Extremism

Jesse Norman Excerpts

Monday 9th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

The hon. Gentleman is getting his quotations mixed up. I made it absolutely clear in my statement, and in my response to the hon. Member for Wrexham (Ian Lucas), that the Cabinet Secretary and the Prime Minister concluded that I did not authorise the release of the letter. Following the review, certain things took place in relation to the Education Secretary, and in relation to further comments that were made to The Times, my special adviser Fiona Cunningham resigned on Saturday.

[Jesse Norman (Hereford and South Herefordshire) (Con)]

Does the Home Secretary share my surprise, indeed astonishment, that it had to fall to her to impose bans on hate preachers and to set up an extremism unit, and that those things were not done under the last Labour Government?

[Mrs May]

My hon. Friend has attributed to me an action to which I referred earlier and which was actually taken by the Education Secretary, namely the setting up of an extremism unit in the Department for Education. However, as I said earlier, I have banned more hate preachers than any other Home Secretary. That is because this Government take the clear view that we want to deal with not just violent but non-violent extremism, which is clear from the actions that we have taken.

Oral Answers to Questions

Jesse Norman Excerpts

Monday 10th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

What we all want is to ensure that stop and search, a particularly valuable tool for the police, is properly used by the police. The recent report by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary, which I requested, found that the stop and search powers were not being used properly in far too high a percentage of cases—about a quarter of the cases it looked into. Stop and search is important and a very valuable tool; when it is used properly and well targeted, it has the right impact. I am pleased to say that the Metropolitan police have already started to make some changes in their operation of stop and search, which is having some impact.

[Jesse Norman (Hereford and South Herefordshire) (Con)]

T3. Trading standards officers and local police have seized more than 189,000 illegal cigarettes and more than 16 kg of illicit tobacco from shops in my constituency in the past 12 months. All of that is untaxed and much of it is counterfeit, but the existing penalties do little to stem the flow of this harmful trade. Does the Home Secretary share my view that trading standards officers should be given the power to shut down these shops where all other enforcement methods have failed?

[The Minister for Crime Prevention (Norman Baker)]

I agree that Trading Standards needs to take that issue seriously, as I believe it does. Of course, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, which is responsible for criminal investigation of fiscal offences, is well aware of the loss of money to the Treasury as a consequence of that activity. The good news is that the UK Border Force is successfully active on this front. The Crown Prosecution Service will decide whether to charge and prosecute in particular cases.

Psychoactive Substances

Jesse Norman Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Jesse Norman (Hereford and South Herefordshire) (Con)]

I am entirely unhappy about the use of the word “dissing”, but I think “predecessed” demands further investigation. I would be grateful if the hon. Gentleman could clarify both those terms.

[John Mann]

It is a late hour and I have had no substances of any height during the day, but I have been building up my adrenalin, looking forward to this debate.

I have been monitoring what the Home Office has been doing in this field. Whenever I speak to people from other countries, they keep telling me how the British Government—this coalition Government—are out there seeking their views and trying to learn from them. Portugal is one of the leaders of the move towards drug legalisation across the world, but the Czech Republic is following—that makes two EU states—and the European monitoring body on drugs is based in Lisbon.

[John Mann]

I would like to make my point first, so that the hon. Gentleman can understand it in its fullness.

It is this Government who have been going and listening to the legalisers. I suspect that the European Commission is making an attempt over time to pull together these strands, backed by several senior police officers in this country, so that they can evaporate the problem of drugs and say that crime will reduce, because if we legalise lots of things and do not criminalise others, we will not need to spend as much money on policing, because crime will be falling all the time. What is happening with this Government—it is why the Minister has encouraged this proposal from the EU and now wishes to demolish it—is an attempt to block legal highs being made into illegal highs so that crime does not go up, because they are not providing the police in areas like mine that are disproportionately impacted by the current legal highs.

I carried out my own public inquiry in Worksop town hall this January into the question of legal highs, asking the young people, the police, the health service and others what was going on. It was interesting to find out that it was not only young people who were taking these substances. It was also middle-aged people, although not perhaps elderly people. It was the people who participate in what the Government call the night-time economy and what I would call pubs with late licences. People are tanking up at home on cheap alcohol then going out to the pubs and nightclubs and taking these substances. The owners of the pubs and clubs complained to my inquiry that their biggest problem was that people were taking cheap pills and other highs instead of buying alcohol.

By the way, allowing pubs to have late licences was the worst error of the last Labour Government. My biggest error in this place was not to speak out and try to alter that policy as it was going through because applying a city solution to areas like mine was totally inappropriate. One pub in my area is open till 5 in the morning, but nobody is drinking beer or spirits; they are allegedly—according to all the information I have—taking all sorts of substances that the Government will not deem illegal because they do not want the police to arrest people, though the police are not there anyway, because the Government have cut their numbers; and there are not even any police cells left in my area to put people in, and the police community support officers are about to take over neighbourhood policing. But nobody is being arrested for using legal highs in the pubs, and of course they are not because the highs are legal. This is part of Home Office policy.

[Jesse Norman]

I continue to be dazzled by the hon. Gentleman’s linguistic dexterity, which is reaching almost Prescottian heights, but will he tell us whether this great experiment in constructing a parliamentary speech out of a single sentence has the possibility of reaching a full stop?

[John Mann]

I would have hoped that the hon. Gentleman was listening.

For two days, I got together young people, the police and the health service in my area, along with my expert panel which 10 years ago looked at the problem of heroin and this time looked at legal highs, among other problems. We analysed more than 400 submissions to find out exactly what was happening. We went out and asked the users of the illegal drugs what was happening with the legal highs. I would have thought that the hon. Gentleman would like to be informed about this, because his close coalition ally the Minister, and the Minister’s predecessor, have not got a clue what is going on with legal highs in this country. Some of the chief constables are increasingly saying, “Let’s legalise drugs; let’s not go any further with legal highs, so that we can get crime down.”

The European Union is heading in exactly the same direction. That is why the Czech Republic has just backed the same approach as Portugal has taken. The European monitoring body’s research is nonsense, but it is quoted by the Minister and others in the Government all the time as the factual basis for what is happening around Europe. But the statistics on this—as on so many other things—that are compiled around Europe simply do not compare with what is going on here. They do not compare at all.

In this country, we have a growing problem with legal highs. The problem is that people are taking cheap pills instead of spending money on alcohol, and the real problem with that is that they do not know what the pills are. People are taking things that give them a stimulus when they go out, but the compounds could contain anything, and on rare occasions there are tragic consequences. The bigger problem is that this is building up an atmosphere of semi-legality. People are taking things that ought to be illegal because they are dangerous, and they have no idea what they contain. They take them presuming and hoping that they are fine, and the Government are not prepared to put a system in place to deal with—

Oral Answers to Questions

Jesse Norman Excerpts

Monday 7th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Harper]

I do not demur from anything that my right hon. Friend has said, but that does not mean that we will not look at how that operates in our balance of competence reviews. Abuses do take place under free movement throughout Europe. My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary has discussed the issues at Justice and Home Affairs Councils and has found a lot of support from colleagues there. A road map has been set out by Justice Ministers throughout Europe to deal with the abuses that took place and were not dealt with by the Labour party when it was in power.

[Jesse Norman (Hereford and South Herefordshire) (Con)]

The Minister paid an extremely successful visit to my county of Herefordshire before Christmas, for which I thank him. Will he reassure me that SAWS will be preserved through the MAC process and that it is not formally part of the immigration figures at all but operates in an entirely separate category?

[Mr Harper]

My hon. Friend correctly points out that it was his constituency that I visited in December. I am not going to prejudge the outcome of the work being done by MAC. The whole point is that it is doing some evidence-based work to inform the Government’s decision. It will be looking at whether a successor scheme needs to come into force to ensure that the sector has access to adequate labour when Romanians and Bulgarians have alternative choices after the end of this year.

UK Extradition Arrangements

Jesse Norman Excerpts

Monday 5th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Raab]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that clarification.

In practical terms the arrangements are unbalanced too. On the latest data available—I thank the Immigration Minister for his letter correcting earlier replies to parliamentary questions—29 UK nationals or dual nationals were extradited from Britain to the US since 2004. Five Americans were extradited from the US to Britain.

Obviously, states extradite their own nationals and third parties as well, but we in the House are rightly concerned about the treatment of those removed from the home country. In front of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the US ambassador disputed some of the earlier data that I spoke to in the Westminster Hall debate, complaining about untrue accusations being made by MPs and adding:

“The constant use of skewed arguments and wilful distortion of the facts by some to advance their own agendas remains of great concern to the United States”.

If there is any dispute about the facts it is not with me or any Member of this House, but with Ministers from the previous Government who failed to record consistently data on the issue between 2004 and 2007. I emphasise that all the figures cited today and in the previous debate were from Government replies to parliamentary questions. Neither the ambassador nor the US embassy, when I later followed up, were able to correct the figures with data based on their own records, so I find it regrettable that the charge of

“wilful distortion of the facts”

is being bandied around without His Excellency being in command of a few of his own.

[Jesse Norman (Hereford and South Herefordshire) (Con)]

I am greatly enjoying what my hon. Friend is saying. I am a thorough supporter of the idea that the extradition rules should be reviewed, but I am still grappling, in the American case, with the difference between the two tests. Will he give us a sense of how they might come apart?

[Mr Raab]

The fundamental question is the difference between reasonable suspicion and probable cause. As paper tests, I do not think there is an enormous amount of difference between them, but as Alun Jones QC, whose article in The Daily Telegraph I commend, has spelled out, the practical operation—the judicial scrutiny that is available in the US because of the US constitutional guarantees—is higher. That is the key difference.

For all the talk of the evidential burden and the question of reciprocity, in my view, the critical issue in the US arrangements is forum. That is the label for how one decides where, in cross-border cases, the appropriate jurisdiction lies. The Gary McKinnon case is the leading case attracting great controversy at present. At root it is about the injustice in dispatching someone with Asperger’s syndrome hundreds of miles from home on allegations of computer hacking when he was apparently searching for unidentified flying objects. Gary McKinnon should not be treated like some gangland mobster or al-Qaeda mastermind.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jesse Norman]

Further to the point about the case of Andrew Symeou, when the European arrest warrant was introduced, did the introducing authorities look at the standards of law, order and punishment across the European countries in order to assure themselves that such conditions could not occur?

[Mr Raab]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. I will move on to the level of scrutiny later, but the short answer is that the level in that case was not nearly high enough. The question today is whether we in this House have the will to stand up and ensure that the trauma of the Symeou case and many others is not inflicted on other innocent people. Let us be very clear that Symeou was innocent, as are many of the victims under the European arrest warrant.

The Symeou case exposes the fatal flaw in the European arrest warrant. Fast-track extradition in the EU—I think this will answer my hon. Friend the Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman)—is based on a leap of faith and an assumption that all European justice systems are of a decent standard. That assumption is a sham. The justice systems in many European countries are well below any acceptable minimum standard. The Baker review proposed no safeguards to prevent a repeat of such miscarriages of justice. The report expressed the aspiration that penal conditions and justice systems across Europe will get better in time. In fact, standards of justice in some of the countries concerned are getting worse. According to Transparency International’s corruption perception index—just one benchmark, but an important one—corruption is getting worse in Greece, Hungary, Italy and Bulgaria. Even if standards of justice improve across Europe, as we all hope they will, our duty is to protect our citizens today, not in five or 10 years’ time. That is why it is important to take action now and not accept the “hit and hope” counsel of the Baker review.

The Baker review failed to take evidence directly from the victims and hear about the trauma that innocent people and their families have been through. In contrast, the Joint Committee on Human Rights, chaired by the hon. Member for Aberavon (Dr Francis), took evidence from a range of victims, including Frank Symeou, Deborah Dark, Michael Turner and Edmond Arapi.

Prevention and Suppression of Terrorism

Jesse Norman Excerpts

Wednesday 14th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Jesse Norman (Hereford and South Herefordshire) (Con)]

I am a rather rare bird in politics—a Conservative defender of the Human Rights Act 1998, which I regard as the codification of 800 years of British common law.

Let me briefly draw attention to the previous Government’s appalling record, which is perpetuated in the suggestion that there is an intrinsic tension between liberty and security. Security often relies on a clear understanding of the commitment of a Government and a nation to liberty. I massively welcome the emphasis of the new Government and the new Home Secretary on freedom, and the suggestion that the order is a temporary measure is most welcome. My right hon. Friend’s personal commitment to 14 days is noted, and the freedom Bill, the crackdown on CCTV and the collection of DNA, and the extension of the Freedom of Information Act are all welcome.

Today is Bastille day. We should never forget that Edmund Burke rightly predicted that it would be followed by disorder, chaos and terror. It made him deeply unpopular at the time. However, on reflection, we now celebrate the day for recorded rights—not abstract, but recorded rights. They were developed in British common law, and the greatest of them is now in section 5 of the Human Rights Act. It is habeas corpus, as prefigured in article 39 of Magna Carta.

We must never forget that we are considering suspects—they have not been convicted of any crime. The Home Office has tools at its disposal that it did not have in 2006. It has the ability to question people post-charge, and to draw on new offences, especially training, preparation and dissemination in the context of terrorism.

I conclude with two questions. First, has thought been given to 21 days as an intermediate period between 14 and 28 days? Are there merits in that? Secondly, has adequate consideration been given to the use of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 as an alternative to 28 days’ detention? If we answer those questions, I am sure that we can make progress overall.