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Criminal Law

I beg to move,"That an humble Address be presented to Her Majesty, praying that the Penalties for Disorderly Behaviour (Amount of Penalty) (Amendment) Order 2009 (S.I., 2009, No. 83), dated 22 January 2009, a copy of which was laid before this House on 23 January, be annulled." The motion brings to light, and to the House's attention, the penalties for disorderly behaviour. Without it, the Government would have got away with simply rushing a statutory instrument out a few days before their policy U-turn on the reclassification of cannabis, which went live on 26 January. The order that we are considering fixes the amount of penalty for possession of cannabis and restates the existing penalties for other offences such as theft, shoplifting and criminal damage. To determine how we come to be debating it today, we need to head back to the heady days of new Labour in 2000, when on-the-spot fines for minor acts of disorder were the previous Prime Minister's big idea. He told the Global Ethics Foundation in Germany that thugs would be marched by police to cash points. Well, we all recall the response to that suggestion, which was soon revised.