Terrorism (Detention and Human Rights)

That intervention is well made, I am sure. I have no doubt that better trained legal minds than mine will clear up that point. The main point is about the 28 days or 90 days. I shall be brief about that because to my mind it is very simple. According to my experience, the extension to 14 days seemed reasonable and probably desirable. I found 28 days difficult to swallow and 90 days impossible to swallow. My case is simply this: in 1975, I arrived in Northern Ireland as a second lieutenant and came across men on the street who had just been released from internment. They struck me as reasonable and balanced. If we looked at their backgrounds or questioned them carefully, we found that they were certainly republicans. Their families might well have had a history of violence, and they were certainly sympathetic to the cause. I am generalising hugely; there were others, of course, who clearly were bad hats. However, many had been changed from being reasonable men into extraordinarily angry men, from principled men into firebrands and from passive men into active supporters and recruiters for a violent cause. I worry very much that if we go beyond the current limits, which I can just about take, we will be in danger of creating a whole new generation of recruiting sergeants—people who will move back into the vulnerable communities from which they have been drawn in the first place. If they endure 90 days in the sort of conditions that I have just seen in Belmarsh, where individuals on remand are treated in precisely the same way as hardened criminals who have been found guilty and face a 40-year sentence, they will go back to their communities and preach the word. Alternatively, they will be used as icons for those who choose to preach the word in a most ardent and articulate way. That would be a huge mistake and weaken our efforts against terror. Rather than helping, it would make things more difficult.