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Home Affairs and Justice

If the hon. Gentleman will allow me, I shall make a tiny bit more progress. I was reflecting over the weekend about quite the extent to which this country has changed for the better since my first speech from the Treasury Bench on the Loyal Address in May 1997. Although I do not claim that every speech that I have made in the past 10 and half years has stood the test of time, I was accurate when I said:"““Laws can help to shape more tolerant values and a better society.””—[Official Report, 19 May 1997; Vol. 294, c. 387.]" I do not pretend that things are better for everyone. Each person who is a victim of crime—there are still too many—remains 100 per cent. a victim of crime, and each person out of a job remains 100 per cent. out of work, but overall our country is a better place, and this Government have led the way in that achievement. Three quarters of the British people are optimistic about the future for their families, a recent and interesting poll for the BBC tells us. Some 93 per cent. of us say that we are happy in our family lives, which is a considerable improvement on earlier such findings. The pollsters expressed surprise at the findings, but I do not. The country is more prosperous, safer and better educated. So much for the claims of a so-called ““broken society””. Something else has changed fundamentally. This did not happen under a Conservative Administration, although it easily could have done. It is something that the Conservatives had every chance to do in their 18 years of office, and something for which they needed no resources. Black Wednesday did not affect their opportunities to do this, yet they singularly refused to act. I am speaking about the way in which people are treated in our country. When we came into government section 28 was, disgracefully, still on the statute book—people who were gay or lesbian were told by the state that they had dangerous tendencies—there was the running sore of policing in a multiracial country, and the fester of the appalling murder of Stephen Lawrence and the abject complacency of the investigation into it. The Conservative Administration sat on their hands about all that. In contrast, we acted. We have made the changes to address inequalities and to help make our country more tolerant. We abolished section 28, equalised the age of consent and established the Lawrence inquiry—not only that, but we saw that almost all its recommendations were implemented. We introduced legislation to outlaw religious and racial hatred, just as we are now inviting the House to make incitement to hatred based on sexual orientation a criminal offence. We introduced a further, and in my judgment even more fundamental, law to help shape the tolerant values and better society of which I spoke 10 and a half years ago: the Human Rights Act 1998. The European convention on human rights, on which our Act is based, was drafted by lawyers who were British and who happened to be leading Conservatives—men such as David Maxwell-Ffye, later the distinguished Lord Kilmuir, the Lord Chancellor. The incorporation of convention rights into domestic law was first called for in this House by Conservatives in 1987. Furthermore, following changes to the 1998 Bill based on the Opposition's concerns, the Conservative Front-Bench team wished it well as it passed into law. I am not surprised, for the convention and the Act enshrined British values, developed over centuries of our common law, with a pedigree that stretches back to the Magna Carta, providing remedy in British courts, to be heard by British judges.