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Criminal Law (Amendment) (Protection of Property) Bill

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that and may refer later to some other points in that CPS memorandum. She is absolutely right: does the hon. Member for Vale of York want householders to have the right to hang, draw and quarter intruders, for example; or a gentleman in his castle to be able to pour boiling oil on them from the battlements? It is difficult to see what else householders should be permitted to do under the law. We should not underestimate the emotional impact of burglary. In the British crime survey 2004–05, 86 per cent. of respondents were emotionally affected by burglary, and if there was forced entry, too, the figure was 89 per cent. The responses experienced include: anger, at 56 per cent. for all burglaries and 63 per cent. for burglary with entry; annoyance, at 46 per cent. and 51 per cent. for burglary with entry; shock, for 36 per cent. at burglary and 42 per cent. at burglary with entry; and a loss of confidence or feeling of vulnerability, for 27 per cent. and 30 per cent. That illustrates how serious the offence of burglary is, and we need to take it seriously in the House. That said, I do not think that the Bill is an appropriate response. Much has been made by the Conservative party of the support that it claims the public have for the Bill. That raises the question of what the public actually know about the existing law. The Bill’s proponents pray in aid various opinion polls, particularly that on the ““Today”” programme. Last time we debated this subject, my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North—the recipient, to put it neutrally, of the ““Today”” poll—made it clear that it was not an honest poll. He said that it was not"““the honest listeners of Radio 4—as far as I can gather, they were all on the slopes at Chamonix at the time””." The poll, he said, was in fact rigged by"““a group of website gun fanatics, headed by an organisation called Cybershooters, who orchestrated a campaign against me.””—[Official Report, 4 February 2005; Vol. 430, c. 1109.]" One must question whether the ““Today”” programme was the victim of practices that one can compare only with the way in which people vote in ““Big Brother””, or similar television programmes, such as the dancing one on Saturday nights at present. It is interesting that the Conservative party is prepared to claim public support for how it has approached the Bill, but when it came to the recent Bill on terrorism, on which 76 per cent. of the public back the police on the 90-day minimum, 72 per cent. supported 90-day detention and 77 per cent. said the police should have the powers that they said they needed, the Conservatives, for purely opportunistic reasons, voted against the wishes of the public. How on earth have they the bottle to come here today claiming the support of the public—with no opinion polls to speak of behind them—given the very clear message from the public on that previous Bill? That smacks, at the very least, of double standards, and I shall not use the unparliamentary term hypocrisy.