Israel/Gaza

Lord Godson Excerpts

Tuesday 24th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Godson (Con)]

My Lords, these are dark times, and they are becoming darker still. We have heard many impressive contributions today which will shape for some time to come national and international understanding of these great issues at stake.

I take particular pleasure in paying tribute to the outstanding contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Stevens of Birmingham, with his courage in calling out the SWP and other entities on our streets that are disfiguring our national debate, and to the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, one of our pre-eminent Silks, for his outstanding exposition of the issues relating to proportionality and other matters of international law. I also pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Austin, and the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, for their contributions and to my right honourable friend the Prime Minister for maintaining Britain’s position in the world and our relevance, so that our voice still counts for something.

I also pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon; I am mindful of the debate on the Abraham accords last month in the Moses Room in Grand Committee, the last occasion on which I heard him in person on the affairs of this region. It all seems a tremendously long time ago now. Rightly, those Abraham accords still enjoy widespread cross-party support across the House and I will return to that matter later.

Although our voices will be heard abroad, our particular responsibility, as British subjects, is here in the UK. Our deliberations will have especial resonance on our doorstep. So, too, will the words of high-profile external stakeholders in this country.

It was on 22 October that the Muslim Council of Britain urged its followers on social media to

“Write to your MP. Stop Gaza Genocide”.


Genocide—think of the word. This is an outrageous assertion, to the point of being a blood libel. No reputable authority on international law, whatever they think of Israel’s response to Hamas’s attack of 7 October, believes that her actions come within the definition of the UN’s genocide convention and other key relevant texts. By contrast, it is Hamas’s professed agenda—to wipe out Israel—which is the genocidal one. Incendiary language such as claims of genocide, and old canards of Jews being party to and pushing genocide, have unfortunately played some tragic part in the explosion of anti-Semitic attacks in this country since 7 October, which, according to the Metropolitan Police’s own statistics, are up by 1,353%.

There are policy implications for our country here. The first relates to community engagement. Pre-eminently, the previous Labour Government under Gordon Brown rightly cut contact with the Muslim Council of Britain in 2009, after its then deputy secretary- general signed the Istanbul declaration, calling for attacks on Royal Navy vessels enforcing a UN weapons blockade on Hamas-run Gaza. The Muslim Council of Britain, despite its avowed modernisation programme, still does not resile from that position. Indeed, its present deputy secretary-general, Mohammed Kozbar, has publicly praised the founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, as

“the master of the martyrs of the resistance”.

That is why it is right that all successive Prime Ministers, whether under the coalition or Conservative Governments since then, have maintained the ban on the Muslim Council of Britain. Will my noble friend the Minister therefore now reaffirm this non-engagement policy and give further assurances that the policy will be implemented throughout government, including within the Ministry of Defence and other departments? It would also be interesting to know where the Labour Party presently stands on this issue. Will the Minister also ask my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities to ensure that responses to this crisis should now inform part of the newly reforged extremism criteria, which his ministry is presently working on?

I began tonight with reflections on the Abraham accords. I greatly welcome the work and initiative of figures such as Khalid Mahmood, the Labour MP for Birmingham, Perry Barr, to set up new structures and bodies that will put those accords at the heart of community relations in this country. More than ever, we need the spirit of that greatest interfaith initiative of our times, not least on the streets of this country.

Ireland/Northern Ireland Protocol: Scrutiny of EU Legislative Proposals (European Affairs Committee Sub-Committee Report)

Lord Godson Excerpts

Friday 20th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Godson (Con)]

My Lords, I take great pleasure in following the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, and I share in the congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Jay, on his stewardship of the committee and to all of the committee staff. There is great consensus on that matter, if nothing else, in this House and in our committee. I congratulate him and all others associated with that.

In the first year, the committee has scrutinised or taken note of around 74 pieces of EU legislation covered by the protocol. That is 10 times more than the original estimate, suggesting that the democratic deficit is wider, and the divergence between the regulation of goods in Northern Ireland and in Great Britain is likely to be greater, than anticipated when the protocol was originally agreed. This will be of concern to this House, to the people of Northern Ireland and to everyone across these islands and beyond.

It is clear from the volume of material passing through our committee, and from the variability of material that we see from the Government, that engagement with Brussels needs now to be enhanced. The protocol, the withdrawal agreement and the trade and co-operation agreement, as well as the other EU-UK agreements, joint policies and ongoing co-operation, mean that our understanding of the EU’s thinking and planning, and our knowledge of its activities, need to be far better than when we were members of it.

We need to identify the legislative changes and policies that will or might come under the protocol earlier than we are currently doing. We also need to discover and understand the changes in the regulation of the EU’s single market and trade policy as early as possible. More broadly, we need to be much better tuned to the development of the EU’s justice, home affairs and human rights policy, as well as its common foreign and security policy and the recent moves to transform its state aid and industrial policy. In short, we perhaps need to look to the model of the Irish Republic, obviously a smaller entity than the United Kingdom, which has been very successfully able to track and influence UK government policy through the years. We now need to be able to perform that task towards the EU, the larger entity vis-à-vis ourselves, with the same rigour with which the Irish state has performed its core functions in its own national interest.

Our engagement with the European Parliament will need to be far better, far more technical and more consistent. This is particularly true for the protocol, but the lessons have much wider application. On balance, our footprint in Brussels should increase, not decrease, as we seek to engage and understand and, in so doing, better manage our relationship with our largest trading partner. We made great errors in our negotiation on the withdrawal agreement because, frankly, we were not on top of our game and too little expertise was diffused across Whitehall. We have learned much since, but those lessons need to be embedded. We cannot afford to make similar mistakes again.

On our legislative scrutiny, it occurs to me that, in due course, there might be merit in a working relationship under the British-Irish Council, which my late friend Lord Trimble did so much to place at the heart of strand 3 of the Belfast/Good Friday agreement in 1998, when many thought that it was a slightly quixotic enthusiasm of his, although, in retrospect, it has turned out to be of the greatest significance in very different and changed circumstances. The British-Irish Council has seen too little activity and has too often been too easily dismissed during the negotiations over the protocol and even, at times, in this House.

In our scrutiny of EU legislation affecting the protocol, there would be real benefit now in co-operative work with the Northern Ireland Assembly, this House and the other place. This would help to address, in part, the democratic deficit that so many from across many different sides of the divide here identified, and it would bring together local expertise with the resources of this House and our expertise in, and experience of, scrutiny and engagement with Whitehall. The Belfast/Good Friday agreement specifically promotes interparliamentary links and co-operation under the British-Irish Council in strand 3. We should pay attention to how the institutions of the Belfast agreement can help us to address some of the challenges that we face. We must protect that agreement, and it can help to protect our national interests in the same way.

Ireland: Russian Naval Military Exercises

Lord Godson Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd February 2022 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Godson]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what discussions they have had with the government of Ireland regarding plans by Russian forces to hold naval military exercises 150 miles off the south-west coast of Ireland.

[The Minister of State, Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park) (Con)]

My Lords, on 24 January, the Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs, Simon Coveney, briefed EU Foreign Ministers about the planned exercises and publicly stated that Ireland did not welcome them, but that Russia was within its legal rights to conduct them. He reiterated this position in a call with the Foreign Secretary on 28 January. The next day, 29 January, Minister Coveney confirmed that the exercises would in fact take place outside of Ireland’s exclusive economic zone.

[Lord Godson (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for that Answer. Of course, the exercises did not take place, partly thanks to the representations of the Irish South and West Fish Producer’s Organisation, which deserves great credit for this. In the intervening period, the Irish state commission on defence has reported, flagging certain concerns it has about the level of Irish state capability in defence. What further can the Minister say about further interactions and connections between the British and Irish Governments through mechanisms such as the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference? Looking forward, might the Secretary of State for Defence’s Office of Net Assessment be able to take a view and produce an assessment on what is going on in what used to be called the Western Approaches, in terms of threats there to the totality of interests of all states in these islands?

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

I assure my noble friend that I will pass on his specific request to my counterparts in the Ministry of Defence. On the issue he raises, the Secretary of State’s Office of Net Assessment and Challenge, or SONAC, which my noble friend has long championed, is a useful mechanism for Her Majesty’s Government to look across all areas of defence. SONAC is closely involved in supporting cross-government efforts on the current crisis in Ukraine, providing rigorous red teaming, a challenge scrutiny and expertise, and it will continue to do so. I note and agree with his comments about Ireland’s fishing community.

Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy

Lord Godson Excerpts

Thursday 22nd April 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Godson (Con) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, it is conventional on these occasions—a maiden speech—to pay tribute to the officers and staff of this House. Having spent much of my professional career in journalism and think tanks debunking the conventional wisdom, it is now delightful to be able to break the habit of a professional lifetime to sing their praises with enthusiasm —the one thing that truly unites us all. I am delighted to do so today for the welcome they have afforded. The expertise and counsel has been very much appreciated by me, as I know they are by many other newcomers here, so I thank them for that.

I also thank my supporters, my noble friends Lord Strathclyde and Lord Howard of Lympne—known well to many here, of course, as a distinguished former Leader of the House and a path-breaking Home Secretary. Their advice and counsel through years have been much appreciated by me as well. I say this particularly because one of my noble friends is a hereditary and the other a life Peer. There has been some harsh criticism from the fourth estate, of which I was once part, of both hereditaries and life Peers. I place on the record here and now my appreciation for the welcome, counsel and wisdom of life Peers and hereditary Peers from all segments of this House. I look forward to learning more and hearing more of their wisdom in the years to come. I say this because the caricature in some portions of the fourth estate and the wider country and society of what has been going on in this House is utterly at variance with what I have experienced.

I say this because I am a Briton not by birth but by choice. I find the caricature of this country in certain quarters of debate as a mean-spirited and bigoted polity, again, utterly at variance with what I have experienced. I place on the record that and the pleasure I derived, in the greatest honour of my public life, from being able to swear allegiance to the sovereign and her successors. The welcome afforded in this country to a newcomer, an immigrant such as me, has always rested on my consciousness, and I am profoundly grateful for it.

I mention this because we are of course here today to discuss the integrated review. As its title suggests, with one of the words about an era of competition, we are of course facing competition from really mean-spirited polities, unlike this country—the critique we hear sometimes in certain quarters. I am grateful that Policy Exchange, the think tank for which I work, has, with its Indo-Pacific report, played its part in shaping debate on the integrated review.

Several things need to be said. The report commanded the attention of many figures in the Indo-Pacific region. It was chaired by Stephen Harper, with a foreword from Shinzo Abe. Commissioners included several Members of this House—the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, and the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner—who are here today. Alas, the traditions of this House prevent me acknowledging them in parliamentary terms as friends, but I have benefited from their counsel and insight through the years.

Several things should be noted about impact of the Indo-Pacific report and the wider integrated review. The first is that there was a tremendous welcome from the distinguished group of commissioners on the Indo-Pacific Commission for Britain’s tilt—to use the term of art—towards that region again. The idea that we had become an irrelevance post Brexit could not be further from the truth.

Another point that I think has been omitted at times is that this is not a backward-looking report; it is not nostalgic. It is forward-looking, putting space policy at the heart of an integrated strategy. Moreover, it puts space policy beyond the confines of Europe and into the UK’s greater role in the wider world. The National Cyber Force is another obvious example, alongside a tech envoy to increase our presence in Silicon Valley and beyond. All these things are scarcely evidence of a backward-looking or nostalgic policy.

I look forward to playing a further part in these debates and learning from noble friends and noble Lords across the House. Although criticisms have been levelled today, there is still the serious possibility of dialogue and of recreating some kind of consensus for the future. The integrated review shows the potential that exists there. I look forward to hearing further from noble Lords and to learning more in the days and weeks to come.