Why I will return to the Lords to close Britain’s terror glorification loophole

Last night I stood in the House of Lords to move Amendment 450 to the Crime and Policing Bill. I did so because the United Kingdom has reached a dangerous point: terrorism can be publicly praised, romanticised and sanitised, while the law struggles to respond. That is not a theoretical concern. It is a lived reality for victims, and a growing risk for our society.

For twenty years we have had an offence of “glorification of terrorism” on the statute book. In practice, it is close to toothless. Under Section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2006, prosecutors must prove not only that terrorism was praised, but that the person doing so intended others to emulate it. That evidential hurdle is so high that the offence is rarely used. In Northern Ireland, to my knowledge, there have been no prosecutions under it at all. Across England and Wales, the numbers remain strikingly low.

The result is a widening gap between what the public instinctively understands to be harmful and what the law is prepared to confront. Terrorist organisations and their actions can be lauded in public, provided the speaker avoids an explicit call to copy them. That distinction may satisfy a legal purist, but it bears little resemblance to how radicalisation actually works.

Terrorism is sustained not only by weapons and finance, but by narrative. It thrives on myth-making: turning murderers into martyrs, intimidation into “resistance”, and victims into inconvenient footnotes. I know this because I lived through it. I grew up in a society where bombs, shootings and threats were part of daily life. I know what it means to hear slogans and chants that reduce decades of murder and fear to something ironic or “cultural”. There is nothing cultural about terrorism, and nothing harmless about its glorification.

That is why I argued last night that glorification itself is the harm. It retraumatises victims and their families, reopening wounds that never truly heal. It also sends a clear message to younger generations, many of whom have no lived experience of terrorism, that violence can be noble, fashionable or justified. We see the consequences of this today in the open praise for proscribed organisations such as Hamas and Hezbollah on Britain’s streets, often by people who know little about their ideology or brutality but are drawn in by slogans and symbols.

The debate in the Lords was wide-ranging and, at times, deeply moving. Many colleagues, particularly those from Northern Ireland, spoke from painful personal experience about the damage done when terrorism is lionised. Others rightly raised concerns about freedom of expression and the risk of drawing the law too broadly, especially in relation to historical conflicts.

I listened carefully to those concerns. Some peers worried that removing the existing “emulation” test could risk criminalising commentary on events long past, or on movements that history has judged differently. The Government also relied on the view of the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, who has argued that there is no legislative gap and that existing offences are sufficient.

In light of those points, I chose not to press Amendment 450 to a vote at Committee stage. That decision should not be mistaken for retreat. It was a recognition that if Parliament is to act, it must do so with precision as well as conviction.

I therefore intend to bring the amendment back at Report stage in a revised and more tightly drawn form. In particular, I will make explicit that it applies to the glorification of current proscribed terrorist organisations. This addresses fears about historical overreach while preserving the core principle that praising terrorist violence today—here and now—is dangerous and wrong.

This is not about stifling debate, political dissent or historical inquiry. There is a vital difference between explaining terrorism and celebrating it. No democratic society should be comfortable with the latter. Laws that are theoretically available but practically unusable erode public confidence and deepen the sense among victims that the system is unwilling to confront their pain.

Defeating terrorism requires more than intelligence operations and policing. It requires moral clarity. Parliament should be capable of saying, without equivocation, that terrorism was wrong, is wrong and will always be wrong—and that glorifying it has no place in our public life. That is why I will return to the Lords with an amended proposal, and why I hope colleagues across the House will be prepared to meet this moment with the seriousness it demands

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