Clause 6 - Making of order
Proceeds of Crime Bill
4:15 pm
Mr David Wilshire (Spelthorne, Conservative)
I can assure the hon. Member for Glasgow, Mollusc that I have never lived in Essex, owned a Range Rover or met Ronnie Barker, but I suppose I must plead guilty to having a criminal lifestyle because I am a Conservative Member of Parliament. I do not want to excite him. I just let him know that. I am not a lawyer, either, as will become blindingly obvious to the Committee as the days turn into weeks and the weeks into months. Occasionally when lawyers gather together what is needed is a spot of lay common sense from the man or woman on the Clapham omnibus—I do not live in Clapham either, so the hon. Member for Glasgow, Mollusc does not need to ask me that. However, the views of the man on the Clapham omnibus occasionally add something to this sort of debate.
It was said earlier that it would be useful if Opposition Members could learn as things went along, just as some Labour Back Benchers were doing when a note came from the Whip to change their minds. Although I am a co-signatory to the amendment, I am prepared to begin to change my mind because, as a non-lawyer, I see a distinction between the principle that we are trying to establish and the use of the words that we are trying to use to do so.
I listened to the debate with an open mind, and I am convinced that the wording in the Bill is wrong. I am prepared for the Government to say that they accept that the wording in the Bill as drafted is not good, but that they do not like our amendment and will come back with something different, for the following reasons. The hon. Member for Glasgow, Pollok suggested that an alternative could be ``a bad man'', but that phrase encapsulates what bothers me about the Bill as drafted: it reminds me of the good Samaritan. If a person does not cross the road but goes by on the other side, he is presumably, by definition, a bad Samaritan, but he has not committed a criminal act by refusing to help his fellow man. For that reason, the phrase ``a bad man'' does not encapsulate the principle of the Bill.
Another example that is relevant to the concept of a criminal lifestyle is of someone I know who has adopted a homeless lifestyle. He has no need to be homeless, but he lives with the people in cardboard boxes in London, to try to get alongside them, although he is not homeless. Using a phrase that includes the word ``lifestyle'' is therefore to miss our point.
I have no difficulty with what the Government are saying; they are rightly trying to get at people who live off the proceeds of crime. My hon. Friend the Member for Henley nearly ruined my point by saying what I was going to say, but far better than I could have done. I believe—I will be corrected if I am wrong—that the Government mean someone who is living a lifestyle that is provided by the use of funds gained from criminal activity. The important distinction is between lifestyle and action; lifestyles can be mocked or taken seriously but they should not be subject to the criticism of the rest of us or to action in the courts.
I hope it will not sound as if I am digressing when I say that many years ago I spent a long time researching religious cults. I grappled with what was good and bad, right and wrong, and with what should be condemned or allowed. Having spent two or three years on the project, it occurred to me that to try to attack, criticise or codify someone's lifestyle would never work, because it would infringe their civil liberties and take away their right to believe and to do things which do not harm anyone else.