Part of the debate – in the House of Commons am 12:00 am ar 21 Mawrth 1979.
I intend to vote tonight for the renewal of the Act for a further 12 months though I have some misgivings, particularly in the light of the Shackleton report. It seems to me that those provisions of the Act which are most deserving of review are the ones which are likely to be most easily renewed from year to year. I refer to section 11, specifically, which in my view could form a permanent part of legislation, quite apart from legislation on terrorism. Section 11 seems to be the one which everyone is very keen—and the Government are a little keen—to terminate.
I hope that in the next year a rather better job will be done of reviewing the operation of this Act than was done by Lord Shackleton. For reasons which I shall come to soon, I do not share in the tributes paid to Lord Shackleton for the work that he has done in the report.
The problem in Northern Ireland, it is often said, is a political one rather than one of security, and there is no solution, in terms of security, to a political problem. That is the usual phrase used when assessing the situation. I do not believe that. There is a political problem, or rather a complex set of interrelated political problems, and there is a military-police problem. There is no political solution to that military-police problem. There is only a military-police solution to that problem. No political solution can buy off the thugs—or, at least, there is no solution which we should be prepared to accept. If we did accept such a solution, those who are prepared to use the gun and the bomb to secure their ends in the present context would be equally prepared to use the gun and the bomb to secure their ends in a different political context if we were unwise enough to concede it.
It is particularly important that Ministers—and I stress Ministers, and not some odd person appointed to do the job—should exercise very close surveillance over the activities under an emergency Act of this kind. I illustrate my point by referring to section 62 of the Criminal Law Act 1977, which gives a statutory right to an arrested person to be permitted to tell somebody, subject to certain qualifications, that he has been arrested.
Although it was desirable to put that provision on to the statute book as a desirable and useful measure, what has really made it work is the fact that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary was prepared to initiate surveillance and control mechanisms in the police force to ensure that the Act was correctly operated. It is those control and surveillance mechanisms which are bringing about slowly a transformation in the treatment of those arrested in some parts of the country. There are parts of the country where behaviour was always good but in other parts those control mechanisms are almost a more important element than section 62 itself.
The lesson of that is that Ministers should be giving their attention to that type of issue. It is not enough to appoint a Lord Shackleton every three years to examine it. From month to month, Ministers should be doing spot checks so that they have a better and more detailed idea of how the provisions are being implemented.
I apply the same argument to the alarming and hugely disappointing revelations which recently came out about the treatment of prisoners in Northern Ireland. Of course, it is not like 1971; it is not like the organised torture which was revealed in the Compton report in 1971. But it is illegal. Given the fore-warning of Compton, Parker and similar reports eight years ago, Ministers should have ensured that such activities did not happen. It is their job to ensure that they do not happen. It is also the job of a Northern Ireland Minister to be on the Government Front Bench throughout this debate.
Having been forewarned by the experiences of 1971 and 1972, it is the job of Ministers to ensure that that kind of thing does not sully British administration in Northern Ireland. That is where the blame lies. I hope that the need for better ministerial supervision of what goes on in police stations and so-called police offices in Northern Ireland is fully understood.
I turn to the Shackleton report. I shall address myself to two bits of it. I do not echo the flattering remarks that have been made about it. Paragraph 91 refers to section 62 of the Criminal Law Act 1977 and the right of a person to have access to a solicitor. When we discussed these matters a few years ago, those of us who wanted this provision to be introduced invoked experience in Scotland and the provisions in the Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act, now a consolidation Act, which gives to an arrested person who has been charged a right of access to a solicitor and, indeed, a private interview with him.
In paragraph 91 of his report, Shackleton rather pooh-poohs this experience north of the border. He says that it does not work out and that it is not administered in practice in the way that those of us who wanted that section to be introduced said that it would be administered.
When these matters were being examined in 1976 with reference to this Act, the Lord Advocate was on the Front Bench. There had been exchanges of correspondence between at least me and the Lord Advocate about this matter. Quotations from that correspondence were made in the House. The Lord Advocate is an authoritative person on Scottish law—certainly more authoritative than Lord Shackleton. He made it clear that, in his view, north of the border the provisions would certainly apply to persons arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. On 28 January 1976 he said that such slight dubiety as existed did not really affect matters in practice because the police—he meant the police in Scotland—were willing to extend the right of access to a solicitor and to all persons arrested and detained under section 7 of the 1974 Act.
There is not a word in Lord Shackleton's report about that. He simply pooh-poohs the Scottish experience and the suggestion that experience throughout the United Kingdom requires that access to a solicitor should be denied more frequently than described as standard practice by no less a person than the Lord Advocate in approving the terms in 1976. That is one reason why I do not regard this as a very good report.
Worse still, I turn to Lord Shackleton's references—such as they are—to section 11 of the Act. May I say to the right hon. Member for Stafford and Stone (Mr. Fraser) that I had some responsibility for section 11, but section 10 was a Government initiative and was nothing to do with me. Section 11 relates to the offence of withholding information from the police. There are two paragraphs about that in the report. That is all. The House debated that provision for about three-quarters of an hour, or an hour, the first time that the Act was passed. We did not adopt the provision in 1974. The Standing Committee on the renewal Bill in 1975–76 discussed the matter for about one or 1½ hours. In the course of the Standing Committee, which I am sure the Under-Secretary of State recollects, the Home Secretary said:
I found some of the arguments advanced…in favour of the proposal rather more convincing than some of the arguments with which I proposed to refute them."—[Official Report, Standing Committee A, 16 December 1975; c. 150.]
On a later occasion, the then Home Secretary, Mr. Jenkins, said:
I thought that those arguments were better than those in my brief.
On 28 January 1976, the Under-Secretary said:
The Government take the view that the Bill could, with advantage, contain a provision of this kind."—[Official Report, 28 January 1976; Vol. 904, c. 463.]
The provision, not the one in the form that I had proposed, but as redrafted by the Government, was put into the Act after a vote by 196 votes to 24. The two main parties supported the proposal, as did representatives of three of the minor parties.
The then Home Secretary concluded:
Because I believe that the clause is right in principle, I ask the House to support it "—[Official Report, 28 January 1976; Vol. 904, c. 463, 493.]
The House did.
There is not a word about that in the two brief paragraphs that the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton wrote on the subject. One would have thought that he would have thought it necessary to put the case for it, to put the case against it and somehow to describe the considerations which looked as if they had led the House of Commons and the House of Lords to vote this into the statute book. But no, he did not.
One must fish in two paragraphs to discover what he said. He said:
There are genuine doubts about its implications in principle ".
What are those doubts? He does not say what they are. Of course, we can all guess. But why does Lord Shackleton not say what the doubts are? Lord Shackleton says of this provision:
There are genuine doubts…about the way it might be used in the course of interviewing someone.
What does that mean? Again, Lord Shackleton does not elaborate. It is difficult to see what he is getting at. He goes on to say that
It has…been little used in Great Britain.
All sorts of offences are on the statute book which have been little used because people do not commit many of those offences. That is not a reason for not making an activity a breach of the law.
People always use the word"obvious"when they are not sure how to describe something—and Lord Shackleton says that there are
obvious difficulties of proof
There are obvious difficulties of proof, of course. That was gone over at great length in the debates about whether we should put this on to the statute book.
Then, in his concluding and full-of-fact remark in paragraph 133, Lord Shackleton says that section 11
has an unpleasant ring about it in terms of civil liberties ".