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Terrorism Bill

My Lords, I live and work across the street from the Honourable Artillery Company, near the City of London. In 1992, it was subjected to an attack by the IRA. The damage was considerable; our windows, across the street, were blown in. I remember how, in response to the urgent advice of our political leaders of that time, we all kept our eyes and ears open for anything suspicious and that we lived through some scary days and weeks. This year, the Honourable Artillery Company became the site of the morgue where forensic experts dealt with the remains of the victims of the 7 July bombings. Some of those involved in that grim work came across the street, from time to time, to seek refuge from their distressing work in our little oasis. I can be in no doubt that terrorism has developed and mutated into something far more grim and ghastly during the 13 years separating those events. That is why I cannot place my entire confidence in a view of civil liberties that supposes that existing safeguards can deal adequately with present and emerging patterns of terror. I add the word ““emerging””, as this nefarious activity, however we define it—much reference has been made to the need for definition—is on the cusp of newly developing technologies. I suspect that it will keep spinning away from us as fast as any coping mechanism of law or law enforcement that we may devise. In seeking the balance so often referred to in the debate between our security and our civil liberties, I find myself, for the first time in my adult life, instinctively wanting the need for security to be put first, with safeguards for liberty being built in subsequently, as checks and balances. It was said earlier in the debate that increasing security was not best done by restricting civil liberties. I could turn that on its head fairly simply by saying that safeguarding civil liberties is not always best achieved by being lax on security. They clearly go hand in hand and will always require fine tuning. The innocence and diversity of the victims of the 7 July bombings on that bus and on those Tube trains and the prospect that others may follow them into abrupt and cruel death seem to demand that we treat security as being of the utmost importance. I am not happy with the loose phrasing or the vagueness of the idea of glorifying, praising or exalting terrorism. I forebear from repeating views that have been made well enough in the preceding part of the debate. Clearly, there is a lot of work to do to tighten the legislation to respond to the expressed needs of other Members. However, I want to repeat the view that I heard earlier from my noble friend Lord Parekh, who said that we should intensify our efforts to understand the views of those who resort to such extreme and radical action as we have been contemplating in this debate and that we should encourage the acquisition of an informed opinion about why some people are prepared to act in the ways that we so naturally abhor. I have heard with great interest the contributions about academic freedoms and the acquisition of the widest possible range of printed materials in libraries and so on, which seems to me to be absolutely essential for a full and free-ranging debate, and, indeed, for a deeper understanding of what it is that leads people to commit terrorist acts. So we must seek too to recognise the nuances and the subtleties in the thinking of Muslims at this time. The large majority of Muslims will certainly want to support those seeking to find effective ways of responding to terrorism. So it is bound to be counter-productive to conduct our discussion in such a way that we simply alienate those who should be our allies. Incidentally, it ought to be of interest to all of us to note the difference between the proposals in this Bill, with its clauses that criminalise incitement to terrorist activity, and those in the Bill that we recently discussed about incitement to religious hatred. In the case of one, the Government were accused by their opponents of pandering to Muslims in order to win their votes; in the case of the other, the Government are accused by Muslims of pandering to cheap popularism by villianising them. At the end of the day, terrorism will be defeated, as was said a little earlier by my noble friend Lord Judd, only when we have addressed its causes and when those who resort to sporadic and destructive violence and who are prepared to sacrifice their own life in such action feel that their voices are heard and understood. However hard that is for us to cope with intellectually or emotionally, at some stage we have got to engage with that. I suspect that we will need a few more terrorism Bills before we attain that happy issue out of all our afflictions, but we should never shut our eyes, in discussing the immediate needs in law of providing for the citizens of this land, to that longer and more distant scene. If the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, could end his consideration of this practical legislation by reminding us that this is not an abstract issue, I would suggest that keeping our eye on the more distant scene, where, with hearts and minds won, we may contemplate a happier existence, is not an abstract issue either.