Terrorism Bill

My Lords, I shall say straight away what considerable pleasure the noble Lord’s last sentence has given me, if no other Member of this House. I hope that I can be as telegraphic as he has been in dealing with some of the points raised. The noble Lord accurately understood the Government’s points and expounded on them with great clarity and precision. I can but say that I agree with him. Those points are right, but the qualifications that he made afterwards were, I regret, fundamentally flawed. I shall take up one of them. The noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, said that glorification was supposed to be a stand-alone matter in the manifesto. Noble Lords will know that we have said that glorification is a species of indirect encouragement and is therefore illustrative. Therefore, the manifesto holds true. We have had that debate on a number of occasions therefore perhaps I need say no more. I reassure the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, that we hope that we have made clear that glorification is an example of indirect encouragement and is included in the Bill to guide the courts, as has been the case in previous legislation. Therefore, I agree with my noble friend Lady Ramsay of Cartvale that the need to include it for illustrative purposes is clear and that the ordinary man in the street—we old-fashioned lawyers used to say, ““the man on the Clapham omnibus””—would understand it with the greatest of ease. I say to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford that there are of course always difficulties. He was right to talk about the difficulties of language, but, on this occasion, that difficulty is not so great that the courts of our country could not deal with it. Quite often, whether it can be inferred that direct or indirect encouragement has taken place will be a question of fact. It will be a question of fact also whether, on the basis of the facts disclosed to the court at the time, acts of terrorism were thereby glorified. That, therefore, makes precision and rigidity of definition difficult, because it would fail to address the mischief that this is intended to cure. I know that that is not the intent of the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, and am therefore happy to assist him and the House in identifying why the flaws of that drafting would not meet the mischief that we have collectively identified as needing to be addressed. I reassure the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart of Swindon, who asked about the guidance to be given to the police, that we take this matter seriously and are clear that the police must not use these powers lightly and disproportionately. We have every confidence that they will exercise due discretion in the operation of all new powers the Bill confers upon them; a Home Office circular will be issued to coincide with its commencement. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, that one of the absolute joys of this House is the breadth and oddity of alliances that, from time to time, take place as people go through the Lobbies. There are many Pauline conversions as a Bill goes through, and I am satisfied that the noble Lord’s conversion will be such that he can rest easy on his Bench, and not take the exercise that would otherwise be forthcoming.