May Adjournment

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Thursday 3rd May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Bob Stewart]

Mr Speaker, as ever, you put me properly in my box and, as ever, I take a spanking without any problem.

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

Too much information.

[Bob Stewart]

Indeed. I think this is one of those debates.

Let me get back to the main point, which is that it is a bad omen if young men and young women trying to be criminal law barristers are finding it very difficult. I am making this speech because earlier this week, I met a young barrister from my constituency who has had to leave the criminal Bar because she simply could not afford to live while working within the system. She was originally from the midlands, from a family of farmers, and she and her siblings were the first generation of the family to go to university. Her parents were totally supportive of her wish to be a barrister, a dream she told me she had had since she was 12 years old. She loved lawyer dramas on television, and her mother told her that her urge to be a lawyer had probably come from watching too much of the American law drama “Ally McNeal”, because she had a superb mobile phone.

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[Bob Stewart]

I think there will be a debate on these issues next Tuesday, and I might take part. I entirely agree with my honourable and very good Friend, and I thank him for raising that point.

My second topic is something that struck me as I passed by the television monitors this morning. If there is a terrorist incident in our wonderful building, we are told to “run, hide and tell”. I was slightly shocked by that, and I asked a policeman whether that is also the advice they are given. The police officer said, “Yes, but don’t worry, sir, that is the last thing we would do. We would not run, hide and tell.” If that is the way we are telling security personnel to conduct themselves, I am extremely concerned about what the implications might be if someone did not run, hide and tell, but instead ran towards the incident, put themselves in danger and was hurt. Does it mean that the Government might say, “Your advice and instructions were ‘run, hide and tell’ and you did exactly the reverse. Therefore we will not give you compensation”?

This issue concerns me a great deal. I do not believe for a moment that the people responsible for our security would do such a thing as “run, hide and tell”. I spoke with the Chair of the Defence Committee a few minutes ago, and he said that he wanted to comment on that point, so I will sit down.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, and I am frankly surprised that common-sense advice from the point of view of an untrained civilian should be extended—if indeed it is—to those who are professionally engaged in maintaining the security of this place and those who work in it. Of course we expect people to rise to the occasion when they are on duty, and we expect those who are not charged with being on duty to keep out of the way of those who are. How concerned is my hon. Friend at the prospect that people who work in the security field are beginning to think that they might pay some sort of financial penalty if they do what most of us would admire, and tackle the danger rather than hide from it?

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[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

I am most grateful to follow the speech of my distinguished colleague, my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh). I very much agree with him on a lot of areas, but I shall start with a point where I might pose a little challenge. I believe we wish, as a country, to be strong on defence. I absolutely agree with him on that and think that what my right hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Sir Michael Fallon) has said about a minimum of 2.5%—and possibly even more—is right. I am very proud that Stafford is host to three signals regiments and the tactical supply wing of the Royal Air Force. If we are to be a global Britain, punching above our weight by maintaining a proper diplomatic representation around the world, which is vital as we leave the European Union, and at the same time we are to ensure that our citizens have high-quality public services, be they in respect of law and order, health or social care, we cannot be an absolute low tax economy. The two things do not add up. If we look at the percentage of GDP that we spend on our public services and compare that with what happens in France, which has a similar global profile to the UK, we see that our figure is much, much less.

At this point I wish to raise the issue of our health service. I declare an interest, in that I am married to a doctor, and I am the father of a doctor and the brother of a doctor.

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

So where did it go wrong?

[Jeremy Lefroy]

My right hon. Friend may very well ask!

If we look at the World Health Organisation’s report on people’s perceptions of access to good quality healthcare in 2013, under a Conservative-led coalition Government, I am glad to say, we find that 82% of France’s population and 85% of Germany’s felt they had access to good quality healthcare, whereas in the UK the figure was 96%. For all its faults, and there are many, as I know personally from my constituency experience, our system is held in high regard and it provides almost everybody—96% is not 100%—with access to high-quality healthcare.

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

My hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) is one of the most decent and good-hearted Members in any part of this House. It is therefore a pleasure, as well as a privilege, to follow him in this short debate.

My hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) and I are acquaintances and friends probably going back longer in our political association with one another than either of us does with any other Member of the House. We began to work together politically in 1981 and, as he said in the somewhat reflective part of his contribution, the issue on which we were working was to counter the dangerous and widespread movement for one-sided nuclear disarmament that was in its heyday at that time at the height of the second phase of the cold war. He rightly paid tribute to the work of Lord Heseltine, as he now is, and others who fought and won that battle. They not only won the argument but won the election on the basis of the strength of the argument, because of the commitment of the British people never to leave this country wide open to aggression from undemocratic and, indeed, dictatorial states.

At the time when my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough and I were waging that political campaign, my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) was engaged in somewhat more dangerous activities, fighting to defend the integrity of the United Kingdom and the security of its citizens in Northern Ireland. Some time ago, he and my hon. Friend the Member for Filton and Bradley Stoke (Jack Lopresti) raised the question of the legal persecution of soldiers who had fought in Northern Ireland in an attempt to mount a successful security operation against enemies who were bound by no accepted rules, norms or laws of conflict. In that counter-terrorist campaign up to 40 years ago, they had to make sometimes life and death decisions in fractions of a second in a form of conflict for which, for the most part, they were entirely untrained. Now, up to 40 years later, as my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Beckenham and my hon. Friend the Member for Filton and Bradley Stoke have made clear, they find themselves in peril of being brought before the courts in relation to actions that have often been investigated over and over again without there being enough evidence available for any proper prosecution to be brought forward.

[Bob Stewart]

I thank my right hon. Friend and you, Mr Deputy Speaker—a colonel of the Royal Army Medical Corps, of course—for allowing me to intervene.

I was involved in fatality shootings in Northern Ireland in my time, but every single time there was a fatality, it was investigated. If it was considered right by the Royal Ulster Constabulary, it would send in an investigation team to check that we had acted legally. I tell fellow Members this: we were so constrained by the yellow card—the rules for opening fire—that we almost thought about it as we went to sleep. It weighed heavily on us in those milliseconds before we opened fire. So it is very hard on us, all these years later, to face the prospect of revisiting these incidents when they were properly investigated at the time and we were told that there was no case to answer.

[Dr Lewis]

Everything I have heard about the conduct of my hon. and gallant Friend, not only in Northern Ireland but in Bosnia and in other dangerous parts of the world, testifies to one single unanimous assessment: that he was an inspiration to the troops he led and that they would follow him anywhere. It is quite right that he has done so much in his time in this House to repay that admiration and to honour the trust that they rightly put in him. What concerns me is that we are not repaying the debt that we owe to servicemen, who in those days were very young who were put in an invidious position in a counter-terrorist environment in circumstances for which they had received no special training.

The Select Committee on Defence has looked into this matter in some depth, and we had an extensive debate on the subject on 25 January in Westminster Hall. I do not propose to rehearse the arguments made there. I just wish to remind the House of something that I have pledged constantly to keep reminding it of—that there will be no end to this process until the Government have the determination to bring in a statute of limitations for all terrorist-related incidents up to and including the date of the Belfast agreement. I have had many conversations with many people about this, including Sinn Féin MPs, who had their own concerns that also have some power and force to them. For them, there is the issue of many unresolved deaths for which inquests have not yet been held.

I believe that there is a basis for a comprehensive solution to that problem. People would be best able to get to the root of what happened to their loved ones if other people, on any side of this multifaceted and horrible conflict, could come forward to explain to the best of their ability what they remember of those circumstances so long ago, without fear of finding themselves in a state of self-incrimination. We have the example of what happened in South Africa and the lesson taught to us by Nelson Mandela.

In the course of the Defence Committee’s inquiry into these matters, we took evidence from eminent professors of law. They said that we could not have a statute of limitations that favours only one side in a conflict, because that could be interpreted as the state legislating for its own impunity, but they emphasised that if we were to combine a statute of limitations with what they call a “truth recovery process” for everybody, that could indeed be entirely legitimate in the face of any form of international legal regime.

The reason for my raising this issue yet again today is my concern about one particular point. The previous Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, my right hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (James Brokenshire), whom we all welcome back into the Cabinet in another capacity following his successful surgery, initiated a consultation exercise that is supposed to be going ahead. He specifically said that the option of introducing a statute of limitations on the basis I have described would be included in that consultation exercise. I do not expect the Deputy Leader of the House to be able to respond today, but I do expect him to take away my concern about the suggestions that that option may not now be included in the consultation when it eventually happens. That would be a retrograde step.

As we have seen with Brexit, we cannot always have our cake and eat it. Sometimes we have to decide whether we are going to have—in other words, keep—our cake or eat it, and we cannot put off the point of making that direct choice forever. If that is true of Brexit, it is also true of the ongoing problem of the vulnerability of our armed forces to one-sided prosecution. The Government need to grip this matter. They have an opportunity to, and I hope that they will.