Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood and Lord Macdonald of River Glaven

Report stage
Wednesday 12th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood (CB)]

My Lords, I too support this proposal. The objectives set out in each of the paragraphs (a) to (h) of proposed subsection (2) of the amendment are plainly and urgently needed. It should not be necessary to establish a royal commission to focus on, pursue and achieve these objectives, but plainly it is necessary. These deficiencies have been identified, recognised and discussed for years but, as for getting anywhere in terms of achievement—on the contrary.

The main parties on both sides of the House, not least this Government, seem ever more intent on winning the law and order vote. Sentences are being increased; minimum and mandatory terms are being imposed. We now need the impetus, the force, of no less than a royal commission to start to recognise the intense problems of our whole penal system and to start to set the matter right.

[Lord Macdonald of River Glaven (CB)]

My Lords, I do not regard the United Kingdom’s place at the top of the incarceration league table for western European countries as a badge of honour. It seems to me that this fact in itself calls for a broad strategic view of how sentencing is working in this country and why it is that we send so many more people to prison than other countries do.

One of the issues seems to be that criminal justice, particularly sentencing, has become a political football. A sort of auction has been going on between the main political parties over the last 20 years or so to discover who can present themselves as the toughest on this issue. I do not mean to minimise the effect of crime on victims or on society as a whole, but short sentences in particular are surely counterproductive. The best way to school a young man in crime and anti-social behaviour is to send him to prison for three or six months.

It seems to me that one of the great possible achievements of a royal commission would be to take some of the political sting out of this issue and to inject some rationality and even some science into it. I strongly support the amendment.

Immigration Bill

Debate between Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood and Lord Macdonald of River Glaven

Monday 17th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Macdonald of River Glaven]

My Lords, if Clause 60 operates in accordance with the Government’s intentions, it is bound to increase statelessness in the world. The noble Baroness, Lady Lister, has already reminded the Committee of the words spoken by Hannah Arendt many years ago, that statelessness deprives people of the “right to have rights”. It brings about a bleak, hopeless status, or rather a complete lack of status, that the British Government should have no role in encouraging, first, because of the positively terminal impact that the imposition of statelessness is bound to have on the ability of the rightless to function in a way that is even remotely human in the modern world and, secondly, because it is clear that such an imposition as a policy measure can have no sensible part in a co-ordinated international effort to combat security threats. In fact, it appears to be the antithesis of such an effort, even in circumstances where it is precisely co-ordinated international effort that we need.

In fact, the unilateral imposition of statelessness is very likely to be directly unhelpful to those efforts because it carries with it the very real risk of breaching the United Kingdom’s international obligations to a country which has admitted a person on the strength of their lawful possession of a United Kingdom passport. Of course, such a country would absolutely have the right to return an individual directly to the United Kingdom, and what then? As the JCHR has observed, the United Kingdom would appear to have no absolute right under international law to require other states to accept its outcasts. In my view, therefore, this proposal is not only ugly in the sense identified so many years ago by Hannah Arendt; it not only associates the United Kingdom with a policy beloved of the world’s worst regimes during the 20th century; but it threatens illegal and procedural quagmire hardly compatible with the comity of nations, still less with solidarity between free countries in the face of terrorism.

[Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, have a fundamental problem with this clause. It has been suggested that it was added late to the Bill and designed to overcome the Government’s defeat in Al-Jedda, which was decided by the Supreme Court just last October, but in fact Clause 60 goes substantially further than merely reversing that decision.