Europe, Human Rights and Keeping People Safe at Home and Abroad

Gerald Howarth Excerpts

Tuesday 24th May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

My hon. Friend tests me on the exact number. I think that a dozen or more new posts have been opened, but I will write to him with the exact figure. The important point is that we have opened new posts in secondary cities in China—when we talk about secondary cities in China, we mean those with populations of between 5 million and 10 million—and India, as well as reopening posts in countries in Latin America from which we had withdrawn.

[Sir Gerald Howarth (Aldershot) (Con)]

The Secretary of State mentioned our commitment to 2% of GDP on defence spending. Will he confirm that had we not transferred £820 million from the pensions budget in another Department, and funds from other Departments, Britain would have fallen below that 2% figure? By that sleight of hand, we have committed to the 2%, but we have not added a single penny to the defence budget, when, as my right hon. Friend said, we face a very dangerous world.

[Mr Hammond]

My hon. Friend and I were Defence Ministers in a past life, and there is no sleight of hand. The 2% NATO target is based on NATO definitions, according to which Britain will spend 2% of its GDP on defence. As I am sure he has already found from talking to people in the defence community, the important thing is not the amount spent today, but the long-term commitment to maintain defence spending at 2% of our GDP so that our defence spending rises in line with our prosperity as a nation. That is the right thing for us to do.

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[Mr Hammond]

I am just going to make a little progress, if my hon. Friend will allow me, as he has had one bite of the cherry already.

While we step up the fight against Daesh and Islamist extremism, the old challenge of state-based aggression has not gone away. To our east, Russia’s disregard for international norms, its illegal annexation of Crimea and its continuing destabilisation of eastern Ukraine are echoes of an era that, frankly, most of us thought had passed with the fall of the Berlin wall. They represent a clear threat to the stability of the post-cold war European security order, and, more widely, to the rules-based international system on which an open, free-trading liberal democracy such as ours depends.

As well as violating the sovereign territory of another country and undermining the rules-based system, Russia’s actions in Ukraine have led to the loss of more than 9,000 lives and the displacement of up to 1 million people from their homes. Responsibility for this human misery lies squarely at the door of the Kremlin. It is a direct result of a deliberate policy that seeks to deny the right of independent former Soviet republics to determine their own economic and political destiny. This Government remain clear that Russia must be held to account for its actions. We will work through the EU to keep up the economic pressure with hard-hitting and carefully calibrated sanctions. Those sanctions must remain in place until such time as Russia delivers on the pledges it made at Minsk. In the meantime, we will continue to provide non-lethal support and training to the Ukrainian armed forces. Building on the British military units already rotating through Poland and the Baltic states, we will announce at the NATO summit in Warsaw in June further measures to reassure our eastern allies in the face of this continuing aggression.

At the same time, we will engage with Russia where it is clearly in our national interests to do so. Russia, along with Iran, is one of the two countries that have real influence on the Syrian regime.

As members of the ISSG, they have the principal responsibility for telling Assad that it is time to go. We will continue to work with Russia on Syria and at the UN and to collaborate with it on counter-terrorism, where British lives are potentially at risk, but it will not be business as usual. All nations must know that we cannot and will not look the other way while the rules-based system is repeatedly violated. We look forward to the time when Russia rejoins the community of nations as a partner in upholding international rules, but our eyes are wide open and we know that it might be a long time coming.

As we said in the 2010 strategic defence and security review and again in 2015, Britain’s national security is indivisible from its economic security. We cannot keep people safe if we do not have a strong economy, and vice versa. As we have continued to deal with the economic legacy we inherited—bringing down the deficit and restoring sustainable growth to our economy—we have also been strengthening our diplomatic muscle in emerging economies in order to grow our trade and support jobs here at home. And those efforts are paying off. The state visit by China’s President Xi last year generated £40 billion of commercial deals, helping to create more than 5,000 permanent jobs in this country and more than 20,000 construction-phase jobs. During Prime Minister Modi’s visit in November, UK and Indian businesses agreed deals worth £9 billion. Inward investment from India in 2014-15 created more than 7,000 jobs and safeguarded more than 1,500 others. Since the UK’s free trade deal with the Republic of Korea in 2011, the value of UK exports to Korea has more than doubled.

While we seek to grow our links with the world’s emerging economies, however, our trade and investment relationship with the EU will always be central to our economic success story. As the House knows, the Government’s clear view is that Britain’s continuing prosperity is best served by our remaining a leading member of a reformed EU. Our membership puts us, the No. 2 economic power in the EU, inside the world’s largest single market, with a seat at the decision-making table. It is a market with 500 million consumers and a quarter of the world’s GDP and a market that buys 44% of Britain’s exports.

There is a world of difference between being inside such a market, with tariff-free access as of right, and being outside it, scrabbling around for a deal; between making the rules of the market to protect our interests and being governed by rules designed for the benefit and advantage of others. Our membership safeguards the pound and the Bank of England, and with the deal that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister negotiated in February, our membership keeps us out of Schengen, exempts us from ever-closer union and limits EU migrants’ access to our welfare system. It is the best of both worlds.

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

The Foreign Secretary and I are good friends but we disagree on this matter. Will he confirm that under this much-vaunted reform deal that the Prime Minister has negotiated, which does not add up to a row of beans, if the UK were to introduce financial measures that we believed to be in the interests of the City of London but which the eurozone deemed to conflict with theirs, we would be obliged either to change our measures or to go to the European Court of Justice for arbitration—and we know that the Court always finds in favour of the acquis communautaire?

[Mr Hammond]

We do not know by any means that the ECJ always finds in favour of the Community. Indeed, we have done rather well when challenged in the ECJ. For example, when the European Central Bank disgracefully tried to prevent euro-denominated financial instruments from being cleared in the City of London, we went to the ECJ and won the case, with a clear declaration that the ECB’s proposal was illegal. So I simply do not accept the premise of my Friend’s question.

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

It is a pleasure to congratulate the hon. Member for Ogmore (Chris Elmore) on taking his seat, and to endorse the tribute he paid to his predecessor. Huw Irranca-Davies is living proof of the fact that one can be a genuinely nice guy and still succeed in politics, and we will miss him.

Members of Select Committees are as divided as any other groups on the question of membership of the European Union, and so it should go without saying that in my remarks on this subject today I am speaking solely for myself. My concern is that the fixation of the European Union on creating a single European defence and foreign policy may make future conflict more likely rather than less. So why has NATO proved to be the most successful military alliance in history? The answer is clear: it is the deterrent effect of United States membership. Taken together with article 5 of the NATO charter, according to which an attack on any member country will be considered an attack on them all, this means that any would-be aggressor must face the prospect of war with the world’s most powerful state, the United States, right from the outset. If Germany had faced that prospect in 1914, not 1917, or in 1939, not late 1941, who knows but that those wars might not have begun, and all that suffering might have been avoided?

In order reliably to deter, collective security must combine adequate power with the virtual certainty that it will be brought into action if triggered by an act of aggression. On both grounds, NATO succeeds, and the European Union fails, as a collective security organisation. Since the US does not belong to the EU, the latter can muster only a fraction of NATO’s deterrent military power. Nor can there be any certainty that the US will respond to an attack involving EU member states outside the north Atlantic alliance. By trying to create its own foreign policy and its own military forces—which on typical European levels of defence investment will remain modest indefinitely—the EU risks reverting to the uncertainties of the pre-NATO era. The NATO guarantee is a solemn commitment to be willing to start world war three on behalf of a member country facing attack or invasion. NATO membership must not be proffered lightly nor extended to countries on behalf of which article 5 of its charter is simply not credible. Where security is concerned, it is dangerous folly to give promises and guarantees that we are in no position to fulfil, and the EU needs to be particularly careful in pursuing a foreign policy that gives promises of that sort.

In terms of deterring an external threat, the EU adds nothing to the exemplary role discharged by NATO. As for the threat of EU members attacking each other, there is certainly no risk of their going to war once again with each other as long as they remain free, democratic and constitutional. That is because constitutional democracies do not attack one another; instead, wars break out between dictatorships and other dictatorships, or between dictatorships and democracies.

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

Is it not absurd to suggest that peace in Europe might be destabilised by the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU? The fact is that before we became a member in 1973, Europe had managed for 28 years not to go to war with itself.

[Dr Lewis]

Indeed, and my hon. Friend anticipates a point I was just about to make. Looking at the internal threat, one sees not the slightest chance of members of the EU going to war with each other as long as they remain democratic and constitutional, but if they lose that element of popular democracy in their constitutions, all bets are off.

We heard warnings today about the rise of the far right in some EU member countries. Why is the far right—the extreme anti-immigration right —on the rise? It is on the rise because people feel that they are being disfranchised to some extent and the fate of their country is being decided instead by people whom they did not elect to power and whom they cannot remove. By trying to build a supranational state in Europe in the absence of a democratic mandate, the EU runs the risk of sowing the seeds of precisely the sort of conflict it seeks to abolish.

I know that in this Chamber today more voices have been raised in favour of remain than of leave, but I am not disheartened because I know that all those people campaigning to leave are out there, at the grassroots level, ensuring that when independence day comes on 23 June, the right decision will be taken by the majority of the British people.

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

I am always reluctant to disagree with the Chairman of the Defence Committee, and on this occasion I could not agree with him more profoundly. I do agree that our defence and security policies must embody the values that they are established to defend. There is no trade-off to be made between security and the values and principles on which a free and open political society is based. On that, we can agree. I think we can agree too that only a defence policy governed by rules established in laws will retain integrity and credibility in the fluid and fickle world of international relations in which we are now mired.

I was disappointed that an opportunity was missed in the Queen’s Speech to provide clarity, particularly on the legal consequences of the Government’s new policy on the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, especially given that in September last year the Prime Minister announced that a UAV had been used for the targeted killing outside armed conflict of a British citizen who had been fighting for Daesh. Since then, the Joint Committee on Human Rights has issued a report calling on the Government to clarify the legal basis for using UAVs in that way. A rebuttal to the Joint Committee’s findings was rushed out by the hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat) and his colleague Sean Aughey, which criticised aspects of the legal analysis and accused the Committee of adopting “a blunt approach” to the application to drone—I hate that word; UAV—strikes abroad. Clearly opinion is divided, and I feel the opportunity was missed in the Queen’s Speech to disperse the fog of law in relation to our defence.

Equally, in the 2015 strategic defence and security review, the Government announced a £178 billion investment in arms and equipment, in part to compensate for the dire budget cuts imposed five years earlier, particularly their cutting of the RAF Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft.

Instead of going to an open contract to replace the Nimrod with a competitive tender, the Government agreed to purchase nine Poseidon P-8 aircraft from the US-based firm Boeing in a deal worth £2 billion. I felt that this was a clear snub to the UK aerospace industry, for which I know Government Members, like me, share a huge respect. The industry employs 80,000 people and contributes £9 billion annually to the UK economy.

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Mrs Moon]

I will certainly give way to someone who shares my love of the aeronautics industry.

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

I wholly support what the hon. Lady says about the British defence industry, but I was the Minister at the time involved in the decision on the Nimrod MRA4. It was £750 million over budget, nine years late and still not fit for purpose. I am afraid the project had to be scrapped, but we should have replaced it.

[Mrs Moon]

I totally disagree with the hon. Gentleman on that issue, but I want to move on to the P-8. The MOD has repeatedly evaded all my attempts to obtain information on the P-8 contract. How many UK jobs will be generated by that contract in either manufacturing or support? No answer. Will the P-8 be capable of carrying British torpedoes or sonar buoys? No answer. Standards of ministerial answers to parliamentary questions have deteriorated desperately, and Members of Parliament, constituents and UK business and industry have been left in the dark.

For too long the MOD has used commercial confidentiality to hide the true cost to UK industry and jobs of its single source contracting. The Single Source Regulations Office has revealed that the MOD’s use of non-competitive defence procurement represented 53% of the value of new contracts in 2014-15. Approximately £8.3 billion was spent on single source contracts, and this figure is set to rise. How many of those companies are non-UK? How many have included no offset work to UK companies? The House, the public and our defence industries deserve to know.

Finally, I have to raise a campaign I feel passionately about. Again, I am disappointed that it was not mentioned in the Queen’s Speech. The campaign calls for veterans and reservists to be included in the census. It is essential that we know how many veterans we have and where they are. How are we to put in place an effective response to the community covenant if we do not know how many veterans we have in each of our constituencies?

It is a great pity that the Government reneged on their promise to introduce a war powers Act.

I will work closely with my hon. Friend the Member for Ogmore (Chris Elmore) to make sure that Bridgend does not lose valuable jobs, particularly those in the Ford factory, where his constituents and mine work. Ford Bridgend won a bid against Romanian, Spanish and German factories to build the new Dragon engine in Wales. That is what Europe does for us.

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[Sir Gerald Howarth (Aldershot) (Con)]

The good news is that the Scottish Tories doubled their representation in the Scottish Parliament. The Tories are coming, so the SNP had better watch out—the only non-socialist party in Scotland is on the march.

Some have said that this Queen’s Speech is a bit thin. I personally take the view that it is much better that the Government limit their activities and do less but do it well, rather than trying to rush through a whole load of ill-thought-out measures. I particularly welcome the proposal to give local authorities the power to retain their business rates, and the Investigatory Powers Bill.

I also very much support what my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis) said about prisons. The hon. Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound) and I served as prison officers in Dartmoor for three days, as a consequence of which I changed my view. I used to be a “lock ’em up and throw away the key” man, but then I found that we were spending £25,000 per prisoner a year on just locking up people who learn nothing. That is wrong, and this Government are absolutely right to try to bring education into our prisons.

In the short time available to me I will concentrate on four issues: the proposal to speed up the adoption process, the introduction of further measures to prevent radicalisation, defence and, inevitably, Europe. I welcome the adoption measures in principle, and understand that social services are caught between a rock and a hard place. But I have myself witnessed Surrey County Council’s behaviour in respect of two young people in my constituency. The council had made up its mind to remove the children from a couple. Each was represented by a different law firm, whose narrow interest was alleged to be the individual client and not the couple. I was threatened with contempt proceedings for having had the temerity to intervene on behalf of my constituents, and the social worker wrote that for the parents to provide good care was not “good enough”. If half the energy expended by Surrey Council on removing those children from their parents had been invested in helping them, the outcome might have been better all round. I am encouraged by my conversation with the Minister for Children and Families earlier this afternoon. I think he understands the problem.

On radicalisation, the principal threat we face is not generic terrorism. We have to be honest about this; the threat is specifically Islamic fundamentalism. That is what threatens our country. Young people brought up in Britain and taught in our schools are nevertheless being indoctrinated by Islamic fundamentalists and persuaded to engage in acts of medieval barbarity, in the name of Islam, beyond the understanding of the British people. The principal onus to root out that evil must therefore rest on the Muslim community. I will wait to see what the Government produce in the way of legislation before making a final judgment. The right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) set out some of the challenges that the Government will face in defining extremism.

Earlier this year, the Government mooted a proposal that any group that met in an out-of-school setting for more than six hours a week should have to register with Ofsted. Although it is vital that the Government take action against those people who wish to do harm to our society, regulating groups such as Sunday schools is clearly absurd. It would place a huge administrative burden on such groups, would severely damage volunteering and would be a serious infringement of personal liberty and freedom of association. Furthermore, any such extremist groups simply would not register, or, given the arbitrary nature of a six-hour figure, would divide their teaching into two three-hour groups a week. This is unworkable and a danger to our freedoms.

On the wider issue, it would be perverse in the extreme if, in order to manage extremist Muslims who are bent on our destruction and whom we have allowed to settle in the country, the Government were to impose severe restrictions on those practising the state religion of Christianity, which espouses turning the other cheek and love for thy neighbour. I believe that Christian society here is under threat. It was reported in the paper today that only 52% of people regard themselves as Christian, and we are in danger of creating a vacuum that will be filled by others.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

I have never been able to document this, but I remember my father telling me—coming as we do from a Jewish background—that when Polish émigrés who settled here at the end of the second world war began, in certain enclaves, to bring some of the anti-Semitic traditions from their homeland of the past to our homeland of the present, the Labour Government of the day made a very firm statement about that. There was nothing discriminatory about focusing on that particular problem; we must focus on the problem where the totalitarian doctrine is being applied.

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

I am grateful, as ever, to my right hon. Friend.

I raised with the Foreign Secretary the issue of how the Government calculate defence expenditure, and I entirely accept that that expenditure fits with NATO guidelines. However, we have only met that 2% target by shifting money from other Departments into defence, which I do not think is the way to proceed. I hope that we will see a real increase in defence expenditure in the coming years, so that we can proceed with the Type 26 global combat ship—our new frigates—for which I had some responsibility in the Department. I welcome the renewal of the deterrent, as will my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), but let us get on with it.

On Europe, in their determination to frighten the public, the Government and their “remain” friends stand accused of talking down the British economy. If leaving would produce such dire outcomes, why on earth are we holding a referendum at all? Why did the Prime Minister readily acknowledge that Britain can survive outside the EU? What has changed? We prospered well enough in the glorious 1950s under the Macmillan Conservative Government—“you’ve never had it so good”—and people were able to move around the continent for work, as my father did in the mid-1950s, when he weekly commuted to Hamburg where he established the Johnson Wax company in Germany. These fears are being raised deliberately to frighten the British people. We should have confidence in our ability to exit the EU, and head for the sunlit uplands where we can prosper as an independent nation on our own.

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[Andy Burnham (Leigh) (Lab)]

This has been an excellent and informative debate, during which we have been treated to the marvellous maiden speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Ogmore (Chris Elmore). He told us that his constituents have set him the goal of being half as good as Huw. On today’s evidence, and given that he is already making the case for steelworkers who will lobby Parliament tomorrow, he will pass that test with flying colours. We wish him well.

A clear majority of speakers, particularly my hon. Friends the Members for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe), for Ilford South (Mike Gapes) and for York Central (Rachael Maskell), have made the case that Britain will be immeasurably stronger by remaining part of the European Union. Just as the economic case for leaving has crumbled under questioning in recent days, so today’s debate has put the security case for Brexit under intense scrutiny and found it to be illusory. A vote to leave is a vote for isolation, and that simply makes no sense whatsoever in a highly volatile and unpredictable world. Nobody put that case more powerfully than my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), the Foreign Secretary, who gave yet another tour de force in this House. [Hon. Members: “Shadow Foreign Secretary!”] I am sure everyone will agree that it is only a matter of time.

We agree with the Government that our membership of the EU strengthens our security at home and abroad, but we do not agree that the Bills in the Gracious Speech will make our society stronger or fairer. Indeed, they could do the opposite, undermine our standing in the world and expose us to greater risks from radicalisation.

Let me quote from the Gracious Speech:

“My Government will bring forward proposals for a British Bill of Rights.”

That was, in fact, from the 2015 Gracious Speech. This year’s said:

“Proposals will be brought forward for a British Bill of Rights.”

Is it not a little unfair on Her Majesty to ask her to keep reading out a cut-and-paste Queen’s Speech?

One can speculate why this long-promised Tory Bill of Rights has never materialised. Might it be because it springs from an impulse for political grandstanding, rather than a carefully thought-through response to the challenges of the modern world? I fear that the same can also be said of the counter-extremism Bill. In both cases it seems that the Government are opening Pandora’s box without fully knowing where they are going or what they are trying to achieve. In areas as sensitive as these, that is a dangerous thing to do.

Let me take each Bill in turn. A few weeks ago, the Home Secretary gave a speech in which she called for Britain to leave the European convention on human rights. What a terrible message that would send to the rest of the world, but what a boost for regimes that seek to deny human rights to their own citizens to claim that Britain is doing the same, as the former Attorney General, the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve), eloquently pointed out in his speech. Of course, the nuances of our debate would be lost on the other side of the world, and Britain’s moral authority on the world stage would be severely dented.

A few days ago, however, The Daily Telegraph reported that the Prime Minister did not support any change to the ECHR, so we have the Home Secretary saying one thing and the Prime Minister another. How can we possibly have confidence in what the Government are proposing when their position is so confused?

They have lost sight of a simple point, which might explain why they are so muddled on this matter: the Human Rights Act is a British Bill of Rights. These are the basic rights that Britain wrote and promoted around the world in the post-war period—rights that protect ordinary people from the unaccountable power of the state and vested interests.

Look at some of the examples of how those rights have helped people fight injustice. I think of the elderly couple, Mr and Mrs Driscoll, who had lived together as a married couple for 65 years but who were then put in separate care homes by a local authority. They used the Human Rights Act to be brought back together. I also think that if the Human Rights Act had been in place in 1989, the Hillsborough families would have had much more ability to challenge the cruel decision of the original inquest to impose a 3.15 cut-off time, which prevented them from finding out basic details about what happened to their loved ones.

One can only surmise that the Government’s purpose in legislating in this area would be to water down the rights in the Human Rights Act and to add more qualifications. I ask the Home Secretary: how is that going to build a stronger and fairer country? It will not do so, and that is why Labour will proudly defend its Human Rights Act and fight any attempt to weaken human rights laws in this country.

Similarly, I struggle to see how the proposed counter-extremism Bill will do anything other than undermine community cohesion. I would be the first to say that the Government are right to want to tackle extremism, and I support them in that aim. However, the question is not whether we do it, but how we do it. I am genuinely concerned that the Government are getting their approach drastically wrong. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) was at her best on this subject today. I say this not out of party politics nor a desire to score points, but because I am worried about the deep despondency caused by the existing legislation, as I hear in the Muslim community when I visit mosques and madrassahs. If the House legislates in haste once again, the damage could be profound.

At the weekend, the Home Secretary received a letter from police representatives, faith groups and civil society organisations expressing major concerns about the proposed Bill. She cannot just ignore this and plough on regardless. The Prevent duty to report extremist behaviour is creating a feeling that the Muslim community is unfairly targeted and monitored. It is building a climate of suspicion and distrust. In my view, if the Government legislate further and extend what is perceived to be an illiberal and discriminatory approach, far from tackling extremism, they will risk creating the conditions for it to flourish.

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

I understand the shadow Home Secretary’s concern, but the rest of the nation knows that the real threat we face is a specific one. As I said in my speech, for which he was not in the Chamber, the threat is specific: with Islamic fundamentalism, barbarity on a scale previously unimagined is being carried out in the name of Islam, and it is up to the Muslim community in Britain to address this problem in its midst.

[Andy Burnham]

The way to address the hon. Gentleman’s point is not to tar everybody with the same brush and throw suspicion on the whole community. That is the language we have heard from Conservative Members. We have heard the Prime Minister say that parts of the Muslim community are “quietly condoning” extremism. That does not win hearts and minds in the community, and we need 99.9% of people to work with the Government to find the very small number of people who may be at risk of radicalisation.

Rather than compounding the damage by legislating in haste, I urge Ministers to take a step back and to set up a cross-party review of how the statutory duty is working in practice. That would be much more beneficial than pushing on with further legislation.