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Counter-Terrorism Bill

I have the near impossible task of following one of the finest speeches I have heard since being elected to the House of Commons. The hon. Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) need not fret: we will not be on the same side on many issues, although we are on this one. In the Home Affairs Committee and in the Public Bill Committee, I approached the subject with a very open mind. I have not been shy about expressing my view in the House that we need more people locked up in prisons; I have even argued with my Front-Bench colleagues on the subject. We need prisoners to serve longer sentences, and we need a lot more prisons to be built to house them all. I add one important caveat: people should not be locked up in prisons or police cells unless they have been charged and convicted of an offence. That is absolutely fundamental to the liberties of people in this country. When the Home Affairs Committee took evidence, and in the Public Bill Committee, it became obvious that the Government have not properly thought out their case. They were setting all sorts of constitutional precedents that some people have not considered. For example, I think it important that if a public servant, whether they be a police officer or in the security services, believes that a certain measure will be required, it should be up to them to make a case to a Minister, and up to the Minister to make the case to colleagues on both sides of the House. Too many times in the Select Committee and the Public Bill Committee we saw that the Government were not prepared to make the case for themselves; they expected public servants to come to the House of Commons and make the case for them. That is absolutely unacceptable. If the Government cannot make the case themselves, there is no case to consider. We have seen the selective way in which the Government have used the evidence that was put before them, and their selective quoting of the Home Affairs Committee report on the 42-day limit. There was not unanimous support for an extension beyond 42 days. The Conservative and Liberal Democrat Members on the Committee did not support it. Essentially, we said that if there was to be an extension beyond 42 days, there would, of course, have to be safeguards. We went along with that, rather unwillingly, so that there could be some form of consensus, and so that we did not have to divide the whole Committee on the issue. We said that although it would have to be amended, the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 could be used in some form instead of the so-called safeguards that the Government came up with, to which I shall turn in a minute. I was not in Parliament when the decision was taken to invade Iraq. I suspect that I would probably have gone along with the consensus, had I been there, because I have always thought that those bright people of all parties in Parliament must know more than me, even though my gut instinct told me that the invasion was wrong. I even trusted Tony Blair when he said, ““Trust in me.”” I have learned the hard way that we should never trust Ministers or assume that people in positions of power are any better than us. I did not appreciate the way in which the evidence that the Home Affairs Committee heard was twisted and turned by Ministers. On one of the first times that the Director of Public Prosecutions gave evidence to the Committee, he made it absolutely clear that he was against an extension beyond 42 days, yet his words were twisted and turned. We met the director general of MI5, and I met a senior member of one of the security services. They spoke to us in confidence, but now that a statement on pre-charge detention has been published on MI5's website, it is fair to say that we knew months ago that MI5 was not calling for the measure, yet we had to listen while Ministers gave a different impression. We have heard lots of quotes from Sir Ian Blair, and that is reasonable enough, but we did not hear about all the other senior police officers, such as Sir Paul Condon, who did not believe that any sort of extension was justified. Throughout the process, the Government have quoted selectively. The fact is that the issue comes down to something very simple: if the police have enough evidence to arrest somebody, they must have something tangible to go on. I can say that as a serving police officer. A police officer cannot simply go around arresting people without any evidence that they have done something wrong, and rightly so. Of course, it might take a little while to get together enough evidence for a charge. I am sure that in the past there was a temptation to get as much evidence as one possibly could, so that the strongest possible charge could be bought, but in some ways, the case for doing that has been removed, because we are to implement post-charge questioning—a measure that all my colleagues and I fully supported. That part of the Government's case no longer arises. As Sir Ken Macdonald said to us, if within 28 days enough evidence cannot be found to bring some charge against someone, any prosecution is likely to be very unsafe. Many colleagues have spoken about the Civil Contingencies Act and the fact that we would have the longest detention in the western world. I shall not add to that, as I want to allow others an opportunity to speak. One would have to be sentenced to more than three months in prison to serve 42 days, because of early release, release on tagging and all the other Government initiatives to turf genuine criminals out of prison. Somebody who has been held for 42 days or longer without charge would have done the equivalent of a prison sentence of more than three months. What is the latest proposal that the Government have come up with today to try to make those people feel better? ““Okay, we arrested you at 5 o'clock in the morning, quite possibly at gunpoint, took you off, kept you there for 42 days, didn't even tell you why we had you in there, but here's some money. Don't worry about it. You were innocent, but have some money””—as if that will make anything better. I challenge the Minister. If he is serious about the Government's proposal, perhaps he will say a word about Lotfi Raissi. He was the trainee pilot who was held in detention in Belmarsh for about five months, and was released in 2002, his career in ruins. He has been fighting ever since for compensation. If the Government are serious about compensating people and they have a compensation package, perhaps the Minister will tell us what he will do for that gentleman, who was held for five months without any charges being brought against him. The Government have relied on emotion to try to get their case across today. They have not relied on facts. I am glad to be able to differentiate myself from rebels on the Government Benches by saying that if they wanted to do something about terrorism, they have had plenty of opportunity. They could, as my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) said, have done away with the Human Rights Act, which has given so much succour to terrorists. It has allowed people who we know have been involved in terrorism to come into this country. The Government have then found that they are prevented from deporting them, prevented from putting them in prison until they go back, and prevented even from keeping them in their own homes while tagged—all because of the Human Rights Act. The Government tried to blame the judiciary, yet they brought in the Human Rights Act, which allowed the judiciary to do that. They could get rid of the Human Rights Act in a matter of weeks, if they wanted to. They could insist that people who come to this country learn our language and start to integrate, instead of allowing them to set up their own communities and maintain practices that are unacceptable in this country, such as forced marriage, polygamy and female genital mutilation, to which a blind eye is being turned by the Government. They should insist on integration, getting people to learn our language and getting them to fit in with our culture and traditions, rather than passing legislation that will do away with the liberties that British subjects and citizens have enjoyed for hundreds of years. Just as King John had to be brought to book by the barons and the lords when they brought in the Magna Carta in 1215, if we lose the vote tonight I hope that, once again, the Lords will come to our rescue—the rescue of the liberties of British people.