Islam: Tenets

Lord Marlesford Excerpts

Thursday 7th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Marlesford (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, has performed a useful function in introducing this sensitive and delicate subject so that we can, at any rate, discuss it. I want to focus my remarks on political Islam and its links with the many jihadist organisations that, as we have heard, inflict terror on other Muslims and on the non-Muslim world.

I have learned a lot from a lecture given on 15 November in New Haven by Sir John Jenkins. I hope that the Minister has read it and I certainly recommend it to other noble Lords. Sir John, an accomplished Arabist and British diplomat, was consul-general in Jerusalem and subsequently Her Majesty’s ambassador in Syria, in Iraq and finally in Saudi Arabia until 2015. He took an active part in the Chilcot Iraq Inquiry. In March 2014, he was appointed by the then Prime Minister Cameron to lead a policy review into the Muslim Brotherhood and political Islamism. Sir John was assisted by Charles Farr, who since December 2015 has been the chair of the JIC—the Joint Intelligence Committee—in the Cabinet.

The review was completed in July 2014 but the report was never published. Only a summary appeared, and that was in December 2015, 18 months later. However, that summary concluded with a damning statement:

“Muslim Brotherhood ideology and tactics, in this country and overseas, are contrary to our values and have been contrary to our national interests and our national security”.


Astonishingly, Prime Minister Cameron merely made a Written Statement to the House of Commons, in which he said that the Government would,

“keep under review whether the views and activities of the Muslim Brotherhood meet the legal test for proscription”.—[Official Report, Commons, 17/12/15; col. 418WS.]

The text of the Jenkins lecture is indeed illuminating to somebody from outside, like me, and I found it disturbing. First, Jenkins dismisses as “almost worthless” any attempt to place the Islamists,

“on some scale of relative extremism or moderation”.

I certainly do not intend to speak of the religion of Islam. Any analysis of its kaleidoscopic complexity and didactic variations is well beyond me. The Sufi version of Sunni Islam seems to me to be closer to what Christians could recognise as a monotheistic religion of peace and love. In the atrocity of 24 November this year in Egypt, for which Daesh has claimed responsibility, 305 Sufi Muslims—including 28 children—were shot while praying in a mosque in north Sinai.

Last Friday, Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of al-Azhar, the most ancient mosque in Cairo, and himself a Sunni, condemned this attack. This is an important step forward. Hitherto, due to the intimidation to which they are subject, very few of that great majority of the Muslim clerics who abhor the violent and cruel terrorism of political Islam as much as we do have spoken out against it.

Political Islam and the various Islamist terrorist bodies affiliated with it can no more claim religious justification for their horrific acts than could the IRA for its acts of murder during the Troubles. On 29 September 1979, Pope John Paul II, who was visiting Ireland, appealed to,

“the moral sense and Christian conviction”,

of the Irish, at his mass in Drogheda, with the words:

“Nobody may ever call murder by any other name than murder … On my knees I beg you to turn away from the paths of violence”.


That it took so long for peace to return did not mean that the Roman Catholic Church ever endorsed, justified or excused murders committed by the IRA.

I have long seen the relationship of the Muslim Brotherhood to the military wings of the Salafist Wahhabi creed, such as al-Qaeda and Daesh, as rather similar to the relationship that once existed between Sinn Fein and the IRA. The Muslim Brotherhood, originally partly based on the theories of Italian fascism, was founded in 1928 in Egypt by al-Banna, who promoted ultimate martyrdom through death in conflict. Its final aim, proclaimed by the Islamic State in April 2014, is the installation of a worldwide theocratic state, or caliphate, under Sharia law.

Theocracy is, by definition, the antithesis of democracy because, once in place, it cannot be removed by the electorate. This conflict can be most clearly observed in Iran, where a supreme leader—in this case, Shia—with the revolutionary guard as enforcers, keeps a careful check on the semi-democratically elected Government of President Rouhani. Jenkins points out:

“Links between the Brotherhood and the Khomeinist trend in Iran go back as far as the 1950s”.


The Muslim Brotherhood operates with much tactical skill. It assassinated President Sadat in October 1981 after he had made peace with Israel. It achieved full power in Egypt through the ballot box in January 2012, only to be ejected by popular protest, supported by the army, in July 2013 following economic chaos. Jenkins concludes that,

“if Egypt had fallen to the Brotherhood, the whole of North Africa would have eventually become a bastion of political Islamism”.

It is said that in 2005, after the 7/7 attack on London transport in which 56 people died, the Brotherhood claimed to be working to prevent further attacks on Britain. That is perhaps why HMG have left them alone. It should be noted that the European leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Ibrahim Munir, has lived in London for many years. I understand that he is likely soon to become the group’s world leader.

The Anderson report on terrorism, published on Monday, makes extensive reference to the background of the Manchester bomber Salman Abedi, but fails to refer to the fact that his father, Ramadan Abedi, was part of the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood and a former al-Qaeda operative in Libya. Last week, 33 members of the US Congress wrote to Secretary of State Tillerson urging him to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organisation. I believe that the time may have come for us to do the same here.

Mohammed Mirzo

Lord Marlesford Excerpts

Thursday 19th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Marlesford (Con)]

My Lords, my right honourable friend the Defence Secretary recently warned British jihadists who go out to fight for ISIS that they may find themselves at the wrong end of an American or British missile. Would it be sensible to extend that warning to those British jihadists who go out to fight for ISIL that they will not be allowed to return to the UK?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My noble friend quite skilfully completely departs from the Question, but the word “Syrian” is in the Question, so I admire him for his efforts. What would happen would depend on the case. People who have been to Syria to fight are dealt with using the full force of the law if and when they return, and many do not return.

Data Protection Bill [HL]

Lord Marlesford Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Tuesday 10th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Marlesford (Con)]

My Lords, I very much agreed with those who said that the regulation must certainly apply to the big boys in the computer and digital world. I shuddered when the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, quoted from that wholly incomprehensible Brussels jargon from the regulations.

I received last week a letter as chair of Marlesford Parish Council. We have seven members and only 230 people live in Marlesford. Our precept is only £1,000 a year. A letter from the National Association of Local Councils warned me that the GDPR will impose,

“a legal obligation to appoint a Digital Protection Officer … this appointment may not be as straightforward as you may be assuming, as while it may be possible to appoint an existing member of staff”—

we have no staff, just a part-time parish clerk who is basically a volunteer. It continues:

“They must by requirement of regulations possess ‘expert knowledge of data protection law and practices’”.


I am afraid that will not be found in most small villages in the country, so I hope that one result of this Bill will be to introduce an element of proportionality in how it is to apply, otherwise the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, who was so right to draw our attention to the threat of incomprehensibility, will be right and we will all lose the plot.

The time has come to have a reliable and secure link between the state and its citizens, and the capabilities of the digital world that underlie this Bill give us that opportunity. There are good reasons for that. First, apart from the excellent national census which was founded in 1841, with the latest information having been collected in the 2011 census, Governments have an imperfect knowledge of their customers, paymasters or stakeholders—whatever you would like to call the rest of us. The various links have many defects which result in serious failures in the duties and obligations of the state. The first of those is to ensure that those who need financial help or support get it and do not go short as a result of funds going to those who do not need them or are not entitled to them. In this, the national insurance system has been incredibly difficult to organise properly. Again and again people have tried, and again and again they have failed.

Secondly, the National Health Service, which many of us believe to be a pillar of our British way of life, is chronically short of funds. Large sums are spent on free medical treatment for those who are not entitled to it. For example, under the reciprocal healthcare scheme within the EU, which is based on repayments made by each EU Government, we pay more than 10 times as much to other EU Governments for their treatment of our citizens as we collect for treating theirs. That is a gap of £500 million. In the case of the NHS treatment of non-EU citizens, the failure to collect charges now costs £1 billion a year.

Thirdly, control of our borders is inadequate, largely due to the failure of our passport system, an issue I have raised many times in your Lordships’ House.

Fourthly, there are serious defects in policing, combating digital crime and other aspects of law and order. To give just two examples, there are problems for our security services in protecting us from terrorism and identity theft, which is a growing problem. My proposal involves giving every citizen a unique identification number that would be backed by centrally held biometrics to confirm the identity of the citizen. The UIN would supplement and eventually replace the plethora of other state numbers, which include those for national insurance, the registry of births and deaths, national health, HMRC, passports, driving licences, the police national computer, the national firearms register and custodial sentences. Citizens would be required to know their own UIN and to give it to those with a legitimate reason to ask for it. The UIN would be printed on passports, driving licences and so on. To assist those without such documents, it might be helpful to make available a plastic card with the person’s name and UIN. Such a card would not be mandatory and it would have no validity in and of itself. It would not of course be an identity card, any more than a credit card or business card would be. Needless to say, it would have no biometrics of any sort on it.

Access to the biometrics would be carefully restricted to those on a need-to-use basis, and those with such access would have data relevant only to their need to know. The verification process would be based on real-time use of the biometrics. The authority would take the biometrics from an individual when necessary, and such action would be limited to appropriate members of government agencies. They would include the police, immigration officers, security people and so on. The biometrics could then be compared with the central record. Important decisions to be made would include which biometrics should be used, such as facial recognition techniques, fingerprints and so forth. The introduction of the UIN would be gradual, depending on the logistics of collecting the biometrics. Existing numbers would continue to be used for a while. Proper data protection would be key to the viability, security, integrity and public acceptability of the UIN. All I am asking is for Her Majesty’s Government to set up a study of what I propose. I am afraid I am not very confident that they will.

In 1997, I tabled an amendment to the Firearms (Amendment) Bill to set up a national electronic record of all firearms, similar to the excellent one that had long been in use by the DVLA. The amendment was passed and became part of the Act, but for the next 10 years the Home Office used every technique from the “Yes Minister” book to resist implementing it. Thanks to widespread support in this House—including from, if I may so, the noble Lord, Lord McNally, in his ministerial position—the amendment was eventually accepted and it has been in useful operation for the past 10 years.

However, I am worried about whether the Government always move as fast as they should on these computer matters. Sometimes they seem rather out of their depth. I remember, in 1966, as a keen young member of the Conservative Research Department, I was sent to carry the bag and take notes for Ernest Marples, a great political figure, around the world, to America and Japan, to see how we could use new techniques—electronic techniques and all the rest—to run the Government better. When I came back, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I met a very senior official, a charming Under-Secretary from the Ministry of Health. I said to him, “You know, I’ve just been in America and Conrad Hilton has this wonderful system. He tracks everything that happens in his hotels: where the money goes, what the clients do and all the rest of it. Your hospitals are really rather like hotels—couldn’t you start doing the same?” He looked at me and shook his head and said, “Mark, before we spend government money on computers, we have to be sure they are here to stay”.

Prevent Strategy

Lord Marlesford Excerpts

Wednesday 6th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My Lords, the Government take all the steps possible to make sure that there are not extremists serving in the Armed Forces. Clearly, some people hide those sentiments and the events of yesterday were clear to see. Just as we are tackling Islamist extremism, so we must tackle the far right.

[Lord Marlesford (Con)]

My Lords, is my noble friend’s Question not in danger of making a distinction where there is actually little difference? In the case of political Islam, which she referred to, is this not rather well represented in both cases by the Muslim Brotherhood, which seems to me to be rather like Sinn Fein was to the IRA?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My Lords, there clearly is a distinction between people who hold extremist views and promote those views to others, and those who actually go on to commit acts of terrorism. That is why we make a distinction between the two, with the former group being tackled on all sides by some of the programmes and engagement that we have with communities throughout this country.

Security: ID Cards

Lord Marlesford Excerpts

Thursday 20th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Marlesford (Con)]

My Lords, I hope my noble friend the Minister recognises that knowing who people are is a pretty crucial ingredient of national security. I am not particularly keen on identity cards because a competent forger nowadays can forge any document, including biometrics. What is needed is a national number with biometrics, held nationally, which everyone has instead of the plethora of numbers, most of which mean nothing at all. Will the Minister at least study the need for and the possibility of introducing a national identity number?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My Lords, we have many numbers that help in assuring our identity. I am not sure that this would add to the mix. I am certainly happy to look at this, but I do not think there is any evidence that a national identity number would improve security in this country. I have already outlined to the noble Lord, Lord Blair, how this country is helping to make us safer.

Security in the UK

Lord Marlesford Excerpts

Monday 10th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Marlesford (Con)]

My Lords, I start by making a small procedural point. It is awfully important that Ministers try to answer debates in your Lordships’ House, and that is why I am very glad that my noble friend Lady Williams will be answering this one. We want to hear her views; we do not just want to hear the standard opinion of Home Office officials, who all too often regard any outside view as a rather impertinent interference and reflection on the competence with which they deal with their mandate. One of the best Ministers whom I have known in the 25 years that I have been in this House was the noble Lord, Lord Rooker. He took charge of and sorted out, rather than defended, the Defra administrative shambles over the payment of Brussels money to British farmers. However, speaking as a farmer, I suggest that national security is perhaps rather more important than that.

When, on 27 June, we debated Home Office affairs in the Queen’s Speech debate, I raised a number of points. Understandably the Minister could not answer them because, first, it was a different Minister and, secondly, there had been about 50 speakers with five minutes each. Last week I rang up the department of my noble friend Lady Williams to ask whether there was any intention of giving me any sort of answer in writing—the Minister answering the other debate had said that he would—and I was told that I would get an email to tell me whether the Minister would be commenting or answering, but so far there has been radio silence. Therefore, I do not apologise to the Minister for again referring to some of the points that I made on that occasion.

I suggest that the greatest threat to our security in the UK comes from political Islam and, in particular, from its military wing, Islamic State or ISIS. It has dwarfed most of the earlier jihadist organisations such as al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab and so on, and has sought to embrace them. Since IS announced its arrival three years ago with the aim of creating a worldwide caliphate, we have seen enough of its brutal methods to be able to classify it as a fundamentally fascist movement clad in the cloak of Islam. Until religious Islam strips away that cloak, exposing and denouncing ISIS, or Daesh, as the contemptible terrorist outfit that most Arabs in the Middle East as well as the Iranians, Turks and many others regard it, we in the UK will be limited as to what we can do to protect ourselves from its influence and activities.

IS also has a political cover. In this, it is remarkably similar to Soviet Bolshevism. It is not communism that is being sought but Islamist theocracy administering sharia law, which is every bit as threatening as the now discarded belief of communism once was.

Along with the threat from political Islam is the huge challenge that, very largely, it has spawned: the mass migration of people. I remind your Lordships of the figures from the UNHCR. Worldwide, 65.6 million people were forcibly displaced at the end of 2016. Of these, 22.5 million were seeking safety across national borders as refugees, which is the highest number since the UNHCR was founded in 1950 to deal with the tragic legacy of World War II. The biggest number of refugees is 5.5 million from Syria, followed by 3.3 million from South Sudan. At the end of last year, 2.8 million people were still seeking asylum. By far the largest number—over 80% of refugees—were in developing or middle-income countries, with some of the poorest countries hosting huge numbers: Turkey, 2.9 million; Pakistan, 1.3 million; and little Lebanon, 1.1 million, which is almost 20% of its population. Yet Saudi Arabia, which is about 200 times larger in scale and with three times the national income per head of Lebanon, has virtually none.

This migration is not a European challenge; it is a global challenge. That explains why the EU has been so ineffective at meeting it. Although being in the Schengen area has its advantages, as the noble Lord, Lord Ricketts, referred to, as the UK is outside this area we are, to some extent, shielded from the insensitive fumbling of the EU Commission, with its national quotas for refugees which have been largely ignored by the Schengen states.

Meanwhile, we should have the greatest sympathy for countries that have had their capacity to receive people overwhelmed by the numbers. I am thinking in particular of Italy and Greece, two of the most generous-hearted countries in Europe. Already, Italy has received more than 200,000 refugees—some 90% of them are still in emergency accommodation. By June this year, more than 60,000 had crossed the sea from Tripoli to Italy, which is a 25% increase on the same period last year. Tragically, more than 1,600 refugees have lost their lives in the crossing this year. Stranded on the tiny Greek islands are 14,000 refugees, sometimes in very poor conditions. Not surprisingly, there is growing resentment at the well-meaning but misguided rescue operations of various NGOs, which have in practice offered a ferry service and filled the pockets of the people traffickers who dispatch their victims in fragile coracles to Italy and Greece. The answer of course is that all these unfortunate victims must be rescued when in peril on the sea, but they should be returned to where they originally took passage. Some noble Lords may be aware that I have four times proposed in this House—on 9 July 2015, 23 May, 16 June and 29 October 2016—a detailed scheme for that to happen under UN auspices. Obviously, I will not repeat it again except to say that several countries are now taking an interest, but so far, sadly, HMG are not.

I now move on to some of my specific suggestions for mitigating the threat to our security today. My first point is that HMG should always make an independent proportionality assessment of the greater national good when there is a clash between the interests of national security with civil or human rights. We cannot afford the cost or risk of some of the cases in recent years where courts have had to take a precise and limited view on rights with little regard to security. We simply cannot allow another Abu Hamza, who was briefly detained in Britain in 2004 and then it took 10 years until he was sent to the United States in 2014 and sent to prison for life in January 2015.

To follow up what the noble Lord, Lord Ricketts, said, I believe that British jihadists who have travelled to take part in IS operations anywhere in the world should not be allowed back into this country whether they are British citizens or not—by naturalisation or birth. Their passports should be cancelled and their citizenship revoked. They have made their choice and if they have not died from it, they should live with it. We cannot afford to take the risk and pay the price of doing otherwise.

We also need greatly to tighten our borders. That must mean that the Passport Office should know much more about what passports other than British passports people hold. I remember pointing that out to Cressida Dick about three years ago when she was still involved in anti-terrorism in the Met. She expressed astonishment that the Passport Office did not have a record of other passports that British passport holders held. The Passport Office should also temporarily invalidate British passports held by anybody who is in prison or on bail. One of the London Bridge attackers was apparently on bail. That would mean automatic notification of instances such as that by the courts to the passport authorities. There must also be automatic electronic cancellation of passports when death is notified to the registrar. At the moment, the trouble is that a lot of passports belonging to dead people drift around and are used by living people.

It is most important that there is an automatic recording of people when they leave the country, which should be kept for at least five years, as well as of people arriving. It is absurd at present that the Home Office says, “We record departure only when it is intelligence-led”. That has not worked and it is not enough. We do not necessarily need national identity cards—I have never been keen on the cards—but we need a national identity number. We have a multiplicity of numbers, but we should all have one number that identifies a person with biometrics. Those should not be on the card, because that is quite dangerous—clever terrorists can fake cards and put biometrics on to them to say, “I am who I say I am”, but there should be a central register of the biometrics. The key thing is the number. We really must reconsider that. We also need new standards of positive vetting, as we used to have in the Cold War days, to make sure that terrorists—it has been said that there are many in the UK—cannot get into sensitive positions.

Finally, the Government really have to review the status and the position of the Muslim Brotherhood in Britain. Its links with jihad are not unlike those that Sinn Fein once had with the IRA in Ireland; it is a rather similar outfit. The MB was declared a threat to national security three years ago by Sir John Jenkins, then the British ambassador to Saudi Arabia, when he was asked to report on the organisation by David Cameron when he was Prime Minister. As noble Lords probably know, it is partly the problem of the Muslim Brotherhood which is causing the Qatar-Saudi conflict because the Saudis are Wahhabis and the Muslim Brotherhood is an alternative source of information and competition. Sadly, they are both guilty of having funded a great deal of terrorism.

Further on the Muslim Brotherhood, let us not forget that the organisation started in Egypt in 1928. Its members killed an Egyptian Prime Minister in 1949 and then killed President Sadat in 1981 because he was a peacemaker. President al-Sisi of Egypt is fighting very hard to prevent the formation of another Muslim Brotherhood Government because, frankly, the ultimate thing about all this sort of terrorism is to separate religion from the state. We cannot have the politicisation of religion in order to secure monopoly power in any country.

Terrorist Attacks

Lord Marlesford Excerpts

Thursday 22nd June 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I thank the noble Baroness for that question. I did not give much detail about the commission for countering extremism because I simply do not have much detail at this point. Recommendations will certainly come back to Parliament. There was a question in the other place earlier about Parliament feeling outside what the commission does, but Parliament will be consulted and have its say on the commission’s recommendations. As for stamping out extremism, will we always stamp out all types of extremism? No, we will not, but what we can do as a society is collectively be intolerant of extremism in our society, and the cohesion of our communities will, to a great extent, achieve this.

[Lord Marlesford (Con)]

My Lords, does my noble friend recognise that when countering terrorism, to preserve our national security, there will be occasions when there is a real and irreconcilable conflict with human rights? Will she assure the House that the Government will always carry out a careful and proportional assessment in order to decide in such cases whether counterterrorism or human rights should take precedence?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My noble friend brings up a very good point about the balance that we have in place to preserve our human rights—we will not be leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, as the manifesto makes clear—while also bringing perpetrators of terrorist atrocities to book. When we look forward, we will certainly consider whether we have got that balance right.