Evacuations from Afghanistan

Baroness Laing of Elderslie Excerpts

Thursday 26th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[James Cleverly]

I thank my hon. Friend for his question. He has communicated to me directly his passion about this issue. I can assure him that the Government take extremely seriously their responsibility to those who worked directly, but also indirectly, with us and for us.

As I said, the ACRS was formally launched in January this year. The scheme resettled up to 20,000 Afghans, including those whom we know to be at particularly high risk of persecution by the Taliban, such as the British Council staff whom my hon. Friend mentioned, as well as female Afghan politicians, female judges and others who, during our presence in Afghanistan, attempted to promote the values about which we feel strongly. I can assure my hon. Friend that we are working, across Government, with Lord Harrington, the Minister who specialises in the resettlement process, to ensure that we can move as quickly as possible, while also ensuring at all times that we create a system that is legally robust, is right, and prioritises the people who are at risk and to whom we owe a debt of honour.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

I call the shadow Minister.

[Catherine West (Hornsey and Wood Green) (Lab)]

The report of the Foreign Affairs Committee on the UK’s botched evacuation from Afghanistan is one of the most damning reports that I have ever read. At a time when the UK can be proud of our support for the Ukrainian mission, this report drags us back to a dark period when we turned our back on our allies. It details a disastrous tragedy of errors that fundamentally undermines the 20 years of progress that Britain and its allies helped to bring to the Afghan people.

When Kabul fell, political and senior leaders were all on holiday, despite repeated warnings from US intelligence agencies that the Taliban were in the ascendant. People who supported the allied mission or were especially vulnerable to the Taliban were left behind. Sensitive documents were abandoned in the embassy because the evacuation was rushed and under-rehearsed. There was no plan. Consular staff were withdrawn before replacements were ready to be deployed, which led to a crucial delay in processing cases. Visa schemes were led by three separate Government Departments, which utterly failed to co-ordinate, and—a year on—these problems endure, including the problem of the British Council staff. National security decisions were taken with potentially life-and-death consequences, with no clarity and with no record of which Ministers authorised what. As my hon. Friends the Members for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) and for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock) made clear at the time, the Government were asleep at the wheel at this moment of acute crisis, putting British lives at risk to clean up their mess.

The effects on the UK’s international standing are immensely damaging. Shaky senior leadership in Government not only had disastrous consequences in the short term, but has damaged the trust that others have in us in the long term. The lack of leadership and the repeated mistakes make a mockery of the notion of “global Britain”, betraying the good work of our armed services and diplomats and signalling a strategic incoherence at the heart of the Government’s foreign policy.

I will be blunt in asking two questions of the Minister. First, who has been held accountable for the clear failures in our handling of a situation in which incompetence was promoted and negligence rewarded? Secondly, will the Government get a grip and commit themselves to working with the international community to ensure that there is a coherent strategy to engage with Afghanistan in the medium to long term? In the light of impending famine in the country, we cannot afford to turn our back on the Afghan people forever. The Government must make amends for this sorry episode, and improve.

[James Cleverly]

In my opening comments, I made the point that the Government had reserved the Baron hotel. Apart from the United States, we were the only country in the world to have that physical presence at the airport. We had made arrangements at Dubai to have an airhead there to facilitate the evacuation and onward passage. The report from the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat), is an important document and we will pay it the attention it deserves and respond to it in the timescale requested of us by his Committee.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I call the Chairman of the Select Committee.

[Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con)]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron) for securing this urgent question. The points he makes about the British Council are absolutely valid, and the Minister, whose integrity is beyond question, has made the defence that his Department would expect of him. May I, however, raise just a few points?

First, the reason we reserved the hotel and others did not was that the French and Germans had pulled their people out months earlier, and they had done so because the Americans had signalled the withdrawal 18 months earlier—or, if you thought that Vice-President Biden would become President Biden, 14 years earlier. This was not a surprise. The lack of a plan was a surprise. The failure to be present was a surprise.

The failure of integrity when discussing matters with the Select Committee was a huge surprise. For us, as representatives of the British people, the real surprise—the real tragedy—is not just the hundreds of lives left behind in Afghanistan and the people abandoned in neighbouring countries but the undermining of the security of this country and the defence of our people, which has come about through an erosion of trust. Our enemies do not fear us and allies do not trust us. That has been tested in Ukraine, and we are all paying for it in every gas bill and every food shop. That is the price of the erosion of trust, and that is why we need a fundamental rethink not just of our foreign policy but of how our country engages with the world. Those who, like our most senior diplomat, are the voice of our country in the world, need to be voices that we can trust, but I am afraid that the Committee that I am privileged to chair does not.