Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Bill Debate
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Paul Goggins
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Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Bill
Paul Goggins Excerpts(13 years, 6 months ago)
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Paul Goggins (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Keighley (Kris Hopkins), who, early in his speech, mentioned the 9/11 attacks. In three months, we will mark 10 years since those horrific attacks took place in America. At that time, I undertook the role that is now undertaken by the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mr Timpson); I was Parliamentary Private Secretary to the then Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett). Over the following nine years, in that role and as a Minister in the Home Office and then the Northern Ireland Office, I worked closely with successive Home Secretaries and other Ministers who were seeking to deal with the deadly threat that was emerging from international terrorism. There was no book on the bookshelf entitled, “Rules of Engagement with al-Qaeda”, but I saw every one of those Ministers make every effort to defend the people of this country against new forms of international terrorism, including the dreadful prospect referred to by the hon. Member for Keighley of the so-called home-grown terrorists who are prepared to blow themselves up as well as their victims.
The debate that has gone on since 9/11 has created great tensions in the Chamber and outside it as we have tried to balance and rebalance the equation between individual liberty and collective security. The previous Government received much criticism for the measures they brought forward but I believe that, without exception, the Ministers who introduced those measures did so with total integrity. The current Home Secretary also displays that integrity and she has my full support in taking the difficult decisions that she has to take about specific individuals.
Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)
In my right hon. Friend’s years in the Home Office, in which he must have been involved in many discussions about anti-terrorism legislation, how much consideration was given to the implementation of the criminal law in open court rather than the creation of a series of special courts, special measures and all the suspicion that surrounds them?
Paul Goggins
Considerable consideration was always given to those issues. As the Home Secretary said earlier, prosecutions should always be brought where possible. Those who engage in terrorist activity should feel the full force of the law and where possible—where the evidence is there—they should be convicted and go to prison for a very long time. The problem is that sometimes the evidence and information that the Home Secretary and other Ministers have is not enough to secure a prosecution because much of it is protected or secret information that could not, of itself, sustain a successful prosecution. That is the territory we are dealing with, but I assure my hon. Friend that that consideration was always at the foremost of Minister’s minds at that time.
Mr David Winnick (Walsall North) (Lab)
I have the highest respect for the work that my right hon. Friend undertook during his time at the Home Office. I have tried to get a parliamentary answer to my question, but I did not get anywhere. I understand that no one who has been subject to a control order has later been charged with a terrorist offence. That seems rather odd and, if I may say so, rather disturbing.
Paul Goggins
My hon. Friend has well-known views on this issue and has expressed them frequently in the Chamber from both the Government and Opposition sides over the years. He forms his own conclusions but my conclusions about such individuals is that they are a small group of people for whom it is necessary to have some form of control outside the normal judicial process because of the risks that they pose. My hon. Friend has put forward his point of view on this before and he has strong views—I respect that.
Naomi Long
The right hon. Gentleman’s experience in Northern Ireland will also colour his view on these issues. One of the experiences that we had is that the use of unusual measures can often act as a rallying point for radicalising other young people, rallying them behind the cause, because people are seen as being persecuted rather than being tried under the law. Does he agree that such experiences show that these measures should be seen as unusual and that, for this reason, their ratification each year in Parliament is an important part of reinforcing that?
Paul Goggins
The hon. Lady speaks with great authority on this issue and I agree with every word she says. These powers—whether the control order powers that have been in place up to now or the new powers that the Home Secretary is bringing forward—should be used absolutely exceptionally and we should always bear in mind the risk that the hon. Lady mentions that their use can become a rallying point and can assist in the radicalisation of people whom we are trying desperately to keep in the mainstream of society. That should always be kept in mind. These powers should not be used generally; they are very specific powers to be used in very specific circumstances.
Let me deal with the circumstances in which the powers should be used. We are talking about a small group of individuals who are suspected of involvement in terrorist activities and who are either foreign nationals who cannot be deported because of a ruling of the European Court of Human Rights or they are individuals who cannot be prosecuted successfully because, as I said earlier, the compelling information about them is secret intelligence that could not alone sustain a successful prosecution. Over the past six years, control orders have been the best—some have used the expression “least worst”—set of powers to deal with that group of people.
As I have said before, we should always seek to gain consensus in the House on the important issue of counter-terrorism. The formation of the new Government last year gave us all an opportunity to reflect on the previous decade and see whether changes were required that would bring greater consensus and get an even better balance between individual liberty and collective security. I have changed my mind about pre-charge detention, having previously voted for 28 days and, indeed, for 42 days. I agree that the normal maximum should now be 14 days, provided that in exceptional circumstances it can be extended to 28 days. I am currently serving on the Joint Committee that is considering the emergency legislation that the Government have brought forward on this, and I have changed my mind on this issue.
Paul Goggins
My hon. Friend is always very persuasive—one way or the other.
One area of policy on which I remain absolutely clear is the need to be able to control the activities of that small group of people who pose a serious threat and who cannot be deported or imprisoned, and I am pleased that the Government appear to have come to the same conclusion. We should seek consensus. There is much in the Bill that I can readily support. Conditions A to E, which are set out in clause 3, are welcome. They confirm the need for these TPIM notices to be focused on protection and prevention and they provide that the terrorism-related activity must be new activity. However, it is important that when a first application for a notice is made, that new activity can well predate the application.
A general time limit of two years is not unreasonable given the provisos that further notices can be made if there is new activity and that where a further notice is made, the older activity can be taken into account in addition to the new activity of which the Home Secretary has become aware. However, I caution her and her ministerial colleague against making that a general rule which can never be excepted. As I said about the maximum pre-charge detention period of 14 days, there might be exceptional circumstances. I hope that the Minister will be prepared, in Committee, to see whether some amendments can be framed to allow extensions beyond two years in specific and exceptional circumstances.
On making the powers permanent, I heard what my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) said about that reducing parliamentary oversight, but we could also see it as a positive development if Parliament can reach a consensus and settled view. Given the constant arguing and bickering on this issue year after year when we should be seeking consensus in the face of the terrible threats that terrorists bring, there is some merit in Parliament’s reaching a settled view. There is a balance to be struck.
I agree strongly with condition A, that the Secretary of State must have a reasonable belief
“that the individual is…involved in terrorism-related activity”.
That is a higher threshold than the reasonable suspicion threshold that has previously operated for control orders, but in reaching my conclusion I have referred to the opinion of Lord Carlile in his most recent report that the higher threshold of reasonable belief was, in practice, always achieved anyway for each control order that was taken out under the existing system. It is a standard that was already being met, and I see no problem in including that formally in legislation.
It is right, given that we have six years’ experience of operating control orders, to set out in more precise form the measures that can be imposed as part of the new TPIM notices. Schedule 1 includes a list of measures, including accommodation, travel, communications, association and so on. I urge the Minister to see whether there ought not to be a catch-all power, because there may be a condition that is not caught by schedule 1. It might be sensible to leave an opening so that the Home Secretary can impose such a condition if circumstances allow. It is not a power that I would expect to be used frequently, but if we do not have that power, and unusual circumstances occur, there is nothing we can do about it. Perhaps that is something that could be considered.
I have four serious difficulties with the Bill and in relation to other pertinent issues. The first was mentioned by my right hon. Friend—the overnight residence measure. She was right to point out that in schedule 1, which says that the Secretary of State may impose a requirement
“applicable overnight…for the individual to remain at a specified residence”,
there is no definition of “overnight”. It may be possible to go into that in Committee to see whether it is possible to include something a little clearer.
The really important issue is the specified residence itself. My right hon. Friend made a powerful argument in relation to that. Paragraph 1(3) says that the specified residence must be
“premises that are the individual’s own residence, or…other premises…that are situated in an appropriate locality or an agreed locality.”
An appropriate locality is one in which the individual has a pre-existing connection. In the case of CD, which my right hon. Friend mentioned, it would not be possible under the new legislation for the Home Secretary to impose the conditions that she rightly imposed on the control order governing that individual. If it is possible, I would welcome an explanation on that from the Minister in his winding-up speech.
Let us reflect on who CD is: a leading figure in a close group of Islamist extremists based in north London. That conspiracy of individuals was planning attacks and seeking to acquire weapons. He was a real threat, and the Home Secretary was quite right to take action, and to insist that he live in the west midlands. It is not just me who says so, as Mr Justice Simon supports her view. My right hon. Friend made it perfectly clear when reading from paragraph 53 of Mr Justice Simon’s judgment that the relocation obligation is a necessary and proportionate measure to protect the public from an immediate and real risk of a terrorism-related attack. The Bill as drafted would not allow the Home Secretary to force that individual to live outside London in the west midlands, and the people of London and elsewhere would be at much greater risk if she could not do so.
My second concern relates to electronic communication, which is dealt with in paragraph 7. Sub-paragraph (1) sounds quite tough, as the Secretary of State may impose
“restrictions on the individual’s possession or use of electronic communication devices”.
However, under sub-paragraph (3), each suspect may have
“a telephone operated by connection to a fixed line…a computer that provides access to the internet…a mobile telephone that does not provide access to the internet.”
To be honest, I am concerned that that demonstrates naivety about the sophisticated operations of international terrorists. They use multiple mobile phones, and will run rings round the measure, unless paragraph 7 is toughened up and made much more specific and much less confusing. There is a real job of work to be done by the Committee.
Dr Huppert
Does the right hon. Gentleman realise that one purpose of the measure is to enable more evidence to be gathered for prosecution? The point of allowing people to have that communication is partly for the sake of civil liberties but partly because it can be monitored. What we want to see is prosecution, not indefinite or even two-year detentions.
Paul Goggins
If the hon. Gentleman thinks that an international terrorist is sitting there thinking, “Thank goodness they have given me the internet so I can reveal all my contacts and conspiracies,” he is quite naive. We are talking about highly sophisticated people, and I am concerned that the provisions in paragraph 7(3) are not as sophisticated as they need to be to deal with the threat.
Paul Goggins
The hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) was saying that international terrorists would rush off and use it and reveal all their sources and contacts to the authorities monitoring the measure. I shall make the point again: I do not think that the provisions as set out reflect the sophistication with which international terrorists operate.
My third difficulty relates not to the Bill but to a wider issue that is significant to the powers in the Bill—the whole business of rules on the disclosure of evidence. I welcome the fact that under the Bill there will still be closed hearings which can continue as before under control orders. That is needed, because if a judge is going to review the material or hear an appeal from a particular individual, he must consider the information available to the Home Secretary when she made the initial application. If some, if not all, of that information has to be protected, that must be done in a closed hearing. Special advocates will still be needed. The gist of the case must be provided to the individual.
As we recognise, however, the AF judgment makes it increasingly difficult to protect what in the interests of public safety and national security must remain secret information. That issue caused problems for the previous Government, and it has caused problems for this Government. It has ramifications for our relations with international partners with whom we share important information and intelligence. I applaud the fact that the Government are seeking to address that problem and deal with it in the Green Paper. May I tell all Front Benchers that we should do everything we can to resolve the issue, because if we do not do so the TPIM system will simply not work, as there will be an ever stronger demand that information that should remain secret is revealed in open court to the individual concerned? It is important that we resolve that issue so that we know what can be disclosed and what can be protected.
Jeremy Corbyn
I thank my right hon. Friend for giving way again. Does he not accept that there is a major concern about anti-terrorism legislation with special courts and special advocates, and in which information is withheld from the defendant? The barrister acting on behalf of the defendant is not allowed to reveal to them the nature of the evidence or the case against them. Therein lies a road to something very, very dangerous in a democracy that prides itself on open prosecutions and open justice, and thereby a much wider acceptance of the judicial system and the rule of law.
Paul Goggins
My hon. Friend again makes his point with great care. Of course, these are exceptional powers that should be used sparingly. We have all this apparatus in relation to control orders to ensure that the suspect’s interests can be protected. That is why we have special advocates who can consider the information and argue on behalf of the suspect. [Interruption.] Does the hon. Member for Cambridge wish to intervene?
Dr Huppert
I should be delighted to do so, and I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. The problem is that the special advocate is not allowed to communicate the nature of that evidence to the person involved. That fundamentally means that they cannot advocate fairly on behalf of their client.
Paul Goggins
It is true that special advocates cannot share the intelligence directly, but they are there to represent the interests of the individual. To the hon. Gentleman, that might not be a perfect solution, but it is better that the individual has somebody to speak for them than nobody to speak for them. That is why that system was introduced.
I say again to my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), who put his point very fairly, that these are exceptional mechanisms to assist in making sure that the rights and interests of the individual are protected, but in the end, the entire Bill is designed to ensure that the rest of us are protected against the threats that those individuals pose. We must not forget that. As we have these debates about the liberty of the individual, we must balance that against the need for the protection of the wider public. That is the dilemma that goes right through the debate. We should never lose sight of one or the other side of that argument.
My final point is whether the whole new TPIM system represents the same level of risk as we had with control orders or a greater level of risk. I can only assume that the Home Secretary believes there is an increased risk from the new TPIM system, otherwise why would she be committing a serious level of resource—whatever that level is—to the police and the Security Service to help them deal with the additional work and the additional pressures that will result from the new system?
I was somewhat concerned to hear the Home Secretary quote Jonathan Evans as saying that the additional money would—I think she said—mitigate against the additional risk. That is an interesting phrase worthy of further exploration. I am extremely concerned that new gaps will open up. The question is whether there will be sufficient resource to fill those gaps and whether those gaps will pose an additional risk. No one in the House should be complacent about the possibility of an increased risk. I know that the Intelligence and Security Committee on which my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) and I sit will take a very close interest in that.
I am sure that the last thing this Home Secretary would want to do is increase the risk to public safety. I mean that genuinely and sincerely, but Parliament must help her. One immediate way in which it can help is by tightening up the Bill in the way that I have suggested and as others will, I am sure, suggest, and then by monitoring closely what happens when the Bill and any amendments that are added to it are put into practice.
Hazel Blears (Salford and Eccles) (Lab)
I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the debate this evening and I think that all the contributions made so far indicate how serious the issues we are dealing with are and how difficult for everyone, whichever side of the House they are on, because it is a case of trying to weigh the balance and make some very difficult judgments. When dealing with matters of national security, it is important that we try as far as possible to reach a consensus, because these matters are incredibly important for the country, and that we try to start from the evidence base, which in my experience leads to better decisions on where the balance of judgment should rightly lie.
I want to think about the evidence we face at the moment. First, that concerns the nature of the threat. Sometimes these issues are discussed in the abstract and are not necessarily rooted in the reality of the threat that the country faces. For some years the threat level has been “severe”, which is only one step down from “imminent”. That means that this country faces a very significant threat from al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda-inspired terrorism, often originating abroad but also involving people who were born and brought up in this country and are enmeshed in a series of worrying plots. It is important to put on the record the nature of the threat that the country faces.
Secondly, we should consider the extent of the problem. People sometimes feel that, because we have been dealing with this threat for 10 years and have had the control order regime in place for the past six, the extent of that threat has somehow reduced. At any one time, the security services are dealing with tens of plots, which are often very complex and interrelated, with a web of international and domestic actors and many technologies, and involving incredibly complex organisations. Between 1,600 and 2,000 known terrorist suspects are involved in these plots, and those are the ones we know about. There may well be other organisations, other plots and other individuals who, as we speak, are intent on organising the kind of terror that can wreak mayhem and destruction on our communities. The sustained nature of the threat and its extent ought to be a backdrop to some of the difficult decisions that we have to make with regard to this legislation.
There is therefore a clear need for surveillance and the gathering of intelligence and evidence on the intentions and actions of those involved in planning and conducting terrorist operations. It is of course right, as my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) and others point out in an eloquent and genuine way, that in a free democracy such as ours we should always seek to bring those involved in terrorism before the criminal courts. That should be our starting point. We should bring prosecutions where the evidence can be adduced and tested, where witnesses can be cross-examined and where a jury can reach a verdict on whether the accused is guilty or innocent. That must be the starting point in any democracy—that we have a criminal system that allows all that to be done as openly and transparently as possible.
One of the reasons we brought in some of the new offences now on the statute book, such as committing acts preparatory to terrorism, was to enable us to interrupt plots at the earliest possible stage and still be able to bring a criminal prosecution and go through the conventional criminal system and bring those people to justice. Those offences have been very useful in giving the police powers to interrupt early and ensure that they disrupt the plot and prevent any damage while still using the conventional criminal justice system, which is obviously what we want to encourage.
However, we must recognise that there are—and, unfortunately, likely to be for the foreseeable future—a small number of people involved in terrorism who pose a serious threat to the safety of our citizens and country and who cannot be brought within the ambit of the conventional criminal justice system. Much as we may dislike it, that is the situation we face. For several years there have been discussions, or attempts at discussions, between various Home Secretaries and Ministers and the judicial system, and in many cases the judiciary have been reluctant to engage in any discussions on whether the way the criminal justice system operates can be amended. I understand their reluctance because of the separation of the Executive and the judiciary, and they want to avoid confusion, but I feel that the criminal justice system is not necessarily able to cope with the nature of the threat and the offences we face in the world we now live in.
Many of the suspects cannot be subjected to the traditional judicial system because to do so would mean bringing forward intelligence and evidence that could put at risk the lives of those who seek to protect us. We cannot allow that intelligence to be revealed as doing so would reveal those agents and their personal security would be jeopardised. Those people put their lives on the line for the people of this country and we have a duty to protect them. Bringing forward that intelligence would also reveal the surveillance methods and techniques that the security services often use to gain it, which would also undermine their ability to keep us all safe.
Control orders have been used in a small number of cases and I think that we should get that number to its irreducible minimum. We imposed only 48 control orders in the six years that they have existed and there are only eight or 10 now in place. It is a very tightly managed and controlled regime, so those powers are not sprayed around and used loosely as a way of rounding up the usual suspects. That is absolutely not the intention. I am afraid that the reality, which we should all be grown up enough to acknowledge, is that the threat we face is such that we have to have a system that, however distasteful we as democrats find it, can protect the people for whom we are responsible.
It was for that reason that in 2005 the then Home Secretary and I, as the Minister responsible for policing and counter-terrorism, brought forward the original control order legislation, which the Bill seeks to alter in some significant respects. I will never forget bringing forward that legislation. I remember being in this House at 4 o’clock in the morning debating that hugely contested legislation. In some ways that was very difficult, but in others it was very encouraging as it indicated the depth of commitment on both sides of the House to a free democracy in which people felt strongly about those issues. I was very glad when we finished at 10 o’clock that morning; nevertheless, it was an inspiring occasion and a good one for the House.
I want make it crystal clear to the House that, whatever some Members might say, that original legislation was not introduced in some kind of knee-jerk overreaction to the events of 9/11 or 7/7. It was a genuine recognition of the inability of the criminal justice system to accommodate the situation we faced. I am a lawyer and I have huge respect for the rule of law—
Hazel Blears
Steady on, absolutely.
I also know how important it is to have a practical and workable system in place. We must ensure that those who pose a significant threat to ordinary people’s safety can be tracked and prevented from pursuing their plans to cause death and serious harm in pursuit of their warped political ideology.
We all want to achieve consensus where we can, but I have some serious concerns about some of the Bill’s proposals, with regard to their effectiveness, their ability to disrupt those who will be subject to TPIMs, as they are so elegantly called, and whether they will provide us with a proper level of security. Lord Carlile is always called in aid in these debates, and I want to place on the record my thanks to him for the fabulous job he has done over the years as the Government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation. He said just last year:
“In stark terms, the potential cost of losing control orders is that the UK would be more vulnerable to a successful terrorist attack.”
He does not say such things lightly. He has huge experience in trying to weigh the balance and get the judgment right. He also said:
“Unless control orders were replaced by some equally disruptive and practicable system… the repeal of control orders would create a worryingly higher level of public risk.”
We ought to have serious and close regard to what Lord Carlile has said and test the Bill against the concerns he has expressed.
In a powerful contribution, my right hon. Friend the shadow Home Secretary expressed her concerns about some of those issues, so I will not speak about them at length. The relocation issue is a genuine concern. It may be characterised as internal exile or a soviet-style imposition, but if it is necessary for someone to be located away from the networks that they have established in order to improve the safety of ordinary citizens, I do not think it should simply be ruled out on principle.
We have discussed whether access to mobile phones and computers might enable us to obtain further evidence for prosecution, but I am very doubtful that it will. I am concerned that people will have access not simply to one mobile phone: once they have one, it will be very easy indeed for experienced people not to dupe the security services, as I hope they are not capable of being duped, but to create the sense that it is normal to have access to a computer and a mobile phone. The prospect of a security risk is therefore higher than I would feel comfortable with, so I seek reassurance from the Minister on access to electronic equipment. We know how much terrorist business is done online and with technology. It is a massive issue for us, and this measure could present us with an increased risk.
Patrick Mercer (Newark) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears), who brings to this subject not only a great deal of common sense but a great deal of experience. As she said, our liberties depend on our security. The two are inextricably linked; we cannot have one without the other.
As the right hon. Lady also rightly said, we sometimes lose the sense of why we are here having these debates in the first place. Over the past few days, four of our fighting men have been killed in Afghanistan, and it is worth bearing in mind that a police officer was recently blown to pieces in Omagh. They died for two things: not only to guarantee our physical security and protection but to guarantee that our liberties remain pre-eminent in our society. I would therefore, with the greatest of respect, ask that we all lift our sights a little—that we stop arguing about telephones, computers, curfews and other technical things and remember why we are here. We are here to honour the memories of those young men and young women who have died for us so that we can have a debate such as this in complete freedom and comfort. The single most important freedom that I would iterate on this occasion is the freedom for the accused man or woman to be innocent until he or she is proved guilty. Control orders do not do that. Control orders deny the very liberty, the very freedom, the very values for which our young men are this evening facing death and destruction in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The right hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins) and I remember the difficult times of the mid-2000s. I have jousted with him many times and always enjoy his contributions. He made a fascinating point when he said that there was no rule book; I think that “instruction book” was his precise phrase. Indeed there was not, but there was a history book; in fact, there were lots of history books. Over the past 60 years or so, this country has allowed itself to make two grave errors at times of serious national emergency. On the first occasion, we were in a war of national survival, when we banged up tens of thousands of people during the period of wartime internment and assumed that they were guilty without giving them any form of trial. Because of the circumstances, that was not as serious a mistake as that which we made in the early 1970s when we interned hundreds of people in Ulster. I do not want to try to drag the argument into a simple, narrow one about Irish republicanism. None the less, it is important that we understand that control orders fly in the face of every lesson that we learned in the ’70s, for which many of my comrades died and others, including me, shed our blood.
Internment was wrong for all sorts of reasons. It was a straightforward denial of liberty, but much more importantly, it left behind a legacy of hatred that continues up until this day. I do not need to tell the hon. Member for Belfast East (Naomi Long), who lives with this on a minute-to-minute basis, that we are currently facing a threat in Ulster that is no less than that which we face from Islamist fundamentalism on these shores. That is because we got the issues and arguments that we are discussing wrong decades ago, and we must now make sure that we get them right. There is no place for control orders in a civilised society that wishes to counter terrorism intelligently, thoughtfully, and based on practice from the past. I therefore say to the right hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East that we should have used the history books before we started to compose these sorts of laws, which have done such damage and wasted so much time and so much life. We should have looked more carefully at where we got it wrong in the past.
Let us stop arguing about telephones, computers and all the technical things and ask ourselves what we can do to get rid of a pernicious system that denies the very thing in which we all believe—freedom and the ability to be innocent until proven guilty. Let us re-inject energy into our decision to negotiate memorandums of understanding. Let us talk to foreign Governments in more detail. Let us re-approach the European courts with greater energy. Let us try to insist that if an individual from another country commits a crime, or is thought to be about to commit a crime, or is even thought to be guilty of a crime, although not proven to be so, he or she is sent back to the country from which he or she originates. If it seems we cannot do that, let us then inject more energy into trying to do it—let us not give up. At the same time, let us look at the techniques that we can apply to make sure that intelligence on these individuals is turned into evidence that can be used in court to convict them and to get them behind bars if they are guilty, or, if they are not, to give them their liberty back.
I ask the Minister what has happened to the process of intercept evidence. Even as early as 1977, we were concerned about whether we could use that in court as evidence. To the best of my second lieutenant’s knowledge, it was being reviewed in the mid-’70s. Why can we still not use intercept evidence in court? I refuse to give in to the foot-dragging approach that the previous Government took on this issue. When I served on the Home Affairs Committee, we were told, “This is not a silver bullet, but by golly it will help.” What about questioning after charge? I think we have made some progress on that; the Minister can tell me whether I am right or wrong. Surely it is a tool that we can use, is it not?
Lastly—I have told people not to be too technical, and here I am delving into all sorts of technical things—there is plea bargaining, which the Americans and the Canadians use very successfully. Where do we stand on that? Have we given it enough thought? Have we had a refreshed insight and looked carefully at how we can use it? If we raise our eyes above the parapet of the specific argument, there are devices that we can use to produce evidence to get people into court and put them on trial. That has to be the aim rather than the current mish-mash of illiberal nonsense that we have within the democracy that we sometimes pretend to be.
My heart bleeds less than most people’s, but the fact remains that we cannot deal with these individuals improperly for two reasons: first, because of their basic human rights, about which I feel strongly; and secondly, for practical reasons. If we continue to subject minorities in this country to measures such as control orders, all of which are being applied to a very small number of people who come from a similar sort of background and believe in a similar sort of cause, we are bound to disaffect the wider societies from which they hail. We need look no further than what we did to the Roman Catholic population in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. We imposed not the same, but similar measures on those people—not entirely, but almost exclusively. The effect was that a military campaign by the Irish Republican Army that was pretty well over by the end of the ’70s extended itself well into the ’90s and killed hundreds more people than it needed to.
Paul Goggins
The hon. Gentleman has returned to the parallel between internment in the 1970s and control orders and TPIMs now. I acknowledge what he says about the impact of internment in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, but to draw a direct parallel between that and control orders and TPIMs is erroneous. The authorisation and oversight system is much more rigorous in relation to control orders and TPIMs than ever it was for internment.
Patrick Mercer
The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right and I accede to that point. I will go with him, sit on a Committee and talk about all that good stuff. However, that does not make a difference in the eyes of the violent republican and the Islamist fundamentalist. They will make the parallels completely and perfectly, and they will use them to twist the mind and to suborn the innocent. That is exactly my point, and I am grateful to him for making it, because we are in danger of becoming over-technical.
I will not extend the point much further. It is simple: if we are not careful, we will impose on the very people whom we are trying to recruit and to persuade to come to our side the same sort of measures that we imposed on the Roman Catholic population in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. I will quote a song that summarises the point:
“Being Irish means you’re guilty, so we’re guilty one and all.”
Irish republicans were able to write that line because of internment. Irish republicans were able to write that line because their society had been suborned by a Government who were misguided. The parallels are not exact, but they are there. This is illiberal, this is improper, this is impractical, and this is wrong. We must get rid of control orders as soon as we can.