Murder of Lee Rigby

Malcolm Rifkind Excerpts

Tuesday 25th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his remarks and for how he has approached this subject. He was right to praise the ISC—it has done a good job—and our agencies; and of course he was right that whereas the terrorist only has to get lucky once, our agencies need to succeed on every occasion.

I shall try to respond to the right hon. Gentleman’s questions. He said we were right to increase resources, and although these are modest additional resources, it is worth pointing out that funding for the security and intelligence services has increased by 5% in cash terms since 2010. Compared to other departments, therefore, it has had a very good settlement, as is right, and that has continued in the 2013 spending round.

The right hon. Gentleman said it was necessary to learn lessons on more rapid decision making and better triaging of cases, particularly when they appear on the fringes of more than one investigation. MI5 has said something about that already in its response today, but I think we will hear more next year. On co-ordination between the agencies and the police, MI5 is confident it now has better systems in place.

On the question about referrals to Prevent, which are considered on a case-by-case basis, the Committee rightly pointed out that referral should at least be considered in every case, but that it did not seem to have been in these two cases. On the issue of money, Lord Carlile’s review of Prevent in 2011 concluded that it should be split, with the money for integration going to the Department for Communities and Local Government, where it is now spent, and the remainder being spent on the Prevent programme, specifically to guide people away from extremism and terrorism; and the money for the latter has gone up from £35 million in 2012 to £40 million in 2014. Lord Carlile found cases of groups we would now consider to support an extremist ideology having received funding, and obviously we want to stop that happening again.

Crucially, on internet companies, the right hon. Gentleman made the sensible point that just as we are getting internet companies co-operate on the definition of unacceptable images of children and child abuse—the Government have done a lot of work on that—so exactly the same needs to happen on terrorist information. We are pushing them on that and will use today’s report to lead a debate about their social responsibility. All the action we have taken—passing legislation, employing Nigel Sheinwald to talk to the Americans and so on—is leading to better co-operation between internet companies and the agencies, but more needs to be done, although for obvious reasons I do not want to give a running commentary on each and every one.

Finally, the right hon. Gentleman asked about David Anderson. His role is very broad—he can look at the threat, the response, the capability and the important safeguards—and I think he has done excellent work on all those grounds.

[Sir Malcolm Rifkind (Kensington) (Con)]

I thank the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition for their welcome for the Committee’s report. I also draw attention to the unprecedented support and co-operation we have had from the intelligence agencies, particularly MI5, which have provided us with all the classified material. In the 190 pages of our report, we have been able to publish for the public more such material than ever before in the history of these matters. There are redactions, but none of them, even if they could be read, would affect the substance of our conclusions and recommendations.

We make some severe criticisms of the agencies, as can be seen in the report, but we have seen no evidence that, even had these errors not been made, the tragic murder of Fusilier Rigby could have been avoided. As the Prime Minister said, there was one online exchange, which came to knowledge some months after the murder of Fusilier Rigby, revealing that Michael Adebowale, months before the murder, had discussed his desire to kill a soldier and that he made various other comments that we refer to in the report. If that intelligence—the one piece of hard evidence that we have seen—had been available to the intelligence agencies at the time, it is at least possible that the murder of Fusilier Rigby could have been avoided.

The Prime Minister has indicated the problem with regard to United States communications providers—the internet companies—and I want to put one question to him. If these United States internet companies feel able to cancel the accounts of some of their clients when their systems demonstrate that either terrorist activity or serious criminal activity are being conducted through these internet exchanges, is there any basis on which they could have an ethical or privacy objection to sharing with the authorities evidence of terrorist intent when that also appears in these same exchanges?

[The Prime Minister]

My right hon. and learned Friend puts the matter into clear perspective. Once it has been discovered on someone’s e-mail account that they are planning or plotting a terrorist outrage, it is hard to think of any justification for not passing that on to the authorities. That is exactly what my right hon. and learned Friend’s Committee finds:

“the companies should accept they have a responsibility to notify the relevant authorities when an automatic trigger indicating terrorism is activated, and allow the authorities, whether US or UK, to take the next step.”

That is absolutely right and I hope that this will trigger a debate among the internet companies themselves about the action that needs to be taken.