I apologise to the Minister but I was not aware that he was going to respond to the amendment now, which would rule out Amendment 14D to which I wished to speak. I turn to that amendment briefly to explain the point of it. It looks a very small amendment but it is a rather serious one.
Amendment 14D relates to those with whom the Secretary of State would consult in advance of putting out the various kinds of guidance, which has already been dealt with to some extent by the Minister in his very helpful amendment requiring an affirmative procedure by Parliament. That meets one of my major concerns, which is the involvement of Parliament in every way and at every stage of the Bill. That is absolutely crucial, especially given the scale of the challenge that the Minister on more than one occasion told us we must meet. The solidarity of Parliament in dealing with these issues is crucial.
Let me explain why I put down this amendment. It was for the very simple reason that absolutely nowhere in the Bill that I can find is there any requirement of any kind to consult the age group that we are most concerned about. There is absolutely none. There are no references to student organisations, youth organisations or for that matter young people at all. Yet I think many of us recognise—I will in just a moment give an example of this—that the most effective force to persuade young people to abandon any thoughts of terrorism is other young people. Statements by senior officials, however senior they may be, cut nothing like the ice and have nothing like the persuasive power as other young people who see the devastating effects of terrorism and bring those to the attention of their friends and colleagues.
One of the things I regret is that the statutory requirement that students should be represented on university bodies which we brought in with the Education (No. 2) Act 1968 was abandoned by the then Government in 1987, so there is no requirement of that kind any more in law. One of the great advantages of requiring that students be represented on, for example, university courts and academic panels was precisely that they were then brought into the operation of the university itself, and into its responsibilities and its authority. That became an important and significant factor in dealing with what one might call young extremism.
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Probably very few people in this House remember that there was an earlier occasion in this country when we faced quite acute violence and even terrorism. It was in the late 1960s, when—people may recall, dimly at least—among other things, the London School of Economics was closed down, the University of Birmingham’s vice-chancellor was besieged in his office, and the University of Southampton saw huge demonstrations of hundreds of students up and down its campus, sometimes using moderate forms of violence. The University of Edinburgh challenged its own vice-chancellor, who then came out and stood on a mound in Edinburgh shouting through a bull-horn at his students. I could go on and on.
Looking abroad, the level of violence in American universities, in opposition to the war in Vietnam, was so high that students were shot to death in Kent State University, students took over the whole of the university administration in Columbia University, and engaged in fisticuffs with the police in the University of California. And as if all that was not enough, at the same time there was a fully fledged terrorism campaign in Germany. Some people will remember the name—Baader-Meinhof.
What we are looking at is not new. It is new in the sense that we now tend to regard the Islamic community as responsible for most of the reasons why we are so worried—but we have conveniently forgotten that we ourselves confronted a major student revolution in the 1960s, and so did other countries in Europe.
I mention this for two important reasons. One is that we should not drive ourselves into conceding to the fear of terrorism what we keep saying we would not concede to terrorism itself. That is a very dangerous road to go down, and I think we are getting quite close to it, as more and more fear and suspicion is built up, on the basis of what is at the moment—thank God—a relatively thin evidential base. I am not saying that that could not change, but we are beginning to get things almost totally out of proportion, and to be driven by fear, amounting in some cases to panic.
In 1968 we dealt with the revolution—and it was a real one—by including students in the structure of universities. They served on the main bodies in universities, including many administrative bodies, although we would not allow them any voice in standards, examinations or other things of that crucial kind. But in the administrative universe, yes, they were consulted and involved. They took part, and in the end most of them gave their full support to the effort to ensure that universities were independent, autonomous and free.
I am therefore very worried now. I recognise that the Government have a real problem. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, put it well when he said that they were facing a double problem, one confronting the other. There is no reference to young voices, student voices or student organisations in this quite long Bill. That is a grave mistake. To put it bluntly, as the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, implied in her passionate speech, we cannot avoid the struggle. We can make the struggle an intellectual struggle, and a struggle of conviction and commitment, but we cannot avoid it simply by saying, “We’re not going to have discussions of this kind”, because they will only go underground and become secretive and much more dangerous.
The point of my amendment is that, in consulting about the advice to be given to universities, the Secretary of State should consult, first, the university administrations, but also, where there are proper student structures, the leaders of those structures. Any other decision will go down the route that is most dangerous of all with young people: it will divorce them from the older generation and make them feel that the only position they can take is one of contention with that generation. They will therefore not recognise that there is a crucial common ground of interest between the generations—the need to save the autonomy and the freedom of the universities, and the freedom of speech in universities. This may seem on the face of it a very minor amendment but because it would involve the Home Secretary, or her successor, in a discussion with not only universities but students we would have much more sensible guidance. It would reflect, as my noble friend Lord Scriven pointed out in describing his own council, things which are much closer to everyday reality for students and their parents.
I want to concentrate for a moment on the Muslim community; I discussed this briefly with the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi. The parents of many Muslim children come from very traditional backgrounds. They can therefore get quite easily frightened at the idea of going to university at all. If the university is seen as the source of wild radicalism, it becomes more and more frightening to the parents. So when I speak about involving the students I also mean that we should involve ourselves in a very large cultural gulf—the gulf between traditional, obedient and patriarchal cultures and the new culture that is still being absorbed by their sons and daughters, of this country’s liberalism and its freedom of thought and discussion. We have to talk to the parents as well and find out what they feel, and therefore begin to bring in the whole community.
We cannot avoid the struggle. That struggle involves all of us, who may or may not be Muslim, in learning enough about these other cultures—not least their religious beliefs—to be able to engage in real and serious argument. Nobody in this country is more capable and willing of doing that than our university faculties, many of which are already heavily engaged in studying these cultural relationships. The worst thing we could do would be to put them under a form of control that would be resented by the young, and either disregarded or much disliked by the seniors.