On Second Reading, I and a number of other Members talked about the need for judicial or legal oversight of temporary exclusion orders and of the removal of passports and documents. I am pleased that some judicial or legal oversight has now been provided, but I am still a little disappointed about the number of days that a person’s passport can be held before that can effectively be challenged in the courts. I am also concerned that temporary exclusion orders are still closed proceedings, which means a person will not necessarily know what is being said against them. The ex parte nature of these proceedings is fundamentally wrong.
It has been said that any application for an exclusion order or to take someone’s documents will be intelligence-led and based on proper evidence. If that is the case, why is everybody frightened of proper judicial or legal oversight? That would not be by the method of judicial review, but in a proper, straightforward way, for example by going to the High Court to argue why a person should be excluded, or why they should not be on the managed programme, or why their documents should be taken. Proper legal aid should be provided for all those purposes as a matter of right, not as a matter of discretion.
On Prevent, I have to say that I disagree not only with the Home Secretary, but with my party and with what has happened previously. Prevent was brought in on a voluntary basis in 2007. I am afraid that some people think that they can introduce these kinds of things and then sit back and say, “Right, that’s going to deal with the whole issue of radicalisation.” That view is based on a fundamental flaw in the argument, which is that somehow this is all based on ideology. It is not based on ideology, or on a perverted ideology; there are other reasons why these things happen. It is completely wrong to think that simply by monitoring people in nurseries, schools, colleges, universities, hospitals and doctors’ surgeries we will be able to identify who might make the big leap from having a socially conservative view of something to going out to commit suicide and injure and maim other people.
I am very disappointed that that has not been looked at critically in this House. There seems to be universal acceptance here that Prevent is some kind of panacea; it is not. A number of organisations have said the same. A Demos report from 2010 recommended that the Government should dismantle the preventing violent extremism programme. The Intelligence and Security Committee’s report following the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby in 2013 said that the Government’s counter-radicalisation programmes are not working.
8.15 pm
Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former director of MI5, who should know what she is talking about, said recently when the Bill was debated in the House of Lords:
“However, it seems to me that Prevent is clearly not working. . . It also follows, therefore, that I am not convinced of the value of putting Prevent on a statutory footing. I am out of date. The Government may be able to convince me but I cannot see how legislation can really govern hearts, minds and free speech.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 13 January 2015; Vol. 758, c. 752.]
Other researchers have reached similar conclusions. Mark Sageman, who was a CIA counter-terrorist officer, looked at 500 so-called radicalised persons and concluded that programmes such as Prevent had no effect on them and that religious ideology was not the motivation for those people to go on to commit serious criminal offences. Studies in this country by MI5 also conclude that such offences are not to do with ideology and result from other things.
I know I am going to be lynched, because whenever somebody expresses such opinions, everybody else has a go at them. What is happening internationally, what is happening in the political world out there has a bearing on some of that behaviour. That is not the total explanation,
but it is part of the equation. To ignore that and concentrate on ideology is to look at the problem through a prism.
We know what we are talking about. We are talking about the Muslim community and it is thought that people commit an offence because of ideology. Putting Prevent on a statutory basis is one of the worst things that could happen. Even the voluntary scheme was not a good idea. I have spoken to some of the people who have been taken away to the so-called radicalisation unit. What sort of questions were they asked? Questions such as, “Were you against the Iraq war? What do you think of the middle east situation? Did you go to the Iraq war demonstration?” Millions of people in this country would answer yes to those questions. Does that mean that we should all be subjected to a programme to deradicalise us? No.
We are heading towards a McCarthyite state, where everybody will be spying on everybody else, where nursery teachers, school teachers, hospital nurses, doctors and everybody else will say, “My friend said something that may be critical of someone or something. That means I have to report them to the local authority or the police.” That person will then be arrested, taken away and questioned.
I shall give an example of a woman who worked in a hospital. She went off to do umrah—hajj—in Saudi Arabia. When she came back, she was wearing a headscarf and she started praying a bit more. What happened? Her manager apparently reported her to the Prevent people and suggested they have a chat with her. It turned out that, in her opinion, she had become a little more religious. That kind of thing will happen, and it has been happening in recent years. All it has done is cause people to feel angry and to feel that they are being spied on. That is not a British value. It is not how we do things in Britain. British values do not entail spying on our next-door neighbour or the person next to us and reporting them.
With the regulations being put on a statutory footing, there will be more and more picking on people, which will not help anyone. It will not make anyone safer. If Members think that holding a socially conservative view about particular issues means that people are going to commit suicide and kill everybody around them, Members do not understand the real situation out there. I mean that very respectfully. We are going to have a McCarthyite state where people spy on each other, and that is not right.
People who commit such offences are criminals and should be dealt with. Anybody who saw the two criminals who killed Fusilier Rigby would have seen that they were frothing at the mouth. It is clear that they were mental. Many educational psychologists and others who have studied people who become radicalised and commit criminal offences say that those people are often educationally deprived, economically deprived and have mental health issues. It is those issues that we should address. Concentrating on Prevent will not stop all the problems. Whatever is happening internationally and what those people are doing will continue.