Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Bill

Lord Bew Excerpts

Wednesday 5th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bew]

My Lords, I, too, welcome the noble Lord, Lord Henley, to his position. However, I speak in this Second Reading with a certain degree of unease. Speaking on these matters in your Lordships’ House on 8 March, I welcomed the projected liberalisations which it was already fairly clear the Government were likely to be proposing in the control orders regime. In particular, I welcomed what was and is being said about relocation, which is almost the heart of the matter with respect to the working of any new legislation. I also welcomed what was and is being said about access to the internet, mobile phones and so on. As the debate has unfolded over the past few months, I am now not quite so sure that I was right to do so.

As far as relocation is concerned, I think I was influenced, as many people from Northern Ireland are, by the jealousy of both sections of the community and irritation about any concept of internal exile, or anything that smacks even remotely of such a concept. For that reason, I still am sympathetic to what the Government are trying to do here, and I respect that it is a very remote connection indeed. While I accept that, even the remotest connotation is something that a modern liberal society should be somewhat afraid of.

However, as the debate has unfolded, I have been struck by some of the evidence that has entered the public domain, particularly that of Deputy Assistant Commissioner Osborne to the Public Bill Committee, as others were. He made the point there that the power of relocation was probably the most effective aspect of the existing control orders regime. I also understand the concern of many others that the police and security services may not be quite ready to cope fully with a deliberate decision to take an increased risk, because that is part of what we are doing here, and we should face up to that. It may be the right judgment, but it is a deliberate decision to take an increased risk.

Partly in response to these concerns, as the debate has unfolded over the past few months, I have been comforted by the Government’s decision to make provision for what the Minister called “additional restrictive measures”—emergency provisions and draft legislation—and their willingness to have pre-legislative scrutiny of them. I fully accept that in some ways, logistically, this is a nightmare—I understand the mockery that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, indulged in regarding this point—but it at least shows me that the Government have a serious concern for public security, which I find reassuring. Although it is hard to imagine the circumstances now being described in which this new legislative activity might take place, I suspect that Parliament can find a way through. I am willing to trust Parliament’s capacities regarding what is quite a difficult situation to imagine. I suspect that in all likely circumstances Parliament would find a way through, if we came unhappily—and it would be very unhappily and unluckily—to the moment when we had to look at a further ramping up of restrictive measures.

I have a concluding but, I hope, reasonable point about the general tone of public debate about these matters in our country and a rhetoric that assumes that we have a problem with the secret state and that there is a natural unchecked tendency towards authoritarianism, with a particular focus on the fact that Ministers receive advice to which the rest of us are not privy, which creates a major problem or difficulty of trust. It is true that Ministers will receive advice to which the rest of us are not privy, but it seems fundamentally to misrecognise the nature of modern Britain to presume anything other than a commitment to democratic liberal behaviour on the part of Ministers of any party and on the part of those who advise them. I know that this goes against a thousand television scripts and a hundred Guardian articles, but the presumption of guilt is not yet proven.

As an illustration of that, I also make the point that when we discuss these cases—while undoubtedly mistakes are made, because human beings always make mistakes, and of course the control order regime has applied only to small numbers of people—we tend to do so not only without reference to secret advice that we could not have heard or reasonably expect to hear but also while ignoring what is in open-source information about many of these cases, such as High Court documentation. It is remarkable the degree to which, in terms of this civil liberties debate, there is no engagement with what is already in the public domain about many cases.

I shall take one dramatic example of that, a case from the past two years that was taken up by many lobbyists and written about sympathetically in the Guardian and the Independent. It is the case of Mahmoud Abu Rideh, whose control order was revoked in 2009, when he left the country for Syria. There was much discussion in the papers about the mental anguish suffered by this man when he was the subject of a control order and, quite rightly, a human concern about these matters. It is none the less not without significance that in December 2009 an al-Qaeda website announced his death in Afghanistan, saying that sadly he had been martyred. A case of that sort is not without relevance to the whole debate about the level of the threat to public order that we face.

The Bill is a difficult balancing act, you could argue, between different parts of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. We simply have to accept that. I just hope that the Government have successfully achieved a balancing act between our traditional civil liberties and the needs of public safety.