Shamima Begum

Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts

Tuesday 27th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, I am afraid I go back to my earlier Answer: it would be inappropriate to comment further on this specific case given the potential for further legal proceedings.

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)]

My Lords, when I was Home Secretary, I was told on a number of occasions that I could not take such action if it left someone stateless. I think that was confirmed by what the Minister said in his qualification. I do not hold a candle for Shamima Begum, and have never been known as a sympathiser of Islamist practices or beliefs, but is it not inappropriate and illegal to remove someone’s citizenship if it leaves them stateless? I would like a yes or no answer, because I may have been told the wrong thing when I was Home Secretary.

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

The noble Lord is right. The Home Secretary has the power to deprive any British national of citizenship status on conducive to the public good grounds, providing that such action does not leave the individual stateless. In this case, the Court of Appeal found for the Government on all grounds.

Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps

Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts

Wednesday 29th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, we are very clear that Iran poses an unacceptable threat to Israel. We have long condemned Iran’s destabilising activity throughout the region, including its political, financial and military support of several militant and proscribed groups, including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. As I said earlier, we are committed to working with the international community to ensure that Iran abides by international laws and norms and is held to account for its destabilising activities in the region.

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)]

My Lords, I understand that these are fine judgments. The suppression of terrorist organisations can often diminish our operational intelligence, so it is not an easy decision. However, the last time I intervened on this subject was in 2010 in the House of Commons. The Government have had 14 years to review the situation, which the Minister told us was constantly under review. Can he tell us anything that has happened during those 14 years which suggests that we should do other than ban this organisation?

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

I pay tribute to the noble Lord’s extensive experience in this area and his perspective on it. These are obviously finely calibrated judgments. I am afraid that I will not speculate on what information has been considered over the past 14 years; it would be unwise of me to do so.

Asylum: Channel Crossings

Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts

Tuesday 27th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

As I have said many times in this House while the noble Baroness has been present, the reason why asylum seekers are not initially allowed to work is in order to prevent a very large pull factor encouraging illegal migration.

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)]

Can the Minister please give us the total figure of the number of asylum claims that have not been concluded? He gave a figure of 92,500, which, presumably, is the number of cases that have not been started. However, there may be many that have been started—a file has been opened—and which are excluded from that 92,500. Can the Minister give us the total number of asylum claims that have not been finished or started?

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

Of course, I do not have those statistics to hand but they are available on the GOV.UK website. The latest statistics release, covering 1 January 2023 to 31 March 2023, shows that during that period 3,793 people arrived in the UK having crossed the channel by small boat. The next quarter of statistics is due to be published on 24 August 2023. As the noble Lord is aware, the Home Office needs to ensure that information intended for publication meets the standards and requirements set for departmental publications.

Public Order Act 1986 (Serious Disruption to the Life of the Community) Regulations 2023

Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts

Tuesday 13th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)]

With respect, no one is trying to stop this Chamber expressing its view on this or anything else. What it is trying to stop is the assumption that it is this Chamber that makes the final decision. It is not. It is essential for the maintenance of the constitutional arrangements we have that we always respect the elected House, which, as my noble friend said, has to own those policies because it is directly responsible to the electorate. So it is not about discussing, it is not about revising, it is about who takes the final decision.

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

I totally understand that, and it is customary in this House to ask the other place to think again. I am not suggesting that we should have the final word; I am suggesting that tonight we should vote down these regulations and invite—require, ask—the other place to think again and to consider whether it really thinks it appropriate to proceed by way of what we all agree is a constitutional outrage, as the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, said. There are occasions when we have to stand up for constitutional principle, and this is one of them. If the other place sends it back again, no doubt we will give way because it is the elected House, but we are entitled to express our view in an effective manner. It is all very well regretting, but it has no effect whatever.

I agree with the comments of my colleague Tom Hickman KC and his co-author Gabriel Tan in the blog that they put on the website of UK Constitutional Law Association. They wrote, and they are right, that the Government are seeking to obtain through the back door of Parliament what they have been denied at the front door. It is, they say, a

“remarkable act of constitutional chutzpah”,

and they are absolutely right.

It does not stop there because, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, rightly said, the original Explanatory Memorandum to these regulations—I have not seen today’s amended, improved version—nowhere mentions that these amendments were defeated when they were proposed to the Public Order Bill. It is worse than that, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, knows, but it is astonishing that the Explanatory Memorandum at paragraph 3.1, under the heading “Matters of special interest to Parliament: Matters of special interest to the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments”, has this entry: “None”. Is that not extraordinary? Does it not demonstrate the contempt which the Government have in this context for the proper processes of legislation in these matters?

Police Misconduct Cases

Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts

Monday 6th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for not accusing me this week of being incompetent, at least. I will do my very best to find out the answer to that question.

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)]

My Lords, would the Minister like to address the question asked by my noble friend Lord Hunt? It was not about an ongoing investigation. It was a point of principle. Does he accept that there are circumstances under which the Home Secretary can carry out an investigation under the statutory powers already available? As a matter of principle, does he accept that?

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

As a matter of principle, yes, I do.

Civil Servants: Reduction in Numbers

Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts

Wednesday 15th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

What I can say to my noble friend is that the reductions will be laid out in more detail in due course. I cannot give her an answer, because I suspect that there is not one at this time.

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)]

Can the Minister provide figures for the effect of the Covid lockdown on passport applications, and of the rise or diminution in Covid lockdown regulations on subsequent passport applications?

Nationality and Borders Bill

Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 5th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)]

My Lords, may I courteously suggest to Ministers that, if I have judged the flavour of the opinions in the House correctly, they could quite easily convey to the Home Secretary the feelings of the House when they tell her that there was absolute concord of views between not only my noble friend Lord Rosser and the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, but my noble friends Lady Chakrabarti and Lord Blunkett and myself? I have never known any other subject on which that could have been said.

When the Home Secretary said that the asylum system was broken, I confess that I felt a frisson of déjà vu. Like my noble friend Lord Blunkett, when I began to hear the suggested proposals to remedy the situation, I had a faint echo in my mind of suggestions many years ago from civil servants which seemed to bear a faint resemblance to some of the ideas that are now being put forward. My Minister at the time, my noble friend Lord Coaker, is nodding in agreement. We rejected them because they were wrong, either morally, politically or internationally, in terms of creating an international alliance, or simply because they would not work. So in all sincerity I ask the Minister to please convey this back, because I will give the reason for it at the end.

Like other noble Lords, of course I am concerned. As we have heard, the Bill was published before any formal response to the consultation. The UNHCR disagrees with the Home Secretary’s statement that it complies with our obligations under the 1951 Act. It would allow the Government to create offshore camps. It will not work. It has not worked anywhere. Every time I see one of these headlines coming out of the Home Office, I wonder how extraordinary the next one will be. I was waiting for somebody to suggest St Helena or Elba, which have been used in the past against intransigent foreigners such as Napoleon. Every proposal like this that is put forward must be sustainable and realisable, otherwise people will recognise that it is a political debate of headlines that is going on and nothing is changing in terms of making the system better.

These and other points concern me, but my greatest worry about this piece of legislation, as well as the other things that have been brought forward on this subject by the Government, is that they always address themselves to the symptoms of the problem and never the underlying causes. The reality is that for 40 years, ever since the Iron Curtain was raised, or at least fell apart, there have been accelerating drivers of emigration. When I was Home Secretary, 200 million people got up every year and moved somewhere else, not just to visit but to stay. War, persecution, famine and climate change, which was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Desai, and others, have driven unprecedented numbers of refugees around the world, probably about 80 million. At present, the globalisation of media and communications has made it plain that there is a better world somewhere else that I can go to if I am suffering in that fashion. We have internationalised travel: the EU’s external borders are porous and the EU’s determination to provide limitless internal travel throughout Europe through the Schengen process offers ample opportunities for anyone coming in from their external borders.

I will make this point. The Government will not solve this problem by trying to put a stopper in the distance between Dover and Calais. This is a much deeper strategic problem that will be solved only by international co-operation, international concord and international plans. That is why it is a tragedy that we have had cuts in the aid budget—which are hardly calculated to address the underlying problems—and the abolition of the Department for International Development. Likewise, leaving the EU reduces our ability. A mad spat between the Prime Minister and the President of France and name calling are hardly calculated to do it—but it is only at that level that we would do it, and it would be better and wiser under those circumstances to underpromise and overdeliver, rather than overpromise and fail to deliver, and I am afraid that once again that is what this Bill will do.

Law Enforcement and Security (Separation Issues etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020

Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts

Thursday 26th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)]

My Lords, first, I thank the Minister, who I think is aiming for the Stakhanovite prize for her endeavours at the Dispatch Box.

I say right at the beginning that it is a bit of an obfuscation for the Minister to say that the regulations are scenario-neutral. They are in the limited sense, in that whatever the nature of the deal, they will be put through, but of course they are being introduced in the whole context of Brexit, which is the biggest change imaginable in the scenario for law enforcement and counterterrorism. The Minister’s allusion to the neutral scenario reminded me that one old philosopher used to say, “We have free will”, but, as he pointed out, we do not have free will in circumstances of our own choosing. So the regulations might be scenario-neutral but they are in the wider scenario of Brexit, and that is what I want to refer to today.

Obviously, as the Minister implied, I, like others in the House, will not oppose these regulations. It is in all our interests to have confidence in our law enforcement capabilities and operations after Brexit. Therefore, I do not intend to oppose them but I want to make some observations.

The first and most obvious to everyone is the desperate lack of time available for our law enforcement agencies to adjust to any new framework or operational procedures. It is obvious that we are now only weeks away from the end of the transition period and still the two parties—like children in the playground playing “Don’t push me or I’ll push you”—are issuing statements every week without any word of substantial advance in them. Meanwhile, our law enforcement and security services still do not know what legal regulatory framework they will be operating under after New Year’s Day. Nor do they know what the practical impact or implications of any security and criminal justice deal will be for their ability to keep the public safe.

Will the Minister therefore tell us how the Government have engaged with our law enforcement agencies or, for that matter, with their European counterparts to ensure that the appropriate arrangements will be in place so that relevant cases can be actioned with confidence and not delayed or stopped? Later, I will refer to ECRIS, the European Criminal Records Information System, to which the Minister referred. Obviously, we need confidence that outstanding cases will not grind to a halt, as that would diminish our ability to tackle criminality and prevent terrorism.

The second issue arising from this timing pressure is the uncertainty caused. We do not know, even at this stage, whether we will have a deal or no deal. Regardless of the assertions that this measure is scenario-neutral, it will have an effect on the practical application and operational capabilities of our law enforcement agencies. In November, the Minister—not the noble Baroness but the Minister in the House of Commons—rather blithely told the House that if negotiations

“do not conclude successfully, we will move back to pre-existing tools and powers.”—[Official Report, Commons, 5/11/20; col. 528.],

as though this was, again, scenario-neutral. But presumably those pre-existing powers and tools were less effective and less satisfactory than the subsequent arrangements made within the European Union, otherwise there would have been no point in adopting the new arrangements. To reinforce that point, Mr Martin Hewitt, the chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, laid out the consequences, and I could not put it more concisely myself. He said that

“the loss of some or all of the tools will mean that, even with contingencies in place, the fallback systems will be slower, provide less visibility of information/intelligence and make joined-up working with European partners more cumbersome.”

That could not be plainer. Does the Minister therefore accept that a failure to conclude negotiations successfully will inevitably involve a deterioration in our capacity to combat crime and insecurity, as laid out by Mr Martin Hewitt, who presumably knows a little bit about these matters? I have some specific questions for the Minister. In her opinion, what is the likelihood of that situation arising? What contingency plans are in place for the loss of these vital tools? What is the certainty regarding Europol arrangements or the Schengen Information System? What about the loss of the European Criminal Records Information System, which effects about 4,000 requests every month? If I understood the Minister correctly, applications that are already in that system will continue. I accept that, but what about the 4,000 a month that will happen after 1 January 2021? What are the arrangements and availability of information for those? What are the details of the fast-track extradition arrangements, which are to replace capabilities enjoyed under the European arrest warrant? Is it not the case that diminished capabilities on data and information sharing would seriously damage the fight against crime, terrorism and insecurity?

The fact that such questions remain unanswered at this late stage indicates just how precarious the position is. As I said at the beginning, I am not opposing this. Today’s regulations are necessary, but they are not sufficient to inspire confidence or engender certainty that our agencies will maintain the standards of law enforcement that they have hitherto reached in order to fulfil our legal commitments on law enforcement and counterterrorism. That is why I give them my very qualified support.

Visas: Visitors from Peru

Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts

Monday 16th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ashton of Hyde (Con)]

My Lords, we cannot hear the noble Viscount, Lord Waverley, in any meaningful sense, so I suggest we move on to the next speaker.

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)]

My Lords, responding to the report that the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, referred to from the international relations committee, on the United Kingdom and Latin America, the Government accepted the assertion of the committee that there is huge commercial potential in a relationship with Latin American countries. Indeed, they went further, saying that

“Latin America has huge potential for trade and investment with the UK. As we leave the EU, we … have been increasing our focus on Latin America.”

Given that that is absolutely contemporary, would it not be beneficial from that point of view to have a more flexible and less restrictive regime? Will the Minister—who I am sure is far more influential than she admitted—press for that in any future review?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

Since the noble Lord asked so nicely, I will certainly take that back. I do not disagree with him at all that Latin America has great potential. I went to Mexico last year and I know that the Foreign Secretary has had talks with Peru. There is great untapped potential.

UK Terrorism Threat Level

Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts

Tuesday 10th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord for that question. He will agree that we have consistently provided the PSNI with additional resources to tackle the terrorism threat. In addition to funding for the Department of Justice in Northern Ireland, the UK Government have invested significantly in the PSNI, with more than £160 million invested in the 2015 Parliament.

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)]

My Lords, I too express my sympathy for the families grieving in France, Austria and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, reminded us, Kabul. This is a global struggle.

I want to press the Minister a little more on the question of resources. In my view, JTAC was correct to raise the threat level. It was precautionary, of course, but in view of what we have seen on the continent it was wise and prudent to do so. Obviously, this requires an additional operational dimension. The Minister said that there are 6,000 more police officers, although that is 14,000 short of where we were when her previous boss, Theresa May, was Home Secretary.

No doubt the Minister will also say that it is a question of operational deployment. Is it possible for the envelope of resources to be increased, either automatically or on request, commensurate with the increase in the threat level? If not, should it not be automatic that when the threat level increases, the resources to deal with it increase?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

I hope that I outlined clearly the police’s ability to request police grants. The purpose of the grants is not particularly prescriptive, but they can be sought for unexpected pressures. In a crisis, it has not been unusual for the police to request additional grants. I have talked about redeployment, so I will not talk about it again. The noble Lord knows about that.

This is in the context of the recognition that it is not just the demand on the police that has changed over the past few years in relation to the number of additional police officers; the type of threat that we face now is entirely different from the type of threat that we faced, say, 20 years ago. Now, we see cyber threats and other types of threat.