Detained British Nationals Abroad

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Julian Lewis

Thursday 5th December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

I was going to say it, but as the hon. Member has raised it, I will do so now: we must not forget those hostages. What has happened to them is appalling, and he is right to raise it. Families across the UK listening to this debate will be appreciative of that.

A critical issue is the lack of a clear and proactive response strategy from the FCDO. There is no centralised approach for dealing with arbitrary detention cases, and that absence of structure adds to the stress for families, who feel unsupported and often ignored.

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

My right hon. Friend’s point is surely the critical one. Traditionally, the best and the brightest went into the diplomatic service and the Foreign Office intake, but even the brightest people need to specialise if they are to do a good job. Given that so many people are being detained in this way, surely the answer is to have a small dedicated unit within the Foreign Office that can handle the co-ordination of a systematic response every time someone is arbitrarily detained abroad.

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

I agree with my right hon. Friend. The point I am really getting at is that the days of the shifting jobs of generalists are long gone, I am afraid. I have often made the case, having run a Department, that the civil service and the Foreign Office need to catch up with what is happening outside. We need specialists in place, and we need that to be considered an important job.

In cases where British nationals are detained abroad, the families of those detained have often found the UK Government reluctant to act to prevent torture or to seek accountability where it occurs. If they are acting, they do not relay that to the families, so the families are left believing that nothing has happened, even if something has happened. For instance, when Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian dual citizen, was detained in Iran, her family first raised allegations of torture with the FCDO in 2017. It was not until May 2021—following outside pressure from Redress and others, by way of a submission to the FCDO of a medical report as evidence of her severe suffering—that the then Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, an old colleague of ours, acknowledged that she had been a victim of torture. Why did it take so long? It seems to me that this is pointless.

In the case of Jagtar Singh Johal, a British national tortured by police in India, FCDO officials would only raise the allegations of torture with the Indian authorities once they had sought consent from him directly, which took two to three months. I know that the hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire (Douglas McAllister) intends to speak about that case, but I just raise it generally as an illustration of what is going wrong.

Families of detainees face significant challenges in their engagement with the FCDO. Many report vague or inconsistent communication, which breeds mistrust. There is a critical need for a designated point of contact for families, as happens in the States, to ensure transparency and accountability in the handling of cases. Without that, families feel abandoned by their own Government while simultaneously battling the detaining state with few tools.

The FCDO also lacks a consistent policy on the treatment of dual nationals, often citing states’ refusal to recognise dual nationality as a barrier to action. That is a practical challenge, not a legal one, and it should not stop UK officials from attempting to access prisons or courts. When the Government fail to act, it risks sending a damaging message to dual nationals that they are less British and, by extension, less deserving of protection.

For instance, that reasoning was used very much in the case of Jimmy Lai, who is a British citizen. China decided, because it does not recognise dual nationality, to call him a dual national. He has never been a dual national, and I have lost count of the number of times that I have literally shouted at Government Ministers in Westminster Hall that he is not a dual national. When they got up to speak, they just said that he is a dual national. He has never been a dual national. He is a proud British citizen. He got into Hong Kong long before he was of an age to have a nationality in that sense or a passport. He has been a British national non-stop since then.

Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Julian Lewis

2nd reading
Tuesday 24th May 2022 Commons Chamber

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

I would be inclined to agree with many of the speeches made from the Opposition Benches, not least the eloquent one from the hon. Member for Rochdale (Tony Lloyd), if it were not for one salient fact. As part of the peace superstructure, in 1998 the Northern Ireland (Sentences) Bill was passed. That Bill put an end to the argument that we must not treat terrorists on the same level as security forces, because it does that in one sense only, which is that everybody is treated equally before the law. It was often said at the time, “Security forces personnel could go to prison for life, but terrorists could not be sentenced to more than two years in jail no matter how many people they had killed.” I had a meeting with MPs from both sides of the divide in Northern Ireland, including Sinn Féin MPs, who pointed out to me that, as far as they knew, that applied to the security forces just as much as it applied to the IRA. And they were right: it does.

I think the Defence Committee was one of the first organisations, if not the first, to introduce the concept of a statute of limitation into the current debate. We did so in 2017 with our first report, but I had heard of the concept of the statute of limitation some 50 or 60 years ago in the context of Nazi war criminals who were escaping justice because a certain number of decades had elapsed since they had committed their crimes. As it happens, a few years before I was born, the vast majority of my family in Nazi-occupied Poland was murdered for nothing more than the crime of being Jewish. I felt then, as I am sure the victims’ families feel now, that it would be outrageous for the perpetrators to get off simply because a certain amount of time had elapsed. However, there was a difference then, in that legislation had not been passed—as it was felt necessary to pass it in this context in 1998 —to say that no matter how many people someone had killed, they could not be sentenced to more than two years in jail and they would not serve more than a derisory few months of that sentence. So the pass has already been sold on the question of getting justice for heinous crimes.

We then come to the question of those who say, “Well, it is not so much the length of the sentence that matters, but that we should have our day in court.” There is another problem here: all these years have elapsed and people have not had their day in court, because there has not been enough evidence adduced.

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

I tried to raise this point with the Leader of the Opposition and I pose it to anybody: what do people want? Do they want the knowledge of what happened or do they want the prosecution and the punishment? As my right hon. Friend said, the punishment is pretty much gone. The point of the prosecution is also gone, unless it is only about the knowledge—in which case, how do we go about getting the knowledge? That is clearly what this seems to be settling down to, if people are honest about it.

[Dr Lewis]

That is exactly the central point. There are perhaps two ways of getting the knowledge. One way is to go on as we have been in trying to investigate these things piecemeal, with everybody trying to hide everything to the maximum because they feel that they will be prosecuted. The other way is to bring in a truth recovery mechanism which, in return for the granting of immunity, maximises the possibility that the truth may come out.

[Dr Lewis]

That is precisely what the truth recovery process is meant to achieve.

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Dr Lewis]

I will one more time, but I would like to develop my argument, fascinating though these interventions are.

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

I apologise, but I want to develop this point. Is the Bill not, in fact, about changing and tightening the process, if knowledge is the key element, to make it happen in an interrogative manner—in which case, that would be the way forward?

Finance Bill

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Julian Lewis

Report stage & 3rd reading
Monday 24th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

I agree with the right hon. Gentleman. The point I am trying to make to my right hon. Friend the Financial Secretary and others on the Treasury Bench is a fairly gentle one: this is something that we can rectify, and we have the capacity to rectify it. We should think of what will happen if it goes much further. We should think of the loan charge and the huge human problems that were caused by that and the attempt by the Treasury to use retrospective legislation to grab money back. Who got hammered in all that? Not the organisations that were doing these things, but the individuals who were led to believe they were in the right set-up. It is always going to be them who get hammered. I thought the purpose of Government was to protect the vulnerable and deal with those who are abusing them.

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

It really is enormously frustrating for those of us who, time and again, have made representations to Treasury Ministers on behalf of victims of the loan charge, only to be knocked back by ripostes relating to tax avoidance schemes, that now, when people who have suffered from the loan charge are urging colleagues on this side of the House and no doubt on the other side as well to take steps to ensure that people are not trapped in these schemes in the future, the Government do not want to give them that added layer of protection, so they seem to be wanting to hit them in both directions.

Telecommunications (Security) Bill

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Julian Lewis

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons & Carry-over motion & Carry-over motion: House of Commons & Money resolution & Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion & Programme motion: House of Commons & Ways and Means resolution & Ways and Means resolution: House of Commons
Monday 30th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

I have to say that I do not agree with the right hon. Gentleman on this. Although the Huawei cyber-security evaluation centre was installed, when I sat and listened to people from it making a presentation to us earlier in the year, it was almost as though we were watching people who were kind of squeezing their own genuine, real opinion, which would have been coming via GCHQ, about how the real threat was formed. Their arguments did not stand up, even in the face of people who were not every day working on security.

The truth is we need to be careful, and it should have been a tighter position from the word go. The very fact that the Government are bringing this measure forward now suggests that that was not the case. [Interruption.] Listen, I am critical of my own Government. I resigned from the damn thing at one point. I have to say that I therefore do believe it is possible for great Governments, like mine, to get things wrong.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

In defence of the Huawei cyber-security evaluation centre, its sixth annual report, from September this year, is absolutely devastating in its criticisms of Huawei’s failures to be secure or to make improvements when insecurities have been highlighted.

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

I agree completely. The point is that when we were talking about this earlier on, it was clear that that was, underneath it all, the centre’s real opinion, but it was kind of moving and modifying. It was also used in a political way, by the way, which I did not think was right. An opinion is either there or it is not; do not get people in to brief Back Benchers about what they should be thinking. I thought that was wrong.

We are absolutely in the right place at this point and the Bill goes a long way towards achieving that. However, we need to do some other things that could be in the Bill. For example, the Bill is about security but it does say on the front that it goes slightly wider than security: the Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, my hon. Friend the Member for Boston and Skegness (Matt Warman) signed the bit that says:

“In my view the provisions of the Telecommunications (Security) Bill are compatible with the Convention rights.”

That convention is the European convention on human rights. We need to ask ourselves whether that idea applies to many regimes—not just China—and companies that come from those regimes that may be guilty of human rights abuses.

I asked the Minister previously, in a private context, whether he would consider including in proposed new section 105Z8 of the Communications Act 2003, on designation notices, the inclusion of the ability, where it may arise, to do something in the area of genocide and the involvement of companies in that process. There is very strong evidence in a couple of cases—particularly in the Uyghur case—of the use of slave labour, which should result in those companies being outlawed. The Minister may argue that this Bill might not be the appropriate vehicle for that because it is specifically about security, but every Bill has on its face that we abide by human rights laws. I am not trying to widen the Bill’s scope; I am giving the Minister the opportunity to have that extra element as part of his possible designations. After all, we are dealing with countries and nations that have, particularly in China’s case, torn up much of the book on co-operation and diplomacy.

Let me raise a final point before I conclude. My hon. Friend the Member for The Wrekin (Mark Pritchard) has gone, but he mentioned Australia. One of our Five Eyes partners, Australia, had the temerity to ask for an inquiry into the covid outbreak. Since then, the Chinese have attempted, in essence, massively to beat up Australia in a very undiplomatic and aggressive manner. It started with abuse of the individuals who asked for an inquiry and then went further into abuse of the Government. Subsequently, it has gone on to sanctions: the Chinese has now broken WTO rules, with sanctions of more than 200% on Australian wine.

In the past couple of days, the Chinese have produced what I think is called a meme—which is a mocked-up instrument on the internet—that shows something about an Australian soldier trying to kill a child. This is appalling behaviour and I want my Government, at some point, to be very clear that such behaviour is simply not to be borne. Although we have said that we stand with China, the key thing about this sort of thing and our co-operation with our Five Eyes partners is to do more than stand with China: we should condemn behaviour like that that deliberately targets and demeans a democratic nation that goes by the rule of law and human rights, which is something that China does not do. I do hope that the Minister will pass on to his colleagues that no matter what we do with this Bill, we need to make sure that we stand up with our Five Eyes partners, now that we have the National Security and Investment Bill and are moving in that direction, and never allow any one of them to be isolated and picked off one at a time. I commend the Bill to the House.

Centenary of the Armistice

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Julian Lewis

Tuesday 6th November 2018 Commons Chamber

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

It is truly an honour to follow two such humane and comprehensive opening speeches.

Seventy-nine men from the village of Brockenhurst in the heart of the New Forest lost their lives in the great war—21 of them in the last year of that war alone—so it is hardly surprising that the village of Brockenhurst should have been early in the process of commemorating this particularly poignant centenary. Only last Saturday, I attended an outstanding commemoration concert that was held in the village. Back on Trafalgar Day, 21 October, the Tile Barn Poppy Pod village was dedicated to the memory of Enda Ryan, Hampshire County Council’s greatly respected outdoor facilities manager who recently died, far too young, from cancer. Each unit in the village commemorates a first world war battle, and service families can have respite breaks in the poppy pods at weekends, free of charge. The Tile Barn where they are sited was one of three New Zealand general hospitals set up in 1916, during the first world war, to care for the wounded. Thousands of New Zealanders passed through it, and the 93 who did not survive are buried in nearby St Nicholas’ church.

I am sure that in this debate we will hear many tales of poignant recollection of the sacrifices made in villages such as Brockenhurst up and down the country, so I wish to list briefly what I regard as nine necessary lessons from the first world war. First, we must not think that we can successfully predict when a war will break out. I have often quoted in the House Sir Maurice Hankey—I shall not quote him again today—who in 1931 reviewed all the previous great conflicts in which the nation had been involved. He pointed out that, far from having 10 years’ warning—which is how far ahead people were saying in 1931 that we ought to be able to predict a great conflict—in the run-up to world war one, we had had barely 10 days’ warning of that war.

The second necessary lesson is not to sign up to multiple bilateral alliances rather than a single multilateral alliance. In the terrible connected development of circumstances that led to the catastrophe of 1914, we saw how individual separate alliances triggered one country after another in a process of what I suppose one could call falling dominoes, which meant that we ended up with a global conflict out of something that started on a relatively small scale. That is what explains the success of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation—the certain knowledge that any aggression against any one of its members will immediately trigger defence of that member by all the rest. I do not wish to be controversial in this debate of all debates, but that is why we have to be careful about other organisations, including the European Union, issuing security guarantees willy-nilly here and there, because we do not wish once again to get into a cross-cutting system of obligations and alliances that can lead to a chain reaction such as happened so disastrously in 1914.

The third lesson is this. Do not think that humanitarian restrictions on methods of warfare at the outbreak of a conflict will last very long. The idea, before the great war, that civilians would be deliberately targeted by the fighting services would probably have been scornfully rejected, yet as early as December 1914 we had the bombardment by the German navy of the seaside towns of Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby, when 137 people were killed in their own homes and 455 injured. That was followed by the Zeppelin airship raids, and the more lethal but less scary Gotha bomber raids—and who can forget that, in 1915, we saw the barbaric initiation of poison gas warfare?

The fourth lesson is, do not imagine that individual valour can overcome the mechanisation of warfare. We had the lethal combination of the machine gun and the barbed wire emplacements. Those defences could not be breached by hurling wave after wave of human bodies against them.

The fifth lesson is, do not repeat the failed methods of warfare time and again. My hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) said that the troops were well led in 1918. Well, they were, at the tail end of the war; it is just a great pity that they were not a lot earlier, because time and again it was shown beyond doubt that attrition did not work, and time and again—at the Somme and Passchendaele most outstandingly—it was tried long beyond the point where failure was an absolute certainty.

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I am listening with great interest to my right hon. Friend and I recognise what he is saying about that issue. There is another feature, which is often not well reported; I think Keegan brought it out in his book on the first world war. The fact that communications had not advanced at the speed with which munitions had, meant that often news of what was actually happening on the front took nearly half a day to arrive back at divisional headquarters, so nothing could be changed. It is a really important issue. We tend to condemn the commanders, but we forget sometimes that they had no idea, quite often, what was happening for hours, let alone minutes.

[Dr Lewis]

I hesitate to disagree with my right hon. Friend, particularly because of his own gallant service and that of previous generations in his family, but I would refer to accounts at the time, such as that of such a considerable figure as Sholto Douglas, later Lord Douglas of Kirtleside, who became one of the most senior RAF officers in its history, who was flying over the battlefield of Passchendaele, and who observed in his memoirs, with all that retrospective knowledge, that it was still inconceivable that the troops were sent forward time and again into a sea of mud, when it was absolutely clear that the attack had failed and had no prospect of success. I know there is a revisionist view of history that says the lessons of the Somme and Passchendaele were needed so they could get it right for the 100 days campaign at the end of 1918, but frankly, with the greatest of respect, I do not buy it.

The sixth lesson is, do not underestimate the value of surprise. The decisive allied breakthrough on 8 August 1918, the so-called “black day of the German army”, depended crucially on the strictest operational secrecy and dominance of the airspace over the battlefield, just as the Normandy landings did a quarter of a century later.

The seventh lesson is, do not forget—we have heard a bit of this today—why the war was fought in the first place. The war was fought because Prussian militarism and sense of entitlement to invade, overrun and occupy Prussia’s neighbours proved to be something that could be stopped only by force. Again, there are revisionists who say it would have been better if we had just let Germany get on with it and done nothing about it. I would just briefly quote the former Cambridge professor of French history, Professor Robert Tombs, who wrote recently in The Daily Telegraph that

“democracy and liberal government would have faced a bleak future. Authoritarian regimes would have been in the driving seat.”

He concluded:

“If tomorrow the Russian army marched through Poland and we were faced with the prospect of hostile aircraft based just across the Channel, would we react any differently? Let us hope we never face such a choice as our great-grandparents did.”

The eighth lesson is, do not settle for anything less than unconditional surrender in a conflict of this sort. Germany did not accept that she had been fully and fairly beaten in the field. The myth of the “stab in the back” gave fuel to Hitler’s subsequent evil campaign to say that Germany had not been defeated but betrayed.

The final lesson speaks for itself and requires no elaboration because we have heard it time and again in the present day in this House: do not stint in peacetime on investment in our armed forces—or we will pay a cost thousands of times greater when we fight a war that we might otherwise have deterred and completely avoided.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Julian Lewis

Monday 1st February 2016 Commons Chamber

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

Will Department for Work and Pensions Ministers hold discussions quite urgently with civil service and Treasury Ministers about the Conservative manifesto commitment to cap very large redundancy payments? Are they aware of serious concerns that, by including early retirement awards in the capping scheme, we may penalise long-serving but low-paid public employees by a measure rightly intended to limit undeserved golden goodbyes to the very highly paid?

[Mr Duncan Smith]

As my hon. Friend knows, that is really a matter for the Treasury, but I am very happy to undertake such discussions. If he would like to add his extra information on this, I would be very happy to take it.

Universal Credit

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Julian Lewis

Tuesday 25th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I am sorry that the right hon. Lady takes that view. She may not know the genesis of the statement, so perhaps I can explain it to her. Labour Front Benchers asked for an urgent question today, and I gather that it was negotiated between the various authorities that there would be a statement, not a UQ, because there were to be some very important statements today. The Speaker made that decision, which is quite correct. The reason I am here today is that I was originally asked to be here by the Opposition.

In answer to the right hon. Lady’s question, I fully respect the NAO and we listen carefully to what it has to say. She knows that she will have its team before her when she undertakes the inquiry process. I cannot second-guess what is in tomorrow’s report, but my general belief and hope is that it will welcome this as being the right direction, the right process and the right prioritisation of safe delivery that makes sure that we do not waste money. In cost terms, as I said, we will be spending less, at £1.8 billion, than we were originally set to spend.

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

Many people are concerned about both welfare tourism and benefit fraud. Will my right hon. Friend explain how they might be diminished as a result of the new system?