Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Bill

My Lords, as the last Back-Bench speaker, I am in the happy position of being able to rely on excellent contributions to this excellent debate by many here now. I associate myself with all that has been said by noble Lords vis-à-vis the appointment of the Minister and, indeed, his predecessor. The few remarks I shall make are based around a sense, rather different from that of the noble Lord, Lord Morgan, that in this intensely difficult business of balancing public safety with individual liberty, this Bill reaches a reasonable outcome. There is no perfect answer. This is a balance we all grapple with, all the time, in all ages. None the less, I think, subject to one major limitation that I shall come to, that this is a reasonable outcome. Many aspects of it are arguable, and I may yet be persuadable in the debates to come, but I say that. The noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, referred to the need to trust the security services, and I wholly agree with his quote from Karl Popper, which seems to me to be a very wise encapsulation of liberty. I think trust in the security services should go only so far. The old cliché of liberty requiring eternal vigilance is true, and the security services are overpressed and hugely pressured. I was at the meeting yesterday, which my noble friend Lady Hamwee referred to, where this young, born-and-bred Englishman told of his years under a control order with his life ruined, and for what? When the court eventually overthrew the order, the judge made extremely critical remarks about the basis upon which the order could have originally been imposed. One has to have that in mind. Yet I fully accept that we should be proud of and grateful for the security services in this country. It is just that, in the modern age, the circumstances they grapple with are intensely difficult. The mobility and anonymity of modern life are enemies to security, and the technology that comes to our aid is also partly an abettor of some of the more gruesome plans that are hatched. I would like to commend the House. Perhaps one should not be self-congratulatory, but it seems to me that the protection of liberty is particularly the job of this House. I do not think there is any denying that, understandably, the public are more easily persuaded in relation to public safety issues than in relation to individual liberties. We have seen examples of that quite recently, and it behoves us to recollect what the noble Lord, Lord Judd, said in an impassioned coda to his speech: human rights are not someone else's but ours. We characterise our society and culture by these great entrenched individual liberties. Our democracy is built around them, and therefore it is right that we should be extremely reluctant to go down the path of secret trials and the rest of it. I am persuaded to go that way only because we had one plangent example of what can lie behind all this from my noble friend Lord Macdonald. It was about an intercept conversation that plainly reveals two people planning a grievous terrorist attack who cannot be brought to justice because of the inability of the court to hear intercept evidence. Yet if it is not taken with ultimate seriousness, and if not protected by exceptional provisions, such as this Bill provides, it could, and in some cases would, lead to ghastly public disasters. Although the freedom to go on living is the most precious liberty of all, in the liberty which protects that there is a great paradox, as my noble friend Lady Hamwee said: the protections we give to liberty head off disaster because they undermine the basis upon which extremism flourishes and can build. My big reservation with the Bill is one that has been well aired by my noble friend Lord Goodhart, the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd. It is the fact that the Secretary of State is the person who first imposes one of these orders. I think that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, said that that was fair enough because the Secretary of State is responsible for security. That is a point of view, but not one that I share. The task of imposing one of these TPIMs is about as difficult as one can imagine. Given the bizarre circumstances in which that judgment has to be made, it seems to be, par excellence, one for a senior judge who is used to weighing evidence, has a nose for truth and falsehood, and whose experience will fit him or her to reach what are often pressured and speedy decisions, never forgetting that Home Secretaries are under the most intense pressure—we have two former Home Secretaries sitting here now. Very often, no doubt, they have 10 balls which are all urgent and important to juggle simultaneously and have to rely to a high degree upon their civil servants. I do not for a moment disparage any of those civil servants if I say that such a crucial decision is, par excellence, one for an experienced judge. If that reform was built into this Bill, I would be assuaged at the otherwise heavy intrusions it makes upon ancient liberties. At this time of night, I do not really want to say much more except to line up with those who feel that an annual renewal of these powers is, in all the circumstances, perhaps the better course.