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Lord Foulkes of Cumnock: My Lords, I start with a confession. I have had a secret admiration for the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Crosby, since she was Labour Secretary of State for Education. At that time, two young student leaders, the noble Lord, Lord McNally, and myself, confronted her on overseas students fees. I still have that admiration for her, although I confess that I have come to a different conclusion in relation to this debate.
We all recall the horror, the tragic loss of life, the maiming and the grief of the London bombings on 7 July. Or do we really? Sometimes it is far too easy for the rest of us to move on. Our lives move on and so do we, for the bombs did not hit the barristers' chambers of the Inns of Court, the dining rooms of Islington or Hampstead, or, indeed, the Palace of Westminster, but ordinary working people going about their everyday business on buses and underground trains. The lives of Muslims as well as Christians and non-believers were shattered or destroyed on 7 July. As the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, rightly said, some people—lobbyists and lawyers—go on and on about human rights as if they did not apply equally, if not more, to the victims and the accused. They argue that we are no better than the terrorists if we infringe the human rights of terrorist suspects. Terrorists are laughing at us as they exploit such freedoms for their campaigns of terrorism, for Britain and London in particular have for too long been the main bases of terror organisations, and we have been subjected to criticism by other countries for allowing that to be the case.
I can understand the woolly-minded liberals objecting to provisions in the Bill. I cannot remember them supporting any provisions to deal with terrorists that have been brought forward by the Labour Government in the past eight years. But I do not understand Labour Members opposing the Bill, and I do not understand the Conservatives doing so, given their history and traditions.
Lord Goodhart: My Lords, does the noble Lord not understand that, for example, we were advocating an
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offence of preparation for terrorism, such as that included in Clause 5 of the Bill, long before it was government policy to do so?
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock: My Lords, I accept that and I look forward to the noble Lord's contribution at the end of the debate. No doubt he will correct me and other noble Lords if we make any other apparent errors.
I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Ramsay of Cartvale, and others that we need to give the police and security services the necessary powers. I also accept what others have said about the safeguards. As my noble friend Lady Henig said, whether the detention period is 14, 28, 60 or 90 days is to some extent arbitrary. As my noble friend Lady Ramsay of Cartvale said in her compelling speech, more time is needed with the high-tech, sophisticated terrorists and the huge volume of tapes, paper, intercepts or transcripts that need to be dealt with. That has not been answered by anyone on the other side of the argument.
Whatever the length of detention, the key safeguard, which has been mentioned today but not sufficiently in the past, is that there will be a judicial review every seven days—in Scotland by a judge of the Court of Session. I disagree with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick. I think this matter must be considered at a higher level. The accused can be held for another period of seven days only if it is approved by that judge. As the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, has said—perhaps he might have said it a little earlier—only two or three people would be held for up to 90 days. The notion that large numbers of people are going to be rounded up and held incommunicado for 90 days, as some have implied, is nonsense. It is a scare story put about by some of the opponents of the Bill.
Some people, as my noble friend Lady Henig said, are playing politics with this issue—a dangerous game. They want to inflict a defeat on the Government, or the Prime Minister, for other reasons. The noble Lord, Lord McNally, seemed obsessed by the Prime Minister in his speech. Again and again he mentioned the Prime Minister as if he were the only person advocating 90 days. If the noble Lord, Lord McNally, were still a member of the Labour Party and had been at the parliamentary Labour Party meeting that I attended, he would have heard that the call came from Member after Member, representing constituency after constituency, throughout the whole of the United Kingdom. The Prime Minister was responding to that. I regret to say that the Tories, with the Liberal Democrats and the Labour rebels, opportunistically opposed him deliberately to seek a pyrrhic victory in the House of Commons. I hope that Conservatives here today will think differently.
I would like to restore the 90-day provision. If that amendment were put down, I would certainly support it. I welcome what my noble friend Lady Henig said about this House being given an opportunity to
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consider the option of 60 days as well. Then we could have a proper discussion about what the period should be.
I found the most regrettable part of the speech of the noble Lord, Lord McNally, his description of the lobbying by the police as "improper". It was grossly unfortunate that he said that. They are not the only ones who lobby the Houses of Parliament. I did not find anything improper in it. I tell the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Crosby, that in my 26 years as a Member of Parliament I have been phoned by members of the constabulary in Ayrshire, the Chief Constable and inspectors about particular issues again and again, and rightly so. As my noble friend Lady Henig said, if teachers and lawyers can do it, then the police should certainly be able to do so as well.
I fervently hope—and no doubt the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwark will pray—that we are spared any atrocities which might have been avoided if the police and the security services had been given the time that some of us want to give them.
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Baroness Park of Monmouth: My Lords, I wholeheartedly support the proposed maximum of 90 days' detention, given that, as has been said, it is to be reviewed weekly by judicial process. Terrorists have become infinitely more sophisticated, and it is simply not practical to expect the police and the relevant specialists to act in so short a time as at present proposed. Much of the evidence, including computers, can be gathered only after the arrest and must be analysed and decrypted. To quote the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, from whom we shall hear later, translations of some of the manuscript material will be,
He too supports the 90 day proposal for many other equally cogent reasons. We are not talking about more time for the police to interview suspects—some of whom may simply exercise their right to silence anyway—but to analyse and identify evidence to which the police will have access only after the arrest.
It is, incidentally, unrealistic to argue that the police should build up their case through surveillance. As I remember, it takes 30 people—three shifts of ten—to provide complete coverage of a targeted suspect. If and when those suspects come from a particular community, the surveillance team has to be able to blend into the neighbourhood and into their daily lives. We should think of that as a need that is not easy to satisfy. The police and security services are therefore likely to be dependent on evidential material which becomes available only after arrest. To quote the noble Lord, Lord Carlile—I am sorry that I am doing it once more—
"significant conspiracies to commit terrorist acts have gone unprosecuted as a result of the time limitations placed on the control authorities following arrest",
and they have sometimes been forced to pre-empt a known threat by such an arrest. They need the time to analyse the often voluminous evidence rather than to pursue prolonged interrogation. I cannot see how that can put the detainees under unacceptable pressure. I quote the noble Lord, Lord Desai, speaking in this House on 10 March:
"How many deaths would noble Lords balance against the incarceration of one or two innocent people before they changed their minds?"
"I respect those who say 'I would lose x amount of lives for the protection of one person's liberty'".—[Official Report, 10/3/05; col. 1005.]
But he doubted whether such certainty could be right.
My second point concerns the issue of glorification, and the double standards which the Government continue to apply in the context of terrorism in Northern Ireland. This Terrorism Bill is, however, to cover the whole United Kingdom. The Government are therefore, I hope, committed to applying this legislation to the IRA, which daily glorifies its past actions and is still recruiting the young. The Prime Minister has rightly said that glorifying terrorism abroad would equally be an offence. I hope that Clause 17 will catch those IRA supporters who have fled to the US and have been aiding, abetting, funding and procuring arms for the IRA, as well as catching the new breed of Islamic terrorists.
Under the legislation for the disappeared, which produced a pitiful three bodies, Her Majesty's Government allowed the IRA to describe their murders as executions. HMG now intend, after praising the IRA for renouncing its arms—after seven years of false promises—to allow known murderers who fled the country before 1998 to escape justice and to return. After that, there is to be a form of judicial process, but these people will not even be required to attend the court, and they will then be free on licence. The Government say that it is not an amnesty but that is what it looks like to the victims of their murderous hate. How is that to be made to square with the Bill? Is this Terrorism Bill for the whole of the UK or not?
I believe that, as well as prosecuting those who glorify murder, we should be ending the culture of respect for them which now obtains. It is not right that we should be failing to understand the aversion which all decent people, including their own communities, feel for those who murder and claim that it is in the name of a religion or a political cause. The Independent Monitoring Commission in Northern Ireland has always argued that it is wrong to give any respect to those who reject the rule of law, as Sinn Fein/IRA repeatedly does and as the new breed of terrorists in this country do. We should apply the maxim generally.
Whichever community our new terrorists come from, those communities will be glad to be able to demonstrate that they, too, disown the violence done, in some cases, in the name of their religion or sect. It is not acceptable that, as in the case of Sinn Fein/IRA, its leaders should be allowed repeatedly to refuse to recognise British justice or to allow men accused of
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crimes in their community to come to court, as in the McCartney case in Northern Ireland, with impunity. It is equally reprehensible for an apparently respectable senior member of the Muslim community to say that in any conflict between duty as a British citizen to respect the law and duty to a putative Islamic world state, loyalty to the latter should come first.
As the Prime Minister has also said, one basic liberty is the right to life of our citizens and freedom from terrorism. I am sure that those whom the IRA paramilitaries have exiled—and whose right to return to their community Martin McGuinness does not recognise—would agree. I hope that Clause 1 will bring in much needed justice, including, since it covers the past, retrospective justice for Omagh, for the McCartney family and for the families and of the disappeared.
The Prime Minister said of this latest terrorist activity in July that it is,
We saw, he says, that these people were prepared to kill more than 50 innocent people—it could have been 500—and to rejoice in that. Where was he when the IRA bombed Brighton, Birmingham, Guildford and Canary Wharf? It is, however, reassuring that this new breed of terrorists is to be treated with rigour, and that we should not allow mistaken respect for their point of view to cloud our judgment.
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