Safe Streets for All

Alistair Carmichael Excerpts

Monday 17th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

Thank you very much, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am very grateful to you.

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill), who made a very thoughtful contribution. He said a lot in four minutes, characterised by the fact that, of course, he knows what he is talking about, because he has not just a political understanding but professional experience of criminal justice. In particular, when he spoke of sentencing and how rehabilitation should be at the heart of our prison system, there was nothing he said with which I could disagree personally or politically.

When listening to the Home Secretary, however, it struck me that if we ever wanted to generate a bob or two, we could bring out a new parlour game called “Who said it and when?” because there were points in her speech when I felt that I could have been listening to just about any Home Secretary that I have heard speak at the Dispatch Box in the last 20 years. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard Home Secretaries stand there talking about “Cracking down on this” or “Getting tough on that”. It is always the rhetoric of toughness, whereas we know that, in fact, getting things right in criminal justice is often about doing things that are difficult—and difficult to explain in the tabloid press—but that are also right and effective.

We heard as much tonight when the Home Secretary talked about setting centrally driven targets in order to improve policing. Centrally driven targets will not improve policing; it is community policing, rooted in the community that it is there to serve, that will improve policing and produce the outcomes. We have heard this for decades: the rhetoric goes on, yet year after year our streets and communities become less safe for our people, and the rhetoric does not change.

I also discern in the Queen’s Speech an emerging pattern from this Government, and it is one that disturbs and concerns me. Yet again, I am afraid, the Conservatives have been pleased to style themselves in opposition as liberals, and perhaps even occasionally as libertarians, but they are increasingly authoritarian in government. The moves in the carry-over Bill in relation to the right to protest are misjudged and ill-conceived, and I think that, ultimately, they will be counterproductive.

The hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst referred to the question of judicial review. Any Government who believe in the rule of law should have absolutely no difficulty putting the decisions that they have taken before the court. If those decisions are right and legal, they should have no problem in the courts; and if they are not right and legal, they should want to change them in any event.

Time is short and there is one point that I wanted to put on the record. I am in total agreement with the Home Secretary’s comments condemning the scenes on our streets and online in relation to antisemitism, specifically in London. I think I come at the Israel-Palestine question from a rather different point of view from that held by the Home Secretary, but even for somebody who is as staunch a supporter of the Palestinian cause as I am, there can be no place in this debate for what we saw, and we in this country help nobody in Palestine by evincing sentiments that are antisemitic. On that, at least, I hope there will be a measure of consensus across the House.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

It is very good to hear the right hon. Gentleman mention consensus in that respect. As a rabbi in my constituency was brutally attacked yesterday—many people may be aware of this—I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for having just articulated what I would have liked to say myself if I were able to do so. I am delighted to tell him that Essex police have arrested two young men in connection with the attack on the rabbi, which was an absolute disgrace.

We now go to a limit of three minutes, I am afraid, and I call Caroline Nokes.