Syria and the Use of Chemical Weapons

Clive Efford Excerpts

Thursday 29th August 2013 Commons Chamber

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

When the Prime Minister performed his U-turn yesterday on taking action this weekend, I wondered what we would be debating today. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition and the shadow Foreign Secretary on forcing the Prime Minister to do a handbrake turn over the action we were clearly called back to vote on today. The Prime Minister may have changed the text of the motion, but he certainly made the same hawkish speech today. I do not accept that wanting to exhaust all the avenues with the United Nations is somehow an argument for doing nothing.

I heard the Deputy Prime Minister being interviewed this morning on the “Today” programme, and it was not his finest hour. He said that this was an atrocity that could not be ignored, which I accept, and that he did not want ours to be remembered as the generation that sat idly by, but our motion does not suggest doing that. He then said that the Government were seeking a mandate for a limited response. There we have it. That is why we are here today; the Government are seeking a mandate for a limited response, which is why our amendment is necessary and needs to be supported. Their intention was not to wait for the UN process to be exhausted, but to take precipitate action.

What is a limited response? We have no mandate to punish—that is not our role—so what is the objective? Who or what is the target? It has been suggested that we aim to “deter” and “degrade” chemical weapons. These are technical terms quite often used to make it easier for us to vote in favour of military action. We have also heard about “precision strikes”, “selective strikes”, “technical strikes” and the intention to “degrade”. We even have civilian deaths described as “collateral damage”. These are all terms used to convince us that we should vote in favour of a strike, but how do we contain a missile attack on a chemical weapons dump or manufacturing centre? How do we ensure that no civilians die? Would those deaths be acceptable? Would they somehow be laudable for having been created by us, rather than by chemical weapons?

We do not have an end plan, a strategy for what we want to achieve with an incisive strike or an exit strategy. We have been here before. I voted against a similar motion when my Government attempted this in 2003, and exactly the same things are being said today.

EU Council

Clive Efford Excerpts

Monday 2nd July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I am now looking for questions consisting of a single, short sentence. I am sure the hon. Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) will lead us in that exercise.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

With reference to the answer that the Prime Minister gave to the hon. Member for West Suffolk (Matthew Hancock), if he genuinely believes that some of the actions of Barclays bank bordered on the criminal, will he now call for the resignation of Mr Bob Diamond?

[The Prime Minister]

I do not think it is for Prime Ministers to hire and fire bank chiefs. Mr Diamond will have to make himself accountable to his shareholders, and to this House when he answers questions on Wednesday. As I have said, I think he has some serious questions to answer.

Party Funding

Clive Efford Excerpts

Monday 26th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Maude]

The shelves of the libraries groan with unimplemented reports on the reform of party funding. We take the view that this should be done by consensus between the parties, if at all possible. That is the spirit in which we undertook these discussions previously—four or five years ago—and that is the spirit in which we shall approach the matter this time.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

When he was the Leader of the Opposition, this Prime Minister said:

“We can’t go on like this. I believe it’s time we shone the light of transparency on lobbying in our country and forced our politics to come clean about who is buying power and influence.”

I agree with that absolutely. The Minister has been suggesting that this can be resolved just by publishing a list of who gave what and how much they gave, but this is about buying access to buy influence. That is the key difference here and it is why only an independent inquiry into what has gone on will satisfy the public. No matter what the Minister says at the Dispatch Box, it is an independent inquiry that is needed.

[Mr Maude]

I agree with what my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister said then and what he is doing now, which is to take it much, much further than any Government have ever done before—that bears repeating.

EU Council

Clive Efford Excerpts

Monday 12th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I am always grateful for my hon. Friend’s support but he tends to take it just a little too far. The coalition is right for Britain and I want it to go on working for the good of Britain. We have to recognise that that sometimes means we cannot get the things we want.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

Will the Prime Minister explain specifically what safeguards are in place today for the City of London and British interests that were not in place last week?

[The Prime Minister]

Clearly, if we had been able to achieve the protocol on financial services there would have been greater safeguards, but the safeguard we do have is that we are not signing up to a treaty that could have put that industry in danger.

Public Disorder

Clive Efford Excerpts

Thursday 11th August 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I will certainly look at what my hon. Friend says. Of course, the age of criminal responsibility is 10, and we do not have any proposals to change that, but she raises an important issue about whether the police at any moment needed to hang back because of the very young age of the looters—some of the people doing the looting were under the age of 10—and I will certainly get back to her about that.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

For the past two nights in my constituency, I have had a very heavy police presence, owing to right-wing extremist groups focusing on Eltham and trying to create unrest and bad feeling between different racial groups. Although we want to support people who are public-spirited and come out to defend their communities, as some of my constituents have done, will the Prime Minister join me in asking those people not to be diverted from their efforts by those extremists who seek to exploit the situation?

[The Prime Minister]

The hon. Gentleman speaks not only for his constituents, but, frankly, for the whole House in deprecating the English Defence League and all it stands for. On its attempt to say that it will somehow help to restore order, I have described some parts of our society as sick, and there is none sicker than the EDL.

Public Confidence in the Media and Police

Clive Efford Excerpts

Wednesday 20th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. May I remind the House that when Members refer to other Members they should do so by referring to their constituencies, rather than by name?

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

When the Prime Minister was Leader of the Opposition, was phone hacking discussed in any of his meetings with John Yates or any other Metropolitan police officer?

[The Prime Minister]

I have had a range of meetings with John Yates over the past year, mostly about terrorism—[Interruption.] I do not recall every single conversation that I have had; you would be mad to pretend that you do. You would need to be superhuman to remember every conversation that you have. I do know that almost all the conversations that I have had with John Yates over the past year have been about terrorist issues. The key point about my chief of staff’s e-mail was that he was trying to ensure that the police did not do anything inappropriate.

Public Confidence in the Media and Police

Clive Efford Excerpts

Wednesday 20th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Simon Hughes]

I absolutely agree. The speech that the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) made in the other day’s debate was not at all persuasive about that point. There were calls for a judicial inquiry from my right hon. Friend the Member for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne), my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay (Mr Sanders) and others. That was on the previous Government’s agenda, so it could have been held, just as legislation could have been implemented following the Information Commissioner’s report and recommendations. However, we had neither an inquiry nor the implementation of higher penalties.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Simon Hughes]

I will not, because I want to make some progress, but if I have any spare time, of course I will.

We gave warnings from 2009 that the fit and proper person test needed to be applied more robustly and that we needed to be aware of the abuse of positions. I just record that right up to last year’s general election, and indeed to December 2010, my right hon. Friends the Deputy Prime Minister and for Twickenham (Vince Cable) assiduously made the case that there was something very rotten in the way in which we regulated the media industry.

The warnings from our party about Andy Coulson started in May 2009. They were made on record and off the record. We regret that they were not heeded, but the decision was not for us, but for the Prime Minister, and he explained it today. As a postscript, however, let me say that from all that I know, have read and have heard, Ed Llewellyn’s role has been entirely beyond reproach throughout. I do not think that anything that he did or did not do can be regarded as inappropriate in the context of the investigations.

--- Later in debate ---

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

I believe that I am the first London Member from the Opposition Benches to speak in the debate. That is unfortunate, given the prominence of the Metropolitan police in our discussions, but I hope that my colleagues from London will catch your eye later, Mr Deputy Speaker.

I would like to say a lot, but we are constrained by time at the tail end of our discussion. Suffice it to say that I believe that the power of News International and many other media organisations, as many hon. Members have said, has distorted the way in which politicians and others in public life go about their daily business, but what is wrong is the fact that the ownership of our media is out of kilter. It should not just be an issue about BSkyB and whether News International increases its influence in it; it should be about whether News International is a fit and proper company and should be allowed to continue to hold sway over such a large part of our national media.

In what is left of my time allocation, I wish to speak about the influence of the Mayor of London on the Metropolitan police. I think it was wrong for him to say that the phone hacking issue was “codswallop”—that it was a plot

“cooked up by the Labour party”,

that it was

“a song and dance about nothing”,

and that he was not going to become involved in the issue, only as far back as September 2010. The Metropolitan police were under pressure from people outside the House and some hon. Members, as we all know, to reopen the investigation and look into the phone hacking scandal. It was bound to influence the views of those police that the Mayor of London, who is supposedly given influence over issues relating to policing matters on behalf of people in London, had already made public statements to say that he did not think such an inquiry worth while—that he thought it was a load of rubbish. It was bound to influence their thinking about whether to reopen that inquiry.

I sincerely hope that the Leveson inquiry will look into that fact, because it will be an important factor in whether we decide to go forward with elected police commissioners throughout the country, because when the Government advocate elected police commissioners, they always use the Mayor of London as an example. Well, actually, the Mayor of London is accountable to the Metropolitan Police Authority for what he does with the police. The members of the MPA have a great deal of influence in London, and it is a democratically based body, with other co-opted members to make it broadly representative of London. We are diluting the influence of the MPA and converting it into a panel. We are not giving it any teeth whatever to enable it to have oversight, and we are placing all the influence and power in the hands of a directly elected Mayor or his appointed deputy Mayor.

The problem that we have faced is the over-burgeoning power of the media and their ability to twist and manipulate individuals, particularly politicians at times. I would stand here and criticise the former leader of my party for going halfway around the world to pay court to Rupert Murdoch—I made that criticism openly at the time and I do so now—but that is because those individuals’ power has been too great. We have seen the tentacles go deep into the Metropolitan police and into our political life. We have officers who are now probably facing prison because they were corrupted by journalists throwing money around; we have politicians who have been too close and embarrassed themselves by their relationships with the media. It is extremely corrupting.

The Mayor of London said that this matter was “codswallop” only days after the article appeared in The New York Times which resulted in the reopening of the Metropolitan police inquiry. So we have to look at how the Mayor has been influenced by the media and the way he has used the media.

[John Mann]

Would my hon. Friend be astonished to learn that one of his constituents, as a police officer in 2005, received a suspended jail sentence for selling information to The Sun for a mere £200? Does that show how endemic the problem has become?

[Clive Efford]

I think it does, and it shows why Parliament was recalled so that we could have this debate. I am sure that that police officer, for that small sum of money, seriously regrets his judgment, but what underlies such transactions is the power of the media to suggest that their influence stretches so far that they are not accountable, and will never be accountable, because they are under the umbrella and shield of our protection because they think themselves so great and so mighty. The fact that Rebekah Brooks thought she could walk into Parliament and say, “Yes, we pay the police,” and walk out again without being held to account for it was an absolute disgrace. The Met must never return to that again.

The Mayor of London, however, used his influence to try to stall the inquiry. His reasons for that will have to come out as these matters are investigated, but without question his attitude to the investigation into phone hacking could only have had influence on the thoughts and decisions of the police, and that must be investigated.

[Oliver Heald (North East Hertfordshire) (Con)]

My old friend the hon. Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) is right in one respect: there are faults in all parties in the House and successive Governments in not tackling this issue early enough. However, I completely reject his criticism of the Mayor of London, because the Mayor’s comments predate the most recent allegations.

[Clive Efford]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Oliver Heald]

No, I will not, because I have so little time. That is the way it is tonight.

I shall make three points. First, people in this country have a fundamental right to live under the rule of law, but Members on both sides of the House must look back on this period and ask themselves this: did we uphold the rule of law? As the hon. Gentleman said, journalists felt that they could break the law willy-nilly, and people felt that they could talk to Select Committees about breaking the law, and nothing would happen. That is a failure of this Parliament over a period of time to uphold one of the basic rights of our people.

That is why it is right that the Prime Minister has agreed to a full, judge-led, independent inquiry, and why it is right that we have a proper police investigation under Sue Akers to go after the evidence. Our Select Committees did a good job yesterday in showing that even the most powerful people in the land, and even the world, can be questioned before a Select Committee just like anyone else. That is how it should be in our country. People should not feel that they can get away with it.

Let us ask how we got into that position. Many hon. Members have said that after 1992, Labour politicians were desperate for the good opinion of the media. They went out to the Canary Islands and all sorts of places—[Interruption.] They went to the Cayman Islands and Australia too. They were out to curry favour with the media regardless. The combination of currying favour with the media and the sofa-style government that we had under Tony Blair meant that we ended up with the sort of situation that was described by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr Cox), who said that the Attorney-General was told in a letter from the police that a vast quantity of private information and criminality needed investigation, but nothing happened.

How did that happen? It should not have been possible, and there should have been a report to the Cabinet. The right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) said that no such report ever occurred. That reminds us of what the Butler inquiry said about sofa-style government, when there are no formalities. We ended up going off to war in Iraq without members of the Cabinet seeing all the papers. That same, sloppy approach is not the way to run a country. It is right that we have the inquiries, but the House must get together to ensure the proper rule of law.

My second point is that the separation of the criminal justice system from politicians is very important. I was surprised to hear the Leader of the Opposition say that he expected the Prime Minister to be briefed by an assistant commissioner about an ongoing police inquiry. The assistant commissioner actually offered that service to No. 10, but Edward Llewellyn was absolutely right to say no, because we want that separation. The cosiness of the police and the media, and sofa-style government, blurs the formalities that protect our constitution.

Finally, I want to mention the presumption of innocence. When in opposition, it is easy to cast stones and to rely on bits of gossip and speculation as if they are evidence, but in this country, thank goodness, we have a fair system of trial with the presumption of innocence at its core. I would not want that to change. All those who throw stones and pretend that someone is guilty just because a newspaper says so ought to think about where that leads. Let us stick up for the constitutional principles of the rule of law and the separation of powers, and let us ensure that we continue to have fair trials.

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973

Clive Efford Excerpts

Monday 21st March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Edward Miliband]

Not for the moment.

I say to the Government—and the Prime Minister will know this—it is incredibly important that the international community observes the terms of the resolution in its actions and in what it says. I shall not rehearse the arguments about past conflicts, but we all know that ambiguity about the case for intervention is often one of the biggest problems that a mission faces. The House should be clear about the degree of difficulty of what we are attempting in securing a coalition from beyond western powers to support intervention in another, north African, state, so we cannot afford mission creep, and that includes in our public pronouncements.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

The point that my right hon. Friend is making is important. Gaddafi could prove to be very difficult indeed to remove, so we cannot impose limitations on the length of time that the action and the enforcement of the resolution will take. Civilians in Tripoli are as valuable as civilians in Benghazi, so the actions that we take will be measured by the people who support them, which will be a judgment on whether what we are doing is in line with the international agreement. Does my right hon. Friend agree that that is an important point we must always bear in mind?

[Edward Miliband]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. It is very important in all our public pronouncements to be careful about what we say. As the Prime Minister said, in principle it must be for the Libyan people to determine the shape of their future.

Military action by the coalition can be accompanied by a wide range of non-military measures to continue the pressure on the Libyan regime. Security Council resolution 1973, as well as resolution 1970, sets out all the measures that can be taken, including cutting off access to money, trade, weapons and international legitimacy for Colonel Gaddafi. And we need to remind Libyan leaders and commanders that they will be brought to justice for any crimes they commit against their people.

Japan and the Middle East

Clive Efford Excerpts

Monday 14th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend speaks with great expertise about these matters. There is an Arab face on this already because of what the Arab League and the Gulf Co-operation Council have said, and that makes a big difference. When we speak to Arab leaders in the Gulf, they are very clear—unanimous, even—that Gaddafi has to go, the regime cannot continue, it is not legitimate and the situation is bad for the region. I think there would be support were a no-fly zone to happen—not only verbal support but, I hope, military support as well.

I cannot be specific about the two countries that my hon. Friend mentions. Obviously Egypt has all sorts of challenges in front of it at the moment, but I have had personal strong support from other Gulf leaders on this issue.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

The fact that arms that could have been sold by this country and many other western countries are being used against the people fighting for freedom in Libya highlights the unacceptable nature of the arms trade. Were there any discussions at the European Union about the possibility of international agreement about who we should deal with regarding arms in the future, to prevent such circumstances from coming about?

[The Prime Minister]

There was not that discussion at the European Council on Friday, because we were really talking about the two issues of the immediate situation in Libya and the neighbourhood policy that Europe should have towards north Africa and countries that are yearning for democracy.

The hon. Gentleman is right to say that we have to consider such issues closely. I do not believe that the arms trade is always and everywhere a bad thing, because small countries have a right to defend themselves. A responsible trade, properly regulated, is acceptable, but although we have some of the toughest rules, we have to ask ourselves, “Are they working, and how can we improve on them?”

Oral Answers to Questions

Clive Efford Excerpts

Wednesday 19th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I can give my hon. Friend a positive answer. The Localism Bill addresses that issue. As well as doing that, it is important that where local communities are affected by things such as onshore wind, they should make sure that they benefit from those developments. The Localism Bill brings a whole new approach that will much better settle this difficult debate than what has been done until now.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

Q15. Today, there is an order before Parliament to proscribe the TTP—Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan—the Pakistan Taliban. Just one week into the term of office of the Prime Minister’s predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown), the right hon. Gentleman demanded to know why my right hon. Friend had not proscribed Hizb ut-Tahrir. Just eight months into the Prime Minister’s term of office, can he explain to the House why he has not fulfilled his manifesto commitment?

[The Prime Minister]

We could put it another way round: why did the last Government have 13 years, yet the Pakistani Taliban were never banned? It has taken us eight months to do what they failed to do in 12 years.