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Mr. Marshall-Andrews: Is not the answer to the hypothetical question that my hon. and learned Friend postulates that if I were to go to the court, I would require the material that the court will require, and I would need to be shown the documents on which the Home Secretary had based his decision in order for the court to exercise a proper jurisdiction? This Bill contains no provision for me to get that disclosure.
Vera Baird:
As between making an order and having an appeal within seven days, for which the Home Office has to furnish material, the furnishing of material at the outset when the application is made and requiring the matter to be determined within seven days means that there is not spitting distance between the two. Once we
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accept, as my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary has for the high-level orders, the principle of close judicial scrutiny, there is little difference to be found. There is therefore every argument for taking the extra step and bringing the judiciary in at the beginning.
That would not end all the problems. I accept what many Members have said about the problems of evidence, special advocates putting the case and the opportunity of challenge. All these matters can be solved with a good deal of effort and cross-party will, if only we can come up with a framework with which all of us are comfortable and within which we could work.
That extra step would end all of the outcry about Executive detention. It would end all of the backlash of the civil liberties groups. It would put away much of the fear of exciting community unrest because of eroding trial rights and replacing that process with Executive detention. It would quiet the public and it would restore our constitution.
I shall vote tonight with my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary because he has clearly said that he understands the issue and that he will consider it extremely seriously. I see no alternative, with 14 March looming large, but to try to get this proposed legislation right in time. I say to my right hon. Friend that I hope that between tonight, when I give him my vote, and the next opportunity for us all to vote, he takes the extra step.
7.21 pm
Mr. Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con): It is 740 years since Reigate first returned a Member of Parliament, so I have the opportunity to make a truncated contribution to the debate. Some Members will not have the opportunity to make any contribution to this extremely important debate. As the debate comes to a conclusion, it is opportune to weigh in the balance what we are discussing and to look back at the rights that have been acquired by Britons over the centuries.
I turn first to the Magna Carta, 790 years ago. Chapter 29 stated that no freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or seized of his freehold or liberties or
"free customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will we not pass upon him, nor condemn him but by lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either justice or right."
These statements and judgments echo down the years.
In 1615, a Chief Justice, Lord Coke, said:
"By the law of God, none ought to be imprisoned but with the cause expressed in the return of his imprisonment, as appeareth in the Acts of the Apostles."
I do not think that I would have expressed the matter quite like that, but this Parliament expressed it in the Petition of Right. In the fifth clause it set out the grievance that
"divers of your subjects have of late been imprisoned without any cause shewed; and when for their deliverance they were brought before your justices, by your majesty's Writs of Habeas Corpus, there to undergo and receive as the court should order, and their keepers commanded to certify the causes of their detainer; no cause was certified, but that they were detained by your majesty's special command, signified by the lords of your privy-council, and yet were returned back to several prisons, without being charged with any thing to which they might make answer according to the law."
In 1770, when a Mr. Stewart brought his slave, Somerset, to England, Lord Justice Mansfield said:
"Every man who comes into England is entitled to the protection of English law, whatever oppression he may heretofore have suffered and whatever may be the colour of his skin. The air of England is too pure for any slave to breathe. Let the black go free."
Then, 140 years later, in a judgment already referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr. Cash)—the Liversidge v. Anderson case, a wartime internment case—Lord Atkin said that
"one of the pillars of liberty is that in English law every imprisonment is prime facie unlawful and that it is for the person directing the imprisonment to justify his act."
That is what is at stake in the passage of this Bill, and I wish that more hon. Members were aware of the enormity of what the Government are inviting us to do this evening.
Why now? On Monday, the Leader of the House announced in the business statement that the Bill is necessary because the existing powers will expire on 14 March. When the Home Secretary made his statement on the following day, however, he said that he does not need all the powers in the Bill. Which is it? We know that my hon. Friends have proposed an alternative to enable the Government to keep those powers on the statute book.
The Bill rests on an assumption about the threat faced by the United Kingdom. In a previous incarnation, I was a soldier, working on the assumption that I could trust the integrity of the chain of command when I was given orders and that I could believe that those orders were beneficial and well intentioned. There is a difference between a soldier making those judgments and Parliament imposing the proper restrictions on the Executive, which is a test not necessarily for this Home Secretary but for any Home Secretary in any Executive. That is the standard that we should apply.
My experience in this House in the past seven and a half years leads me to believe that I cannot trust this Executive. I regret to say that I voted for the war in Iraq. I heard the final speech by the hon. Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch (Mr. Sedgemore), and I felt rebuked by the fact that I had allowed myself to make what I believe was a misjudgment on the basis of the case that the Prime Minister presented to the House and set out to the country in a television broadcast. I believed what he said about the nature of the threat to the United Kingdom, and I feel that I was wilfully misled.
In my eyes, the Prime Minister and the Executive no longer enjoy the benefit of the doubt.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Sylvia Heal): Order. Will the hon. Gentleman reconsider and withdraw that remark about the Prime Minister?
Mr. Blunt: I will, of course, observe parliamentary convention and withdraw the remark.
The Government no longer enjoy the benefit of the doubt when they come to the House of the Commons or make their case to the wider public on the threat that the United Kingdom faces. That is one of the reasons why
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we urgently need a change of Prime Minister. If the Prime Minister has to come to this House again and say that the UK faces a threat that necessitates the UK going to war in order to deal with it, I for one will not give him the benefit of the doubt, which is a huge handicap for any Prime Minister to carry. That point applies directly to the measures that we are being invited to endorse this evening.
The Home Secretary laid out what he sees as the qualitatively different threat from al-Qaeda, which he says is different from anything that has gone before, and set out five of its elements—its ideology, its lack of restraint, the suicidal readiness of its followers, the different order of its capability and resources and its global reach. Some of those propositions are contestable. In terms of taking on the ideology of the French revolution, as it would have appeared to this Parliament in 1792 or 1793, or taking on the ideology of communism for most of the 20th century, the threat is not qualitatively different.
Yesterday, the Government published a paper to support the Bill, listing all the different actions taken by international terrorists. We must be slightly more sophisticated in assessing the threat, and it can be argued that we do not understand al-Qaeda terribly well. If we examine the individual examples of international terrorist attacks since 9/11, a number of different attacks can be explained because they relate to national struggles, such as the struggle between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Al-Qaeda is a predominantly Saudi organisation that is conducting a battle that concerns the control of Saudi Arabia, which is its primary objective. I do not know whether my instincts are correct, but I have a duty to examine the case that the Government are putting forward. In the modern era, the state, in taking on al-Qaeda, has a number of significant advantages that were not available to states taking on threats to the UK before.
The first is that since the war in Afghanistan—undertaken, quite properly, to ensure that al-Qaeda had no place to hide—there is no state within which al-Qaeda can hide. There is international uniformity on bearing down on al-Qaeda—it has no friends. Surveillance techniques have improved significantly in the past seven years, as has information technology, giving the Government enormous powers to gather information about people. Therefore, I believe that taking these powers now is counter-productive. The Bill is a victory for al-Qaeda, and al-Qaeda should not be given this victory.
7.31 pm
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