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5.5 pm
Mr. Gerald Howarth (Aldershot): I apologise to the House because I had to leave the Chamber earlier. I have two constituency engagements tonight, and I hope that the House will not regard my action as discourteous because no discourtesy is intended. I have been here since 1.15 pm, as the hon. Member for Bristol, East (Jean Corston) will know.
I was interested in what the Home Secretary said at the beginning of his speech. He ascribed good relations in this country since 1976 to the Race Relations Act 1976, which was passed not by a Labour Government, but more specifically by Parliament.
Mr. Howarth:
The 1976 Act was passed by Parliament.
The Home Secretary was wrong to ascribe the success--I think that it has been a success--of the assimilation in this country of a large number of people from many countries around the world and different cultures to an Act of Parliament. We cannot change minds merely by changing the law. We cannot enforce a change of character or a change of view in that way.
The real tribute should be paid to the British people. They have been remarkable in the way that they have adjusted to the changes that have taken place rapidly in some parts of the country. The hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) will know very well what I mean, as will the hon. Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr. Khabra), who I am sorry is not present at the moment. At least 50 per cent. of the people in his constituency have origins in the Indian subcontinent. We should pay tribute to the people of Southall. They do not live in grand country houses at the end of long drives surrounded by parkland. They live in terraced houses, cheek by jowl with their neighbours and they--and not the landed gentry--have borne the brunt of the changes in society.
That brings me on to the hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Woodward), who made a particularly nauseating speech. I warn the House that I recognise that my speech will be rather different in tenor from those that have been made before. I do not apologise for that, because this is the place where we should be able to express our views. I recognise that it is a sensitive subject and I will endeavour to talk about it without inflaming emotions and passions in the House. However, I feel strongly about it, and just as strongly as other hon. Members, albeit in a slightly different way.
As I said, I thought that the speech of the hon. Member for Witney was nauseating, in part because he was in charge of the Conservative party's whole campaigning operation. When did he advise Conservative Ministers that they should adopt a different policy on this issue? Where are the letters to suggest that he did? I suspect that they do not exist. He campaigned vigorously for the Conservative party, attacked this Government and then, overnight, switched sides and suddenly found that everything that the Conservatives had done was nauseating and anathema even though he had stood at the last election on the Conservative party's manifesto, much of which he had helped to draft. That smacks to me of gross hypocrisy.
The hon. Gentleman also referred frequently to decency in his speech, which, I thought betrayed his obsession with other areas of discrimination that are not the subject of the debate. I should have thought that he was obsessed with the promotion of indecency rather than that of decency.
Mr. Woodward:
On a point of clarification, I had no hand in drafting the 1997 Conservative party election manifesto. I was involved in drafting the 1992 manifesto, and the then Conservative party chairman, Christopher Patten, and I shared with the then leader of the party an absolute abhorrence for any form of discrimination. As a matter of record, the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Major), would very much want to distance himself from the kind of racist observations that I fear may be lurking behind the hon. Gentleman's remarks.
Mr. Howarth:
The hon. Gentleman can throw insults at me, if he likes, because frankly they are just water off a duck's back. If he distanced himself from the 1997 manifesto, he had had five years in which he could have told Ministers to take what he thought of as a more robust attitude towards this issue. Suddenly he is sitting on the Government Benches and declaring himself hostile to everything that we stand for, but he kept remarkably silent until he had got his safe seat under his belt.
I am sorry that my right hon. Friend the Member for Charnwood (Mr. Dorrell), who explained why he could not stay, is no longer in his place. I oppose the Bill, but he made a point of principle when he said that there is a case for applying to the public sector that which is applied to the private sector, and a number of my right hon. and hon. Friends would agree that that is right in principle. However, my right hon. Friend gave me an opportunity to get myself off that hook by saying that he was nevertheless a pragmatic man, and I think that the Bill has something to do with pragmatism.
I am pleased to share my duties on the Home Affairs Committee with the hon. Member for Bradford, West (Mr. Singh). He is an excellent member of that Committee. We may have our differences, but we get on well together. He made the fair point that ethnic minorities in this country are doing very well, and he was keen to paint a balanced picture.
Since the hon. Gentleman spoke, I have discovered information from the Institute for Social and Economic Research at Exeter university which shows that the richest ethnic group is not native Brits--whites, if one likes--but Chinese. In terms of family wealth, native Britons come third after Chinese and Indians. The idea that ethnic minority communities are all in the lower wage bands and among the poorest is not borne out by the facts. I found also a statistic showing that black women earn on average more than white women, at £6.10 an hour to £5.19 an hour. I am told that the figures came from The Guardian, so Labour Members will know that they must be true.
I want to make three key points, and I do not want to detain the House, although I suspect that my contribution will be rather different from the others, so I hope that the House will be indulgent towards me. The Bill clearly has its origins in the Macpherson report, and as I said in the debate on the report a year ago, I regard it as intellectually shoddy and devoid of logic. I advanced that argument
because Sir William Macpherson's examination of the behaviour of each and every policeman responsible for the investigation of the awful, tragic murder of Stephen Lawrence revealed that none would have acted in a different way if the victim of that murder had been a white boy.
The only person who was singled out for any criticism was Detective Inspector Bullock, and that was because he was insensitive in referring to Stephen Lawrence and his friend Duwayne Brooks as "those two coloured lads". Poor Detective Inspector Bullock was unaware that to use the word "coloured" was a sign of insensitivity.
Having established that there was not a single case in which a single police man or police woman involved in the investigation of that murder had acted in a way that was racist, the committee under Sir William was driven to the conclusion that it would have to find something else, so it came up with the idea of institutional racism. That is a cop-out.
The report and the reaction to it have been severely damaging to police morale throughout the country, but especially among officers of the Metropolitan police force. Officers at all levels, from the top all the way down to those with whom some of us in the House come into contact, feel anger, bewilderment and a sense of having been beaten senseless by the criticism. They see their senior officers beating their breasts and saying "Mea culpa--it is all our fault and we must change", yet the report on which we are invited to base a change in the law could not find that a single police officer had acted dishonourably, save for the one example that I gave, which I do not consider a very serious example.
Fiona Mactaggart:
I rise mainly to challenge the picture that the hon. Gentleman paints of the police response. Not long ago I attended a meeting of police of all ranks, members of the Thames Valley police in Slough. At the meeting they considered how they should respond to the Macpherson report, and I can tell the hon. Gentleman that they found it enhancing and empowering. In my constituency people of all races live together side by side, benefiting from that. The Macpherson report has given my local police force a route map showing how they can improve the quality of their service to the community, and they are pleased to have it.
Mr. Howarth:
Of course the police would say that; they cannot say anything else. I at least have the privilege of representing a constituency and having a voice in the House, where I can articulate my views. If a common or garden copper expressed such views, he would be at serious risk of impairing his promotion prospects or possibly of being dismissed from the service. I shall deal in a moment with a man who has been dismissed from the service.
Reference has been made to stop and search. A year ago, in the aftermath of the report, the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis told us that in Tottenham, stop and search fell by 48 per cent. and crime went up by 25 per cent.
I make no apology for quoting again the remarks that I quoted a year ago, made by the chairman of the Police Federation in Hampshire, who said:
My right hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe), the shadow Home Secretary, referred to a report that was conducted by Dr. Marian Fitzgerald and commissioned by the Metropolitan police. It found that there was support for stop and search among black youths. I hope that the police are encouraged by that. It was striking that those who had been searched were no less inclined to say that the power was necessary. A black school boy commented that police
Law-abiding ethnic communities have never caused problems for the police service, and indeed in Hampshire we have always enjoyed good relations with community leaders . . .
I believe that police officers will be intimidated into being soft on stop and search. The Home Secretary's argument that the Bill will not make the individual police officer liable, but will make the top man vicariously liable does not meet my objections. If a police officer is referred to his superior officer as the subject of a complaint, and the chief police officer is vicariously liable, and if there is a growing list of complaints against a particular officer, of course he will be hauled up before his boss and have questions asked about him. [Hon. Members: "So he should."] If so, the police officer will hold back from enforcing the law equally and impartially for fear of being accused of racism.
The main concern is in dealing with criminals who just happen to be black or Asian.
It is this element which I fear will attempt to capitalise on a well-intentioned report and try to use it to their advantage.
The phrase "You have only stopped me because I am black" in light of this report will understandably cause officers concern.
It will be exploited by that criminal element who attempt to hide their criminality behind their colour and attempt to thwart proactive policing by falsely alleging persecution on the basis of race rather than the truth.
need to be able to do their job properly and as part of their job they have to stop and search people.
I take some encouragement from that. However, the police are nervous about enforcing the law. Far from improving matters, the Bill will make them worse.
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