Maria
Eagle: May I say that the hon. and learned Gentleman seems
to have the genius of Kafka?
2
pm
Mr.
Garnier: Let us see whether the Secretary of State really
is some form of insect or a real Secretary of State. I get to the
church by way of the
moon. If I
achieve nothing else this
afternoon—
Maria
Eagle: Given us a good
laugh.
Mr.
Garnier: I may have done that, but I possibly have cheered
up the Committee. However, I hope that I will also have provoked the
Government and their supporters into standing up and justifying clause
152, as currently
drafted. The
hon. Member for Cambridge and my hon. Friend the Member for North-West
Norfolk have given us a learned dissection of the beast on the slab. We
are grateful for that, but it is important that we use all weapons at
our disposal to expose the ridiculous nature of the Government and what
they are seeking to do—and they are seeking to do it
half-blind.
Of the number
of press articles written today, some suggest that we are about to move
into a period of deep darkness, in which personal liberty is put at
risk. However, a number of journalists and commentators have said that
that is unlikely. Let us take two examples. One is written by Andrew
Gilligan. [Interruption.] Mr. Gale, did
you hear the groan from Government Ministers when I mentioned Andrew
Gilligan, the man who, I suspect, has been proved to have been right
about the Government’s ability to construct
facts.
Mr.
Russell Brown (Dumfries and Galloway) (Lab): A man who
once worked for a Back-Bench Member of Parliament and was reported to
have been less than competent.
Mr.
Garnier: I thought that the hon. Gentleman was going to
say something interesting, but I am delighted to welcome his first
contribution to debates on the Bill.
I remind the
Committee of what Mr. Gilligan
said: “Britain
will never be Nazi Germany. But in our steady march towards a police
state, this could be something of a Niemöller moment. Until
recently, perhaps even until now, New Labour ministers’ mocking
claim that civil liberties were a concern only for the ‘dinner
party crowd’ had some
truth.” He
then referred to the report mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for
North-West Norfolk, written by Sir David Omand on behalf of the
Institute for Public Policy Research. The report, Andrew Gilligan says,
makes reference to
“active
government proposals for ‘data-mining’, where the private
and personal data of everyone in the country—telephone records,
emails, shop transactions, our very movements as tracked by
number-plate recognition cameras and CCTV—is fed into giant
computer banks to be analysed for ‘suspicious’
activity...‘Such sources have always been accessible to
traditional law enforcement seeking evidence against a named suspect
already justified by reasonable suspicion,’ says Omand. However,
‘application of modern data mining and processing techniques
does involve examination of the innocent as well as the suspect to
identify patterns of interest for further investigation...Finding out
other people’s secrets is going to involve breaking everyday
moral rules.’”
That final quotation was
also referred to by my hon. Friend. In short, Sir David said that
privacy is up for grabs. Mr. Gilligan continued:
“Privacy,
in short, if Sir David and his colleagues like the Home Secretary
Jacqui Smith have anything to do with it, is over. He even says so
(‘modern intelligence access may have to be at the expense of
some aspects of
privacy’).” There
is plenty to read and plenty to be gained from Mr.
Gilligan’s piece. It demonstrates that newspaper commentators
write what they think but that they also reflect what their readers
think. There is growing concern among the public that the Government,
for good measure or for bad, are allowing powers to be taken which
erode unnecessarily the right of the individual to conduct himself
freely within
society.
Mr.
George Howarth: Since the right hon. Gentleman has prayed
in aid Sir David Omand quite extensively, can he share with the
Committee what Sir David’s conclusion
was?
Mr.
Garnier: The hon. Gentleman knows the answer to that as
well as I do. Let me tell the Committee about another commentator, Mary
Riddell, who wrote in The Daily Telegraph today about the
subject. [Interruption.] If the right hon. Members
for Knowsley, North and Sefton, East and for Cardiff, South and Penarth
would like to make their own speeches, we will be happy to listen to
them.
Alun
Michael: The hon. and learned Gentleman’s
contribution seems to draw tremendously on media reports rather than on
direct comments from people. My right hon. Friend the Member for
Knowsley, North and Sefton, East asked him a simple question
about Sir David’s conclusions. Does he agree with them?
Does he know what they are? Would he like to share with us his summary
of
them?
Mr.
Garnier: The important point is not his conclusion. I am
sorry that the right hon. Gentleman has not got the point, which is
about the analysis of the intrusion into the rights and liberties of
the citizen. It may be of no importance and, if I have got it wrong,
the right hon. Gentleman will tell me. I want to provoke the Labour
party and the Government into defending the clause, but I have yet to
hear a good defence. I will continue to provoke them, here or outside,
until the Government and their supporters—such as they
are—advance rational, cogent and sensible reasons for allowing
the Government to garner themselves the powers under the
clause.
Mary Riddell,
who I referred to a moment ago, said
that “even
if we are not heading for dystopia, something strange is happening to
law and
order.” If
we, as representatives of the public, do not recognise that, we are not
doing our job properly. She continued:
“This
suggestion was floated on the day that Binyam Mohamed was flown back to
Britain”— the
suggestion was from the mouth of Sir Ken Macdonald, the former Director
of Public
Prosecutions— “legislators
have foolishly pursued tough terror laws when we should be locking up
City fraudsters
instead.” She
commented: “Sir
Ken’s sensible, if wishful, suggestion also had a wider point:
that the ‘liberty-sapping addictions’ of the Home Office
are a useless way to tackle terror. Indeed, they may promote not only
jihadism but insurgency of all kinds. Already, the unease engendered
by a collapsing economy risks being fuelled by political paranoia.
Secrecy and suppression are enmeshed with the unrest seeping on to the
streets.” Those
are the views of rational people, who are listening to what is going on
outside in the street. If we do not listen ourselves then, as night
follows day, we will pass clauses such as this one, to the disbenefit
of our constituents, and contribute to the general undermining of
confidence in criminal
justice.
Mr.
Bellingham: My hon. and learned Friend has touched on a
vital point. The security services and the police already have ample
powers to look at the data of suspects. The clause will lead to data
mining of private data and of the details of many innocent people,
which will lead to the breakdown of trust. It will also hinder the war
against terror, rather than the other way around.
Mr.
Garnier: I agree entirely. The sooner we can get that into
the collective mind of the Government, the sooner we may get a better
clause. Mary Riddell
adds: “As
the former Whitehall security chief, Sir David Omand, implies, the
security services will soon be privy to our every detail, from our
dwindling savings to our taste in shower gel. Most galling is the
imbalance of data-sharing, under which ministers know everything about
us while we know little about them. True, we may discover an
MP’s outlay on Philippe Starck lemon-squeezers, or whether he or
she (legitimately, of course) declares a top bunk in a youth hostel as
a primary
residence. On
the other hand, we can’t know what was in the Iraq war Cabinet
minutes, because Jack Straw has defied two rulings that they should be
released. That veto is as rash as it is disgraceful. Not only does it
suggest an illiberal government—an impression borne out by the
Justice Secretary’s Coroners and Justice Bill, which promotes
secret military inquests and, in Clause 152, a sweeping sanction for
data swapping—it also gives the appearance of a government with
shameful secrets to
hide.”—[Interruption.]
I hear a lot
of squawking and squeaking from Labour Benches. If the Government do
not realise that that is what people think and that perceptions are as
important as facts, they are walking themselves up a blind alley to
their detriment. We have now reached the stage at which the Government
are not believed even on those rare occasions when they tell the truth.
They must come to terms with the
matter.
Maria
Eagle: While we all like to have our morning newspapers
read to us, instead of reading them ourselves, how does the extent to
which the hon. and learned Member for Harborough is doing it, including
reading out passages—admittedly not written by him, but by
esteemed members of the journalistic profession—that he knows to
be inaccurate help the Committee to develop his
argument?
Mr.
Garnier: I most certainly do not know the passages to be
inaccurate.
Maria
Eagle: Secret military inquests? There are
none.
Mr.
Garnier: If the Minister is to base her reputation on the
introduction by Mary Riddell of the word “military” to
describe secret inquests, she has completely lost all sense of
proportion. When we dealt with clause
11— [Interruption.]
Mr.
Garnier: I am happy to reply to questions from Labour
Members. I would be even more delighted to hear them justify clause
152. I have yet to hear them do so, but I am sure that such an
opportunity will
arise— [Interruption.]
Mr.
Garnier: Having demonstrated with some degree of fairness
and accuracy the dangerous position into which the Government are
leading us, let me briefly pick out one or two of the egregious
provisions under clause 152, which ought to worry Labour Members but
apparently do not. Proposed new section 50A(3) states:
“For
the purposes of this Part a person shares information if the
person— (a)
discloses the information by transmission, dissemination or otherwise
making it available,
or (b)
consults or uses the information for a purpose other than the purpose
for which the information was
obtained.” Proposed
new section 50A(4) states:
“A
designated
authority”— shorthand
for a Minister of one sort or
another— “may
make an information-sharing order only if it is entitled to make the
order by virtue of section 50C and it is
satisfied— (a)
that the sharing of information enabled by the order is necessary to
secure a relevant policy
objective”. My
hon. Friend the Member for Rugby and Kenilworth has already drawn
attention to the relevant part in the explanatory notes, but that is
drawn from the interpretation measure under the Bill of
“relevant policy objective”—proposed new section
50F, on page 105, which is not even halfway through
it. Proposed
new section 50F(1) states that a relevant policy objective
means, “in
the case of an information-sharing order made by the Scottish
Ministers, a policy objective which relates
to— (i)
matters within the legislative competence of the Scottish
Parliament”, and
so it goes on for the Welsh, the Northern Irish or British sphere. A
relevant policy objective is as Lewis Carroll might have described
it. Under
proposed new section 50A(4)(b), a designated authority must be
satisfied “that
the effect of the provision made by the order is proportionate to that
policy
objective”. If
we do not know what that is until the Minister condescends to tell us
and self-certifies it, how can we reach a rational conclusion now or
later about the proportionality of the
order? Proposed
new section 50A(4)(c) requires that
“the provision
made by the order strikes a fair balance between the public interest
and the interests of any person affected by
it.” Again,
we are talking about wholly undefined concepts. We cannot work out the
balance or the relationship between two concepts about which we are
told nothing.
Proposed
new section 50B on page 101 is
entitled, “Information-sharing
orders: supplementary
provision”. It
states:
“An
information-sharing order
may— (a)
confer powers on the person in respect of whom it is
made; (b)
remove or modify any prohibition or restriction imposed...on the
sharing of the information by that person or on further on onward
disclosure of the
information; (c)
confer powers on any person to enable further or onward disclosure of
the information;
(d) prohibit or restrict
further or onward disclosure of the
information; (e)
impose conditions on the sharing of
information; (f)
provide for a person to exercise a discretion in dealing with any
matter; (g)
enable information to be shared by, or disclosed to, the designated
authority;” Finally,
and this really is breathtaking, it may “modify any
enactment”. That means that it may modify any primary or
secondary legislation.
2.15
pm This
is a modification to the law of the land by ministerial fiat, not by
the House of Commons and the other place. It does not stop there, as I
mentioned to the hon. Member for Cambridge. Subsection (2)
states: “An
information-sharing order may provide for the creation of offences
triable either
way” either
in a magistrates court or the Crown court. Those offences are
punishable “on
conviction on indictment, by imprisonment for a term not exceeding the
specified period or to a fine or to
both”. At
least in the Bill the Government condescend to tell us what the
specified period of imprisonment means. In the case of a summary
conviction it is 12 months, or six months in Northern Ireland—I
do not know what they have done to be favoured by a lesser period of
imprisonment. In the case of conviction on indictment, it is two years.
You could go to prison for two years, Mr. Gale, for a
criminal offence that has so far been left undescribed and was created
by a power that is ill-defined or undefined.
The Government
complain that we are making far too much of clause 152. It is little
wonder that the public are concerned, as are people like Mary Riddell
and Andrew Gilligan and plenty of others. It is little wonder that my
hon. Friends and I, whether we win or not, will stand up and be
counted. We will vote with our words and exercise our rights as MPs to
seek to remove this subsection from the Bill.
On Saturday,
in London and across the country, an event called the convention on
modern liberty is being held. It will represent the most concerted
coming together yet of people who are concerned about the destruction
of our democratic way of life. I shall attend that event and contribute
to it, and I hope that I will see members of the Labour party there too
to speak out against this and many other similarly egregious provisions
that the Government see fit to impose on the people of this
country.
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