Judiciary, Legislature and Executive

Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 6:20 pm on 21 May 2003.

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Photo of Lord Windlesham Lord Windlesham Conservative 6:20, 21 May 2003

My Lords, I start with a reflection. The remarkable tolerance of the British constitutional practice has been demonstrated by the Home Secretary, an elected Member of one House of Parliament, criticising the Lord Chief Justice on a public platform outside Parliament, and by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, as a Member of the other House of Parliament, replying from within it—and what an effective reply it has been.

The debate is timely for several reasons, not only for the Home Secretary's reported remarks in his speech to the Police Federation at Blackpool last week. Although his unwarranted criticism of a recently retired and well respected High Court judge was widely reported in the press, the fact that no mention of it was included in the Home Office press release suggests that Mr Blunkett was speaking off the cuff—something that departmental civil servants always dread on sensitive occasions of that sort. Yet his censure of the judiciary was important in that it demonstrated publicly his own true instincts, and his political values, more starkly than would have been the case in any more carefully edited text.

As widely reported in the press, Mr Blunkett said that judges should live in the same "real world"—that dread phrase—as the rest of us. In a regrettable display of what can only be regarded as class prejudice—there is no other word for it—he declared that a retired judge who had criticised his policy in a radio interview only recently appeared to have discovered that the people he tried lived in a different world from those he had met—mark these words—at school, at university and in his chambers. I know Sir Oliver Popplewell, as do others present in the Chamber this evening. He was my vice-chairman for a time when I chaired the Parole Board. It is an entirely unfair caricature.

If sentiments of this sort are to be the driving force in relationships between Ministers and the higher judiciary, then, indeed, the outlook is bleak. What the Home Secretary appears to want to do is to determine levels of punishment by ministerial decree. This is illustrated by his attitude towards the duration of the period to be spent in custody by offenders who have been sentenced to life imprisonment for murder or certain other serious crimes. His latest claim is that the tariffs—that is, the minimum period to be spent in custody by offenders who have been sentenced to life imprisonment for murder or certain other crimes—should be reviewed. This is very difficult to accept. What it boils down to is his belief that the guidelines set by the Lord Chief Justice are simply not long enough. But how to decide what is long enough? It is a personal judgment which may be influenced and I believe is strongly influenced in the instance of the Home Secretary by reactions as reported in the mass media.

In any high profile criminal trial which attracts the interest of the mass media there is always the likelihood of a strongly punitive public response. From time to time judges have to stand up to this criticism when deciding what is the correct sentence that they believe is appropriate to all the facts that have been heard by the court. We should be grateful to them for doing so.