Contribution
My Lords, as always, the rational logic of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, has been very helpful in untangling this issue. She has summed up some of my concerns and things that I am not sure about.
The noble Baroness, Lady Foster, has brilliantly articulated her worries about the glorification of terrorism and how it normalises terrorism into everyday life. I think that is valid. She notes that this is based on little knowledge, and little knowledge can be very dangerous. Whatever one thinks about Northern Ireland —and I assure noble Lords that at this end we do not all agree—it was a bloody conflict, and it is not to be treated lightly. Those who simply reduce it to slogans in the way that was described do not know what they are talking about.
In support of the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, my concern is that when we get proscription legislation wrong, we also rob the notion of terrorism of its power to shock, of its content, and the danger is that we relativise it and trivialise it. I think a huge amount of damage has been done by putting Palestine Action into the same category as Hamas or ISIS. Even though Palestine Action, as has been described, is an obnoxious or objectionable organisation and should be held to account under the law when it uses criminal damage, I do not think it is a terrorist organisation. Putting those self-indulgent OAP protesters or students into the same camp as Hizb ut-Tahrir calling for jihad or those hate preachers I quoted earlier, for example, seems misplaced. It turns what I consider to be numpty protesters into some sort of heroes in their own mind, and it has captured the imagination.
If you go to universities, you now find that people think that anyone who supports Palestine Action is a free speech warrior who we should all get up and support. They do not understand why I, as a free-speecher, am not supporting it. The problem is that they now all think that terrorism is sitting on a road and saying, “I support Palestine Action”. If only terrorism were sitting on a road and shouting, “I support Palestine Action” or wearing a badge. That is not the content of terrorism, and there is a lack of knowledge about what terrorism is. If people think those people are terrorists, we sell young generations short by them not understanding what we are up against and what the problems are. Proscribing organisations, which is a very important weapon to use in a particular way, is one thing; treating those who simply are vocal in their support of that organisation, as has happened with Palestine Action, can just mean that we conflate slogans and words with terrorist actions or violent actions and empty them of any horror.
The difficulty is that I am torn. When I hear Bob Vylan, Kneecap or those student groups shouting “Internationalise the intifada” or strutting their stuff and cosplaying their support for barbarism, it is sickening and I want something to be done. Listening to the moving speech by the noble Lord, Lord McCrea, you can see that that is what you might want to tackle. It is just that I do not think proscribing Palestine Action did that, and we are now paying the cost for having inappropriately used proscription of an organisation to devalue what we mean by terrorism.
If we no longer have young people in this country who have lived experience of terrorism—sadly, young Iranians do, for example, so let us not concentrate entirely on ourselves—they think going on a demo outside a prison fighting for the hunger strikers inside is as bad as it gets. They do not get it, but I do not think we have helped them get it either, which is why I am nervous about saying that glorification of terrorism in that context should be against the law, because we have to be very careful about what we are making illegal.