This speech was given to the London Liberal Democrats conference, 18 November 2006

Thinking back to when I first came to a London Region conference, the idea that it might be held in Liberal Democrat-run Camden and be addressed by a Lib Dem MP from Haringey, would have seemed very implausible!

It’s a tribute to how far we have come, that here we – and I – are.

And it’s not just in this part of North London. Across the country as a whole, there has never been a higher proportion of councillors who are Liberal Democrat councillors than there is now. We’re at an all time record high – both locally and in Westminster. Not bad, I say!

Turning from the present to the future, if there ever was any doubt before the Queen’s Speech, there’s no doubt now that the next year will see much of politics dominated, once again, by terrorism and civil liberties issues.

These are important issues across the whole country, but of course particularly pressing here in London, the scene of 7/7 but also home to a hugely – and wonderfully – diverse population.

Being a London MP, representing a highly diverse constituency – where the so-called ricin plot took place, the issues of terrorism and how to fight it often play on my mind, and that’s what I want to speak about this morning.

About how we can both tackle terrorism and preserve our civil liberties.

There is, so some people claim, a tension or even contradiction between the two. As the Daily Express put it, “It is absurd and dangerous to apply Queensbury rules to measures taken by the authorities … all that matters is success” – though they published that, not in response to any our recent terrorist outrages, but in the 1970s in response to the IRA’s bombings.

These words could however, so easily have been uttered in the last year or so – and indeed many of this Government’s comments are in truth little different. But have we really learnt so little since the 1970s?

For the reality is that the attitude of “we must get the evil-doers at all costs” resulted, in case after case, in evidence forged to suit and innocent people being fitted up. And of course when you jail the innocent you not only punish them wrongly, but it means you let the guilty off scot-free and, as an added bonus, your injustices make it easier for the terrorists to recruit support for their cause.

Hardly being tough on terrorism!

Over-blown rhetoric; abandoning civil liberties; dodgy evidence; abuses making it easier for terrorists to recruit support – sound at all familiar?

Sadly the current Labour Government seems far too often to go for curtailing civil liberties as the first option, not the last resort.

Let me give just one example. It’s one of the cases presented as part of the case for introducing detention without charge for 90 days without charge.

The reality was that the person was actually released before having even been held for the maximum time even under the existing rules. Not much of a case there!

The alternative to Labour’s disregard for civil liberties and the way to effectively tackle terrorism starts with recognising that it would be the perfect material for satirical black humour (if it weren’t so tragic) to so often here politicians say, in response to a terrorist outrage that is intending to provoke, “It’s outrageous. We will never given in to terrorists. Oh ok …we will be provoked then.”

And one of the things terrorists want is to get rid of liberal society. It’s their enemy.

So stripping away our freedoms is not fighting them – it is doing what they want.

And stripping away our freedoms, with ID cards and DNA databases, means pouring resources into keeping track of innocent people rather than tackling terrorists.

What would you rather millions of pounds and thousands of people were poured into? Looking for terrorists? Or keeping tabs on the innocent?

The alternative to Labour’s approach also means recognising that simply saying “terrorists are evil, their acts are inexcusable” doesn’t help understand where their support comes from – and without that understanding, the sources of its support cannot be tacked.

It is one of the standard cliché exchanges of our times:

“X is evil”
“But Y and Z help explain why X did it”
“Oh, you’re just a soft touch – X is evil and you’re just making excuses”

and so on and on.

The problem so often is that, yes – terrorists are evil, but no – not everyone who helps them is so irredeemable that we can’t imagine plausible circumstances under which they would not have helped.

Especially when we remember that “help” often includes behaviour such as turning a blind eye to what someone who knows someone who lives next to someone else is up to.

Terrorism gains strength from consent – explicit or implicit – from a wider circle of people.

Understanding what motivates people to turn a helping hand or to turn a blind eye is what is needed to cut the ground from under terrorists and make it harder for them to operate.

So, no – I don’t think any amount of alienation, poverty, discrimination or exclusion excuses murder, and I’m doubtful how many fewer terrorists murderers there would be if all those were tackled (after all, those in the UK in recent times have been rather more middle class) – but I am sure that those same terrorist murderers find it easier to operate when they are surrounded by people who do suffer from alienation, from poverty and from discrimination.

We need to look to encourage moderates in our Muslim communities, such as by supporting the drives to have more preaching done in English.

We should also recognise that we live in a world of international terrorism and easy communication – the policies of making it easier to deport people simply shift alleged trouble-makers to another location. What an odd way to fight an international war against international terrorism … to say the answer is simply to shuffle terrorists from one country to another via deportation.

And then the next step is to be willing to take on terrorists – especially Muslim extremists – on their own rhetorical terms and on their own ideological ground.

One of the recruiting drives of Al Quaeda and its ilk has been its calls to cleanse the world of corruption and immorality. Just the sort of corruption and immorality that results in governments, for example, turning a blind eye to drug cultivation in their territory because some are being bribed and others are ensuring a tax-rake gets taken off the drug payments.

Only – the government I am thinking of in this case is Al Quaeda’s own top favourite, the former Taliban regime in Afghanistan, with Osama Bin-Laden not just letting the drug trade take place under his nose – but benefiting from it too.

It shows a remarkable degree of ineptness that this actual record – sordid, corrupt and immoral – is so little known, giving those same extremists a free hit in claiming to be different, better and purer.

With terrorists and extremists attracting support for opposition to corruption, our own activities to tackle it need not just to publicise this hypocrisy, but also to fight corruption itself. Too often the UK drags its feet on international anti-corruption standards.

In conclusion – we must fight terrorism not by reducing our civil liberties but by reducing its sources of support.

So to the populist, tabloid-headline seeker, I simply say: talking about being tough whilst neglecting the causes of terrorism isn’t fighting terrorism, it’s making life easy for terrorists. And for the rest of us, let us remember John F Kennedy’s words – “Peace and freedom walk together.”