| Previous Section | Back to Table of Contents | Lords Hansard Home Page |
Lord Alli: My Lords, this is an important Bill. Like many others, I would like to focus on the clauses dealing with incitement to religious hatred contained in Schedule 10.
14 Mar 2005 : Column 1123
This debate can be characterised by a conflict of freedom: the freedom to say what you like in a fair and democratic society, and the freedom to live your life without the violence that flows from what a person says about the colour of your skin, your religious beliefs or your sexual orientation. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Ramsay of Cartvale, I believe that society has to balance the rights that we have as citizens with the responsibilities to exercise those rights in a way which protects and cherishes other people's rights and freedoms.
This House has often been instrumental in resolving difficult questions on a conflict of rights. For my part, coming from the Muslim community, I find it hard to understand the logic of those who say that freedom of speech will be under threat if we extend the provisions already in place for race to religion. How is it that the protection of the Sikh community or the Jewish community does not infringe freedom of speech, but the extension of those protections to the Muslim community or other vulnerable groups does?
It is patently absurd to assert that freedom of speech is somehow impaired in a different way when applied to Muslims as opposed to Sikhs. Those who oppose these measures on the basis of freedom of speech will need to work much harder to convince me, and many people from the Muslim community and other religious faiths, that this is not a question of, "Do as I say and not as I do". I look forward to seeing the narrow amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Lester of Herne Hill, when it is published.
Having dealt with the points of principle in these provisions, I feel rather like Oliver Twist. I want more. I hear the noble Beadle on the Front Bench from the workhouse saying, "More! You want more?". Yes, I want more. I would like the Government to go further. I have written to the Minister asking her to give consideration to the extension of the provisions to cover gay men and lesbians through a new offence of incitement to homophobic hatred. I have given her notice that, in Committee, I shall be bringing forward amendments to that effect.
If the law is extended as currently intended, it will be able to tackle hatred against me because of my religious beliefs. It is already able to tackle hatred against me on the basis of the colour of my skin. But it will be unable to tackle hatred against me on the basis of my sexuality.
Perhaps I may give some practical examples of what I mean in three extracts of homophobic lyrics in popular, contemporary rap music. I have no idea who Beenie Man is, but he sings,
Another current popular rap song states,
With rights come responsibilities. Advocating through popular song hatred of the kind expressed in those lyrics is unacceptable in a civilised society.
14 Mar 2005 : Column 1124
I conclude with lines which I am sure will be familiar to noble Lords:
So to my Christian colleagues and all the Church groups who filled our postage bags, and to my Jewish and Sikh friends, I say that it is time to speak out for us. I will be looking to my Muslim brothers and sisters, too, and hoping that they will support my extension of the Bill to cover homophobic hatred. In the end, we all have to speak out for each other.
The Earl of Rosslyn: My Lords, I begin by declaring an interest as a serving officer in the Metropolitan Police and as someone who has worked operationally with both the National Crime Squad and Customs and Excise, two constituent parts of the proposed Serious Organised Crime Agency.
The new agency will, I believe, deliver a more co-ordinated and creative approach to tackling organised crime, building on the strengths of the existing agencies and significantly enhancing operational and intelligence capability.
The increasing domination of organised crime groups in criminality most threatening to our national interest provided a compelling imperative for action. Operating across force boundaries, often at a national or international level, such groups are sophisticated and well resourced. The scope of their criminality is wide ranging, such as drug trafficking, organised immigration crime, fraud, counterfeiting and intellectual property theft, while the links between organised crime and terrorism are well established.
But if the pattern of their offending is diffuse, they share at least two common features: an inclination to corrupt and intimidate, including the intimidation of witnesses and victims, and a capacity for extreme violence. They increasingly demonstrate a growing understanding of law enforcement methods, using themselves elaborate counter-surveillance techniques and highly complex money laundering arrangements.
The economic and social costs of their crimes may be as great as £40 billion a year, approximating the GDP of New Zealand. Few markets are more profitable to them than drug trafficking and people smuggling, with the UK heroin and crack cocaine markets estimated to be worth £3 billion a year, while the global profits from people smuggling are estimated at £5 billion annually. Europol believes that 70 per cent of illegal migrants are facilitated by organised crime groups. Such groups are in effect businesses that exist to make money and do so by creating markets for their
14 Mar 2005 : Column 1125
trade, which in turn create victims of crime. They base their activities on the twin priorities of maximising profit and minimising risk, the most sophisticated operating across commodities to do so.
It would be right to acknowledge the achievements of existing law enforcement agencies in addressing these challenges. The links between them have improved. They are widely respected abroad, generally effective operationally and the co-operation between them and the intelligence agencies is almost unique internationally. Nevertheless, institutional responsibilities are not always clearly defined. The collation, assessment and sharing of intelligence is not consistently achieved and ill-conceived perceptions of each other's role still remain.
At its worst, such an arrangement leads to operational compromise. At best, the national law enforcement effort is less cohesive than it might be. The capability of these agencies has not, in short, kept pace with the sophistication and flexibility of organised crime groups.
A response predicated on nothing more than an amalgamation of the existing agencies would, in my view, have been a lost opportunity, less likely to lead to fundamental improvements, more likely to prolong existing inefficiencies. I therefore welcome the more radical proposal outlined in the Bill, where the new agency really does have the opportunity to be much more than the sum of its parts by linking intelligence, investigation and intervention and by providing a single point of contact for international partners.
However, to be effective, the agency requires a radical new strategy, one in which law enforcement, though important, is just one of a wider range of integrated measures aimed at reducing harm with equal attention given to reducing profit opportunities, hardening targets, disrupting businesses and their markets and preventing new enterprises from gaining a foothold in a market thus destabilised.
To measure the success of such an approach, an entirely new performance management framework will be required which focuses less on numbers and more on how effectively the agency is disabling career criminals, using whatever technique is most effective.
However, the national response to organised crime cannot be considered in isolation from other aspects of law enforcement and must link effectively with local policing. Organised criminality has both national and local dimensions and to overlook the relationship between criminals and levels of criminality is to ignore those loose structures that exist between those operating in the criminal environment.
Serious organised crime at a national level is the mirror image of criminal enterprises to be found in many urban communities. National and international crime often has its roots in local crime, with criminals learning their trades in local communities through dysfunctional role models. Even when operating at a national or international level, they are still based in local communities, so any strategy for tackling serious and organised crime should recognise those interdependencies.
14 Mar 2005 : Column 1126
The new agency will need to rely on the infrastructure of local forces to support it and to be a productive source of criminal intelligence. The agency may wish to engage its assets at a local level and then work its way up the supply chain. Local forces in their turn need the agency's intelligence products to tackle organised crime at force level and its specialist support for complex operations.
The management of these relationships will, I believe, be a key determinant of the agency's success and I wonder whether the Minister agrees that more needs to be done to give local forces and police authorities a stake in the new agency, something which goes beyond the somewhat passive provision in Clauses 6 and 7 to provide them with copies of the agency's annual plan and report.
Finally, any national strategy must recognise the importance of community engagement. The nature of urban communities is changing and with those changes come vulnerabilities that can be exploited by organised criminals.
The public are unlikely to distinguish the actions of one law enforcement agency from another and if the new agency gives insufficient consideration to neighbourhood engagement, that will in turn degrade the ability of local police to operate effectively in key vulnerable communities.
Perhaps I may end by commenting briefly on Clause 125 which proposes an offence of trespassing on designated sites. I currently command the Metropolitan Police Royalty and Diplomatic Protection Department and am very proud to do so. Apart form the responsibilities self evident in its title, we also provide policing for the Palace of Westminster and Downing Street, sites all susceptible to designation under the Bill.
Mine is a predominantly armed command with officers, male and female, accepting the profound additional responsibility which attaches to those carrying a firearm. They know that the armed engagement of any suspect will lead to the meticulous and often prolonged scrutiny of their actions whether through an independently supervised internal inquiry, a coroner's inquest or in some cases with the officer a defendant in a criminal trial.
However sincere their beliefs, those who seek to exploit iconic protected sites by using trespass as a campaign tactic do so at immense and wholly unnecessary risk to themselves and to my officers, not to mention the significant diversion of other operational resources. I believe that the proposal in the Bill would provide a degree of deterrence similar to that which has existed in respect of diplomatic premises since 1977 and I hope that this measure will enjoy the support of the House in due course.
| Next Section | Back to Table of Contents | Lords Hansard Home Page |