Justice and Security Bill [HL]

Debate between Marquess of Lothian and Earl of Erroll

Tuesday 17th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[The Marquess of Lothian]

My Lords, I have very mixed feelings about this amendment. I said in my speech at Second Reading that national security should not be so widely interpreted as to give cover for embarrassment or incompetence. I am sure that is absolutely correct. Indeed, my noble friend Lord Hodgson made that point. However, I am very worried when we begin to interpret something such as national security in terms of specific operations or departments. In passing, I make the point that the Diplomatic Service may do many things overseas that affect national security. Many embassies that I have been to have protected rooms where such matters can be discussed. It would be naive to say that because they were done by the Diplomatic Service and not the intelligence service, those matters were not, in the terms of the Bill, ones of national security.

I do not have an answer. All I can say is that you know national security when you see it. The difficulty of looking at this in terms of legislation is that you cannot see it. To give one example, we debated earlier the activities of the Intelligence and Security Committee and the process of redactions. When a suggestion to redact is made by the Prime Minister, it has to be on the basis of national security. There have been cases in which the committee has argued that national security was not affected. In the course of a practical argument you can come to an answer about what is national security and what is not. This does not help the Minister on the Front Bench. However, I feel it is somehow better to leave the definition more open and allow it to be interpreted in the context of the individual circumstances of each event than to curtail it within the definition of the activities of various departments. In the end, we might find that we are throwing the baby out with the bathwater if we proceed in that way.

[The Earl of Erroll]

My Lords, I shall make a couple of topical points in support of the noble Lord, Lord Deben. This is very complex. In the old days, in a less complex world, we knew how to finesse these things in a common-law society. Now we are moving towards statute law. The French know how to disobey the law sensibly in view of local circumstances. They know that you cannot slavishly obey every rule. We have not learnt that yet, so we should be very careful about how we set the rules in case they are slavishly obeyed. Somehow blurring the boundaries is much more sensible. I am not sure that having this whole thing of national security quite works. We have seen photographers being stopped for photographing perfectly innocent targets in the name of national security. I am very worried about the way that certain people will use these rules to stop normal activities. We regard ourselves as a free country but, if we are not careful, we might cease to be free. We have to worry about how other people, less sensible than us, may interpret rules in a very strict way in the future.