Published: The House Magazine, 8 November 2010
Having agonised over the legal and moral niceties of terrorist control orders himself, David Blunkett is not about to decry the efforts of the current administration
There is much froth being talked in some branches of the media at the moment about splits within the coalition government. According to the papers, there are threats from this group or that as we await the outcome of the review of counter-terrorism legislation.
That review, if it is to be successful, must strike a balance between the action necessary to protect lives and the security of the nation and the civil liberties which form the bedrock of our free society.
A little more light and a little less vitriol wouldn’t go amiss. Those who have to take decisions rather than oppose them – to accept responsibility rather than offload it – need to hear experienced and expert advice.
They cannot, as is the case at the moment, take seriously nonsense about rejecting the information they are given, or treating with ultimate suspicion the advice proffered from those who have lived with, exposed and presented the truth to governments of all persuasions.
Living in your own dream world – in a bubble where reality is set aside – is not a luxury that government ministers can afford to indulge in.
Given that we are talking about prevention and not prosecution of those who have perpetrated their deed (as with the normal adversarial court system), those who are vehemently against control orders and have made a shibboleth out of them have to answer one simple question. What would you put in its place?
The answer at the moment is “the normal courts process”. This is so naive in terms of the rules of evidence, disclosure and admissibility – not to mention the safety and security of those working on our behalf – that it takes your breath away.
Yes, if we can try terrorism suspects in open court, then we should. But there are legitimate and rational difficulties in doing so.
If the judiciary and the legal profession would come forward with sensible proposals that would enable us to reform our system, so that we can deal with those terrorists who we know without peradventure seek to do us harm but about whom it is difficult to build a case that will be admissible in court, we might be able to make progress.
At the moment, the line has been that it is government’s job to come up with proposals – and it is the legal establishment’s job to knock them down!
Section 4 of the legislation that I took through the Commons in the autumn of 2001, in the immediate aftermath of 11 September, was struck down by the judges in December 2004. It was my successor who had the unenviable task of bringing in control orders, which I know he was extremely reluctant to do.
Why did Charles Clarke do this, as someone with a considerable history of defence of human rights? Quite simply, because someone had to take responsibility for the protection of the public from those who, for human rights reasons, we could not remove from our country – but who, as per the Law Lords’ judgement, could not be held in prison, because it infringed their human rights.
Those taking office to govern have to do just that. In a Catch-22, they are the ones who have to catch the ball.
Those grandstanding have the privilege of not answering for the mistakes they make, just as, ironically, former Directors of Public Prosecution never seem to answer for theirs!
So, when you see former Home Secretaries offering bipartisan support to the incumbent, it is not simply that they understand and have sympathy with the difficulty she faces. It is because, having done the job, they know a little more about the complexity – and, yes, the contradictions – of having to defend democracy, whilst at the same time grasping the reality of how those very freedoms are used by the terrorists to facilitate and perpetrate their evil against us.
