Report of the Iraq Inquiry

Mark Durkan Excerpts

Wednesday 6th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I am going to hesitate before replying to my hon. Friend, because there is not a huge amount about that in the executive summary of the Iraq inquiry. I think we will probably have to dive into the volumes to see exactly what Sir John has to say about advice from the MOD, advice from the Foreign Office, how much group-think there genuinely was, and all the rest of it. So I would hesitate. I think we need to study the report, and then we can discuss the matter during next week’s debate.

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

Those of us who come to the report scandalised anew by the duplicity of presentation and the paucity of preparation on such grave matters must nevertheless remember most those who are acutely burdened today by their cruel sense of futility of sacrifice in terms of lives lost, lives devastated and lives changed. The Prime Minister has rightly emphasised that lessons need to be learned, but we must be careful not to turn the report into a greywash by converting it into a syllabus about foresight in government and oversight in Parliament. This is not a day for soundbites, but does the Prime Minister not agree that the hand of history should be feeling someone’s collar?

[The Prime Minister]

I do not think it is a greywash or a whitewash or an anything elsewash. I think, from what I have seen so far, that this is a thorough effort in trying to understand the narrative of the events, the decisions that were taken and the mistakes that were made. I think there is a huge amount to learn and everyone who has played a part in it has to take their responsibility for it.

EU Council

Mark Durkan Excerpts

Wednesday 29th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

It was pretty late by the time I got back, and there was not really time for anything.

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

I join the acknowledgements being given to the Prime Minister. I do not really think he fully appreciates—certainly, his Secretary of State does not—that when we negotiated the Good Friday agreement, common membership of the EU was taken as a given, and it is there in the fabric of the agreement. At the core of that agreement is the principle of consent, but the people of Northern Ireland now find that they are being dragged out of the European Union against their consent, as expressed when they voted for the Good Friday agreement and in the referendum last week, when 78.2% in my constituency voted to remain. It is not enough for the Prime Minister to say now that the negotiations that will take place will sort things out for us. It is clear that English politics does not have a sat-nav or a map for where it now finds itself, yet he is simply telling us that we will have to tailgate and go where the impulses and prejudices of English politics drive next. We need to achieve a better situation to protect EU access and benefits for our constituents.

[The Prime Minister]

I totally understand the hon. Gentleman’s passion about this—he and I were on the same side—but my reading of the history of this is different. The Good Friday agreement, based on the principle of consent, was that the United Kingdom would continue and Northern Ireland would be part of that United Kingdom. This is a sovereign decision for the United Kingdom. Now, the job of the United Kingdom Government, in full collaboration with the First and Deputy First Ministers in Northern Ireland, is to try to get the best possible negotiation in terms of Britain’s place, and therefore Northern Ireland’s place, so that relations north-south can be as strong as they can.

Voter Registration

Mark Durkan Excerpts

Wednesday 8th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[Matthew Hancock]

No; the two issues are separate. If someone wants to register, or applied to register yesterday, but is not available to vote on 23 June, a postal vote could not be organised in time, but they can still vote by proxy. That opportunity is available, so that they can express their democratic wish.

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

The House has heard a “carry on” registration message from the Minister and the Prime Minister. Should people in Northern Ireland listen, given that online registration is not available there? There were separate difficulties in Northern Ireland arising from strike action over proposals to centralise electoral office services that affected those offices yesterday and last week.

[Matthew Hancock]

This is an incredibly important concern in Northern Ireland, and any legislation will be absolutely clear about the position, which we will set out as soon as we can.

UK-EU Renegotiation

Mark Durkan Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd February 2016 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I thank my hon. Friend for her remarks. Of course section B is important, but it is also worth looking at the draft European Council declaration on competitiveness which adds to section B and brings out some more details.

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

Obviously any referendum debate will centre on the bigger picture, the longer-term challenge and deeper interests, but as well as the issues raised by my hon. Friend the Member for South Down (Ms Ritchie), will the right hon. Gentleman address whether the package he has come up with to do with the changes in relation to child benefit will automatically extend to cross-border workers in a constituency like mine, where EU precepts apply?

[The Prime Minister]

I will look very carefully at that issue, but I seem to recall from conversations I had with the Taoiseach that there are particular arrangements for the common travel area. But I will come back to the hon. Gentleman on this.

EU Council

Mark Durkan Excerpts

Tuesday 5th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I will look carefully at what happens when you “pass go”! I believe that we are getting closer to an agreement on Britain’s renegotiation, and at that point—not before—although the Government will have a clear recommendation, Ministers will be able to campaign in a personal capacity on a different side, as I have said. But that needs to happen after the negotiation has taken place. I think that Members on both sides of the House, and indeed members of the public and businesses and others, want to know what the renegotiation amounts to. We need to have a proper debate about what we bring back, and then people will be able to make up their minds. In the end, it will not be any of us who decides the outcome; it will be the people who put us here.

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

It is not only Save the Children but UNICEF and others, including the International Development Committee, that are urging the Prime Minister to give a positive and decisive response on the issue of unaccompanied children. Does he recognise that the over 26,000 unaccompanied children who came to Europe last year came not just from Syria but from other places of conflict, and some of them already have relatives in the UK? Does he not think that he would be in a stronger position at the donor conference he is co-hosting next month if he had already made a clear decision?

ISIL in Syria

Mark Durkan Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

I will not dwell on any sense of resentment that the Social Democratic and Labour party might have about the Prime Minister’s line about terrorist sympathisers, but I will say that I think it was unworthy and that it warranted an apology in this debate. However, today is not about any personal offence that Members of this House might feel; it is about the real fears and threats and the dire suffering faced by people in Syria and the concern that so many hon. Members have expressed for the safety and security of our constituents.

People in Syria, as we know, are caught between the barrel bombs of Assad and the barbarism of Daesh, and they struggle to reach the barbed wire now going up in Europe. Yes, their plight demands a comprehensive strategy and compels a much stronger response from this Government and others across Europe. The Prime Minister has told us that he is offering a comprehensive strategy. He told us in his opening statement today that he has listened to many of the considerations and concerns raised by hon. Members, and in effect he has collated them and co-opted them in the rolling references we now see in the motion, which is presented as a comprehensive strategy. I do not believe that it is coherent or complete. It do not believe that it is convincing in the collateral considerations and claims that are or are not addressed. I do not believe that it is cohesive in how its different dimensions meet and join.

Like the hon. Member for Spelthorne (Kwasi Kwarteng), I think that it is right that we test the logic of what we are hearing on both sides of the debate. I am not among those who, in arguing against the motion, claim that airstrikes will increase the risk of a terrorist attack in any constituency in the near term; I do not think that it makes a difference one way or another to a threat that is real and live. However, I think that there is a severe risk of feeding what we are trying to fight—of feeding a wider agenda of radicalisation—by agreeing to airstrikes and so adopting the role that the jihadism playbook craves us to adopt.

We are told that we should agree to airstrikes in Syria because they are merely an extension of what is already happening. The people who tell us that are the same people who tell us that there is no danger of mission creep in what the Government propose, yet there has already been an absolute mission flip. Only two years ago the idea was to go in and airstrike against Assad, and now it is to go in and airstrike against the very people we would have been assisting had we conducted airstrikes two years ago.

[Mr Burrowes]

What feeds the terrorists’ agenda is territory, and the more territory they gain, the bigger their so-called caliphate becomes and the greater their ability to recruit other jihadists, including from this country. The fact that we have been able to reduce that territory—we have regained 30%—has degraded their ability to radicalise other jihadists.

[Mark Durkan]

But let us remember that their concept of the caliphate is not merely geographical; it is an altogether different concept.

There is a danger of western powers piling in because we think that what is proposed is merely an extension of what we are already doing. It has been argued that we should not recognise the border between Iraq and Syria because ISIL does not recognise it, so is ISIL to dictate the terms by which judgments are made? We should not be taking our standards from Daesh.

It has also been argued that we have to take such action to stand by our allies. Does that mean that this House will have to agree to the next thing our allies do? What about ground troops, for instance? Many hon. Members who support airstrikes have been very clear that they would not agree to the deployment of ground forces. Indeed, we are told that one of the merits of the motion is that it contains no commitment to ground forces. What if people say that that is what is required? What if the operational circumstances and exigencies of the conflict are such that ground forces are required, because the 70,000 Free Syrian Army people are not there? They cannot be provided by CGI. What if everybody agrees that ground forces are needed to achieve what the Government want in Raqqa?

What happens when Assad decides that he is moving into Raqqa, supported by Russia? We will then have a conflict within the alliance itself, because what the Government propose is on the basis of a shifting alliance with some very shifty allies, including some who have been the syndicators of terrorism, powers and personages within the Gulf states. Members should question what Turkey has been doing in relation to oil and arms and Daesh; question what Saudi Arabia has been doing, and they are our allies. When the Government’s mission changes, where will we go? We will have mission creep.

Syria

Mark Durkan Excerpts

Thursday 26th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s support. The advice I am getting is that there is no quick or easy way of solving the problem. We have been committed for four years to humanitarian assistance and to the diplomatic process for many years—remember, we have had Geneva I, Geneva II and now Vienna. In the same way, this whole process will take a long time, and we should be clear about that.

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

The Prime Minister has stressed that the ISIL-first strategy cannot extend to our intervening as an ally of Assad. In the memorandum to the FAC, he said that an intervention on such terms would be wrong on three grounds: it would misunderstand the causes of the problem; it would make matters worse; and Assad’s rule is one of ISIL’s greatest recruiting sergeants. Does he accept that those valid considerations against such intervention also persuade many of us against intervention on the terms he is commending? We do not want to feed the evil we want to defeat.

[The Prime Minister]

I have great respect for the hon. Gentleman, but if we do not intervene against ISIL, we should not be surprised when it grows and threatens us more. Of course there are concerns and difficult questions—it is a complex situation—but, as I have said, just because a strategy is complicated and takes a long time does not mean it is not the right strategy and cannot work. If hon. Members are looking for complexity as a reason to say, “This is difficult, and therefore we cannot support it”, they will not have any trouble finding it—it is complex—but in the end it comes down to some simple judgments about what will make us safer or less safe.

Syria: Refugees and Counter-terrorism

Mark Durkan Excerpts

Monday 7th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I can certainly give that assurance. It is important to select people who are genuinely vulnerable and need to be saved. We will be careful not to accept people who might support extremist or terrorist views.

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

Constraints mean that I will have to park questions about the deployment of lethal force against a UK citizen in order to address the refugee crisis. The Prime Minister talked about supporting these refugees in their hour of need, but how does that rhetoric chime with admitting only 20,000 over the course of five years, with overtones of disqualification for those who have already made perilous journeys and perhaps lost loved ones? Will the Prime Minister go further than merely have his Ministers having disparate conversations with First Ministers and will he, along with the Irish Government, convene a special meeting of the British-Irish Council properly to co-ordinate the response for refugees across all the Administrations of these islands, taking account of their different service models, and to offer good partnership to international agencies and domestic charities that want to help?

[The Prime Minister]

I will look carefully at what the hon. Gentleman says. Obviously, what the Republic of Ireland does is a matter for the Republic of Ireland, if it wants to opt in to the relocation system. I am pretty confident that 20,000 refugees coming into Britain is, and will be seen to be by other European countries, a generous and compassionate offer that will help to take the pressure off other European countries.

Oral Answers to Questions

Mark Durkan Excerpts

Wednesday 1st July 2015 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

First of all, let me take this opportunity to praise my hon. Friend’s constituent and the skills that were used on that dreadful day in Tunisia. The Bill will reinforce the work we have already done to increase funding for counter-terrorism and counter-terrorism policing; make sure there is a duty on public authorities to combat radicalisation; and go after the fact that there are groups and individuals who are very clever at endorsing extremism but then stopping one step short of actually condoning terrorism. That is what the new banning orders we are looking at aim to achieve, because we are clear that people who support the extremist narrative have no place in our public debate.

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

Q2. Given regional wage profiles, many families in the north of Ireland will identify with the concerns raised today by the four children’s commissioners about tax credits. Further to heeding those wider warnings, will the Prime Minister have the Chancellor take particular care to ensure that no supposedly more targeted changes to child benefit or tax credits will end up being misdirected against natural, everyday, cross-border working families in my constituency and its hinterland?

[The Prime Minister]

When we talk about cross-border working families, it is still the case that welfare arrangements in the United Kingdom are far more generous than what is available in the Republic of Ireland. Our view is clear: the right answer is to create jobs, cut taxes, raise living standards and reduce welfare. I want an economy that has high pay, low taxes and low welfare, instead of low pay, high taxes and high welfare.

Let me share with the House one important statistic. Under the last Labour Government—[Interruption.] I know that Labour Members do not want to talk about the last Labour Government. [Interruption.] Well, under the last Government, inequality and child poverty fell. Now for the history lesson: let us go back to the last Labour Government. Under Labour, the number of working-age people in in-work poverty rose by about 20%. That was at the same time as welfare spending on people in work went up from £6 billion to £28 billion. What that shows is that the Labour model of taking money off people in tax and recycling it back to them in tax credits has not worked. It is time for a new approach of creating jobs, cutting taxes and having businesses that are creating the livelihoods we need.

Oral Answers to Questions

Mark Durkan Excerpts

Wednesday 10th June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

Q5. As a Back Bencher, the Prime Minister campaigned for group B strep awareness. I am sure that he is aware of Northwick Park hospital’s highly successful programme of universal GBS screening, which proves the very case that he used to make. Will he now encourage Ministers to roll out GBS-specific testing as a routine offer to all pregnant women in all our health services?

[The Prime Minister]

May I say how grateful I am to the hon. Gentleman for raising the issue? Two of my constituents, Craig and Alison Richards, came to my surgery and raised it with me, and that is what caused me to become interested in it in the first place.

We have made some big breakthroughs. The national health service is doing much more screening and taking much more action to help those who potentially have the infection, although there are difficulties with national programmes because of the whole issue of anti-microbial resistance and the use of antibiotics. However, I am happy to take this opportunity to look into what has been achieved so far and what more can be done, and then write to the hon. Gentleman.