My Lords, I, too, commend this amendment for very serious consideration by the Government. We all have different experiences in life.
As the House will know, I have spent a good deal of my life with the developing world, and have learnt a great deal from the experience. To put it as succinctly as I can, if I have learnt one overriding message above all, it is that if you are trying to strengthen communities you must not talk at them or about them but with them.
I may have mentioned this in the House before and, in that case, I do not apologise for repeating it. I remember the Bishop of San Cristobal making a brave stand for the Indians in Chiapas, in Mexico, who were being persecuted very badly. I said to him, “Have you got a message for us back in Britain?”. He said, “Yes, I have. What is important is solidarity. You speak about people, you talk to them, but how often do you really listen to them, work with them and build with them their strength and future?” We cannot overemphasise the danger and the urgency in this situation, but whatever we do, we must not inadvertently stereotype people and put them on the defensive, because that does not help. Even in the most normal times—if we can talk about normal times with all our recent experiences—successful policing always seems to me to be the policing that works with the community and not just in it. From that standpoint, this amendment touches on very important principles about building confidence and building upwards.
It strikes me, just from my experience as a citizen, like most other people in this House, that the great horror of terrorism is that it involves a very small number of people. Terrorism works most effectively when there is a climate of ambivalence around the people who do the terrible things. There are people who sometimes feel, “I could never do that, and it’s horrible, but I can understand people doing that because of how they find the reality of living in this situation”.
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We must not build up that constituency of ambivalence by taking action that is unnecessarily heavy-handed and authoritarian. The greater the dangers, the greater the urgency and the more essential it is to work with the community and be seen as friends of the community, working with it to strengthen it; to build a situation in which those people are not being told, “After all, they are good decent citizens”. They can feel that they are ordinary, decent citizens in society. That is the point: it is creating an ethos and social reality that people experience in their everyday lives. We must be careful that we do not give extremism a victory by allowing it to provoke us into doing things that do not help.