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Mr. Robert Marshall-Andrews (Medway) (Lab): It is a great, profound and rare joy to be able to congratulate the Government on what is for the most part a measured, effective and necessary piece of legislation. However, no pleasure is unalloyed, so having got over that, it is possible to be curmudgeonly about one or two general and specific parts of the Bill—so I will indeed curmudgeon about them.
It is not surprising that the Bill has almost unanimous general support, as one can see by looking round the Chamber. I have been instructed by the Whip to speak as slowly as possible—an instruction that I shall uncharacteristically ignore.
The first matter of general importance that I want to raise is the way in which the Bill began its introduction to the House. As a criminal lawyer—by that, of course, I mean a lawyer who has dealt with crime for most of my professional life—I have a small plea: let us stop talking up professional crime and professional criminals. Let us, as a matter of practice, stop telling each other, and the people, how good those criminals are, and how effective, big and dangerous they are. It is an unhappy fact that many law enforcement agencies, and, indeed, many politicians, have a vested interest in so doing. The more powerful one's enemy, the greater the plaudits when one succeeds and the greater the mitigation when one fails.
It has been my happy, or unhappy, task many times in my life to prosecute or defend those who are engaged in major professional national and international crime, and it is a plain fact that they, like all criminals, are cut and bleed just like everybody else; they all whinge and whine in precisely the same way when they are caught, and beside the power of the state they are pygmies, in precisely the same way as all criminals are pygmies. Adulating serious crime—glorifying it—is a matter for the media, not for us, and we serve no purpose by doing so. We must treat it as a criminal enterprise; it is something to be dealt with, and we can indeed deal with it. The Bill, as it is right immediately to say, makes a considerable contribution to doing that.
I shall expend a little time on the other two controversial elements of the Bill. The first is the incitement to religious hatred. I have to say that the law will have difficulty with that. The job of the law is to interpret legislation, and the better the legislation, the easier it is to interpret. But juries and magistrates will have a problem with that element. The Attorney-General will have a problem in deciding what is and what is not to be prosecuted.
At root, the matter is philosophical; there is a profound difference between hatred based on race, sex or age—all of which are thrust upon us; we have no choice—and on religion, which is not thrust upon us. Religion is a matter of choice; it is a matter of what we do. It is intolerable, and should be criminal, to incite hatred of a man or woman because of what they are, but I have grave doubts whether it should be criminal, as opposed to merely socially unacceptable, to incite hatred of someone because of what they do. Religion is what we do, not what we are. We shall have grave difficulties with those proposals.
I join with ease in the plaudits to the Home Secretary for his motives, but motives must be thought about carefully. They pave not only the route to hell but the route to extreme difficulties in enforcing the law in society.
The truth, which goes to the core of the argument, is that there is no interpretation. The fact is that the Attorney-General will interpret the Act in a way that is not written in statute, and bring prosecutions only when incitement is not only to hatred but also likely to cause serious violence. That is not in the Bill, but that is how it will be interpreted and it is not a happy state of affairs.
I turn to the third matter that I want briefly to deal with: the missed opportunity in the Bill in relation to plea-bargaining. What is contained in the Bill is not plea-bargaining; it enshrines what is already practice in the courts to provide either immunity or a diminution in sentence for those who turn Queen's evidence. That is not plea-bargaining, which has a specific, largely American, cognisance and is an absolute direct bargain between plea and sentence. That is anathema to our law, because in the past it has been felt that defendants have said that they were, at least, misled, sometimes grievously, by their lawyers, or by their lawyers in conjunction with prosecution lawyers or even with the judge, and that they entered pleas on a basis that they did not understand. The purpose of our law, which is anathema to plea-bargaining, is to protect the defendant.
The same is not the case in offences of serious fraud. I have spoken to the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint), about this matter, and hoped that we could take this opportunity to put into statute a provision to allow for plea-bargaining in offences of serious fraud. This may seem a tributary, but it is not, because we spend a great deal of courts' and jurors' time on it—far more than on anything else. Our arguments about inconvenience to jurors would largely be negated if we were to allow a simple amendment.
Serious fraudsters do not require protection from their own lawyers; the reverse is more often the case. In those circumstances, there is no reason why for such offences, carefully regulated and tabulated direct plea-bargaining—a sentence known in advance in respect of a plea—could not properly be introduced in the Bill. Will the Minister give that matter her consideration? If necessary, rather than being sentenced to the honour of serving on the Committee, I should be delighted to discuss that perfectly reasonable, small but effective provision, which could be added to an otherwise admirable Bill.
