---

Terrorism Bill

Of course there is the danger of a nuclear weapon being infiltrated into London. That is too horrific to think about and I hope that it will not happen. But none the less, my judgment is that while we must take this issue extremely seriously, we must not get carried away and possibly damage our society by our efforts to protect it. Moving on to other reasons, the use of forged and stolen identity documents will not stop with the Identity Cards Bill. In Israel there are half a million forged identity cards on the loose in a country which is smaller than ours. There are some other serious reasons which have been mentioned such as the lack of interpreters and the need for skilled decryption teams. There is no doubt that we must spend time, money and effort gathering a full cohort of necessary interpreters. We ought to have those in our society. One of this Government’s strengths is that they are inclusive, that they are seeking to draw all sections of society, all ethnic minorities and communities into our British society. I hope that we on this side of the House are learning from that, but one of the ways of doing that is to make quite sure that we have enough interpreters so that they are not exhausted. I listened carefully to the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, who pointed out in the context of encryption and the deciphering of computers, that the Metropolitan Police, or possibly the City of London Police, had only—