Security in the UK

Lord Marlesford Excerpts

Monday 10th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Marlesford (Con)]

My Lords, I start by making a small procedural point. It is awfully important that Ministers try to answer debates in your Lordships’ House, and that is why I am very glad that my noble friend Lady Williams will be answering this one. We want to hear her views; we do not just want to hear the standard opinion of Home Office officials, who all too often regard any outside view as a rather impertinent interference and reflection on the competence with which they deal with their mandate. One of the best Ministers whom I have known in the 25 years that I have been in this House was the noble Lord, Lord Rooker. He took charge of and sorted out, rather than defended, the Defra administrative shambles over the payment of Brussels money to British farmers. However, speaking as a farmer, I suggest that national security is perhaps rather more important than that.

When, on 27 June, we debated Home Office affairs in the Queen’s Speech debate, I raised a number of points. Understandably the Minister could not answer them because, first, it was a different Minister and, secondly, there had been about 50 speakers with five minutes each. Last week I rang up the department of my noble friend Lady Williams to ask whether there was any intention of giving me any sort of answer in writing—the Minister answering the other debate had said that he would—and I was told that I would get an email to tell me whether the Minister would be commenting or answering, but so far there has been radio silence. Therefore, I do not apologise to the Minister for again referring to some of the points that I made on that occasion.

I suggest that the greatest threat to our security in the UK comes from political Islam and, in particular, from its military wing, Islamic State or ISIS. It has dwarfed most of the earlier jihadist organisations such as al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab and so on, and has sought to embrace them. Since IS announced its arrival three years ago with the aim of creating a worldwide caliphate, we have seen enough of its brutal methods to be able to classify it as a fundamentally fascist movement clad in the cloak of Islam. Until religious Islam strips away that cloak, exposing and denouncing ISIS, or Daesh, as the contemptible terrorist outfit that most Arabs in the Middle East as well as the Iranians, Turks and many others regard it, we in the UK will be limited as to what we can do to protect ourselves from its influence and activities.

IS also has a political cover. In this, it is remarkably similar to Soviet Bolshevism. It is not communism that is being sought but Islamist theocracy administering sharia law, which is every bit as threatening as the now discarded belief of communism once was.

Along with the threat from political Islam is the huge challenge that, very largely, it has spawned: the mass migration of people. I remind your Lordships of the figures from the UNHCR. Worldwide, 65.6 million people were forcibly displaced at the end of 2016. Of these, 22.5 million were seeking safety across national borders as refugees, which is the highest number since the UNHCR was founded in 1950 to deal with the tragic legacy of World War II. The biggest number of refugees is 5.5 million from Syria, followed by 3.3 million from South Sudan. At the end of last year, 2.8 million people were still seeking asylum. By far the largest number—over 80% of refugees—were in developing or middle-income countries, with some of the poorest countries hosting huge numbers: Turkey, 2.9 million; Pakistan, 1.3 million; and little Lebanon, 1.1 million, which is almost 20% of its population. Yet Saudi Arabia, which is about 200 times larger in scale and with three times the national income per head of Lebanon, has virtually none.

This migration is not a European challenge; it is a global challenge. That explains why the EU has been so ineffective at meeting it. Although being in the Schengen area has its advantages, as the noble Lord, Lord Ricketts, referred to, as the UK is outside this area we are, to some extent, shielded from the insensitive fumbling of the EU Commission, with its national quotas for refugees which have been largely ignored by the Schengen states.

Meanwhile, we should have the greatest sympathy for countries that have had their capacity to receive people overwhelmed by the numbers. I am thinking in particular of Italy and Greece, two of the most generous-hearted countries in Europe. Already, Italy has received more than 200,000 refugees—some 90% of them are still in emergency accommodation. By June this year, more than 60,000 had crossed the sea from Tripoli to Italy, which is a 25% increase on the same period last year. Tragically, more than 1,600 refugees have lost their lives in the crossing this year. Stranded on the tiny Greek islands are 14,000 refugees, sometimes in very poor conditions. Not surprisingly, there is growing resentment at the well-meaning but misguided rescue operations of various NGOs, which have in practice offered a ferry service and filled the pockets of the people traffickers who dispatch their victims in fragile coracles to Italy and Greece. The answer of course is that all these unfortunate victims must be rescued when in peril on the sea, but they should be returned to where they originally took passage. Some noble Lords may be aware that I have four times proposed in this House—on 9 July 2015, 23 May, 16 June and 29 October 2016—a detailed scheme for that to happen under UN auspices. Obviously, I will not repeat it again except to say that several countries are now taking an interest, but so far, sadly, HMG are not.

I now move on to some of my specific suggestions for mitigating the threat to our security today. My first point is that HMG should always make an independent proportionality assessment of the greater national good when there is a clash between the interests of national security with civil or human rights. We cannot afford the cost or risk of some of the cases in recent years where courts have had to take a precise and limited view on rights with little regard to security. We simply cannot allow another Abu Hamza, who was briefly detained in Britain in 2004 and then it took 10 years until he was sent to the United States in 2014 and sent to prison for life in January 2015.

To follow up what the noble Lord, Lord Ricketts, said, I believe that British jihadists who have travelled to take part in IS operations anywhere in the world should not be allowed back into this country whether they are British citizens or not—by naturalisation or birth. Their passports should be cancelled and their citizenship revoked. They have made their choice and if they have not died from it, they should live with it. We cannot afford to take the risk and pay the price of doing otherwise.

We also need greatly to tighten our borders. That must mean that the Passport Office should know much more about what passports other than British passports people hold. I remember pointing that out to Cressida Dick about three years ago when she was still involved in anti-terrorism in the Met. She expressed astonishment that the Passport Office did not have a record of other passports that British passport holders held. The Passport Office should also temporarily invalidate British passports held by anybody who is in prison or on bail. One of the London Bridge attackers was apparently on bail. That would mean automatic notification of instances such as that by the courts to the passport authorities. There must also be automatic electronic cancellation of passports when death is notified to the registrar. At the moment, the trouble is that a lot of passports belonging to dead people drift around and are used by living people.

It is most important that there is an automatic recording of people when they leave the country, which should be kept for at least five years, as well as of people arriving. It is absurd at present that the Home Office says, “We record departure only when it is intelligence-led”. That has not worked and it is not enough. We do not necessarily need national identity cards—I have never been keen on the cards—but we need a national identity number. We have a multiplicity of numbers, but we should all have one number that identifies a person with biometrics. Those should not be on the card, because that is quite dangerous—clever terrorists can fake cards and put biometrics on to them to say, “I am who I say I am”, but there should be a central register of the biometrics. The key thing is the number. We really must reconsider that. We also need new standards of positive vetting, as we used to have in the Cold War days, to make sure that terrorists—it has been said that there are many in the UK—cannot get into sensitive positions.

Finally, the Government really have to review the status and the position of the Muslim Brotherhood in Britain. Its links with jihad are not unlike those that Sinn Fein once had with the IRA in Ireland; it is a rather similar outfit. The MB was declared a threat to national security three years ago by Sir John Jenkins, then the British ambassador to Saudi Arabia, when he was asked to report on the organisation by David Cameron when he was Prime Minister. As noble Lords probably know, it is partly the problem of the Muslim Brotherhood which is causing the Qatar-Saudi conflict because the Saudis are Wahhabis and the Muslim Brotherhood is an alternative source of information and competition. Sadly, they are both guilty of having funded a great deal of terrorism.

Further on the Muslim Brotherhood, let us not forget that the organisation started in Egypt in 1928. Its members killed an Egyptian Prime Minister in 1949 and then killed President Sadat in 1981 because he was a peacemaker. President al-Sisi of Egypt is fighting very hard to prevent the formation of another Muslim Brotherhood Government because, frankly, the ultimate thing about all this sort of terrorism is to separate religion from the state. We cannot have the politicisation of religion in order to secure monopoly power in any country.