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Mr. Churchill: My right hon. and learned Friend shakes his head. I hope that, before our debate concludes tonight, he will explain how representatives of the Kurdish terrorist movement against our NATO ally, Turkey, have been admitted to the United Kingdom and are allowed to remain in this country despite their known involvement with acts of terrorism against Turkey. How is it that the radical--
Mr. Howard: I assure my hon. Friend that, where we have evidence of terrorist complicity, we exclude people before they enter the country on the ground that their pres ence is not conducive to the public good. Where we have information, on which we can act in relation to people in this country, about any complicity in terrorist action, we can take action to remove them from this country. The diffi culty with the group of people to whom my hon. Friend has referred and whom he has in mind is that there may be many who sympathise with the overseas activities of terrorists, but who do not themselves engage in terrorist action. There is a clear distinction to be drawn between the two groups. Where no information links those people to terrorist activity, we do not act, and I invite my hon. Friend to consider the possibility that it is right that we should not act.
Mr. Churchill: My right hon. and learned Friend is sufficiently well versed in these matters to know the distinction between those who directly commit acts of terrorism and those who are active sympathisers, fund raisers and godfathers. I suspect that it is, above all, the latter roles that are the problem in this country. I refer not only to those involved on the Kurdish side against our Turkish allies, but to those involved with the radical Palestinian group Hamas, which is violently opposed to the recent moves to normalise relations between Israel and the Palestinians and Israel and its Arab neighbours.
Only this Sunday, The Sunday Telegraph reported:
Furthermore, there is evidence that Algerian extremists who have been involved as godfathers in recent terrorist outrages in France are based in this country. That is all deeply disturbing. I must ask my right hon. and learned Friend the Home Secretary what MI5 and the Home Office have been up to in allowing those who engage or strongly support such activities to be based in this country.
Mr. Howard:
My hon. Friend makes some serious allegations. He says that there is evidence. If there is evidence, he should supply it to the authorities. I must tell my hon. Friend, for whom, as he knows, I have great
Mr. Churchill:
I am grateful to my right hon. and learned Friend for that assurance. As he is well aware, it is obviously difficult to come up with clear-cut evidence in this area. All I ask is that he reinforces the resources available to him closely to scrutinise--
Mr. George Galloway (Glasgow, Hillhead):
It takes some doing to outflank the current Home Secretary on the ground of illiberality, but the hon. Member for Davyhulme (Mr. Churchill) has done so. In so doing, he has raised the issue that I wish to pursue--the role of MI5.
I refer to the part of the Gracious Speech from which will flow a proposal to let loose MI5 on to the streets of this country as a kind of British FBI. That proposal has created a frisson, if not of fear, of definite nervousness throughout the land--from members of all parties in the other place earlier this week, through the nation's chief constables, through the upper reaches of Scotland Yard, through the civil liberties lobby, through the trade union movement and through many sections of the media, by no means confined to the liberal left.
There are two main reasons for that shiver along the national spine. The first is that the proposal has not been the subject of national debate. It has not been thought through properly and it is driven not by policing priorities, but by the need to find work for the newly idle hands in MI5 in the wake of the collapse of communism and in the wake of the Irish ceasefire.
The idea is driven, too, by the need to find something to do in the enormous white elephant, the spooks' palace at No. 11 Millbank, with its lavish furnishings, its squash courts, marble staircases and chandeliers, its £25,000 rock face in the trophy room and all the other amenities, none of which are enjoyed by humble police stations all over the country, including that in Davyhulme in which, as we have just been told, there are only 10 policemen available of an evening to police an area with a population of 100,000. Those facilities are not for our undermanned and under-resourced police stations.
The idle hands of MI5 are one of the reasons for the turn in Government policy, which has not been thought through. There has been no proper definition of the terms
"organised crime" and "serious crime", which we are told that the "MI5/British FBI" will fight. No definitions have been laid, either, of the areas in which MI5 will be unleashed, and no structure has been agreed for the "new FBI". No relationship has been charted out between it and, for example, the national criminal intelligence service or the regional crime squads.
No wonder the chief constables are so uneasy about the development. Indeed, in the newspaper this morning we can read the following in a letter from the respected former chief constable of Devon and Cornwall, Mr. John Alderson:
Mr. Howard:
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Galloway:
Yes, but I only have a short time, so I hope that the Home Secretary will be brief.
Mr. Howard:
Does the hon. Gentleman know the difference between a chief constable and a former chief constable?
Mr. Galloway:
Yes I do, and I also know that the Home Secretary is aware of the anxieties about the proposals not only among serving chief constables but in Scotland Yard itself.
Mr. Howard indicated dissent.
Mr. Galloway:
The Home Secretary can shake his head as vigorously as he likes, but he knows that in Scotland Yard and in the offices of chief constables all over the country, there is anxiety about the introduction of the political policemen, unaccountable and untransparent, who will be injected into the policing system of this country.
The second reason for the anxiety is the nature of MI5. It is quite an achievement to have changed the police in the 41 years of my lifetime from a force based on "Dixon of Dock Green" community policing, with public support and familiar faces down on the beat, with officers seeing where the crime was and being where the people were, to a system in which the buggers and burglars of Peter Wright's MI5 will take Dixon of Dock Green's place. Perhaps only the present Home Secretary could achieve that with the degree of arrogance that he is displaying this evening.
MI5 and dirty tricks have become synonymous in the public mind. MI5 is unaccountable and of dubious loyalty to the democratic process at certain times and in certain sections, with a dubious relationship to the law. In yesterday evening's mesmerising television performance, which struck at the heart of the British establishment, Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales made clear allegations. She said that the tape recording of her conversation with Mr. James Gilbey had definitely been deliberately recorded and released into the public domain with a view to discrediting her.
Who, anywhere, believes that Britain's security services were not involved in the commissioning and execution of that crime, either directly or by using what they call their "alongsiders", in an attempt to change public opinion about the Princess of Wales? Her Royal Highness also said that the telephone was tapped at the home of Mr. Oliver Hoare, her former friend. She said that that was done by the local police station, but that cannot be true, because local police stations do not tap telephones, do they, Mr. Deputy Speaker?
Does anyone out there believe that MI5 was not involved in the tapping of that telephone, or in commissioning the Royal Marine who on "Kilroy" this morning said that he was deployed to spy on the Princess of Wales's relationship with Mr. James Hewitt?
Does anyone believe any longer that MI5 was not involved in acts of subversion against the elected Labour Government of the late Harold Wilson? Certainly the subsequent head of MI5 conceded to Harold Wilson in 1975 that sections of MI5 connected with Peter Wright had indeed burgled the offices and homes of the elected Prime Minister of this country, and bugged his telephone conversations and those of his associates.
Is there anyone out there who still believes that MI5 staff, including its present head, Stella Rimington, were not involved up to their necks in the subversion of the great miners' strike of 1984-85--a legal industrial action taken by hundreds of thousands of workers to defend their jobs? The strike was subverted by provocations and by the placing of agents in the miners union, all of which has been outlined in the brilliant work, "The Enemy Within: MI5, Maxwell and the Scargill affair", by Seumas Milne, the labour editor of The Guardian. [Interruption.] I commend that work to Conservative Members, who should read it before they pour scorn on what I am saying.
Is there anyone out there who does not believe that MI5 and its present head, Stella Rimington, were involved in trying to break the miners' strike, or that MI5 was not involved with Mr. David Hart, who is now ensconced as an unpaid civil servant in the Ministry of Defence, whence he is subverting British defence and manufacturing interests? Does anyone believe that in those days that adviser to the Secretary of State for Defence was not involved, in his role as a conduit for both American and British intelligence, in the subversion of democratic legal trade union activity in this country?
I put it to the House that such people--unaccountable and of dubious democratic loyalties--who were at large in MI5 then and, I believe, still are, are not the sort of people who should be introduced into the policing of this country.
If there is organised crime, and there is, it should be dealt with by the police--
"Israeli officials say they have accumulated evidence which proves that orders for terrorist operations are being issued from London by military commanders of Hamas, the group responsible for the recent spate of suicide bombings in Israel and the Gaza Strip.
The Israelis also claim that Hamas leaders are using London as a base to publish Islamic propaganda and raise funds to support terrorist operations."
6.37 pm
"the Home Secretary, Michael Howard, informed us that our secret political police (MI5) would also now be diverted to police duties."
The writer says that to put such a building block of the police state into position
"in one week must be a record, outside war."
That is a serious charge.
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