I am going to be fairly brief. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Reid, will accept that I have an abiding interest in national security. I was Director of Public Prosecutions and chief prosecutor for some of the period that he was Home Secretary, and during the worst of those years that he has been referring to, between 2003 and 2008. We had the London bombings on 7 July, the attempted bombings on 21 July, the airline plot, the dirty bomb plot, the fertiliser plot, and a conspiracy to plant bombs in the Bluewater shopping centre—deliberately at half term, so that there would be women and children present.
I understand all those issues. I should like to say to the noble Baroness that my presumption is that members of the security services do not go to work to commit crimes and that they work tirelessly in the national interest and to protect public safety. That is my view about national security and about the security services. I think that the debate that we are having here is slightly different from that and I do not believe that anything that is proposed in this amendment would damage national security in any way or needs to be in effect an insult to members of the security services. It is a question about the sort of legal system that we want, and therefore questions of law are bound to intrude. But I accept the national security context.