"The government's record over Home Affairs and justice is not a happy one and is at complete variance with the aspirations in the Queen's Speech.
It has presided over the virtual doubling of violent crime, whilst its incessant red-tape and regulation has tied the hands of the police.
Her government's open door policy to immigration has led to a five-fold increase in immigration, straining public services, exacerbating community tensions and allowing drugs, guns and criminal gangs to flow with all too much ease into this country.
When it comes to defending our security, this government has consistently opted for rhetoric over action, headlines over effectiveness.
We have had - and continue to face - proposals to extend detention without charge to 42 days, roundly rubbished as unjustified, unnecessary and unworkable by security experts and Members across this House and the other place.
It persists as no more than a fig leaf for its climb down which was forced on it because it entirely lost the arguments over it.
The Home Secretary is introducing ID cards, at a cost of £19 billion pounds at the worst of economic times, but which is incapable of stopping terrorists, illegal immigration or benefit fraud.
The database state hoards an ever-increasing volume of data on the citizen, but the Prime Minister readily admits that he 'can't promise that every single item of information will always be safe' ... a gross understatement to say the least.
And there are real fears that Britain is turning into a surveillance society, with local councils stretching security powers under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act to monitor dustbins, dog-fouling and trail children home from school to check their catchment area.
This thirst for headlines, the inflation of ineffective bureaucracy and legislative hyperactivity have distracted this government and successive Home Secretaries from the real job at hand.
Getting more police on the street, with the single imperative of cutting crime.
A dedicated border police force, to reverse our current vulnerability, which has seen the street value of cocaine and heroin slashed by almost half, whilst estimates of the number of young women and girls trafficked into prostitution have quadrupled.
And practical measures like lifting the ban on using intercept evidence in court to prosecute terrorists, protect lives whilst also protecting our way of life.
To preserve our individual liberty ... and our shared democracy.
The consequence of these failures is plain today.
We have an exhausted government, bereft of new ideas, scrambling to find answers to problems of its own making and papering over the cracks of eleven years of failure.
The proposals presented by the Home Secretary in the Policing and Crime Bill to tackle law and order are particularly disappointing, given the serious problems Britain now faces.
I know that Home Officials do not always feel it necessary to keep her updated on what is going on, but will the Home Secretary accept the very clear the advice from Sir David Normington, the senior official at her department.
She claims that violence has dropped by 40% since 1997.
But it has been disclosed recently that Sir David advised Home Office Ministers that:
'Recorded crime statistics do indicate that levels of the most serious violence are higher than they were ten years ago.'
Is Sir David wrong? Because he and she can't both be right.
Then there was the Flanagan Report on police bureaucracy.
Sir Ronnie Flanagan's set out the Ministerial failures very clearly, detailing
'Perverse incentives',
A 'raft' of targets,
And officers 'straight jacketed by process'.
The Home Secretary hasn't listened to him either.
That's why police still, despite all her promises, spend more time filling forms than out on patrol.
The truth is that the Home Secretary, like those before her, has been so obsessed with making loud political noise that they have neglected to listen to sound advice on policy.
As a result, the glaring omission from the Policing and Crime Bill is serious and concerted action to deliver on all those bold pledges to release officers from the burden of forms, targets and red-tape.
It is left to the Conservatives to present a serious alternative for police reform.
Cutting the stop and account and stop and search forms.
Removing the bureaucratic hoops to allow police officers to charge in less serious cases and save a million police hours per year.
Slashing targets that as Sir David Normington notes have distracted officers from dealing with the most serious crime.
And consolidating the excess audit that led one police force to face 15 separate inspections in a year.
The only substantive proposal for police reform in this rag-bag of measures is the proposal for elected crime and policing representatives to sit on existing police authorities.
This half-baked idea is a pale imitation of the Conservative proposals for elected police commissioners, responsible for local policing and directly accountable to the communities they serve.
It also raises serious issues of politicisation as the elected crime and policing representatives look likely to represent quite small areas and be susceptible to single issue interest groups, the very thing which our proposals are intended to avoid.
The choice now is clear.
You can't be in favour both of increasing centralised government control and handing back accountability to local communities.
This government still thinks it can direct policing better than the police, and still thinks it knows local priorities better than local communities.
A Conservative government will release forces from the iron grip of Whitehall, and vest real control over law and order at the local level.
Then there are the ritual pledges to take action to seize the assets of the Mr Bigs in the criminal underworld.
First, the government set up the Assets Recovery Agency in 2003 vowing to put the fear of God into the criminal gangs living the high life off the proceeds of crime.
The Assets Recovery Agency cost £65 million to set up, and managed to recoup a mere third of those costs in criminal assets. The ARA failed.
So the government swept it into the Serious Organised Crime Agency, but its record is equally poor, missing each of the targets set by Ministers for forfeitures, confiscation and restraint orders by a country mile.
So now, yet again, the government is proposing to create new law to try and address basic failures in law enforcement.
Mr Speaker, we had heard that the government was so concerned about the consequences of binge-drinking resulting from their reckless policy of 24 hour licensing, that they would be announcing a tough crackdown on retailers, pubs and clubs.
Ministers are right to be concerned.
Last year there were a million victims of alcohol-related attacks.
Alcohol-related admissions at Accident and Emergency wards are up by a quarter.
And 24 hour drinking has resulted in a 25% increase in late night violence.
We have been calling on the government for months to reverse 24 hour drinking, replacing it with local authority control over licensing.
We called for a ban on loss-leader sales of alcohol.
And a rise in tax on high strength lagers, beers and ciders and alcopops, to enable us to lower tax on lower alcohol drinks associated with responsible drinking.
Mr Speaker, we will look closely at the outcome of government's review on happy hours and promotions, but on its own it is a wholly inadequate response to the serious social problems created by anti-social drinking.
So too, we will look constructively at the government's proposals to create a new criminal offence relating to prostitution and tighten controls around lap-dancing clubs.
I share the Home Secretary's wish to see decisive action taken against those profiting from the misery of forced prostitution as well as forced labour and protect the victims of human trafficking.
But if the Home Secretary is serious about taking real action against this barbaric trade, at a time when upper estimates of the number of woman trafficked into forced prostitution in this country have risen from 4,000 to 18,000 in just a few years, why has she cut the Metropolitan Police's human trafficking unit, the most effective in the country?
And why have convictions for trafficking for sexual exploitation halved in the last year from an already low and declining rate?
The current, much hyped, proposals will do nothing to provide the unequivocal signal we need to send, to those engaged in this human trafficking, that they will not go unpunished.
They are another fig-leaf for this government's appalling track record in tackling the scourge of this modern form of the slave trade.
Mr Speaker, the Home Secretary is also bringing forward proposals in this government's seventh, yes seventh, immigration Bill, the surest admission that they just keep getting it wrong.
Nevertheless, we will scrutinise carefully the additional new powers for the UK Border Agency, although they are no substitute for the dedicated Border Police Force that a Conservative government will establish.
Nor will we accept any powers that might require individuals to prove at random and without cause their identity just because they have been out of the country.
So too, further tinkering with the points system is no substitute for an overall, annual limit on economic migration as the immigration minister has now made clear himself on several occasions.
Will the Home Secretary join the consensus?
Mr Speaker, My friend the Member for Arundel, will address in further detail the proposals from the Justice Secretary to reform coroners' procedures, strengthen victim and witness protection and reform the law on homicide.
There is much we can engage constructively with the government on, although I would make two points.
First, any attempt to re-introduce the power of Ministers to remove coroners and juries from inquests will be firmly resisted.
Second, we are pleased to see that the government has dropped plans to reform the Sentencing Commission so that criminals punishments depend on the levels of prison capacity a proposal that would further weaken the justice system and undermine public confidence.
We cannot support attempts to further weaken criminal justice, just because this government has failed to provide enough prison places.
Mr Speaker, we had expected at one stage for the government to introduce proposals for a new Communications Data Bill, to provide wide new powers for the collection, retention and sharing across government of even more personal data.
It was reported last month that the Home Secretary's officials have advised that the original proposals were 'impractical, disproportionate, politically unattractive and possibly unlawful'.
Can the Home Secretary confirm first of all whether this advice reached her? And second, whether she agrees with it?
I assume she did because of her sensible decision to consult which we welcome.
The Home Secretary and her department will, I suspect, have the sympathy of many across this House in relation to Home Office concerns.
We will of course look very carefully at any proposals she presents, and test the justification, proportionality and safeguards rigorously and robustly.
The government, and the Home Office in particular, now have some of the most extensive and intrusive security powers available anywhere in the democratic world.
More CCTV and a larger DNA database than any other country.
A national identity card register and proposals in the Home Secretary's back pocket for another attempt to force through 42 days detention without charge.
The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act has been stretched well beyond its original focus of dealing with serious crime and terrorism.
And the onset of a surveillance society has been outpaced only by the rise of the database state, the latest sign of which are the current proposals for a communications data bill.
The Home Secretary is wrong to suggest that, if Members of this House do not agree with any particular security measure she proposes, then they care less about tackling the threat of terrorism.
But many of us wonder what way of life will be left for our children, and theirs, if we fail to question, and where necessary resist with all due vigour, incessant requests from this government for more and more repressive and intrusive powers of state.
It is not ultimately a question of a balancing security and liberty, because we cannot defend our freedom by sacrificing it.
Time and time again, this government has proved that it cannot be trusted with the powers and authority enacted by Parliament.
The controversy over 42 days ended in its defeat, first and foremost, because all the evidence contradicted the Home Secretary's claims that such a draconian step was really necessary.
Opposition to ID cards is based partly on concerns about the intrusion into privacy, but also on the well-founded fear that this government just cannot be trusted with our personal information.
No-one objects to using RIPA to trail terrorist suspects - but we don't want to pay ever-increasing council tax bills to pay for neighbourhood spies to watch us, as we go about our daily lives.
Mr Speaker, if ever there was a time to question the powers of counter-terrorism police, if ever there was a time to test Ministerial accountability over, and responsibility for, the unwieldy security apparatus built up over the last eleven years, and if ever there was case for resisting the government's periodic attacks on the right to trial by jury it must be now.
When a Member of this House, Parliament itself and the heart of our democracy has suffered at the hands of what appears more and more to have been a gross and unprecedented abuse of state power, an abuse of power that this Home Secretary says she knows nothing about, and refuses to take any responsibility for.
We need much better than that."