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Counter-Terrorism Bill

I will not follow the normal custom and say that it was a pleasure to listen to the speech by the hon. Member for Reading, West (Martin Salter), because there were so many things fundamentally wrong with it that it is not worthy of comment. I would like to touch briefly on two or three aspects of the Bill that deserve our further attention. My greatest fear is that if we pass the measure on 42 days, we are in effect doing the terrorists' job for them. Let us be clear about this. We all accept that terrorism is a threat to this country and to our liberties—that cannot be disputed. However, this proposal assaults our hard-won civil liberties and the common law of this land. We have already heard many excellent arguments against it. The lack of evidence is one such argument. It is telling that the Government cannot produce one piece of concrete evidence to substantiate their claim that 42 days are required. The intelligence services took the unprecedented step of making a statement saying that they had not called for an extension to 42 days. The Director of Public Prosecutions has already said that he cannot support it either. There is no evidence whatever in support of the proposal. We have also heard how the introduction of 42 days' detention could be counter-productive. I intervened on my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (David Davis) on the question of internment because I served in Northern Ireland during the 1980s, when that practice had come to an end, but when we were still picking up the pieces from that disastrous policy. I want to impress on the House just what a disastrous policy it was. It was completely counter-productive. It turned whole communities against us, and the recruitment of terrorists was made so much easier when people in those communities had suffered because of the policy of internment. I know that there are differences between the two circumstances, but the differences are not so great that parallels cannot be drawn for the purposes of today's debate. The bottom line is that people were taken off the streets, put away and not charged because it was thought that they might be a threat. That created a great deal of resentment, which in the end, caused even more bloodshed and loss of life. I ask the House to think very carefully before we go down that road. If we want to engage communities, and to counter terrorism and the threat of terrorism, taking someone off the streets and putting them away for 42 days without charging them is not the way to do it.