Chilcot Inquiry and Parliamentary Accountability

Debate between Lord Clarke of Nottingham and Alex Salmond

Wednesday 30th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe) (Con)]

As the right hon. Gentleman is aware, I agree with his description regarding the catastrophic nature of the invasion of Iraq. I agree with him that the former Prime Minister has a lot to answer for. He will no doubt continue to do so, although he was cleared by Chilcot of deliberate misbehaviour. Does the right hon. Gentleman not accept that if we turn post-Chilcot debates into an attempt to pursue and hound Tony Blair, the whole thing turns into a party political argument, with Labour Members trying to defend the position of their Government?

Will the right hon. Gentleman go on to address—he is entitled to go on for a bit—the most important matter: how do we ensure that the system of Cabinet government, handling intelligence, and taking on board and properly communicating defence advice to all members of the Cabinet and to Parliament, cannot be repeated, so we do not have another catastrophic foreign policy decision? By personalising the issue we will, if we are not careful, lose the point, which is whether we are satisfied that everything possible is being done to ensure that cannot happen again.

[Alex Salmond]

As the Chilcot report concluded, this was very much a personal campaign by the Prime Minister in doing things unbeknown to both Cabinet and certainly Parliament. I am going to address the point the right hon. and learned Gentleman makes, but the question of parliamentary accountability is in my estimation central to this case. Committees of this House have been examining the conduct of the processes of government. If he reads the minutes of the meeting that the Committee to which we intend to refer the question of parliamentary accountability held with the Cabinet Secretary, I do not think he will find much reassurance that there has been a tremendous advance in the process of government. The overwhelming impression is that a headstrong Prime Minister could still create a situation where sofa government drove a country into an illegal war. I suggest that parliamentary accountability and an examination of statements made to Parliament and public against the facts as we now know them would be a valuable additional sanction and tool in restraining future Prime Ministers from any such course of events.

Europe, Human Rights and Keeping People Safe at Home and Abroad

Debate between Lord Clarke of Nottingham and Alex Salmond

Tuesday 24th May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe) (Con)]

I propose to resist the temptation to give the House my arguments in favour of Britain remaining in the European Union. [Hon. Members: “No!”] Those Members of Parliament who find it irresistible to hear me on the subject made their way to the debate in Speaker’s House last night, where I debated against, among others, my old colleague Lord Tebbit. On this occasion, I agreed so completely with what has been said by both the Foreign Secretary and the shadow Foreign Secretary that I thought I might desist, particularly as over the next 30 days I shall be making many more speeches on the subject.

This afternoon, I look forward with a certain amount of relief, after this interminable campaign, to the fact that this House and the Government are going to return to the government of the country on domestic issues. We can return to an agenda that will spare us from the fear of millions of criminal Turks coming to this country, our sovereignty being sacrificed to faceless men in Brussels and all the rest of it. A lot of serious issues are facing this country at home. They are described today as, “How to keep people safe at home and abroad, and how to protect our human rights”, so I shall turn to that.

[Alex Salmond]

rose—

[Mr Clarke]

With great respect, I am trying to keep my remarks short. As I become more long-serving, I find that I get ever more garrulous, and I know that huge numbers of Members wish to speak in this debate, so if I may be allowed to, I will resist the temptation to give way, much though I normally enjoy it.

When I looked at the Queen’s Speech, listened to it and heard it being analysed afterwards, it seemed to me that the Prime Minister was rather looking to his legacy. He has already become one of the longest-serving Prime Ministers since the war and he has announced that he is not going to be Prime Minister into the next Parliament, so this Queen’s Speech has rather more of a theme than most Queen’s Speeches have. He described it, using the slogan that we are all supposed to use now, as a “progressive, one nation” theme. I do not like slogans, but I can hardly object to that, as I have been trying to describe my own political views in those terms for years. But it also looks at disadvantage in society and improving the life chances of those who have disadvantages, and, in effect, tries to address the still weak state of meritocracy today. I was one of those who benefited from the brief window of meritocracy and social mobility that this country enjoyed quite a long time ago as a result of the Butler Act of 1944, although I hasten to add that I would not go back to that old system nationally or anything of that kind.

We all know that one of the worrying things in our society is a growing awareness of widening inequality, both of incomes, thanks to the absurd levels to which some corporate salaries have been allowed to rise over the past 10 years, and of opportunity for those born in the less advantaged parts of the country. The thing that I was mainly impressed by in looking at the contents of the Queen’s Speech is how we are seized of that. This growing inequality is sensed by more and more people, and it is very real for many of our younger generation. Inequality of opportunity and of income is a subject that has always concerned those of the left, but in my opinion those of us who believe in free market economics should be just as concerned by this threat to the stability of our society as our socialist opposite numbers are. It behoves us to do something about it.

I therefore hope that the Children and Social Work Bill, which contains proposals to tackle the inadequacies in what we do for children in care and improve the operation of the adoption system, will be one of those measures—I will not go through the whole Queen’s Speech—that gives positive effect to the agenda of recreating a fairer society in which opportunities are much more widely available to all sections of society.

The most prominent Bill in the Queen’s Speech was on prison reform. Obviously, I very much welcome that. I say “obviously” because the Secretary of State for Justice and the Prime Minister, who made a very noticeable speech, have reinforced an agenda that our party first set out when we were in opposition before 2010. It is an agenda that I propounded and tried to give effect to as Justice Secretary for the first two and a half years of the Government.

I congratulate the Secretary of State for Justice, who I regret to say is not in his place, because he appears to have achieved more success in overcoming the hesitations in practice of some of the more senior members of the Government than I did. He has been able to promise things that I wish I had achieved and has a much bigger agenda than I was able to deliver. I got rid of indeterminate sentences and did a great deal to improve training for work in prisons by outside employers, among other things, but it looks as though there are things that will at last be tackled.

The problem is always that we have a fear in this House of the reaction to anything entitled “prison reform”, because it is seen to be dangerously wet. In recent decades, both parties have been subject to the fear of the right-wing tabloids every time they have looked at this subject. It is not wet; it is part of protecting people from harm in this society that everything should contribute to the reduction of crime. When people are rightly sent to prison for criminal offences, it is an achievement if most of them do not return to crime, but become honest citizens when they are released.

I think that we can get public support for these changes, so long as we emphasise the fact that at the moment 48% of prisoners are convicted again—they return to crime—within 12 months of being released. That shows how little progress we have made in dealing not with the hard-core criminals who will be in prison for long periods of their life if the police succeed in catching them, but with all those who suffer from drug abuse and mental health problems; those who have never had a basic education and are not numerate or literate; and those who could benefit from training, preparation for work and rehabilitation to return them as honest citizens. I hope, therefore, that we implement these changes, as well as legislating for them.

I welcome Dame Sally Coates’s report on education, which addresses the fact that although we have always tried to educate prisoners, what is delivered is very patchy and limited. I hope that we implement all of it. I welcome the interesting idea of the six reform prisons, but I hope that it does not mean that the most adventurous reforms are confined to those six prisons. I think that we should keep an eye on the 48% figure and judge our progress in a few years’ time on whether we are able, at last, to reduce it.

European Union Referendum Bill

Debate between Lord Clarke of Nottingham and Alex Salmond

Tuesday 16th June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Alex Salmond]

I was merely pointing out that there are a number of international examples. As I said, my hon. Friend the Member for Ochil and South Perthshire will go through some of those in some great detail. This is not unusual in matters of constitutional import.

There is no doubt that a constitutional referendum on whether the United Kingdom should be part of the European Union carries constitutional implications. It is not unusual internationally, even in a federal or confederal state, to have more than a simple majority on such matters, and also reference to the various component parts of that state. If that is the case for a confederal or federal state, surely it should be so much more the case for a United Kingdom of four component nations.

[Mr Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman is being generous in giving way. Will he confirm my suspicion that his secret wish—the perfect result, from his point of view—is for Scotland to vote yes and England to vote no? Personally, I would regard that as a disaster. Does he agree that if Scotland voted to stay in the European Union and England voted to leave, the end of the United Kingdom would probably be quite imminent?