Terrorism Bill

I will give way shortly, otherwise this speech will consist entirely of responses to interventions. It will doubtless be argued that what the police want, the police should have. What the police want carries real weight on this side of the House, but it is not in itself conclusive. If the police want 90 days and are given it because we do not want to stand in their way, what would the House say if they were to come back and ask for 100 days, 180 days, 360 days or two years? While we are at it, another point raised by the Minister was about the security services. Let no one claim that the security services want 90 days. Whitehall officials have reported that the security services have made ““no recommendation”” on the detention period. To return to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Billericay (Mr. Baron), let no one claim, either, that we need to bring our periods of detention into line with those of other countries. In Australia, where a murderous terrorist plot has just, mercifully, been foiled because of vigilant police action, there is fierce debate about an extension from two days to 14 days. Most of the other countries with similar judicial systems to ours have smaller, not greater, rights to detain without trial. On the evidence that we have, 90 days is simply too long, and too long by an order of magnitude. The relative leisure of the three-month time scale, compared with the present 14 days or—for that matter, 28 days—risks the imprisonment and consequent release without charge of innocent people. Those innocent people will be drawn disproportionately from one section of the community and there is a real risk in that community of a backlash on an unprecedented scale, not to mention the affront to justice that would be felt by all. When this matter was raised with the Home Secretary, it was clearly a sore point, because he went into his high-decibel overdrive, as he sometimes does. He started talking about how the leaders of the community were entirely onside against terrorism. Of course they are. Of course the heads of the Muslim communities, in particular, are onside against terrorism. They fear this more than we do, I suspect. The problem that they face is the problem of radicalisation—indeed, unknown radicalisation—of very small but dangerous parts of their own community, involving young men in their community. We must not make those community leaders’ job more difficult, or, indeed, almost impossible.