Counter-Terrorism Bill

My Lords, when I recently had the privilege to be permitted to visit our troops in Helmand province in Afghanistan, it was evident to an ex-soldier like me that our service men and women had learnt hugely from the Northern Ireland experience. When I listened to the Minister today, it was equally evident that the Government have learnt nothing. At this late hour and after 45 speakers, I will try not to reiterate what has been said. I am on my feet to vehemently oppose 42-day detention. It is wrong, unjust and potentially the repetition of a 1970s mistake in Northern Ireland. As my noble and learned friend Lord Steyn clearly indicated, it would be a process without safeguards, as it would occur in circumstances where there was no evidence for a court to test. Thirty-five years ago, I saw how internment without much high-grade intelligence, based on perception and prejudice, resulted in many of the wrong people being detained without any judicial safeguards. It saw alienation and a loss of community support. I am not opposed to internment, by which I mean the real thing, where we have evidence to tender in a closed court that simply cannot be revealed in open court because it would infringe the security of a valuable source of information or the use of electronic devices, or would endanger security personnel working under cover. That is as opposed to this 42-day compromise, which assumes that, if we keep suspects long enough, we will break them. We might break an innocent person and get a confession, but there is not a defence lawyer in the country who cannot argue successfully that duress, not guilt, was the reason for the confession. The hardened, conditioned, brainwashed terrorist whom I have known for 30 years in Northern Ireland will concentrate on the cracks in the wall or the individual bits of dandruff on the interrogator’s shoulders—whatever—and it will not matter whether it is 28, 42, 56 or 90 days. He will resist and resist and he will win the day. I am no softie on terrorism. I have probably been instrumental in helping to put away more terrorists in Northern Ireland than anyone else in your Lordships’ House. I learnt at first hand and know what must be done. In Northern Ireland, the Government backed down on the option to have judicially directed and monitored internment when improving high-grade intelligence would have provided sensitive information and allowed vulnerable sources to give their evidence in closed court. Such a process could have been honourably and justifiably employed. Today, instead of biting the bullet, the Government want us to accept their disguised version of the Guantanamo gulag employed by the United States. That is what the Government’s demand amounts to. When it does not work, we will we have a clamour for 56 days or 90 days. Let me forecast to the Government what they will inevitably do when they come under international pressure, as they will if they go down the route of extended detention without trial. They will do what they have done in Northern Ireland. They will abandon those police and intelligence agencies that are currently striving to defend our community against the evil that threatens us. I hope that the Government recognise that this is what the police and intelligence agencies here in Great Britain expect and fear. They have seen the Government’s willingness to accept phrases such as ““a force within a force”” as something discreditable in relation to the RUC’s Special Branch. What do they think Special Branch and the intelligence agencies really are? Today’s police and security personnel have seen the Government spend multiples of millions of pounds sterling on inquiries where the actions of security services in the 1970s or 1980s are judged against the comparative normality of 2008 and where the security of the then serving officers is disregarded and their approaching old age is disrupted by what they see as a treacherous attempt to criminalise them. That is the background evidence against which our security services are asked to work today. For example, in Northern Ireland, over £60 million has been spent to date looking at the Hamill, Nelson and Wright cases. Almost £10 million per annum is being spent to maintain a Police Ombudsman’s office with almost 150 staff—one member of staff for every 50 police officers on the ground, or £1,500 per annum per policeman in Northern Ireland to be policed by PONI. Against that craven reaction to terrorist propaganda, how can our current security forces anywhere in the UK have the confidence that they will not be the sacrificial lambs? If the Government want to prevent and overcome the terrorist threat, they must realise that it cannot be done by intimidation, by creating distrust within society as a whole or by diluting a nation’s hard-won freedoms and rights. It must be done by recreating the confidence that society has lost in the Government’s ability to think ahead of the event, to put a vibrant and well resourced security and intelligence service in place and to give it—and us—the confidence to believe that, in doing what is right, it will not be betrayed or abandoned. Finally, do the Government believe that, if we have a terrorist outrage, the victims’ families will take comfort from the fact that we can fill our holding centres with suspects? No. They will still ask why the Government expended energy and resources on diluting a nation’s civil rights rather than on implementing a feisty, durable and well resourced anti-terrorist capability.