Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Bew Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 27th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dodds of Duncairn (DUP)]

My Lords, I want to contribute briefly, because we have had some powerful speeches and important contributions. Wherever you stand on the issue of Palestine Action and the arguments around that, one thing that we are all agreed on, as we have heard in this debate, is that the glorification of terrorism is wrong and should be outlawed, because it retraumatises victims and legitimises violence in the eyes of young people today.

The noble Baroness, Lady Foster, has done a great service in raising this issue and tabling this amendment. It is particularly focused on Northern Ireland, although, as the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, said, it is absolutely an issue across the United Kingdom. The thing that concerns me, as the noble Baroness, Lady Foster, referenced, is the inconsistency in approach by the prosecuting authorities and by the police in Northern Ireland and across the United Kingdom in relation to this whole area. Whatever law we may pass or whatever amendment we may put in place to strengthen the prohibition on the glorification of terrorism, what effect does it actually have in reality when it comes to the victims seeing people who are carrying out these acts of glorification and speaking in terms of glorification? Will we actually see a difference in prosecutions and effective action against those who perpetrate these crimes?

When I speak to victims, they of course remember the events that have particularly affected them—we have heard the very powerful speeches by my noble friend Lord McCrea and the noble Baroness, Lady Foster, and all of us in this House from Northern Ireland have either personally experienced acts of terrorism against them or know people who have. The victims want that remembered. They want justice, of course, but they also want not to be forgotten. They want a consistency when it comes to those who glorify these terrible atrocities and acts of violence. They want action to be taken as appropriate, and when they see things being said and done, and nothing happens as a result of it, they lose faith in government, in politics and in democratic processes, and that is why people turn to other means that they think will get something done about such action.

It is very important that we have proper and appropriate laws in place against the glorification of violence or terrorism right across the United Kingdom. What I would ask for is consistency on the part of the prosecuting authorities and the police to take this matter more seriously than they do and have a common approach throughout the United Kingdom.

[Lord Bew (CB)]

My Lords, I want briefly to express my sympathy in support of the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Foster. The Minister will recall that, some months ago in Grand Committee, we discussed the noble Baroness’s amendment on this question of the glorification of terrorism. I absolutely respect the concerns raised by the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, and others about ambiguity, which clearly exists in some of these contexts, but for the issues that the noble Baroness talked about, there is no ambiguity—“Ooh ah, up the Ra” means only one thing. There is no ambiguity either in Kneecap—the word itself refers to glorification of a sadistic paramilitary act. When I spoke that day, many Members in the Room had not heard of Kneecap. Since then, Kneecap has become much bigger. I understand completely the difficulty the Minister has now in concluding, but I wish to convey to him this problem. Since we spoke that day, the glorification of terrorism has not abated or weakened; it has actually increased. Entire communities are getting locked into this, and that is a problem that faces this House.

[Lord Elliott of Ballinamallard (UUP)]

My Lords, briefly, I know this might sound as though it is a Northern Ireland debate, but it is not. I respect and accept the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, saying that this is an issue in England and Wales and more broadly. But we have experience of it—maybe more experience than others, or we may think we have. I stand here having served in the home service security forces in Northern Ireland for 18 years. Colleagues were murdered and friends were murdered. I carried their coffins. What is more, I have seen the devastation of some of those families in the aftermath, when some people lauded those terrorist acts. We see the rewriting of history and the glorification of terrorism—they taunt the families.

To prove that it is a much wider issue than Northern Ireland, back in 2014, two people were jailed for the glorification of the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby. So I accept that it is a much wider issue than Northern Ireland, but I want all noble Lords to understand the experience that the noble Baroness, Lady Foster, the noble Lord, Lord McCrea, and others have of the Northern Ireland situation and what we have seen.

I had a friend murdered back in 1985. That evening, going past their house, people were stopping and jeering and applauding that murder. Is that not the glorification of terrorism? I do not care whether it is the glorification of a terrorist, terrorists or terrorism—to me, it is all the same. If you are glorifying terrorism, that is wrong and should not be allowed. That is the rewriting of history. Even now, we have the taunting of young people because their grandparents, uncles or other family members were murdered. That is wrong and it cannot be allowed to continue. That is why I support Amendment 450.

Terrorism: Glorification

Lord Bew Excerpts

Thursday 30th January 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Bew (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Foster, for securing this important debate. I am well aware of her intense personal interest and, to be frank, at times her suffering on account of terrorism in Northern Ireland. I am very grateful to her for securing this debate. I am also delighted that the noble Lord, Lord Hanson of Flint, will be replying. He was a distinguished Minister in Northern Ireland. It is now, I think, 15 years or so since he was a Minister, and I am interested in reflecting on how he sees the evolution of this question of the public perception of the glorification of terrorism—how he thinks things have happened, whether he is surprised or whether it is pretty much what he was expecting when he was a Minister.

I was a civil rights marcher and I speak from the point of view of John Hume. There is no grievance in Northern Ireland that was worth the loss of a single life. Even more importantly, in terms of political structures, these were all clearly, essentially in place in the 1974 Sunningdale Agreement. There was absolutely no need for the thousands of lives that were lost. The largest single purveyor of death was the Provisional IRA in this period by some way, although there is a dreadful record of loyalist crime, and there were also instances where the British state forces let themselves down. But there is no question about who the largest purveyor of death was.

In recent times, there have been a number of cultural phenomena that tend to recreate and glorify that campaign. The most obvious example is the phenomena around the group Kneecap and their very successful film. The Sunday Times and the BBC—all these official organs of our culture—celebrate Kneecap and their work.

I cite the verdict of Professor Liam Kennedy from Tipperary—an old colleague of mine at Queens. What he says, and with some acuity, in his review of Kneecap’s film, is that

“in subtle ways … Kneecap serves to validate the Provisionals’ murderous assaults on their … neighbours and the British state”

and validates the idea that the decades of terror were

“inevitable and necessary, the last recourse of an historically oppressed people suffering from intergenerational trauma”.

I should say something else about my friend Professor Kennedy. More than any other academic in Belfast—I suspect that the Minister remembers this—he cared about the fate of those who were actually kneecapped in east Belfast in large numbers by the Provisional IRA. Nobody put themselves more at risk in speaking out against these crimes.

There is also the poem “The Knee” from this era by Ciaran Carson. I will read only the last section, which describes a kneecapping:

“It seems he was a hood, whatever, or the lads were just being careful.

Two and two were put together; what they added up to wasn’t five.

Visiting time: he takes his thirteen-month-old son on his other knee.

Learning to walk, he suddenly throws himself into the staggering,

Distance between his father and his father’s father, hands held up high,

His legs like the hands of a clock, one trying to catch up on the other”.

This is the cruelty which is now apparently a subject for critical acclaim in our mainstream media. This is why we are disturbed about the glorification of terrorism.

We have all made concessions, and the Minister was particularly important in defending the achievements of the Good Friday agreement when he was a Minister. But, as I say, I speak as somebody who was a civil rights marcher and who has never changed my mind on John Hume’s dictum that there is not a single political failing in Northern Ireland that justified or even began to justify the loss of a single life. But, somehow, Hume’s wisdom seems to be eroding now, and that is what is so worrying.

Hezbollah: Threat to the United Kingdom

Lord Bew Excerpts

Tuesday 5th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bew (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Godson, for securing this debate. I know, as I read the wording of the debate, that when he refers accurately to the proscription of Hezbollah in its entirety since 2019, some noble Lords in this House will sigh—noble Lords whose opinions I respect—and say “Proscription? Is this all we can talk about? What use is that really?”. I am sure that is an inevitable emotion that accompanies this debate. However, we are still in a world where proscription is necessary and required, and possibly has to be extended for the reasons given by the noble Baroness, Lady Foster.

While we are in this world, let me explain that for 12 years I was the chairman of the Anglo-Israel Association. I regularly argued to my Israeli audiences that there was a requirement to support a two-state solution. I regularly said to them, “Do not be obsessed with the ideology of the other side”. Had David Trimble been so obsessed in 1998 about what the IRA was saying —every word in the green book—there would never have been a Good Friday agreement. In the aftermath of that, I was very keen to say, especially to Israeli audiences, “Don’t be obsessed about this talk of Hezbollah leading to the extinction of Israel and so on. Let’s see if we can have a dialogue; let’s see what understanding we can have”. I am well aware that there are many people who still believe in that. They look at the reference to proscription and say that it is the wrong way to go and that a free-flowing, open dialogue is the way forward, however difficult it is.

However, the truth is that since 7 October the world has changed in this respect. I can no longer make the advocacy I made for so many years as chairman of the Anglo-Israel Association. I still believe in a two-state solution—at least, I refuse to rule it out—but I can no longer say, “Forget the underlying ideology of the other side, in the way that we did”. The ideology of Hezbollah and its amazingly self-destructive decision to back Hamas following the events of 7 October show that the form of dialogue that one once advocated no longer exists. Therefore, unfortunately, we are in a world where we have to talk about proscription. That is the realpolitik at the moment.