Julian Lewis
Main Page: Julian Lewis (Conservative - New Forest East)Department Debates - View all Julian Lewis's debates with the Home Office
Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill
Julian Lewis Excerpts(10 years ago)
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Mrs May
If the hon. Gentleman is referring to the power to issue warrants on companies who offer services in the UK but who are based overseas or the holding of whose data is based overseas, we addressed precisely that issue in the legislation introduced in the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014 that this House put through under emergency powers in the summer.
So we are taking action at home, but we must also have a comprehensive strategy to defeat these extremists abroad. This involves using all the resources at our disposal: humanitarian efforts to help those displaced by ISIL’s onslaught—efforts that Britain is already leading—and diplomatic efforts to engage the widest possible coalition of countries in the region as part of this international effort.
Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
I am glad the Home Secretary just mentioned tackling the terrorists’ narrative. Does she have in mind in that respect not only taking down extremist postings on the internet, for example, but promoting a counter-narrative that exposes the fallacies of the terrorist narrative?
Mrs May
I commend my hon. Friend because he has been resolute in promoting this aspect of dealing with terrorism for some time, and he is absolutely right that it is important to promote that counter-narrative, but I think it is also important to do something else: to take a further step back and look at the whole issue of extremism more generally. That is why we have been very clear, and the work of the Prime Minister’s extremism taskforce is very clear, that we need to introduce an extremism strategy, and the Home Office is currently leading on that. It will be a cross-Government piece of work, but the Home Office is leading on that and the strategy is being developed.
Yvette Cooper
My right hon. Friend makes a very powerful point. We should be honest about the fact that we do not know the perfect answers. This is a difficult area, and different things need to be tried. However, the current programmes are not addressing two significant challenges: peer group recruitment, which is clearly taking place in many areas, and social media, through which recruitment and radicalisation are taking place. Much more should be done to address those challenges, and community-led programmes might be considerably more effective than police-led or Government-led programmes in achieving results.
Dr Julian Lewis
I applaud the constructive tone of the right hon. Lady’s remarks so far. May I take her back to the intervention by the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears)? Most of what is being discussed is still at community or even individual level, whereas we believe that something needs to be done at national level that is comparable to the efforts made to counter Nazism in the second world war and to counter communism during the cold war.
Yvette Cooper
I agree with the hon. Gentleman that more needs to be done at the national level. The Bill introduces a statutory duty on a series of organisations to do more, and those organisations should certainly work in partnership to prevent people from being drawn into extremism and terrorist activity. Given the points made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) about some of the gaps, particularly in relation to the Department for Communities and Local Government, there is a question about whether the duty should in fact extend to that Department, rather than simply to local organisations across the country.
In Committee, we will probe the Home Secretary further on what she intends to do with her power of direction. That is still unclear from the Bill, and it is unclear what she envisages putting in guidance. She said that guidance would be published alongside the Bill, but we have not yet seen it. I do not know whether it has already been published.
Keith Vaz
Those are exactly the unintended consequences to which the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield and others have referred. Of course we need powers in order to deal with those who wish to undermine the values of our society, but we need to be very careful about the way in which we use them, and we need to think about the consequences.
A number of the recommendations made by the Select Committee over a number of years have been adopted in the Bill. We support what is being done in respect of radicalism, but we are cautious about some of the programmes that are being used. I do not support the placing of the counter-terrorism narrative in the Department for Communities and Local Government. The Select Committee has not inquired into that, but I believe that the Home Office is the lead organisation and these should be Home Office programmes. The problem with dealing with more than one Department is the need to persuade different Ministers and civil servants of the necessity of changing things. I do not think that it works very well when two Cabinet Ministers are responsible for roughly the same area of policy. This should be done with and through the Home Secretary, so that she can deliver locally what she tells the House that she wishes to deliver in a more strategic way.
Dr Julian Lewis
Some of us feel that a seamless counter-narrative needs to be presented, and that therefore it would be more appropriate to set up one of the MISC or GEN Committees, as I believe they are called. Several Departments—I can think of four or five—could then have overall control of a counter-narrative that has yet to be properly generated.
Keith Vaz
The hon. Gentleman has worked very hard on this issue for some years. I believe that the status quo does not work, and I have every sympathy with his proposal, which would enable the different programmes to be delivered together.
I mentioned earlier that the Home Secretary had addressed the Bangladeshi community yesterday. She was extremely well received by the 2,000 people who were present; she made a strong effort to relate directly to that important community. Obviously her message yesterday was different from her message today, because a different kind of event was involved, but the point is that we need to get into the DNA of communities.
The Home Secretary’s constituency contains a south Asian community—indeed, like my own constituency, it contains various communities—but we have in this Chamber Members such as my hon. Friends the Members for Birmingham, Perry Barr (Mr Mahmood) and for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi), both of whom are very much a part of their communities. Anyone who walks down the Lozells road with my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr will see that the entire community relates to him. We are lucky to have not just him and my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton South East, but other Members with different origins, on both sides of the House. They will tell us what the voice of the community says, which is that being told what to do never works, whether by police officers or—if I say so myself—by men in grey or black suits. What is necessary is peer group pressure and community engagement, and those must come from communities themselves.
How many times do we discover from the BBC news that parents have no idea that their children have gone to Syria to fight? One parent from Brighton said that he did not know where his son had gone until he was phoned and told that the son had died. That is why peer group pressure is so vital. How do we miss this point every time? We cannot tell communities what to do; we need to engage with them, and they need to move that process forward.
Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
Thank you, Mr Speaker, for calling me to follow an excellent speech by the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears).
At the end of the Home Secretary’s forthright speech, she said that we are “in the midst of a generational struggle”. That is true, but we are also in the midst of an ideological struggle. That is the message that the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles and I have been trying to deliver to the Government. Our message is that we are well served by our security and intelligence agencies in identifying and disrupting home-grown terrorists, but we lack comparable capacity to neutralise the ideology that infects them in the first place and to support mainstream moderate Muslims in challenging the extremists’ perverted distortion of Islam.
In reviewing our current strategy and policies to prevent people from being radicalised and drawn into extremist activity, we should, as I said in an intervention, follow the precedents of the wartime efforts to expose and denounce fascism and the cold war campaigns to counter communist totalitarianism. The extremist ideology of political Islam is a similarly totalitarian creed requiring an organised effort to undermine its appeal and to strengthen the long-term resilience of the communities that are most vulnerable to it.
In order to succeed, this work must be owned by the whole of Government on a cross-departmental basis, working closely with local government in engaging with civic and faith organisations on the ground. It requires the creation of a specialist counter-propaganda agency—I use the word “propaganda” in its non-pejorative sense—to develop a counter-narrative and to support communities in their efforts to challenge the extremists. This agency should operate under the supervision of a permanent ministerial committee on which the Home Office, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Department for Communities and Local Government, the Ministry of Defence and the Department for International Development are represented.
I assure you, Mr Speaker, that I did not give the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles any warning of what I am going to say next, but I am nevertheless going to say it, at the risk of embarrassing her. I feel—as, I am sure, will many others—that it is a great loss, given her specialist knowledge and flair for this subject, that she has decided to leave the House of Commons at the next election. Should such an agency be set up in future, I can think of no better person to run it than the right hon. Lady—whether she wants the job or not.
As we have heard, the Prime Minister has said, as far back as three years ago but also more recently, that it is not enough to tackle terrorism; it is also necessary to counter what he calls the “poisonous ideology” that underlies it. The Home Secretary now says that we need to tackle non-violent as well as violent extremism, so the message is clearly getting through, but there is still some way to go. Why is there such reluctance to recognise that what we ought to be calling un-Islamic extremism, and what we certainly should not be calling Islamic State, should be confronted at a similar level, on a similar scale, and in a similar way to our approach to fascist and communist ideologies in the past? The answer, I suspect, is the fear of the pseudo-religious basis of this incarnation of traditional totalitarian, extremist doctrine.
I want to draw the House’s attention to a particularly important article by Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph on Saturday 29 November. It is headed, “We won’t defeat extremism until we understand their ideology”, with the sub-heading, “Stopping jihadists is one thing—but stopping them from wanting to kill is more important”. The article reflects very much the views that I have been putting forward in this speech, but neither I nor the right hon. Lady had any contact with Mr Moore before he wrote it. It is always very encouraging when somebody of that calibre independently arrives at similar conclusions to those that one has oneself reached.
Hazel Blears
I cannot anticipate what the hon. Gentleman is going to say next, but I did speak to Charles Moore last week, so I would not want him to mislead the House inadvertently.
Dr Lewis
That only goes to show that the right hon. Lady and I do not co-ordinate our efforts as seamlessly as perhaps we ought, because I should have known that. Anyway, the important thing about the article is that it looks at the consequences and conclusions of our recently published Intelligence and Security Committee report on the terrible events in Woolwich. The main question in Charles Moore’s mind about the killers is: what is it that made them so bloodthirsty and so bold in the first place? Why did they want to do such a terrible thing? He comes to the conclusion:
“Islamist extremism combines something very new—the power of internet technology—with something very old—the power of belief.”
He says that the report establishes that
“Lee Rigby’s murderers were ‘self-starting’”,
but that
“they were not lunatics or even ‘lone wolves’. They took large doses of the drug called ideology…It was supplied by pushers who might live in their neighbourhood, but might equally well live in Yemen or Aleppo.”
Charles Moore refers to the calls that have been made to start a counter-narrative, but he notes that MI5, for all its good work, does not have—some would say that it should not have this; it is not necessarily its responsibility to have it—an ideological unit. He says:
“It is rather as if we were trying to combat Communism without knowing the theories of Marxist-Leninism.”
He concludes:
“Time after time, it is non-violent subversion that has prepared the ground for serious trouble”,
and he warns against the danger of running around
“trying to catch the bad fruit, instead of taking an axe to the tree.”
This is a problem that we face at a scale that is not yet insupportable, but which could get very much worse.
Somebody once said that the problem with the world is that the ignorant are cocksure and the wise are full of doubt. The problem we have is that some people with a racist, radical, totalitarian, extremist, murderous ideology have found a way, in the name of their interpretation of their God and their Prophet, to do what extremists have always wanted to do, which is to enjoy untrammelled power over everyone else.
One cannot mobilise a society or a community to counter that successfully if one confines oneself simply to dealing with individuals whom one has already recognised as at risk of radicalisation, because they will already be on the conveyor belt to an extremist outcome and, very probably, to a violent extremist outcome. What one has to do is not to be shy about the virtues of democratic politics, institutions and ideas, or about denouncing the follies and iniquities of systems based on an ideology that stands in total opposition to everything that moderate and liberal-minded people believe.
Pete Wishart
The hon. Gentleman is making such a powerful speech that I am loth to interrupt him. I am sure that he would appreciate, respect and understand the fact that we, too, have a responsibility for creating some of the conditions that have allowed this dreadful, awful and appalling ideology to take root, through decisions such as those about military adventures in the middle east, injustice in Palestine and illegal wars. In his rounded assessment, surely he should also look at our responsibility for allowing this to happen.
Dr Lewis
When I heard the hon. Gentleman, in his articulate fashion, make that point in an earlier intervention, I felt, frankly, that it was a counsel of despair. If he is saying—[Interruption.] Let me give him my answer. If he is saying that the only way to stop terrorism is to bring peace to the middle east, then, frankly, we are never going to stop terrorism. [Interruption.] I will let him intervene again in a moment if he so wishes. I want to put to him the more serious point that we have a Muslim community of between 2 million and 3 million citizens, but I am very pleased to say that out of that very large number, only a very tiny number resort to such methods. If the real cause was western folly in interfering in the middle east, that would still not justify what the tiny minority of Muslims are doing. I will give way to him again.
Pete Wishart
In no sense was my intervention an attempt to justify what is happening. It was about accepting and assuming our responsibility following the decisions that we have made. There is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that military adventures in the middle east have increased radicalisation, with some people finding such an ideology as a response to their ultimate and desperate frustration. Surely the hon. Gentleman must recognise that.
Sir Menzies Campbell
The hon. Gentleman will forgive me for taking advantage of his good manners. In his very careful analysis, does he draw any parallel between the fact that for a long period in the 1930s Nazism was tolerated—indeed, in some parts of this country, it was welcomed—without a full understanding of the philosophy behind it, and the extravagant and extreme fruition of that philosophy in Hitler’s expansionist ambitions?
Dr Lewis
I absolutely accept that parallel. Many other parallels could be drawn that are similar to the one the right hon. and learned Gentleman has made so perceptively. For example, democracies in the 1930s faced the twin dangers of Soviet communism on the one hand and Hitlerism on the other, which is why it is understandable, although unforgivable in retrospect, that some people chose to back the Nazi approach in preference to meeting what they thought was the threat of bolshevism advancing against the western system of life and liberty.
Therefore, one can indeed draw parallels with the twin problems that we see now. There is a thousand-year war between Shi’a Muslims and Sunni Muslims. As the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) said in his interventions, as we make our attempts—sometimes misguided and sometimes more sensible—to mitigate the outcomes of such conflicts, we should not be surprised if there is a blowback effect, to some extent, on the more volatile elements in the community here. I think that I have now got his point to his satisfaction.
In conclusion, bearing in mind your precept, Mr Speaker, that one should never have more than one or perhaps two main points for somebody to take away from a contribution in the House of Commons or any other public arena, the point that I wish to urge on the Government is the same one that I have urged before with the support of—indeed, I should say under the leadership of—the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles: we need to face up to the ideology in its purest and most evil form. It is an ideology. It is not the ideology of Islam. We must mobilise and support those people in the Muslim community who wish to tackle this matter, and we must not be afraid to set up institutions and organisations that are capable of dealing with this formidable threat.
Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr (Mr Mahmood) who made a heartfelt speech and spoke as an authentic voice for British Muslims in a way that extremists of various ideologies do not.
I often speak in the House on international issues rather than domestic home affairs, but it is important to reinforce the importance of the international context. If we talk about tackling the free flow of potential terrorists to and from various countries in Europe to states in the middle east, and if we ask the Gulf states to stop the flow of funds and support to those organisations, or ask Turkey and others in the neighbourhood to stop the flow of people across its borders, we must also play our part. It is important that we respond to the new challenge of people going as potential fighters from this country and other countries across Europe to play their part in atrocities and the awful war in the middle east that is spreading from country to country.
We can do that in our own self-interest, not only because we are legitimate potential targets for Daesh, or IS, or whatever we want to call it, but because it is the right moral and humanitarian response to try to inhibit those who would cause such unimaginable brutality, and instead to promote peace and an end to the suffering. That in turn would reduce the need for us to contribute enormous resources in humanitarian, political and even military terms to help solve these crises.
The right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) was right to support the Government in saying that there is a clear and present danger to the UK from IS, as indeed there still is from al-Qaeda and other similar extremist organisations that pose a threat to the security of this country. However, it is important to remember that we have faced terrorism before, and while the dangers may be new and extremely violent, we must guard against over-reacting or reacting in such haste that in some way we compromise the liberties we seek to protect.
I am a great defender of our security and intelligence services—I have to be as the Member of Parliament for Cheltenham. I see a great tradition stretching back to the code-breakers of Bletchley Park. People regard them as absolute heroes for their contribution to surveillance and intelligence during the second world war, but the same people sometimes forget that the self-same organisation under the new name of GCHQ has continued through to the present day, and protects our liberties in a vital way. In fact, GCHQ works under a much more comprehensive scrutiny, legal and oversight framework. Such a framework did not apply to the Government code and cipher school during the second world war so, in a sense, we could say that Bletchley Park was illegal. GCHQ certainly does not act illegally.
Even my constituents in Cheltenham who work for what is euphemistically called “the office” would be the first to say that it is not for them to tell the Government or Parliament where the line should be drawn between liberty and security. It is also not for hon. Members to over-respond to the fears of the intelligence and security services in drawing those lines. We must take a measured view and judgment, and be cautious about where the line is drawn.
The Labour Opposition and Liberal Democrat Ministers have accepted that the Bill broadly strikes the right balance, and will support the Bill today. Therefore, it is right to point out that the modifications to people’s right to come back into the country with a British passport are not the same as making them stateless, and that the differences have been carefully drafted in the Bill; that the new version of TPIMs are not control orders, and that there are many differences between them; and that the data retention elements of the Bill on IP addresses were not objected to in the original draft Communications Data Bill by, for instance, the Liberal Democrats.
There are differences and the safeguards have been thought about, but there are serious questions. The former Attorney-General, the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield, and my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for North East Fife (Sir Menzies Campbell) raised some of those questions. They spoke of the process of temporary exclusion and asked where precisely it leaves the legal status of those who are temporarily excluded or denied passports, and what their rights are to challenge those orders. There might be a suggestion in the explanatory notes or the Government’s response that we need not worry, and that processes will ensure that the orders are designed only temporarily to interrupt someone’s return to this country, so that they can be met either by a person or by a legal measure designed to make them less of a threat to the public, but that detail or explanation needs to be in the Bill. Perhaps the question whether the phraseology of the Bill is clear enough will be addressed in Committee.
The same goes for the questions about TPIMs. Liberty and others have suggested that TPIMs reinstate aspects of control orders that allowed for internal exile, which led to some control orders being declared illegal. They say that that is not just the wrong thing to put into legislation, but a weakness, because it would make the measures less effective.
The Open Rights Group and others have focused on some of the loose definitions in the data retention portion of the Bill. If we follow the trail of what constitutes relevant data in the Bill through the various clauses to the annexes and the explanatory notes, we find that it is not absolutely clear what relevant data are in the Bill. Internet providers are not absolutely defined, so perhaps more clarification is needed and more safeguards need to be built into the Bill in Committee.
There is a slightly deeper question. The House often responds to a challenge to security and public safety with legislation, but the response we need is often not a legislative one. The hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) and others talked about ideology. There is good evidence that many young people who go out to the middle east to take part in these battles are not really seduced by any sophisticated form—or even a perverted form—of Islamic ideology. In fact, they know very little about Islam at all. They are more seduced by attractive slick internet videos, social media and social pressures from within a peer group who have become alienated from their own communities. That is not about ideology, but a propaganda war that has to be fought. The best response to that is not always legislation. The best response may be to understand what mainstream society needs to feed back to communities and young people, and to understand why they are so alienated and why they are being seduced by these social media techniques.
Dr Julian Lewis
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that these people are not steeped in the religion of Islam, and are receiving a perverted and simplistic message. Our side of the argument still needs to be put in a comparably efficient way.
Martin Horwood
The hon. Gentleman makes a reasonable point. My underlying point is that legislation is not always the forum through which we will provide the answers to these questions.
It seems there is consensus across the House that the Bill should go forward, but there are serious questions to be answered. There needs to be careful examination in Committee to ensure that the Bill strikes the right balance between liberty and security.