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Terrorism and Community Relations

I am pleased to be able to open this debate on the Home Affairs Committee report, which was published earlier this year. I am also pleased that there is a good attendance, both by members of the Select Committee and by other Members. I will try to be as brief as I can in introducing the debate. I am glad that my right hon. Friend the Minister for Policing, Security and Community Safety is present to reply to the debate. There will be some criticism of Government policy in my comments, but it is intended to be helpful criticism, and no criticism of her role is intended. We have discussed terrorism a lot in the past few weeks, both in the Select Committee and in the House. In yesterday's debate in the House on the Terrorism Bill, a number of Members, including myself, stressed the importance of the broader strategy that we need to follow to reduce extremism and to tackle terrorism. Today's debate, far from providing us with too much discussion on terrorism, enables us to look at some of the broader issues that go beyond the legislation. This debate is also relevant because although our report was published before the general election, it specifically addressed the links that we need to make between any legislation that we pass and the wider strategy of tackling extremism and terrorism. I will return to that subject. The Committee set out about a year ago to look at what effects the rise of international terrorism had had on community relations in this country, and at the same time to try to identify how measures that might be adopted to strengthen community relations and community cohesion could play a role in fighting extremism and terrorism, and in tackling the consequences of world events. The report was published several months before the London bombing. It gives me no pleasure to stress that point, but the Committee deserves credit for having recognised the importance of these issues—which are now being debated much more widely in our society—long before there had been a terrorist attack on United Kingdom soil as part of the current wave of terrorism. When the Committee was preparing the report we attached great importance to certain recommendations and issues, and that stood in contrast to an apparent lack of urgency from the Government. I am sure the Minister will refer to the big agenda that is now under way, and which tackles many of the issues in the report. We welcome that and look forward to hearing more about it—and I am sure that the Select Committee will want to discuss it in detail with Ministers in due course. However, the response before the London bombings lacked the urgency that was needed. The Government had not really grasped how central the issues of community relations and community cohesion were to our ability to tackle terrorism. I do not mean by that that there was some magic thing that the Government could have done. It would be ludicrous to say, ““If only they'd done this or that, or talked to this group of people, we would not have had the attacks,”” but we did not see then the urgency that we see now. For example, recommendation 14 of the report points out that the Government's own evidence to the Committee's inquiry about terrorism and community relations made no mention of the programme of work on community cohesion that had been launched in the wake of the riots in north-west England in 2001. The Home Office should have seen that as directly relevant; that it did not do so was a disappointment. In recommendation 36, we said that more needed to be done to support the Muslim community in tackling extremism. The only concrete thing that could be mentioned in the Government's response, which we received a few months after the report, was that"““The Learning and Skills Council worked with Muslim religious leaders to run a pilot management and community leadership course for Muslim faith leaders.””" Although I have great respect for the Learning and Skills Council, I am not sure that that amounted to the scale of response and support for Muslim leaders that was needed. We will hear from the Minister that a huge programme is now under way through the commission on integration to deal with these matters, but it should have started earlier. I will make a couple of further observations. We raised the first with the Home Secretary on Tuesday, and it was also raised through the Liaison Committee of Select Committee Chairmen with the Leader of the House. I am talking about the Home Office's failure to provide our inquiry with accurate and relevant documents when we were examining these matters, particularly its failure to provide a Cabinet Office paper entitled ““Young Muslims and Extremism”” that was subsequently leaked to the newspapers. We subsequently obtained it. That is important because there is a marked contrast between the tone of the evidence that the Government submitted to our inquiry and the assessment that was made by officials for the Cabinet. Recommendation 4 of our report concluded that since 2001"““community relations have deteriorated, although the picture is by no means uniform””." The Government's response said:"““The Government has no evidence that terrorism and the response to it has led to an overall deterioration in community relations.””" Yet the documents we now have clearly show the situation. The Government's assessment of published opinion polls indicated that between 50 and 65 per cent. of Muslims thought that relations between Muslims and non-Muslims had got worse after 11 September 2001. Incidentally, that had not been affected by the Iraq war; it was clearly a result of the terrorist events of September 2001. That indicates a serious deterioration in relations, which means that our Committee was right to make the assessment that it did.