Author Archives: Chris Huhne MP

Back in February, the Home Office’s decision to ban Dutch MP Geert Wilders provoked controversy – not least here on Lib Dem Voice, after the party’s shadow home secretary Chris Huhne backed the government’s decision. This week an immigration tribunal overturned the government ban, so we invited Chris to set out his views …

The Home Secretary’s decision to block Geert Wilders from entering the country was controversial for all sorts of reasons. For libertarians, it was appalling to deprive anyone of freedom of speech. For many Moslems, it was astonishing that anyone could fail to see the need …

The new conventional wisdom at Westminster is that the Conservatives are heading for an overall majority at the next election, and that the Liberal Democrats are therefore bound to take a pounding. On this view, the Lib Dems’ fortunes are inextricably linked with Labour and we are supposed to lose seats as we did when the Conservatives won in 1951, 1970 and 1979.

I don’t believe a word of it. After each Liberal Democrat advance – in 1997, 2001 and now 2005 – the commentariat has written our obituary. But we went on to increase our seats at the …

Jack Straw is now in real trouble, as it is very difficult to reconcile what he told the House of Commons on 4th February in a statement on the bugging of Saddiq Khan MP at Woodhill prison with the statement of his department in reaction to the Daily Telegraph’s breathtaking scoop on Saturday. The bugging issue is going to be an enormous political story this coming week.

The Telegraph’s Saturday story said:

The full scale of a nationwide policy to bug British jails can be disclosed today after a whistleblower revealed that hundreds of lawyers and prison visitors had been secretly recorded….Lawyers, including human rights solicitors Gareth Peirce and Mudassar Arani, were allegedly “routinely bugged” by police during visits to see clients at Woodhill prison.

Why is this so important? Simply because the right of a defendant to talk in private to his or her lawyer is basic to the fairness of our adversarial courts system. If the prosecution can find out what the defence’s strategy and tactics are, the trial itself will be prejudiced and unfair.

Indeed, there is now a serious risk that any convicted person who can prove that their conversations with legal advisers were overheard may be able to overturn their convictions, which would be an enormous embarrassment to the Government in cases like that of Ian Huntley, the Soham murderer.