Orders of the Day — Public Safety and Respect for the Law

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 25 July 1974.

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Photo of Mr George Cunningham Mr George Cunningham , Islington South and Finsbury 12:00, 25 July 1974

I wish to express disagreement with the hon. Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) in his view that if 50 per cent. of people charged in the criminal courts are acquitted it must mean either that something is wrong with the processes of trial or that they were wrongly charged. Unless we have a system in which the police take decisions whether a person is guilty, and that is regarded as the end of it, there are bound to be a number of cases in which there are adequate grounds for putting the matter to a court although the court may decide that the accused is innocent or that it is not satisfied sufficiently that he is guilty. The hon. Gentleman is surely falling into the same error as that of Sir Robert Mark in his notorious speech of over a year ago. I have great respect for Sir Robert's leadership of the Metropolitan Police, but he said something along the same lines as the hon. Member.

There is nothing wrong in people being acquitted in court. It would be a serious reflection on our legal system if the vast majority of people who appeared before courts were convicted. That could only mean that the courts were taking the view that if the police thought that an accused was guilty, and thought so sufficiently strongly to bring him to court, then he must certainly be guilty.

I shall now explain to the hon. Gentleman the background, at which he could not be expected to guess, to the question which I put when I intervened in his speech. I asked him whether he thought that a Minister of the Crown who undertook illegal acts should be obliged to make recompense in some way. Earlier in the debate the right hon. Member for Leeds, North-East (Sir K. Joseph) suggested that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary had encouraged illegality in a number of ways. To hear some Members of the Opposition talk, one would think that never had any Conservative Member—certainly no Conservative Minister—had anything to do with any illegal actions.

The hon. Member for Burton was not a Member of the House in the last Parliament, but he knows quite well that three years ago it was revealed that British forces in Northern Ireland, under the direction of and with the full knowledge of Ministers, were undertaking torture of IRA prisoners.

The facts on this were brought out—when many people, including myself, did not at first believe them—in a report by Sir Edmund Compton. Some hon. Members appeared to consider that the instances might have been regrettable but that there was nothing illegal. But there have been a number of cases in which the British Government have recognised that actions were illegal and have therefore had an obligation to pay compensation.

According to an Answer which I received today from my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, compensation has been paid so far in three cases to the people concerned. The compensation does not amount to much. It seems that one does not get much for torture. One is paid much more if one's property is damaged. The compensation so far totals only £25,000.

Lord Carrington and the hon. Member for Welwyn and Hatfield (Lord Balniel) knew that those illegal actions were taking place. They encouraged that illegality, and the fact that it was intended to deal with people who themselves were guilty of gross illegalities is no defence of it. I raise this point so as to plead that we do not engage in this debate in throwing charges from one side of the House to the other about encouraging illegality. I do not think that any significant proportion of the 635 Members of the House encourage illegality. We shall distract ourselves from what needs our attention if we indulge in throwing brickbats from one side to the other—