THE Government’s majority was slashed to 14 last night after concessions by Charles Clarke on his new anti-terrorism laws failed to satisfy critics in all parties, including 62 rebels from his own side.
In a substantial climbdown, the Home Secretary accepted that a judge rather than ministers should make control orders subjecting suspected terrorists to house arrest.
After a day of confusion and chaos over the way he had brought forward the changes, however, MPs went close to defeating him over a demand that judges should also be responsible for making the less severe forms of control order. These include electronic tagging surveillance, curfews and bans on suspects using mobile telephones and the internet.
It was one of the Government’s narrowest scrapes since 1997. Mr Clarke had angered all parties by stating that the changes would be made in the Lords, where the Bill goes today, rather than in the Commons. In a shambolic day, MPs called for the Commons to be suspended to allow time for Mr Clarke to lay amendments and the Opposition offered one of their own debating days to give more time for consideration. Mr Clarke is now almost certain to have to concede in the Lords on the issue on which he was almost defeated last night.
The call for judges to approve all control orders, proposed by the Labour backbencher Win Griffiths with cross-party support, was defeated by 267 votes to 253.
Under Mr Clarke’s revised plans the police would be given powers to arrest and detain the suspects in order to prevent them disappearing while the order was being obtained. The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats said last night that he had not gone far enough, setting the stage for the battle to continue in the Lords today.
David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, said that Mr Clarke’s move still left a politician rather than a judge making judgments on areas such as tagging and stopping people using their telephones. He added: “It is quite clear that when this Bill gets to the Lords there will be a lot of amendment to it.”
Mr Clarke was on his feet for 90 minutes as he battled with all-comers in an increasingly tetchy House. In a substantial climbdown he said that his new procedure for the more severe control orders would be for the Home Secretary to apply to the High Court for a control order, for the application to be heard within 24 to 48 hours and for the judge to look at the material on which the application was based and decide if there was a prima facie case for an order.
The order would then be referred to the full court, where a special advocate would represent the interests of the suspect in closed sessions.
Mr Clarke also announced that to cover an emergency where ministers needed to stop a suspect disappearing while the application was being dealt with, the police would be able to hold them pending the judge’s decision.
In chaotic Commons scenes, however, he discovered that his concessions had made his opponents angrier than before and there were calls for the House to be suspended. He had used a letter to Mr Davis to set out his change of heart. He ordered that copies should be placed in the Commons library so that all MPs would have knowledge of his intentions before he spoke in the debate, but MPs saw the letters only as the debate was starting, prompting many to complain that because Mr Clarke was making the changes in the Lords later this week the Commons proceedings were a waste of time.
Mr Clarke was under pressure to extend the concessions over house arrest to the other forms of control orders, making them subject to judicial approval. MPs also pointed out that even under the changes the suspects would not be told of the evidence against them.
Mr Clarke and Tony Blair had previously insisted that only the Home Secretary should have the power to execute the most extreme house arrest control orders, which would involve the Government applying for an exemption from the European Convention on Human Rights.
The Home Secretary began by apologising to the House if he had erred by writing the letter to Mr Davis. He said that he had hoped that by writing it he was helping MPs to avoid wasting debating time. “Since the second reading debate we had last Thursday, I have been considering as fully as I can many of the issues from all sides of the House,” he said. “The choice I faced was to respond to the debate on the first group of amendments, summing up the conclusion I had come to at that point, or to seek to try and help the House by letting that position become clear at an earlier stage.”
Dominic Grieve, the Shadow Attorney-General, said that control orders were “repellent and disgusting”. They were “at worst a system of executive detention and at best a parallel system of justice based on secrecy, the inability of a defendant to be given the full facts that he has to answer and a person being subject to a whole variety of constraints that would previously have been totally unknown in our law”, he said.
Robin Cook, the former Foreign Secretary, welcomed the concession but said that powers such as house arrest could be counterproductive in the fight against terrorism. Internment in Northern Ireland was abolished not because of civil liberty concerns but because it provoked sympathy for the IRA, he pointed out.
Mark Oaten, for the Liberal Democrats, welcomed what he called Mr Clarke’s fundamental leap on the issue but said that his party would still be voting against the measures. He asked at what point consideration would be given to prosecution in the process and said that this must be specified in the Bill.
He added: “It is not satisfactory that it is still the Government’s intention to have individuals not being able to see the evidence against them. There must be a way . . . which would allow a defendant to at least be able to take on and argue about matters of fact in these particular cases.”
Towards the end of his speech, Mr Clarke’s patience snapped and he protested at being patronised by lawyers in the Commons. Mr Grieve had intervened to accuse him of failing to understand the principle at stake. Mr Clarke snapped: “I have had decades of my life being patronised by lawyers and I do not appreciate it.”
The Government had a more comfortable majority of 53 as MPs gave the Bill a third reading.
