Foreign Affairs Committee
Debate between Lord Austin of Dudley and Bill Wiggin
Ian Austin
The Labour party, as it is currently led, is making a vindictive attempt to boot me and the hon. Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes) off the Foreign Affairs Committee.
I want to correct one point that was made earlier: I am not a member of the Independent Group. If the hon. Member for North Herefordshire (Bill Wiggin) has based his calculations on over-representation, I am afraid that is a mistake.
Bill Wiggin
As I said very clearly, that would be true if those hon. Members were taken as a group. It is as a group of others that the representation is seen as.
Ian Austin
That is as may be, but I am not a member of the Independent Group; I am the independent MP for Dudley, standing up for the people of Dudley, and representing the whole of the House on the Foreign Affairs Committee, which is what members of Select Committees are elected to do.
As the Chair of the Liaison Committee pointed out in an article just this week,
“Select Committees have been strengthened”
since recent reforms
“which allowed their members to be elected by their fellow MPs—and Chairs by the whole House of Commons—rather than appointed by the patronage of party whips. As a result, members are more likely to have relevant experience and genuine interest in the work of their Committees”.
Of no one could that be said more truly than the hon. Member for Ilford South. As far as I am aware, there is no criticism of the way in which he or I have discharged our responsibilities on the Foreign Affairs Committee. He is a distinguished former Chair of the Committee, and before that he was the Labour party’s foreign policy expert. As I have seen in my short time on the Committee, and as Members in all parts of the House would agree, he has a more detailed knowledge of foreign policy issues, and greater contacts around the world, than anybody else in the House of Commons. Booting off the Committee somebody like that, who holds the Government to account, is a ridiculous decision. It flies in the face of how Select Committees are supposed to operate.
As for me, I was one of the people who instigated the Committee’s inquiries on Kurdistan. I was one of the MPs in this House who campaigned for years for the Magnitsky Act.