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Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

My Lords, there we have it. It was exactly the same, except that the threat to this country was far greater then than it is today. There was the threat of invasion and revolution. Pitt’s Government were attacking in particular the corresponding societies, which had outposts in Manchester, Sheffield and elsewhere and were meeting to discuss such terrible things as universal suffrage. That was the situation in which that Government decided to bring in measures of this sort. Today, risk management is central to this Government’s position. I have gone on about it on a previous amendment and I need not repeat what I said. When it comes to legislation to avoid risk, we are in a serious situation. There is risk, but there always is risk of one sort or another in any society. What is it that today demands us, for example, to lock people up for 42 days without trial or to introduce these violent offender orders, which do not go through the ordinary criminal processes? What is so crucial about this point in British history that we throw away all the safeguards that were gradually built into our system, which is exactly what this Government are doing? Historically, the same thing happened, but we got away from it and reintroduced concepts of freedom and liberty, of which we have been proud. The Americans have gone against that tradition by risk managing in Guantanamo Bay. There is also an awful lot of risk managing going on in Mr Mugabe’s regime. I hope by using these examples that the Government will see the direction in which they are going. It is an authoritarian approach to lock people up for fear of what they might do and not for what they actually have done. We on these Benches will continue to fight that for as long as we have breath.