Patrick Mercer MP: Abu Qatada must go back to his home country and face justice

Patrick Mercer OBE is MP for Newark.

This week has seen Abu Qatada doing what he does best.  The media has been swamped by his undoubted right to a fair trial whilst the rights of Britain’s population have been eclipsed.  Be in no doubt, whatever the results – whether he is deported or not – he and Terror Unlimited have won a victory.  The architects of his victory are, of course, the European Judges.

I fully endorse the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR), as do a great many of my colleagues. The rights set out in this Treaty, signed by the UK in 1951, were inspired by Sir Winston Churchill after he witnessed the appalling human rights violations committed by the Nazis during the 1930s and 1940s.  I absolutely agree with Churchill that the UK should not torture people (enshrined in Article 3) and that we should ensure people receive a fair trial (Article 6).

What I do not agree with is the gross distortion of these important legal principles by unelected judges sitting in Strasbourg.  What these judges are now saying is that not only does Article 3 or Article 6 mean that the British authorities must not torture people or cause unfair trials, but the very act of deporting someone found in Britain to a country which might not plan to abide by the ECHR is itself a breach of human rights!

Patrick Mercer MP: The odious aspects of Control Orders remain, sadly, largely untouched by the Home Secretary

Patrick Mercer is Conservative MP for Newark.

This week we have seen an attack by Islamist fundamentalists against queues in Moscow Airport that left many dead.  Just such an attack – against the queues that extra security measures create – rather than against aircraft has long been predicted and the results have been bloody. 

Similarly, today, dissident Republicans tried to detonate a large explosive device in North Belfast at the very point when the Home Secretary was making her statement about the Counter Terrorism Review.  You can always rely on violent Republicans to be predictable!

But both these events serve to remind us of exactly why the Home Secretary is doing what she has done.  We watched the nonsense of the Labour years as we discussed the need or otherwise to extend the period of detention without charge beyond 28 days.  Similarly, the arguments about ‘stop and search’ powers also ranged backwards and forwards. 

On top of this came the vexed question of control orders – all three making me want to jump up and down and shriek at my Parliamentary colleagues, ‘You just don’t get it, do you?’  The whole point of terrorism is not necessarily to kill or injure but is to terrorise – in other words, to control peoples’ minds.  And the difficulty is, is that be they Islamist fundamentalists or Irish Republicans, they fully understand the power of the word rather than the bomb and they fully understand how damaging measures like these can be to the Government’s cause.  All of these measures play directly into the hands of our enemies because they persuade minority communities that they are being subject to needless and draconian measures.

In other words, anything that helps to alienate people and increase recruiting for terrorist organisations is counter-productive.  Sadly, I am not sure that what I have just heard from the Home Secretary’s lips is going to improve matters.

Patrick Mercer MP: Match rhetoric with reality and ban Al Mujahiroun

Patrick Mercer has been MP for Newark since 2001 and is a former shadow minister for homeland security.

After the July 2005 bombings, which killed 52 innocent British citizens and injured over 700, Tony Blair announced that we would immediately proscribe Hizb ut-Tahrir and its successor organisation, Al Mujahiroun. To date, neither organisation has been banned and Al Muhajiroun is planning to conduct a debate this evening for the first time since 2004, now that it has appointed its new British leader.  This Government should concentrate less on rhetoric and more on reality and taking the action which is needed to protect this country and its people from terrorism.

Hizb ut-Tahrir is an extremist organisation that poisons the minds of young Muslims against Jews, Christians and other ‘unbelievers’ and some who have been through its ranks have ended up in Al Qaeda.  David Cameron reminded Gordon Brown at his first Prime Minister’s Question Time in July 2007 that the Government had repeatedly pledged to ban it and yet no further action has been taken.

Al Mujahiroun used to be led by banned preacher, Omar Bakri Muhammad, who once described the September 11th hijackers as ‘The Magnificent 19’ and said he wished to see the ‘flag of Islam’ flying over Downing Street.  This group was also responsible for organising the despicable protests in Luton when our men from the 2nd Battalion of The Royal Anglian Regiment paraded through the town centre.

Why isn’t this Government taking the action needed to ban these people from preaching and practising their hatred?

Al Mujahiroun has little support in the wider Muslim community and has operated under various different names over the last five years.  The Home Office began to talk about banning al-Muhajiroun in 2004 so its leader, Omar Bakri Muhammad, formally shut it down and fled to Lebanon after being banned from entering the UK by then Home Secretary, Charles Clarke.  However, it then became fragmented into two groups: the Saviour Sect and al-Ghurabaa which both later became two of the 45 proscribed organisations (under The Terrorism Act 2000 & 2006).

Patrick Mercer MP: The counter-terrorism lessons we should learn from Northern Ireland

Patrick Mercer has been MP for Newark since 2001 and is a former shadow minister for homeland security. A former army officer, he now chairs the Counter-Terrorism Sub-Committee of the Home Affairs Select Committee and considers the lessons that can be learned from Northern Ireland as we seek to tackle Islamic terrorism.

Under the auspices of the Home Affairs Select Committee, I now chair the Counter-Terrorism Sub-Committee and we have been looking into the government’s counter-terrorism strategy.  This strategy is referred to as Project CONTEST and contains four strands which are largely self-explanatory: Prevent, Prepare, Protect and Pursue.  We will be preparing a report on this strategy and nothing I say here, clearly, must pre-judge this, but there are some overarching comments that I think need to be made.

I spent a lot of my youth trying to counter the efforts of the IRA in Ulster.  A number of governments and the security apparatus made some bad mistakes during that campaign, the experiment of internment being the most disastrous.  But we also got quite a lot of things right and I sometimes wonder why we do not look more carefully at those lessons and see how far we can apply them too the different but parallel problem of countering today’s threat from the terrorist.

Patrick Mercer MP: Securing the homeland

Patrick Mercer OBE MP is Shadow Minister for Homeland Security.

If I say “Project CONTEST” I’ll bet that no one who is reading this has a clue what it is!  Actually, it is the government’s counter-terrorism strategy, it has been around for nearly five years now and follows four very sensible disciplines.  It concentrates on Prevention, Protection, Preparation and Pursuit – the “4 Ps” – and is intellectually unassailable.  Whoever designed it needs to be congratulated on its intentions and designs. 

Sadly, it has completely failed to deliver on its excellent aspirations.  Harsh judgement you might say but it doesn’t come from me - it actually comes from the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit that was asked to audit the strategy after 7/7. 

The PMDU’s comments must have been a very bitter pill to swallow for the Home Office.  In its conclusion the eleven page review said that, “the strategy is immature; forward planning is disjointed or has yet to occur; accountability for delivery is weak; real world impact is seldom measured” and the plan’s objectives were dismissed as vague.  Most damagingly it continues, “activity is not connected or coherent; who is in charge?” and “we measure meetings and reports, not real world impact.”  The only thing that was missing was, “nought out of ten, see me!”

Now this is worrying stuff but worse still when the Government published its so-called “narrative” on the 7/7 and 21/7 incidents this spring they trumpeted the success of Project CONTEST.  Hadn’t they noticed that the strategy had been damned by their own people? 

Clearly, our Security Services and Police have produced some stunning successes and, with one exception, kept us safe from the horrors of terrorism.  Nothing can detract from the excellence of the work that avoided the August plot to destroy as many as eight airliners and which would have been quite simply a cataclysm.  But, the Government’s strategy stands condemned out of its own mouth. 

That report was published last September and appeared in a newspaper in October; since then nothing has been done to rectify the situation.  The Government must act and here are some simple ideas of what they can do.

• First, they need a single Minister of Cabinet rank who will oversee security in the round.
• Next, our intelligence machinery must be streamlined along with the way that our police are organised to deal with counter-terrorism.
• We need an effective force to secure our borders and to protect our energy sources and other parts of our critical national infrastructure.
• Lastly, we have got to use our most precious anti-terrorist resource better. Every citizen can be trained to become a pair of eyes and ears that will frustrate the terrorist. 

There will be voices raised up all over the place saying “it can’t be done” and that these measures imperil civil liberties.  Politicians will bolt towards the safety blanket of useless legislation and the whole effort is likely to be consigned to the “too difficult” bin.  Well it mustn’t be, we’ve managed to counter threats to this nation both externally and internally in the past and we can do it again.  All we need is a bit of coherent, hard-nosed and effective political leadership – sadly many people are going to have to die before we get it.

Related links: Tories must be party of homeland security and Homeland security definition.