Foreign Affairs Committee

Debate between Mike Gapes and Julian Lewis

Tuesday 19th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Ind)]

There have been times today when I thought I was listening to my own obituary, and it has been quite moving to hear some kind things said about me. But it is not about me, and it is not about my good friend the hon. Member for Dudley North (Ian Austin) either; it is about the way in which this Parliament works.

I have had the privilege and the honour to be a Member of Parliament for 27 years. For the vast majority of that time—19 years—I have been a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee. I have also served on the Defence Committee, the Joint Committee on National Security Strategy briefly, the Liaison Committee and, for more than 10 years, the Committees on Arms Export Controls, formerly known as the Quad. I know that the only way that this Parliament’s Select Committees work and work effectively is if we produce unanimous reports. We get listened to and noticed only when we work on a cross-party basis and leave our party labels behind us. If we get a 9:2 split in a Committee, it is better that the two are from different parties and that the nine are from different parties, than if it goes the other way. That is how Parliament works, and it works effectively.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

Is this not the heart of the matter? Is it not absurd to be talking about changing the balance between Opposition and Government membership on these Committees? These Committees, with very few exceptions, never divide along party lines. When the Defence Committee meets, I never ever have to consider the fact that it might be me—one Conservative—and five Opposition Members who happen to be in that meeting at the time.

I crave your indulgence for a second, Madam Deputy Speaker, to say that I am very sorry I cannot make a full speech in this debate because I was chairing a Defence Committee meeting that overlapped with a large part of it. However, I have known of the hon. Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes) since the 1970s, when we were both fighting Trotskyists inside the Labour party. In the 1990s, I remember going with Conservative delegations to eastern Europe, only to find that the hon. Gentleman, as international secretary of the Labour party, had got there before us. The idea that the hon. Gentleman has had to leave the Labour party, when every drop of his blood is infused with the ethos of the Labour party, is absolutely tragic—

Chilcot Inquiry and Parliamentary Accountability

Debate between Mike Gapes and Julian Lewis

Wednesday 30th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to begin by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Robert Courts) on an outstanding maiden speech. I have a history of sometimes disagreeing with hon. Members from Witney, but on this occasion it was fantastic to be able to nod in agreement and pleasure at every remark he made. He has got off to a tremendous start in this House, and I am sure he can tell from the reactions of Members on both sides of the House the good wishes that flow to him today. Make the most of it!

I welcome the fact that Scottish National party Members and other parties’ Members have chosen to bring forward this subject for debate today. I speak as somebody who voted and spoke in favour of toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003 and who has come to believe that that was entirely the wrong decision to take. It is therefore with a degree of humility that I address the two reasons that I voted and spoke in the way I did: first, because I believed what I was told about weapons of mass destruction; and, secondly, because I had a naive view that if Saddam Hussein were removed we might see something like the emergence of democracy in Iraq—and of course we saw nothing of the kind.

[Mike Gapes]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Dr Lewis]

I will, but I am conscious of the informal time limit we have been given.

[Mike Gapes]

I am extremely grateful. Does the right hon. Gentleman accept that if Saddam Hussein had not been removed, it is very likely that his son Uday, or someone else of a similar nature, would have inherited, and that the problems we have seen writ large in Syria since 2011 would have been even worse in Iraq?

[Dr Lewis]

I accept the first part of what the hon. Gentleman says. It is highly probable that if Saddam Hussein had not been removed, things would have gone on in Iraq in the brutal, dictatorial way in which they had gone on previously. The problem is, as we have learned from what happened in Iraq and in Libya, that one can remove these brutal dictators, but instead of seeing democracy emerge one sees re-emerging a deadly conflict, going back more than 1,000 years, between different branches of the Islamic faith. The hon. Gentleman knows my view on this because, as I hope he remembers, in the arguments we had when the same proposition was put forward to deal with President Assad as we had dealt with Saddam Hussein, I made the same argument then as I make now—that in a choice between a brutal, repressive dictator and the alternative of a totalitarian Islamist state, I am afraid that the brutal dictator is the lesser of two evils. If we have not learned that from what happened in Iraq, then we truly have not learned any lessons from Iraq at all.

At the Liaison Committee meeting on 2 November, we had the opportunity to speak to Sir John Chilcot in person and to ask him directly to interpret the results of his own inquiries. I was particularly struck by the fact that of the two arguments I mentioned earlier—the one about the weapons of mass destruction and the one about the naive belief that democracy would emerge if we got rid of the brutal dictator—he was more censorious on the latter than on the former. He said that if the Prime Minister of the day had not exaggerated the certainty of his claims about weapons of mass destruction it would have been completely clear that he had not misled the House in any way. Sir John said:

“Exaggeration—placing more weight on the intelligence than it could possibly bear—is a conclusion that we reached on the Butler committee and reached again with even more evidence in the Iraq inquiry.”

He went on to say something rather curious. I put it to him that one argument that I had found convincing was when Mr Blair had said that there was a real danger of the weapons of mass destruction that were believed to exist in the hands of dictators getting into the hands of terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda. Sir John went on to say:

“On the other hand, I do not know that, in putting forward the fusion argument, Mr Blair related it very directly and specifically to Saddam passing weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups.”

I was surprised that Sir John made that statement. In the debate in March 2003, Tony Blair had said that

“there are two begetters of chaos: tyrannical regimes with weapons of mass destruction and extreme terrorist groups who profess a perverted and false view of Islam…Those two threats have, of course, different motives and different origins, but they share one basic common view: they detest the freedom, democracy and tolerance that are the hallmarks of our way of life. At the moment, I accept fully that the association between the two is loose—but it is hardening. The possibility of the two coming together”—

that, I think, is what Sir John meant by fusion—

“of terrorist groups in possession of weapons of mass destruction or even of a so-called dirty radiological bomb—is now, in my judgment, a real and present danger”.—[Official Report, 18 March 2003; Vol. 401, c. 768.]

We discussed in the debate on the Chilcot report the fact that there were plenty of references in the documents of the Joint Intelligence Committee and other intelligence organisations to the intelligence services’ real belief that Saddam still retained some weapons of mass destruction. I share Sir John’s conclusion that Tony Blair was guilty of exaggeration of the certainty with which knowledge was held about Saddam’s supposed possession of WMD, but that he was not guilty of lying to the House about that belief.

I have real concern with regard to the second argument, and it is on that argument that I believe the then Prime Minister Tony Blair will be held to have rather seriously misled the House. I revert to my exchange with Sir John Chilcot on 2 November, in which I said to him:

“I would like you to tell us to what extent Mr Blair was warned of the danger that, far from democracy emerging, Sunni-Shi’a religious strife would follow the removal of the secular dictator, who gave these warnings, and how and why they were ignored. In particular, I would just quote back to you a briefing note from your report which Mr Blair himself sent in January 2003 to President Bush.”

I ask the House to pay particular attention to this note, which Mr Blair sent to President Bush before the war began. The quote is as follows:

“The biggest risk we face is internecine fighting between all the rival groups, religions, tribes, etc. in Iraq when the military strike destabilises the regime. They are perfectly capable, on previous form, of killing each other in large numbers.”

I put this to Sir John:

“Mr Blair knew that and he said it to President Bush, so why did he ignore that terrible possibility that he himself apparently recognised?”

This is Sir John’s reply:

“I cannot give you the answer as to why. You would have to ask him. But what is clear from all the evidence we have collected is that this risk and other associated risks of instability and collapse were clearly identified and available to Ministers and to Mr Blair before the invasion. I can cite all sorts of points, but you will not want me to go into that detail now. It is in the report.

There were other signals, too, from other quarters. Our ambassador in Cairo, for example, was able to report that the Egyptian President had said that Iraq was at risk—it was populated by people who were extremely fond of killing each other, and destabilisation would bring that about.”

Britain in the World

Debate between Mike Gapes and Julian Lewis

Monday 1st June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Dr Lewis]

We, however, rely on the combination that involves lay people who become Ministers being guided by the expertise of the professional civil service. Now, the civil service has adopted a policy of opening up the possibility of more top jobs to its most high-flying people, but if they are not to be the experts, who is?

I shall now say something about my second topic—the nature of defence reviews—which may not make me entirely popular with those my own side. I have said it before, and I intend to go on saying it: the 1997-98 Labour strategic defence review went about things in a better fashion than our review did in 2010. My hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot (Sir Gerald Howarth) was good enough to acknowledge that ours was Treasury-driven. By gum, yes, it was.

[Mike Gapes]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Dr Lewis]

Of course I will, but only briefly.

[Mike Gapes]

Is it not a fact that the Labour Government’s review, which took about a year and a half, had a foreign policy focus at its centre and was not just about bean counting?

[Dr Lewis]

The answer is yes, and the hon. Gentleman has saved me from uttering the sentence I was going to utter next, but the point about that review, of course, is that although it was truly strategic, it was not properly funded. Ours went to the other extreme of being properly funded but not truly strategic. We have to try to get a balance between those two methods.

Ukraine, Middle East, North Africa and Security

Debate between Mike Gapes and Julian Lewis

Wednesday 10th September 2014 Commons Chamber

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

I disagree with the hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) about the idea of containing ISIS, because allowing a caliphate, however small or large, to establish itself would pose a great threat to the neighbouring Arab countries.

[Dr Lewis]

I obviously did not make myself clear enough. I said that containment by balance of power often means active intervention, and at this stage it means active intervention against ISIS. I am sorry that I did not make that clear.

[Mike Gapes]

Perhaps we can talk about a different wording later.

When I was in Perth three weeks ago, I visited the Black Watch museum, and after that I visited Edinburgh, where I was struck by a very interesting exhibition on the role of Scottish troops and Scottish diaspora troops in the British imperial forces during the first world war. Is it not sad that an organisation is campaigning on an anti-British platform when, historically, the British imperial army was, and the British Army today is, very much rooted in the contribution of Scots to many of our country’s distinguished regiments? That is another aspect that those of us from England, Wales and Northern Ireland should remind our brothers and sisters in the rest of the United Kingdom about when they vote next week.

The end of the first world war, nearly 100 years ago, led to the treaty that resulted in the creation of a number of states. Turkey, which came out of the Ottoman empire, has already been mentioned, and others included countries on its borders, such as Syria, as well as Lebanon and Jordan, and countries further away, such as Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Later came the establishment of the state of Israel and the consequences that were touched on earlier.

The Kurds, who were scattered among up to three, four or five countries in the region, did not get a state at that time. Events in Iraq have led to the establishment of an embryonic state in the form of the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq, which has its own flag and defence forces—the very brave but poorly equipped peshmerga, who are fighting so hard and who are now, I am pleased to say, going to be armed by the United Kingdom, at last, as well as by other European partners.

There will be ramifications as a consequence of current events, because the PKK in Turkey and the PYD in Syria, which has been fighting against Assad, have been co-operating with the peshmerga to get the Yazidis and others off Mount Sinjar to safety. Yet we know that Turkey, Syria and Iran are very much against an independent Kurdish state, because of what the consequences would be. Therefore, a very complex development is going on.

Some people have said that the Sykes-Picot line, which was drawn on the map by French and British diplomats nearly 100 years ago, is dead. It is not yet dead, and we must be very careful. I believe that we may need a comprehensive international conference in the region at some point to redraw the boundaries.