Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood: My Lords, few situations are so bad that they cannot get worse, and certainly the current world migration crisis will inevitably get worse. Whether the UNHCR figure for those currently needing resettlement is 100 million or just tens of millions, future floods, fires, famines and human conflicts will inevitably drive it up. Obviously, it is insoluble by any single country, so—and this is...
Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood: Recognising the need for public protection, my question relates to the IPP prisoners who are now detained for 10, 12 or 14 years beyond their tariff terms—that is, beyond the punishment they deserve for their offending—because they cannot prove to the Parole Board that they can be released without any risk of reoffending. It is a proof which the noble Lord, Lord Clarke of Nottingham, when...
Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood: My Lords, I acknowledge that I am no expert in the main areas of law central to this Bill—company law and banking law, for example. I am speaking to indicate my wholehearted support for all the measures designed to strengthen powers to combat corruption and rid this country of the dirty money and—as the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, just said—the dirty people who have been allowed for...
Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood: My Lords, I support the noble Baroness on her amendments and am opposed to Amendment 8 from the Government and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, which seeks to exclude and narrow down very dramatically the scope which, I submit, should be present in this offence for a defence of reasonable excuse. Why should not a demonstration against measures concerning, for example, climate change as...
Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood: Before my noble friend sits down, would he agree that there is no particular reason why Amendment 1—although plainly it would pre-empt Amendment 5—should pre-empt Amendments 14 and 24?
Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood: My Lords, I support Amendment 1, and no less strongly I oppose Amendment 5 proposed by the Government, my noble and learned friend Lord Hope and others. I never feel comfortable at the opposite end of the spectrum from my noble and learned friend Lord Hope, but I trust that he feels at least as uncomfortable on the other end of the spectrum from me. Before commenting briefly on the actual...
Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood: My Lords, at this late hour, I will say just a very few words. I start, rather tiresomely, with a pedantic legal point. The explanatory statements for the first three numbered amendments in this group suggest that they relate to the “burden of proof”, but they do no such thing. As I say, somewhat pedantically, I point out that the burden is unquestionably accepted to be on those who wish...
Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood: My Lords, I am sorry to say that we have two atheists in a row—a bit like No. 73 buses. I greatly like the noble Lord, Lord Cashman—I would call him a friend—but I do not like following him in debate. The fact is that he was trained to hold an audience and I have not been. I start with this story. On my maiden visit to Albania, some 20 years ago, I was driving into Tirana from the...
Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood: My Lords, after a lifetime in the law, I was thrilled beyond all else to hear what my noble friend Lord Moore said about the merits of the courts as he lauded the courts, independent justice and so forth. However, I profoundly disagreed with what he said in this debate, because one other thing I have learned over a lifetime in the law—actually it seems a good deal longer than a...
Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood: My Lords, I echo the tributes already paid to my noble and right reverend friend Lord Harries. I decided to put my name down for this debate having seen two things on Sunday. The first was a piece in the Sunday Times, no doubt applauded by the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, which said that although the West has frozen $350 billion worth of Russian assets, none of it is available to start paying the,...
Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood: My Lords, I maintained a Trappist silence throughout all the earlier debates on this Bill. I may be prominent among those wishing I had maintained it when I sit down in a moment or two because I recognise that I speak from a position of having less knowledge of the political and economic background to this debate than perhaps anybody else here—certainly less than anyone who has spoken. What...
Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood: Does the Minister feel that the time has come for a royal commission? Every day in this House we have a new fundamental problem—police and crime commissioners, police reporting, police culture or the question of whether there are too many differing police forces. Is it not time for a fundamental look at the relationship between government, the police and any other related body, to try to...
Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood: Can the Minister assure me that, in supplying the heavy weaponry and such other support as we rightly give to Ukraine in resisting cyberattack and so forth, we place no inhibition on the Ukrainians in terms of their reciprocally trying to attack infrastructure behind Russian lines?
Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood: My Lords, I also support the Bill. A flutter on the Derby or even the habit of doing one’s weekly football pools are one thing, but the domination of one’s whole life by a gambling addiction is quite another. It is a cancer in our society. Moreover, as poverty tightens, as it is already starting to, I fear that this addiction will grow. By the same token that desperate refugees risk...
Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood: My Lords, 10 years ago, the discredited ISPP scheme was abolished—alas, prospectively only. In the previous seven years, 8,711 people had been sentenced to that regime and almost all remain so. Almost exactly one-third of that number are in prison today, half of that third because they have never yet been released and half because they have been recalled. The rest are subject to and under...
Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood: Not realising that this was a high tea, rather than a dinner break, I confess that much to my regret I was not here at the start of the debate. Why, if this is designed to stop these individual experts pre-empting the Parole Board’s decision, is it left to the Secretary of State to be allowed to do so with his single view?
Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood: Why is that any different from the same operation being done by those who have been contributing to the background?
Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood: My Lords, that was a masterly introduction to this debate, and I am honoured to follow it. As the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, says, this report is to be welcomed greatly. Your Lordships’ House has long recognised the shocking injustices suffered by all those sentenced under this scheme—injustices continuing and growing 10 years after its abolition. We have hitherto been given to...
Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood: My Lords, some 40 years ago—that is, some 20 years before the 1998 Act—I used to appear for the UK Government in Strasbourg. I regularly—almost invariably—lost their cases. My record there was: played 12, lost 10, drew 1, won 1. That counted as not a bad record in those days. I then spent some 30 years on the Bench, roughly half of it before the 1998 Act came into force in 2000 and...
Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood: By reference to the question of the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, does the Minister remember a time when, for example, prison staff read all prisoners’ correspondence to stop them petitioning? There were a number of practices with regard to prisoners, but it was only under orders of the Strasbourg court—orders which the Home Office was happy to lose; I was arguing them—that our prison regime...
