Counter-Terrorism Bill

When the Bill was introduced, the Home Secretary said that it was partly the result of lessons learned from previous legislation, such as the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, so that those working at the coal face who every day face the threat that we talk about from our comfort zones would be able to put things right. The hope was that it would bring the lessons learned from the past into the present day, but I see no evidence of that in the Bill. Rather it seems to have come off the top of the head of some special adviser or focus group in response to public opinion. The Government have not learned the lesson from the last debate about detention without trial and have decided to reintroduce the measure, despite all the inevitable consequences. The Bill's justification is that terrorism is different, that it has severe consequences, and that often the resulting trials are very complicated. But organised crime has severe consequences, too; evidence trails from drug running or any other type of organised crime are incredibly complicated; and the perpetrators of such crime take advantage of technology like anybody else. Paedophiles make exactly the same efforts to cover their tracks. The Government are not introducing proposals today to include those types of crime. Try telling the victims of paedophiles and organised crime that they are not as important as the victims of terrorists. In fact, there are more victims of organised crime and paedophiles than there are of terrorists. Another justification is that today's terrorists are different from the previous lot, but that is not the case. Terrorism is always countered in the same way. A number of my Conservative colleagues have personal experience of facing down and combating terrorism. I myself have had many experiences in Northern Ireland and here in countering terrorism when some Government Members were doing their best to prevent us from doing that job. Good counter-terrorism is intelligence-led; it needs community support and informers. Failure means that we all face serious consequences, but failures there are. There is no such thing as a 100 per cent. successful counter-terrorism policy, because counter-terrorism is a premeditated activity, often relying on the coverage given by communities. I am sure that the Home Secretary did not mean to mislead the House, but one cannot simply compare a straightforward IRA case with a complex al-Qaeda case. Many IRA plots were incredibly sophisticated, extending to countries such as Libya, France and America, involving many people and using technology to avoid detection, and often—much more regularly than the present-day terrorists—they hit their targets, causing 3,000 deaths. The IRA came into this House and blew up one of its Members and bombed the Cabinet. As the hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Mr. Galloway) said, the IRA used real bombs that worked every time. We should not pretend that because today's terrorists are different, we should compromise more of our liberties. They are the same. They may have more ambitions, but most IRA bombs in the centre of London went off; they were not towed to the car pound by an overzealous car-parking attendant. The IRA were more and more successful, and we should not forget that. The hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) is right. He and I would never have seen eye to eye in Northern Ireland. Members of his communities may have been the victims of some of my activities. We would have debated what level of security was right for living with the threat, although we may not have agreed. I am sure that, in my time, we did things that may not have been received sympathetically, but we ensured that we undertook other counter-terrorist activities. Counter-terrorism is not just about convicting; it is often about disrupting terrorist organisations or operations. One day, one is sure there will be a conviction, but one needs the political courage to recognise that one cannot always get it right. One has to admit that sometimes mistakes are made in counter-terrorism. Counter-terrorism is about a balance between extremes. We could do nothing or we could do everything. We could have internment and Guantanamo Bay. We could even put the pressures on police forces that may have led to the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four convictions. Getting the balance right so that we protect our liberties while ensuring that we catch the criminals is the important part of the debate. It is an act of political cowardice to go quickly to the extreme. One Labour Member said that one should wear a hard hat in case part of a building falls on one's head; I can understand that if one is working on a building site, but out in a field one would look ridiculous wearing a hard hat as some form of risk coverage. We must strike the right balance. The Bill is a missed opportunity. Not one of the 20 recommendations in the report to Ministers from ACPO on RIPA about how to make our surveillance more efficient has been included in the Bill. Instead, there has been an attempt on spurious grounds to lock people up without trial for 42 days—an arbitrary figure if ever there was one. The Home Secretary likes to say that technology allows terrorists to co-ordinate and hide their activities, but we have huge amounts of technology on our side. We have GCHQ at Cheltenham and the police, and often such technology means that we do not need 42 days, or even one hour, but the Home Secretary will not tell us about the weapons that we have at our disposal—perhaps rightly, for the sake of security. She would rather let it be thought that the advantage is one-sided—that only the terrorists can use technology. The challenge in modern crime-fighting is to stay one step ahead, but that must not be at the expense of our civil liberties. When we do that, we fail not only the victims, but the whole of society. The challenge to the Government is to have the political courage to say to victims of terrorist incidents, that, unfortunately, sometimes we cannot do it all, but we act in the best interests of the whole nation and to defend all our liberties.