Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill

Lord Scriven Excerpts

Wednesday 4th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, my name is attached to Amendments 13A and 13B. I want to comment on my noble friend Lady Buscombe’s contribution a minute ago. I am not sure that it helped the Minister. I think it explained why we need Amendments 13A and 13B, because the most important thing about implementing Prevent is to recognise that each of our communities differs and that each community, area and specified authority should have due regard to the impact in order to understand it and to pass that message back to central government to understand the change in the nature of terrorism and radicalisation.

That is why I believe that Amendment 13B is valid. It is an extra tool in the box to make sure that we are monitoring what is happening, at whatever level and in whatever specified authority, to the range of people it is going to affect—including, interestingly, pupils who are under sixth form and under student age. What is happening is not consistent across the country. There may be young girls in one area talking about going to Syria; there are young Muslim British girls in other areas who are appalled by that. As a society we need to understand the nuances of that. The briefing that we have had from the Muslim Council of Britain sets that out very clearly. The one thing that we must do is to make sure that we do not have alienation on a grand scale. We need to understand that what is happening is not the same in every single community.

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, support my noble friend in Amendment 13A. I want to share my experience as a former leader of Sheffield City Council to say how difficult this is. We make a grave mistake by talking about the Muslim community as though it is a homogenous group of people. They are people with many different beliefs, different processes and different understandings of what is happening worldwide. When I was leader of Sheffield City Council, very strict central guidelines came in with Prevent. That ended up setting not just community against community but different people of the same community against each other, because we were not allowed to have leeway to make judgments or to put in place policies and practices that were relevant to our local context.

What became clear to me, and to many other council leaders across the country, was that unless we got it right from a bottom-up approach, by working with and for those different people in the community, we would alienate more people than we brought in. One of the key findings of the Audit Commission report on the last Prevent programme back in 2008 was that there should be more of a bottom-up than a top-down approach. I have no doubt that the Government’s intentions are well meaning. I have no doubt that there is a view that if you have a set of guidelines from somebody in Whitehall, it is applicable across the country. However, my personal experience tells me that it is best to be more bottom-up than top-down on these issues, otherwise we will not just set community against community but cause tension because of the people within those communities who have different opinions.

I ask the Minister to consider this amendment very seriously. Past experience of my own and the Audit Commission report of 2008 make it very clear: a top-down approach which does not take this into consideration as a major part of implementing Prevent will have unintended consequences and will mean that we have good intentions but bad implementation of something that we all support.

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, commend this amendment for very serious consideration by the Government. We all have different experiences in life. As the House will know, I have spent a good deal of my life with the developing world, and have learnt a great deal from the experience. To put it as succinctly as I can, if I have learnt one overriding message above all, it is that if you are trying to strengthen communities you must not talk at them or about them but with them.

I may have mentioned this in the House before and, in that case, I do not apologise for repeating it. I remember the Bishop of San Cristobal making a brave stand for the Indians in Chiapas, in Mexico, who were being persecuted very badly. I said to him, “Have you got a message for us back in Britain?”. He said, “Yes, I have. What is important is solidarity. You speak about people, you talk to them, but how often do you really listen to them, work with them and build with them their strength and future?” We cannot overemphasise the danger and the urgency in this situation, but whatever we do, we must not inadvertently stereotype people and put them on the defensive, because that does not help. Even in the most normal times—if we can talk about normal times with all our recent experiences—successful policing always seems to me to be the policing that works with the community and not just in it. From that standpoint, this amendment touches on very important principles about building confidence and building upwards.

It strikes me, just from my experience as a citizen, like most other people in this House, that the great horror of terrorism is that it involves a very small number of people. Terrorism works most effectively when there is a climate of ambivalence around the people who do the terrible things. There are people who sometimes feel, “I could never do that, and it’s horrible, but I can understand people doing that because of how they find the reality of living in this situation”.