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Fraud (Trials without a Jury) Bill

No, I will not. The hon. Gentleman has given us the benefit of his views and we are able to judge them. I agree with the hon. and learned Member for Medway in this. He said that the Bill constituted a serious attack on our civil liberties and that it was unnecessary, unworkable, expensive and unwise. In all of that he was entirely right. He said that, not just from the position of someone who wishes to annoy the Government, but from the position of someone who has even more experience in the criminal courts than my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Mr. Hogg), and he was characteristically but none the less modest in drawing to our attention the huge experience that he has in these matters. It is absolutely no good for the Government or their friends to attack him for making arguments based on evidence and long experience—and common sense. The protocol that Lord Woolf, then Lord Chief Justice, introduced in March 2005 is barely a year old, and yet the Government are saying that it is of no account. The Fraud Act 2006, which completed its passage through Parliament just before we prorogued, has yet to be made use of and yet no doubt was introduced to this Parliament for a purpose. It has simplified the law of fraud and the way in which our courts will be able to look at alleged fraud. And yet the Government are so hyperactive and so addicted to headline legislation that they do not even wait to draw the conclusions of their own legislation before rushing on to pass another piece of legislation—and in the face of arguments that we have heard any number of times and seen defeated both here and in the other place, albeit I accept that the Government are capable of crashing legislation through as a result of their whipping capacity. Many hon. Members on both sides of the House have spoken against the Bill. Those on the Labour Benches, apart from the hon. and learned Member for Medway, expressed their dissatisfaction with the Bill by means of interventions. Others, on the Opposition side of the House, have had the opportunity to speak, some at length and some at less length, about the issues that concern them. I can extract some broad themes from the speeches. The first is that the jury system is under attack; and that whether it is under attack in this narrow sense or more broadly, it is none the less the necessary upholder of our civil liberties and the necessary barrier between the state and the citizen, as my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd) and others said. It was also said that the jury system is the necessary introducer of the citizen into the criminal justice system and prevents it from being but an esoteric lawyers’ fest; I think it is important that we remember that and that we maintain that important break. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham asked three important questions. First, he asked whether it was appropriate for juries to try lengthy and complex serious fraud cases. Not surprisingly he answered that it was, and he used the analogy of drug dealing cases, murder cases and terrorist cases. He went on to ask whether there is a principle that can be established to demonstrate that the Government’s case is right. All the Government can do to come anywhere near that is to produce an argument based on Executive convenience. Indeed, Executive convenience—the convenience of this Government—has been promoted to the level of a principle in itself. I was disappointed at the manner in which the Solicitor-General advanced his case. Some years ago, I listened with great interest to the late Lord Williams, speaking in the other place on the Criminal Justice (Mode of Trial) Bill—the first of two such Bills, I believe. It was a fine speech in support of an argument that he knew he was going to lose. At his fingertips were all the factual and legal arguments required to convince a sceptical House of Lords. He failed, but he did so with good grace and with a flourish. Tonight we have heard arguments that were confusing, confused, ahistorical and based not on fact, but on the Government’s prejudice against the jury system as a whole. Although they try to argue that this is just a narrow piece of legislation, it is but the sharp end of a very big wedge. The Government have used arguments based on efficiency, based on the need to deal with delay, based on the need to deal with expense and based on the need to make cases explicable to a jury. The Solicitor-General said that his arguments were not about what I characterise, perhaps unfairly to him, as the stupid jury argument. He said that that was not the case, but he then went on to explain how these serious and lengthy fraud cases were incapable of being understood by a jury and how they needed to be removed from juries so that lawyers and a judge could deal with them and produce the convictions that the Government think appropriate. That is in line, of course, with the Prime Minister’s argument that the current criminal justice system is outmoded and requires, as the Government constantly tell us, ““modernisation””. We have it in our power to defeat the Government tonight—if not by votes, at least by argument. My hon. Friends have demonstrated that, as have the two Liberal Democrat spokesmen today. I suggest that we not only convert our arguments into votes, but convert our votes into a majority against the Bill. Believe you me, Mr. Deputy Speaker, even if we do not win here tonight, we will not have lost the argument and there is another place that forms an equal part of our parliamentary system, which will check, advise and warn the Government that they are making a mistake—not just some ordinary and easily remediable mistake, but a fundamental and very dangerous one.