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Criminal Law (Amendment) (Protection of Property) Bill

The hon. Lady makes a good point. If we changed the law in this way, we should be saying that it was okay to be disproportionate or unreasonable, so long as we were not grossly disproportionate. I would be very reluctant to anchor that principle in the law of Great Britain. The principle of reasonableness, which we apply to enormous swathes of the law, is very valuable. It has stood the test of time, and juries have traditionally interpreted it in a way that most of us would accept. If we were to move from the concept of what a reasonable person would do, and to adopt a concept of what a not-grossly-disproportionate person would do, I submit that we should be moving on to dangerous territory. We should be moving into the area of frontier law. I hope that I am not misrepresenting the hon. Member for North Shropshire—he will correct me if I am—but I understood him to say that, because people in remote farmhouses, for example, cannot realistically expect the police to dash round at two minutes’ notice, they need to take other measures to deter burglars and make them think twice before intruding on their property. I assume that such measures would include the possession of some kind of weapon with which the householder could defend themselves in the event of what they saw as a dangerous intruder entering their property. That would say to people across the countryside, ““We encourage you to equip yourselves with weaponry, and, if you see someone who you believe to be an intruder, you can use those weapons on them so long as you are confident that a jury will not find that you have behaved in a grossly disproportionate manner.”” That would be dangerous in the extreme. I do not believe that the general public want it to be the norm in the British countryside for people to arm themselves in order to assault potential intruders. That is not where we want to go; it would lead to more trouble than we have at the moment.