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Prevention of Terrorism Bill

I am trying to recognise the dilemma in which the Government find themselves, as they try to find a way between the requirements of security and our traditions of the rule of law and natural justice.

I do not support the sunset clause. Like probably everyone in the House today, I accept that it is unlikely that we shall get this legislation right. It will need sorting out. After the general election, the Government propose to introduce new legislation on terrorism, which will probably command broad support. We shall have to look at that and other terrorism legislation in the statute book and try to come up with something better, but the idea that it can be done by November is preposterous.
No work will be done on those measures between now and the general election. There will be turmoil for a few weeks after the general election. There will then be a few weeks of Parliament going about its normal business. Then there will be a recess followed by the party conferences and we shall actually get down to this business, which should be at the heart of what the House is doing, only in October—five or six weeks before the due date of the sunset clause. The idea that the sunset clause would enable us to look rationally, deeply and carefully at the legislation is preposterous and anyone who thinks about it would have to recognise that.

I do not understand why my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary is not prepared to accept the position of the House of Lords on the lesser orders. As I said during the previous debate on the Bill, we can assume that the people who will be subject to house arrest are the most dangerous ones. He has conceded that the judge will take the decision in those cases and I cannot really understand why he will not concede that the judge should take the decision in the lesser cases. That seems to amount, roughly speaking, to administrative convenience, and we should not support that. It is still not clear to me—non-lawyer that I am—whether the judge will be able to look at the facts in all cases, or whether the suspect will know enough about the charges to be able to challenge them, and we need to look very carefully at that.

On the burden of proof, I have not followed the logic of my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary—he is a good friend of mine—in that he says that we do not need a high burden of proof because this is not punishment. He is quite right: the burden of proof that we need for punishment is that of being guilty beyond reasonable doubt. Nevertheless, people's liberty will be interfered with, and I must admit that I find myself somewhere between "balance of probability" and "reasonable suspicion". We are in that territory. If we had had enough time to think about that, we might have even come up with a novel definition somewhere between those of balance of probability and reasonable suspicion.

The other point that I would make is that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary cited certain cases where judges—of course, they are not always right, nor is the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords—and said that reasonable suspicion was all right, but those cases applied to people who were not British citizens. We are talking about an extension of that approach to British citizens for the first time in our history, and I personally cannot, and will not, do that.

I would welcome an opportunity to look at the legislation in perhaps a year's time, when we have all had the opportunity to do so very carefully. The House, which is elected to protect not only the security of the country, but rights to natural justice and the rule of law, could look at it very carefully and we would have done our job properly, which no one can possibly even assert that we have been able to do in the preposterously short time that has been available to either us or the House of Lords.

I once checked on the passage of the Bill of Rights in 1688. It went to and fro, from the Lords to the Commons and back again, and the Commons eventually gave way because the king prorogued the Parliament and they beat him to it, but I have to say that the House of Commons was then in favour of protecting the rights of the individual and the Lords were against doing so—sadly, it seems to be the other way round today.