Downing Street Says

Asked what the Government’s approach to the Prevention of Terrorism legislation was, the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman (PMOS) said that the position hadn’t changed since yesterday. We continued to believe that the bill, as passed by the Commons, struck the right balance between security and safeguarding individual liberties. The Commons would consider the Bill as returned by the Lords but let’s wait and see what that was. Asked if there was no chance that the Government would consider a sunset clause, the PMOS said that as we had said last week, we had to be very careful about the signal we sent to terrorists. We also had to be very careful about the signal we sent to the Security Services and the Police about the seriousness with which we regarded the issue. Given the comments over the weekend, people were in a better position to understand why the Government did regard this issue with a serious mind. Asked if the Government felt that annual renewal weakened the previous prevention of terrorism act, the PMOS pointed out that annual renewal was built into control orders for those under house arrest. Equally the other control orders would be reviewed on a three-monthly basis. If you took out control orders which resulted in having to derogate, you had to annually re-pass that derogation through parliament. What would be sending the wrong signal was if we had to re-debate this issue again and again. There was a distinction between review and going back to the start again.

Asked how Parliamentary debate could be seen as sending the wrong signal to terrorists, the PMOS said that if you said that this was a measure which you believed was necessary for a very short period, that was not actually the advice we had received from the Security Services or the Police. Questioned further the PMOS said that, in terms of the debate, the issues were not going to change. As Sir John Stevens had said in his article in the News of the World, "the world had changed, and we needed to take new steps for new threats. This new act must be passed as soon as possible." It was in the nature of the new threat and sending a signal about how we intended to deal with this threat, that we had to respond.

Asked if the Government was saying that the amendments made to the bill were sending a signal to terrorists that Britain was a soft touch, the PMOS said that as Hazel Blears had said this morning, there was progress was that it was now recognised that there was a genuine dilemma here. There was a genuine problem about how you dealt with that small number of people who you had intelligence about, and about whom the Police were genuinely concerned about, but could not actually bring evidence against so that they could dealt with through the traditional route. What could you do about that small number of people? So what you had to judge was that not only are we giving the Police and the Security Services the powers they have asked for to deal with the situation, but also sending the signal about the determination of this country to safeguard its national security. Those were the two criteria which had to be applied as you tried to address people’s concerns about Civil Liberty and so on.

Asked if the Prime Minister was concerned that Lord Irvine, the former Lord Chancellor voted against the bill, the PMOS said that people would have their view. All he could say was that the Prime Minister was responding to the current information, that passed in front of him, that passed in front of the Police and the Security Services. The Government had to act on the advice that we had, and the advice we had on the nature of the new threat. Asked if the Prime Minister had discussed this with Lord Irvine, the PMOS said he wasn’t aware of any conversation between them. Asked if the Prime Minister had considered bringing Lord Irvine into the Privy Council in order to make progress, the PMOS said he wasn’t aware of any plans to do so. A lot of the information was very sensitive, otherwise we would use it as evidence before a court, that was the whole dilemma. The nature of the dilemma was: what did you do when you had intelligence and it would be prejudicial to that intelligence to reveal, but which did say there was potentially a very real threat.

Asked if this intelligence was more or less credible than the 45 minute claim, the PMOS said he would invite people to consider seriously whether someone like Sir Ian Blair or Sir John Stevens would give their opinion in the way they had if they didn’t consider it to be credible. Put to him that people who had written the Iraq dossier must have also considered it to be credible, the PMOS said that was an invitation to go down a trivial road. The PMOS invited journalists to consider the authoritative opinion of leading Police figures in this country who had spoken about the need to react to what they consider to be a very real threat to this country. If you needed to see evidence of that real threat then you need look no further than recent court cases in this country and what happened in Madrid. Any suggestion that the threat was not real was not borne out either by the evidence on the ground here or in Europe, or in the very considered, serious opinion of people whose judgment should be respected. Put to him that the former Commissioner of police Lord Condon opposed the Bill, despite presumably being aware of the threat, the PMOS said that Lord Condon would speak for himself. However he would point people to the views of Sir John Sevens and Sir Ian Blair. Equally as the Prime Minister and others had said, while the threat from the IRA had been real, this was a different kind of threat. It was even more dangerous because these terrorists would try to cause as many deaths as possible as Madrid underlined.

Put to him that in the case of the IRA the policy if internment was now regarded to have been a mistake, the PMOS said that this was not internment. Internment had no judicial input or overview. This did.

Put to him that following the intelligence failures in Iraq that people might be concerned about giving a Government minister free reign to act on secret intelligence, the PMOS said that if you put it in those generalised terms then it was not being put accurately. The legislation did not give ministers free reign, there was judicial input. People should consider the reality of the terrorist threat as evidenced by Madrid and recent Court cases in this country. The Madrid conference underlined both the terrible outcome of terrorism of this kind, and also that this was a dilemma, with no easy answers which was faced by not just us but by countries across Europe and across the world. We either accepted that there was a genuine problem here or we didn’t. That was the issue.

Asked to spell out why a Government minister should make decisions about control orders, rather than a court, the PMOS said that there was judicial input and that should not be forgotten. The question of the timing of judicial input was between retaining that judicial input and the ability to act speedily so that if there was a threat we could react quickly. That was the balance which had to be struck. Asked about judicial input on lesser controls, the PMOS said that in every case there would be judicial scrutiny within 14-28 days.

Asked about the figures in the regulatory impact assessment of the bill which suggest that only £10,000 per person would need to be spent on each terror suspect and if they suggested that we didn’t take the threat that seriously, the PMOS said the question conflated two different things. The Prime Minister had referred to people of concern to the Police and that concern was of varying degrees. Monitoring for instance was of variable use in terms of keeping surveillance of people. At the top end monitoring on its own had limitations because it was not 100% certain of keeping tabs on people of very high concern. Therefore the approach that ACPO and others approved was that you had varying powers to deal with varying degrees of threat. It was a complex issue but it wasn’t helped by reducing it to simplicity. Therefore we needed a more sophisticated approach than the one we had at the moment. At the moment we had monitoring which was not 100% secure or you put people in Belmarsh. There was nothing in between.

Put it him that the major concern was not that there wasn’t a terrorist threat but it might lead to innocent people having their liberties taken away, the PMOS asked what the point of judicial oversight was if it wasn’t to address that concern. Already there were safeguards built into the legislation. This was all a balance between protecting Civil liberties on the one hand and protecting people’s lives on the other. You had to strike that balance.

Asked if the Prime Minister was happy about the way Charles Clarke had handled this bill, the PMOS said that Charles Clarke had handled what was a very difficult and complex issue with the seriousness of purpose which was required. Trying to get the balance right between protecting national security and protecting individual liberty.

1 Comment »

Often the people questioning the PMOS seem to really have the right idea. This is totally about the competance of the executive. The demand to allow executive detention with no public airing of the evidence rests on the assumption that the executive has anything that resembles sound judgement. Which they do not, by a long margin.
Comment by Julian Todd — 10 Mar 2005 on 10:32 am | Link

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» Tuesday, March 8, 2005

Terror

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