European Council

Helen Goodman Excerpts

Monday 23rd February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

One of the schoolgirls was lured over Twitter by another girl from the same school who had gone to Syria just before Christmas. Surely, that demonstrates to the Prime Minister the weakness of his relying on a voluntary approach with social media firms. Will he explain why the authorities did not keep track of the girl who had already gone to Syria?

[The Prime Minister]

That is a very difficult question. We do not have an entirely voluntary approach with social media companies. We passed a law through this House, the so-called DRIPA legislation—the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014—so that we can enforce the extraterritoriality of our desire to see the data and content of communications between potential terrorists. We have that legal power because of the work we have done during this Parliament. The point I made in my statement, and which I will continue to make, is that getting organisations such as Twitter, Facebook and Google to help us, where possible, to combat terrorist extremism voluntarily—by taking down pages with extremist content, and revealing to us people whom they think might be at risk of radicalisation, extremism or worse—is all to the good, but when it comes to combating terrorism, we have legal remedies as well.