Cumberlege Review: Pelvic Mesh

Debate between Alec Shelbrooke and Julian Lewis

Thursday 5th December 2024 Westminster Hall

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

Listening to the heartfelt contributions of so many new colleagues, I get the impression that most if not all of them had, like me, never heard of this problem until a constituent walked into their surgery and told them of the terrible experience that they had had.

I have a practical suggestion: at the end of this debate, which will no doubt follow in the footsteps of several previous debates that were equally well informed, passionate and horrifying, we should perhaps put our names to a joint letter to a man called Nick Wallis. He is a freelance journalist who did a wonderful thing: he researched the Post Office Horizon system disaster and wrote a book called “The Great Post Office Scandal”. If I remember correctly, it was serialised for a week on Radio 4, and subsequently he was the consultant to the remarkable production, “Mr Bates vs. The Post Office”. We can have these debates regularly, as we have been doing, and we can upset and horrify each other by recounting our constituents’ pain and the appalling negligence that led to these terrible outcomes, but until the issue grasps the public imagination, I do not think people will get anywhere.

Interestingly, one point that has not been mentioned is the possible responsibility and liability of the large pharmaceutical company that manufactured the mesh in the first place. What research did it undertake? What responsibility does it have? What help can the Government give people who have been irreparably harmed to go after that company for compensation?

There has been one great positive development, which has been referred to several times, and that is the magnificent work of Baroness Cumberlege, who certainly did the whole community of damaged women the best possible service in conducting that excellent review. The question is to what extent will her recommendations be implemented?

I pay tribute in particular to my right hon. Friend the Member for Wetherby and Easingwold (Sir Alec Shelbrooke), who spoke earlier, and the hon. Member for Washington and Gateshead South (Mrs Hodgson), from whom we are about to hear, for their exemplary leadership of the all-party parliamentary group on this terrible disaster and for keeping the flame burning all these years. I say “all these years” because it has been a long time. Looking back on my own website to check my contributions, I see that this is now the fourth full- scale debate in which my colleagues and I have gone over the same ground. If anybody is interested, the dates of the previous three debates, which were packed with testimony and interesting information, were 19 April 2018 —slightly longer ago from now than the entire duration of the second world war—8 July 2021 and 3 February 2022. It would not be appropriate for me to go over in detail what has been said previously, as it is all there on the record, but it is important to recognise that we are talking about thousands and thousands of damaged women—10,000 at the very least, and as we have heard, some estimates put the number as high as 40,000.

Treatment centres have been mentioned, but there is a particular question about who has the skill to practise in the treatment centres. Who will put themselves forward as being appropriately skilled? It will be the very people who inserted the mesh in the first place.

In one of the earlier debates, I cited a constituent who was 35 when she was given what was described to her as “routine surgery”, 16 years before the debate in question took place. I said then:

“She was initially told that it was her fault that her body was rejecting the two mesh implants. She then went through a cycle of implants, the removal of protrusions and eroded segments and seven bouts of surgery. Three TVTs—trans-vaginal tapes—are still inside her, she suffers chronic pain from orbital nerve damage, constantly needs painkillers and has had constant side effects, indifferent treatment and a refusal to admit fault or to refer her to an out-of-area specialist in mesh removal.”—[Official Report, 19 April 2018; Vol. 639, c. 508.]

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke]

My right hon. Friend has just made an important point. He spoke about the removal of protrusions and seven surgeries. That almost puts a gloss on what has happened. We have all heard from women who have had the surgery and the experience of many of them is that they have been butchered. It is important to make that clear in this debate, especially for new Members, because we have discussed this in Parliament before: when we think of surgery, we think of any other normal surgery, but this surgery leaves huge amounts of scar tissue and has butchered women in ways that I will not go into now. That must be recognised when we describe some of the remedials that have happened, mainly because those carrying them out do not really know what they are doing at this stage.

[Sir Julian Lewis]

Exactly right. That is why my constituent said at the time, “I do not want anyone from the hospital coming near me ever again. I have lost complete faith in them. I have been lied to and told repeatedly that it was my body rejecting the mesh. But unbelievably they kept putting more in.”

Over this period of six or more years I have probably tabled about 12 or 15 questions for written answer, obviously to a previous Government. I will quote three, which were all in the aftermath of the Cumberlege report. In June 2021—for the benefit of Hansard it was question 16777—I asked the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care

“what checks his Department carried out to ensure that surgeons awarded NHS contracts for the removal of failed vaginal mesh implants had not previously been responsible for (a) originally implanting them, and subsequently (b) denying that anything had gone wrong with them; and whether any personnel awarded NHS contracts to work at mesh remediation specialist centres are known by his Department to be currently facing legal proceedings for implanting mesh which injured women who are now seeking its removal at such centres.”

The answer, which came from the then Minister of State, read:

“It is the responsibility of the employing organisations”—

presumably the NHS—

“to ensure that the staff undertaking mesh implantation and/or dealing with mesh complications are qualified and competent to do so. NHS England’s procurement process to identify the specialist centres to deal with the complications of mesh considered a range of clinical and service quality issues. No assessment was undertaken regarding National Health Service contracts or staff facing legal proceedings.”

Somebody in the process of suing a surgeon but still needing ongoing care may have no other option but to go to a mesh centre headed up by—guess who?—the surgeon who she is suing because he damaged her in the first place.

The second written question I will refer to was in July 2021—question No. 31274—which read:

“To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to the debate on the Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Review on 8 July 2021…what steps he plans to take to research new and improved techniques for removal of eroded surgical mesh implants.”

As we have heard, it is intolerably difficult to remove this stuff. One would think that the very least the NHS could do would be to make a dedicated effort to develop new techniques for doing it. The description of it being like removing hair from chewing gum is vivid. I have sometimes speculated—I am not in any way qualified to do so—that maybe the answer to this might be to develop some sort of technique that could harmlessly dissolve the material and let it be gradually flushed away, rather than physically trying to disentangle it with the risk of doing more damage. That may be completely and utterly impracticable, but my point is that we do not know because no proper national effort is being made to find a way in which this disaster can be, to some extent, effectively rectified without harming the victims further.

Ukraine

Debate between Alec Shelbrooke and Julian Lewis

Tuesday 11th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Of course, Crimea is Ukrainian territory that has been invaded. Any allegations about what happened at the bridge, and any questions about what is behind the attack, are for the Ukrainians to answer, but what happened at Kyiv is simply a war crime. We will make every effort to hunt down the people responsible and to bring them to justice.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is a reassuring presence at the Dispatch Box, and I congratulate him on his recent appointment to his post. Does he agree that all that will deter Putin from the use of nuclear weapons is the thought that: a) they may be ineffective; and b) their use may not result in the west withdrawing its military support for Ukraine, which is what has enabled it to resist successfully so far? Is it not therefore imperative that the west makes it clear that the support will continue? Did he note the remarks of General David Petraeus, who said that western support, in conventional terms, would be redoubled if Putin made any such move?

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for his kind comments. Indeed, General Petraeus really just outlines the situation overall that NATO is united. It is a defensive force and a nuclear defensive force. I am proud that this country has had a constant at-sea nuclear deterrent for almost 54 years. Statistically, that is deemed to be impossible, but it is something we have achieved and continue to achieve. That acts as a major counterbalance to any leader of a country who may be thinking that nuclear weapons may be something to use. The policy has been shown to work, but we have to calm down and take the air out of the talk about where we are moving with the nuclear rhetoric. It is highly irresponsible of the Kremlin to be upping the rhetoric on nuclear weapons, and I hope that it will draw back from those comments, because the last thing we want to see is any miscalculation and we must make sure that it does everything to take it out. Fundamentally, to answer my right hon. Friend, the NATO alliance is showing just how united it is and that it will stand up to this level of nuclear threat.

Ukraine

Debate between Alec Shelbrooke and Julian Lewis

Tuesday 15th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Alec Shelbrooke]

May I draw on my right hon. Friend’s point about the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact? I am sure that he has seen the Putin essay. Paragraph 38 is really frightening for European security:

“Under the 1921 Treaty of Riga, concluded between the Russian SFSR, the Ukrainian SSR and Poland, the western lands of the former Russian Empire were ceded to Poland.”

Does that not make it clear that Putin’s intentions do not stop at Ukraine?

[Dr Lewis]

It makes it absolutely clear. That will be the very next point that I address.

Whereas Russia previously infiltrated by ideology, its leaders now bribe their targets with high-spending oligarchs and the temptations that they place in the way of western politicians. Gerhard Schröder, a former Chancellor of Germany, is the prime example—a man who has been chairman of Rosneft since 2017 and has recently, I believe, been a director of Gazprom as well. He has been at the heart of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, which my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) did so much to warn this House against when people were somewhat complacent about it.

For 40 years from 1949, two factors ensured the containment of Russia and the maintenance of peace: the deterrent power of western nuclear weapons and the collective security provided by article 5 of the north Atlantic treaty. No longer could an aggressor attack small European states that belonged to NATO without the Americans immediately entering the war. We know that it is Ukraine’s misfortune not to belong to NATO, and we can argue about whether that should have been permitted. I simply say what I have said all along, which is that if NATO over-extends the guarantee of article 5 to the point at which it ceases to be credible that the major NATO countries would fight world war three to defend the country in question, it undermines the credibility of the guarantee as a whole.

I will conclude by referring to what the former President Petro Poroshenko said on Sky TV at 1 o’clock today. He made a more appropriate parallel with world war two than Putin could ever make when he referred to what we called “lend-lease”, which was the decision taken and signed into law by President Roosevelt in March 1941 to give all sorts of high-value equipment and support to those countries that were fighting for democracy, even though America was not then in the war itself.

Former president Poroshenko quoted Churchill’s words:

“Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.”

He also said, “Don’t trust Putin…if you try to compromise with Putin he will go further.”

This relates to the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell (Alec Shelbrooke). There is no doubt at all that the battle that Ukraine is fighting now is the frontline of the battle that would face NATO if NATO’s credibility were undermined.

So it is quite simple, and I think that the Government could go further in terms of this rather artificial distinction between “defensive” and “offensive” weaponry. I believe that fighter jets—provided that they are crewed by Ukrainians and not by people of a NATO nationality—are a defensive weapon, and that we should operate according to a single practical slogan, namely that we will support Ukraine in its fight for democracy by all means short of war; and that means supplying them with the tools so that they can finish the job.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)]

This has been a fascinating and wide-ranging debate. The hon. Member for St Helens South and Whiston (Ms Rimmer) made an incredible speech. It was one of the best, and it got to the nub of the military side. It was a fantastic speech.

I was at the Rose-Roth seminar of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in Kyiv in 2016, and it was noticeable that a Ukrainian former member of the Minsk group said:

“Appeasers of Russia must go.”

He called it a “Chamberlain complex” and believed it was

“a fundamental failure that people feel they can work with Putin. He gets away with it. The international community must recognise that Russia’s actions are not against just Ukraine, but the whole world.”

That was in relation to the invasion of Crimea.

My hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) had a Backbench Business debate in our first week back this year on the Russian threat, and at the end of my speech I made the point that we have to accept that we are back in a cold war situation and that we must adopt a cold war mentality again. That includes increases in defence spending, on which we have seen an incredible and welcome change in position—I do not call it a U-turn—from the German Government, who have said they will spend 2.2% of GDP on defence, as laid down in the 2014 Wales summit. That is indeed welcome in bolstering NATO, because people are now recognising that whether we like it or not, we are back in a cold war scenario, which means that we have to get the playbooks back out. They are about standing up and pushing back. I have often spoken in the House on various issues about countermeasures and counterbalances, and this situation is about counterbalances. This is about saying to Russia, “Don’t try to push the envelope, because we will push back.”

People who are trying to be apologists for Putin have said, “It was the NATO expansion to the east.” NATO did not expand to the east; the east wanted to join NATO. That is a very subtle difference. The people of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are jolly well grateful today that they have got the backing of NATO, because I do not think they would be sleeping easily in their beds if they felt that Russia may be able to just walk through.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that Mr Putin’s claim that he is worried about having a NATO country directly on his border if Ukraine joins NATO is rather given the lie by the fact that if he occupies Ukraine, he will have several NATO countries on his border?

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I am most grateful to my right hon. Friend for that, because he touches on something very important. The drive to NATO membership accelerated substantially after Russia had invaded Crimea. Putin invited that move of the Ukrainian Government to look further to the west, as they saw their security threatened. A real analysis could be done of what Putin was doing in and around Ukraine three or four months ago. Was he probing to see what the reactions of the west would be? Was he thinking, “What could happen here? Perhaps I will focus my attentions elsewhere, in the ‘Stans or areas like that.” We have merely to read or analyse the Putin essay for it to become apparent how far this Third Reich mentality of his goes. He makes clear in that essay the centuries-held hatred towards the sacking of Kyiv, the capital of Rus. He also makes clear in that essay the countries he is going to go after—Lithuania, eastern Poland, Belarus; he basically names them. He uses the phrase “Russia was robbed”.

Afghanistan

Debate between Alec Shelbrooke and Julian Lewis

Wednesday 18th August 2021 Commons Chamber

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

In his speech of self-justification after the collapse of Kabul, President Biden reduced a complex military issue to only two stark alternatives. It was a gross over-simplification for him to pose a devil’s dilemma between either a massive troop surge on a never-ending basis or a ruthless, chaotic and dishonourable departure. It is ruthless because people who trusted NATO will pay a terrible price; chaotic because of a lack of foresight to plan an orderly and properly protected departure; and dishonourable because even if our open-ended, nation-building, micromanagement strategy was wrong, as I think it was, in 20 years we created expectations and obligations which those who relied on us had a right to expect us to fulfil, as the right hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) has just said.

It has been pointed out correctly that for 20 years, NATO operations in Afghanistan succeeded in preventing further al-Qaeda attacks on the west from being launched under Taliban protection. That was indeed the key outcome, but unless we choose a better future strategy, the threat of its reversal is all too real. Not only may sanctuary on Afghan soil again be offered to lethal international terrorists, but other Islamist states may also decide to follow suit. How, then, should we have handled a country like Afghanistan when it served as a base and a launchpad for al-Qaeda, and how should we deal with such situations in the future?

These are my personal views on a defence issue unrelated to the work of the Intelligence and Security Committee. For the past 10 years, I have argued both inside and outside this Chamber, very often to the dismay of my parliamentary colleagues, that a form of containment rather than counter-insurgency is the only practical answer to international terrorist movements sheltered and sponsored by rogue regimes like the Taliban. Containment, as older colleagues will remember, was the policy that held the Soviet Union in check throughout the cold war until its empire imploded and its ideology was discredited. Islamist extremism has a subversive reach similar to that of revolutionary communism, and our task is to keep it at bay until it collapses completely or evolves into tolerant, or at least tolerable, alternative doctrines.

In Afghanistan, the task of overthrowing the Taliban and driving al-Qaeda into exile was quickly accomplished in 2001, and at that point NATO arrived at a fork in the road. The option selected was, as we know, an open-ended commitment to impose a western version of democracy and protect it indefinitely in a country that had a strong sense of its own political and social culture and which was known to be politically allergic to foreign intervention.

Yet there was another option available to western strategists in response to the 9/11 attacks. Having achieved our immediate objectives of putting al-Qaeda to flight and punishing the Taliban, we should have announced that we were completely removing our forces but would promptly return by land and air to repeat the process if international terrorist groups were again detected in Afghanistan. When the Taliban regain full territorial control, they will lose their shield of invisibility. If they then choose to pose or facilitate a renewed threat—a terrorist threat—to western security, they should expect both their leadership and their military capability to be hit hard by our mobile land and air forces. That cycle would be repeated until the threat was removed, but we should not and would not allow our forces to be sucked in again.

[Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is making some very important points. Has the game not changed slightly, though, with the immediate recognition of the Taliban Government by China and Russia? As they are permanent members of the Security Council, it will be very difficult to get any UN-led action in the way he describes.

[Dr Lewis]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right but, of course, this was a NATO intervention, and it is to NATO that we have to look when there are serious threats to international security, particularly those affecting western interests.

The point is that it has to be flexible, because al-Qaeda itself is very flexible. An active containment policy of this sort can track and match the flexibility of the terrorists. Such a policy depends on the maintenance of integrated and highly mobile land forces, positioned in regional strategic base and bridgehead areas.

Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Review

Debate between Alec Shelbrooke and Julian Lewis

Thursday 8th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

I must say it is quite hard to speak unemotionally after hearing the tragic story that the hon. Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Allan Dorans) has relayed to the House. How much more difficult must it have been for Baroness Cumberlege to hear dozens, if not hundreds, of such stories of individual human suffering? She came up with a truly magnificent report and the House of Commons had what I thought was one of its best days for a long time when we discussed it, in no small measure due to the Minister for Patient Safety, Suicide Prevention and Mental Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Ms Dorries) and her response to the report. We would all have felt quite justified in thinking that, at last, there was real light at the end of this horrible, terrible, awful tunnel, but it does not seem that we have got to the end of it yet.

I took from Baroness Cumberlege’s report one particular area of hope, and that was the establishment of the specialised mesh centres, and I wish to focus in my contribution on three questions. First, are the mesh centres truly dedicated and comprehensive one-stop shops offering all the types of treatment likely to be needed and all the types of investigation likely to be required, if not under one roof, then at least within a single footprint, or are they merely specialists hubs in name only?

Secondly, there is another problem related to the centres. Are we seeing a situation in which surgeons who could have been described as mesh problem deniers are now reinventing themselves as mesh problem remediators? I do not think they are qualified to hold that role. I fear that there is an attitude of mind that says, “Well, it’s not that easy to find people who specialise in this area, and therefore, even though these are the people who put the mesh in, maybe they are the people who are best qualified to take the mesh out.” I absolutely refute that. Not only did those people put the mesh in, but when the patients came along time and again to say what terrible problems they were suffering, those were the people who refused to listen to them. They were the people who, in some cases, insisted on putting more mesh in, and they were the people who, in other cases, refused to let the patients have a referral to figures such as Miss Sohier Elneil in London or Professor Hashim Hashim in Bristol, who are—or were at that time—the true, and possibly the only, specialists in mesh removal.

When I was thinking about what to say in the light of what had gone before, I was debating whether I should use the word “butchered”, but my right hon. Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell (Alec Shelbrooke) did use it in his most powerful speech and I will use it as well. The idea that someone who has butchered your body is an appropriate person for you to go back to, after all that, and that they could then say they are going to take the mesh out, when that person may well have stood in the way of your perhaps going to see Miss Elneil or Professor Hashim, who could have done something for you, is unconscionable.

My third question is: what research is being undertaken on new methods of safe removal? If indeed it is the case that an argument is going to be made that there might be some future use for mesh in safer ways, what research is being done to see whether or not something could be developed that would not run the risks of this disaster?

I shall say something very fanciful now, and it is probably nonsense, but the thought occurs to me, hearing about the way in which the flesh grows around the mesh, the mesh fractures and it becomes so very difficult to remove: has anybody ever thought that it might be possible to develop a future type of mesh, if this is not possible with the mesh that has already been put inside people, that might conceivably be harmlessly dissolved within the body if something went wrong, by the addition some sort of chemical? That may be absolute nonsense, but the point is that unless specialist research is carried out, this sort of botching and butchery is going to continue.

As a result of the three constituency cases that I originally cited in a debate on—it is hard to believe that it is more than three years ago—19 April 2018, I have received certain amounts of information and concerns from Kath Sansom, who does such wonderful work with the Sling the Mesh group. I conveyed a message to her and basically said, “If you were standing up in this place today, what points would you like to put over?” She said:

“The debate is calling for all Cumberlege recommendations to be implemented without further delay, including financial redress for women and sweeping reform of the healthcare and regulation framework. Women are losing hope that they have been properly listened to. They need urgent financial redress for the many losses they have suffered. They want to know also when they go to a specialist centre that it is not a postcode lottery of care. To date the specialist centres are special in name only.”

In other words, is there really a new centre, or are people being sent from pillar to post for all the different parts of the investigations and having to wait months between each particular appointment for each particular type of investigation?

Kath also said:

“There has been no national training programme and no agreed way to measure success—they haven’t even agreed on outcome logging measures to standardise the data capture.”

She also made the point, which I think I have made strongly enough, about some of the centres

“being run by pro mesh surgeons who have denied mesh is a problem”.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I said this in my speech, but it is worth emphasising again. We are talking about what needs to be done and what is happening, but we must also come back to people; as my right hon. Friend says, people are very important. Women are killing themselves. They are killing themselves. Look at the suicide rates for women with mesh problems and endometriosis. Women go through crippling pain, and dozens a year are taking their own lives. Does that not make the point that my right hon. Friend is making—that we have to move more quickly on this?

[Dr Lewis]

It totally does. I shall share a little something with the House. Although it does not compare with the agony of what these women are going through, I lost a year and a half of my life when I was given some inappropriate treatment that resulted in my being unable to read for a year and a half during my early 20s. What really made it worse was the knowledge that, if I had not asked for a particular treatment to try to improve my tired eyes because I was studying, none of it need have happened. How much worse must it be for these women, many of whom are not only undergoing all this suffering, but are undergoing it because they were told it was a minor procedure and they thought, “Oh, well—maybe I will have it, then.” If only they had known, they would never have gone within a mile of it. They must be saying that, over and over again. To expect them to go back to the same surgeons who did not tell them what the consequences could be is inhumane and totally unrealistic.

The issue of some people having a financial interest in promoting certain products has been touched on. We are obliged to declare our interests in this House and perhaps something like the Physician Payments Sunshine Act would be the equivalent for people in this context.

Finally, Kath draws attention to what she calls a black hole in official statistics. She says, for example, that according to hospital statistics, in the year 2008-09, 1,038 women were readmitted to hospital with problems within 30 days of a mesh sling having been implanted. In comparison, data derived from surgeons says that only 104 women were admitted to hospital—that is something like 10% of the total. Some 934 women have somehow gone missing from the surgeons’ data.

These are strange and disturbing features. This House has shown itself at its best in condemning what happened. The Government need to build on that and put in place the measures recommended by the report to make it far less likely that it could happen again.

Britain in the World

Debate between Alec Shelbrooke and Julian Lewis

Monday 13th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Dr Lewis]

Yes, but the trouble is that no such grant was made to the BBC Monitoring Service, which is our principal source of what is called open-source intelligence—or, as the BBC prefers to say, open-source information. The Defence Committee produced a hard-hitting report entitled “Open Source Stupidity”, because that was entirely our opinion of the effect of that cutback by the coalition Government. It led directly to the closure of Caversham Park, and although BBC Monitoring continues to do very good work, it is a shame and a disgrace that it is not specially separately funded, as it used to be.

Coming back to the main topic, this is, as we know, a debate on Britain’s future place in the world. However magnified, however static or even however reduced our future place in the world may be, we have to be able to keep our country safe. As I never tire of explaining to the House, the basis of any sensible defence policy depends on three concepts: deterrence, containment, and a realisation of the unpredictability of future conflicts. The examples I always give—I fear that people will start joining in in a chorus if I do it again, but I do so nevertheless—are the Yom Kippur war in 1973 that took hyper-sensitive Israel by surprise, the Falklands war in 1982 that took us by surprise, the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 that took everybody by surprise, and the 9/11 attacks in 2001 that took the world’s then only superpower by surprise.

What do I conclude from the fact that most wars in the 20th century—I could give many more older examples —were usually not predicted significantly in advance? I conclude that if we are going to have an adequate defence policy, we have to be able to defend flexibly against a whole spectrum of future potential threats because we do not know which of those threats is going to materialise.

[Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is making an excellent speech and excellent points. I want to draw him back to his comments about spending at least 3%. I do not believe that it is about 3%; it is about having the capability we need. The key word he has used is “flexibility”, and that does not have a percentage price on it; it has an equipment and capability price.

[Dr Lewis]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. However, I have found through long experience that although it is a rather crude shorthand, this business of percentages is the one straightforward, simple and clear way of showing to the country what has been happening in relative terms, compared with other high spending Departments, to defence expenditure.

Passchendaele

Debate between Alec Shelbrooke and Julian Lewis

Thursday 13th July 2017 Commons Chamber

[Dr Lewis]

The award of the Military Medal to John William Feasey is now well and truly, and most justifiably, recorded.

The next assault was planned for 4 October, and was persevered with despite a great deterioration in the weather. It was originally hoped that success at Ypres would drive the Germans away from the channel ports, as my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) said, and an amphibious force to help achieve that had already been assembled. The reality, in the words of the official history, was very different.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

My right hon. Friend is rightly describing the sea battle and what was happening at sea, which brought the Americans into the war. Does he agree that, when people ask whether we had to go into the war, the reality is that we could well have been starved out if we had not taken those actions?

[Dr Lewis]

Yes and no. We certainly had to resist German aggression, but that does not mean there was any justification, when faced with a stalemate, to keep repeating tactics and strategies that were wholly unsuccessful and counterproductive. The concept of the “big push” might have had something to recommend it, despite the obvious imbalance between the technology of the machine gun, on the one hand, and the lack of armoured vehicles to override it, on the other, in the earlier phases of the war. That might have justified a big push on the Somme in 1916, but it did not justify repeating the same lethal strategic nonsense a year later.

This is what the official history has to say about what happened after the outbreak of terrible weather:

“The British line had now been advanced along the main ridge for 9,000 yards… The year was already far spent and the prospect of driving the enemy from the Belgian coast had long since disappeared. The continuous delays in the advance as a result of the weather and its effect on the state of the ground, had given the enemy time, after each attack, to bring up reinforcements and to reorganise his defences. Although General Headquarters now recognised that the major objectives of the Flanders operations were impossible of attainment, they were still anxious to continue the operations with a view to the capture of the remainder of the Passchendaele Ridge before winter set in. The weather was entirely unfavourable but there were hopes that it would improve, hopes based on the somewhat slender foundation that the abnormal rainfall of the summer presaged a normal, perhaps even a dry, autumn.”

Instead of remaining a means to an end, the offensive had become an end in itself. At 5.20 am on 9 October, after two days of continuous heavy rain, the attack was renewed on a six-mile front. Sir Douglas Haig had decided that Passchendaele must be captured, so captured it would be. The cycle was repeated on 12 October in the hope of helping to prevent German forces from being switched to meet the impending French offensive on the River Aisne. Some ground was gained east of Poelcappelle and on the southern edge of Houthulst forest on 22 October, with fighter pilots doing everything they could to attack German infantry in trenches and shell holes, on the roads and in villages.

And so it went on and on—a little progress here, a forced withdrawal there, and the final taking of Passchendaele village on 6 November by the Canadians who, with British assistance, extended their gains on the main ridge four days later. According to the official air historian, Passchendaele was

“the most sombre and bloodiest of all the battlefields of the war”.

One of the pilots who lived through it, and later reached the highest rank in the RAF, was Lord Douglas of Kirtleside, who, as Sholto Douglas, commanded 84 Squadron’s SE5 fighters when he returned to the western front in September 1917. He, too, regarded third Ypres as

“the most terrible of all the battles of the Great War”.

He wrote the following:

“The Somme of the year before had been bad enough, and after that it was felt that the lesson of the futility of mass attacks must surely have been learnt. But it was not learnt, and less than a year later our Army was called upon to embark on an offensive that in so many ways was even more terrible than the Somme”.

He continued by saying that Passchendaele

“was the beginning of what was to become for those on the ground a long and indescribable misery…all the drainage systems were smashed in the opening bombardment, and eventually the whole area became clogged with mud. Over this devastated area, which had been reduced to the state of a quagmire, attack after attack was launched...For communication there were only the rough tracks which wound their way almost aimlessly across the mire, and wandering off them led to drowning. The Germans welcomed the rain as ‘our strongest ally’.”

Many of the pilots in the third battles of Ypres were tasked to carry out low-level attacks against enemy concentrations on the ground. As Sholto Douglas later recalled:

“In this job there was very little fighting in the air, and since we were flying at heights of only two or three hundred feet we were supposed to be able to see plenty of what was going on below us. What I saw was nothing short of horrifying. The ground over which our infantry and light artillery were fighting was one vast sea of churned-up muck and mud, and everywhere, lip to lip, there were shell holes full of water. These low-flying attacks that we had to make, for which most of my young pilots were quite untrained, were a wretched and dangerous business, and also pretty useless. It was very difficult for us to pick out our targets in the morass because everything on the ground, including the troops, was the same colour as that dreadful mud...it was quite obvious to anyone viewing from the air this dreadful battleground...that any chance of a major advance or a break-through was quite out of the question.”

We can see from Douglas’s memoirs that it was not just fashionable post-war opinion which came to damn the strategy of attritional offensives. The ordering of more and more attacks in such an appalling “morass” was seen at the time, by him and his comrades, as “the grossest of blunders”. They recognised the need to relieve pressure on the French by keeping the Germans fully stretched, but he said that

“as I watched from the air what was happening on the ground there were presented to me some terrible questions. Why did we have to press on so blindly day after day and week after week in this one desolate area and under such dreadful conditions? Why was there not some variety in our strategy and tactics? The questions that I asked then are the questions that have continued to be asked ever since; and the answers to them have never ceased to be most painful ones.”

As I said at the outset, I remain completely unconvinced by the argument, which some people deploy even to this day, that it was necessary to undergo the catastrophic failures of the Somme and Passchendaele offensives in order to learn the lessons necessary for victory in 1918. There is testimony enough from senior military figures in the second world war, writing of their experiences as junior officers in the first, spelling out the futility of relentlessly sacrificing huge numbers of British troops in fighting unwinnable battles. One does not have to explore every military cul-de-sac over and over again, in order to stumble across a strategy that might actually succeed.

Let us not forget that each one of these tragedies involved an individual personality, and I close with a quote from a young Welshman, Second Lieutenant Glyn Morgan, who wrote this to his father at the start of the Passchendaele offensive:

“You, I know, my dear Dad, will bear the shock as bravely as you have always borne the strain of my being out here; yet I should like, if possible, to help you to carry on”—

this was a letter that would be sent only in the event of his death—

“with as stout a heart as I hope to ‘jump the bags’…My one regret is that the opportunity has been denied me to repay you to the best of my ability for the lavish kindness and devotedness which you have always shown me...however, it may be that I have done so in the struggle between Life and Death, between England and Germany, Liberty and Slavery. In any case, I shall have done my duty in my little way...

Your affectionate son and brother, Glyn”.

Glyn Morgan, who joined the Army straight from school, was killed on 1 August 1917. He was recommended for a posthumous Victoria Cross, and he was just 21 when he died.

UK Economy

Debate between Alec Shelbrooke and Julian Lewis

Wednesday 29th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[Alec Shelbrooke]

rose—

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

rose—

[Stewart Hosie]

I will give way one more time.

Trident

Debate between Alec Shelbrooke and Julian Lewis

Tuesday 24th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Dr Lewis]

That point leads directly to the question of what it means to say that we are “using” Trident. Those of us who believe that the possession of a deadly weapon is the best method of stopping other people who possess similar deadly weapons from using them against us, say that Trident is in use every day of the week, and if ever the button had to be pressed, it would have totally failed in its purpose.

My second argument is that it is not the weapons themselves that we have to fear but the nature of the regimes that possess them. Whereas democracies are generally reluctant to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear dictatorships—although they did against Japan in 1945—the reverse is not true. Let us consider what might have happened if in 1982 a non-nuclear Britain had been facing an Argentina in possession of even just a few tactical nuclear bombs and the means of delivering them. Would we then have dared to use our conventional forces against its inferior conventional forces?

The third argument is that the United Kingdom has traditionally played a more important and decisive role in preserving freedom than other medium-sized democracies have been able, or willing, to do. Democratic countries without nuclear weapons have little choice but either to declare themselves neutral and hope for the best or to rely on the nuclear umbrella of their powerful allies. We are a nuclear power already, and it is also much harder to defeat us by conventional means because of the existence of the English channel.

The fourth argument is that because the United States is our closest ally, if the continent of Europe were ever occupied and the nuclear forces of the United States had not been used, an enemy might feel that they could attack us with nuclear weapons with impunity.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

For those who say that our nuclear deterrent is in the hands of the Americans, what does my right hon. Friend make of the fact that every Prime Minister has to write a letter held in every submarine that is never, ever seen unless in the most dire circumstances?

[Dr Lewis]

My hon. Friend is exactly right. There is no question but that the Trident nuclear system is entirely autonomous. Indeed, nothing—not the Americans, not any form of cyber-bug—can possibly intervene if, heaven forbid, the worst happened, the United Kingdom were attacked in part or in whole and the submarine commander had to open the dreaded letter written by the Prime Minister.

The fifth and final military argument is the most important of all. I put this to people when they try to say, “Well, you’re inflicting cuts on our conventional capability.” The argument is that there is no quantity of conventional forces that can compensate for the military disadvantage that faces a non-nuclear country in a war against a nuclear-armed enemy. The atomic bombing of Japan is a perfect example, not only because the Emperor was forced to surrender, but because what of might have happened under the reverse scenario: if Japan had developed atomic bombs in the summer of 1945 and the allies had not, a conventional allied invasion to end the war would have been out of the question.

The debate should and will go on, and I congratulate SNP Members on giving us the opportunity to take part in it today.

Cost of Living

Debate between Alec Shelbrooke and Julian Lewis

Tuesday 14th May 2013 Commons Chamber

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

It was kind of you, Mr. Speaker, to allow a segment of today’s debate to those of us who were concerned about the Opposition’s decision not to choose foreign affairs, defence or, indeed, Europe as the subject of one of the themed days of debate on the Queen’s Speech, so that we could refer to some of those matters. I suppose that I ought to get the words “cost of living” into my speech from time to time, and I shall endeavour to do so, but I hope that if I fail, they will be taken as read.

Although the right hon. and learned Member for North East Fife (Sir Menzies Campbell) and I serve closely together on the Intelligence and Security Committee, we are not best known for agreeing on issues such as the future of the European Union or that of the Trident nuclear deterrent. On one issue, however, we find ourselves in close agreement, and that is the question of whether or not we should arm the rebels in Syria, or become militarily involved in the civil war in other ways.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Absolutely not.

[Dr Lewis]

I think I am right in saying that my hon. Friend’s view is quite widely shared on the Back Benches, at least on this side of the House, and, I suspect, on the other side as well.

It is not a matter of wanting to do something less than we might in terms of humanitarian intervention. I certainly supported humanitarian military intervention in Sierra Leone, and I was one of the first to call for military intervention to topple Miloševic. I have supported military action in other theatres, such as Afghanistan and Iraq, and I even supported such action—albeit with considerable reluctance—in the case of Libya, given Gaddafi’s explicit threat to the citizens of Benghazi. We must, however, consider two aspects when thinking about undertaking military intervention. One is the humanitarian consideration, but the other is the question of who will take over if that military intervention is successful. What concerns me is the possibility that the people who take over will become dominated by a group allied to al-Qaeda who are even worse than the Assad regime—and that is saying something.

My mind goes back to the speech made by Tony Blair as Prime Minister in the run-up to the Iraq war. What did he say that so swayed the House in favour of intervention? He said that his nightmare was the prospect of weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of al-Qaeda. We now know that either there were no weapons of mass destruction, or, if there were chemical or biological weapons, they were not there by the time the allied forces went in.

In this case, however, we know that there are weapons of mass destruction—chemical weapons; a big stockpile of nerve gas—in Syria. What the Foreign Secretary has admitted at the Dispatch Box, repeatedly, is that there are, to use his own estimate, several thousand al-Qaeda-linked militants fighting alongside the Syrian opposition. I have raised the question at least five times since last September, and I have had five answers, none of which has satisfied me on the point. The point is this: how do we prevent that stock of deadly chemical weapons, which in the hands of Assad and his regime poses no threat to the west, from falling into the hands of al-Qaeda-linked militants, who would undoubtedly use them against the west, with terribly adverse effects on our cost of living and on our being able to stay alive?

It is not beyond the realms of possibility that Carla del Ponte may be right, because it certainly does not make sense for the Assad regime to use chemical weapons—the one thing that would cause the west to intervene and overthrow him. If he did use them, why use them in such small quantities that they could not have a decisive effect? If the intent was to intimidate the opposition, why deny vehemently, as the Assad regime does, that it has used them? It does not make sense.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

What would be the direct effect on the cost of living in this country if an al-Qaeda-led Government in Syria got together with the Shi’a-led Government in Iran and took a direct look at the democracy in Iraq, which is diametrically opposed to their beliefs?

[Dr Lewis]

I am sure that my hon. Friend is right in his implication that there would have to be a huge uplift in public expenditure on all forms of counter-terrorist techniques, and there would undoubtedly be a deleterious effect on the freedoms of peoples in this country, which would have to be restricted considerably if we found ourselves under attack from deadly chemical weapons in the hands of an extremist group allied to our enemies.

The hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Jim Dowd) quoted Marx, without attributing the words to him, when he said that the spectre of communism is haunting Europe. I am put in mind of a quotation attributed to Lenin:

“The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”

We would have to be out of our minds to assist in the overthrow of one shocking regime and the coming into place instead of a regime that was equally shocking and atrocious but hostile to us and armed with chemical weapons.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)]

I rise to support the Gracious Speech.

Without any shadow of a doubt, we live in a global economy. We have heard many speeches about the cost of living based on the domestic policies that are set nationally, and there is indeed an important debate to be had about that. However, like my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), I regret the fact that we will not discuss international affairs during the debate on the Gracious Speech.

An escalation of issues in the middle east would have a very detrimental effect on the cost of living in this country. Many hon. Members have talked about the cost of energy—oil and gas—in this country and the increase in fuel poverty. The stark truth is that that could increase only if we were to move towards a more militarised conflict across the middle east. There are serious concerns about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but that does not mean that we should take a unilateral decision, or a decision with any other nation, to take military action against that country. The mere suggestion of moving forward there could result in oil price rises across the world that would have a deep impact on the people of this nation, without a single bullet being fired.

We do not get any oil from Iran; we got only 2% before the EU embargo came in. However, a vast majority of the oil coming into this country comes through the Straits of Hormuz, and if the oil traders believe that there is a threat to those shipping lanes, oil prices will inexorably rise. We must remember that oil is bought three months in advance of when it is sold. If the oil traders believe that there may be difficulty in getting that oil out of the Gulf and into our country, oil prices will increase, and that will affect every aspect of the cost of living in this country. It is not just about the straightforward issue of fuel prices. If we are on a bus we have to get a bus ticket, or if we are on a train the electricity has to be generated to run it. The price of oil affects the price of food in our shops, which has to be transported there using fossil fuels. That shows why we should have discussed the effects of international affairs on this nation during our debates on the Gracious Speech.

I do not think I am the only Government Member who seriously questions the wisdom of relaxing the EU arms agreement on Syria. If history has taught us anything over the past 10 years, it is that picking a side and arming it will rarely lead to a useful outcome for world stability. If we side with the opposition in Syria, who are we actually siding with? Many companies in this country that employ many people are now banking with Israeli banks, and that has a direct influence on their strategic fiscal capability. Do we seriously want to empower an opposition that has some, let us say, interesting people on the Islamic fundamentalist side who are right next door to a country that the vast majority of Arab countries would like to see removed from the face of the map? That instability, linked with Iran talking to Hezbollah and a change in the dynamic in Syria, could have a direct consequence on the ability of companies to operate in this country.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

Would my hon. Friend also like to make an observation on whether the task of humanitarian intervention has been made that much more difficult by the way we went about it in Libya? We said that it would be a very limited, no-fly-zone-type intervention, but we ended up intervening much more directly on one side, and in a strictly military way, in a civil war?

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that point. That is a recent example of a country that we helped to liberate, but it led to issues for our embassy and that of the US. That paints a picture. However good the intentions to solve a crisis may be, the question is: what comes next?

That is not to say that we should shirk our responsibilities towards humanitarian aid. More than 1 million refugees are flooding out of Syria into Jordan alone, a country that is ill-equipped to deal with that number. We will eventually be called upon to help with that humanitarian crisis and it is important that we will, again, be there for our fellow man. I come back to the point that, when we debate the cost of living in this country and the Government’s programme over the next year, we should also discuss international issues, because, importantly, they are interlinked with everything we do.

In 1983, when I was a child of just six or seven years of age, the film “Threads” was made. I watched it recently and am sure that a number of other Members have also seen it. It is set in Sheffield in the 1980s in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. It is a sobering film and it should be watched. What struck me about it is that those who made the decisions that caused the wars to take place did not feature in the film. Indeed, given that it was set in Sheffield, the decisions were being made 190 miles away in London and elsewhere in the world. That is the point I am trying to make: we have to take notice of the innocent people on the ground and of the impact of our decisions.

We live in a highly volatile world and have to be very careful about how we move forward, and it is regrettable that the debate on the Gracious Speech has not given us the opportunity to address these issues, which could have such a fundamental impact on our cost of living.