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Counterterrorism

My Lords, the Minister has slightly misunderstood what was said by the Front Benches about not having received the document a couple of days ago. The problem is not so much that we did not get to see it, although obviously that would have been very helpful, but that it was aggressively trailed by the Government through the media: the Statement was available on the internet several hours before the Print Paper Office had it. That is the point we were trying to make. I should say to the Minister that I am the daughter of an intelligence officer. As regards the strategy of 161 pages, I would think that if you are talking about counterterrorism strategy, which by definition is predicated on not knowing very much—that is what the gathering of intelligence often is and you cannot have absolute certainty in what you know—investing so much, as I see on the face of it, detail, particularly where the detail is rather confused and contradictory, only adds to the confusion. I will stick to the points I want to make on confusion. What the Government can do confuses us. On the one hand they talk, as the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Jones, said, about violent extremism and on the other hand they talk about ideology. This morning, we were completely confused as to whether the Home Secretary was against unlawful acts, which I would have thought we were all against, or whether she wanted to put a chill through expressions and restrictions on freedom of speech. I think she said she was going to launch "civilian challenges" against people who said things of which she did not particularly approve. I have the scars on my back. I took up and challenged Hizb ut-Tahrir more than once and have gone through a campaign of intimidation by Hizb ut-Tahrir against me personally and very publicly. But I would argue with the Home Secretary that the people to take on the challenges in terms of ideology in the community are those from within the community itself. It is not the role of the state, a particular government department or a particular Home Secretary to decide that right thinking rather than wrong thinking can go on in communities, which, if I might say, are very socially conservative. Finally, the strategy seems to want to be all things to all people, so it says that it will address the grievances which these ideologies exploit. If the Minister had been here on 26 February and had heard the speech on challenges to foreign policy, he would have heard several noble Lords raise the issues of the challenges of not providing counterinsurgency training in Pakistan to the intelligence services; the problem with the ISI, whose head has only recently said that the terrorists have the right to think that way; and the other challenges that Pakistan faces. The Minister has told us that he has increased—