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Terrorism Bill

My Lords, being the 27th speaker, almost everything that I want to say has been said. Briefly, when we were debating the Prevention of Terrorism Bill, I put forward a criterion that has been kindly quoted by the noble Lady, Baroness Park of Monmouth, as to how we will have to strike a balance. This is my rule and may not be anyone else’s. Simply, on the one hand we want to prevent the probability of an innocent person being incarcerated, but on the other hand we want to diminish the probability that a terrorist might escape and kill a lot of people. We have to balance those two probabilities. In an absolute sense, some people would say that they do not want a single innocent person to be incarcerated and that that is our tradition. I respect that. I cast my balance slightly differently. I am not saying that I am right or you are wrong. Nothing is right or wrong; we all strike our balance differently. The balance that I strike has, I admit, been disturbed, or enhanced, by what happened on 7 July. Perhaps I should not let such events influence me, but I do. What I like about the Bill is the provision on acts preparatory to terrorism. Again, when debating the Prevention of Terrorism Bill, we decided that as soon as possible in the new Parliament we would have a Joint Committee of both Houses of Parliament to discuss and to consult, and that the Government would bring forward a Bill, which we would then discuss. That of course did not happen because of what took place on 7 July. We now have a much more hurried process due to those circumstances. But, within that context, we have to scrutinise the clause on acts preparatory to terrorism very carefully because it is crucial to what we want to do. I do not think the clause on glorification of terrorism is very good. On the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill I argued that speech acts should not be punished unless there is strict intentionality. The same applies here. It is not, as the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, said, that Professor Wilkinson or John Simpson will be incarcerated—the good people will not be incarcerated—but I worry about the bad people, the ordinary people, the graduate student, the amateur who happens to look at computer records on the websites of different Islamic organisations. Common sense tells me that we have a fair system—we know that the Director of Public Prosecutions will not round up everyone and prosecute them—but, as an academic, I worry about what might happen to an enthusiastic student, especially a bad one who does not know how to carry out research and who would probably get into trouble. We have not made the one very simple distinction that the problem is not Islam or religion but ideology. We have to understand the distinction between Islam and what is called Islamism. There are various phases of Islamism—some are quite local and others are national—but we face global Islamism. The global Islamism that al-Qaeda represents has a story which, although it uses religious symbols, is a political story. We have to understand the political story that global Islamism is telling us. It starts with the decline of the Ottoman empire and the abolition of the Caliphate in 1924. I shall not go into all the details but there is a genuine belief among many Muslims that they have been in decline ever since then. They believe that the only way to restore the glory of the Muslim community is to attack the main enemy—the West—by guerrilla means and to inflict as much damage as possible because that will begin to revive the glory of the Muslim community. The majority of Muslims are not concerned with this hard line ideology. Likewise, in the days of our own glorious past there was a philosophy called Marxism and there was a state terrorism called Stalinism. They both used the language of Marxism but they were very different things. Similarly with Islam: global Islamism is a much more sinister and violent ideology than that of the people who argue that, for example, Sharia should be adopted by Muslim states, or that perhaps states such as Pakistan and Egypt have deviated from the true path that a Muslim state should follow. They are different issues. The more we understand the enemy, the better we will be able to deal with that enemy. If we do not understand the enemy and cast our net too wide, we will punish innocent people.