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Terrorism Bill

Can I go back to the point I was making? If we really do create injustice by arresting people, the sense of injustice that detaining them for 90 days and then releasing them without charge will create among the community will be considerable. We need that community because at the moment we are trying to build up intelligence within that community, and people within that community are going to help us to prevent those kinds of acts that took place on 7 July. So the perceptions of injustice that I am talking about are the very thing that was experienced by the Irish community in Britain back when we were dealing with that terrorism. Before I forget, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Imbert, before I forget, that I hope he has the courage to repeat what he said outside this Chamber about the ricin trial. Here he is covered by parliamentary privilege, but if he repeats it outside this Chamber, he may find that he is subject to litigation because there was no ricin. I repeat: there was no ricin. People were arrested and the public was told that ricin was found. At the time there were discussions about biological weapons, but no ricin was ever found. Those people were acquitted and it should be with care that the suggestion is made that this was a trial about ricin, or that those people were wrongly acquitted. I go back to a hypothesis that nobody ever talks about. What about the hypothesis of a young Muslim man being detained on the basis that there is intelligence that someone has said that he, with friends, is talking about taking part in some kind of terrorist incident in Britain; and that that comes from inside the British Muslim communities? We always get the impression that everything operates from a standing start: that the police are going to operate from a standing start, that there will be an arrest and that there is nothing but intelligence, but they cannot use that. I assure noble Lords that that is rarely the case in criminal cases, because what the police would do with that kind of information is immediately to tap the phone—it might not be used in court, but they would hear conversations. They can bug and the transcripts of that can and will be used in court. They can bug the cars; they can look at who his associates are; and they can survey him for a number of days. If they choose not to do that and they go into his house, they can then swab for explosives or any kind of biological entities. They can then search it for any kind of lists or anything associating him with terrorism. They can go through his mobile phone, which, as we have heard, can give forth information fairly quickly. And of course his computer can be taken for all the material that is not encrypted; and encryption is pretty rare. Suppose at that point, you have got him in and you have kept him. You have gone through all that and you have got 14 days. But you are now allowed to keep him for up to 90 days, just to carry on seeing what might turn up. Do you think that that is justice, when it may be that somebody in the community just made it up? What does that do to the many people who learn of it? Collateral damage of that kind is not something we have ever considered as acceptable within our legal system. Our legal principles should matter to us. Before we go down this road we should be looking for alternatives. Many alternatives have been suggested. I am not going to mitigate for the noble and learned Lord, Lord Fraser, but we heard him mentioning how he had friends who experienced detention without trial in South Africa. Whether or not we like it, and whether or not the comparison is accurate, 90 days has a resonance historically. For the communities we are dealing with it has a resonance historically. So, the Muslim community is feeling that laws that were never introduced before will be ones that they and their children will be subjected to. I spent today at a conference with the Muslim community. The Muslim community is absolutely wretched over what is happening. This legislation is at the heart of its dejection. When it heard that we were revisiting the 90 days bit of this legislation it was really horrified. All I can say is that if we want to send out messages to the Muslim community that they are not part, that they are different and that they will have special laws created for them, I am afraid we are going the right way about it. The voice of sense in this debate, so far as I am concerned, was that of the noble Lord, Lord Condon, who said, ““Yes, of course we are anxious about terrorism. Of course we have to give the police every resource they need that is viable, while at the same time protecting liberty and ensuring we do not alienate the very communities that we need to help us in countering this terrorism””. So, rather than rush to this notion that we can make good for the Prime Minister in this Chamber, let us just remember that the Prime Minister got it very wrong on the intelligence leading up to the war, and that is why there is a low level of trust. That is why, there is not the same level of confidence as there was in the days of Lord Callaghan, when he was Prime Minister. We should be thinking about that—the ways in which intelligence can get it so badly wrong, and how people will end up with—what are we going to call it?—collateral damage. We are worth more than that. Britain has stood for liberty in the world. Let us continue to do so.