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Antisocial Behaviour

I am extremely flattered that just over an hour and a half after the debate began the hon. Gentleman rushed into the Chamber as soon as my name appeared on the monitor. I anticipated that the Labour Whips Office would be able to provide briefings for Members who did so, but the hon. Gentleman is right. Many hon. Members no doubt entered politics as a result of their experiences growing up or because of their parents’ party preferences, but that is not true in my case. When I was old enough to take an interest in such matters, I tried to make a cool, dispassionate assessment of which political party offered the best prospects for our country. Anyone who undertakes such a task intelligently would conclude that the Liberal Democrats offered the strongest future. It would be difficult for anyone who, like me, grew up in the 1980s to adopt the Conservatives as their preferred party, because the Conservative party presided over a doubling of crime, which is a truly astonishing record. Crime did not rise by 5 or 10 per cent., or even by monstrous figures such as 15 or 20 per cent., but by 100 per cent. We have paid for that under successive Governments, including the last Tory Government, as billions of pounds in tax have been spent on Home Office legislation and policing. We therefore had the right to expect crime to fall under the previous Government, but instead it went up by 100 per cent., so the lives of millions of our fellow citizens were blighted as a result of the Conservatives’ period in government and the way in which they exercised power for 18 years. Any rational person would object to the Conservative record so, instead, I shall consider the Labour party’s record on crime and its critique of Liberal Democrat policy. The Labour party’s approach to the Home Office cannot be regarded as a manifest success. In the 60-year period between 1925 and 1985, Governments of different parties introduced six criminal justice Acts. Roughly speaking, there was a criminal justice Act once a decade. Under this Government, the introduction of criminal justice Acts has become more frequent than an annual event. Such is the frenzy of legislation that the Government often plan the next criminal justice Act before they have implemented the previous one. So many Home Office Bills making legal changes have been proposed this Session that I cannot remember them all, and I have to refer to my notes. They include the Fraud (Trials without a Jury) Bill, the Legal Services Bill, a criminal justice Bill, an asylum and immigration Bill, the Offender Management Bill, a counter-terrorism Bill, the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Bill and, just this week, the Serious Crime Bill. Too often, the Government mistake legislative frenzy—it is called ““eye-catching initiatives”” by the Prime Minister, and it secures a quick hit for Ministers in the newspapers—for effective action on crime. For the first few years after Labour came to power, that was quite seductive, because Ministers were busy with new initiatives and legislation. They seemed to care about the problems and wanted to crack down on them. Then, after a period, people started to think, ““Wait a second. We keep reading in the newspapers about all the crackdowns and the other tough measures that are being taken, but where I live—on my estate, or even in my village or small town—they do not seem to be having any effect. We still seem to be blighted by antisocial behaviour.”” The Government’s big litmus test in this area is antisocial behaviour orders. The Liberal Democrats have been criticised by the Labour Government for not embracing antisocial behaviour orders as enthusiastically as they would wish, so I took the opportunity to look into the matter. For clarification, the Liberal Democrats supported the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. We had questions to ask about antisocial behaviour orders, and rightly so. If the Minister wants to intervene and say that antisocial behaviour orders have been perfect in every regard, or if any other Member thinks that there are no criticisms to make of the implementation of antisocial behaviour orders, I am happy to give way. I am willing to take an intervention from any Member who can say that they have been perfect in their constituency. I suspect that that has not been the experience of most right hon. and hon. Members.