'Let me say that what might be called a Home

Office issue might well compel the Liberal party to vote against the Government or forgo for ever its claim to speak for freedont:—Mr. Grimond at Scarborough, September 25, 1965

Open Letter to a New Home Secretary

From JO GRIMOND, MP

DEAR Rm.—Before you get down to curing what is wrong with the Home Office, you might consider what is wrong with the Govern- ment. For the Home Office decisions have illus- trated very clearly the faults of Labour in office. Labour in office has not bad the courage to follow through the humanity over such matters as immigration or homosexuality which it pro- fessed in opposition. It has not been radical. Again and again it strikes at the symptoms of some problem. rather than at the root causes. It does not give the impression that it knows the sort of Britain it wants and has the conviction to get it. It has provided us with no new assess- ment of the public values.

The law is concerned with maintaining :he fabric of a society within which individuals can have the maximum choice. At least, that is my view of it. Of course, at some point the law is based on a view of private morality. To say that individuals ought to have as much free choice as is consonant with the freedom of other individuals is to make a moral judgment. But the law is not concerned to enforce a par- ticular code of conduct on individuals if their actions do not intimidate, harm or publicly affront their fellow citizens.

All this is old and trite. And, of course, there is always an area of human conduct which is on the borderline between public and private behaviour. So, too, do some apparently publicly harmless acts affront people with particular re- ligious or other views. But it so happens that in this country at this time the taboos on per- sonal behaviour have weakened and there is no reason for you, as a new Home Secretary, to flinch from giving a public and official lead on reform of the law concerning such matters as homosexuality between consenting adults in private and on abortion. In due course the laws relating to divorce and suicide merit considera- tion.

You must root out the notion of revenge as far as possible from the criminal law and replace it with a wider view of prevention. The whole welfare state has concerned itself too much with what we should do after things have gone wrong and too little with stopping them going wrong. For instance, an increase in national assistance rates is no answer to the question of how over a million people come to be on national assistance.

For prevention of crime the First need is again the obvious one- more police, better equipped. The obvious fact that highly organised crime pays well is something which can undermine the confidence of a countrN in law and order. Not only does it lead to violence but to intimida- tion and corruption. You w ill find it much easier to be a humane and liberal Home Secretary if you show that you are determined to stop crime which is a genuine threat to order. To do this may require radical changes at Scotland Yard and the creation of a nation-wide gendarmerie.

This latter will be all the more necessary if the Government are determined to massacre the Territorial Army. For, if this is done, in many parts of the country there will be no disciplined force available for aid to the civil power or the guarding of valuable installations. You will, of course, have to fight for money. But you must fight. You should also free the police as far as possible from the activities which are in- finitely time-consuming and bring them into continual clashes with the public, e.g. the offences concerned with motor-cars.

In a different way there is a wider and wider job of crime detection to be done through the services of doctors, schoolmasters, psycholo- gists and sociologists. We can find out a good deal about why and when people become criminals. But, in spite of improvement, the law waits too often until they have committed crimes and then still enforces penalties which may con- firm their criminal tendencies.

So I come to the prisons. No doubt here, as over the police, you will be up against the need for economy. But did you read our old colleague Horobin's article about his prison experience? Perhaps you did not need to--perhaps it was exaggerated. But a copy on your bedside table could do no harm. People are prepared for a clean break with the tradition that a convicted man is to be treated as less than human. Can we justify keeping anyone thirty years in prison to the total destruction of their personality?

Now let us look at the machinery of the law. It is wholly out of date, unnecessarily expensive and complicated and riddled with restrictive practices. You have the great advantage of not being a lawyer but an economist. Ask yourself if any business could run efficiently with all the inherited trappings and mumbo-jumbo of the law?

I once defended a murderer and, apart from the ultimate degradation of the judicial killing, I shall not easily forget the ghastly charade of the trial, of which the accused understood very little and which was played as some esoteric rite between the lawyers concerned. The procedures of both the criminal and civil law could be greatly simplified. To take one example: why is buying a house still so expensive when simpler ways have been found of transferring 'chattels' such as a motor-car in which the ownership is inherently more difficult to trace?

As far as the general tendency of our law is concerned it still has a bias. It is stiffer on crimes against property than against the person. To me. the class of crime which needs the most urgent attention is offences against children. Cruelty to children is the real English vice. It may v,ell be that prison is not the answer but in so far as the severity of sentence is a measure of public disapproval, there is something wrong with a scale of public values which sentences thieves more heavily than those who beat their children half-dead. 'I had a black-out' seems far too easily proffered as an excuse for murder- ing a baby. Is this not a matter on which you should seek the advice available from doctors, nurses and welfare officers as quickly as possible?

As for your powers over immigrants and your powers of deportation: for goodness' sake now that the latest statistics show that more people are leaving the country than coming in, liberalise the policy on immigration. Remove the arbitrary powers which still exist over deportation. And remember that law and order in Britain are not going to be threatened by allowing some Communist to stay here. Do not be beguiled by the favourite argument of the narrow- minded: that if you make any exception to a rule, the dykes will be down and you will be overwhelmed in a flood which you cannot with- stand. The Home Secretary, above all else, should be the ultimate power which can decree that humanity over-rules legality.

Reform the law and our legal machinery. This is a big job. I haven't touched on some parts cf it—the law on obscenity, for instance. But you can change the emphasis right away.

Liberalise the immigration rules.

Take the Homosexual and Abortion Bills under your wing.

Look again at the thirty-year sentence.

Set up an urgent inquiry on cruelty to children. Strengthen and supplement the police forces.

Yours ever, JO.