My Lords, I am very pleased to follow the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, and I broadly agree with what he said. I was a police officer for more than 30 years, but I was not directly involved in counterterrorist operations so I have no specialist knowledge of the subject. However, I was the police spokesman following the 7 July 2005 bombings in London and I was responsible for community issues for the police in the immediate aftermath of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes on 22 July 2005.
I was a police officer during most of the IRA bombing campaign on the UK mainland and regularly attended briefings by the Anti-Terrorist Branch, as it was then. The IRA threat was very different in nature from that presented by Islamist extremists. The IRA was conventionally organised through an established hierarchical structure and, as such, it was capable of being infiltrated. Even so, the then head of the Anti-Terrorist Branch, John Grieve, said that the police and security services alone could not defeat terrorism; it was communities that would do this. I spoke to John Grieve this morning and he reiterated what he said in the 1990s: the role of communities is even more important in combating the sort of tragic and totally unjustifiable outrages that we saw in Paris last week.
Lone individuals or groups that come together to carry out acts of terrorism are very difficult to identify, intercept and thwart without intelligence from the communities they live among. What we understand from the Paris shootings is that, although the two brothers involved were known to the security services, they were among hundreds who had the potential to be a threat. It is those closest to those individuals who will notice changes in their behaviour that might highlight to the security services that these are the few from the many who may act on their perverted beliefs.
In an interview this weekend, the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, talked about how important it was, for example, for the parents of those preparing to leave to join the conflict in Syria and Iraq to tell the police and other agencies. We should consider how many parents would
want the authorities to prevent their children travelling to Syria and Iraq to engage in terrorist activity. He went on to say that he recalled how the 7/7 bombers accidentally bleached their hair and the vegetation outside the flat where they prepared their explosive devices with one of the components from their home-made bombs. Their friends, family and local people would have noticed and could potentially have prevented the atrocity by telling the authorities. They did not, and 52 innocent people died.
That is why increased powers for the security services and the police must be balanced against winning the confidence of communities which fear that powers may be used against their innocent members. We cannot have, do not want and cannot afford to have a police officer on every street corner and an intelligence officer in every community. Whatever surveillance powers we might agree, if we have learnt one thing from the recent tragedies it is that there are too many people who could potentially pose a threat to be able to monitor all of them. Community intelligence is as important as any powers we give to the intelligence agencies.
There is also the wider civil liberties issue. This country has a liberal tradition that citizens should be allowed to do what they will, provided it does not harm others, free from interference from the state. This freedom is anathema to the Islamist extremists who carry out terrorist attacks against the West. They want a society where every aspect of people’s lives is controlled. If we curtail people’s liberties, we are taking society in exactly the direction the terrorists want us to go.
Of course the police and security services will always ask for more draconian powers in order to carry out surveillance of those suspected of criminality. The Liberal Democrats have been criticised for scuppering the Communications Data Bill—the so-called snoopers’ charter—but we must always seek to find the right balance between security and civil liberties.