I shall speak briefly because I know the Home Secretary is about to reply. Following the speech of the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) about the general direction in which anti-terror law has gone, I want to make two essential points. Ever since I have been a Member, we seem to have had some piece of anti-terror legislation before us every year. I assume that there is a very large department in the Home Office that is writing next year’s anti-terror Bill and the one for the year after that. I am sure there will be an ambition to do that.
The theme that runs through all such legislation is an attempt to give greater and greater executive powers to the Home Secretary, which are usually rowed back by a combination of the courts and parliamentary action; then, a year or two later, we come back to yet another counter-terror Bill in respect of which the Home Secretary, no doubt with the very best of intentions, is nevertheless given a high degree of executive power. It is no part of our duty as elected Members of Parliament to undermine an independent judicial process and hand executive powers to Ministers, on the basis of which they can either detain or exclude people under any process whatever. That is fundamental to what I understand our democracy to be.
Although there is—ultimately, I suppose—some degree of judicial oversight when an excluded person finally comes back to this country, I would have thought that the points made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson) are surely true and important. If someone goes abroad, albeit on the basis of perhaps misguided notions about what they can do when they reach the zone of conflict to which they have gone, they will be there and will subsequently be prevented from returning. That might render them at risk of imprisonment by another judiciary, which might have much less concern for human rights than anyone here, and they could then be tortured and all kinds of terrible things could happen to them. Would the possession of British nationality on the part of someone affected in that way require the British Government to intervene on their behalf to stop them being tortured, given that the Government opposed their return to Britain in the first place? This whole process is full of many complications and contradictions, which I hope have been adequately thought through by the Home Secretary in introducing this legislation.
Secondly, I want to note the points made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley (Mr Howarth). We are involved in a process of making subjective judgments about who goes where to fight for what, and for whom. My right hon. Friend made the point that if somebody goes to fight for ISIS in Syria—I wish they would not; I have no truck whatever with ISIS—they will be deemed to be a terrorist and a dangerous person. If they go to fight for the Syrian Government, I presume the same point applies, but if they fight for the free Syrian army, which is supported by the Americans and the British, and they do things as despicable as they would in any other force, are they then deemed to be all right? Do they then have to prove which particular force they joined in Syria’s three-way civil war?
There is a further complication. If someone enters Syria from Turkey to fight with the Kurdish forces, having been taken there by the PKK, which is a listed terrorist organisation in Turkey, they would nevertheless be on the side of the Kurdish forces against the forces of the Syrian Government and against ISIS. There are an awful lot of contradictions surrounding how we decide who is a good fighter and who is a terrorist; who is struggling for liberation and who is a terrorist. There was a time when people involved in Umkhonto we Sizwe in South Africa were known as terrorists; they were later welcomed to this country as freedom fighters. Things can turn full circle.
None of what I am saying is intended to give any succour, comfort or support to ISIS, but I feel that we should think about this rather more carefully and avoid the knee-jerk reaction of saying, “These are bad fighters and those are good fighters, so we will ban these and allow those in.”
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