Immigration Bill
Debate between Lord Ashton of Hyde and Lord Marlesford(8 years, 3 months ago)
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Lord Marlesford
On the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, how can the Home Office argue that there are no resources? It is absurd. It may not be mega-bucks to use private planes, but it is quite expensive. To charge a cost for someone to be at the landing place to check the person is absurd, given the present terrorist situation and the fact that all the indicators say that the terror alert is very high. Look at it another way. We do not hesitate to have police cars, probably with two police people in them, checking that people are not going 40 miles an hour in a 30 mile-an-hour limit, which they should not be doing, but the resource is there. They are the real resources. It is inexcusable not to be following up what the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, said. The Minister says in triumph, “We have now introduced exit checks”, but it is a real disgrace that the Government had not done so long ago, certainly at the time of 9/11.
Lord Ashton of Hyde
On that last point, I do not know that one can blame just this Government, but I accept the noble Lord’s point on exit checks. They are a useful procedure to have. I believe that we had them in the past. We reintroduced them. Nobody is saying, and I certainly did not say, that the reason we do not have permanent Border Force personnel at every single general aviation airfield is simply a matter of cost. The Border Force has 7,700 members, I think. If we had someone permanently at every single general aviation airfield, we could use the whole of the Border Force on that. It is a question of value for money. We are not sitting there doing nothing. As I tried to explain, under the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act, we are extending the powers so that advance passenger information can be enforced. It is an intelligence-led procedure. We do not have Border Force people sitting for weeks on end with no passengers arriving from abroad. We try to do it in a more proportionate and value-for-money way.
Lord Marlesford
I shall ask the Minister a very straightforward question. How is it that, when I was pressing for exit checks, I was constantly told, “We do it by intelligence? We do not need to do it regularly”, but it is now being done regularly? Does the Home Office not understand that we are in a much more dangerous position than we were? Will it wake up please?
Lord Ashton of Hyde
The Home Office understands that because it takes advice from the law enforcement agencies. Of course, we also take advice from my noble friend. It is not true to say that the Home Office does not recognise the security situation. In fact, the Home Secretary regards it as her highest priority.
Lord Ashton of Hyde
I shall turn the question round. If you ask any law enforcement agency if it would like some information, it will always say yes. The question is whether it is nice to have something or it is an essential tool, and that is the advice that we have received at the moment.
Lord Marlesford
My Lords, I am afraid that my noble friend has reinforced my argument, by indicating that the information is already being collected and it is only a matter of having it on the same record as the passport record. It would obviously be useful to know, once you know that somebody has another passport, when they are entering or leaving the UK on the other passport, which will often be screened. If it showed that that person had a British passport as well, that might well be a clue and be useful. But the fact is that they are collecting information and then not using it; that is my complaint. I shall withdraw the amendment, but I will come back to it on Report, when we can have a proper debate.
Lord Ashton of Hyde
I must correct the noble Lord on one thing. The Passport Office collects information for foreign passport holders when they apply for a British passport. What it does not do is to maintain it consistently through life; for example, it does not keep up-to-date addresses, and things like that. What I was saying was that, for the information that it does collect, on application and renewal only, it will attempt to make available throughout the other law enforcement agencies. But it does not collect information across dual nationalities, as the noble Lord would want, except when someone applies or renews a British passport.
Greece
Debate between Lord Ashton of Hyde and Lord Marlesford
Lord Ashton of Hyde
I completely agree that politics is very important in all these things, along with the economic arguments. Politics demands that all people in positions of power take decisions that are not just in the short-term interests of their political persuasion but in the long-term interests of the Greek people.
Lord Marlesford (Con)
My Lords, it looks inevitable and is probably desirable for the euro’s sake that Greece leaves the euro area. Does the Minister agree that it is very important that Greece stays in the EU, which is a more important organisation of longer standing than the euro and should be much more durable? Does he agree that Greece should not invent some Mickey Mouse currency such as a new drachma, which would not fulfil the functions of money—store of value, unit of account and medium of exchange—but should instead continue to use the euro? As the noble Lord, Lord Lea, said, a country does not necessarily have to be in the euro area to use the currency. It has been done with the dollar in South America. Tourists, who are so important to Greece, could use travellers’ cheques. Hotels and so on do not have to cash them; they can accept them and keep them. As long as they have been issued by a reputable outside bank, they are as good as cash for them.
Lord Ashton of Hyde
My Lords, I am not an economist, but I accept that it is theoretically possible to use other countries’ currencies. The problem is that a country does not have control over its currency if it does that. It is not up to me or to the UK Government to decide which currency Greece should use in the event that it leaves the euro. That will be up to the Greek Government.
Terrorism Act 2000 (Proscribed Organisations) (Amendment) (No. 2) Order 2015
Debate between Lord Ashton of Hyde and Lord Marlesford
Lord Marlesford (Con)
My Lords, I support very much what my noble friend is proposing in this order, and in doing so I should like to say that the plethora of these splinter groups which are affiliated to what is now the umbrella body known as ISIS or Islamic State is an extremely worrying phenomenon. It is interesting to discover that new ones are constantly being created, which of course is quite a usual technique among terrorist organisations in order to avoid any disruption to their activities.
In that connection, I want once again to ask my noble friend about the Muslim Brotherhood, which is actually a very dangerous organisation. It, too, seeks to have theocracy with sharia law and is prepared to use violent methods to achieve that. As my noble friend will remember, the Muslim Brotherhood was started up in 1928 and in January 1949 it assassinated the Egyptian Prime Minister. It was banned by President Nasser after it tried to assassinate him in 1954. It was also responsible for the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in October 1981. The organisation is the trunk of the tree, the roots of which are the Wahhabi and the Salafists, and the branches of which are the various organisations to which my noble friend has referred.
At this point we are in more danger from terrorism in this country than probably at any stage in my lifetime, and it is getting worse and more serious. There are actions which could be taken which I much regret have not been taken on what are not very good grounds. A particular point which I do not apologise for returning to again is the need for tighter control over passports, in particular through the introduction of a system by which the British Government are at least aware of the other passports being held by British passport holders.
The Government recently announced the reintroduction next month of exit checks, which is thoroughly desirable. I am glad that that is going to happen, although I am a little worried about the mechanics of how it is to be done. Will the checks on exit be as thorough as those on entry? Apparently, the exit checks are going to be done by the agencies carrying the passengers—the shipping lines, train companies and airlines—rather than by immigration officers who check entrants.
It would be a great help if we had at least some knowledge of the second passports being held by people. There is no discrimination about it. I was very concerned by the argument used by the Home Office against this proposal because it struck me that it was totally out of proportion to the threat we face. Perhaps I may remind the Minister by quoting from the letter signed by his noble friend:
“If there were security benefits, we would look to make best use of such a database”—
that is, a database of second passports. The letter continues:
“However, we are not persuaded that this is the case. It would create a level of intrusion for all British citizens who hold dual nationality, who would be obliged to keep HMPO informed of any change to their second passport. There are legitimate concerns about imposing such intrusion on one particular class of UK nationals, which we do not believe would be outweighed by operational benefits”.
I suggest that, with the situation we face, the arguments against this are so trivial that it is absolutely astonishing that they have even been raised. We have had cases in recent weeks and months of people getting out of the United Kingdom who should have been kept in the country because they were on bail or wanted for terrorist offences. Of course, in many cases these sorts of people have other passports, so they may travel in and out when it suits them on British passports and then do other things on other passports.
All I am asking is for my noble friend to ensure, please, at any rate during the period when all of us are campaigning for our particular political persuasions, that the Home Office will continue to work on better methods of securing our borders and defending the realm. It is certainly true that a balance has to be struck between national security and human rights, but personal privacy, in such a period of crisis as we currently face, cannot itself rate highly against the need to introduce all necessary measures.
Lord Ashton of Hyde
My Lords, I thank noble Lords who have participated and particularly the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, for her support not only today but in previous discussions on terrorism, along with her noble friend Lord Rosser, who has been constructively critical over many hours of debate on these subjects.
I begin with the noble Baroness’s question about why we have not proscribed the Haqqani network before, when it has been proscribed by other countries. When we proscribe a particular organisation depends on the extensive consideration that we have across government. We know that the Haqqani network has met the statutory test for proscription for some time, being concerned in terrorism. When a group meets the test of being concerned in terrorism, there are then discretionary factors which may mean that a decision is not taken to proscribe it at a particular time. Those include the nature and scale of an organisation’s activities, the specific threat it poses to the UK, the specific threat that it poses to British nationals overseas, the extent of the organisation’s presence in the UK and the need to support other members of the international community in the global fight against terrorism.
We keep groups of concern such as the Haqqani network under review. The attack against the British embassy vehicle in November 2014, which killed six people, including a UK national and an Afghan member of the UK embassy staff, and injured more than 30 people, meant that the Home Secretary considered that the discretionary factors are now balanced in favour of proscription.
By contrast, the other organisation that we are talking about today, JuA, has not been proscribed by any other country in the world. Depending on the nature of the particular threat from each of those organisations, we can act before other countries, but in some cases it is not appropriate to do so, in the light of the tests that we have to apply to proscribe organisations.
My noble friend Lord Marlesford asked—not, I think, for the first time—about the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood is not proscribed in the UK at the moment. Proscription can be considered only when the Home Secretary believes it to be concerned with terrorism. However, the Muslim Brotherhood is an organisation that the Government have significant concerns about and we will continue to monitor its activities very closely. We will seek to ensure that the Muslim Brotherhood and groups like it cannot operate without challenge in public places in this country. We will not tolerate secretive meetings behind closed doors on premises funded by the taxpayer. We will ensure that civic organisations are made well aware of the Muslim Brotherhood and groups like it and of the names under which they operate and the ways in which they go about their business.
As noble Lords will know, the Prime Minister commissioned an internal review, which was submitted to him in July. The National Security Adviser is advising the PM on the resulting policy options. We understand that the PM has not yet made a final decision about the timing of an announcement on the Muslim Brotherhood review, although the Government have committed to making the findings public.