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Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

It is unprecedented, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that I should take precedence over my hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Patrick Mercer), so I will keep my remarks extremely brief. We are debating new clause 6 because the Secretary of State for Justice, who has always opposed changing the law in this area, sought an eye-catching initiative at the last Labour party conference, when we were gearing up for a general election. He sat down with his advisers and said, ““What can we do to get ourselves on the front page of the newspapers?”” They said, ““Why not bring forward this policy, which you have always opposed?”” The new clause simply restates the law. That is made explicit in subsection (2), which has the gall to cite"““the common law defence of self-defence””," to remind people that there is such a thing, and then to restate the defences in existing legislation. Subsection (5) merely adds into what is already a matter of precedent factors that the courts can take into account. The key difference between new clause 6, which does not change the law at all—