Lord Young of Acton (Con)

I thank the noble Baroness for that intervention. The group in question advertises the fact that it breaks the law in order to shut down and silence its political opponents, people with whom it disagrees. It advertises the fact that it engages in criminal activity to advance its point of view, its agenda, on its website and its social media accounts. It uses its social media accounts to recruit additional members of the group. It operates with impunity in the public square, so I do not think it can plausibly be claimed that the existing criminal law is sufficient to rein in a group like this. Now, I take the point of the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, that we should be cautious before granting the Secretary of State additional powers to restrict the activities of protest groups. But I think it is worth bearing in mind that one of the reasons, perhaps, for the overdesignation of groups as terrorist groups under the powers granted to the Secretary of State by the Terrorism Act may be because the Secretary of State does not have enough flexible ways of responding to the threats posed by extreme criminal protest groups. Either he or she designates them as terrorist groups or they are allowed to continue to organise, protest and recruit. This would be an additional power—less extreme, I think, than designating a group a terrorist group. One critical difference is that if a group is designated a terrorist group and someone expresses support publicly for that group, that can be a criminal offence. That is not the proposal in the case of what the consequences would be of designating a group an extreme criminal protest group. That is one respect in which it would be a less extreme restriction than designating a group a terrorist group. I hope that there would be less tendency to overdesignate.