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Terrorism Bill

The Bill as it now stands merits the continuing support of the official Opposition and will have it. In the unlikely event of the House being divided this afternoon on Third Reading, we will support the Government. I am pleased that the circumstances that have arisen in the House, both in Committee and on Report, have enabled us to do so. It is greatly to the credit of Parliament as a whole that the Bill has been sufficiently improved so that the consensus that the Home Secretary sought has been achieved, even if he might have wanted somewhat different details in the Bill from those that are in fact present. We will give the Bill our support and wish it fair passage through the other place. I hope the Home Secretary will forgive me if I examine some of the details. I had to disagree slightly with him on one aspect. It is true that we have had a great deal of time to debate the detail of the Bill, but we have not had—I do not entirely blame the right hon. Gentleman—sufficient time, particularly yesterday, to decide whether we wanted to make changes to the Bill in certain areas, following that scrutiny. There are issues relating, for example, to whether a defence should be available to somebody who is arrested for having been present at a terrorist training camp. The House has not had an opportunity to decide whether a proper defence should be allowed and, if so, how it should be worded. That will have to be considered in another place. We have also failed to resolve whether there should be a defence for the dissemination of terrorist publications. That has been of great concern to academics and librarians because, as the Bill stands, if one hands out an al-Qaeda manuscript to students so that they can write an essay on it at a university, one commits a serious offence. Only the discretion of the Director of Public Prosecutions will prevent prosecution. That is unsatisfactory. It is not sufficiently unsatisfactory to make us abstain or vote against the Bill, but it must be tidied up in another place. We have great problems with clause 1 that have not been resolved at all. Glorification remains a concept in the clause and it essentially muddies the provision’s clarity. I cannot believe that there is no better formulation, which meets the Government’s need to criminalise indirect incitement without introducing to our national law a concept that has previously been alien to it and which is so opaque and woolly that we fear that it risks creating injustice. I hope that perhaps lawyers—it is a legal issue—can tackle that in another place and devise a better response.