Terrorism Bill

The debate has indeed been fascinating, but the Minister seemed to illustrate the muddled thinking from which the Government are suffering when it crystallised around what a freedom fighter and a terrorist might be. The description that she provided for the Committee was that if an Iraqi had stood up at a public meeting in the middle of the 1990s, or indeed in 1998, and said that conditions in Iraq were such that the violent overthrow of Saddam Hussein was necessary and that people should take active steps towards it—a policy that at the time was at least tacitly supported by the Labour Government of the late 1990s, when some military action was being taken against the Iraqis by the use of air strikes—that person would now be committing a criminal offence. That may be a new Blairite doctrine. I do not know, because the Prime Minister has said on several occasions that the rules of the game have changed. However, if that is the case, we need a proper debate about it, because the Government are introducing that offence by the back door. I appreciate that we shall have an opportunity tomorrow to consider definitions of terrorism, but at present terrorism is undefined, except by our domestic circumstance, and the Government, by passing the Bill and clause 1, will without the slightest doubt criminalise those who even negligently call for action to be taken in such circumstances. We can see that from the debate. For the Minister to come to the Committee and ask us to approve that is breathtaking. We said at the outset that we want to work constructively with the Government, but we are in Committee and, apart from Report, this is our last opportunity to do something about clause 1. I am glad that the Minister said that she will consider the problem of the wording of clause 1 and whether the negligence extension is justified. However, she has known about Members’ anxieties for some time, yet no concrete proposals have been presented to us this afternoon to solve or remedy the problem. That makes my life—and that of any hon. Member who wants to provide some broad support for the Government’s aims but is anxious about the detail—difficult. Those points were well made in the debate by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) and my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Bone). As the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham) said, if we get it wrong, we will make things worse. I listened carefully to the comments of the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen in a debate on terrorism and community cohesion in Westminster Hall last week. From my experience of contact with the Muslim community in Britain, I agreed with almost everything he said. It is worrying that, at this stage of our proceedings, the problem remains and the clause is so poorly drafted. If the Minister intends to make a concession, why cannot she accept amendment No. 79? It takes the first necessary step. Two more steps are needed—one relates to terrorism and the other to glorification—to make the Bill workable and fair. We need a tight recklessness test on specific intent, not the existing loose, opaque and wide-ranging catch-all provision. I regret that it has taken a long debate to extract from the Government just how wide ranging the clause is intended to be. Any hon. Member who is considering what to do this afternoon should bear in mind that clause 1 criminalises negligence. On the whole, we are reluctant to do that in this country. I am sorry to tell the Minister that I shall seek to press amendment No. 79 to a vote. I invite all hon. Members who are worried about the wording to join me in trying to get it improved. No one can claim that amendment No. 79 would wreck the Bill—it would do no such thing. It leaves clause 1 in a perfectly workable condition but makes it clear that the offence of encouragement cannot be committed by negligence. The other matters that we have considered include the provisions relating to glorification. The Minister has not provided a single justification for keeping those provisions in the Bill. As was rightly said in the debate, the concept of glorification is alien to our legal system. Why retain it when it will cause the endless problems that the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen highlighted? It could easily be removed, leaving a perfectly workable clause. Again, nobody can claim that we would wreck the clause. I therefore hope that, after we have voted on amendment No. 79, we will have the opportunity to vote on amendment No. 4, which would ensure the removal of the subsection relating to glorification. I am conscious that the hon. and learned Member for Medway (Mr. Marshall-Andrews) has also tabled well-reasoned amendments, which he presented with his usual cogency, that seek to restrict the operation and scope of the Bill. On that basis, if we are unsuccessful on amendment No. 79, I shall have no hesitation in supporting the hon. and learned Gentleman if he chooses to move amendments Nos. 21 or 22, although I suspect that he will not be allowed to move both of them. Their purpose is to restrict the offence to one of specific intent only. I would much prefer to see the Bill in that shape at the end of this afternoon than in the incoherent and, frankly, frightening shape in which the Government have left it. The Minister and I agree that the basic intention behind the Bill is to ensure that terrorism is curbed, and that those who might be encouraged to engage in it should be discouraged from doing so. However, as the Minister knows from other debates that we have had on these issues, the best way of doing that is to persuade the communities from which terrorists are drawn that they should not succumb to their blandishments, and that it is better to achieve that by voluntary means than by coercion. Clause 1 has a coercive quality, particularly in relation to glorification, that goes well beyond the point to which it should go. For those reasons, I urge the Government to think again on this matter. If they do not, they will find themselves being increasingly obstructed as the Bill progresses. If they would only listen, we could make some progress.