Iraq Inquiry

Debate between Jeremy Corbyn and Elfyn Llwyd

Thursday 29th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

It is always a great pleasure to follow the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve), but it is also a challenge, because I believe that he has one of the finest analytical minds in this place.

Twelve years ago, the UK went into what I believe to have been an unlawful war against Iraq. That happened against the background of the protestations of thousands of members of the public and dozens of Members of Parliament, and on the basis of legal advice that Parliament was not allowed to see.

The impact of the war can be measured in bodies. Between March 2003 and May 2011, when UK operations ended, 179 UK armed forces personnel lost their lives in Iraq. Of those, 136 died in combat. As was mentioned by the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), whom I congratulate on leading the call for this debate, the Iraq Body Count project estimates that between 134,000 and 151,000 civilians have been killed as a result of violence in Iraq since March 2003. The number of violent deaths, including combatants, stands at 206,000 and is still growing. The website reports that only yesterday, 26 people were killed in Iraq. That is because Iraq was not left in anything like a stable condition when the UK and US armed forces pulled out in 2011.

In March 2005, I visited Iraq and travelled to Basra and Baghdad. It was plain to see then, as it is now, that little preparation had been put into planning for peace after the war ended. It is a distressing place to visit. We found open sewers, a lack of any infrastructure and badly underfunded social services, if any. The thinking in Washington, after all, was that it would take only weeks to get rid of Saddam. A former White House adviser, Kenneth Adelman, said that

“demolishing Hussein’s military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk.”

Instead, Iraq is a troubled, crippled state. How wrong the establishment was.

Six years ago, the inquiry was set up with the express aim of finding out why such a colossal mistake as this war was allowed to be made. At the launch of the inquiry, its chairman, Sir John Chilcot, said that the inquiry would be

“considering the UK’s involvement in Iraq, including the way decisions were made and actions taken, to establish…what happened and to identify the lessons that can be learned. Those lessons will help ensure that, if we face similar situations in future, the government of the day is best equipped to respond to those situations in the most effective manner in the best interests of the country.”

The scale of the inquiry was significant. Those of us who had opposed the war from the beginning had some hope that at last we would hear answers to the questions that we had posed since 2002.

How disappointing it is for me to stand here today, four years since the inquiry concluded taking evidence, with the knowledge that those answers are no closer to being published. Indeed, if the reports are to be believed, the conclusions are yet to be written. Those criticised by the report have, of course, been given the right of reply by means of the Maxwellisation principle, which we have just discussed.

After all is said and done, the Chilcot inquiry finished taking evidence in early 2011—I believe that the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) was the last to give evidence—and the expectation was that the findings would be published in the autumn of that year. Prevarication followed each delay and in November 2013 the inquiry said that it had reached an impasse over the release of crucial documents, including transcripts of the conversations between Mr Blair and Mr Bush. In May 2014, the inquiry announced that those transcripts would have to be published in a redacted form. Now, in January 2015, we learn that the findings of the inquiry will not be published until after the election, with no guarantee of when they will be published. It is becoming a farce—a very expensive farce—and an affront to democracy.

I have had grave misgivings from the very beginning about the independence of the Chilcot inquiry. I believe that it may well have been flawed and even compromised from the beginning. I have a particular interest in the transcripts of the conversations between our former Prime Minister and the then American President.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

The right hon. Gentleman points to what I suspect will be a grave disappointment when the Chilcot report finally comes out. Would he then favour a totally independent judicial inquiry, so that we get to the bottom of this? I, for one, will not leave this subject, and I am sure that he will not either.

[Mr Llwyd]

The hon. Gentleman is right. He and I agree, as I believe does the right hon. Member for Blackburn, that it should have been a judge-led inquiry. It might have had two lay assessors, but it definitely should have had a counsel to the inquiry, who would have directed the line of questioning forensically and would not have been batted away by the simple answers that were given, often in artistic and heroic terms, by some individuals, the right hon. Member for Blackburn excepted.

The inquiry did not go into any real depth. Being a Privy Counsellor does not make one a forensic analyst. I am a Privy Counsellor and I happen to be a lawyer, so I am able to ask the odd question, but the fact that someone is a Privy Counsellor does not take them any further on from Joe Public on the Clapham omnibus. It was quite ridiculous. Those are some of my misgivings.

As I said, I have a particular interest in the transcripts of conversations between the former Prime Minister and the former American President. In 2008, confidential documents were dispatched to my office from an unknown source. The documents showed that discussions had been held between the leaders of the two countries in 2001 and 2002 relating to removing Saddam using military force. Mr Blair had committed us to war even then, before seeing any proof of weapons of mass destruction.

My colleague, Adam Price, and I were visited by two very senior Metropolitan police officers—I believe they were from SO13—and questioned about the documents. The fact that they visited us made me believe that the documents were genuine. They were marked “Top Secret”. I believe that one was an American transcript and the other a British transcript. To this day, I have no knowledge of where they came from. I thought that the proper course of action was to say to the police, “I do know where the documents are, but I am not going to make them public until we have an inquiry. When that inquiry is set up, I shall take them to the inquiry personally so that it can look at them.”

I therefore decided to hand the documents over to the Chilcot inquiry when it was set up. I have doubts that they ever saw the light of day, but I do not know what has happened. After submitting the documents, nine months went by before I received any response. When one came, it simply informed me that I would not be called to give evidence. That is fine, but I have since found out that the way in which the gatekeeper to the inquiry, Ms Margaret Aldred—the hon. Member for Bradford West (George Galloway) referred to her a few moments ago—was appointed as the inquiry’s secretary did not follow the procedures in the civil service code. The Cabinet Office refuses to disclose any paper trail relating to that appointment, if indeed there is one. Ms Aldred was appointed on the nod by Sir John Chilcot —the same Sir John Chilcot, by the way, who criticised Tony Blair’s Government as a “sofa Government”. A good example of sofa government is when someone rings their pal to say, “Come and be a secretary to my inquiry.”

Margaret Aldred’s appointment showed a glaring conflict of interest, since she had regularly chaired the Iraq senior officials group, which co-ordinated across Government. Ms Aldred met US officials in October 2008 to discuss Iraq, and she even flew to Washington for discussions with her counterparts in the three weeks before the inquiry was announced. It was Ms Aldred’s section of the Cabinet Office that drew up the plans for regime change, and it was the Cabinet Office—the Joint Intelligence Committee and its staff—that produced the so-called dodgy Iraq dossier.

What I would like to know is the following. Why has the inquiry stopped publishing documents on its website? It did so for the first year, then it stopped. What is the total number of individuals who have been granted a right to reply to the accusations against them, when were they contacted by the inquiry, and what time scale have they been given to respond? Why has the inquiry been allowed to be so cowed by the establishment?

I am afraid that those and many other questions have not yet been answered. I sincerely hope that they are in the near future, because otherwise it will be an affront to democracy, an insult to Parliament and, more importantly, a gross offence to people who have lost loved ones out in Iraq and to the people of Iraq themselves. Democracy demands that something is done urgently, otherwise this Parliament will be the laughing stock of the world.

Iraq War (10th Anniversary)

Debate between Jeremy Corbyn and Elfyn Llwyd

Thursday 13th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Llwyd]

I am very pleased to agree with the hon. Gentleman. He has made a good input into the record.

Between 2002 and 2003, my then Plaid Cymru colleagues Adam Price and Simon Thomas and my hon. Friend the Member for Arfon (Hywel Williams), along with our colleagues in the SNP, were unanimous in our opposition to the incursion into Iraq and, on 18 March 2003, we voted against the invasion. We did not believe then, and nor have we ever believed, that the dossiers produced by the then Government displayed any credible threat from Saddam Hussein’s regime. In the words of Mr Blair that I quoted a moment ago, the former Prime Minister said that he had let Parliament have the final say on whether we should go to war, but the motion on which Parliament voted asserted:

“That this House…recognises that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and”—

crucially—

“long range missiles, and its continuing non-compliance with Security Council Resolutions, pose a threat to international peace and security”.—[Official Report, 18 March 2003; Vol. 401, c. 760.]

The motion was flawed in several regards, so we were meant to vote on a flawed motion in any event, quite apart from the fact that the evidence did not stack up to create a credible or immediate threat from Saddam’s regime. Thus the basis on which Mr Blair led Parliament to decide was a false premise. The jury is still out on the extent to which Mr Blair and the Cabinet knew that the claims were counterfeit.

On the day after the House voted for the invasion, the Prime Minister said:

“We want to ensure that any post-conflict authority in Iraq is endorsed and authorised by a new United Nations resolution”.—[Official Report, 19 March 2003; Vol. 401, c. 932.]

There were of course those of us who argued even then that the Government were not acting under the endorsement of an existing UN Security Council resolution, because as Sir Jeremy Greenstock admitted, there was no automaticity in resolution 1441 and our incursion into Iraq was therefore illegal under international law.

On 24 November 2004, an impeachment motion was tabled in the name of myself, the hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier), Douglas Hogg QC and the First Minister of Scotland. The motion had been supported, in writing or otherwise, by 24 Members of this House, but it was never called for debate. However, the Impeach Blair campaign had the support of the Stop the War Coalition, the Green party, Frederick Forsyth, Terry Jones, Brian Eno, the late Harold Pinter, the late Corin Redgrave, the late Jimmy Reid and, last but by no means least, the late—alas—Iain Banks.

With hindsight, and following debates on this topic, that one sentence of Mr Blair’s seems almost to override all else: he had decided that “we should be in”. He had made that decision without a second UN resolution, when most of the world was against the incursion. He had decided that the UK would lend its support to President Bush’s war on terror, whatever the cost. Let us be realistic; Bush had the might to do this in short order in any event. He wanted a cloak of legitimacy, and that is how he lured Tony Blair in to support him—and at what a cost it has proven to be.

Today, Iraq is the state fifth most at risk of terrorism in the world, and the eighth most corrupt. It is a country marred by car bombs and corruption. Under the Shi’a Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, power is divided along ethnic lines. Economically and physically, the country has been all but destroyed. In a poll published in September 2011, 42% of Iraqis said that they were worse off as a result of the invasion, compared with only 30% who thought themselves in some way better off.

The war has arguably resulted in the other members of the so-called axis of evil, Iran and North Korea, obtaining nuclear weapons, and the risk of terrorism at home has definitely increased. We have heard quotes from Eliza Manningham-Buller and others on that subject. There is no basis for claiming that al-Qaeda had a real presence in Iraq before 2003, but the war itself has established one. The human cost has also been devastating. Between March 2003 and the end of UK operations in May 2011, 179 UK armed forces personnel died as a consequence of operations in Iraq. Of those, 136 were killed in combat. I join other Members across the House in paying tribute to them. Whatever foreign policy decisions are arrived at in this place, they always do their best and carry out their duties bravely. I respect them for that. The question of whether the war was lawful or otherwise is our problem.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I accept everything that the right hon. Gentleman is saying, but does he not agree that there also needs to be some reflection on the treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, and on the many atrocities that were perpetrated on ordinary Iraqi people by occupying troops in that country?

[Mr Llwyd]

Absolutely; the hon. Gentleman is quite right. He also voted against the war and took part in the debates at the time. We have not even touched on that important subject in today’s debate, but I hope that, if he catches the Deputy Speaker’s eye, he will develop that theme. It is vital that it should be brought into the debate.

According to the Iraq Body Count project, an unofficial survey of Iraqi civilian casualties, between 113,000 and 123,000 civilians have died as a result of violence in Iraq since March 2003. According to the same source, 883 civilians died in May 2013—the highest number of civilian deaths in any month since April 2008. That is the ugly legacy of this war.

Let me tell the House that it gives me no satisfaction whatever to stand here today and say that we who voted against the motion were proved right. The damage to Iraq, has, as they say, already been done. However, many unanswered questions remain about our descent into war in the spring of 2003. I want to quote from the words spoken by the then Member for Blaenau Gwent, Llew Smith, who said:

“We…need to know whether Ministers simply proved to be very bad judges of geopolitics, stubbornly refusing to listen to the millions who marched against the war…or—worse—deliberately distorted the evidence, cherry-picked the details that suited their case for invading Iraq, and pressed the Attorney-General to provide an opinion that endorsed a political decision already taken two years earlier to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam.”—[Official Report, 9 March 2004; Vol. 418, c. 1426.]

Personally, I have little doubt that the evidence was indeed distorted, as the decision to go to war had already been made months, if not years, before a motion was ever put before the House. I saw proof of this dating from 2002, and I will return to that point later if I may.

On 9 March 2004, I opened a debate calling for the advice of the Attorney-General on the legality of the war in Iraq to be published in full. I said during that debate that Treasury counsel would have received instructions when they were advising the Attorney-General, and that, had counsel been ill informed or misled in those instructions, the advice would have been flawed ab initio. I said that it was of the utmost importance to establish whether the instructions given by the Attorney-General contained reference to the now infamous 45-minute claim. Had these instructions contained such references and had counsel accepted them as valid, the whole basis of that advice would obviously have been flawed. I made it clear in the debate that the ministerial code holds no bar on publishing such advice. In fact, the code states:

“Holders of public office should be as open as possible about all the decisions and actions they take. They should give reasons for their decisions and restrict information only when the wider public interest clearly demands.”

I argued at the time and I argue now that it is in the wider public interest on going to war that disclosure should be made, for heaven’s sake. What is more, I set out the precedents for publishing the advice of the Attorney-General—including, for example, the Belfast riots and the Archer-Shee cases. I cited the opinions of five distinguished international lawyers who each had differing views about whether the war in Iraq had been legal, but who were unanimously in favour of publishing in full the advice of the Attorney-General. One of these, James Crawford, who was then—and still is, I believe—professor of international law at Cambridge, observed:

“If the war was conducted in private, there would be every case for hiding the advice. If it’s going to be fought with public funds, in public and expending the lives of members of the public, then it should be published”.

Another, Lord Archer, QC, said that the Attorney-General’s arguments constituted

“the most important legal opinion given in the last quarter of a century.”

To this day, however, that advice has remained unpublished.

Interestingly, that debate was tabled by us in Plaid Cymru and our friends in the Scottish National party. What I think was then a joint group of nine secured a vote of about 285, as I recall, so there clearly was some concern around, and I am pleased that we brought the matter to the fore.

As I have outlined before, in 2002 I was sent documents from an unknown source which put me in no doubt whatever that Mr Blair had been determined to go to war with Iraq from the very outset. The documents had with them a note saying that they were top secret documents, some British and others appearing to emanate from other intelligence sources—American, I believe. The documents showed me that as early as 2001-02, discussions were being held about toppling Saddam, in which mention was made of the term “regime change”—which we all know is unlawful in international law.

Soon after I received the memorandums, my then colleague, Adam Price, and I were visited by two senior police officers from a special section of the Metropolitan police. I did not have the documents in my personal possession at the time, so I was unable to surrender them to those police officers. When the Chilcot inquiry was established in 2009, however, I decided to hand over the documents. I searched for them, found them and handed them over to the inquiry. I took them down to Victoria street and handed them over to the secretary of the inquiry, Ms Margaret Aldred.

Several months went by without my receiving any response to my submission. Nine months later, following a number of unanswered letters, I was finally granted the courtesy of a reply. As a result of this treatment, I had my misgivings about the secretariat of the inquiry, which I set out in full during a Westminster Hall debate on the issue on 25 January 2011.

Suffice it to say here that I discovered that Ms Aldred, the gatekeeper for the inquiry, who had previously acted as the Cabinet’s deputy head of foreign and defence policy secretariat, was put forward for her new role, in which she would inquire into the actions taken in that same foreign and defence policy, by the Cabinet Secretary himself, Sir Gus O’Donnell. The potential conflict of interest was breathtaking. I discovered that in her previous role, Ms Aldred had regularly chaired the Iraq senior officials group. Let us not forget either that it was the Cabinet Office, for which Ms Aldred had worked previously, that drew up plans for regime change and that it was the Cabinet Office and the Joint Intelligence Committee and its staff that produced the “dodgy dossier”. Her hands were hardly clean for that particular job. Thanks to the detective work of Dr Chris Lamb and others, we further discovered that this appointment had not followed the procedures set out in the civil service code and was neither open nor indeed transparent. I countered that her appointment to this role obviously made it questionable whether the inquiry was a Cabinet Office subsidiary. In the continued absence of the Chilcot inquiry’s report into the war, I am unable to comment further on this issue. But let us not hold our breath, folks.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Absolutely. On something so fundamental as the deployment of armed forces, a free vote is the right thing to do. Many have said it is easy to send other people’s sons and daughters off to die and then hide behind a veneer of party loyalty, but the issue is much bigger than that.

[Mr Llwyd]

May I suggest a further prerequisite, which is that some machinery should be adopted whereby we are all made privy to a certain amount of the delicate intelligence information that has led the Government to their conclusion? Otherwise, we could be duped into acting the same way again.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

The right hon. Gentleman is correct. The legal advice given to the Cabinet is still the subject of debate. The Chilcot report is yet to come out—I understand it is heading for 1 million words, leaving “War and Peace” well behind, and goodness knows how many volumes there will be when it is finally produced. The information we are given is very important if we are to make an informed decision. It is, however, simply not credible to say that we were unaware of the dubiety of the information we were given. I came here at 8 o’clock on the day the dodgy dossier was published to pick up a copy and read it, and by a quarter past 8, I had realised it was a load of utter bunkum and that we had been dragged back to the House on false pretences. The same is true of Colin Powell’s address to the UN that September, when he claimed that chemical weapons were hidden in ice cream vans all over Iraq.

I received hundreds of messages, e-mails and so on from people who were involved in the anti-war movement, and I spoke at 200 anti-war meetings in this country and others before the decision was taken. Just think of the commitment of those people who went on the march in February 2003. Many of them were not of the left and many were not necessarily pacifists—anti-war as such—but they were convinced that we were being led by the nose into disaster. Frankly, the whole political establishment should have woken up and understood that, because the consequences were so huge for us and for the rest of the world.

I say all this not because I am any apologist for Saddam Hussein—I am not—and not because I do not recognise the abominable human rights abuses he committed; I do. But I remember that, in the 1980s, raising questions about arms sales to Iraq, human rights abuses in Iraq and the British relationship and trade with Iraq was a very unpopular thing to do in this place. There were not many people supporting that. Even after Malabar—as I said earlier—in 1988, we still participated in the Baghdad arms fair only a year later to continue that relationship. Of course the west did support Iraq against Iran. The consequences of all this are absolutely huge.

I just want to raise a couple of more general points as a lesson from this. What happened in 2001 was wrong, obviously; what happened at the twin towers and the killings was a disaster. Then we merrily invaded Afghanistan, the point at which the Stop the War coalition was founded. We proceeded to occupy the country very quickly and then found that it was not as simple as that. Here we are 12 years later; still in Afghanistan, still not controlling the country and still losing lives there. We denied international law by allowing the Americans to call people enemy combatants, not prisoners of war. Guantanamo Bay was set up. Extraordinary rendition took place. The Homeland Security Act was passed in the USA and a whole raft of anti-terror legislation was passed in this country. Civil rights of people all over the world were damaged by the decision to invade Afghanistan, and that was compounded later by the decision to invade Iraq.

Then we invaded Iraq, after the infamous George Bush speech in 2002 in which he talked about the axis of evil without any evidence whatever and tried to claim that Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were as one. They did have one thing in common, actually. There is some evidence that, at various points in their lives, each tried to kill the other. That was roughly the only thing they had in common.

The behaviour of the occupying forces in Iraq has been far from perfect. We have seen Abu Ghraib, Falluja, the bombing campaigns, the torture of individuals and the driving of hundreds of thousands of people into exile both as internal and as external refugees from Iraq. I have very sad memories of visiting a refugee camp on the borders of Iraq and Syria, where there were a few hundred poor benighted Palestinian people whose families had been driven out of Haifa in 1948. They had been though countries all through the Gulf states, ended up in Iraq and were driven out of Iraq into Syria. Goodness knows where those families are now. They have joined the steady stream of refugees across the region. We have to think for a moment about the Palestinians and so many others.

I conclude with this thought. We have to learn a lesson, and it is a harsh one. We are not a global power. We cannot afford to be a global power, and why would we want to be one? Have we been enhanced as a country by our activities since 2001 in Afghanistan or Iraq, or have we been diminished? Do we have a better image or a much worse image around the world? It is time for us to take stock. Do we have to be a nation with a predilection to go to war and to have a global reach for our armed forces? Or do we wish to become a force in the world that supports international law, human rights and recognises the limits of the environmental destruction of our planet? Do we need Governments or Prime Ministers who say, to use the words of Tony Blair, that this is a chance to remake the middle east? The best way of remaking the middle east is to recognise the injustices done by colonialism, occupation, wars and the treatment of people who are trying to live their own lives, and to try to promote peace. The legacy of this war is a disastrous one. The enmity between the west and the Muslim communities, the enmity that is played out on the streets of this country, is a result of that. It is time for us to learn some very harsh lessons and, above all, to put them into practice.

Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Debate between Jeremy Corbyn and Elfyn Llwyd

Wednesday 2nd November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Llwyd]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. I note from my own experience that such people are highly qualified for the work that they do. If two hours are spent with a solicitor who is well-versed in procedure, a lot of work can be done and people’s reputations can be saved. It is vital that we do everything we can to retain that provision. I am not doing any special pleading for lawyers. I appreciate that there should be paring back in some areas of legal aid, but this is a fundamental matter of access to justice and it is important that the Government listen.

It is worth noting Liberty’s point that attempting to introduce means-testing when an individual is in police custody is likely to be “unworkable” because it

“requires documentary verification of financial resources”,

which an individual in custody is clearly unlikely to have on his or her person. That would again result in inevitable delay and the wasting of resources.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

The right hon. Gentleman is making an excellent point. Is he aware of any representations on this matter from police sources? They must be worried that suspects will be held in police stations for an excessive time while documentation is sought and possibly not found. They will then be forced either to release the suspect or to take them to court without access to a lawyer, which a lot of police forces would not be willing to do.

[Mr Llwyd]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely correct. I will say a few words in a minute about the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, which is important in this regard. Clause 12 will run a coach and horses through it.

I do not believe that clause 12 is well thought through. What is worse, it undermines one of the core principles of our justice system: fair and equal access to justice for all citizens. I therefore cannot support it.

The Law Society’s head of legal aid, Richard Miller, has said:

“This is not only an assault on the rights of citizens, it is also a logistical nightmare to operate in practice.”

He has said that substantial hidden costs undoubtedly will follow and that it will be “simply unworkable”. Max Hill, the chair of the Criminal Bar Association, said that the Government were meddling with a “fundamental right”:

“To contemplate some sort of qualitative testing to decide when and if a member of the public should receive legal representation and advice…is deeply alarming.”

As I said, I will not speak at length, but I will say a word about miscarriages of justice. We know of a spate of miscarriages of justice that occurred in the ’70s and ’80s, and there was an official inquiry into several of them. The Birmingham Six were jailed for life in 1975 for pub bombings. The convictions were overturned in 1991 after evidence emerged of the police’s fabrication of confessions and suppression of evidence. The Guildford Four were convicted of a bombing in the same year. The conviction was secured on confessions that were obtained through coercion, violence and threats by the police. They were acquitted in 1989.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

The right hon. Gentleman is making a strong point. However, the Guildford Four were actually the first people to be arrested and convicted under the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act 1974, which meant that they were specifically denied access to anyone at the time of arrest. That was not the case with the Birmingham Six, who instead were abused in the police station.

[Mr Llwyd]

I stand corrected. I am pleased that the hon. Gentleman has corrected the record for me. However, my point still stands.

Stefan Kiszko wrongly served 16 years for rape and murder after being arrested in 1975. He confessed to the police after three days of questioning without a lawyer. That and several similar cases gave rise to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, which gave a detained person the protection of proper legal advice. It also, crucially, gave protection to the police, which is the point made by the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn). Clause 12 will undoubtedly drive a coach and horses through the 1984 Act and I believe that it should be resisted at all costs.