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Terrorism Bill

I rarely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart of Swindon, but I want to underline two things that he said. First, legislation of this kind—which, by the by, carries extraordinarily draconian penalties; it is worth reading just how major are the penalties associated with various provisions of the Bill and, if I may say so, the Identity Cards Bill that we discussed yesterday—rests on how far the law is clear to the citizen who is likely to be caught up in it and could end up being very heavily penalised for a breach of it. With the best possible will, no one could read Clause 21 without being extremely confused by it. The definition of glorification to include more forms of praise and ceremonial and the extraordinary definition of a statement as including communication without words but which consists of sounds or images or both, even slightly altered, raise huge questions about the exact meaning of the Bill. If I accept that there have been drafting difficulties, I must still ask whether the clause could not be drafted much more precisely. My noble friend Lord Thomas gave a description of how Plaid Cymru might be caught. I did not find that all that difficult to understand. The noble Lord, Lord Stoddart of Swindon, raised the position of the whole Northern Irish nationalist movement, which has in recent years glorified terrorism and spoken in terms of great praise and celebration of its achievements and standing and, until very recently, suggested that it should be emulated. I find myself in great difficulty with the clause, not least because we will shortly consider another Bill that will remove previous penalties on Northern Ireland terrorism. This becomes more and more obscure. It is possibly clear to lawyers, but it is certainly not to citizens and is certainly frightening because one may want to keep the law but will no longer be sure exactly what the law is.