Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act 1976

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 4:38 pm on 7 March 1983.

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Photo of Mr Enoch Powell Mr Enoch Powell , South Down 4:38, 7 March 1983

My hon. Friends in the Ulster Unionist party and I were glad that the Government decided last year to set up the Jellicoe inquiry. We welcomed it and thought that it was, if anything, overdue.

I assure hon. Members, and the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Sparkbrook (Mr. Hattersley) in his absence, that the House does not need to wait for the contribution of the hon. Member for Belfast, West (Mr. Fitt) to listen to a representative of a Northern Ireland constituency who feels the same obligations towards all his constituents, desires to see the rights of the citizens of Northern Ireland no different from those enjoyed by their fellow citizens on the mainland and shares, as we all ought, a feeling of uneasiness about the ratio between imprisonment and conviction to which attention has already been drawn, and about which I was not reassured by the arguments adduced by the hon. Member for Beckenham (Sir P. Goodhart).

My hon. Friends and I welcome the report almost in its entirety and support the Home Secretary's intention, if I have understood it correctly, to implement it virtually as it stands—I shall mention one or two qualifications—administratively as soon as possible and by legislation when time for that can be found.

In particular, my hon. Friends and I wish such legislation to be United Kingdom legislation. That is one criticism of what is almost an aside in the Jellicoe report. We not only do not wish provisions to be different on the two sides of the Irish sea, but we do not want the powers that apply in Northern Ireland to be tucked away in separate legislation for Northern Ireland.

One of the virtues of the Act, however regrettable its necessity, is that it is a United Kingdom Act, passed and considered in detail by this House and the Parliament of the United Kingdom. We hope that that will remain so for as long as such legislation is necessary.

We support particularly the proposal that the legislation, while having the misleading title of "Temporary" dropped from its heading, should be reenacted every five years. I thought that the right hon. Member for Sparkbrook was not accurate when he referred to that as "total re-enactment". It will be one thing for a Government of any party to introduce a Bill that happens to coincide with the existing Act, but I suspect that it will be a different Bill in a number of respects by the time it receives Royal Assent. Unlike an order, a Bill has to go through a gruelling procedure in Committee, when every aspect and every line can be tested for practicability and for evidence that it is required. So it seems good to us that we have the undertaking not only that we shall get a new Act as soon as legislatively practicable, but that if there is still to be a successor Act to that it will be a brand new Act that will have to go through all its stages in the House.

My hon. Friends and I also welcome the substitution of a shorter period of residence for the 20-year definition—if I may so call it—of settlement. Twenty years is a draconically long period of qualification for the exercise of powers of exile from one part of the United Kingdom to another. Such a division of the United Kingdom is an object of antipathy to my hon. Friends and myself and to the public in Northern Ireland in any case; but the fact that to be identified with a part of the United Kingdom, so as not compulsorily to be removed from it, one should have had to complete 20 years of residence there has always seemed excessive. Whether or not three years is the right: figure, I hope that the Bill that we are to see—for this matter will require legislation—will include a period much shorter than 20 years.

My colleagues and I especially welcome something that can be done without legislation and I hope will be done executively immediately, namely, the implementation of the firm recommendation in paragraph 189 that no exclusion orders be made except after consultation with the police both in the receiving and in the exporting part of the United Kingdom. If that recommendation is to be fulfilled in its natural meaning—if the RUC is to be brought into consultation on equal terms in the case of exclusion orders to Northern Ireland—that will riot indeed remove the abiding feeling in Northern Ireland that the Act makes Ulster a receptacle or waste bin for unwanted potential terrorists from Great Britain, but it will at least be some answer to be given to those who hold that view and will go some way towards assuaging their irritation.

If I refer only to some recommendations, I do not intend to imply an absence of agreement with others; but there are one or two on which my hon. Friends and I have certain qualifications. One has been mentioned already by the right hon. Member for Glasgow, Hillhead (Mr. Jenkins) and the hon. Member for 13eckenham. It is that if we are to detach the Act from specifically Irish terrorism, from terrorism related to circumstances in Northern Ireland, we should make a clean job and relate it to terrorism as such.

As the hon. Member for Beckenham said, the attempt to distinguish between international and domestic terrorism is particularly absurd, when what we call Northern Irish terrorism is, to a considerable extent, based and supported outside the United Kingdom. The distinction is unreal in any case. We should much regret it if we were to find, as we may one day, an upsurge in this country of terrorism unconnected with Northern Ireland, and had no means of applying the Act to that upsurge. This is not romancing. Within the past decade right hon. and hon. Members have had their lives endangered by terrorist acts, for which the motivation had nothing to do with circumstances either in Northern Ireland or outside the United Kingdom. I hope that is one point on which the Home Secretary and the Government are open to persuasion.

Lord Jellicoe suggests that landing and embarkation procedures should be applied to all journeys between the island of Ireland and the island of Great Britain That is entirely logical. Such a provision would remove much irritation and ill feeling and the sense of unreality on the part of travellers who find that apparently no precautions are taken on one route while only too evident on some other route. It is right that the reality should be recognised and that any procedures should be applied uniformly to journeys between the island of Ireland and the island of Great Britain.

Lord Jellicoe refers to the completion of landing and embarkation cards, and a word of practical warning might not go amiss in that context. It is easy for those used to whiling away their time on international flights by filling in landing cards to suggest that we should have embarkation and landing cards on all these journeys, both ways, at all terminals. It works at Gatwick because, unfortunately for British Midland Airways, the volume of traffic through Gatwick is small compared with the volume of traffic through Heathrow. But before the Government implement the principle—which we accept—that lies behind this recommendation, I hope they will consider the practicalities of applying embarkation cards, and consequently the requirement to hand one's embarkation card in and have it scrutinised before boarding, to the volume of traffic which travels to and from Northern Ireland by the shuttle services from Aldergrove and Heathrow.

I have a last observation to add to the general support of my hon. Friends and myself for the real improvements, the real ameliorations, which implementation of the report will bring about. In paragraph 21 of the report Lord Jellicoe refers to the fact that compared with the first half of the 1970s the volume of terrorist action connected with Northern Ireland has been markedly reduced since then. None of us certainly would query his attribution of that result in part to the efforts, and the increased effectiveness of the efforts, of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and of the security forces in Northern Ireland; but it would be wrong for an hon. Member representing Northern Ireland to take part in this debate without pointing to another and much more fundamental factor which governs the volume and the ebb and flow of that terrorism.

In those early years of the 1970s it was very natural—perhaps it was inevitable—for the terrorist organisations and for those who wished ill to the connection of Northern Ireland with Great Britain to assume from the policies being followed by Her Majesty's Government that Her Majesty's Government were, if not on their side in the matter of methods, at any rate working towards the same end. There is no encouragement to terrorism, and there is such discouragement to the law-abiding who are the front-line against terrorism, so great as the belief that the terrorists have success in their sights, the belief that those opposing them are not really as serious in their opposition to their aims as to their methods. In fact, the best period in Northern Ireland—not an "acceptable" period, perish the word—has been the years 1977 to 1979, when, under the administration of the right hon. Member for Barnsley (Mr. Mason), no evidence whatsoever was given by Her Majesty's Government of the day of any anxiety to make arrangements that could be even be misinterpreted as leading towards the objectives of the IRA and its terrorist activities.

Only when no practical prospect is perceived by Irish terrorism that, by its means or by any other, its objectives will be obtained shall we see the cessation, which has to come some day, of acts such as were the reason originally for the right hon. Member for Hillhead introducing this legislation in 1974.

So, while we implement, as I hope we shall, the Jellicoe report and while we recognise, with varying degrees of reluctance, the case pressed upon the Government for the retention of these powers, we should not be under any delusion that, in the last resort, it is in this House, through the legislation and the policies that it supports, that the key to the continuance or the defeat of terrorism lies.