Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Andrew Mitchell and David Davis

Tuesday 30th April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sir David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

When will the Foreign Office and the Home Office abandon their ridiculous pseudo security argument that is preventing the return of Shamima Begum and other women and children from northern Syria? Our allies oppose that policy because they know that it risks turning those children into tomorrow’s terrorists.

[Mr Mitchell]

My right hon. Friend, who knows a great deal about this matter, speaks with considerable authority on it. I have no doubt that his voice will be heard in both the Foreign Office and the Home Office.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Andrew Mitchell and David Davis

Tuesday 12th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mr Mitchell]

The British Government have certainly raised those activities with the Israeli Government. That is why we have asked that they should be arrested, prosecuted and punished for those activities. On those who may or may not be subject to a sanctions regime, we keep that fully under review, but the hon. Member will understand why I think it is best not to discuss that across the Floor of the House.

[Sir David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

Has any Foreign Office Minister, official or embassy member had any discussions with our American allies over the dysfunctional extradition treaty since the disgraceful end of the Sacoolas case?

[Mr Mitchell]

My right hon. Friend asks an extremely good question. He and I have co-operated on this matter many times in the past. If he would be so good as to table a question on this matter, I will make sure that he immediately gets a full answer to that question.

Occupied Palestinian Territories: Humanitarian Situation

Debate between Andrew Mitchell and David Davis

Wednesday 8th November 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr Mitchell]

The Foreign Office and British Government are very focused on how to re-energise the peace process when the opportunity presents itself. The hon. Lady will have seen the comments that have been made about both a civil Administration in Gaza and what is necessary to secure peace when that point arrives. It is important to note that the huge progress—ultimately unsuccessful—that was made at Oslo took place on the back of the first intifada. It may therefore be that there will be an opportunity, given the disaster that has taken place, to re-energise that political track. We must make sure that if that opportunity presents itself, we grasp it with both hands.

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

This is something that unites the House more than divides it, certainly on the issue of the horrors going on in Palestine right now and what caused them. We all recognise the personal commitment of the Minister to humanitarian aims and, in particular, to humanitarian pauses. Does he agree that those who call for a ceasefire must recognise that Hamas is a terrorist organisation and, as was said by the right hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson) yesterday, that terrorist organisations go for ceasefires only when they suit their own regrouping, not to end violence?

[Mr Mitchell]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his comments and, of course, he is absolutely right. We all recognise the motivation of those who call for a ceasefire and why they are doing it, but at this time, in this situation, it is perfectly clear that Hamas have no intention of engaging in a ceasefire. Indeed, they have repeatedly made it clear that their intention is to repeat the awful events of 7 October. So I agree entirely with both his understanding and prediction of the situation.

Vladimir Kara-Murza

Debate between Andrew Mitchell and David Davis

Monday 17th April 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr Mitchell]

The hon. Gentleman slightly over-chides my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield. What the hon. Gentleman said about the trial was absolutely correct—I set out in my first response the key points where natural justice was clearly totally denied. He is quite right about that. He asked about the danger that Kara-Murza will die in detention. Clearly, that is very real, which is why the ambassador was summoned on 6 April and is being summoned again today. At today’s meeting, the issue of his health will be specifically addressed.

On the issue of consular relations, let me make it clear to the House that under the Vienna convention on consular relations, there is no clear policy on dual nationals and on which takes precedence. There is a bilateral agreement from 1965 between the Soviet Union and the UK that talks about nationality being determined by the sending state. We are looking to see whether there is any extra leverage that we can gain through international law to pursue the point that the hon. Gentleman raised.

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend talks about seeking out and sanctioning the individual officials, but this is an action of the Russian state, not of individuals. Since the Ukraine war, just the major countries in Europe have expelled between 27 and 45 diplomats each. Is that not a measure that we should look at?

[Mr Mitchell]

As ever on these matters, my right hon. Friend makes an interesting and important point. We have to balance the national interest in how we pursue our diplomacy, and we keep these matters under review. In view of his comment, I will take another look at the issue that he has raised.

Nationality and Borders Bill

Debate between Andrew Mitchell and David Davis

Report stage
Tuesday 7th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Davis]

Thank you for that, Madam Deputy Speaker. I was not looking for a promise.

Before I talk about my amendment, for which I have a one-minute speech, let me address questions that my hon. Friends on the Government Benches asked the Opposition spokesman. He was asked whether he agrees with the idea of withdrawing citizenship, full stop. My answer is that the British Nationality Act 1981 gives too much power to the Home Secretary—[Interruption.] I will answer, if I am not interrupted. It gives too much power, without sufficient early judicial intervention. It allows for a right of appeal, but it does not require the right of application to court first, and given that we are talking about something as serious as citizenship, it should.

We should not give the state the power to take every right away from erstwhile citizens of the country. That is not just my view; it also happens to be that of our biggest ally. In my time in this House, I have only once had a visit, as it were, from the State Department of the United States, and that was on this policy. In some people’s view, we are leaving our “human detritus” out in the conflict zones of the middle east. Most of our allies, having started with that policy, have withdrawn it and are taking back their people to put them on trial in their own country. From a security point of view, this policy does not stand up in the view of our allies.

[Mr Andrew Mitchell (Sutton Coldfield) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is making an incredibly strong point. Does he think it is quite inappropriate for one of the leading nations at the United Nations, with the privilege of a veto, not to accept its international responsibilities, when all other members of the permanent five do?

[Mr Davis]

I do think that, but I was focusing on the security element, and I do not think that the security argument stands up.

Amendment 12, in my name, would remove clause 9 from the Bill. That would not take away the Home Secretary’s right of rejecting citizenship, but it would take away her right to do so without notification. Of course, that matters. I go back to judicial rights. Say that someone does not know that they have had their citizenship withdrawn. They cannot appeal the matter for as long as they do not know, and that might be a long time.

Clause 9(2) says that the requirement to notify

“does not apply if it appears to the Secretary of State that”—

and there is a series of conditions, one of which is that notice should not be given if that is

“in the interests of the relationship between the United Kingdom and another country”.

I cannot think of a weaker reason to withhold the rights of one of our citizens than to favour our diplomatic relations with another country. I do not think we are on the same page on that.

International Aid: Treasury Update

Debate between Andrew Mitchell and David Davis

Programme motion
Tuesday 13th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

I consider myself an economic Thatcherite, yet when I come to choose between money and lives, I always choose lives. This House should remember—this should be at the forefront of every Member’s mind today—that this is a vote where we are choosing whether or not to intervene to save lives. That is the key issue, not the monetary issue, which I will return to in a second.

The Government argue that this is a policy the United Kingdom cannot afford, but while we have heard about this being a small fraction of our borrowing, we should remember that it is an even smaller fraction of our spending. We spend, in a non-covid year, at least £800 billion; the £3.5 billion saving we are talking about is less than 0.5% of that. That is what the Treasury tells us is the critical, overwhelming measure that forces us to do something that has such dramatic consequences.

The Chancellor might say, as his press spokesman did in the course of last week, “Well, you find the money from somewhere else”—saying that to a past Public Accounts Committee Chairman is very dangerous for a Chancellor. We were in Chesham and Amersham a week or two ago, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) said, and Cheryl Gillan would have said to the Chancellor, “Well why don’t you just cancel HS2?” That is between £100 billion and £200 billion; it would pay for 25 to 50 years of this shortfall. It is really that simple.

So I do not really accept what the Chancellor is saying—that the only place, indeed the best place, for savings to be found is cutting aid, which will cost lives. Such a choice is morally reprehensible. Let us be clear about that—morally reprehensible.

[Mr Mitchell]

My right hon. Friend is making an incredibly good point, but has he also noticed that, in the Chancellor’s outstanding policy on spending announced last November, the cut that he is referring to—this cut of 1% of the borrowing on covid last year—is the only cut that has been announced?

[Mr Davis]

My right hon. Friend is right. The prioritising of this cut makes it even more morally reprehensible. Indeed, at the same time, as I think the spokesman for the SNP, the hon. Member for Dundee West (Chris Law), said, we are increasing spending on defence. I happen to agree with increasing spending on defence, but I do not agree with cutting spending on things that will lead to the need for more defence because of migration, civil wars and the rest of it.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield, the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) and the Leader of the Opposition have pointed out, the Government’s proposed double lock on returning to 0.7% is deceptive. It is designed to look reasonable. However, in fact, none of the people who have spoken so far has actually stated the full case. Although we say that the condition has been met only once since 1990, under a Conservative Government, and has never been met, really—well, it was once, just about—since the 0.7% policy was put in place, it has actually never been met since 1970, because the wording is not “a current budget surplus” but

“a sustainable current budget surplus”.

All the current budget surpluses we have been talking about so far have been for one year—and frankly, the one under us in 2018 lasted about 10 nanoseconds; it was a very tiny surplus. In practice, we have not had a sustainable current surplus since the 1970s, so I am afraid that, under the actual wording in the statement, we are not looking at 0.7% for a very long time indeed. We heard the Leader of the Opposition say it would be years, possibly decades, possibly never, and I think he is right about that.

Even if the conditions were to be met, the proposal will do nothing to deal with the crises that are caused by the policy already, right now. The Government argue that the cuts are temporary, but death is never temporary—and this will cause deaths.

0.7% Official Development Assistance Target

Debate between Andrew Mitchell and David Davis

Tuesday 8th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Andrew Mitchell (Sutton Coldfield) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the matter of the 0.7% official development assistance target.

I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

Mr Speaker, yesterday you made one of the strongest statements that I have heard from the Chair in more than 30 years, and you made it clear that the House should receive from the Government a meaningful vote. Naturally, in accordance with what you have said, we do not seek to divide the House on the motion today. We seek the meaningful vote that will enable the House to decide whether the Government can break our promise and arguably our law.

I see that my right hon. and hon. Friends and I are described as rebels. It is the Government who are rebelling against their clear and indisputable commitments. Who are these so-called rebels? A short perusal of yesterday’s Order Paper shows that we have among our number eight Select Committee Chairs, four distinguished former Select Committee Chairs, 16 former Ministers, 12 Privy Counsellors and four knights of the realm. From the new intake, my hon. Friends the Members for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall), for Milton Keynes North (Ben Everitt), for Bury South (Christian Wakeford), for Penrith and The Border (Dr Hudson) and for Keighley (Robbie Moore), along with others who have recently arrived in this House, have shown great courage and determination in the face of the possibility of being tarred and feathered by the Government Whips Office.

We are also supported by every former Prime Minister and, I believe, by every former leader of all four major political parties. Over the weekend, the Archbishop of Canterbury said:

“The foreign aid cut is indefensible…Let us…pray”

that it is reversed

“and that our unconscionable broken promise to the world’s poorest people is put right.”

All four distinguished current or former Chairs of the Public Accounts Committee who are in the House support our cause. My right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) describes himself as the last Thatcherite on the Government Benches.

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

Cheek!

[Mr Mitchell]

My right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) might possibly wish to disagree there. My right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough said:

“There is no public accounting justification for slashing budgets by 80% in this way. It is like telling the builder before he finishes your garden wall that you won’t pay at the end. Cancelling projects overseas is just a waste of taxpayers’ money when we should be providing long-term stability for schools, clinics and clean water projects.”

Better Jobs and a Fair Deal at Work

Debate between Andrew Mitchell and David Davis

Wednesday 12th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

When I saw that I was number 7a on the call list, I thought perhaps I was the first reserve for my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown); I did not realise that I had promotion rights too, so thank you for that, Madam Deputy Speaker.

One of the effects of the shock of the pandemic, along with other geopolitical changes, is that after 50 years of global trade liberalisation, the world is facing a long period of aggressive mercantilism, and we have to deal with that. The Government are to be congratulated on their ambitious agenda, including record increases in research spending, which has not been mentioned today, the employment drive, the freeport programme, the campaign for ambitious free trade agreements and the bold infrastructure plans. On the non-economic front, I also welcome the excellent proposals to guarantee free speech on campuses. However, I have serious concerns about several aspects of the Queen’s Speech.

[Mr Mitchell]

Do those concerns include the issue of the 0.7%, on which my right hon. Friend and I have not always agreed in the past?

[Mr Davis]

My right hon. Friend is quite right: I opposed the increase to 0.7% because I thought that it was too fast and that it would encourage inefficiency, but, once you are at 0.7%, reducing it will lead to the loss of lives, so I absolutely agree with him on that.

The most important of the domestic issues that concerns me is the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. The Bill reverses the reforms that we put in place in 2017 after the scandal of the treatment of Paul Gambaccini, who was on police bail for well over a year before not being charged. Even now, after that reform, far too many suspects are still bailed for years on end. I currently have a case in front of me where an individual has spent five and a half years on bail without an end in sight. This is crippling to an individual’s life—it is like a loose house arrest—and the National Crime Agency shows zero understanding of the cruel damage that is being done to a person’s life by its ridiculously slow investigation. The Bill, as it stands, will make those problems worse by relaxing the current restrictions on police bail. I give notice to the Government that I will aim to amend the Bill.

The Bill also contains a proposal for the mass collection of data under the auspices of preventing and reducing serious violence. Here we have the Government countenancing pre-crime, and to deal with pre-crime, they have to have someone’s medical data, health data and education data—there is no restriction on it. It imposes a duty on an array of authorities, including health providers, to share data with the police. We know from history, including from when people have their phone confiscated, that once the police have this data, getting them to delete it and give it back is the devil’s own job. Indeed, it is near impossible; anybody who has tried it knows that. We are talking here about massively enhancing the powers of the state or an agent of the state to collect as much data on as many individuals as they see fit. I want to see that restricted.

I am concerned about the threat to the right of protest, which this country has enshrined in our national fabric for over 800 years—the right to peaceful demonstration. The Home Secretary promised me from the Dispatch Box that we will be incredibly careful to protect that fundamental right. However, I am afraid that the wording of the Bill, as it stands, simply does not do that. It needs reform and I will endeavour to ensure that it is put right.

Finally, my name, along with that of the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy), is on the amendment to the Queen’s Speech that calls on the Government to obey the law in areas where the courts have ruled that they are acting illegally. There are a number of cases where the Government have not done what they have been told to by the courts three or four years ago. Many of these cases affect the rights of children. Rule of law is not a theoretical constitutional concept. It affects lives and living standards of bereaved adults and deprived children.

We should, as a Conservative party and a Conservative Government, stand up for the rule of law, even when it is inconvenient and when the Treasury finds it unpleasant because it has to pay out a few hundred million pounds. This Conservative Government should limit the power of the state rather than enlarge it, celebrate freedom rather than curtail it, and operate under the law rather than under ministerial fiat. I hope that this Parliament and all the parties will hold the Government to that. Otherwise, we will risk betraying the ideals of the country that we live in.

Extradition (Provisional Arrest) Bill [Lords]

Debate between Andrew Mitchell and David Davis

Report stage & Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting & Committee: 1st sitting: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 8th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

Let me start by agreeing entirely with what was said by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith); he has argued forcefully that we should not extradite to China and Hong Kong, giving powerful humanitarian and human rights reasons, and he is right on every count.

Our extradition arrangements with the United States are not anything like as divisive as those with China and Hong Kong, but they remain deeply imbalanced and can lead to serious miscarriages of justice. As it stands, the Bill would allow individuals in the United Kingdom who are to be extradited to a list of specified countries to be arrested without a warrant. My amendments 7, 8, 9 and 10 would remove the United States from that list of countries, and I shall speak to those amendments now.

The Government say that they need the powers in this Bill because of suspects getting away if they are “encountered by chance” and it is not possible to arrest them without applying to a judge for a warrant. For hundreds of years in this country we have woken judges and magistrates up in the middle of the night to do precisely that: to carry out a police action, be it a search or an arrest. We do not bypass normal legal protections when a domestic suspect might get away, so why is this necessary in respect of individuals facing extradition? The Home Office’s own impact assessment of these new powers says that, with or without them,

“suspects are highly likely to be before the court in any event when the requesting state confirms that the suspect is at large in the UK.”

So one has to wonder why the provision is needed at all.

The methodology used in the impact assessment supporting the Bill is both opaque and bogus. It is too long to go into here, but I recommend that if Members want a confusing way to go to sleep, they should read it—it is completely useless. Even so, it asserts that the proposed change would result annually in just

“6 individuals entering the CJS more quickly than would otherwise have been the case.”

That is just six individuals a year in the criminal justice system, out of the more than 100,000 criminals we deal with in this country every year, and for that we are giving away a fundamental legal protection for the innocent, as well as for anybody else.

The Bill’s explanatory notes try to justify the legislation on the basis that it is similar to powers introduced by our European neighbours, such as Spain. Let me give the House one example of that in operation. Members will know the name of Bill Browder, who campaigned on behalf of Sergei Magnitsky, the man who died in Russian imprisonment; in effect, he was killed by the Russian state. The Russians put out a red notice through Interpol for Mr Browder, and the Spanish Government executed it. Right enough, a judge subsequently released him, but I ask the House to think how Mr Browder would have felt, sitting in a Spanish prison considering the prospect of being extradited to be imprisoned in Russia and put into the hands of the people who had killed Magnitsky. These things are not without price.

As for other European countries, a number of them have absolute embargoes on extraditing their own citizens to anybody outside the EU, for reasons that I will come to in a second, but which in essence relate to a lack of trust in other countries’ justice systems.

The Bill’s impact assessment states:

“Under the proposed new power, the police could arrest a suspect who was wanted for extradition by a trusted partner country”.

The Bill defines such a country as

“those who respect the international rules based system”—

broadly speaking, although not entirely, the United States does that—

“and whose Red Notices and Criminal Justice Systems the UK trusts”.

We like to think of the US justice system as similar to our own, but recent high-profile cases have highlighted just how wrong that is and how we cannot trust the system with the interests of British citizens.

When the 2003 extradition treaty and the associated Bill were introduced, they were sold to the House on the basis that they would be used principally for paedophiles, murderers and terrorists. I was shadow Home Secretary at the time and I remember it vividly. I remember the leader of the Conservative party at the time accepting it on those terms, because he thought it was in the interests of the country. But the people we are extraditing to the United States are mostly white collar businessmen who pose no danger to United Kingdom citizens, or indeed United States citizens.

[Mr Andrew Mitchell (Sutton Coldfield) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is making a characteristically sensible and robust speech. Does he agree that at the moment the international rules-based system is under great pressure but matters hugely to all of us? Is the case of the United States not an example of a totally asymmetric approach to extradition and will that asymmetry not be seen by people in Britain as most unfair and as bringing the whole process into disrepute?

[Mr Davis]

My right hon. Friend is right on several counts, and I will elaborate on the unfairness in a second, but he is right also to highlight something else, which is that international rules-based systems work only if everyone sees them treating all countries and their citizens identically. If they do not do that, they fall down. An American exceptionalist approach, therefore, destroys the systems we are trying to uphold. So there is an interesting philosophical point in his intervention, as well as the moral one that I will major on.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Mitchell]

It is not just a case of lack of reciprocity. The people in the NatWest case, which my right hon. Friend mentioned, had no case to answer according to the British authorities, yet in spite of that they were extradited. That is an appalling abuse of their human rights.

[Mr Davis]

My right hon. Friend is exactly right. Interestingly, in their case human rights were not used as a defence mechanism, whereas in another case the only thing that stopped Gary McKinnon being extradited was the implementation of the human rights law. My right hon. Friend is right more generally, too; they did not have a case to answer in a normal justice system, but they gave in and confessed to guilt rather than face 30 years in a grim high-security Texan prison, never seeing their families again, which is what this would have amounted to. That illustrates where the disparity lies, and why it is so unfair.

The US Government also have much greater discretion in refusing extradition requests. Under the Extradition Act 2003, the Secretary of State “must”—the word is “must”—issue a certificate for extradition. The equivalent US code states that the Secretary of State “may” order the person to be tried. Of course, there is no stronger demonstration of this than the case of Anne Sacoolas, the person responsible for the tragic death of Harry Dunn. In Ms Sacoolas’s case the US Secretary of State used this discretion—I think in the view of most in this House, wrongly—to prevent her extradition. The Dunn family may now have to settle for a wholly unsatisfactory virtual trial of Anne Sacoolas, because our extradition arrangements have failed to give them proper justice.

That is just the latest example of how the completely lopsided treaty allows US citizens to evade justice while exposing United Kingdom citizens to miscarriages of justice. The Prime Minister himself has recognised this imbalance. At Prime Minister’s questions on 12 February he said:

“I do think that elements of that relationship are unbalanced, and it is certainly worth looking at”.—[Official Report, 12 February 2020; Vol. 671, c. 846.]

Due to the scope of the Bill, my amendments would not rebalance the extradition arrangements with the US, but they would prevent, in a very small way, further facilitation of further miscarriages of justice. It would be a tiny improvement in a system that requires an entirely radical rewrite, so I am only moving them as probing amendments today.

The simple truth is—I make this point very firmly to my right hon. and very old Friend the Minister for Security, who is sitting on the Treasury Bench—[Interruption.] He is older than you think. I say to the Minister that this really needs, in the words of the Prime Minister, a rethink. I do hope that the Government will rethink this treaty and ensure that in future when we extradite British citizens to any other justice system in the world, that justice system will work as it is supposed to, and give them what is in the title: justice.

Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Andrew Mitchell and David Davis

Report stage & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 30th June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

I will speak to new clauses 7 to 10, but before I do, may I add my support to new clauses 2 and 29 in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton)?  As an ex-Brexit Secretary, I see no reason whatever to wait on the negotiation in order to take his clauses forward.

Today there is no limit on the amount of time for which people can be held in immigration detention in the United Kingdom. We are the only country in Europe that takes this stance. At the end of 2019, the individual detained in a holding centre for the longest period had been held for 1,002 days. In earlier years those numbers were even worse. These people are detained without trial or due process, oversight or basic freedoms, and they are carrying the debilitating psychological burden of having no idea when they will be released.

This flies in the face of centuries of British justice. Its operation has been severely criticised by the chief inspector of prisons, the chief inspector of borders, the Select Committee on Home Affairs, the Joint Committee on Human Rights, the Law Society and the Bar Council—quite a bunch of radicals, I would say. As a result of this early criticism, the Home Office had to reduce the numbers in the system, for which it claimed credit in a briefing note issued this morning. This is an improvement towards bringing down the numbers, but is still nowhere near right. We need a 28-day limit on immigration detention, and that is the purpose of my new clauses.

The Government also claimed in that briefing note that 97% of the occupants of immigration holding centres are foreign national offenders. Well, that is technically true, since at the moment, under covid-19 emergency arrangements, we have temporarily put out into the community a significant majority of the people who were detained in holding centres, keeping in only the most serious cases. In fact, in normal times—to which we will presumably return when the covid-19 crisis is over—the average proportion of foreign national offenders who have been detained over five years is 22%. The figure is never more than 23% and is normally at 19% to 20%. That tells us that four out of five detainees in these centres have no criminal action against them whatever; they are innocent people.

[Mr Andrew Mitchell (Sutton Coldfield) (Con)]

I completely agree with what my right hon. Friend is saying. Not only is his point correct, but I have found out, as a result of tabling a question to the Home Secretary, that over the past five years the taxpayer has had to pay out in excess of £20 million to people who were unlawfully detained. Is he aware of that?

[Mr Davis]

My right hon. Friend makes a good point, to which I will return in a moment because it impinges on another claim made by the Home Office that is plainly not true.

We have established what these people are not—they are not all foreign national offenders—but we should understand what they are. I do not have time in the six minutes available to me to go through all of them, but I have in front of me case after case of people who have suffered human trafficking, torture, rape, forced prostitution and modern slavery—mostly before they got to these shores, but in some cases after they arrived here too. Many are damaged people to whom the world has dealt a very, very rough hand. And what do we do when they come here for our help? We lock them up for an indefinite period.

Exiting the European Union

Debate between Andrew Mitchell and David Davis

Monday 5th September 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Davis]

The right hon. Lady was an eminent member of the Cabinet, and, indeed, an eminent Front-Bench Member and shadow Home Secretary. I therefore take her question extremely seriously, as she does this issue. The simple answer is that the whole justice and home affairs stream is being assessed even as we speak, and the aim is to preserve the relationship with the European Union on security matters as best we can. The right hon. Lady will recall that last year a decision was made which laid aside about 100 measures that we did not want to be part of, but kept some others, including the European arrest warrant and one or two others—controversially, as she will remember. So yes, of course we are across that, and of course we are aiming to maintain it. That is the answer.

[Mr Andrew Mitchell (Sutton Coldfield) (Con)]

I warmly congratulate my right hon. Friend on his return to the Government Front Bench after an unfortunate hiatus of some 20 years. Is it not absolutely clear that he has both the skills and the experience that are required for the extremely difficult job that lies ahead? Surely the whole House will wish him every success as he charts those extremely difficult shoals.

Iraq Inquiry Report

Debate between Andrew Mitchell and David Davis

Thursday 14th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Davis]

I do not think it is a question of “may be”; I think there will be the continued disruption of international affairs and the continued threat of terrorism. Europol’s assessment that there are 5,000 jihadists in Europe implies an arrival rate of 1,000 a year, and the rate is going up, not down. It is clear that the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right.

That brings us to a significant point. When the individual Prime Ministers involved in each of the decisions I mentioned made their decision, I am sure that in their own mind they were doing the right thing—they were trying to save lives, to save a civilisation or to intervene to prevent further terrorism. The trouble is that every single one of them made simplistic decisions, without detailed understanding. The complexity of the issues they were reaching into was beyond their knowledge. It is correcting, enhancing and improving that knowledge that the inquiry report is all about.

I am no pacifist, but I find myself horrified at the thoughtless, aggressive and unnecessary interventions by the west in areas that it does not understand. I did not like the Gaddafi regime; I did not like the Saddam Hussein regime; I do not particularly like the Bashar Assad regime, but ripping them out has led to something even worse. The hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) is therefore absolutely right in his analysis, which demonstrates why this report and its speed of preparation are so important.

[Mr Andrew Mitchell (Sutton Coldfield) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is making an immensely compelling point. Does he agree that when the report is published, which, I like him, hope will be as soon as possible, although the tendency in the British media will be to use it as a trial of the former Prime Minister—Blair guilty or innocent—the great gain of the report will be in showing how the whole mechanism of government worked in the run-up to the decision to go to war? A Prime Minister is not Dr Strangelove; this is about how the whole machine in Whitehall works.

[Mr Davis]

My right hon. Friend will forgive me if I do not follow him down his comparison between Dr Strangelove and past Prime Ministers, but he is right in one respect: the most important element of this is what we learn from our mistakes. However, there are also issues of accountability and closure, which I will return to in a moment.