Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill

Debate between Pete Wishart and Hazel Blears

Tuesday 16th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Pete Wishart]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Weir—the more Scottish National party Members we see in such positions, the better—and to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas). She made several pertinent points, particularly on the need to look at experiences from across Europe, and I shall listen carefully to the Minister’s response. It struck me that there is an attempt to look at some of the measures that other countries are adopting to try to tackle this serious issue, but there are also different things being done across the United Kingdom. I wish to focus my remarks on what we are trying to achieve in Scotland.

We are absolutely committed to ensuring that law enforcement agencies and other bodies have all the tools they need to tackle terrorism effectively. We take that particularly seriously in Scotland. We believe that we have robust but different measures in place to tackle these issues. We have massive concerns about what is proposed in the Bill, particularly in part 5. We are concerned that it might cut across some of the initiatives in our Prevent strategy.

It is natural that in Scotland we look at things differently from the rest of the United Kingdom. We face a different range of issues, we have smaller ethnic minority communities, and we have not had the same sort of tensions within our communities, so obviously we look at things differently. I like to think that we therefore look at things a little more holistically, and certainly more holistically than a Conservative-led Government would, or even—if I may be so brave as to say it—than a new Labour Government would.

Our Scottish Prevent strategy shares the same objectives as Prevent across the rest of the United Kingdom, but it differs in some pretty serious and significant ways, particularly in how it is delivered. I think that it does all it can to reflect our Scottish context. Our approach uses Prevent though a safeguarding lens, with an emphasis on keeping people safe, on community cohesion, on participative democracy and on making sure that it is consistent with the needs of, and risks to, all our communities. The Scottish Government’s Prevent strategy for tackling violent extremism works with and through key sectors, including higher and further education, the NHS, the Scottish Prison Service and local authorities. Prevent delivery also benefits from Police Scotland’s model of community engagement and the strength of the relationship between our Muslim communities and the police service.

We sometimes ignore the cultural context, but it is important. One of the most impressive features of Scotland’s Asian community is its willingness and eagerness to adopt what is seen as Scottish identity. We have what is called the bhangra and bagpipe culture. Particularly in Glasgow, where we have a large Muslim community, it is striking how eager the community is to take on board some of the central, defining features of Scottish culture and to get involved. We saw that during the referendum campaign, as Mr Weir in particular knows. One of the fastest growing groups in the movement was Scottish Asians for independence, because there was a natural affinity with what we were trying to achieve as a nation, and there was something about what we were trying to do in order to transform society that proved attractive to many people who had come from countries such as India and Pakistan, which had in their own way secured their independence from the United Kingdom at some time in history.

This feature in Scotland differs significantly from the rest of the United Kingdom. Efforts have been made by the Scottish Government, Ministers and colleagues to try to ensure that the cultural context is taken into account when we approach issues such as radicalisation. I am sure the Minister has seen on his trips to Scotland how the Muslim community, particularly from south Asia, has been integrated in our society and our community. We should all be impressed by that, and perhaps the Minister can learn from our experience.

My hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Pavilion made a powerful point about how we start to approach these matters and look at some of the community dimensions. We cannot be prescriptive. We cannot talk down to communities or expect them to respond to our stimuli, our suggestions and our objectives. I shall not dwell on what my hon. Friend said, but we have to work with communities. This process has to be organic, a conversation within communities and groups, to ensure that we come to the right conclusions.

The one thing that I want to add to what my hon. Friend said is that we must also look at the external environment. We have to try to understand what motivates people to get involved in what the hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) rightly describes as barbaric activity. There is one thing that this Government have never done, and it surprises me how little work has been done on it. I encourage the Minister to look more closely at it: there is very little profiling of people who have gone out to the middle east to get involved in such activity. We do not have a sense of the pull factors, the reasons why people go there and get involved, because we do not ask them. We are too busy locking people up and all the other things that go with that.

We spend very little time trying to understand what it is that drags people to engage in such awful behaviour and activity, and I suspect that our reluctance to do that has much to do with the results that we are likely to find. When we see people being interviewed about their involvement in such activity, they are not people who would concern the Government on a day-to-day basis—people who have just emigrated from Pakistan or the middle east. They tend to be second or third generation who have been here for a long time. The ideology has not been brought here; it is an ideology that has emerged and grown within our communities.

When we listen to people being interviewed by broadcasters trying to understand what informs the way they behave, they all seem to be pretty respectable, cultured, almost middle class, standard citizens of the United Kingdom. They do not seem to conform to the traditional vision, if I may say that, of jihadists, and the caricatures that develop around that. We fail to get that right, to understand and to do the necessary work to profile—

[Hazel Blears]

I have some sympathy with the argument that the hon. Gentleman is developing on working with communities, which is the approach that I have always wanted to emphasise. Does he accept that one of the reasons that many of the people who are born and brought up in this country and have lived here for very many years then decide to go to Syria, or to create a terrorist plot here in Britain, is that they have been influenced by an ideology based on hatred and a complete rejection of other people unless they agree 100% with their very narrow world view? We have debated whether we use the word “combating” or “countering” in relation to this ideology, which has its roots in Salafi thinking. It is about a violent version of Islam that supposedly justifies this kind of terrorist activity. There is quite a lot of research on this, and I am sure that the hon. Gentleman is aware of some of it.

[Pete Wishart]

Indeed. The right hon. Lady is partly correct. There is something that draws people in, but our failure to understand some of the motivations and pull factors is a fault that we have.

I do not want to labour my next point because I had an exchange about it with the hon. Member for New Forest East on Second Reading. It is that people feel such a sense of injustice and frustration about not being able to use the traditional, normal political process to exert some sort of change that they are driven to get involved in these activities. People are not born genetically programmed to become jihadists and terrorists: something fundamental and significant happens during their journey that influences them and makes them get involved. We fail to understand that.

We also fail to take responsibility for what we may have done in setting the external stimuli in this regard. For example, we fail to acknowledge the disaster that was the Iraq war and how that cause became a recruiting sergeant for a generation of young Muslims who, with their perverted sense of justice, saw no alternative but to get involved in these terrorist activities. We do not even need to debate this: we can see the line going all the way back to when it started. Yes, there were issues before Iraq and before some of the other difficulties in the middle east, particularly in relation to Palestine, but it is when we get to the invasion of Iraq that we can see the exponential growth in these activities.

We have to take responsibility for that. We have to acknowledge that the decisions we have made and the environment we have created perhaps give rise to some of the massive frustrations that people have. People are not born predisposed to be terrorists, to be jihadists, to be the most barbaric type of murderers. Something happens along the way and a frustration develops. Unless we address our responsibility for creating these conditions, we fail.

[Hazel Blears]

The hon. Gentleman and I have debated this on previous occasions. Does he think that ISIS is killing Yazidis and Christians because it has a grievance about British foreign policy?

[Pete Wishart]

No, of course not. If I may put it ever so gently to the right hon. Lady, that question is not worthy of her. There are conflicts right across the middle east that we fail to understand but only condemn, but in some way we are the major power in all this. We are the interveners in these types of activities, and we therefore have responsibilities in that regard. Of course this does not reflect UK foreign policy, other than perhaps at the margins.

Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill

Debate between Pete Wishart and Hazel Blears

Tuesday 2nd December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Pete Wishart]

The hon. Gentleman reminds me of the last feature I wanted to include in the list of what we always see in these counter-terror Bills, which is the very thing he mentions; it is all about suspicion, and the powers of the Home Secretary and how she will be allowed to exercise them, never testing things in courts, because the evidence is not substantive enough. It is all to do with this idea that somehow we have got to make people safe in this country by proposing all sorts of control mechanisms on suspects. If the Government were serious about this—if they believed and had the courage of their convictions—they should take it to court and test it in the public court, and give people an opportunity to defend themselves. If someone is subject to one of these new TPIMs, they have no means to try to fight their defence; they have no access to having that tested in court. The Government talk about how extremism develops, about radicalisation and about the furthering of ideologies, but when they are doing things like this, it is no surprise that people might take a jaundiced view about some of the things that happen.

I enjoyed the contribution of the hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis). It was good and there was very little I could disagree with. Some of the things that are necessary to tackle extremism are the sorts of things he presented, and many of the things mentioned by the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) are also absolutely necessary, but we have got to look at ourselves. We have got to look at the decisions we made. We have got to understand the things we have said, passed and done that may have inflamed the situation. If we cannot do that, we are not acting responsibly. We have got to make sure we account for our actions and see what they led to.

I was in the House when we had the debate on the Iraq war, as were other Members, and we said what would happen as a consequence of the Iraq war—an illegal war that inflamed opinion and passions not just in communities here, but communities around the world. We said that there would be a consequence and a reaction. That has come true. That has happened. The reason why we are now having to mop up with this type of legislation and these types of measures is because of some of the critical decisions we took, and some of the appalling and bad decisions we made and are still accounting for.

[Hazel Blears]

Does the hon. Gentleman not recognise that, in equal measure, the decision not to intervene in the events in Syria may also have inflamed the feelings of some of the people who saw the terrible events played out on their screens showing what was happening to vulnerable families in those circumstances?

[Pete Wishart]

What I accept is that there was a failure to recognise some of the international dynamics that influence communities in this country. The solution always seems to be that we have to intervene—that we have got to try to make the world better—and sometimes we are unaware of the unintended consequences that come from that. All I am saying to this House is that at some point we have got to acknowledge what we have done in terms of framing the conditions and setting the environment in which these things happen. By failing to do that, and by failing to acknowledge that type of issue, we will be hampered in our approach to these matters, and the very good things in Prevent and all the anti-radicalisation programmes will fall and fail, because we will have missed out a crucial part of the holistic view we need to take of these things.

Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Bill

Debate between Pete Wishart and Hazel Blears

Tuesday 7th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Hazel Blears]

These are matters for careful and balanced judgment, which is why we have constant judicial oversight, why we have to return to the courts to renew our orders and why we have a legal system in this country which is capable of making such judgments. If we are in the hands of a respected, experienced and knowledgeable High Court judge, who has heard submissions on the issues, I should feel slightly more content than if an order simply came to an arbitrary end as a result of legislation passed in this House.

[Pete Wishart]

If that individual is so dangerous, why do we not just arrest him, charge him and throw the full force of the judicial system at him?

[Hazel Blears]

I am delighted that the hon. Gentleman has asked me that question, because this is where we end up in a sort of tortuous circle. That individual has not been charged because the intelligence against him does not comprise evidence, has been gained by covert surveillance and cannot be revealed in court, as it will put at risk either the lives of the agents or their techniques. We know that this person, as Mr Justice Wilkie said, remains a trained and committed martyr to the cause and is prepared to carry out further attacks, but, because the individual cannot be prosecuted through the conventional criminal justice system, the hon. Gentleman’s decision would be to let him walk free.

That is the judgment that has to be made, and that is why these issues weigh so heavily on the people who have to make the decisions, people such as the Home Secretary, who has to make those decisions in individual cases. They weigh incredibly heavily on all of us and are not lightly taken, and that is why we need a system of checks and balances. An arbitrary limit of a two-year TPIM in every single case would cause me concern if the original threat still existed.

My final concern, on which I have not received reassurance, is the extra costs of surveillance, because there will need to be greater surveillance if TPIMs conditions are substantially lighter and less invasive than those of control orders. Next year we have the Olympics, which will be a massive drain on the resources of the security services. That is acknowledged throughout the system, so I want significant reassurance from the Minister about the ability of the security services to maintain the same assurance to the citizens of our country through TPIMs as they have through the control orders system. I am not satisfied that that is the case.

The control order system had more measures to disrupt people’s ability to organise their networks. Surveillance does not take the place of disruption, because it is a different technique of a different order, and, as Lord Carlile says, unless there is a system of disruption as well as surveillance, he has concerns about the effectiveness of the regime, as do I. The security services say that the extra resources would mitigate the risk, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins) has said, and it is incumbent on the Government to give us such reassurance.

We must remind ourselves that the people who have been the subject of control orders are not law-abiding, innocent citizens going freely about their business. By their very nature, they are dangerous people who pose a real threat to our safety, and the measures must be sufficient to reassure people properly that the system is sufficient to control the movements of such individuals. Surveillance is not as effective as disruption, so we need to do more to ensure that disruption takes place.

In all my years as a Home Office Minister, and through my work in the Communities and Local Government Department, control orders have represented some of the most difficult decisions I have had to make, because they go to the heart of our democracy. Our freedoms are incredibly hard won, and none of us wants to give them up lightly at all. I talked to a senior member of the judiciary a few weeks ago, who said passionately and in a very committed way, “Hazel, whenever there’s a decision to be made between liberty and security, I will always, always err on the side of liberty,” but it is more complicated than that.

We cannot simply say that we would always make the decisions in that way. We might do in theory, in academic practice and, certainly, in terms of our values, but we are faced with making a decision that must balance security and liberty, the security of ordinary people seeking to go about their daily lives, as against the liberty of people for whom there is a great deal of intelligence to say that they are dangerous and dedicated, because of their political ideology, to causing mass harm and death among the community at large. That is an incredibly difficult decision, but sometimes it is portrayed as an easy one.

Of course, we do not want to restrict people’s civil liberties or to introduce a punitive, repressive or oppressive regime, but the alternative is to allow people who pose a severe and dangerous threat to our country to walk our streets. Those decisions are hard to make, and I just ask the Home Secretary and the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (James Brokenshire), who is on the Treasury Bench tonight, to think really hard, as I know they will, about whether their proposed regime is sufficient to give the people of this country the reassurance that they deserve, and to ensure that that tiny minority of people who are subject to a regime are not able to continue to pose the threat of damage, death and destruction to the people of this country. I look forward in Committee to the Minister giving us a great deal more reassurance than I have had this evening.