Terrorism Bill

: It is a pleasure to follow the hon. and learned Member for Medway (Mr. Marshall-Andrews). The word ““glorify”” is meant to be orotund. It is a word used almost exclusively on religious occasions, when it is meant to convey a feeling. It is meant to convey much more—and much more vaguely—than the meaning that it actually has. So it does have a place, but not in law. The hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz) was wrong to say that the Home Secretary, the Government and their experts have concluded that the word ““glorify”” is necessary. Only the Prime Minister came to that conclusion, and ““glorify”” remains in the Bill in order to save him from the consequences of omitting that word, to which he feels deeply attached. No one on either side of the argument can give anything other than a ludicrous example of the difference between a case that could be caught by the term ““glorify””, and one that could be caught by the term ““indirect encouragement””. In other words, the Government have not produced a single example of someone’s saying something that manifestly should be prosecuted, but which cannot be prosecuted unless the word ““glorify”” is included in this legislation. If the House is to support it, the Government, the Home Secretary and the Minister for Policing, Security and Community Safety must prove that point. It is no good making vague, suitable-for-the-““Today””-programme statements that anybody who does not agree with the Government must in some way be nasty. I know that that is a basic new Labour belief, but the truth is that many of us are concerned that the law be enforced, and be seen to be enforced, impartially, particularly on a matter as serious as this. Every time that an example of something that would be caught by the term ““glorify”” is cited and shown to be ludicrous, the Home Secretary laughs and says, in effect, ““I wouldn’t allow a prosecution on that basis.”” He has to be saved from himself. We do not want a legal system in which the public and the individual are protected from the rigors of the law not by the law itself, but by a collection of political figures. We want a law that—to paraphrase the hon. and learned Member for Medway—is clear, precise and clinical; we do not want one written in such a way as to extend Ministers’ privileges and prerogatives. Having been a Minister for 16 years, I believe that Ministers should be saved from being given an apparently quasi-judicial role; that is not a proper role for them, unless it is utterly necessary in the case of a particular Minister. Of course, there are circumstances in which the word ““glorify”” is not as otiose as we think—in which it is, contrary to what the Home Secretary thinks, capable of being used unreasonably. It could have a serious effect on minority communities, and here, I have a great deal of sympathy with what the hon. Member for Leicester, East said earlier, although not with the conclusion that he came to. A person who recently preached in the town of Ipswich the particular, in my view rather narrow and extreme, position of a Protestant group was stopped by the police and told that his action—he felt that he was preaching the gospel—was liable to prosecution on the ground of stirring up religious and racial hatred. I believe the policeman in question to be wrong in his interpretation of the law, but I do know the effect of that interpretation on that small and perfectly decent—but, I think, wrong—religious community. They happen to live in my constituency, and they came to me to talk this thing through. They said, ““We are law-abiding people and we do not wish to be put into a category whereby it may seem, either to us or to others, that we have broken the law. We wish to abide by it.”” Given their peculiar view of the nature of human law and their desire for a theocracy, that is a very difficult thing for them to say. However, I do not believe that small groups of decent people should be made, in a sense, illegal simply because we think them rather peculiar. Here, I mean ““peculiar”” in the technical sense of different from other people. I therefore point out to the Home Secretary that there is a serious reason why the word ““glorify”” should not be included in the Bill—a reason akin to that advanced by the hon. Member for Leicester, East. We must also recognise that we are dealing with issues about which the law has to be precise. Such issues of their nature give rise to fervour, and the word ““glorify”” is itself a word of fervour. The great music of Steiner is fervour-creating. I very often find myself uplifted by those words and that music, but they are not a suitable subject for law. We have to be very careful, because people who speak about religion often do so with fervour, as it is the most important part of their lives. For believers, it is the most important part of life, so the use of fervent words is not surprising. Sometimes, when the Home Secretary describes the sort of statement that he is trying to prevent, he gets pretty close to what is said in the holy books of various religions represented in this country. The step is not a big one. That is partly because holy books were usually written in times and language very different from our own, and partly because they use turns of phrase that are especially difficult to translate into English. The Government must be sensitive to that, and not make matters worse.