Prevention and Suppression of Terrorism

Yes, I recognise that, and we warned of that from this Dispatch Box when the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 was introduced. I suspect that the hon. Gentleman was in the Lobby with us trying to prevent those powers from being enacted. All the legal difficulties that were foreseen at that time have come to pass—that picks up on one of the points that the hon. Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) raised about the costs of these orders, to which I shall return later. We ought to recognise that the fact that most of us are denied the entire picture makes the decision-making process much more difficult. On this issue, I am sure that most of us would be predisposed to trust our Government, but the unhappy record of the past decade, ranging from the dodgy dossier through to the naked priority of political positioning in the debates on 90 and 42-days' pre-charge detention, has meant that this Government have squandered people's trust on security issues with the same abandon as our principal ally squandered the unimpeachable moral and legal high ground after it was attacked by the forces of mediaeval religious fundamentalism as represented by al-Qaeda. We examine these orders as the United States of America is setting out on the long process of trying to pick up the pieces of what has been a disaster for western liberal values—this is a disaster in whose costs we share and in which our present Government are wretchedly implicated. We are asked to conclude that although control orders are flawed, practically highly problematic, potentially damaging to community relations, extortionately expensive and legally doubtful, they remain necessary. Like the Minister, I am sure that this evening we will hear again the powerful arguments against control orders in principle—indeed, we have already heard some of them in the interventions on the Minister and me. In the corresponding debate last year, the right hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz) was kind enough to describe my speech as a "careful critique" filled with "passion", and he noted the surreal situation of a debate in which Member after Member criticises Government policy before going on to vote for it. Well, if he were to look back at the record, he will note that last year I was not with him in the Aye Lobby. However, he made a valid point and I want to make clear from the outset my party's position on control orders. We believe that the control order regime—I use English understatement here—is practically problematic and unjust, and we want to replace the system in a manner consistent with protecting the security of our citizens from both the immediate threat and the long-term threat, which will be shaped by how we manage today's threat. If a Conservative Government were to be elected, we would instigate a full review of the control order regime within a proper consolidation of this Government's counter-terrorist legislation. Following its consolidation in 2000, that legislation has received a decade's-worth of incremental additions, so rationalisation is overdue. The replacement of this control order system should properly be part of a comprehensive overhaul of the existing legislation that sits in the eight counter-terrorism Acts brought into law in the past decade. It is matter of regret that the former Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Norwich, South (Mr. Clarke), was not able to introduce the consolidation Bill he promised when he said that he planned for""a draft Bill that takes into account all the work that I have laid out, to be published in the first half of 2007 for pre-legislative scrutiny."—[Official Report, 2 February 2006; Vol. 442, c. 479.]" Part of the Government's proposition is that there is no quick fix to the problems that would be posed by control orders being scrapped, and that it would be irresponsible to remove them without alternative measures being in place.