Foreign Affairs and Defence

Mike Gapes Excerpts

Wednesday 26th May 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hague]

I used to say that I agree with him, but now he will have to say that he agrees with me; the situation has changed. We seek to buttress the diplomatic initiative of President Obama’s Administration and the proximity talks that are under way, and we will be strong supporters of those building the institutions of a future Palestinian state while actively exploring with our European partners the scope for further EU action.

[Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)]

I congratulate the Foreign Secretary on his elevation. During the general election campaign a full-page advertisement was placed in the Jewish Chronicle on 16 April by the Conservative party. It stated:

“Universal jurisdiction will be amended at the earliest opportunity to enable Israelis to visit the UK”.

I noted that the Queen’s Speech contained no reference to “universal jurisdiction”. Will the Foreign Secretary clarify whether that is because of a disagreement in the coalition or because the Government are not prepared to introduce legislation in the near future to resolve this matter?

[Mr Hague]

That is a perfectly legitimate question. I will go on to say in my speech how we will proceed on this issue, so if the hon. Gentleman will allow me to reach that point, I will explain the exact answer to his question.

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[Mr Hague]

Again, I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his point. I can assure him that I share his frustration that not enough is happening. One of the things that I discussed with Secretary Clinton in Washington was this subject and how we could support the efforts of the United States to push forward the peace process. It will be one of the subjects that I particularly want to discuss in European capitals over the next couple of weeks in order to see how the European Union and its member states can exercise more leverage in this important process.

I do not want to spend my time redefining any attitude to past conflicts; this is a new Government and we will set out our position on what happens in the future. However, I will say to the hon. Member for Birmingham, Northfield (Richard Burden) that we call on the Government of Israel to freeze all settlement activity and to allow unfettered access for aid to Gaza, where we are seriously concerned about the deterioration in the humanitarian and economic situation and about the effect on a generation of young Palestinians. At the same time, of course, the rocket attacks from Gaza must cease and Hamas must make concrete movement towards the Quartet principles; we will have no truck with those who espouse or practise terrorism. The hon. Gentleman can be assured that this Government will give our energy to that and also try to ensure that there is European leadership in trying to drive the middle east peace process forward.

The conflict matters to British national security. We will take every opportunity to help promote peace and we will now examine—to deal with the question asked by the hon. Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes)—how to deal with the totally unsatisfactory situation that has had the effect of barring Israeli politicians, among others, from visiting the UK without weakening our commitment to holding accountable those guilty of war crimes. We will report to the House in due course. To answer the hon. Gentleman’s question more explicitly, this is a coalition Government and we have to discuss together the way forward, although we are absolutely clear that the current situation cannot be sustained.

[Mike Gapes]

“In due course” is not the same as at the earliest opportunity. Will he explain the difference?

[Mr Hague]

Consideration of this will not be long delayed, I can assure the hon. Gentleman. Given that the previous Government said in December that it was urgent to deal with the matter but had done nothing about it by April, I will not, after two weeks in office, take lectures from the Opposition about the speed with which we are dealing with it.

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[Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind), and I agree strongly with what he said about the importance of sustaining and maintaining the commitment to Afghanistan. I am also pleased to follow my right hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd), who has been a steadfast campaigner for democracy and the rights of the Iraqi people, and I agree with her that the Iraqi people are much better off not living under the vile, fascist, Ba’athist regime of Saddam Hussein. It is important that all people who aspire to high office in my party and in this country recognise that.

I shall concentrate my remarks on the role of Select Committees in scrutinising the work of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and other Departments. We are in a strange period. The House of Commons was dissolved on 12 April, and yet we will not have effective Select Committee scrutiny of the Departments concerned for some months. We have today set in train a process for electing the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee—it will not be me—and I want to draw to the attention of the successor Select Committee and the Government a number of points raised in reports published at the end of the last Parliament by the FAC.

We highlighted a problem of which I am sure that the Foreign Secretary and other Ministers are well aware: there is a fundamental difficulty with the FCO budget. The Government have compounded that difficulty by taking £55 million out of that budget. I would like the new Government to address the overseas price mechanism and the problem, raised in an earlier intervention, about the cost of international subscriptions, which is borne by the FCO on behalf of the UK as a whole. The declining value of the pound against the dollar has led to a serious erosion, which we highlighted in the last Parliament, although, to his credit, the now shadow Foreign Secretary fought hard with the Treasury to put in place measures to deal with that problem in the current financial year.

The FCO, however, cannot sustain its current level of commitments on its existing budget, so we face very hard choices. It is all very well for people to talk about increasing our footprint in parts of the world such as Latin America, but we are faced with the fact that in Commonwealth countries—in southern Africa, the Pacific and elsewhere—high commissions and embassies have closed. That process will be accelerated if we do not recognise in this country that funding for diplomacy and soft power is as important as funding for hard power and hardware. We need to think about that for the future.

[Sandra Osborne]

Will my hon. Friend also highlight the impact that that has had on terms and conditions of staff in the Foreign Office, who in some cases have been asked to take unpaid leave?

[Mike Gapes]

That is absolutely right. In a number of countries in Europe, earlier in the year—until the then Foreign Secretary got additional support from the Treasury—budgets were being overspent. Last year, when the FAC visited the United States, we highlighted the fact that the locally engaged staff there were working four-day weeks and taking unpaid leave to ensure that the budget for those posts did not exceed the annual allocations. That is the context in which the new Government and Foreign Secretary have agreed to an additional £55 million in cuts. That situation will get worse, and I implore Members of all parties to recognise that we need to defend the fundamentals of having a global diplomatic footprint and effective diplomacy in many parts of the world.

I am conscious of the time limit, but I want to highlight an additional aspect published in one of our reports. We produced a brief report on the situation in the Turks and Caicos islands. I hope that the new Government will continue to fund adequately the special prosecutor in Turks and Caicos, so that there can be proper investigations of the corruption and scandals that took place in that overseas territory. I have something else to say to future FAC members: it is fundamentally important that we keep an eye on the overseas territories. They do not represent many people, but they are important, and they are the responsibility of the House. It is crucial that we maintain the interest and scrutiny, because the citizens of our overseas territories do not yet have democratic representation in this country—they do not have the right to speak in this Parliament—so we have to speak for them and maintain the relationship with them.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Does my hon. Friend share my concern that a lot of the legislation to do with the overseas territories is done by Orders in Council? There is therefore no discussion or transparency about those arrangements and they cannot be debated in the House.

[Mike Gapes]

This is not for this debate, but we need to consider mechanisms under which the overseas territories can be involved in the process, whether in this House or the other place. We need to find ways to do that.

In the time left to me, I shall move on to some of the issues that featured in the new Foreign Secretary’s speech. Clearly, we have this week a very important conclusion—or, perhaps, not a conclusion—to the non-proliferation treaty review conference. It has become clear already that the processes to get an agreement are proving difficult. The conference on disarmament, which is chaired by the Zimbabwean UN ambassador, could not reach agreement, and its proposals have now been pushed into the general discussions about the sections dealing with non-proliferation in the plenary. The main reason is that the developing world, in particular, wishes to have a timetable under which the declared nuclear weapons states who are signatories to the treaty will begin the process of taking real measures towards nuclear disarmament. There was no agreement on that timetable proposal, because the United States and France, in particular, did not wish to go down that route, and nor did Russia.

I urge the new Government, in the days that remain, to consider sympathetically how we can assist getting an agreement. It will be a disaster if the 2010 NPT review conference goes the same way as the 2005 review conference. I hope that we can find a solution through Britain, France and the other nuclear weapons states making concrete offers on how they can contribute to the achievement of article VI, under which the nuclear weapons states are to agree to act in good faith to secure real measures of nuclear disarmament. The previous Labour Government did a lot in that way. They did more than any other of the nuclear weapons states, and now we have this new Russia-United States agreement on deep cuts in strategic nuclear warheads. That is very important.

I welcome the Foreign Secretary’s statement about the maximum number—225, he said—of warheads for this country. However, I had understood, having read various of these documents over recent years, that it was thought that the UK had nowhere near 225 deployed warheads. We therefore need some clarification. My right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett) said that there might be a case for co-operation between the United Kingdom and France on future nuclear weapons activities. That might be a way forward, leading to an overall reduction in the nuclear arsenals of European signatories to the non-proliferation treaty, which might help in reaching an agreement at either the current conference or a future review conference.

Proliferation generally poses big threats to the world. We have seen what has been happening in Korea this week, and I am not as relaxed as some seem to be that we might not get into a hot conflict between North and South Korea. This is potentially an extremely dangerous situation. Through the efforts of China in particular, I hope that we can find ways to get the six-party talks or some other mechanism to defuse the conflict and show to the North Koreans that this is not the way to behave. Ultimately, however, the South Korean Government are absolutely right to take the matter to the United Nations. They need solidarity and support from the whole of the rest of the world. China is clearly playing a big role in the Korean peninsula. It also plays a big role in the debate on Iran—I do not have time to go into that now—as well as having played a pretty bad role with regard to what has happened in Sri Lanka in the past few years.

This century, and the next decade in particular, will pose big challenges for those of us in Europe, as we adjust to the shift of economic, political and military power from our part of the world towards Asia. We need to handle that shift carefully. In that context, I note that the Foreign Secretary did not choose to repeat the words of the Prime Minister, as Leader of the Opposition, when he sought to justify the retention of British nuclear weapons on the basis of a potential nuclear threat from China. I hope that that is not Government policy. I hope that it was just a slip of the tongue and that we will work in a measured way to have good relations, but also express our view with regard to human rights abuses in China—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Alan Haselhurst)]

Order. Hon. Members must not overrun.