My Lords, I entirely support the analysis so eloquently made by the noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Ipswich, and supplemented by the points made by my noble and learned friend Lord Brown. It is easy to think of ways of making these clauses, chipping here and chipping there. However, the approach of the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, was plainly correct. The Government have got themselves into the mess of putting this into legislation without understanding the context of where these orders were made in the past and what they are seeking to do now.
Being a lawyer, I always go back to precedent. You look at it and copy it all out, but at the end of the day you have to sit in your chair and think. There are two things the Government ought to think about. First, can they achieve what they want to do by something that is much more sensible?—to which the answer is plainly yes—and, secondly, what is the consequence of what they are doing? When you are dealing with people who carry knives, with terrorists, or with people who engage in activities that disrupt neighbourhoods, people gathering together, and violence in a social
context, that is one thing. But here we are dealing with people who genuinely believe that they are fighting the existential threat to the planet—or they may be fighting for trade union rights, or for liberty. If you treat those people, who have a noble cause as they see it, in the way that you treat terrorists, what do you do for justice? You can only damage it severely. I therefore humbly ask the Minister to sit back in his chair and have a good think about the wisdom of this.
9 pm