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Mr. Cook: My broad political ideology does not preclude me from saying that something that has been done for 100 years might possibly be wrong. On the specific issue, however, I have grave anxieties about the argument that the Home Secretary should have access to information to which the rest of us and the courts do not have access. I would be very reluctant indeed to go down the line of depriving a citizen of liberty on the grounds that the Home Secretary's information is not known to the rest of us, particularly in the light of our experience in this Parliament of the case for the war against Iraq.
Lynne Jones: Does my right hon. Friend accept that his remarks about the appropriate involvement of the Home Secretary also apply to the non-derogating control orders?
Mr. Cook: If my hon. Friend allows me to develop my argument, I shall return to that.
Mr. Cook: I shall give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central (Mr. Fisher), but I then want to make progress because I am conscious that a large number of colleagues want to speak.
Mr. Fisher: I am wholly in sympathy with my right hon. Friend's comments. Does he agree that in the process of the Home Secretary having access to information to which no one else has access, one of the key details is that the person who is accused will not be able to hear what he is accused of? Is he satisfied with that?
Mr. Cook: No, I am not. There are good grounds for having an argument about what the disclosure rules and procedures should be when the matter comes before a court, but we must first get a case to court. If the decisions are taken inside the Home Office, there is little chance of the suspect having an opportunity to dispose of the matter of which he is accused.
This is not an ad hominem point. If my right hon. Friend were Home Secretary for life, I might be slightly more relaxed about the powers, but he will not be. Other people will become Home Secretary. It is theoretically possible that it may even be someone from another party. [Hon. Members: "Oh."] I am seeking to find a point of consensus without becoming controversial. The serious point is that we are giving powers not to my right hon. Friend as an individual, but to his post, and I do not think that they sit readily with his post.
I said that there were three reasons why my right hon. Friend is to be congratulated on his decision to accept the principle of my amendment. The third is that I worry gravely that the powers, in particular the power of house arrest, could be counterproductive in the fight against terrorism. Over the weekend, we heard of the new plans for the Maze prison now that it is to be demolished. It is, perhaps, appropriate to remember that internment was
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abolished not so much because of concern about civil liberties, but because it was proving counterproductive in the fight against terrorism. It was much more successful in provoking sympathy for the IRA than it was in assisting the police in combating terrorism.
Let us be frank. We all know that the control orders are most likely to be applied against citizens of Britain who are British Muslims. Those of us who have been in contact with that community know perfectly well the alienation and disaffection that has been caused among many young British Muslims by the way in which current powers under the prevention of terrorism legislation have been used. We need all the communities of Britain to work with us to ensure that we defeat the common enemy of terrorism, and we need all members of the British society to believe that they are allies in that fight and that none of them is a suspect because they belong to any one particular community.
My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Lynne Jones) anticipated my point. I am glad that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary has accepted the logic of the argument in relation to clause 2, but that argument applies with almost equal force to clause 1. I congratulate him on a bravura performance of stamina at the Dispatch Box. It is perhaps a pity that the Oscar ceremony took place last night and his performance cannot be considered for an award. I feel a certain sense of guilt, in that I tempted him into accepting my amendment to clause 2, thereby creating some of the difficulty in arguments that he has had in relation to clause 1.
Listening to how the debate unfolded in the hour and a half when my right hon. Friend was at the Dispatch Box, however, it was impossible to avoid the point that the only distinction that could be made was a matter of degree, not a matter of principle. Indeed, he relied not on a qualitative argument, but on a quantitative argument. I am not sure that that adequately justifies adopting a different procedure for the two different forms of control order. Indeed, the restrictions on liberty in clause 1 are severe. They enable the Home Secretary to specify where the citizen will work, to whom the citizen will talk, where the citizen will stay, who visits him there and where he can travel to within the United Kingdom. We are talking not about where he can travel by leaving the UK, but specifically about where he can travel in the UK. Those are very grave restrictions on liberty. My right hon. Friend might be wise in the light of this afternoon's experience to tell the Committee before we conclude our business that he will reflect on the arguments that have been put to him and consider ways in which they can be brought into the text of the Bill before proceedings are completed in both Chambers.
David Winnick:
Would it not be useful for the Home Secretary to bear in mind the fact that those of us who recognise the shortcomings and think that such a proposal could be counterproductive, but accept control orders for the reasons that we have explained, nevertheless feel very strongly—no less than Members who are opposed to the measures—that the matter of who is to be subjected to a control order should be initiated by the court? Clearly, the vast majority of
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Labour MPs on listening to the debate would certainly agree. If the Home Secretary is to concede, as he must do next door, he should do so earlier and to the House of Commons.
Mr. Cook: My hon. Friend makes a perfectly fair point with which I would entirely concur. It is notable that we have now been debating this matter for the past four hours and that, apart from the Minister who has spoken from the Dispatch Box, no Member has put in a favourable word for the material before us.
Rob Marris: Like the Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend is a lay person; I am a lawyer. The Home Secretary seems to be putting forward a lawyer's argument that deprivation of liberty is a technical term that appears in article 5 of the European convention on human rights. However, if my right hon. Friend the Member for Livingston (Mr. Cook) went into a pub in Livingston—or if I went into a pub in Wolverhampton—and said that the Home Secretary had placed restrictions on an individual so that he could not go to work, speak to his wife, or use his mobile phone or computer, and that where he could travel in the United Kingdom was limited, he would find that the average lay person would think that that was deprivation of liberty.
Mr. Cook: I suspect that my hon. Friend accurately reflects what might be described as the public house commonsense view of the matter. I would add, though, that I would be cautious about accepting the idea of a lawyer's point of view. In my experience, there is no one single point of view that can be expressed as a lawyer's point of view. Indeed, one can usually find a lawyer to support any possible point of view. I very much doubt whether every lawyer will accept the distinction that we have heard made from the Dispatch Box today, and I would not be at all surprised, should this Bill reach the statute book and be implemented, if we found them arguing in the courts that the restrictions on liberty under clause 1 also require a derogation every bit as much as those under clause 2. I am conscious of the fact that a large number of Members wish to speak, so I shall conclude.
I mentioned that it has been striking how few voices have been raised in favour of the contents of the measure. One of the main reasons for that is that the places around the world where we find legislation parallel with what we are debating are not comfortable. I heard on BBC radio yesterday the chief of staff of F. W. de Klerk justifying the measure before us. That was not advice that I wished to hear or a source that commended the Bill to me.
Those of us who have spent much of our political careers condemning countries where it is possible to put citizens under house arrest on the decision of a politician on the basis of secret police evidence have every reason to be concerned about this Bill. I am glad that this afternoon we have been able to take the significant step to remove one of the worst offences of the measure, but I hope that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary will reflect on what has been said and enable us to go further in order to remove some of the more offensive aspects of the Bill.
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