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Intelligence and Security Committee

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Knowsley, North and Sefton, East (Mr. Howarth), with whom I have been happy to serve on the Committee for the past five years. As has been said, I have been on the Committee since it was formed in 1994—16 long years—and I am very proud indeed to have been able to contribute to it over that time. I have enjoyed it and found it stimulating, and it really is good to work with. I have seen five Chairmen come and go, and I am happy that two of them are here today—from both parties. The point about the Committee is that there is practically no party politics whatever. We are there to do a serious job that is not normally in the party argument. We try to come to the right conclusion having been given a lot of information that no other Committee gets. I happily pay tribute to my two Welsh colleagues and friends, the right hon. Members for Torfaen (Mr. Murphy) and for Pontypridd (Dr. Howells), for their handling of the Committee in their periods in office. It is a sadness that this last year of the 16 has been the most difficult, in terms not only of what has been happening, but of a distinct change in the attitude of the authorities in the Government—I will not say Ministers—to what the Committee does and how it goes about its business. I could not set those difficulties out better than the right hon. Member for Pontypridd, but I trust that what he and others said will put an end to the thought, which is much too active in the media, that Committee members are simply puppets or, as one hon. Gentleman said, poodles, of the Prime Minister. I have been described as many things in my life, but never yet as a poodle, and I do not think it is particularly apposite. I shall speak about that difficult only briefly, because the Chairman covered it in much more detail, but there has also been a lot of terrorist activity to report on. However, the most difficult matter has been the question and dilemma of torture, and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, to which I will refer as CIDT to spare my teeth. Reading the press, one would think there was no difference between torture and CIDT, because they write only about torture. Torture is absolutely out: we are all clear about that. One must not do any physical harm to anybody in one's custody if one belongs in a civilised society. The Government do not tolerate it, their predecessors did not tolerate it, and no member of our security and intelligence services tolerates it. That is a given. I hope that nobody doubts those words. However, CIDT is another matter. Obviously, there are degrees of CIDT, and it is not clearly defined in law, which gives everybody a problem. Some months ago, one judge said that slopping out in jail was CIDT. Slopping out might be degrading, and it might be part of an antiquated Prison Service that is trying to improve itself, but we cannot in any way liken it to torture or talk about it in the same breath. I do not think that anyone would be found guilty of partaking in, or allowing, CIDT if a prisoner who was under investigation had to slop out their cell. There are many gradations of CIDT, which is what has given so many people so much difficulty. CIDT is not legally defined, but because a case is before the courts, it has been very difficult for the Committee to say much about it—we have been unable to report or comment on it in anything like as much detail as we would have wished. Again, that has led the media to say that we are not speaking out simply because we are puppets. I know that I am not going to persuade some hon. Members, but nothing could be further from the truth, and I hope that when people look at the criticisms in both reports, they will see that when we feel we need to criticise the security services for serious failures, we do so.