Counterterrorism Practices

Lord Judd Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

My Lords, I am glad to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hylton. Nobody has been more consistent, in his modest but effective way, in pursuing the issues before us in this short debate. In supporting him, I will make a few general observations.

First, we must not allow ourselves to be tempted into thinking that it is somehow weak to say that we are in a battle for hearts and minds. We are faced with an appalling threat which every father and grandfather in this country must take seriously: the threat to the innocent is real. We must therefore talk about what is muscular in policy. What is muscular in policy is not to react—not to settle for simply containing and managing the problem—but to seek to win minds. One observation that I would make about extremism and terrorism is that they operate best in the context of ambivalence.

There are large numbers of people, as we saw in our own history in Ireland, who would individually be appalled and horrified by some of the things that happened. Yet they would always have an element of doubt. However dreadful and however deserving of unqualified condemnation the acts, there was the idea that the perpetrators were perhaps on their side. They were perhaps fighting for rights and a concept of society which had not yet been achieved. There is a grey area of ambivalence. This means that people do not leap up from—or struggle out of—bed every morning and say, “What can I do today to expose the terrorists?”. There is an undermining element of doubt and ambiguity. That is why I will never take second place to anyone in saying, “Let’s be rid of the nonsense which we allow ourselves to hear from time to time about what is strong and what is weak in the response”.

The real issue is to win minds. If we are to do this there must be something to which people can relate. There must be hope, and a context of decency and fairness in society. There must be a convincing context of justice that people can see and relate to. In the aftermath of Syria we have been presented with a renewed campaign. I applaud those with responsibility in this area who remind us without qualification that the dangers of terrorism in our own society are accentuated because of what is happening in Syria. We have to be on our guard and we have to be effective.

However, that makes it all the more important that we establish in the United Kingdom in all we do a transparent commitment to the values that we say are basic to our society and which we wish at all costs to defend. That is why I am very glad indeed that the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, is replying to this debate. If I am allowed to say so, over a number of issues over the years I have come to like and admire him as a decent parliamentarian who cares about society, although across a political divide.

I now want to make some points about the interconnections, or connected government as we sometimes call it, and our effectiveness in winning hearts and minds. Forgive me if I have to oversimplify slightly. If a well qualified, intelligent, thinking and decent man or woman, who is struggling to find a future for their family in the real desperation of the world as it is, has a bad experience in the immigration process, are we not sowing the seeds of the ambivalence of which I speak? I am not one of those who object to the concept of the need for a convincing immigration policy; we cannot just have an open door. However, this is why it matters desperately that everything within the procedures happens with decency, civilised values and so on.

When something goes wrong, let us please remember that there is an element of real potential—I hesitate to use the word because it is very strong—treasonable activity. It plays into the hands of the extremists, who play on the doubts and the anxieties that exist. It strengthens the climate of ambivalence: is this society really about the things it talks about, or has it got double-speak and double values? That is why what we do in immigration policy is so important. It is why, when we are talking of the armed services, the police or the security services, we should uphold people within those organisations who are determined to operate by the highest standards.

When things go wrong, they are not just wrong and to be condemned as acts that are insupportable in terms of the rules and regulations and conventions, they are counterproductive in terms of giving ground to extremist recruiters. We have to be infinitely more rigorous in seeing the connections in so many elements of our society and public life between what is happening and the way it is happening, and our determination to preserve security in this country.

I think I have said this in the House before and I do not apologise for saying it again: I was greatly influenced at the age of 13, in 1948, when I was taken to Geneva by my father to an international conference that he was organising. At that conference, I had the privilege of meeting personally Eleanor Roosevelt. Eleanor Roosevelt was not just championing a nicer way of organising society in which human rights would be an element. She was a tough woman. Like many others in the aftermath of the Second World War, she had seen that human rights and all that attaches to them were a fundamental and indispensable element of security and stability. If you do not have human rights, there is always the danger of extremism gaining ground. The commitment to human rights throughout everything we do is therefore desperately important.

Sometimes I am anxious about phraseology that is too easily used about the trade-off between human rights and security. There is no trade-off between them. Human rights are central to security, and from that standpoint it is all about how we uphold them in everything we do.