Yemen

Debate between Lisa Cameron and George Kerevan

Wednesday 26th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[George Kerevan (East Lothian) (SNP)]

The hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) accused the SNP of grandstanding and of denying Saudi Arabia the right to self-defence. Our argument is rather that the Saudi intervention in Yemen is disproportionate; that is the key. Several legitimate and well-respected human rights organisations have used open source material to try to count the number of airstrikes in Yemen since March of last year, when the Saudi coalition began the bombing. There have been at least 8,600 airstrikes, and that is disproportionate. There are not enough targets for the Saudi coalition to go on bombing as they have done. One of the findings from that open source material is that at least one third of the airstrikes have resulted in civilian casualties. That is the issue.

[Dr Cameron]

Does my hon. Friend agree that funding what appears to be indiscriminate bombing is undermining the excellent work that the Department for International Development is doing in humanitarian aid?

[George Kerevan]

I would not only accept that, but go further and say that it is undermining the Saudi case for trying to create a stable Government and a stable political position in Yemen.

The hon. Member for Reigate (Crispin Blunt) introduced a new doctrine: the doctrine of intent. He said that we should look at the intent of the Saudis and, since they say they are doing good things and they want peace and security, we should consider that to be enough. Let us look at the intent of the Saudi Government. They have not signed up to the international convention on cluster weapons. If they do not want to use them, I would have expected them to sign up to it. In fact, as we all know, they have been using them—air-launched and ground-launched cluster weapons. I know that the Houthis on the other side are using them as well, but we are talking about a massive, western-funded, western-armed coalition versus a small group of rebels. That is disproportionate.

If we look at which cluster weapons have been found by human rights organisations across Yemen, we can see that they are not just the BL755 cluster weapons manufactured in Britain, but the CBU-105s, CBU-87s and CBU-58s manufactured in the United States. They have been found to have been used in at least five provinces in Yemen. Here is the thing: the American cluster weapons were sold to Saudi Arabia 20-odd years ago. I do not know how they got there or who used them, but it is surprising that all the types of cluster bomb weapons supplied to the Saudis about 20 years ago—in the 1980s and 1990s—have been found to have been used comprehensively and across the whole of Yemen. That deserves an investigation, which is what our amendment asks for.

The test of what Saudi Arabia is doing is not intent, but whether there is on balance a risk that humanitarian law has been broken. I put it to the House that there is ample evidence of that. How do we get the attention of the Saudi regime? That is at the core of the proposal in the SNP amendment, which has not been selected, to call for an immediate withdrawal of current sales of weapons to Saudi Arabia.

To respond to the hon. Members for South Ribble (Seema Kennedy) and for Fylde (Mark Menzies), our proposal is not to stop all arms sales in perpetuity. We are trying to get the attention of the Saudi regime, which cannot put its own ground troops into Yemen. The real secret is that the regime cannot trust to using its own ground troops—it keeps them at home to protect the regime, which has no democratic legitimacy—so it uses its air force, which has very close links to the royal family, in a consistently indiscriminate way.

Hon. Members have repeatedly mentioned the bombing of the funeral. It was the funeral of a leading Houthi Minister and a lot of Houthi Ministers were expected to be at it, so one suspects that it was not quite the accident that it has been made out to be. There have been repeated cases of civilians being killed in missile and bomb attacks in places where Houthi leaders were expected. My point is that calling for an investigation and for a halt to arms sales in the short term is a way of getting the attention of the Saudi regime to ensure a ceasefire and a permanent solution to this crisis.

Green Investment Bank

Debate between Lisa Cameron and George Kerevan

Thursday 29th October 2015 Westminster Hall

[George Kerevan]

Indeed. The success of the Green Investment Bank has been in creating partnerships and a model of development. We are going to lose that. It is certainly the case—hon. Members on both sides of the House have alluded to this—that the strength of the Green Investment Bank is its staff and the expertise they have built up. Is that safe in the private sector? If a major investment fund in the private sector is looking for staff with the expertise to fund its expansion and its next level of activity, it goes and buys the staff. It can buy them individually, but that is usually more difficult when it comes to investment projects, because investment staff work as teams, rely on one another and build up collective experience. So the investment fund goes and buys the bank or the bit of the bank it needs to move over to its infrastructure development. My worry is that once we take away the public involvement, no matter how experienced and successful the team that runs the Green Investment Bank is, it will simply be snaffled by someone else. That is why we have to, at least in the interim, let the model develop as it is.

I come back to the BIS Committee the other day. The Green Investment Bank was essentially set up to meet a degree of recognised market failure. If that market failure has not been cured in some generic sense, taking the Green Investment Bank out of public ownership, control and involvement means that we go back to where the market failure was. What was the market failure? I want to add a little to what the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness said. Infrastructure projects and energy projects are, in the main, highly expensive capital projects.

[Dr Lisa Cameron (East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow) (SNP)]

Given what my hon. Friend just said, does he share my concerns about the possible impact of this Government move on our ability to meet the sustainable development goals on climate change, which are universal and apply to the United Kingdom?

[George Kerevan]

I absolutely agree. Underlining the achievement of the climate change targets is a vast capital investment in major renewable energy projects. To date, the Green Investment Bank has invested in essentially small pilot projects, but the scale of overall investment needed to meet the climate change objectives is huge.

That brings us to the issue of how we fund major infrastructural investment. Single banks and single funds will not undertake all the risk, so most major investment projects are undertaken by a consortia of capital groups. They do not trust one another. It takes a long while to broker such consortia. That is the fundamental weakness in the market, and it has been exacerbated since 2008, when we had significant bank failure. That has made banks or funds worry about whether they will get their money back—they know what they are doing, but will the other partner really be in a strong position five years down the line?

If we want infrastructure development, energy development and capital investment, we need consortia. We need an honest broker to put the consortia together. That is where the market fails, and that is why many countries have put together some public body that is trusted by everybody, has seen the books and does not provide a full commercial guarantee if there is failure but takes an element of the risk. That is what brings everybody else to the table.

It is not a question of us wanting the Green Investment Bank to be a public body, risking public money. We want it to essentially be an honest broker. That has proven brilliantly successful in the past three years. What we are about to do is what fundamentally destroys the model of the Green Investment Bank: if we weaken the public guarantee behind it and the public involvement in it, it ceases to be an honest broker. It just becomes another player in a crowded field and eventually, because of its small size, it will be snaffled up by some hedge fund and that will be it. The team will go off to do something else.