Terrorism Bill

The word ““glorification”” is pretty unusual. Its only regular use is in the formularies of the Church of England and the Church of Rome, where it has a particular religious meaning. If one walked down a high street saying, ““I’m just about to go and do a bit of glorification””, it would be thought at least a bit odd. The problem with the provision is that it is left over from a previous attempt to try to react satisfactorily to the understandable anger of people in Britain about the seeming ability of clerics from various organisations, among others, to talk in a hot-headed manner and thereby seemingly encourage people to accept actions that are manifestly dangerous and unpleasant. The Minister needs to be very careful about things that are left over and no longer of any use. The appendix, for example, is a particularly nasty part of the body in the sense that it causes a great deal of harm to no discernible good effect. That is because it is left over from a use that it once had but does not have any more. It would have been much better had the Almighty so organised the process of evolution that we got rid of it altogether. I suspect that that is precisely what we should be doing with this part of the clause. It would be much better to get rid of it altogether because the residuum is not sufficient to grant any important advantage. I have tried hard to invent a case that could properly be prosecuted with the possibility of seven years’ imprisonment and could not be prosecuted under any other subsection in the clause, let alone the rest of the Bill. So far, I have been unable to do so other than by reaching to those furthest shores that some people have visited in explaining why glorification is so dangerous to history teachers and so on. It is almost impossible to imagine circumstances in which the provision creates any additional defence of freedom or opposition to terrorism that could properly be used. It does not make sense. Introducing into British law an offence of glorification is seriously dangerous. The word ““glorification”” is so loose, difficult to define and varied in people’s understanding of it that it will become a dangerous precedent for the Government.