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Jeremy Corbyn (Islington, North) (Lab): I have examined the amendments that the hon. Gentleman tabled. Will he assure us that, if they were carried, became part of the Bill and subsequently law, they could not lead to the same sort of perverse prosecutions, which, as he rightly said earlier, are possible under the glorification clause?

Mr. Grieve: I believe that they will be a great improvement because they focus on what Parliament wants to achieve. My judgment is that Parliament wants to prevent people from indirectly encouraging terrorism by referring to it in such a way that the listener, reader or viewer, who heard, read or saw whatever was said would infer that he should emulate it. I have always accepted that glorification could constitute an offence if a reference to terrorism was made in such a way that a listener, reader or viewer inferred that he should emulate it. Our amendment removes the focus from a concept that should have no part in our law. People should be allowed to celebrate the Easter rising in Dublin without thinking that they are beginning to fall foul of the measure. They celebrate it not only in Dublin, but, for all I know, in west London.

Jeremy Corbyn: And in north London.

Mr. Grieve: The hon. Gentleman may be right—there could be more such celebrations. In my part of London, celebrations of the Easter rising will undoubtedly take place. The Irish centre is within a few hundred yards of my home.

Let me reassure the hon. Gentleman. If he accepts that indirect encouragement of terrorism should be criminalised, he should have no fear about supporting our amendment. It gets round the problem of the Government's concept.

The clause that covers proscribing organisations specifically focuses on glorification. Again, the amendment would remove that focus and provide that, if an organisation referred to terrorism in a way that made people infer that they should emulate it, it would fall foul of the proscription provision. However, simply glorifying something would not fall foul of the provision. Some glorification will undoubtedly constitute a reference to behaviour and terrorism in a way that encourages emulation but some will not. The amendment would get rid of the concept of glorification. That is a great improvement.

I am waiting for the Home Secretary to intervene because no coherent argument has been advanced for the Government's reason for getting so hooked on the inclusion of glorification. I do not know what will happen when the Bill returns to the other place. I note
 
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that, for something that has become so intimately bound up with the Prime Minister's ego, when it previously returned to the Lords, only 156 out of 208 Labour peers turned up to support the proposals, even in the Government's great heave to show their mettle. Indeed, some Labour peers supported us.

Mr. Charles Clarke: What was the position of Opposition Front Benchers in the Lords in the debate? What were the reasons for their position?

Mr. Grieve: The Home Secretary can read what my noble Friend Lord Kingsland said. He took the view that the Government's slavish adherence to glorification was unproductive. He and many other peers on the Front and Back Benches criticised that. However, he said that the Opposition believed that the argument might have been exhausted and they therefore abstained on the vote. So many peers of all parties, including the Labour party, took objection to "glorification" that they defeated the Government despite the Government's turning out their troops in large numbers. That is a telling indication of the independent mindedness of the other place. For that reason, when the Bill returned here, I went to much trouble to ascertain whether there is a way in which we can square the circle.

At one stage, I drafted an amendment that made use of the words "referring or glorifying". I try to apply a bit of logic to what I do, and I hope that the Home Secretary will forgive me for saying that I could see no basis on which the word "glorifying" in that context would add anything at all to the legislation.

This is what worries me about the Government's approach. When we read the Bill, we see that the Government have created an offence and then, in a bizarre way, put in a subsection that draws specific attention to an activity that they want to criminalise or condemn. That is very bad law. It would have made sense, had the Government persevered—I am glad that they did not—and said that glorifying terrorism was in itself an offence. Mercifully, they did not go down that road, because enough people pointed out to them that that would have been a completely loopy proposal. What we have here, however, is a remnant of that loopiness. The House should not be in the business of encouraging loopy legislation.

Jim Cousins (Newcastle upon Tyne, Central) (Lab): I am following the hon. Gentleman's arguments closely. What comfort does he draw from the clear statement by Baroness Scotland, who speaks for the Government on this issue in the other place? When she was asked by my noble Friend Lord Clinton-Davis whether there would be an opportunity to revisit this matter soon, she conceded that there would be "bound to be" such an opportunity. What comfort does the hon. Gentleman draw from that?

Mr. Grieve: A pretty limited amount. The hon. Gentleman will be aware that the Government have said that at some point—probably not in the next parliamentary Session, but possibly the one after that—there could be a huge terrorism Bill to bring together all the many terrorism and anti-terrorism Bills that the Government have enacted in the past five years. We
 
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seem to move between terrorism Bills and anti-terrorism Bills. We have heard about the possibility of such a Bill in the context of control orders. I hope that, in the course of producing such a Bill, some of the loopier things that we have done will disappear down the plughole. That would include allowing people to be deemed to be members of a proscribed organisation on the basis of the hearsay evidence of a police officer. That measure has never been used since it was introduced. There are an awful lot of added-on bits that we could get rid of. However, we are in the hands of the Government, and I can easily envisage the circumstances in which the Home Secretary—despite having been completely honest when making the point in relation to control orders—could come to the House in 18 months' time and say, "I'm sorry, but there is insufficient parliamentary time. We'll have to put this off for another two years."

In the meantime, the House should not put on the statute book a measure that is plainly idiotic and wrong. This problem could so easily be cured. If we were to cure it by adopting my amendment, the Bill would have every bit as much bite. It would be able to deal with those whom we wish to prosecute, and it would be able to help to uphold the rule of law without making us a laughing stock for having adopted a concept so opaque that it will be unintelligible when presented in court.

Hon. Members should also bear in mind the important point that certain law-abiding sections of society feel that they are being targeted by anti-terrorist activity. That is an almost inevitable consequence, but we must keep it in mind. It is my view—I wish it were the Home Secretary's view—that, in using terms such as "glorification" when they are not necessary to achieve our objective, we do ourselves no favours in the battle for hearts and minds that we have to win. That battle will have to go together with everything else that we do, if we are to curb the terrorist threat in this country.

For those reasons, I invite hon. Members to support our amendments in lieu of the Home Secretary's proposition. If we do not succeed in that regard, my colleagues and I will stand by the Lords amendments and vote against the Home Secretary's proposition.

Mr. Nick Clegg (Sheffield, Hallam) (LD): In this debate, as in the earlier one on the Identity Cards Bill, the Government have revealed a curious attachment to a single, ill-defined word. The debate on identity cards highlighted their somewhat spectacular redefinition of the word "voluntary". Now we are dealing with a Government—or more precisely a Prime Minister—who appear to be absolutely insistent on another word, "glorification". A petulant insistence on the use of a particular word does not make good law.

The Government's position is weak on three counts. First, as was said earlier, there is no legally understood definition of the word "glorification". It confuses the law, creating unnecessary imprecision and fluidity. That should not happen to a law that deals with such an important issue as tackling terrorism. The Joint Committee on Human Rights objected to the term on exactly that ground—legal imprecision—and we have still not heard a compelling argument from the Government to refute that view.

Secondly, the provision adds nothing other than confusion to existing laws that are deployed effectively to tackle many of the problems that it is supposed to
 
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address. The arrest yesterday of a number of protesters who used sickening and inflammatory language on their placards when demonstrating against the anti-Islamic cartoons published in Denmark shows that current laws against incitement appear to be working fairly well, although there was some delay in that case.

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