It is a real pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), who speaks consistently on this and other civil rights issues, even if he does not often agree with the right hon. Member for Knowsley (Mr Howarth). I suspect that, on this occasion, he is also unlikely to agree with me.
I have to confess that I hesitated before deciding to speak in this Second Reading debate, partly because I see a Bill Committee looming and the prospect of
12 days in the spring with the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) is not particularly attractive to any of us, and partly because consensus seems to be emerging among the majority of Members that, unsatisfactory though the Bill might be, it is none the less a necessary measure.
There is little disagreement on the first part of the Bill, which will establish a regime for the oversight of the intelligence services that has long been called for. That is much to be welcomed. It is the second part of the Bill, which deals with the closed material proceedings—wrongly, in my view, called secret courts—that appears to cause controversy. I shall focus my remarks on that part of the Bill, although not at length as consensus is emerging and many of the points that I wanted to raise have already been discussed. The right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears), for example, identified many of the arguments that I would deploy in support of the Bill being given a Second Reading.
Many lawyers, myself included, regard the Bill as at best undesirable and possibly pernicious. The obvious reason for that is that the principle that has served us well for many years is that we do justice publicly. We also permit full access to the evidence for those against whom allegations are made—whether serious or not; in these cases, they usually are—and for those who make those allegations, in order that a fair adjudication can be openly and publicly be made of their complaint and of what has been said against the accused.
The Government need to persuade those who have expressed concerns that the mischief against which the Bill is said to be directed is so serious that, in the limited number of cases to which closed material proceedings would apply, we need to take a fundamentally different approach from the one that has traditionally applied to the administration of public justice. The Government have identified four problems, although they have not always been clearly articulated. It is worth identifying them, for the sake of those such as my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Mr Tyrie) who are troubled by the Bill, in order for me to explain why I think the Bill should be given a Second Reading.
The first is the continued necessity in the security climate in which we the United Kingdom and, indeed, the western world find ourselves to have access to very good intelligence material—material gathered not only from our sources and by our own agencies, but by the agencies and sources that are available to our allies overseas. The difficulty the Government face as regards those agencies capable of providing us with information that is essential for the defence and security of this country is that when something is secret and comes from a foreign intelligence agency and potentially a source of that intelligence agency that might be exposed or, if it is a live source, even threatened, the Government need to be able to give an absolute assurance that that material will remain closed and will remain secret. Without that assurance—this applies not only to the United States but to other intelligence agencies, too—the Government face real difficulties in ensuring that the intelligence necessary to protect all our constituents will be available in this country.
There is, of course, a related point—that the intelligence services here need to be able to recruit their own agents and need to be able to assure those agents from the very first that their identity and anything connected to anything
that might reveal their identity will remain secret. That is the first issue that calls to be dealt with, and it supports the Government’s position on part 2.
The second problem, as I see it, is that undoubtedly in the past the Government—perhaps not only this Government but the preceding one—have been obliged to settle cases where they had legitimate defences to the accusations that were made against them, but in respect of which they felt, for the reasons I have already given, that those defences could not properly be advanced, usually for the simple reason that it would expose intelligence sources and, potentially, the way in which intelligence is gathered.
Those settlements are wrong for two reasons. First, there is never any adjudication whatever of the underlying merits of the case, and from the perspective of justice as a whole—and, I might add, from the perspective of claimants as well as that of the Government—that is totally unsatisfactory. Secondly, because the Government have been obliged to settle these cases—a point touched on by the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles—large sums of taxpayers’ money have had to be paid out. In many cases, they might have been lost by the Government and perhaps the damages were justified, but we do not know where the money has gone in other cases and we do not know, for example, that it has not gone to fund activities that are, putting them at their very lowest, detrimental to the interests of this country. That is the second reason why the Bill, and particularly part 2, is deserving of a Second Reading.
There is a related third point—the reputational risk to this country. These cases are settled, albeit with no admission of liability, in circumstances where, as was said earlier, much of the world will say that there is no smoke without fire. People might say that the British Government would not settle these cases unless there was some truth in the allegations, which does this country enormous damage overseas. It also runs the risk—I say this particularly to my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester—of encouraging those who would see this country damaged by radicalising young Muslim men overseas who will believe that this country has no respect for the rights it is trying to push on the Islamic world.