---

Prevention and Suppression of Terrorism

That was precisely the point that I was about to make. When we debated the initial proscribed list, many of us made the same points. We said that Parliament had been presented with a complete list and that we were unable to consider individual organisations on the list and vote on them separately. We were told that there was provision for appeals, but that is not the same as a parliamentary right to exercise a parliamentary judgment on the legitimacy of a case for inclusion. It is dangerous for the democratic process if we start on a path of assuming that Parliament has a right to make lumped-together decisions on composite lists without adequate scrutiny. I would be happy if the list had gone through a separate Committee scrutiny system in the House. I would be happy if there had been a fuller debate in which we were allowed to exercise our judgment organisation by organisation. I might not have liked the decisions that were reached, but at least I could have been confident that our responsibilities for the democratic process had been properly exercised. However, the House is not going about matters in that way and that takes us into dangerous waters, as illustrated by the case that my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) mentioned. I am worried by the point that the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) made about organisations on other people’s lists. The House has a right to be told what representations other Governments have made to the UK Government about including organisations on a proscribed list. I suspect that if we looked at the United Nations list, it would contain some organisations whose proscription would be unwelcome to the United States of America. I suspect that we do not include any of those organisations on our list. We have a proscription list that is friendly for the current US Administration. There is a dreadful lop-sidedness to that sort of approach. If we go through the list, we see that many of the organisations go back to the 1980s. We were not presented with them in the first or the second proscribed list and we must ask what has changed to require their addition to our list of known risks or threats to the UK. The list is littered with expressions such as ““have the potential to””, ““have the capacity to””, ““they have anti-western views”” or ““they have anti-American views””. Many of us have similar inclinations, but that does not make us terrorist organisations. I was relieved to note that the Socialist Campaign group was not on the list. [Hon. Members: ““Not yet.””] Indeed. I would not rule it out for all time.