Terrorism Bill

My Lords, most of what I wanted to say has already been said, and probably more elegantly than I would have said it. However, I want to make two short points that have not been made. The noble Baroness, Lady Ramsay, correctly said that there could be no prosecutions under this legislation without the consent of the Attorney-General. That is right. I am worried about what leads up to the question of whether there should be a prosecution and who will define the new offence of glorification. In the first place it will be the police. They will have to decide whether somebody should be put under arrest, questioned and held. What worries me is legislation creep. We have had some very stark examples of what can happen when we have not defined things properly just lately. For example, we passed an Act that prohibited assembly without permission within 916 yards of Parliament. Ostensibly that was to deal with terrorism, but I think that it was probably intended to get rid of the shacks which are just outside but which are still there in spite of the legislation. But what happened? A woman decided that she was so concerned about the Iraq war and the British dead that she and a colleague decided to announce by the Cenotaph the names of the British soldiers who had been killed. Before she had got very far down that unfortunately very long list, nine policemen descended on her, arrested her, told her she was committing an offence, took her to a police station, charged her and she was taken to court. That is the sort of thing that worries me—the fear that the police will overstretch themselves, as the north Wales police have, I believe, overstretched themselves in wanting to prosecute the Prime Minister for saying some derogatory things about the Welsh. In voting on these amendments, we ought to keep that in mind. The only other point I want to make is on the manifesto commitments. Of course, we all want to respect manifesto commitments, don’t we? Some people, like the Minister, think that they are sacrosanct, but I wonder whether they really are. I remember that in the Labour manifesto there was a commitment on smoking. The manifesto commitment was that smoking would be allowed in bars where there was no eating and that private clubs would be exempt. I am quite sure that noble Lords will all have read every word of the Labour manifesto and they will know that what I have said is true. But, unfortunately, manifesto commitments are not always taken in their complete context. On 14 February the House of Commons decided that the manifesto commitment was not good enough—that what the people had voted for was not good enough and that the people had to be corrected. They therefore decided to amend that manifesto commitment to say that there should be no smoking in any enclosed public space whether there was eating or not and that even private clubs would not be able to decide whether or not they should allow smoking. Manifesto commitments are not sacrosanct—they can be altered. This House has altered them and I hope that it will do so again today without being accused of insulting the electorate by not keeping completely in line with a manifesto commitment made by the Labour Party at the last election.