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Terrorism and Community Relations

: Considering that it is the Thursday afternoon of a busy week, I have enjoyed the opportunity to listen to Members from all parties, particularly in light of yesterday's debate on Second Reading of the Terrorism Bill. Today's debate has given us the opportunity to explore in more detail, as the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) said, some of the underlying issues that are part of the overarching strategy that will, we hope, enable us to deal with these problems. I shall take some of the points raised away but shall do my best to respond to them today. My right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham) does an excellent job of chairing the Home Affairs Committee; we are often on the receiving end of a fairly intensive grilling, which is exactly as it should be. The Committee is absolutely on the ball and goes to the heart of issues that really concern us. I can genuinely say that both my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary and I find it useful to have our thinking and policy making tested and challenged in that way. The Committee deserves credit for raising these issues before the events of 7 and 21 July. It was ahead of the Government on that. I shall go through all the things that we were doing, but hon. Members will realise that since 7 July and the Committee's sittings on this issues, there has been a renewed focus and extra energy. We have begun to see connections between work on community cohesion and on engaging Muslim communities that were not as prominent as they might have been before those events. Everyone acknowledges that the events of 7 and 21 July were horrendous, but something quite encouraging came out of them. Hon. Members have told us about what happened in their constituencies. The hon. Member for Aylesbury talked about the services that took place and the way in which there was a coming together of people from all faith backgrounds and those of no faith. There was a sense of solidarity that they were united, not just in condemning the atrocities but in saying, ““How do we go forward? How do we work together? How do we deepen and strengthen our relationships in this country in terms of the values that unite us?”” If we can build on that solidarity, we will make a big difference. We face these issues across the world, not just in this country, but internationally. My right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen talked about the meetings of the Committee in France and the Netherlands. There is to be a European seminar at the beginning of December on radicalisation and prevention. All Governments are hugely exercised by those issues. One big strand of our work on the counter-terrorism strategy is prevention. To prevent terrorism, we need to follow the path of individuals, to see at which points in their lives they are particularly vulnerable to the teaching and powers of extremists and to work out how we can increase the protective factors around people's experience so that they are less likely to be drawn into that kind of activity. Much intensive research and practical work is going on. Some points are to do with further education and some with the prison system. We need to work out how we can intervene, to ensure that the situation does not continue and how we can reverse it. Obviously, we have the Terrorism Bill, but today's debate is about wider issues. I assure the Chamber that the legislative measures that we are introducing are not aimed at any community, let alone the Muslim community; they are aimed at terrorists. We must be clear about that. The Bill's measures will be controversial and there will be debates in Committee over the coming weeks, but they are genuinely aimed at trying to prevent terrorism. That is the right approach, because people want us to have sufficient powers to tackle terrorism, but people also reject crude stereotyping and discrimination. Aiming our powers at a particular community would not be supported by the people of this country. We well understand that combating terrorism and having good community relations are intrinsically linked. Much of the work we need to do in gathering intelligence and information from local communities depends on having open channels of communication so that people feel secure and confident enough to come forward to give us information. The hon. Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis) talked about how important it was for the security services to have communities involved, so that they can reach out and be more effective in their work. He will know that we are in the process of doubling the number of people in our security services, and our ensuring that we reach out to a range of communities in that recruitment process will be incredibly important. We recently brought in a statutory duty for police authorities to have a positive duty to examine the diversity of forces, to ensure that they are properly representative of the communities that they serve. Sir Ian Blair of the Metropolitan police has specifically said that he wants to recruit more Muslim men and women into our police service, so that we will have a much better and closer relationship with those communities. We are making progress, but it is not fast enough. We need to do more in terms of positively recruiting people into the service. We also have to ensure that we tackle the genuine feelings of many in communities about inequality and poverty. I do not for one moment think that that is a justification or an explanation for people getting involved in extremism and terrorism. However, feelings of inequality and alienation can sometimes provide the breeding ground and the basis for the extremist message to get through. We have to be conscious of tackling those issues. I will now discuss the matters that hon. Members have raised. First, I will deal head on with the failure of the Home Office to provide the Cabinet Office paper on ““Young Muslims and Extremism””. Clearly, it was prepared some time ago—I think it was two years old—and I am sorry that members of the Committee did not have access to the full range of papers. There was no intention to hide the work that was going on. Perhaps there was feeling that it was more about the path of the individual and radicalisation, and not necessarily about community relations. With hindsight, we can see all too clearly that the path of the individual is connected to the effect on the wider community.