Terrorism Bill

I do not intend to detain the House for long, as we have been over this ground several times and I fear that we are in danger of pursuing a debate that might generate more heat than light. However, I commend the closing remarks of the hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz) to the Home Secretary. The approach that he advocates, of going out from Whitehall and engaging with communities, is much wiser than that which the Government have hitherto chosen to follow. The obsession with introducing one piece of legislation after another on the basis that something must be seen to be done is not a sustainable approach in the long term. On the political context of today’s debate, the Home Secretary spoke last week about his wish to build a consensus around terrorism legislation. I took him at his word and was disappointed on Monday to hear the Chancellor of the Exchequer—I know how fond the Home Secretary is of him—basically say that anyone who does not agree with the Government is soft on terror. Such language does not really assist the debate. Again, on ““Today”” this morning, the Home Secretary spoke about the House of Lords playing politics with terrorism. He only needs to read the report of the debate in another place and he will see that Lords amendment No. 5, with which we are dealing, was brought forward by Lord Lloyd of Berwick, a Cross Bencher, and supported by the Bishop of Winchester. Clearly, there is a wide concern outside the chattering classes and the political community. I know that Ministers and Secretaries of State in particular sometimes find themselves living in a bubble in which they are insulated from some of those concerns. I ask the Home Secretary to accept, however, that those of us who hold such concerns do so for sincere and deeply felt reasons and that we are not simply engaged in some sort of frolic. On the Home Secretary’s point that the glorification proposal was in the Labour party manifesto, the manifesto referred not just to glorification but to those who condoned terrorism. Clearly, that proposal has been quietly and properly dropped, but it indicates to me that these days—particularly in light of last night’s events—there is a pick-and-mix element to political manifestos. I caution the Home Secretary against relying too much on that point. The Liberal Democrats’ concerns remain as they have been throughout. First, there is the question of the vagueness of ““glorification”” as a term to be used in statute. My hon. Friend the Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Dr. Harris) made that point in relation to the report of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, and he is absolutely right. Three concerns were raised by the Joint Committee, of which the first two have been addressed, but the Government have made no attempt to address the third. For as long as they insist on the maintenance of the term in the Bill, they can make no such attempt, as that circle simply cannot be squared. The Home Secretary accepted in a speech today that we still do not have a proper working definition of terrorism. The effect of that is to have vagueness heaped on vagueness, which results in bad law. I did not come here to enact bad law. The Home Secretary told us that glorification is a subset of indirect encouragement. He is absolutely right. That assertion, however, is an admission that the reference to glorification is wholly unnecessary; in fact, it is dangerous. The problem with using exemplars in that way is that they can be seen as in some way restricting the broader term of which they seek to be an example. The right hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer) said that all glorification would be caught by indirect encouragement but that not all indirect encouragement would be caught by glorification. He is absolutely right in that. He will be aware, as those advising the Home Secretary should surely be aware, that it is a simple rule of statutory construction that to express one option is to exclude the others.