Chilcot Inquiry and Parliamentary Accountability

Debate between Paul Flynn and Natascha Engel

Wednesday 30th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Ian Austin]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Is it in order for a Member of this House to allege that other Members of this House were bribed—paid—to vote a particular way? Should he not produce evidence for it? What a disgrace.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Natascha Engel)]

The hon. Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn) did not accuse a specific individual of taking a bribe. The hon. Member for Dudley North (Ian Austin) is perfectly entitled to ask him in an intervention whether he will withdraw what he has said, but this is not a matter for the Chair.

[Paul Flynn]

I am not suggesting that anyone took any money. There are such things as political bribes, with inducements and offers, of which we are well aware in this place. There was a very heavy operation here to convince Members to vote for war. We must look at the situation then.

One Back Bencher wrote to Tony Blair—I speak of Tony Blair with no animus against him. I campaigned for him to be Leader of the House. I have congratulated him again and again on the work that he has done for the Labour party, but it is not the case that there was one failure. It was a failure of the three most important Select Committees in this House, who were all cheerleaders for the war. There were all those who went around saying, “If you knew what we know—we’ve got this secret information—you would certainly vote for war to go ahead.” I believe it was in that circumstance that the decision was taken.

One letter to Tony Blair warned in March:

“Our involvement in Bush’s war will increase the likelihood of terrorist attacks.”

It said that attacking a Muslim state without achieving a fair settlement in other conflicts in the world would be seen by Muslims from our local mosques to the far corners of the world as an act of injustice. I believe we paid a very heavy price for seeming to divide the world between a powerful, western, Christian world which was taking advantage of its other side, who were Muslims.

I am certain that in his mind Tony Blair was sincere. He was proved to be right on Kosovo when many people criticised him, and on Sierra Leone he was right. He was convinced on that that the others were wrong and he was going to prove it. One of the pieces of information that he quoted was an interview with Hussein Kamel, who was the son-in-law of Saddam Hussein. It was quoted in the document as evidence of weapons of mass destruction. According to the interview, Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear weapons, which he did say in the evidence. But in the same interview, which was conducted in 1995 and was already old news, Hussein Kamel said, “Of course, we got rid of them after the Gulf war.” What was in that dodgy dossier was half the story—evidence, yes, that Saddam had had such weapons, but also evidence that he no longer had them, and that was never published.

What Chilcot said in his report was not the absolution that people believe it to be. He said that the decision to invade was taken

“before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted”

and that military action was

“not a last resort”.

According to the strictures of modern philosophy, that means it is not a just war. Chilcot said that Saddam posed no “imminent threat”. In effect, he declared the war needless.

Colin Powell has confessed that he was fooled and lied to, and that he regrets bitterly that he did not follow his natural instinct and avoid the war. Strangely enough, most of the people who were advising him at the time have said that they were wrong and the war was a terrible mistake.

I believe that this House must accept what Chilcot is saying and not take an aversion to it that pleases our political point of view. The issue is one that the loved ones of the 179 have been following. They have gone through years of torment asking themselves, “Did our loved ones die in vain?” Chilcot has reported, and his report was that the decision was taken not just by a Prime Minister but by all those who were gullible enough to believe that case. There were a million people who walked the streets of this country and demonstrated. It was not a clear decision.

We fall into the trap time and again of believing that our role in Britain is to punch above our weight militarily. Why should we do that? Every time we do, we die beyond our responsibilities.

Tax Avoidance and Evasion

Debate between Paul Flynn and Natascha Engel

Wednesday 13th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

I am happy to start on a note of consensus with the hon. Member for Bracknell (Dr Lee) and my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams) that this is all about trust. The public have reacted so fiercely against recent events because there is a collapse of trust in us. The expenses scandal was a screaming nightmare, and public trust reached rock bottom. It is now subterranean—it has got worse. An examination of our standards in this House is currently taking place, and I urge every hon. Member to contribute to it. Democracy itself—the political system—is under threat.

The country is rightly angry about the unfairness in the system. The other day in the House, we heard the most insulting speech, which will deepen the sense of alienation between the Government and the Opposition. I have been here a long time and I recall an incident in which the person who made that speech revealed to the newspapers how he made some of his money. He bought the council house of an elderly gentleman in London, who I think was a neighbour, on the basis that it would appreciate greatly in value and that the neighbour would not live very long. The agreement that the hon. Member made was that he would give the tenant, who would get a discount for being there for years, the money to buy the house and then the hon. Member would inherit the house. That is Tory morality, and it is morally repugnant. It is not the right to buy, but the right to greed. That man lectured us the other day and tried to castigate those whom he described contemptuously as low achievers.

The difficulty is the gulf between what the Government say and what they do. In March 2010, the Prime Minister made an impassioned speech about how he would clean up lobbying. He knew all about it: he was a lobbyist, and he was going to sort it all out. Where are we today, six years later? The Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act 2014 has been passed, life for trade unions and charities is a bit more troublesome, but the big corporate lobbyists do not have to declare who their clients are. No worthwhile reform has happened. The Prime Minister has worried the minnows in the shallows, but the great fat salmon still swim by unhindered.

There is similarly no sincerity in the Government’s determination to tackle the tax havens. I will give the House an interesting example. Lord Blencathra, who sees himself as the spokesman for the Cayman Islands, mocked the Prime Minister, saying that he had no intention of carrying out his threats to deal with tax havens and that they were a “purely political gesture”—those were Lord Blencathra’s words. We have just heard that the First Minister of the Cayman Islands is putting two fingers up to the Prime Minister. They are not going to take any notice.

Let us look at the remarkable history of Lord Blencathra. It is a fascinating story that shows the laxness of our controls in this House. In 2012 I made a complaint about his behaviour. My complaint was taken to a Committee in the other House to examine. It suggested that he was in breach of the parliamentary code of conduct. His activities included lobbying the Chancellor about taxes affecting the Cayman Islands; he also facilitated an all-expenses paid trip to the islands for three prominent Members of this House. The Committee that deals with standards in the Lords held an investigation, and produced a remarkable document. Lord Blencathra explained that he was taking £12,000 a month in payment from the Cayman Islands, but that he was not lobbying Parliament or Government, but Members—or the other way around; he gave some spurious excuse. Quite remarkably, the decision was taken in 2012 that he had not been in breach of any rules of the House.

Two years later, the contract that Lord Blencathra had signed was leaked. It appeared that he had agreed in the contract to

“Promoting the Cayman Islands’ interests in the UK and Europe by liaising with and making representations to UK ministers, the FCO (Foreign and Commonwealth Office), Members of Parliament in the House of Commons and Members of the House of Lords.”

He put up a spirited defence, saying that he may have signed the contract but he had forgotten what he had agreed to, and anyway if he had signed it he had no intention of doing what it said. That is a most egregious breach of the code of conduct of the House—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Natascha Engel)]

Order. I have been listening very carefully. The hon. Gentleman knows that he is not to criticise Members of the other House directly or personally. He has been quoting from reports up until now. If he would desist from directly criticising Members of the other House, I would be very grateful.

[Paul Flynn]

These are not new matters, if I may say so. I have dealt with that matter now.

If the Government fail to act against their own Members, who are not trying to stop the abuses of tax havens but are actually lubricating them, how can we take them seriously? There is some agreement on this, and some pleasure in the House that this situation has happened, because it might expose the corruption that is so endemic and the huge sums disappearing into tax havens. Light has been shone on all that.

I believe that there is a political agenda behind those who have hacked into Mossack Fonseca’s site. We do not know what that agenda is, and it might well be very sinister, but I will repeat my earlier point: one of the curious things here is what is happening with other nations. China has $44 billion in the Cayman Islands and $49 billion in the British Virgin Islands. Those are huge sums of money, but they are only part of the revelations—part is still to come. The reverberations of this pivotal scandal will spread for decades.

I am curious about the Government’s reluctance to act against China in many other ways. We have already done a dreadful and financially disastrous deal over Hinkley Point, which might give us the most expensive electricity in the world, although the deal is now collapsing. The Government seem to want to ingratiate themselves with the Chinese Government. As a result, they are going soft on them in many ways. What is most damaging is that they are not taking sharp action against the undercutting of the steel industry that is affecting so many jobs here.

We have a strange relationship with the Cayman Islands. We provide them with great advantages, by providing their defence for them. The Government’s permissiveness must stop. We will look to the Government to take the tough line that they have promised at the anti-corruption conference. They have not taken it before, so let us see them do it there.

Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill

Debate between Paul Flynn and Natascha Engel

Tuesday 3rd September 2013 Commons Chamber

[Natascha Engel]

I do not see the relevance of 38 Degrees not turning up to a briefing, which would almost certainly have been largely pointless as the Bill would gag the activities that 38 Degrees legitimately wants to undertake in the run-up to a general election.

[Paul Flynn]

Does my hon. Friend think that there might well be a Machiavellian motive in the Government drafting the Bill as they have, which has meant that the great majority of the speeches today have been about the non-existent excesses of charities or trade unions, and that we have neglected the fact that the Bill woefully fails to address the terrible excesses of lobbyists?

[Natascha Engel]

That is exactly right and it is why the debate today has been a missed opportunity. We would all like to do something quickly about curbing the excesses of the wrong kind of lobbying, but the Bill captures the right sort of lobbying—exactly the sort that we as politicians should encourage. We want people to influence the way that we make decisions because it is their democratic right to do so, and those are not the sort of people that we want to criminalise.

It is on trade unions that I have the greatest problems. In the run-up to the 2005 general election I worked as the trade union liaison officer for the Labour party, and straight after the general election I helped to co-ordinate the last round of political fund ballots, so I know from personal experience just how heavily regulated trade union political activity and financial matters are. They are extremely heavily regulated. Membership records are up to date. Trade unions must have up-to-date membership records; otherwise they would be cutting down their own income. When they ballot members for strike action, they need to know who those members are and where they live, and when they want them to participate in internal elections, it is in their own interest that their membership records are up to date. They are also kept up to date by law.

Trade unions are democratic and accountable institutions. The Leader of the House implied that trade unions are somehow unaccountable institutions. That is absolutely not so. Any trade union member has the right to opt out of paying into a political fund. Members may choose not to pay the political levy. Every 10 years they are balloted about whether they want a political fund in their trade union. Also, in those ballots every 10 years—we are going into the fourth one now—more than 90% of members who vote are in favour of keeping their political fund. These are massive figures, which we as political parties can only dream of.

It is important to remember that freedom of affiliation is a fundamental pillar of our democracy. Before we rush into changing the way that these very important institutions work in society, we should reflect more carefully on what the perfectly foreseeable consequences of such legislation could be. The Bill is badly drafted. I take the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn) that it may be a deliberate attempt to do something else.