Prevention and Suppression of Terrorism

Patrick Mercer Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Patrick Mercer (Newark) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bradford South (Mr Sutcliffe). Many of his comments, and his support for the Government, were not unexpected.

I sometimes wonder how much time we consume in the House of Commons dealing with apparently insignificant affairs. For instance, having had a grand total of—I think—nearly 30 individuals under control orders at one stage, we are now down to eight, so we find ourselves devoting many minutes, if not hours, of parliamentary time discussing the fate of eight individuals. That is important. However, what concerns me most is that the previous Government imposed control orders that are fundamentally wrong, misapplied and undemocratic—they are fundamentally a help to our enemies—but did not seem particularly bothered when individuals who were subject to them under the previous regime absconded or escaped.

That is the point. I pay huge tribute, as the hon. Gentleman did, not only to the work of Lord Carlile, but to the work of our security services, who have foiled or plain put off any number of extremely dangerous plots. However, the fact remains that although the eight individuals about whom we are speaking today are not numerous, they are a totem for our enemies.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I am interested in the hon. Gentleman’s opinions, but, as the Minister said earlier, there are no charges against those eight individuals, and there is apparently no possibility of deporting the foreign nationals involved. Does the hon. Gentleman share my concern that the House will vote through Executive orders that control and change people’s lives entirely when no criminal charges have been laid against them?

[Patrick Mercer]

The hon. Gentleman’s intervention is helpful and timely, and I completely agree with him. The difficulty is that we are detaining those individuals undemocratically and improperly, which plays directly into the hands of our enemies.

Our foes—be they Islamist fundamentalists, direct action groups or animal rights groups, Irish individuals or whatever—all understand the power of propaganda. The one thing at which they are good is broadcasting their word. They understand that the spoken, the written and the broadcast word are more powerful than any bullet or bomb.

Before Christmas there was a series of events, with which I shall not detain the House, involving a serious plot against western Europe—a core al-Qaeda plot—that both failed and was foiled. To replace that failure in the eyes of the public, an extraordinarily ill-thought-through plot was mounted from Yemen involving ink cartridge containers on a certain number of aircraft—cartridges that, frankly, were unlikely ever to explode. However, for very little effort, our enemies dominated the media for four complete days at the end of October last year, making the point that terrorism had not gone away and that they still intended to terrorise people. They did so without killing or injuring anyone, and with very little effort on their part.

The point is that with control orders we continue to aid and abet our enemies in exactly those methods of operation. First and foremost, we fought Nazism, communism and Irish republicanism without having to resort to any of those methods, because we were a democratic nation fighting on democratic principles against non-democratic enemies.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

I agree with a great deal of what my hon. Friend is saying, but we did intern people in the last war and we did have extraordinary regulations—regulation 18B—to lock up people who were deemed to be a threat to the state, so I think it is fair to have extraordinary regulations for relatively small numbers.

[Patrick Mercer]

I am most grateful to my hon. Friend. He is absolutely right: of course we interned people in the last war, and we also carried out the disastrous policy of internment in Northern Ireland in the ’70s. I was not there at the time, but I was there in the follow-up to that policy, which was literally disastrous, not only in countering terrorism, but in aiding and abetting the recruitment of our foes in the battle with the Irish Republican Army that lay ahead. However, I hope that my hon. Friend does not mind if I do not go into that in too much detail.

If we retain the powers indefinitely and continue to treat that small number of people in that way, we will pass the most important tool that we can to our foes. We will be saying to our enemies: “Please understand that without letting off any bombs or killing any policemen, soldiers or civilians, you have achieved exactly what you want to achieve. In other words, you have destabilised our democracy. Without raising a finger, you have done exactly what you wanted to do: you have changed the way we live our lives.” That is not right. I celebrate the changes that the Home Secretary announced earlier. Without doubt, there have been some improvements. For instance, of the three measures for which I have long argued, and for which I shall continue to argue—the ability to question after charge, the use of intercept evidence and plea bargaining—one has been accepted. One is better than nothing—it is an improvement—but we must understand that our abiding aim is to get those individuals into court on a legitimate charge and with a legitimate trial, and to uphold the principle that they are innocent until proven guilty.

We have other methods of dealing with criminals. I am sure that, like me, the House remembers how a previous Prime Minister made it a point of principle that Irish republican terrorists, and indeed Protestant paramilitaries, should not be treated as they wished to be—that is, as soldiers—but as mere common criminals.

[Mr Nigel Dodds (Belfast North) (DUP)]

I am following the hon. Gentleman carefully, but will he correct his reference to “Protestant paramilitaries”, by perhaps describing them as loyalists or so-called loyalists? His use of the word “Protestant” in this context is not correct.

[Patrick Mercer]

The right hon. Gentleman is quite right. I am afraid that I am a victim of my own experience. He is absolutely right that the term is outdated. It was one that we used in the many tours that I served in Northern Ireland, but it is both wrong and probably insensitive, and I apologise.

Whatever stamp of terrorist we were facing in Northern Ireland, that terrorist was deemed to be a criminal. There are methods that we can use to handle those criminals. They are not soldiers; they are criminals. Therefore, surely it is up to us to deal with them in the same way, using the rules of bail along with other methods that we use to surveille those of whom we are suspicious. We do not need to take these individuals’ liberties away from them.

There are two points behind that idea. The first is that it is improper and undemocratic; the second is that it is plain damn silly. If we say to someone, “We are interested in you; we are surveilling you; we are keeping you under observation”, we immediately fail to harvest the intelligence that those individuals can give us. Not all of them are terribly clever, although some are, and many of them are very foolish, which is why they have fallen under suspicion in the first place. Foolishness, of course, should be aided and abetted by the security services because foolishness provides us with further clues and further evidence.

I will not detain the House further. Despite my instincts, I will certainly support the Government tonight on the basis that I understand that future legislation needs time to mature and to be properly formulated. The fact remains that I hope that the Home Secretary and her Ministers will look most carefully at what is proposed so that in the future we will deal with our enemies not only in a democratic and proper way, but in a thoroughly practical one.