David Davis
MP for Goole and Pocklington · Conservative · United Kingdom
“On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. May I start by congratulating my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne) on putting a Bill in front of the House that has support from literally everybody in the Chamber?”
“The Post Office Horizon scandal highlighted the institutional instinct to find a convenient scapegoat. Innocent people paid the price, while the institution sought to protect itself. If the Thirlwall inquiry asks too narrow a set of questions, systemic NHS failures will go unexamined.”
“Last month’s sentencing of Nicola Sturgeon’s husband exposed the real reasons behind the Scottish Government’s persecution of Alex Salmond. From 2010 to 2022, Peter Murrell abused his position to embezzle almost £500,000 from the SNP to buy luxury items. He used SNP money to buy a £33,000 Volkswagen Golf.”
“The consultants also reported that in the two months since the change infants have been sick but recovered as expected.” The report highlighted deficiencies in staffing levels, leadership and communication, but, in the trial, it was not shown to the jury—they knew nothing of it.”
“One of the nurses let go later described it as “the decimation of the Nursing and Midwifery service”, adding that “eight registered nurses...were replaced with nursery nurses...unqualified staff are replacing qualified staff”.”
“There was little space, cots and incubators were stored in corridors, and mothers struggled to find somewhere to breastfeed their babies. Susan Gilby, the hospital’s chief executive between 2018 and 2022, later described the unit as “dark, dingy and cramped”, providing a “less than ideal” environment to work in.”
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“There will now be an exemption for ceramics, but frankly there are many other businesses—they employ about 600,000 people—in the energy-intensive industries. We need to address that. The previous Government were very happy to deliver golden rules of one sort or another. I would like to suggest a rule for us on environmental and energy policy: we should not introduce any environmental policy that is not matched by our European colleagues. That would ensure that we do not do ourselves huge harm. Let me move on to infrastructure. The hon. Member for East Antrim made a perfectly sensible point about broadband, and I agree with him. What I do not want to see is massive expenditure for its own sake in the expectation or hope that that will simply generate employment by itself. The Japanese experiment demonstrates that that does not work.”
“The Germans effectively removed employment law for companies with fewer than 10 employees and created mini-jobs and other mechanisms to reduce the bureaucracy and legislation surrounding employment. That is massively important. It is one very effective way of creating new employment, and it is something we should undertake as dramatically as we can. Another item that was raised earlier—the hon. Member for East Antrim raised it with respect to Northern Ireland alone—was the question of carbon tax and carbon floors. In the next month or so, the changes that are being introduced will give us a disadvantage of £10 a tonne, and not against China or India, but against Germany, Holland and France. We will see a transfer of heavy industry from this country to Europe.”
“At 28%, we are collecting much less money than we would if it was somewhere between 15% and 20%. There is a series of other taxes, including corporation tax, on which action could be taken. Again, the examples to look to are Canada, Sweden and Germany. The third key element, which we did not hear much about from the Chancellor today—perhaps we have not heard much because we are yet to go through the detail of the Budget—is deregulation. The most successful recovery in Europe in the past decade was Germany’s. The Germans took it upon themselves to dramatically deregulate their employment market for small companies. That is key, because small companies are the biggest employment creator in the economy, bar none.”
“One of the critical drivers of competitiveness is tax policy. I wholeheartedly welcome the actions announced today on corporation tax and national insurance, although I would like them to go further. The simple truth is that expensive, complex and high levels of tax returns are very damaging to a country’s economic competitiveness. We should be looking hard at the tax categories that are most responsive to lower rates. We have heard today, even from the Labour Benches, about a couple of measures—on beer, I think—that will deliver more money for the Exchequer, not less, so even Labour Members recognise dynamic tax strategy. We certainly want to see lower national insurance contributions for employers. I would like to see the employment allowance scheme that we put together extended considerably. Capital gains tax must come down.”
“The first is straightforward: the Chancellor is absolutely right not to hesitate or flinch in the deficit reduction programme. That is absolutely essential. Canada, Germany and Sweden, which are all successful examples—Japan is not—managed their deficit reduction unflinchingly, and in all of them it delivered 3% plus rates of growth within a few years. Indeed, Canada had the fastest growing economy in the G8 when it carried through. The simple fact is that, even with the deficit reduction programme, we will be £600 billion more indebted at the end of this Parliament than we were at the beginning, and that is a devil of a burden for any country to carry. Clearly we cannot hesitate on deficit reduction. The second key element is the one on which I and my right hon. Friends on the Treasury Bench might have a difference of view.”
“In effect, if 1% is taken off the growth rate, the OBR’s rule of thumb says that within a year or so that adds £10 billion to the deficit every year thereafter—not once, but every year thereafter. So growth is fundamental to the central fiscal policy as well. While we are talking about growth, we have had much talk about double and triple-dip recessions, but judging by the employment numbers, we have not had real recessions; we have had bouncing around zero to 1% growth, and that will show up when the numbers are corrected, as will be done in a few years. There are six key elements to ensuring the economy’s competitiveness, and they are all pretty straightforward. I agree with what the Government are doing on some of them, but on others I think that they should go further.”
“I will come back to the detail in a minute, but the point I am making—it is a serious point—is that we can do what Keynes said and pay someone to dig a hole and then pay someone else to fill it in, and that creates employment. So long as we avoid that and talk about the real value, we are on the same side. I will come back to the real value issue in a moment. The problem with actions to promote competitiveness is that they are not always politically popular. Very often, they are politically unpopular, and I will elaborate on that in a second. The other element about growth—everyone in the Chamber today agrees that growth is necessary—is that it is also important to the deficit reduction policy.”
“I apologise for intervening so early in the right hon. Gentleman’s speech. David Anderson used the word “small” in those comments, but the Government’s impact assessment indicated that there will be about 15 of these cases a year. We should therefore not underestimate exactly what we are talking about.”
“Given the genesis of the Bill, some of the biggest leaks relate to our biggest ally, whether it is Pentagon papers four years ago or, only two months ago, what sounds from the British papers to be the putting at risk of the life of an Anglo-Saudi agent whom it used in one of its operations and then talked about afterwards. Nobody, certainly not I, would challenge the right of the agencies to preserve their own proper security—I stress “proper security”.”
“It is a particular pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears). Her speech was well thought through and persuasive. We do not always agree on these issues, but on one aspect she persuaded me, and I shall say in a minute what that was. In this area of argument, which goes right to the heart of what makes British justice special and right to the heart of our national security, we are all inclined sometimes to put things rather too heavily in black and white. I have every sympathy with the agencies that are trying to preserve their own security. They have plenty of threats: past agencies, the David Shaylers, the Richard Tomlinsons, leaking their information, even Ministers—I remember that Ted Rowlands once in the House gave away some Crown jewels—and most ironically of all, Washington.”
“As one of the two junior Ministers who took the Secret Intelligence Service Bill through the House and asked the then head of MI6 whether he really meant this, I can take his point. But the simple truth is that we have to live up to those standards of accountability, and that means open justice wherever we can have it. One of the interesting divides that has taken place in all this is almost a generational one. We have had closed material procedures only since—”
“Of course there can be simple blocking; of course, in addition, there can be redaction; of course there can be circles of confidentiality; of course there can be in-camera hearings. The Minister without Portfolio rather dismissively said that this is the system that gave us arms to Iraq. Even in that process, which involved at least one ex-Minister and one Minister in the House today, early on in the development of PII we saw one category of certificate refused, one category accepted and one category heavily redacted. That gave the court enough information to make Alan Clark face the interrogation in which he came out with those famous words “economical with the actualité”, which collapsed the case because the prosecution recommended an acquittal on the basis of the evidence.”
“Yes, 1997; for only a decade or two. A generation of special advocates have taken a strong stance on this, and they have taken a different stance from everybody else because they have experienced both sorts of procedure. Nearly all of them have personally understood the closed material procedure and the PII procedure, and most of them know both procedures inside out. One of the things they argue—a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Mr Tyrie) in his brilliant speech, every word of which I agreed with—is that PII has been misrepresented. Any special advocate will say that PII is a much more complex, judge-created, judge-evolved process than is being represented.”
“The hon. Lady is of course right, but let me come to the point that I was driving towards, which is that none of the systems that we are talking about is perfect. PII clearly has weaknesses. Everyone who has spoken has said something to that effect, and the hon. Lady was particularly correct about that; there are weaknesses to PII. We should not accept that that is the perfect outcome either.”
“I am cognisant of the point made by the Minister without Portfolio. We do not want a Minister to be pinned down for a year working on one PII. I am sure—indeed, I know from experience—that some of the Guantanamo cases are incredibly complicated and involve very many documents. I do not think it is beyond the ken of the House to achieve that. I will support the Opposition’s amendment today, although I am open to argument if we can find better wording to get what we are trying for. I am talking about a hierarchy, a priority—first, open hearings; then the PII process, if that is appropriate; if it is not, CMPs in the final analysis. I agree with my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) that the process should be more open than it currently is.”
“When the defendant heard it, he said, “I’m sorry, but I left after about five minutes.” People listened carefully and could hear the door opening and closing as he went. So a piece of evidence that appeared to be incredibly incriminating became not incriminating at all. David Anderson put a similar point to the Lords Committee when he was giving evidence. The issue of challenge is important; it is critical to our judicial process—completely different from any other judicial process around the world. The challenge is vital. Without it, the judicial process is not operating properly. That is why we have to take on board what the special advocates say and effectively build it into the structure of the Bill—to create, as it were, a hierarchy. We have to go through that thought process.”
“I do not dispute any of that; that is where I am coming to with respect to the attitude of the special advocates. Clearly, of the two they do not like CMPs, for reasons on which I am about to elaborate. That means not that CMPs should be impossible to use, but that restriction should be the order of the day. The best outline of the weakness of closed material procedures came from Lord Justice Kerr, who effectively said—I am now desperately paraphrasing—that unchallenged evidence can be “misleading”, which was the word he used. That came up any number of times during the Lords debate from a number of lawyers. Helena Kennedy, for example, cited a case in which a tape recording of a conversation that appeared to incriminate a defendant was played in court.”
“Mr Justice Newman said the ‘administration of justice’ had been put at risk in the trial of Algerian Abu Doha and a suspect known as MK…Both sets of contradictory evidence had come from MI5.” There had been a false passport that was claimed to have been used by two different people in two different places at the same moment on the same day—clearly impossible. That became apparent only because the same barrister was acting as a special advocate in each case. The problem is that there was no process of challenge; if there had been, the contention would have been denied and struck out. As it was, both cases were struck down because they were clearly implausible. The process of challenge is vital. For that reason, I am entirely with what the Joint Committee on Human Rights wants—gisting, if it is possible.”
“All right, let me give the right hon. Gentleman an example. The question is whether or not there can be a challenge; if the evidence can be in court, it should be capable of being challenged. There is an example that goes back to 2006 relating to the current CMPs used in the Special Immigration Appeals Commission. I shall read from the Press Association release: “A judge in a secret hearing has criticised the Home Office over contradictory MI5 intelligence in the trial of two terrorism suspects. The intelligence only came to light because—by chance—the same barrister was acting in both cases.”
“Forgive me, but I am just coming to an end. The right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles was persuasive in arguing that if there is to be some sort of opt-out on gisting if things are really serious, only the judge should decide that. I take that point, and it is a good argument. There should be proper, explicit judicial balance in the decision to go to a CMP that takes into account all the interests of justice, and not just national security. There should be the argument of strict necessity; that is what I mean by the hierarchy. On that basis, the House could come to a conclusion in which we effectively have the best of all worlds.”
“On exactly that point, my right hon. and learned Friend—and he is my friend—said that these proceedings were created under the Labour Government. They were, and there are now 69 special advocates, 32 of whom are experienced in closed material procedures. The vast majority of them—nearly all of them—oppose the Bill as they think PII works better than the procedure they have been operating for the past few years. Why does he think that is?”
“One reason why it is rare is that such things are exposed and deterred by an open and transparent system of justice—the whole system of justice, including the criminal judicial system, the inquest system and the civil courts system. Measures in the Bill create the power to take parts of that civil judicial system not just out of the public domain —that already happens in some ways—but completely out of the normal judicial testing procedure. Under the Bill, evidence can be presented by the Government that the other side and their defence lawyers cannot see. That evidence cannot be tested, and therefore may be wholly wrong and misleading, which undermines the very thing that makes our system work.”
“It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Aberavon (Dr Francis), whose Committee—the Joint Committee on Human Rights—produced the best guide to the Government’s proposals and their weaknesses, and to the threats they pose to our current civil liberties. In recent months, the Prime Minister rightly received plaudits for how he handled the apology for the Bloody Sunday massacre and the Finucane murder. He did so with great openness and sensitivity. Both inquiries exposed unlawful killing, either directly or indirectly, by agents of the state, and subsequent cover-ups. Thankfully, that sort of thing is extraordinarily rare in the UK.”
“A defence lawyer has the role of challenging the evidence, but I will come back to the right hon. Gentleman’s point later. The Bill is, in the words of Lord David Pannick, a leading barrister—indeed, he is the Government’s leading barrister of choice—“unnecessary, unfair and unbalanced”. He said it is unnecessary because we already have the public interest immunity system.”
“Exactly—or not exactly, in the context of this debate. Much depends on how the Government decide to respond to amendments made in the Lords.”
“All those operations are possible under the PII system, which has served British justice well for decades, not just against the current threat of terrorism, but against the Soviet threat, which in many ways was much more professional, and the previous Irish terrorist threat. The proof of the PII system is that no Government, including this one, can point to a single court judgment that has undermined national security—not one judgment.”
“If my right hon. and learned Friend will forgive me, I have run out of injury time. If a case involves sensitive information, the Secretary of State asks the judge’s permission to keep documents away from the court. The judge examines the evidence and makes a decision that balances national security with the interests of justice. Under the PII system, evidence can be shown in an edited form, and witnesses, whether spies or special forces or whoever, can speak from behind screens. Suspects can be given the gist of the case against them, and the court can sit in open session or in camera.”
“That is why Supreme Court Justice Lord Kerr, former Government prosecutor in Northern Ireland during the troubles, subsequently Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, said: “It would be, at a stroke, the deliberate forfeiture of a fundamental right which has been established for more than three centuries.” The Justice and Security Bill is being sold as a fair way to protect our national security and justice. It does neither.”
“They were both supposed to have used the same passport on the same day, which was clearly not possible. It was only by lucky coincidence that the same special advocate, out of approximately 70, was handling both cases. He recognised the evidence and was able to point out that this was false. I do not believe that it was an intentional misleading of the court by the agencies; I think it was simply a mistake. However, it is a matter of public record and the special advocate concerned is now a judge. That demonstrates how easily the CMP can fail miserably in critical issues of justice.”
“More cases would be heard in secret, with no defence lawyers, victims, press or public present to challenge or report what transpired. Evidence heard in secret cannot be easily challenged, and we need to address that. Inconsistencies cannot be spotted and witnesses cannot be properly cross-examined. Under these conditions, evidence may not be worth the paper it is written on. Let me give the House another example of how this system can fail. A few years ago, there was a control order case, under the previous Government, where the suspect was accused of entering Britain at a specific date and time using a fake passport, which was part of the evidence. Shortly afterwards, exactly the same evidence, including the same fake passport, was used against a different suspect in another, totally unrelated case.”
“The information posed no threat to any agents, no threat to any techniques, and no threat to any British national interest and yet that was one of the redactions. The only negative effect of showing it in court, of course, was the possible political embarrassment that we may not have met our duties under international law and under the rules of war in protecting a prisoner who was technically under our command. This is exactly the sort of public interest information that could be concealed if the Bill became law. With closed material procedures enshrined in law, the intelligence agencies would inevitably be tempted to protest that any information relating to their activities was “sensitive”. We have seen that before in the Binyam Mohamed case.”
“The court did not allow the redaction of the secret UK eyes only document, so we now have both the redacted and unredacted copies in the public domain. We can, therefore, see what was redacted, supposedly for security reasons. Paragraph 20 talks about a visit to this prisoner by British embassy staff and Royal Military Police. It states: “The detainee showed the visit party...some of the injuries which he claimed were made as a result of being beaten several times with steel rods to the areas of his legs and feet which he claims left him unable to stand afterwards. Photographs of some of the alleged injuries are also annexed.” Where the security interest of the British state is in redacting that, I do not know. It was absolutely material to the case in front of the court on Serdar Mohammed.”
“This issue of exposure of state misdemeanour in the courts, therefore, is still very current indeed. It is worth looking at an example of how the state currently uses closed material procedure when it is able. As luck would have it, we have a topical case right now—the case of Serdar Mohammed. Two weeks ago, a British court heard allegations that a suspected Taliban terrorist, captured by UK forces, was tortured by Afghan security services. A secret document was presented to the court in redacted form, the way it would have been in a closed material procedure. Indeed, the document was in the Maya Evans evidence case that my right hon. and learned Friend the Minister without Portfolio referred to earlier.”
“I even include in that the Intelligence and Security Committee, good job though it does; an open court is even more important than that. Many of the Government misdemeanours I have just mentioned have been and gone—inquests held and claims settled. However, the problem of Governments using the rhetoric of national security as a shield for politically embarrassing information has not gone away. In recent years, we have seen allegations of Government complicity in torture and extraordinary rendition. We have seen Gaddafi’s political opponents seized and handed back to the Libyan dictator to face imprisonment and torture—the case that was settled last week. I suspect we will be involved in the use of drones, which have killed scores of innocent people, because of intelligence.”
“It said that if evidence was not heard in secret then it might have to release information from top secret intelligence files. No such thing happened. Instead, we learned a great deal about what happened on 7/7. We learned about failings in operations, data handling and management—all perfectly proper things for the British public to know, and not a single failure of security or intelligence. As the right hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins) said, Dame Justice Hallett ran the inquest very well indeed, as we expect our security-experienced judges to do. That balance was managed nearly perfectly. There is no doubt that this sort of important information about the scrutiny of the state is far more likely to come out in an open court of law than by any other means.”
“It is the view of almost all the special advocates, the lawyers who make closed material procedures work and understand the procedure better than anyone else—indeed, I would argue that they are the only people who understand both the strengths and the weaknesses of the procedure they operate. It is the view of Lord Pannick, as I said, and the view of the former Director of Public Prosecutions, Lord Macdonald, who had a formidable record of prosecution in terrorist cases in his time as DPP. The Government, the security agencies and their proxies say the opposite, just as they did—in fact, we had the reference earlier—when the 7/7 inquest was proposed. What did MI5 say? It said that holding the inquest in public would amount to “handing over the keys” to its headquarters.”
“PII balances the demands of national security and justice—that is exactly what it does. I do not want to be distracted for too long, but I discussed this at some length with Lord Pannick, whom my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) mentioned, with a number of lawyers who operate in this system all the time—not just as an aside or even as criminal lawyers, but all the time—and with the special advocates. This is not just the view of some civil liberties extremists, as the Minister without Portfolio tries to imply. It is the view of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which is unpersuaded —the word it used—that the existing law is not up to the task.”
“The right hon. Lady might not be aware, but the greatest release of intelligence information in history prior to WikiLeaks came in the Pentagon papers. In that case, the American Government brought the control principle before their courts, and they were turned down and vast amounts of data provided by foreign countries were released into the public domain—and that was not the last time; it has happened several times since. Indeed, evidence to the Binyam Mohamed trial stated that the US understood the issues about control because the courts in the states were independent.”
“Therefore, apart from traducing a large number of Members of this House, the Home Secretary is undermining the work of that Committee. Has she asked to come to the House to explain herself, and if not, what can you do to protect us, Mr Speaker?”
“On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I raise this point of order with you in respect of your duty of defending the interests and rights of Back Benchers and Committees in this House. This morning in an interview in The Sun newspaper, the Home Secretary, who I see is on the Treasury Bench, said the following about the Communications Data Bill: “Criminals, terrorists and paedophiles will want MPs to vote against this bill. Victims of crime, police and the public will want them to vote for it. It’s a question of whose side you’re on.” She also said: “Anybody who is against this bill is putting politics before people’s lives.” A Joint Committee of this House and the other House is meeting at present to pass comment on this Bill.”
“The right hon. and learned Lady has a strong and honourable history on this matter. Earlier this year, she spoke to the Oxford convention and announced she was firmly in favour of press freedom. She said: “Because the press are now in the dock, it looks like special pleading from a vested interest when they make the case for press freedom. That’s why it is all the more important that politicians must insist on the freedom of the press.” What has changed?”
“May I for one welcome wholeheartedly the Prime Minister’s caution about using statute in this matter? I remind him that it was not a policeman, a regulator or even a judge who highlighted the hacking scandal; it was a member of our free press. As such, one of our highest priorities is to ensure that whatever we do preserves the independence and freedom of our press from Government intervention, because that is the best bastion of our freedoms.”
“I commend my hon. Friend on his compelling analysis. Listening to him reminded me of something that my mother—my single mother—said about 40 years ago. She used an old phrase, “When money troubles come in the door, love goes out the window”, which is a good measure of the stresses that are put on families by financial pressures. Does he agree that there is no more important time than now for this issue, when the least well-off in our society are facing job and cost pressures as never before, which will put pressures on marriage as never before?”
“As the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) has just demonstrated, this is a non-partisan, parliamentary issue—a matter of debate across the House. In that context, I congratulate my right hon. Friend on doing exactly the right thing in the Bill and handing the decision back to Parliament. I am sure, given the debate that the right hon. Gentleman and I secured some time ago, that the House will effectively decide on the status quo, but that is for the House to decide. If that is what the House decides, does he accept that it will set a precedent, and that every time the European Court goes beyond the remit set by the treaty, to which we did sign up, Parliament will reserve the right to correct it and put things back into proper law?”
“Finally, it is time we stopped asking our judicial authorities to act with one hand tied behind their back, and gave them the right to operate the law as it should be operated—with full knowledge of, and full insight into, the issues they have to resolve for us.”
“As a result, his family is in a permanent state of grief, which will never be allayed by a judicial inquiry. If we do not put this right, the family of Mark Duggan and his community will be in the same position. It is time to put this matter right, and time we allowed these communities, families and people to know the truth, whatever the truth may be. It is also time that we gave the wider national community the enhanced security that would arise from a reform of the law, and the added protection that intercept evidence gives them—the ability to prosecute and convict serious criminals and terrorists.”
“Evidence was not forced into the public domain, because it had already been destroyed. The Finnish Government took it on the chin and changed the basis for treatment pretty much straight away by introducing a judge to decide the process. That is fine. That Government have continued to use intercept. Since then, nothing has happened in Britain. As a result, the inquest over Azelle Rodney has been disallowed, and we now have a judicial inquiry. To remind Members of what happened to Azelle Rodney, he was shot with an assault rifle from a range of only 15 metres about half a dozen times. He died. Guns were found in the car he was in, so there might well have been good reason for the action taken, but we will never know because of this foolish and unwise restriction.”
“There are terrorists in prison today who would not be in prison without intercept. That is true in every country from America to Australia. The previous Government saw this problem as a serious handicap to our system—I give them that credit; I think they were open-minded about this—and set up the Chilcot Privy Council review of intercept evidence, which recommended careful reform of the law to allow the use of such evidence in court. I have some quibbles with it, but I think it is a pretty good report generally. That decision was then derailed by the Government’s and agencies’ over-interpretation of a case, Natunen v. Finland, in which the European Court on Human Rights rebuked the Finnish Government for destroying exculpatory intercept evidence. The ECHR was right to rebuke the Finnish Government on that.”
“and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Stephen Phillips)—previous heads of the Met, previous incumbents of Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary and a whole series of people who have been up close and personal with these issues. All of them want to use such information in court. I take their opinion with at least as much seriousness as I take the opinion of currently operating agencies which might be embarrassed about coming out into the public domain. These experts, moreover, point to fact that every major country uses such evidence without risk. It allows serious terrorists and criminals to be apprehended and convicted and, as has been intimated, the head of every single one of five mafia families in New York is now in prison. That would not be true without intercept.”
“If our criminals and terrorists want to know about this technique, they need only reach for that fierce weapon of a Google search. This is simply ridiculous; we are hiding things that everywhere else in the world are in open sight, and I do not believe that we have skills so much greater than those of our allies and contemporaries to justify protecting ours above and beyond theirs. In my opinion we can safely allow intercept evidence in court without jeopardising our intelligence-gathering techniques above and beyond where they are now. However, my opinion is as nothing in comparison with the learned judgments of the most eminent security commission in modern times, for a start, and of at least two previous Directors of Public Prosecution, not to mention past Attorneys-General—I was corrected on the language by my hon.”