Terrorism Bill

My Lords, I quite understand the noble Baroness’s concern about the time that we have spent on this and the fact that we are going over much of the same ground, but I hope that she will feel that there was something to be gained from our proceedings when we last considered this matter, even if it was only the amusement or astonishment of those who read the Division List and found that I was in the Division Lobby with the noble Lords, Lord Ahmed and Lord Lester of Herne Hill. That suggests that there is a rather wide coalition against Her Majesty’s Government on this point. However, each of us was looking at it from a slightly different point of view. For my part, I am still not happy about the definition even of terrorism that we use. There is a great deal of work to be done on better defining terrorism. Like the noble Baroness, I have no taste for those who glorify terrorism, but I do not think that she dealt terribly well with the points which I put to her the last time that we discussed this. Many of us feel that the celebration of the Easter Rising of 1916 come pretty close to the glorification of terrorism. That leaves a lot of us unhappy. At the other end of the spectrum, I notice that a film is shortly to be released that has as its theme a masked desperado who commits an enormous number of terrorist acts, finishing up in the blowing up of Parliament at the end of the film. Is that glorification of terrorism, or is it just rather silly fiction? I know that the Attorney-General will have the sole right of instituting a prosecution under those provisions. In a way, that makes me even more uneasy. It gives people the feeling that some people will be able to glorify some sorts of terrorism and some people will not, although there might be no difference in what is in the legislation, but there would be a difference in what was in the mind of—I will not say the Attorney-General—any attorney. However, for what it is worth, I would say to the noble Baroness that I recognise when we have kicked this around for long enough and when we have tramped through the Lobbies for long enough, and so I will not be tramping through a Lobby today.