Medical Cannabis: Alleviation of Health Conditions

Debate between Crispin Blunt and Julian Lewis

Thursday 4th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for Inverclyde (Ronnie Cowan) and have worked with him actively in the past few years on this issue, and I wish we had made more progress. I am delighted to welcome the Minister to her place, answering this debate. I have an interest recorded in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests on this, but it is a non-financial interest. It is in recognition of the fact that I chair an organisation that I have set up, the Conservative Drug Policy Reform Group Ltd, whose objective is to find the resources to bring arguments based on science and research into this debate, on all of drugs policy, and to have this academically peer-reviewed, so that the arguments for the huge challenge of a policy change that is required can be put in a proper, calm way, based on all the available evidence and a proper scientific assessment of that evidence.

I say to the Minister at the beginning of my remarks that this issue is not just about medicine from cannabis. That is one element and one casualty of how we have conducted our nation’s drug policy over the past five or six decades, but it is a huge missed opportunity. My journey into this issue arose as prisons Minister, when I saw the impact of taking a criminal justice approach to drug misuse as the first lever, rather than a public health approach. As I saw at first hand, the cost to the criminal justice system is just enormous. Indeed, the Government’s own statistics talk of a cost in the order of £19 billion a year. When one then thinks that half of acquisitive crime in the UK is driven by drug misuse and drug addiction, we see that we should be asking some serious questions about the whole of our drugs policy.

However, that is a separate debate. It was made clear to me when I became the first Conservative to co-chair the all-party group on drug policy reform, when I decided to make this issue one of my central areas of focus, after I ceased to be chair of the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, that we needed to focus on the arguments for medicine, which had not been able to be researched and developed because of our drugs policy. Focusing on the arguments associated with prohibition and criminal justice, and the parallels with alcohol in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, is not where the discussion is; the Government are completely clear on where their policy sits on those issues. There is now a big global debate on those issues, with a Global Commission on Drug Policy reform, but it was put to me that we must focus on getting medicines from cannabis for the people who are suffering because they are not able to get access to it.

I became co-chair of the all-party group in September 2017 and I took the advice I was given by people who had been in this field rather longer than I had, and we got behind the family of Alfie Dingley. A national newspaper had got involved and a petition was signed by 300,000 people. The family had gone to a holiday camp in Holland in order to access medicine from cannabis, because they could not get it in the UK. The Bedrocan oil that Alfie was getting then stopped his epileptic fits, but the family had run out of money, so they had to come back to the UK and they could not access the medicine here. On the day of the presentation of the petition to Downing Street, I was able to ask an urgent question in the House on the matter. The issue was raised with Ministers and we were given assurances that the Dingley family were going to be helped to find their way through the complicated licensing process in order to enable Alfie to be able to access the medicine. Three months later, of course, they still had not got it. The cost of the licence application process—simply buying the licences to access this oil—was £20,000; we are talking about £5,000 a licence, so enormous barriers were put in the way.

Then we had the case of Charlotte Caldwell and her epileptic son Billy, who had been in the United States getting treatment. When they returned to the UK, wisely doing so via Dublin, because she lived in Northern Ireland, her GP gave her a prescription for the medicine she had brought back from the US. When the manufacturer of that medicine changed and it became a Canadian company, she needed a new prescription, at which point it all fell apart. The doctor was told, “You are not allowed to prescribe that medicine for this epileptic child to stop him having his fits.” With the support of Richard Branson and others, Charlotte went to Canada, collected the medicine, came back and presented it to customs at Heathrow on the Monday, when it was confiscated. By the Thursday the boy was in hospital fitting, and his consultants were on the steps of the hospital saying, “It really doesn’t matter. What is unacceptably cruel is to take a medicine that is working off a child.” The current Health Secretary, to his huge credit, then issued a special licence for Billy Caldwell to be able to get his medicine back from customs. That led to the then chief medical officer being invited to offer an opinion as to whether there was anything in this cannabis stuff as far as medicine is concerned. It only took her two weeks to come back with a strongly affirmative answer, based on the evidence available around the world. That then led to the regulations that the Government passed in November 2018, which have not solved the issue. As the hon. Member for Inverclyde said, only three prescriptions have been made on the NHS.

You will be familiar, Madam Deputy Speaker, as we all are in our constituencies, with the position of multiple sclerosis sufferers. There are about 50,000 people in this country growing their own medicine. They are committing quite a serious criminal offence in the process, but they are trying to treat their health condition. What we have failed to do on the back of the regulations passed in November 2018 is get an evidence-based approach to medicine from cannabis, and educate the health service, prescribing doctors and the rest about the potential benefits and how we should have developed a position from the first go at the regulatory change in 2018.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a fascinating case, because I, like many other Members of the House, I am sure, thought that this problem had largely been solved. Why does he think it is that the Government or the Department find it is so difficult to grip this? I recall having back surgery 35 years ago and being very grateful for some pain relief. I asked whether I could have some more, but I was told, “No, you can’t, because it is morphia. It is related to heroin and you might get addicted.” If it was possible properly to prescribe something related to heroin for a proper medical condition 35 years ago, why can something similar by way of the arrangements needed not be sorted out for this particular problem?

Human Rights in Saudi Arabia

Debate between Crispin Blunt and Julian Lewis

Thursday 18th July 2019 Westminster Hall

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

If ever there were a prime candidate to be the subject of that excellent BBC Radio 4 series, “Moral Maze”, it would be Britain’s relationship with Saudi Arabia. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) on securing the debate and on the measured and temperate way in which he presented the case.

All the Back-Bench Members who have spoken have shown wisdom and moderation in their remarks. I was particularly struck by the contribution of my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Reigate (Crispin Blunt), who knows more about the Arab world than just about anybody I have come across in 22 years in this House. Even he, though, with all his knowledge of the subject, made no bones about the extent to which one must be conflicted about a relationship as complex as this.

I mentioned that I have been in this House for 22 years, which takes us back to 1997, when the Blair Government came in on a tide of optimism and idealism, and Robin Cook, who became Foreign Secretary, stated his admirable objective of importing an “ethical dimension” into foreign policy. The problem with trying to find an ethical dimension, however, is that the choices we face, far from being between good and evil, are often about which is the lesser of two evils. I am afraid that that is the situation in which we find ourselves regarding our decades-long involvement with the countries of the middle east.

It is sometimes tempting to feel a sense of superiority about the way in which our society conducts itself, compared with the brutal and authoritarian regimes in other parts of the world in general, and in the middle east in particular. It is good to remind ourselves, therefore, that a few hundred years ago people in this country, who regarded themselves as Christians, thought nothing of inflicting terrible barbarities on one another, similar to what happened to poor Mr Khashoggi in that embassy, in the name of a belief as to which was the true branch of Christianity and which was what we would call, in another context, an infidel variation on that theme.

If we think of that in the context of our history and say, “What could have been done several hundred years ago to rapidly bring those societies to an appreciation of human rights and democratic politics?”, we realise how difficult that process is. That is why revolutions often have such bloody consequences and make bad situations even worse. That is also why I would like to think that most hon. Members believe in the evolutionary, rather than the revolutionary, process. If we are going to make improvements, we have to take society with us from the point at which we find it.

Let me give an example of the dilemmas that arise in relation to Saudi Arabia. On 20 June, I asked the Secretary of State for International Trade:

“Do the Government accept that, as the years have rolled by since the 9/11 atrocities, it has become harder and harder to justify the closeness of our relationship with Saudi Arabia, but in defence of what the Government are trying to do, would it not be sensible for my right hon. Friend to have conversations with the Foreign Secretary, perhaps with a view to publishing a digest of some of the representations that we make to the Saudis in trying to keep them from straying further away from acceptable standards of international behaviour?”

We could add to that the dimensions of human rights abuse. The Secretary of State’s reply, rather predictably, was as follows:

“The Foreign Secretary and I have answered numerous questions on this issue in the House of Commons, and we have certainly cited some of those incidents and been questioned on specific incidents in the House. On my right hon. Friend’s key point, I do not think the proximity or otherwise to 9/11 is the key determinant here; rather, it is whether Saudi Arabia acts as an important source of intelligence for this country in our shared combat against a global terrorism. It is a valuable partner in that particular battle and has helped to keep numerous UK citizens safe.”—[Official Report, 20 June 2019; Vol. 662, c. 379.]

This is where we begin to run up against a dilemma, because we all know that much of the problem of international Islamist totalitarian terrorism derives from sources in Saudi Arabia. When 9/11 happened, it was widely pointed out that there was some sort of pact between the authorities in Saudi Arabia and the totalitarian Islamist revolutionaries that basically they could do what they liked abroad, as long as they kept their activities limited at home. That is what we might call a form of the devil’s bargain.

Because I am not within the ring of secrecy, I am not in a position to know whether the Saudi intelligence services are really constantly feeding us vital information to thwart terrorist plots, or whether, as well as promoting and funding madrassahs all around the world that leach out this terrible form of totalitarian ideology, they are actually just giving us what I believe is known in the trade as chickenfeed, to keep us satisfied that it is better to remain, rather than cease to be, their friends.

[Crispin Blunt]

I think that the position in Saudi Arabia has radically changed since 9/11. Its Government have had to take on board some of the consequences of their policy up to that point, and of the large scale of their investment to support madrassahs in most of the rest of the world. As I understand it, it is now illegal in Saudi Arabia to make a cash donation within a mosque, and everything now has to be accountable in terms of where the money is going. That is the scale of change that is happening in Saudi Arabia, and it is why our Government are right to see it as a practical and important ally in this ideological battle in which we find ourselves on the same side.

[Dr Lewis]

That welcome intervention, if accurate—I have no reason to believe that it is not—is a powerful argument in favour of continued engagement with the regime, even though from time to time it does things that we would regard, with justification, as barbaric. That has often been the nature of international relations, and those are often the difficult choices that have to be made. To give the most extreme example, Sir Winston Churchill had a lifelong hatred of bolshevism and communism; he said at the time of the 1917 revolution that he wanted bolshevism to be strangled at birth. When he found himself in alliance with Stalin after the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941, he was twitted by a political opponent who pointed out his lifelong hatred of communism. His famous reply was:

“If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”

The history of diplomacy is that we often have to have relationships with unsavoury regimes in order to avoid something that would be even worse. However, having to have a relationship with a regime that does terrible things does not mean that we should go silent on criticising it. That is why I particularly welcome this debate. In some senses, it was a relief to discover that it would be more about human rights than about the arms trade. Believe me, if we had to have the same debate about the arms trade, which has been touched on slightly, we would face an infinitely more difficult dilemma. We would have to decide, as my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Reigate said in passing, whether it was better to wash our hands of supplying military hardware to Saudi Arabia if the consequence would be to anchor that country in the orbit of Russia or China, as the Iranian regime already is.

I conclude by commending the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland for securing the debate, and by endorsing his notion that pressure on the Saudi regime on the human rights front is one area in which we can safely express our differences without risking a rupture that we cannot afford on overall strategic grounds. I wish him well in his campaign and congratulate all those who stand up for human rights in Saudi Arabia. I hope that they, in turn, will recognise that vast geopolitical forces are and will continue to be at work in the area, and that there are no morally perfect solutions to dealing with an environment like this, in which frankly all the actors are tainted.

I have mentioned Sir Winston Churchill, but perhaps we should go back to the 19th-century concept of the balance of power, which expressed the interests of Britain by ensuring that no one power could become overwhelmingly dominant on the continent and that we did not get drawn in too closely with any power. My fear, which I have expressed before, is that in the conflicts in the middle east we are sometimes in danger of getting too closely involved with one side rather than the other. That side, I am afraid, is Saudi Arabia.

Points of Order

Debate between Crispin Blunt and Julian Lewis

Thursday 8th September 2016 Commons Chamber

[Crispin Blunt]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. This is pursuant to the point of order raised by the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) yesterday. There has been a further development, increasing the seriousness of it, which you acknowledged yesterday. On Monday, The Guardian reported the central recommendation of a draft report being put to the Committees on Arms Export Controls. The meeting to consider this was held yesterday in private. On Tuesday, “Newsnight” produced exerts of the text of the draft report, and that was the excepts subject of the hon. Gentleman’s point of order.

Yesterday, the Committees met and resolved to report the matter to the Liaison Committee. As I understand our procedures, the Liaison Committee will have to consider the matter and decide whether it should be referred to the Privileges Committee, which would then have to decide whether and how to pursue this matter. Subsequently, last night, “Newsnight” reported extracts of the amendments tabled by the right hon. Member for Warley (Mr Spellar) and me, which can only have come from the consolidated list of amendments circulated to members of the Committees on Tuesday.

Separately, Patrick Wintour in The Guardian today—this was put online at 00.01—reported the number of amendments we had tabled to the report, a fact which was not reported on “Newsnight”. “Newsnight” chose to contextualise the amendments tabled by the right hon. Gentleman and me in the light of our previous membership of the all-party group on Saudi Arabia, work I did in the middle east 12 years ago and the right hon. Gentleman’s record of supporting employment provided by the British defence industry. “Newsnight” emphasised that none of this was improper,

“but it gives you a sense of where people stand”.

In parallel, members of the Committees received between 1,500 and 2,000 emails on Tuesday and overnight, which appear to have been organised on someone’s behalf by Avaaz, a self-styled global citizens movement, which was aware that the Committees were meeting to consider this issue. The right hon. Gentleman believes one of them was from a constituent, but my office did not identify any constituents before it called the organisation to invite it to desist.

Mr Speaker, this amounts to a prima facie case of a deliberate campaign to influence a Select Committee, relying on in-confidence information provided by a Member of this House or their staff. Conceivably, the information could have come from Committee staff, but I think you would agree that that is highly unlikely. I cannot recall an example of such deliberate and repeated leaking of information in our time in the House.

Will you confirm, Mr Speaker, that it would not be open to the Privileges Committee, if this is referred to it, to call in the police, as this is not a criminal matter, but that it would be able to call on the services of private investigators? They would have the capacity to interrogate the electronic records, including deleted emails, relating to potential sources for this confidential and private consideration by Committees of matters, in this instance, of the greatest seriousness, involving life and death issues and the employment of tens of thousands of our fellow citizens. Will you encourage the Liaison Committee to consider this as a matter of urgency, and confirm your view of the seriousness of this attempt to undermine the work of Select Committees?

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. I have participated in only two meetings of the Committees on Arms Export Controls, because three other members of the Defence Committee have been nominated as our regular attenders; I have total confidence in them. May I, however, express my disquiet about something I learned only yesterday? The draft report, which is very one-sided, was produced without any heads of report discussion prior to the drafting of the report. That means there was no opportunity for members of the Committees who dissented from the thrust of the report to raise their objections and try to reach consensus before a draft report was produced and then leaked in a very sensational way. I must say, as someone who has been at one remove from the operation of the Committees, that something went terribly wrong with the procedures, because there should have been room for consensus to be built before any such one-sided report was leaked. I say that as someone who is highly critical of Saudi Arabia and in some sympathy with some of the arguments in the draft report.

ISIL in Syria

Debate between Crispin Blunt and Julian Lewis

Wednesday 2nd December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Dr Lewis]

In a moment.

In an attempt to try to establish the facts about the 70,000, I made inquiries of two people whose expert opinion I much admire. One is the writer and journalist Patrick Cockburn, who is one of Britain’s leading commentators on Syria and Iraq and who was one of the first to write about the threat from what was then called ISIS, long before it captured Mosul. This is what he tells me:

“Unfortunately, the belief that there are 70,000 moderate opposition fighters on the ground in Syria is wishful thinking. The armed opposition is dominated by Isis or al-Qaeda type organisations. There are many small and highly fragmented groups of opposition fighters who do not like Assad or Isis and could be described as non-extremist, but they are generally men from a single clan, tribe or village. They are often guns for hire and operate under licence from the al-Qaeda affiliate, the al-Nusra Front, or its near equivalent, Ahrar al-Sham. Many of these groups seek to present a moderate face abroad but remain violently sectarian and intolerant inside Syria.”

[Crispin Blunt]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Dr Lewis]

No, I am sorry—I promised to give way to the hon. Member for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham).

[Dr Lewis]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that contribution. It is not only ridiculous but highly dangerous. I will insert at this point something I was going to leave out, and say in passing that to have separate conflicts going on within the same battlespace, without reaching a proper agreement, can lead us into all sorts of nasty confrontations—the worst of which would be if we ended up eyeball to eyeball with the Russians when they and we share the same common enemy in ISIL/Daesh.

The second expert I consulted was our former ambassador to Syria, Peter Ford, who describes the Free Syrian Army as

“a ragbag of 58 factions (at the last count) united mainly by a desire to use the FSA appellation in order to secure Gulf, Turkish and Western funding…most of the factions, which are extremely locally based, have no interest whatsoever in being drawn into battles against groups which basically share their sectarian agenda hundreds of miles away in areas with which they are unfamiliar.”

So instead of having dodgy dossiers we now have bogus battalions of moderate fighters.

Once Daesh has been driven out, as it must be driven out—if, eventually, we get an overall military strategy together, which adding a few bombing raids does not comprise—there arises the question of the occupying power, because an occupying power will have to remain in control for many years to come if other Islamists are not going to take over from Daesh. That occupying force must be a Muslim one, and only the Syrian Government army is likely to provide it. Indeed, as the Prime Minister himself acknowledged in the Commons,

“in time the best ground troops should be the Syrian army”.—[Official Report, 26 November 2015; Vol. 602, c. 1501.]

Airstrikes alone are a dangerous diversion and distraction. What is needed is a grand military alliance involving not only the west but Russia and, yes, its Syrian Government clients too. We need—

[Crispin Blunt]

rose—

[Dr Lewis]

We need—[Hon. Members: “Give way!”] I honestly think that my hon. Friend, the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, has had more than his fair share in this debate, and I am going to make use of mine.

We need to choose the lesser of two evils and abandon the fiction of a cosy third choice. There is now a general consensus that the decision to remove Saddam Hussein was a terrible mistake, but Saddam Hussein was every bit as much of a vicious dictator as we are told that Assad is. So ask yourself this when you are thinking about the hard choice that has to be faced tonight: you may feel pious looking back on the wrong decision that was made about Saddam Hussein, but a very similar decision confronts us tonight. It is a question of choosing the lesser of two evils, not fooling ourselves that there is a cosy third option, which is, in reality, a fantasy.

Defence and Security Review (NATO)

Debate between Crispin Blunt and Julian Lewis

Monday 2nd March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Crispin Blunt]

I—

[Dr Julian Lewis]

May I say to my hon. and gallant Friend that it is no good contrasting the building of the Successor-class submarines with the Astute-class submarines, because if we do not build the Successor submarines—I am not saying that that is a reason to have a deterrent when we otherwise would not have one—there will be a huge gap between the ending of the Astute hunter-killer programme and the next hunter-killer programme, in which all skill in building submarines will be lost?

[Crispin Blunt]

That is the point I wish to address. We will invest an enormous amount in one weapon system for one task only. If we choose to invest in a free-fall bomb and 48 strike attack aircraft in order to deliver that bomb, it would at least put doubt in the mind of our opponent because we would have a capability that we can deliver in extremis. Although we would not have the total protection that a submarine launch system would give us, it would be enough. When it comes with the potential to have five additional Astute-class submarines, four additional Type-26 frigates, six airborne warning and control systems and eight long-range maritime patrol aircraft, we should think about the capability that we will not have if we commit to Trident. If we have a deterrent that is suitable for the future role of the United Kingdom, we will ensure that we have some of the conventional capability that will be absolutely necessary.

There was a very good piece in The Times on Saturday by Matthew Parris. His chilling conclusion, with which I agree, is that we must now prepare seriously for war. We have not been in this position or seen the scale of engagement that will be required since the cold war, so 2% does not cut it. Mis-investing our limited resources, as we will be doing if we keep the deterrent in the way that is proposed, does not cut it. If we are going to put our soldiers into action, there has to be certainty that they will be properly equipped, capable of acting and capable of doing so in collaboration with our NATO partners. That is why the recommendations of the Defence Committee about forward basing and looking again at something like the Allied Command Europe mobile force must be looked at by the Government. I am afraid to say that the resources that we are putting towards our strategy are simply not enough.

Palestine and Israel

Debate between Crispin Blunt and Julian Lewis

Monday 13th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Crispin Blunt]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. The right of return will have to be dealt with at some point during the negotiations. In the course of the debate I was delighted to hear the contribution of my right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Sir Richard Ottaway) and see the scales begin to drop from his eyes, with the latest land grab by the state of Israel. I was slightly surprised by his characterisation of the six-day war as an effort to destroy Israel. It was a brilliant Israeli feat of arms to dissipate what appeared to be a coming threat to Israel, but it certainly was not a response to an attack on Israel.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

My hon. Friend predicted that he would provoke me to intervene and he has succeeded in that aim. I think the laying of mines across the straits of Tiran could just conceivably be described as an act of war.

[Crispin Blunt]

I will let the lawyers and my hon. Friend come to their own conclusion on that.

My last visit to Israel was with a collection of colleagues from this House to again play cricket for the parliamentary cricket team. I note that the chairman of the Israeli cricket board who entertained us so magnificently—he is a Jew from South Africa who is now an Israeli citizen—said that in his view Israel had begun to lose its moral and legal authority from 1967. Since 1967, we have to understand and consider Israel’s approach to the negotiations and the realities that have been created on the ground. I am afraid that in recent years it has become clearer and clearer that Israeli politicians have avoided the opportunity to deliver a settlement. As the realities on the ground have changed, so it has become more difficult for Israeli leaders to deliver a settlement. The 400,000 settlers in the occupied territories form the most enormous political problem for any Israeli leader to have to address.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Crispin Blunt and Julian Lewis

Tuesday 15th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Blunt]

Yes. The report is excellent, and it will inform the proposals that we bring forward when the House returns in October.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend accept that it adds insult to injury when a victim of crime, having seen the perpetrator sentenced, finds that the person is released halfway through their sentence? What steps will we take to reintroduce honesty in sentencing?

[Mr Blunt]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for that question, because plainly the proposals that were in the Conservative manifesto will inform the outcome of the sentencing review. I am quite sure that he will be satisfied with the outcome, and that we will have a great deal more honesty in sentencing at the end of the process than we have today.