Mortgage Charter

Debate between Martin Docherty-Hughes and Jeremy Hunt

Monday 26th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Hunt]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right to talk about the impact on renters because of the high prevalence of buy-to-let landlords and the pass-through effect. That is an area we are looking at in great detail, and I will write to her with some of the things we are looking at and planning to do.

[Martin Docherty-Hughes (West Dunbartonshire) (SNP)]

The Chancellor said in his statement that

“this new measure means that people will be able to opt for a lower-cost approach for six months with full reversibility, giving them the peace of mind of knowing they can try out a new approach and still change their mind later.”

Going back to mortgage prisoners, why does he not know about the assistance he is able to give them as Chancellor of the Exchequer? Why does he not have an answer to that question, given the statement he has just given?

[Jeremy Hunt]

It is a very complicated issue. I have said I will write to the hon. Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan), and I am also happy to write to the hon. Gentleman. If he is saying that we are doing nothing to help people who are struggling or worrying about mortgage repayments, I urge him to read the statement in full.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe

Debate between Martin Docherty-Hughes and Jeremy Hunt

Tuesday 16th November 2021 Westminster Hall

[Jeremy Hunt (South West Surrey) (Con)]

I salute the quiet dignity of Richard Ratcliffe, who is one of the bravest people I have ever met. I thank the hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq) for her campaigning. We are from different parties, but she makes me proud to be a Member of this House.

How do we get Nazanin, Anoosheh, Morad and Mehran home? If it were ransom money, heartbreaking though it is, we should not pay it, because it would only lead to more hostages being taken. But it is not ransom money; it is a historical debt that we owe Iran. The debt should not be linked to this case, but it is, and that is why we should pay it. It is not easy to do because of sanctions, but with political will it can be done. No country can have a veto over a sovereign Britain deciding to pay its debt, not least the United States, because it did exactly the same thing under President Obama.

[Martin Docherty-Hughes]

When the right hon. Gentleman was Foreign Secretary, were they advised by senior civil servants that this money would not be paid, and what was the answer in Cabinet?

[Jeremy Hunt]

I believe that during the period when I was Foreign Secretary, the decision whether we owed that money was settled. There was an understanding, confirmed publicly by the Defence Secretary, that the money is owed and should be paid. It was going to take, and will take, a real effort to deal with the practicalities. But the Americans managed it and we can most certainly manage it, if necessary by getting an RAF plane to fly gold over to Tehran. There are lots of ways of doing it.

Counter-Daesh Update

Debate between Martin Docherty-Hughes and Jeremy Hunt

Monday 11th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

My right hon. Friend of course speaks with great wisdom on this because he was responsible for a lot of the training of overseas armies that makes precisely that strategy possible. We have now trained 70,000 Iraqi forces as a result of the programme that I think he may even have set up when he was Secretary of State for Defence.[Official Report, 14 February 2019, Vol. 654, c. 10MC.] He is absolutely right that coupling that with a programme of political reconciliation is the key. I would go further and say that that is really the key lesson from what happened in the original Iraq conflict, which ended up so much more problematically than anyone in this House was hoping for at the time. Local boots on the ground and proper political reconciliation is the way to make progress.

[Martin Docherty-Hughes (West Dunbartonshire) (SNP)]

I, too, thank the Secretary of State for early sight of the statement. I join him in recognising the risks faced by and the capabilities of members of the armed forces. As someone who comes from a forces family who served in Iraq, and also Afghanistan, I know of the risk that they put themselves in in fulfilling their duties.

The Iraq Government have stated that they need £88 billion to rebuild the country following the prolonged conflict. While, as the Secretary of State said, Daesh’s state-building may be close to defeat, the organisation still holds a powerful sway in many parts of the world, including the Philippines and Somalia. He talked about reconciliation. At the heart of reconstruction, there is a lack of truth and reconciliation for a new Iraq, and that could possibly allow for a resurgence of Daesh. Does he recognise that with less than half of the sums required for reconstruction being available, if we fail to invest adequately in Iraq, that runs the risk of allowing Daesh to regain a foothold?

Will the Secretary of State expand slightly more on what we have learned in this process to enable us to combat fanaticism in this region and beyond?

Finally, does the Secretary of State recognise that more work is required to be done through truth and reconciliation, especially if Iraq is to be fully reintegrated, and that that includes the innocent women and children whose Daesh husbands and fathers cast them aside for the sake of fanaticism—an issue that was most recently given steam in The New Yorker by journalist Ben Taub?

[Mr Hunt]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his comments. He speaks of some very important issues.

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that reconciliation has to be central. Sometimes that costs money. In this country, we can be proud of the fact that we have put £2.7 billion into that process, which has had a huge humanitarian impact.[Official Report, 14 February 2019, Vol. 654, c. 10MC.] But part of reconciliation in this case, which is a specific case different from the original Iraq war, is the need for justice against the perpetrators of the genocide that Daesh was responsible for. On 17 January, I had the privilege of meeting Nadia Murad, the Nobel prize-winning Yazidi campaigner against sexual violence in conflict. In her book, she talks about the perpetrators of sexual violence against her who have still not faced justice and are still in the region somewhere. She says that for someone like her, there will be no closure until those people face justice. Part of that process of closure is justice, but part of it is also for people like her to be able to go back to the villages near Mount Sinjar that they were driven out of, at a time when many of their family members had been murdered. That is beginning to happen. All these things matter.

I think we have learned a number of things, but probably the most significant has been the need to engage in cyberspace as well as with boots on the ground, because it was the dissemination of propaganda that probably allowed Daesh to grow much further than we anticipated in the early days.