Arms to Syria

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Thursday 11th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Baron]

I take on board what my hon. Friend says, but I think it does him no service to try to create the impression that those of us who suggest that we should not arm the rebels are insisting that we do nothing. It is actually quite the opposite. I think there is an awful lot that we could be doing—on the humanitarian front and on the diplomatic front. I will return to the issue in a minute or two, if my hon. Friend will bear with me. I will allow him in again, if he wishes to come back to me.

If I had another concern, it would be that, as has been hinted at already, the civil war in Syria is in many respects a proxy war being fought out at different levels—whether it be Sunni versus Shi’a Muslim; the old Persian gulf rivalry of Iran versus Saudi Arabia; or indeed the west versus Russia and China. The risk of pouring more weapons into this conflict and of pouring more fuel on to the fire is that we not only increase the violence within Syria but extend the conflict beyond Syria’s borders in very large measure. That would be a mistake of historic proportions.

Returning to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Braintree (Mr Newmark) about doing nothing, I would suggest that there is a lot more that we can do, particularly on the humanitarian and diplomatic fronts.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

rose—

[Mr Newmark]

rose—

[Mr Baron]

I give way first to my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin).

[Mr Jenkin]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, and I am listening carefully to what he is saying. Has he considered the risk of how this debate and his motion will be interpreted? The arms are pouring into Syria from the Sunni factions in Qatar and Saudi, and the Russians are pouring weapons into Syria, yet we seem to be sending the message that we will do nothing for the other side—the forces of democracy and freedom. Is that the message that my hon. Friend wants to send, because it may inadvertently be the message that the Russians will understand from this debate?

[Mr Baron]

I think my hon. Friend does himself a disservice by misunderstanding the stated intention of this debate. It is not that we should do nothing; it is that we as a Parliament should have a say and that our explicit authorisation should be given before any arming of the rebels. We are not making a decision today about whether we should or should not arm the rebels. The motion is very clear that no decision should be made about arming, or, rather, that no policy should be implemented about arming

“without the explicit prior consent of Parliament”.

That is an important distinction. Let me move on, because the issue has been raised before.

The argument is often made that we are to do nothing. Well, there is an awful lot more we can do. On the humanitarian front, for example, why are many refugee camps desperately short of basic amenities? Britain has done more than its fair share—I do not deny that for one moment—but the bottom line is that there are still desperate shortages, so we could do even more there. On the diplomatic front, most people would accept that there can be no military solution to this problem in the longer term; there has to be a diplomatic solution. Why, then, as is presently the case, is the west trying to exclude Iran, a key player in the region and within the country, from the forthcoming peace talks being arranged by the Russians? Time will tell when those talks take place, but there is no doubt that there is an intention at the moment to exclude the Iranians, which is nonsensical.

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[Mr Peter Hain (Neath) (Lab)]

The hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron) spoke eloquently for the majority view in the House, as does the motion. May I apologise in advance for having to leave the Chamber if the debate runs past 3.15, as I have a long-standing speaking commitment?

I am not a pacifist. I was a Cabinet Minister when the decision was taken to invade Iraq. I was Africa Minister when we sent troops to save Sierra Leone from savagery. But as a former Foreign Office Minister responsible for middle east policy, including Syria, I vehemently oppose British military intervention of any kind in Syria.

We all share the Prime Minister’s genuine anger at the humanitarian disaster. We all agree that Bashar al-Assad has become a callous butcher who, instead of responding positively to non-violent protests when the Arab spring reached Syria in March 2011, drove his people into carnage and chaos. Russia and Iran have been culpable in the unfolding horror, and so have the Saudis and Qataris. But Britain, too, is culpable. We should have promoted a negotiated solution from the very beginning. Instead we began by demanding Assad’s unconditional surrender and departure. However, calling for regime change meant chasing an unattainable goal at the cost of yet more bloodshed and destruction, and so did supporting a rebel military victory.

That was fatal. Britain should have offered a practical strategy to end a deepening civil war, because this was never simply a conflict between a brutal regime and the Syrian people. Assad and the ruling Shi’a-aligned Alawite minority form a 10th of the population and were never going to give up power if it meant, as they fear, being oppressed by the Sunni majority. Christians and other minorities are similarly nervous about change. Together those behind Assad amount to nearly a third of the Syrian people; add the Kurds and the total reaches about 40 per cent. Few of them like Assad or his Ba’athist rule, but they fear even more the alternative—becoming victims of genocide, jihadism or sharia extremism.

This is not some simplistic battle between evil and good. Nor is it simply a battle between a barbaric dictator and a repressed people. It is a civil war, and a highly complex one into which Britain treads at its peril. It involves Sunni versus Shi’a, Saudi Arabia versus Iran and, a cold war hangover, the US versus Russia.

[Mr Jenkin]

I do not necessarily demur from a single word of the right hon. Gentleman’s analysis of the complexity of the conflict, but what effect does it have on the efforts to bring those parties to the negotiating table when the International Criminal Court makes it virtually impossible to manage any kind of orderly transition, let alone continuity in the existing regime? He seems to be suggesting that that might be one of the options.

[Mr Hain]

I will address that point in a minute.

Regime change in Damascus could be the outcome of a negotiated solution, but if, as the UK and the US are effectively doing, getting rid of Assad is set as the precondition for talks, the carnage will continue. Surely we should by now have understood from Britain’s long and bitter experience in Northern Ireland that setting preconditions will prevent attempts at negotiation from even getting off the ground.

The Prime Minister’s “good guys versus bad guys” prism is hardly made credible by the presence of al-Qaeda fighters among the west’s favoured rebels, nor is it by the barbarous murders of innocent Syrian citizens by some rebels. Other parties have started to intervene, such as Hezbollah, in turn dragging in Israel, another lethal development. The collateral impact of 1 million Syrian refugees in Jordan is especially dangerous. Iran will not back off because of its key interests.

If the regime were somehow toppled without a settlement in place, the country could descend into even greater chaos. Russia fears that anarchy because, like the US and the UK, it has key strategic military, economic and intelligence interests in the area; for example, Syria provides Russia’s only Mediterranean port in a region where the US is well placed militarily. The only way forward is to broker a settlement, with Russia using its leverage to ensure Assad negotiates seriously. Like it or not, Russia is critical, as is engagement with Iran: otherwise, a Syrian settlement will not happen.

The guidelines for a political transition approved by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council at the Geneva conference a year ago on 30 June 2012 still provide the best road map for a Geneva II, but the US, the UK, Saudi Arabia and their allies must drop their present stance and help to implement that. Preventing Iran and also Assad from attending a peace conference means that it will not even get off the ground. Transitional arrangements that reach the end point of democratisation are crucial, but their pace must be negotiated, not imposed. However unpalatable, Assad and his henchmen may have to be granted immunity to get them to sign up: hardly worse than the continuing barbarity and devastation of ancient heritage. All state employees, including the ranks of the armed forces, must be allowed to keep their posts, to avoid a repeat of the chaos caused by America’s de-Ba’athification in Iraq. The UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s call on 9 October 2012 for both a ceasefire and an embargo on more arms going to the opposition as well as Government forces, should now be heeded. A Yemen-type process may even figure. There a hated president did not actually resign but equally did not stand for re-election.

This will all be incredibly, tortuously difficult, and I understand that Foreign Office Ministers are seeking to grapple with this on our behalf, but what is certain is that UK policy was always going to fail. The Prime Minister began with a demand for regime change, which did not work. Then he supplied “communications equipment” and other resources, which failed too. Then he tried to supply British arms and got the EU arms embargo lifted, until cross-party opposition in Parliament made that very difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.

Unless there is a radical change, all the hand wringing and condemnation as atrocity follows atrocity is empty. Two years after the Syrian uprising, it is high time for Britain, France and the United States to change course. They, as well as their allies, including Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, need to recognise that neither side is going to win the civil war now destroying Syria. Instead a political solution has to be the top priority.

Britain needs to work with its friends in the Syrian opposition and persuade them to go to Geneva with a credible plan for a compromise: local ceasefires, access to humanitarian relief, and the names of prospective members of a new Government of national unity, which will include Ministers from the current Syrian Government. Together they can initiate a process of constitutional reform for new parliamentary and presidential elections with UN observers. Only through mutual concessions by both the regime and the opposition can the people of Syria be saved from the current nightmare. All this is going to be incredibly difficult, as I said, but it is the only way forward, I strongly submit. The present policy and past policies have got us into this awful mess.

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[Mr Brooks Newmark (Braintree) (Con)]

In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king, and I have probably spent more time in Syria than most Members of this House, including meeting Bashar Assad up to 10 times over a six-year period. My experience of Syria is very different from the Syria we have heard about today. Syria has always been a highly secular country. There is no Salafi tradition in Syria; it has more of a Sufi tradition and a mystical approach to Islam. There was no sense of radicalism there, so how have we got from where we were to where we are today with a highly sectarian divide and the potential for a fragmented Somalia on the Mediterranean?

We must remember how this began, which was when a 13-year-old boy in Daraa had the audacity to urinate on a poster of President Assad. The security forces took him, beat him up, killed him, cut off his penis, and returned him to his parents. That sparked massive outrage among civilians in five different cities and was the beginning of the Arab Spring. Those who point to hardly any complicity of the Assad regime in causing what is happening today should think carefully. It made a very bad situation worse with civil disobedience met by repression. Ultimately, individuals felt that they had to protect their communities, and small militias were set up in various towns. The Free Syrian Army was really a fragmented group of people, and only more recently has it become a little more co-ordinated under General Idris. The Syrian National Council has been equally dysfunctional and has not sought to reach out at all beyond the Sunni community.

In February when I was in Cairo, there was an opportunity and the Russians said that they would try to lead engagement. The regime was feeling insecure, but unfortunately Minister Lavrov dropped the ball. He did not do anything and, in fact, the opposite happened. Iran and Russia provided more arms, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard bolstered the Assad regime, including his personal bodyguard, which became a member of the IRG. Until then I had always believed in engagement, but Al-Qusayr was a turning point. The regime knew it could not win alone, so Iran and Hezbollah came in and gave it the support to win Al-Qusayr. I changed my mind and believe that one needs to do a little more than simply provide humanitarian aid. From my understanding of Assad, he will have to be pushed, or driven kicking and screaming to the negotiating table.

My solution is fivefold. First, radical diplomatic engagement is absolutely necessary including—I agree with all Members of the House—with Rouhani and the Iranian regime. This is time to press the reset button.

[Mr Jenkin]

Does my hon. Friend agree that if we persist in doing nothing, the situation will continue to deteriorate and the radical Sunni factions will come to dominate the opposition to Assad? They are providing a playground for terrorism, where British citizens are going to train as terrorists and coming back to this country.

[Mr Newmark]

Yes, my hon. Friend is absolutely right. In fact, there are 70 to 80 citizens of the United Kingdom who are today with Jabhat al-Nusra and the more radical groups. However, those groups represent only 5,000 or 6,000 people on the ground, versus the silent majority of 15 million Sunnis.

The second part of the strategy, beyond radical diplomatic engagement, should be containment. We must protect the likes of Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Turkey from becoming infected by this explosion. Thirdly, we must provide more aid, not just to Jordan and Lebanon, but internally.

NATO

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Thursday 4th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Moon]

My hon. Friend hopes against reality. Norway has taken 40 years patiently and persistently to negotiate a treaty with Russia on joint responsibilities in the Arctic circle. I think that it would take slightly longer than 40 years to get all countries across the globe to agree to nuclear non-proliferation.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

The hon. Lady is making an extremely interesting and well-informed speech. Should she not also say in response to the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) that if there is an aggressor in the high north, it is Russia, which is aggressively arming and renewing its vast nuclear weapons stockpile in an attempt to dominate the high north? The idea that we should lie down meekly and let it do that unchallenged suggests that the hon. Gentleman starts from a rather naive standpoint. Russia’s fuelling of the conflict in Syria and the way in which it just walked into Georgia show how prone it is to reasonable negotiation.

[Mrs Moon]

I do not want to be as personal as that in response to my colleague. However, I agree with the hon. Gentleman that the opening up of the high north makes it imperative that we maintain a continuous at-sea deterrent. Perhaps Russia is rearming, but we must also be aware that China is moving in our direction. It has sent through an ice-enabled ship on at least two occasions recently and is agreeing mineral trading rights with Iceland, which will facilitate regular voyages into our backyard. We need to be aware of that. I am not necessarily saying that it poses a threat, but we must not ignore it and must prepare for any risk that comes our way as a result.

I want to comment briefly on the NATO training mission in Afghanistan, which has been essential in building post-conflict capability. Capabilities of different levels are available across the NATO alliance. It is important that we recognise that the end of the cold war brought back allies from the eastern European bloc that have expertise in building capacity and creating democratic capabilities that we should utilise more.

I am aware that a number of Members want to speak, but I want to comment briefly on the Government-owned contractor-operated model. I recently asked a Minister what capacity the GoCo would have to facilitate bilateral and trilateral procurement with our NATO allies. The response was a bit pathetic, because I was told that nothing would change.

The NATO Parliamentary Assembly gives us the opportunity to test such ideas with our allies face to face. We can hear their assessment of what we are doing and their understanding of why we are doing it. I look forward next week to asking the French how they would feel about negotiating the joint procurement of equipment with an agency that could potentially be owned by a third power on our behalf. Next week, along with some of my NATO Parliamentary Assembly colleagues, I will travel to the US and attend briefings at the Department for Defence, the State Department and Capitol Hill. I will raise all the issues that I have raised today at those meetings.

In conclusion, NATO provides the opportunity to share our understanding of the world, its problems, its risks and conflicts, and to build a shared understanding and response. On a personal level, having the opportunity to meet people and share our thoughts and views on defence issues is invaluable. Long may it continue. Long may NATO provide Europe with the peace and security that it is dedicated to defending jointly among its 28 members, and which it has succeeded in providing for a long time.

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[Stephen Gilbert]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend and I am pleased that he has been more successful in some of his more recent endeavours than he was in getting NATO to stay out of the Balkans. It was the international community looking for a vehicle to deliver its will on the ground that led to the NATO involvement in south-east Europe, which shows the benefits of an alliance that brings together collective action in support of common values.

I do not entirely share the view of the hon. Member for Islington North on Afghanistan. Hundreds of thousands of people are now going to school there in a way that they did not before. There is now a freedom for women that has not been felt recently. There is also the beginning of self-determination. NATO has helped to bring an end to a religious dictatorship there and my hope is that, as the negotiations go forward, it will continue to protect the newly won rights for people there.

I would like to pay tribute to the hon. Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley) and to my hon. Friend the Member for Colne Valley (Jason McCartney) for securing this very important debate. My hon. Friend talked about the danger of unnecessary duplication—we may see that in some of the remarks today—but that in itself pays tribute to the work of the Parliamentary Assembly and to its British delegation, which works on a cross-party basis, putting the British national security interest first. The delegation is able to come back to this House and to the country and share a fairly coherent and joined-up criticism of NATO where there are criticisms to be made. We also play a key role in advocating the benefits of the alliance for everybody.

We all recognise that the world has changed. NATO was born into a Europe that was divided, and it formed the bedrock of our security for 60 years. The world was split between two diametrically opposed systems of government that were forged out of the second world war, the largest conflict in history. For much of its existence, NATO has been preoccupied, rightly, with conflicts between states, but as hon. Members on both sides have said, that has now shifted. It is no longer simply about interstate warfare. In Bosnia and in Kosovo, NATO has involved itself with civilians as well as states and this new role has been cemented in Afghanistan and, more recently, under the right to protect mandate delivered by the UN in Libya. That latter conflict displayed a strong example of how NATO, in accordance with international will and international agreement, was able to deliver effective military capabilities to prevent, I believe, the escalation of that conflict and to hasten the end of hostilities.

Humanitarian-led intervention is only one part of the changing landscape. There has been a paradigm shift towards focusing on international terrorism and piracy, as we have heard, and UK forces are highly active alongside NATO and EU allies in these regards. Cyber-security is also a new frontier for NATO. The unrelenting computerisation of our society and our reliance on the internet bring many opportunities for NATO Governments and citizens, but it brings significant dangers too. The scale of such infrastructure is something that no state could have anticipated in 1949. It requires a completely different approach that, through common endeavour, is better delivered within the alliance.

The power structures of the world have shifted far more rapidly than many predicted. We now live in a world where China is the world’s second largest economy, and it looks set to overtake the United States this century. This, coupled with the relative demise of the Russian economy and the break-up of the Soviet Union, has seen the attention of the United States shift firmly to the Pacific. That poses fundamental questions for NATO, an organisation that remains embedded in the regional geopolitics of Europe and the Atlantic.

The US remains by far the largest contributor of money and matériel for NATO. In 2011, the US spent 4.8% of its GDP on defence. Germany, Italy and France failed to contribute even 2% of their respective GDP. Like many hon. Members, I think it is deeply unfair that our European NATO allies expect the US and the UK to bankroll European defence. It is right to expect our allies in NATO to contribute fairly to the upkeep of NATO forces, and I call on Ministers not to be shy in their discourse with our European counterparts. Calling for member states to contribute fairly is one part of ensuring that the organisation remains effective. For NATO to be effective, we do not just need a willingness to deploy military force when necessary, but for our European allies to be willing to fund that resource, so we have the ability to deploy when the time is right.

On procurement, we can and should do things differently. There are many ways to work more closely with our European allies. We must ensure that the sum total of a country’s specific specialised contribution exceeds its individual parts. By procuring equipment and weapon systems together, we can create the flexibility essential to meeting the array of challenges in the 21st century. For example, it is wasteful to buy planes that cannot land on another country’s aircraft carriers, to have to supply different types of bullets for different countries, or to have radio systems that cannot be integrated or talk to each other. We must ensure that our armed forces can operate as effectively as possible with troops from other countries. That underscores the point made by the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) about how unlikely it is for this country to go to war by itself. The more likely scenario is that we will always be acting as part of a coalition, so it is important to make that coalition effective—very basic stuff that NATO continues to get wrong.

Let us be clear: Britain should always be able to retain control over the deployment of its forces. We must do so wisely and with appreciation of the consequences of engaging our men and women in armed conflict. However, the EU can play a role in developing institutions and structures that allow humanitarian access and peacekeeping missions in partnership with NATO where possible. As I and other hon. Members have said, the gaze of the United States is now firmly on the Pacific. Having EU structures, where appropriate and necessary, to help plug the gaps left by the Americans, who are now more concerned with Beijing than Berlin, will be in the UK’s national interest. Deeper EU defence co-operation makes economic sense for the same reasons that it does within NATO. We are stronger together, and if we are smart, it will not be an additional burden to the taxpayer.

[Mr Jenkin]

Will my hon. Friend explain why it is necessary for the EU to duplicate what European nations can already do on a military and politically co-operative basis through NATO? Does he agree that it is essential not to waste resources by duplicating NATO structures that already exist?

[Stephen Gilbert]

I share the hon. Gentleman’s concerns. It is clear that we need to reduce duplication both within the EU and between the EU and NATO. There will, however, be certain fundamental operational ways in which a resource on a European basis can best plug a gap that NATO does not move into. I suggest that these things are best looked at on a case-by-case basis.

[Mr Jenkin]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Stephen Gilbert]

No, I will not.

It is my view, and that of the Liberal Democrats, that NATO should remain the bedrock of our international defence obligations. It should be properly and fairly funded, but it must adapt for the 21st century.

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[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

If I may say so, it is a privilege to follow such a powerful speech about the spread of weapons. The whole House respects my hon. Friend’s extraordinary devotion to his work on arms control for the Quadripartite Committee. He approaches his subject with a passion and knowledge that is probably unrivalled in either House of Parliament.

If I may, however, I would like to respond, perhaps impertinently, to my hon. Friend’s implied rebuke to the Government for their helping to persuade the European Union to lift the arms embargo on the supply of weapons to the Syrian National Council—the least unrespectable part, if I may put it that way, of the Syrian opposition, which we would want to be properly represented in the peace negotiation or peace settlement that we are all striving to achieve. I support the Government in seeking to redress the extraordinary imbalance affecting the more reasonable forces involved in this extraordinarily bloody and complex conflict.

NATO should be agonising over this whole issue because it will have to pick up the pieces of a spreading war and conflagration that almost inevitably will occur unless the United States, Russia and the other major powers in the region—including, perhaps, even Iran—start to sit around a table and work out how to contain the conflict.

We were right to question whether there might be a case for sending arms into Syria to try to redress the imbalance, because the regime is already using a massive stockpile of weapons. Russian-trained pilots are flying Russian aircraft, dropping Russian munitions and firing Russian shells out of Russian guns at civilians all over Syria. I find it very difficult to tolerate the idea that the Russians should be able to do whatever they want in their bloody way in that country, while the west sits idly by doing nothing. It is not just the Russians, as extremist Sunni factions, too, are being armed by Qatari and Saudi interests, which are pouring weapons into the Syrian conflagration.

The danger is not that our sitting back and doing nothing will mean that nothing happens or that the pre-2010 stasis will reassert itself as Assad reasserts his power. The danger is that this conflagration will grow and grow and grow. I therefore think the Government are right to try to redress the political balance and to tempt the Americans into entering this crisis—otherwise, NATO will finish up having to pick up the pieces in a very much more active and perhaps unfortunate way than we would wish.

That brings us back to our subject, Madam Deputy Speaker—I hear you heaving a sigh of relief—which is the question, “What is NATO in our modern age?” I thought that my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot), the Chairman of the Defence Select Committee, was right when he said that NATO has become a coalition of the willing—an organisation or a military alliance from which a coalition of the willing can be drawn. I do not rebuke the Minister for representing the Government at this debate because NATO is a political alliance that represents the foreign policy of this country, albeit backed by national military capability, pledged in co-operation to support the objectives of that political alliance.

Why is NATO still needed? I hope that I have just exposed one possible reason—to prevent war and to contain conflict. The reason NATO seems to be redundant and out of date to so many of our citizens today is that it has been so successful—the most successful military alliance in modern history—at containing, deterring and preventing conflict so that our continent feels perhaps deceptively safe from foreign conflict. NATO not only won the cold war, but keeps the peace. People should not forget the adage “If you want peace, prepare for war”, as that is what NATO is about.

Deterrence is the watchword—preventing wars rather than fighting them. That is why we spend money on defence—not to use the military capability in hot conflict, but so that we do not have to use the capability at all. Its use is pacific. That is one of the reasons the nuclear deterrent lies at the heart of NATO military doctrine. It is the relationship between the future of NATO and the continuation of our own nuclear deterrent that I shall explore briefly this afternoon.

There are three NATO nuclear powers: France, Britain and the United States. What threatens the future of NATO today is not just apathy or the parsimony of its member Governments’ defence budgets, and neither is it ignorance about its vital role. NATO is not going to be abolished suddenly. Nobody is going to make a decision at some NATO summit that NATO has had its day and will be wound up. The great danger is that NATO withers. I put it to the House that, with the war fatigue following Iraq and Afghanistan and the lack of appetite for NATO to play its deterrent peacekeeping and stabilisation role across the world, NATO is already withering. The collapse of key components of NATO is another danger, as is the uncertainty and the question mark that still exists over the continuation of our own nuclear deterrent. In fact, that is a threat to the continuation of NATO.

With the greatest respect to those who advocate European Union alternatives or supplements to NATO, I say that without NATO European defence is sunk. NATO has been doing European defence and security and it is doing European defence and security: there is no substitute or alternative to NATO.

We have left a question mark about the vital part of NATO’s capability. Our nuclear deterrent is pledged to the defence of NATO and our NATO allies. The Government have conducted a study into possible alternatives to the Trident nuclear deterrent. Now is not the time to go into great detail about that, except to say that we understand that it has exposed the truth: that there is no viable or cheaper alternative to our nuclear deterrent. Trident is the only viable nuclear deterrent on offer to the United Kingdom.

[Mr Spellar]

Can the hon. Gentleman—who is probably better informed than Opposition Front Benchers on this—give us any idea of when he expects the outcome of the study to be published so that we can have that informed debate?

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[Mr Jenkin]

I am ahead of the right hon. Gentleman, and ahead of the official Opposition. I have tabled a question to the Prime Minister, and I am waiting for his written reply. I cannot tell the House any more than that, although my hon. Friend the Minister might be able to do so.

We know that there is no alternative to Trident, because we have been briefed to that effect, so why does this uncertainty still hang over our deterrent? The answer is that there is now talk of our no longer needing continuous at-sea deterrence. It is being said that we could have, or could risk having, a part-time deterrent by having fewer than the four submarines that are essential to the guaranteeing of continuous at-sea deterrence.

I need hardly explain to the House why that idea simply does not bear scrutiny. At a time of crisis, putting a nuclear submarine to sea to stand guard over our country is a very public act, because submarines go to sea on the surface. The submarine would be exposed to possible enemy pre-emptive attack, and our foreign policy would be exposed to accusations of escalation and inflammatory acts at a time when sensitive international negotiations were taking place. A continuous at-sea deterrent that is not at sea 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, is not a viable deterrent. It would be vulnerable to attack and vulnerable to misinterpretation, and at a moment of crisis we would hardly ever dare to put it to sea. I cannot imagine why it takes intelligent people so long to work out that if we are not going to order four submarines, we might as well not order any.

I regret to say that that uncertainty is being sustained by our Liberal Democrat coalition partners. The implication must be that they want the issue to be a bargaining chip in the negotiations of a future coalition. As my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) has repeatedly pointed out, if they have a choice between coalition partners at the next general election and one of the parties offers unilateral nuclear disarmament—which is what this amounts to—that is the party that they will choose.

The hon. Member for St Austell and Newquay (Stephen Gilbert) is shaking his head. If I am wrong and the Liberal Democrats are now committed to the renewal of the Trident deterrent with four submarines, I invite the hon. Gentleman to put me right.

[Stephen Gilbert]

Like the hon. Gentleman, we are all eagerly awaiting the publication of the report that is being prepared by the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister. When we have seen that report, we can have a debate on the basis of some facts.

[Mr Jenkin]

I do, indeed, eagerly await the report’s publication. I wonder what the delay can be.

I do not think that the report turned out to be quite what the Liberal Democrats wanted, although many of us had been saying that submarine-launched Cruise missiles, land-based systems or new air-launched weapons would be not only impossibly expensive, but probably illegal under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. However, I am glad that they have learnt that much. Perhaps they will now learn something else.

Because that uncertainty rests over our deterrent, it rests over the whole of Europe’s deterrence system. We should not imagine for a moment that it would be easy for a French Government, equally afflicted by austerity and public pressures, to sustain their deterrent if we were going to wind ours down. We should not believe for a second that the United States would remain as committed to NATO and the transatlantic alliance if it became apparent that the European powers were no longer prepared to shoulder their burden of nuclear responsibility in the defence of our own continent. We should not think for a minute that the United Kingdom’s relationship with the United States could stay the same if we threw the gift of the Trident nuclear deterrent back in its face after the US had gone to such lengths to share the costs, development and risks of the system that we both deploy.

The hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) rightly referred to the importance of continued co-operation between our conventional forces. It is true that we engage in extensive military co-operation. The airborne forces based in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Sir Bob Russell) need to be integrated with the American military command when necessary, so that we have a role in supplementing American forces. The Americans can do so much less unless they have international support, and we are always their first port of call in that regard. It is our influence over American policy that gives us our leverage. That is why, when there is a really big international crisis, the American President does not call the French, the Germans, the Japanese, the Indians or the Chinese. It is always the British Prime Minister whom the American President calls first.

Many people are aware of the importance of the intelligence-sharing relationship between the Americans and GCHQ, which demonstrates an extraordinary degree of trust, but it is not widely known how integrated our nuclear forces are. We send our submarines to the United States, and the Americans subject them to readiness-at-sea trials. The Americans train our crews for NATO operations, and, indeed, we train theirs. We certify their crews for readiness at sea. The relationship between our two nuclear submarine fleets is deeply symbiotic. It is burden-sharing in the real sense of the term. If we were not to maintain continuous at-sea deterrence, we would deliver a mortal blow to the US-UK relationship, to our ability to contribute to global security, and to NATO.

Let me make two more points, which will serve as a coda. Last week the Public Administration Committee published a report, “Engaging the public in National Strategy”, which explains how “deliberative” polling can be used more effectively to help us to understand what motivates our voters, what aspirations they have, and what sort of country the British people want ours to be. Members of the public were asked a number of questions, one of which concerned nuclear forces. It became clear that most people in the United Kingdom would order the four submarines: 57% said that they would rather do that than give up our nuclear weapons altogether, which is what the alternative amounts to.

Let me say finally that the great danger—the wild card—is Scotland. The Scottish people must make their own decision about their independence, but even if they vote for it, if they want Scotland to continue to be a member of NATO, they had better accept that the British nuclear deterrent will remain at Faslane. It would be impossibly expensive to move it, and were they to insist on scrapping it, they would deliver a fatal blow to the affordability of our nuclear deterrent. If it were brought down to some other part of the United Kingdom over a short period and stationed there—if a deep-water port were found where all the weapons systems and weapons storage and protection facilities would be welcome—not only would Scotland be giving up the largest employer on its own west coast, but it would be wrecking NATO. The fact that Scotland has taken a stronger anti-nuclear stance than any other NATO member—refusing, unlike any other NATO member, not just to admit visiting nuclear forces but to allow any nuclear forces to be stationed on its soil, even in a crisis—means that it would never be allowed to join NATO.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

I am going to return to the theme that the vice-president of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly started us on: why NATO? By the end of next year, we will be out of combat in Afghanistan. Clearly, there will be a period of readjustment for western armed forces. The British Army is being reduced by 20%. The other armed forces—the Air Force and the Navy—are being reduced by a similar amount. The Americans are already declaring that sequestration will take $50 billion a year out of their $550 billion budget, which is a lot. Therefore, fundamentally, there will be big changes.

When NATO started in 1949, General Lord Ismay said that its purpose was

“to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”

Obviously, the situation has changed a lot. The Warsaw pact was formed in 1955 as a reaction to NATO. We could not have had NATO without German rearmament.

I and other members in the House spent most of our military careers preparing for what we loosely called the third world war, hoping it would not happen. Thank goodness it did not happen on the north German plain. When the Berlin wall fell, everything changed and NATO had to change. As I have explained to the House on previous occasions, after I came back from Bosnia, in my last two years in the Army, I was a member of the planning team at Supreme Allied Commander Europe. We most definitely were not seeking a new role outside Europe; it was largely thrust upon us. Therefore, doubts remain about NATO and its solidarity. I agree that we must keep banging on about NATO’s target of spending 2% of GDP on defence. We must keep it. The problem is that some people, particularly in France, suggest that the alliance is

“an alliance of the unable and unwilling”.

A French academic said that. I put it to the House that NATO has a good future.

Twenty years ago, who would have thought that Russia would be resurgent? Russian military spending is now increasing by three quarters of a billion dollars; it will have increased by 53% by 2015. Russia still possesses more than 1 million troops and it has 20 million in the reserve. However, the Russians have big problems. Russian military prosecutors recently said that about a fifth of the budget had been embezzled, so they are trying to sort that out. However, look at the Russian navy. We have talked about the high north. That navy has been transformed in the last eight years: 45% of the ships in the Russian navy will be replaced by 2015. By 2007, Russia was building as many ships every year as the Soviets did at the height of their power.

My hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) made an excellent speech on the nuclear deterrent. The Russians certainly think in terms of flexible response. They envisage using tactical nuclear weapons in their exercises; a recent exercise that they undertook in the Baltic states suggested exactly that. Part of their war-fighting ability is to use nuclear weapons. That is one of the reasons that we must retain our nuclear deterrent.

[Mr Jenkin]

Not only do the Russians exercise that capability, but they talk about it, have not renounced first use and have said that they would use their nuclear weapons in a conventional conflict against their neighbours.

[Bob Stewart]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. He puts it better than I could write it.

In China, Xi Jinping has consolidated his power. He talks of fighting to win wars. There has been a 10.7% increase in the Chinese military budget. The strategic forces of China now have 3,000 miles of tunnels. They have 850 nuclear warheads ready to launch. They are almost at strategic parity with the United States. They are also building globally deployable forces, which are now edging into the Mediterranean, as we have heard, and coming through the high Arctic. They are challenging western strategic military superiority.

Something else is new, and we have touched on it in the debate: cyber-warfare. The Defence Committee has just completed a report on that. It is a new form of war. It is invidious and evolving at unimaginable speed, with serious consequences. Cyber-space is an aspect of asymmetric warfare. It is very difficult to identify sometimes where these attacks are coming from. State actors such as China, North Korea, Iran and Syria are devoting resources to it. Hacking can be more deadly than the gun. The targets are government, industry and the military. There is great concern in the west about how disruptive cyber-attacks can be. For example, on 23 April, in seconds, the United States stock market dropped 1%, losing $136.5 billion, because of a false tweet put into the system, possibly from Syria.

The United States is changing some of the focus of its direction. Its strategy now, as the Defence Committee heard when we were in the US, is to concentrate on trying to avoid war much more. The Americans do not want any war that is not short term. They are looking at Asia. Sequestration will cost an enormous amount in military terms. The Americans consider that Russia is not a great threat at the moment—although its military spending is increasing, as I have mentioned—but that China is and it is growing in power. However, as one American academic put it to the Committee, “Going to war with China would be like going to war with your bank if you are an American.” Thankfully, since 2001, there have been huge improvements in US intervention power: there has been a two thirds increase in its intervention power capability.

The lesson of European, and world, history is that surprise is normal. The unexpected should always be expected, so we should expect to be surprised. Therefore, whatever we do within NATO, we must try to work in such a way that our armed forces can deal with as many envisaged eventualities as possible while also expecting that we will still be surprised. NATO gives us more combat power, by collaboration with others.

I am about to conclude Mr Deputy Speaker—I think you might be looking at your watch. The problem is that our potential enemies remain our potential enemies. Symmetric warfare between states is not dead. We may think it is. We have not had a war for 70 years, when Europe historically had six or seven each century, and thus the public ask, “Why do we have to spend money on defence?” The problem is that that has not gone away and we may well be surprised.

Defence is an insurance policy, therefore. We want to deter the possibility of war. We do not want to use nuclear weapons. The point of possessing nuclear weapons is to avoid using them by avoiding threats. The aim is to help our country be left alone and not be attacked, and, in NATO terms, the aim is to avoid all NATO countries being attacked.

I believe very strongly that we must remain part of NATO as I believe it has a big future. I disagree with those who say its purpose, in Lord Ismay’s definition, is gone. No, NATO is required because it helps us, as a medium-sized nation, to combine with other nations—the French, the Germans, the Spanish and other nations that are not members of NATO—and form a coalition of the willing to deal with problems in the world.

We must have the resilience to adapt, to deter and to deal with the unexpected, and we should try to do that as cheaply as possible of course. The days of huge military budgets are over; they are long gone. The best way is for us to collaborate and work with like-minded states, and NATO is most certainly the best means to that end.

Iran

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Monday 17th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hague]

I think the same message is coming from all parts of the House on this subject—that is, that it is good to have that unity in our message. The hon. Gentleman is right. Not only is the political spectrum in Iran complex to interpret from outside, but so is the power structure. We should not assume that the President has the absolute power by any means on the subjects about which we are most concerned. Most observers would consider that the presidency overall is perhaps a weaker institution than it was eight years ago when President Ahmadinejad first took office. The hon. Gentleman is right that Iran has an immense capacity to act for good or ill in the region, and on a very important global issue, the nuclear file.

On the hon. Gentleman’s specific questions about the E3 plus 3 negotiations and the role of the EU High Representative, our offer has been clear since February and that offer remains. That will continue to be the approach of the High Representative and of the E3 plus 3. We have regular meetings about all these issues. I regularly meet the director general of the IAEA to discuss in detail all the concerns about Iran’s nuclear programme.

We have some contacts and conversations with Iran. As I mentioned before, we have not broken off diplomatic relations. Our embassy became impossible to operate and as a result I required the closure of the Iranian embassy in London, but we have had conversations since that time. I have had conversations myself with the Foreign Minister of Iran, Mr Salehi, and we have conversations in the margins of the United Nations and other international forums. We have not, of course, had any contact yet with the President-elect, Mr Rouhani, who is some way from taking office. Decisions about that are for the future.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that although the best thing has happened that we could have hoped for—the Iranian people have once again reaffirmed their support for engagement with the western world and cynicism about the grabbing of nuclear capability—the worst thing the west could do is raise excessive expectations about how much could be achieved under the new leader in too short a time? Yet the urgency is on to contain the nuclear threat, with Iran possibly acquiring weapons-grade plutonium by the end of this year, and Iran is one of the powers fomenting the civil war in Syria. May I suggest urgent engagement on these matters, but as firmly and as diplomatically as possible?

[Mr Hague]

Yes, I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. We should hesitate before trying to interpret the results of elections in other countries. Sometimes we have enough trouble interpreting election results in our own country, so we should not rush too excitedly into that, but we should take full note of what has happened and what Mr Rouhani said during the election campaign and be ready to respond in good faith in the way that I outlined in my initial statement, and we will stick to that over the coming weeks. My hon. Friend is right about the urgency of the issue. Iran is acting in defiance of six UN Security Council resolutions and of successive resolutions of the IAEA board, and addressing the nuclear issue has become very urgent indeed.

G8 Foreign Ministers

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Monday 15th April 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

Will my right hon. Friend cast his mind back to the first G8 summit that he attended as Foreign Secretary? Was anybody forecasting that we would be facing a horrendous conflagration in Syria and the threat of thermonuclear war in North Korea? Does not that underline how unpredictable our current international security situation is and the fact that it is impossible for us to predict that we will not require nuclear weapons for our protection within the next 50 or 60 years?

[Mr Hague]

Yes, my hon. Friend is absolutely right, particularly with regard to the attempts of the DPRK to develop nuclear weapons and ballistic missile technology. The effects of the decisions that we are making about a successor to Trident will last for decades. We have to provide for the security of this country over several decades to come, and we must therefore, absolutely, have at the forefront of our minds the fact that we cannot predict—even a few years out, as he says—the threats that we might face. We can imagine that anyone in 1913, rather than 2013, who was trying to predict the threats they would face into the 1940s would have struggled very seriously to do so.

European Council

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Tuesday 19th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Swire]

The hon. Lady is making the great mistake of imagining that I was forced to do anything. I came here very willingly, as the Speaker has pointed out, to respond to the urgent question from my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash). I have stated the Prime Minister’s position and, thanks to the indulgence of the Speaker in allowing me to repeat verbatim what the Prime Minister said on this subject to my hon. Friend the Member for Stone yesterday, I have nothing further to add.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

Will my right hon. Friend commend the Prime Minister for setting out the need for a new relationship with our European partners? Is not that need underlined by the fact that, despite vetoing the fiscal union treaty last year, the presidency conclusions contain four new pieces of legislation on economic consolidation that apply to the UK? They include a national fiscal policy making framework, strengthening the surveillance of national fiscal and structural economic policies, an accelerated procedure for dealing with member states with an excessive deficit and a new procedure for monitoring the build-up and correction of macro-economic balances. Why does that apply to us at all, given that we are not going to join the euro?

[Mr Swire]

The hon. Gentleman should also acknowledge what was discussed, particularly in the Council, and the emphasis that was placed on the single market and on cutting red tape for small businesses. The Prime Minister is setting out what will be discussed at the G8 at Lough Erne, when we will be talking about issues such as tax, transparency and getting businesses going. Those are the things that we want to concentrate on. I agree with my hon. Friend that those other things are not so relevant.

Syria

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Wednesday 6th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hague]

Turkey is very supportive of the change that the European Union has made in the arms embargo. It has, let us say, a forward-leaning approach to the crisis. If the Turkish Foreign Minister were here, he would not only say everything that I have said today, but say quite a lot more about the need for greater international support for the national coalition. I shall be meeting him again tomorrow, here in London, when he comes to the Friends of Yemen meeting, but I can say now that Turkey is extremely supportive of this announcement and of the change in EU policy.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I welcome my right hon. Friend’s statement. I note that he does not rule out any option, and that, according to his reply to my hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot (Sir Gerald Howarth), he does not rule out military intervention. No country is advocating that yet, but if Syria is considered to be part of a primary interest in our national security strategy, are we equipped to deal with this crisis? To what extent should my right hon. Friend be talking to his opposite number, my right hon. Friend the Defence Secretary, about what contingency arrangements should be made—and, indeed, what additional expenditure is required—to give us the capacity at least to influence the security aspects of this problem?

[Mr Hague]

Of course the Defence Secretary and I discuss the whole range of international affairs on an almost continuous basis. We make the decisions about our policy on Syria in the National Security Council or in the Cabinet; we discussed it in the Cabinet yesterday. He and I are very much of the same mind, and work closely together in relation to all contingencies.

As my hon. Friend knows, the Ministry of Defence has plans covering a wide range of contingencies. It is not helpful for Ministers to speculate about those contingencies, and I stress again that we are neither calling for nor planning a military intervention. The discussion in the international community is about the degree of support for the opposition inside Syria, rather than about an external intervention. We will plan for all contingencies, but that is the context and the background of any military role in this crisis.

European Union (Approval of Treaty Amendment Decision) Bill [Lords]

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Monday 3rd September 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hague]

Different solutions can be advocated and the hon. Gentleman is advocating what he thinks would help as a solution. However, the point that he and I have to bear in mind is that those countries—their national Parliaments and democratically elected Governments—wish to stay in the eurozone. That position is different from the one that he and I have always taken on the United Kingdom, but that is their wish. Therefore in practice we are dealing with that situation. We want those countries to succeed in stabilising the eurozone.

Let us take the worst-case scenario—the hon. Gentleman’s assumption that the measure would pour good money after bad. What we are ensuring is that money from the United Kingdom taxpayer is not going after other money, good or bad, giving assistance to eurozone countries. The Bill provides solely for the parliamentary approval of an amendment to article 136 of the treaty on the functioning of the European Union, which makes it clear that the eurozone member states may, by means of a separate intergovernmental agreement, establish a financial assistance mechanism—the European stability mechanism, or ESM—without acting in contravention of their obligations as member states of the EU.

As the House will know, this is not the first time that this treaty amendment has been considered and approved by Parliament. Before the Prime Minister agreed to the treaty amendment decision in March last year, a motion in favour of the draft decision was passed by both Houses under the provisions of the previous legislation—the European Union (Amendment) Act 2008. Before our Act of last year, that was all the parliamentary scrutiny and control required for the Government to agree to a change in the EU treaties under the simplified revision procedure.

In our view, those provisions were grossly inadequate, so at that time my right hon. Friend the Minister for Europe committed us to bringing the decision before the House again under the more stringent parliamentary scrutiny of what was then the European Union Bill. Indeed, we introduced an amendment to that Bill, now section 5(6), to enable the treaty change to be subject to the Bill’s provisions once it entered into force. That Bill has become the European Union Act 2011 and any use of the simplified revision procedure now requires an Act of Parliament for ratification. That is why this Bill is being presented to the House.

Having gained the approval of Parliament in March last year, the Prime Minister formally agreed to the decision at the following European Council. The decision must now be ratified by all 27 member states before the amendment to article 136 can enter into force. Eighteen member states have now done so. The target date for entry into force, as set out in the European Council decision, is 1 January 2013.

The scrutiny process under the European Union Act 2011 began in October last year, just under two months after its relevant provisions came into force, when I laid a statement before Parliament, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash) has referred, under the provisions of section 5 of the 2011 Act. I set out in that statement why the decision does not trigger the requirements for a referendum set down in the European Union Act 2011.

The proposed amendment to article 136 applies only to member states whose currency is the euro. Consequently, it does not transfer further competence or power to the EU from the UK. The opinion set out in the statement was open to judicial review, but in the intervening 11 months no one has sought to challenge it in the courts. To ensure timely ratification of the decision, which is strongly in our country’s interests for reasons that I will now come to, the Bill was introduced in the Lords, where it was passed without amendment. Should the Commons now grant its approval, the Government intend to ratify the treaty amendment by the end of this year.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

Is this really such a big change in the scrutiny of how these things are done? Since we joined the European Union, has there ever been an amendment to the European treaty that did not require an Act of Parliament?

[Mr Hague]

Without the Act that we passed, the change that we are debating would not have required an Act of Parliament. Therefore anything similar achieved under a simplified revision procedure would also fall into that category.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Hague]

No, it is not. The decision relates to a treaty being created for the eurozone countries. In conjunction with that and at the same time, as is reflected in the fourth recital, the Prime Minister secured agreement at the December 2010 European Council that article 122 would not be used. That is absolutely clear. If my hon. Friend wants to argue that we should have a referendum on our not being liable for eurozone bail-outs any more, he can do so, but I will not agree. That is not the kind of thing that we had in mind when we passed the European Union Act 2011; nor would it do any good to the good name of referendums.

[Mr Jenkin]

My right hon. Friend is in something of a Catch-22, which he is skilfully trying to obscure from us. If the article basis for the May 2010 mechanism was illegal or questionable, why do we need this legislation to get out of it and why did we not challenge it? If it was not illegal, why is it necessary to amend the treaty to legalise a different mechanism? The very fact that the European Commission and the other member states have agreed to the treaty amendment, which effectively does away with the no bail-out clause that was so central to the passage of the Maastricht treaty, means that they admit implicitly that the original mechanism had an illegal treaty base.

[Mr Hague]

I do not agree with my hon. Friend. The reason we do not challenge that and want to proceed with the process is that we have secured something very important in parallel with it that is potentially enormously beneficial to this country and its taxpayers.

[Mr Jenkin]

Which is what?

[Mr Hague]

I can go over that again. It is that article 122 will no longer be used for eurozone bail-outs. It may be my hon. Friend who faces a Catch-22 here, because he just cannot bear the idea that a Bill that says “European something” on it might be good for the country. This Bill is good for the country. Even those of us, like him and me, who are very sceptical about many aspects of the European Union have to admit that securing an agreement that means that we are no longer liable for eurozone bail-outs and that does not harm the country in any other way is, in the words of our noble Friend Lord Flight in the other place, a “no-brainer” to support. That is why I hope that the House will support the Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Alexander]

I can assure the hon. Gentleman that if I were to draw up a list of what is damaging the economy of the United Kingdom at the moment, many items would stand above a recognition that the single market has provided British businesses with European markets constituting 500 million consumers. It would be perverse logic to suggest, at a time when we are struggling to secure growth in the British economy, that it would be to the advantage of British exporters or British businesses more generally to shrink the UK’s home single market from 500 million consumers to just 60 million.

A mechanism with sufficient firepower to restructure and recapitalise weak banks, and to bail out Governments who can temporarily no longer access the bond markets to finance their borrowing and debt, is a necessary part of bringing stability back to the eurozone, and a permanent bail-out fund is one key part of making that happen. However, the burden of responsibility for delivering that growth and prosperity must be taken by eurozone members themselves. In the establishment of the ESM, the European Council is making it clear that ultimate responsibility for ensuring the overall stability of the euro area rests with eurozone members. It will be a fund by the eurozone for the eurozone. That is clearly in the UK’s national interest, and we will not vote against a Bill that will allow the ESM to be established.

[Mr Jenkin]

Why, then, was the previous Government’s parting act to agree that the UK should be liable under the stability mechanism that they approved?

[Mr Alexander]

The hon. Gentleman is right to recognise the timing of that in the final days of our time in office, but the other significant event that was happening then was the real prospect of the eurozone collapsing completely. He might welcome that, but the Opposition certainly would not. That was why the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the outgoing Government made genuine efforts to consult the potential incoming Finance Minister, who is now the Chancellor of the Exchequer. That matter is discussed in the explanatory memorandum on European Union legislation dated 15 July, in which the then Economic Secretary to the Treasury, now the Transport Secretary, stated:

“The Government regrets that the Scrutiny Committees did not have time to consider this document before it was agreed at Council. It should be noted that whilst agreement on behalf of the UK was given by the previous administration, cross-party consensus had been gained.”

If the hon. Gentleman is concerned that the outgoing Chancellor reached the wrong decision, he might like to put that point directly to the current Chancellor.

Let me be absolutely clear that our support for the Bill does not equate to unqualified confidence in the ESM or in the current package of eurozone policies of which it forms but one part. We have concerns about both the restrictive terms of the fiscal compact that eurozone members have negotiated to establish the ESM and the manner in which it is currently envisaged that the ESM will be operationalised. The Opposition are certainly under no illusion that the ESM in itself will resolve the eurozone crisis. Much more will be required to do so than is included in this two-clause enabling Bill. The establishment of the ESM represents but one part of a broader package of measures and reforms that members of the euro must adopt to deliver stability successfully and bring greater prosperity to the eurozone in future.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Denis MacShane (Rotherham) (Lab)]

It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Stone (Mr Cash). He is the Private Frazer of our European debates. For nearly 20 years I have been listening to him saying, “We’re doomed! We’re doomed!”, “There’s no hope at all”, “Europe is schizophrenic”, “Europe is extreme”, or, “Europe is locked in riots and difficulties.”

That is a good description, frankly, of our country. It is only 12 or 13 months ago that London was set ablaze for three days. The state completely lost control of the streets, and the rioting, looting and burning spread to other cities. We are now the recession queen of Europe. It seems that we are in a triple-dip recession. While the hon. Gentleman complains about the threat of inflation and the printing of money, we are the great printers of bank notes—it is known as quantitative easing—and we are printing them as fast as we can, just as the United States is. By comparison, the European Union is relatively restrained. It has been our banks—some nationalised still, some still in private hands—that have been going to the European Central Bank to avail themselves of cheap-cost euros, to the tune of several billion. My point remains, as always, that we are all in this together.

I am not sure whether the hon. Member for Stone is quoted in Bundestag speeches as Eurosceptics there look for a friendly British voice to pray in aid, just as he assiduously reads The Economist and the Financial Times. Indeed, in the many friendly debates that I have had with him, both in this House and outside, he always has a quotation to sustain his case. However, as somebody who reads the German press a little bit, let me gently say to him that there are quotations and opinions like that bubbling up every day, just as there are in this country. The broad thrust of German economic policy is for stability and open markets. The notion that Europe’s currencies and Europe’s trade should be balkanised is of no advantage to the German economy at all. Far from creating an über-Germanised Europe, Mrs Merkel and the Social Democratic party—I was with some of its leaders at the weekend at a congress in South Africa—are very conscious of the fact that they carry a heavy responsibility. Part of the reason is that they took some tough decisions at the beginning of this century—to hold down wages, recapitalise industry, and transfer a lot of technology offshore to Poland and integrate the new EU member states into the broader German economic zone—while we, sadly, were over-fetishising banks. Now Britain is associated with LIBOR, the collapse of other banks and the great problem of illegal trading in offshore money in Mexico.

We really ought occasionally to put a mirror in front of our noses before we patronise and condescend to other countries. We have always lent money to countries in need. We poured money into Greece in the 1940s after the war and in the 1950s to stabilise it. We did so again at the beginning of the 1960s, when there was a great deal of turbulence in connection with the end of British rule in Cyprus. That has always been a British tradition. Quite intelligently, we prefer to use our treasure rather than shed our blood when things break down in Europe.

We are out of the current arrangement—this kitty of €500 billion. As the Foreign Secretary said—I could not find much to disagree with in his speech, and I am sure that the Bill will receive its Second Reading—we are not directly concerned. However, he went to such great pains to point that out that I thought he was over-striving for effect. Indeed, the hon. Member for Stone is absolutely right on one point: the so-called euro referendum Act, which the Foreign Secretary prayed in aid, is a piece of completely phoney jiggery-pokery. It gives the Secretary of State the sole, exclusive right to say whether there has been a significant transfer of competences or sovereignty to the wider Europe Union. If he alone decides that, he triggers a referendum; if he does not, as with this Bill, there will be no referendum. This is not about a referendum lock or allowing the British people or Parliament to have greater scrutiny or a greater say over European affairs; it is a completely cynical piece of legislation, which frankly is irrelevant to the broader European debate.

[Mr Jenkin]

Does the right hon. Gentleman not think that there is an inconsistency in saying that we do not want a referendum on this issue, yet vetoing the fiscal union treaty in December? We are effectively consenting to the process of fiscal union by allowing the treaty amendment to go through almost on the nod, effectively abolishing the no bail-out clause, which will be the foundation of fiscal union.

[Mr MacShane]

The hon. Gentleman makes a fair point. The Prime Minister found himself, through no fault of his own—inexperience, 2.30 in the morning, exhaustion—thinking that he was speaking for half of Europe, but at the end only the Hungarians were left. We created a British-Hungarian empire overnight, and even they peeled off in the end. It was deeply embarrassing. I do not think the Prime Minister actually understood how European decision making works or how to present our case effectively. That is part of the price that the Government pay for opting out of any political engagement with European partners. Working in the European context is a learning curve. It is about building relationships, networking, trading, and give and take. At times, certainly, it is about stamping our foot and not allowing something to go through. Indeed, I was a witness to all sorts of European countries and leaders doing that when I was Minister for Europe. However, in this case the Prime Minister found himself not so much naked in the conference chamber as utterly alone, without anybody else in the slightest bit interested in anything the United Kingdom had to say.

As a result, we will now move forward to a new treaty—the hon. Member for Stone is absolutely right about that. The German Government are quite determined. I was talking to a senior associate of François Hollande over the weekend, and the French now accept that quite soon we will be moving to a serious banking union—a serious treaty—that will do for banking what the Coal and Steel Community did in 1950 and what subsequent treaties did, in placing under broad supranational supervision a good and important chunk of the European economy. There is a huge debate about how far that process should go. Should it, for example, include the small regional banks and savings banks—the cajas, as they are called in Spain? Should banks be closed down, as happens quite regularly in the United States? When banks there are no longer able to stand on their own two feet, they are not bailed out—they are closed down.

Some supranational authority is now being created, however, and the British banking and financial system will not be able to operate wholly independently of that authority, because banking systems are permanently intertwined. Anyone walking through the streets of Madrid, Munich or Geneva will see British high street names such as Lloyds and Barclays operating there. Those banks will come under the control of any banking union. The more we pretend to ourselves that we can stay out of that arrangement, the less influence and say we will have over the new rules as they come into being. That is what really worries me. The notion that expelling Greece from the eurozone and re-drachmatising, if that is the right word, the Greek economy—I always prefer to use a Greek term, so I prefer “grexodus” to “grexit”—will somehow save the British bacon is just foolish.

The hon. Member for Stone is fond of citing YouGov polling in Germany. I did not know that YouGov—“Anything you want, guv”—was now a polling company in Germany as well. If we look at the Irish vote on the referendum to accept quite onerous conditions, we can see that they voted by 60% to 40% to stay in the euro, and any Greek polling will show a massive majority—up to 80%—in favour of staying in the eurozone. Those countries are mature enough to realise that it is their internal policies, not the existence of a currency, that lie at the heart of their economic difficulties. For example, there was no housing boom in the Netherlands, which had low-interest euros to play with, just as the Spanish and the Irish did. Why not? Because people in the Netherlands have to put between 5% and 10% down before they can buy a house or a flat there. In other words, economic, administrative and political decisions could be, and are being, taken in all the countries concerned.

However, it is quite right to criticise those countries, and especially the accounting in Greece, where the shipping industry and the Greek Orthodox Church—the country’s biggest land and property owner—pay no tax. Greece spends twice the share of its gross domestic product as we or the Turks do on defence, rather than ensuring a clean taxation system. This moment of truth is, very painfully, forcing those countries to take new directions and new decisions, yet paradoxically, if for some reason the euro were to dissolve into drachmas, pesetas and lira, that would take all the pressure off the political and administrative classes in those countries to take new decisions.

Yes, there will be enhanced supervision of those countries’ economies and budgets, but that also happened after the war as a result of the Marshall plan. Along with the credit from the United States came the Marshall planners—technocrats who sat in ministries to ensure that, in accordance with the broad remit of the plan, there was no improper abuse of the credit lines that the United States was providing.

My plea is rather more philosophical. I feel sorry for the Foreign Secretary—who is not in his place— because he has consistently championed out-and-out Euroscepticism. He has encouraged all the false hopes. Let us remember his famous statement before the 2001 election, when he warned the British people that if they voted Labour, Britain would become a foreign land. That was about as sensible as the earlier remark made by the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) that signing the treaty of Amsterdam would mean the abolition of Britain. We have constantly been told by leaders of the Conservative party that being in Europe was bad for us. The hon. Member for Stone presents the most brutalist version of Conservative party thinking, but he is swimming in the same sea as many members of the Cabinet. He is simply rather more honest in describing the endgame that he wants to see.

I am fundamentally opposed to that aim; I do not want to see the eurozone break up. The entire western liberal market-economic world is going through a great crisis, as evidenced by problems in America and China, but there is a wider crisis, as evidenced by the difficulties in India, Russia, China and even Brazil, whose economy is now slowing down. How we get out of that is a huge challenge for all of us, but it is naive in the extreme to suggest that dissolving the eurozone would present a magic solution that would instantly liberate productivity, growth and employment and ensure the disappearance of extremist parties so that all the nation states could enter into a happy-clappy relationship.

This debate signals the firing of the first serious shot in what will be a much greater debate in our nation. The €500 billion in the kitty to bail out distressed countries sounds like a lot of money, but it is actually very small beer. We are going to have to take much bigger decisions about the future of Europe.

Over the summer, I was concerned to see a lot articles in the European press saying that Britain was about to withdraw from Europe. The language of repatriation and referendums was being used and, for the first time, a British Prime Minister said that he had no problem with linking the word “referendum” with Europe. He might not have any such problem, but neither Lady Thatcher nor any other British Prime Minister has used that language since Britain joined the EEC in 1973. Those headlines were appearing all over Europe, however, and the Minister for Europe, the right hon. Member for Aylesbury (Mr Lidington) had to be rushed out to comment on them. I was leafing through my copy of Le Monde one day and I was surprised to see his by-line in it; I thought I had an exclusive franchise to write in that newspaper. He said that Britain was not going to leave Europe, and that we were very committed to the EU. I have not brought the article with me, so I cannot read it out. Dagens Nyheter in Sweden said the same thing.

The Government went into total panic mode as they realised that a lot of people in Europe thought that the hon. Member for Stone spoke for the Conservative party, and that we were on our way out—[Interruption.] I hear cheers and “Hear, hear” from the Government Back Benches. I am delighted that we now seem to have buried the proposals for boundary changes, so that all those right hon. and hon. Gentlemen can perhaps be returned to the House at the next election. They will then have to make big decisions, however, on whether Britain should remain part of this thing or not. We are approaching a fundamental turning point in our nation’s life. I remain firmly committed to our staying a partner of the other countries in Europe, although I agree that there are huge problems to be resolved, and I agree with a lot of the reform agenda that is advanced by right hon. and hon. Members on both sides of the House.

The Bill gives the first flavour of the much greater debate that is about to come, but the Conservative party seems wholly ill-prepared for the seriousness of some of the decisions that we are going to have to take in the next two or three years. I am confident that, with greater study and work, our eminent shadow Europe Minister and the Labour party will become fully prepared to take part in that debate, but I fear that the possibility not just of a “grexodus” but of a British exit is now seriously on the table. We would be foolish if we did not accept that Britain could now be on the point of taking a fundamental decision that would significantly alter the nature of our lives and our nation.

[George Eustice (Camborne and Redruth) (Con)]

I should start by saying that I agree with much of the analysis of my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash) about what is wrong with the euro and how we got to this situation. However, I disagree strongly with his conclusions about this Bill, because I think it is relatively uncontroversial. As the Foreign Secretary pointed out earlier, the new European stability mechanism is certainly an improvement on the European financial stabilisation mechanism that went before it. Under that previous arrangement, Britain was liable for some 15% of the liability, which could have been a bill of up to £9 billion, whereas the new ESM means that Britain will not be taking on any future liabilities. So, first and foremost, this is a step forward.

Secondly, we must bear in mind that the Bill is not about the establishment of the ESM itself; it is simply about the amendment to article 136. This is just about clarifying the legal basis on which the ESM is set up, and discussion is taking place about whether that even needs to happen, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stone pointed out. This has already been happening under article 122, and it is apparent that it is mainly a concern of the German constitutional court that has prompted this change. The one thing I would say is that if other European countries or all 27 member states are going to acknowledge the concerns of one member state—Germany—by amending the article to reflect its needs, I look forward to the day when that will be reciprocated. I look forward to those moments when Britain is in a minority of one in having concerns about some things European and that, too, is respected by the other member states.

[Mr Jenkin]

I cannot quite believe what I am hearing, because a criticism that my hon. Friend and I have regularly made of the European Union is that what we are categorically assured will not happen then happens, and when we amend the treaty just to tidy up the wording, that makes it more explicit that it was always intended to happen in the first place. May I just read to him what the no-bail-out article actually says? It says:

“A Member State shall not be liable for or assume the commitments of central governments, regional, local or other public authorities, other bodies governed by public law, or public undertakings of another Member State”.

That is what the treaty says now and he is supporting, by a sort of sleight of hand, that being negated and set aside simply because it has already happened illegally. Is that not the grandmother’s footsteps of European integration that he and I have always railed against?

[George Eustice]

I would simply say to my hon. Friend that Britain is not bound by the ESM; it is very clear that only eurozone member states will be affected. Is it proportionate for us to stand in the way of those countries that are wrestling with and trying to decide what is going to happen with the euro? Is it proportionate for us to block that particular tweak to that treaty? I just do not feel that it is. I agree with him in that I want renegotiation and I want it, at some future point, to be put to a referendum. However, we need to pick our battles and pick our moments, and I think it is wrong to nit-pick over what I would regard as a small change.

[George Eustice]

My hon. Friend makes a point that I was going to deal with. I simply return to what my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) said, as I do not think that by blocking this Bill we are going to stop the ESM. Other countries will continue, because they have decided that they need to do so to try to save the euro.

We also need to give the Government and the Prime Minister credit when they achieve things and make progress. My hon. Friend the Member for Stone and I would like to see faster progress made and a renegotiation sooner rather than later, but we should give the Government credit where they safeguard British interests and improve on the situation we inherited. We should not blame our own Government for the mistakes the previous Labour Government made. They engaged in sloppy negotiation, and, as a result, we ended up with the former arrangements in the EFSM. The situation has now been improved with the ESM and we should support that.

[Mr Jenkin]

Where is the consistency in the Prime Minister’s vetoing fiscal union at 27 in December last year and now implicitly consenting to it by scrapping the no bail-out article? Should we not be extracting a real concession? Should we not be getting the concessions we really want? Should we not be using this opportunity as a fulcrum for renegotiation? Is this not the moment—when these countries want fiscal union to support monetary union—to say, “This is what we want to pull back in return”? Instead, we are just giving this away, and for what?

[George Eustice]

I think that there is a big difference between the fiscal compact that we vetoed last December and this particular one. Again, this comes back to the point about what is proportionate. By vetoing that fiscal compact, Britain was sending a clear signal that we were not going to be part of a wider decision at an EU level for those types of fiscal integration, because we were not affected. That approach was absolutely right on a number of levels. First, it showed that Britain was serious and that, on these issues, when we said we were going to do something, we meant it and we were ready to use a veto. That will help us when it comes to budget negotiations.

Secondly, by vetoing that particular treaty at an EU level, the Government managed to limit its scope, because it was, thus, necessarily just about the eurozone members and it cannot affect the UK. Had we signed up to that particular treaty, we would have faced all sorts of threats and demands, and people trying to put other agendas on the table. We would have had months and months of wrestling over things we did not want, before we would probably finally have had to veto it in any case, so I think that we did the right thing. However, I am just not convinced that such an approach is right in this instance, for the reasons I have set out. As I say, I think it would be disproportionate, as the ESM is not going to affect the UK; there is nothing that will expose us to future liabilities. Would it be right for us to stand in the way of countries that think that it is the right thing to do? There is a question of whether it is the right thing, but would it be right for us to stand in their way?

Balance of Competences

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Thursday 12th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hague]

Certainly, public disillusionment with the European Union is the greatest that it has ever been. We should be clear about that. I remember my hon. Friend being there on the day we launched the campaign to save the pound; let us be thankful that it was successful. We had precious little help from the other side at that time. [Interruption.] I seem to remember that a certain Prime Minister—the one before the last one—was very keen on joining the euro, so it was important to put him off, which we helped to do. A referendum, however, is a separate question from this exercise. I am not saying that this review is the only thing that will happen in our policy on the European Union. Much else will be happening over the coming months. My attitude towards a referendum is as I expressed it earlier. Discussion about it and the debate within all the political parties about what should be proposed for the future will carry on at the same time as this review.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I welcome my right hon. Friend’s statement, but will he reflect on the fact that some years ago President Giscard d’Estaing himself—a wise European—said that the United Kingdom would need to negotiate for itself a special status in the European Union? I commend my right hon. Friend’s recognition of public opinion, but at least two thirds of public opinion favours a looser trade and co-operation relationship with the EU, rather than this disastrous process of integration. Will he shout from the rooftops that only a Conservative Government will deliver the renegotiation that British people want?

[Mr Hague]

Like my hon. Friend, I remember the statements of President Giscard d’Estaing. I am sure that my hon. Friend will make extensive contributions to the review, and I look forward to them. Although I shall of course be shouting from the rooftops about what a Conservative Government will do, I shall not be doing so from the Dispatch Box now, given that I represent a coalition Government as Foreign Secretary. However, I look forward to doing the shouting at the appropriate time.

Iran

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Monday 20th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

We have yet to hear whether the right hon. Gentleman is going to support the amendment or the motion—[Hon. Members: “The amendment.”] I beg his pardon. Were the implicit military threat to be taken off the table, with whom in the current regime would we negotiate? Is that not a matter of considerable complexity? I am all in favour of negotiation, but with whom should we negotiate? Is that not part of the problem?

[Mr Straw]

I have had a serious problem in my right ear since 1981, and I can tell the hon. Gentleman that there is a very good consultant just across the river at St Thomas’s, on the NHS. I have been treated there for 30 years. I think it was within the hearing of the House and Hansard when, within about my first two sentences, I spelled out that I would support the amendment moved by the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington. I apologise if it did not quite get as far as the bubble in which the hon. Gentleman sits.

European Council

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Thursday 26th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

This debate is being conducted between some right hon. and hon. Members with an extraordinary air of complacency and myopia. The European Union is on the edge of the most appalling crisis—a self-inflicted crisis that many of us predicted when the euro was first conceived in the early 1990s and is now being fuelled by blindness and denial. The fundamental problem is that the euro cannot work—it cannot succeed. There are fundamental structural flaws that are destined to cause the euro eventually to fly apart into separate currencies. I do not want the euro to fail, but the fact remains that the crisis will go on and on until it does fail, so we should start to ask ourselves whether it is, in fact, in our interests that it be resolved quickly and in an orderly fashion, instead of waiting for the markets to do their work.

The fundamental structural problem is that the different national components of the euro represent very different economies, with different surpluses and deficits. The 2010 figures for trade in goods in the eurozone, provided by the Library, show that Germany has a surplus in exports to the other eurostates of €43.4 billion. Other countries have very large deficits: France’s is 4%, Greece’s 6% and Portugal’s 9%. Unless there is a system of fiscal transfers permanently operating to compensate for those surpluses and deficits, the European economies will become ever more out of balance. The debt problem has been greatly exacerbated by artificially low interest rates in countries that were used to much higher interest rates and therefore borrowed vast sums.

[Mr Leigh]

Is it in our interests that the other countries succeed in creating fiscal and monetary union? We will be excluded from a massive monetary union, which historically—for centuries—we have tried to avoid. Or is it in our interests that the euro gradually breaks up in a reasonably orderly way?

[Mr Jenkin]

I do not subscribe to the view that British foreign policy should be constantly to try to divide and rule on the continent. Actually, I think it would be in our interests if the euro succeeded with a democratic settlement in the European Union, but for the euro to succeed with 17 nations the institutions would be required to take on much more power, to accumulate much more taxation and to distribute money much more than they do now. I put it to the House that because there is a democratic deficit in the EU, which everyone acknowledges, the institutions lack the legitimacy and the authority to be able to impose their will across the democratic nations of the EU. There is a fundamental lack of consent to what would be required to impose the necessary discipline.

The problem with the fiscal union treaty is that it is a case of Germany trying to write German rules for the whole eurozone. That will not work—it cannot be sustained—and the result will be the break-up of the euro, so we had better start planning for that eventuality now. There are three things we should do, the first of which is to have a plan and not pretend that a break-up will not happen. I accept the suggestion made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) that the plan should be made in secret, but there should be a plan and the IMF should be its guardian. Secondly, the plan should be clear on what liabilities will be denominated in what currencies as each country comes out of the euro—easy for sovereign debt and very complicated for commercial paper, but it has to be done. Thirdly, the G20 must be ready to provide the liquidity needed to deal with the defaults that will occur as each country comes out of the euro—massive defaults that will require massive central Government printing of money to recapitalise the European banking system.

That can be done and it has to be done. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister was absolutely right to veto the treaty on 9 December. He knows there can be no going back on that decision, because to do so would leave him a position where he might as well have not vetoed the treaty, and then where would we be?