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Intelligence and Security Committee (Annual Report)

I am grateful to my hon. and gallant Friend for that intervention. He is absolutely right. That relates to the legal powers of soldiers serving on the streets. We have to ask these questions. Has the Government given people emergency powers? The armed forces on the mainland do not have executive powers under firearms legislation to act in the way that our police forces do. For example, if, during the course of the Stockwell investigation, it transpires that soldiers were involved, we have to be careful that there is not a grey area. We have to remember that a solider has no more rights than you or I on the street in the UK—as opposed to a policeman, who does have those executive powers. That is an important issue that we need to consider. We also have to look at what is happening in Northern Ireland, where the Government have said that they would like to move members of the Police Service of Northern Ireland special branch to MI5. I have worked alongside PSNI special branch. They are excellent men and women who have learned that one cannot short-cut terrorism. They have learned that the hard way and they have got extremely good results. When I met a few of them recently, I said, ““You do realise that if you belong to MI5, you do not have executive powers. You cannot carry a weapon in South Armagh. You cannot go and arrest someone to pull them in to interview them. You do not have all the powers that you used to use to protect yourself and to help you to get access to informers.”” That is important. I said to a current serving policeman, ““Would you like to go into Turf Lodge without a gun? Would you like to go to South Armagh, to Crossmaglen, without a gun?”” He said, ““You can bet your bottom dollar, I’m not going there.”” But that is the subtle implication of some of the changes. It is important that the Government pick up the detail when it comes to reforming and moving the intelligence picture along, because if they do not, the person who will bear the brunt at the end of the day will be the individual soldier, the individual policeman, or one of the security service personnel. That is important. It is interesting to note that the average age of a special branch PSNI individual is about 45 in Northern Ireland; the average age of the MI5 recruits who go there is 28. That is a vast gap in experience and knowledge and a vast gap in relation to the people perhaps best placed to recruit informers and go about getting under the skin of terrorists in Northern Ireland. For all the reports, they have not gone away. The infrastructure is still there. In this day and age, transparency is very important. Owing to the way in which the security services started, they are obsessed with secrecy. It is important that MI5 moves more into the modern world. If it is to work alongside the police each day in offices in our regions, it must accept that there will be a drive for more transparency in not counter-espionage, but the counter-terrorism field. When the agency hands over information to the police and the police act on it and get things wrong, it is the police that get the blame. The public attacked the chain of command in the Metropolitan police over Forest Gate, but perhaps Security Service intelligence should have been considered on that occasion. MI5 must come into the real world when it comes to transparency. There is no KGB operating in the same way MI5’s counter-terrorism functions, so there is a real need to examine the transparency in MI5. We should remember that there is no short cut to countering terrorism. The draconian laws that we pass to try to do that will have an impact on the human intelligence that we try to recruit, so they will make a difference. The end result of an operation in Northern Ireland that I joined was that 21 members of the IRA were put down, but it took more than a decade to achieve that. We must accept the rough with the smooth, and the Home Secretary was right that if we get things wrong sometimes, that is life. If we all miss the terrorist, that is life. However, we must also realise that we cannot deny people human rights as a short cut, because the end result of that will be that Muslim communities will produce no informers or sources and will not collaborate with the forces of law and order, although such collaboration and information is the only way of defeating terrorism in that community in the long term.