(7 years, 8 months ago)
Commons ChamberMy right hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North (Joan Ryan) has been trying to intervene for ages.
No doubt, but I think I have been more generous in giving way to Labour Members than they have ever been to me in any Committee or debate that I can remember. I say this reasonably gently: when I first came to this House, the Scottish National party had three Members here and the Labour party in Scotland had 50. I was used to taking constant interventions, and that was entirely legitimate. It did not faze me at all when I was a young Member, and it certainly does not faze me now. So let us make some progress.
On the question of the imminent threat, Chilcot said after assessing all the evidence that the then Prime Minister was engaged in advocacy, not in presenting the facts. On the question of a prior commitment, the Chilcot report is full of expressions from the Prime Minister to the President of the United States of America that were not known to Members of this House or to the general public. That information gives a totally different view of the reasons for conflict that the Prime Minister was then presenting to this House. For example, back in December 2001, the then Prime Minister said in a letter to President Bush that
“at present international opinion would be reluctant, outside the US/UK”—
I do not know how he read opinion in that way—
“to support immediate military action though, for sure, people want to be rid of Saddam. So we need a strategy for regime change that builds over time.”
The Prime Minister said repeatedly and consistently in this House that regime change was not the objective of Government policy. He stated that the Government’s objective was to stop a clear and present danger to the United Kingdom. I have yet to see a more clear example of misleading people.
Lastly, and I think most pertinently, Chilcot identified the damage done to the authority of the United Nations. These were among the clearest and most resounding points in his report. In this troubled world, we have never needed an effective United Nations more than we do at this moment. That undermining of the UN was clear in the actions of the Prime Minister and in his presentation of why the second resolution was not to pass. Such a resolution would apparently have gone down by 11 votes to four. The Prime Minister repeatedly told the public that the only circumstances in which there would be a war without a second resolution were if one country expressed an unreasonable veto or stood out against international opinion and was not prepared to sanction action in Iraq. We now know beyond question from Chilcot that that was not the case.
We know that the then Prime Minister was misrepresenting the views of the Government of France and of President Chirac, for example. Even on the day of the debate, he continued to misrepresent the French position. The damage to the authority of the United Nations Security Council and to the consistency of international relations is inestimable. In a radio programme last year, as I recall, Sir Stephen Wall was asked specifically whether the Government had lied about the intentions of the French and withheld information on that matter. His answer was yes. The damage to international relations and the question of the unreasonable veto, as the then Prime Minister put it, are at the heart of this misrepresentation.
In recent weeks we have heard a great deal about checks and balances in political systems, particularly as people across the world are crossing their fingers and hoping for the best in the White House. We have been hoping that the institutions of office have a restraining effect and that the mad tweeter will become a sensible President.
It gives me great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Witney (Robert Courts). I congratulate him most warmly on an excellent maiden speech. He talked with great descriptive beauty about his constituency. He used humour and he was serious. He talked about his own family’s political journey in having a Labour grandfather. My family has had a political journey in the opposite direction: of my two grandfathers, one was Liberal and one was Conservative. I noticed, however, that he did not talk about the political journey of his predecessor but one—an interesting journey that took place rather more recently than his grandfather’s. I thought that what he said about his predecessor was absolutely right, at a time when a lot of people are saying not very nice things about the previous Prime Minister. I am really pleased that the hon. Gentleman said what he did and put it on the record. I thank him for that.
Before addressing the motion itself, I would like to consider what we might be debating today instead. We could be debating the crisis in the national health service and social care. We could be debating the devastating impact on living standards of the Government’s autumn statement. We could be debating what the Scottish National party Government in Scotland might be doing with the powers they have, but resolutely refuse to use, to mitigate that. Or we could have used this precious debating time to put pressure on the Government to drop food and medicine to the people of Aleppo, who, as the French Government said today, are facing the worst massacre of civilians since the second world war.
But no, we are debating the motion before us—and why? SNP Members are furious, livid and incandescent with rage that Sir John Chilcot did not find that Tony Blair lied. After seven years and five independent inquiries, the lie that our former Prime Minister lied has finally been laid to rest, and SNP Members cannot stand it. The motion, of course, does not talk about lying. However, the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), who supports the motion, let the cat out of the bag when she told The Observer on Sunday
“The Chilcot report confirmed Tony Blair lied to the public, parliament and his own cabinet in order to drag us into the Iraq war.”
She has clearly not read the Chilcot report; it did no such thing.
Without going over the detail as we did in a very full debate on this back in the summer, let me remind the House briefly of what the Chilcot report did say. Volume 4, paragraph 876, says clearly that there was no falsification or improper use of intelligence. Volume 5, paragraph 953 says that there was no deception of Cabinet. Volume 1, paragraph 572 onwards, says that there was no secret commitment to war either at Crawford in April 2002 or anywhere else. Although outside the body of the report, as a number of hon. Members have pointed out, Sir John Chilcot himself, in his appearance before the Liaison Committee, said:
“I absolve him”—
Tony Blair—
“from a personal and demonstrable decision to deceive parliament or the public—to state falsehoods, knowing them to be false.”
Some people just cannot give up. Some people do not seem able to accept the possibility that reasonable people can come to different views on a difficult subject but do so in good faith. Some people cannot accept—
No, the right hon. Gentleman had half an hour and a lot of Members want to speak.
Some people cannot accept that however much one disagrees with a decision taken, it can still have been taken in good faith. So here we are debating a motion that seeks to distort and rewrite Chilcot and, in effect, put Tony Blair back in the dock. I am delighted that my own party is having none of this nonsense and that we will be voting against this mendacious opportunism in an hour and a half’s time.
I think there may be another reason why some people persist in trying to claim falsely that there was deliberate deceit in all this. They are more than a little nervous that as we look at what has happened in Syria, and is still happening in Syria today, where there was no intervention and we left a brutal dictator to continue to slaughter his own people, history will prove our former Prime Minister right.
Several hon. Members rose—
Order. I am going to suggest an informal limit of six minutes and see how we get on. It may be necessary to put a formal limit on, but we will start with six minutes.
(7 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberMy hon. Friend is absolutely right. The decision taken to leave the EU is a decision of the United Kingdom. It will be the United Kingdom that negotiates that deal, and it will be the right deal for the United Kingdom.
Our national health service, universities and businesses are already losing talent because of the uncertainty about the status of EU citizens here in the event of Brexit. It is an uncertainty the Prime Minister could end now. Why won’t she?
I expect to be able to guarantee the status of EU citizens here in the United Kingdom. I intend and want to do that. The only circumstances in which that would not be possible would be if the status of British citizens in the European Union member states was not guaranteed. This is an issue that, as I have said previously, I hope to be able to discuss at an early stage.
(7 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberI join my hon. Friend in commending all those who have been involved in the bid at Gainsborough’s House. Many people will enjoy visiting Gainsborough’s House in the future as a result of the work that will be able to be done. I know the importance of the Heritage Lottery Fund. It supported the excellent Stanley Spencer gallery in my own constituency, so I have seen the impact it can have. He is absolutely right. The point about devolution deals is people coming together with that ambition for their local area to generate the transformative investment he talks about. Suffolk is looking at the sort of deal it might wish to have locally.
We are very clear that it is for the courts to decide where a war crime is being committed. We co-sponsored a UN Security Council resolution in May 2014 to refer those responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Syria, regardless of affiliation, to the International Criminal Court. Of course, that was vetoed by Russia and China. On the issue of a no-fly zone, this has been addressed. People have looked at this over a number of years. The scenes we see of the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent civilians are absolutely appalling. We want to see an end to that, but there are many questions about a no-fly zone. Who is it there to protect? Would it lead to Assad bombing people in the expectation that they would then move to that zone? How would a safe area actually be enforced there? Who would do that enforcement? There are many questions that need to be looked at in those sorts of issues. What we all know is that the only real solution for peace and stability in Syria is political transition, and it is time Russia accepted that: that the future of Syria is a political transition to a stable Syria, free of Assad.
(7 years, 11 months ago)
Commons ChamberDoes the Prime Minister accept that, like all developed economies with ageing populations, Britain needs to import labour to thrive? Would it therefore not be an act of extreme self-harm for us to give up our full and unfettered access to the single market out of a dogmatic and arbitrary desire to reduce immigration?
It is not an arbitrary and dogmatic desire. We recognise the impact that uncontrolled immigration can have on people, particularly those at the lower end of the income scale. The right hon. Gentleman needs to consider carefully the message that the British people gave in the vote on 23 June. I think that vote told us that they want to see the Government able to take control of the movement of people from the European Union into the United Kingdom, and that is what we will do.
(8 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberMy hon. Friend is absolutely right on his second point. Prime Ministers do need to be able to deploy force or take action without parliamentary sanction if it is urgent and then to report to Parliament straight afterwards. Where there is a premeditated decision to take action, that convention has grown up, and I am happy to repeat it from the Dispatch Box.
As for the national security adviser, I think it is right to have an expert. It does not have to be someone who is currently a civil servant—an expert could be brought in from outside—but it does need to be an expert who is garnering together the military, civilians, the intelligence and all the different parts of Whitehall. It needs to be someone who is full time, rather than a politician who is also running a Department.
Will the Prime Minister put on the record that he believes all those who voted for the action against Saddam Hussein did so in good faith? On the very important lessons to be learned, does he acknowledge that just as there are consequences, sometimes terrible, of military intervention, so there are consequences of non-intervention, as we are seeing at huge cost today in Syria?
I am happy to make both those points. I am sure everyone, like me, came here, listened to the arguments, wrestled with the difficult decision and then took it. We can look back now and see how we feel about all the things that happened subsequently. I am sure that everyone made their decision in good faith. The consequences of non-intervention can been seen clearly in Syria, as I said in response to the hon. Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes). This is true, and it is worth mentioning other humanitarian issues, as I did in my statement with respect to Srebrenica and Rwanda.
(8 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberThat is a very good question, and one that I am quite keen to answer. The sense in the European Council was that it had bent over backwards to give to a country that already had a special status—out of the euro and out of the Schengen System—things that they found profoundly uncomfortable. Many of those countries really do believe in ever-closer political union however wrong we might think it is here in this country, and they hated saying to Britain, “Right, you are out of this.” That really pained them, but they did it. They particularly disliked having to agree to cut welfare benefits for their own citizens, because that is what they signed up to do. I believe, and will always believe, that it was a good negotiation. It did not solve all of Britain’s problems, and I never said that it did, but it certainly addressed some of the biggest concerns that the British people had. I would like to know whether there is more that could have been done, but the very strong sense that I get is that this issue of full access to the single market and reform of free movement is very, very difficult. We achieved some reforms of free movement, but the idea that there is an enormous change to free movement, particularly from outside the EU, is a very tough call and people have to think that through very carefully before we get into the negotiations.
The referendum was about our membership of the European Union and not about our membership of the single market. Given the very grave damage that is already being done to our economy because of the uncertainty, will the Prime Minister call on all of those in this House who aspire to lead this country to commit themselves to keeping Britain in the single market with full access?
The right hon. Gentleman makes an important point. This is one of the key arguments. When I examine why I have always believed that we are better off in, even though I have wanted to see reform, it has always come down to this: the single market exists, we are in it, and it will go on existing even if we leave it and it has a profound effect on our economic, business, political and national life. I certainly urge my colleagues to aim for the greatest possible access, but, obviously, they will have to think about what the benefits and disbenefits of that route are.
(8 years, 2 months ago)
Commons ChamberUrgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
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I am grateful to my hon. Friend, and she is right to say that there is no link between IER and last night’s registration difficulties on the website. I will study her recommendations with great interest, and I understand that she will soon meet the Minister responsible for constitutional affairs to discuss the matter.
It would be an absolute scandal if people who tried to register before the deadline were deprived of a vote in what is the most important vote in any of our lifetimes. Will the Minister pull out all the stops until the last possible moment to ensure that people can vote? Will he also address the concern raised by my constituents who live and work abroad, and who have heard that there are problems with processing the huge numbers of postal and proxy votes that are coming back in at local level, and ensure that those votes are counted?
There are very high numbers of registrations for postal votes, and indeed of registrations by post as opposed to through the website. We are dealing with all those issues. The right hon. Gentleman asks me to pull out all the stops; believe me, we are.
(8 years, 4 months ago)
Commons ChamberMy hon. Friend makes an important point. Some people think that if we care about air quality there is no room for any road building, but, of course, stationary traffic pollutes much more than moving traffic. We must make sure that the arteries that serve all our constituencies are open, and I will look carefully at what my hon. Friend has said. However, we should also recognise that air quality is improving. Nitrogen oxide levels have fallen by 17% over the last four years, and we want to do more by introducing the clean air programme.
Q11. With the United Kingdom facing its most momentous decision for a generation in eight weeks’ time, does the Prime Minister think it makes more sense to listen to all our closest friends and allies around the world, or to a combination of French fascists, Nigel Farage and Vladimir Putin?
I am glad the right hon. Gentleman takes the English pronunciation of Farage, rather than the poncey, foreign-sounding one that he seems to prefer—a thoroughly good thing. I think we should listen to our friends and our allies. Looking around the world, it is hard to find the leader of a country who wishes us well who wants us to do other than stay inside a reformed European Union.
(8 years, 6 months ago)
Commons ChamberMy right hon. Friend is absolutely right. We will be holding the debate at a time of great uncertainty and insecurity in our world. We have Russia, with its destabilisation of Ukraine to our east. We have the horrors of Daesh to our south. This is a time when we need to be working closely with our neighbours and friends to make sure we can deliver greater security for our people. It is, of course, true to say that a cornerstone of our security is NATO, our “Five Eyes” partnership and our special relationship with the United States. They are vital. In the modern world, however, border information, passenger name records, criminal record information systems, sharing information about terrorism and fighting together against Islamist extremists—not just in Syria and Iraq, but, tragically, in our own countries all across the European Union—are very important issues.
I wish the Prime Minister and the British negotiating team well for what remains of this process. Will he acknowledge that all the major threats and challenges Britain faces, from international terrorism to climate change, demand that we work closely and collaboratively with our close neighbours, and that we do not relegate ourselves to a position of isolation and impotence?
My judgment in all of this is that I want things that increase the power and the ability of Britain to fix problems and to deal with our own security, stability and prosperity. What matters is this: are we more able to deal with these things? One thing Europe needs to get right is to get rid of the pettifogging bureaucracy on the small things that infuriate people but do not actually make a difference, and to focus instead on security, prosperity and jobs—that is the focus.
(8 years, 7 months ago)
Commons ChamberClearly, if we have a legally binding and irreversible approach that says that Britain is not part of an ever-closer union then the courts cannot use ever-closer union to provide a ratchet against Britain in future court judgments. It is an important matter. I accept that it is a symbol, but symbols matter in politics. Our politics is full of symbols. A symbol of being outside this ever-closer union speaks to the British belief that we joined a common market and not a political union, but, as I have set out, it does also have a practical application.
Given that the Daesh terrorist apparently responsible for the latest disgusting video and the cold-blooded murders in Syria jumped bail in Britain, does the Prime Minister regret his decision to scrap Labour’s control orders?
The experts say that the terrorism prevention and investigation measures as amended are every bit as powerful as the control orders that they replace. We must remember that those control orders were, increasingly, knocked down in court decision after court decision. If Members listen to the experts in the security services or the police, they will hear that they are content with the approach that we have.