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Sir Ivan Lawrence: The hon. Member for Glasgow, Hillhead (Mr. Galloway) has missed the point about the Attorney-General with his examples of cases in which the United Kingdom chose not to prosecute. The issue is not whether there is evidence--the subject of the examples that the hon. Gentleman gave--but whether, there being evidence, it is in the national interest for a prosecution to proceed. It is in those circumstances that powers are given to the Attorney-General. The latest edition of "Blackstone's Criminal Practice" sets out the situation concisely on page 935. It says:
- "In general, the Attorney's consent is required where issues of public policy, national security or relations with other countries may affect the decision whether to prosecute. An example is the Suppression of Terrorism Act 1978 . . . by which he must sanction any proceedings here for terrorist offences allegedly committed in a convention country. Other examples are offences of bribery under the Public Bodies Corrupt Practices Act 1889 or Prevention of Corruption Act 1906 . . . offences under the Official Secrets Act 1911"--
- "contrary to part III of the Public Order Act 1986 . . . offences of belonging to a prescribed organisation, contributing money to prescribed organisations"
12 noon
Mr. Kirkhope: I do not know whether my hon. and learned Friend was in his place a few minutes ago, when I made clear a proposal in regard to the Attorney-General and the Director of Public Prosecutions in future consideration of matters that arise from the Bill in the area that he is discussing.
Sir Ivan Lawrence: If my hon. Friend has conceded the point that was made in Committee, I am grateful and I apologise for detaining the House unnecessarily even for a minute or two.
Mr. Kirkhope: It is difficult for me to go back over that ground. I have not conceded the precise nature of the amendments, but I have said that we want a mechanism put in place to ensure greater scrutiny, particularly for sensitive matters and matters that may be in the area of public policy. We want that put on a clearer basis. I have put that clearly on the record this morning. Our proposal does not fit the amendments precisely, but it recognises the contributions in Committee of my hon. and learned Friend and other hon. Members who wanted us to make such provisions to allay their fears and concerns.
Sir Ivan Lawrence: I am grateful for that. I trust my hon. Friend and his advisers to come up with a form that responds reasonably to our concerns. I apologise for having taken the House's time.
Mr. Donald Anderson (Swansea, East): I apologise to the House for arriving late. I have been to and from my
constituency. I understand that the Minister has made it clear that the Government have moved, recognising that the points raised on Second Reading and in Committee are points of substance. We accepted from the start that the Bill was necessary, but that safeguards were needed. We shall give the Bill a fair passage and we hope that the Government will move towards the points relating to sensitive matters that we have raised.
I pay tribute to the hon. and learned Member for Burton (Sir I. Lawrence) for suggesting a formula and for raising some interesting examples of ways in which things might go wrong. His Afghan example was particularly apposite. A private individual can normally raise an issue without the consent of the Attorney-General. A private prosecution might have been made against our former Prime Minister because of her collusion with certain Afghan rebels against the then established Afghan Government during the mid-1980s.
I shall not detain the House. I welcome the Minister's undertaking that he and his advisers--as well as the promoter of the Bill, the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Mr. Waterson), whom I congratulate again--have recognised that a problem exists. I look forward to finding out how they will address it.
Mr. Waterson:
I am entitled to be brief in responding to the debate for two reasons. First, we have had positive and detailed debates on the issue on Second Reading, in Committee and today. I am delighted to see my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton (Sir I. Lawrence) and the hon. Member for Swansea, East (Mr. Anderson) in their places. Both of them have been admirably persistent and persuasive on this topic. The second reason is my hon. Friend the Minister's announcement, which I very much welcome. The Government have clearly listened to the arguments deployed at various stages and they have come up with a positive solution to the concerns expressed.
I want to add just two other points on which I have touched in previous debates on the subject. I give the House a general reminder that for many years, the Attorney-General has had the power to intervene in any prosecution in this country under the nolle prosequi procedure. In addition, there are already certain substantive offences on the statute book which specifically require the consent of the Attorney-General. Under the Bill, the same requirement would apply to offences of conspiracy and incitement relating to those substantive offences. Those offences include issues of special sensitivity, one example being the Official Secrets Act 1911.
I commend my hon. Friend the Minister for his announcement and invite the hon. Member for Cardiff, South and Penarth (Mr. Michael) to seek leave to withdraw his amendment.
Mr. Michael:
I thank the Minister for responding positively to the concerns expressed in Committee and today. He is wise to do so and wise to have left open the
We recognise that the Minister's response has been genuine and sincere. I am sure that he will ensure that his undertaking is followed through. I am also certain that intentions expressed in this House are of some value, but, as the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn and Lochaber (Sir R. Johnston) said, they do not have the same force as legislation.
The power of the Attorney-General to intervene when he feels like it, to which the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Mr. Waterson) referred, is not enough. We need a mechanism in place that guarantees the Attorney-General's oversight and ensures that the Bill is used only against the targets that it is intended to deal with.
I hope that the Minister accepts that we appreciate that he has moved swiftly to try to address the concerns expressed by hon. Members on both sides. I pay tribute to the fact that he has been willing to listen to hon. Members. That says a lot for him and is an example of the House of Commons acting as it should. I hope, however, that he is aware of our strong belief that the mechanism to provide a safeguard which he offers should be included in the Bill. That is beyond our scope to address today, but the Minister will have read our suggestion, which is included in another group of amendments concerning terrorism. I know that he will continue to think about these matters.
I offer the Minister our co-operation in trying to tease these matters out. We are always willing to help the Government, as he knows--
Mr. Kirkhope:
For about the fourth time during the passage of the Bill, I must tell the hon. Gentleman that it is not a question of teasing anything out of me. I do not like that phrase and I wonder whether he would desist from using it.
Mr. Michael:
I apologise if I have teased the Minister. The hon. and learned Member for Burton (Sir I. Lawrence) suggested that I was seeking to terrorise the Minister. I seek simply to help to achieve an effective measure that contains the safeguards that are required. It is not the Minister's mind or his intentions that need teasing out, but effective, clear legislation. I hope that the Minister will not feel so sensitive to that way of expressing it. The Bill needs a safeguard to balance the completely open range of offences that it seeks to address by making sure that it cannot be misused or abused.
Given the Minister's willingness to consider further, we welcome the Bill, but in a limited way. Although we should like some amendments to be made in another place, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Order for Third Reading read.
Mr. Galloway:
I oppose the Third Reading of the Bill. As I said earlier, I shall not attempt to talk the measure out. It is clear that I am alone in opposing it in principle and as a democrat I shall have to accept the consequences of that when we divide.
I was unable to attend the debate on Second Reading as I was out of the country. However, as I have been on my feet for a good part of this morning and I hope that I have registered some important points that have been acknowledged by hon. Members on both sides of the House and may well be picked up elsewhere, I shall confine myself to stating relatively briefly my opposition in principle.
Of course there is complete consensus about the need to hunt down paedophiles, football hooligans and other criminals and deal rigorously with them. I hope that the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Mr. Waterson) will accept that those of us who are anxious about the political dimensions of the Bill are genuinely concerned about liberty. There have been long discussions on Second Reading, in Committee and on Report, but the nub of the problem remains the same--the definition of terrorism and the proper appreciation of our state's interest in deciding whether to pursue people held to be involved in inciting others to commit acts of terrorism.
On Second Reading, a number of hon. Members restated their position and said, as the Minister has today, that they were against all violence for any political end at any time. I am not--and I do not believe that in their heart of hearts they are either. Each one of them would oppose occupation and oppression ever they came to our land: they would fight them on the beaches, they would fight them in the streets, they would fight them on the rooftops and from house to house and would never surrender their liberty. Precisely that evil has occurred in other countries, where good men and women have been ready to resist tyranny and determined to resist the assertion of what was called on Second Reading the divine right of kings. A Government being established, recognised and lawful does not mean that the country has any democratic validity. The country may, as many do, be pursuing appalling acts of tyranny against its own citizens such that some of them flee abroad, often--to our credit--to this country because of the high standards of liberty that it has historically enjoyed.
I gave examples, as have others, of people such as Kossuth and Marx in the 19th century, as well as many more without number--I could spend the rest of the day reciting their names--who came here because this was a land where liberty had been won, freedoms gained and in which there was democratic space to organise, incite, and even conspire to overthrow the tyrannies that afflicted their countries.
By definition, a tyranny can be removed only by extraordinary measures. It is sometimes possible, although very rare, that massive civil disobedience and huge demonstrations can topple a regime, as some in eastern Europe were toppled, but much more often at one stage or another during a dictatorship, people have to bear arms and take armed action against it.
Inevitably, in conditions of extreme repression, the leadership of such movements will gravitate to countries such as ours where freedom and liberty prevail. The Bill will criminalise such people, even though they have not
broken any law in Britain--or at least they would not have done so until the Bill became law--or caused any harm to the Queen's peace in her realm. They will fall open to prosecution in this country under the Bill because they are inciting, supporting or organising events in distant tyrannies, which are clearly offences under the laws of such distant tyrannies.
Such circumstances will lead us down some very dark pathways. I insist that, given the Conservative majority and the prevailing mentality at the time, the Bill would have led to the prosecution of Nelson Mandela. Only in recent years would he have been free from the threat of prosecution by the Attorney-General, the Director of Public Prosecutions or whoever was making the decision. Many other people today, some of whom are approved by me and some of whom are approved by Conservative Members, would be similarly affected.
I restate the cliche, which is a cliche only because it is so obviously true, that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Makarios was a wanted terrorist and took tea with the Queen in Buckingham palace. Mugabe was a wanted Marxist Leninist terrorist and then took tea with the Queen at Buckingham palace. One could give example after example of such people. Yasser Arafat was referred to earlier. Until very recently, he was routinely described as a terrorist leader. I never believed that--I was with him always, but that was not the case for the majority of Members. Yet last year and the year before that he sat with his distinctive chequered headdress up in the Gallery as an honoured guest in the House of Commons. The definitions of terrorist and freedom fighter are constantly changing and we will be asking for trouble if we proceed with the Bill.
The Bill itself might disturb the Queen's peace. I gave an example earlier, which I will now develop. In this country, there are 580,000 Pakistani Kashmiri Muslims. Every man and woman among them supports what they call the freedom struggle in occupied Jammu and Kashmir. Today, in mosques up and down the country, people will be collecting money for the jihad--the holy war. That money will make its way to Srinagar and the coffers of the liberation movement. If the Bill became law, those people would be committing an offence every time they did that. Will they be prosecuted? India will demand that they are. India will say that we now have a law that would allow us to proceed against people who are inciting and helping to organise acts of terrorism in Kashmir. India will press the Foreign Office, and our ambassador in Delhi will be upbraided for any failure to prosecute the hive of terrorists--as India perceives them--who support such activities.
Will our Attorney-General agree to a prosecution? If he does, what will be the response of the Pakistani and Kashmiri communities in this country? Will they welcome the criminalisation of their brethren? Will they support a prosecution of their co-religionists who are British citizens? We can be sure that they will not. They will take grave exception. They might demonstrate and even burn an effigy or a flag. The demonstration might get out of hand and the police might deal with it injudiciously. Civil disorder might break out in our country because of a cack-handed prosecution of political activists at the behest of a foreign state.
The Under-Secretary may argue that, although we have important trading and economic interests with India, it would be unlikely to be able to push us into taking such
a prosecution, but Saudi Arabia was able to put enormous pressure on the British Government to crack down on the activities of Dr. al-Masari and other Saudi dissidents in Britain. I recognise and acknowledge the Government's motives: they wished to protect jobs, industry and profits. Only a fool would deny that those are important factors, but I believe that the Government are supporting the Bill as a direct result of their inability to deal with the al-Masari affair. The Government were unable to silence him or kick him out to a remote Windward island.
The Bill has been hurried through with such unseemly haste that the Opposition and the Government have been unable to carry out their duties. My hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, South and Penarth has been unable properly to table amendments and the Minister has been unable properly to inform us of the concession that he has made: it sounded different each time he explained it, so until we read Hansard we shall not know what we are being asked to accept. That is indecent and unseemly haste, at the behest of a foreign Government--indeed, a foreign tyranny with no elections, no democratic system and no proper legal system.
The Bill would open us up to pressure from every tinpot dictatorship around the globe asking why we are not using the legislation to prosecute Mr. X or Mr. Y, who is in London busily plotting the overthrow of the dictatorship. We shall be asked, "Why did you prosecute Mr. X when you will not prosecute Mr. Y? Is it because Mr. X's country of origin is more important than Mr. Y's?" India will ask, "Why are you prepared to prosecute Saudi dissidents but not Kashmiri activists fomenting armed revolution in our territory?" What will the Government's answer be?
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