Terrorism Bill

The problem with that is that the hon. Gentleman’s case has already been undermined by the Home Secretary, who has told us that glorification is a subset of indirect encouragement. That means that nothing said by the imams referred to by my noble and learned Friend Lord Carlile would not be caught by the broader and more general terms of indirect encouragement. The difficulty arises from the baggage that is attached to glorification. I shall say more about that later. I want to say something about the Home Secretary’s objections to the Lords amendment. He latched on to the word ““listener””. I accept that the wording is not the best possible formulation, and it is not the one that I would have chosen. If the word ““recipient”” had been used, with one bound we should all have been free; but instead of trying to work around that, the Government chose to set up a tremendous clash between this House and the other place. As I told the hon. Member for Stone (Mr. Cash), I think that that can only have more to do with the wider political debate than with the process of securing good, workable legislation. Then there is the question of the signal that would be sent to the courts and to terrorists if it were suggested that glorification was somehow acceptable. That has more than a whiff of desperation about it. If it is the strongest argument that the Government can come up with, they are in some trouble. As I said earlier, the Government previously used the word ““condone”” in their manifesto. When they dropped that word, did it mean that they suddenly condoned terrorism? I do not think so.