Schedule 1
Counter-Terrorism Bill
6:15 pm
Patrick Mercer (Newark, Conservative)
I am glad that a deep and sensible perception of military history exists in the east midlands. The right hon. and learned Gentleman is absolutely right when he says that the one single survivor from Kabul in 1842 was Dr. Brydon. I will not go into any of the details. The point is that our enemies are knowledgeable, thoughtful and will use propaganda to the very best of their ability to unhinge our efforts and to defeat us—not with bombs and bullets, but with words.
I ask you, Mr. Bercow, to look carefully at the incident in Forest Gate, which took place nearly two years ago. I will not question the intelligence upon which those operations were based. However, when an individual who was being arrested was accidentally shot, the propaganda machine immediately went into overdrive. With those points in mind, I believe that if we extend our period of detention from 28 days to 42 days—I have to say that I had the gravest of reservations about the extension from 14 days to 28 days—three things will happen, all of them have been touched on already. First, vulnerable communities will be much more easily alienated than they have been so far. I understand those on the Government and Opposition Benches who said that the vast majority of people inside those vulnerable communities are reasonable, rational, sensible and thoughtful people. However, that is before our opponent’s propaganda machine has started to work properly. Again, I would urge everyone here to consider what happened to the Roman Catholic population in the 1970s. Again, it was slightly before my time, but the sight of British soldiers being greeted by Roman Catholics on the streets of Londonderry and Belfast in 1969, with cups of tea and plates of cakes, quickly changed after 1971. A vulnerable community was suborned—to use the modern phrase, radicalised—by careful and clever propagandists. It would be grossly unfair to say that we lost the sympathy of the Roman Catholic population, but none the less we lost a lot of sympathy from that particular vulnerable community.
Hard on the back of that comes recruiting. Once the sympathy of the community is lost, recruiting becomes that much simpler. Once recruiting gets into its stride, the job of the intelligence agencies becomes that much more difficult. The third point relates directly to that again—the crucial point that we found on the back of internment concerned the carefully established, nurtured and worked-up intelligence communities—the informers’ touts. Many of those individuals were alienated and lost until we managed to re-establish those communities from about 1975 or 1976 onwards. I would go so far as to say that, had we been able to maintain those lists of informers, we would have nailed that particular iteration of the IRA by about 1980. The long-lasting effect of internment was the killing of the gathering of intelligence and the implementation of aggressive use of intelligence on the back of it. That was purely and simply due to a failed and flawed piece of legislation, an Act of Parliament that worked so thoroughly badly, to the detriment of the security forces and to the aiding and abetting of our enemies.
In conclusion, we have had some compelling evidence from witnesses and other speakers that everything that I have predicted so far in my three points has yet to happen. A fair argument has been made that, if so draconian and dreadful, why did those things not happen when we went from seven to 14 days or from 14 to 28. I do not fully know the answer, but before the Minister challenges me on that I would say that our enemies are awaiting their opportunity. None of that will be as effective as if they deploy their arguments on the back of the next major incident that strikes this country. Nothing that legislation can do can prevent the next incident. However, we have an opportunity today not to repeat the mistakes of the past—to look into the future and to try to understand the depths of our responsibility, to nip this in the bud, rather than taking a short-term view.