Counter-Terrorism and Sentencing Bill — House of Commons, 2020-06-09
Topic: Law and Crime
Crispin Jeremy Rupert Blunt (Conservative, Centre-right): It has been a real pleasure to sit through the debate and listen to the quality of the speeches. I cannot help but reflect that both the Lord Chancellor and his shadow, the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy)—both good men and good lawyers, and a fine reflection on our profession—probably, if left to their own devices, would not have wanted to deliver quite the speeches they gave. The shadow Lord Chancellor’s speech flew when he talked about the duty to try to rehabilitate and to deradicalise, and quoted Jack Merritt and considered what he would have wanted. Then, when he got into the detail, he was pulling his punches on some of the issues in the Bill that are singularly problematic. My hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill), the Chairman of the Justice Committee, gave a very good and wise summary of the challenges in the Bill. My hon. Friend the Member for Keighley (Robbie Moore) gave, in a sense, the speech designed to give the public reassurance that we are going to be tough on terrorists and unyielding in our approach. I say to him that it is so much more complex than that. There are so many balances that have to be struck. We need to understand what we as a society now are competing with as far as the apparent terrorist threat is concerned. The hon. Member for North Down (Stephen Farry) pointed out that our overreaction in Northern Ireland—internment, Bloody Sunday and the injustice seen in what carried huge popular support to tackle the murderous wickedness of the then Provisional IRA—meant that the terrorists were able to enjoy significant support from their own community. There is a real battle to be won against those who want to engage in murder and mayhem, perhaps for reasons that are wholly unrelated their ideology. As a society, we have to detach them from their support base, so that the community is on our side. In the end, we are engaged in a battle to protect our society’s liberal values, so we must not take measures that are plainly unjust On imposing mandatory 14-year sentences, the hon. Member for Belfast East (Gavin Robinson) made the point that it is our job to impose a sentence. No, it is not. It is our job to decide what the maximum sentences ought to be, and the Sentencing Council then gives recommendations to the judiciary about the appropriate tariff. There should always be room for judges to be able to come to their own judgment about the appropriate sentence in the circumstances of the individual case that is presented to them. I have the gravest reservations about apparently securing public support by having ever longer mandatory sentences. We will do an injustice and find that we have given the opportunity for that injustice to be exploited by these people. They will then get a level of support from the communities they come from. We are working so hard with such communities, with the Prevent programme and all the other aspects of policy, to convince them that they will not be the continuing victims of injustice, and that, as a society, we are trying to address the issues that lead them in a direction where they might be minded to give some support to people who are turning on our society Of course, it is even more complicated than that: there is religious faith. The perversion of Islamic faith sits behind some of the violence and the motivation of some of these people, so that they think they are acting with some perverted form of God’s truth on their side. I urge my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley and others to turn the board around—understand why people are coming from the place they are and why they have these attitudes. Then we will get to a better place where we are able to understand the injustice that they perceive, and we will have a chance of beginning to address it. We must address it by not betraying our own values. If we betray our values by the justice measures that we take, we might find ourselves on the wrong end of the European Court of Human Rights because we have taken measures that are manifestly unjust and unable to be reversed by our own court system, and those measures will then be reversed by the convention to which we must remain attached—we will create a further set of problems for ourselves I urge Ministers to consider some of the wise words of the Chairman of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst, the shadow Lord Chancellor and the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry). There is a degree of unanimity about the very careful set of balances we have to find here, and we need to make some changes to the Bill in Committee to get those balances right. We have to carry public confidence; I understand that. If we cannot carry public confidence, we will set up problems for ourselves. But we continue to swing back and forth on this—we abolished control orders in 2011, and here we are putting them back again nine years later—and this pendulum is not doing any of us any favours.