---

Home Affairs and Justice

My hon. Friend has a point. The number that the Home Secretary bandied around this morning was three terabytes or 3,000 gigabytes, which would work out at about 100 gigabytes a suspect. I recommend that hon. Members go and look at their computers. If, like me, they keep everything for ever, I recommend that they look at their lifetime of gathered data. I doubt whether those data would come to anything like 100 gigabytes or even 25 megabytes. One of the questions that will be put to the Home Secretary—not now; we shall give her notice of it—is whether the vast quantities of data that she has talked about involve just the capacity of the disks or whether they involve all the software on those disks, such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Windows and so on, all of which is checkable and removable in an instant. Then we shall see whether the problem is really what it is cracked up to be. If the Government want to look at the issue properly, the serious problem is not the encryption or the sheer volume, but the issue of foreign language translation. I hope that we shall talk about that in practical terms when we come to the main debate on the legislation. The House should not forget that cross-party co-operation delivered a range of new offences to enable the police to charge anybody—and I mean anybody—involved in a terrorist plot. That was done at great length, at our suggestion and, to give them their credit, the Liberal Democrats' suggestion, in the debate on 90 days. Acts preparatory to terrorism, encouragement to terrorism, dissemination of terrorist publications, and terrorist training offences, in addition to the pre-existing offences of possessing information for terrorist purposes, recruiting for terrorist training and inciting overseas terrorism—all are criminal offences. What has been lacking is the determination to make the full use of the law and that powers that we have already. The previous Home Secretary understood those arguments and came up with another scenario, in the earlier stage of the discussion. He said, ““Okay, we can cope with one Heathrow reasonably easily, but what if we had five all at once? We'd be overwhelmed.”” That is the circumstance under which, we argue, the Government should invoke the state of emergency provisions in the Civil Contingencies Act 2004. The definition is very simple and involves an emergency that poses a serious threat to the public, overwhelming the Government's ability to defend the public. The powers in the 2004 Act are quite sweeping and include the power to hold without charge for up to 30 days, over and above any period under existing legislation. So, in a state of emergency—but only in a state of emergency—the Government already have the power to hold for 58 days. The scenario described by the previous Home Secretary involved 50 airliners coming under attack. That is clearly a state of emergency. Such a power would of course require the Government to justify their action after the event to both the House of Commons and the courts, but they say that they want proper scrutiny and control over the process. For such an incursion of liberty, that is a good thing. The Government complain about that process, which they designed, remember. They say that it would alarm and panic the public—this from a Government who habitually issue blood-curdling assessments of the threat, describing it as the biggest threat since the second world war. I consider that objection to be unutterable nonsense, first, because it underestimates the British public, who withstood 3,000 deaths under the Northern Irish troubles and who faced that many deaths in a single night at the height of the blitz; secondly, because the public would expect a state of emergency if 50 airliners were about to be blown out of the sky; and thirdly, because there would be no immediate need to declare such a state of emergency, as the Government would have 28 days before they ran out of time under the counter-terrorism Bill. In that time the state of the nation would be all too clear to the public. The Home Secretary has suggested that that demonstrates that we accept the principle of the need to go beyond 28 days. That is a facile argument. It should be clear that we do not accept the need to extend detention without charge based on either the evidence of the operations to date or the most horrific hypothetical scenarios so far dreamt up by Ministers. Let me explain the matter to the Home Secretary by quoting from a document that I hope that she already has ready, the House of Lords judgment that struck down the Government's arguments on control orders last week. In it, Lord Brown said that the right to liberty"““represents a fundamental value and is absolute in its terms…Liberty is too precious a value to be discarded except in times of genuine national emergency...None is suggested here.””" The important phrase there is"““except in times of genuine national emergency””." That is the requirement that must be fulfilled before we give up our fundamental liberties, and this is the crux of the matter. Rather than having—[Interruption.] Did the Home Secretary say something about control orders? This is about rather more than control orders. This is about people being locked up for 56 days, in case she has forgotten the main thrust of her argument. This is the crux of the matter. The Home Secretary is arguing that, rather than having a temporary, declared state of emergency, the Government want a permanent, undeclared state of emergency. To choose that is to reject the tradition of liberty in this country that has been paid for by hundreds of thousands of British lives over the past century. The Government argue that the enemy is getting more sophisticated and the plots more complex, and they demand more time. The presumption is that the plotters are getting better but that we are not. I do not accept that defeatist argument. It is one that we will explore in great detail on Second Reading of the counter-terrorism Bill. The House should heed the warnings of those on the front line in counter-terrorism—which the Government try to use in a way that they might not appreciate—about the counter-productive implications of extended detention without charge. The former head of MI5, Stella Rimington, has warned explicitly against this ““increasingly draconian”” measure. Sir Ronnie Flanagan has warned us to"““take great care not to over-react…not to do the job of the terrorists for them.””" The Met's senior counter-terrorism officer, Peter Clarke, warns against destroying the trust that"““fundamentally affects the level of support…and of course intelligence…that we receive from communities””." Even this week, the head of MI5—who notably did not mention 28 or 56 days in his speech—has cautioned:"““The terrorists may be indiscriminate in their violence against us…but we should not be so in our response to them.””" Extending detention without trial will, like ID cards and control orders, undermine our freedoms, but it will not make us safer. In fact, it risks making the threat worse. Looking round the Chamber, I see that almost everyone here is wearing a poppy. Those poppies represent an enormous sacrifice. Tomorrow morning at 11 o'clock, many of us will be standing in the regimental plots in the grounds of Westminster Abbey, paying our respects to the soldiers who paid for our freedom with their lives. Our freedom was bought at a very high price. We on this side will not give that freedom away without very good reason.