Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill

Mike Hancock Excerpts

Tuesday 16th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Mike Hancock (Portsmouth South) (Ind)]

I agree entirely with the right hon. Lady that we have to start the process as early as possible, but the real problem in my city, which has been suffering quite badly from extremism—we have already lost four young men and there are others still out there—is how to give confidence to families in the community that, first, they will be taken seriously, and secondly, as the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) has said, that, somehow, their children will not be punished. How do we get to the families? I have yet to hear a decent argument that will give confidence to families.

[Hazel Blears]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. The work is difficult and complex. It is not easy. During my contribution I shall give a couple of examples that I hope will reassure him that we have made more progress over the past couple of years than in the past on exactly the area he mentioned.

I want to cover several aspects. Why is this work important? Who is best placed to do it? That is a key issue. I also want to address the importance of having an online presence these days, because so much is done through social media. I also want to address the role of religious leaders and scholars. That is a controversial area, but it is absolutely essential to work with them. I shall also give some practical examples.

Why is the work important? Young people are being drawn into situations and scenarios that are absolutely horrendous for them and their families.

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[Hazel Blears]

I am very much aware of the difficulties faced by people in such circumstances. It can be a dilemma for families and friends to take those steps, but what I will go on to say might reassure the hon. Gentleman to some extent.

Sara Khan is the director and co-founder of We Will Inspire, which might be an unfortunate name, given what has been said so far in the debate. The group works with Muslim women and empowers them. Sara Khan says:

“When I was growing up I was exposed to a moderate British Islam which talked about integration, active citizenship, love for one’s neighbours and it was this theological grounding that played a significant role in making many young Muslims that I knew resilient to the extremist narrative.”

She goes on to talk about a project she did:

“Earlier this year, Inspire completed a 6 week challenging extremism programme in Leeds to help educate women about the extremist threat and taught them key theological counter-narratives to extremist ideology. Many of the participants lived doors away from the homes of the 7/7 bombers and participants time and again stated ‘if I knew this information ten years ago when my children were teenagers, I would have taught them about the issues raised in this course. This is the first time I’ve been educated on such a crucial and important topic.’ These women expressed feelings of disappointment in religious and civic Muslim leaders in not providing their children with a contextualised understanding of Islam and their inability in directly challenging extremist ideas so easily available on the internet.”

When such work is done, therefore, and people feel confident in being able to rebut those arguments, it is absolutely possible to provide that kind of community assurance.

[Mr Mike Hancock]

I agree entirely with the right hon. Lady about the role of women in the community. I have talked to women in communities in Portsmouth, some of whom have lost their sons. They wished they had had more information and had been aware of what was going on. The trouble was that those young people had been radicalised outside the home and, in most cases, outside their working environment. Most of those young men were in further education and that was where they had been radicalised, which led them to go to Syria and, ultimately, to lose their lives.

[Hazel Blears]

The hon. Gentleman is right. He will see that in schedule 3 to the Bill there is a list of educational organisations that will be subject to the general duty in clause 21. I am pleased about that, and hope that the Minister will give us the assurance that, as well as formal education institutions, madrassahs will also be covered by this kind of work. Sometimes informal educational settings do not have standards that are as robust as we would all like.

Sara Khan has also given a good example of where community resilience building has worked really well, in Bristol. Five or six years ago, when local people were worried about young people being drawn into extremism, they set up an organisation called Naseehah, which trained 25 local people to recognise radicalised people, and then support and deradicalise them using Islamic theology. A potential suicide bomber who wanted to blow up Bristol town centre was sent to prison, where he was deradicalised. He then sent a message of endorsement to the community organisation, saying how important it was to challenge extremist ideologies.

That is one of the best illustrations I have seen of preventing extremism. It is about building resilience in communities, directly challenging the ideology, supporting vulnerable individuals and then referring them on to a channel project for an early intervention. If all the parts of the circle work together, we have a really powerful mechanism. At the moment, the Minister has a general duty on Prevent and his Channel provisions, which deal with individuals. I honestly think there is a gap on challenging ideology and building the resilience of communities so that they can take that work forward.

When I have raised that matter previously in the context of the Bill, people have said that that is implicit in clause 21—if there is a duty to prevent people being drawn into terrorism we will have to challenge the ideology. If it is implicit, what is wrong with making it explicit? The Prime Minister has said time and again—in his Munich speech, for example, and in his speech in Canberra—that this is a long-term generational struggle. It therefore ought to be explicit within the legislation. [Interruption.] The Minister talks about the Prevent review, but that was in 2011. I hope to persuade him today that it is a tiny step to say that work under clause 21 will include combating ideology.

I will move on now to online messaging. We have discussed previously some of the excellent work done by Erin Saltman of Quilliam, who has pointed out that, yes, it is important to take pernicious material off the internet so that people cannot access it, but that is not enough. People will find other ways to put that information back up, perhaps via another website, as there is still the technology. Therefore, what Quilliam has classed as counter-speech is very important. The hon. Member for New Forest East has talked a lot about that issue and has a lot of in-depth knowledge on it.

Quilliam has been good at saying what that counter-speech should look like. We need three things: a good message, credible messengers and a means of getting the message across. Quilliam has made the distinction that that should be done through a partnership between civil society, the Government and local government, and has pointed out that civil society organisations are often the best placed to deliver that message. It is not always the case that the Government have to do everything; they can facilitate, help, encourage and provide financial assistance, but the people out there in civil society organisations are crucial to efforts on this matter. Quilliam has made the point that many extremist groups are themselves peripheral civil society groups, so what better way to challenge them than robust civil society groups with really good values that want to do the right thing?

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[Dr Lewis]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right and the insincerity of some of those who do these sort of things is an important issue. It is important because if we succeed in making adhesion to the ideology something that nobody in the community would want to touch with a bargepole, it makes it much more difficult for anyone motivated by the desire to say “Look at me: I’m this glamorous figure and I’m going on jihad”, particularly if they know that the rest of the community would respond with “What are you saying? Are you mad? Why do you think we should admire you for saying that you are signing up to this ideology?”

A related point common to all these totalitarianisms is this: it is interesting to note how often everybody else gets wrapped up with the historic inevitability of whatever extreme cause it is or the God-given duty to follow it, but funnily enough, it is the people at the top who always seem to end up having supreme power over everyone else. Is it not convenient if someone is an megalomaniac to have to hand an ideology that justifies doing whatever the person wants to do in a society in which civilisation has broken down? As the famous philosopher Thomas Hobbes said, life would be “nasty, brutish and short” in such circumstances.

In reality, these extreme ideologies allow psychopaths and megalomaniacs to get to the top and exercise untrammelled power—but not, of course, for themselves. No, they are doing it because God has laid down that society should be run this way. I feel that, over many hundreds of years, our civilisation has torn down this edifice of extremism, and most of us feel that we will be damned—I use the word almost literally—if we do not stand up to prevent it from being re-erected in the heart of our own society or other societies.

[Mr Mike Hancock]

I hope that the hon. Gentleman does not fall into the trap that his hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) was leading him into—of believing that these young men and women who have gone to Syria were parading themselves around the community saying that they were on their way there. I do not think that any available information suggests that that is the case. In fact, it is the very opposite of the case.

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[Mr Mike Hancock]

I apologise for not being here when the hon. Gentleman started his speech. I agree that the Iraq war was undoubtedly the tipping point, and most people now recognise that it was a mistake, but that has not stopped young Muslim men becoming radicalised. All the baring of our chests and saying “We were wrong and it was a terrible thing to do” has not changed what has happened by one iota.

[Pete Wishart]

The hon. Gentleman is right. Of course it has not changed behaviour, but we owe it to ourselves to acknowledge this issue. It is a flaw that runs all the way through a lot of the programmes to counter, or combat, radicalisation that we embark on. Unless we understand the external stimuli and the environment that were created, I am afraid we will not have any great success in these things.

There is another factor that informs this and it is some of the debates that we have in this House. If I were a young Muslim listening to some of the poisonous debate about immigration that takes place nowadays, I do not know what I would make of being told, “You’ve got to stay away from here; you’ve got to be kicked out, or sent back, or whatever”—all the inflammatory language that this House hears almost on a day-to-day basis when we debate these things. We have got to be careful, for goodness’ sake. We cannot just believe that it will all of a sudden be reasonably accepted and adopted, and that nobody will mind that this language is employed when such debates take place. Again, let us just be careful about what we do to contribute to the environment that has been created or the conditions leading to such frustration.

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[Pete Wishart]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman because he is right to say that we must see this in the round. That is one of the reasons why I have difficulties with what is suggested in the Bill. I will not support the amendment moved by the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears), as I think she knows, because I just do not like this type of language. It does not really address the difficulties we face and the things we have to take on. In looking at anti-radicalisation or ensuring that our communities are resilient in fighting against such messages, as the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) set out so eloquently, we must work holistically—in the round—and ensure that that is combined and merged with all other community issues that would help us.

We are trying to work towards that in Scotland. Historically, we have taken that approach. We have had responsibility for the Prevent programme for eight to 10 years, and I believe that we have made real progress. With our distinct legal system, we have our own means of doing this sort of thing, and we are making great attempts and efforts to do so. We just take a different view of such things: we have a different type of community and a different approach to the issues that have emerged during the past few years.

The Minister for Security and Immigration is now deep in conversation, but I hope he will allow us to pursue our agenda on such matters. Scottish public bodies that were initially listed in schedules 3 and 4 are no longer included, so I hope that the Minister, when he finishes his conversation, might be of a mind to allow us to make our own progress when it comes to such things. The Minister is now back with us. I was saying—I know he missed this—that Scotland has been excluded from the schedules of public bodies. I know that there have been conversations with the relevant Scottish Minister, and that the Minister for Security and Immigration understands that we have our own particular agenda for this sort of thing.

I hope that in time—perhaps amendments tabled during the remaining stages of the Bill will help him to come to this conclusion—we can have our own strategy without the combat and the fighting language that we do not like. We do not think it works or believe that it adds much to achieving the objective that we in this place all want, which is to make our communities safer and resilient enough to ensure that we get the right type of result and response. I hope that the Minister will be open to further suggestions that will exclude Scotland from part 5 and allow us to pursue our own agenda. We do not like some of the language, and we do not believe it works. Perhaps even in his response, he could satisfy me and my colleagues that we will be allowed to pursue our own agenda and do this our own way.

[Mr Mike Hancock]

I come to this debate with a great deal of sadness about what has happened in my own city. Six young men went out, of whom four are now dead, and one returned to the UK and is now starting a very lengthy prison sentence.

One of the saddest moments in my 45 years’ experience of politics was reading the letter that one of the lads wrote to his parents and left for them when he went to Syria. His parents sat in front of me in the office not saying that they wanted us to fight back, but really begging for something to happen or for someone to take the initiative. They could not understand how this very well educated young man, who was at university—he had a glittering career before him—could walk away from university and go to Syria without discussing it with anyone, not his local peer group or, most importantly, his parents. The last words of the letter were, “Don’t worry about what’s going to happen to me when I come back because I have no intention of coming back.” His parents read into that that he had every intention of fighting, wherever it took him. How sad it was for his mother to read that letter.

We have tried desperately hard with the community in Portsmouth. We have a large Bangladeshi community and four mosques. Portsmouth has a great, integrated society. Everyone was horrified that our city was highlighted in the way that it was and nobody could understand how it had happened. The imams in the mosques did not know, the people who run the madrassah did not know and the extended families of the young men did not know how it came about that these young men were radicalised in such a way that they were prepared to walk away from everything they had in front of them, put their lives on the line and even put it in writing that they did not believe they would be coming back. Some sort of fightback is required on the part of all of us who care about the young men and women who have done that.

I do not share the view that giving disproportionately long prison sentences to people who come back will help the situation. I do not know whether other Members have spoken to young Muslim boys who have been in prison or whether they understand the pressure that those boys are put under in prison by much older members of the faith and the other issues that they raise. We need to find a mechanism to sort that out. I am in favour of the various things that the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) exposed so eloquently. The Bradford example is a fine one. However, none of them offers an easy solution to finding the right role model who can put the alternative case to these young men and women, and do so in the right place.

Nobody has yet suggested that there is an easy way out of this situation. I have first-hand experience of the pitiful state of the families who are devastated when their young sons or daughters are killed and taken away from them. Surely the Bill goes some way towards starting the process that the mother who sat opposite me in my surgery called for when she said, “For goodness’ sake, Mike, we’ve got to find a way of preventing this. I’ve got an 11-year-old son and I’m worried about what will happen to him. What is he thinking? How will it affect him and his peer group when they talk about their brothers who have been killed fighting in a war in Syria?” It is no good just saying that they were mistaken and that they did not believe in what they were going to do. They were believers in what they were going to do and they knew the risks they were taking. They were so certain about it that they were still prepared to do it. We ignore that at our peril.

Again, I agree entirely with the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles that we have to start lower down the age range. We need to find a mechanism for very young people.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

I apologise for missing the beginning of the debate; I was in Westminster Hall. Does the hon. Gentleman not think that there is an issue with the general narrative in our society and in our media, where there is a high degree of Islamophobia, with throwaway comments being made on television programmes the whole time? It is regrettable, and on some people—on a very small minority, maybe—it has the beginnings of a very bad effect.

[Mr Hancock]

It is more than regrettable that that has happened—it is despicable. Of course the hon. Gentleman is right that it must have an effect on people. It would have an effect on me if I had that sort of problem. I know what it is like to have abuse thrown at me. I know what effect it had on me. Goodness knows how other people feel when they have abuse thrown at them day after day. I hate the thought that people in my constituency have stooped to cutting off a pig’s head and sticking it on the gatepost of an Islamic school. What sort of message does it send to young children going to school if there is a dead pig’s head stuck on a railing outside that school? It is appalling, and the hon. Gentleman is right to say that we must combat such things and be more realistic about allowing certain comments to go unchallenged. It is important that that message comes over loud and clear in debates such as this.

I hope that the Bill gets the support it deserves and that the promised resources are forthcoming and go to the right places. All of us involved in this issue for one reason or another must work hard with our communities and, most important, with those who are prepared to step out and say the right things, and encourage young men and women to think that there is an alternative to what they believe in. However, it is no good suggesting for one minute that those young men and women do not believe 100% in what they are doing at the present time, because they certainly do.

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

I will make a couple of brief points on amendment 20 and the impact of clauses 21 to 27 on universities, and I do so as someone who represents Sheffield’s two universities and more students than any other Member of the House.

Some 28 years ago, in my previous career in the university sector, I remember preparing a draft code of practice on freedom of speech in universities, to entrench further something that has traditionally always had a strong place in our higher education sector. I did so in response to the Education (No.2) Act 1986, introduced by the then Conservative Government, which sought to ensure that universities maintained that commitment to freedom of speech.

As I am sure the Minister is aware, that Act imposed a duty on universities to ensure that the use of their premises is

“not denied to any individual or body of persons on any ground connected with the beliefs or views of that individual”.

Universities have always taken this issue seriously and sought to fulfil their legal responsibilities, but it is not clear how that provision sits alongside new responsibilities in the Bill. What potential legal quagmire might a university find itself in if, for example, an action is brought by a third party to challenge a decision made under the provisions of this Bill, on the basis of the university’s responsibilities in the 1986 Act? That issue needs clarity so that we do not find ourselves in a very big mess.

My second point relates to the general, sweeping nature of the Government’s new powers in the Bill, and the potential for direct intervention in the governance of universities that it establishes. Amendment 20 deals with that issue, but the House would be making a big mistake to allow such a measure to proceed without ensuring proper parliamentary scrutiny. I understand that universities have been reassured by the Home Office that guidance is being prepared, but our difficulty is that we have not yet seen that guidance and do not know how the Government intend to proceed. It seems a fairly fundamental principle that Parliament ought to be able to scrutinise the initial guidance, and any subsequent guidance that the Government might issue should they feel that universities are not complying with requirements in the Bill. Amendment 20, which I hope the Minister is able to embrace, seeks to strengthen confidence in what the Government are trying to achieve by ensuring proper parliamentary scrutiny of the process, and that links to some of the imprecision in the language and description of terms in the Bill.