Prevention of Nuclear Proliferation

Brian Binley Excerpts

Tuesday 13th December 2011 Commons Chamber

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

May I declare an interest, as co-chair of the all-party group on Iran? I apologise to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for the fact that I shall have to leave before the conclusion of the debate as I have to chair the group’s meeting on The Daily Telegraph versus The Guardian on the future of Iran, which we hope will be an entertaining event.

I would like to put on the record why I support the Government’s attempt to impose sanctions on financial transactions coming out of Iran. My support is not unqualified, but I support the aims and ambitions. It is absolutely clear that in the past decade or so Iran has used a plethora of its banking network to fund Hezbollah and other organisations, and to try to acquire conventional and perhaps potential nuclear parts for its programmes at home. So I understand what our Government are trying to achieve.

I would have been less supportive before June to July 2009. Before then—indeed, when I last visited Iran—whatever we may have thought of the Iranian Government, they ruled by consent, and attempts were made by a number of senior members of the Iranian Government to reform Iran. Unfortunately, after President Ahmadinejad’s last election, we have seen a clear move away from the rule of law towards a much more totalitarian state. Anyone who has contacts with the Baha’is or with mere critics of the Iranian Government will notice that these people’s human rights are constantly being exempted from the Iranian constitution under the guise of “national security”, “spying” and so on. All those traits lead me to worry about the shifting nature of the regime.

I know enough about Iranian history to put aside the rhetoric. Death to America day is still an annual event in the Iranian calendar and has been since 1981, but let us not forget that before that there were plenty of other annual events, under both shahs and even before that, which related to us, too. I put aside the rhetoric because it is a regular occurrence that the British embassy is abused. Every Tuesday rent-a-mob turn up on a bus and stones are thrown over the wall. When I was there they were pelting stones into the garden. Under the previous Government it was invaded twice, although certainly not as seriously, and without any threat. We should be in no doubt that that is certainly co-ordinated.

The antagonism towards the British embassy goes back hundreds of years to the time of the “great game”. More recently, in the ’80s, the street running parallel to it was renamed Bobby Sands avenue, just to annoy us. It is a game the Iranians play, I am afraid, and one could say that part of the Iranians’ problem is that they have too much history, not too little, to draw on.

I shall push aside the rhetoric, however, and focus on what is more worrying: the nature of the regime. I can understand that it is certainly time to send a strong message that the rule of law is the best protection for the Iranian people and the Iranian street. I mean the rule of law according to their constitution not ours, not a rule of law that we seek to impose on them. Their constitution is actually one of the few in the middle east to give automatic rights to Jews, Christians and a range of other peoples. By making those exemptions, they show the danger of the nature of regime that the west and the rest of the United Nations should seek to put right.

[Mr Brian Binley (Northampton South) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way, and I shall be very brief. Does not my hon. Friend agree that although the Iranians may have the constitution in place, they certainly do not act as though a constitution were in place? Therein lies the problem with human rights.

[Mr Wallace]

Absolutely. They do so less and less each day, and that is one of the major regrets for someone such as me who believes that Iran has a great future and that the west often looks to the wrong allies in the middle east in the long term. I disagree, however, with the position on the Mujahedin-e Khalq. I believe that if one of the few things the Iranians and the Americans both agree on is that the MEK should be a proscribed terrorist organisation, we should perhaps maintain that.

I have some specific questions for the Minister about the sanctions. Why did he choose to include the Central Bank of Iran? A number of cases have been brought to my attention, including one from a company in Cambridge that has gone through five regimes of British export licences, and has European as well as Treasury approval to sell engineering goods to Iran. It is owed £12 million for goods already delivered and the sanctions—either those effectively extraterritorially imposed by the United States or our own—have prevented it from getting its money. I suspect—in fact, I know—that that threatens its very viability. When I went to visit Treasury officials, the answer to the problem was that they did not really get engaged in commercial-to-commercial decisions. I am afraid that the Treasury’s decisions have caused the problem, and in the past, companies—including American companies—have used a corridor from central bank to central bank to clear certain moneys. Not so long ago, JP Morgan in New York received money from Iranians that was owed to an American/UK contractor. If they can do it, so can we.

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[Mr Brian Binley (Northampton South) (Con)]

Let me say at the outset, in order to set my hon. Friend the Minister’s mind at rest, that I fully support the measures that the Government have taken on sanctions. I welcome the sanctions as they have been levied, but I would have wished us to have applied a whole series of sanctions in a more programmed and measured way for a longer period. However, we are where we are. The information I am getting from people inside Iran is that the sanctions are already proving quite successful, but I think the Minister mentioned that.

The action of shutting the Iranian embassy in London and downgrading our staff in Tehran desperately needs to be followed up by our European Union partners and others in the wider western world. It has been a tragedy over many years that we have consistently given messages suggesting that we were attempting to appease the mullahs as though they were friendly English vicars eating cucumber sandwiches and drinking their tea on their lawned gardens. We all know that not to be the truth, but that impression seems to have been ingrained in the Foreign Office for a long time. Every time I talk to the Foreign Office about Iran, it seems to want to bring the mullahs on board, as though any kind of appeasement would achieve a friendly outcome in which we could all eat cucumber sandwiches together. There is no hope of that, so we need to go further and apply sanctions, perhaps in the oil and gas arena, but we need the help of other nations to do that. The Germans and French seem particularly concerned about our interests at the moment, but doing that would be in their interests. We are talking about a mediaeval theocracy that is building a nuclear weapon, and that is very surprising.

Let me remind the Minister that the Iranian people had the courage and the bravery to start the first demonstration that could be described as the beginning of the middle east spring—I shall not call it the Arab spring, for obvious reasons. They were the people who recognised that their elections were corrupt and who rose up in their hundreds of thousands to make a point to a regime that they have found difficult to influence. We have talked about the constitution, but that constitution is not regarded very highly by the people who have a duty and a responsibility to operate it.

Let us look at Iran’s human rights record. Minors have been executed: Amnesty International said only a short time ago that a 16 and 17-year-old were hanged this year. Young women are being stoned, and trade unionists, students, bloggers and members of the Baha’i faith have been imprisoned and, in some cases, hanged. Three fathers who went to visit their children in Camp Ashraf in Iraq were charged on their return with moharebeh—being an enemy of God. Those three people were killed too. So much for a constitution.

This is a country that needs to see strong measures from the west and to hear strong messages that we support what is a sizeable wish for democracy and freedom. The sanctions are a measure in the right direction, but more needs to be done. I ask Ministers to make every effort to implore their fellow Ministers in the EU and beyond to send a strong message that will give hope to the people of Iran and to those Iranians who are working externally for a free and democratic Iran.

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[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)]

I, too, preface my remarks by stating that I have been a consistent opponent of the regime in Iran. I founded the Hands Off the People of Iran organisation in this country to campaign for the restoration of democracy in Iran and, with my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) and the hon. Member for Northampton South (Mr Binley), have signed a number of early-day motions in support of human rights in Iran. I have focused on the persecution of trade unionists, particularly those in the Tehran bus workers union, but I also led the campaign in this country to free Jafar Panahi, the film director.

Having said all that, I am extremely fearful of the statutory instrument under consideration, because I fear that it will take us into the cul-de-sac of war, which is an all too familiar path for us in this country: we seem to find an opponent, which is usually associated with minerals or oil; we then find that it is a threat to world safety; and we then find or concoct evidence of that threat. The International Atomic Energy Agency’s recent report failed to find any conclusive evidence of nuclear weapons production and, in fact, found no evidence of Iran’s

“diversion of declared nuclear material”

to weapons production.

The report relies on past evidence, which we have debated in the House before: a laptop computer, originating we believe from the Israeli or US intelligence services and referring to the development of a nuclear weapons programme by a certain scientist, Vyacheslav Danilenko. We were told at one point that this Ukrainian was a nuclear science expert, but we now discover that he was an expert in nanotechnology and had no real expertise in nuclear weapons. We were told also that there was a technique, supposedly being developed by the Iranians, involving a test explosion chamber, but we now know from the evidence of Robert Kelly, the chief of the IAEA for eight years in Iraq, that the chamber could never be used in a test.

[Mr Binley]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

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[Mr Baron]

I am afraid that my hon. Friend was not listening. I did not say that sanctions made the regime more extreme, but that they reinforced the position of the hardliners within Iran, itself being a complex society. There is a difference. The only sensible option is calm yet vigorous diplomacy. We need to offer implicit recognition of Iran’s status as a major power in the region—a status that we created ourselves by castrating Iraq. There is a precedent for recognising a new status. In the 1960s, when the US presence in Asia was waning and China was beginning to flex her muscles, Nixon did not respond by denying the reality of Chinese power.

As I said, the west underestimates the opportunity to influence Iran. She is a state in transition with multiple centres of authority and constant power struggles. The challenge for the west is to influence those struggles. Crude sanctions or appeals for regime change undermine local proponents of reform by making them look like imperialist lackeys. Offering Iran a new relationship with the west could strengthen the pragmatists at the expense of the hard-liners. We can, and should, go the extra mile for peace. Much greater emphasis needs to be placed on quiet diplomacy between Iran and the west.

[Mr Binley]

Does my hon. Friend recognise that we have approached the Iranians bearing gifts in that we proscribed the MEK as a way of mollifying them and encouraging them to be our friend? None of our overtures over the past 12 years has worked. Does my hon. Friend recognise that a consistent but strong voice is now the only way to proceed, and that the last thing we want is military intervention?

[Mr Baron]

I am afraid that the Iranians have a slightly longer memory than just 12 years. They remember our support for Saddam Hussein when he invaded Iran, and many other interventions in Iran by the west are still fresh in their memories.

We need to go the extra mile for peace. Much greater emphasis needs to be placed on quiet yet vigorous diplomacy between Iran and the west. The UK is well placed to help in this effort. Despite recent measures announced by the Foreign Secretary, of the three stated enemies of Iran—the UK, the US and Israel—only one still has diplomatic relations with Iran.