Counter-Terrorism Bill

I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan), who has, I think, injected an important note of realism and passion, drawing on his experience in Northern Ireland and, indeed, this House's experiences and the mistakes of previous Governments. I will return to some of those issues as I develop my speech. I shall set out what we welcome in the Bill, as well as what we deplore in it. There are good and bad things in what Ministers have brought forward. The good things include the use of intercept evidence in limited cases—in our view, too limited—and the ability to question people after charge, again in a limited and incipient form. Those are innovations with the potential to help substantially the attack on terrorism, particularly if combined with the benefits of greater flexibility in the decision to charge already being exercised by the Director of Public Prosecutions, as we have heard. It is the innovations in law, together with the innovations in practice through the variation in the test applied by the DPP, which make the bad elements of the Bill both redundant and harder to understand. Most of my speech will be taken up with attempting to meet the various arguments advanced by the Home Secretary to justify the further extension of the period of detention without charge. We on the Liberal Benches will fight tooth and nail against these provisions, which we believe will prove to be a serious erosion of hard-won freedoms. Just as crucially, the measures will prove to be counter-productive, as we have heard from the hon. Member for Foyle. Effective policing depends on intelligence, and successful conviction depends on evidence and witnesses. These provisions will ineluctably undermine both. Nor are we persuaded of the need to abandon juries in coroners' courts or to give the Secretary of State extraordinary powers to appoint special coroners. That may seem a minor matter, but it is far from being so. Coroners' courts were one of the first and most fundamental bulwarks against the abuse by the state of its monopoly of the legal use of force.