Anti-terror laws ‘unworkable and wrong’
The current wave of anti-terror legislation will never get through parliament because it is unworkable, a leading QC and MP warned today.
Bob Marshall-Andrews insisted that the offence of glorification of terrorism was a “truly rotten law” that would never reach the statute books.
But speaking to a fringe meeting at the Labour party conference in Brighton, he warned the government must be wary of falling into the terrorists’ trap by, in its efforts to protect the public, undermining all their hard-fought freedoms.
“Terrorism is a great enemy to our lives and our property but that is not the greatest threat it poses,” the Labour MP for Redway said.
“It is not what it does to us, but what is makes us do to ourselves. Terrorism is always used as an alibi to pass laws that would not otherwise be available in an otherwise civilised society.”
Speaking at the same meeting, home secretary Charles Clarke insisted the government was “totally committed” to protecting civil liberties and would continue to be so.
But he warned that while rights were fundamental to democracy, it was necessary to examine them in relation to how best to protect people from the threat of terrorism.
Measures such as the retention of telecommunications data and anti-social behaviour orders were considered by some to be an infringement on civil liberties, Mr Clarke said, but he believed they were a small price to pay for a wider good.
“ID cards, CCTV, Asbos. [are all] providing the capacity to inhibit those who seek to take away our civil liberties and at not a great cost to individual civil liberty,” he said.
However, Shami Chakrabati, director of Liberty, warned against looking at the issue in terms of simply the liberty of the individual versus that of the community, as the individual would always lose out.
Instead, the government should look at the role of rights and freedoms in wider society, she said, and avoid drafting legislation that would alienate sections of the population who could then turn against the country.
“[There has been] a constant denigration of the whole idea of rights and freedoms, and that from a government that gave us the Human Rights Act. They ought to be proud of it, not irritated by it,” she added.
Responding, Mr Clarke admitted that the best way to combat terrorism was in creating a “socially-just society”, but said that unfortunately there were those who wanted to use British freedoms to attack that very same society.
“It is important to acknowledge that the ambition of al-Qaida is to destroy all the values for which we fought,” he said.
For a list of Opinion Former fringe events at the Labour conferenceclick here.
