Given the lateness of the hour and the number of right hon. and hon. Members still wishing to catch your eye, Mr Speaker, I hope to confine my remarks principally to those amendments that stand in my name, but I would also like to pick up on one or two more general points.
10.30 pm
With regard to the intervention that I made on the shadow Home Secretary concerning the extension of the Pitchford inquiry to Scotland, the House may wish to consider the case reported in the Sunday Herald recently of Dr Nicholas McKerrell, a lecturer in law at Glasgow Caledonian University. Dr McKerrell discovered recently that he is among those who have been blacklisted from working in the construction industry. That was something of a shock, because Dr McKerrell—I do not think he will mind me saying so—is perhaps more accustomed to labouring in law libraries than on building sites. I know a little bit about him. He may not thank me for broadcasting this, but he is a distant cousin of mine, and he comes from the more left-wing branch of the family, if I may say so. He has been involved over a number of years in a variety of different protests, particularly and perhaps most pertinently those surrounding the extension of the M74 motorway around Glasgow in the 1990s.
I bring the case to the House’s attention because Dr McKerrell’s inclusion on the list of those blacklisted from working in the construction industry could have
happened only as a result of information provided to those compiling the blacklists by undercover police officers. That is why it is necessary and important that the work of the Pitchford inquiry should extend to parts of the United Kingdom beyond England, and that the Home Secretary should make it clear at the earliest available opportunity that that is her intention. Otherwise, the Pitchford inquiry will never get to the bottom of the range of enterprises undertaken by undercover police officers. I suggest to the shadow Home Secretary that such investigation into the use of undercover police officers in blacklisting does not exclude the possibility of having the wider inquiry that he seeks into the use of blacklisting more generally.
On the protection of legal privilege, I am enormously concerned that even at this stage of the Bill—after a draft Bill, and after the Bill has been through Committee—various professional bodies, including the Faculty of Advocates and the Law Society of Scotland, remain unpersuaded that the Government’s efforts have been sufficiently robust. I think that their judgment is correct, and I look forward to seeing something a bit more substantial.
On the authorisation of warrants relating to Members of Parliament, the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) and the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which she chairs, have come up with probably the least bad option. I do not think that there is a perfect solution to this somewhat knotty problem, but I think that, as she said, removing the final act of authorisation from the Prime Minister and the Executive and putting it in the hands of some judicial authority is at the heart of it. She is right to say that you, Mr Speaker, representing Parliament, would be the most obvious check or balance to the acts of the Executive. Although there is no perfect solution, the solution proposed by the Joint Committee is probably as close as we are going to get. I commend her and the Committee for that.
A variety of amendments relating to single-step judicial authorisation of warrants stand in my name. If some of those amendments appear familiar to the House, it is probably because they are. They were tabled in Committee by the Opposition Front-Bench team, and I confess that I do not understand why the Opposition have not tabled them again tonight. The accommodation that appears to have been reached on the matter by the Government and Opposition Front-Bench teams looks all too cosy, and I do not think that we have been particularly well served by it, so I make no apology for bringing these amendments back to the Floor of the House.
Essentially, the amendments remain true to the observation made by David Anderson, QC, in exploring a double-authorisation process:
“There was some resistance on the part of intercepting authorities to the idea of double authorisation, which was conceived as unnecessarily time-consuming.”
In essence, the deal that has been struck between the two Front Benches will leave us with the worst of all possible worlds. We have a double-lock or a double-step authorisation, as it were, that will be cumbersome—it will not meet the requirements of those who legitimately need speedy action—and will still leave the authorisation of warrants in the hands of the Home Secretary, which remains, to my mind, completely inappropriate.
The notion that the Home Secretary can somehow authorise such warrants because she is accountable to the House is, frankly, bogus. Liberty has described that notion as “misconceived and misplaced”. It is worth observing that for the Home Secretary to account in Parliament for the warrants she has signed might put her in a position of criminality as it will be a criminal act, under clause 49 and similar provisions in the Bill, to disclose the existence of a warrant.
On the previous group of amendments, the Solicitor General said it was unfair or unhelpful to look at the facts in other jurisdictions, and he made a reasonable point about the difference between jurisdictions that have inquisitorial processes rather than the adversarial ones with which we are familiar. I gently point out to him that if he looks at other common law jurisdictions—America, Australia, Canada—he will find that the process of warrant authorisations in all those jurisdictions is done by judges, and that there is no precedent for a common law jurisdiction such as ours to embark on the procedure that the Government would have us follow tonight.