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Dr. Julian Lewis (New Forest, East) (Con):
Recently, a senior figure in the anti-terrorist world addressed a conference on security issues, and pointed out that the United Kingdom and other target countries face a terrorist threat that aims to cause destruction, not in single streets, as the IRA did, but in entire neighbourhoods and, if possible, entire cities. He predicted that the threat would persist for the next 10, 15 or even 20 years, but on a note of grim optimism he
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predicted that life would go on and a new sort of normality would be established after hard, remorseless effort by society as a whole and anti-terrorist services in particular. I am sure that his prediction is right, and history bears it out. In the period between the first and second world wars, it was widely believed that society could not stand up to the pressure of aerial bombardment. In fact, society stood up to it throughout the blitz in the United Kingdom and, more surprisingly, throughout the much heavier attacks in the latter days of the Third Reich, when German cities were utterly devastated.
There is a tendency, because we live in peaceful times, to underestimate what society can cope with in war. No free society can have absolute security against a small group of determined saboteurs—that was one of the Home Secretary's messages in his thoughtful opening remarks. To those remarks one could add that no repressive society or dictatorship could have absolute security against such a threat, either. Again, one casts one's mind back to the occupied countries of Europe and to the French Resistance in particular who, despite enormous totalitarian forces of repression ranged against them, were still able to mount effective sabotage—or terrorist attacks, as the German occupiers would have called them.
What one can do is try to focus on the known possessors of weapons systems which, if they got into the hands of would-be saboteurs or terrorists, would enable them to wage the sort of campaign that that senior anti-terrorist figure was predicting they would try to wage, to devastate whole neighbourhoods or even whole cities.
In that connection, the most interesting paragraph of the report for me was paragraph 91 in the section dealing with Libya. It states:
The detailed intelligence on Libya . . . collected by the UK and the USA from all sources over a significant period of time, enabled the UK and USA to demonstrate to the Libyan authorities that they knew about their WMD programmes."
It then adds the curious comment:
"Consequently, when the inspectors went to Libya the Libyan authorities, while they tried, were not able to hide their programmes and full disclosure was eventually achieved. This was a major intelligence success."
Yes, it certainly was, but that was the first indication that I had had that there had been an attempt by the Libyan authorities to go on with a policy of concealment, even after they had come forward and said, "We want to get rid of our weapons of mass destruction. Come in and help us do it." I should be very interested to know more of the story behind that interesting comment, and I congratulate the Committee on having teased out that titbit of information.
It must be said that the terrorist movements with which we are concerned are extremely patient. I think I am right in saying that there was a period of about eight years between the two attacks on the World Trade Centre, the second ultimately being the successful one. It is all too easy for us to go into one of those periods between attacks and begin to become a bit complacent. Indeed, that senior anti-terrorist figure said that his principal concerns were complacency in society, which
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he described as a very great problem, and the importance of creating greater public understanding of the wide range of dangers and the long-term nature of the overall threat.
What the Libyan business illustrated in the wider context is that something sinister was going on under the surface. A report on BBC News Online on 23 May retails how North Korea had been involved in sending uranium to Libya. It states that the International Atomic Energy Agency
"had found evidence that Pyongyang provided Libya with nearly two tons of uranium in early 2001."
A spokesman for the IAEA, Mark Gwozdecky, told BBC News Online that the investigation
"'spans three continents and involves entities or individuals in at least eight countries.'"
That was all linked to the plot by A. Q. Khan, the father of the Pakistani bomb, to sell nuclear secrets to Libya, Iran and North Korea.
Another report on the BBC on 28 May is headed "UN continues Libya nuclear probe" and states that the IAEA has said that
"questions remain about Libya's nuclear weapons programme, despite the promise last December to scrap it."
A report from Associated Press back in February commented on a firm in a place called Shah Alam in Malaysia. The firm, ironically enough, is called SCOPE—nothing to do with the new system that was described earlier in the debate for intelligence collation in this country. It is a precision engineering firm that was part of the network and was involved in machining the parts of the centrifuges that the rogue regimes, in particular Libya, planned to use to construct their bombs. Worryingly, at the end of the report the company's spokesman said that if it received an order similar to the Libya shipment, it would have no reason to turn it down. The spokesman commented:
"Milling and cutting is the same today as it was before".
It is not good enough for the Government, or even for the Committee, periodically to state that successes have been achieved, that terrorists have been disrupted and that we have been saved by the good efforts of the security and intelligence services. Something more than that is required. If we are to obtain the greater public awareness, concern and realisation of the long-term threat, which senior counter-terrorist figures feel to be necessary, we must have authoritative accounts of what has been going on as soon as the information can be revealed. We should not have to depend upon putting together a jigsaw from individual, isolated press reports, such as I have been quoting. We should have a system whereby the Government publish from time to time, perhaps in the form of an annual report, an account of what can be revealed about those operations that have been frustrated or exposed.
In the brief period remaining, I want to address some of the remarks about Iraq. When I congratulated my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Mr. Tyrie) on his thoughtful speech, he said, "I am sure that you do not agree with half of it." I said, "You are right, but there is one thing that I do agree with in particular, and it is the most important thing—the British people must always be told the truth." If a democratic Government do not tell the British people the truth, even in a good
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cause or because they think that they have a good reason not to do so, they will destroy the trust on which their support depends.
I have said this before and I will say it again: I wish that the Government had not fought shy of telling the British people the real reason why war against Saddam was essential. It was not because Saddam was about to attack anybody; it was not because he had attacked anybody; and it was not even because of his humanitarian record of atrocities. Those are the traditional justifications under international law, as it currently stands, for intervention.
War against Saddam was essential because the events of 9/11 showed that the world now contains groups that would unhesitatingly use WMDs, if they could get them, and thus cannot be deterred. This has lowered the threshold for intervention against rogue regimes that have a track record of trying to obtain WMDs. That probably does not conform with international law, as it was explained to the Government at the time that they took the decision, and they therefore felt that they had to massage the facts.
International law is not static; it evolves, and Governments must help it to evolve. It would have been better if our Government had helped international law to evolve by saying clearly to the British people that we did not know what Saddam did or did not have, but after 9/11 we could no longer take the chance.
4.29 pm
Patrick Mercer (Newark) (Con): I apologise to the House in advance for perhaps having to leave a little early.
It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis), many of whose points I will endeavour to discuss, although I do not expect to do so as lucidly as he did.
About six weeks ago, 1,500 lb of fertiliser was found in west London. I gather from open sources that it would have been most likely to be turned into home-made explosive and used in a number of car bombs, probably around west London, or possibly in north London. The discovery of that potential explosive represents a very considerable success for the security agencies that picked up those of our enemies who were involved. On the back of the discovery there came a series of arrests, mainly of Pakistanis, some domiciled in this country and others from abroad.
About two weeks ago, I had the enormous privilege of being briefed by the high commissioner and his staff in Islamabad. They hinted that the operation was much more complex than anything that the open sources in this country had been able to tell us. They told me, or rather hinted, that there had been a very successful operation by British agencies in combination with local agencies in Pakistan. They also said that a much worse event, the details of which I was not told, had been planned, which, if it had gone ahead, would have devastated large parts of this country. I can only pay tribute to the agencies that are prepared to carry out such operations with such courage. The high commissioner told me, "If you are talking about prevention versus cure, homeland security starts here in Islamabad, in Kabul or wherever—that is where the real operations are carried out."
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I want to try to tease out one or two points about the balance between prevention and cure. If an operation can be prevented, so much the better, but the fact remains that the head of the Security Service and the commissioner of the Metropolitan police tell us that an attack on this country is all but inevitable. To use a wartime phrase, the bomber will always get through. Then, it referred to the Luftwaffe, but the analogy is not lost today. I will not use the old saw about always being lucky, but there is no doubt that we have been extraordinarily lucky so far. It needs only one terrorist to get through for the whole complexion of our security structure to be changed.
The Committee's report says that the Security Service's website includes information about
"the threat from terrorism and details of protective security measures available".
Like my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest, East, I wonder why the details on that website are not made far more widely available to the public. Why are we not told as much as we possibly can be told? Why are we not told, for instance, what is the national state of alert?
The counter-argument, of course, is that to do so would scare the pants off people. However, it has been done in the past. MI5 and the Metropolitan police carried out a very successful public information campaign against the Irish Republican Army in the 1990s. That gave the public detailed indications of what they were to look for and how they could help the security agencies and services to thwart terrorism. Why are the offices of the national security advice centre not more accessible to the public? Why do not the Government choose to follow the example that is being set by the Metropolitan police and British Transport police in relation to the current poster campaign? Why do not the Government choose to enrol every responsible member of the public as another pair of eyes and ears for the wider police family?
"We recommend that the threat to the United Kingdom's critical national infrastructure and vulnerability to electronic and other attacks should be examined by the JIC and considered by Ministers."
If we continue to be vulnerable in that way, should we not consider streamlining the intelligence that we have to handle? Doubtless, the Butler report will make many good points about that.
How much time do our security agencies spend dealing with people who should not be here? Should we have a proper immigration policy, which would save so much of the time of those important men and women? The United States deals with that through a Department of Homeland Security. It has pulled together its Government agencies. In this country, the Home Office, the Cabinet Office, the Department for Transport, the Northern Ireland Office, the Ministry of Defence and a host of others might deal with the sort of problem that I have outlined. They would have to refer to the head of the Security Service, the head of the Secret Intelligence
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Service, the head of GCHQ, the head of Defence Intelligence Staff and the head of assessment staff. We are told that a security and intelligence co-ordinator is now pulling all that together, backed up by only a small civil contingency secretariat to deal with curing part of the problem.
Where does the responsibility of one agency start and another one stop? Where does one Department's responsibilities begin and another's end? Is it any wonder that intelligence has been, to put it charitably, over-analysed, and that the wrong conclusions have been drawn? We need one central figure and one central Ministry to deal with the matter. The problem will not get easier and the money that we need to spend on it will increase every year.
Let me make some small, sub-tactical points. It is interesting that an officer who is posted from one part of the intelligence community to deal with Islamic fundamentalism receives no training in the nuances of the Muslim faith and creed, the problems that surround Islamic fundamentalism, the history behind it and the outlook. He or she is expected to pick up the whole discipline on the job. That is most odd when the humblest private soldier receives extensive training in dealing with the problems that he faces before deploying to, for example, Northern Ireland, Iraq or Bosnia.
The report provides some detail about the intelligence cycle, which is interesting and reminds me of parts of my basic training years ago. We are told that the collection plan is set centrally for the agencies, but the report does not make clear where the audit trail for the collection plan lies. Each agency is responsible for auditing its success. That cannot be objective; it must be subjective. Surely there is a better system for assessing success v. failure.
In the report, C mentions collection gaps. He says that the SIS is now "behind the curve". We have heard today that funding for MI5 will be increased considerably. What about the other agencies? The Chancellor said yesterday that it was the Government's "first duty" to defend the people of Britain. He continued:
"I will make available the resources needed to strengthen security at home and take action to counter the terrorist threat at home and abroad . . . Those who wish to cut in real terms the budget even for security will need to answer the British people . . . We will spend what it takes on security to safeguard the British people."
Those are fine words, but what about the civil defence grant to our local authorities? What about the anomalies in the equipment that fire, police and ambulance services hold? What about the fact that our firemen who back up the immediate response units have received no training in chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear attacks? What about the fact that the civil contingencies reaction force—the only addition to manpower to deal with the curing rather than the prevention part of the problem—have been seen manifestly to fail in the face of the overstretch of the regular forces? And what about the fact that our armed forces are to be cut yet again? Fine words indeed.
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I shall end by quoting from paragraph 8 of the report, which states:
"Terrorism is currently the biggest threat to the national security of the UK and its interests and the Agencies are operating in an extremely difficult and hostile environment. The Prime Minister stated in a speech on 5 March 2004:
'the [security] threat we face is not conventional. It is a challenge of a different nature from anything the world has faced before.'"
We are blessed with outstanding intelligence agencies, and this report has been enormously helpful, but I do not see a Government who are ready to rise to this challenge, or who are willing to face
"a challenge of a different nature from anything the world has faced before."
I see a Government who are mired in complacency.
4.40 pm
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