Foreign Affairs Committee

Ann Clwyd Excerpts

Tuesday 19th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Joan Ryan]

I thank the hon. Gentleman, the Chair of the Committee, for those remarks, which I think are well received and well deserved by my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South. I take them as an endorsement of all that I am saying about the way in which he has served the Committee, the House and the country. I know that the Chair of the Committee and, for that matter, all its members do not want this to happen and have made that clear in their own way.

Membership of Select Committees is fundamentally a matter for the House of Commons. It should not become the subject of mean-spirited manoeuvres by party leaderships who do not brook dissent. Labour’s move is the latest indication of how its leadership is unable to handle criticism, alternative viewpoints or any dissenting voices—a very worrying development in a democratic Parliament. This Parliament works through the Commonwealth, the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and the Inter-Parliamentary Union to help other Parliaments around the world to learn from our examples and our experience to be good, democratic Parliaments, to strengthen democracy and to strengthen parliamentary democracy in particular. This move by the Leader of the Opposition absolutely cuts across and undermines all those aims, all of that mission and all that work.

[Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley) (Lab)]

As a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee both in this and the previous Parliament, I support the Members who are on it presently and particularly my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes), who I have known for over 40 years. He has been an excellent member of the Committee. He has great knowledge and expertise and, as the Chairman said, he has been a rock to many of us in the Committee. Because of his experience and wisdom, he is an essential part of the Committee. Not for the first time, I will vote against the Whip—if there is a three-line Whip asking us to vote for the expulsion of those Members, I will not do it.

[Joan Ryan]

I sincerely thank my hon. Friend, as I am sure her hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South will, for those remarks and for her courage in saying that she will not follow this Whip. I hope that other Opposition Members, many of whom I know are not happy about this move, will show their displeasure and vote against the motion. I also hope that will be true of Government Members.

Members from inside and outside Labour who have raised serious concerns about Labour’s direction will not want to see the silencing of an experienced voice from the Foreign Affairs Committee at a time when the leader of the Labour party’s foreign policy has come under intense scrutiny. From Venezuela to Syria and Russia, the positions taken by the leader of the Labour party and Labour Front Benchers have been a concern to MPs on both sides. This attempt to remove a platform from one of Parliament’s most experienced voices on foreign affairs should be opposed. I want to refer back to what my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley North said about his reasons for leaving, which are virtually identical to my own—