Reserve Recruitment

Debate between George Howarth and Julian Brazier

Monday 17th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Brazier]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s question, not least because he is a former member of the Royal Naval Reserve, who are well ahead of their recruiting targets. The short answer is that if we want defence to prosper in this country when there are very many calls on the public purse, we need the footprint around the country that the reserve forces have—they are represented in half of all the constituencies in this House—to remind people what armed forces are all about.

[Mr George Howarth (Knowsley) (Lab)]

Does the Minister accept that part of the problem is that some applicants, although they have the potential, do not yet meet all the requirements? Does he believe that there is a place in the recruitment system for the military preparation course that was devised by Lieutenant Colonel Tony Hollingsworth, who runs Knowsley Skills Academy?

[Mr Brazier]

The right hon. Gentleman asks a really excellent question. This is why we are looking at the criteria again. We have reintroduced proper medicals, proper fitness tests, proper intelligence tests, and all the things that disappeared under the previous Government. He is right. There should be room for flexibility, and where people are, for example, a little bit below the right level in the fitness test, units have measures in place to give them coaching to bring them to up it. I would like to have a longer conversation with him about this another time.

Justice and Security Bill [Lords]

Debate between George Howarth and Julian Brazier

Monday 4th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Brazier]

Of course, the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. I used the phrase “modus operandi”. This brave officer led our special forces operation for so long in Iraq and did so well at a time when, frankly, other parts of our military operation were failing—the verdict of history is that sadly they did largely fail. The hon. Gentleman is right that this is not only about sources, but about modus operandi, but there is now a further wrinkle. Because the Government have committed to much more of what is generally called “upstream intervention”—putting small numbers of people into areas where they are not in charge or running the show, but simply mentoring, the dodgiest end of which will inevitably go to special forces—this is not only about our modus operandi, but about whether our relationships with host countries, which in almost every case will, I believe, do better in a range of different ways with advice from our special forces, will be possible at all.

I shall move on to the second part of my comments. In Committee, I listened again and again to hon. Gentlemen talking about ancient British traditions of justice. I have listened again and have been reading some of the contributions from the human rights lobby. Although they are perfectly entitled to their points of view and I am willing to listen to them with respect, they cannot claim that the current position of the civil rights lobby, which is reflected in some of these amendments, is in any way rooted in the traditions of British justice.

Let me quote what Lord Denning said in a deportation case some 40 years ago. He was speaking on the Hosenball case, which involved the deportation of, ironically, an American journalist. The case was decided unanimously in favour of the Home Secretary, but nevertheless Lord Denning felt that he ought to put some extra remarks on the record, just to remind people where the balance of British justice lay:

“But this is no ordinary case. It is a case in which national security is involved, and our history shows that, when the state itself is endangered, our cherished freedoms may have to take second place. Even natural justice itself may suffer a set-back. Time after time Parliament has so enacted and the courts have loyally followed.”

Time is brief and others are waiting to speak, so I will not go back to the earlier Liversidge v. Anderson case during the second world war, where by a 4:1 majority the locking up of everybody who happened to be German, with no procedure at all, was upheld. Suffice it to say, however, that this was the continuous view of the courts all the way through until the Belmarsh case. I will give one further quote. Ironically, I would like to quote Lord Hoffmann, one of the judges who found against the Government in the Belmarsh case, on the rather narrow grounds rooted in the then brand-new human rights provisions. In 2001, he commented in a lengthy judgment in the Rehman case:

“I shall deal first with the separation of powers… What is meant by ‘national security’ is a question of construction and therefore a question of law within the jurisdiction of the Commission, subject to appeal. But there is no difficulty about what ‘national security’ means. It is the security of the United Kingdom and its people. On the other hand, the question of whether something is ‘in the interests’ of national security is not a question of law. It is a matter of judgment and policy. Under the constitution of the United Kingdom and most other countries, decisions as to whether something is or is not in the interests of national security are not a matter for judicial decision. They are entrusted to the executive.”

The concessions that the Government have already made, even without going down the route of amendment 30, go much further than any court would have required 10 or more years ago. Whatever the claims of the human rights lobby, the British judicial system always used to understand the vital demands of our national security, and I urge the Government not to give any further ground.

[Mr George Howarth]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Canterbury (Mr Brazier). I shall try in a moment to give some examples of how important the point is that he finished on.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) referred to the well-known liberal credentials on these matters of the Minister without Portfolio. I would go further—perhaps my own Front Benchers will take this into account—and say that if someone is as liberal as he is, they are probably in the wrong place and, on this occasion, if someone is even more liberal than he is, they are almost certainly in the wrong place.

I would like to make one further point by way of introduction. I came here genuinely hoping to be persuaded by my right hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) to follow the course of action he has outlined in the amendments. I wanted to hear what he had to say—that was why I made at least one, perhaps two, interventions—and to see whether he had an answer to some of the dilemmas I felt still existed in our approach to the Bill and, more particularly, our amendments. Before arriving here, I decided to read what he said on Second Reading about the tests he set for the Bill at that time and what it would look like when it left Committee.

My right hon. Friend relied heavily, though not exclusively, on the words at the time of David Anderson QC, who concluded that there was a

“case for restricting the novel application of Norwich Pharmacal jurisdiction to national security information”—

the relevant clause at the time was clause 14—but that the Bill at the time was

“too broad in its application.”

Beyond that, however, no specific tests were set other than those set by the Joint Committee, which its Chairman listed at the time.