Counter-Terrorism Bill

Today's debate has been about not whether to counter terrorism, but how best to counter terrorism. Whenever we do that, we have to address the unavoidable ethical and practical dilemmas faced by any open democratic society that is subject to the threat of terrorism. Much of the Bill is on the right lines, but the proposal to extend detention without charge beyond 28 days is not. I understand why Ministers have come forward with that proposal, and I do not question their motives. I know that Ministers feel that they will be responsible if things go wrong and people are killed. I know that that is why they want to err on the side of what they see as security, set against civil liberty. But I think that what they propose is wrong—wrong in principle and likely to be counter-productive in practice. In recent times, a lot of attention has been paid to what it means to be British. Well, one thing it means is that we British do not allow the police or politicians to lock people up for a long time without charge. That is not some trendy, fashionable bit of political correctness; it was laid down in Magna Carta in 1215 AD, and it has been followed in the English-speaking, common-law democracies ever since. In Canada, the maximum is just one day. In the USA, South Africa and New Zealand, it is two days; in Ireland, seven days; and in Australia, 12. Here in Britain, we already have a maximum of 28 days—more than twice as long as anyone else—yet the Government are saying that a further extension is necessary because anti-terrorist investigations can take a long time. However, as has been made clear today, other people equally involved and equally well informed believe that the current limit is quite long enough. In any case, there are alternative and better ways to deal with the problem of protracted investigations. The Government have accepted the proposal, which I made some years ago, that the law should be changed to permit suspects to be questioned after they have been charged. So, suspects could be charged with lesser offences related to terrorism and, if appropriate, charged with greater offences later. That has also been made easier by the lowering of the threshold for deciding that a suspect should be charged, and we have to remember that all this is set against the background that no one can be arrested unless there are grounds for suspecting them in the first place. Yet the Government now propose on top of all those changes, which would strengthen the hands of the police, to allow the Home Secretary—not in a crisis, but in individual cases—to hold suspects for longer than 28 days without charge on the say-so of the police and the Director of Public Prosecutions. It has been suggested that that power would be constrained if it were subject to a parliamentary debate. It certainly would be a constitutional novelty: Parliament being recommended by the Government to deprive an individual citizen of their liberty, presumably on a whipped vote. To describe that as a kangaroo court would be an insult to kangaroos. Such a change would not be a defeat for terrorism; it would be a win for the terrorists. Whatever the motives of the misguided zealots who become suicide bombers, the evil people promoting terrorism know that no democracy has ever been overthrown by terrorism. That is not what they are after. What they aim to do is intimidate us into closing down our open society. They want to provoke us into setting aside the libertarian principles that form the basis of our parliamentary and judicial systems. They want to be able to portray us as hypocrites who preach one thing and practice another. They want to be able to say that, when the going gets tough, we are just as reckless with human rights as they are. Those people also want us, by our response to terrorist outrages, to take actions that alienate sections of our own law-abiding population and attract sympathy for their cause by getting us to lock up innocent people. So, how we respond to the threat of terrorism needs to be considered very carefully. We want to thwart the murderous intentions of the bombers and assassins. We also need to thwart their propaganda. That is why I believe the Government's proposal is likely to prove counter-productive in practice, as well as wrong in principle. The Government say that they want these powers in case the police and security services are overwhelmed by demands on their time, but the law already provides for that through the Civil Contingencies Act, which specifically lists terrorism as one of the types of emergency that it covers. The procedure laid down in that Act, which was passed by the House as recently as 2004, could be triggered in such a crisis, and Parliament could have a sensible debate about whether it would be appropriate to respond by resorting to the emergency provisions. That would not require the declaration of a state of emergency, and the use of such emergency powers could be subject to challenge in the courts. None of that applies to what the Government propose. I hope that the Government will not proceed with their proposal to extend detention without charge beyond 28 days. Surely it would be better to develop a consensus in the face of the terrorist threat and to develop policies that were likely to thwart terrorist outrages while denying any propaganda advantage to the terrorists. I say that as Member for Holborn and St. Pancras, which is where two of the four 7 July outrages took place, and which was also the location of one of the attempted outrages on 21 July, so I yield to no one in my opposition to terrorism and my loathing of terrorists. However, I also want to protect our ancient liberties, because they are at the heart of our open democracy and because, by sticking to our civil liberties, we give the lie to the terrorists' claims that we are no better than they are.