My Lords, last Thursday in the Moses Room we were debating terrorism. In the context of that debate some of us were raising the issues of immigration. This is a specific and good example of the danger that some of us foresee. Forgive me if I repeat a bit of what I said on Thursday. Extremists
operate best in a climate of ambivalence, one in which a significant number of people—particularly young people but not only young people—are pursued by doubt. They may not like what the extremists do. They may actually abhor the actions themselves, but they sometimes wonder whether those extremists are perhaps acting on their side.
This does not create a climate in which everyone is busting a gut to co-operate with the security services. There are anxieties and doubts. Ruthless recruiters for extremism play on that kind of ambivalence. I can think of no area such as the one that we are debating that illustrates better the point that I am making. If it can be said that we have double standards of justice and that we do not live up to the ideals that we like to proclaim to the world as essential, and if it seems that freedom is not a complete but a relative principle—something that you like to apply when you can and when it is inconvenient you do not apply it—sometimes very intelligent people begin to raise queries. It does not take many people to be in such a state of anxiety and doubt for the extremists to make more recruits. It takes only a very few people in the age in which we live to do terrible things in the context of terrorist action. If we are going to win the cause of wooing people away from terrorism and extremism, it is a battle for hearts and minds. That kernel of toughness should be in all that we do. The battle for hearts and minds means that we should live up to the principles we proclaim and make them transparently clear in all the practice of policy throughout the penal system and, particularly because of the complications of international terrorism, in the sphere of migration.
I hope that when the Government consider their response to these issues they do some connective thinking and ensure that at the very time when we are desperately anxious about, for example, the implications of Syria in terms of accentuated terrorist activity, we are doing nothing that inadvertently even marginally plays into the hands of extremists.