Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 21 March 1979.
Mr George Cunningham
, Islington South and Finsbury
12:00,
21 March 1979
If Lord Shackleton had done a less sloppy job, my hon. Friend would know the answer to that, because Shackleton would have made the point and would, indeed, have quoted—I know that it would have taken a few lines, but he could have done it—section 5 of the Criminal Law Act 1967, which reads:
Where a person has committed an arrestable offence, any other person who, knowing or believing that the offence or some other arrestable offence has been committed, and that he has information which might be of material assistance in securing the prosecution or conviction of an offender for it, accepts or agrees to accept
a bribe, and so on. In other words, the words of section 11 of the present Act are modelled as far as possible upon the words of that section in our existing non-emergency law, and that law was drafted by the Criminal Law Revision Committee.
I do not say that anything drafted by the Criminal Law Revision Committee must be right. I say only that it was not dreamed up in the middle of the night after the Birmingham bombings but it was drawn up in the middle of the day by the Criminal Law Revision Committee and was passed to our permanent statute book, with all those considerations having been gone through.
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