Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Programme

Ben Wallace Excerpts

Tuesday 12th November 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr Hollobone]

I agree with my hon. Friend that Iran has said some unfriendly and unpleasant things about the state of Israel and its right to exist, which he and I and most Members totally abhor. The question in the previous intervention was whether Israel’s possession of a nuclear weapon was not a big issue in itself. Of course it is, but the whole Israeli mindset has to do with defending Israel’s people, not projecting aggression elsewhere.

I know that the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) is looking at me quizzically because he will not agree with much of that, but the perspective of the state of Israel is that the Jewish diaspora throughout the world, but mainly in eastern and western Europe, suffered the horrors of the holocaust, and out of that was born the state of Israel. He and I and others can agree or disagree about that history, but the fact is that half the present world’s Jewish population lives in the state of Israel, and they have found nowhere safe in the world throughout the history of the Jewish people. The state of Israel now offers the best chance for Jewish people to live in peace. They have developed a nuclear weapon or weapons because they want to defend themselves. They do not want to deploy that weapon against anyone else; they just want to be left in peace.

[Mr Ben Wallace (Wyre and Preston North) (Con)]

I fully accept many of my hon. Friend’s arguments about an expansionist versus a defending nation, but within the United Nations and the global community, there are rules about the development and holding of nuclear or any other weapons. Iran is a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which imposes certain obligations that ultimately involve its being taken to the Security Council; Israel is not. Does he therefore recognise the disparity there, and will he join me in urging Israel to sign the NNPT, or at least to allow inspection of its sites?

[Mr Hollobone]

Yes, I agree that Israel should be a signatory, but there would be no question of Israel giving up its nuclear weapons. Enough bad things have been done to the Jewish people over two millennia that they simply will not give them up.

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[Mr Ben Wallace (Wyre and Preston North) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone) on securing this debate. May I also say what a thoughtful and principled speech my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) has just made? He is a true believer in the importance of the nuclear deterrent and of the logical application of standards that the deterrent must adhere to.

I had better declare that I have chaired the all-party group on Iran since 2006; my co-chair is now the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw). In that time, I have visited Iran and made a number of trips around the world to meet Governments and officials linked to the policy on Iran.

I should start my remarks by saying, briefly, that there is a real certainty in the debate that there is a nuclear weapons programme in Iran. However, that certainty is not shared by the United States Government. The US national intelligence estimate of 2007 said that Iran had halted the programme, and in 2010 the US national intelligence estimate yet again confirmed that Iran was not on the verge of breakout. These national intelligence estimates are significant bodies of work, drawing on intelligence from around the world and on the work of different agencies, so we should not just brush them aside.

A country does not just jump from 20% to a nuclear weapon. The uranium has to be weaponised, the grade of the uranium has to be increased and the weapon must be tested, which would usually leave a very significant footprint and take some time. If we take those facts in conjunction with the US national intelligence estimate—and, indeed, with some of the reports from the International Atomic Energy Agency—we see that there is not such an urgency. Iran is not suddenly going to produce a nuclear weapon. In addition, there is the supreme leader’s fatwa that nuclear weapons are un-Islamic. I have visited Iran and if anyone wants to understand the country they have to understand its supreme leader. When the supreme leader says that about nuclear weapons, he means it. It is absolutely imperative that people follow that ruling.

That does not mean that there are not people in Iran who want a nuclear weapon; I suspect that there are plenty of people there who wish to have one, for the purposes of deterrence. If a sane-minded Iranian who represented New Forest East was living in downtown Tehran, I suspect that he would believe in the principle of deterrence, given that his neighbours are Pakistan, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. Those are sworn enemies of Iran, ideologically different and religiously opposed—there are all sorts of issues that we could say we faced in the cold war in the late 1940s. Those differences are often brought home to Iran by the terrorist attacks across its border. We should certainly remember that the supreme leader—for now—has made that ruling and that it is not something to sniff at.

I totally agree that the nature of the regime goes hand in hand with the issue of nuclear weapons. Obviously, Iran’s record on human rights is abhorrent. It has engaged in the persecution of the Baha’is, the suppression of women’s rights and the persecution of lawyers and of people who lead strikes, including bus drivers who lead strikes and have their rights under the constitution denied. It is very important that we do something to put pressure on Iran about those issues and ensure that they are resolved.

Let us remember that the only democracy in the whole region, other than Israel, is Iran. Iran’s democracy may not be one that we think perfect, but it is a democracy that operates at all sorts of levels—the guardian council, local councils and the mayor of Tehran are all elected. Iran has an active democracy. There is no democracy in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Syria or others of our allies to whom we sell weapons systems around the world.

There is a democracy and a constitution in Iran. One of the reasons for the green movement in 2009 was the desire among the Iranian people to follow the rule of law. If someone reads the Iranian constitution, they will see that it is quite good, even though it was authored by a Belgian. One of the reasons for the green movement was the demand that the denial of rights to people should stop. Label someone a “terrorist” or a “Zionist spy” and they do not have those rights. Well, we live in a democracy that labels someone a “terrorist” and they are then locked up for 90 days, without the same rights that they would have if they were labelled a “criminal”. Iran is certainly more extreme, but let us not forget that the temptation to deny people their rights for all sorts of reasons is not just confined to Iran.

Then we talk about security guarantees. It is a rough neighbourhood down there—a very rough neighbourhood, with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. No one has mentioned the recent discovery that in Saudi Arabia there is a ballistic missile launch-pad facility with two aiming marks: one to Tel Aviv and one to Tehran. It is a rough neighbourhood and I think that if I were there, I, too, might like to look out for myself.

At the heart of all this is trust, rhetoric and history. Let us not forget that Iranians distrust the west as much as we distrust Iran. That is at the heart of this process. Let us remember that we distrusted Gorbachev, but we did not say that because he was from the Soviet regime—the regime that was pulling people’s toenails out and torturing them—we could not do business with him and we could not find a solution. We did not write him off. I was involved with the peace process in Northern Ireland in 1994 with the right hon. Member for Belfast North (Mr Dodds), who would have been appalled by the people I had to meet in the course of trying to make peace with our enemy. We do not necessarily just write people off.

The history of Iran, the great game, the fact that the BBC World Service was used in 1953 to trigger the coup against Iran’s only democratic prime minister—if we were Iranian, we might be a bit suspicious of western media, although now I think that would be wrong. Then there was the grand bargain offered up in 2003, which was the demilitarisation of Hezbollah, the offer to suspend enrichment of uranium and even a movement to a Saudi recognition of Israel, which was dismissed out of hand by the United States Administration.

We are in the business, with this peace process and the process at Geneva, of trying to build trust. We cannot indulge in rhetoric and history to rule that out. We have to give it a chance. We are not stupid and we have all been here before. No one has rose-tinted spectacles when it comes to dealing with Iran; it is a straw man argument to say that we do. We need to work on that and the Government are engaging. I am confident that we will get there, if we just give it a chance.

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[The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Hugh Robertson)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone) on securing this debate at such an important moment in the negotiations on the Iranian nuclear issue. I also congratulate the other hon. Members who have spoken this afternoon. I will address the points raised in their various contributions.

To set the scene, it is worth saying three things. First, Iran has shown over the course of recent months that it is genuinely taking a new approach to negotiations. We need fully to test that and explore the opportunity—I go no further than that at this stage—for a deal. We believe there may well be a deal on the table that would give us meaningful assurance on our immediate proliferation concerns and create the space for a comprehensive solution.

Secondly, let me absolutely clear: there is no question of our seeing this issue through rose-tinted spectacles. We approach this negotiation with our eyes wide open. We are fully aware of Iran’s history of concealment and its defiance of its international obligations. We will continue to be firm in our approach to Iran on that and other issues. Thirdly—this addresses a point raised by the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) and others—despite the fact that progress on nuclear talks remains possible, we are not blind to Iran’s nefarious activities in its immediate region and beyond, or its terrible human rights record.

I hope my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering will take some comfort from what I have just said. He was worried about the possibility of the talks becoming a space in which the Iranians could continue to enrich. The obvious point is that, without the talks, Iran will continue to enrich anyway, so we might as well give the talks a chance. I cannot go into the detail of the negotiations and the terms around which they revolve, but clearly the basis of the deal is that Iran will take concrete and verifiable action to address the international community’s concerns about its nuclear programme, and the E3 plus 3 may consider some measure of sanctions relief to offer in return. There will not be a deal unless Iran ceases its enrichment programme.

The hon. Member for Islington North made the obvious point that human rights in Iran remain in a terrible state, and we agree with him. The negotiations in Geneva are purely about the nuclear file, and the hope is that the twin-track approach of exchanging non-resident charges d’affaires, and so on, will create preconditions that enable progress to be made in other areas.

The hon. Gentleman asked the Foreign Secretary yesterday about the middle east weapons of mass destruction-free zone, for which we argued during the non-proliferation treaty review in 2010. There has been a small amount of progress on that recently, and we hope to be in a position to make an announcement in the near future.

The hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) made three clear points. The first was on the international relations dynamic. Tempting though it is, it is not my position to comment on Saudi relations with the United States. Perhaps it would be helpful if he considered that in the context of Iran’s history of negative involvement across the Gulf. There are many states beyond ours that are extremely suspicious of Iranian activities, and justifiably so. There is concern across the wider Gulf—the concern in Israel is often mentioned—about many of the worries raised this afternoon. We already keep all our key allies in the Gulf fully briefed on where we are.

I hope that I have answered the hon. Gentleman’s question on the nuclear-free zone in the middle east. He mentioned disarmament here in the United Kingdom, and I can do no better than repeat the comments of the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) by saying that we have a slightly different view on that.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere (Mr Clappison) talked about our approach to the talks, and I hope that I have reassured him on that. The phrase “rose-tinted spectacles” has come up on a number of occasions this afternoon, and there are no rose-tinted spectacles in the Geneva talks. Everyone knows exactly what is involved, the difficulties of what we are dealing with and the backdrop against which we are trying to do this. However—one only has to talk to the Foreign Secretary, who has met the regime on a number of occasions in New York and Geneva, to get a feel for this—there is a new feel to the talks. It is important that we test that to see what can be achieved. If we are able to get over the line, I doubt there is anyone anywhere in this Chamber who would not agree that that is a good thing. The question is, to test Iran’s resolve and to see what is achievable, but we must do so with our eyes wide open.

My hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) made a good and thoughtful speech, as he always does, and he is absolutely right that Iran ought to be the subject of a system of containment. In a sense, of course, that is what an interim deal before a final deal will seek to achieve, and he is right to make that point.

My hon. Friend the Member for Wyre and Preston North (Mr Wallace), the co-chair of the all-party group on Iran, talked about the importance of trust, which is a key component that he compared to Northern Ireland. I remember someone saying to me some years ago that, in relation to Northern Ireland, the Government of the day were in about the right place if everyone was marginally unhappy with them. I suspect that might be a principle that applies here, too. He is absolutely right about the importance of gaining trust. The hope is that, if trust builds during the negotiations, it could translate into other affairs. He has the Government’s approach in a nutshell—it is important to take the opportunity seriously but to be realistic about what can be achieved.

I thank the hon. Member for North Durham for supporting the process. I was struck in the Chamber yesterday by the level of support from Opposition Members, including the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) and others who dealt with the issue in the past and know what is involved. I am grateful for the continued support of the hon. Member for North Durham.

I do not know whether there is anything that Members feel I have not addressed, but I will provide a brief update on where we are.

As most people know, the Foreign Secretary returned on Sunday from the E3 plus 3 negotiations in Geneva, which were the third round of talks since President Rouhani’s election in June. The talks were detailed and complex. They covered every aspect of Iran’s extensive nuclear programme, and the Iranian negotiators were, as has been reported and as the Foreign Secretary mentioned yesterday, tough but constructive. The focus of the negotiations was to reach agreement on a first step—this was the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East—that would create confidence and space to negotiate a comprehensive settlement that resolves the Iranian nuclear issue.

Talks ended without that interim agreement because some key differences remained between the parties. Disappointing though that was on one level, it might comfort people to know that we are not running into the talks with rose-tinted spectacles. The negotiations are tough and have a long history, but the gaps are narrowing. At the conclusion of the weekend, the E3 plus 3 Foreign Ministers presented a united position, which we believe gives us a very strong foundation for the next round of talks on 20 November.

Provided the conditions can be met, the Government are in favour of reaching an interim agreement. As the Foreign Secretary told the House yesterday, the agreement being discussed would have real benefits for global security, but it needs to be detailed, clear and concrete. The agreement also needs to assure all countries that the threat of nuclear proliferation in Iran is being addressed and, therefore, it is crucial that the agreement cover all aspects of Iran’s nuclear programme. We believe that such a deal is on the table and is within reach.

Sanctions have undoubtedly played an indispensable part in creating the new opening. Sanctions are putting the Iranian leadership and the Iranian economy under serious pressure. We think that the sanctions are costing the Iranian economy at least $4 billion a month or $48 billion a year. There is no question of our relaxing the sanctions pressure before we have taken action to address the proliferation concerns.

It is worth noting in passing that, while the talks are going on—this goes to the centre of what my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering said in his opening remarks—the Iranian nuclear programme continues to advance. The most recent International Atomic Energy Agency report of 28 August noted that Iran’s stockpile of near-20% enriched uranium continues to grow. Iran has installed more than 1,000 advanced centrifuges, which are capable of enriching at a significantly faster rate, and there is also the heavy water research reactor at Arak. All that represents a breach of the United Nations Security Council and IAEA board resolutions and shows why, in the interest of international security, we want the talks to succeed.

Because of the time, I will finish by saying that this afternoon’s debate has revolved around two dynamics. There is a new opportunity to do something, and I think that everyone in the Chamber would agree that, if that opportunity exists, we should take it. Rest assured that we are going into the talks with our eyes wide open. We know what we are dealing with. I do not think anyone is in any doubt that a deal will be difficult to achieve, but such a deal would be in the interest of the international community.

[Mr Wallace]

On a point of order, Mr Sheridan. Throughout the debate my seat has been referred to as Lancaster and Wyre Valley, Lancaster and Wyre or Wyre and Preston North. Given that my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Eric Ollerenshaw) is sitting behind me, I want to correct the record. Before the boundary changes, I was the Member of Parliament for Lancaster and Wyre, but I am now the Member of Parliament for Wyre and Preston North.

[Jim Sheridan (in the Chair)]

I am sure that Hansard will have recorded the hon. Gentleman’s constituency correctly.