Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Khalid Mahmood (Birmingham, Perry Barr) (Lab)]

Today and over the past 10 days or so, the vast majority of people in the Muslim community in the United Kingdom, which numbers between 2.5 million and 3 million people, will have been apprehensive about what the Bill holds for them, how they will come to look at it and in what way they must play a part in delivering this policy and moving it forward. There will, of course, be those who will try to capitalise on that. They will say, “This Bill is about putting you down. It is about doing things to you because you are not regarded as full UK citizens or as belonging to society in the UK.” Those are the people we have to look at and deal with.

I stand before the House as a member of the Muslim community who believes that those people do not speak for me. The ideology that the hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) spoke about is very warped. I refuse to call it a Muslim or Islamic ideology, because in no way does it encompass the beliefs that I have. To me, Islam translates as submission; it is not about torturing people and it is not about killing people of different faiths. Recognising the three great Abrahamic faiths, which belong to the book, and calling any of them kufr is certainly not justified in any way. These people will use whatever little snippet they can grab hold of, try to turn the whole thing upside down, and use that as a recruiting sergeant for their ideology. They did not have the right to cruelly butcher Alan Henning. My respects go to his whole family for what they have suffered. There is certainly no justification for that in any religion of Islam that I support, believe in and will continue to believe in.

Before I consider the issues before us, I pay a huge tribute to the police, not just in Birmingham and the west midlands where I belong, but across the country, and to the security services, which have done a tremendous job over the past decade or so to protect us all from the plots that have been mentioned by the Home Secretary and others. That is what they do, day in, day out, and they deserve huge gratitude.

As for the Bill, the first issue that I wish to raise concerns the strengthened powers of temporary restrictions on travel and the suspension of passports. A number of Members have dealt with that point, so I will try to make my remarks fairly brief. The shadow Home Secretary had a significant amount to say about it, and the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) made some important remarks about it. My hon. Friend the Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi) also made some good points about whether legal aid would be granted to the people in question. We need to look more deeply at the proposal, because, as a number of Members have mentioned, it will leave us in a legal quagmire. I only wish the Government had taken some more time to consider it. Unless we are prepared to do that, the problems will not be dealt with properly.

On the subject of passports and people coming into the country, I do not believe that we currently have sufficient border agency staff to deal with the problem. We need to move forward on that if we are to solve it in any way. It was said earlier in the debate that 500 people have travelled to Syria—a figure that I do not necessarily agree with—and that at least half of them have returned. If so, where are they? If we had proper passport control and exit controls, perhaps we would know. Not only are we missing those people coming back, but we are missing a huge opportunity to learn from them how they were radicalised, what their points of contact were and what happened. We miss that opportunity at our peril. I welcome the fact that the shadow Home Secretary said that she wanted to reinstate 1,000 border control personnel to fill that gap, because it is important that we deal with the problem.

I turn now to control orders, if I can call them that. I was in the Chamber when TPIMs were first discussed, and the Government did not really want to listen to the Opposition or the shadow Home Secretary. Unfortunately, we are back here now discussing control orders under different guises and different names, and there are different protestations about what we are supposed to be doing. Control orders are a difficult legal issue, but when people are significantly radicalised, it is important to try to resolve that problem. We have to start tackling it so that we can stop those people spreading their evil ideology and recruiting more people through their presence in the community. We need to find a proper answer, and we have not had the wherewithal to do that—as has been said, two people under TPIMs escaped.

The Government need to consider security arrangements overall. The new budget for the security services is welcome, but the cuts to the police and the forthcoming further cut of 30,000 people will not help. If we are saying that TPIMs are important for the safety and security of our citizens, surely we must consider how we can best put them into effect. Without the personnel on the ground, it will be difficult for us to do that.

I deal now with Prevent. My right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) made a fantastic point about the work that she has done, particularly when she was in office. I remember a meeting that we had about some of these issues just before she left office. The issue that I raised at the time was ideology. On the subject of Prevent and how these problems are dealt with, slashing the budget from £17 million to £3 million did not help, nor did giving the responsibility to the Department for Communities and Local Government, which was not bothered about how we dealt the matter or how we moved forward, and which did hardly anything in that respect. We need to consider how we deal with radicalisation through Prevent.

I welcome the measures placed on schools, colleges, universities, prisons and young offenders institutions. Those measures will go some way. I had to deal with the “Trojan horse” schools in Birmingham, and found myself in a very lonely place. Everybody criticised me. Colleagues on the Opposition Benches were not happy with what I said. I had known for some time that there were issues that had to be dealt with. The difficulty for me was that they were not in my constituency, but in the end I got involved because I thought enough was enough. Somebody had to get involved and deal with them.

There were clear signs of what was happening in the classroom. I had taken an interest in such matters before. I spoke to head teachers of those schools, former head teachers who had been excluded from those schools, deputy head teachers, senior teachers who had been excluded from those schools, parents and governors who had been pushed out of those schools. I even spoke to students in those schools. Practices that went on were, for example, boys and girls not being allowed to sit together, and the girls being pushed to the back of the classroom so that they would know their place.

I spoke to one of the parents, who said everything was fine and none of that happened. I asked whether any of her children went to the school in question. She said that both her son and her daughter went there. I asked her to ask one of them. She asked her son. He said, “Yeah, Mum, that happens normally.” The mother asked, “Why don’t I see it?” Her son said, “When you come to school, there’s a different arrangement from what we normally do in class.” On parents evening, the parents were shown the school acting normally, but when they were not present the girls were made to sit at the back and the boys in front.

The schools had a specific interpretation of music and art and photographs of the human form or living form. The children were even told that if they had photographs of their parents or grandparents at home, or photographs of other family members, perhaps deceased, that was not right and was a crime under Islam. That is what was happening. Many people might see it as non-extremist radicalisation, but if a school has a child for eight years and passes on such teaching, what happens when the child leaves and goes to college with that ideology fixed in their mind? We need to think about how we deal with these issues and move forward.

As part of Prevent, we should recognise that we have a generation of lost young people—a small minority, as the hon. Member for New Forest East said, but still far too many.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a very interesting contribution. Does he agree that one of the problems—only one of them—is the high degree of Islamophobia that is reported in many of our newspapers and media all the time? Any discussion about anything to do with the Muslim community rapidly descends into a quite unpleasant area. This is played out in our communities, schools, colleges and streets, and some young people are forced into extreme positions because of it. That is bad, but we should recognise that there is a bigger problem concerning perceptions in society, which has to be challenged.

[Mr Mahmood]

I certainly agree that there are issues of Islamophobia in terms of employment, but it comes to something when people call me Islamophobic because of the work I did with the Trojan horse schools. Control of the press is difficult, given the way it sometimes tries to—excuse the pun—“sex up” certain issues. That is difficult to deal with and we need a far wiser press to do that. Trying to further excite the issue of Islamophobia affects the wider community, and we must look at that.

There are real issues about how we deradicalise our young people, and the way to do that is not to allow a half-way house—as we have done previously—or look to non-extremist organisations to hold that place. If they do that, the ideology of the non-extremist organisation allows issues to foment; we allow people to get the whole of that ideology into place, and it is then easily pushed to the next stage. That is my problem when people say that we can use some of those organisations to prevent extremism. We are currently trying to deal with issues in Birmingham, and Channel and Prevent programmes have been used with some of those organisations.

If we are to provide the safeguards we must consider the issue. Unfortunately we have had the missing link of leadership from within the Muslim community—whether the Muslim Council of Britain, the Muslim Association of Britain, or other national organisations that said they represented Muslims across the community—which did not quite deliver that. To save that lost generation, and future generations, we need a joint effort. We must start ideologically, from the point of Islam, to stop people persuading young people from within the Muslim community—including different schools of Sunni, Shi’a and other schools of thought in Islam—to be ripped away from their parents, community and societies. That is the best way to move forward. I would like to discuss other issues in the Bill, but time does not permit so I will do so at a later stage.

--- Later in debate ---

[Pete Wishart]

I know that my hon. Friend has been paying real attention to some of the conversations that we have been having. That is exactly how Labour behaved. What a Government! They established and effectively monitored an anti-civil libertarian state. My hon. Friend is spot on when he reminds us of the proposal for 90-day detention. The one reason for which I applauded the incoming Conservative Government was that the first thing they did was bring about the bonfire of the ID cards and the national database. Is it not depressing that they have fallen into their old manners and customs? They are almost right back to where the Labour Government were in supporting the creation and maintenance of an anti-civil libertarian state.

We always get this wrong. At the heart of all these counter-terrorism Bills is a critical balancing act. On one hand there is our need for security—the need to make our citizens safe—and on the other hand are the civil liberties that we all enjoy as a result of being part of a democracy.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that one problem is that there is a mentality and a default position that anything to do with national security and terrorism has to be dealt with by secretive special courts and a secretive special process, all designed to protect the security services from any kind of accountability? Does he agree that we should actually rely much more on the basis of the criminal law, so that where people commit criminal acts, they should be tried for that crime?

[Pete Wishart]

The hon. Gentleman reminds me of the last feature I wanted to include in the list of what we always see in these counter-terror Bills, which is the very thing he mentions; it is all about suspicion, and the powers of the Home Secretary and how she will be allowed to exercise them, never testing things in courts, because the evidence is not substantive enough. It is all to do with this idea that somehow we have got to make people safe in this country by proposing all sorts of control mechanisms on suspects. If the Government were serious about this—if they believed and had the courage of their convictions—they should take it to court and test it in the public court, and give people an opportunity to defend themselves. If someone is subject to one of these new TPIMs, they have no means to try to fight their defence; they have no access to having that tested in court. The Government talk about how extremism develops, about radicalisation and about the furthering of ideologies, but when they are doing things like this, it is no surprise that people might take a jaundiced view about some of the things that happen.

I enjoyed the contribution of the hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis). It was good and there was very little I could disagree with. Some of the things that are necessary to tackle extremism are the sorts of things he presented, and many of the things mentioned by the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) are also absolutely necessary, but we have got to look at ourselves. We have got to look at the decisions we made. We have got to understand the things we have said, passed and done that may have inflamed the situation. If we cannot do that, we are not acting responsibly. We have got to make sure we account for our actions and see what they led to.

I was in the House when we had the debate on the Iraq war, as were other Members, and we said what would happen as a consequence of the Iraq war—an illegal war that inflamed opinion and passions not just in communities here, but communities around the world. We said that there would be a consequence and a reaction. That has come true. That has happened. The reason why we are now having to mop up with this type of legislation and these types of measures is because of some of the critical decisions we took, and some of the appalling and bad decisions we made and are still accounting for.