Hansard

Is it two minutes, Presiding Officer? Thank you for calling me.

I have campaigned on this issue for a decade, because the spy cops scandal was one of the great policing scandals of our time. More than 1,000 social justice groups such as the Stephen Lawrence campaign, involving MPs, trade unions and environmental activists, were infiltrated by agents of the state, some using the identity of dead children and some having intimate relationships with women who bore their children while they were living under an assumed identity.

The bill seeks to introduce a power to provide officers and agents with advance, prospective immunity from prosecution for criminal acts up to and including murder, with no limit on that power. Such immunity from prosecution goes to the very heart of our legal system—no longer will every citizen be equal before the law. We know the scandals that have emerged under the current system, in which there is no immunity from prosecution. Imagine the sort of abuses that would happen if there was full immunity from prosecution. That would be a departure from legal norms and another human rights scandal waiting to happen.

Scotland has its own legal system, and, if the Scottish Government and the Parliament want to legislate on the subject, we should debate and scrutinise such legislation. Let us not accept the proposal that Priti Patel or any other Home Secretary could authorise an order under the bill to give MI5, MI6, police officers, the Gambling Commission, the Food Standards Agency or the officers of many other bodies carte blanche immunity from prosecution for crimes committed in the name of the state.

No one argues that undercover police officers’ work is not important in dealing with terrorism, organised crime or drugs, but the bill is not the way to address the matter. Liam Kerr seems to want people to be given immunity for actions up to murder, which would be regarded as lawful. That would be extraordinary. As a campaigner on the issue, I ask anyone to read the testimonies of victims who have come before the undercover policing inquiry and then ask themselves whether they are doing the right thing in rejecting the LCM and supporting the bill.

Prior approval of immunity would not be a safeguard. We should introduce not total criminal and civil immunity but a public interest defence that can be considered before any court proceedings—that is the way to go. Let us reject the bill, which is an affront to our democracy, to our legal system and to the Parliament, and introduce legislation that we can debate and discuss.