Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker.
We have these amendments today because there has been an intervention from David Anderson, the anti-terrorism supremo. We all have to listen very carefully to what David Anderson says about this. He is absolutely spot on, of course. With measures such as this, we need judicial oversight. A number of us could possibly trust the Home Secretary to carry out her function in approaching this with a reasonable degree of professionalism, as one would expect from a Home Secretary as upstanding as the current one. David Anderson gets to the heart of all this: the burden of proof, being able to test matters in court, and the rights of the individual who has been subject to these charges and has no recourse to justice to be able to test them in court and try to determine their innocence. That is not possible as things currently stand, and that is why I very much support what is on offer today.
We have to give people the opportunity to respond to particular charges laid against them. The idea that suspicion that they are involved in a certain activity is enough to stain their reputation and means that they have no opportunity of recourse to justice or to put their case is not good enough. These perfectly good amendments would be a very useful intervention. The Labour party has given us an opportunity to re-examine the issue.
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I hope the Labour party will put new clause 3 to the vote. The right hon. Member for Delyn seems to be shaking his head, but given what we have heard from our Liberal colleagues I think we have a really good chance of making progress. It is not good enough for this House to abrogate its responsibility and casually shove it down the corridor to an unelected House of Lords, which is a total affront to democracy. We are the Members who have been elected by our constituents and we should be making these decisions, not the unelected donors, cronies and party placemen in the House of Lords. This is our responsibility and we should be making these decisions, rather than leaving them to those in another place.
I have massive difficulties with temporary exclusion orders in their totality. I question whether they are actually useful, whether they will work and whether they will do what they are intended to do, which is to make our country safer. I doubt it very much, because the one clear and obvious flaw with temporary exclusion orders is that they will drive people underground if they feel there is any threat to them. They will impact on those communities we are trying to get to work with us to counter terrorism through anti-radicalisation programmes, which are doing a lot of good work. We know that temporary exclusion orders apply almost exclusively to those minority communities with which we need to engage in order to fight terrorism and make our country a better place. TEOs fail that very basic and important test and I do not believe that pursuing that particular line of inquiry will enable us to do what we want to do.
Temporary exclusion orders are being introduced to try to address what the Government see as a new problem, and that is why the Government want to rush this legislation. The problem is our fear of those who are going to Iraq and Syria to become involved in ISIS forces. My understanding of the logic behind TEOs is that we are worried that those people will seek to come back to our country, pose a threat and put the community in general at risk. We are therefore proposing to identify people we suspect might be involved in such activity before subjecting them to a TEO, and giving them no recourse to any nationality—it is almost a condition of statelessness—and then we expect to make progress in making our communities safer. That is an absurd suggestion and it will be counter-productive to the type of work we really need to do in order to make our communities safer.
I hope we will make progress. I do not think that Labour’s proposed amendments go far enough, but they make a good start by suggesting judicial review, which the House should welcome. I hope we shall have the opportunity to put them to the vote. I listened to what the right hon. and learned Member for North East Fife (Sir Menzies Campbell) had to say and hope that the Liberals will support us.
The problem with the Bill is that it is an attempt to rush legislation. Even the person charged by the Government with the responsibility to review their terror legislation says that a specific and definite problem has to be addressed. The Government could respond in one of two ways. The first is the usual Government response: “We know better than the person we have charged to look at our terror legislation and to suggest how we
should progress.” The second option is the right one, which is for the Government to support what is being suggested by the very man they put in charge of looking at the terror legislation and to ensure that we get the right result or at least an opportunity to debate his suggestions. I hope that is the course the Government will take.
The issue might go to the unelected House of Lords and it might be up to them to resolve an issue that this House should take care of today, but whatever happens I hope we make progress and that at the end of this process there will be some form of judicial oversight of temporary exclusion orders.