Clause 30 - Providing false information
Identity Cards Bill
4:15 pm
Mr David Curry (Skipton and Ripon, Conservative)
We have listened to quite a lot of Latin phraseology today, in a little private discourse between the lawyers. Those of us who are not lawyers and are not familiar with that phraseology occasionally come across an Anglo-Saxon word that we think we understand, but then we see it in the context of the Bill and begin to wonder what on earth it can conceivably mean. I speak as a simple hack, not a lawyer, and I know that if I put the word into a piece, my editor would say, ''What do you mean by it?''
I had one rule when I was a Minister: I would never sign a letter that contained the word ''appropriate'', on the grounds that it always stood for something else. It meant ''right'', and ''not appropriate'' meant ''wrong'' or ''silly''. Yet I found that the word is used endlessly in Government to disguise what is actually meant.
I take the point made in the analogy of the telephone. I have to tell my hon. Friend the Member for Woking that I am not well versed in the operations of photocopiers of the sophistication of those in Portcullis House. There are occasions when one seeks to make them do a simple task, and one is overcome by a very powerful urge to express one's disapproval in a physical form. Whether that would be described as a ''reckless'' action I am not quite sure.
Surely, if ''reckless'' stays in the Bill, there has to be some test of what is meant by recklessness. All that the word is doing is standing as code for a much longer explanation of what is ''reasonable'', a word that is constantly used in the Bill. One would have to start by defining what ''reckless'' could conceivably mean before one could discover whether something was reckless or not; that must depend on particular circumstances. I realise that, in legislation, it is necessary at times to use particular words that are difficult to define, but about which one has an instinct as to what it is trying to do. That is why I think that ''not appropriate'' is such an indispensable phrase for Government.
I hope that the Minister will think about the matter again. I looked at the word and thought, ''This is curious; it looks a rather direct word.'' Then I thought, ''What does it mean?'' I could write a significant dissertation on that in Anglo-Saxon and still not get us very far. I am sure that the Minister would like to reflect on the matter.