Leaving the EU: Parliamentary Vote
Debate between David Davis and Paul Flynn(7 years, 1 month ago)
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Mr Davis
My hon. Friend is right: this House should be pulling together in the national interest, but let me say this. I have never, ever accused my opposite number of being anything other than interested in the national interest—of course, he has a political interest. While I am at it, by the way, I should also say to the Chairman of the Exiting the European Union Committee that I took his views as his views, not those of the Select Committee as well. It is very important in this exercise that we keep things on a proper, stable, rational and patriotic level, and I think everybody does.
Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)
Will the Secretary of State ignore the voices of manic optimism that seem to be compulsory among Conservative Members and agree that the choice that will be made on the final deal will be very, very different from the choice made on 23 June 2016? Does he not believe that well-informed second thoughts are always superior to ill-informed first thoughts?
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between David Davis and Paul Flynn(7 years, 7 months ago)
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Mr Davis
My right hon. Friend is right to suggest that the agricultural sector is the most sensitive to the issue of tariffs, and indeed to the issue of customs, because of the nature of the product, which, for instance, is often biodegradable. However, that is also true the other way round. We are an enormous market for France, Bavaria and many other agricultural areas in Europe. We have at dead centre the aim of securing frictionless trade in that sector in the future, and we are confident that it is in the interests of the whole European Union, not just us.
Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)
Will the Secretary of State tell us why we are going into this premature election? Those of us who voted to remain in the EU have fully accepted the decision that was made, and voted for the triggering of article 50, as did those in the other House; so that is not the reason. Will the Secretary of State confess today that the real reason we are having this election is the Government’s wish to escape from the promise that they made two years ago—a five-year promise—not to raise taxes, and to respect the triple lock? Is it not true that what lies ahead on the economic front is a great sinkhole into which our economy will fall in a tailspin?
Mr Davis
I note the attention paid to your call for short questions, Mr Speaker, but I will give the hon. Gentleman’s question a short answer. Throughout this process the Labour party has maintained its interesting schizophrenia, first saying, “We respect the outcome of the referendum”, and then, at every turn, trying to thwart it. Labour Members say, “You have a mandate to leave, but not on those terms.” Well, when the election is over, we will have a mandate on those terms.
Article 50
Debate between David Davis and Paul Flynn(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)
The Supreme Court’s judgment is welcome in that it establishes that the will of this House is sovereign and superior to the royal prerogative, but it is unwelcome in that it seeks to take back from Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland powers that had been devolved to them. Will the Secretary of State promise that the special needs of Wales, which will be hit more severely by withdrawal from the single market than England, will be considered and that we will have not just a red, white and blue Brexit, but a red, white and green Brexit that meets the will and the needs of Wales?
Mr Davis
I will say two things. First, I think that the hon. Gentleman misreads the judgment. It does not talk about taking back powers back from the devolved Administrations at all, as far as I can see. As I said to the hon. Member for Arfon (Hywel Williams), the interests of the people of Wales, as far as the Welsh Government view them, have been put into a paper that has been submitted to the Joint Ministerial Committee and will be debated at the next meeting of its European negotiating arm.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between David Davis and Paul Flynn(7 years, 12 months ago)
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The Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (Mr David Davis)
We take parliamentary scrutiny of the Department’s work extremely seriously, and I am delighted to be appearing before the new Select Committee on Exiting the European Union on 14 December. Department for Exiting the European Union Ministers and officials have made 10 appearances before Select Committees since the Department was established and before our own Select Committee was formed. But it is right that we do not overstep our remit and that Ministers across Whitehall—this is a cross-Whitehall operation—are accountable to their own Committees, including in relation to European Union exit.
Paul Flynn
To curb the Secretary of State’s manic optimism, would it not be beneficial for him to get a dose of reality from the Welsh Affairs Committee, which went to Aberystwyth this weekend? Somebody came to me and said, “My company has decided after the referendum not to expand here in Ceredigion but to relocate in Dublin.” Is it not right that the Minister should come, not to tell us what he is doing but so that we can pass on to him the fact that industry is collapsing post-referendum?
Mr Davis
The hon. Gentleman should perhaps make his point about industry collapsing to Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Nissan, GSK, Jaguar Land Rover and the rest. To come to his substantive point, we consider every request from Select Committees on its individual merits. There are probably something of the order of 30 ongoing projects at the moment. Frankly, if we appeared in front of every Select Committee on all those, we would not have any time to do any negotiation or planning at all.
Next Steps in Leaving the European Union
Debate between David Davis and Paul Flynn(8 years, 1 month ago)
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Mr Davis
It is hard to have tests along the track of the negotiations; it is the outcome that matters. In response to my opposite number, the hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer), I highlighted three of the four main aims that we are after. One is to regain control of our borders. Another is to get back control of our laws. The one I did not list was our aim to keep our justice and security arrangements at least as strong as they are. Finally, and most importantly in this context, the United Kingdom must aim to maintain the best possible open access to European markets and vice versa. If we can achieve all that, there will be no downside to Brexit at all, and considerable upsides.
Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)
There seems to be some political forgetfulness here. Does the Minister not recall that the Chancellor has forecast financial bumps along the road? Others fear that they will not just be Brexit bumps, but that a vast sinkhole will open up in the road, into which the British economy will fall in a tailspin. If that Brexit slump occurs, how can the Minister deny the public a second vote on this? Second thoughts are always better than first thoughts, especially as the referendum was conducted on the basis of untruths from both parties. Is he going to honour the pledge to give an extra £350 million a week to the national health service?
Points of Order
Debate between David Davis and Paul Flynn(9 years ago)
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Iraq Inquiry
Debate between David Davis and Paul Flynn(9 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Davis
My hon. Friend makes a good point. I will refer in a moment to the Winograd commission, which produced an interim report before the final report. Either of those approaches would have been sensible and worth while, and are still possible.
When decisions such as those that were made in Libya, Syria and Iraq are made without knowledge of all the facts, mistakes are made and sometimes people die as a result. So it is not hyperbole to say that the delay to the Iraq inquiry could cost lives because bad decisions could be made.
When it was announced in 2009, the inquiry was expected to take one year, and that was thought by the then Leader of the Opposition to be too long. Had the inquiry stuck to that timetable, the Government would have had the benefit in all the actions I have mentioned of any lessons that might have been learned from the final report. Six years on from the start, Sir John Chilcot has said that the report has taken
“longer than any of us expected would be necessary”.
Mr Davis
If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I will not for the moment.
That was perhaps the understatement of the decade. It has been claimed that it is not an unreasonable period of time for such an important inquiry, but the Franks report on the Falklands war took six months, and we should not forget that that war had a controversial start. There were controversial aspects to the continuing diplomatic negotiations. It was incredibly sensitive in diplomatic, national security, military and espionage terms, yet it took six months.
The Winograd commission—the Israeli Government-appointed commission of inquiry into the war with Lebanon in 2006—is another relevant example. The commission held its first session in September 2006, released a preliminary report within seven months and then published in January 2008, less than a year and a half after the inquiry was announced. Any argument for delay on the grounds of political sensitivity or national security would be far more pertinent in Israel, where the immediate threat to life is considerably greater than in any other country in the world.
Paul Flynn
Sir Jeremy Heywood was asked two days ago whether he would approve of this House subpoenaing the evidence to Chilcot and publishing it ourselves. His comment was that he did not want to rush the Chilcot report. Is that a reasonable view?
Mr Davis
When the hon. Gentleman listens to what I intend to say shortly, he will realise that Sir Jeremy Heywood certainly does not want to rush the report, and there are some reasons for that of which I do not approve.
I have been asked by a number of colleagues why I believe that the delay has occurred. The truth is that no one in this House knows, not even the Minister. There is not enough information in the public domain, which is why the motion requires an answer to that exact question from Sir John Chilcot. Nevertheless, there are some clues. For clarity, I should say that I do not believe, at this stage at least, that the witnesses are the cause of the delay, and I say that because I think that one of them will be speaking later.
Some of the delay is undoubtedly down to the conflict between the inquiry and Whitehall—Sir Jeremy Heywood and others—about what can and cannot be disclosed. What the inquiry can publish is wrapped up in a series of protocols that have criteria so broad that a veto on publication can virtually be applied at Whitehall’s discretion. Compare this with the Scott inquiry into the Iraqi supergun affair. It also covered issues of incredible sensitivity in terms of national security, international relations, intelligence agency involvement, judicial propriety and ministerial decision making. Sir Richard Scott was allowed to decide himself what he would release into the public domain, unfettered by Whitehall. By contrast, Sir John Chilcot, who is a past Northern Ireland Office permanent secretary, who chaired an incredibly sensitive inquiry into intercept evidence, and who is considered a responsible keeper of Government secrets, is tied up in protocols, subject to the whim of Whitehall.
We know there have been long negotiations between the inquiry and Sir Jeremy Heywood, the Cabinet Secretary, and his predecessors over the disclosure of some material, most notably correspondence between ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair and George W. Bush. There is no point whatsoever in the inquiry if it cannot publish the documents that show how the decision to go to war was arrived at. Chilcot himself wrote in a letter to the Cabinet Secretary:
“The question when and how the prime minister made commitments to the US about the UK's involvement in military action in Iraq and subsequent decisions on the UK's continuing involvement, is central to its considerations”.
The negotiations between Chilcot and Jeremy Heywood concluded only in May last year, when it was announced that an agreement had been reached. The process was clearly frustrating for the inquiry: Sir John Chilcot queries why it was that
“individuals may disclose privileged information (without sanction) whilst a committee of privy counsellors established by a former prime minister to review the issues, cannot”.
He was of course referring to Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell’s respective diaries, which quoted such information. Sir John stated in his letter that documents
“vital to the public understanding of the inquiry's conclusions”
were being suppressed by Whitehall. That is ridiculous. If that is the approach taken, nothing will be learned and there is little purpose in the inquiry.
The inquiry protocols are symptomatic of a mindset that seems to assume that serving civil servants are the only proper guardians of the public interest. That leads me to a particular problem: if a Minister is asked to make a decision that affects him, his family, his property or even his constituency, he is required to withdraw—in the jargon, to recuse himself—from the decision and have somebody else make it. That does not say that the Minister is corrupt; it simply means that one can avoid the appearance of corruption and any chance of an improper decision, and it removes the risk of unconscious bias. It is a proper procedure. No such rule applies for civil servants.
This inquiry process is littered with people who were central to the very decisions the inquiry is investigating. Sir Jeremy Heywood was principal private secretary to Tony Blair for the entire period, from the 9/11 atrocity through to the first stage of the Gulf war, yet he is Whitehall’s gatekeeper for what can and cannot be published. Even the head of the inquiry secretariat, Margaret Aldred, was deputy head of the foreign and defence policy secretariat and therefore responsible for providing Ministers with advice on defence and policy matters on Iraq, and she was nominated to the inquiry by the Cabinet Secretary of the day.
All of that would matter less if the ridiculous restrictive protocols that Whitehall has imposed on the Chilcot inquiry were not there. Like Scott, Sir John Chilcot should be allowed to publish what he thinks is in the public interest, and not what Whitehall thinks is acceptable.
Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill
Debate between David Davis and Paul Flynn(11 years, 2 months ago)
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Mr Davis
The hon. Gentleman invites me to commit political suicide by confessing that I have used 38 Degrees in some of my campaigns. Sometimes I am for, and sometimes I am against. The organisation is part of the modern mechanism, and it is not the only one. It was, after all, based on similar organisations in America and Australia. That is the way politics is going and, frankly, my constituents should judge me on whether I voted for the proposed Syrian war. They should judge me on whether I voted for tuition fees and on how I voted on this, that or the other measure.
If I may, I shall disagree with the author of new clause 4, my hon. Friend the Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross, on one point. He said that the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr Skinner) was wrong to claim that it was an attempt to protect the Liberal party from the National Union of Students, but I was told by a member of the Liberal party that that is exactly what it was intended for. The raw truth is that, in our trade, we should be willing to stand by our principles and our aims, and by what we actually do. We should live or die by that, in political terms.
I want to make one more point, and I shall make it directly to the Minister on the Front Bench. As I have said, this section of the Bill deals with a constitutional matter and goes to the heart of free speech in our society. Undertakings have been given by those on the Front Bench—entirely in good faith, I imagine. The Deputy Leader of the House of Commons, my right hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) has been teased about tabling a manuscript amendment, because that is not the way to do it. We should do it properly, with proper legal advice and taking a wide range of contributions from the very people who will be affected. What the Government should have done before the Bill was presented to the House should be done now. If it is not done now, and if what is presented on Report is unacceptable, it will probably still get through, although I shall vote against it.
Mr Davis
I am on almost my last line, so I hope that the hon. Gentleman will forgive me if I do not.
The Bill would probably still get through in those circumstances, but it is probable that the House of Lords, whose primary function is to act as a defender of our constitutional rights, would strip out the whole central section of the Bill. That is what it ought to do, and that is what it will do if the Government do not get the next stage right.