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Terrorism Bill

I think that the last remarks of the hon. Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr. Khabra) were unworthy of him. We all hold him in great affection and we are all delighted that he escaped those terrorist attacks in 1980, not least in my case, because he affords me the rare privilege of following someone in the House who is older. I say to him in a spirit of true friendship that if he reads the report of his speech he should reconsider some of the remarks that he made about those who voted in the opposite Lobby from him. Perhaps there were some hon. Members who were seeking to settle scores with the Prime Minister. I do not know, but it is possible. However, the vast majority of those who voted yesterday in an opposite sense to the hon. Gentleman did so because they genuinely had real concerns. It was not, as my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) so eloquently put it, because they were soft on terrorism. All decent Members of Parliament—I believe that most of us are—are fundamentally opposed to terrorism. We all want to see our Government, and it is our Government—I am sorry that the Home Secretary is not present—uniting Parliament and the nation behind a series of coherent and sensible measures. But some of us felt that the measures contained in the Bill were not particularly coherent, and some of them had not been properly thought through. I yield to no one in my admiration for the Prime Minister’s personal courage. I do not always agree with him, but the Prime Minister has on many occasions demonstrated real political courage. He has also demonstrated on a number of occasions that he is capable of being the political leader of the nation. When he spoke on 18 March 2003 in that amazing debate before the country went to war—let us not forget that he gave the House the opportunity to vote on that—he spoke with a passion and an eloquence that I have never heard exceeded by any Prime Minister in my 35 years in the House. When he came before the House on the Monday after those despicable acts on 7 July, he spoke for the nation and was congratulated on so doing by my right hon. and learned Friend the Leader of the Opposition, by the leader of the Liberal Democrats and by speaker after speaker in all parts of the House. I am not in any way impugning the integrity of the Prime Minister or his ability to rise to the occasion, but in this instance I do not think that he did entirely rise to the occasion. I say that for a number of reasons. First, although I do not doubt for a minute that he believed with passionate sincerity that 90 days was right, he did not do anything to convince a majority of the House that that was right. He rather acted on the ““Alice in Wonderland”” principle that if I say a thing three times, it must be true. He said it more than three times, but many of us were not entirely convinced that it was true. Then there was that rather crude attempt—I absolve my own chief constable, because I received no letter from him—to persuade chief constables, in the apposite words of the hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Carmichael), to act not as those who would brief, but as those who would lobby. That is not their function, important servants of the Crown though they are. What I would like to have seen and what we did not have was a concerted attempt properly to brief Members in all parts of the House. Perhaps if we had been so briefed, more of us might have been convinced of the 90 days. The hon. Member for Ealing, Southall has been so convinced, and I do not doubt his sincerity.