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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: I’m joined now from north London by the Liberal Democrat peer and former reviewer of Anti-Terror legislation, of course he is Lord Carlile, a very good morning to you Lord Carlile and first of all on the Data Communications Bill, I guess you would agree, have to agree with Simon Hughes on the fact that we don’t know whether it could have helped at all in preventing what we saw happen in Woolwich last week?

LORD CARLILE: I absolutely agree, we don’t know whether if that Bill had been enacted two years ago it would have prevented this incident. What we can certainly say is that it might have done and what we can absolutely say for certain is that if the Communications Data Bill, with the safeguards that were agreed in the last session of parliament, was introduced then it would be very likely to prevent some attacks of this kind in the future. The description of it as a Snoopers Charter is outrageously inaccurate and I fear that my good friend Simon Hughes whom I admire greatly, has been muddling up the politics of this and the evidence base which demands the enactment of this Bill or something like it.

DM: Don’t you feel it is just a very, very blunt instrument and there is scope for all kinds of abuses if this amount of data is held and it is held so indiscriminately?

LORD CARLILE: Well first of all it is a very sharp instrument and secondly there is nothing new about it. All the Bill tried to do was to update what is already being done day by day and throughout Europe. Internet service providers keep material of the kind that is required under this Bill in any event, they need it for billing. They keep it in different ways, company by company, they keep it for different times. The Communications Data Bill which has actually been under consideration for something like six years, standardises the way in which the material is kept, provides safeguards for examining it and most certainly does not allow random snooping. It’s a tool that is already used in the detection of serious crime, the product of it has been used in countless court cases up and down the country, it is being used every day of the week, it is extremely effective and it is not illiberal in the slightest.

DM: If you don’t mind, Simon Hughes is still here, I’d like to bring him back in here. Simon Hughes, listening to Lord Carlile there, it seems you are getting your knickers in a twist really about something you don’t need to.

SIMON HUGHES: Firstly I know Alex well and he has done very good work for us as a country as well as for the party on these issues. I would just say to him that the evidence base isn’t as clear as I think he would argue it is and I’m not confusing the politics and the evidence base, I start from a political position of course which is that you maximise freedoms and you minimise restrictions on freedoms but then you look at the evidence and you listen to the case put and the evidence given to the committee that looked at the draft bill, across the parties, the evidence given by the industry, the evidence from other countries, has not come out in favour of all the proposals that were in the Bill and that’s why the government has proceeded in a measured way and one of the major proposals is going to be implemented this year and obviously everything else will be kept under review.

DM: Thank you for your brevity on that. I want to go back to Lord Carlile because there are other things I want to ask him about but just on that, Lord Carlile, perhaps the Bill needs reconfiguring and it could come back and could get broad support.

LORD CARLILE: Well I am all in favour of it being re-examined as long as it is brought back. The evidence base was not as Simon Hughes suggested, with great respect the evidence base was founded on the evidence available to the security services and the police, not all of which for perfectly obvious reasons was deployed to Members of Parliament, is strong. That is why the heads of the security services and the police, that is why as I understand it the Home Secretary and I believe the Prime Minister, are broadly in favour of the Communications Data Bill. The reason it was vetoed, as Nick Clegg the leader of my party and Simon knows very well, was purely political because of demands from inside the Liberal Democrats. I believe those demands were entirely politically based and not founded on any evidence.

DM: What’s your view, Lord Carlile, on the so-called preachers of hate and those who pedal some of these extreme and indeed violent views, is there anything legally we can do about that, anything further?

LORD CARLILE: I certainly think it would be wrong to have a knee-jerk reaction and start introducing draconian new laws about what people can say, however I believe there is plenty of law in existence that enables one to examine the activities of some of these preachers who appear to have supported political and Islamist violence. My call therefore is for the police and in due course the Crown Prosecution Service, to look with renewed vigour and rigour at investigations into these fomenting preachers.

DM: And from your knowledge, lastly, of those that are trying to protect us, of course we never get headlines saying nothing happened because the security services did so well in their protective blanket they are throwing around us, I mean from your knowledge is the terror threat growing or have the security services managed to nullify so much of it now that incidents such that we see on the streets on Woolwich last week, they are the kind of things that occur?

LORD CARLILE: The terrorist threat remains roughly the same as it was a couple of years ago. The authorities have done extremely well, we know for example that in 2006 they foiled an airline plot what could have resulted in the deaths of two to three thousand people. However we must be eternally vigilant. Until Woolwich a degree of complacency had been creeping into political thought that terrorism need not worry us as much as it did and there is a lesson here for government and the security services. In my view they have been poor on narrative, it is very important that they should tell the public the narrative. By that I mean the story of what they have been able to deal with by prevention and protection. Obviously they can’t give away every secret but I think that the public and politicians are entitled to know more on a month by month basis of the activity of the control authorities, the police and the security services, in dealing with possible terrorism.

DM: Great to talk to you Lord Carlile, thank you very much indeed for your thoughts.