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National Security

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for repeating what I can see is a long Statement. I can partly understand why it is so long, but if it is an example of the terseness of the Prime Minister, it must be hard to get a word in at meetings with him. I have a question at the outset, to which I hope the noble Baroness will be able to reply; after all, she is sitting next to the noble Lord whom it concerns. What happened to the noble Lord, Lord West, this morning? Shortly after eight o’clock he said on the radio: "““I still need to be fully convinced that we absolutely need more than 28 days””." An hour later he said: "““My feeling is, yes, we need more than 28 days””." What on earth happened between those two statements? I cannot believe that an old sea dog like the noble Lord was fazed by an early rise. Did he go from one studio to another via Damascus? The House will know that there is a desperately serious side to this. When we talk of detention without trial, when we talk of overthrowing habeas corpus, or of holding people without telling them why, we are playing with the deepest and most fundamental matters. I regret to say that we are doing so in a society where an innocent young man can be gunned down on suspicion on the London Tube. We do not play politics on this, and we never should play politics with our freedoms. However, the real suspicion, reinforced this morning, is that, when it comes to the issue of 28 days, it is politics that is sadly uppermost in the Prime Minister’s mind. We can and must be a safe society, and we support a whole range of the proposals in this Statement. But we must also be a free society. Without freedom, life is not worth living, and, this week of all weeks, we recall how many people died for that freedom. We should not barter it away to play to any focus group. Let us hope that it is the sensible talk of consensus about intercept evidence, about post-charge questioning, that now prevails, and not the ““let’s fit-up the Tories and Lib Dems”” mentality of those election-hungry young Turks around the Prime Minister. We sincerely thank the noble Lord, Lord West, for his work and for his careful report. We look forward to studying those parts of it that we are allowed to see. We back the national security approach, the idea of a national security strategy and creation of a national security committee. Those were all proposed and adopted in our recent policy review. On the broader issues of security in the Statement today, we have three particular areas of concern. We have long argued for effective securing of our borders. Will the noble Baroness say whether these proposals include the police and so create a proper border police force? On intercept, where we have supported the campaign of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick, and on our idea of post-charge questioning, can the noble Baroness say whether the review will be complete in time for those provisions to go into the much awaited and anticipated Counter-Terrorism Bill? We welcome proposals on security at railway stations, airports, sports stadia and shopping centres, but will the noble Baroness assure the House that disruption to the legitimate travelling public will be minimised? Too often lately, we have seen heavy-handed measures and absurd super-projects like ID cards aimed at the innocent, while there has been a corresponding lack of focus on high-risk areas and elements. The noble Baroness described new controls from the Charity Commission. We can understand them, but can the noble Baroness say how she will prevent them ending in more unnecessary burdens on every charity? We hear of more action on asset-freezing and seizure. That is good as far as it goes, but can the noble Baroness assure us that it will go hand in hand with easing some of the absurd rules on money laundering that make life impossible for any child wanting to put a few quid into a bank account? We welcome provisions for spending more on security, focusing on foreign nationals and tackling extremist preachers and imams. Those provisions, too, are good, as far as they go, but let us hope that they will be followed through. Recently, the Irish Government refused entry to Ibrahim Moussawi, head of the viciously anti-semitic TV station, Al-Manar. Will the British Government stop Moussawi when he tries to enter the UK to speak at a conference in December? It becomes harder and harder for UK citizens to enter their own country. Some airports make a habit of making UK citizens queue to get in, while lanes for foreign nationals are scarcely used. British people find it increasingly hard to understand how all this is imposed on them, when illegal immigrants waft in and out of Britain in numbers that even the Home Office cannot count and can even end up guarding the Prime Minister’s car. They would not even put that in an episode of ““Yes, Prime Minister””. Why are 4,000 prisoners still awaiting deportation? What is the cost to the UK taxpayer of keeping them? The Statement talks of road shows in Pakistan to combat extremism. We all know—and there is increasing public concern about this—that Pakistan has been a fount of extremist groups and extremist teaching, but what authority is going to enable this action? What Government are going to combat extremism there? Is this not a matter of the profoundest concern? Finally, of course we welcome projects to promote greater understanding of the contribution of Islam to European history and culture, but can we have projects on the contribution of Judaism and Christianity, too? We are all in this together, and the time for relativism and intellectual ghettoes is gone. We have common traditions, common values and common ideals, which British people of all faiths and none can cherish and share. We support everything in this Statement that tends to that. We must win the battle for hearts and minds among those who might be tempted by extremists, but we must not win it while losing the hearts and minds of those ordinary people who want to lead their own lives, without unnecessary intrusion, surveillance and fear.