Deferred Divisions

Angus Brendan MacNeil Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Pete Wishart]

I am grateful for the early Christmas cheer.

To return to the Bill, what new measures does it contain? I suppose that its unique selling point is the introduction of temporary exclusion orders. They are a relatively new feature, and I do not think that there has been much discussion of them. They are designed to ban British citizens who are suspected of travelling abroad to fight for terror groups from re-entering the UK, and they involve the cancellation of travel documents and the inclusion of such individuals on watch lists and no-fly lists. The Bill allows the cancellation of passports at the border for up to 30 days. The police and border forces will be able to seize the passports and tickets of British citizens if they suspect that those individuals intend to engage in terrorism-related activities at their destination.

That all moves us quite conveniently and neatly towards the idea of statelessness, which we have looked at in relation to other matters that we have debated in the House, and which seems to be the drift and the trend. I would be grateful if the Minister would tell me where we have got with the 30 days issue. I listened carefully to the Home Secretary’s speech, in which she said clearly that the Government are in control of allowing people back in. Well, we have heard about some of the difficulties with that. What happens if there is a breakdown of bilateral relationships with other nations that are not prepared to play along with the UK’s game? Surely, an effective state of statelessness will emerge.

The Bill includes the stronger enforcement of TPIMs, including an ability for the authorities to force suspects to move to another part of the country, which amounts to internal exile. There is no great difference between that and the main feature of Labour’s control orders. The Bill also contains curious stuff about colleges and universities, and the expectation that our higher education institutions will prevent individuals from being drawn into terrorism. The measures include banning extremist speakers from campus grounds. How that is to be achieved without massive impacts on academic freedom and freedom of speech in higher education institutions is beyond me. I am looking forward to guidance about how those freedoms will be maintained and guaranteed. Our universities and colleges have already started to raise concerns. I listened carefully to the right hon. and learned Member for North East Fife (Sir Menzies Campbell) who said that only yesterday there was concern about how the proposal would be represented in colleges and universities. We have to be careful about how we pursue such a measure.

Perhaps most controversially, the Bill contains measures to require internet service providers to retain data on internet protocol addresses to enable authorities to identify individual users. That brings us neatly to the ongoing concern about, and the trend towards, the Home Secretary’s much-coveted snoopers charter. We are all in the business of doing all that we can to keep the people of our nation safe and secure, but that does not always mean that we must necessarily agree with everything that the Home Secretary says from the Dispatch Box. Some of us might even have a different way of doing things and different suggestions about how to get the balance right between assuring our safety and security and making sure that there is no compromise on our civil liberties. That is why in Scotland, where we have specific responsibilities on that agenda, we take a different view about how it can be better progressed. In Scotland, we want to ensure that our police and our other public bodies have the tools they need not only to tackle and prevent terrorism but to maintain a community where civil liberties are respected and where measures that are introduced are proportionate and have full community support. We have our own separate and distinct legal system in Scotland, and we have a range of devolved responsibilities. We have responsibilities for delivering large parts of the agenda in the Bill, particularly on the Prevent side. Once again, we have seen an almost total lack of consultation between this Government and the Scottish Government, who have specific responsibilities for delivering large swathes of the Bill because of devolved competences.

[Mr MacNeil]

Does my hon. Friend think—this is emerging in his speech—that in the seven Bills he has mentioned, and in the responses of both the Labour and Conservative Governments over the years, the reaction has been, “Must do something, although we are not sure what”? That seems to be the driving policy. There is not much thought in their policy, but the policy is, “Must do something.” It is probably headlines driving the policy.

[Pete Wishart]

That “must do something” feeling has probably increased as we approach an election year. The Conservative Government have gone a bit more cautiously and trodden a little more gently and carefully into this area than the previous Labour Government. The Labour Government went all guns blazing straight into the Labour anti-civil libertarian state they so carefully constructed and made sure they managed so effectively. The Conservatives have played this game a little differently, but we are now into an election year. So what is a good move to get people overexcited about political issues? What is the approach to take? It is, “Get a terror Bill, to make sure you are seen to be hard on this. That will differentiate us, and challenge the Labour party and all our political opponents to say we are doing this wrong.” That is not a game we have a particular interest in playing.

So we have this idea and this conversation we are having between the Government and Scottish Ministers, but the Scottish Government did not even get sight of some of the measures in this Bill on First Reading. I know that the Minister has been in touch with our new Justice Secretary, so he will know the unhappiness there is in Scotland about some aspects of all this. The Scottish Government have said that because we have responsibility for the public bodies mentioned in so many bits of this Bill, we want proper consultation. We are not interested in this fast-tracking and getting it through as quickly as possible because it is an election year—we want to do this right. Where we have devolved responsibilities for delivering this agenda, we want to make sure that the public bodies accountable to our Parliament will be properly consulted, so that we can shape up and make sure we have a proper agenda. We have therefore asked the Minister to take Scotland out of the Prevent side of these measures. The schedules relating to Scottish public bodies have already been dropped in part of this. I suggest, and I hope the Minister may be open to this approach, that he seeks to ensure that we at least have the opportunity to engage with our public bodies and consult them properly, and to make the right decisions that suit our agenda and our responsibilities. That would be good. Sometimes we tend to look at things such as the Prevent strategy in a proper, holistic way, considering how public bodies could also promote cohesion, well-being and democracy. That is the way we differ on looking at these things, and we hope the Government follow our approach.

Let me say something about my commitment and my reason for taking this on. David Haines, the British man so brutally executed by ISIS forces in Iraq, was a constituent of mine. His family were in Perth, and I was at the memorial service that was held. His killing was an appalling act and it brought this right home to my community. The way the people of Perth responded to what they had observed—the brutal, appalling murder—was nothing short of magnificent. They made sure that David Haines was properly commemorated and that his memory will endure in Perth, and it was fantastic. So I know how these issues are brought home to specific communities and I have seen the wonderful way communities unite to make sure they gather around that family, making sure they are supported, and try to understand. But the most impressive thing for me was that I saw a real attempt to understand what was going on within this—more so than probably the Government have done. People wanted to understand why this happened in our community and what special conditions led to this happening in a small, sleepy little city such as Perth.

Every single one of us in this House has a job of work to do to keep our communities safe and to keep brave people such as David Haines safe. David Haines went out there to help the world become a better place and to ensure that communities without help and assistance could be helped and assisted. All of us have a responsibility in this regard, so I will take no lectures from anybody in this House about being soft on terrorism or about our Government taking no interest in this matter. We all have an interest in this matter. We might not all agree on everything. I vehemently disagreed with the approach of the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles when she was in the Labour Government. I was keen on what the Conservative-led Government were doing at first, but I am less keen now. But let us all work together. We need to look at this whole thing holistically. We should take responsibility for the things that we do wrong and challenge the horrible extremism and ideology that exist in our communities, but let us do it together, do it sensibly and do it constructively.