I am grateful to my hon. Friend. In fact, we have almost never agreed on anything, and as far as I am concerned, long may that continue.
I shall try to make it clear where I stand and what I think happened as the Bill progressed through the other place. I start with a proposition that almost everybody would agree with—perhaps everybody other than my hon. Friend. It is that the state has to be able to hold secrets. That is not a desirable state of affairs, but the reality of relationships around the world and the problems that we face even within our own country are such that the state sometimes has information that should remain uniquely its property.
If that is the case, the question arises of what should happen in court proceedings. Closed material proceedings relate to civil cases. I do not know whether anybody other than me, sad as I am, has read the history of the agencies involved, but this is not a new phenomenon. As far back as world war one, some cases simply did not go to court because the agencies concerned did not want their networks, individual agents and practices exposed in a court of law. That is not new. What is new is that we now have cases exported from abroad, as it were, and heard in our courts for civil reasons.
The right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden came to the debate, said a few words and went—he does not seem to have listened to anybody else’s argument, but that is a matter for him. He made two fundamental mistakes, and I will deal with them in turn. First, he gave an example of what must have been a Special Immigration Appeals Commission case in which a special advocate had been used and the case had been overturned as a result of his being privy to certain information. The right hon. Gentleman prayed that in aid as an argument against special advocates, but as far as I could tell it was an argument in exactly the opposite direction. His point was flawed in that respect.
Secondly, the right hon. Gentleman seemed to misunderstand the control principle. It means that when agencies representing two nations share information, the originator of that information has control over what happens to it when it is shared. He cited the Binyam Mohamed case and was right that some of the evidence that emerged in a British civil court had previously been heard in a court of the United States’ jurisdiction. However, that does not alter the principle. The fact that that information could have been found by other means does not mean that the originator of the intelligence does not still own it. The problem was a breach of principle rather than the actual information that came out in the British court.
I echo what several Members have already said: I and many others have reason to know that there have been cases in which lives in this country have been saved because of shared information. To be blunt, if we cannot continue to share information with our counterparts, particularly in America, but not exclusively, lives will be lost. That is the tough, blunt reality of the choice that we have to make. I have no doubt that the balance of the argument lies with a system that many people say, from pure legal principles, is imperfect, but it is the best system that anyone has been able come up with to deal with the problem. I have no difficulty in supporting part 2, and I have no difficulty in supporting Second Reading if there is a Division.
Finally, we have to make a choice on closed material proceedings—the hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) made a point about that in an intervention. We also have to make a choice about whether it is better not to defend civil cases because we know from the arguments that PII will not resolve the issue; it just means that nothing will be heard. Do we not defend those civil actions, many of which are probably founded on dubious grounds, and carry on paying out millions of pounds in compensation, even in cases where we know that the person concerned had bad intent to this country and its citizens? I think I know what my constituents think about that issue. I know where I stand: the answer is no, we should not carry on spending that money for that purpose.
4.21 pm