Fraud (Trials without a Jury) Bill

I apologise to the Solicitor-General for not reading out the full paragraph. It was not that I wished to avoid that section; I simply did not wish to be too long-winded, and it is quite a lengthy paragraph. I entirely accept that that is what the Government said. Indeed, I had understood that to be the position from previous discussions with the hon. and learned Gentleman. In 2003, the matter was hard fought out between this House and the other place, and various assurances were given at the time. It is commendable that the Government should honour them. Leaving aside the will and intention of the Solicitor-General for a moment, I would be interested to hear from him how it could be justified to give a prosecutor a right to make such an application, but not to give it to a defendant. That is the issue that new clauses 9 and 13 try to address. This is an important point and, as I have freely said to the Solicitor-General, it is one about which I feel quite uneasy. On the one hand, I wish to support the principle of jury trial. On the other hand, however, there is a logic—a slightly remorseless logic—that says that once we have given a prosecutor this right, it is unfair to a defendant not to give him the opportunity to make a similar application, should he wish to do so. That is the nub of this debate. It is true that the Government and we, as parliamentarians, can ignore that logic. The Minister might succeed in finding a way around it without difficulty. I shall wait to hear what he has to say. He might be able to stand in the way of that logic at the moment, but it will be brought back up at some point, and the same argument will be made. It is precisely for those reasons that I would have preferred not to see this legislation being presented to the House at all.