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Intelligence and Security Committee

Members of the Committee have thought very carefully about the prospect of public hearings, and have wanted to find a way of holding them. However, it is a question not simply of patsy hearings, but of choosing real subjects that are not suddenly going to disappear because one asks a question to which the security chiefs must answer, "I can't tell you." The Foreign Secretary was talking about priorities and security. Would we not get close to that situation if we began examining why a certain aspect of security was a priority against another without going into the detail of the information behind that?