Recognition of Western Sahara as Moroccan

Debate between Daniel Kawczynski and Jeremy Corbyn

Wednesday 8th May 2024 Westminster Hall

[Daniel Kawczynski]

Yes, I will. I was trying to explain why I feel so strongly that Morocco is a reliable partner for the United Kingdom. I am not sure what point the hon. Gentleman was trying to make. Yes, we do go overseas on visits where we try to increase our understanding of other nations. We do not have a budget in the House of Commons to pay for those visits; we are guests of the foreign country, which is recorded in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

During our visit to Morocco, we had a very unsatisfactory discussion with the British ambassador on the telephone. As on many other occasions, the British ambassador tried to indicate that we cannot recognise Western Sahara because somehow it will impinge on or affect our relationship with our overseas territories, particularly the Falkland Islands. Yet, when I pressed the British ambassador to explain why and how that could be the case, no satisfactory response was forthcoming.

I seek clarification from the Minister on this point. Is it the fact that we cannot recognise Western Sahara as being Moroccan because there is some legal, constitutional or technical difficulty that might affect our relationship with our overseas territories? I cannot see that, given that France, which is in the process of recognising this issue, also has overseas territories. I would be grateful if the Minister could explain that point. We need to recognise Western Sahara, as Israel and America have done. At the very least, we should follow Spain, the former colonial power, along with Germany and France in recognising that the autonomy proposals are the only way forward.

I have mentioned women’s rights; during my visit to Dakhla we had the opportunity to visit the new port that is being constructed in Western Sahara, and I was able to speak to Mrs Nisrine Iouzzi, who is the lady who runs the 1,600 engineers and construction workers at the port. It is going to be an extremely important link, not just for Morocco but for the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, including Niger, Chad, Mali and many other countries.

One way to deal with illegal immigration in Europe and to support Morocco is through a programme of support for illegal migrants, which I saw at first hand in Dakhla. The Moroccan Government are helping illegal migrants to settle there, training them and giving them opportunities.

Only four Arab nations have signed the Abraham accords, of course. The first contact between the Egyptians and the Israelis in the 1970s was brokered by Rabat, leading to Sadat’s visit to Israel and, ultimately, the peace accord. In 1994 the late King Hassan hosted a World Economic Forum, inviting Israelis and Palestinians to Casablanca for their first joint session at an international conference.

Professor Marc Weller, chair of international law and international constitutional studies at the University of Cambridge, has submitted a report to the Foreign Office. He was commissioned to evaluate the concept of why the United Kingdom may find it difficult to recognise Western Sahara, bearing in mind the intricate relationship we have with our overseas territories. I have met Professor Marc Weller here in the House of Commons on two separate occasions over the past few weeks. He submitted his report to the Foreign Office three weeks ago; I would be grateful if the Minister could recognise whether it has been received and say whether his officials will brief him on it.

Let us not forget that Professor Marc Weller, chair of international law and international constitutional studies at Cambridge, is one of this country’s leading academics on international law and works in the sphere on which I am pressing the Minister directly. He says that when he took on the commission he found it a potentially daunting prospect, yet after the research he has done he has come to the conclusion that recognising Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, and indeed recognising the autonomy proposals, would actually strengthen our relationship with our overseas territories and with the Falkland Islands. Professor Marc Weller from the University of Cambridge says the direct opposite of what we hear from our own ambassador in Morocco.

During my visit to Western Sahara, we came across representatives of 30 countries that have set up consulates in Dakhla, and more than 90 countries around the world have recognised Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

The hon. Member has obviously done detailed research; did he have a chance to meet the Polisario, and has he visited the refugee camps in Algeria?

[Daniel Kawczynski]

I rather suspected that the right hon. Gentleman would ask that question. I will come to that later in my speech. I have not been, as yet, to the Tindouf camp in Algeria where the Polisario are, but I have received very serious allegations from various friends in the Moroccan Parliament. I am glad that the right hon. Gentleman referred to the Tindouf camp, because we have received very serious allegations about the promotion of terrorism within it. We have received transcripts of audio discussions from the Tindouf camp in which various members of the Polisario Front urge young female fighters to plant bombs in Dakhla and to try to murder their way back to the Western Sahara. That is a great concern if it is true, and I strongly urge the Minister to take up the matter with his Algerian counterpart to seek the veracity of the situation.

We here in the United Kingdom have had to deal with terrorism ourselves during the course of our lifetime, have we not? We have experienced bombings in this country by the IRA. We have experienced innocent men, women and children being murdered and bombed in Manchester, London and other places. Indeed, there was an attempt to assassinate the leader of my party in the Brighton hotel bombing. So we, of all countries, should recognise the difficulties that Morocco is facing, if the allegations are correct and it is true that the Tindouf camps are still being used by the Polisario as a hotbed to promote terrorist activities across the border in Morocco.

Finally, there are allegations from organisations, even including Amnesty International, which I am sure the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) respects and recognises, of human rights abuses in the Tindouf camps. I will put those allegations into the House of Commons Library. Will the Minister take that issue on board?

I hope that hon. Members will forgive me for talking about Morocco rather than just Western Sahara. When we discuss Western Sahara, I do not think we can discount why and how certain parliamentarians have so much confidence in Morocco, because of the strategic bilateral relationship we are creating with the country. I pay tribute to the Moroccan ambassador, who works tirelessly and very effectively on behalf of his nation in trying to educate us parliamentarians about the Moroccan perspective.

I recognise and understand that there are hon. Members with views different from my own, and I am sure we will hear those views later in the debate. From my perspective, I want the Minister to realise and recognise that in the remaining time we have in government, however short or long that is, this issue will not go away. We are falling behind our main competitors, such as Spain, France, Germany and America, and unless the issue is resolved satisfactorily for the Moroccans and unless we recognise Western Sahara, we will be jeopardising our relationship with them.

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[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

I thank the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) for securing the debate. We should also put on the record our thanks to the Library for a very good briefing on the situation of the Western Sahara. I listened carefully to what the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham had to say. It is unfortunate that the first 21 minutes of his speech were taken up by talking about Morocco and he barely mentioned the issue of the legality of Morocco’s occupation of the Western Sahara. That is the subject of the debate and the area we should be talking about.

I first raised the issue of the occupation of the Western Sahara in this House in 1984. I have had the good fortune to visit the refugee camps in Algeria on two occasions and to visit the part of Western Sahara that is controlled by the Sahrawi people—a small part of it—near the border with Mauritania. I have also visited the occupied territories and Morocco, and met many shades of opinion, both within the Polisario and within Morocco itself. I have done my best to take a view on the situation based on its history.

Western Sahara was occupied by Spain; it was a Spanish colony. On the return of democracy to Spain in the 1970s, Spain withdrew from Western Sahara. The United Nations General Assembly requested that, as part of a process of decolonisation, the people of Western Sahara—the Sahrawi people—should have the opportunity to decide their own future; they should have a choice they could make. The choice has now come down to the three options that have been put, which I will come back to in a moment: independence, autonomy or incorporation within Morocco.

We must recognise that if we just say, as the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham appears to be saying, that Morocco’s illegal occupation of Western Sahara should now be confirmed and condoned and we should trade with Morocco absolutely normally, as though nothing had happened in Western Sahara, we are failing in our duties under international law. The issue was taken to the International Court of Justice in the 1970s, and an advisory opinion was issued requiring a referendum for the people of Western Sahara. That referendum has never taken place.

The United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara was established to ensure that there was a peaceful future for the people of Western Sahara. There has been conflict in the past, and there is a danger that it will return. The hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham referred in his speech to issues surrounding Northern Ireland and to other issues. Surely, the way to avoid a conflict in the future is to look at the heart of the issue and to deal with it in a peaceful way, which is where the referendum comes in. The referendum has not happened.

UN representatives have tried hard over many years to get agreement on what an electoral roll would look like and who can vote on the future of Western Sahara—for example, the people in the refugee camps in Tindouf and the Western Sahara diaspora, as well as the Sahrawi people in Western Sahara itself. I hope that the UK Government will recognise the importance of international law in that respect and recognise the right of the people of Western Sahara to decide their own future. The hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham effectively is, effectively, denying the Sahrawi people any rights whatever. He is saying that the occupation of Western Sahara by Morocco on the departure of Spain should just be accepted as a done deal.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

In the right hon. Gentleman’s logic, the United States of America, Israel, Germany, Spain, France and the Netherlands are all wrong that the autonomy proposals from the Kingdom of Morocco are the correct solution going forward. Is he saying that all those NATO allies of ours are wrong?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

What I am saying is that international law should come first, so the decision by Donald Trump, when he was President of the United States, to recognise Moroccan occupation, which few other countries have done, is a backward step for international law. It will obviously make a lot of people—particularly Sahrawi people—extremely angry, because they see in it no right of representation for themselves.

My argument is that the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion was in terms of a process of decolonisation. The issue has been taken to the UN Special Committee on Decolonisation in New York, and I was there myself on that occasion, speaking about exactly this issue. Surely, the position we should adopt as a member of the United Nations and the Security Council is to support the General Assembly decision, the Security Council’s continued appointment of MINURSO, and the Secretary-General’s appointee to try to bring about a process for the future.

The hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham seems to be using the Morocco’s huge economic advances as a reason for overriding international law in respect of Western Sahara. I respectfully say to him that the two things are not connected. Morocco’s trade with Europe, its developing solar economy, the proposal for building an underground train tunnel to Spain and all those sorts of things are great and very welcome—many things in Morocco are extremely welcome and very good—but that does not take away the fundamental point that the occupation of Western Sahara on the departure of Spain remains illegal, and we should not be trading in goods produced in illegally occupied territories. That argument goes on all around the world.

What I hope comes out of this debate is a statement by our Government that we will continue to respect international law, engage with Morocco and Polisario and engage assertively with the United Nations to ensure that this long-running conflict can be brought to a conclusion by giving the Sahrawi people a fundamental right to decide their own future. That right can be supressed and wished away, but the desire for recognition and self-determination of the Sahrawi people, as with peoples all around the world, will not go away.

Human Rights: Saudi Arabia

Debate between Daniel Kawczynski and Jeremy Corbyn

Tuesday 24th June 2014 Westminster Hall

[Daniel Kawczynski]

The hon. Lady will have to interact with those organisations and ask for their perspective. I can only give her my perspective as someone who has been to the kingdom on a number of occasions and interacted with those organisations—and by the way, not with chaperones or under their auspices, but by actually selecting organisations off our own bat, going to see them and interacting with them and with ordinary men and women in the street.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

On his visits to Saudi Arabia, has the hon. Gentleman been able to engage with the 1.5 million enslaved domestic workers, who have no rights beyond staying in their employer’s house? Has he raised any of the very serious concerns about the treatment of migrant workers in Saudi Arabia with the Saudi Arabian Government? What was their response?

[Daniel Kawczynski]

Later in my speech I will address how we raise human rights issues with our hosts. Yes, of course we have met a wide range of Saudi Arabian citizens—both ordinary men and women in the streets, and through various industries—and we get a perspective from those people.

I have been chairman of the all-party group on Saudi Arabia for the past eight years, since 2006. Unlike many MPs, who join a lot of all-party groups, I am a member of only two: the all-party groups on Saudi Arabia and Libya. I feel passionately about the importance of our strategic alliance with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which is an extremely important country of the most profound strategic importance to the United Kingdom, globally and, in particular, to the middle east. Our two countries co-operate on counter-terrorism and on trying to bring peace and stability to the middle east—at another stage I hope to share with the House the extraordinary work and effort that Saudi Arabia gives us in helping to fight terrorism and the extraordinary efforts and investments that it puts into de-radicalisation programmes, but of course this debate is specifically on human rights.

I have stated that the delegations that go to Saudi Arabia are cross-party, but we also welcome delegations from the Shura council to the House of Commons. Those delegations visit us on a regular basis. Many members of the Shura council are keen to come to the House of Commons, and they spend considerable time here trying to understand the procedures of our House and learning about the Select Committee process. They are keen to understand the Westminster model—which, as we all know, is highly respected across the world—so that they can learn from how Parliament works and take some of that information, expertise and experience back to the Shura council. Fundamental changes to accountability and transparency are taking place in the Shura council, and we are very pleased to be able to interact with our Saudi counterparts to give our perspective.

One of the most recent delegations even asked to come to visit my constituency of Shrewsbury and spend a day in our beautiful county town trying to understand how a parliamentarian interacts with his constituents and the local council, how a parliamentarian deals with people’s problems and what rights citizens have. Every time they come on these delegations, they give us a real sense that they are interested in learning from our experience.

I say to the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran that the Saudis are trying to pursue a system of evolution, rather than revolution. As the King has said to me in the past, there are conservative elements in Saudi society who are reticent about big-scale, radical, fast changes to the structure of society. The King is desperately trying to modernise and improve various aspects of society, but he has to move at a pace that the most conservative elements will allow. I think he wants to take the whole society with him in the transition that he and the country are trying to make.

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[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

I am pleased that we are having this debate on UK relations with Saudi Arabia. I was fascinated by the contribution of the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski), who seemed to manage, towards the end, to draw an equivalence between the social and economic problems and human rights issues that we face in Britain and those in Saudi Arabia.

I remind the hon. Gentleman that more than almost any other country in the world, Saudi Arabia has virtually incalculable financial wealth and that, unusually for the rest of the world, it has a large number of public executions. The death penalty is rife, discrimination against women is systemic, migrant workers are denied any access to representation and frequently face deportation if they protest in any way, and the legal reforms that have been introduced do not apply to 1.5 million domestic workers.

I hope that in his visits to Saudi Arabia as a guest of its Government, the hon. Gentleman is able to raise those issues robustly. I hope that he reminds them that since Saudi Arabia has become a member of the United Nations Human Rights Council, it has had a responsibility to accept the universal declaration of human rights, which includes the rights to free speech, representation, freedom from discrimination against women, religious freedoms, trade union freedoms and press freedoms. A large number of responsibilities go with that, and I hope that the hon. Gentleman’s group will make representations to that effect.

The hon. Gentleman also raised the canard of visits to Saudi Arabia. I freely admit that I have not been to the country. I would be happy to visit on an independent basis. It is possible for parliamentarians to go on an independent basis through the Inter-Parliamentary Union, as he is fully aware. I find it odd that he says that the only way for MPs to visit is as guests of the Saudi Government, but no doubt he, my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Katy Clark) and I will form a delegation, and we can robustly engage on matters of human rights. I am sure that he will be utterly convinced by the arguments put forward by my hon. Friend and me about the need for serious engagement on human rights abuses.

The background to the issue lies in what the hon. Gentleman mentioned at the beginning of his speech: the strategic and economic role that Saudi Arabia plays in the rest of the world. It is the biggest purchaser of arms from this country, and one of the biggest purchasers of arms from the United States, of any country in the world. It has a dubious economic relationship with BAE Systems and others, to the extent that the Serious Fraud Office went to enormous lengths to investigate the al-Yamamah arms contract. Apparently, the investigation was on the point of revealing a lot of corruption, and possibly prosecutions, when the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair—[Interruption.] The then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, intervened, as he had the prime ministerial power to do, and stopped the investigation. Those are extremely serious issues.

These matters have been raised many times in Parliament. On 23 January this year, in a debate in this very Chamber, my right hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd), who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on human rights, of which I am a vice-chair, pointed out that although the Foreign Office human rights report was slightly stronger than in previous years, it still remained weak, and that she wished there would be something rather stronger.

The papers and reports produced by the Campaign Against Arms Trade point out that arms sales to Saudi Arabia seem to colour all issues affecting relations with that country; I suspect that the Foreign Office’s “softly softly” approach on human rights and the interference in the SFO inquiry and many others are heavily influenced by the prospect of Typhoon aircraft and other materials being sold. The revolving door of lobbyists from the armed forces, including retired armed forces officers, and of course the influence of our own royal family on exports seem to override everything related to concerns about human rights abuses.

Any other country in the world that did not have the economic clout of Saudi Arabia would be strongly condemned by the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham and many others, but it is the economic relationship between Saudi Arabia and the rest of the world that heavily influences views on human rights.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

The hon. Gentleman seems to imply that somehow selling Typhoon jets to Saudi Arabia, which obviously provides very important jobs in the United Kingdom, is somehow inappropriate. As a sovereign nation, Saudi Arabia needs to protect herself. She is in an extremely unstable and difficult region, and is potentially threatened by Iran. Are we to leave this very important country defenceless?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

The position of Saudi Arabia in the region is interesting, and I am pleased that the hon. Gentleman has raised the issue. I am sure he would have been concerned, as I was, by Saudi Arabia’s military incursions into Yemen, and perhaps even more concerned by the role that Saudi Arabia played in Bahrain, supporting the King against protesters through the use of Gulf Co-operation Council forces that went into Bahrain—indeed, those forces continue to support the Bahrain royal family. I am pleased that relations with Iran are improving. I hope that the human rights situation in Iran will improve in parallel with those relations, and that any negotiations with Iran are as strong on human rights as they are on nuclear processing or any other issues.

However, the hon. Gentleman must be aware of the very deep concern expressed by many about the volume of funding—some, apparently, from Saudi sources—that has become available to the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant forces. Again, those forces have incalculable levels of funding compared with many other groups; I am sure that the hon. Gentleman has raised the involvement of Saudi Arabia in the war in Syria on a strategic level with the Saudi Government during his visits there. There is a desperately dangerous situation in the whole region and Saudi Arabia is a very important part of that entire calculation, so surely we need a coming together rather than the funding of more military actions in other countries.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

The hon. Gentleman will know that Saudi Arabia warned Tony Blair repeatedly against intervention in Iraq; he also knows perfectly well that Mr Blair, despite all the Saudi misgivings, chose to intervene in that country—

UK Trade & Investment

Debate between Daniel Kawczynski and Jeremy Corbyn

Thursday 12th September 2013 Westminster Hall

[Daniel Kawczynski]

This debate and the report focus predominantly on the general export picture, of which our defence exports are just one aspect. However, if the right hon. Gentleman stays until the end of my speech, he will hear a reference to arms exports.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

At what point?

[Daniel Kawczynski]

The hon. Gentleman will have to wait and see.

The report makes three or four specific recommendations, which I will highlight to the Minister. One of the most critical is extra parliamentary scrutiny. In the process of writing this report, we went to see the Select Committee on Business, Innovation and Skills and interviewed its esteemed Chairman. The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills is a large Department, and the Committee is focused on domestic business and skills matters. During this Parliament—I may be corrected if I am wrong—I understand that the Committee has not undertaken any reports specifically scrutinising UKTI.

The Committee and the Department are so large that we need a subsection of the Committee or even, dare I say it, a separate Select Committee. The Minister and others might say that that is unrealistic, but I am putting the suggestion out for deliberation and consideration. Some form of body or mechanism is needed to perform ongoing scrutiny of the work and performance of UKTI. Let us not forget that UKTI receives hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money. It is vital that all of us in the House play our role in scrutinising how that money is spent.

If we have additional scrutiny in the House, we can be confident in going to the Exchequer and others when things need additional funding and saying, “This is the work that the House of Commons has performed in scrutinising UKTI, and these are the deficiencies and shortfalls that UKTI faces. We need to secure additional money for it.” One mistake that the Government made at the outset, although I completely understand that budgets had to be cut across the board, was cutting the communication and advertising budgets for UKTI and others a little too much. I am certainly making representations to the Prime Minister to ensure that additional funding is given to UKTI so that it can advertise itself in providing service delivery and market itself to SMEs.

The hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) rightly referred to SMEs. About 47% of British SMEs have never heard of UKTI. They do not know anything about it; they do not understand what services it can provide. How can we expect cutting-edge SMEs, some of which have the most extraordinary innovation and ability to export, to use UKTI if they simply do not know what resources exist? I want UKTI to have product placements, even in soap operas. There could be a storyline where a local UKTI chap comes to see a company to help it export. I want advertising in national newspapers and on the radio and television, so that everybody starts to talk about export and understand that we can use our experiences in other markets to help SMEs export. We all remember the “Tell Sid” campaign, whether or not we agreed with—

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[Daniel Kawczynski]

Absolutely. I could not agree with my hon. Friend more, and I am sure that the Minister will reply to his point.

If I can achieve one thing from the debate, it will be that the Minister goes out and advertises for a top French export expert. I want the Minister to pinch him or her from the French export agency or a French export sector. I want him to find him or her, whoever is best, and pay him or her double what he or she is getting in France. Frankly, we will never get into the French markets unless we have French understanding, in both language and how French-speaking countries operate. We are not normally prone to saying wonderful things about France; but to start pinching their contracts, we need to understand how to do it. I want the Minister to take that point seriously, and if not, at least explain to me what his Department is doing to ensure increasing competence in the French language and the ability to understand how French contractual operations function in French-speaking north Africa, so that we are in a better position to attract contracts.

I pay tribute to the two Prime Minster’s trade ambassadors who are here. They do a superb job and are in a privileged position. To appoint them trade ambassadors, the Prime Minister obviously has great confidence in them, but how many people out there or in Shrewsbury know about trade ambassadors? I am sure that they know my hon. Friends the Member for Wealden (Charles Hendry) and for Gloucester (Richard Graham). It is important that we communicate with SMEs in Shrewsbury and elsewhere, so that if they are interested in exporting to Indonesia, for example, we can say, “There is a dedicated trade ambassador. This is his name. This is how you get in contact with him,” and do the same with Algeria and other countries. What work is the Minister’s Department doing to ensure greater understanding among SMEs of the vital resource of trade ambassadors and envoys that the Prime Minister put in place?

I have spent 20 years studying Libya. It is a country about which I am passionate. I have many friends there whom I treat as family. Before the last election, I wrote a book about Libya and the appalling human rights abuses there. My tremendous frustration with the previous Labour Government trying to curry favour with Colonel Gaddafi was such that I decided to write the book, highlighting the extraordinary abuse in Libya. I presented the Prime Minister with a copy two weeks before the 2010 election, and in 2011, I, along with others, pleaded with him to intervene in what we thought would be a bloodbath on the streets of Benghazi. Recently, I went to see him to highlight my concern about the ongoing instability in Libya.

I passionately feel that British companies should be exporting to Libya. The media circus has of course moved to Syria, but we must never forget that if we intervene in a country such as Libya, we have a duty and a responsibility to ensure that everything is done subsequently to help with security, building democracy and ensuring that residents have stability, so that they can trade with the UK.

From my friends in Tripoli, I get daily reports of kidnappings, violence and acts of terrorism; the Government still do not have control over large parts of the country. It is very important that we do everything possible to help Libya, by assisting her with security, and here I am drawn into the point made by the right hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Mr Clarke) about our security industry.

There are many people who would like to criticise British security exports, but exporting the knowledge that we have accumulated in the UK over decades—on policing, border guards and training armies, navies and air forces—to a country such as Libya is a good thing. Surely, we ought, at the very least, to help Libya—with all its instability—with our expertise.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for securing the debate. His points about Libya and its instability are absolutely correct. Is he not concerned that vast amounts of the weaponry that was supplied—not just by Britain, but by France and many others—to various opposition groups under Gaddafi, or post-Gaddafi, have now found their way into Mali and many other places across north Africa? There is a genuine danger of further instability.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

I certainly agree with the hon. Gentleman that a lot of equipment that the Gaddafi regime had has got across the border into Mali and other countries. We are deviating slightly from the subject of the debate, but I will say that most of that equipment is Russian. I am not sure what proportion is western-supplied arms.

I pay tribute to Mr Richard Paniguian, head of the UKTI Defence and Security Organisation, which is the military security part of UKTI. DSO is populated by people who have been in the armed services. They understand the products and are passionate about them and their work. If UKTI generally can understand how DSO operates and replicate the passion, energy, enthusiasm and calibre of the staff, we will be motoring further ahead.

I shall say a few things about British defence exports because I, for one, am not embarrassed that the United Kingdom exports security—it is extremely important for our country. Many hon. Members have in their constituencies, as do I, defence operators and contractors, firms on which many jobs and a lot of this country’s prosperity depend. The UK has some of the most rigorous export licensing procedures in the world. It considers each application on a case-by-case basis, taking into account, among other factors, the precise nature of the equipment and the identity and track record of the recipient. Her Majesty’s Government do not—and will not—issue licences if they judge that the proposed export would provoke or prolong internal conflicts, or if there is a clear risk that it might be used aggressively against another country or to facilitate internal repression. When circumstances change or new information comes to light, we can and do revoke licences if the export is no longer consistent with the criteria.

Recently, I had to defend the Prime Minister on the radio when he went to the United Arab Emirates and many people criticised him for trying to sell them some Typhoon jets. It would be the height of irresponsibility if the United Kingdom did not collaborate with our Gulf allies—sound, strategic allies such as the United Arab Emirates—to ensure that they had the capability to defend themselves against a belligerent neighbour who might attack them at any time. If countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia did not have British planes with which to try to pre-empt naked aggression against them from Iran or others, we would see increasing instability in the region.

You will be pleased to hear, Mr Betts, that I am coming towards the end of my speech, but let me just raise one or two remaining points. My hon. Friend the Member for Romford (Andrew Rosindell), accompanied me on the delegation to Gibraltar, and I want to make a point that he wanted to make about the British Council. The United Kingdom has a global British Council network. Its work is very good, but we do not see it providing any information on UKTI. How is the Minister’s Department collaborating with the British Council, utilising its extraordinary network, to ensure that as well as sharing information about British language courses and all the other good things that it does, it communicates about UKTI and British commercial links?

I wish to talk very briefly about the European Union. The Prime Minister hopes to renegotiate various aspects of our position with the European Union, and I hope that one of those aspects will be how we go about international trading agreements. The first thing that happened to me when I was elected in 2005 was that I was sent to the World Trade Organisation talks in Hong Kong. The other two Members of Parliament with me were the hon. Gentleman who is now the Speaker and Lord Mandelson who, as Trade Commissioner, was representing the whole European Union. I found that very frustrating, because the United Kingdom did not have a voice. The UK was represented by Lord Mandelson, who was representing all 27 nations, but different countries mean different things to other countries—for example, Gibraltar and New Zealand are far more important to us than to Poland. I very much hope that there can be some movement on individual countries being able somehow to negotiate with countries of long standing, so that there is no one-size-fits-all criterion for the whole European Union.

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[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) for securing the debate and ensuring that we had the opportunity for this discussion. I will make two points that he will agree with, but he may have problems with the rest of my speech.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

Let us have the nice things first.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that. As someone who grew up in Shropshire, I fully appreciate the beauties of Shrewsbury.

My first point is that the hon. Gentleman’s comments about language and the British approach to the rest of the world are absolutely right. It is depressing to find that the number of students entering university this year to study foreign languages has gone down, as it did last year, and that the quality and quantity of language training in many secondary schools are wholly inadequate. We need to start language teaching much earlier, in primary schools as well as in secondary schools, and to give greater emphasis to the learning of all foreign languages at university—not just the obvious European ones, such as Spanish, French, German and Italian, but the Chinese and Arabic languages, as well as Hindi, Bengali and others. We are a country that has to trade and export, and if German and French companies can send people around the world who are competent in all the local languages, we should be able to do the same. It is extraordinarily arrogant for us to turn up in a country and assume that, because we are British, everybody will want to speak to us in English, so we just have to be prepared to make those changes.

The second point on which I am sure the hon. Gentleman will agree relates to the engineering base of much of British trade with the world. It is obviously essential to have a high degree of understanding of engineering and science teaching both in schools and universities, and to recognise the status of engineering, which has done so much in this country; I am thinking of the railways, shipbuilding, motors and all the other aspects of engineering. Engineering is often seen as a dirty-hands profession, rather than a mainstream one. I can say that because I come from a family of engineers who closely followed that whole narrative. The basis of an awful lot of our past trade was the export of high-quality, high-tech engineering products.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I obviously completely concur with the hon. Gentleman, but I also recognise that many families in Britain who are bilingual in a variety of languages—I cannot put an exact figure on it, but I would think that about 70 different languages are spoken in my constituency—and many brilliant young bilingual people do not seem to get job opportunities in companies that are often trading with the countries that their parents came from. We should recognise that we have those resources in our society.

As I said in my intervention, I want to raise some arms trade issues, which are highly appropriate because the biennial arms fair, the Defence and Security Equipment International exhibition, is taking place in the London docklands. I think I am right in saying that more than 1,000 exhibitors—1,400, I believe—are now plying their wares.

I have many concerns, because if we compare the countries and companies involved in that arms fair in the London docklands with the Foreign Office’s report on human rights problems and abuses, we find an unfortunate coincidence between, on the one hand, the countries exhibiting at that international arms fair, countries that British companies that are exhibiting wish to sell to, or countries invited to send delegates, and, on the other hand, serious human rights concerns that the Foreign Office has drawn attention to, and countries with human rights records that it thinks we should be concerned about. Algeria, Bahrain, Iraq, Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are among the UK’s biggest customers for arms purchases, and Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Libya, which were not on the list in 2011, have now received invitations, although human rights problems are legion in those countries.

An early-day motion was tabled two days ago, on 10 September, by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), and has been signed by a number of colleagues, including me. It draws attention to the “Scrutiny of Arms Exports and Arms Controls” report, House of Commons paper 205, and states

“that the Government would do well to acknowledge that there is an inherent conflict between strongly promoting arms exports to authoritarian regimes whilst strongly criticising their lack of human rights at the same time”.

I look forward to the Minister’s response to that.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

The hon. Gentleman gave a list of countries about which concerns have been expressed, including the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, but has he visited those countries? I have taken to those countries delegations of parliamentarians, including Labour MPs. They interacted with non-governmental and human rights organisations there, and got a very different perspective on what is happening on the ground from the one reported by the British media in this country.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I have not visited Saudi Arabia or the UAE, but I have visited many countries on the list and others in those regions. Only half an hour ago, I spoke to a young man from Bahrain. He came to this country as a place of safety and security, because of how brutally he was treated in prison in Bahrain. He showed me the shot marks on his body—from birdshot—inflicted on him by the police because he was taking part in a demonstration for democracy in Bahrain. His view is that the Bahrain regime is propped up by Saudi Arabia, Britain and the United States, that it is an enormous purchaser of arms from this country and that it provides military facilities for both Britain and the USA, but it has an appalling human rights record.

Although non-governmental organisations in Saudi Arabia are doing their best, we must ask serious questions about the human rights record of Saudi Arabia; there is the use of the death penalty, the suppression of opposition groups, the denial of women’s rights and a whole lot of other issues. Even the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham could not claim to concur with the Saudi Government’s approach to human rights, or indeed support it in any way. We are the biggest arms exporter to Saudi Arabia, and the influence that Saudi Arabia has is absolutely enormous. We should think carefully on this matter, because if we export CS gas and crowd-control and anti-personnel equipment, as we do to nearly every one of the countries in the middle eastern region, they will be used against the legitimate democratic process that wishes to bring about the kind of society that we enjoy, with our freedom of speech and elected Parliament. If those people are shot by the equipment that we have supplied, are we not part of the problem? Are we not partly responsible for that oppression of human rights?

The hon. Gentleman tells us that the UKTI Defence & Security Organisation works very hard and does very well. I am not surprised that he mentions that it is heavily populated by people who were formerly in the armed services. Let me ask him this. The end-user certificate system and the monitoring of arms exports have been around for a long time, but there seems to be an incredible degree of leakage. As soon as one raises the issue, and says, “We shouldn’t be exporting arms to that country”, we are told that someone else will do it. They say that the French, Germans, Chinese or Russians will. Perhaps that is so; they probably will try, but we have to start somewhere and influence others. If we are exporting equipment that is used—it is often quite low-technology equipment—to oppress human rights protesters, we should ask ourselves some serious questions about it. Who are we to table motions complaining about the oppression of democracy in Saudi Arabia if we have supplied the equipment that oppresses the democratic wishes of people in the first place? I say that as an example; there are many others that can be used.

We can learn lessons from the Iran-Iraq war, which took place some years ago. At the time, as now, the west was fairly obsessed with supporting Iraq against Iran because of the presence of the ayatollah in Iran. I am not in any way defending the human rights record of the Iranian Government, any more than I would defend the human rights record of the Iraqi Government of that time, or indeed Iraqi Governments since. Britain quite happily provided equipment, support and political cover for Saddam Hussein in Iraq because it was opposed to Iran. The west did that, as did the US and lots of other people. In 1988, when the gas attack took place on the Kurdish people in Halabja, I raised the issue here in Parliament and was told that the situation was serious, bad and quite appalling. I then asked why we were involved in the Baghdad arms fair only eight months later. The Minister at the time told me that it was good business. We went ahead with that arms fair, and only two years later we were at war with Iraq. No doubt some of the equipment that was being fired back at British troops had been sold to Iraq by Britain. What goes around comes around.

There is a disproportion in many of the issues. Arms exports contributed, I think, 1.5% of the total exports of this country, yet they have a wholly disproportionate level of support from the Department of Trade and Industry and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and there is a substantial degree of subsidy for the research done through the domestic purchase of the products. I do not wish to go on for too long, but I want to register the point that there are many people in this country who are deeply uneasy about our arms export policy, and about the export of surveillance equipment, high-tech planes and everything else that can be used to bomb and strafe people in civil wars in any part of the world, much as we deplore those civil wars.

I am always told, “If you raise all these issues, it will cost a lot of jobs in the arms industry.” I fully understand the employment issue, but I also fully understand the enormous, brilliant skills that we have that produce these weapons and the equipment that backs them up. None the less, many of the workers and I would rather the brilliance and skills were put towards exporting peaceful products, useful goods, energy-efficient goods and transport products, such as trains, planes, cars and ships, instead of getting us so deeply involved in the arms industry. Once we have supplied arms to an authoritarian regime, we cannot wash our hands of it and pretend that it will go away.

I want to know how much money has been spent on the exhibition in docklands. Who authorised the invitation list, and who allowed many of the companies, including Russian arms exporters and others, to come to Britain, knowing full well where many of the products will end up, and the misery and suffering that are caused as a result of them? We cannot wash our hands of this or wish it away; we have to take responsibility for it.

North Africa and the Near and Middle East

Debate between Daniel Kawczynski and Jeremy Corbyn

Monday 28th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I am very pleased that the hon. Gentleman is going to Saudi Arabia with a substantial delegation. I hope that it will involve a substantial number of women Members of this House and that it will be able to meet women’s organisations in Saudi Arabia.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

The hon. Gentleman will be pleased to hear that there are more women going on the trip than men, which is a specific wish of mine. [Interruption] No, not for that reason. We will certainly be meeting various organisations that deal with women’s rights in the kingdom. I will send the hon. Gentleman a copy of the report after the visit, if he wishes.

There is tremendous anger and hostility towards Saudi Arabia in this country. On one occasion I was sitting in the Smoking Room waiting for a vote, and I asked 15 Tory MPs what their views were on Saudi Arabia, and every single one made very hostile statements about the country. That really upset me, and I did not understand it. I think we have a Guardian-reading liberal elite who want to denigrate Saudi Arabia at every opportunity. The BBC, with its left-wing bias and determination not to report anything positive from Saudi Arabia, also contributes to the extraordinary drip, drip effect of negative press that it gets in this country.

Of course there are huge problems in Saudi Arabia, and of course there are things that we in the United Kingdom disagree with and want changing, but there has been progress, slow though it is. It is extremely important that people like me and others who are interested in Saudi Arabia engage with the country and, specifically, with people who are trying to reform it, who are democrats, and who are passionate about making sure that it improves its human rights.