Part of the debate – in the House of Commons am 12:00 am ar 21 Mawrth 1979.
As usual, one of the more impressive things about contributions from Conservative Members in debates such as this is their unspoken assumption that anyone wearing the uniform of the State can do no wrong, no matter what horrifying crimes they commit against individuals. If, however, they were income tax inspectors, their attitude would be quite different.
Probably the only interesting comment that one can find in the Shackleton report is that which comes at the very end of it, where Lord Shackleton offers the comment that this legislation was originally intended to be temporary in character, and he hoped that it would never become permanent. He said:
It would be highly regrettable if the view were to gain ground that these powers should in some way slide into part of our permanent legislation: I do not think that they should ".
Neither do I, and nor do many Labour Members. We have heard from the Home Secretary and his predecessor that they do not hope so either. I am afraid that most of us feel pretty much the same as the hon. Member for Antrim, North (Rev. Ian Paisley), in that we have the awful conviction that, having got on to the statute book, this legislation will remain on it.
There is probably a simple explanation for this, which is that, having put legislation called the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act on to the statute book, taking it off would leave one open to the accusation that one was not in favour of preventing terrorism. In fact, this is a piece of public relations psychology. It seems that we are very likely to be stuck with it, since we rarely get a Home Secretary who is prepared to do anything other than the most shallow, populist things.
Contrary to what my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, South and Finsbury (Mr. Cunningham) said, this legislation was not dreamed up in the middle of the night after the Birmingham bombings. It had been written long before by the civil servants and put on the shelf waiting for such a moment when a bunch of panic-stricken Ministers would look for something with which to convince the public that they were dealing with something outrageous that had happened. But, of course, what had happened, what had been happening for a long time and what has happened since has frequently been outrageous. People have been blown up, burned to death, tortured, beaten up until they were senseless, had their knees blown apart and so on. All of these are outrageous things.
But, notwithstanding the peculiar line of my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, South and Finsbury, this is fundamentally a political conflict that is taking a military expression. Fundamentally, it is a political conflict of long standing. There is little point in hon. Members saying"Ah, yes, we can have a military solution first, and then we shall get a political solution ". I should like just one hon. Member to cite one precedent which indicates the validity of that sort of attitude. I cannot think of one, and I doubt whether any hon. Member would suggest that what was done in Europe during the Second World War settled any political questions, except the physical annihilation of Nazism in Germany. But even that has not proved to be permanent, notwithstanding the expenditure of lives and high explosives on that exercise.
It is rarely the case that military action solves any political problem at all, or that it even facilitates the resolution of a political problem. On the contrary, the use of military force invariably complicates an existing situation and creates other political problems which are as difficult as the ones that existed before the military action started.
There can be little doubt but that the kind of force that has been used during the last 10 years in the context of Ireland has not contributed constructively to the political resolution of Ireland's political problems. A lot of people have been killed, a lot of property has been destroyed, lives have been disrupted endlessly and the basest elements in human nature have been brought out. But, as yet, we are no nearer to a political resolution than we were in 1968. Indeed, my impression is that we are further away from it.
I can tell my hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Miss Richardson) that the case of the Bradley family was resolved after two and a half days and the adults were released. Having mentioned that case, the question needs to be addressed to the Home Office solemnly. This is not just a political or debating point. The Home Office must take this on board. Two babies were arrested at Heathrow airport in the interests of suppressing terrorism. They were 18 months and two and a half years old. I hope that the Minister does not try it on by saying they were not arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. They were. Technically they may have been taken into custody under the Children and Young Persons Act 1969, but they were arrested because their relatives and parents were being arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. We know that the photographs of those two babies will be of no interest to the police in a few years but their fingerprints will.
What this House needs to know, and what that family needs to know, as a matter of honour, is whether the fingerprints of Cathy and Gerard Bradley will be destroyed and expunged from the computer record. I hope that we receive the right answer from the Home Office tonight. But how will we prove to that family that for the rest of their lives those two babies will not appear on the police records? The Home Office will need to take a great deal of trouble to prove that they will not.
I sincerely hope that many of my hon. Friends who have some respect for human dignity will demand that some convincing proof is given to the family that those fingerprints will not be put on permanent record. When the State arrests babies, it has no justification for the authority it takes upon itself. If the State needs to arrest an 18-month-old baby and a two-and-a-half-year-old child it is surely bankrupt of any positive thinking on the political and security problems that face us. The arrest of those babies was a lunatic act as well as being inhuman.
I concentrate on this case because it sums up the hideous inhumanity in which the State is involved when it starts to go down that slippery slope. Some of us warned the Government about it in late 1974 when they put the Prevention of Terrorism Act on the statute book. It is difficult to stop the slide once it has started, because the temptation is always to believe that a degree more severity will do the trick and solve all our political problems.
Though the Conservatives do not take this in, many reports have indicated that the green light is given to police officers in the form of powers which honest officers do not want, and should not have, and which dishonest police officers welcome. They are the rogues who do a great disservice to the police and discredit it. They are, none the less, given their opportunities by legislation such as this, which allows them to take innocent citizens into custody for long periods without allowing them access to lawyers or advice.
The ratio of those taken in by the police to those subsequently charged is more than 9 to 1. I think that the ratio is 3,885 people detained to about 370 charged. A large number of those charged are charged with offences of no significance. In other words, there is a ratio of almost 10 to 1 of innocent people who are taken into custody and exposed to the risk of falling into the hands of brutal and irresponsible policemen. I remind the House that we are talking not only about the Bennett report. A series of reports dealing with such behaviour has been published since 1970.
We must also consider the infamous cases which were brought before the European Court of Human Rights. It is not enough for the Opposition to suggest that the judges in that court and the people who sat on the investigating committees which have been set up since 1969 were all agents of the Provos or the Communist Party. The Hunt report was the earliest such report and it investigated the sectarian character of the RUC. It is silly for the Conservatives to adopt that attitude.
The hon. Member for Antrim, North showed a healthy respect and a healthy regard for the integrity of the institutions which he knows are absolutely essential for the integrity of his society and the peace of mind of his constituents. That is an important advance. But, unfortunately, that attitude is not shared by the majority of those who call themselves Ulster Unionists or, even more sadly, by the majority in the Conservative Party. They believe that anybody in uniform can do anything to anybody. That is tragic and very dangerous.
The arguments against the Act are the same as they were in 1974. The only difference is that since then the evidence has accumulated to vindicate the original arguments. That is all that has happened. The horrors that we predicted have happened. They were already happening in Ulster before this legislation was passed, as even the Ulster Unionists know. It was easy to predict what would happen. We argued then, as we must argue now, that the powers which existed in law before November 1974 were sufficient to cope with the problems of terrorism. The extended powers of the police encourage fishing expeditions by policemen who simply dragnet innocent civilians into police stations for questioning. Thereby the police and the law are brought into disrepute. The ratio of 10 to 1 of detentions and subsequent charges is extremely unhealthy. Innocent detainees, however briefly they are detained in police stations, are irreversibly stigmatised by having been taken into a police station. The vast majority of those so detained are innocent.
The fingerprint and photographic evidence collected by police is held permanently on record. Unfortunately and inevitably that evidence dogs the individual for the rest of his life. I have been involved in negotiations—I say that sceptically—with the police about my own constituents who properly demand proof that the fingerprints and photographs of them after they have been held in police stations for several hours have been destroyed. It is difficult for the police to prove that they have destroyed them. We know that they have an unfortunate penchant for keeping information. Perhaps next week we shall discover that there are interesting police records of many hon. Members. Watch this space.
The public steadily have gained the impression, as a result of legislation such as this, that the police have the right to pick them up on any and each occasion. They believe that they have no right to object. On several occasions I have had to rescue people from police stations to tell them about their rights. They were not aware of them. They believed that the police had a right to take them in. That is a hideous step towards a police state. I hope that we are afraid of that.
The extended period of detention is a violation of a citizen's rights. The extended period of detention which is allowed under the Act means that the police can keep people incommunicado. It prevents lawyers from doing their job in defence of the citizen. Given the ratio of detentions to subsequent charges, it brings the police and the law into disrepute.
I thought that one the saddest points in the Home Secretary's speech was his promise—at least, I think that it was a promise—that he would do something on behalf of the relatives of people who had been deported and he would agree to review the sentences, for that is what they are, the sentences of deportation inflicted on people who were subject to exclusion orders.
There was an unconscious irony in my right hon. Friend's remarks at that point in his speech. He was saying"We shall no longer "—that is, when he has made up his mind—" sentence people to indefinite deportation. We shall review their position after three years ". How liberal that is! The Home Secretary, who is, after all, just Home Secretary and not a judicial authority, having deported someone, will after three years, he says, reconsider that person's position.
If hon. Members are curious about these matters, they can look up the Russian penal code, where they will discover that even in the USSR no one is deported for an indefinite period. It is true that the Russian State plays cat and mouse with its prisoners in that, quite commonly, it deports people after they have served a prison sentence. But what have we heard today? Precisely that. We heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Barking of a prisoner who in fact turned out to be innocent and, having been found to be innocent, was released from a British prison and on the instant was deported.
There is no difference at all there between our behaviour towards these people and the behaviour of the Russian State. The Home Secretary's claimed advance in his promise to consider indefinite deportation after three years was merely a pathetic confession that we have reduced ourselves to the same level as we have for years accused the Government of the USSR of maintaining in the way it treats its citizens and in its disregard for its citizens' civil liberties.