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Andrew Mackinlay: I shall be pleased to give way if my right hon. Friend can clarify the point.
Mr. Barron: Without wanting to go into detail, I point out that paragraph 91 explains what the Committee has done in the past 12 months and what the current situation is.
Andrew Mackinlay: I am not satisfied about that. Nothing that has been uttered today or that features in the documentation reassures us that Members of Parliament are not subject to unauthorised surveillance either by the security and intelligence services or special branch. Regardless of the political persuasion of any of the people to whom I referred, it is fundamentally wrong that what happened should have taken place. I suspect that those involved overlooked the Wilson doctrine and that one of our colleagues, the hon. Member for Mid-Ulster, who had not taken his oath, did not feature on their radar screens as a Member of Parliament, so they assumed that they could proceed. I suspect that that was the case and/or that the Northern Ireland Office had, as a matter of practice, recorded the telephone conversations of the Secretary of State without thinking that he or she might be talking to a Member of Parliament.
Dr. Julian Lewis: I should like to put to the hon. Gentleman a hypothetical scenario. What does he think the security and intelligence services should do if they have reason to believe at some future stage that someone who has been elected to the House of Commons is secretly in contact with an extremist, fundamentalist terrorist organisation? Does he believe that such people should be off limits purely because they are Members of Parliament?
Andrew Mackinlay: I am grateful for that intervention, as the hon. Gentleman makes a valid point. I have said that the matter should be revisited, as the Wilson doctrine needs to be updated and could take such issues into account. In the particular cases that we know about, however, national security, by definition, could not have been at issue because they involved the Secretary of State, who was talking to a Member of Parliament, and the Prime Minister's man. If Mo Mowlam or Jonathan Powell were threatening national security, we might as well pack up and go home, but that was demonstrably not the case. Therefore, those conversations demonstrably should not have been bugged or subject to surveillance, and we need to be reassured and told what the position is. As I said, if there is some validity in the scenario that the hon. Gentleman postulated, it should be considered so that we know exactly what the ground rules are.
I make no apology for again raising that matter in the House. Clearly, there have been some very unsatisfactory goings on. The Prime Minister has refused, failed or felt unable to clarify the position on repeatedly being asked in the House specifically about the Mo Mowlam and Jonathan Powell conversations. The issue cannot and should not go away, and he should make a statement to clarify it. In the meantime, our colleagues in the Committee need to deal with the issue with some vigour and come back to the House and set out in their next report precisely what has gone on and what they recommend to the Prime Minister for the future.
4.49 pm
Mr. A. J. Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed): The hon. Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay) made as lively and constructive a contribution to the debate as he has to the Foreign Affairs Committee's deliberations on Iraq. I agree with him that the work of the two Committees can be complementary.
In the light of what he said about the Wilson doctrine, I have changed the order of what I was going to say to address his comments at the beginning of my speech, without dealing with the detail of the case to which he referred. The Wilson doctrine means that if there is any change in the policy that MPs' communications will not be intercepted, the Prime Minister will, when it seems compatible with the security of the country to do so, make a statement to the House about it. The Committee spent some time considering that matter, and there is a paragraph in the report relating to it, which merely records that the Prime Minister has not advised us of any such change in policy; and it is clearly common knowledge that he has not told the House of any such change.
The problem about the Wilson doctrine is that we could at any time be in the position that the policy had been changed, but it had not been deemed to be compatible with the security of the country to make an announcement. That is not an abuse of the doctrine. In that situation, it would be an entirely proper application of the doctrine for the Prime Minister to have relaxed the policy, for some overriding reason of national security, but not yet to have made an announcement to the House. That leads me to wonder whether the Wilson doctrine is a good basis on which to rest the general presumption that MPs' communications will not be intercepted. If an MP's communications were to be intercepted, of course, it would still have to be by means of a warrant issued by the relevant Secretary of State. Nevertheless, it is worth considering whether we should have a system whereby no interception of the communications of a Member of either House could ever be undertaken unless it was approved by someone at a very high and manifestly independent level, such as the Lord Chief Justice.
Knowledge that MPs' communications are not intercepted is an important safeguard for our constituents, and I am not convinced that the Wilson doctrine provides an unambiguous assurance that no MP's communications will be intercepted unless there are compelling grounds to do so, relating to threats to national security or evidence of involvement in serious crime. The time has come to look for a better basis than one whereby, in effect, the doctrine might be in general abeyance without our knowledge until such time as it was reasonable, in the circumstances of the case that had given rise to the problem, for the Prime Minister to tell the House that he had had to do that. The hon. Member for Thurrock raises a perfectly reasonable point, but he slightly misunderstands the present position and certainly underestimates the amount of attention that the Committee gave to it.
Let me express my wish, as others have, that the Foreign Secretary will soon be recovered from his indisposition, and suggest that next time he goes to Kandahar he takes his own sandwiches with him.
Let me also echo the Chairman's tribute to all the work that is done by the agencies and pay tribute to the very small but immensely hard-working staff of the Intelligence and Security Committee, without whom we could not achieve what we do. They deserve great credit for their work.
I want to touch on a subject that was raised by the right hon. Member for Rother Valley (Mr. Barron), as well as by the hon. Member for Thurrock, and which is mentioned in the report—namely, special branch. I co-operated with the right hon. Gentleman in his enthusiasm to ensure that we spent some time on considering special branch, which has some important responsibilities, including port policing. My noble Friend Lord Carlile referred to the issue in his reports on the prevention of terrorism Acts, and more attention and resources need to be given to it.
The right hon. Member for Rother Valley mentioned an important point that I need to clarify. There is an important reason why special branch does not and should not share all its intelligence with the security service—namely, that it has a different job. One of its jobs is to protect public order. It has to collect intelligence on public order in order to know whether there is going to be so massive, and possibly so uncontrolled, a demonstration that police resources will be needed for the purpose. People who may need to be the subject of surveillance for that reason are not, by that mere definition, threats to national security and properly the subject of investigation by the security service. There is a distinction, and it is right that it be maintained. Whereas special branches provide a very important executive arm for the security service, it is right that they recognise the difference between work that they do on their own account, for the purposes of their own responsibilities, and work that they do for the security service.
The right hon. Member for Rother Valley mentioned the regional intelligence cells that have been created for special branch—they are not regional special branches, but regional cells—and the fact that the one in Yorkshire serves two whole Government regions. That happens to be the Association of Chief Police Officers arrangement, but we were given to understand that the cells were structured in that way primarily for resources reasons. The right hon. Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West (Joyce Quin) and I are not happy with that.
Joyce Quin (Gateshead, East and Washington, West): I believed that regionalisation made a lot of sense for effective organisation throughout the country. However, I endorse the right hon. Gentleman's point that in the north-east, it is important that a regional organisation corresponds to existing regions and regional identity.
Mr. Beith: The right hon. Lady and I are at one on that. I continue to have doubts about the merit of organising special branches into regional special branches as opposed to intelligence cells. If county-based police forces—in some cases, multi-county police forces—continue to form the structure of our policing, regional special branch forces would be divorced from
the accountability structure of our current system. Although there are problems about allocating budgets to special branch, I would not be happy if special branches existed in limbo and were not part of local accountability. There are arguments for and against regional police forces, but if they existed, my point would fall.Let me briefly consider paragraph 67 of the report, which deals with collection gaps, warnings and the suggestion that the services' ability to warn us of dangers in future could be impaired by the stresses on their resources. One of the lessons of Afghanistan is that the west collectively had not maintained adequate intelligence on what was happening in that country. For specific reasons, the intelligence that we received was perhaps better than that of some of our partners. Nevertheless, an overall intelligence gap allowed a failed state to become the headquarters of an organisation that carried out the horrific destruction of thousands of lives as well as many other terrorist incidents. We must learn from that.
Al-Qaeda is regrouping in other countries and there are failed states all around the world. We have only to consider a country such as Somalia to ascertain the extent of the danger that could be lurking. Other states are at risk of tipping over into failed state status. All that makes heavy demands on the intelligence effort. Things are much more complicated and difficult than the cold war effort of simply seeing what the Russians were up to, to put it crudely. Our intelligence effort was never limited to such an extent, but the focus was much clearer. Nowadays, there are all sorts of trouble spots throughout the world. They are precisely the places where international terrorist organisations go to find a safe haven in which to carry out their activities. If we cannot keep a careful watch on those trouble spots, and keep between the nations that ally themselves for intelligence purposes, we shall not get other sorts of warning.
We have much work to do on Iraq. We deal with the dossiers in paragraphs 81 and 82. The Foreign Affairs Committee discussions will give us much more detail about who said what to whom and when. However, we left hon. Members in no doubt that the February dossier—although we did not use the Foreign Secretary's terminology—was a dreadful mistake and that systems had to be put in place to ensure that that did not happen again. We were confident that that had been done.
However, there are many other questions beyond the dossiers, not least the issue of whether the intelligence was strong enough to support the assessments that were made throughout that period. That is a more fundamental question. Was the intelligence reliable enough to bear the weight that was placed on it? We should examine that question closely.
We shall do the job thoroughly and without fear or favour, and we shall take the time that is necessary to get at the truth. That is why we make no promises about the date of the report's publication. Our only promise is that, to the best of our ability, we shall do a thorough job without fear or favour. We hope and believe that we shall have access to all the available information that we need. If we do not, we shall say so, as the Chairman pointed out earlier.
I want to consider the nature of the Committee and its operation. To some extent, I am responding to the point of the hon. Member for Thurrock. Hon. Members have often said that it would be much better if the Committee were a Select Committee of the House. Indeed, some Committee members have expressed that view. If that happened we would lose one feature of the Committee, in that it now comprises hon. Members of both Houses. A very able and helpful peer serves on the Committee, and other valuable contributors have come from the other end of the building.
However, while I have a good deal of sympathy with that view, Members should not exaggerate the difference that would be made to the Committee's operation. In many respects, it would operate in much the same way. It would need its own secure accommodation, like the comparable congressional committees in the United States; it would meet mostly in private, like the American committees. The vast bulk of their work is done in private. They see certain benefits in occasional open sessions, and I do not disagree with those who think that that could apply here; but there is no escaping the fact that the bulk of the work on which the Committee's value depends would continue to be done in private.
Unless the House changes its system of appointing Select Committees, which it conspicuously declined to do last year, the system according to which this Committee is appointed will not differ greatly from the system governing the appointment of most Select Committees—with the significant exception that, just occasionally, the House can overturn the Whips' recommendations in regard to Select Committees. The Prime Minister, and earlier Prime Ministers, did not appoint this Committee on the basis of picking their friends; they went through the usual processes by which all three parties and their Whips' Offices submit their nominations, and the mechanisms were strikingly similar to those that apply to Select Committees.
The Committee would not be all that different in another important respect. Material would be excluded from its reports, just as it is excluded from Select Committee reports and, indeed, reports produced by committees of the United States Congress. I agree with my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for North-East Fife (Mr. Campbell), the right hon. Member for Devizes (Mr. Ancram) and others about asterisks. Some of our reports are spattered with them, and I wonder that the printer does not run out of them—although, of course, we are past the days of old-fashioned typesetting.
The statement in the introduction to the report to the effect that the Committee consents to the redactions, or exclusions, should be seen in context. It means that something we consider essential to the House's knowledge of whether we are making a critical judgment has not been excluded. But I think that some of our consent has been given with reluctance, and some of us, at least, feel that the agencies could be a little more relaxed about some of the material that they seek to exclude.
First, we insist that omissions be marked with asterisks and not achieved by changing the text or disguising the fact that something has been omitted. We believe that it is part of our responsibility to the House to enable it to know that we have obtained, for instance,
a figure in a column that is missing—that we have looked into the matter, and that the work has been done. We do not want our reports to be disguised or sanitised in a way that denies our coverage of the issues involved.Secondly, throughout my time on the Committee—and I have served on it since its creation—no criticism made by it of the agencies or anyone else has been excluded through the redaction of information that is sensitive for security reasons. I hope that I shall be able to give that assurance for as long as I remain on the Committee; I can certainly give it now.
Thirdly, our statutory basis does not allow us to substitute our judgment for that of the agencies on whether detailed information, if released, would damage their operations. That is the problem that we have: at the end of the day, the agencies are responsible for deciding whether revealing how much they are spending for a particular purpose, how many staff they have transferred from one branch of activity to another or what mechanism they have found uniquely valuable in obtaining intelligence would be damaging to their effort. It is not for us to decide. We may have a view, and on occasion we express it quite strongly; but it is an understood condition of the basis on which we were created that we cannot substitute our judgment for that of the agencies and say "Hard luck, but we think it would be much better for everyone to know how you obtained this piece of intelligence, and what is more we are going to tell them".
That would be to put the essentially amateur scrutineers and overseers of intelligence into the position of the professionals who have to do their job and perhaps risk their colleagues' lives. They are not right in their judgment in every case, but we have those arguments with them, and it is very difficult to avoid that.
If it seemed that the continued concealment of a piece of information was likely to cause real harm and prevent reasonable criticism, we should at least draw attention to that, even if we could not state the precise reasons and the details. Our first step would be to alert Ministers and the Prime Minister to the fact that we were being impeded by the continued concealment from being able to bring sufficient pressure to bear on something that we considered very unsatisfactory.
Again, we have not found ourselves in that situation. There are times when we might set aside a matter in the belief that we could deal with it in more detail later, when immediate operational requirements would no longer be relevant. That is a mechanism that I have certainly advocated.
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