Oral Answers to Questions

Clive Lewis Excerpts

Tuesday 30th July 2024 Commons Chamber

[Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)]

I thank the Foreign Secretary and his team for the £500,000 committed to the Caribbean after the devastation on Grenada and Carriacou as a result of Hurricane Beryl, but can I press him and the team on the fact that the Caribbean is at the sharp end of the climate crisis? Will he tell the House what plans he has to advocate at COP29 for a replacement of the $100 billion climate finance deal?

[Mr Lammy]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for taking up such issues from the Back Benches. He will know that I was dealing with these matters on day one in office. Very sadly, this is the beginning of the hurricane season across the region, so I will keep in close touch with my Caribbean colleagues, and I expect to have further conversations later today. We of course want to take up those issues as we head to COP.

Israel and Gaza

Clive Lewis Excerpts

Tuesday 19th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mr Mitchell]

My hon. Friend is correct in what he says, but the important point, which I have repeatedly made in the House, is that in order to have a ceasefire we have to have agreement from those taking part in these actions that they will abide by a ceasefire. Israel has the right of self-defence and the right to protect itself from the appalling acts that Hamas perpetrated on 7 October ever taking place again. Hamas have made it clear that they wish to repeat those awful acts. Those things do not sound to me like a strong basis for having a ceasefire.

[Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)]

Three standout statements from today have been that starvation is being used as a weapon of war; Israel is provoking famine; and the UK is still selling arms to Israel. When will the Minister understand the damning nature of this and the damage it is doing to the UK’s international reputation—or, rather, what is left of it?

[Mr Mitchell]

We have been clear that Israel has the right of self-defence but it must abide by international humanitarian law and the rules of war. Britain is one of the leading nations on finding ways to get aid into Gaza and helping our allies and other regional powers to do everything we can to get the hostages out. I hope that the hon. Gentleman is proud of our country’s intervention in both those respects.

Financial Security and Reducing Inequality in the Caribbean: Government Role

Clive Lewis Excerpts

Wednesday 8th March 2023 Westminster Hall

[Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered financial security and inequality in the Caribbean.

It is an honour to conduct the debate with you in the Chair, Mr Davies. Before embarking on such debates, it is customary for Members to declare any interests that might influence them in the debate at hand. Heritage is rarely one of them, but I would, for the purposes of this debate, like to declare that I am a son of both Britain and the Caribbean island of Grenada, and therefore have a vested interest in these matters.

What are these matters? I would contend that we cannot debate our Government’s role in promoting financial security and reducing inequality in the Caribbean without discussing the elephant in the room—namely, the preceding 400 years of exploitative colonial history and the urgent need for some form of reparatory justice.

I am not the first person to raise the issue. Indeed, I would not be here discussing it today without the understanding and analysis of Caribbean giants such as Frantz Fanon, who wrote “The Wretched of the Earth”; Eric Williams, who produced the seminal work “Capitalism and Slavery”; Walter Rodney, who wrote “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”; and Sir Hilary Beckles, who wrote “How Britain Underdeveloped the Caribbean”.

While those people, in their own way, gave us the theoretical and academic arguments for the case for reparations for colonialism and slavery, I want to thank another group for the compassion and leadership they have shown on the issue—namely, the Trevelyan family, some of whom I believe are here today in the Gallery, fresh from their visit to Grenada, where, as the descendants of slave owners, they did what no British Government have ever done. They apologised for their ancestors’ part in the exploitation of the 1,000 slaves they owned on six plantations. They acknowledged the financial and cultural advantage that had generated for them, and urged the British Government, as I do today, to enter meaningful negotiations with the Governments of the Caribbean in order to make appropriate reparations.

The Trevelyan family did not leave it there. They set up an educational fund worth £100,000, and in so doing opened the door of the debate just a little wider. Thank you very much for all that you have done.

The issue of reparations could simply be dismissed as the obsession of a small group of so-called woke extremists. We have seen in this country a political backlash, often from Members on the Conservative Benches, against any notion that we should reassess our history as regards colonialism and slavery, and the impact they have had, and continue to have, on the lives of millions across the globe and here in the United Kingdom.

Whether it is the pulling down of slaver statues or campaigning against the National Trust’s efforts to educate the public about the link between slavery and the financing behind many of our stately homes, this is a live issue that evokes great passion and sometimes anger. That is entirely understandable, because when anyone questions the very story we tell ourselves and the world around us about who we are and what we represent, that is challenging—triggering, even. People who have been in a relationship will know this.

Relationships can be difficult because our partners often challenge those notions of who we think we are: “What do you mean I snore? What do you mean I’m tight fisted? How dare you say I leave the toilet seat up?” Learning things about ourselves and others can either end in denial, argument and divorce or result in growth and development. That is what those calling for dialogue on this issue are striving for. The Commonwealth is a relationship between Britain and her former colonies, which, like a partner who has endured 400 years of the most hideous abuse, seek not charity but restitution.

[Nadia Whittome (Nottingham East) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend for securing this important debate. He is making an impassioned speech. Does he agree that the case for former colonial powers paying reparations to the descendants of enslaved people is particularly strong, given that the UK Government were making payments to compensate the descendants of enslavers—families and organisations—as recently as 2015? Reparations are the right and fair thing to do not only because of the legacy of slavery and because the wealth that countries such as ours extracted underdeveloped those societies, but because of our role in the climate crisis, which threatens the very future of the Caribbean.

[Clive Lewis]

I thank my hon. Friend for her points, which I will come to in my speech. One key thing she pulled out is that successive Governments have made many arguments about why this should not happen, but they should be making the argument about why it should. I want to pick up on one thing she said that I will not have time to cover in my speech. One argument that Governments have often made over the past 20 or 30 years, in the postcolonial period, for why we should not pay reparations for the slave trade and colonialism is that it was legal at the time. Not only do this Government make that argument, but our Labour Government made it in the noughties. We have to remember that throughout history, including in the 20th century, countries treated people brutally and exterminated them ostensibly under their own laws, so we cannot allow that argument to be made against reparations.

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

I speak as the chairman of the all-party group on St Kitts and Nevis. All Members will be incentivised and motivated to ensure that there is the greatest flow of capital to our allies in the Caribbean, but does the hon. Gentleman think that giving the Caribbean states tariff-free access to the United Kingdom, the world’s fifth-largest economy, is more important than reparations? That would contrast with the protectionist racket they have experienced from the European Union, which, inherently, tried to restrict the flow of goods from the Caribbean to the EU.

--- Later in debate ---

[Clive Lewis]

The hon. Gentleman will not find me defending the EU on the matter of the Caribbean. Later, I will explain why, like the United Kingdom, the EU also owes a debt to the Caribbean.

When we look at how the Caribbean has been systematically underdeveloped, it makes no sense to say, “Let’s not worry too much about the past. You can now take advantage of tariff-free access to UK markets.” If those countries do not have an economy to take advantage of that tariff-free access, what is the point? We first have to build up the economies in the Caribbean and structurally invest in those countries’ people and infrastructure to enable them to make use of that tariff-free access.

[Dawn Butler (Brent Central) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an extremely powerful speech. We often hear the argument, “Let’s forget what happened.” Reparations are about making amends for centuries of violence and discrimination against those countries. It is interesting that people say, “Let’s forget what happened,” when those countries are still in debt, their jewels and artefacts are in museums in this country and we refuse to give them back. A lot of reparation is needed, whether it be economic reparations or an acknowledgement of what happened. Does my hon. Friend agree that any arguments against that are not only a betrayal, but collusion in what happened many centuries ago?

[Clive Lewis]

I thank my hon. Friend for her wonderful intervention—it is almost as though she is reading ahead in my speech, and I will come to some of those points. I would go further: this country will be unable to move on as a cohesive whole until these issues are resolved. I think that that everyone in this room would want to see that happen as this country goes forward, post Brexit, into the big, wide world yonder.

I was in the middle of my discussion about the Commonwealth being a relationship—a relationship between Britain and her former colonies, which, like a partner that has endured 400 years of the most hideous abuse, seek not charity but restitution. The alternative is divorce in the form of growing republican sentiment across the Caribbean. Abusive partners who cannot say sorry cannot change, can never grow and can never develop. Who in their right mind would want to stay in an abusive relationship like that?

But do not take my word for it. King Charles III, through his goddaughter Fiona Compton, has shown an intimate understanding of the necessity for this national conversation—knowing, as he does, that he could well be the last king of anything resembling an international Commonwealth. As such, the monarch has shifted positions. He believes, we are told, that British history “should not be hidden”, and that, in the same way that we are taught about the holocaust,

“we should be open to speaking about Britain’s involvement in the slave trade”.

For it seems that this country still finds it easier to remember the transgressions of other nations than it does its own.

Let me turn to the issue of those transgressions. What happened such that Britain, or any other European colonial power, should be expected to apologise and pay reparations? As any student of history would attest, history is littered with ancient atrocities and what would now be called crimes against humanity that elicit no such reactions or demands. Why is what took place in the Caribbean so different?

Sir Hilary Beckles, a historian and vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies, nails a key part of the explanation in his book “How Britain Underdeveloped the Caribbean”. He states:

“The modern Caribbean economy was invented, structured and managed by European states for one purpose: to achieve maximum wealth extraction to fuel and sustain their national financial, commercial and industrial transformation. Therefore, for each European state, the Caribbean economy was primarily an external economic engine propelling and promoting national economic growth.

No other large and lucrative colonized economy in the five-hundred-year history of Western economic development has ever been created for such a singular purpose. No such economy has ever been as intensively exploited as that of the Caribbean by imperial entrepreneurs and nation states.”

It continues that European countries, Britain chief among them,

“called into being a new, immoral entrepreneurial order that defined the Caribbean…economy as a frontier beyond the accountability of civilization, where crimes against humanity became a cultural norm”,

with the ability

“to accumulate wealth without cultural or ethical constraints.”

That involved

“the institutionalization of piracy and plunder, genocide and slavery, violent hostility and hatred, and notions of black subhumanity. These were the driving forces in Europe’s wealth extraction as it rose to economic dominance”—

a dominance that, we know, it still enjoys to this day.

Sir Hilary goes on to describe slavery as “systematic genocide”, because although around 3.5 million Africans were brought to the Caribbean in those 400 years, only 600,000 were in the region by the time of emancipation, which is unsurprising, given that the average useful lifespan of a West Indian slave was five to 10 years. That went on for 400 years, so extreme was their treatment. British history books might tell us that the first African slaves landed in the British empire in 1624, but when we listen to that, the reality is that black people, Africans, did not land in the British empire; the British empire landed on them. That is what happened in 1624 and continued to happen for 400 years, to this very day.

This is not just about Africans. Indians were also forcibly indentured in the Caribbean by the British. Let us not forget the 3 million indigenous peoples estimated to have inhabited the Caribbean in 1700. I have some Carib Indian in me, which I can trace back through my great-grandmother. Those people were deliberately wiped out by those European forces, so now only 30,000 survive.

As the fabulous research of University College London shows, even the abolition of slavery in the 1830s saw no justice, because it was the slavers, not the slaves, who received the vast sums of compensation—billions in today’s money—that taxpayers in the UK, including the Caribbeans who came here in the post-war period to rebuild this country, after it had fought a war ostensibly against racism and fascism, finished paying off in 2015, so vast was the debt. Let us think about that: the people who had been brutalised and exploited for 400 years came back to the mother country, after it had fought a war against racism, to rebuild this country, leaving theirs in poverty, and paid taxes to pay their former slave masters.

This does not end there. Some of those same people, decades later, having worked for this country, were deported as illegal immigrants in the Windrush scandal. You could not make this up. If it was written in a book, some would say it is fiction. It gets worse, because the Windrush compensation scheme was made so difficult to apply for that fewer than one in four people eligible for compensation have received it. That is not a scandal; it goes beyond scandal.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

The hon. Gentleman is making an impassioned speech. He is talking about immigration and the rights of people. As the first Polish-born British Member of Parliament, who came to this country from Poland, I say to him that one reason I campaigned for Brexit was that I felt the current immigration policy was racist. We gave automatic access to fellow white Europeans to the exclusion of Commonwealth citizens.

I want everybody to be treated in the same way when they are at our border, irrespective of their colour, religion or where they are from. It should be based on their skillset. The Labour party and the SNP—[Interruption.] I hear chuntering from the SNP—campaigned for a system that would have allowed that ongoing racism to take place: automatic access for Europeans to the exclusion of Commonwealth citizens.

[Clive Lewis]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for those points. We can have both a fair immigration system in this country, which we do not have at the moment, and justice for the Caribbean. The two are not controversial or incompatible.

The money paid to the slave owners in the 1830s poured into the British economy, paying for Victorian infrastructure and modernisation. That includes the embankment over there, across from where we sit; the first underground, the Metropolitan line; and new modern insurance companies, with the capital to go global. That was all generated by the investment that came from the compensation given to slave owners.

That compensation in part funded what would eventually become the insurance giant Aviva, based in my Norwich South constituency and formerly known as Norwich Union. It financed vast cultural and learning investment in universities, the creative arts and science. It financed a modern 19th century military industrial machine, one finally able to colonise Africa and vast swathes of Asia in that fast phase of 19th century colonialism, finishing what had been started in the centuries before.

For former slaves in the Caribbean, there was no such economic renaissance. The century after emancipation was one of racist brutality, the suppression of basic human and labour rights, bloodshed and massacre. Even in the 1930s, people in Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, St Lucia, St Vincent and St Kitts witnessed violent suppression and death at the hands of British colonial police forces for seeking basic labour rights in the colonial sugar factories, mines and fields that they still toiled in, for poverty wages—and all the time, the profits rolled out of the Caribbean, not into it.

Already I can hear the howls of those opposed to the reparations and the apology that no British Government have ever given: “Move on! Get over it! Don’t linger in the past; look to the future!” But there is no future worth looking forward to in the Caribbean until we confront the past. If people go to the Caribbean, what they will see is the past alive and well today. There is poverty, racism still, inequality, and debt. But do not confuse an honest appraisal of the situation across much of today’s Caribbean for victimhood, because although the peoples of the Caribbean have been wronged, they are a proud and capable people, whose 400-year baptism of fire has made them strong and resilient, with great potential—potential that now needs to be realised.

Let us take, for example, the University of the West Indies. Despite the past, it ranks among the top 1.5% of universities globally. That is evidence of how far ahead the Caribbean could have been had three quarters of the population not been unable to read or write just 60 years ago. That was the condition they were left in when they were given independence—illiteracy rates of 60% or 70%. So when, as happened this week, the Prime Minister of Grenada, Dickon Mitchell, invites British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, another son of empire, to discuss reparations, he does so with full understanding of that potential.

It is potential that CARICOM—the Caribbean Community—and its 10-point plan for reparatory justice also recognises. Its reparations commission is working with initiatives such as Repair, set up by the entrepreneur Denis O’Brien. Their joint mission is for an EU and UK 25-year, multibillion-pound programme of reparation and repair and investment in the Caribbean, involving education, physical infrastructure and science and technology, replicating the EU’s structural investment funding, which transformed the poorest countries and regions of the EU, including Ireland and Poland. The same can be done for the Caribbean. It can be given the tools to prosper, to make the jump to clean energy technologies, and to adapt to the climate crisis, by which it will be disproportionately affected. There have been centuries of carbon-intensive manufacturing, which the bodies of its people financed, but it receives no share of the bounty. The irony of the climate crisis is never lost on me—or on millions of other people around the planet.

I am sure that the Minister will tell us today of the largesse of Britain and its generous overseas development packages. Let us unpack that. Forget for now that this Government oversaw a 21% drop in aid spending since 2020, as a result of their decision to cut aid budgets from 0.7 of GDP to 0.5% of GDP. I have the Library figures for the British Government’s overseas aid to Caribbean countries in millions of pounds, not adjusted for inflation, over a series of years. For Grenada, the figures are 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.1, 0.2. This is the reality of overseas aid for the Caribbean. Let us go down the table. For St Lucia, the figures are 0.0, 0.0, 0.2, 0.2, 0.1. The 0.2 is a fraction of a million—hundreds of thousands of pounds. St Vincent and the Grenadines: 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.1. We get the picture.

[Dawn Butler]

My hon. Friend is making such a powerful speech. Does he agree that development aid is often given to developing countries through a middleman, and not directly to the countries, or to small businesses in those countries that do valuable work? It is often difficult to find out who the middlemen are, but we know how they worked during covid.

--- Later in debate ---

[Clive Lewis]

We do. They certainly took their cut, and they continue to. We want something completely different. We want to give the victims of slavery and colonialism the tools and ability to help themselves. They do not want a handout; they want a hand up, and they want to be able to build for themselves. There must be a reckoning with the primary reason why empire was created: to materially enrich some people at the expense of others. Its afterlife is not an issue of identity politics, but a key contributor to global inequality and its corrosive impact on democracy.

I will conclude on a personal note. The BBC’s Laura Trevelyan, who made such a moving BBC documentary on her journey of discovery about her ancestors’ part in this story, shared with me the comments of a Caribbean woman who worked in the NHS. After watching the programme, the woman told her how the lack of justice, combined with the Windrush scandal, meant that for the first time in her life, she felt she did not belong in this country, despite being born here and working here all her life. Many other black people in this country will be able to relate to that; I can relate to it.

We as a country and as a Parliament have to remember that until we acknowledge the past, play our part in resolving matters, and help to build a better future, we will never be able to heal and move forward, and a significant number of people will never truly feel a part of this country. That cannot be allowed to happen. We should live up to our words; we often talk in this place about collectively wanting to take our country forward into a bright future. The issue of reparatory justice must be confronted now. If this Government do not do it, the next Government, whoever they may be, will find the arguments growing stronger by the year, by the day, by the week.

--- Later in debate ---

[Clive Lewis]

I thank everyone who has taken part in the debate. I wish there were more here. There aren’t, but perhaps in the future there will be, because this issue is not going to go anywhere. I will play my part in ensuring that St Kitts and Nevis is mentioned a number of times in Hansard, but it would be remiss of me not to say: Grenada, Grenada, Grenada, Grenada, Grenada, Grenada! My father, probably watching this in Gouyave at some point, would never forgive me if I did not mention his island in this debate.

This is part of the complexity of the issue—that a descendant of former slaves, a part of that injustice, can find themselves centuries later in the British Parliament making the case for reparations. That is the complexity of the issue; this injustice has been done, and yet it is this country that has given me the opportunity to stand here today to make this argument. We all acknowledge that the issue is complex, but life is complex, history is complex, and it is our job as politicians to be able to navigate that.

I thank the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) for turning up—I am looking at some empty Benches on both sides of the Chamber. He spoke, as have others today, about China. People in the Caribbean are well aware that China has its own motivations—not all of them honourable—for wanting to invest in the Caribbean, but it is investing and it does not have the colonial hang-ups and history that that money from the United Kingdom, which is not coming in, would have. It does not have that complex history, so we can understand why people in the Caribbean accept Chinese investment.

I welcome the hon. Member’s comments on accepting the comparison between German-Polish reparations and British-Caribbean ones; it was an important and gracious point to make, and I thank him for it. I disagree with him, though, on the matter of racist immigration policies and the EU’s part in that. Of course the EU has racist immigration policies. “Fortress Europe” is a term that I am well aware of when it comes to immigration into the EU, but we have to remember that the campaign for Brexit was a complex campaign with many different actors and motivations. However, it would be remiss of us not to acknowledge that a key part of the Brexiteers’ campaign was one based on a fear of all immigration—east European, European, and from across the globe. It would be wrong not to acknowledge that.

The hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) mentioned, as have others, Haiti and the severe situation that it finds itself in. As I was listening to him, I could not help but think of CLR James and “The Black Jacobins”, and Toussaint Louverture, the black Spartacus, because Haiti, of all Caribbean countries, has paid a heavy price for the defiance it showed at the turn of the 19th century when it freed itself from slavery. It has suffered for centuries the wrath of western countries—the United States and Europe—because it freed itself from slavery. I think it is fair to say that Haiti is still, to this day, paying a price for that resistance.

The hon. Member for Glasgow also spoke about the sorrow that his country and party feel about slavery. We have heard sorrow expressed by Labour and Conservative Governments and now the SNP, but I am afraid that sorrow is not enough. There is a question for the SNP as we move into the future: if it one day extracts itself from what it might call English imperialism—I know some do—what will the SNP’s position be on reparations, and all the economic benefits and advantages that that country now enjoys, in part because of what happened in the Caribbean? The Campbells and many other surnames testify to the Scottish slave owners and the benefits that came back to Scotland. It will be interesting to see where the SNP go on that in the future. I will monitor that closely, and I think there are questions for them to answer.

It is always a pleasure to listen to my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North East (Fabian Hamilton) speak; he is so eloquent, kind and compassionate. I particularly appreciated the connection between what it is to be a Jewish immigrant and what it is to be a black immigrant. While there are differences, there are lots of similarities in the experience. I also acknowledge that it is way above his paygrade to be able to make any substantial position changes from where the last Labour Government were on this issue.

I understand that for my party this is a difficult issue, especially in the so-called red wall seats, where we feel such issues could alienate potential Labour voters. It is for the Labour party to make the argument and the case as to why this is the right thing to do. I think that people will listen, because there is a connection. At the end of British colonialism, the deindustrialisation that occurred in many of the former glorious cities of Leeds, Bradford and Manchester damaged those communities. That was an integral part of decolonisation. The pivot of British capitalism away from manufacturing, leaving so many of those people and communities bankrupt and broken, is something we are still paying for today. That is why we have the levelling-up agenda. British capitalism pivoted to financialisation, and those communities paid a price for that. We can never forget that that is connected to colonisation, slavery and our history.

There is a message here for an incoming Labour Government—we do not know if that will happen, but I am confident and hopeful that it will. I would tell my Front Bench team that this issue will not go away. It will be there, and it will land on the desk of my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), who I hope will be the first Caribbean Foreign Secretary. It will be on his shoulders to say yes or no on this matter; and many people will be waiting with bated breath in anticipation of his decision, and the decision of a potential future Labour Government. I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North East will pass that on to the Labour Front Bench.

Turning to the Government, again, there is the question of paygrades. I did not really expect the Minister to be able to come here, issue a formal apology and then set out in detail the reparations that will be coming to the Caribbean. What I have done today is put down a marker. However, I will comment on some of the things the Minister talked about that got my goat a little bit. He talked about capital investment finance and new finance deals; those are about sucking yet more money out of the Caribbean, because although there is investment, a return is taken out. The whole issue of reparations is about not taking any more. After 400 years, we have taken enough from the Caribbean. Now it is time to put back into the Caribbean, not to continue the financialisation and extraction processes.

Today we kept hearing about the bridge between St Kitts and Nevis. Bridge building is what reparatory justice is also about; it is about building a bridge between the past and the present, between injustice and justice, and between Britain and the Caribbean—a bridge to a more prosperous future for all.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered financial security and inequality in the Caribbean.

Elections Bill

Clive Lewis Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 17th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

I rise to speak to new clause 16, in my name and that of Members from four of the parties represented here in Westminster. We tabled the new clause because the Bill has many flaws, but among the worst is the lack of any attempt to clean up the laundromat of British politics, which is now awash with dark money from dubious sources. We cannot in good conscience now pretend we are unaware. The Government can no longer plead ignorance or innocence: they are either careless or culpable and we in this House cannot tolerate the situation for a moment longer. That is why the amendments we are moving are so important.

Our Pandora amendments are simple. They would insist that party donations must come from profits made here in the UK, and they would establish a new regime that would allow the Electoral Commission to call in donations for an assessment on national security grounds. As it happens, the Government have just introduced precisely that regime for investments in critical national infrastructure. What infrastructure in this country could be more important than the essence of our democracy itself? We have heard warnings from Chatham House, the Intelligence and Security Committee and from Lord Evans this weekend that our system of party funding is now wide open.

We have heard and debated in this House the example of Mr Banks, Leave.EU and the mysterious source of his gigantic loans from Rock Services—or was it Rock Holdings? Thanks to evidence given to Carole Cadwalladr and the heroic reporting of The Guardian, we know that there are all kinds of interesting and no doubt innocent connections, such as the fact that Mr Banks’s wife, Katya Banks, was given entry into the country on a passport serially numbered to a passport given to someone who MI5 reported as a Russian spy. That is no doubt completely innocent, but the fact is that, when the National Crime Agency dropped its investigation into the source of the money, it left the source of the money shrouded in mystery. The Electoral Commission was so alarmed that it issued a warning that it could open the floodgates to donations from offshore.

Let me underline why the national security assessment is important to those on the Opposition Benches, but should be of importance to the Conservative party, too. Let us take another honourable donor, Mr Mohamed Amersi, a man who together with his partner has given nearly £800,000 to good causes and who, it would seem, might qualify for a walk-on part in John le Carré’s “The Night Manager”, but not as Jonathan Pine.

Information I have seen from well-placed sources in the Kremlin shows that Mr Amersi is an associate and business partner of people with all sorts of friends, including some with close connections to the SVR and FSB. They include Yuri Lopatinsky, Ernst Stauffer, and Aleksandr Barunin, with whom Mr Amersi worked on several telecom deals, including the takeover of Megafon, the firm later accused by the Georgians of

“illegal business operations and participation in the military and economic annexation of Georgia”.

Mr Amersi made a fortune helping to sell PeterStar to a Luxembourg-based company, which—surprise, surprise—turned out to controlled by Leonid Rieman, who was none other than President Putin’s former telecoms Minister. Coincidence? You be the judge, Mr Deputy Speaker.

[Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend has made some excellent points. The chair of the Trade Union and Labour Party Liaison Organisation, Mick Whelan, has said that trade union money is the cleanest money in British politics, and, listening to my right hon. Friend’s speech, I think I can agree with him. Given that the Bill will make that more difficult, do we not begin to see a pattern forming?

[Liam Byrne]

My hon. Friend is right and he will horrified to hear that there is more.

Perhaps the most concerning of Mr Amersi’s connections is Leonard Bogdan, a man with very interesting friends in the FSB and the SVR. Mr Bogdan was a minor partner in Tempbank, which held Soviet Union Communist party assets and then specialised in covert foreign transfers. The bank was associated with several Syrian citizens supplying arms to Syria and Iran and was sanctioned by the US Treasury in 2014. But Tempbank also helped to facilitate another sanctioned firm, Hudsotrade, which dealt with Russian arms and ammunition suppliers. Sources inside the Russian Government say that Mr Amersi was involved in these deals, providing finance from Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates, along with private clients from Syria and Iran, to help exports into the middle east. Mr Amersi, it is said, dealt directly with Hudsotrade and two of the shareholders, who were later sanctioned.

Despite those connections, however, correspondence that I have seen shows that Mr Amersi was asked to chair COMENA—Conservative Friends of Middle East and North Africa—a new political interface between the Conservative party and the middle east established

“on the authorisation of CCHQ”.

Mr Amersi says that he had a half-hour chat with officials from the Conservative party before writing his cheques, but on the basis of the evidence to which I have drawn attention today, I think we would all benefit from the Electoral Commission’s being empowered to call in donations for a national security audit. We have allowed this regime for donations and investments in critical national infrastructure; we now need to bring in that regime to clean up the laundromat of British political funding.

Time does not allow me to highlight further coincidences—

Afghanistan: Humanitarian Crisis

Clive Lewis Excerpts

Wednesday 12th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)]

(Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs if she will make a statement on the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs (Vicky Ford)]

Afghanistan is facing a serious and worsening humanitarian crisis. It is affecting well over half the population, with 23 million people facing acute food insecurity. This is now the world’s most severe food security crisis. The UN has this week requested nearly $4.5 billion for 2022—the largest humanitarian appeal on record, reflecting the magnitude of the humanitarian challenge ahead.

The UK has been at the forefront of efforts to address the situation, working with the UN Security Council, the G20, the G7 and countries in the region. The Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary and other Ministers have all been working extensively with world leaders. In August, the Prime Minister announced that the UK would double its assistance for Afghanistan to £286 million this financial year, and we have now disbursed over £145 million. That will support over 3.4 million people in Afghanistan and the region, providing emergency food, healthcare, shelter, water and protection. We are working at pace to allocate the remaining funding in response to the developing crisis and the new UN appeal. Further details were in the ministerial statement on 15 December. I thank the British people for donating £28 million to the Disasters Emergency Committee appeal in December, of which £10 million was doubled by UK aid match funding. That has helped to provide lifesaving support.

We were particularly concerned about the impact of the situation on women, girls and other marginalised groups. Last month I, alongside the Minister of State with responsibility for south Asia, Lord Ahmad, met organisations representing women, LGBT+ and religious minorities to discuss support for their needs. In allocating UK aid, we want to ensure that women, girls and other marginalised groups have equal, safe and dignified access to assistance and services. We have pressed the Taliban to respect humanitarian principles.

Our partners report that aid is getting through. We continue to monitor the situation very carefully, especially in the winter months. Aid workers face challenges getting money into Afghanistan due to the banking system. We are working closely with multilateral organisations, banks and non-governmental organisations to address those challenges. We welcome the decision by the World Bank board in November to transfer £280 million to support the humanitarian response, but it is vital—it is vital—that the World Bank produces options to allocate the $1.2 billion remaining in the fund. It is important that donors across the world step up to the challenge, including by responding to the UN’s call for additional funding.

[Clive Lewis]

Afghanistan, as has been heard, is facing an escalating and multi-faceted humanitarian crisis. In response, the United Nations launched its largest ever single country appeal, in part because the crisis in Afghanistan embodies a new breed of 21st century international crisis, where the hazards of war collide with the hazards of climate change and a global viral outbreak. This has created a nightmarish feedback loop that punishes some of the world’s most vulnerable and destroys their country’s ability to cope. So far, the UK’s response has been woeful. It took five months for the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme to be put into place, while our aid commitment to Afghanistan in 2021 was lower than what was delivered in 2019.

A heavy dose of realpolitik is now needed to address the immediate crisis before us. Let me ask the Minister for more detail on how the Government will square the circle of dealing with the Taliban and playing their part in supporting Afghanistan and humanitarian aid. Let me also ask the Minister what plans her Department has to deal with the multi-faceted nature of this crisis. The $4.4 billion the UN has appealed for is only a stop-gap. It will not stop escalation. But if we do not meet the appeal, it will be £10 billion next year and a lot more suffering.

After two decades of military intervention costing at least £27.7 billion, the UK must now step up to the plate to meet the $4.4 billion requested. The UN cannot deliver at the scale and speed needed by working alone, so will global Britain now show global leadership? Will the Secretary of State agree to help those in urgent need, including 1 million children who face starvation, by convening a conference, as former Prime Minister Gordon Brown is calling for, with the United States, the EU and other willing partners to agree new financing to fully cover our obligation to this appeal?

[Vicky Ford]

As I said in my opening remarks, the situation is enormously serious. Indeed, it is now the world’s most severe food security crisis.

On the issues relating to supporting Afghan resettlement, of course everybody in this Chamber has had huge praise for all those who worked during Operation Pitting. It was incredibly challenging, but those on the ground, including the ambassador and his team from the Foreign Office, did amazing work. Since the evacuation, as the Minister for Afghan Resettlement, my hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins) made clear last week, we have helped a further 1,500 to enter the UK, including female judges, human rights defenders and LGBT Afghans. At that stage, of course, she announced the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme.

On getting more aid into the country, as I said in my opening remarks it is incredibly important that the world steps up to this challenge, especially towards meeting the UN appeal.The Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary and other Ministers, including the Minister for the region, are working closely with world leaders, including in the US, the EU and the UN. Indeed, my colleague the responsible Minister is in regular co-ordination with all key international agency leads at the UN, including those for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, UNICEF, the World Food Programme and the International Rescue Committee. We will make more announcements in response to the UN appeal in the coming weeks, but I restate what I said in my statement about the importance of the World Bank giving options to unlock the $1.2 billion that remains in the fund.

--- Later in debate ---

[Vicky Ford]

This is the most serious food crisis in the world. This is not the time for party politics. The UK has been leading the international efforts on this issue. The UN has just launched the world’s biggest-ever appeal. We have been working, with UK leadership from the beginning, on this incredibly difficult situation with our partners at the UN and at the World Bank. We are leading the pressure to unlock the money from the World Bank, which is key to this issue.

I encourage the hon. Lady to please get behind the UN and behind the UK Government’s efforts to bring the world together to help the people of Afghanistan, because that is vital for the people of Afghanistan right now.

[Clive Lewis]

Do your job.

[Vicky Ford]

There is no one working harder to get on with the job and to support people around the world than this Government. I find Members accusing us of not getting on with the job from a sedentary position really offensive to the people of Afghanistan.

A written ministerial statement updated the House just before Christmas. I have said from this Dispatch Box that the UK Government will come back with further statements in response to the UN appeal in the coming weeks. That is the right thing to do and it is right that we are working with the UN, other international partners and key NGOs. In terms of doing my job, as soon as I leave the Chamber I am going to meet Save the Children, one of our key partners on this issue, because it is really important that we continue to work with our key partners.

Oral Answers to Questions

Clive Lewis Excerpts

Tuesday 20th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)]

What diplomatic steps his Department is taking ahead of COP26 to work with partners in the global south to tackle climate change.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs (James Duddridge)]

As COP hosts, we encourage all countries to make a step change in ambition. The success of COP26 is a top priority for the Government and the FCDO this year. It is prioritised by Ministers and it is prioritised across our diplomatic network.

--- Later in debate ---

[James Duddridge]

As the hon. Lady can imagine, this is a very important issue, and I have asked the question internally within the Department and can assure her that we are doubling our international climate finance to £11.6 billion over the next five years and have committed to aligning all official development assistance with the Paris agreement, so actually there is a really positive story to tell.

[Clive Lewis [V]]

A recent Cambridge Sustainability Commission on Scaling Behaviour Change report says the world’s wealthiest 1% need to emit 30 times less carbon than they currently do by 2030 if we are to have a fair transition to net zero and, according to the science, save the lives and livelihoods of millions, perhaps billions, of the world’s poorest from the worst effects of the climate emergency. Given the stakes and given the UK’s historical and disproportionate carbon emissions, will the Minister commit to ensuring that not a single penny from the public purse will be used to fund or subsidise the fossil fuel industry, including through development aid?

[James Duddridge]

Certainly everybody, especially those emitting the most, needs to make those reductions. We are no longer investing in fossil fuels. Various organisations clearly have a historical book of fossil fuel investment that can be managed down over time, but we are very exercised to do the right thing as individuals and as Government, and, through COP26, to be leading and ambitious and ask others to be ambitious as well.

Covid-19: Repatriation of UK Nationals

Clive Lewis Excerpts

Wednesday 29th April 2020 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Adams]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. As I said in the statement, the Foreign Office is an addition to the domestic work we are doing on PPE. I have had conversations with our posts in China and from China alone we have had over a third of a billion pieces of equipment. That work is continuous. All our posts are on the hunt for equipment—that is one of their tasks—and they are doing a pretty fine job.

[Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab) [V]]

Like a number of Members, several of my constituents are still trapped in different parts of the world. One couple from Norwich have been trapped in New Zealand for well over a month. They are running out of money and have been refused a refund from their travel company. They face exorbitant flight prices that they cannot afford and are becoming increasingly desperate. Can I ask the Minister what pressure the Foreign Office is putting on travel companies to refund British nationals trapped abroad, and, to reiterate the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy), why it has taken so long to put on sufficient charter flights compared to countries such as Germany, which has already managed to get most of their trapped nationals home?

[Nigel Adams]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his point. On New Zealand, I am pleased to say that over 600 UK nationals have returned. One of the problems is that most of the commercial flights back to the UK have been suspended, so flight availability is extremely difficult. We are now chartering flights to help to bring back the most vulnerable British nationals stranded in New Zealand. There are five initial Government charter flights, which started on 24 April. They will bring home over 1,500 people. On cost, I do accept his point about how some airlines have dealt with their customers and not given cash refunds. I do not agree with that. I think it is incredibly bad form for the airlines not to provide timely refunds to their customers. The cost of the repatriation flights is at a reasonable level, with a maximum of £800 if a flight is over 10 hours.

Yemen

Clive Lewis Excerpts

Tuesday 26th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mark Field]

The hon. Lady makes a very good point. I have already alluded to that subject in several answers. Our immediate focus, obviously, remains on ensuring that enough food is getting through to the desperate Yemenis to prevent starvation and a disastrous famine. With the operating environment in Yemen extremely difficult for humanitarian organisations we are now focusing our attention on UN agencies, NGOs and other donors, to get out to those more difficult areas. Part of that is to assess the acuteness of need in those parts of Yemen, but that of course is an ongoing process and we feel that we have made some significant progress along with NGOs and other international partners.

[Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)]

At a recent lobby of Parliament by Save the Children and Oxfam, my constituents were quite clear that the arms sales to Saudi Arabia need to end if the famine in Yemen is to end. Does the Minister share their sentiments?

Yemen

Clive Lewis Excerpts

Thursday 30th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Graham P. Jones (Hyndburn) (Lab)]

I thank the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) for obtaining the debate. It is important that we debate this issue, and do so frequently, such is the scale of the catastrophe. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg), the Chair of the International Development Committee, for his speech, which was very illuminating, very focused, and spoke to the heart of the problem.

There are two issues—today’s crisis and tomorrow’s crisis. I believe there is a consensus in the House that today’s crisis—the blockade—must end. We must help the people of Yemen right now, irrespective of all the other issues. This is about life and death and nothing else, and that is what we should be focused on. In today’s crisis, it is imperative that the UK Government, other Governments, and all our agencies, bring pressure to bear so that the blockade is lifted, allowing aid into Yemen, so that those people in Yemen can be relieved of their suffering.

Some issues transcend today’s crisis and tomorrow’s crisis, and the blame for them cannot be laid at anyone’s door—local warlords; fights over economic assets, including oil, within the country; roadblocks; illegal taxes; theft of aid. It is a complex situation, which we must understand in order to prevent tomorrow’s crisis, because we do not want a crisis tomorrow. We must try to resolve the situation in Yemen so that the country has a future and is not in eternal crisis. That requires the conditions that people have spoken about—primarily, it requires peace. In requiring peace, and if we are to find a long-term solution, we must look at the circumstances that led to what is happening now.

I will mention some important issues that have not been raised. The Gulf Co-operation Council and the Gulf countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, were the largest donors to Yemen. They remain so today, and will continue to be so in the future. What dwarfs that fact is that what Yemen really needs is a better relationship with Saudi Arabia. The border is currently closed because of the Houthis; one of the biggest elements of Yemen’s economy is the remittances from the 1.5 million Yemeni workers who work in Saudi Arabia. They no longer work in Saudi Arabia because of this conflict; they are victims of it. Open trade has ended. The economy in Yemen is suffering. We need a relationship between Saudi Arabia—the principal partner of Yemen—and Yemen, and that is part of the future. That is part of the peace-building process.

But what has led to this conflict, and why has Saudi Arabia taken the action that it has? Although I do not agree with the blockade, I believe that we need to understand the motivation for it. Many speakers have referred to the rocket fired on 4 November, but that is only one rocket. I thought there were 54, but I am now told—and I stand to be corrected—that there have been 80 rockets. The original rockets, with a range of 1,000 km, were Scuds provided by North Korea, but we now understand that in the latest development, the rockets that are being provided into the area or supplied to the Houthis are Iranian-made—they are coming from Tehran.

If we are to resolve this situation, there needs to be demilitarisation. UN resolution 2216, which is at the heart of this, says that the Houthis must withdraw from all occupied areas; that they must relinquish all arms and military assets; that they must refrain from provocation; and that they must enter peace talks, and there are sanctions on individuals because of the actions that they have taken in the name of the Houthi-Saleh alliance. Let us look at what happened when resolution 2216 went through the United Nations, which has 15 voting members. We say that there is no alliance, and we talk about chaos, but the world was clear. Fourteen members voted for the resolution, and only one member—the Russian Federation—abstained, presumably on the principle of the intervention in Syria. No members voted against. The world was united in condemning the Houthis.

Incursions are among the provocations that Saudi Arabia faces. As I mentioned in an intervention, on the internet there are a plethora of videos showing Houthis engaging in extreme violence—killing Saudi Arabian citizens, attacking schools and killing Saudi Arabian armed forces personnel—inside Saudi Arabia. A violence surrounds the Houthis.

I was fortunate enough to meet the Iranians at the Inter-Parliamentary Union conference in St Petersburg, where they were asked about the arms that are currently in Yemen. Although the Iranians admitted that there were Iranian arms in Yemen, they said that those arms were being supplied by Hezbollah, not Iran. [Interruption.] I thought for a moment that the Minister was going to ask me to give way.

There is real concern about the evolving situation in north Yemen and the fact that the Houthis still will not come to the table, even after 70 accords and agreements. An empty chair is waiting for them, and they will not sit in it. They have no excuse for failing to engage with a process that would afford them peace talks and a path to the future prosperity of their people.

Why should we be concerned? In the BBC documentary that was filmed undercover in Sana’a, we see oppression, and we see the posters going up. The right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield mentioned children chanting “Death to America”, and said that that was some sort of reprisal. I think he omitted the remainder of the words on those posters and the chant that the schoolchildren were forced to sing. The chant is: “Death to America! Death to Israel! Curses upon the Jews!” I do not see that as a step along the pathway to peace, and I begin to understand why the Houthis’ chair at the table is empty. What has Israel to do with this conflict, and why should there be a curse on the Jews? How is that relevant to this conflict? It is not.

There are many other points I could make, but I want to wrap up and allow others to speak. The Houthis must be forced to come to the table, otherwise we will not get peace. Removing the blockade and sending in as much aid as we want may solve today’s crisis, but it will not solve tomorrow’s. Tomorrow’s crisis has to be solved by diplomacy, and that means everybody getting around the table and achieving demilitarisation. People in this House and across the world have to accept and face up to the difficulties in Yemen and start to meet the challenges.

It has been suggested today that the United States should not sell defence missile systems to Saudi Arabia. But the US Patriot missile system is a defence battery, and the 80 missiles fired by the Houthis were shot down by Patriot missile systems supplied by the United States. Is this House really saying that the United States should not have sold the missile defence systems that were used to shoot down the rockets that were fired on 4 November? I do not think so. People need to accept that the situation is very complicated. Finally, we need the Houthis to come to the table.

[Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. Although I accept that this debate on Yemen is worthy and important, the two debates that come afterwards—one of which, on RBS and the Global Restructuring Group, I am sponsoring—are also critical. A lot of people on both sides of the House want to speak in the debate that I am sponsoring, and the guillotine as it is today will leave insufficient time to give the subject the due and proper attention. With that in mind, Mr Deputy Speaker, I am prepared to pull my debate if you can speak to the Leader of the House to secure more substantial time for it.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

May I say that I totally agree with the hon. Gentleman? The debate in his name that we were going to come on to is very well subscribed, and I would not want to have to curtail it because I think there is a lot to be said. I think the suggestion being offered to the House is the right one, and I will of course speak to the Leader of the House about it. More to the point, however, I have already spoken to the Chair of the Backbench Business Committee, who has assured me that he will make bringing this debate back to the House a priority. I think everybody recognises that we would not want to curtail such an important debate, given the limited amount of time left, so we will absolutely speak to whoever we need to in order to make sure that time for the debate is provided. I thank the hon. Gentleman.

Iran: Human Rights

Clive Lewis Excerpts

Wednesday 11th October 2017 Westminster Hall

[Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)]

I, too, would like to thank the right hon. Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers) for securing this debate. It was quite shocking to listen to the seemingly inexhaustible list of human rights abuses by Iranian authorities. It was quite numbing to hear them all. I think it is right that we focus on human rights, as that issue has been a central thrust of my very short parliamentary career since being elected two years ago, but I would also like to focus on the fate of journalists, both those working inside Iran and those working remotely from the UK. I declare an interest as a former BBC journalist and the chair of the National Union of Journalists parliamentary committee. I do that for the record to state my solidarity with journalists both in Iran and around the world, who strive to do nothing more than ask questions in an attempt to hold power to account.

As we know, Iran has elections that many other inhabitants of the middle east can only envy. Here I state a truism, but it is essential that we set it down, that elections are only ever one element of a functioning democracy. A democracy where bloggers and reporters must risk their lives and the well-being of their families in order to comment on the political life of their country cannot be seen as a democracy in the true sense. Democracy is not worth the ballot paper it is printed on without freedom of the press. There is a barrier to informing the electorate, as the press provides feedback to the legislature. The often brutal suppression of those speakers also creates a chilling fear that acts as a cancer on all of those forming opinions and on the ability to take action in the public arena.

It is important to make the point that Iran is not a homogeneous political entity. I have heard other hon. Members make comments about the political situation in Iran. There are reformers, as they are called, as well as the politically established so-called hardliners. I do not know where we place President Rouhani in all this, considering that much of the repression discussed today has occurred on his watch. However, I do know one hardliner, someone who is not a friend of civil liberties and human rights: President Trump. His suspected refusal to re-certify the Iran nuclear deal can only have the effect of pushing Iran ever further into the hands of those hardliners.

I will come back to the journalists. As my hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Nick Thomas-Symonds) mentioned a constituent of his who has been in prison, I would like to mention three journalists who are being held and are on hunger strike. Soheil Arabi has been in prison since 2013 and has been on hunger strike for over a month. Mehdi Khazali was arrested in August and has been on hunger strike since the day of his arrest. Ehsan Mazandarani was arrested in 2015 and has been denied early release despite very poor health. There are many more prisoners I could mention. Their stories make for chilling reading.

The long arm of control reaches way beyond Iran and stretches as far as those working in our very own BBC, as the hon. Member for Argyll and Bute (Brendan O’Hara) mentioned. Charges have been filed against almost all the Iranian journalists working for the BBC’s Persian-language service in London; 152 journalists have been charged with conspiracy against Iran’s national security and have faced constant harassment and intimidation and an effective freeze on all their Iran-based assets. Those charged cannot defend themselves unless they return to Iran, which they feel unable to do for fear of reprisal. I beg the Minister to raise these names whenever he meets his Iranian counterparts and to push the issues of journalism, freedom of the press and democracy very clearly, as I know he will.

To end with a general comment, there are far too many in politics today who wish to criticise only the countries that fit into a very black and white binary world view. I am not one of them. I believe it is entirely possible—nay, essential—to criticise and hold to account Iran just as much as Saudi Arabia for human rights abuses and attacks on civil liberties. The two are not mutually incompatible. The same applies to the US and Russia and the questionable choices those Governments continue to make domestically and internationally. In fact, our hand is strengthened and our criticism is more valid when we show neither fear nor favour to any country or regime, wherever they may be, whether they be friend or ally, when defending human rights and civil liberties.