---

Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

My Lords, these arguments are not new. My noble friend has gone back to Dickens’s time. I can go back even further, to 1794, when this country was at war with revolutionary France. There was great concern among the ruling classes of this country that revolution would break out in England, and that there might be a threat to the throne and to parliamentary government as it was then known. There was unrest in Ireland and a threat of Ireland being invaded, as indeed happened in 1798. What was the reaction of the Prime Minister, Mr Pitt, to that? First, he suspended habeas corpus. The Duke of Leeds said on that occasion, ““We have to suspend habeas corpus because, if we don’t, we won’t have habeas corpus to suspend in the future””. That is one of the more brilliant observations from this Chamber that I can think of. Pitt also passed an Act to suspend the rights of people to meet in numbers of more than 50. In another Act, criticism of the Government became a criminal offence. From our history, you can see how these things happen. Of course Pitt was opposed by Charles Fox and the Radicals. Indeed, the ancestor of the noble Earl, Lord Onslow, was a great Whig in his day.