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Home Affairs and Justice

I wholly agree. Legislation is for defining the law and determining what is and is not an offence, not for sending signals. Ministers can make speeches to send signals as much as they like, but they should not use the legislative process or criminal justice to do so. Another aspect of the liberty principle is that it needs to be applied to existing legislation. The Prime Minister and Home Office Ministers need to go back through the statute book and apply that principle to some of the stuff that has been introduced in the past decade. I move to another point of principle. I want to question the increasing tendency on the part of the Prime Minister and the Lord Chancellor, who did it today, to qualify liberty by reference to responsibility—they say that with freedom comes responsibility. Of course we want people to behave responsibly; society runs a great deal better if they do. Ministers are fully entitled to promote responsible behaviour and I hope that they will do so by example as well as sermon. However, one cannot qualify liberty by reference to behaviour other than by the use of the law to determine what is a crime and what loss of liberty follows conviction for it. If a person commits a crime, they lose some of their liberty—through a custodial or community sentence, or the loss of money as a result of a fine. Their liberty is rightly affected by the fact that they had committed a crime and broken the law. However, outside penal institutions, rights cannot be made contingent on general good behaviour; they can be limited only by the due process of the law. We cannot have some kind of people's soviet ruling whereby someone loses a measure of their free speech because they have failed to help with the scout troop or to use their time and energy to help the parish council in the litter-clearing exercise that was rightly undertaken. There are lots of good things that people should do and that I want them to do—I am involved in encouraging and supporting voluntary organisations—but we cannot make people's willingness to behave responsibly the basis on which legal rights exist and on which a failure of duty leads to those rights being taken away. There is a dangerous confusion between what can be defined by law, and defines the extent of rights, and the promotion of good behaviour in society, which I strongly support—after all, I spent some of my Sundays as a Methodist local preacher getting into pulpits and encouraging people to observe the precepts of the Christian gospel. However, the pulpit is the place for that, not the statute book, which must contain a clearly defined understanding of what can be determined by law. For that we go back to something that the Prime Minister was ready to quote: John Mill's essay ““On Liberty””. When liberty is restrained, it is to protect the liberty of others, not to enforce our particular moral views or to encourage good things. I want to turn to some specific items in the Gracious Speech. It says:"““Proposals will be brought forward to renew the constitutional settlement and strengthen the relationship between the Government, Parliament and the people.””" That sounds very good and very grand. The Justice Committee is to take evidence on devolution 10 years on, including the English question and the issue of the regions, given that we now have a situation where much power is exercised at regional level without any democratic accountability. These are not questions that admit of easy solutions; indeed, with every solution come new questions and problems. We have recently heard from Conservative Members arguments about what was called in the 19th century the ““in-out”” principle—English votes on English laws. Some people outside this House argue strongly for an English parliament. My party has traditionally argued for regional assemblies. Everyone is trying to address a genuine problem, which must be done in the context of a United Kingdom in which England is much larger than the other units—so large that when looked at from my end of the country London is further away than it is from much of Scotland. Purely London-based solutions do not necessarily answer this. The Justice Committee is holding a major inquiry on devolution 10 years on—not to review how it has worked in Scotland, because we see that as the province of the Scottish Affairs Committee or, in the case of Wales, the Welsh Affairs Committee—but to see how it has affected the United Kingdom as a whole. One consequence of that is that we will need to look pretty closely at the situation in England. In the context of the Government's saying that they want to strengthen the relationship between the Government, Parliament and the people, I am minded to raise the small matter of the referendum on local government reorganisation. In Northumberland, we had a referendum in 2004 to address the question of, first, whether there should be regional assemblies and, secondly, whether there should be one or two unitary authorities to govern the whole county of Northumberland, at present served by a county council and six district councils. People voted by a substantial majority not to have a regional assembly, so we are not having one. People voted by a substantial majority to have two unitary authorities, not one, so we are going to have one. The Government have decided that because certain stakeholders they chose to consult—namely, the chief constable and the north-east chambers of commerce—would like one authority, that outweighs the vote of the people who voted in the referendum. Those stakeholders were chosen by the Government and, almost without exception, cover areas much larger than the one or two authorities that are under discussion—it is much more convenient for them to deal with fewer authorities, not more, and they tend to look at it that way—but their votes carry more weight than those of the people who voted in the referendum. The Government still have quite a bit to learn about how to apply the principle of strengthening the relationship between Government, Parliament and the people. Another issue that will be considered in the course of this Parliament is that of judicial appointments. The Government recently, quite rightly, changed the judicial appointments system—a reform that I strongly supported and that the Committee examined, and is monitoring, in detail. Some of the objectives are not initially being met and problems have arisen. There have been significant delays in judicial appointments and difficulty in ensuring that we are getting diversity by the proper and accepted route of identifying candidates for judicial office who are fully suited to it but come from a wider background than has been the case hitherto. The new system is gradually bedding down, so it may not be a good idea to make fundamental changes again so soon, although I fully accept the argument behind the Government's changes, which is to minimise ministerial, and therefore potentially political, involvement in judicial appointments. The Government are considering this against the background that they are still in conflict with the judges following the creation of the Ministry of Justice. There is still an unresolved dispute between Ministers and judges about whether it was created on a basis that will protect judicial independence, particularly in a situation where the Department to which they relate has in its brief the prison system—that all-consuming, voracious eater-up of Government money. Judges rightly fear that the functioning of the judiciary could be impaired, financially and more generally, by being co-located with the prison system. The Government did not have much alternative to setting it up on the basis that they did, but they were wrong not to have sought to resolve the dispute beforehand. For the Lord Chief Justice to read in his Sunday papers that there was going to be a Ministry of Justice was clearly no way to go about it. In their paper on the subject, the Government talked about the judiciary in Parliament and the question of confirmation hearings. My Committee has been firm in its opposition to the idea that we should hold confirmation hearings for the appointment of judges. We have all looked at the American experience, which might be sufficient to put us off, but there are more compelling theoretical reasons not to do it. In this country, we choose judges not according to the views that they hold but according to their ability to set aside those views and make objective judgments. It is therefore irrelevant if a judge is of a rather conservative disposition or a rather liberal one—we want to know whether he can make judgments according to the law that are not unduly influenced by the dispositions that he might have.