Withdrawal from Afghanistan: Joint Committee

Alyn Smith Excerpts

Wednesday 15th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Alyn Smith (Stirling) (SNP)]

The Scottish National party supports the motion. I am very glad that the Opposition tabled it, because there is a great deal to learn from the debacle, the failure, the ignominious defeat that we have seen in Afghanistan. We have expressed a preference for an independent judge-led inquiry and we are still very open to that option, but let us consider the motion that stands before us.

I would quibble slightly with the scope of paragraph (1)(a)(i), which would start the timetable from the Doha agreement; we think that previous events need to be properly considered in the round. I would also quibble with paragraph (1)(a)(ii), because I think that there would be quite a lot of overlap with the Intelligence and Security Committee, a point that has been dealt with already. Nevertheless, we support the motion. While taking due cognisance of the Committee inquiries already under way, we think, as Labour does, that the matter is of such significance and magnitude that it must be properly ventilated.

There is a lot to learn from the past few months. One thing that has struck me personally is that, in all our discussions and urgent questions on Afghanistan during and since the emergency recall, not a single person—on either side of the House, actually—has said sorry. Four hundred and fifty-six service personnel lost their lives. We have not said sorry to the veterans and their families. We have not said sorry to the Afghans who believed our promises and whom we collectively—all of us—failed. We have not said sorry either to our taxpayers, who funded this to the tune of many billions of pounds. There is a real need for more collective humility on all of this. I myself am sorry, because I think we have all let the people of Afghanistan down, and I think we need to learn the lessons from that.

I have to say, even to the Minister, that while I pay tribute to the intelligence personnel, the defence personnel and everyone else involved in Operation Pitting—and to everyone who has spent time in Afghanistan keeping the people of the country safe—to present Operation Pitting and recent events as some sort of herculean triumph is out of tune with the reality of the situation. I pay tribute to all those who have achieved so much over recent months, but we must learn the lessons of this collective huge failure. I would counsel a little more humility from the Government Benches and a little less hubris when we are discussing this issue.

There are also lessons for the conduct of the House’s business, because the responses that Members received from the Government were not as they should have been. We are reasonable people. We understand that things were stretched, we understand that things were unprecedented, and we understand that things were moving very fast. We would have taken all that in the round, but it was particularly galling to have a breezy assurance from the Prime Minister and former Foreign Secretary that everything would be dealt with, and that everyone would receive a response “by close of play”.

There is a world of difference between a response and an answer, and the inquiries of many Members, on all sides of the House, were not properly dealt with and still have not been. That is something of which the House should take due cognisance. I think that the distinction between those words was cynically abused by the Prime Minister himself—not by this Minister, who is far more credible on the issue. I think that there has been a collective failure of government. It was suggested earlier that the duty of the House is not necessarily to understand the administration of government. I thought that that was precisely the function of the House. We fear that there has been a failure of collective responsibility in this regard.

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald]

When the Minister was on his feet, I hoped to ask him this question. I myself have tried to obtain a copy of the call logs for each Minister for each day during the month of August, so that we can map what Ministers were doing as the Taliban were advancing across Afghanistan. The Department refuses to publish that information, which it holds. Does my hon. Friend agree that, if the Department will not even do that, it explains why we in the House believe that greater transparency, not less, in government and ministerial actions is what is needed?

[Alyn Smith]

My hon. Friend has made a very sensible point. I would add gently to the Government that perhaps there would not be a call for a specific inquiry if we felt that the inquiries had been dealt with properly thus far.

What we need to do, as a priority—all of us—while learning lessons is get people out and make people safe. I pay tribute to the work that has been done on that, but we need more. The House needs to scrutinise the ARAP scheme itself, but we also urgently need the details of the new scheme so that our constituents can be informed. We in the SNP already think that it needs to be expanded. We do not think that 20,000 is remotely sufficient for the scale of the trouble ahead.

We would also like clarity on the actual timescale. If, as we have heard, “in the coming years” means more people coming in, does that mean that, if 20,000 people apply in the first few months of next year, the scheme will close—in which case it is wholly insufficient—or does it mean that there is a quota for how many people can actually get in? These are basic questions that are as yet unanswered, so we need more details urgently.

[Carol Monaghan (Glasgow North West) (SNP)]

We have another issue, and that is family reunion. The family reunion visa will not be suitable for the situation that we face. There is currently a 12-year-old girl in my constituency who was separated from her parents in the chaos at Kabul airport, and we cannot get the parents out. Surely we need to look very carefully at how we are going to operate family reunion in cases such as that.

[Alyn Smith]

I strongly agree; in fact, that was going to be the next line of my remarks. Indeed, a number of Members across the House have been pressing for details on family reunion. There is also the question of funding for local authorities to keep people safe. I have met three families from Afghanistan who have already been settled in Stirling in the last couple of weeks, and they were particularly concerned about friends and family who were still in the country and still very much in harm’s way. I pay tribute to Stirling Council and to Forth Valley Welcome, who have done so much to make these refugees feel safe and secure in the Forth Valley. I say, in a genuine and constructive offer to the Government, that we can do more: the Forth Valley can do more and Scotland can do more. We need the details of the scheme and particularly of the funding, because we are not going to make promises that we cannot keep, but we are willing to play our part constructively.

There are wider and longer-term implications to the Afghanistan situation. It is not just about Afghanistan. Where is your global Britain now? After Afghanistan, it is clear that the UK cannot operate significant independent engagement and that it has precious little influence on US engagement. This was a collective failure of the US, the UK and others; many countries have failed in this. The world is less secure than it was, and the bad guys are now feeling more confident than they should be. That is something we should all be deeply concerned about.

Domestically, the integrated review is out of date within six months of its publication. We also see that the UK’s Indo-Pacific tilt looks even less credible than it did—and frankly that was not much, from our perspective. Global Britain is not the SNP’s project. That stands to reason, as we have a different world view. We believe that Scotland’s best future is as an independent state within the European Union, but we do not wish global Britain harm. The UK is always going to be our closest neighbour and our closest friend. The SNP submitted constructive suggestions to the integrated defence and foreign affairs review, and they are even more relevant now than they were. We will continue to work constructively, from our perspective, to help our nearest friend and neighbour to learn the lessons of the last few months, but that needs to be done on the basis of humility and reality. Learning lessons would go a long way to support the motion put forward by Labour today, which we are very pleased to support.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. We are going to try to get everybody in, but I am afraid that the time limit forthwith is four minutes.