Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Bill

Lord Tyrie Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 9th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tyrie (Non-Afl) (Maiden Speech)]

I have just heard the latest in a long line of extremely interesting and informative speeches. The enormous expertise in this House is clearly on view and I have learnt a great deal already. It is certainly an honour to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, who spoke from considerable personal experience. This is also an opportunity to say how impressed I was, if that is permitted from one maiden to another, by the maiden speech of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier. I know him as a reliable and thoughtful person—one of the most reliable and thoughtful people in public life—but much more importantly he is also a very good friend.

For me, this House is a curious mixture of the familiar and the surprisingly new. On the latter, I have benefited a great deal from the guidance of the staff: doorkeepers, librarians and clerks among them. I would particularly like to thank my sponsors, one of whom is sitting next but one to my right: the noble Lords, Lord Luce and Lord Turnbull. They have been very kind to me and are two people who have made exceptional contributions to public life, and on whose advice I have been fortunate enough to call on a good number of occasions not only in recent weeks but over many years. They are two outstanding public servants.

I am making this speech from the Cross Benches because, as chairman of the Competition and Markets Authority, that is the right place for me to be. The CMA has some major challenges ahead, not least Brexit—I have to mention it somewhere—but those will be manageable because the CMA has, as I am now discovering, some exceptionally able and dedicated people aboard. Those challenges, and competition policy more widely, are not for now; they are for another day.

I have just completed an exhilarating 20 years in the other place and it was a great privilege to represent Chichester. More important than the beauty of the area, or even the fact that it returned me five times with increased majorities, has been the chance to make many deep friendships. I hope and intend to keep those for life. As I was clearing out my office at the other end of the building last year, I came across a letter from a resident of the parish of Tyrie in Aberdeenshire, which I received shortly after I was first elected. I have it here and it reads:

“If you ever went into the House of Lords … you could become Lord Tyrie of Tyrie. And, if you moved up here”,


the correspondent went on—I suppose there were perhaps some properties for sale up there—

“you would be Lord Tyrie of Tyrie, Tyrie”.

I am grateful to that citizen of Tyrie for his suggestion, but I hope he will understand that I would rather stick to Chichester, where I have put down deep roots and to which I owe a great deal.

About the same time that I got that letter 20 years ago, the Conservative Party, reduced to 165 MPs, was locked in a bitter row with itself about Europe, much as it was when the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, arrived five years earlier. At about that time, I happened to hear a speech by the late Sir Denis Thatcher. He was asked from the floor how the Tory party was going to get out of that mess, to which he replied: “Well, it’s all very straightforward. All we have to do is stick to our values”. He then thought for a bit and said, “But don’t ask me what they are”.

In today’s debate, and particularly with respect to anti-terrorist legislation generally, it is the values not of a political party but of the country that are at stake. I have no particular expertise in that field, but it seems to me that legislation is certainly needed to respond to the digital age, so I shall not oppose the Bill and I welcome its intent. None the less, the noble Lord, Lord Marks, made a trenchant point with his four tests and I think the noble Lord, Lord King, acknowledged the same point. As both of them implied, the issue before us is to reconcile the requirements of a free society and the needs of those who work to protect us from terrorism. We should bear in mind that they do that work in an outstanding manner and in very difficult circumstances.

Rather than examine that issue in depth in relation to the Bill, I prefer to take advantage of the licence I am told is afforded to a maiden speech and the Long Title of the Bill, which is very broad, to raise one aspect of anti-terrorist policy where successive Governments have fallen short.

In the years following 9/11, Britain facilitated a US programme of extraordinary rendition. Just to be clear what we are talking about, in the 21st century Britain facilitated the kidnapping of people and having them taken to places where they could be maltreated and, in some cases, brutally tortured. I was shocked when I first heard those allegations, and I still am. That is why in 2005 I founded the All-Party Group on Extraordinary Rendition. My purpose was to find out the scope and limits of Britain’s complicity, to establish who authorised it and to do whatever was required to give us greater confidence that it would not happen again.

Since 2005, there have been three inquiries, all of them at least partly prompted by the group I founded. The first, by the ISC in 2007, completely erroneously concluded that Britain had not been involved at all. The second, a judge-led inquiry that I persuaded David Cameron to establish in the months before the 2010 election, was closed down before it had a chance to get very far. The third, another by the ISC, has just completed its work and has done its best but, by its own admission, has not been able to get to the bottom of the issue. That it failed to do so is scarcely surprising. The Prime Minister blocked the ISC’s access to almost all the relevant witnesses. It is clear from the report that in response to that the ISC closed down its inquiry. The ISC did not examine some of the toughest cases, such as Belhaj, who was rendered with UK assistance to Libya, nor detainee transfer in theatre.

How involved were Ministers in those decisions? We still do not know, and we still do not know what really happened. For much of the past 13 years, it has been an uphill struggle to elicit much information. Denials were frequent and often pretty comprehensive, if completely wrong. Here is Jack Straw’s in 2005, when he was Foreign Secretary, in response to a question I asked a colleague to ask at the Foreign Affairs Committee:

“Unless we all start to believe in conspiracy theories and that the officials are lying, that I am lying ... there simply is no truth in the claims that the United Kingdom has been involved in rendition full stop”.


Only a couple of years ago, I was assured by a very senior civil servant that there were only a handful of cases. Now the ISC has established that the UK was involved in more than 70. I do not think this issue can be left unaddressed. The question is how to address it. More than a decade ago I concluded that only a judge-led inquiry could hope to clear this up and enable us to move on. That inquiry is still needed, and I am very pleased that Ken Clarke, the former Justice Secretary who suspended the first judge-led inquiry, now agrees.

Freedom of information will not achieve much in the UK on rendition now that its effectiveness has been greatly curtailed by the Justice and Security Act, but in the US the group’s FOI requests are now eliciting significant further information which the group will put into the public domain. It could be that FOI in the US becomes the best remaining source on UK involvement, given that so many domestic avenues towards more information have been closed off. But best of all would be a judge-led inquiry, which would also be able independently to assess what can reasonably be put into the public domain and what must not be. Clearly, much of the information might carry operational risk for those in the security services today and should remain secret.

It is not just that kidnap and torture is deeply repugnant or even—which is the case—that it is probably ineffective as a means of gathering information. It is much worse than that. Complicity in kidnap and torture eats away at the moral authority of the perpetrators. To the extent that the UK has facilitated such practices, we have diminished ourselves and we have undermined the values that we seek to export. That is why getting to the truth about rendition is not some recondite backwater but goes to the heart of the kind of society that we aspire to be. In the age of Trump, Putin, fake news and the erosion of trust in the electorates of western democracies that is now taking place, it is all the more important that we stick to our values and on that issue, unlike Sir Denis perhaps, we know what those values are. That is why we now need to stick to those values and get to the truth on rendition.