Offender Management Bill

Indeed. The Home Secretary gave the probation service a premeditated kicking in front of the very audience who, one would have thought, needed to be persuaded that the probation services—by that I mean with a small ““p”” and ““s””—should be respected and encouraged, but that is not his style. We know from the Home Secretary’s letter to members of the Public Bill Committee that he has attempted to appear emollient, but his real style is to be found in the way that he approached the Home Office in the first place, crashing in like a bull in a china shop, breaking the furniture and generally causing mayhem, and then complaining that nothing and nobody works. We know that his real style is to be found in the article that he wrote for The Daily Telegraph on 26 February in which he roundly abuses anybody he can reach with his pen, accuses my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition of hypocrisy and then says, ““But I do hope that you’ll be supporting me.”” It really will not do. If we have a control freak running the system, a man who is given to abuse and throwing his weight—such as it is—around to get his way, we cannot have much faith in the words ““as he thinks fit”” when it comes to consultation. I know that time is short and others wish to speak, so with those few words I want to persuade the House that although the Home Secretary is, from time to time and with one part of his personality, offering us fig leaves and palm olives, with the other part of his personality, which he reveals daily, he is abusive, he is a control freak and he wants, through the Bill, to have micro-management, on a top-down basis, of the provision of probation services. That is retrograde, and we urge the House to support the new clause and amendment No. 9.