and excuse oneself for voting against Second Reading tonight, because there are pilot schemes in Manchester, Berkshire and Norfolk and, bearing in mind that we have national sentences for drug trafficking, there is no reason why Scotland should not take advantage of technology that is being tested elsewhere in the United Kingdom. My right hon. Friend made it clear that we wanted to introduce powers to tag offenders over 18 years of age, and not under.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Dumfries (Sir H. Monro) highlighted a number of initiatives that were taking place in Dumfries and Galloway. I was also pleased to hear that the Secretary of State intends to ensure that the Scottish Office provides further support for young people, enabling them to gain valuable experience in education and, to a small extent, in the military. Support will be forthcoming from both the Scottish Office and the Army.
Several hon. Members have mentioned young people from deprived backgrounds. On a personal note, I might add that I recall the enormous satisfaction I gained in the Army when I played a tiny role in looking after youngsters from deprived backgrounds in Edinburgh. I suspect from what my right hon. Friend said that the increased support on offer will result partly from his discussions with GOC Scotland.
Speaking of young offenders and children generally, I listened with great interest to the hon. Member for Glasgow, Maryhill (Mrs. Fyfe). I cannot remember whether she is an officer in the Scottish children's group, but she is certainly a leading light in it.
Mr. John McFall (Dumbarton):
An officer.
Mr. Banks:
Yes. She mentioned the importance of pre-school education, and I think the whole House took her point. We understand that it is enormously beneficial in inner-city areas. I was not entirely convinced by her arguments about this Bill, but I welcomed her warm remarks about clause 23, in respect of children.
My hon. Friend the Member for Ayr conducted an interesting exchange about young people drinking in the streets. A number of hon. Members seemed unsure about whether the Bill does anything to act on under-age drinking. Perhaps the Minister of State will deal with that later. For myself, I believe that the Bill may provide extra powers in relation to people over 18 supplying alcohol to those who are under 18--but I may be wrong.
My hon. Friend the Member for Ayr made an excellent speech. I was not surprised to learn the results of his constituency survey. He puts his finger on the nub of a number of issues. It is a great pity that his regular efforts to keep in touch with his constituents are so often denigrated by other hon. Members.
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The hon. Member for Falkirk, East expressed some concerns which I share, although he perhaps emphasised them differently. The hon. Gentleman frequently speaks in European Standing Committee A. This afternoon, he said that the existence of a minimum sentence was no deterrent to the person who killed one of his constituents some time ago; as a result of all sorts of shenanigans, the person concerned managed to get off--my words, not his. That sort of thing certainly brings the criminal justice system into disrepute. That is why it is important to move towards mandatory or automatic sentences, depending on which part of the United Kingdom we are talking about.
Special circumstances must, of course, be allowed for. If I have one constructive criticism of the Bill to offer, it concerns special circumstances, and I hope that that point will be dealt with in Committee.
I certainly do not agree with the hon. Member for Falkirk, East that prison has no part to play in reforming criminals. While that may be true of some, and while we must not lose sight of the fact that punitive measures are also needed, we should also do all in our power to rehabilitate people. I thought that the hon. Gentleman's comments on automatic sentencing were incorrect.
My hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Staffordshire (Mr. Fabricant) rightly drew attention to the discrepancies between what Labour says and does. He read out a long list showing how Labour has voted so often against useful measures--the prevention of terrorism legislation, for instance. The Liberal Democrats have done likewise. Clearly, new Labour says one thing but old Labour does another. Certainly, Opposition Members did not hang about in the Lobbies last night, when they could not afford to be seen to oppose yesterday's Bill for England and Wales. Tonight, however, they have chosen to oppose this measure--against the public interest and what the public want.
The hon. Member for Glasgow, Cathcart (Mr. Maxton) and several others mentioned yesterday's speeches by my right hon. Friends the Members for Witney (Mr. Hurd), for Mole Valley (Mr. Baker) and for Fareham (Sir P. Lloyd). I believe that my right hon. Friends have been misquoted. Yesterday, my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney said:
Yesterday, my right hon. Friend the Member for Mole Valley said:
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We want automatic or mandatory sentences, with the proviso that judges can take certain matters into account so as to avoid imposing unnecessarily harsh sentences.
Mr. John McAllion (Dundee, East):
Earlier this evening, I said that I had not been here for last night's debate, and as I listened to the hon. Member for Southport (Mr. Banks) droning on, I began to wish I was not here for tonight's debate, either. It was a dreadful filibuster which added nothing to the debate. Indeed, we have heard a succession of speeches by Conservative Members working themselves up into a frenzy of synthetic outrage about the fact that the Opposition have chosen to treat this Scottish Bill differently from the one dealing exclusively with England and Wales.
Intervening on the hon. Member for Mid-Staffordshire (Mr. Fabricant) earlier, I tried to make him understand our reasons--but I failed. But given that he is someone who thinks Scots drink McEwan's bitter and that Tolstoy wrote "War and Punishment", it is rather difficult to make him understand anything. Even Shakespeare would struggle to make him comprehend.
I was trying to make the hon. Gentleman understand that it is not Opposition Members who argue that Scottish Bills should be dealt with separately in this House, but the Government. The Secretary of State for Scotland has consistently argued that Scottish Bills should be approached in a distinctive and completely different manner from Bills dealing with England and Wales. He argued that Scotland has a different history, culture, legal system and system for handling criminals and young offenders, and that therefore a different approach to legislation on crime and punishment is required. That is the point I was trying to make.
Mr. McAllion:
I am not going to give way to the hon. Gentleman. One of my hon. Friends has been sitting here since 3.30, trying unsuccessfully to get into the debate because of Conservative Members' filibustering.
If the Government want to be consistent, they should not send the Bill to a Standing Committee that is dominated by English Back Benchers who will ensure a Conservative majority, but pass it to the Scottish Grand Committee and let its members determine the Bill's progress through Committee. We shall not, of course, see such an example of Government consistency. There is a solution to the problem: it is called a Scottish Parliament--a directly elected parliament. If we had one, we would not have the absurd situation that faces us tonight.
When opening the debate, the Secretary of State called on hon. Members on both sides of the House to rise above electoral considerations and to concentrate on the real problem of crime that affects so many people in Scotland. I might have taken that appeal seriously, were it not for the fact that he then spent the first 28 minutes of his speech making cheap party political points against the Opposition parties. For him to call on the Opposition to rise above electoral considerations and then to spend most
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The Secretary of State's favourite taunt is to say that hon. Members who dare to disagree with him have a brass neck, but there is no more brassy neck in the House than that of the Secretary of State for Scotland. He consistently says one thing and does another--his actions are completely inconsistent with his words.
The real lesson of tonight's debate is that it is the Conservative party that is playing party politics with crime and punishment in Scotland. Earlier tonight, I went out to make a phone call and I found the parliamentary private secretary to the Secretary of State for Scotland on the phone, contacting his office and trying to find out what would happen if the Bill was defeated on Second Reading. He asked whether it would be possible to reintroduce the Bill again in the same Session of Parliament. He was desperate for the answer to be yes, so that he could rush back into the Chamber and say that Labour Members were putting the Bill at risk--not because we were in any real sense, but because the Conservatives might be able to make a cheap party political point outside the House if the Bill were to fail. Let the message go out from tonight's debate: if the Bill is lost, only one party will be responsible--the Government party, which has a clear majority and can deliver the Bill if it wants to. The Conservatives have chosen to play party politics with a serious issue and that will not go unnoticed in Scotland.
The Secretary of State used part of his speech to address the problem of reoffending and how to deal with it. His view was clear and honest. He argued that, if offenders are behind bars, they cannot commit crimes--as he put it, if they are put away, they should stay away. That has a certain simplistic and reactionary appeal for many people in this country, but as we listened to Conservative Members speaking in the ensuing debate, we got a picture of the road down which they have started in making such arguments.
The reintroduction of hanging was raised--the hon. Member for Ayr (Mr. Gallie) surveyed his constituency to see whether hanging would be a good way of dealing with crime. A hanged man cannot reoffend--that much is certain--and perhaps many Conservative Members think that the Secretary of State's approach is too timid and that the argument should be carried to its logical conclusion. Why not hang, shoot, gas and otherwise kill offenders? That is one guarantee that they will not reoffend, but it is also a guarantee that there will be no civil liberties or civil justice in our society and that innocent people will be killed.
The Secretary of State's policy flies in the face of academic research into the problem. For example, a paper presented to a probation officers' conference in Scotland in September this year reviewed strategies for reducing the rate of reoffending among convicted criminals. It highlighted a body of evidence from around the world showing that harsh punishment programmes are counter-productive--they do not reduce the level of crime in society, but increase it. Specifically, the research showed that it was important that reoffending programmes should be based in the community, or at least closely
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No doubt the Government will dismiss that paper as the work of liberal do-gooders and academics who do not really live in the real world; but the academics who presented the paper were Scottish Office researchers--members of the Scottish Office central research unit, speaking at a conference supported by Scottish Office money and staffed by Scottish Office civil servants. I have to conclude that their views expressed in that paper had the backing of Scottish Office Ministers, or they should not have been at the conference. When we understand that reality, we begin to understand that this is a Government who even argue against research findings that they commissioned from their own civil servants in the Scottish Office. We begin to realise that the Government are playing politics with a serious issue affecting Scotland.
The example of America has been cited several times tonight, but the fact is that although, proportionately, America imprisons seven times more people than European countries, it suffers a much higher crime rate than any European country. America has already gone down the road that the Government are threatening to take Britain down. In American prisons, there are geriatric wards for the people caught by the "three strikes and you're out" rule, who are never to be allowed back into the community. They die in prison--old, disabled or blind men and women who will never be released back into society because of the idiotically reactionary approach taken to the problem of crime in America.
The lesson of America is that prisons do not work. More prisons and more people banged up in society is not a sign of success in tackling crime--it is a sign of failure. Until now, we in this country have--thank God--understood that lesson, but we are in danger of forgetting it because of the reactionary nostrums voiced by Conservative Members.
Many hon. Members today talked about the Maguire case and asked whether a rapist would reoffend if the sort of prison regime introduced in the Bill had been available before; but think about it--how does a rapist in an all-male prison prove to the warders that he is fit to re-enter society and that he will not be a threat to the young and vulnerable women there?
My hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Ross) and I visited Rossie secure unit for young offenders near Montrose. There we saw some of the hardest young offenders in north-east Scotland. We went round their classes and saw that they were model pupils while they were inside Rossie, where they were locked up in small numbers and looked after all day long. They present no problem whatsoever in Rossie, but return them to the communities they come from and it is a completely different story.
How do we know whether they are fit to return to their communities, unless we are prepared to say that part of their sentence should be served in prison, but another part should be spent outside in the community, under supervision? That way, offenders can be tested to discover whether they are fit to go back into society. That is the only realistic way forward for us, yet the Government are trying to close it off with the Bill.
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I want to allow my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Govan (Mr. Davidson) to contribute, so I shall deal only briefly with clause 2 and the Government's claim that they want to crack down on class A drug traffickers. They believe that they can do that through minimum sentencing--seven years for people who fall within the provisions of clause 2. The Government believe that after the drugs have been brought into Scotland, after they have been sold to vulnerable people in Scotland, after the profits have been made, after the pusher has been caught and convicted, and after the damage has been done, they can deal with the problem by minimum sentences.
"The Labour party used to contain a tradition of liberal thinking on penal matters. In my time, I occasionally found that tradition extremely irritating. Earlier, when the Attorney-General answered questions, we were reminded of the Labour party's record in resisting the Conservative Government when we proposed the prosecution's right of appeal against lenient sentences. I believed that the Labour party was wrong about that and several other measures in my time, but we recognised that as part of a consistent tradition."--[Official Report, 4 November 1996; Vol. 284, c. 933.]
That consistent tradition is one of backing away from taking tough measures which the public and the Government want brought in.
"I was glad to see the provision in the first three clauses that mandatory sentences need not be imposed if there are 'exceptional circumstances' . . . However, I am glad that the Home Secretary has made that provision, because it allows judges to exercise some discretion, which is important. The clauses would be unacceptable without that discretion."--[Official Report, 4 November 1996; Vol. 284, c. 941.]
The Bill relating to Scotland would be just as unacceptable without the analogous clauses.
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