Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill

Lord Wasserman Excerpts

Tuesday 13th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wasserman (Con)]

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington, and to congratulate him on a maiden speech that was every bit as insightful and thought-provoking as one would expect from someone with his extraordinary background of experience and achievement. The noble Lord is, as he reminded us, a former British diplomat who served with great distinction in a number of key posts around the world, including as our ambassador in Syria and in Saudi Arabia. Between those postings abroad, the noble Lord was the director for the Middle East at the Foreign Office. He is probably best known to the general public as the founding chairman of Migration Watch UK, an organisation concerned with immigration to the United Kingdom. As an immigrant to this country myself I was delighted to read, on the organisation’s website, that it believes that,

“sustainable levels of properly managed immigration are of distinct benefit to our society”.

The website then states:

“Many migrants make a valuable contribution to our society in terms of both their skills and experience”.

I was grateful to see that.

The noble Lord, Lord Green, was created a life Peer in October, on the Prime Minister’s personal recommendation to Her Majesty the Queen, for his proven record of public service. This is a very rare honour and one which mere political appointees like me look upon with awe and admiration. As I am sure noble Lords will agree, the noble Lords, Lord Green of Deddington and Lord Evans of Weardale, have set a very high standard with their contributions this afternoon, and I for one look forward very much to hearing much more from them both in the coming months and years.

I welcome this Bill because it will make us safer. I have no illusions about the extent to which it will improve the safety of our country because there are no easy answers in this area of human activity—whether we are thinking about the kind of murderous outrages we saw in Paris last week, or the many other forms of serious crime that our local police forces, our National Crime Agency and our intelligence and security organisations are having to fight every day of the year. Keeping a large, multicultural and free society safe is an expensive and very complex business. It is, however, doable provided that those in charge do not rely on spectacular public gestures like the marches in Paris last Sunday but concentrate on making slow but steady progress, one step at a time. The Bill represents this step-by-step approach, particularly in Parts 1 to 4, and that is why I commend it to the House. Of course, the Bill is by no means the end of the story. There is still much more that can and needs to be done to make it more difficult for would-be terrorists to operate in this country and easier for our law enforcement and security services to keep us safe. I have no doubt, however, that the Bill will make a difference, which is why we need to get it on to the statute book as quickly as possible.

Terrorist outrages of the kind that we saw in Paris last week attract worldwide attention, and the images of police activity transmitted from such crime scenes make it appear that fighting terrorism requires a completely different kind of policing from that required to fight the serious and organised criminality with which we are much more familiar. The truth is that what the media choose to call terrorist acts are for the most part simply another form of serious criminality, and preventing them requires the very same tools and methods that our law enforcement agencies use to tackle the wide range of other serious crimes with which they have to deal every day.

I am talking here of collecting information about what is going on in our communities, a task for which we must rely mainly on the instincts and observational powers of the bobby on the beat. It involves: the careful analysis of this raw information and its conversion into useful intelligence; the deployment of effective tactics based on this intelligence; the rapid deployment of adequate human and other resources; and, finally, the relentless follow-up to ensure that the job is really done and all the lessons that can be learnt are learnt. Parts 1 to 3 will strengthen the capabilities of our law enforcement agencies in each of these areas, particularly in the key area of information and intelligence collection—which, at the end of the day, is what effective crime prevention is all about.

Many will argue that the measures I have highlighted deal only with the symptoms of terrorism: that we need to be paying more attention to its underlying causes. For such people Part 5 is what really matters, because it is aimed at reducing the risk of individuals being drawn into terrorism in the first place. I appreciate the strength of these arguments. I do not for a moment underestimate the need to devote resources to combating the odious ideology that underlies the murderous events of last week. However, these arguments remind me too much of those that we heard in the late 1980s and early 1990s in America, when crime in American cities was going through the roof. New York City alone suffered more than 2,000 homicides in a single year. The argument we heard then was that what was required was not more and better policing but social policies directed at the underlying causes of these crimes, such as dysfunctional families, poor education, bad housing, racial discrimination, unemployment and low incomes.

All these good things were tried in New York and elsewhere, and can all be justified in the name of producing a fair society. They could not, however, be justified on the grounds that they made the communities safe. What drove down the crime rates in New York and elsewhere so dramatically was not higher incomes, better houses or less discrimination: it was much more effective policing, which incorporated the collection and analysis of timely and accurate information, effective tactics, rapid deployment and relentless follow-up. So, while I welcome the Government’s proposals to devote more effort and resources to reducing the risk of people being drawn into terrorism, I hope that these resources will not be at the expense of more conventional policing.

Talking of resources, I do not think that only government resources are needed if we are to strengthen our guard against terrorist attacks. Each of us can play a part in increasing our collective security. In the same way that target-hardening activities such as better household security equipment and more effective vehicle-locking systems have reduced burglaries and car thefts, so they can protect us from terrorist attacks. For example, had the entrance to the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris been controlled by a lock mechanism that could be operated only by someone inside the office seeing on video the person requesting entry, rather than a keypad operated by someone on the street, the events of last week might never have occurred.

In the Second Reading debate in another place, my right honourable friend the Home Secretary and her shadow agreed that the first and most important duty of government is the protection and security of its citizens. I very much hope this means that no matter what happens on 7 May, the Government of the day will not decide to fund the fight against terrorism from resources that would otherwise be devoted to more conventional policing. As I said, terrorism is simply another form of serious criminality and protecting our communities against it is simply another responsibility of our law enforcement and security agencies. A safer Britain is a Britain safe against all forms of criminality, from one-off attacks by deranged individuals who see themselves as part of an international terrorist army to cybercrime, burglaries, thefts and anti-social behaviour that make up the everyday work of our local police forces. We cannot pick and choose. Public safety requires us to address all those threats and to treat each of them with equal determination and concern.