Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Bill

Debate between Pat McFadden and Richard Fuller

Monday 5th September 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr McFadden]

I will keep my remarks brief, because I know we all want to get on to the debate about relocation. However, I wish to say a word about new clause 5, which shows the difference between the Bill before us and what the Government know they might have to do. The new clause and the draft Bill on enhanced TPIMs measures published last Thursday represent the Government taking out an insurance policy against the failure of the Bill before us this evening.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) reminded us that we are debating the matter around the 10th anniversary of 11 September. It is important that the House remembers that, because that incident, more than any other, forced Governments around the world to reassess their thinking and their expectations of what terrorists were capable of. It also forced all of us in democratic regimes to look again at the protections in law and law enforcement that we can give our citizens against terrorist activity. That is the basis of this whole debate and the Bill.

We did not get here entirely by choice. We got here partly because of court judgments shaping the regime for us in an involuntary way. The problem is simple: what do we do when we cannot bring someone to prosecution, but we have a good and reasonable suspicion that that person would engage in terrorist activity if they could, and there may be inadmissible evidence that they have tried to do so? There has been an assumption running through this debate that such people are necessarily less dangerous than those who have been convicted. That is not necessarily so. If they were able to carry out their intent, they may in fact be far more dangerous than people who have been convicted of other terrorist events.

The Government have published draft legislation that is an insurance policy against the Bill, and they cannot have an in-principle objection to the measures within their own draft Bill. Whereas the Bill before us states, unbelievably, that the Secretary of State must grant terrorist suspects access to mobile phones and the internet, the draft Bill would give the Secretary of State discretion over that. Whereas the Bill before us disarms the Government from giving the public the protection that relocation can provide, the draft Bill would reinsert that possibility. The question that the public will ask, and which the Minister must believe they will ask very seriously should the draft legislation be needed in future, is why the Government did not include those powers in the Bill before us. Why wait until an incident has happened?

I repeat the question that I put to the Minister before. What would he say to the victims of terrorism in such circumstances? Would he say, “We knew we might need these powers, and we could have legislated for them, but we chose not to because we believed that the balance of civil liberties was wrong”?

[Richard Fuller]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr McFadden]

Not at the moment.

Let us deal with the point about civil liberties. The Minister has said several times that the motivation behind the Bill was a perceived imbalance in the last Government’s civil liberties legislation. The notion that we are some sort of quasi-police state or overly authoritarian state is complete nonsense. In this country we enjoy freedom of expression, religion and association that is the envy of the world. That is why so many dissidents from regimes around the world have sought refuge here. Indeed, the criticism that is sometimes levelled, and perhaps with validity, is that we have been very generous in accommodating dissidents from other regimes, and that sometimes our freedoms have been abused by some of those individuals. It is simply the wrong analysis and the wrong starting point to say that civil liberties in this country have been fundamentally compromised. That is not the case, but because the Government believe it and have carried forward into government the wrong analysis that they developed in opposition, that is leading to the wrong policy and to greater risk for the public. New clause 5 addresses that to some extent, but people will not understand why it, and the draft emergency legislation, were not put into the Bill.