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3.38 pm
Mr. David Winnick (Walsall, North): I begin by wondering whether any of the defects and omissions in the way in which the security services handled the case
of Mrs. Norwood would have come to our knowledge if the Intelligence and Security Committee had not existed. The answer is pretty obvious: little or no such information would have come to Members of the House of Commons.I say that because I well recall all the arguments endlessly repeated by successive Governments to explain why, given that the Security Service was accountable to the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister, it would be totally inappropriate to subject it to the scrutiny of a committee of parliamentarians. When I intervened on my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary, I pointed that oversight came into existence thanks to the work of my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, West (Ms Hewitt), who is now Minister for Small Business and E-Commerce, and of my right hon. Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman). When they took their case to the European Court of Human Rights, it was felt that they would certainly win. As a result, the arrangements regarding oversight by the House of Commons were changed.
I may be considered to be a critic of the security services, but I have always accepted that all democracies need such services. Moreover, even if the terrorism of the past 30 years carried out by the IRA and loyalist groups had not existed, the need for the security agencies is nevertheless obvious. However, we should be under no illusions that all has been well. Peter Wright, for example, defends, or justifies, the state of near-lawlessness in which he operated as a senior MI5 agent, and the dirty tricks--targeted against the Labour Government of the time--for which he, although not only he, was responsible.
Dr. Julian Lewis: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Winnick: In a moment. The way in which my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary was targeted because of his presidency of the National Union of Students could not be justified, and no Conservative Member would attempt to justify it--even the hon. Gentleman to whom I am about to give way.
Dr. Lewis: This must be the first time since I have been a Member of this House that I have agreed with the hon. Gentleman. However, he should set the record straight and point out that whereas Peter Wright said initially that large numbers of security services operatives were engaged in the sort of dirty tricks that he himself admitted to, subsequently he retracted that and admitted that if he had to put a real figure on it, that figure was one--namely, Mr. Peter Wright.
Mr. Winnick: Be that as it may, in my view, for what it is worth, Wright did not act alone--but I shall not pursue that point.
Paragraph 29 of the report shows that not only were senior Ministers not told about what had happened at the time, neither were the most senior members of the Security Service. If ever there was a case for parliamentary accountability, this is it. All the previous arguments put forward by Ministers fall to the ground. If the Intelligence and Security Committee had been in existence in the early 1990s, some of the non-disclosures would probably not have occurred.
As for Mrs. Norwood, I take the same view as other right hon. and hon. Members: it would have been far better if she had faced justice. I see from the report that
there is some doubt about the seriousness of the information that she passed on to Russian agents. I am only a layman in these matters, but I was rather surprised that, given her position in the organisation, she could have passed on such serious information. However, one thing is certain--if Mrs. Norwood had had more important information, she would not have had the slightest hesitation in passing it on. She wanted to do as much as possible for the regime to which she was loyal--the one that ruled in Moscow.It would have been much better if she could have been taken to court but, by the time her role was revealed, nearly half a century had elapsed and she was in her late 80s. In many respects, Mrs. Norwood's real punishment is that the cause that she served with such dedication all her adult life has not only collapsed in Europe but has been exposed as downright evil.
Mr. Winnick: We all recognised that it was evil long before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the other events in eastern Europe. Let us think for a moment about the cause that Mrs. Norwood was serving. It was responsible for mass murder, the gulags, the denial of all civil liberties and the secret police, and it had contempt for the rule of law and truth. That is what she dedicated her life to. So I suppose that it could be said that she has had her punishment, even if it was not the sort of punishment that she should have had for betraying her country.
The Shayler case has been in the news for nearly three years now. I am certainly not an apologist for what Shayler did, but I doubt whether there is much to be gained by pursuing the matter. The French court has refused extradition, and the affair continues; I do not know how much time and money is being spent on it. Some newspapers are involved and are in danger of being taken to court again. Whether Shayler was the right sort of person to have been recruited for MI5 in the first place is, to say the least, doubtful. Clearly he is eager to play the martyr, and my view--which is perhaps the minority view--is that the sooner this saga is ended, the better it will be for the security services.
One argument is that if Shayler gets away with it, others in the security services would spill the beans. It would be a poor state of affairs if there were other people like Shayler in the security services who needed to be discouraged. Let us hope that he is a one-off. Whether his motive is money or conviction--I suspect that it is money, but I could be wrong--I think that we should end this business.
Mr. Mates: The hon. Gentleman and I agree on one thing: we hope that Shayler is a one-off. However, the hon. Gentleman's contrast in logic is interesting. He says that Mrs. Norwood should have been punished for committing crimes betraying our nation, but that Shayler should not be dealt with for the alleged crimes betraying our nation with which we want to charge him.
Mr. Winnick: That is a point of a kind. If I may say so--what the hon. Gentleman said had occurred to me before his intervention--there is a difference between what Mrs. Norwood did and what Shayler did. How long
will the Shayler saga continue? Will it go on until next year, and the year after that? As I said, I think that it should be ended soon, but obviously some disagree.My final point is about accountability. The ISC has done a good job, although I had doubts at the beginning about whether it was the right kind of Committee, and about the people on it. Indeed, the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) mentioned the fact that in a previous debate I had made the criticism that its members would all be made Privy Councillors. I had my suspicions, and I am pleased to say that I was wrong.
I do not want to give the impression that the ISC has not done a good job. It has, and I congratulate it on its activities as a Committee of parliamentarians. Nevertheless, I take the view--as does the Select Committee on Home Affairs, of which I am a member--that there should be a different form of parliamentary accountability. In its third report, which came out in June last year, the Committee said:
- In our view, it is inevitable that the intelligence services will one day become accountable to Parliament. That is the logical outcome of the process of reform embarked upon by the previous Government. The existing arrangements are merely transitional and are still evolving--witness the fact that the ISC itself is now demanding, and has been given, facilities that were undreamed of when it was established only five years ago. We hope that the Government will keep an open mind on this issue.
I accept that the ISC has shown independence, but we need to go further. We need a Committee that reports directly to the House. I do not believe that it is appropriate for the Committee to be set up by the Prime Minister and to report to the Prime Minister. Members of Parliament on such a Committee, like those on other Committees, should report directly to the House. That does not mean that any such Committee can operate like other Select Committees, but in the end there should be that form of parliamentary accountability, which means reporting here, rather than to the head of the Executive.
Dr. Norman A. Godman (Greenock and Inverclyde): I am confident that this does not meet my hon. Friend's requirements, but I should like to point out to him that recently members of the Foreign Affairs Committee met a senior representative of the security agencies. As one who was there, I can say that it was a very useful meeting.
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