Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill

Khalid Mahmood Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

My right hon. Friend is right that the threat level is the same now as it was when the Home Secretary came into office. There have been ongoing threats to our security and liberty for many years, and it was not increased threat that led either Ibrahim Magag or Mohammed Ahmed Mohamed to abscond when their relocation orders were revoked. It was the lack of a relocation order and the weakening of the counter-terrorism powers.

Counter-terrorism policy is always difficult. There will always be things that Governments find challenging, and there will be times when they get the balance wrong. However, we should look at the evidence together. The Home Secretary and the Government failed to look at the evidence about relocation powers, and they failed to listen to the advice of the security experts. They have had to do so now not because the security threat has changed but because TPIMs simply did not work. It is right that they should be strengthened now and that powers should be restored.

There are two other puzzling things about the Home Secretary’s measures on TPIMs. The first relates to the point that my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles made about the 200-mile limit: what is the difference between someone being 205 miles away and someone being 195 miles away? More puzzling is the measure that the Government are introducing to prevent people on a TPIM from having access to a firearm. That seems extremely sensible—we would not want any terror suspect to have access to a firearm—but how could any of them have had such access before? That raises the question whether either the gun licensing regime or the TPIMs regime is considerably weaker than we thought. We hope that some clarity will be provided in Committee on why that measure is needed. We will clearly support it, but it is a puzzle that existing powers are not strong enough to ensure that that sensible restriction is in place.

The next challenge is how to deal with the new and growing problem of British citizens leaving to join the conflict overseas, where they may become involved in awful crimes and barbarism, be further radicalised and become a threat to this country. We need new measures to prevent people from going. Removing people’s passports through the royal prerogative is understandably not a swift process, and sometimes faster action is needed. If troubled parents ring the police because they are worried that a son or daughter has left to join ISIS and taken their passport with them, the police need to be able to move quickly. We therefore agree that temporary powers are needed.

The lack of judicial oversight is a concern. As the Bill stands, the police will be able to seize a passport based on their own judgment of reasonable suspicion, and there will be no judicial oversight for 14 days. Even then, a magistrate will look only at whether the police are continuing to investigate, not at whether there was reasonable suspicion in the first place. The power to seize a passport is important, but that means that it is also important that it is not abused.

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

Does my right hon. Friend believe that the apprehension of passports requires proper border agency staffing, which the Home Secretary has cut by 50%? She is now proposing to cut the police by 30,000 in the next period, which will make it extremely difficult for any of the actions set out in the Bill to be carried out.

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[Mr Khalid Mahmood]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that that is why we had to tackle the issue of the “Trojan horse” schools in Birmingham, which were deliberately separating pupils, putting young girls to the back of the class and not giving them the same opportunities as boys, further reinforcing that stereotype?

[Hazel Blears]

My hon. Friend is so right. I would like to place on the record my huge admiration for the courage he has shown in his community by standing up to some of the voices of reaction. That is never an easy place to be when taking a stand for something one believes in so strongly. He is second to none in the way he has enabled ordinary people in his community to speak out. They did not want that going on in their schools; they wanted their schools to educate their children for the future, not the past. He has done an amazing job.

My second question to the Minister is this: where is the collective work happening? Tackling the threat is an issue for us all—parents, all of us in this House and people in the community. When we see people starting to be led down the extremist path, we have a responsibility to act. Even before that point there is work to be done in increasing the resilience of communities to withstand the extremist message. Again, that is difficult to do. My right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East asked what the evidence is for a tipping point. The truth is that it is complicated and we do not have all the answers, but I am absolutely convinced that it is not enough just to deal with individuals who are already radicalised, to refer to the Channel group, to have a panel discussion and to come up with a bespoke programme for that individual. That is not enough. It is essential, but it has to be complemented by work that empowers people in the community, the decent vast majority of Muslims in our country who feel absolutely betrayed by this perversion of their faith. They have to be empowered to stand up, be counted, push that message back and gather the consensus around the majority of the community. I do not see that in this Bill, and I want to.

I want to put on the record my personal position on this, because there is a lot of confusion about it. As I think the Minister knows, I have always supported action against non-violent extremism as well as violent extremism. I did not always get 100% of my way—I am sure that the Home Secretary has experience of not always getting 100% of her way in Cabinet—but my personal position has always been that it is not enough to tackle violent extremism; we must also tackle the conditions in which it is allowed to become the accepted discourse and dialogue. That is where our strategy should be.

I have no problem with the Home Office leading on Channel and on the police and the agencies, but I agree with the hon. Member for New Forest East that we need a broader view on this agenda, because there are so many Government Departments involved. I do not think that the Department for Communities and Local Government should lead on this, but I believe that it has a role to play in bringing communities together. I am very disappointed by that Department’s lack of action and its failure to produce a counter-extremism strategy. We have had a statement, but we have seen no action to back it up over the past three years. I think that the issue is now incredibly pressing.

I will briefly say something on de-radicalisation. It is an even newer field and we have even less best practice on it. A very good European Union study by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue has given examples from other countries, but they are mainly based on bringing people out of far-right extremism. The Islamist threat has not yet been explored enough. We need to do more work on that. People in this country are doing great work, including Shiraz Maher from the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, Fiyaz Mughal of Faith Matters, and those at the JAN Trust and the Active Change Foundation. We have some great, great people whom we need to support to make a difference.

I conclude with what the Prime Minister said—credit where it is due—in his Munich speech three and a half years ago:

“This terrorism is completely indiscriminate and has been thrust upon us. It cannot be ignored or contained; we have to confront it with confidence—confront the ideology that drives it by defeating the ideas that warp so many young minds at their root, and confront the issues of identity that sustain it by standing for a much broader and generous vision of citizenship in our countries.”

Our country is a great place for people to live and grow up—a country of freedom, tolerance and inclusivity. We have to stand for those values and stand against the wicked, pernicious, narrow, divisive extremist agenda that is unfortunately pervading so many of our young people.

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[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.